Of Wars and Vengeance: Sami Shah's The Havelberg Djinn is a good addition to South Asian supernatural fiction

I’ve been suffering from a severe case of guilt about not reviewing part two of Sami Shah’s duology, and because I’m an active procrastinator who also falls apart after missed deadlines, I’ve decided to do something that makes no sense, which is to review another short story by him.

I’m aware that by doing this I will have in no way completed my actual task, but I have a horrible feeling that it’s been too long since I read the duology, and the dual expectations of finishing the review vs being unable to write a detailed, in-depth analysis might relegate this task to the list of incomplete things I vaguely stress about.

That being said, there’s something so great about reading Sami Shah’s works cause his stories are so Pakistani. As a voracious reader growing up, I suffered from a lack of representation in the Sweet Valley and Hardy boys I inhaled religiously, so to have moments you’ve grown up with being merged into a story is such a bittersweet experience. Reading Sami Shah feels like reading a story by a cousin whom you might have spent your summer vacations with, because he’s writing scenes and feelings from the same memory bank that I pull all my experiences from.  

Everyone in the family knew Phuppa could see djinns.

Every Pakistani family has at least one distant relative that all the kids know of who could speak to jinn. In my case, it was a man we called ‘jinn nana’, who, common family lore goes, once breathed on my hand when I came home dirty and sweaty from playing outside, and out came the smell of roses from my cupped palms. Of course, it’s entirely possible that he was particularly dexterous with a hidden perfume dropper, but it’s cooler to imagine the first version rather than the second.

“It always shakes my toe just before dawn and I wake up, Sami pasha,” he would say. 

The idea of these humans using jinn as friends as well as servants is part of common parlance in Pakistani households, including the ‘they wake me up for prayer’ idea that Sami introduces at the beginning of the story. From there though, we veer into a completely different territory. And because I was going into this story without having read a blurb, it’s entirely possible that the path this story took could have been jarring, but Sami leads us expertly from present-day Pakistan back into the past, using an uncle telling a bunch of kids a story about their ancestors to drag us back into history.

Mostly though, most Pakistani authors focus on selected years in the country’s history: primarily on the 1947 partition, with a few more titles based on the 1965 war or the 1971 separation. India features prominently in these stories, usually as the protagonist, but Sami does something different, and by extension much more interesting. He keeps going backwards even before the split of the subcontinent into two countries, dragging us back to the time when British colonial powers ruled this land mass, and World War 1 was raging on.

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.

Even as I read this story, slightly surprised at how far back in the century we had jumped, the author managed to retain a level of authenticity in his tale. Given the unexpected coincidence that I’ve been reading about the atrocious treatment of Indian soldiers by the British during the World Wars—Winston Churchill’s disdainful but contentious ‘they breed like rabbits’ comment about the 3 million dead Indians during the 1940’s Bengal Famine comes to mind—this story could not have come at a better time on my radar.

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, the brother of the great grand-father of our narrator, gets caught during the war and transferred to Havelberg, a town in Germany, where two interpreters, a big meaty man and his vicious partner, go around being cruel to literally everyone. Surviving on barely any food and reluctant to socialize for fear of spies in the camp, Riffatullah becomes friends with Omar, the only other Indian present. The men bond over their shared love of Hyderabad and the memories they had of the place, until Omar complains of hunger one day, and gets brutally beaten up for it.

It is at this point that certain similarities between this story and Sami Shah’s entry in the anthology The Djinn Falls in love and Other Stories started to emerge. In both stories, a character wronged becomes possessed and comes back to take revenge. Even the descriptions used sounded eerily similar, although one could argue that almost all supernatural creatures look almost the same across the genre (vampires pale and pointy, dwarves stout and leathery, etc. etc.)

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.

I have to admit though, reading The Djinn Falls in Love opened up a world of possibilities to me about the kinds of fantasy we could experiment with in a South Asian setting, and Sami Shah is probably one of the few authors I know who are already doing that experimenting, proving it true with stories like this one (Usman T. Malik is another, but his stories verge slightly from the fantasy into the realm of magic realism, whereas Shah’s story stay grounded primarily in the supernatural).

This is not the most amazing thing ever written, but it’s a good piece, solid and entertaining, and the writing is at ease, which is a weird compliment to give, but there you have it. I’d recommend this.