He had begun to post episodes from the career of Natraj Hero online but the big boys had notably failed to call. Then, one hot night—one hundred and one nights after the storm, though he hadn’t worked that out—up there in his third-floor bedroom with a red moon shining through his window, he woke up with a start of terror. There was somebody in the room. Somebody … big. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness he observed that the far wall of his bedroom had disappeared completely and been replaced by a swirl of black smoke at whose heart was what looked like a black tunnel leading into the depths of the unknown. It was hard to see the tunnel clearly because a gigantic many-headed multi-limbed individual was in the way, trying to fold those limbs into the cramped space of Jimmy’s room, looking like it—he—was about to knock down the other bedroom walls, and complaining loudly.
The individual did not look as if he—it—was made of flesh and blood. It—he—looked drawn, illustrated, and Jimmy Kapoor recognized, with a shock, his own graphic style, Frank Milleresque (he hoped), sub-Stan-Lee-ite (he conceded), post-Lichtensteinian (this when in the company of snobs, himself included). “You’ve come to life?” he asked, being incapable at that moment of depth or wit. Natraj Hero’s voice, when he—it—spoke, sounded familiar, a voice he’d heard somewhere before, a snarling multi-mouthed echo-chamber voice of divine authority, ruthlessness and wrath, the very antithesis of Jimmy’s own voice, a poor thing filled with fears, insecurities and uncertainty. The correct response to this voice was to quail before it. Jimmy Kapoor made the correct response.
Fuck yaar no space in here sala having to make self smaller, chhota like fucking ant, or I will take roof off your pathetic ghar. Okay, better. See me? Check me? One two three four arm, four three two one face, third eye looking straight into your piddling soul. No, no, please to excuse, respect must be shown, because you are my creator, isn’t it? HA HA HA HA HA. As if great Natraj was dreamed up by tax accountant in Quveens and hasn’t been around and dancing since Start of Time. Since, to be precise, I personally have danced Time and Space into being. HA HA HA HA HA. You think you have summoned me maybe. You think you are a wizard maybe. HA HA HA HA HA. Or you think it’s a dream? No, baba. You just woke the fuck up. Also me. Returning after absence of eight-nine hundred years, featuring many long snoozes.
Jimmy Kapoor shook with terror. “How didid you get hehere?” he stammered. “Ininto my bebedrooroom?” You have seen Ghostbusters fillum? responded Natraj Hero. This is like that only. That was it, Jimmy understood. It was one of his favorite films, and Natraj’s voice was like the voice of the Sumerian destruction-god, Gozer the Gozerian, speaking through the lips of Sigourney Weaver. Gozer with kind of an Indian accent. Portaal is busted open. Border between what imagineers are imagining and what imaginees are desiring is leaky now like Mexico-USA, and we-all, who before were caged in Phantom Zone, can go fast now through wormholes and land up here like General Zod with superpowers. So many wanting to come. Soon we will be taking over. Hundred and one percent. Forget about it.
Natraj began to flicker and dim. This was not to his liking. Portaal not functioning just now at full efficiency. Okay. Tata for now. But please be assured, I will return. Then he was gone and Jimmy Kapoor alone wide-eyed in bed watched the black clouds spiral inward until the dark tunnel was gone. After that his bedroom wall reappeared, with the photos of Don Van Vliet a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, Scott Pilgrim, Lou Reed, the Brooklyn hip-hop group Das Racist, and the Faustian comic-book hero Spawn pinned to the corkboard unaltered, as if they hadn’t just voyaged to the fifth dimension and back, and only Rebecca Romijn, in the large pin-up poster of the blue-skinned shapeshifter Raven Darkhölme a.k.a. Mystique, looked a little put out, as if to say, Who was that who shifted my shape out of the way, fucking nerve of some people, I’m the only one who decides when I change form.
“Now sabkuch changes, Mystique,” Jimmy told the blue creature in the poster. “Meaning to say, everything. Now the world itself is shape-shifting, looks like. Vow.”
Jimmy Kapoor was the first to discover the wormhole, and after that, as he correctly intuited, everything shifted form. But in those last days of the old world, the world as we all knew it before the strangenesses, people were reluctant to admit that the new phenomena were truly occurring. Jimmy’s mother pooh-poohed her son’s account of his transformative night. Mrs. Kapoor was stricken with lupus, and rose only to feed the exotic birds, the peahens, the toucans, the ducks. These she obstinately reared for sale and profit in the concrete-and-dirt wasteland behind their building, an empty plot where something had fallen down long ago and nothing had risen in its place. She had been doing this for fourteen years and nobody had objected, but there were thefts, and in the winter some birds froze to death. Rare breeds of duck were pilfered and ended up on somebody’s dinner table. An emu fell over shivering and was gone. Mrs. Kapoor accepted these events uncomplainingly, as manifestations of the world’s unkindness and her personal karma. Holding a newly laid ostrich egg, she scolded her son for confusing dreams and reality, as he always did.
“Unusual thing is never the true thing,” she told him, while a toucan on her shoulder nuzzled her neck. “Those flying saucers always turn out to be fakes, na, or ordinary lights, isn’t it. And if people are coming here from another world, why only show themselves to crazy hippies in the desert? Why they are not landing at JFK like all others? You think a god with so-many arms legs and what-all would come to you in your bedroom before visiting president in Oval Office? Don’t be mad.” By the time she had finished Jimmy had begun to doubt his own memory. Maybe it really had been a nightmare. Maybe he was such a loser that he had started swallowing his own shit. In the morning there had been no trace of Natraj Hero, right? No disarranged furniture or fallen coffee mug. No torn photographs. The bedroom wall felt solid and real. As always, his ailing mother was right.
Jimmy’s father had flown the coop with a secretary bird some years back and Jimmy did not as yet possess the funds to get a place of his own. There was no girlfriend. His sick mother wanted him to marry a thin-thin girl with a big nose that was always stuck in a book, college girl, nice manner on surface nasty behavior underneath, the way those girls were, No thank you, he thought, better off on my own until I hit the big time and then look out major babeland. The tall pretty girls lived in New York and the short pretty girls lived in LA; Jimmy was glad he lived on the glamazon coast. He aspired to be worthy of a personal glamazon. But right now there was no girlfriend. Fuck. Never mind. Right now he was at the office quarreling as usual with his cousin Normal, boss of accountancy firm.
He hated that his cousin Nirmal wanted to be normal so badly that he changed his name to Normal. He hated even more that Nirmal—Normal—spoke such bad normal Amreekan that he thought the word for name was Monica. Jimmy told his cousin that nowadays moniker meant a graffiti artist’s drawing on a freight train. Normal ignored him. Look at Gautama Chopra son of famous Deepak, Normal said, he changed his Monica to Gotham because he wanted so bad to be New Yorker. Also basketball players: Mr. Johnson wanted to be Magic, isn’t it, and Mr. Ron or Wrong Artist, don’t correct me, please—okay—Mr. Artest preferred to be Mr. World Peace. And don’t forget those actresses so famous in before-time, Dimple and sister Simple, if those Monicas are acceptable then what you talking. Me, I just want to be Normal, and so what’s wrong with it, Normal by name, normal by nature. Gotham Chopra. Simple Kapadia. Magic Johnson. Normal Kapoor. Same to bloody same. You should focus on the figures and keep your head out of the dreams, isn’t it. Your good mother told me your dream. Shiva Natraj in your bedroom as drawn by Jinendra K. Keep going on that way, why not? Keep going on and you will come to a grief. You want a life? Wife? No strife? Focus on figures. Take care of your mother. Stop dreaming. Wake up to reality. That is Normal practice. You will do well to follow suit.
Outside, when he left work, it was Halloween. Children, marching bands et cetera, parading. He had always been kind of a Halloween party-pooper, never got into the whol
e dressing-up Baron-Samedi thing, and half admitted to himself that the killjoy attitude was related to the absence of a girlfriend, was both an effect of said absence and also the partial cause of it. Tonight, with his thoughts full of last night’s manifestation, Halloween had completely slipped his mind. He walked down streets filled with dead people and tits-out prostitutes, readying himself for his mother’s infirmity, her guilt-trip monologues and her doddering birdseed duties, I’ll do, it Ma, he told her, but she shook her head weakly, No, son, what am I good for now except to keep my birds alive and wait for death, her usual speech, a little more macabre given the context, the dead rising from their tombs to perform their danses macabres, the night of skeleton-masked figures in hooded monks’ habits carrying the Sickles of the Reaper and drinking vodka from the bottle through the gaping mouths of their skulls. He passed a woman with astonishing face makeup, a zipper running down the middle of her face, “unzipped” around her mouth to reveal bloody skinless flesh all the way down her chin and neck, You really went all out, darling, he thought, that’s really full on, but I don’t think anybody will want to kiss you tonight. Nobody wanted to kiss him either but he had a superhero-slash-god to meet. Tonight, he told himself, filled with both dread and joy. Tonight we’ll see who’s dreaming and who’s awake.
And sure enough, at midnight, the pictures of Captain Beefheart, Rebecca /Mystique and the rest were swallowed up by the swirling dark cloud, which slowly spiraled open to reveal the tunnel to somewhere infinitely strange. For some reason—Jimmy supposed that supernatural beings weren’t required to abide by the laws of reason, that reason was one of the things they defied, held in contempt, and sought to overthrow—Natraj Hero didn’t bother on this occasion to visit the bedroom in Queens. And, again for some reason—though Jimmy himself would have admitted afterwards that rational thought had very little to do with his decision—the young would-be graphic novelist moved slowly towards the cloud spiral and gingerly, as if testing the temperature of bathwater, put his arm into the black hole at its heart.
Now that we know about the War of the Worlds, the main event to which the strangenesses were the prologue, the bizarre cataclysm which many of our ancestors did not live through, we can only marvel at the courage of young Jinendra Kapoor in the face of the terrifying unknown. When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far. So it was with Jimmy K. He had no control over the wormhole’s first appearance, or the entry into his bedroom of the giant Ifrit, the dark jinn, disguised as Natraj Hero. But on this second night, he made a choice. Men like Jimmy were needed in the war that followed.
When Jimmy Kapoor plunged his arm into the wormhole, as he afterwards told his mother and his cousin Normal, a number of things happened at mind-blowing speed. In the first place, he was instantly sucked into that space where the laws of the universe ceased to operate, and in the second place, he at once lost his sense of where the first place might be. In the place where he found himself the idea of place ceased to have meaning and was replaced by velocity. The universe of pure and extreme velocity required no point of origin, no big bang, no creation myth. The only force at work here was the so-called g-force, under whose influence acceleration is felt as weight. If time had existed here he would have been crushed to nothing in a millisecond. In that timeless time he had time to perceive that he had entered the transportation system of the world behind the veil of the real, the subcutaneous subway network operating just below the skin of the world he knew, which allowed such beings as the dark jinn and he had no idea who or what else besides to move at FTL speeds—speeds faster than light—around their lawless land for which the word land seemed inappropriate. He had time to hypothesize that for whatever reasonless reason this, the underground railroad of Fairyland, had been sequestered from terra firma for a long time, but had now begun to burst through into the dimension of the actual to wreak miracles or havoc amongst human beings.
Or it may be that he did not have time for these thoughts and that they actually formed in his mind after he was rescued, because what he felt there in the tunnel of swirling black smoke was a rushing towards him of something or someone he could not see or hear much less name, and then he was tumbling backwards into his bedroom with his pajamas ripped off his body so that he was obliged to shield his nakedness with his bare hands from the woman standing before him, a beautiful young woman dressed in the casual uniform of young women her age, skinny black jeans, a black tank top and lace-up ankle boots, a person even more thin-thin than the girl his mother wanted him to marry but with a far more attractive nose, the kind of girl he would have loved to date obviously, except that she was not glamazon shaped, but he found he didn’t care so much about that, but in spite of or because of her stick-thin beauty he knew she was far out of his league, forget about it, Jimmy, don’t make a fool of yourself, stay loose, play it cool. And this was the girl who had saved him from the vortex of velocity and who apparently was a being from the other world, a fairy or peri from Peristan, and she was talking to him. This stuff that was happening to him now: it did his head in. Vow, yaar. No words. Just … vowee.
The jinn are not noted for their family lives. (But they do have sex. They have it all the time.) There are jinn mothers or fathers, but the generations of the jinn are so long that the ties between the generations often erode. Jinn fathers and daughters, as will be seen, are rarely on good terms. Love is rare in the jinn world. (But sex is incessant.) The jinn, we believe, are capable of the lower emotions—anger, resentment, vindictiveness, possessiveness, lust (especially lust)—and even, perhaps, some forms of affection; but the high noble sentiments, selflessness, devotion, and so on, these elude them. In this, as in so much else, Dunia proved herself exceptional.
Nor do the jinn alter greatly with the passage of the years. For them existence is purely the business of being, never becoming. For this reason, life in the jinn world can be tedious. (Except for the sex.) Being, by its nature, is an inactive state, changeless, timeless, eternal, and dull. (Except for the nonstop sex.) This is why the human world was always so attractive to the jinn. The human way was doing, the human reality was alteration, human beings were always growing and shriveling and striving and failing and yearning and envying, acquiring and losing and loving and hating, and being, in sum, interesting, and when the jinn were able to move through the slits between the worlds and meddle in all this human activity, when they could tangle or untangle the human web and accelerate or hold back the endless metamorphosis of human lives, human relations, and human societies, they felt, paradoxically, more like themselves than they ever did in the static world of Fairyland. It was human beings who allowed the jinn to express themselves, to create immense wealth for lucky fishermen, to imprison heroes in magic webs, to thwart history or enable it, to take sides in wars, between the Kurus and Pandavas, for example, or the Greeks and Trojans, to play Cupid or to make it impossible for a lover ever to reach his beloved, so that she grew old and sad and died alone at her window waiting for him to arrive.
We now believe that the long age in which the jinn were unable to interfere in human affairs contributed to the ferocity with which they reentered it when the seals between the worlds were broken. All that pent-up creative and destructive power, all that good and bad mischief, burst upon us like a storm. And between the jinn of white magic and the jinn of black magic, the bright jinn and the dark, an enmity had grown in their Peristan exile, and human beings became the surrogates upon whom that hostility played itself out. With the return of the jinn the rules of life on earth had changed, had become capricious where they should have been stable, intrusive where privacy would have been better, malicious to a fault, preferential with scant regard for fairness, secret according to their occult origins, amoral for that was the nature of the dark jinn, opaque with no care for transparency, and accountable to no citizenry on the planet. And the jinn, being jinn, had no intention of teach
ing mere humans what the new rules might be.
In the matter of sex, it is true that the jinn have on occasion had intercourse with human beings, adopting whatever form they chose, making themselves pleasing to their mate, even altering gender on occasion, and having little regard for propriety. However, there are very few cases in which a jinnia bore human children. That would be as if the breeze were to be impregnated by the hair it ruffled and gave birth to more hair. That would be as if a story mated with its reader to produce another reader. The jinnias have been for the most part infertile and uninterested in such human problems as motherhood and family responsibility. It will readily be apparent, then, that Dunia, the matriarch of the Duniazát, was, or became, very unlike the vast majority of her kind. Not only had she produced offspring the way Henry Ford learned to produce motor cars, the way Georges Simenon wrote novels, which is to say, like a factory, or industriously; she also continued to care for them all, her love for Ibn Rushd transferring itself naturally, maternally, towards their descendants. She was perhaps the only true mother of all the jinnias that existed, and as she embarked on the task the great philosopher had given her, she also became protective of what remained of her dispersed brood after the cruelty of the centuries, missed them bitterly during the long separation of the Two Worlds, and yearned to have them back under her wing.