The Wasted Vigil Read Online Free

it, remembering that containers discovered in Egyptian tombs were still fragrant after three thousand years.
     
    Where was Zameen on the night the Soviet soldiers came to the house? Marcus wouldn’t know the answer to this question until he met David Town many years later.
    She would disappear from Marcus’s life but enter David’s at a point farther down the line, and then, time moving on, David would meet Marcus. How stories travel—what mouths and what minds they end up in.
    The girl had slipped out of the house in the darkness when a pebble was thrown against her windowpane, the sound like a bird’s beak accidentally striking the glass. A boy in the garden. She went with him along the lake, towards Usha. She was unafraid of the djinn, Marcus and Qatrina having taught her to quietly disregard the many rumours about that place—quietly, undemonstratively, because Marcus with his outsider’s nerves did not wish to injure anyone’s sensibilities.
    Just the previous week a man was said to have trapped a green bee-eater and taken it to his bride, but the pious girl who was versed in all seven branches of Islamic knowledge had veiled her face immediately, exclaiming that that was no way for an honourable husband to behave, bringing a stranger into the presence of his wife. She explained that the bird was in fact a human male who had been given his current form by the djinn.
    Zameen and the boy were in the demon-strewn expanse of trees when they saw the cleric of the Usha mosque, a torch burning beside him. He was a powerfully built man in his late thirties who had four wives, the maximum simultaneous number allowed to a Muslim. His back was towards Zameen and the boy, and they were about to change direction when he looked over his shoulder. Later she would think the perfume she was wearing on her skin had reached him. But the disturbed soil from the grave he was digging must have released much stronger odours. Their eyes met, and then the two young lovers turned and hurried away, ran, unsure of whether or not they were being pursued.
    They knew what he was doing, because he had done it before.
    Soon after buying their house, Marcus and Qatrina had learned that the myth of the djinn was only a decade or so old, dating from around the time the cleric’s eldest wife—a woman in her forties who had pulled him out of poverty—had vanished. That was when he began insisting that the area around the lake was a nest of malevolent beings, forbidding anyone from venturing there. He married a thirteen-year-old within a month of the disappearance. His insistence proved to be a great problem for Marcus and Qatrina, who would have liked their home to serve as their surgery and clinic. But virtually nobody from Usha, no matter how ill, was willing to brave the journey because the spiritual leader had forbidden it. Qatrina and Marcus had to acquire two small rooms in Usha and drove there every morning. The cleric was to prove just as intractable when Marcus began thinking about the perfume factory, but he changed his mind when Marcus offered to produce the sat-kash rose perfume for him: the extract of the best blossoms was distilled seven consecutive times to produce this, and the very few people who could afford it took it with them to Arabia to sprinkle on Muhammad’s grave. An immense honour. The cleric agreed to issue talismans to the workers of the perfume factory, to protect them on their journey towards Marcus’s house, providing they kept to the one main path along the lake. Later he began to issue them to the very desperately ill also, warning them in no uncertain terms that they must not stray.
    All her life, Zameen had heard Marcus and Qatrina air various theories about the djinn, but it was always obvious to them that the missing wife was interred there.
    And now Zameen herself had proof.
    The two of them emerged on the path along the lake, the water so placid tonight it could have reflected even the thinnest of the