Free Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie Page B

age, and, as a happy side effect, giving students of morality a task that had no ending.
    At any rate, in the old days before the separation of the Two Worlds, they say everyone had his or her personal jinni or jinnia whispering in an ear, encouraging good deeds or bad. How they chose their human symbiotes, and why they took such an interest in us, remains obscure. Maybe they just didn’t have much else to do. Much of the time the jinn seem to be individualists, even anarchists, acting purely on their own personal impulses, caring nothing for social organization or group activity. But there are also stories of wars between rival armies of jinn, dreadful conflicts which shook the jinn world to its foundations, and which, if true, may account for the decline in the number of these creatures and of their long retreat from our own sweet dwelling place. Tales abound of sorcerer-jinn, the Grand Ifrits, streaking across the skies in their giant flying urns to deal colossal blows, possibly even deadly ones, to lesser spirits, although, in contradiction, it is sometimes rumored that the jinn are immortal. This is untrue, though they are hard to kill. Only a jinni or a jinnia can kill another of the jinn. As will be seen. As we shall tell. What can be said is that the jinn, when they intervened in human affairs, were gleefully partisan, setting this human against that one, making this one rich, turning that one into a donkey, possessing people and driving them mad from inside their heads, helping or hindering the path of true love, but always holding themselves aloof from actual human companionship, except when trapped inside a magic lamp; and then, obviously, against their will.
    Dunia was an exception among the jinnia. She came down to earth and fell in love, so deeply that she would not allow her beloved to rest in peace even after eight and a half centuries and more. To fall in love a creature must possess a heart, and whatever we may mean by a soul, and certainly such a creature must possess the group of traits we humans call character. But the jinn, or most of them, are—as you’d expect of beings made of fire and smoke—heartless, soulless, and above mere character, or perhaps beyond it. They are essences: good, bad, sweet, naughty, tyrannical, demure, powerful, whimsical, devious, grand. Dunia the lover of Ibn Rushd must have lived a long time among human beings, in disguise, clearly, to absorb the idea of character and begin to show signs of it. One might say that she caught character from the human race the way children catch chicken pox or mumps. After that she began to love love itself, to love her capacity for love, to love the selflessness of love, the sacrifice, the eroticism, the glee. She began to love her beloved in her and she in him, but beyond that she started loving the human race for its ability to love, and then for its other emotions too; she loved men and women because they could fear, and rage, and cower, and exult. If she could have given up being a jinnia she might even have chosen to become human, but her nature was what it was and she could not deny it. After Ibn Rushd left her and made her, yes, sad, she pined, and grieved, and was shocked by her deepening humanity. And then one day before the slits in the world closed she left. But not even hundreds of years in her palace in the jinn world, not even the endless promiscuity that is the everyday norm of life in Fairyland, could cure her; and so when the slits broke open she returned to renew her bonds. Her beloved asked her from beyond the grave to reunite their scattered family and help it fight the coming world cataclysm. Yes, she would do it, she said, and sped off on her mission.
    Unfortunately, she was not the only citizen of the jinn world who had reentered the human levels, and not all of them had good deeds in mind.

N atraj Hero naaching down the avenue like dancing god Lord Shiva, lord of dance, bringing world into being as he prance. Natraj