Book Excerpt: Farah Bashir’s Rumours Of Spring

It was past midnight. I wanted to pray for Bobeh, but couldn’t. Despite Mother’s repeated instructions to do so, I resisted. My eyes were heavy from loss, from fatigue. I looked at the rectangular tin box in which Bobeh kept her medicines. It lay next to her body. I knew it also had my medication that could help me fall asleep and also calm me down. I had those small pills sometimes, as a doctor had advised me. I took them with great caution. I was scared that I’d end up like Abida’s mother. Her being depended on them.

When I was much younger, around seven or eight years old, I would be petrified by a story told by my friend and a distant cousin, Abida. She and I were the same age. We went to the same school, took the same school bus. She didn’t live very far from our house. Sometimes, I’d stay over at her place. When we’d get ready to go to bed, she’d tell me the same story.

‘There are two cats that come to life at night. They control my movements, my sleep, my words. They have full control over me,’ she’d say in a grave, heavy tone. To make it more frightening, she’d add, ‘They sleep under the bed, only I can see them. They are not visible to anyone else, not even my parents, not even Mumma. Go, check for yourself if you don’t believe me. You won’t see anything. They trouble the person who is rude to me, including my Mumma.’ I was too scared, and never dared to look under the bed and call her bluff.

Abida was a wiry and petite girl. Her distinguishing feature was her light-coloured eyes. When she’d tell me the scary-cat story, her glassy pair of eyes appeared bigger and brighter. I think I gave the cat story more importance and credence because of her mother, Jaaji. Jaaji was known to have tasruf and be under the spell of a spirit that manifested itself through her from time to time. A couple of times, she had threatened violence against her family but had never harmed anyone. She had run after her husband with a box of matches to set him on fire though.

Her two children, Abida and her younger, sister, Sabia, were kept away from Jaaji during such times, but the rest of the relatives who had seen her during or soon after an episode, said that she would change beyond recognition. Her voice became coarse, her light eyes turned vacuous and her movements jerky. During the ‘spells’, Jaaji would apparently become physically stronger. Her scaredy-mouse of a husband didn’t dare to go near her. Her petite frame had to be overpowered either with help from the males in the house or by a priest-cum-exorcist.

‘Neyrkha kinih kadath? Will you leave, or shall I drive you out?’ the priest was heard threatening the ghost in the dimly lit room where he performed exorcism rituals. Their conversations were somewhat audible to the family members outside the room. They could hear Jaaji’s voice transform into a rough, adult male voice. During her outbursts, the spirit that possessed Jaaji demanded various things. One time, it had asked that three whole chickens be fed to it within fifteen minutes. It had threatened to poison the family meals if the demand wasn’t met. There was one other demand that was so peculiar that it became the stuff of legends. The spirit had frightened the entire family by telling them that it would reside in Jaaji’s body forever and had additionally sworn to raze the entire house down.

‘Baanavkha astaan nebrikani kinih na?’ it had asked. ‘Will you make a shrine for me or not?’ That was the big ask. A small shrine had to be constructed near the main market of Boher Kadal. The spirit, through Jaaji, had drafted the precise blueprint of the shrine in seven minutes flat and specified the exact location.

Under dire circumstances, a shrine was constructed overnight. It is said that right after the work on the shrine was completed, on that very day, the poltergeist had fled Jaaji’s body. It didn’t return for a long, long while.

Unfortunately, the incident had also made a hero out of the priest on whom Abida’s family had increasingly become dependent not only to cure Jaaji, but also to extract the messages from spirits in general. Since the djinn had obeyed the man, he was considered irreplaceable.

After 1989, as curfews and instances of round-the-clock cross-firing increased in frequency, it became difficult for their family to fetch the priest from his village. It’d take half a day to call on him and another half to bring him to the city. Every time Abida’s mother had an episode, before the news could reach the relatives who could come to her rescue and by the time the priest arrived and began his exorcism rituals, the loud banging of the doors and her screams would rouse the neighbours.

(Excerpted from Farah Bashir’s Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir with permission from HarperCollins India)