Aqdas Aftab

72 Seconds

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

The earth shudders in the wind’s embrace, opening itself to receive the rainwater. The trees clasp the earth with their roots but let their branches sway against the wind’s loud groans. It feels good, this moment before the moment when the veil is lifted between the two worlds, when the dense dark clouds warp time, turning afternoon into dusk. Savoring the petrichor, I start rubbing my back against the amaltaas’ rough bark. I want so badly for the tree to devour me, to suck me into its roots, to pull me away from civilization. My back moves the amaltaas until its gold petals start to pepper my long, tousled hair and get caught in my patchy beard. The more I am covered with the wild, the more I feel like myself.

When the clouds finally rupture, I spread my sizzling skin under the rain. I want to luxuriate in the steam, to surrender to the weight of the water on my eyelashes, but I must keep my eyes open. I must look around as this city, usually so good at maintaining its borders, becomes porous for a short amount of time when the seasons are at the cusp of transition. During the late summer downpour. Just for 72 seconds.

The rain tries to blur my gaze, but I stay alert, looking around. And suddenly, quietly, they appear. The djinn of Islamabad. One moment, it is just me with the rain and trees, and the next, I notice them lounging lazily on branches. Some of them are smoking herbs that smell strangely sweet against the musky mud. Some of them are sleeping. Some of them are looking back at me with heavy lids, their mangled faces difficult to read. It still surprises me that the humans around me don’t notice the hordes of djinn emerging like earthworms. But it’s a frazzled time for most, so I guess it makes sense. All the neighborhood aunties and uncles are too busy emptying the clotheslines in their backyards and stuffing towels under their doors to pay attention to the momentary puncture in the veil.

When the 72 seconds pass and the veil is sutured again, I am left standing under the amaltaas tree with a familiar loneliness. I run my fingers through my gold-filled hair and continue rubbing my back against the tree’s bark until Ma’s voice interrupts my ritual.

“Batin, be careful! Make sure your skin doesn’t break! You can’t mix your blood with the rainwater, it can be dangerous.”

“I know, Ma. Don’t worry. This bark isn’t rough enough to break my skin.” I start to make my way towards Ma.
“You don’t have to come inside, beta. I just came to check on you. But you can stay in the rain.”

“No, it’s okay, I’m done anyway,” I mumble. She nods and starts walking home, her short gray hair straight like her proud back under the giant black umbrella. When we reach the front door, Ma leaves the umbrella outside and quickly hops inside. “I’ll shower and then help you with lunch.” I tell Ma before angling my chin to the side to wring my hair. I brush off the flower petals and wipe my muddy bare feet on the mat.

“Don’t worry beta, lunch is ready… And you can shower later.” She pauses and touches my hand. “Did you see the djinn?”

“Yeah,” I walk to the kitchen. The house is moist with the smell of fried onions and cloves and mutton.

“Did they look like they were doing okay?” Ma asks, looking genuinely concerned.

“I don’t know, Ma. It’s not like I have long enough to get to know them.”

“Well, I’m just asking because of the new construction projects in our sector. All the deforestation and pollutants can really affect their health.” Ma starts whisking yogurt as she talks. “Your dad always talked about how his parents got sick when Ayub Khan built this city. It wasn’t just humans who got displaced, you know. Every living thing was affected. And now with the same kind of urban projects, it’s happening again. So just look for any changes in our neighbor djinn next time, okay beta?”

“You can look at them yourself next time it rains!” My agitated tone surprises me. Ma ignores it. I take a shallow breath and shift to my higher pitch. “Smells so yummy, Ma! Thanks for making my favorite pulao.”

“Well, eat up then! You need some meat on those long bones. You look even thinner now that you’re so tall!”

I take my seat next to the open window, opposite Ma’s, and place my heaping plate in front of me. My seat is wet, and so is the floor around it. This would have driven Ma insane some years ago but she’s different now. She hasn’t tried to close the window or dry the kitchen floor. I scoop a heapful of pulao and shove it into my mouth. The mutton is tender, falling off the bone with the slightest touch of my fingers.

“By the way, how is your personal essay for university applications coming along?” Of course, Ma has to ruin this day with her questions.

“Oh, it’s fine.”

“Just fine?” Ma frowns. “Batin, you should be done with your draft by now.”

“Hmm… I can’t really think of one specific topic.”

“But you’ve always been so good at writing. Just write about yourself. Write about your struggles in human society.”

“I don’t think I want the admission committee to know I’m not fully human.”

“Why not? There’s nothing to be ashamed of!”

“I’m not ashamed, Ma! I just think it’s stupid to write about this.”

“The deadline for most applications is in a month.” Ma’s spoon scrapes her plate noisily as she mixes raita with the rice. As usual, it seems like she is having a conversation with herself. “This is a very important time in your life, Batin! You have to be responsible.”

I shrug, keeping my gaze on my plate.

“These days the personal essay is the most important part of the application,” Ma continues. “You should write an essay about your dad. About your djinn ancestry. Admission committees want to see something different. They like diversity these days. And I think it’ll be really good to be open about who you are. It’ll make your essay authentic. And unique.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“You should write about how our society doesn’t accept different kinds of beings.” Ma exclaims. “The Quran dedicates a whole surah to the djinn, but our society still can’t accept that.”

I take the empty plates to the sink. The dishes cling gratingly as I start washing them. Oblivious to the cacophony in the sink, Ma continues: “I think it’ll be good for admission committees to know that you aren’t like the other applicants, but still so smart and creative. Perhaps more smart and creative because of your difference. And who knows, maybe there will be other half-djinn students in your university as well. Won’t that be nice?”

I tune out Ma’s voice and continue scrubbing the dishes over and over again, scouring past stains that refuse to fully disappear.

❧

It wasn’t always like this with Ma. There was a time when she never acknowledged that I even had a father, let alone mention the word djinn. For the longest time, I didn’t even know who, or what, Dad was. Or, by extension, what I was. I guess it makes sense. She was heartbroken, after all. And I guess she had hoped that my quirks – the long, luscious hair that crept past my butt, the constant desire to be in nature, the nocturnal tendencies – were just a part of my individuality. A product of her “progressive parenting.” She always liked that I was different, not like the other boys in my school who were obsessed with cricket and cars and porn. But how do I forget all the ways she tried to erase the other parts of me just because they didn’t make sense to her? Just because they reminded her of a man who had broken her heart?

It’s strange to be in this in-between space of a parent’s evolution. Ma changed her mind about djinn. And of course, I wanted her to change. To understand the parts of me that everyone found abnormal and frightening. I really did. But her transition from one place to another left me stranded in the sticky space of the past. How do I forget the day that Ma curbed my freedom and looked at me with intense fear just because I tore off my shirt? (Imagine, your own mother being scared of you!)

It was a monsoon season just like this one, and I was playing in the heavy rain in the street, stomping at the puddles, splashing water, slipping and scraping skin. Our street had many potholes then, which I loved because it meant there were many tiny pools of muddy water to splash in. I was trying to fit myself in one of the potholes when Ma emerged with her umbrella and told me sternly to go inside and put on a shirt. When I asked her if I could return to the potholes after wearing a shirt, she shouted a loud no. I ignored her and continued to playfully wrestle with the movements of the puddles. A car whizzed by, swishing muddy water at both of us, and before I could laugh at how Ma’s white kameez was half brown now, she grabbed my wrist and dragged me inside the house. Her anger was large and looming. It sucked all the laughter out of me until I started weeping pathetically. But Ma didn’t care. With a tight clasp on my wrist, she forced me into the shower and started slathering my hair with shampoo while my eyes burned and my wrist throbbed. “Finish showering and dry yourself properly! And then clean all the mud and water you brought in!” She shouted. Once I was done cleaning my body and the muddy floors, she told me I was forbidden from going out in the rain again. That I had to always have a shirt on my back and pants covering my legs any time I left the house. That I couldn’t even go into the rain in my white cotton shalwar kameez because the water made the wispy fabric translucent and she didn’t like how the older men looked at my body. The more rules she slapped me with that day, the more I wanted to run away from her. So, I did. I compulsively tore off all my clothes and ran out of the house. I left our street, our neighborhood, our sector, my bare feet calloused from the rough concrete. I kept running.

After a few hours, Ma found me near the zoo, at the foot of the Margalla hills, rubbing my back against a tree. Her face was unusually pale. She was terrified not just of losing me, but of me. Her hands shook as she tied her dupatta around my waist to cover me before shoving me into the car. During the drive home, she forced me to call everyone she had alerted – her brother in Lahore, her NGO friends, a neighborhood aunty, even my science teacher who once told Ma that my aversion to indoor spaces required psychiatric intervention. Ma forced me to apologize to all of these adults. To tell them I was safe, and to explain why I tormented my mother. To demean myself in front of my horrible teacher! Some of them were nice enough, but my science teacher kept telling me I had angered God by angering Ma, and that I should promise her to be a “good boy” from now on. When we reached home and Ma shouted at me some more, I tried to tell her how I felt, that my skin craved the cool grip of rainwater, that I needed to be in nature to know I exist, that I couldn’t be a good boy because I wasn’t a boy at all. That’s when the fear in her eyes returned. And as if my pride wasn’t already wounded beyond repair, she locked me in my bedroom that night. And many nights after that. Until I had learned my lesson.

And now Ma wants me to write a silly essay about the very thing inside me that scared her, the thing she refused to name, the thing she once emaciated by locking it within the sterile white walls of our house.

After she started locking my bedroom at night, I stopped going out in the rain. I stopped going out at night at all. And I stopped doing many other things too. Like eating and talking and reading. And that’s what finally changed Ma. When she saw me laying depressed in bed all day, refusing to say a single word, she contacted all kinds of doctors and ulemas in a desperate attempt to revive my soul. She told me she loved me. She told me to take a walk in the rain with her. She offered to scratch my back all the time. She even told me I could go all the way to the Margalla hills by myself. But nothing really pulled me out of my vegetal state. Until one day, when I was resigned to my bed, Ma entered my room and said she wanted to tell me about my father.

Ma perched herself at the foot of my bed and started telling me about her university days. She told me she bonded with a man over their shared love of literature. How he had long thick hair and lashes, just like mine. How this man – tall and strange, with a constant shadow on his face – lurked in the lecture halls and libraries, always reading or taking notes. He was not enrolled as a student. He would just sneak into classes quietly. Ma was so taken by this man who wanted to learn without the payoff of a degree that she fell in love with him. They dated in secret for a long time. When Ma proposed marriage, he said no. Ma being Ma, insisted, asking him to explain himself. That is when he revealed to her that he couldn’t marry her because he was a djinn.

When I threw the covers off and sat up, Ma’s face lit up. She continued, telling me details about Dad.

When Dad first came out to her, Ma was scared. She tried to break it off with him and move on. But she couldn’t. She believed his love was pure. So, she asked him once again to marry her. She promised him no one would find out what he was, that she would teach him to act fully human, that they would get a house near the Shah Allah Ditta caves so he could be near his family and look at them every time the veil became porous for 72 seconds. And it worked. They got a small place and Ma worked long hours while Dad wandered the city, doing God knows what. Ma didn’t mind being the breadwinner. For a while she was extremely happy. She would even accompany him in the rains to catch glimpses of his relatives, hanging amidst the rooting branches of the banyan trees. And then one day, when Ma told him she was pregnant, he sliced his finger with a kitchen knife, rubbed his bloody skin against a tree trunk, and disappeared. Ma carried that unwashed knife with her everywhere she went for nine months, hoping that the father of her unborn child would return somehow, but after I emerged from inside her with big dark eyes and a head full of luscious hair, she let go of Dad. She vowed to raise me as a human and moved into a new house on the other end of the city, far away from the caves.

“What if he came back and couldn’t find us?” I asked her.

“He couldn’t have. It’s not easy to come back. Sometimes djinn can slip through, but it’s rare. That’s what your Dad told me anyway. It’s harder to cross the border into our realm because of how much fear humans have of djinn. The djinn aren’t scared of humans, so entering their world is much easier. But you know how humans here are doing all kinds of things, like burning chillis over prayers, to keep the djinn away.”

“So the people who burn chillis made him go away?”

“No, Batin, that’s just a superstition. People just do all kinds of superstitious rituals because they are scared of djinn. That’s why I never told you about your Dad. I didn’t want you to think people don’t like you.”

I remember being unmoved by the idea of people’s aversion to me. What I couldn’t make sense of was why I didn’t know this man who had hair and eyelashes like mine, who apparently was the reason for my love of the wild, for my nocturnal inclinations.

“Did Dad not want to meet me?”

“I don’t know, baby. But it was his loss. He missed out on God’s greatest gift.” Ma leaned over and pulled me to her chest.

“But why did he leave when I was going to be born?”

“I think he got scared.” Ma said, holding me. “You know, it’s not hate that kills love. It’s fear.” Ma’s words stuck with me, but they stuck with her as well. They changed her. After that conversation, she started telling me I could play in the rain shirtless (I still needed to wear proper pants). She even allowed me to wander the city at night like the stray cats around us, to walk to the foot of the hills, to let my wet pants drip muddy water all over the house. All she wanted, she said, was for my spirit to feel at home in my body.

❧

That is why she says nothing to me about the water bill as I continue running the tap water over my hands, long after we are done with the mutton pulao and long after I am done over-washing the dishes. She is proud, she says now, of how I sizzle and frizzle when the rainwater touches me. So proud that I should write about it in a university application. But how do I explain to her that every time she wants to celebrate my difference, I am reminded of the pain of emaciation, of the hopelessness of confinement, of the humiliation of being asked to be a good boy? That every time she talks about this university application, I want to retreat to my bed and hide my face under the covers again?

“Ma, I don’t want to write about my djinness in the application.” I turn off the tap and look at Ma. “So please, let’s not talk about it.”

“Batin beta, you cannot avoid this forever,” Ma interjects. “Sometime soon, you will have to tell the world about it. And I know it feels bad. Especially now that the crazy mullahs are making money off their so-called exorcisms. But that’s all the more reason for you to be loud and proud. To convince people that djinn can add so much good to our society. That they are nothing to be scared of. Maybe one day you can become a lawyer or social worker, advocating for djinn.”

“That sounds ridiculous!” I snap back.

“Why is it ridiculous? That is how change happens.”

“Ugh, God! Ma, you just don’t get it!”

“I’m just saying this because I know you feel so excluded. That can change. If you use this essay to –”

“I’m not writing this stupid essay!” I yell. “I’m not even going to university!”

“What?” Ma shouts back. “What do you mean? You want to give up on your education?”

“No, I can still continue learning. I just don’t want to go to university.”

“You cannot just read books under trees by yourself your whole life, Batin!” Ma barks.

“I know.” My voice begins to quiver. “I think I just want to… I want to learn about the other realm. By going there.”

“What are you saying?”

“I want to leave, Ma. To transition to the other world. I think I need it.”

Ma’s eyes drill into mine for a second, and then she turns away. She fills up a pot with water and throws in a scoop of tea leaves and a few pieces of jaggery before laying it on the stove. She opens the fridge and stares into it for a long time before taking out the milk. Slowly, she adds milk to the pot. The rain gets louder outside and the tea starts hissing in the pot, threatening to boil over. Ma turns off the stove and slowly pours the tea into two large mugs. She hands me my mug with an averted gaze.

“Ma, isn’t it better like this? Everyone leaves Islamabad, but this way I’ll stay with you. I don’t want to go abroad for university. Or even to Lahore or Karachi. I want to stay here.”

“In a whole different dimension!” Ma cries. “I’d rather have you go to America or Turkey than to the other realm!”

“Ma, I really need this. Please try to understand.”

“Yes Batin, I understand that you want to leave me like your father left me!”

“I will not leave you. I will just leave the human realm. The only difference will be that you won’t see me. Dad was a piece of shit not because he went to the other world, but because he completely left you. I promise I will not do that.”

“That’s what these mullahs want, you know.” Ma says brusquely. “For you to leave. To disappear. Why do you want to give in to their bigoted fears?

“Ma, this is not about the mullahs.”

“What then?”

“I want to… to shape-shift. I want a new body.” The faltering tremor in my voice surprises me. I sip the tea to calm myself, but its thick heat feels nauseating.

“So I won’t be able to … even recognize you?” Ma asks.

“So what? I’ll be able to recognize you! I’ll watch over you every day, every night. And you’ll see me too, when the veil lifts.”

“Just for a minute in August? How can I be okay with that?”

“We’ll still be able to communicate all the time. I’ve done my research, Ma. I promise. All the books I’ve read say the same thing. That if we are in the same place on earth and have the same trees and rocks and birds around us, I can leave you messages. And you can respond.”

Ma’s pupils dart around, examining my face. “Research, huh?” She asks. “So how long have you been thinking about this?”

“A long time. I just… didn’t know how to tell you.”

“I see.”

“Ma, I will leave you a message on leaves every day. And this will be good for me, Ma. I promise! I will learn so much about myself.”

Ma nods her head slowly but does not say anything for the rest of the day. Outside, the rain clamors on.

❧

It’s true, what I promise Ma. I will learn a lot about myself. In the other dimension, I will transition to many forms, experimenting with bones and bulges, with horns and hormones. I will learn that hair can act like wings, helping me glide through the sky to catch shikras and black kites. I will feel all parts of me burn and breathe freely when the araucaria tree’s spindly fingers scratch my skin. I will write Ma a message every night on a leaf and read her response every morning on a yellow legal pad. As I get to know other inhabitants of the trees around me, I will try to strangle many of them when they give me unsolicited advice about divesting from humans (I will learn that even the djinn of Islamabad are irritating!). But I will also make some friends, and one day, I will find myself tasting the sweet inner crevice of a friend’s newly forked tongue. I will learn a new kind of love, one that is hot and sticky, one that I do not want Ma to know about. I will grow firm hard roots into my transitioning body, and finally, I will stop desperately needing to douse myself in water.

When the next heavy rains announce their arrival, I will find Ma waiting under an amaltaas tree, looking around anxiously. She will stop carrying her umbrella, instead allowing the rain to soak through her kameez and shalwar, and the gold petals to cast a net over her gray hair. I will find a spot close to her as the veil between our worlds lifts. Seeing my new form, Ma’s face will twist with shock and worry, and annoyingly, she will start demanding that I brush my mangled hair. “Batin beta, you have such pretty eyes, don’t hide them under your hair!” She will tell me to exfoliate my strange, rough skin. To trim and clean my claws. To eat more protein. I will probably huff and turn my face away from her scolding eyes, exasperated as always, by her own way of loving me.

But I will not be relieved when the window closes and the veil returns. When Ma is no longer able to scrutinize me, my heart will sink. For the rest of the arid year, I will long for the heavy rain to return. For its thrusts to arouse the earth. For the typhoon to shift the atmosphere and blow open the heavy curtain between Ma’s world and mine. For Ma to see me in my new form, even if just for 72 seconds.

❧❧❧

Aqdas Aftab is a community-engaged writer and educator from Islamabad, currently based in Chicago. They write about the forces that keep them alive: gender improvisation, spiritual surrender, trans interdependence, and feral desires. Some of their writing can be found in Strange Horizons, Fourteen Hills, Stonecoast Review, The Margins and Doubleback Review.