TITLE: The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years

AUTHOR: Shubnum Khan

PUBLISHER: Magpie

REVIEWER: Mbugua Ngunjiri

AVAILABILITY: Available in local bookstores

PRICE: Ksh2,890 (Print) at Nuria Bookstore.

Bilal and his teenage daughter, Sana, move from Johannesburg to Durban. He has recently lost his wife and is looking for a place to call home.

Home happens to be Akbar Manzil, a rambling old mansion that had been abandoned by its original owners, and one that is full of secrets, and a djinn.

The “house on the hill” has since been partitioned into apartments and tenants invited.

Akbar Manzil has very lively women tenants, always at each other's necks, using very colourful language, but cannot do without each other. They only defer to Doctor, the ageing landlord.

For Sana, this house is one giant puzzle she must piece together, if only to fill the gnawing loneliness in her life. This now becomes an obsession for her.

In The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, Shubnum Khan tells a fantastic tale of love, rejection, immigration, culture and race relations, spanning a hundred years and taking place across two continents. This is the story of Indians who emigrated to Africa at the turn of the century and who, in spite of settling in the continent, still struggle with the idea of integration.

The book is a humourous description of what goes around in Akbar Manzil and the colourful and often disagreeable residents of the house—both in the 1930s and in the present, 2014.

The author, in her lively use of language, employs personification to incorporate even the furniture and inanimate objects in creating a dense cocktail of emotions and feelings. Add that to the mystery of the other metaphysical residents of the house—the djinn and Sana’s dead sister—and you have a narrative that permeates the reader’s every pore.

Despite the present story being set in 2014, in post-apartheid South Africa, the residents of Akbar Manzil insist that tenants to be admitted there “must be our own”, meaning that they must be of Indian origin.  More on this later.

The theme of love and loss is constant throughout the book. We see things unravel through the eyes of Sana, whose restless spirit seeks to know what love entails. Apart from Doctor, who freely shares part of his experiences, the other tenants give evasive answers; clearly, love has not been kind to them.

Just like Bilal, residents of Akbar Manzil have secrets they are running away from. "People don't come to this house to remember, they come to forget," Zuleikha, an old beauty queen, tells Sana, when she pesters her with incessant questions.

Even the house, with its fair share of secrets, is suspicious of the girl’s intentions. The author tells us that the “house watches Sana's nosiness with 'morbid fascination'. In the past, the desire for discovery was something the house snuffed out early 'by making things feel impenetrable...'”

It is through Sana’s unrelenting nature that the reader is ushered into the adventurous, but tragic world of Akbar Manzil, a dashing heir of a wealthy Indian family who sails around the world and finally settles in Durban, by the sea, in 1912. He invests in sugar production and constructs the rambling mansion that is named after him.

Although he comes to Africa with his wife, a product of an arranged marriage, he finds love in Meena, a lowly factory sweeper of Tamil origin whose parents immigrated to South Africa to seek a fortune as labourers.

With the entry of Meena into the Akbar household, the author introduces us to yet another layer of prejudice. We see Akbar’s wife Jahanara, who doesn’t see eye-to-eye with her mother-in-law, who rules the castle with a heavy hand, now closing ranks and directing their combined ire and hatred towards Meena.

In the eyes of Jahanara and her mother-in-law, Akbar commits the unpardonable sin of marrying a girl from an inferior caste. Akbar’s mother calls Meena a “filthy coolie”.

So entrenched is this class prejudice that a majority of domestic servants, obviously from inferior castes, side with Jahanara and Akbar’s mother in sidelining Meena. Ironically, it is Nkosi, an African servant, who disagrees with the Indian servants by saying it could be a case of genuine love between their master and Meena.

Ironic, considering that in apartheid South Africa, Africans were relegated to the bottom of the racial food chain, classified lower than the lowest of the Indian castes.

Oh and before you accuse the current residents of Akbar Manzil of being racist towards Africans, their racial prejudice is non discriminating—it cuts both ways, including even whites. Listen to Razia Bibi, the more dramatic of the tenants: “What—now we are white people, we listen to music while we eat? What next? You will give us knives and forks and say bon appétit?”

And while the tenants cannot agree on practically anything, they concur on one aspect; that they are all “crazy!”.

Then there is the djinn…

While I would have expected the ancient djinn to cause mayhem and mischief in the house, it comes across as docile and emotional, given to occasional moaning and sobbing, to express sadness for the losses it has encountered.

Apart from a hilarious moment, when the djinn forgets to mask its appearance, thereby shocking Razia Bibi almost half to death, much to the amusement of Zuleikha—who is Razia Bibi’s nemesis—it is harmless and rather helpless.

It fails, or is unable to save, when Meena is attacked by a lion. It however redeems itself when, towards the end of the book, it saves Sana from sure death, helpfully directing her to a safe exit from the burning house.

The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is an enchanting and thoughtful piece of writing that the reader only appreciates by reading slowly and leisurely in order to savour all the juicy morsels the author throws throughout the book. It takes a talented writer to turn mundane thoughts and actions into highly readable and enjoyable prose.

I really enjoyed reading this book and would readily recommend it to other readers.

Shubnum was one of the guest writers who graced the fourth edition of the Macondo Literary Festival, in Nairobi, towards the end of September. The theme of this year’s Festival was “The Sea is History”.  

Mbugua Ngunjiri, a Kenyan art and literary journalist, is the curator of the digital arts and culture platform Maisha Yetu. Email: mbugua5ngunjiri@gmail.com