Thread by @XilleIlahi

Since it's been a year and I've got 15 minutes till my zoom meeting starts and jinn stories are back in style....

The Muwakkils of Mehmoodabad - A thread.

https://twitter.com/XilleIlahi/status/1299018182095712257

Majid Ajmeri was a rebel. Inasmuch as anyone with a side parting and a mustache can be called a rebel but there are degrees of everything, even rebellion. Majid’s grandfather Mirza Hafeez Ajmeri, had been a Pir, a holy man of sorts who’s father and grandfather had also been Pirs.

Mirza Hafeez’s gimmick had been control of two muwakkils, ethereal beings made of light and fire who did his bidding. The story went that one of them escaped from his control when Mirza Hafeez migrated to Karachi in 1949.

Mirza Hafeez had seven sons, each of whom had seven sons of their own. As the seventh son of a seventh son, Majid had about as much chance of inheriting the Pirhood from the family patriarch as he had of winning the 1 crore Fatimid Foundation lottery that he dreamed of.

Majid had no interest in being a Pir anyway. He had become a Hafiz like his brothers and cousins all had by the age of 13 but his involvement in worship and spirituality was ritualistc at best, performed more out of fear of his grandfather’s anger than any faith in a divine being

Majid had two passions in life. Chemistry and Faryal Gauhar. Both unattainable in their own ways for a lower middle class kid from Mehmoodabad but I did mention that Majid was a rebel. Majid secretly enrolled for a B Sc Chemistry degree while he was studying for the BA Islamiat..

...his family paid for and got a first class first position from KU in 1986.

In 1989, the day he completed his Masters degree in applied chemistry he came home late riding his Honda 50 through flooded Karachi streets to the news that his grandfather had died that afternoon.

Mirza Hafeez left his sons and grandsons little in the way of earthly possessions – urban Pirs, even with muwakkils, weren’t very popular in the Karachi of the 80s as orthodoxy had begun to spread – but he did, as was the custom, leave behind a will...

...naming his successor and binding both the serving and the escapee muwakkil to his heir and the 18th pir of his silsila, Mirza Majid Ajmeri.

Majid, of course, was unmoved. He had no interest in what he thought was a low level con being run on the handful of poor devotees that Hafeez had left and thought there were far better uses the building on the 120 sq yards plot that served as Hafeez’s aastaana could be put to.

That building became home to a tuition centre where “Sir Majid” taught chemistry to high school kids in the evenings after he got done from his day job as a researcher at the Plastics and Polymers department in PCSIR.

In 1991 he became the 2nd among the batch of 49 cousins to own a new car, a red Suzuki Alto. He was single, working towards a PhD and largely estranged from his family. Life was good.

***to be continued***

It was also in 1991 that the first in a series of strange events happened to Majid. He woke up early one Tuesday in his bedroom above the tuition centre to what sounded like a class going on in full swing below him.

When he went down to investigate there was nobody there and only the chirping of a jheengar to listen to – pretty much what he’d expect the classroom to look like at the time.

Except for the steaming cup of hot tea on his desk.

Majid was a man of science. He quickly figured out that this was a prank of some sort, checked the house to see if any intruder was still there, locked up everything again and got ready and left for work. By evening he’d forgotten about it and only remembered he’d planned to...

...have a stern word with his students when he switched the tv off at night after watching the khabarnama.

Majid was a man of science, but he was also a man.

That night sleep came a little later than usual, the locks were locked a little tighter, the clasps on the windows a little more clasped, the razaee was wrapped a little closer to the body and a hockey stick from his younger days found itself leaning against the bedside table...

... for no particular reason. Night has a way of desciencing the scientist and the Ayat ul Kursi becomes a little easier to recall.

And it is in the night when the TVs are off and the tubelights don’t buzz and cars don’t honk and crows don’t crow and uncles don’t sneeze loudly on the street corners that everything is just a little easier to hear.

Steps creak, mosquitos buzz, little moths crash against the window panes and even the breeze that carries the scent of raat ki rani to one’s olfactory system has a clumsiness to it – causing curtains to flutter and leaves to rustle and…

...

Majid woke up, suddenly alert. There was no raat ki rani anywhere near his window.

It’s not, when you think about it like a trained chemist, that hard to simulate a scent. Practically any natural smell can be replicated by extracting scented oil from natural ingredients. These ingredients can include various plants, fruits, woods and even animal secretions.

Other resources like alcohol, coal, tars and petrochemicals can be used during the manufacturing process… but these are too elaborate a ruse for students of matric chemistry.

Majid got out of bed, grabbed his hockey stick and made his way quietly downstairs to the classroom. As he got closer the scent got stronger and sweeter and he began to hear the hushed murmuring of prayer you hear from older gentlemen standing next to you in prayer.

Bur when he opened the door there was nothing. No students. No flowers. Nobody praying. Just a steaming cup of hot tea on the desk.

Majid didn’t sleep again that night. He kept pacing the room until dawn broke and the sunlight started to come in through the windows. He dumped the tea in the sink and washed the cup and went upstairs for a shave and a shower and then headed out to work.

Or to his workplace at least. Because work was far from his mind.

The plastics and polymers lab at PCSIR isn’t exactly a breeding spot for Nobel laureates. No Hodgkins or Curies have scribbled theorems on the blackboards and the burners haven’t been lit by Faradays or Pasteurs.

But while it is no great monument to the science of Man, it is, still, a laboratory. And there is no better place to shrug off the supernatural than such a building.

Majid, however, was flummoxed.

He reasoned that he could have imagined the smell. He told himself it is not too farfetched to hear something that isn’t really there. Minds play tricks at times. But teacups do not fill themselves and land on desks without someone assisting them.

His drive home was slower than it could have been and he jangled his keys loudly before he unlocked the door. Even the students that evening couldn’t completely distract him from his thoughts.

But sleep has overpowered things much stronger than the adrenaline of a nervous man.

He slept fitfully that night, interrupted by the sweet scent of non existent flowers and the murmured prayers of absent worshippers and he did nothing but wrap his razaee even tighter around himself.

In the morning he dumped the tea in the sink and washed the cup before leaving.

Every day he did the same. And the unexplained became routine. Sure, the events took their toll. Majid changed from the genial teacher who roasts his students to the crabby professor who gets irritated by the scraping of a chair.

His hands became just a little too unsteady to allow for a smooth shave so he let his beard grow out. The PhD became more aspirational than a definite milestone on his journey forward. And the nighttime readings shifted from scientific journals to subjects metaphysical.

And still the scent wafted through the walls and incantations reverberated around his room and undrunk cups of tea materialized for washing every night.

And then one night there was peace. Or something resembling it.

The human mind doesn’t actually accept silence. If you rob the ears of all stimuli in a vacuum, hold your breath and even cease your pulse for a few seconds, the brain will simply create its own. That’s what tinnitus is. And yet, Majid woke up to a complete silence.

He heard before he felt the goosebumps rise on his skin. And when he blinked it felt like two great gates had been slammed in the dark. And this would have been alarming if he hadn’t seen what he saw at the foot of his bed.

*** to be continued. it's my bedtime now ***

The coils of a serpent have long been an allegory for the beauty of a temptress’s hair in Urdu poetry. This is not what immediately comes to mind when you see one on your bed. One can scream but vocal cords don’t always cooperate.

One can run but legs can turn to stone. Or one can stare, hypnotized like prey, and wait for the next move.

This is all subjective, of course. Because for this to happen, you need to be in the moment, to see that serpent in front of you and that serpent needs to behave like serpents do – not dissolve into nothingness after making eye contact.

Majid sensed the silence dissipate. The rhythmic thrum of the ceiling fan came back, the compressor of his fridge in the kitchen downstairs took one of those electrical sighs. His heartbeat came back and then merged into the normal sound of nothing.

Normal. But there was something not normal. It was in the air. A distinct smell of foam from the sea. The sharp saltishness that settles into the nose. A dampness that you sense rather than feel.

And even this would have, could have been treated as a nightmare by the chemist if it wasn’t for what the serpent left behind.

On the bedsheet by his feet was a salt stain like you get on your darker shalwars after you’ve waded in the sea at Clifton. Except that it wasn’t a standard salt stain. It seemed to be Arabic lettering. Bidhukh.

Majid Ajmeri may never have officially accepted his pirhood but he was raised as the grandson of a Pir. And Majid Ajmeri’s grandfather was one of the kind of pirs who always had a story or two of the occult to tell his grandchildren.

So where you, I or any other PCSIR employee might not have understood anything by that name, Majid Ajmeri did.

Bidhukh. The daughter of Iblis. Bidhukh. The queen of the jinn. Bidhukh. The heiress of the sea throne. Bidhukh. The contract maker. Bidhukh. The granter of Muwakkils.

Bidhukh. The executor of Mirza Hafeez’s will.

Majid Ajmeri jumped out of his bed, ran downstairs and out of his gate and collapsed on the street as a result of what was later diagnosed at NICVD as a coronary thrombosis.

It was 5 days before he was discharged from hospital and reluctantly made his way back home. The house was pretty much the same as he had left it though his room didn’t smell of the sea any more. And there were 5 cups of tea to wash on the desk in the classroom.

Not that spending time in the bedroom or washing teacups was anywhere close to what Majid had in mind. The first thing he did when he got home was pull out the trunk his grandfather had left him and started looking for anything that might provide answers.

And he found nothing.

It’s an interesting conundrum. You have been sent a message by a supernatural being. Do you let it absorb your life or do you try to block it out and continue living? Or do you try to strike a balance at finding a meaning to both the message and your temporal existence?

Majid was no philosopher. He placed a tray on the desk with a thermos of fresh brewed doodhpatti and two teacups and went to bed.

He slept the sleep of a baby.

And so began a new chapter in Majid Ajmeri’s life. Every day he would go to PCSIR to research new industry cases for plastics and polymers. Every night he would brew tea for his unseen visitors.

His house smelled of raat ki rani, his hands grew steady enough to shave close again and the hockey stick went back into the cupboard.

You’re probably thinking he’d made his peace with the situation.

Every Friday after his juma prayers, Majid Ajmeri would head to the Sharfabad Club. Unknown to many, on the second floor is the Abdul Qadir Bedil Library. And while visitors know they can find every issue of Jang from the 60s onwards and Dawn from the 70s;...

...few know that their collection on the occult would rival that of some of the best research universities in the world.

Majid read Urdu translations of Majmuat Thalath Rasail and Kitāb shumūs al-anwār wa-kunūz al-asrār al-kubrá. He pored over Imam e Natek with a Turkish to Urdu dictionary in hand. He could practically quote entire passages out of Kitab e asatir in both the original farsi and Urdu

He wrote letters to Rukya experts as far away as Indonesia and Egypt and tried to learn what it was too late to learn from his granddad. He learned a lot and he learned nothing.

Literature, illuminating as it can be, doesn’t exactly give you a user's guide to contacting Bidhukh.

Seven months after his heart attack Majid was nowhere closer to finding a solution for his jinn invasion than he had been on that fateful night. And then one quiet Saturday morning the doorbell rang.

*** to be continued. breakfast time ****

The early 90s were not Karachi’s finest hour. And though Mehmoodabad wasn’t the epicenter of the flames that engulfed us – it was scorched pretty badly. The chirping and cawing of birds and calls of street hawkers selling vegetables and fruits and kulfis and gola gandas ...

...and the honking of horns and the rumbling of trains was often punctuated if not drowned out by the sound of gunfire. Newspapers carried death tolls every day, Edhi ambulances buzzed around town with sirens wailing and gravediggers made small fortunes.

The city lost more sons than the casualties of many a major war in history.

It was, to put it mildly, not a time for guests to show up unannounced.

Majid was tired. He spent hours every day in his commute through several checkposts. He spent hours every day reading on jinns and angels and the supernatural. He was still recovering from his heart attack and the stress of everything was taking a toll.

In his late 20s, Majid could easily have passed for 50. Yet the doorbell had rung and Majid got up and opened the door.

The old man outside was dressed in a threadbare white shalwar kameez and wore a white skull cap over his unkempt hair.

His beard was long and grey and had probably not been afforded the luxury of a comb for days. His gnarled hands were heavily encumbered by several rings set with brightly colored glass stones. He had with him a small travel bag...

...that seemed to be stuffed to bursting with his effects and a couple of polythene bags full of groceries. But what caught Majid’s eye was the fact that the old man had taken off his shoes before he had opened the door, let alone invited him in.

The visitor introduced himself as Rajab Affendi, a mureed (disciple) of Mirza Hafeez. This was something that Majid had gotten used to over the years since his grandfather’s passing. People would show up from time to time with similar introductions asking for blessings or...

...prayers and he would usually oblige by muttering a few verses from the Quran and raising his hand in what he thought of as a beatific gesture and send them on their way.

He had found it to be an easier process than explaining that he had not taken over the Silsila because plastics and polymers made more sense to him than the effects of Saturn’s position on one’s fate.

But perspectives change when you brew tea every night for beings you can’t see

In any case Rajab Affendi didn’t seem to expect an invitation. He took Majid’s outstretched hand not to shake it but to raise it to his eyes in a measure of respect and then simply walked in.

He never left. When Majid pressed him on why he had come he simply said he’d received the message that it was time for him to come and help. Big things were due.

Rajab Affendi cooked dinner that evening from the groceries he had brought with him and set himself up in the small room to the right of what was Majid’s classroom. He would go out in the morning each day to get groceries and quietly assumed the role of housekeeper.

He’d clean the house, do the laundry and cook the food. Majid had time to read and focus on whatever he was hoping to find. The only chore Rajab insisted he wouldn’t do was brew the nightly tea or wash the teacups afterwards.

And so began the third chapter of Majid’s life. He gave up the evening tuitions and set aside the PhD research entirely. He’d spend his days working on cellulose diacetate usage for waterproof fabrics and his evenings researching obscure texts on the secrets of the jinns.

And the fogs started to lift.

When you are granted passage through the portals of the different worlds, the veils on the faces of mysteries begin to disappear. Mirrors show more than the mere reflection of light...

...illusions become accidents of viewing points and dreams become portents of the future. Alchemy becomes an extension of chemistry, language is movement of the lips and the art of swaying hearts becomes a science.

Majid’s greying hair turned black again. His back grew straighter and he lost his slouch. His voice acquired a deeper, more resonant power to captivate. He could step into a room and you would sense a certain magnetic energy emanating from him.

In a crowded bazaar people would make way for him. Cops would wave him through at checkposts and street gangsters would step back in deference when he passed.

Rajab started allowing visitors to the house in Mehmoodabad. Sabahat Aijaz came and wept about the disappearance of her 22 year old son, Furqan Aijaz. The next day he showed up safe and sound at her doorstep with no memory of where he had been for the past three weeks.

Parvez Mughal, a halwai, came and begged Majid to pray for his business to take off, he had a daughter, Mariam, he wanted to send to medical college. He went back to his shop to find a crowd gathered outside waiting to order sweets. In weeks he was able to pay the fees.

Farhad Qasimi was a club cricketer who hadn’t scored more than 20 in his last 11 games. Majid told him not to worry. That afternoon he scored 138 runs in one session and got a call from KCCA to join their first class team. He scored over 1300 runs that season with seven centuries

And the people kept coming. Teachers and plumbers, butchers and housewives, patients and lovers. No one was turned away. Nothing was asked of them. All left feeling their burdens lifted and their desires fulfilled.

The legend grew. Majid didn’t call himself a Pir but in the evenings in Mehmoodabad, nobody referred to him as anything but Pir Saab.

And then one particularly busy evening around a year after Rajab Affendi let the first visitor in, Majid retired to bed without brewing tea.

Wrath is an evil thing. It takes no prisoners and shows no mercy. Majid woke up early that morning to the distinct smell of sea salt and a cool dampness in that room. Terror gripped him and he ran down to brew tea but it was too late.

Sunlight had broken through the window and the only thing in the silence he could hear was Rajab Affendi’s muffled snores.

Furqan Aijaz was killed in a police encounter near Saddar that morning. Bidhukh. It was a violent shooting in a particularly busy commercial area that sparked riots across the city.

A bus carrying Dow Medical College students was attacked by the rioters and the two casualties included a young first year student named Mariam Mughal. Bidhukh.

Among those injured in the aerial firing at National Stadium Karachi was Farhad Qasimi who took a stray bullet in his spinal cord and never walked again. Bidhukh. Teachers and plumbers, butchers and housewives, patients and lovers. It was carnage. It was Bidhukh.

Until it was night time and Majid could brew tea for his night time visitors again. An uneasy peace settled over the city and dogs barked and crickets chirped and mothers sang their children to sleep as the familiar scent of raat ki rani once again wafted through the rooms again.

***to be continued***

***I'll just add a little more so you know what to expect on Sunday***

A few kilometres north of Mehmoodabad, in the Natha Khan area near Airport Colony is situated the humble monitoring centre of the Pakistan Meterological Department. And it is to here that the reader must momentarily turn.

On October 6, 1993, Meteorologist Muzaffar Tunio, put a report on his boss’s desk detailing his assessment of what appeared to be a cyclone heading towards Karachi. Reports and memos in Pakistani government circles have a way of getting passed around slowly and to little avail.

In any case Tunio’s boss did not come to the office that day or any other day of the week and the report and the desk it was on and the big leather chair with the towel on the back gathered dust...

...until a phone call from Islamabad triggered an emergency meeting and the 5:00 pm news report on October 14 was the first time anyone heard of a cyclone warning.

Anyone other than Majid Ajmeri.

The three months since the accident with the tea had been a nightmare for Majid. The tea was brewed every night and the cups were washed every day but there was a tension that hadn’t been there before. Light bulbs fused more frequently,...

...more silverfish dropped out of the books from Bedil Library, the electric cables outside hummed a little louder, mosquitoes bit with more menace and as if even the winds had taken offence, there was a nip in the air that Majid had never noticed in September before.

The winds.

The night breeze carried more than just dust and scents those days. Some nights dried seaweed blew up on to his window sill, others a couple of seagull feathers would be left behind.

Rajab Affendi’s steel utensils were rusting for no reason and one morning he found a crab’s leg stuck to the sole of his slipper. The fragrance of raat ki rani mingled uneasily with a faint stench of stale fish.

And in his dreams Majid saw a queen in white sailing towards Karachi on a throne of driftwood and pearls.

Anyone who has ever attended a mushaira or heard a couple of qawwalis will tell you that when veils are lifted, the hitherto unseen cast them as nets on those who now see them. It is the ultimate reversal of the hunt and the hunter is now as prey to the hunted.

But as the dance is danced, the power of mystery is ceded and the hunter can choose to reverse it again.

Majid had gone beyond the veil of the temporal. He had heard the calls of the namgirak and danced with the ifrit in the dust storms.

He had watched the Si’lat brides of Karsaz Road and made tea for the Marid who fulfilled the promises that Majid made to his visitors. He had seen from afar the Kings of Mars and Venus and Saturn wield their dark magic while Rajab Affendi cooked his dinner.

And he could see the wind patterns change and the birds fly inland and spiders scuttle far away from their webs as the Queen arrived. For people like us, the veils are firmly in place and we were defenseless against the fates because we wouldn’t know what to look for.

But Majid did.

Muzaffar Tunio’s boss sat nervously on a bench outside the Sindh Secretariat waiting for his audience with the caretaker Chief Minister of Sindh, Syed Ali Madad Shah.

***to be continued***

In Pakistan the least trusted type of person is the one the people elect to office. The elected can be trusted to govern the country, start or end wars, legislate on your right to live, take decisions to bind your future generations in debt...

...but what they cannot be trusted with is overseeing elections.

This is why we have caretaker governments.

Syed Ali Madad Shah was a caretaker chief minister. He was a caretaker chief minister in his last week of office.

The elections were over and the only thing left for him to do in his term was to hand over the office to his successor once he took oath. He had no interest in meeting officials from the various executive branches...

...and among the lowest on his list of priorities was the Meteorological Department, secomd only to the Ruet e Hilal Committee.

But Muzaffar Tunio’s boss had been persistent and pestered the Commissioner Karachi, the Mayor and even the Chief Secretary hard enough for them to pull strings to arrange a small meeting on this day.

Some cities have disaster management plans. Entire civil defence teams trained and equipped to handle earthquakes and fires and floods. Others have public awareness programs that educate citizens on the best ways to save themselves in such calamities.

Others still have preventive infrastructure and facilities in place well before any calamity strikes.

Karachi has a shrine to an eighth century mystic and InshaAllah in a variety of accents.

And this was not lost on Muzaffar Tunio’s boss. The man was as bureaucratic as they come and all he wanted to do was put his assessment on record in front of people who could survive the fallout of not being able to do anything about it and beat the hell out of town.

In this desire, he wasn’t so different from Ali Madad Shah who wanted nothing to do with the affair. But Muzaffar Tunio’s boss had suggested that the storm, something he referred to as Category 5, could make landfall in less than a week.

Tunio’s boss said that a storm of that strength could flatten the city and result in anything between 10-15 million casualties – a number too high for Shah’s faculties to register.

Bereft of other options, Shah and his emergency committee decided to release a notification about expected heavy rainfall, direct schools and colleges to close for a week and then retire post haste to his family lands in Mirpur Khas.

The shrine and the InshaAllahs would have to do.

Or just maybe the man in Mehmoodabad who could smell the tides could lend a hand.

Majid Ajmeri heard the news of the expected “thunderstorms” on the khabarnama at 9:00 pm while Ali Madad Shah was still on the way to his estate. He could smell a squall of rain coming and the air hung heavy as if pregnant with calamity.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to focus and lock out external stimuli. The noises around dulled, lights dimmed and he felt his astral self rise up and soar above the city.

He saw the first salvo of clouds speeding in on the horizon, pushed by an army of smoke and embers. He saw the ifrit raise up dust devils that darted and danced across the roads as people rushed home and boarded windows to protect themselves from the “aandhi”.

He could see the city’s stray dogs rush in packs toward the graveyards and the rats heading for higher ground.

And in the distance, over the seas, he saw the driftwood and pearl throne riding waves as resurfaced shipwrecks full of acolytes of the queen rallied behind her.

“Bidhukh is coming” muttered Majid as he came back into his physical body. Bidhukh is coming he mumbled as he got around to brewing the nightly tea while the electricity went off. Bidhukh is coming he whispered as he placed the teacups and thermos on the table in the dark.

And, for the first time, the darkness whispered back.

“What are you going to do about it?”

***to be continued***

Turab was old. Not only in human terms – he was positively ancient in those – but even among his own, he was very much an Elder. 300 years earlier he would dine with Mudhib, the King of the Sun, wearing gold jewelry and silk robes;...

...and practiced his swordplay with Ahmar, the King of Mars. He had ruled the Marids for 473 years and the angels themselves would only whisper the fates for fear he’d hear and twist them to his will.

No magic could dim his flame, no chains could bind him and no being on the heavens or the earths took him for an enemy. And then three hundred years earlier in a moment of weakness he gave his heart to the Princess of the Night, Qarinah, the maker of dreams.

Courtship among the Others is not too different from human folk. You mix with your kind and anything overly out of the box usually requires sanctioning from a higher societal power. Turab turned to the family of Iblis. A pact was made.

If Qarinah accepted him, Iblis’s trueborn heir would ratify the union. But if she didn’t, Turab would live in servitude until the driftwood throne floated on the seas. A heavy price. But who in love hasn’t risked it all?

Turab flew over the lands of men in bliss. A great feast was planned on Koh e Kaaf for the Others to celebrate but, if he had listened to the angel whispers, Turab might have heard his own fate.

Qarinah, the temptress, had power over only the fickle hearts of men and when the acolytes of Bidhukh told her to spurn the love of Turab she didn’t put up a fight.

On September 23, 1699 there was a total eclipse of the sun. Or that is what history tells us. Mudhib had turned his back. The planet of men was drenched in a dark redness as Ahmar betrayed his friend and sided with the queen of the seas.

Great chains of stone quarried from the Hindukush were brought up by the Deos of the mountains, 20 ft tall ogres who feasted on the flesh of mankind to bind the Marid as Bidhukh came to collect her due.

It is said things went a little crazy that day. Temperate people succumbed to blood lust, lovers quarreled and holy men drowned themselves in wine. Dogs bit their masters, horses threw their mounts and flames from funeral pyres raged and set forests alight.

Bidhukh walked on land that day as she came for her prized trophy and plague and pestilence followed in her wake.

Turab the Mighty had no power over the contract with the Ibliszaadi.

His wings clipped, his neck chained, he stood silent as his face was painted white with the mark of Bidhukh. And the throngs at Koh e Kaaf watched in silence as the sea queens acolytes clipped the horn of free will from his forehead.

A few years later Bidhukh sold him in servitude to the second pir of the Ajmeri Silsila. He was to be paid in the scent of fresh brewed tea every night and the penalty of nonpayment was the wrath of Bidhukh herself. Turab served.

Sometimes he served alone, others he had assistance from the Muwakkil the Ajmeris held. But as their influence faded, so did Turab’s workload and he spent the years mainly in dark rooms sniffing tea and watching his horn grow again.

And today when the sea salt in the gale before the storms was setting his scars on fire; for the first time in 300 years Turab opened his mouth to speak. As he watched the most powerful Pir of the Ajmeris he’d ever served put out his nightly tea....

he leaned forward and answered a question with a question.

“What are you going to do about it?”

***to be continued***

Farooq Alvi had two parrots, Raju and Mithu. He used to spread out a sheet on the beach at Seaview and have them pull out folded notes with ambiguous fortunes written on them from ajar at ten rupees a pop for any picnickers in the mood to know their horoscopes.

It was a stunt that he’d been pulling for eleven years and while he didn’t make much, it kept his children fed. Few customers ever believed the fortunes the parrots pulled out and it was all done in fun and jest.

Nobody knew that the jar the notes came out of filled itself up every night while on the mantle at his little hut in Shireen Jinnah Colony. Nobody knew Raju and Mithu hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in the eleven years he’d had them.

And Farooq didn’t particularly care.

Until that September when the winds had grown colder and the sea had begun to stink of dead fish and crabs with cracked shells kept leaving the beach to cross the road and scurry inland.

And the fortunes that Raju and Mithu pulled out foretold of death and devastation for everyone who would spare 10 rupees.

Farooq was scared and on that night he thought that maybe the contract he made eleven years ago with the veiled woman at the graveyard wasn’t worth it.

Nazima Begum, Naajo, was a childless widow who lived in Moosa Colony. By day she worked as a maid, cooking chapatis and washing clothes and sweeping floors at three different houses in North Nazimabad Block F.

In the evenings women from all over Moosa Colony would visit her jhuggi and ask for her aid in having male children and increased incomes and marriage proposals for their daughters.

She never promised anything but tied a black string on the wrist of each person who asked for help and sent them on their way. She would spend hours on her prayer mat each night and that would be the end of it.

Sometimes Naajo’s visitors would come back with tears of gratitude on their faces and whatever small gifts they could afford and Naajo would be happy and smile with them.

And under the ground beneath her bed in the jhuggi in Moosa Colony the unrotted corpse of her husband would not feel the wrath of her cruel magic on those happy nights.

There had been no such happy nights since September when the wind grew colder and the rains did their tap dance on her asbestos roof and the lizards had started to die of some mysterious plague.

More and more women came each evening and more and more black string was tied on wrists but no one came back with a happy tiding to share.

And Naajo felt her feet begin to turn back to the reverse direction they had been in before she dug the grave beneath her bed.

For all intents and purposes Sultanabad was like any other katchi abadi in the city. People lived and worked and died there everyday. Babies were born, food was eaten, mothers-in-law quarreled with their sons’ wives and life went on as it does everywhere else.

But one quarter was unique. 3 lanes across and 3 lanes wide from the house Haseeb Khan lived in you could be in your 20s but you could not be lovelorn.

Nobody ever fought about anything, and even if the vagaries of fate led you to sleep hungry, you did so with a smile. Neighbors helped each other, husbands respected their wives, children laughed as they played in the streets...

...and on his wheelchair Haseeb would sit, paralysed from the neck down but with a glimmer in his eye as his energy kept the evil that whispers in the hearts of men at bay.

Until one unusually cold and windy day in September when the crickets went silent and the carrion birds came and for the first time in years Haseeb heard the unmistakable sound of a child crying from the house next door as its parents swore and yelled at each other.

Haseeb felt a tingling in his legs and looked down to see he could wiggle his toes and a chill came over him as he realized the invisible chains the Nasnas had bound him with years ago had fallen loose onto the ground.

All over the city spells were breaking, curses were lifted, hexes were broken things good and bad that been held back by the unseen breached the gates of resistance and swept through the streets.

Wajeeha, barren for years, felt a kick in her womb and hugged her husband in delight. 23 healthy women at the Mumtaz Memorial Maternity Home suddenly miscarried.

Javed, who had avoided eating dinner for days so his children could have two meals got a phone call informing him that he had won the Fatimid Foundation Grand Raffle. On the eve of his wedding, Naveed was laid off from work.

Munazzah got a call from the principal’s office informing her that her class topping son was being expelled for taking drugs...

...and Rukhsar who had given up hope for her daughter getting into engineering college learnt she’d been awarded a full scholarship.

And they grieved and rejoiced as their fates twisted up in the vortex of the coming storm.

In the classroom in the house at Mehmoodabad, Turab’s deep voice pierced Majid’s consciousness in the dark.

“What are you going to do about it?”

***to be continued***

There is not much academic research available in the world of men on the anatomical processes of the otherfolk. So we cannot say for sure if the brains of jinn release dopamine or serotonin when they’re satisfied.

Or even if they have a neurotransmission network behind the flaming orbs of fire that serve as their eyes. 300 years of waiting for the right answer can dull the experience when it finally arrives or overwhelm the senses because of the anticipation.

Or possibly neither of the two. We will never know. But human empathy transcends species and life forms. And though he couldn’t see it, Majid could sense exactly what Turab felt when he answered him.

“Whatever it takes.”

In his little room next door to the classroom Rajab Affendi watched the glass stones of his rings glimmer in the dark. He smiled and prepared for the war that was to come.

Muzaffar Tunio’s wife was happy to see her husband become the first meteorologist to be interviewed on the 9:00 pm news and couldn’t for the life of her fathom why he looked so nervous. Rain was just.. rain. Sometimes hard, sometimes regular, sometimes seasonal, sometimes not.

But Muzaffar Tunio, who had been appointed to Ali Madad Shah’s emergency task force in the absence of his boss, was worried sick. Karachi had never been lashed by anything stronger than a Category 1 storm and while this was a fact that its citizens normally quoted...

...with a nod of deference to the city’s patron saint, the 8th century mystic Abdullah Shah Ghazi; Muzaffar Tunio knew geography and climatic conditions meant the sleeping saint had probably never had to deal with anything remotely resembling the magnitude of what was coming.

And Muzaffar Tunio had seen Karachi flood after less than a teacup worth of precipitation.

Yet after a day of hearing reports of capsized fishing boats and crashing billboards and fallen electric cables and phenomenally high tides sending waves crashing into the huts at the beaches; Muzaffar Tunio climbed the 99 stairs at ASG’s shrine and said a prayer for his city.

Much of the city was blacked out. In the monsoon season this would have meant much of the city was dancing in the waterlogged streets and their rooftops.

Womenfolk would make samosas and pakoras and the temporary respite from the sweltering summers would be enjoyed as nature intended it to be. But this was no monsoon.

The wind before the rain carried no pleasant fragrance of wet sand and the crashing of thunder sounded like the Almighty’s fury, not his mercy.

The lightning flashes illuminated the city just enough to show that those who had roofs cowered under them and those who didn’t huddled under bridges and shopfronts and trees.

Meanwhile in Mehmoodabad, in a small classroom on the ground floor of a 120 sq yard house an unlikely alliance was forming.

Farooq Alvi, normally a sound sleeper, had been woken up by the shrill squawking of Raju and Mithu who seemed to have broken out of their cage and were perched on the mantlepiece.

They pulled out note after note from the jar and seemed to hurl them in Farooq’s direction. All but one said the same thing – Bidhukh. The last one was an address. Farooq rushed out and got on his Yamaha GTO 100 and sped in the direction of Mehmoodabad.

Naajo was on her knees in the jhuggi in Moosa Colony. The pain in her ankles wouldn’t allow her to move as her feet continued to shift into the direction they had been in when she was born – and no matter how much of the pain she transferred to the corpse in the grave...

...under her bed there seemed to be more of it. Her shrieks and screams were drowned by the gunfire like pattering of heavy raindrops on her asbestos roof and she felt that perhaps this was the night that she would join her husband in the grave.

Then a lightning bolt struck the roof above and she was flung on to her back unconscious. She woke up a few hours later, donned a black burqa and set off at speed towards Mehmoodabad on what any witnesses would have sworn were reversed feet.

In the erstwhile happy corner of Sultanabad the heavy rain had flooded the streets. All around people scurried to barricade their doors and move possessions to higher, dryer places in their homes. All except the house in the centre of the quarter, 3 lanes wide and 3 lanes across.

In that house the water lapped around an empty wheelchair and the silent house echoed with the screams and cries of neighbours as woe and fear and horror entered where it never had before.

In the distance, Haseeb Khan, who had been a quadriplegic until that morning, ran in the direction of Mehmoodabad.

They kept coming and Rajab kept letting them in. The Marid and the Qareen and the Churails and the Pari. And those of the Unseen that have no names. Beings of smoke and fire and light and dew. And the practitioners of sihr that Turab had sought out.

Majid Ajmeri brewed tea.

27 nautical miles from the coast of Karachi, from the periscope of Pakistan Navy submarine PNS Mujahid, Commodore Zohair Rana sighted an unidentified convoy of what seemed to be drifting wrecks headed at speed towards the Karachi coastline.

He would have missed the smaller lead vessel altogether if it hadn’t so conspicuously been the one in command. He described it to his captain as a raft of wood and indiscernible white substance with an elevated platform and a chair on top of it.

A “lady officer” in navy whites seemed to be in command.

***to be continued***

Capt. Zahid Kazmi was a retired Merchant Navy officer who lived in the Galaxy Tower building in Sea View. A stubborn stay-behinder, he lived alone in his apartment writing letters to the editor on environmental issues while his wife and sons lived in Ohio, far away in peace.

A man with a natural talent to find something to outrage about on the most serene and peaceful of days, he had been in overdrive since the stench of dead fish had started to blow in from the sea over the past two weeks.

His trusty Olympia SM-1 typewriter had churned out multiple drafts of at least 13 rants which he’d mailed to not only the editor at Dawn but also to the Cantonment Board, the Commissioner’s Office, the Coast Guard, the Pakistan Navy, the Fisheries Department,...

...the Ministry of Ports and Shipping, the Karachi Port Trust, the Defence Housing Authority and, for no explicable reason, the Karachi Boat Club.

Now, protected against the elements in a bright yellow rain poncho, he stood in his balcony trying to see through the torrential rainfall what was going on. Storms did not faze Zahid Kazmi.

He had braved the Drake Passage around Cape Horn twenty one times in his sailing career and any sailor would agree that that was probably twenty one times too many.

And yet, 300 metres inland from where the highest tide could ever be, in a strong building on solid ground, Kazmi gripped the railing a little tighter than he was used to. This was not a storm like he’d ever seen before.

Anil Maheshwary had masqueraded as Ahmed Chishty successfully for the entirety of the three years he’d been selling chaadars at Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s shrine to pilgrims seeking blessings from the most ancient Muslim site in the country.

Not that the shrine wasn’t welcoming to non-Muslim visitors but the world of commerce has its own rules and prejudice is a business risk.

He’d considered leaving shortly after selling his last chaadar of the day to Muzaffar Tunio but he had a long commute and getting stranded at the shrine sounded like a better option than getting stranded on the roads.

As the storm raged he hunkered down under the tarp that covered his boxes at the foot of the 99 steps; with a plate of biryani from the langar ...

...and tried to ignore the chanting of scripture he heard rising from under the ground between the crashes of thunder. The battles of the God’s friends and enemies were not his business and he’d got his own problems to worry about.

West Wharf was flooded. The warehouses and factories were abandoned as employees and owners alike had evacuated hours earlier or at least hunkered down in upper stories of the buildings wherever they had that luxury.

The heroinchis who gathered to get a fix around Essa Nagri had tried to seek shelter in the buildings around Hassan Square but when has a heroinchi ever been welcome anywhere?

38 corpses floated along with used syringes and polythene bags and corn cobs and the debris of a population that lives without a waste management system as the water rose to cover the safai nisf imaan hai messaging on the walls.

In North Nazimabad near the KDA Chowrangi teenagers tried to pull out children from a bus stuck in the centre of an ever stronger flow of water as security teams in the area had been redirected to evacuate VIPs.

Roofs fell, cars sank, loose electric cables got some and open manholes and uncovered storm drains got others. A constant wail of Edhi Ambulance sirens punctuated the gaps between crashes of thunder across the city...

...as the metropolis sank inch by inch into the sea and water full of flyers promising to bring your beloved to your feet lapped against the gate of the house in Mehmoodabad.

But hope was not lost. The word was spreading. The King of the Marid was back and he had the strongest ally the world of men had provided since Sulaiman himself.

Along the submerged Karsaz street, stranded motorcyclists were guided to higher ground by brides dressed in red as the Si’lat rallied to the call of the Marid.

Residents of FC Area swore later that waves from Gujjar Naala were held back by some invisible force as the Qareen cleared obstructions in stormwater drains and the naala and the Lyari River itself.

In Mewa Shah the flesh eaters who feasted on the graves were whipped first into submission and then into service and trapped residents reported doglike creatures manned rafts that evacuated them to safety.

In Saddar Farooq Alvi raced through the streets throwing folded chits of paper into houses and shops and each house the chits landed in saw the flood water retreat like an attacking wolf when confronted by fire.

In Kharadar Naajo walked on her reversed feet chanting scripture and every street she walked seemed to experience a break in the clouds and the thunder faded and basked in the full moon as a cat does in the sun.

In the National Institute of Child Health, locally known as Bacha Ward, the panic died down and the young patients started to laugh and relax and the staff got back to treating the trauma victims and chronic patients as Haseeb Khan walked into its premises.

Beyond the city, in the drylands on the east of the superhighway, Turab and Majid’s lieutenants gathered the Ifrit hordes. A hot wind whipped up and the dust devils began their dance.

A wall of dust rose and headed towards the storm, stripping paint from walls and posters from paint and graffiti from posters as billboards advertising Dentonic powder and Mospel mosquito repellent crashed to the ground...

...wrecking ’86 corollas and Suzuki Margallas and Toyota Sprinters indiscriminately along with carts selling kulfis and gola gandas and har maal dus rupay.

From the balcony of Galaxy Tower on Sea View, Captain Zahid Kazmi in his yellow rain poncho saw a man and a… a horned being walk towards the beach as the calm of the eye of the storm seemed to settle above.

Even in the dark, illuminated only by the moonlight, he could see a navy amass on the waters beyond the beach and though his hearing aid was on the bedside table inside,...

...he could swear he heard the strange sailors chatter in ancient tongues across the water. And then he heard them fall silent as the horned being with the man on the beach raised a hand and said a single word that in any language could only mean “stop”.

***to be continued***

Zahid Kazmi’s doctor, Mukarram Zuberi, was technically just a GP. He hadn’t pursued his true passion of psychiatry as it simply wasn’t socially acceptable to be a doctor of the mentally ill back in those days. Still, as his patients aged and faced the trials and tribulations...

...of life, he often found himself treating them for various stress and anxiety related disorders and apart from paracetamol and amoxycilin, diazepam (valium) was his most popular prescription.

Dr. Zuberi had never prescribed drugs for Zahid Kazmi though. He didn’t see Zahid’s fear of irrelevance, or althazagoraphobia as he called it, as anything beyond the anxiety that every person faces as they approach their inevitable sell-by date.

There’s no cure for death and hence really no point in treating the fear of it.

But as he pored over the letters to the editor section of the Dawn newspaper from his drawing room in his bungalow in PECHS that day, Dr. Zuberi wondered if his favourite patient needed to be treated for some sort of psychotic delusions.

Or at least for going too heavy on the bottle of Murree’s Finest Rum.

Fire and smoke and dust beings battling winged devils flying in from the sea and a scream the shattered windows was either a metaphor inconsistent with Kazmi’s usual rants or there was something else going on.

Dr. Mukarram Zuberi sipped his tea and tried to put out of his mind. But his mind kept returning to the fact that there was a fully grown neem tree in his lawn this morning where there had never been one before.

Azhar Masih and Younus Gill were on post storm water cleanup duty in Bath Island. Not that two man armed with squeegees can do much about a waterlogged street, but sometimes the mere sight of them can mollify VIP residents to a degree...

...that their even more VIP relatives reduce the frequency of their phone calls to various functionaries of the Clifton Cantonment Board. Azhar and Younus knew how to look busy.

They scurried up and down the street, directing whatever water they could to the manholes they’d uncovered, making sure they’d be seen periodically from windows everywhere.

Except the windows from No. 62. There was something lying in the kiyaaree there that they wanted no part of.

Azhar was no stranger to the dead. He moonlighted as a gravedigger at Gora Qabristan. And Younus had worked on a fishing boat in his youth. But this was the first time they’d seen anything that could have made both of their other careers simultaneously relevant to the job at hand

So they kept their distance and stayed busy and moved what water they could towards the manholes as crows pecked on the body of the dead mermaid in the kiyaaree in front of No. 62.

In Ibrahim Hyderi Fish Harbour, Harbourmaster Asfandyar Sharif had a problem. Not only had his jetty and the boats tied to it sustained considerable damage in the storm the day before, there was a beached sperm whale lying across it. And he had no idea how to get it off.

And he wanted it off before too many of the villagers saw it. A massive sperm whale, per se, is not something that would faze too many fishermen. But one with sixty saddles strapped on to its back might. And when they realized that the saddles were too big for men…

Asfandyar ordered his men to seal off the access to the jetty and arrange some dynamite. They would blow up the pier and the saddled sperm whale before the villagers came to check on their boats.

At the K-1 reactor at the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant near Paradise Point, Senior Engineer Faizan Mehdi wondered how he’d explain to his superiors that the carcasses of 2,347 seagulls that littered the facility had nothing to do with any radioactive leakage from the plant.

He ordered an immediate cleanup and hoped the water on the roads would delay the Chief Scientist’s arrival.

Zafar Latif was a KESC lineman working on repairing a shorted transformer in 13-D Gulshan e Iqbal. And KESC and the shoddy electrical cabling in the city being what it was, this wasn’t the first time he’d seen a body fried beyond recognition.

It was the first he’d seen that had wings though.

But there were fridges and fans and bulbs and tubelights that had to be turned on so he tried to put it out of his mind and soldiered on to restore the power.

He told the Edhi guys who came to collect the body for the morgue that it was probably a case of a bird and a man being fused together by the current. And that was what he tried to tell himself too for the remainder of his life.

The daily Ummat carried reports of miracles caused solely by the prayers of religious men that had saved the city from even greater damage than it had faced. The daily Jasarat published op-eds blaming pop music and in particular Nazia Hasan for enticing the wrath of the Almighty.

Nawa-i-Waqt reported “eye-witness” accounts of the main body of clouds being turned away at the coast by secret technology deployed by the Pakistan Navy. The Jang published statements from Ali Madad Shah’s task force celebrating civ-mil cooperation in managing the situation.

Only the tabloid Evening Special carried a detailed report mentioning how a force from the sea had battled with an army from the land on the coasts and how the last bolt of lightning in the storm had seemed to rise from the land itself...

...followed not by thunder but the scream of a woman in white on a driftwood and pearl throne on the waves that shattered windows across the city. Of flying men who rose from vessels behind her and mermaids tossed by the waves to land.

And of smoky, unclear apparitions that blew the clouds back out to sea, casting bolts of fire on to their enemies. And of the horned king who led them in their decisive charge against the waters and whose lightning pierced the sea queen’s chest….

But nobody read the tabloid for news reports on storms and civic infrastructure. Their readers turned to page three for the latest scandals about actresses across the border and the rest of the issue made its way as usual to vendors of paans and pakoras and bun kababs across town

Anil Maheshwary AKA Ahmed Chishty sold a lot of chaadars at the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi next day as the pilgrims came, their faith renewed by the powerful elixir of survival.

Naajo opened the door to see three women outside her jhuggi. One wanted a son, another a daughter in law and the third just wanted the good fortune that had kept her house standing in the storm to continue.

Naajo brought out her black string, tied it on their wrists and sent them on their respective ways. Her smile that day was at being able to see her toes again.

Farooq Alvi spread his sheet on a relatively dry spot of footpath as beachgoers came to enjoy the post rain freshness. Raju and Mithu were kept busy.

In a small part of Sultanabad, three lanes wide and three lanes across, peace reigned. Neighbours smiled at each other, children laughed as they played and husbands complimented their wives’ cooking.

In his wheelchair, Haseeb Khan smiled as he heard the sounds of calm and happiness around him.

The next Sunday, Majid Ajmeri woke up tired and still exhausted from the trials of the days gone by. His clothes were still damp and he had a runny nose and the days lost in the buildup to the battle had made him ravenous now that it was over.

He knew it was over because the birds were chirping outside his window, sunlight was filtering in from the gap between the curtains and he could smell Rajab Affendi whipping up a breakfast of half fried eggs and parathas in the kitchen below.

On his bedside table stood the last bottle of cellulose diacetate that he’d infused with the magical Hajr-as-Samur Turab brought him from the moon. He had poured it into floodwater all over the city and the hydrophobic substance had caused the water to evaporate...

...and the Lyari river and its associated tributaries to recede and trees to sprout up in gardens across town and creepers of raat ki rani and din ka raja to spread across boundary walls and flowers to bloom and bees to buzz and the city of Karachi slowly returned to normal;...

...the nightmare fading from its collective memory as garbage once again piled up on street corners and new heroinchis took over Essa Nagri and the smoke that people smelled was spewed from diesel engines and burning trash and industrial chimneys...

...as overloaded buses plied the streets and the clamour of life and drudgery echoed through the city again.

Brides in red haunted Karsaz once more, the cemeteries in Mewa Shah became scary again at night and often children would cry in fear when they perceived some movement in dark corners.

Majid looked out of his window and smiled. He could sense there would be new visitors that Rajab Affendi would let in today. He headed down for breakfast.

151 million kilometres away, Turab sat with Mudhib, the King of the Sun, and sipped tea as they looked down on the world of men. Turab tilted his head as he listened for angels to whisper the fates. There were adventures to be had and stories to be told.

Much closer, the undercurrents near Hawkes Bay dragged an iron chest closer to the shore. Inside, bound in chains of lead and stone, Sakhr murmured in his sleep.