The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan
I love picking up a book I know nothing about and just diving in. This was the case for this book. I’m so glad I happened upon this story!
This story follows Sana, a teenager who with her father is moving in to the Akbar Manzil mansion. They meet the other tenants living in the house and proceed to slip in to daily life at their new place of residence. Sana explores the grand house and happens upon some old relics hinting at who had occupid the house 100 years prior. All the while “the djinn sits morosely in the corner of the room and watches [her]."
Right off the bat the story feels very slow going. I was anticipating a haunted house or many interactions soon to come with this djinn. But it was nothing like that.
Sana’s mother recently passed away. It is now just she and her father. However even before that the family experienced another loss that still follows Sana to this day, no matter how hard she tries to ignore it. Once they are at Akbar Manzil they meet the other tenants who each have their own ‘set in their ways’ personalities. All the tenants are older people who are wary of Sana and her father Bilal moving in. Particularly Razia Bibi, who is astounded that Bilal cooks. She scoffs ‘a man who cooks?’. Razia Bibi has a very outdated look at the world, she believes ‘The world must be kept in balance. Girls must marry at eighteen and men must have stable jobs as doctors or accountants.”
The story picks up around the halfway point when Sana begins uncovering the story of the family who lived in the house originally. A wealthy man named Akbar, his wife Jahanara, and their two kids, also his mother(who enters the picture commanding household authority over Jahanara). At this point of the story I was flipping back to the synopsis because it says “the long forgotten story of a young woman named Meena who died there tragically a hundred years ago.” Who is Meena then??
The best way I can describe the writing of this book is beautifully cinematic. The way Khan describes the scenes feels tangibly real. The characters feel as though inspired by actual people. I enjoyed how this was not a ‘haunted house’ story. This was something much more intimate. The djinn is a background character who never speaks and is almost never seen. It lurks around watching peoples lives unfold. We get glimpses of it just briefly at times. Example :
“Under her breath [Sana] says, ‘Who is M?’
The djinn knows. It will never forget.”
The house itself is also written as if it is a separate entity also witnessing the events that take place.
“The House watches all this with a peculiar kind of horror…”
The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years also takes us through the history of people from India coming to South Africa for work thinking they’d have a better life there. Only to see that the British are also there and they are still being treated horribly by white people. “It was still slavery, just in different packaging.” Colorism is talked about extensively throughout the story. One of the characters is Tamil and we see the hardships that they go through and the treatment they experience. The way others speak down to them about their language, their hair, their skin. In contrast another character is OBSESSED with making themselves as close to whiteness as they think that they can. Skin whitening, learning English, dressed in the finest fashion from London, eating the right foods, anything they can think of that makes them better than other Indian people and better than South Africans.
To end this review I just want to express how much I loved this story. The writing is truly so beautiful. I was flipping through the book trying to pick out quotes for this review but I found myself wanting to write down entire pages. One short qoute didn’t feel like enough to show you how amazing this story is. So with that I will leave you with this beautiful moment:
Without spoiling…the part I’m going to quote happens in rapid succession. Two characters have a discussion which takes place in the past, and we get this:
“That night outside the window, a small red bud begins to emerge on a twist of jasmine vine.”
At the end of the chapter we read: “White petals begin to emerge like tissue paper from inside their buds. Soon the air fills with the scent of jasmines in bloom.”
The start of the very next chapter, now in the present time: “Sana battles to open the window against the old knotted jasmine plant outside.”
This sequence was just so beautiful to me. I’m hiding the context from you for spoiler purposes, but it just made me feel like time was really passing between these peoples lives and I was able to watch it all along with the house and the djinn.
