Old homes can be unnerving. You know that people have spent years, even decades, in such places, and some part of your brain finds it plausible that the stories they lived in these walls could still, somehow, have resonances today. One may even come to believe that the people themselves still walk those halls long after they may have passed onto another world. All of this has been ample fodder for haunted house myths all over the world, from fairy tales to horror movies. Here, we shall be discussing another take on such a concept: Shubnum Khan’s 2024 novel The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, published by Viking.
This novel takes place in South Africa, in an aging apartment complex on an island near Durban, overlooking the Indian Ocean. Its characters are mostly Indian Muslims who either came to India themselves, or their descendants who made their living in this foreign country. The novel divides itself temporally into two alternating settings. The first is in the 1930s, involving the arrival of the man who came from India to build this house, as well as the wife he brought with him and stayed under more than a little duress. The second is in the twenty-first century, as a father and teenage daughter move into the house, now filled with neighbors who are peculiar and yet somehow endearing.
Both the house and the main character, Sana, the aforementioned teenage daughter, are haunted by their pasts. Sana has her own personal tragedies weighing heavily over her, events that have stained her very being, the long shadow of trauma never letting her go. The house, also, has had many awful things happen in it over the decades, and those linger here. As one may expect from the very title, there is a djinn here, locked away, waiting to find someone to hear its tales. All of this takes place among people who are, in one way or another, trapped in the past; you almost begin to wonder if the house has a pull on such people, wanting to share the misery and the unsettledness.
Those who are looking for a tale of magic and intrigue may be disappointed here. This is not like the Arab-inflected romps of P. Djèlí Clark’s Dead Djinn universe (a series I love by an author whose works I adore, for the record); this is a far more subdued, moodier sort of story that takes clear influence from Gothic fiction. The environment is dark, claustrophobic, and suffocating as you, with Sana, have to learn to figure out what is making this place so wound up, and what can be done to relieve the pain.
This is a story about migration. Sana and her father have moved here after their own family tragedy from another part of South Africa. In the segments set earlier, an ambitious impresario from India comes to stake out his fortunes in South Africa. He and his wife have also been chafing under the British yoke in India, and they bring their own traumas from that. There, the businessman tries to create a small utopia on this island near Durban, creating a massive house with its own menagerie of animals, as well as its own staff of servants, allowing him to become something akin to the sort of colonial overlord that he had to serve in India. His story reminds me of what Paulo Freire says in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
This businessman came to South Africa to be master of his own domain, and he very much intended to be a master. Much of the story is told from the vantage point of his wife, or more accurately his first wife. She is the one who has to deal with his flights of fancy that can change her life on a whim. He treats her as an object, and like all people who have been treated as such, can only endure it for so long. Her husband has interiorized what Tyler Stovall called ‘white freedom’ in his book of that name: to be free is to be white, and to be white is to experience freedom. To free himself, he becomes like the white lords of the Raj he had served in India, and that pain has consequences for himself, his family, and future generations that live in this house.
This is a novel with a very strong sense of place. Almost all of it is set within the confines of this house-turned-apartment-complex, with some digressions elsewhere. In making this choice, Khan zooms in on this particular location, making the effects of all this change feel very personal, sometimes painfully so. You can hear every creak and echo in this house, and each and every one of them tells part of the long and painful story.
The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is an odyssey of sorts, albeit a mostly stationary one; it reminds me of the monastery whose website I read that talked of how its monks may not travel physically, but they travel great distances in the spirit. That’s what Sana does here, and that’s what the reader does as they follow her through the novel. You feel the weight of decades here, and you wonder if that weight can be cast off. That is a question that applies to all of us, no matter where in the world we are, and Khan has given us an adroit exploration of that theme.
This novel takes place in South Africa, in an aging apartment complex on an island near Durban, overlooking the Indian Ocean. Its characters are mostly Indian Muslims who either came to India themselves, or their descendants who made their living in this foreign country. The novel divides itself temporally into two alternating settings. The first is in the 1930s, involving the arrival of the man who came from India to build this house, as well as the wife he brought with him and stayed under more than a little duress. The second is in the twenty-first century, as a father and teenage daughter move into the house, now filled with neighbors who are peculiar and yet somehow endearing.
Both the house and the main character, Sana, the aforementioned teenage daughter, are haunted by their pasts. Sana has her own personal tragedies weighing heavily over her, events that have stained her very being, the long shadow of trauma never letting her go. The house, also, has had many awful things happen in it over the decades, and those linger here. As one may expect from the very title, there is a djinn here, locked away, waiting to find someone to hear its tales. All of this takes place among people who are, in one way or another, trapped in the past; you almost begin to wonder if the house has a pull on such people, wanting to share the misery and the unsettledness.
Those who are looking for a tale of magic and intrigue may be disappointed here. This is not like the Arab-inflected romps of P. Djèlí Clark’s Dead Djinn universe (a series I love by an author whose works I adore, for the record); this is a far more subdued, moodier sort of story that takes clear influence from Gothic fiction. The environment is dark, claustrophobic, and suffocating as you, with Sana, have to learn to figure out what is making this place so wound up, and what can be done to relieve the pain.
This is a story about migration. Sana and her father have moved here after their own family tragedy from another part of South Africa. In the segments set earlier, an ambitious impresario from India comes to stake out his fortunes in South Africa. He and his wife have also been chafing under the British yoke in India, and they bring their own traumas from that. There, the businessman tries to create a small utopia on this island near Durban, creating a massive house with its own menagerie of animals, as well as its own staff of servants, allowing him to become something akin to the sort of colonial overlord that he had to serve in India. His story reminds me of what Paulo Freire says in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
“But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity.”
This is a novel with a very strong sense of place. Almost all of it is set within the confines of this house-turned-apartment-complex, with some digressions elsewhere. In making this choice, Khan zooms in on this particular location, making the effects of all this change feel very personal, sometimes painfully so. You can hear every creak and echo in this house, and each and every one of them tells part of the long and painful story.
The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is an odyssey of sorts, albeit a mostly stationary one; it reminds me of the monastery whose website I read that talked of how its monks may not travel physically, but they travel great distances in the spirit. That’s what Sana does here, and that’s what the reader does as they follow her through the novel. You feel the weight of decades here, and you wonder if that weight can be cast off. That is a question that applies to all of us, no matter where in the world we are, and Khan has given us an adroit exploration of that theme.
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Nerd Coefficient: 8/10
Reference: Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, [Magpie, 2024]
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
