HWJN (English 2nd Edition) Read online

  Sawsan’s friends hung out in her room all the time, discussing the latest in music and fashion. I noticed during these times that one of her friends would always come with her companion, a very tacky, insidious, and deceptive Jinni. He looked at me with askance every time they crossed the yard coming in or going out of the house. I found out later that his name was Dardeel.

  I never really paid much attention to what was going on at these gatherings until one cold night when a scream coming from Sawsan’s room. I immediately jumped to her window, which was half open, to find her friend Rahaf crying hysterically. The other girls around her were trying to calm her down, and Dardeel was on his back in the middle of the room, dying with laughter. I did not understand the situation, but I could not contain my anger — I attacked that villainous character by yelling at him “What have you done to the girls, you vile thing?”

  Still laughing, Dardeel tried to get me off of him. “Hey there, prude Jinni. Are you here to help these Human damsels? You afraid they’ll stop throwing their food leftovers in the trash for you?”

  I could not keep my cool. I squeezed his skinny body. “If I see you here again, I swear to God I will kill you.”

  The scumbag removed himself from my grip and fled to the window. His laugh turned into a mocking smile, and he looked at me. “Keep to yourself, you nosey, good-for-nothing Jinni. You defend these Humans, and they’re the cause of all our ordeals! They’re the ones who begged me to come and play. If you don’t believe me, ask them!”

  With that he fled the scene, leaving the girls panicked and confused. One of them, named Khulud, came toward me, saying, “Come, girls. We need to release the spirits!”

  Areej followed her, while Sawsan remained next to Rahaf to calm her down. I saw them coming toward me and looking at me— It creeped me out.

  It was the first time I felt that one of you could actually see me. But then, I found out that they were going for a wooden board that sat on the floor underneath me. I stood still as Khulud and Areej sat on either side of it and put their fingers on a plastic disk that sat on the board.

  Khulud said in a clearly nervous voice, “Goodbye…”

  Her nervousness turned into fright as she repeated, “Goodbye… Goodbye!”

  Areej repeated it with her as the disk moved beneath her shivering fingers. “Goodbye… Goodbye, Delma!”

  Rahaf gasped for air as she watched them. Then she suddenly stopped crying and said in horror, “See? See? The Jinni has possessed me! I am possessed! She said she would possess me! I am possessed!”

  Sawsan tried to calm her down. “Girl, don’t say that. This is just a stupid game. I can’t believe an educated girl like you would think that way.”

  But Rahaf kept repeating, “I am possessed!”

  Khulud’s tension was rising. She shook that disk beneath my feet and repeated with Areej, “Goodbye! Goodbye!”

  I know that interacting with you Humans is forbidden, but in that situation I could not stop myself from stepping in to calm things down. I extended my hand toward the disk; the board had English letters and numbers on it, and pictures of the Sun and Moon, and some words like “Goodbye” “No” and “Yes”.

  I understood the girls wanted to finish the game, so I started moving it. It slid over the board with the movement of my hand to the word “Goodbye” and the moment it got there I pulled back my hand as if I were afraid I would get struck by that thing if I kept moving it.

  Everyone felt sudden relief except me. I think I was more terrified than Rahaf was! I jumped to the window and went back the storage room as fast as I could. I did not sleep all day. For the first time in my life, I had actually interacted directly with Humans, and I did not know if what I had done was okay or not. I would not dare reveal it to mother. It was truly a strange feeling.

  For ninety years I had watched you Humans without ever feeling your existence and on that day, I communicated with you. I said one word: “Goodbye!” and then decided I would never say another word.

  (3)

  H W J N S W S N!

  Overwhelmed by my interaction with Sawsan and her friends, brief as it had been, I could not keep a hold of myself. I traveled immediately to Hindabah, one of our colonies north of the Red Sea, and met my friend Ghurman to ask him about what had happened. Ghurman was a wise Jinni who was more than three hundred years old, and had a long history with Humans. He had traveled around many of your cities.

  I told him what had happened, and he said, “That was a Ouija board!”

  “Ouija? I have never heard of such a thing. Is it a game? Because these girls were scared to death—and I was even more terrified!”

  Ghurman laughed, “I guess it’s only logical that you’ve never heard of it, as it’s not common in the Arabian world. It’s a very ancient game between us and them, that I think originated in India and is now very popular in the West.”

  “Really? Sawsan and her friends know how to call on us?”

  Ghurman sighed. “Why do you have to make such a big deal out of it? It is a very simple thing, really. With the Ouija we do not interact with the Humans directly. Listen, it is true that humans are limited to their muddy dimension, but their spirits feel all dimensions, very few of them recognize those feelings, what happens is that when humans gather and concentrate their connection to their soul is clearer, thus they better feel our movement and move the Ouija piece with us”

  “You mean Dardeer was making them believe he was a female Jinni that possessed their friend?”

  “No doubt! A lot of Jinn enjoy playing with the Humans. And every time he made up a new story they believed him.”

  I came back from Hindabah with one thought on my mind: Could I really communicate with Sawsan? The more I pushed the idea away, the stronger its hold on me became, especially when I watched Sawsan. Every morning before I went to sleep, she watered her flowers and sang and talked to them. I wished I were a flower on her windowsill, living on her sweet whispers and songs.

  “Hawjan? Where have you drifted off to?” My mother’s voice interrupted my imagination as I watched Sawsan one morning.

  “Mother? Nowhere. I am here”

  “You haven’t been yourself lately, ever since the day these Humans moved into our home. You stay awake all day and keep circling their daughter. That is not right!”

  “Mother, you know this was our home before they were even born. It’s not easy for me to move out of my room to the yard so suddenly after all these years.”

  “Hawjan! I am your mother. Do not play games with me. It’s not right for us to invade their privacy in their own house. Don’t you dare get close to them, you hear me? If you care about my feelings, keep away from them.”

  “Seriously, Mother? Of course I would never get close to them. I have no capacity for Human problems on top of ours.”

  My words did little to put her concerns to rest, but her words ignited me. Was I really attached to a Human? No, no. That was impossible. Then why did I, who had known hundreds of Jinn whose beauty and fame had not moved a grain of emotion in me, stand now beneath the balcony of this Human female, moaning to the sound of her song to some flowers? I used to pity the Human lovers who filled mental institutions to get cured of their Human attachments. Now I had become one of them.

  I remembered asking my aunt, “Is your passion for that Human worth destroying your life and his?”

  “Hawjan,” she replied, “love does not distinguish between Human and Jinn.”

  Love? Could I have fallen in love with a Human? Was it possible that I loved you Sawsan?

  This kind of love might be some form of madness. Could we overlook the radical differences in our forms, the fact that we could not communicate, the age difference that always seems to be an issue for you Humans? (For us Jinn this is normal. My father was eighty-eight years older than my mother.) Was my aunt’s saying right? Was love really above all differences?

  I convinced myself—rather deluded myself—that a little bit of attention
, curiosity, and admiration did not harm. At the end we had our own lives in our own worlds, one of which was hidden from the other. It was enough for me to watch you Sawsan from afar, to listen to and enjoy singing.

  Oh, but what tore me apart was that she did not notice me. She did not even know I existed! I thought about this while I was in Sawsan’s empty room one day, between her bed and desk. The door suddenly opened, and she came in, closing the door behind her. She seemed anxious. She opened her computer and inserted a USB drive she had taken out of her bag. Sawsan’s worry rubbed of on me, and my curiosity forced me to stand behind her chair and watch the monitor. Some dark pictures appeared on the screen. I recognized a cross-section of a Human head—I’d had to learn Human anatomy at school.

  Sawsan flipped through the images. I saw a pale spot in them, which meant only one thing: this person had a deadly tumor in his head. I turned to Sawsan when I heard her begin to cry quietly, as if she were afraid someone might hear her bitterness. Her tears flowed down her cheeks and dropped on her keyboard, her eyes fixated on those images on the screen. I stretched out my arm. I knew it would not touch her, but I passed my fingers across her cheeks as if I could wipe away those tears.

  She wiped at them herself, and I saw her hand go through mine. Sawsan shivered and looked behind her, making me shiver as well. She slammed her laptop shut and rubbed away her tears in a hurry while running toward the door. She had heard her mother coming. I got out in a hurry, and looked behind me to see Sawsan floating from the depths of despair to the summits of cheerfulness as her mother came in.

  Could it be that Dr. Abdulraheem had cancer? I had heard him talk so many times about how old age was treating him and the pains he had. I thought those were normal symptoms for a person who had gone through so much just to provide a house for his family and see his kids grow up to face the battle of life. Everyone who gets to that point starts obsessing about age, but I never thought it’s that serious.

  After that I took any chance I had to be near Sawsan, but I vowed to myself that I would avoid being with her when she was alone. I respected her privacy. Sometimes, however, I would break that vow when I could not resist watching her—from afar, of course—as she perform her daily ritual of pampering her flowers.

  Then came the night when Sawsan and her friends (Areej and Khulud) went to a café on the coast, and as usual my curiosity got the best of me. I followed them there. I hesitated as I trailed Khulud’s car, and almost went back home when I remembered my mother’s words, but I brushed that thought aside and kept on going. When the car stopped at a traffic light, I came close to the rear window and eavesdropped on Sawsan and her friends. They talked and laughed about the same old topics: boys and their adventures as well as the latest fashions.

  Suddenly Khulud gasped for air and looked directly at me. It frightened me, and I pulled back quickly.

  Sawsan asked her, “Khulud, what’s wrong?”

  “I felt like someone was watching us through the windows.”

  Areej interrupted her. “Can you stop with all your ghost stories? We’re really not in the mood for your superstitions.”

  “Khulud,” Sawsan added, “you’re so affected by all those superstitious movies you watch. You should really stop watching them!.”

  But Khulud was sure she had felt something: my presence!:

  “I swear to God, I am not joking,” she said. “I truly felt as if some shadow was watching us through the window, and then suddenly disappeared!”

  Areej lost her temper. “Can you please stop frightening us? Isn’t what happened to Rahaf that day enough?”

  That line of discussion was over, but my worry was not. I’d heard before that some of you can feel our presence, or even see us. Some of my friends had told me their kids played with Human kids, and some swore that some Humans could actually see them. But the barrier between our two races is a mystery we know so little about.

  I followed Sawsan and her friends into the crowded café. I felt uneasy with so many Humans around me and was suspicious of anyone who looked my way after the shock Khulud had given me when she’d noticed me in the car. Luckily the girls sat at a four-top table, so there was an empty seat for me. As they talked, I drifted into observing that Sawsan was different from the rest of them. She did not share their shallow mentality; although she would complement them with a smile or a nod, her eyes showed a sadness no one recognized but me.

  I wasn’t interested in anything they talked about until Khulud reopened the topic of Jinn. I know that Jinn stories have a lot of suspense, pleasure, and fear, and we’re an important subject of discussion at your gatherings. However, as I mentioned before, I have had it with all of the exaggeration with which you describe our reality. Everyone who notices a blanket swaying in the wind on a laundry line claims to have seen a flying bearded man with light coming out of his eyes. Yet I felt on that day honesty in Khulud’s words. As she told her stories of situations that had happened to her personally, most of them seemed at least logical to me. Sawsan and Areej were lured in by them too.

  Then Khulud said, “How about we try talking to them again?”

  Sawsan asked, “ Did you bring the Ouija board with you?”

  Areej objected. “Why don’t you just cool down, girl? I’m getting married in a month, and I’m not planning to go to my wedding possessed.”

  Khulud ignored her. “I don’t need the board. Jinn are everywhere. We can chat with them whenever we want.”

  She moved the coffee cups aside, removed the paper tablecloth, and flipped it over to the white side while calling out, “Excuse me, please!”

  One of the waiters came rushing over, and was a bit surprised when Khulud asked him only for a pen. He brought one, and she wrote the Ouija letters and numbers on the white paper. She was sure the board itself did not have any magic, and this communication could be done in other ways.

  When our Jinn expert was done preparing the primitive board, she scanned the area, looking for something. Then she smiled and picked up Areej’s plastic water bottle. “I’m borrowing your bottle cap.”

  “You want to cast a spell on me?” Areej asked, sounding a little bit frantic. “And have you ever seen an Arabic Ouija? How far have we advanced?”

  Khulud ignored her again. “Come on, girls.” She dropped the cap onto the paper. “Each of you put a finger on it.”

  My curiosity fell back this time in light of my fear of Humans—and my promise to my mother.

  “Is someone there?” Khulud asked. “Is someone there?” She repeated the question, and Areej joined her.

  “I guess Jinn don’t go to Starbucks!” Sawsan said, and Areej laughed. So did I.

  But Khulud went on. “Is someone there? Is someone there?”

  This chance may never have repeated itself. I could talk to Sawsan! I could tell her who I was, and how her eyes made me—a Jinni—melt. And how her singing mesmerized me.

  “It seems you’re right. There are no Jinn here,” said Khulud. She just gave up.

  Areej removed her finger from the bottle cap and asked, “Do you really believe the stories? I think it’s all just delusion. Jinn have no time for us! Give me back my bottle cap. I hope it’s not cursed now.” Her face brightened. “Hey! I need to get my fiancé to drink from this bottle so he’ll fall even deeper in love with me—and see every other girl as one of the Three Stooges!”

  I pushed my arm toward Sawsan’s hand, like a person trying to reach out and catch an expensive, crystal masterpiece before it falls. Who ever makes that catch? She pulled away before I reach her, so only Khulud’s hand was left there along with mine. I tried hard to move the bottle cap toward the word “Yes.” I tried and tried, but the cap did not move an inch.

  “Girls, we must say goodbye just in case. Maybe there was a Jinni. I’m serious! I’m not joking.”

  Areej ignored her; she was talking to her fiancé. Sawsan moved her hand toward the cap, and my heart exploded. (Yes! I have a heart.). I went back to trying to mo
ve the cap with my shivering fingers. Finally it slid slowly toward the word “Goodbye.”

  Khulud was astonished. “Is someone there?”

  I moved the cap toward “Yes.” Khulud smiled, while Sawsan’s eyes widened.

  Areej’s jaw dropped, and she ended her call. “Loai, I’ll call you back. Bye.” She threw her phone to the side and yelled, “You guys are joking, right? This is not funny!”

  Khulud responded, “Fast, put your finger with ours.”

  Areej put her index finger on the cap. It started to float over the paper above the word “Yes.”

  My friends, I was now talking with Sawsan for the first time in my life. What should I tell her? Should I say I was a Jinni? That I was older than her grandfather, who had died fifteen years ago? And I live with my family in her house? What a situation I’d put myself in. I wished I had not laid my finger on that bottle cap. I would have removed it immediately, but I feared causing the girls to panic like last time. But their courage tempted me to go on, usually the first contact between humans and Jinn is filled terror, panic and screams, but you get used to it after that, and I guess that happened with Sawsan and her friends as they got used to playing Ouija.

  So I thought: What should I tell you, Sawsan? What would get you to admire me? Khulud did not give me a chance to sort out my thoughts. “Male or female?” she asked.

  I moved my finger, and the cap flowed to the letters on the board. “M…A…L…E.”

  “What is your name?” Khulud then asked.

  Should I tell you my name, Sawsan? Will it surprise you? Will you laugh at it? Should I borrow a Human name? No, Sawsan, I will only tell you the truth.

  “ح…و…ج…ن,” I spelled out. H…W…J…N.

  “Ho-Jan?” The way Areej pronounced it sounded funny, but I could understand her confusion. In Arabic, although we have vowels, we only use them to bring extra emphasis to that letter. Simple vowel sounds are represented by marks on other letters. So for an A we have a dash over another letter, and for an E or I we have a dash under the letter. For the O or W we have a comma-like symbol over the letter. Now, as there were no vowel symbols on the girls’ makeshift Ouija board, Areej expected the H in my name since it was followed by the vowel letter “W” that it would have an O-like vowel. I move the cap to “No” and rewrote my name: “H…W…J…N.”