I want to tell you a story, soni. Once upon a time, a group of men set off for a day of hunting in the forest in a jeep. They took with them a little boy who belonged to the youngest one of them. He’d been wanting to accompany his father for months, and the father, eager to take his son hunting for the first time, decided that he was ready now. His own father had taken him at a similar age, but perhaps he’d been a little older.
The men set up their camp in the forest and prepared for the day. The boy, excited to explore, managed to slip away from between them when he was meant to be doing a small task. He didn’t go too far, but he was a little one, and the foliage concealed him from the others. He did not mind this, because the trees and bushes were so green and lush and only added to his excitement. Presently, he needed to relieve himself. Had his father and friends known this, they would have been able to help him do it properly and safely. But the boy was too far away for that. So, he relieved himself among some bushes and went off chasing dragonflies and digging in the matthi.
Before long, the boy’s father noticed that his son’s task lay abandoned and that he was missing. Alarmed, he informed his companions, and they all broke up to search for him at once, fearful that he’d been met with a mishap. The forest was full of creatures that, while not dangerous to them, could assuredly pose harm to a child. But to their immense relief, they found him not too far off, sound asleep beneath a tree. They checked him for injuries, thankful upon finding none. So they carried him into the tent to let him nap and proceeded to hunt, his father a little saddened that his son could not enjoy it with them after all.
All went well for most of the day. But the group returned home earlier than planned, with the boy ill from a terribly high bukhaar. His parents put him to bed and tended to him, to no avail. By nightfall, he was delirious, babbling and thrashing about, seemingly distressed, in and out of consciousness. The father was in tatters, holding himself responsible. The mother was anguished to see his suffering. And, when the dead of the night came, the boy began rasping in a voice that was not his and speaking in tongues he never learned.
Three sleepless days and nights passed. Finally, after no amount of treatment helped their child in the slightest, the parents, harrowed and distraught, turned to the Elder of the family who was also the wisest among them, the boy’s great-grandfather. He examined the boy and realized that this was not a natural illness. Thus, he also realized that it could not be cured through natural means. He spent hours in prayer, keeping vigil by the boy’s bedside, seeking answers they did not have. Then, when it seemed like all hope was lost, the boy turned his head to his great-grandfather, opened his eyes, and floated several feet off the bed. Everyone gathered there shrieked and wailed in terror, silenced at last by the boy’s mother who shouted at them to let her grandfather-in-law finish what he set out to do.
The boy’s mouth opened, and another unknown voice informed the room that he was being justly punished. That was when the Elder realized that the child was possessed. Possessed by a jinn, soni. You know of them, don’t you? Possessing us insaan is one of the many powers they have over us. Before the veil that separated our worlds descended, they did this quite often, though some of them do it to this day. They use it to display their might, to amuse themselves, to frighten us. And sometimes, they use it to punish us.
The Elder asked why they were tormenting an innocent child so. The jinn, speaking through the levitating boy told him that three days earlier, the boy had passed urine on a sleeping jinn child. Jinn live in the forest, soni, remember that? It just so happened that this particular forest was one of their dwellings. And this jinn child, like the rest of its kind, had been sleeping through the day as jinn do. Jinn awake and roam about at night, as everyone but the boy had known. The jinn child’s father, the very being who possessed the little boy now, had been enraged by the humans’ arrogance and how they had used his child as a receptacle for their waste. He determined that the boy and his family needed to atone. He claimed that he had already entered the boy’s body by the time he was found sleeping.
The Elder pleaded with the jinn for mercy. He explained to him that the boy’s actions had been done in innocence, that he was a very young child, that he had slipped away from the humans that were tasked with supervising him. Humans who would have ensured that he relieved himself without disturbance. They would have announced it to the trees, just as people do to this very day when passing waste in woods and jungles. Jinn are unseen to human eyes unless they choose not to be, after all. How could he have known? The Elder apologized for the negligence of the boys’ caretakers and begged him to lift his curse, promising that they would never repeat their error.
The jinn was not hard of heart. Seeing the humans’ desperation thawed him a little. Therefore, he granted them his forgiveness and departed the boy’s body. However, he left with a warning: to never hunt in that forest again. He vowed that the consequences, should he catch them there a second time, would be dire. The parents of the child readily agreed. And, within the next day, the boy awoke, speaking in his own voice and unaware of anything that had transpired after he had run off on his own in the forest. It took several days for him to fully recuperate, but sure enough, he then became the same merry, curious boy he had always been. The humans held true to their word and never stepped foot into the forest again. All was well.
But, soni, even after many years went by, and the boy was fully grown. Even after he set out on his own, after his parents found him a wife, and after he had built his own home and began to live a contented life, filled with light, good fortune and few hardships. Sometimes, on the rarest of nights, his wife would be roused by her sleeping husband speaking in a tongue neither of them had learned.
Sometimes, in the midst of the day, he would be overcome by fatigue and take a nap that lasted hours, engulfed in the scent of shrubbery and dew. Plagued by a recurring khwab, the visceral sense of an invasive presence dwelling within his body for days and being ushered out amid the echoes of despairing prayers by an older, less relenting one. Sometimes, in the dead of the night, his wife asleep by his side, the boy would lie awake. And, sometimes, on those nights, the boy would see a shadowy figure in the corner of the room. A figure that resembled a woman, but that he knew could not be, because she had the feet of a lion and the horns of a beast. And sometimes, this creature who appeared as a woman would peer at him from where she stood, curiously. Sometimes, the boy was certain that she smiled, seeming pleased that now, he too knew what it was to have his sleep disrupted.
Areej Quraishi’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in Passages North, Porter House Review, The Normal School, Indiana Review, New Delta Review, Southern Humanities Review, Baltimore Review, BULL, and elsewhere. It has received contest accolades from Glimmer Train Press, CRAFT Literary, Salamander Magazine and Sycamore Review. Her surrealist fiction is inspired by myth and subversive fairytales. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington—Seattle and a PhD from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she was a Black Mountain Institute fellow. She is at work on a novel and two short story collections. Find her at www.areejquraishi.com