Possession at the Tomb of Sayyed Pir Hazrat Baba Bahadur Saheed Rah Aleh
The Spirits, Anger and Sorrow
My name is Gussa, and last Thursday I came to live inside this woman. As she rolled out her prayer rug I was shaken loose from the crook in the Tree of Life where I had lazed for forty-three years. Out of the carpet weft, past the easterly mihrab and shabby fringe, I sailed into the woman’s intestines. For a week I waited, wandering by her bladder, squeezing around her sockets. I missed the dry rug, the opinions of the wool, sometimes irritating and judgmental like the sheep it had grown from, but still, a familiar voice. It is never easy to leave a place of comfort. The dangerous pumping of this woman’s heart and the emissions of her liver frightened me. I hid at the base of her skull, an area of some peace. Then the woman and her daughters were invited to a wedding where she ate seven and a half ladoos. In her veins, I saw the linear structure of glucose sweep by. It excited me. Lengthening, I soused the woman’s lungs. She ran to the tomb. It was Thursday. Up her throat I spiraled, branching off and down and plunging into her arms. She pounded on the floor, she hollered and grunted, and I, I minced along her tongue. Reaching her teeth, I pushed through the stained gaps. And all of this I did, all of it, so she could roar, “Why did you not ask me how I felt?”
My name is Dukkha, and twenty Thursdays ago, I came to live inside this child. From the smoke of her mother’s funeral pyre I detached myself and flew up her nose. Warm and moist, I stayed hidden in the short cilia, gripping tightly when she sneezed. For weeks I swung there, small but persistent. When she slept, I elongated and spread myself into the bumpy folds of her cerebellum, the canals of her tiny ears. I was sneaky and silent. And one afternoon, the child stepped down from the stool that she used to reach the stovetop. She left the lentils to burn in the pot. She left her brother’s math equations blank, and her father’s shirt, twice her length from skull to toe, she put aside with an unmended tear. The tires of her uncle’s bicycle she left flat, and she ignored her grandfather’s gritty feet. As she walked to the temple to garland Ganesha, to pat his trunk and say hello, I sloshed back and forth in her ears. It was the scent of marigolds that finally released me. As the girl extended her hand to the Lord’s nose, I shot into her legs, down past her pointed knees and wormed into her toes, as small as peas. She ran to the tomb. It was Thursday. On the ground she curled up, puny and tight; she rocked back and forth. I slid into the corners of her eyes, careful to avoid the gravel there, and then she cried, she moaned and grieved, and sometimes she shouted in her squeaky voice, “I miss my mother, I miss her. Let me have a life of my own.”
The Tomb
Climb up a long flight of white marble stairs and you will come to a white marble doorway. Through this doorway you enter a room with a white marble ceiling and four white marble walls. In the center of the room stands a white marble rectangle: nine feet high, three feet wide, and six feet long. Inside the tomb lies Sayyed Pir Hazrat Baba Bahadur Saheed Rah Aleh, a heap of rotting white bones and white cloth. Behind the tomb is another marble doorway. Go through it and you will find yourself in an open-air courtyard with brown brick walls. If you go on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, you will see only young Farouk, sweeping the dirt floor, resting for a smoke, scouring the walls with a wire brush, looking up into the sky, sprinkling bleach and rose water, scratching the back of his leg with a bare foot.
But if you go on a Thursday, Farouk won’t be there, and you will be forced to remain in the doorway. There will be no space for you to sit, to walk about. You will stand there and see fifty-odd women (rarely does the pure spirit bewitch a man) all possessed, but only on Thursdays. They are crammed close against each other, howling, thrashing, sweating, and ranting. And you will see the men who accompany the women. These men squeeze their eyes shut against spit, they dodge kicks and swipes, teeth and knuckles, curses and threats. It takes Farouk six whole days of hard work, some praying, and a bit of loafing, to make the courtyard clean again.
This Thursday, there is one man with two sets of raised pink scratches running in parallel lines down his cheeks. His name is Gopal, and he is here with his possessed wife, Apsara, and their son, their only child, Nanak.
Apsara, Gopal, and Nanak
“THE SPIRIT WANTS TO DRINK A SALTY LASSI.”
Apsara bellows to Gopal, who sits on her stomach. He inclines his head toward their child, but does not loosen his grip around Apsara’s wrists.
“Quick quick, fetch one fetch one,” she croons to Nanak. Her eyes, her own eyes, blink at him before scrolling up, white again. The boy hesitates. Unless his mother looks at him once more, he will refuse to go. Focusing on Apsara’s forehead, webbed with black hair, Nanak thinks, See me, see me. Slowly, her eyes roll down, the pupils shrink, then dilate. She sees him. From the ground near his father’s foot, the boy snatches coins and runs away.
It is noon, and already the spirit has demanded 7500 rupees worth of goods, mostly kitchenware—a food processor with interchangeable blades, a no-stick frying pan, a glass teapot that the spirit specified whistle, but not too shrilly, and a diamond-chip nose ring. These items were purchased and presented to Apsara. Promises, such as “I’ll buy the teapot tomorrow after work,” angered the spirit, causing Apsara to hiss and jerk. Excuses, such as “Please, Spirit, we do not have a lot of money. Why don’t you go inhabit our neighbor, Jajit, who has a satellite television,” forced the spirit into Apsara’s long hands. Her fingers curved, then clawed, seeking skin. Sometimes a patter of compliments, praising the spirit’s strength and ability to frighten, formed a perceptible ripple that traveled up the length of Apsara’s body. After these episodes, the woman smiled and seemed to sleep for a few minutes.
When the nose ring was thrust in front of Apsara’s blank eyes, the spirit left the woman abruptly. Apsara coughed and spat blood. She sat up, ruffled Nanak’s hair, and touched her husband’s scratched cheeks. She pulled a dull gold stud from her nose, twirled in the new starry diamond, and looped her hair into a tidy knot. Then the spirit returned, slamming Apsara onto her back with such force that both of her feet flew up, one after the other, and whacked Gopal in the groin.
Auntie Is Useful
Three years in a row Nanak has seen his mother possessed by the same spirit. It always arrives at dawn on Independence Day—August 15th—when his father’s favorite liquor store is closed, and a sign, DRY DAY, hangs crooked on the door. If Independence Day does not fall on a Thursday, the spirit lurks inside Apsara until midnight of the following Wednesday, at which time it detonates, caterwauls, and they all race to the tomb. Gopal holds his wife as the spirit bucks and twists through her. He begs Nanak to buy him a bottle of whiskey, to bring it to him with a Coca-Cola. Then the spirit enters Apsara’s mouth. Her sweat-shined lips curl and she snarls, “Irresponsible Drunk, Wastrel, Poor Provider, One-Testicled Sot,” until Gopal whimpers, “No more whiskey, I swear it. Release me, release my wife. Forgive.” The spirit possessing Apsara is more aggressive and greedy than those controlling the women who convulse and wail around her on the floor. The other husbands nod respectfully to Gopal. He does not notice them.
Friday, the spirit disappears from Apsara, leaving behind a cloud of pale yellow smoke. The family runs from the tomb of Sayyed Pir Hazrat Baba Bahadur Saheed Rah Aleh and goes home to sleep. And on that day Nanak’s 250-pound auntie arrives, in a bicycle rickshaw, with her fifty-pound padlocked trunks. Nanak longs to see the insides of these trunks, longs to crouch in one, listening to his aunt’s voice fray with worry as she calls his name, searching for him. She tells the boy stories about the wicked suitors she has rescued her daughter from. “Nanak, sweetie, you would not believe,” she says, coyly drawing a fuchsia chunni across her face, “These men will grow mustaches and beards to hide their cruel lips, but a good Brahmin girl, like myself, always finds them out. You are lucky to have nice plump lips. Be proud; stick them out.” Puffing air between his teeth and closed lips, Nanak forms his breath into a ball, then juggles it back and forth in his cheeks. The swishing sounds loud inside his own head, but Auntie does not hear it. “Soon, you will be a young man, Nanak. In four, five years. I suggest you do not grow a mustache.” She swings the boy onto her broad lap.
Auntie smells of hing, sulfuric and rotten. During the week that she cares for Nanak, she wears the same salwar kameez, but changes her chunni and spacious underwear daily. She will not allow Nanak to see his parents. They hear his father crying and pacing upstairs; they hear his mother making fresh lime sodas in the kitchen. She carries the drinks on a copper tray, ice cubes clinking, seltzer fizzing quietly. Sometimes she calls out, “Having fun, you two?” and waits until they chorus, “Yes,” before mounting the stairs.
Together, the boy and his aunt sit on the tiled parlor floor rolling red marbles up alleys of grout. Auntie tells Nanak, “Maybe your father will end his sickness this time. Maybe, maybe. Some things are very difficult. You understand, don’t you, baby?”
Nanak, The Shoe-Finder
With the coins pressed inside his left fist, Nanak darts out of the tomb. At the head of the marble stairs he checks for the spirit’s food processor, frying pan, and teapot. He finds them, half-buried beneath a spreading hill of shoes: black rubber, red leather; brown cloth, pink plastic. Since he and his parents were among the first people at the possession, the boy pockets the coins and throws himself, face-down, onto the pile of shoes. He rams his arms deep into the jumble, his right and left hands searching away from each other. Empty heels and toes kick into his stomach. The mixed smell of foreign feet is confusing, so Nanak closes his eyes and rests his cheek on a slipper.
He envisions the green of his own shoes, he smells the crumbled-dirt scent of his feet and closes his hands tightly around two canvas toes. When the boy pulls his arms free of the pile, he sees that he has guessed correctly. In each hand, he holds one of his own green canvas shoes. He claps them, sole to sole, above his head and announces to the sky, “I am Nanak, The Shoe-Finder!”
At the center of the courtyard, a fountain gargles. He skips to it over green and blue tiles and slips into his shoes. Wind gusts through the fall of water, lightly spraying the boy. Laughing, he jumps up and down, his feet smacking into his rump, the ground, his rump, the ground. He listens to the water bubble, the shrieks of possessed women. He cannot distinguish his mother’s voice from the others. Holding one knee to his chest, he hops out of the courtyard chanting, lassi lassi lassi, as he goes.
How to Make a Salty Lassi
Fill a glass, almost to the top, with plain yogurt, preferably homemade. If you must use store-bought yogurt, keep it at the back of the refrigerator and age it about two months. Only the seasoned nose will be able to discern if the yogurt has soured beyond edibility. It should smell rather strong. Do not worry about the greenish liquid skimming the surface of the yogurt. This is normal, and to be expected. Now, fill the rest of the glass with ice cubes, or water, depending on how much effort you want to put into making the lassi, and if you have an electric blender or not. If you are tired and do not have an electric blender, you must use water to fill the remainder of the glass. Use ice cubes and blend if you have a blender; if you have only spoons, use water and stir vigorously for quite some time. Once the concoction has the consistency of cream, salt and pepper to taste. Sometimes mint is added. If you use water to make the lassi, ice cubes may be tossed into the drink after blending has occurred. Sip and enjoy.
On His Own
“The spirit wants to drink a salty lassi,” Nanak says to the dudh-wallah, giving the man some coins.
“And how does the spirit like its lassi?” Wrinkles cover the man’s face, winding under his chin, down his neck, and beneath his undershirt.
“The same way my mother does.” To see over the edge of the counter, Nanak balances on his toes. He smells the creamy milk, yogurt, butter, and wishes he had more coins. “With plenty of pepper and mint,” he adds, deepening his voice, puffing out his lips.
A conversation between two men, standing in line behind Nanak, distracts him from the placid smells. He tries to discern if the men have mustaches from the sound of their voices: “No, no, the definition of a slum is a densely-populated area. Which makes all of India a slum. If we are to have Western luxuries, we must learn to live like them, to think like them.” No mustache on this man, Nanak thinks. He watches the dudh-wallah spoon yogurt and ice into a cup.
“But all our villages will turn into Kotla with expensive shops run by women who wear saris for the tourists, then go home to put on blue jeans and count their money. Those Western Indians who come back after living over there, they have no sense of family; they’re greedy.” Nanak stamps footprints into the dusty ground, then rubs them out, deciding that this speaker has a mustache, crinkled and thick. A softness rings the man’s voice, as if something hangs in the way of his lips. Closing his eyes, Nanak sees a floating black mustache hung with words that dangle like earrings. Village, Tourists, Women, Money.
“Hey, boy, the spirit’s beverage.” The dudh-wallah hands Nanak a large cup of lassi and a small cup of milk. “No charge for yours.”
Because he smiles as he drinks, milk dribbles down Nanak’s chin. He stands on his toes to place the empty cup on the counter. Glancing back, he is surprised to see that both men have full beards.
The Man-Woman
As the boy steps away from the stall, he almost collides with a woman. She has short black hair, short like a man’s. Her lips are scarlet, and she wears black trousers and a grey silk blouse. Nanak stands close enough to her to see an indentation in the side of her nose where once a jewel must have been. She carries a briefcase and shoves at a cotton-candy wallah who presses against her as he walks by, “Arrey, asshole, who do you think you are?” Her voice is harsh, outraged. The man regains his balance and purses his lips into an exaggerated kiss, shaking his stick of bagged pink cotton at her. Again, the woman shoves him, her voice now hysterical, “I have a PhD for God’s sake, how dare you, how dare you?” The man ducks as the woman swings her briefcase at him. It swoops over Nanak’s head, and he drops his cup on the ground. White lassi, dotted with black and green flecks, runs over his canvas shoes, pooling near the toes.
When he sees the boy’s tears, the dudh-wallah gives him another lassi and cup of milk, both free. By the time Nanak leaves the stall for the second time, the woman with short hair is gone. He will ask his auntie about her. A woman with man-hair and man-wrath he has never seen before. She must be possessed by some spirit, he thinks, tightly clenching the new cup of lassi between his hands. He takes a sip of the drink, careful to wipe the incriminating white film from the cup’s edge, but he forgets to clean his mouth.
What Nanak Will Remember
On the way back to the tomb, the cup of lassi between his hands, Nanak looks into an open doorway. He sees an elderly man in a white turban. Above his head, the man holds a small boy by the armpits. They turn together in a circle. Inside the house, the light is blue and glowing. They are laughing, both old man and young boy. Nanak wants to feel the man’s hands under his own arms; he wants to swing and laugh. He stops walking, leans against the doorframe, and watches as the man lowers the little boy to the ground. Into the blue light of the house the boy lurches, and Nanak realizes that he limps not from dizziness but because he has a withered leg.
If Nanak had not stopped in the doorway, he would never have known that the boy was lame. He would only have remembered the sound of laughter, and the way the old man cupped the boy’s armpits. And if the man had not lifted the boy, had not spun him above the ground, the boy might never have known the ease and smoothness of flight. The image of the man and boy stays with Nanak till he himself is an old bearded man, long after he has forgotten the possession, the screaming women, the spilled lassi.
A Second Man-Woman
There is a white woman, an American, inside the tomb now. She sits with her back against the northern brick wall. Like the man-woman from the street, she has short black hair and wears trousers. An orange scarf covers her head and her feet are bare, like everyone else’s. Nanak gives the lassi to his father and steps over and across and around the howling women to get to the American.
“What type of spirit possesses you?” he asks her. She takes a tissue out of her pocket and wipes the coat of lassi from his lips. In Hindi, she replies, “Why do you want to know?” Immediately, he answers with another question, “Are short-haired women possessed by the P-H-D?”
He does not understand why the woman laughs for so long, but he is thrilled by the sound because it reminds him of birds in the morning. When she pats him on the head, he takes a step back, out of reach of her hand, and demands an answer to his question. He repeats, “What type of spirit possesses you?”
Smiling, the woman fidgets with her scarf, pulling tight the knot at the nape of her neck. With her head tilted down, Nanak sees gold threads running horizontally across the cloth. He wants to touch them, and he steps toward the woman, again within reach of her hand.
“What type of spirit possesses me?” the woman asks, tucking the sides of the scarf behind her ears.
She shrugs. “Curiosity, I guess.”
Nanak leaves the man-woman, the second he has ever seen, the first he has spoken to. He steps across the bodies till he reaches his mother. Her eyes are rolled back in her head, shivering, and her tongue drips pink blood. “Ma,” he says, and reaches for her hand.
The Spirits, Joy and Guilt
My name is Khushi, and I have always lived inside this girl. From her mouth I tumble in loud howls; I flit around her neck and thighs, so she will bounce and toss her head. Poor girl, she stifles me, covers her laughing mouth and slows her skipping. She hangs her head when her mother scolds, “Do your duty, be a good, clean girl and act as you should, not as you feel.” But I am perverse and persistent. Sometimes I guide the girl into dusty streets where she and the legless beggars play patty-cake. Other times, I make her run so fast that she trips and sprawls and muddies her kameez. And when she is spanked, her mother’s hand hard upon her, I tilt her eyes toward the sky. Am I really to blame when she laughs aloud to spite the spanking? The girl, she boils with happiness because she is alive, alive, and the day is not yet finished. This Thursday, she and I have come to the tomb. First, she lies down and laughs raucously till she chokes. Then she spins and drums among the people, unwinding turbans, whooping, clapping her hands, dancing wildly till she falls in a most unladylike way. With her hands on her hips, she says, “I will act as I feel, not as I should. I am happy! Why must I hide?”
My name is Pathak, and I am new to this old woman. She was walking by the tomb, just a few minutes ago, when the tip of her cane gouged me from the earth. As a vibration, I climbed the cane, then twirled into her withered hand. Up the white marble stairs she hobbled, past the tomb, into the brick courtyard. She stood in the doorway, looking upon the women, the men, the children, and she whispered, “I am sorry for the cruel things I have done.” When she spoke these words, I swept from her. I called to the spirit, Pyaar, love, who was watching a man with scratched cheeks, his wife, and their boy. I asked Pyaar to drift this way, over my old woman. And so he did.
Friday Comes
After a full day and night of possession, Apsara is tired. Gopal has promised more than seventeen times that he will stop drinking whiskey, and Nanak has been napping in between the errands run for the spirit’s great appetite. The white woman did not stay long at the tomb; she sleeps alone in a hotel bed under a rotating fan. Across the city, Farouk is just awakening and deciding to nest under the blankets for a few more minutes. And there, over Apsara’s head, hangs a pale yellow cloud of smoke, signifying the departure of the pure spirit.
Nanak, the shoe-finder, locates his green shoes and those of his parents. He carries a sack stuffed with the spirit’s new kitchenware. The family is delayed from leaving the tomb because others also want the boy to find their footwear. A large crowd gathers around Nanak, but when Apsara grunts impatiently, Gopal ushers her and the boy down the white marble steps, past the lassi stall, along three busy avenues jammed with traffic, and out to the city’s edge where their two-story house stands on a small plot of land.
As they close the front door behind them, Auntie rumbles up in a bicycle rickshaw. The rickshaw-wallah is skinny. He stands on his pedals, throwing the weight of his slight body behind the circular motion of his legs, forcing them to work down and around, down and around. His arms shake from exertion, his chest heaves, his breathing sounds like a hacking cough. Even the bicycle, wobbling wheels and taut chain, strains under the burden of Auntie’s body and her two big trunks.
After helping her down, the rickshaw-wallah hoists Auntie’s trunks, one at a time, onto his back and carries them to the front door. She gives him a meager tip, and he grumbles, “Thank you, lady; your generosity is as bounteous as your body.” Since she is already pounding on the door and calling for her young nephew to come and help her, she does not hear what he says.
That night, at dinner, the rickshaw-wallah tells his four children about Auntie and her tremendous trunks. When they laugh at the way he tells the story, he is pleased.