Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [30]
For that entire summer, every day became for Ammi a race to procure more cold water and more cubes of ice, and to tie the jeweled turban before the morning sunlight empowered the jinn inside. Still I became more and more frail. When my brother fell to a lesser jinn, her attention was momentarily diverted and she took to procuring other types of treatments. There were tablespoons of honey kissed with hope. Cool yellow rice chilled with desperation. Iced teas and custards refrigerated with a mother’s love.
Nothing worked. My skin darkened. The jinn inside me, so eager to take me to heaven, had started to disfigure me, turning me into a shadow right here on earth.
With squeals of pain Ammi watched the splotches on my body expand. By the time the last of my hair fell out in clumps, she was broken. She gave in to exhaustion and fell asleep, forgetting to wrap the straitjacket of ice around me. She also forgot to set my feet in a bucket of water, so the jinn smoke rushed into my ankles and I began aspiring upward, to Allah Mian. Soon I was flipped upside down, my hair scraping the floor like a broom and the soles of my feet rubbing against the hot skin of the lightbulb.
I closed my eyes. I was cooked. That’s what Dadi Ma said—and that’s certainly what it felt like.
Then, right then, Ammi put her hand on my forehead and started reciting a teleportation spell. It sounded just like Quranic verses.
When I opened my eyes I saw that I was flying—not Superman style, but held under each armpit by Ammi, who flew above me. Transformed into a parri, she was covered with a lustrous, light-colored cuticle, and her wings dripped with light. As her long hair flowed free, she carried me through the vague fog.
“Where are we?” I asked, my voice echoing as if through a thousand invisible hallways.
“We’re in the seven heavens,” she replied.
“What level are we on?”
“Fifth.”
“Who lives here?”
“Humans live on the first world,” she said, “jinns on the second and third, the Prophets on the fourth, the parris on the fifth, and the angels on the sixth.”
“Allah is on the seventh?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Why can’t I see into the other heavens?”
Ammi explained that the architecture of the seven heavens obeyed the laws of hierarchy. Imagine a house with seven stories, she said, each story separated from another by a pane of glass, and each pane of glass a one-way mirror, with the various mirrors arranged in such a way that the individual looking down from the seventh floor could see all the way to the bottom, but one couldn’t see anything looking from the bottom up.
“So what are we doing here?” I asked.
“We’re looking for a cure,” she said.
“A medicine for me?” I asked.
“A magical fruit,” she replied. “And look at your luck! There it is!” She pointed to a man carrying a paper bag.
Pops entered the room carrying the season’s first batch of plums.
“Aloo bukhara!” he said. Literally translated: the fever potato. He shoved plums down my throat and for days didn’t stop.
Over each piece of fruit, Ammi and Dadi Ma read surah Yasin from the Quran.
Within days the typhus jinn left my body. The hallucinations ended as well. The Quran had saved my life.
Soon after I was cured, I was enrolled at another