Non-Fiction
An Aladdin Tale
artwork by sharif ahmed
The yells were issuing out in unbroken waves. As were the screams. And, then, they subsided, almost simultaneously. And we looked at each other. The terrified yells had emanated from me; the high-pitched screams from the woman I was married to at that time. The year was 1977, and we had been united in wedlock for a couple of months or so. That the "united" unraveled into disintegration a few years later is another story, and will not be related here. But, then, life was a kaleidoscope of colours, everything was right with the world, and, what, we worry? Certainly there was no call for a simultaneous cacophony of yelling and screaming. But we did, and, thereby hangs this tale. The antecedent to it is to be found in our tenant of our adjacent building of 1938 vintage. It has since been demolished, to be replaced by an imposing modern structure. Then, a few years before the night of screaming and yelling, my father had rented the one-storied house to the imam of a local mosque. He was just another in a long line of tenants who had occupied the place, and, when the time came, left for other places. I really could not be bothered about the new tenant, except for two things. One, this was the first time, as far as I could remember, that an imam had become a tenant, and, second, there were these stories told by our neighbours and our hired hand-cum-darwan that the good imam captured jinns and bottled them up in large glass jars. Oh yeah? Very funny! Tell that old wives' tale to the legions of believers who would lap it up at the drop of a hat! Not to this man of the world who would firmly direct you to the road to perdition for your pains! As is my wont, I hardly ever visit a tenant's house. I did not ever do that to the imam's residence either. Naturally, I never got to see any of the bottles of imprisoned jinns that he was reputed to have squirreled away in some part of the house, let alone any jinn. To tell the truth, I never bothered to dwell at any length of time on the imam and his captive jinns. You just can't with any such cockamamie story. Go read 'Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp' instead. That would be a more interesting and satisfying undertaking. And so I banished the tale completely out of my mind, and concentrated on more worldly things. And got married. The imam must have come to the wedding reception. My father made it a point to personally invite his tenants. My wife inevitably got to hear about our rather tenuous version of Aladdin and his uncanny power, and she was amused. We had a laugh about it, and forgot all about it in the midst of the whirlwind of social obligations that are almost inevitable accompaniments to new marriages, until the night some two months into our marital bliss when we almost simultaneously woke up yelling and screaming. I am not certain, even to this day, about the proximity of our individual loud awakenings. What I know is this: Well after midnight, sometime around two (going by the wall clock which showed half past two or so when my eyes happened to fall on it after I had finally calmed down), I woke up and was staring at the roof of the mosquito net. And staring back at me, from a floating position over that roof, or top, whatever you might call it, was a man, looking down at us (my wife, as you might have guessed, was sleeping at my side), or just me. I must have been dumbfounded for a couple of seconds or so, because I was able to take in a great deal of details about that figure, or apparition, or whatever. He had craggy features, was dark in colour, the colour of the generic Bangladeshi, with a full beard that was a combination of black and gray, and he had a white cloth cap (called kistee tupi in my part of Bangladesh, which is greater Dhaka) on his head. A white (probably discoloured) punjabi hid the upper part of a (probably green and white) checked lungi, and that is all I remember about him until I broke the silence. In retrospect, he was not at all forbidding or frightening to look at; he looked more like a rural elder going about his business. And then I felt myself sitting up, and heard myself exploding into an insistent series of loud bellows, and I became aware of my wife also sitting up next to me and screaming at the top of her voice. And the apparition vanished into thin air. Just like that. As the cliché goes, one moment it was there, and the next it was gone. But my nightmare stayed with me until I vaguely became aware of loud pounding on my door, and shouts outside of it. That is when my howling stopped. As did my wife's shrieks. And we looked at each other. She broke the silence inside our room as the pounding and shouting went on outside. "What happened?""There was a man on top of the mosquito net!"
"You saw him too?" I realized that she had probably seen the same vision. And ignoring the loud knocks and gaggle of voices that was a combination of my father, mother, and younger brothers, she proceeded to describe exactly the same man that I saw, or thought I saw, floating over the mosquito net. Dammit, I am not going to psychoanalyze myself! I leave it to those readers wishing to indulge in some spirited psychobabble. Somehow feeling strangely reassured at a shared experience, I got down from the bed, and opened the door. My mother was standing in front, followed closely by my father and three brothers. Concern plainly showed on their faces, none more so than on my mother. For me. For their daughter-in-law, their sister-in-law. They looked more worried than what I felt. Heck, we must have created some din to have woken up the entire household! Briefly, I told them our experience. Without a word, my mother went to the kitchen, and brought back two glasses of water, muttering some doa and ending up by blowing two or three times over each of them. "Drink," she ordered, and we obeyed. My throat felt dry, and I finished the entire contents of my glass at one go. My mother was voluble for the next half hour or so; my father was strangely quiet. Eventually, we went back to sleep, and had an uneventful rest of the late night until daybreak. That afternoon, my father called my wife and me to give us this message: "I've talked with the imam, told him about last night, and asked him to find other accommodation from next month." The Imam complied, and he left with his family and all the special bottles that he was supposed to have in his possession. I never did get to see those bottles. And I have not seen any hovering figures over my mosquito net to this day, since that late night, so long ago. Shahid Alam is currently Head, Media and Communication department, Independent University, Bangladesh.
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