‘The Havelburg Djinn’: A Pakistani stand-up comic and writer’s short story

Everyone in the family knew Phuppa could see djinns. It was a gift given to him by Allah for his dedication to Islam. He claimed never to need an alarm clock to wake him in time for the early Fajr prayer, having simply to ask a faithful djinn for help.

“It always shakes my toe just before dawn and I wake up, Sami pasha,” he would say. He called me “pasha”, an Arab honorific, because it made me giggle every time.

“Is there a djinn in this room right now?” I asked him once. I was close to ten at the time, and we were all sitting in the drawing room. He looked around the room, not just glancing casually, but carefully peering into every corner and assessing empty spaces, then said, “No pasha, there are no djinns in this room.” Then Phuppa looked through the door leading into the drawing room. Next to it was a hallway, at the end of which was that damned TV lounge.

“There’s one there,” he said. Then, because he saw my face losing colour, he added, “But don’t worry, it’s a good djinn. If you respect it, it won’t hurt you.”

He also told me, as well as all my other cousins, about the djinn that met our great-grandfather’s brother in a German prisoner-of-war camp. The time he shared that tale with us is exactly as you’d imagine it to be, with a cluster of children all sitting cross-legged around him, all of us verging on the need to pee out of pure fright, but none willing to get up in case we missed a detail of the story.

“His name was Riffatullah Shah,” Phuppa said.

“That’s my name,” said my cousin Riffoo. We all knew that. We had been told repeatedly how he was named after our great-grandfather’s second brother, just as I was named after our great-grandfather, and my younger brother after his younger brother. It was a point of pride, something to help us gain a modicum of social advantage over our other cousins who had decidedly more mundane names.

“Did you know he fought in the Great War?”

I didn’t know then what the First World War was. At that point in our collective education, the wars we learned of were the 1947 war of Independence – which I’ve since learned wasn’t a war at all, just a particularly brutal birthing that culminated in India spawning Pakistan – and the wars of 1965 and 1971, both again with India. That there had been a massive conflict in Europe during the first quarter of the twentieth century was something that might have been brought up in our history books, but we didn’t get into its details until later in our schooling. We were more familiar with the Second World War, only due to the way Holocaust history suffused all kinds of pop culture and fiction even then.

And so we were given a quick summary of the war: “Germany wanted to rule the world and so many other countries got together to stop them. One of those countries was Great Britain, which used to rule India at the time.”

This last part we all knew. The overthrow of the British Raj was an integral part of the Pakistani and Indian historical identity, then and now.

“Great Britain didn’t have enough soldiers of its own to fight Germany, so they asked India to send their soldiers as well. And so your great-granduncle –”

“Riffatullah Shah,” Riffoo offered up.

“Yes, THE Riffatullah Shah,” Phuppa corrected, putting Riffoo in his place, “Riffatullah was sent to fight the Germans ...”

... which is an inaccurate way of starting this story.

True, almost all the Indian soldiers fighting for the English in the Great War were doing so because the British Raj demanded it of them and they lacked the independence to refuse. However, Riffatullah Shah was perhaps the only Indian to volunteer. His family had enough wealth (or rather the appearances of wealth, given how much would be revealed as debt in the coming decades) to buy all the educational and career prospects needed to keep their sons out of military service – a conscription foisted upon India’s poor and uneducated, of which there were so many that the British faced no shortage of manpower.

However, for Riffatullah, the British Indian Army was the only way to bring some adventure into a life that seemed already to be plotted on a course of tedious domesticity.

His elder brother Samiullah Shah was an accomplished engineer, having travelled to Manchester University to receive his qualification. Upon returning from England – where he acquired an affinity for bow ties and a Mancunian accent – he’d married, begun producing many children, and was working for the Hyderabad Waterworks Department. Their youngest brother, Azmatullah Shah, was the commissioner of police for Hyderabad, and had also sired a sizeable family. Their mother had been lining up potential brides for Riffatullah for some time now, and both brothers were being pressured into finding him employment in their respective offices.

By this point, the war in Europe had been raging for two years, and if the newspapers in India – moderated as they were by British censors – were to be believed, it was a glorious series of victories for the Queen’s empire against the ruthless Huns, with the Indian regiments bringing honour and glory to Crown and Country. And so, in January of 1916, Riffatullah Shah marched into his father’s room and announced that he had, the day before, signed up for military service and was going to fight the Germans. The beating his father gave him, first with his hands, then with his belt, while his mother wailed like an air-raid siren in the background, proved more effective battle training than anything his drill sergeants would put him through. The next day, as Riffatullah hugged his brothers and their many, many children, Samiullah told him, “Just come back alive, ullu ke patthe,” and Riffoo promised to try.

By the last days of 1916, the likelihood of coming through on that promise looked bleak. The newspapers had been lying, as Riffatullah learned all too soon. Deployed first to the Balkans, then to France where he joined up with the surviving Baluchis who had blocked the German advance in the Battle of Ypres two years before, he saw enough of the frontlines and their damned trenches to know that this war would not be won by either side any time soon. “The shells are pouring like rain in the monsoon”, he had written in a letter home to his mother, penned during an organised retreat in Belgium. The British commanders treated the Indian soldiers horrifically, often using them as human shields behind whom the sons of England took shelter, then denying them basic rations so that the British could eat double portions. Riffatullah, who came from enough privilege to never having been called an “Indian dog” before, was shocked at how the rest of the soldiers in his platoon didn’t even register the insult, while he still cringed each time it was aimed at him.

And then, in the first days of 1918, they had been caught behind enemy lines.

The British had left him and six others to defend a trench while the larger British regiments retreated. By the time the Germans appeared at the lip of the trench, only Riffatullah and one other remained alive. Sitting waist-deep in snow, mildly concussed from the shrapnel that had slapped his helmet hard enough to knock him down, Riffatullah raised his hands slowly, making a visible show of dropping his gun. The Sikh soldier next to him screamed and ran at the two dozen Germans. They did not bother to shoot him, waiting instead until he got close enough for one of them to step forward and smash him in the face with a rifle butt. He collapsed, turban deepening in colour.

Riffatullah was marched back to the German trenches, and thrown into a bunker packed so tightly with other captured soldiers that he thought he might faint from the heat and sweat. They were in those bunkers for three weeks, fighting over bread tossed down to them. If the British soldiers thought they might enjoy some privilege even here, they were soon disavowed of any such superiority when Riffatullah elbowed and punched several of them in defense of his collected loaf. The German lines were shelled continuously, and they grew accustomed to the apocalyptic cacophony. “If you cannot sleep during a shelling, you are of no use to anyone,” his regiment commander had told him in the first days on the front, and Riffatullah had, like so many others, become expert at pushing the sound and fury to the peripheries of sensation.

He was eventually shifted from that bunker, separated from the other captured soldiers, and sent by train to Hamburg, where he and many other Indians were put on a prisoner ship, the Anchoria. The crew was entirely German, with the exception of two Indian interpreters employed by the Huns. Soon, Riffatullah and the other Indian soldiers grew to hate the interpreters even more than the Germans – which, given how brutal the Germans were, was a feat. They were called half monkeys and niggers constantly, beaten by truncheons, and given the most menial and degrading of tasks. Riffatullah had seen the Germans do much the same to their British and French prisoners as well, but to be degraded and abused by two of their own countrymen was an indignity too far. Gulam Ali was an immense Delhiwala, with fists as large as a child’s head that he was constantly seeking excuses to use on the prisoners; and always next to him was the smaller man named Senegali, who spoke little, but seemed to hold the reigns to Gulam Ali’s temper, often directing it with just a nod. Both spoke fluent German, Gulam Ali translating from Urdu for the crew, while Senegali was well-versed in various other languages and dialects from the subcontinent.

Several of the prisoners did not survive the journey to Havelburg Prison Camp, their bodies thrown into the icy river, where they bobbed in the ship’s wake.

Havelburg itself was a retired army barracks, refitted as a prisoner-of-war camp with minimal effort. Tin roofs leaked, so torn in places that a dusting of snow would cover those sleeping directly under.

Most of the days were spent working at a munitions plant on the camp, stamping out artillery for German use. The food offered as compensation for the work was worse than that on the ship, with just a few spoonfuls of coarse grain that they would soften with melted snow to render edible. During Riffatullah’s first month there, an American ambassador visited the camps and promised those held there that he would report their deplorable conditions back to the British. A few weeks later, several trucks pulled up with large crates bearing Her Majesty’s insignia on the side. Only half of them made it to the camps, filled with books, board games and broken musical instruments. The ones containing food and warm clothes were, it was assumed, gifted to the Germans by Gulam Ali and Senegali.

The two interpreters were the true power in the camp. The Germans handed over daily management of the camp to them, trusting in their judgement. Gulam Ali would stroll through the barracks, often when the prisoners were asleep, always flanked by a pair of armed German soldiers. He would pick someone at random and begin beating him, smashing acorn-sized knuckles into teeth and cartilage, demanding to know if there was any resistance network being created. There never was. Not because of Gulam Ali’s beating, rather because of Senegali’s spies. Using an intoxicating mix of food rations and uncensored letters sent home, he recruited many camp members to the German side, while keeping them interred in the camp to report on their fellows. This went from insidious rumour to confirmed fact for Riffatullah one evening.

He was working next to Umar Rangoonwala, the youngest prisoner at the camp. Umar was, with Riffatullah, the only other Indian prisoner who could read and write. His father was a butcher in Hyderabad, who had invested all his earnings into his son’s education but did not have enough to keep him from being drafted into the war. Both Umar and Riffatullah had grown close, reminiscing about the Hyderabad they’d left behind, sharing memories of crowded streets redolent with the smell of cumin and heeng, of passing under the shadow of ancient Mughal architecture. They had even agreed that they had most likely prayed together in the grand Makkah Masjid, both hearing the echoes of the muezzin’s call to Eid namaz as they shared the memory.

“I sat on the bench before leaving for war,” Umar said, “the stone bench on the edge of the pond in front of the mosque. Do you know the legend about the bench?”

Riffatullah said he did not.

“The legend is, that whoever sits on the bench, Allah sees to it that he will return to sit on it again one day. That means I cannot die here, you see. Allah will send me back to India to sit on that bench again.”

Riffatullah agreed that it was inevitable. Umar was barely eighteen when he’d been sent to the trenches a year before, and had managed to sustain his sincere optimism.

That ended one day, brutally. Umar, his stomach growling so loudly from hunger that it could be heard over the clanging of metal bashing metal, could keep his misery to himself no longer.

“It’s not fair,” he grumbled to Riffatullah. “Those two bhenchods, Gulam and Senegali, keep all the food. They’ve actually grown fatter since we got here. If I ever see them back in India, I’m going to beat them up.”

It was whispered, but they were standing too close to others for it to have gone unheard. Riffatullah saw excitement flickering across at least two faces, the prospect of extra rations too much to contain for some. Gulam Ali came for Umar that night, and he was dragged off screaming by two guards, Gulam Ali stopping them just long enough to smash Umar’s ankle under a boot heel. They didn’t see Umar for a full week after that, which they knew meant that he was in the coffin-sized box at the other end of camp. When he did return finally, limping on a foot twisted too far to the wrong side, his skin was pale and heavily veined with sores and cuts. His hair had been shaved down to the scalp, and his ribs jutted out like too many stalks of wheat packed into a fine jute sack. He did not speak much after that, about Hyderabad or anything else. He mostly sat quietly on his bed, wrapped in a blanket, chewing softly on his arm as he stared ahead.

It was too late though. Gulam Ali and Senegali had fixed their attentions on him now. Umar’s rations, already minimal, were cut further in half. Anyone caught sharing with him was told they too would end up in the same condition. His ankle had begun resembling, both in touch and appearance, an overripe grapefruit. The camp doctor, a silver-haired man with sapphire eyes, looked at it once. He felt it with a gloved hand, ignoring Umar’s pained howl, then declared it too infected to fix and left. Riffatullah would gather snow and cover the ankle with it, the heat it radiated melting the ice.

“Why should I die here? I don’t want to die here,” Umar said to Riffatullah, the words squeezed out through chattering teeth. Riffatullah told him he’d pray for him.

“I prayed to Allah for revenge, but he has done nothing,” said Umar, lying down, pulling his grey blanket over him.

Looking down at him, Riffatullah was reminded of a puddle of mud and rain, Umar’s shivering like the reverberations of approaching shells rippling the surface.

That night, lying in the cot next to Umar’s, he heard whispering. Riffatullah raised his head and looked around. All the others in the barracks were asleep, and there was no one to whom the boy could be speaking, so Riffatullah decided it was likely just a byproduct of Umar’s fever and lay back down. It continued, a susurrus so low it was barely reaching him. Then, just as he was slipping back into sleep, he heard a new voice. For an instant Riffatullah was reminded of one of his many nephews back in Hyderabad – little boys always speaking in breathless excitement, giggling at the potential adventure that every moment of their lives seemed to hold. This voice was just as young, just as excited, just as hungry for more.

“Yes,” it said, followed by a joyous laugh, “I’ll do it. Such fun it will be.”

Riffatullah sat upright, eyes straining in the darkness, but he saw nothing amiss. There was no little boy standing between his cot and Umar’s. Even Umar was asleep now, having stopped his whispering. And so Riffatullah too slept.

The next morning, Umar’s bed was empty. Riffatullah asked the others if they had seen the boy leave, and they all said they didn’t even think it possible for him to sit up without help, much less walk out.

“Gulam Ali must have come in the night and taken him off to beat or torture whatever’s left of him,” said another prisoner, this one a career soldier from Dehradun. He had been in the war since 1914, and had little compassion left to spare, but he would spend time watching over Umar when Riffatullah was busy.

After a meagre breakfast, they trudged through snow to the munitions factory, and began their work assembling cannon shells and bullets. It was precise work, that involved careful measurements of gunpowder and heavy machinery, that was unforgiving of carelessness. Several of them had had one finger, at least, smashed to permanent uselessness under a hydraulic press that jittered unpredictably. The week before, a sprinkling of gunpowder had exploded spontaneously, giving the closest prisoner severe burns and blowing off half his left ear. Riffatullah knew he could not afford to expend too much concentration on worrying over Umar, and so focused on his work.

His arms had just begun their daily ache from screwing and unscrewing shell-heads, when Gulam Ali and Senegali stormed in. They were bracketed by several German guards on each side.

“Where is the butcher boy?” thundered Gulam Ali.

They all stopped working and looked at the interpreters, too exhausted even for confusion.

“Umar. That son of a pig is not in his bed. Who moved him? Where is he?” Gulam Ali shouted.

Senegali nodded towards Riffatullah, and Gulam Ali rounded on him, grabbing him by the collar and shaking him so hard Riffatullah thought his shoulders might dislocate.

“You’re with him all the time. I’ll beat you till –”

They all froze.

At the door, behind Senegali and the guards, stood Umar. But not Umar as they had last seen him. Not the pale grey boy so thin that the hollows of his skull were casting shadows on translucent skin, unable to stand upright on his twisted, swollen foot. This was Umar as he must have been back in Hyderabad, before being sent to kill and die in the bogs and trenches of Europe; a glowing youth, with confidence and pride in his bearing. He walked into the factory, no limp visible. Gulam Ali released Riffatullah and charged at Umar, bellowing. The guards around Senegali grabbed Umar’s hands, two of them moving behind him and attempting to push him down. He didn’t budge. Just stood still and upright. Even when Gulam Ali’s large fist smashed him on the side of the head, he didn’t stagger. His nose smashed, blood dribbling over his chin, he looked over Gulam Ali’s shoulder straight at Riffatullah. Their eyes met. Or rather, Riffatullah looked at Umar, and Umar looked back, but there were no eyes. Where he should have had eyes, were twin flames, flaring and growing outwards.

Gulam Ali turned to Senegali bewildered.

“Djinn. He is a djinn,” said Senegali, almost in awe. Then, “Bhagwan help me.”

The munitions factory exploded. The fireball that ascended into the sky was so immense, people in the town of Havelburg thought the British had reached their shores. The camp was almost entirely destroyed, very few of its inhabitants surviving. Those inside the factory were reduced to ash that was buried in the falling snow.

We sat in silence, taking in the end of the story. Later, our respective parents would ask Phuppa not to tell the children such frightening tales, since most of us crawled into their beds that night, trembling and crying.

It was only the next year, when Phuppa came to visit again that it occurred to me to ask him about Riffatullah Shah’s death. I sat down next to him on the ground, just as Phuppa finished his Maghrib prayer, and before he could begin reading from the small Quran he carried with him everywhere, I asked,

“Phuppa, if Riffatullah died in the camp along with everyone else in the factory that day, then how do you know what happened? How do you know about Umar and the djinn and Gulam Ali and Senegali and everything else?”

Phuppa licked a finger and began turning the pages of the Quran, finding his way to wherever he had left it from the afternoon’s prayer.

“The djinn told me,” he said with a smile.

I believe him still.

Sami Shah’s new novel, The Boy of Fire and Earth, will be published shortly.