The Weight of Our Sky(15)
He made me lie flat on my back on the straw mat, my arms at my sides. Then he muttered verses from the Quran, all while swirling his arms and pulling vigorously at the air above me, his eyes closed in concentration. I knew it was meant to be a serious situation, but every time he flailed and grabbed at nothing and yanked at it, I felt perilously close to giggles. A snort escaped, and I quickly turned it into a cough-groan as my mother glared at me.
The ustaz stopped and opened his eyes. “There,” he said, with great finality. “Now let me see here. . . .” He grabbed my toes and prodded each one hard, causing me to yelp in pain. “Yes, yes,” he muttered, nodding. “You feel pain? That means the Djinn is there, definitely, definitely. Yes. I will help you with that.”
He’s not in my toes, I wanted to tell him. He’s in my chest, and stomach, and mostly in my head. My toes don’t really have anything to do with it. But I kept my mouth firmly shut. Adults rarely like being told that they don’t have all the answers, or worse still, that the answers they do have are all the wrong ones.
He rummaged in the wooden chest beside him and emerged with three glass vials. “This one, you dab behind your ears and on your wrists, like perfume. One day, three times,” he said, handing me the first one. “This one, you mix a little bit into your bathwater every time.” I held the second vial to my nose and inhaled; it smelled like limes. “This one, I blessed with all the good Quran surahs already. You drink every day.” The vials clinked against one another in my arms. “Okay,” I said, then “Thank you.” Should we shake hands? Was I supposed to bow? I didn’t know what the etiquette was for a spiritual healing—I still don’t.
He turned to my mother. “God willing, the Djinn will have completely left her body within the next three months.”
“Three months? That long, ustaz?”
“You cannot rush God’s work.”
“Of course, of course,” she said, subsiding hastily.
Before we left to catch the bus, I saw her slip a handful of notes into his outstretched palm. It was more money than we could really afford, and I felt the tips of my ears grow hot. Tears stung the back of my throat.
“Come on, Melati,” she said, smiling at me. “Let’s go home.”
Truly, I did feel better that first time. I let the words of the holy book wash all over me, and came out feeling virtuous, cleansed, purified. I let myself believe that the Djinn was gone. This false sense of security meant I was unprepared for the onslaught when he returned later that night. You thought it would be so easy? The taunting lilt barely hid his anger. You will see that you cannot be rid of me so easily.
I couldn’t stop counting that night. Couldn’t stop tapping every third item in our house three times, and then again, and then again, caught in an exhausting loop I just couldn’t break, my head filled with visions of Mama dying over and over and over again. I wailed and I raged and I sobbed, but I could not stop. And all she could do was stand there and watch, weeping quietly with me. “Take me to the madhouse, please,” I told her at one point, weak and weary. “I can’t live like this anymore.”
“Never,” she said, shaking her head firmly, the tears still visible on her cheeks. “And nobody ever will, unless they plan on killing me first.”
She meant it too. She was determined to find something that would work. And so we went on, spending time and money on all sorts of treatments. I was subjected to cupping and needles, poked and prodded and induced to puke my guts out into a waiting basin, made to bathe with water laced with salt, with lime, with leaves and herbs and flowers. Each time, I willed myself to get better, to heal, to chase the Djinn out and leave me with my own thoughts at last. But now I had learned to distrust that beguiling, early feeling of peace.
And all the while, I watched as it took a toll on my mother. Mama used to be gay and vibrant; when she walked into a room, she drew your eyes to her like moths to a flame. My father’s death a year before had diminished her light a little, but it was as if she’d gone from a wild, raging bonfire to a delicate, tapered candle—she was still bright and beautiful, but somehow more elegant in her grief. My situation took whatever light she had left and extinguished it. Before my very eyes, she shriveled and shrank until all that was left was shadows. The Djinn might inhabit my body, but he held us both captive.
By the fifth treatment, I finally figured it out. When Mama asked me how it went, guarded and cautious, I told her what she needed to hear. “I’m better now, Mama,” I said. “I think it’ll all be fine from now on.”
“Really?” she asked me, her eyes filled with joyful tears, her voice high with grateful disbelief. “Really,” I lied. And the Djinn smiled a vicious little smile and wrapped his scaly arms tight around my chest, as if he would never let go.
The day I gave my mother back her light, I vowed I would never let her know my darkness again.
? ? ?
“Who is this?”
We are barely five steps into the house when we are greeted thusly by another young man. Vincent might not have been too thrilled to see me earlier, but compared to the venom I can hear dripping from each word this one utters, we’re practically best friends. My heart begins to pound, and my mind, sensing impending trouble, leaps immediately to the safety of the numbers and occupies itself counting the black-and-white tiles on the floor.