His name is Javaize, age 14-years. His terrified family struggled for six months to save him. They begged with folded hands, they wept, they took Javaize to shrines, fed him holy ash and Zumzum water, but the jinn would not leave. Now it has been exorcised. The exorcists were not some holy quacks but psychiatrists of Jinnah Hospital.
Javaize's mother is my housemaid since five years. For the six months when the jinn was in complete control of her son, she did not come to work but sent a replacement. This new maid described Javaize's state. In a shivering voice the terrified woman said Javaize sat in a corner, he did not eat, he did not speak most of the time. When he did open his mouth it was to make strange demands. He would tell his mother his cloths were "paleeth (befouled) although they were clean.
He would change his clothes every few minutes. He would make a pile of his clothes and ask for kerosene to burn them. When the mother pleaded, he would look at her with angry red eyes and command, "I am telling you! Do as you are told!" Sometimes his body would go stiff as a board. There were many other signs of abnormal behaviour, which convinced who ever saw Javaize that he was possessed by a powerful jinn. The entire basti in Quaidabad was scared to death.
What astonished me was not that these poor, ignorant basti-walas believed Javaize was possessed by an evil spirit, but that a number of educated people living near my apartment, and in whose homes Javaize's mother also works, believed the boy was possessed.
Education, it seems, does not enlighten people. Their belief in evil spirits, ghosts and jinns is profoundly strong. Tell these quasi educated people there is a jinn in the apartment above yours and their response is: Really? My God! Have you seen it? And so forth. That is, they do not doubt the existence of evil spirits for one second.
The good deed of these middle-class people was to help Javaize's mother financially so that she could take her son from shrine to shrine for "jhar-phook" (exorcism). With all these educated saabs and begumsaabs aiding and abetting the poor mother's belief in jinns, how was she to know that her child had a mental problem and needed medical aid.
I couldn't get through to the mother even though I sent many messages through the new maid. Finally one day she did turn up because she needed money. I was rather harsh in telling the mother her son was not possessed, he had some mental problem and she should take the child to a "zehni amraz ka doctor" (a psychiatrist). You have tried everything else, now try a doctor, I told her. She did.
A week later she was back to work. She said the doctor told her she had brought Javaize to the hospital in the nick of time. A few weeks more and the boy would have gone completely mad. The first thing the doctor did was to immediately inject glucose into Javaize's emaciated body, "drip lagaya" said the mother. A treatment of eight weeks was outlined and the doctor told her Javaize would be completely cured.
The point to ponder in this whole affair of Javaize's possession by a jinn is that the educated fools who had encouraged the mother's belief in possession had pushed the ailing child to the brink of death. They never used reason. They knew Javaize's health had been slowly deteriorating since three years.
Three years ago when the mother had brought Javaize to my apartment (they were going to hospital after she finished her chores) I was shocked to see the eleven-year old lad. He was skin and bone. The pallor of his face was dull. His eyes protruded like a frog's eyes. The medical verdict, and the reports of his tests that the mother showed me later, was that Javaize had become anorexic which, in his case, was not actually self-induced but resulted from frequent bouts of dysentery, which had made him anaemic.
In almost all cases of jinn possession I have heard of, the story begins in the alimentary canal of the victim. Lack of sustenance, either because of gastric problem or starvation leads to shortage of blood in the body. An anaemic person begins to hallucinate and the body becomes weaker and weaker.
Hence possession by spirits is a superstition of our starving rural masses. It is usually a young female who is possessed because in the village pecking order she gets the least to eat. You will have heard that the jinn always demands food, and not just any food but rich food like biryani. The possessed woman is taken to a shrine where the lungar (large food pot) is usually full of biryani. The girl gets food and is usually cured until the next bout. It seems that some of these cases are faked by starving girls. We had a servant once who insisted on a three day holiday during full moon because his daughter was possessed at that time of the month and he needed to take her to the sain baba.
Although possession incidents are not common in urban Karachi one does hear of them occasionally, as the case of Javaize. His family is of-course rural in their culture and they usually think of the quack holy men who exorcise spirits rather than psychiatrists.
It sends a shiver down my spine wondering how many people must have gone mad because they were denied medical treatment. Don't the doctors ever think that this superstition needs to be eradicated? I have not been able to locate a single research paper on the connection between possession and madness. Let us hope the story of Javaize's near death because of this superstition motivates someone to research the matter. Also, I must confers, I have a strong urge to take a stick and beat the daylights out of so-called educated people who believe in this superstition.