Column by Saba Mahjoor | The jinn that wasn’t

On a crisp spring afternoon, Phuphee and I were sitting on the verandah chatting after our lunch. She had rustled up a simple dish of pootche gande ti thool (spring onions and eggs) and served it with hot rice and roahane koadur aanchaar (a pickle made from the tender green stems of young garlic).She was telling me the recipe for pootche gande when the gate opened and a large party of people walked in. Before they reached the verandah, she called for Aisha, the household help, to bring the samovar, chinipyaale (small cups without handles) and some kulchas.The party was headed by an elderly gentleman who looked annoyed and angry. Before he even sat down and caught his breath, he started narrating his tale of woe. ‘Kyahaz dapai hamsheera, maehaz chu sitam. Yemyis nechtvyis karyov khaandar badyeav armaanoav magar nazar laejj kamyistaansinz.’ (What can I tell you, my sister. I am facing such hardship. We got this son of ours married with so many hopes and dreams, but I don’t know who has given us the evil eye.)He sat before Phuphee beating his chest with his hands. It startled me a little, but Phuphee didn’t so much as flinch. She watched him calmly and, after he had tired a little, he sat back and pretended to cry.Phuphee asked him to speak plainly about why he had come. He stopped his non-crying and wiped his non-existent tears with the sleeve of his pheran. He proceeded to tell her about the young woman who was standing at the back. She was his daughter-in-law and he was sure that either someone had given the entire family the evil eye or she had been possessed by a jinn, for she behaved most abominably towards him.‘How so?’ Phuphee asked.‘Yihaz chenna myesyith kathai karaan.Amyis chu shayad praah gomut (She isn’t speaking to me at all. I think she has been possessed),’ he replied, looking at the young woman crossly.Phuphee sat watching them for a few moments and then asked the daughter-in-law and her husband to come forward. ‘Is this true?’ she asked them.They nodded silently. ‘Real power moved with the gentle power to move destinies’ | Photo Credit: Illustration: Zainab Tambawalla Phuphee looked at the young woman and told her to speak openly.‘He speaks to me unkindly, often treating me as an outsider. He hurls abuses at my parents and other family members. If anything goes wrong in our home, he puts the blame at my feet. He seems to feel that it is acceptable for him to treat me this way because I am his daughter-in-law. There was nothing else I could do to hold him accountable, so I simply stopped speaking to him,’ the young woman explained calmly.‘See! See, my sister, how she speaks. No respect for her elders, no respect for you,’ he said, his voice now shrill and his manner aggressive.Phuphee took a deep breath and asked them all to sit for a while and have some kehwe. She instructed the father-in-law to follow her inside and asked Aisha to bring his kehwe ti kulche. Twenty minutes later, they returned to the verandah where everyone was waiting. She walked towards the daughter-in-law and whispered something in her ear. Once everyone had finished their drinks, she bid them all goodbye.Once we were alone, I asked Phuphee what she had whispered in the young woman’s ear.‘I told her to come back in a week’s time and tell me how everything is at home,’ she replied.‘That’s it?’ I asked, a little surprised. ‘But what about the exorcism?’‘I think you have had too much aanchaar today, myoan jaan [my life]. Go walk it off,’ she replied, amused by my question. She got up and disappeared into the house.I saw Aisha sweeping the garden with a kaend doaph (broom). She watched me as I walked towards her and smiled. I asked her to tell me what had happened inside.Aisha explained that Phuphee had told the father-in-law that it was true, his daughter-in-law had indeed been possessed. But it was not just her, his son was in trouble, too. Sometimes jinns came in pairs, she had told the gentleman. The pair of jinns were too powerful for spells. If she attempted an exorcism and failed, they would both perish. Upon hearing that he could lose his only son, the gentleman had fallen quiet and asked if there was another way.Phuphee had told him the only options he had were to either keep them both at home and treat them with the respect that jinns of this calibre commanded or he expel them both from the family home. The gentleman decided he wanted to keep his son at home.I looked at Aisha, puzzled.‘I have already said too much. I really couldn’t stand life as a goat,’ Aisha laughed, and before she disappeared into the house, she turned around and said, ‘Sometimes entitlement runs so deep, it feels demonic when you finally have to face it. I guess everything changes when you have skin in the game, right?’I picked up the broom and started sweeping the garden clean of the leaves and twigs that a mild wind had blown in yesterday. As I swept, I wondered when Phuphee would do some real magic, the kind that included incantations and bubbling cauldrons.But one day down the years, I would realise that I had been too young and too naïve to understand that real magic was rarely visible to the naked eye. Instead, it moved around like a zephyr, unseen and invisible, but with the gentle power to move destinies.