Samir’s Story

The other boys on the block weren’t like Samir. In fact, I doubt there was anyone in the whole city quite like him.

He didn’t go to our school, so he was just that Indian kid on our otherwise Arab block. He had this confidence unlike anyone else our age. He played by himself a lot, but he didn’t seem to mind being alone. There was always a football at his feet. He was really good with it, practicing his around-the-worlds and keep-ups in the courtyard. If anyone tried to steal his ball, he would kick it far away and go tearing after it, then grab it and disappear before anyone could catch up with him. If anyone’s sister talked to him, she would get scolded, but that didn’t stop the bolder girls. He didn’t try to get their attention, he just knew how to talk to them in a way that made them blush and laugh. The rest of us couldn’t get them to look at us twice. So we hated him. We yelled taunts in English and Arabic, but the more we did, the less he seemed to care.

He had a group of friends who lived on the other side of the city. They were all older and came over to play on his gaming console. Sometimes they hung around the river nearby. Seeing him hanging out with teenagers made all of us seethe. Who did he think he was?

*

The one who hated him the most was Abdullah. His dad was the boss of many of our parents, and his family lived in the nicest apartment on the block. Abdullah imitated Samir’s accent and insisted that he smelled bad. If Samir had ever had a chance to hang out with us after school, Abdullah made sure it didn’t happen. I don’t think anyone disliked Samir until Abdullah told us to. Abdullah was the kind of kid whose teasing started off tolerable but would progress until you were tying his shoelaces and getting his lunch just to make him stop. We’d all seen it. He wasn’t big or strong, but there was something dark about him gleaming under the surface. Nobody wanted to find out what he would do if he were pushed. It was also common knowledge in the neighborhood that he beat his little sister–we saw her at school with bruised forearms and black eyes. Nobody said anything to him about it. He had these skinny wrists and tiny eyes. His fingernails were always long and black with dirt.

I was out one afternoon, wandering around the courtyard because I didn’t want to help my mom clean the house. Kicking pebbles, I waited for someone to come out and start a football game or play a game of tag. Then I heard this long scream. It sounded like a street cat being hung up by its back legs. The other boys tortured the neighborhood cats sometimes. I never participated, but that day I thought I’d finally tell them to stop. I like cats. The screams were so loud that I jogged over to investigate, and when I came into the alley, I saw Abdullah standing over his little sister, beating her with this wooden sword. There was blood on it. I just stood there. He hit her in the stomach, on the face, on top of her head.

Then Samir came tearing around the corner carrying a hockey stick. He brushed past me and leaped at Abdullah. They scuffled until Samir was on top and straddling Abdullah, who I suddenly realized was quite small. He had seemed bigger before. Samir pressed him down by both shoulders into the dust, which billowed out in little clouds. The hockey stick lay forgotten beside them. I pulled Abdullah’s sister to her feet. Her face was smashed; her lip was split, and there was a dark line of blood beside her left ear. She’s small. The thought felt like a slap.

I remembered all the times we’d ignored what Abdullah was doing, all the times we’d greeted him at school as she slunk through the door. Some of her blood had dripped onto my sneakers. The sight of blood had never made me nauseous before, but at that moment, my stomach clenched, and I wanted to vomit. I tried to help her walk, but as soon as she was steady, she wrenched her arm away and fled. She looked back once to see whether I was chasing her; her expression was a mixture of fury and terror. She must have thought I was going to take her away and hurt her too.

When I looked back, I saw that Abdullah had wrestled one arm free to scratch Samir’s face. He called him a dirty Indian, the son of a whore, a rat. Samir didn’t budge, even when those long fingernails raked against his eyelids. I didn’t move until Abdullah shoved Samir off him and scrabbled for his wooden sword.

I leaped forward, ramming Abdullah as hard as I could into the dirt. Samir’s head snapped up. We looked at each other for a moment. Then I broke into action, pulling Abdullah to his feet and holding his arms behind his back. I realized for the first time that I was at least a head taller than him, and twice his weight.

I held Abdullah there until he stopped thrashing. Samir leaned towards Abdullah's face and whispered, “If you touch her, or any other girl again, you’ll get it back ten times worse. I can make that happen.”

He seemed so sure of himself.

Abdullah asked in Arabic what the hell I was doing taking the Indian’s side. He promised that my life at school was over.

“Your life is over once I tell everyone what I saw,” I said.

I had never been courageous before. I had mid-tier popularity in school and had always been afraid of doing the wrong thing and falling to the bottom of the food chain. But seeing Samir hold Abdullah in the dirt even while his eyes were being scratched had woken me up. The girl’s blood shone on my sneaker.

We let Abdullah get to his feet. Once he recovered, he sucker-punched Samir in the stomach, turned, and sprinted home. Samir smiled and spat at his retreating back. I brought Samir home, staggering a little. Mama patched him up and fed him dinner. She didn’t need to hear the whole story to realize we’d been through something. We would be friends.

“How did you know what was happening?” I asked.

“I see everything,” he replied with a vaguely irritating aura of mystery.

The next day, I interrupted a game of tag to tell the other kids on the block what had happened between Abdullah and Samir. My bloody shoe was passed from person to person. Some shuddered away from it. Others scrutinized it. Even Abdullah’s friends seemed embarrassed. When the neighborhood heard that the girl was in the hospital, my story was confirmed, and Abdullah fell from grace. The silence had been broken–we couldn’t pretend not to see it anymore.

Nobody let him play football after that. When he tried to join, we all insisted that it wasn’t our ball and he’d need to ask the owner of the ball to play. He went around asking until he got angry, and when nobody was afraid of him, he left in a fury. He brought a new football to school the following day, and we abandoned tag to watch him kick the ball lamely by himself.  Nobody walked into school with him or gathered around his dad’s sports car anymore. The few times Abdullah caught Samir walking back from the baqala alone, Samir just outran him. My new friend was like a cat that way; he could scramble up the compound walls and run along them without hesitation. It was almost like gravity didn’t work the same way for him.

One night, Samir climbed onto my balcony and rapped on the glass. He pointed across to Abdullah’s apartment where the sister was hiding on a balcony. Even from a distance, we could see that her face was stricken. We watched Abdullah come onto the balcony, grab her arm, and drag her inside.

“He’s still hitting her,” Samir said. He was usually cheerful, but when he was mad, his eyes darkened. “I’m going to get him back. Much worse this time.”

He borrowed my drawing set and drew a bunch of diagrams with symbols I’d never seen before. Some of the drawings were of himself surrounded by shadowy figures.

*

Abdullah didn’t come to school for a week after that. We heard he was sick, but the rumor was that his illness was a mental one. His mother had called the Imam. When he came back to school, he was different. He wouldn’t look anyone in the eye, and he refused to pick up a pencil or pen. He simply stared at his desk or blank notebook until the final bell rang.

Despite his silence, the rumors began to swell. They said it was the djinn haunting him every time he went to sleep. A young kid had seen them surrounding Abdullah in the bathroom at school. Someone else claimed a maid in their house had left because she’d seen the djinn in his bedroom when she went to wake him from a nightmare.

Samir didn’t say a word until we found out that the sister had asked her parents if she could attend an all-girls boarding school in Alexandria. We watched from my balcony as she hauled her suitcases into the family car. She was smiling for once, and her expression was mirrored on Samir’s face. I asked him what he’d done.

“Do you believe in the djinn?” he asked.

I did. My uncles had been telling djinn stories since the first Eid I could remember.

“I summoned them,” he said.

I checked to see if he was joking, but there wasn’t a trace of humor on his face.

Still, I was dubious. “How?”

He shrugged and mumbled something about his drawings.

When I pressed him, he snapped. “It doesn’t matter. I summoned them into my room and ordered them to take care of Abdullah’s sister.”

 For a few weeks, Samir seemed happy. But then he started disappearing from the neighborhood for days. He said he was hanging out by the river, which he used to do with his other friends, but I hadn’t seen them in months. Sometimes, I saw his mother wandering around the neighborhood looking for him. When we did meet he was… different. His face was wan. He couldn’t hear me sometimes, like there was something else drowning me out. I thought something was wrong at home; he had alluded to his parents not being happy. His dad was an angry and absent man. His mother flinched when people spoke.

During our first sleepover in weeks, Samir was finally acting like himself again. We stayed up until four in the morning playing video games, sharing sour candy, and practicing headers against the wall until Mama came in and insisted we went to sleep.

I woke soon after, covered in sweat. Something large and dark stood at the foot of Samir’s cot, looking down at him.

It was just like when I saw Abdullah beating his sister. My whole chest turned to ice. I couldn’t do anything. More of those dark… things surrounded him. I was sure they were robbers or murderers. Then Samir stood, and they guided him to the balcony. As they opened the door and led him outside, I realized what they were: djinn. When Samir put one foot up on the rail, I saw what they were going to make him do. I screamed until my dad burst into the room, saw Samir climbing onto the railing of the balcony, and grabbed him by the back of his shirt just in time.

In the morning, I eavesdropped as my mother talked to Samir’s mother about what had happened. Samir’s mother confessed that things weren’t good at home, which was why Samir was having night terrors. It was because of his father.

But they were missing a big part of the picture.

I tried to tell my parents about Samir summoning the djinn and what I’d seen around his bed that night, but they told me it must have been a nightmare. They told me that Samir was depressed, and the balcony had been a cry for help. The words “suicide attempt” hung in the air. Samir needed spiritual help, but he wasn’t Muslim, so the Imam couldn’t get involved. My parents told me to just be a good friend. There was nothing else I could do.

For a while it worked, Samir seemed to be getting better. We played football again. He invited me over for video games with his older friends. But there was an absence in his eyes, as if he were longing to be somewhere else.

“You look far away,” I once said.

“I did go somewhere,” he replied. “I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

But no matter how many times I asked, he remained irritatingly aloof.

*

One night there was a loud banging on our front door, loud enough to wake us all up. My father opened it and Samir’s mother burst in. Samir had been in bed an hour ago, but now his bed was empty. His mother had a bruise on her cheek, which my parents politely ignored. Mama instructed my father to wake the neighborhood.

“We’ll find him soon," my mother said.

I insisted on going with my father. We gathered the people who answered their doorbells and went out in pairs with torches.

“I bet he’s by the river, Baba.” I tried to sound confident, but I had the familiar icy feeling in my chest. I did go somewhere, Samir had said. But where had he gone?

My father was trying to hide it, but he was terrified. He held my hand as we approached the embankment, but there was nothing there. I found a few of Samir’s drawings held down from the wind with a rock. They hadn’t been there for very long. Baba looked out at the churning water and dialed the police. I don’t remember anything else from that night except that I wouldn’t let anyone pry Samir’s drawings out of my hands. I slept in my parents’ bed for a week.

While I tried to decipher the drawings, they dragged the river and found one of Samir’s shoes. He was presumed dead.

Illustration by Garreth Chan