A man comes in around 2:30 for an appointment I forgot to write down. He is slight, his back hunched like a misshapen hanger. A Mr. Alaoui. His face, I imagine, was once handsome, but now, it is tired and old. His daughter, he tells me, has been claimed by a jinn. He stands at a distance as he tells me this, as though afraid of a temptation he thinks women were born to embody.
His daughter is dating an American–he is careful around that word–boy and won’t listen to her parents. “She wasn’t allowed to date,” he sighs. “Especially outside of the faith.” Now, she claims she’s not going to school anymore. She’s moving in with this boy. She’s leaving her family behind.
It would be good for me to see more original nightmares, I think, but who am I to say what is horrifying. I tell him it sounds like a serious problem. I show him the space where we’ll do the exorcism, and he nods his approval.
I’m going to talk to her about safe sex and how to think about interracial relationships; ask her what she’s running from to see where her doubts lie. Her father doesn’t need to know.
I believe in possession, but most of the cases brought to me could hardly be classified as such. I’m no worse than any so-called Sufi who recites the Quran and claims to exorcise whichever garden variety, suburban jinn. Those frauds charge more than me, offer talismans and amulets containing butcher shop castaways, and their work is far fishier, requiring freshly spilled lambs’ blood and the like. Messy.
An exorcism doesn’t demand theater. The real cases would bring it. I haven’t thought about what I’d do if an actual case came through my door after all these years, but I do think it’s good that the girl is being trusted to me. I’m the only fraud who can help with a problem her father can’t imagine. He’ll come back on Monday with her in tow and a check for me.
“Call me, Paro,” I tell Mr. Alaoui on his way out. He keeps addressing me, “Madam.”
◆
The hardest thing about living is the body. Yes, it holds a certain power. The medium for our senses, our experiences, what have you. But what about when it doesn’t hold what it used to. When it’s always reaching, never grasping.
When she hit 93, my mother, a witch in her own right, started telling us that Allah would be our protector when we gave him everything. This despite the fact that, at the end of her life, she was alone, dying slowly and in pain.
My collarbone is more pronounced now than it was before. My skin softer after being cared for over many decades. This body looks as fuckable in theory as it is in action, and, if this is its power, I can live with the mistakes it will continue to make.
It’s because Imran came over last night. Beautiful, mild Imran. Everything a widow could ask for, right? We, mostly me, finished half a bottle of whiskey, and in the moment where we’d usually turn towards one another, he asked why we spend time together. I told him it’s because there aren’t enough attractive singles over fifty for us to engage in more than one relationship at once. He hated me in that moment for not taking it seriously, though he’s a man defined by his understanding. I’ve been trying to tell him I have nothing else to give.
Not a fight. Perhaps a reckoning. He’s tired of the runaround, and I can’t blame him.
After he left me in the doorway, I drank another quarter of the bottle and listened to Chaka Khan. I thought about Tariq and cried a little before stopping myself, the beat still pulsing the couch. I lay face up on the floor wondering if tonight would be the night I’d slip past the veil. It wasn’t. I was too drunk and fell asleep.
◆
On Saturdays, I usually meet Salma and her family for dinner. I’m not one to distance myself in every way, even if her attempts at care are founded more in her sense of responsibility than in love. Sent away to boarding school at the age of eight, my sister chose to believe in a strict god. A god disapproving of appeals to any power outside of his own. A god shaped by fearful men who don’t want to acknowledge the presence of spirits on this earth until it affects their lives. I have no regrets about our differences, even if I never thought we’d end up in the same place. I have to assume we love each other, though the only evidence of that is a weekly mutual presence at her home.
I don’t know if I feel loving today, and so it is good that she is out of town. If she is the last person who might tie me to this earth, the rope needs reinforcement. An open conversation. A meeting that is more than ritual. But tonight she’s not here.
I take a shower, and afterwards brush my hair as I roam the house in my robe, a few hours still till I’ll head out for the night. I stop in the living room.
Tariq made this painting of a dear friend from home, Minu, and her daughter. It still hangs on the wall in the living room. It is undeniably his, the simplistic figures formed from blocks of shape and color, the sky. Minu and her daughter sit inside a beach hut in Karachi, not unlike the one where I once spent evenings with my father. Minu reclines against a long couch at the center of the hut. Her daughter stands at her persimmon head, eyes and chin directed at Minu, her hands lost in blue-black hair.
As she helped me pack up his things after the funeral, Salma told me I should take this painting down. I hated her for that, though the feeling was unfair. She moved to Texas to care for me and stayed to build a family of her own. She has two sons now. They’re sweet.
We never had children because he didn’t want them, nor do I think he would have been a good father. He was an amazing man in many ways, an artist, an activist, but not known for nurturing outside of his chosen subjects.
I wear a midnight blue kurta Salma bought me for my birthday and hang obsidian around my neck. I take a stick of kajal out my purse and put it between my eyelids, dragging it gently across. A habit. I used to carry so many spirits. Yes, ancestors, but also my selves. I learned to listen to them one at a time so their clatter didn’t conquer my mind. I don’t know where they’ve gone now. I keep listening as though I’ll hear them breathe.
◆
We’re meeting at a place where the patio is covered by a canopy of non-native plants and they play awful live music. Their bartender is sweet to me, over pouring with a smile. People keep looking at me. I sit, let them stare. Some nights you only want to exist in the eyes of someone else.
It’s a woman singing tonight. She’s good. Her voice is gentle in its depth, the bottom of a river that runs slow. She wears a flannel over jeans, looks like she’s in her early 30s. Her hair is straight, cropped in a close bob that frames a circular face and the kind of body that looks sturdy enough to have washed clothes by hand and raised chickens whenever that was what most of us spent our lives doing.
I don’t pay attention to the words, but I know these are love songs. They smell of a festering wound. I look at the swirling cocktail in front of me wondering how it’s moving when I feel so still. I barely notice Kamal sit next to me, his hello accompanied by a hand on my shoulder, the light catching his forehead.
“Looking nice tonight,” he says sitting down. Tariq met Kamal at a record store where he’d buy old comic books, and after a few months invited him over for the first of many dinners. We’d all play cards, drink mojitos. Now Kamal meets me at bars and we alternate buying each other’s nights. Still, he disapproves of my living in the shadows.
“What’s wrong, Paro,” he asks, noting something I know I’ve already done a good job disguising, “You seem off.”
“And here I thought I looked great,” I say in response.
He rolls his eyes. “You can be beautiful and not as radiant as usual. What’s going on? You sick?” He moves to put a hand on my forehead, and I bat him away.
“Okay stop. That’s enough, I know my body. I’m fine.”
“If you know it so well, why aren’t you taking care of it?”
I hold a mocking hand to my chest. “You think I look uncared for?” I laugh and he drops it.
Of course, everyone can find something to say. If you sit too long with people, let them hold your eyes in theirs and then speak, use words to tell you about you—well that’s the most vulnerable place you could be in. Kamal knows. He’s gone through his own losses. A partner, twenty-five years ago. His mother, too recently. Friends he mentions in stories before darkening into silence. It’s a miracle that anyone continues to seek love.
“Let’s talk about you, my love. What are you making of this one special life?” Kamal doesn’t know a thing about jinn but he has an altar in his dining room covered in dead roses and stones. He prays there and does not call it prayer.
“I’m not manifesting much more than a drink these days.”
“What about the boy you were seeing,” I call as he walks away.
He turns his head back towards the table. “34, not a boy.”
This song is more upbeat than the last. The bass is moving faster. The singer is smiling, looking back to her accompaniment. They seem to be syncing up. Her voice has gotten deeper, closer to the sound of someone speaking. I still can’t tell what she’s saying.
Kamal comes back. “The boy was jealous of the silliest things. I had to end it.”
“Boys.”
“Hush. You know Miakka called me the other day, though?”
“Did she?”
He laughs and offers no further details. Something in this on again off again love will always be juicy. He can’t commit, but I can’t judge a woman for her love, though. It can take a lifetime to learn how futile it is.
Kamal pulls three joints from a cigarette case in his pocket. “Want to pick a cleanse?”
One mixed with mullein, an enhancer of dreams. The second mixed with tobacco, the carrier of messages to the spirit world. The third, green like fresh pressed olives, for presence.
It is important to know how to work with the fruits of the forest. Like anyone else, a witch’s longest companion will be the soil that surrounds us as our bodies rot. It is inevitable that this also be the root of our power.
I don’t know why I’m calling us witches when we are churails. The first churail was a demon woman born when the bahu of a wealthy household died during labor. She haunted the forests and the men of the family who did not protect her. Eventually, she killed the entire male line, youngest to oldest. She is beautiful, perfect head to—well, then the giveaway: her feet face backwards, footsteps always leading into the past. Pichal Peri. My mother always claimed we were her descendants, but I don’t think she’s dead. Recently, I heard she’s haunting the developers trying to deforest her home to build whatever high rises watered by whichever diverted river.
I choose the tobacco, though I can’t think of a message.
We smoke on the back of the patio, and while a few patrons give us looks, no one says anything. When Kamal goes back inside, I check my phone. I texted Imran a while ago asking him to meet us.
Sometimes, after three or four drinks, I swear I can hear the footsteps of past selves making their way into different rooms, searching for a way into my consciousness. Like a child hiding in the closet, I pretend I’m not here at all. My body outside myself, I can see how that light dances on my cheekbones, catches the pearl of my hair. Even if these things haven’t faded yet, I know they will. The footsteps aren’t real. It’s the sound of my hands on the floor.
The musicians take a break. They put some sort of bossa nova on the stereo.
“You want to,” Kamal asks, gesturing his chin, and we hold hands as we move to the small square in front of the stage then release each other to our distinct bodies. I let my muscles strain slow, work into my legs from the feeling in my feet. When was the last time I was intimate with myself. I wonder. Kamal smiles back at me. We take each other’s smiles for granted.
Imran comes in during the second song. I offer him my hand and he takes it.
“I thought about bringing a date,” he says into my ear. “Just to prove you wrong.”
“I beat you to it.”
“Kamal doesn’t count.”
We dance holding each other. He lets me twirl him. He has forgiven me, I think, but he barely meets my eye, even when he’s smiling. Imran should learn not to love me. I should learn to push him away. The woman and the bassist smile at us as they come back. When Imran leaves to get a drink, Kamal moves closer to me.
“He’s good for you, don’t fuck it up,” he says, reading my mind.
“We’re too old to be in love.”
Imran doesn’t come back quickly, and Kamal has gone back towards the table. I stand alone on the dance floor for a moment and see the woman who was singing whispering into the ear of her partner and don’t want to be seen by anyone.
Sometimes everything heats from the ground up. I envision a gas line to the base of my feet. When it reaches my face, I have an urge to collapse that I don’t follow.
I tell Kamal I need to get something from the car and leave.
◆
Salma posted a picture of the boys, cackling having flipped over a monopoly board after dinner in whatever lodge they’re staying at. My phone is bright blue, too bright to see anything else. I drop it into my bag. Should I have gone with them? She invited me.
I keep turning my head looking for Tariq. Not Tariq, Imran. I walk past my car, not ready to drive. I need a breath. I turn into an alley that I know to be behind a bar. Tariq and I used to have a list of our favorite spots like this—it’s not the same alone, but I am reminded. Warm evenings and stale cigarettes and sometimes a kiss against the wall, playing at youth. How many decades since the first time we did so. How stupid to reminisce. We never remember the flaws. Never remember the dishes thrown against the wall, the fights over how much chili went into the chicken. There’s no point I guess.
I feel sick. I move to bend over at the wall’s edge and hold it back. I should go. I pull out my phone, walk into the humid air. When I turn my head I see the lights from the SUV. I smile at them, it must be heavy. I walk into the street, but the car swerves. It hits me with the side view mirror. I fall onto the concrete.
“Allah,” I ask, looking at my fingers, red from instinct.
The driver sees me get up and speeds away. I understand. Don’t I look like I would sue? I told you I’d live another forty years. My necklace has broken on the ground.
When I get back to my car, Imran is standing by the front door.
“Hey you,” I say. “Look.” I outstretch my fingers, show him my red as though it isn’t visible in the white of my hair.
◆
He insisted on driving me home, and I let him drive behind me. He’s characteristically anxious even though I let him check that the amount of blood overshadowed the severity of the wound. He keeps asking how I am. I keep telling him I couldn’t die now if I wanted to. That I’d have to be walking forward.
When we got to my place, he worried that I had a concussion. His hands were warm and dry on my face, solid, but he’s no doctor. He tried to convince me to go to the hospital and I refused.
In the shower, I am disappointed to see the blood go pink down the drain. I can imagine Tariq in the room with Imran, not as worried as angry. Imran would have found my deceased husband a bit full of it. Tariq might have found Imran boring.
He would have told me I was stupid. It’s not safe for a woman to walk around a city alone, he used to say. But I’m not always a woman. I’ve held so many spirits inside me.
I turn off the shower, step out. The mirror needs to be cleaned.
Imran is waiting for me in the living room when I get out. He laid out pajamas on the bed, but I just wear my robe. My hair drips down my back.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him.
“Can I see your head?” I kneel in front of him and he looks at my forehead. He offers again to take me to the hospital, but I still hate hospitals. I don’t need that kind of healing. My wound throbs when he touches it, but I don’t say anything. He tells me I ought to be careful.
I don’t know what I should have done. I don’t know how I didn’t notice the anvil on my chest. I can feel my breath moving through my ears. My breath.
He rubs my back through the robe. I say please, and he lets me kiss his chest. He kisses my forehead. I let him walk me to bed. He lays me down, but when I ask him to lie next to me he declines.
◆
Imran doesn’t wake up from his place on the couch when I rise and move towards the kitchen to get water. This house is small by Houston standards, but too big for me. I could scream and he might not hear me. I have screamed and no one heard me. I scream now and nothing. Nothing shakes or falls off its shelf. Minu and her daughter hang quietly on the wall. Imran doesn’t move.
Can you hear me? Are you listening yet?
I stand at the counter. It’s not a cicada year and I hear nothing. I drop my glass, expecting it to shatter. I go to the broom closet anyways when it doesn’t, planning to sweep up its whole. The dustpan is on the top shelf and when I pull it down, I’m clouded red.
Pigment powder I should’ve thrown away or sold. I run a finger down my cheek and then on the closet door. He used to paint at a studio. I don’t remember who packed it up. It has been nine years since they sent back his body. He never painted in our house, always kept a studio downtown.
Tariq used to mix the pigments so precisely, seeking new colors, new modes. If the art was meant to offer an epiphany for the artist, he never hinted at one. Always the pursuit, never the answer. And yet, I remember a time calling him home from the studio to get a bat out of the living room. It was dark already, the bat flying circles over my head along the edges of my room. This is not an emergency, he screamed, as though I’d interrupted something important. I screamed back. It was a harbinger of death, for Christ’s sake.
I grab the half-emptied container of pigment, sweeping the powder off the surface of the shelf and back into its mouth. The glass is still on the floor of the living room. I take the container to the kitchen and dump the contents into a cereal bowl. I mix it too thick at first. Then too thin.
I take out a box of brushes, selecting the biggest of them. I set the brush and bowl on the dining table, which I pull away from the wall. The paint sloshes a bit. I look at the wall and pick up the brush. I paint a red square on the white. Layer after layer. It’s as tall as I am. As wide as my outstretched fingertips. It drips down the wall onto the wood floor.
I go back to the closet. Find black and purple. White. The red is drying and I mix the black. The black is an outline for the square. I paint it using the width of the brush as a measure. I mixed it better this time.
Can you hear me yet?
I touch my hand to the red and close my eyes and behind my eyes is red. The paint is dry. I mix the purple too thin. I paint it sheer over the red. I go over the black.
Fuck. Can you hear me yet?
I blur the edges of the black with my finger. I mix white. I wait for the purple to dry. I think about Imran’s shoulders. His voice saying I will be okay. I don’t want to be loved, but my heart might. And he shows up. And he doesn’t ask much. And most of the time, I can be my self and my strange in his presence.
I’d let it all go. There are pills. There are razorblades in the kitchen drawer. But I can’t take myself seriously. With a gun to my head, I’d just hand over my wallet.
The paint is dry when my fingers return to the wall. I follow my body, draw a skeleton with six arms. He, I think, holds a sword to his neck. I paint red at the neck. He is dancing, the butterfly trusting their larvae will find them at the end of their migration.
I use purple to go over the red, leaving only droplets across the square.
The sun still isn’t risen, so I light two candles on either side, and they shine tall ovals on edges. The colors are bleeding on the baseboard. It will look ridiculous in the morning and maybe I’ll laugh.
When we first moved to Houston, Tariq asked me over lunch if I thought we’d be buried here. I said how, when we’ll never die. “Bewaqoof,” he said to me, laughing. When the plot twisted, I had twenty-four hours to find him a plot in an American qabristan. His grave is in the middle of a swampy field. There’s no space on either side of him.
I can’t look at this painting.
When I wake up Imran, I tell him I’m sorry. I tell him I could try to be with him, try to not disappear. He kisses me now, his lips soft and direct. I face him, sitting on his lap. He puts his mouth to my chest.
◆
As it turned out, Mr. Alaoui’s daughter was possessed, and, even after a decade of nothing, I exorcised the particularly charming jinn before sending her and her father on their way. It would be a good story for Kamal.
I took a walk that afternoon. The air was clear. My mother died in her sleep. My husband, in a rush of air. They both loved the thing that was bigger than them more than they loved me. I don’t blame them. I text Salma a selfie. I think about saying I miss her, but I just ask if she’s around during the week. At the edge of a small man-made pond, a crane stood on a fallen tree. It did not notice me, and I walked past.