Coffee with Barabas was slightly anticlimactic. They met at the newly opened Gloria Jeans café in Gulshan 1, which was routinely packed to the gills. Rais drove his father’s car and had to spend half an hour looking for parking. Shaking with nerves, he ended up grazing a rickshaw and spending another ten minutes placating the passengers. By the time he got inside, he was in a terrible panic.
Pushing his way through the crowd, he realized, absurdly, that he had no idea what Barabas looked like. He had assumed the djinn would be enlivened with blue fire or something—hardly possible, now that he saw the café was filled with perfectly normal-looking people. Feeling stupid, he nodded to the manager at the door and was about to ask him if he had seen a djinn, when a large hairy fist grabbed his shoulder.
He spun around to face a giant mullah in sandals and a sweat-stained shalwar, beard and hair dyed red, and fingers full of multicolored rings.
He grinned, and his teeth were orange and repulsive. “Good, eh?”
“Barabas?” Rais blurted out.
“Yes, little envoy,” Barabas said. “Let’s get some coffee. I like the sweet icy ones. And some pastries. You’re buying.” He looked around craftily.
In a slight daze, Rais paid the exorbitant prices and waited in line, while Barabas appropriated seats. People were giving him funny looks, the upper-class clientele of Gulshan clearly uncertain about whether mullahs needed to drink coffee. Barabas kept flashing his hideous grin at everyone. Pretty soon there was a wide, empty space around him.
“So, thanks for meeting me,” Rais said, after the pastry plate had been thoroughly ransacked. “Er, what should I call you? Master?”
“Certainly not!” Barabas said. “We djinns don’t believe in that kind of hierarchical nomenclature. I was a friend of your father’s, you know, god rest his soul.”
“He’s my uncle, and he’s not dead yet,” Rais said.
“Right, right, young Kaikobad. I remember many nights of fun I had with him,” Barabas said, tugging at his beard in reminiscence. “He used to take me drinking, you know. Most unlikely places. The man had a genius nose. You may call me Uncle Barabas.”
“Thank you, Uncle.”
“So times are bad for us,” Barabas said. “Politics. Know anything about it?”
“Nothing much,” Rais said. “I’ve just started.”
“Well, you’d think Kaikobad would have trained you up before croaking.” Barabas looked put out.
“My mother told me something about conservatives running amok.”
“Smart lady,” Barabas said. “Well, the conservatives have got Matteras, who is the top dog now, and Kuriken. The younger djinn follow Matteras, and the older ones sort of follow Kuriken. It started because the Isolationists suddenly woke up—all those right-wing, it-was-so-much-better-twenty-thousand-years-ago nutjobs. They think they’re better off without humans. Their leader is Hazard, who’s a famous duelist. You definitely don’t want to run into him at night. They’ve joined together with the Creationists and made a voting bloc. Creationists are the real crazies. They translate the Lore literally. They’ve got their own leaders, but Matteras has sort of brought all the pieces of them together under the banner of the conservative party. You probably don’t know this, but after Matteras put down the Broken seventy, eighty years ago, his dignatas has really gone through the roof. So suddenly all these nutcases get together and start making noise about creationism and turning back the clock on living space, racial purity, and instead of everyone having a laugh, a lot of djinn are quietly nodding along.”
“What side are we?”
“We’re kind of middle of the road. Live and let live. Most of the big clubs follow centrist policies. Memmion is the bigwig at the Royal Aeronautics Society, or RAS. He and Bahamut go way back. The Royal Anglers’ Club are sort of with us, plus the bunch over at Giza, as well as the Old Hag Davala in Baghdad, although she said she’s busy and can’t help. Basically most of the sensible djinn want things ticking along, no fuss. Unfortunately everyone else seems to have gone crazy.”
“So where do we stand right now?”
“We’re lucky if we get any standing room,” Barabas said, suddenly gloomy. “I can’t command a porter in a train station these days, it’s gotten so bad. Absolutely plummeting auctoritas! Even Bahamut is feeling the pinch.”
“Er, do djinns have trains then?”
“What?”
“In the sky perhaps?” Rais felt a glow of anticipation. “Or underwater?”
“Don’t be silly, we use your trains,” Barabas said. “Trains in the sky? What nonsense! How on earth would we get them up there? Well, that’s not to say that we don’t have terribly advanced technology, because we do, I can assure you. Why, we could flatten all of you in a second, if we wanted to. Well, a few days at the most. Really, you people are incorrigible breeders. I took a nap once in 1033 and woke up to find the entire delta crawling with humans.”
“Sorry,” Rais said.
“Well, don’t worry. Truth is we’ve gotten quite used to you people making roads, trains, ships, and whatnot. Do you know in the old days it was such a bother to get around? Oh, and air-conditioning. We love air-conditioning! Of course, we are the ones who taught you all this stuff to begin with.”
“Really?”
“Everyone knows djinns invented everything. We’re great inventors, we are. You humans have always been stealing our ideas. There are 322 million running cases at our patent court. When some of those reach a decision, you guys will be in big trouble. That Apple fellow will be bankrupt, I tell you; we’ve been using those touchy-thingys for hundreds of years…”
“I didn’t know. I thought djinns were not really into tech—”
“Oh, we’re very much up to date on technology!” Barabas said. “High tech is the real fashion nowadays. Of course we djinns are the most fashionable race around. We’ve invented most of your fashion. That backward cap thing? Invented by a djinn. Fact. It was old Hoodiveras who did that first. You humans started copying him right away. And did he get any credit for it? Not a bit. He was very hurt, was Hoodi. Put him right off humans.”
“Wow, I always thought djinns were all about magic and stuff,” Rais said, a bit nonplussed. “You know, dark powers. But of course, you guys appear very fashionable.”
“Yes, about that,” Barabas said with a slight trace of embarrassment, “people are giving us some strange looks. Is it possible that you’re not quite up to date with fashion?”
Rais regarded his clothes. He was wearing an old pair of Diesels, worn through and finally comfortable (the first three years had been horribly tight around the crotch), and a very soft white Muji shirt. Nothing exciting, but hardly deficient for coffee.
“I think maybe you’re getting the looks,” he said finally.
“Oh?”
The place suddenly got very frosty. Little icicles formed around the corners of the table.
“You’re, well, dressed like a fundamentalist mullah,” Rais said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that—plenty of people dress like you. It’s just that this place is a bit upmarket, and they probably don’t get too many customers like you…”
“What?”
“You know, most people drinking coffee here are a bit Westernized, you might say…”
“Really?” Barabas was aghast. “Kaiko told me this was all the rage. He said this was real upper-class stuff. He helped me pick out the rings…”
“He might have been, er, joking,” Rais said.
“The devil,” Barabas said. “That rotten bastard has been leading me on! Are you sure?”
“He always had an odd sense of humor.”
“I can’t believe it! People have been laughing at me!”
“That’s Uncle Kaiko for you.”
“Ohhh, I went to the Westin poolside dressed like this,” Barabas said, holding his head in his hands. “No wonder those girls were sniggering…”
“I’m so sorry,” Rais said.
Barabas slumped in his chair abruptly, crestfallen. “Can you imagine how much dignatas I’ve lost? Kaiko must have raked it in! Ohh, I could just die…”
“Look, I can take you shopping, get you really fitted out,” Rais said. “I have friends with garment factories. We can get you some good stuff from their sample sections. I know a really good tailor in Malaysia, we could get you some suits made.”
“You’re a good boy,” Barabas said, sniffling.
For the next few weeks Rais settled into a strange routine of essentially following Barabas around and correcting a whole host of misconceptions the djinn harbored. It quickly became apparent to both of them that Kaikobad had been an inveterate liar and prankster, trespassing horribly on Barabas’s good nature.
Consequently, Barabas became pathetically insecure and often took to dropping in at odd hours. Rais started spending more and more time at the Mirpur apartment. As the bizarre minutiae of the djinn’s life began to take over his existence, he felt the mundane world begin to slip away imperceptibly, until all of his old associations appeared to him hazy and uncertain. He began to realize in part the kind of madness that had afflicted Kaikobad.
The simple acts of eating and sleeping became erratic. He needed a caretaker, but some form of paranoia had set in, and he was unable to fix on a trustworthy servant. In the end, a flash of genius reminded him that Butloo was currently unoccupied, being the majordomo of that empty, wrecked property that was his cousin’s birthright. Butloo, who must have shared in the adventures of Kaikobad, who must have a treasure trove of knowledge about djinn hidden behind his mild gaze, was the perfect candidate. Yet would the old man leave his domain?
The proposal was made and duly rejected. Rais then told his mother, with every expectation that Juny would solve the problem. Juny went over to the house in Wari and had a conversation with Butloo, fifteen minutes of which was sufficient to reduce the old man to tears. The very next day Rais found his flat being stringently organized by the stalwart, who threw away half the things and applied to Juny religiously for whatever he required, bypassing the choto sahib entirely. This suited Rais fine.
Rais’s role being part adjunct, part advisor to Barabas anyway, he could relate to Butloo completely and even picked up some pointers from the old man. Barabas was going through a phase of intense curiosity about mankind and wanted to spend his days taking pictures of everything. Rather than sporting a sensible digital camera, he stubbornly continued to use his ancient manual-focus Contax RTS III, which was a bulky device with a lot of accoutrements, including cases of very heavy and expensive lenses. Rais had to carry all this stuff, which made him irritable. Furthermore, Barabas’s pictures were not really very good, and he could spend half an hour trying to capture a single image unsuccessfully.
“Why on earth are you taking so many pictures?” he said one day, as they stopped in front of yet another random tree in Gulshan.
“Oh, you know, memories,” Barabas said.
“Memories?”
“Oh yes, in case all of this goes.”
“Goes? You mean trees?”
“Trees, ants, buildings, the city…” Barabas said absently.
“Barabas.”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you? I’m sure I told you…”
“Your eyebrow is twitching, like when you bluff at poker.”
“Well, it’s Matteras, isn’t it?” Barabas said. He sat down heavily on the sidewalk. “The Iso-Creationists have gotten so strong now. Rumor has it he’s building a murder pit for them.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a kind of a trap, a technicality. You cunningly create a situation that results in death, as opposed to directly killing people. Like if I somehow lured and trapped you inside a sinking ship and then you drowned, it’s not my fault. A small distinction, you might say, but it holds up well in court, I can tell you,” Barabas said.
“That’s kind of fucked up.”
“All part of the Lore. Matteras is an expert at them. World renowned. A nasty sort of mind, I can testify to that.”
“Who is the murder pit for?”
“For this,” Barabas said, spreading his hands out. “For all of you. See, he’s going to turn the whole bay into a murder pit.”
“You must be joking.”
“Imagine the dignatas he’s going to get.”
“Could he do it? I mean how?”
“He might have made a mechanism that could cause earthquakes and tidal waves and stuff.”
“That sounds like science fiction.”
“He might have tested it on Indonesia a few years ago.”
“Barabas, are you really serious? Why would he do this?!”
“Well, it’s the isolationist bit of their philosophy, isn’t it?” Barabas looked aggrieved. “Don’t look at me, I’m not supporting his policies. I like having humans around.”
“So this djinn is going to wipe everyone out?! And he’s allowed to do this? What happened to the ‘djinns don’t kill anyone’ rule?”
“Well, that’s a bit more of a guideline than a strict rule,” Barabas said. “Plus he keeps harking back to the days when this area was quite a bit—how do you say it—less crowded. It’s playing very well with the nostalgic crowd. Quite a few sensible-type djinns have been nodding their heads. I’m telling you, Matteras’s auctoritas has gone right through the roof.”
“This is just crazy. Who’s stopping him?”
“Well, we were hoping you might stop him.”
“Me?”
“Strictly speaking, it’s really the emissary’s job to sort this out.”
“Emissary? I’m just a trainee. Your courts haven’t even granted me official trainee status. I’m not even confirmed as Kaikobad’s heir.”
“Shirking responsibilities won’t get you anywhere,” Barabas said huffily.
“Shirking? Shirking?”
“Look now, Kaikobad would have risen to the occasion, sure enough,” Barabas said. “In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Matteras had him put away for just that reason. Then we thought Dargoman would step up, but he’s just gone missing. I called the other emissary in India, but he said he’s emigrating to America and doesn’t want to get involved. In fact, none of the emissaries seem to be fighting back at all. Everything is always dumped on me! That fat-ass Memmion hasn’t left the RAS hub in like three hundred years. I’ve tried to call the Old Hag in Baghdad a hundred times, but I don’t think they even have phone service there anymore. Well, it sucks. If these right-wing crazies get their way we’ll be set back for centuries, and no one seems to care. Poor old Bahamut. He lives in the bay, you know. Matteras will destroy his dignatas if he pulls this off. Literally knock his front door down.”
“You’ll be set back? We’ll be wiped out, Barabas!”
“Calm down, calm down, it’s not like he’s wiping out all of humanity. Most of the inland people should be fine. Unless he starts renting out his earthquake machine.”
“Are you saying this nutjob can just go around the world making earthquakes and tidal waves?!”
“Well, really, something ought to be done,” Barabas said weakly. “I mean this is exactly why we have emissaries. Where are all of them, eh? I miss Kaikobad. He would have known what to do…”
“And what about Bahamut? Isn’t he some kind of big-shot djinn? Surely he’s not going to stand idly by?”
“Yes, he told me he was counting on you.”
“Oh god. You’re actually going to pass the buck to me.”
“I’d hurry if I were you.”