Djinn

       A good djinn is a good djinn is a good djinn.

       I am a good djinn. Mama Asiya put all that salt in her co-wife’s cooking of her own free will. Certainly, I aided with a whisper. But the amount of salt was her choice. I cackled when Alhaji Musa ate the first bite of tuwo and miyan taushe, and his face scrunched up like a man who had tasted the sea.

       I am a good djinn. Yes, I encouraged Brother Ismail to steal Brother Umar’s slippers from the entrance of the masjid. But I did not tell him to throw them over the fence and into the gutter that never emptied. The exchange of blows, when the crime was exposed by a loud-mouthed eleven-year-old, and the root revealed to be one man’s flirtation with another man’s wife, is theirs to justify.

       It was almost Maghrib, at the hour parents told their children to return home. Never begin a journey at dusk, they said, never let the sun set before you find your way home. The setting of the sun opens wounds I could enter. I lowered myself into the ground and instantly found a man in Kabala West who was considering stealing from his boss.

       Maltreatment was his excuse. His boss owned a carpentry shop, and the man was an apprentice of less than three months. He had traveled from Kano to Kaduna in desperation. His last job was as a brick-maker, layering dense red clay into wooden molds, waiting for them to dry on a hot day, and then knocking them out with precision because a crack could mean deduction from his meager wage. He was ready for something that let him display skill. Skill was a feeling he had, a feeling of earned reward as his hand hovered over the tin box where he had seen his boss lock the deposit for a bed frame that a mother had ordered for her to-be-wed daughter earlier that day.

       He was the one hammering timber, bending the unruly material into shape, smoothing it out, polishing, polishing, and so the money was his. As I rose above him, I whispered into his left ear, yes. If he believed that he deserved more, then so be it. I did not tell him to steal nor the amount to steal. I did not tell him to take the tin box and hammer the lock until it burst open in the middle of the shop, the poor canister, forever deformed. 

       His boss was around the corner. The elderly man had wanted to trust the young apprentice, wanted to take his diligence for loyalty. But less than halfway home, after bidding the boy goodbye and giving him instructions to lock up, he had turned back with the swiftness of a man who had left a part of him behind. I laughed at the shriek of the apprentice. He was caught, flooded with a shame I found righteously delicious, and chased with a long scrap of wood.

       I left just as his pleas for mercy turned into moans from a bloodied mouth. I enjoy human remorse, but never as much as those who inflict it. Through the earth I slithered to meet the twice-removed victims of a woman in Kakuri who sold chickens. For every chicken she butchered and sliced into a dozen pieces, she saved one piece for herself. All around the city, families were missing a thigh, a breast, a drumstick. A vigilance descended. Wives took to accounting for every piece of meat. Maids were blamed, and lastborn children were made to kneel down and confess to the bad habit of late-night eating.

       I arrived at Dawud’s house because he was crying to his mother and father about his innocence. You would think he was innocent, the wailing timed, gasping between...“I did not”….and “do anything.” I had seen him the day before reach for a piece more than he was awarded, just before his mother sealed the pot after her nightly count. Dawud was not a smart boy. He had left proof. When his father almost caved, soothed by his mother, who preferred to stand back for the man of the house to do justice, I whispered to the elder Dawud to check under the boy’s bed, and he did. The man thundered, and I laughed. Shoving the dried-up chicken bone he had found in his son’s face, he declared that he did not want to raise a thief. Yet he was the only civil servant in the Ministry of Education who would not receive a principal unless they confirmed that they brought him a lunch allowance. The man’s theatrics, arms raised and shaken vigorously at the sky, asking God why he was being punished with a greedy child, before lashing his son, five strokes on each buttock, were as funny to me as his stance of virtuousness.

       I laughed my way to Malali. I laughed my way to Ungwan Rimi. To Tudun Wada and even to Ungwan Shanu toward Barnawa, where I found two friends at play until one felt threatened by the other.

       Ten years they had been friends. Ashiru and Kabir. They met on the football pitch next to the government secondary school with a drunkard for a headmaster. One, a midfielder, the other, a striker. Each with his kick, adapted styles from Lionel Messi, Didier Drogba, Jay-Jay Okocha. They bumped chests after goals. They lusted after the same women, girls who claimed to be uninterested in football, but who walked back and forth along the path that sided the pitch, carrying the scent of agarwood on veils swept with a flourish.

       Their skills had not gone unnoticed. A man who claimed to be a scout for the most promising teams in Europe had come to the game that day. You have passes that would make them go crazy over there, he said. But he had only one spot. They were interchangeable to him. Ashiru said little as they walked over the river that separated Kaduna North from Kaduna South. Kabir chatted away as if Europe were already his. He talked about how he would kiss the grass at Bernabéu, the home of Real Madrid, how he would make sure to do a sujud the first time he scored a goal, and then tell everyone it is all thanks to Allah and his mother, even though Ashiru knew Kabir’s mother hated his love of football more than anything else in this duniya. Ashiru felt that his friend had no regard for him. For his potential to be the one scoring and doing sujuds in Europe. After all they had shared together, Kabir thought himself better. Ashiru wondered if it was because Kabir went to a private school. Or if it was because Kabir’s parents owned two cars, a Volvo and a Mercedes, whereas Ashiru’s had none. Kabir was also a head taller. 

       On that day, it must have been the cylindrical waves on the river, the murky expanse of water and weeds, of hyacinths that cloaked crocodiles, and a riverbank crowded with the elephant grass that cows preferred, that compelled Ashiru to push over his friend. I laughed at the panic he felt when he realized what he had done. The absurd manner in which he tried to dive into the river to reach for Kabir. His hands grabbed at the lopsided extension of the bridge as if he had not, barely a minute prior, inelegantly pushed a man off it. I laughed when he started to cry, shouting I am sorry, I am sorry. I could laugh because I had done nothing. Maybe a breeze of confidence when Ashiru had put his hands on Kabir’s shoulders and pushed. Yes, I had whispered to Ashiru, it is you who should go to Europe, not Kabir.  

       Kabir survived. He could swim. He came out of the water quickly to prevent Ashiru from falling in. Kabir knew Ashiru could not swim. Kabir held Ashiru, his neck gently cradling Ashiru’s head, as Ashiru cried.

       I left then, disgusted. 

       Darkness was coming, and Kaduna would be given over to the night djinns. The faster, crueler ones. I see and hear every desire during the day, but at night, the city multiplied in hunger, so much so that it took a more ravenous creature to satisfy it. 

       Far from Kabir and Ashiru, a small girl was walking back home from school. Closer and closer to her destination, her gait changed, and the road changed too. Her sandals, paired with plain white socks, were covered with a light film of dust. The road she ventured into was loud. She had left the quiet residential area where her school was nestled and was almost at the city center. Motorcycles zoomed past her. A man on a tricycle with a sack of yams loaded at its end brushed against her. The road was wide and encroached on the buildings that lined it, the pedestrian path increasingly indistinguishable from the road itself.

       Her heart raced. She had never been on this street without being in a car. Walking made it less colorful and jubilant and more intimidating. She took each step carefully, pausing when lorries loaded with sheep approached, waiting for them to pass, bringing some wind and taking some fright, before she kept walking. If they did not see her, their ordinary carelessness could become a disaster.

       For the endless time I have spent whispering in this place, for a djinn does not know when they come to be nor when they will cease to be, I have seen the city give its share of ordinary carelessness. Each time, someone dies and someone has to live with the loss. Even as she bravely maneuvered the road, the small girl repulsed me. I rarely played with children. They contained little awareness of pure evil. Their innocence, a creed against my ways of planting mischief and delighting myself. And yet, Ashiru and Kabir had repulsed me more. 

       Kabir had gone quiet as he soothed Ashiru.

       He had been the one wronged, but he had stayed with his friend.

       He had let his friend be. Be ashamed.

       How innocent, how pure. 

       I followed the small girl. I snake across the city, sink into the ground to find those who desire, who need me to say yes, yes to their ugly desire. I was created to do this, whisper, stand between thought and action. The girl kept walking until an alley emerged abruptly, an offshoot. It was not well-lit, but I knew this was Ungwan Mai Samari, the neighborhood of the young and beautiful. She eased the grip on her bag. Then the adhan for Maghrib coincided with security lights turning on. Bulbs at the top of doorways guided her through makeshift shops that peeked from the first floor of houses and aboki kiosks that sold bread, milk, and smelled like tobacco. These lights also identified her to the people she walked past. People she paused and greeted, genuflecting gracefully. You are just coming home now, a woman said. The girl smiled. She felt proud that she was considered old enough to return home on her own. That she had ignored the fear and the worry of doing it. She felt extremely proud that she had ignored her mother’s warning to wait for her at school because she would finish work late, to wait even if she was the last child to be picked up. She had ignored instructions, disobeyed orders, and everything had turned out all right. I stopped, darkness enveloping me and her, time wrapping us in the separation between night and day, and I watched her move deeper into the enclave until she reached a gate that glowed. It did. And I waited, almost expecting her to turn around and look at me. And I wondered, how, after all these years of being with these people, these creatures, I did not know what made them good.