Bang! Mevlana slammed his enormous hand on the kitchen table. Khadija kept her gaze low, but noticed that the collars of Anwar’s checked-shirt still stood proudly and the crease in his khaki pants held firm down the length of his legs. He didn’t seem like a man who liked being told to shut up.
“She needs care,” Anwar argued. “I’m taking her to the hospital.”
“If you think doctors can handle the consequences…” Mevlana replied, deadpan, from the other end of the table.
It occurred then to Anwar that he didn’t even know what the consequences were, let alone if they were dire. That’s when the itching in his crooked little finger warned him to listen first.
Mevlana took the cue. He reached for a box of chalk on the shelf behind him, and removed a stick. With it, he drew a circle on the kitchen table. A few strange symbols were then added to the circumference. Khadija dropped the grimoire he regularly referred to in his hand. The mystic slid his fingernail along the ream of antiquated pages and, at once, flipped the book open to the precise page he was looking for. On it was drawn a diagram that matched the one on the kitchen table exactly. Mevlana copied the spell alongside onto a notepad, tore the sheet off, and set it alight in his hand. His palm was carefully tipped over, and the fire fell into the circle.
Mevlana’s face was imbued with a yellow glow. Anwar swore that the temperature in the kitchen had suddenly dropped when the mystic’s eyes suddenly rolled over and glared a stark white. His teeth grinded against themselves as the most obtuse way to recite a spell, and the sound of clicks and hisses echoed in the farmhouse kitchen. It may have been a foreign language, but equally likely to be gibberish too. Anwar’s brows knitted. He crossed his arms, partly to keep the cold at bay, but also because he had seen talented tricksters before.
He quickly changed his mind though when an eerie voice began booming in his head. It wasn’t Anwar’s own, but it was distinct enough to be understood.
“Something else it is. Inside her. Pulls strings. She gone mad,” the voice said.
A tingle ran down Anwar’s back, and it wasn’t the result of magic at all. He was utterly shocked and, try as he might, couldn’t shut the voice out of his head. Anwar’s inner ear was forced to heed the warning that Amina was a victim of demonic possession.
The voice said that her choices were being influenced by a creature called a Jinn. It was fashioned out a smokeless fire, could travel vast distances in time, and had entered Amina through the nape. That was where the door to human consciousness was located. Anwar had always believed in seeing as a measure of truth but, when he felt behind his own neck, there was no handle or doorbell there. The strange voice, however, still echoed in his head and he realized that Mevlana was communicating with it. Anwar was somehow privy to that conversation.
“Slowly, slowly. Take woman away. Alone. It with her. She for it.”
The creature possessing Amina had a purpose. It wanted to enter the human world, and found in Amina a physical vessel to inhabit.
“Why?” Anwar yelled, now engaged, but the spell had burnt out in the centre of the circle, and the connection was cut.
The kitchen warmed up again, and the light seemed to have also brightened. Mevlana’s pupils swung around in his eyes as he snapped out of the trance.
“How would you like to be prisoner in your own body?” Mevlana asked, his big glaring eyes mesmerizing Anwar.
Just as his own mind was invaded moments ago, the idea of being conquered by some beast terrified him. He began to get an inkling of the suffering that Amina was experiencing during her episodes.
It turned out that the voice Anwar had heard in his head was an interdimensional creature who Mevlana employed from time to time as a consultant in the ethereal world that existed alongside theirs. But Amina didn’t have the luxury of knowing what was going on.
“She’s deliberately hurting herself,” Mevlana explained, “which is why a hospital will only fix her body. But inside…soon the Jinn will find new tricks to draw her away from this farm, and your family, and from you.”
“So, Amina trying to run away was its trick?” Anwar asked, somewhat confused.
Mevlana nodded. It was how he knew that the diagnosis had worked.
The episodes that Amina was experiencing were really bouts of fuzzy logic that Amina thought made for perfect sense, but was nonetheless irrational. By skewing her perception, and interfering with her choices, the jinn made Amina feel as if she was acting out of her own accord.
“So long as we try to rescue Amina, the jinn is in danger. It doesn’t like that,” he explained.
“How can we help her?” Anwar asked.
“Everything costs!”
Anwar bit his crooked pinkie finger, tempted to ask Mevlana if he accepted medical insurance cards. A hospital surely would. Just as he did in all his business dealings, Anwar was forced to calculate how much his wife’s sanity was worth. It was no easy task either to think objectively about someone Anwar had shared a life with for so many years. In that time, Anwar had realized that Amina was different to anyone he had ever known, and that was precisely the difficulty in deciding whether to accept Mevlana’s help or not.
When Anwar asked to see Amina, he was led up the old home’s wooden staircase, and to a door outside which Bruno was standing guard. Khadija unbuckled a ring of keys from her waist and unlocked it. What Anwar saw within was a sorry sight indeed. Amina was lying on the bed, bloody and bruised.
Anwar immediately rushed to her side, only to find that a chasm between them had to be crossed first. As soon as she laid eyes on him, Amina pulled her hands and kicked her legs violently. She only managed to struggle like a caged animal though as her wrists and ankles were tied to the bedposts. Anwar couldn’t believe that this was what had become of the woman he loved, and slowed his step in an effort to prioritize Amina’s well-being.
Khadija closed the door behind him, but also left it slightly ajar, and gently pressed her back up against the wall. Putting a finger to her mouth, she signalled Bruno to stay put.
Inside the room, Anwar crept up to the bed and sat down alongside Amina. He caressed her face. Despite the maddening glare in her bloodshot eyes, he picked up a cloth from the pedestal and wiped the caked blood from her brow. Amina too relented and collapsed in exhaustion. Lying there, she stared blankly at the ceiling in that dimly-lit wooden box of a room. She didn’t even look at him, and the rejection melted Anwar’s insides.
“It’ll all be over soon,” he whispered, but Amina still didn’t respond.
Instead, she rolled her head on the pillow to spit at him but, when her eyes met Anwar’s, they took her to a place she hadn’t been for a long, long, time…
A much younger version of both Anwar and Amina were seated at the dining table in her parent’s home. They were out of earshot, but Ma, Pa, and Amina’s parents were watching them keenly from the lounge. It was customary in arranged marriages for parents to chaperone their children’s first formal meeting as it was believed to bring about better decisions for the future. And Anwar needed help too. He nervously mistook Amina’s thumb for a samosa when she offered him a tray of savouries. Everyone chuckled, and Amina was asked if she would like to speak to Anwar privately. She did.
The real matter wasn’t whether Anwar and Amina liked each other. Their parents knew that the young couple were sneaking out of the house in the wee hours of the morning. They would park their car wherever they found an interesting view and talked for hours. Sometimes they guessed at what was happening in the windows of tenement buildings and, from the water tower at the top of a hill, they stared at the sky and unravelled themselves to each other. It was fun but, in all seriousness, Anwar’s parents were at her home that day to support Anwar in asking for Amina’s hand in marriage.
“Here’s a cracker!” Amina’s parrot chirped while she and Anwar stared at each other across the dining table. They both burst out laughing, and it broke the tension of being watched with so much hope. Everyone does, after all, love a success story.
“Well, the choice is really yours,” Anwar told Amina.
“What do you mean?” she asked, then avoided stating the obvious by saying, “you have to choose me too.”
“I’m here aren’t I?” Anwar replied. His muscles were bursting out of his shirt, but he knew that they had no power there.
“Look, if you want to marry me, you should know I’m not the person you think I am.”
“Tell me who you are then?” Anwar asked.
“I don’t even know myself,” Amina replied, dropping her gaze at the admission. “What you know of me is only an impression.”
“No one knows anyone really. We’re all discovering ourselves,” he said. “We’ll just be doing it together.”
“How can you even be so devoted to me when I’m telling you that I have my own problems?” she whispered but, when Anwar’s eyes met hers, he saw that Amina was really yelling.
“Because I made a choice to love you, and that precedes all other choices,” Anwar leaned in to tell her.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Devotion!” Anwar whispered, and when Amina’s eyes met his, she saw that he was really yelling. “There is no other choice in devotion but to love,” he explained in a far more tender tone, and didn’t have to say anything more.
“It precedes every other choice…” Amina whispered. She then considered herself lucky to have Anwar.
Back when that memory defined her life, Anwar had a vision to create a joyful family for both of them, and Amina was surprised that the future she had imagined for herself was being put to words by him. She agreed to marry him then, and gave him another chance now in that dreaded farmhouse.
“We have a future,” Anwar said, and then told Amina that Pa had offered him the family inheritance if he could prove himself worthy of it. It came with conditions of course, but becoming the head of their family was an extension of a dream they had begun their marriage with.
It was the desire to build something meaningful together.
Even Khadija sighed at the intimacy of that moment. She stood quietly outside the door, holding her laughter with a hand over her mouth. Anwar and Amina were such romantics that it was almost tragic for two adults to be so naive.
“We can create whatever we want,” Anwar continued in the room, “we just have to get through this one night. Whatever we did, together or to each other, is the past.”
It was true and, even while tied to the bed like an animal, Amina’s gaze softened towards Anwar. No matter what their marriage had turned into, they had created it together. To rescue their love, they needed to mutually breathe new life into it. Their future depended on it, as did their children depend on them.
Through the crevice in the doorway, Khadija peeped into the room to spy on why the conversation had suddenly died. What she saw sparked her curiosity. Despite Amina’s injuries, she had lifted her head to peck at Anwar’s nose. He smiled, and nibbled hers in return. It was a sweet thing to share, and Khadija fell dreamily back against the wall.
Anwar kissed Amina’s forehead. It was all going to be over soon, he repeated, before standing up to leave. He caressed her one more time, and the gentle embrace stretched into a long and heartfelt smile at his wife.
Amina beamed a grin back. It seemed as if they were sharing the same thought, but hers was really a gesture born out of confusion. The truth was that Amina couldn’t believe her ears.
A pair of birds were sitting on the ledge outside the window and, perhaps it was a hangover from the herbs she had sniffed earlier, but Amina easily understood their chirping. They were betting on whether she would forgive Anwar or not.
“Who doesn’t like happy endings?” the first bird chirped.
“She’s tied to the bed for God’s sake!” the other tweeted back.
And so, the moment was lost in translation. Anwar left with a spring in his step while Amina’s mind fought with itself. Wake up! She convinced herself that the idea of being a polyglot was certainly attractive, but believing everything she heard was dangerous.
Khadija pretended to have arrived with a bucket of water just as Anwar swung the door open. It was sitting outside the door all along, as a bowl for Bruno to drink from while on guard. Oopsie! She navigated around Anwar to avoid a spillage that Khadija knew would have to be cleaned up by herself, but he hardly noticed her while intoxicated by love-brain. To Khadija, Anwar looked like he had just rescued a puppy.
“Wow! That’s one way to destroy a man,” Khadija quipped while straddling across the floor.
She dropped the bucket of water next to the bed and sat down alongside Amina. Bruno followed her into the room. He bit the cloth on the pedestal and carried it over to Khadija. It got rinsed a few times in her sturdy hands before Khadija wound it around her finger and began nursing Amina’s wounds. Slowly, and methodically, Khadija worked across Amina’s arm, tending to each incision with such care that Amina’s skin crawled. Amina was, after all, still tied to the bed.
“That must hurt!” Khadija jibed while yanking a thorn out of Amina’s shoulder.
Amina cringed, but sneered right back, “that must too!”
She was staring at Khadija’s cheek. The bruise left behind by Mevlana’s tight smack to the face clearly showed three of his fingers. For once, Khadija didn’t care to comment. She rinsed the cloth quietly to continue cleaning Amina’s wounds.
“Is it just you and your husband who live here?” Amina asked.
Khadija sniggered. “Mevlana is my father.”
“You’re very dutiful to him,” Amina remarked, surprised.
“We stick together. It’s necessary!”
“Was that really necessary?” Amina asked, glancing at the painful bruise again.
“He’s just looking out for me,” Khadija replied after a pause.
“Looking out for you?” Amina frowned.
Mevlana slapping his daughter was an odd way to protect her, but Khadija explained that there were all kinds of creatures lurking about the ranch, and Mevlana was simply reminding Khadija not to step out of line.
“Oh, you mean for the greater good?” Amina asked, rolling her eyes.
“I need him,” Khadija mumbled. The words were accompanied by a vacant look on her face, and that made them stand out as a loaded statement.
Amina read into it, and surmised that Khadija’s relationship with her father was toxic. In exchange for her protection, Khadija was Mevlana’s slave, and that made her a kind of possession for him to use as he saw fit. If Amina were to guess, it was probably why Khadija had taken a shining to her. Amina’s cheekiness toward Anwar, and Mevlana, had made an impression on Khadija in the bathroom earlier, and it now made sense that a younger woman like Khadija may be seeking some freedom for herself.
What Khadija didn’t know was that, all her life, Amina’s wilful personality begot criticism from everyone. She was constantly advised to avoid rubbing people up the wrong way as it would eventually leave her isolated. Indeed, Amina did sometimes feel like she was living the life of a soldier of fortune. Those experiences had taught her though that surviving wasn’t a life at all. A life worth living was filled with joy and sharing. That was true freedom.
“I’m sorry I nearly killed Bruno,” Amina said. He was the only creature Khadija had to share her days with on that desolate farm.
Bruno nodded, as if to say he had told Amina so. She was indeed out of her mind when she drove over his tail with the lawnmower.
“Accidents happen,” Khadija replied, in a brighter mood.
She was so moved by the apology that she told Amina of the many adventures she and Bruno had enjoyed in the vast field that surrounded the farm. They spent entire days in the stony crags that rose above the land while hunting for insects, flowers and herbs that Mevlana needed for his work.
Khadija so delighted herself by her own story that she leaned over to nuzzle Bruno on the nose. He licked hers in return, and Amina startled at the familiarity of that gesture.
Oh Hello!
Pecking at each other’s noses was certainly not a unique habit, but it was Anwar’s and Amina’s. They had exchanged a nibble just a few moments before Khadija had arrived, and Amina suspected that Khadija had a darker side.
“Aww! Ain’t that a sweet thing the two of you do?” Amina asked, watching Khadija’s reaction closely.
“Everyone’s doing it!” Khadija quipped, and then got squeamish when Bruno licked her face again.
She ran her sleeve down her cheek to wipe Bruno’s saliva off and, when she opened her eyes, Khadija found Amina reading her like a book.
“You’ve got blood on your face,” Amina sneered.
“It’s not a disgrace,” Khadija replied, continuing to clean Amina’s wounds quietly.
There was indeed a smear of Amina’s blood on Khadija’s chin, but she didn’t know it was there.
In such close proximity to each other, Amina understood that it wasn’t freedom that Khadija sought. It was belonging, and emulating others was her way to feel it. Khadija was a chameleon, and Amina had best watch out for her. That was perhaps what Bruno had warned her about at the gates. Having just seen Khadija’s true colours though, Amina pushed her luck.
“Does your father know you might slap him back one day?” Amina asked. It seemed reasonable to think that, if Khadija was besotted by Amina’s insolence, she may mimic it in time.
Khadija ignored her. She didn’t want to talk about her dirty little secret, so Amina clenched her fists and lifted them up slowly, until the rope tying them down pulled at her wrists. Khadija watched the display. Everyone knew that fists were likely the most prominent symbol of freedom in all of history.
“Do everything twice,” Khadija mumbled, “that’s what I say.”
Instead of reaching for the cigarettes in her bra, Khadija stood up and dropped the bloody cloth into the bucket. She carried the pail over to the door but, when Bruno followed her, she stopped and patted him back down again. Khadija then left Bruno behind while exiting the room. The door was closed behind her, but no key turned within to lock it. All that was heard were Khadija’s footsteps dwindling down the hall.
Bruno turned to Amina and licked his lips. For dogs, it was a gesture of appeasement, and Amina agreed. Maybe people didn’t deserve to be hated all that much.
Minutes later, Bruno had gnawed through the rope around Amina’s wrist. She stretched her arm high up above her, and the blood within began circulating freely again. Amina’s mind began clearing, and the intimate nuzzle she had recently shared with Anwar filled her with hope. She rested her hand on the spot where Anwar had sat alongside her on the bed. A trace of something was left behind. It felt authentic, and Amina’s heart crooned that it was trust.
Her head, however, recognized that Brad was Anwar’s elder brother, and the rightful heir to their family fortune. It didn’t make sense that Pa would suddenly dispense with tradition to offer Anwar the inheritance instead.
Hmm! The conflict between her head and heart left Amina wondering if Anwar was just telling her what she wanted to hear when repeating that everything was going to be ok?
“Hey Bruno!” Amina called out, “is Khadija trustworthy?”
“Whar rhao whee rhov eh!” Bruno replied while continuing to chew through the ropes around Amina’s ankle.
“Tsk! …I know that dogs are a man’s best friend!” Amina sighed, “but how do you know you can actually trust her?”
“Wharr! Wrr rhim phrr rhee rhur!” he replied through a mouth full of rope.
“That makes sense,” Amina observed.
As a domestic dog, Bruno relied on Khadija to bath, feed and shelter him. That Khadija accepted and serviced his vulnerabilities made Bruno believe that she was indeed trustworthy.
“Hmm!” Amina wondered, “how do you know she’s not deceiving you?”
“Whoar rhon!”
“You don’t?” Amina asked.
“Whaach rhish rhees rhao whow whrr!”
“Yeah, I suppose we should all trust our own instincts,” Amina remarked. It was food for thought, and raised the question as to whether Bruno was ever disappointed by Khadija.
“Wrr jhim rhop rhee rhur rhaar!” Bruno replied while cutting through the last bit of rope.
“Time!” Amina mumbled to herself. It made perfect sense.
Even though she had trusted her instincts to risk both heart and person in a life with Anwar, it was really time that told her whether someone was trustworthy or not. That applied to Anwar as much as it did to herself.
“I swear you’re just like a human in that body!” Amina exclaimed. “I do like animals more than people.”
“Whow rhee rha whif rhee!”
“Sure, I’ll throw you a frisbee som…” Amina said, but stopped abruptly. “Tricks!” she murmured to herself, wondering if she was a victim of one.
The last bit of rope snapped and fell to the ground. Amina was free, and she swung around on the bed to sit up. Her brow knitted while weighing up the differences between what her heart felt about Anwar and what her mind was saying about him.
“Hey Bruno,” Amina whispered, “what do you do if Khadija forgets you outside?”
“I’ll tell her to throw a dog a bone,” he replied, coughing a few loose threads of rope out of his mouth.
“Wow, your expectations are low!” she said pensively.
“Well, do you trust him or not?” Bruno asked.
“Sure I do!” Amina replied, but that was just the staid reaction of a wife. The truth was that Amina didn’t know what to make of the conflict between her head and heart.
So long as she refrained from explaining how a cricket ended up in the groom’s mouth at Leila’s engagement, no mediation between Anwar and Brad could be successful. Brad would always think of the incident as an act of malice, and Anwar’s integrity would forever be in question if he couldn’t get his own wife to spill the beans. The family may even conclude that Anwar was helping Amina hide the truth. For that reason, Anwar was beholden to Amina to realize his ambitions to leadership, so Amina couldn’t tell whether Anwar meant that everything was going to be okay for her, or for him.
The only thing she knew for sure was that she was a woman trapped on a ranch by some evil people. The facts were more trustworthy than Anwar, Amina surmised, and it was unfortunately necessary to get some short-term insurance.
Amina fell back down on the bed as soon as she tried standing up. Perhaps it was uncertainty that weakened her knees, or it could’ve also been referral effects of the herbal concoction she had sniffed earlier. But Amina didn’t allow any confusion to deter her. Instead she mustered up enough determination to never ever depend on anyone again for her own happiness. Amina steadied herself as she stood up again, and carefully stumbled across to the window where she threw one leg over the sill.
“That’s the wrong way!” Bruno barked, “it leads to the hospital.” He was waiting for Amina at the door that Khadija had deliberately left unlocked.
“I’ll manage by myself, thank you very much!” Amina replied while hauling herself up onto the window’s ledge.
She wasn’t exactly being sensible, but Amina didn’t want to run into any unexpected surprises on the other end of that closed door. There had been just too many of those in a single night.
At stake were the lives of two little souls who Amina hoped with all her might were not lost somewhere, shivering from the fear that they had been abandoned by their mother. Her own heart burst with the feeling of home. It beamed out of her chest into the wide-open skies. It carried her sentiment across the barren escapement that surrounded the farmhouse, past the thorn bushes and vicious dogs that guarded the perimeter. With all the force of a familial bond, it smashed through the bricks and mortar buildings in which her children lay probably asleep, and penetrated their dreams with the reassurance that they were still loved.
But the ledge she was standing on was at the mercy of the howling wind, and it blew Amina’s hair into a crazy mess. She steadied herself to scan the frontier beyond the farmhouse. The window she was climbing out of stood an entire floor above the ground, and only the insane would’ve attempted such a dangerous route to escape. Her battered and bruised condition didn’t put her at an advantage either, but somewhere out there were Mo and Fati waiting for her, so Amina did what all mothers in her position would.
She took a leap of faith.
“Wait!” Bruno yelled, running up to the window behind her. If, at first, he had thought Amina was crazy for thinking that she was invisible, he now was sure that lunacy was her permanent disposition.
Amina’s feet slammed onto the corrugated iron roof covering the veranda. It stood at a slant that Amina hadn’t initially detected, so she slipped and fell onto her back. Gravity then did its work. Amina skidded fast and dangerously towards the edge. Desperate to cling onto anything, her heart pumped furiously, and her survival instincts took over. The hyper-focus was far from comforting as Amina was fully aware of her legs falling off the edge of the roof. It was higher than she had imagined, and she was moments away from letting the menacingly hard ground below catch her.
In her panic, time slowed down. If Amina was incapacitated by the fall, she feared never seeing her children again. In an instant, she pulled herself together.
Clarity helped her hand to find the gutter, and she managed to grab a hold of it just in time. Amina hung off the edge of the roof by an arm, swinging from the house like a pendulum. She caught her breath, and laughed like she hadn’t in years.
It felt wonderful to be herself.
With a little ingenuity, her feet found a lattice that was grown over with a crawling vine. The thick foliage was sturdy, and allowed her to climb down safely. When her feet touched solid ground again, Amina was a new woman. She quickly spun around to surprise the old grape-eyed farmhand who was always keeping watch, but he was nowhere in sight.
Amina then snuck around the farmhouse to the backyard. There, she crept up to the kitchen window. The coast was clear, and the screen door left unlocked. Amina swung it open and tiptoed into the kitchen where smears of her blood had stained the wooden table. She was laid down there earlier while wounded, and remembered seeing her handbag hidden in a cupboard.
The first cabinet she ransacked was stocked with Bruno’s treats but, in the next, she found the cereal box that had spilt earlier. Behind it, was her handbag. Miraculously, Amina fished her mobile telephone out of it without having to dig around for an aeon. She noted that trick for use on ordinary days, but there was no time to waste, so Amina dialled the emergency services.
“I’m being held hostage, erm, by two men and a woman,” she frantically whispered into the receiver.
“We’re tracking your location,” the operator said, “can you hold on?”
“Erm, Hekport! It’s a farmhouse in Hekport!” Amina exclaimed. She remembered the sign they had passed on the dusty road to the farmhouse.
“Can you be more specific?”
“No!” Amina whispered, trying to contain her frustration, “that’s all I know. It’s farmhouse, very old, and the people here…”
Amina’s words trailed off when a terrible wailing echoed through the creaky old farmhouse. It shook the walls and rattled the tiles on the roof. It was even creepier than the howling wind outside, and sounded like the abysmal cry of someone who was so helpless that they had given up on themselves.
“Khadija!” Amina cried, recognizing the voice.
She hoped that Khadija wasn’t being slapped around by Mevlana again for leaving the door to Amina’s room unlocked. Guilt overcame Amina. She had coaxed Khadija into aiding her escape and, while Amina appreciated the gesture enough to raise concern for Khadija, she didn’t want to jeopardize her own flight.
Choices, choices!
The telephone that connected Amina to her only hope of rescue was in her hand, but her freedom would remain no more than an expectation if the events of that one unpredictable night hung over her head for a lifetime.
“Hello? Hello?” the operator’s voice repeated on the other end of the telephone line, but Amina had already dropped the phone.
She followed the cry through the passage. It led her to the lounge, where she found that it was echoing from somewhere up the stairs. Amina found herself sneaking back toward the place she had just escaped from.
Outside a door at the end of the landing, stood Anwar looking rather perplexed. He watched Bruno scratch at the door. Neither dared to force themselves into the room despite the terrible begging coming from within.
Anwar caught Amina’s hand before she turned the door knob. He pulled his car keys out of his pocket and jiggled it at her. The domestic squabble didn’t concern them. They could leave quietly, he meant to say.
Amina smiled. She was relieved to have not distrusted Anwar outright, and agreed to leave with him as soon as she discovered what the matter with Khadija was. Amina needed to know because people often ridicule the things that they don’t understand. Even Khadija didn’t deserve that.
No sooner had Amina swung the door open though, did she wish that she hadn’t pried into someone else’s business. Inside the room, the most horrifying scene accosted her.
Khadija eyes were shut, and her body strewn across the bed. Mevlana was standing over her, pulling at her feet, as if trying to drag her away with a sadistic grin. Khadija wailed helplessly on, but she was at the mercy of the cruel mystic.
Nothing was what it seemed that night though, and what Amina found in that room was actually a sick joke.
On the bedside table was a bottle of oil that Mevlana used to grease his hands and then rub his fingers between Khadija’s toes. He pulled at each digit and scratched the tips of her feet before pressing his thumbs into her arches. Khadija wasn’t sobbing from despair at all, Amina realized. Though she sounded like a wounded animal, Khadija’s moaning echoed how immensely she was enjoying the foot rub.
“I got bored waiting for you,” Khadija said when opening her eyes.
“I read you all wrong,” Amina gasped. It was a grave error in judgement she had made indeed.
“Tsk! Assumptions-assumptions!” Khadija replied, true to her motto of doing things twice.
“You’re as mad as he is!” Amina exclaimed, and Mevlana chuckled. That was no insult.
“Just because we’re different from the people you know doesn’t make us mad,” Khadija laughed.
Khadija seemed to know all about ordinary people like Amina. She knew that they lived in their own little worlds, avoiding anyone and anything that didn’t fit the standards that they were familiar with. The lives of common people were nothing more than aged recipes for living that were passed down from one generation to the next, and dogmatically repeating traditions that had outlived their time was the undoing of many. Like Amina, efforts to rescue ordinary people from themselves was met with resistance, because the temptation to be right was far too overpowering.
“What makes you any better?” Amina asked.
“Nothing!” Khadija replied, deadpan.
Mevlana bellowed so loud with laughter that Khadija couldn’t contain herself either. The joke really was on Amina. It was by her own hand that she had relinquished any chance of escaping the ranch, and led herself back into the clutches of her tormentors. Being human certainly seemed to have its caveats.
“This is insane!” Amina yelled.
“Is it really?” Mevlana asked, setting Khadija’s foot down on a pillow.
He turned to Anwar, who didn’t have an opinion to share. Anwar’s little finger was itching again, and he chewed on it quietly.
Mevlana reached for a glass on the side-table and filled it with water from the pitcher alongside. He gurgled disgustingly to muster up the greenest glob of phlegm in his chest, which he spat into the glass of water. The spit hung from his lips for a moment before dropping into the glass, and Mevlana then offered it to Amina.
“You won’t listen to anyone,” he said politely, “so let’s test your sanity.”
Amina wasn’t afraid of him. Oozing grit, she snatched the glass and gulped enough of the water to puff her cheeks up. She then spat the whole disgusting mess back into Mevlana’s face.
“Oh, look!” Amina feigned surprise, “I’m perfectly fine.”
The mystic didn’t seem perturbed at all, even though she threw the glass against the wall and smashed it to pieces. He squeezed the damp out of his beard with a sardonic grin that helped Amina see what she was perceived as when behaving insolently herself. That too was unexpected, so she turned to Anwar and told him that he was right.
“Tonight, this ends,” she said. It was time to take responsibility for their own marriage.
When she attempted to retrieve the car keys in Anwar’s pocket though, Amina found that her arm had gone numb. Her limbs were stiff, and her face was stuck expressing the last expletive that she had hurled at Mevlana.
Amina was frozen, rigid as a corpse.
Mevlana stood before her, watching the terror fill Amina’s eyes as she realized that the water was toxic. He showed her his middle finger, before tapping it lightly on her forehead. Amina tipped over, and fell backward like a domino. Anwar caught her just before she banged her head. He then laid her body gently down, flat on the floor.
“Was that really necessary?” he asked.
“You paid for it,” Mevlana replied, fishing a set of car keys out of his own pocket and handing it to Anwar, who exchanged it for the keys in his pocket. “Told you, hope is the most effective way to ambush a demon,” Mevlana said.
“What about Amina?” Anwar asked desperately. “Look at her!”
“Well her mouth doesn’t move,” Mevlana replied with intent to scathe, “now she’s nothing more than a blunt instrument!”
Behind her dilated eyes, Amina was fully conscious, and watched Mevlana inspecting the pitcher of clear liquid. The potion certainly did look like water, and it had easily fooled her. It was ludicrous though that Anwar and Mevlana thought that they were helping her. Intent didn’t translate to action. Instead, their concerns for Amina’s apparent ‘episodes’ only reinforced her notions that people could never be trusted.
Too often, the words that are said are not always heard for what they meant. Misunderstandings were then slept over, and emerged the next morning as hideous philosophies which people convinced themselves was the absolute truth. Ideological monsters then rallied support from their kith and kin, who themselves nodded their heads in agreement because they too needed backing for the fictions that they carried in their heads. Petty confusions soon grew into gigantic balls of crap that trampled all and sundry. In this instance, it amounted to Anwar believing that Amina was possessed by a demon.
…And he was the one accusing Amina of making up stories in her head. People!
Stiff as a plank, Amina was carried down the stairs by Anwar hauling her at the shoulders and Mevlana at her feet. The ceiling of that old farmhouse was in no better shape than the walls and plumbing. It hung here and fell there, and it was the blinding flash from a cracked light fitting that took Amina to a space deep within that was beyond the violation of her body and the twisting of her mind. It was a place that Amina unquestioningly trusted, and it was there that she had buried a secret that she hadn’t dared to tell anyone.
Keeping it had angered Anwar, who then poisoned Amina’s own children against her. She was now a corpse, thanks to a charlatan that Anwar couldn’t see was masquerading as a mystic. Her family hated her and her friends thought that she had lost her mind. All the rejection in the world didn’t matter as much as keeping that one secret, for it was all Amina had to negotiate her reunion with her beloved children.
That was the only thing that mattered to Amina and, if the sun was to rise again after that night, it would be the time to seek out a divorce lawyer. In the meanwhile, she watched herself be laid down in the basement of the farmhouse like a cadaver in a coffin, waiting to be abandoned.
“Pinkie Promise,” she thought, reminding herself why she was enduring this fate.
“Pinkie promise!”
“Pinkie promise…”