The Five Fakirs of Faizabad Read Online Free Page A

American, although not in a bad way.
    “You don’t look much like a djinn,” said Silvio.
    “What’s a djinn supposed to look like?” Philippa asked.
    “About thirty feet tall, with silk trousers, bare chest, little waistcoat, turban, and with a big curly mustache. Scary.”
    “Take my word for it. We’re a little more modern these days.”
    “So, why me?” asked Silvio. “Why not you?”
    “What I mean is: I didn’t do anything for you. Shouldn’t I have released you from a lamp after a thousand years of you being in there, or something?” He shrugged. “Or maybe I did. In which case, you’re very welcome.”
    “That does happen, sometimes,” said Philippa. “But not very often. And to answer your first question, you don’t always have to do something for a djinn to get three wishes. In this case I’m giving you three wishes because four Italian newspapers and two Japanese magazines voted you the unluckiest man in the world.”
    Silvio made a face. “I don’t think of myself in that way at all.”
    “You don’t?” Philippa sounded surprised. “Being struck twice by lightning in the space of one week sounds unusually unlucky to me. Especially on top of all the other stuff you’ve been through.”
    Silvio shook his head. “The way I see it is this: I’m still here. It’s true, some dreadful things have happened to me, but I’ve survived them all. You’d have to be pretty lucky for that to happen. In fact, you’d have to be the luckiest man in the world. This is the way I look at myself, like the luckiestman in the world.” He smiled kindly. “So, I think you ought to take those three wishes and give them to someone who really needs them. Not me.”
    Philippa was flabbergasted. “Look here, I really am a djinn, you know,” she said. “I do have the power to make your dreams come true.”
    “Oh, I believe you,” said Silvio. “I mean, it happened exactly the way I used to read about. Like in ‘Aladdin’ and those other stories. You may not be thirty feet tall with silk trousers, but you did appear from a vase, and in a cloud of smoke. It’s not every little girl who can do that.”
    “Well, I never,” said Philippa, who’d had no idea that granting a mundane three wishes would turn out to be quite so hard. “Are you sure?”
    Silvio shrugged. “What would I do with three wishes, anyway? From what I’ve read, people either wish carelessly, which wrecks their life, or they end up being paralyzed with indecision about what to wish for. Besides, I’m at the kind of age when my life is pretty well set, you know. Having more or less anything I might want, just like that, would only complicate things now.” He shook his head. “It would complicate life and, perhaps, make it less fun.”
    “Less fun?” Philippa sounded surprised. “A lot of people might disagree with that.”
    “Then they don’t understand what life is all about,” said Silvio. “To grant all a man’s wishes is to take away his dreams and his ambitions. Life is only worth living if you have something to strive for. To aim at. You understand?”
    “You’re a very unusual man, do you know that?” Philippa couldn’t help but be impressed. “Most people would give anything for a djinn to grant them three wishes.”
    “I stopped feeling like most people the day I got sucked out of an airplane at ten thousand feet,” said Silvio.
    “By the way,” asked Philippa, “how did you ever survive getting sucked out of an airplane?”
    “About two-thirds of the way down I hit a hot-air balloon,” said Silvio. “It broke my fall quite a bit. Just as I slipped off the balloon, it was flying over a circus. I fell onto the big top and that helped to break my fall, too. Even so, I still went through the roof of the tent. And it just so happened that I arrived in the circus just as a high-wire act was in progress, and they had a safety net for the man walking the tightrope. Which I fell into.”
    “Gosh, that was