What’s weird and inexplicable is that I would still read the next story that he writes. Even better if he wrote a full-length novel, because there is something enjoyable about his writing style, something very genuine in his descriptions of things. It’s just that a lot of those descriptions sometimes pass right over my head, which makes me realize that I’m one of those readers who’s just not that into vague, ambiguous endings and only-slightly-implied plot twists.
In Emperors of Jinn, the penultimate story of this anthology, Malik uses two teenagers spending an end-of-summer weekend at the family farmhouse on the outskirts of Lahore to explore their fascination with jinn, and their own family history of possession. Zak, at thirteen, and Saman, at fourteen, become the catalyst when Saman becomes interested in a gruesome-looking ritual found in Zak’s grandmother’s book about jinn.
There’s also lots of other stuff happening in the story. There are twins who are quite obviously not corporeal (this isn’t a spoiler, this is fairly obvious pretty early on); there’s a possessed sister and a young peacock thief who may or may not have been sexually abused (I could have done without the vague hints of sexual assault that made me feel uncomfortable and contaminated); there’s a very confusing, mysterious protagonist; there’s a jinn summoning. Lots of stuff going on with minimal clarity, at which point I had given up and was reading the text just for the sake of reading it.
Mystery is power, the bearer of mysteries most powerful of all. That which precedes is Secret. That which proceeds is Empire.
Of all the stories I’ve reviewed so far, this one is the hardest to properly comment upon, primarily because I didn’t manage to understand much of what was happening. I was inclined to be generous and blame the fact that by the second last story in the anthology, maybe I had had too much of this particular subject matter, but since the confusion is pretty common upon reading any of T. Malik’s work, I feel like I should have seen that coming. I guess ten points to this story for the very desi reference to the character Zakoota from the popular 1993 Pakistani children’s TV series Ainak Wala Jin, but overall? You can give this a miss.
This is Review Part 3 of the Anthology titled The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories. The remaining reviews for stories by Pakistani authors in this anthology can be found here.