Only little things went missing from the house at first, like the head of Massih’s razor blade and the handheld mirror in the guest bathroom. Minor items mostly, easy to replace. Things got lost in a big house all the time, a consequence of having five children under fourteen. Then larger objects started disappearing too, things that couldn’t be attributed to misfortune or forgetfulness: the glass lid from the dish of sugared almonds, the emerald-green bath mat.
Faiza’s nerves were pinched. For weeks now, her children had complained of their things going missing, barging in on her showers, interrupting her naps, telephoning her while she was working at the childcare centre. She did what she could to help them. She ransacked every closet, pried open shoeboxes and coat pockets, plunged her arm under the recesses of bunk beds and sofa cushions. Nothing.
Her stuff was vanishing too. She searched everywhere for the rhodium-plated earrings her great-aunt had brought home from the gleaming markets of Dubai, worth a small fortune.
Massih didn’t seem to mind much. He saw his missing Stanley screwdrivers as an excuse to delay household repairs. ‘There has to be a logical explanation,’ he said cheerfully.
Faiza was unconvinced.
A curfew was set for the kids. They were grounded. Locks were uninstalled from their bedroom doors and brutish deadbolts appeared on the front and back gates. Friends and neighbours were forbidden to visit. All guests were asked to stay away, extended family included. Still, like clockwork, something new and useful would vanish.
When Rena, aged twelve, lost her prescription reading glasses, the family spent all afternoon looking for them. Until she got new ones, she strained her eyes, continuing to read her treasured books until they gave her sharp headaches and dizzy spells. Kabir was blamed when a prized black and gold soccer ball belonging to his twin brother, Salim, disappeared. The eldest boys fought viciously, and Kabir’s cries of innocence evoked little sympathy from the other kids, terrified as they were of Salim’s merciless knuckles.
Meanwhile, Ghafar upturned the house for his collection of pin-mounted insects, which he’d won from Scholastic after mailing in several entries to a school reader competition.
‘I had it last night before bed,’ the eight-year-old told no one in particular, slouched across the couch. Little Suraya, who was playing with her squishy Happy Meal marine animal toys, offered him her grey porpoise to no avail.
*
The day Suraya turned five, she overhead Faiza confiding in a colleague, Alia, at the childcare centre about the mysterious disappearances. She lifted herself from the sea of children fast asleep during nap time and glided across the room in the dark, where she stood with her ear against the wall, listening.
‘They’ve each had something taken,’ she heard her mother say in a hushed tone. ‘Who can I blame? It keeps happening. Even when they are asleep. I don’t know what to do anymore.’
Alia brooded silently for several seconds, a silence interspersed only by the ritual clip of carrots and celery prepared for the afternoon snack. ‘It sounds like you have djinn,’ she said at last to Faiza, who gasped and recited her duas. ‘But it is not my business to say.’
Though the community in Perth was small, Alia was well respected among Muslims in the area. She was an elder, and her second daughter was already in her third year of medical school at UWA, a clear sign of moral parentage.
‘What crime could I have committed to deserve such a curse?’ Faiza pleaded with Alia. ‘Massih and I do everything we can to raise our family right, according to the deen.’
Alia placed the knife against the side of the chopping board and took Faiza’s shoulder in her hand. ‘It is not for me to say, sister. I would never wish a curse of this kind on you. Our families are devout. First, there are other steps. You trust your children, yes?’
Faiza blinked twice before Alia would continue.
‘Good. You must believe, then, in their goodness, above all else. There is no reason to think they have strayed permanently from the path of the righteous. But the children we raise here are corruptible.’
‘There is so much darkness in this country,’ Faiza concurred.
‘A great deal of darkness,’ said Alia. She wiped her hands on a tea towel and reset the pins in her navy-coloured headscarf. ‘Many here have wickedness in them, and they reach for our children, our good and pure children, to muddy their hearts. They wish ill on us.’
‘How can we be there to protect our children all the time? They go off to school and they leave our supervision. We don’t know anything of what really happens out there. Who these teachers are and what they teach them.’
‘Exactly right, sister. It is out of our hands. So try this: take each one of your children out individually. Treat them to ice cream or a chocolate. Call them your honey and a sweetie. Oprah says it can make a big difference for kids in this culture to hear such things.’
‘Honey and sweetie, yes. Okay.’
‘See what comes of it,’ Alia continued. ‘If one of them knows the culprit, with enough praise and encouragement from you, they will do the right thing and confess. It is better to know now who is susceptible to this darkness. As the mother of the household, you are the true spiritual leader of your family. You can make the change.’
‘Yes, Massih is no help. His solution is to add more debt to the credit card. Worry about it later. The things will show up. But who does the buying? Who must replace each item?’
At that moment, another colleague, Penny, walked into the kitchenette and her arrival terminated their conversation. Faiza whispered her gratitude to Alia, who nodded in turn.
Suraya reclaimed her position on the foam mat fashioned into a makeshift bed. She lay there with her eyes wide open, ruminating quietly on the fear this word djinn evoked in her mother until the first of the children around her woke up and erupted into tears.
*
‘Massih?’ Faiza asked in an uneasy voice later that night. ‘Massih?’
Her husband awoke in a startle and reached immediately for the remote on the armrest at his side. Faiza clicked her tongue.
‘Tsk. It’s not about the volume, dummy. Listen. Today at work I spoke to Alia-jan.’
Massih turned his wrists to the ceiling and arched his back on the recliner.
‘Mustafa’s wife? Give her my condolences about the tragic death of her sister. Gone so young.’
Faiza clicked her tongue again. ‘Tsk. Not that. Her sister has been dead and buried for many months. I mean about the situation here.’ She inspected the space over both of her shoulders and added, ‘With everything going missing.’
‘Ay girl, go make some chai for your sleepy Baba,’ Massih commanded.
Suraya, on her stomach playing beneath the legs of the dining room chairs with her plastic marine creatures, looked up at her father and wriggled out of her spot. Where her older siblings complained about the housework expected of them, she never whined, she never made mistakes. She unfolded the stepping stool from the pantry and got to work.
‘Yes, yes,’ he continued. ‘My briefcase had all those important tax documents inside it. All the files lost. Such a shame what happened. Well, bad things do happen sometimes.’
‘Not just your briefcase, Massih. My Coach handbag. The only handbag you bought me in all these years of marriage—even that disappeared last week. The kids have lost a lot too. Clothes and toys. We can’t afford to keep buying it all again. Alia says we need to talk to the children one on one. Praise them. Encourage them to come clean about whoever is doing this. They must know something.’
‘Have you checked the kids’ rooms?’
Faiza took her forehead into her hand. ‘Yes, Massih. All the rooms have been checked. The house is getting emptier by the day.’
A groan tore out from under Massih’s thick bristled moustache. ‘Where is the girl with my tea? Suraya?’ he bellowed, before sinking back into his recliner.
‘Coming, Baba,’ came a tiny voice from behind the granite breakfast bar that separated the adjoining kitchen.
‘Listen, Alia warned me it could be something else,’ said Faiza under her breath. ‘All our belongings could be going missing because…djinn are here. It’s possible we have allowed evil spirits into our house and they are taking our family hostage. Bit by bit.’
Massih straightened his spine as a steaming glass of saffron-tinged chai was offered to him on a matching tea plate that rattled under the effort of Suraya’s small hands.
‘Faiza,’ he said after a long pause. ‘We are God-fearing people, you mustn’t even speak such things. My missing briefcase is no reason to jump to conclusions. Don’t let Alia get to you with talk of djinn. Those superstitions belong back in Afghanistan, not here.’
‘What do you suggest we do instead then, dummy?’
‘Let’s solve this rationally.’
‘This is not rational. There is no rational explanation for this.’
Then Faiza noticed Suraya by the edge of the room caressing the loose skin around her elbow, her cheap McDonalds’ toys bundled in her forearm like the swaddle of a newborn. She clicked her tongue once more and got up. ‘Come, little one, it’s late. Let’s get you to bed. Don’t worry yourself listening to grown-up matters. You’ll have nightmares.’
*
Suraya stayed up late that night, though not from any bad dream. What she did instead was make good use of her clandestine tiptoes. She had been siphoning off Ghafar’s marble collection for several nights, and word had arrived that it was time for the last of them to be swiped.
Ghafar kept the glass spheres in repurposed cookie tins beside the red metal base of his bed, each tin piled on top of the other like the tower of Babel. Suraya was relieving tin after tin when she noticed that one, which contained Ghafar’s most prized marbles, was missing from the stack. Her nostrils flared. She snooped around the floor and inside the folds of the blanket wrestled to the foot of his bed until, nestled in her brother’s relaxed grip beside an unsteady thread of dribble, Suraya found what she was looking for. She hid each tin with her toy animals and, by morning, like everything else, they were gone.
*
That weekend, Suraya played in the front yard while each of her siblings was shepherded into the backseat of the Camry, only to return an hour later lagging miserably behind their frustrated mother. She herself was too young, too responsible and much too small to warrant suspicion. Suraya kept her kind face down, miming the voices of her sea creature toys as they leapt over blades of grass and twirled into the air. It seemed as though none of her siblings had confessed.
Faiza called her back into the house at dusk.
‘Come, my sweet honey girl,’ she beckoned as Suraya approached the kitchen. ‘Only you deserve such pleasantries. Only you remain untainted and obedient. My darling girl.’
Warmth effused from beneath Faiza’s collarbone, the place where Suraya had taken to resting the side of her face since birth. The Premier League playing on the television in the next room echoed through the house.
‘Here, take some kofta chalau to your siblings. They will be hungry by now.’
Suraya cast her eyes down at the bowls on the counter and, looking back up again, she caught her mother’s strained expression.
‘I haven’t had a chance to replace the spoons and forks from the drawer. Just bring them napkins. They’ll have to eat with their hands, like we used to back home. It will have to do for now.’
*
The twins didn’t answer the first set of knocks or the second. Suraya assembled the bowls up her wrist and arm, replicating the way she observed waiters do it with the wide oval plates at the kebab parlour, and undid the latch on the door herself.
Two sets of wary eyes stared up at her from their respective positions on the floor. The room was inundated by detritus and the sour musk of pubescence. As soon as her brothers registered the visitor was not a parent come to badger them with more questions they had no answers to, Salim and Kabir flocked to the meatball stew.
‘Hot-hot-hot,’ said Salim instantly, bringing the food greedily to his mouth with his left hand, his right arm sore from blocking punches. Flecks of amber-coloured gravy dotted his Liverpool soccer jersey, already stained from days of wear.
‘Your right hand only!’ said Kabir, whose tongue hung loosely out the edge of his kofta-rimmed mouth. He drained a plastic water bottle dry. ‘I think I burned my tongue.’
‘Sorry,’ said Suraya. ‘Be careful.’ She took the napkins from the back pocket of her shorts and passed them to her brothers, taking her leave soon after.
On her next round from the kitchen, Suraya found Ghafar tucked away in the corner of his room, the smallest one at the top of the stairs. Like an echidna balled up under attack, he sat with his back against the bedframe facing away from the door, in the void where his marble tins used to be. When Suraya offered him a bowl, he sniffled and said he wasn’t hungry.
‘Are you sad?’ Suraya asked him, drawing close to her brother. She kneeled beside him and placed four fingers on the back of his head. He was shy to reveal that his eyes were inflamed.
Ghafar nodded, but kept his face obscured by his knees.
‘You need to eat. Here.’ Suraya took a table knife from her pocket, the only cutlery she’d been able to find in the kitchen, and scooped a portion on the widest part. She extended it to her brother’s mouth. ‘Eat,’ she repeated the instruction, coaxing her brother’s appetite.
She fed him several times, enough to see the muscles in his shoulders unclench. On the sixth bite, inches from each other’s face, Suraya’s eyes met Ghafar’s as the knife’s hilt reached the edge of his lip and ripped out into the air, the blade’s edge tearing his inner cheek.
The knife fell to the floor and Ghafar recoiled. He wrapped a hand around his mouth and stared at Suraya in shock. ‘Ow, why did you do that?’ he cried. The bulge of his tongue ran back and forth under the skin above his jaw and then, after a moment of sudden fury, the crease in his forehead softened. As the middle child, he was used to dissolving grudges. His little sister was harmless. She was generous and dutiful to even bring him his dinner at such a tender age. He waved her away.
Suraya’s final bowl belonged to her sister, who was more reclusive than ever before. Her most recent pair of reading glasses had gone missing from the toilet tank where she’d left them while she showered, and, though she tried, Rena couldn’t gather the nerve to admit to her mother they were lost and face another mopey visit to the optometrist.
For this reason, she’d substituted her love of reading with cassette tapes of stories by Tamora Pierce and Terry Pratchett, which she borrowed six at a time from the library by her school. She played them on the Casio stereo in the living room, her ears glued to the dusty dotted side of the machine. The sounds emerged for hours at a time until that too went missing one afternoon, at which point she took her cassette tapes to the Camry and started playing them inside until long after the standby lights of the car had dimmed.
It was here that Suraya knew to look for her sister. She opened the passenger door, interrupting the cloak of darkness, and took her seat.
‘Who’s there? Ghafar, is that you?’
‘It’s me,’ said Suraya. ‘I have dinner for you.’
An older woman’s voice was narrating the story of a brave young girl on a mission to recover an illustrious jewel accompanied by a legendary dragon. Suraya turned the volume down to the lowest register and handed Rena the bowl.
‘Hey, why’d you turn it down? You might like this story.’
The sound of Rena’s slurping mouth formed a compressed echo in the garage. As she waited for her sister to finish with her meal, Suraya fixed her gaze on the silver dice dangling from the keychain inside the ignition switch. Something trembled deep within Suraya’s chest—a law of nature as ancient and unyielding as gravity—and she swallowed the swell of impatience that itched the back of her throat.
The following week, Faiza reached out to Alia again. She waited for the last stubborn rustles of nap time to die down, and for Penny to go out on her twice-daily cigarette break, before going into the kitchenette and confiding in the only colleague from her workplace she trusted.
‘The mechanic sent us to the dealership and the dealership sent us back to the mechanic. Who knew it was so hard to get a set of car keys replaced?’
Alia pursed her lips. ‘It’s not right.’
‘Sister, I left home at six o’clock this morning to arrive here on time,’ Faiza told her colleague. ‘We caught two buses. Suraya and I were waiting on street corners in the cold like runaways. Poor girl has no idea what’s going on.’
‘Did you talk to the children?’
‘Yes,’ Faiza replied, her chin resting on her hand. ‘Each one: “I’m innocent, I’m innocent.” Sister, it broke my heart to see my own children lie to their mother’s face. In broad daylight, no less. I did all of it, the sweetheart and the honey. Nothing.’
‘A great darkness has come over your family, sister. You must release its grip. May Allah, subhanahu wa ta-ala, guide you through.’
At the mention of His name, the two women entered the private space of prayer and recited the Ayat al-Kursi, known to be the most powerful supplication of all to ward off djinn.
‘Sister,’ Faiza said at last, breaking the votive silence. ‘When we spoke about the situation, you said there may be another way out. For the sake of all that is good, can you please help my family?’
Another unsteady pause crept between them.
‘Yes, sister, it may be time to consider outside help,’ Alia finally answered. ‘But me? My family have never been visited by such wickedness. We are God-fearing and we are rewarded in turn.’ The door to the staff entrance opened and this quieted the conversation several decibels further. ‘But I can direct you to a holy man from the masjid. He is feared for his knowledge of the occult.’
From her silent perch on the other side of the wall, Suraya listened to this scene taking place around the working island. She waited for her name and was glad to hear the names of her siblings and the repercussions levied against them instead. She returned to her rectangular spot on the floor where the porpoise, seal, walrus, whale and shark—her inseparable plastic companions—were arranged neatly in a conference circle facing each other. From there, she awaited further instruction.
*
Faiza was up at dawn, cleaning. Hunched over with steel wool and a sudsy bucket, she ordered Suraya to gather up her toys and play with them in the master bedroom. As she watched her daughter obediently climb the stairs, Faiza allowed a brief moment of gratitude to envelop her. Then, not one for sentimentality, she cleansed the air in each of the rooms with the fragrant smoke of espand seeds and, at the holy man’s insistence over the phone, splayed open any copies of the Holy Quran that had hitherto lain out of action on a bookshelf, such that the word of Allah might bathe the shadows of the house in piety.
Faiza had warned the children that divine justice was coming to release the good among them from the sins of the bad, and they anticipated the holy man’s arrival with a craving for something, anything, to change. Such was the heightened mood in the house that the single knock at precisely midday could not be mistaken for anything else.
The gaunt figure kept his hand on his heart and his head down as he spoke his solemn greetings in the accent of a man who had long ago surrendered his life to the scripture. The holy man avoided contact with Faiza’s hands and eyes, a practice common among devout men in the company of women. He slipped the wad of folded fifty-dollar notes that Massih handed him into the chest pocket of a long grey coat and then examined as though he were a military sergeant the stiff-spined row of children lined up in the foyer.
‘Djinn are a very serious curse,’ the holy man said after a drawn out inhale, rolling his Rs dramatically for emphasis. He shifted his glare briefly from the row of bodies back to Massih to confirm the patriarch was still listening. ‘They hide in dark corners of a house. They inhabit the essence of an object. But what they prefer most? Where they do the most damage? Within the soft hearts of children.’
Faiza jabbed Massih in his ribs, impelling the stout man to step forwards.
‘Your holiness, sir. If I may? We are good people. God-fearing people. Our children, they are good too—impressionable perhaps, as all children are. A great deal has been taken from us. My entire briefcase. We have suffered and we continue to suffer. Can you rid us of these pests?’
‘All of that remains to be seen, brother, depending on how held your family is within the grip of the djinn. That is what I am here today to find out.’
The holy man’s eye snagged Ghafar’s face and glowered at the lewd gesture the boy was making as he rubbed his tongue from side to side on the inside of his cheek. In one swift move, the holy man swept up Ghafar by his collar and wrenched his limp frame into the air.
‘You dare to look at a messenger of Allah, subhanahu wa ta-ala, while calling forth an innuendo of this kind? Where is your decency, boy? What has come over you?’
Ghafar was so taken aback he stuttered over his words. The holy man’s breath reeked of garlic, and his yellow nails dug into the soft skin above his collar.
‘I cut…I cut…I cut the inside of my cheek and it never got better. I keep…I keep…chewing on it. By accident.’
The holy man let the boy fall to his knees and addressed Massih in a booming voice: ‘It is precisely as I feared. Depravity has taken root firmly in this home. Show me the children’s bedrooms. It seems Shaitan is amassing his loyalties comfortably here.’
Massih led the holy man to the room that Salim and Kabir shared, and the gasp the holy man let out caused a ripple of uncertain murmuring through the family.
From under his breath, the holy man asked Massih about the origins of the signature framed number eight jersey of Steven Gerrard hanging on the wall.
‘The boys, they like Liverpool. From the Premier League. They are my sons, after all.’ Massih shrugged his shoulders. Then, with a tense laugh, he added, ‘No big deal.’
‘No big deal?’ The holy man fished out Salim’s red jersey from where it had been shoved inside his closet and inspected the words Standard Chartered branded on its torso. ‘Do you know what Islam teaches about worshipping anything other than God?’
Massih snaked his arms behind his back and stared blankly at the floor.
‘I must admit, brother, the sinfulness of the Premier League was not known to me. I swear it.’
‘Do you insult the teachings of Allah, subhanahu wa ta-ala? Your great sin is not the mere game of soccer itself but shirk, which you will know is the act of placing any partners in divinity beside Allah, subhanahu wa ta-ala.’ The holy man stuck a finger to the framed jersey on the wall and then directed his gaze to Massih in the door. ‘It is little wonder the djinn saw this house and flocked to it. How did you expect to protect your family from moral corruption when you encourage your own sons to worship false idols?’
Massih rubbed the back of his neck and turned his face to the wall.
The next room along the landing upstairs belonged to Rena and Suraya, and the family shuffled diligently on their heels to make way for the holy man as he sauntered inside. Faiza shooed Rena out from the loose folds of her long dress, where she was taking shelter as schools of fish are known to do in coral reefs during storms. With a final push, Rena stumbled out to the front of the pack and began to rattle on the spot. The holy man seemed uninterested in the modest corner of the room where Suraya’s bed stood. The scrutiny was Rena’s to hold.
The holy man leered down the length of his bulbous nose and wiry beard at Rena, whose knees near buckled under the weight of his gaze. The room showed no sign of decoration or idolatry, and for this Rena was grateful. Even before her final pair of reading glasses had disappeared, flourishes of colour in the material world had always paled in comparison to those she encountered on the page.
Rena wavered on her feet as she watched the towering shape in her field of vision scour the bare surfaces of her room. The clipped breaths of her siblings and parents raised a phantom bridge behind Rena that pitted her, gladiator-style, against the tall man. When she heard the old wooden drawers of her desk slide open, she wet herself a little. Hers was the terror of the inevitably condemned, and there was no magical jewel or companion griffin that could save her now. Then, from the far side of the room, came the sound of a zipper unfurling the metal teeth of her backpack and, a moment later, its contents were dumped on her frilled floral bedspread.
‘Cursed child, how do you explain this witchcraft?’ snarled the holy man, shoving a Garth Nix audio cassette box in Rena’s direction. ‘Sorcery is forbidden in Islam. Sihr is one of the Quran’s cardinal sins. Haram to the greatest degree. You must know this already—that’s why you’ve gone to the effort to hide these books in your bag.’
Someone clicked their tongue and another body shifted pressure from one foot to another. Under the serrated glare of the holy man and her disgraced family, Rena walked the unsteady plank to her bed to confront her fate. A stunned silence spilled from her lips.
‘Only Allah, subhanahu wa ta-ala, has the power to change human fate and design the path for us to follow,’ the holy man said, picking up a Kate Forsyth audio cassette box featuring a wide-winged unicorn bathed in blue light. ‘This is the kind of black magic that recruits young minds in the service of Shaitan. You must answer for this.’
The side of Rena’s mouth quivered and the patch of moisture on her pants, larger now and getting bigger, lent the air in the bedroom a rank stench.
At that moment, Faiza slunk herself out from behind Massih’s hunched shoulders and addressed the holy man directly.
‘Holy man, sir. We are indebted to you for your work. Truly indebted. Such evils face our young here in this country, in this culture. Such evil.’
‘Sister, is this not your house, too? Do you not control what comes in and out?’
‘Mine?’ she said, glancing at her husband who was leaning against the doorframe, flanked at his sides by a slew of sullen faces. ‘Mister holy man, sir, we never worried about such dangers back home. It was a simpler time when we were children. Afghanistan was a sacred place. These challenges are brand new, I swear it. How could we have known?’
Using the phalanges of his right hand to keep count of the tasbih beads that stymied his frustration, the holy man stood firm before he spoke again.
‘Djinn are very intelligent creatures, though not impossible to banish. What I see here, however, is no effort from you or your children to purify of corruption your hearts or your home. It is clear to me now that these are fertile grounds for inhabitation. You have welcomed the djinn in to dine with you. And so I bid you my farewell and pray for your forsaken souls.’
Not unlike Moses and the Red Sea, the family parted on cue and the holy man promptly took leave of the house.
In the master bedroom, Suraya listened keenly to the round of thundering rage as her mother and father berated her siblings anew. She heard the sound of tapes breaking, of the framed jersey being taken off the wall. Rena’s sobs became high-pitched wails. Standing on her tiptoes on the dressing table stool, Suraya took note from a circular window as the holy man lit a cigarette and entered a car parallel-parked on the curb across the street. A voice addressed her.
‘You have served us well,’ said the toy walrus pompously.
‘Yes,’ said the squeakier voice of the porpoise. ‘Your rewards will be plentiful.’
‘The seams are beginning to come apart,’ said the shark.
‘Just as we planned,’ the toys rejoiced in unison.
‘A success.’
