The Jalpari

Fiction by Sakina Hassan

“Come see the Nagin! She is half snake, half woman! She eats, and she 

speaks-” 

If you’ve followed the crackling sound of Bashir Gujjar’s voice, you’ll find it blaring from a couple of dirty speakers perched next to a lurid hand-painted sign on top of his ‘freakshow.’ 

“We have the headless man, Suleman! He still moves, he still breathes...” As you read Bashir’s name in the fancy calligraphic script, you might, like me, be very impressed by the garish Nagin undulating around the letters. Its large kohl-rimmed eyes beckon, a forked tongue escapes its red lips, and its voluptuous body melds almost seamlessly into a snake’s tail, every curve still visible under the brown scales. The sign also features a grey-skinned head on a platter, blood dripping from its eyes, nose, and mouth. And finally, next to it is a tap floating in mid-air, supported only by the water flowing from its mouth.

“Witness the magical faucet! Water flows, but it has no connection...” 

The recording is much louder now as you line up to purchase tickets from Bashir himself. He is perched on a bamboo platform, taking 20 rupees for a piece of the cheapest, most flimsy grey paper that he quickly stamps right there and then. His nephew, Umer, ushers you with a group of other customers toward a shed-sized cuboid of black cloth that hides the magic from those who have not paid. 

Behind these cloth walls, you find yourself in a fabric hallway with a shoddy wooden counter running along your right and the outside world screened from view on the left. On the other side of the counter are three rooms hidden by curtains, and I am standing in front of the first curtain, waiting to lift it and show you the wonders within. 

Of course, that is how it is supposed to go. 

On our first night at Racecourse Park, as I rushed from room to room for one last inspection before the first group of gawkers was let in, I realized that we simply could not begin yet. The faucet was running as it ought to, and Suleman was ready with his body concealed behind his mirror, but Bisma, the child who plays the Nagin, was nowhere to be found. I quickly sidestepped behind the scaffolding that held up the black sheets around our exhibits and yelled at Umer to let people file in while I looked for her. The verge behind the fabric façade of our little show and all the other stalls next to it was not as well-lit as the front. It was littered with broken and notched wood, plastic sacking, gas cylinders, and the various paraphernalia of our neighbors.

The last thing I wanted was for Bisma to be found playing with the children from other stalls and wasting their time. She would be beaten, and we couldn’t afford a crying Nagin. Calling out was of no use with the noise from the Gujjar’s speakers and the sounds of the crowd, so I began to walk in a random direction, looking left and right. I hadn’t gone far before I saw her climbing over some cartons, chasing a boy, and laughing. I grabbed her by the arm as she ran past and shook her as hard as I dared before dragging her back to our stall. Once inside her ‘enclosure,’ I stuffed her unceremoniously into her box, turned on the tail, and took one last look at the effect from the front before taking my assigned place. 

The first set of spectators were all wearing glasses—living in a city clearly weakens eyesight. I drew back the curtain before the Nagin and began my litany of questions. The audience is only supposed to see a glass box, the kind snakes are often kept in, with Bisma’s head on top. Inside the box, a cracked, brown snake’s tail writhed with a mechanism I have yet to understand. I asked the Nagin where she was from, what she ate, how she slept, and Bisma lisped suitably macabre answers, failing to look mysterious with rumpled hair and a shiny stream of snot running down her face. I know for a fact that the people grouped on the other side can usually hear very little anyway over the din outside. 

A few of the watchers clapped politely, and some laughed. I hid Bisma from view and moved to the next section, with Umer urging the people forward to follow me. I lifted the next curtain to reveal the magical faucet— as expected, no one was impressed. “A common enough toy.” Umer had said the first time I’d tried to puzzle out how the brass tap seemed to be held up by a stream of glowing water. It turned out to be nothing more than a glass pipe with small bulbs that lit up to look like flowing water. Since then, I’d often been surprised that even vegetable farmers treated it as nothing special. The third exhibit elicited a better reaction. The audience gasped when they saw Suleman’s head lolling from side to side with its corpse makeup and clacking teeth, and the applause was louder. A few boys, however, soon yelled, “A mirror! It’s a mirror,” and Umer quickly hustled the group out. I rushed back to my post next to the Nagin to wipe her nose and prepare for the next set. 

# 

“Every year, I tell you to get them printed instead of writing them out like a cheapskate,” Umer mumbled through his cigarette as he helped his uncle count the day’s takings. It was two in the morning, and he and Bashir were huddled over a mountain of change while the rest of us removed the cloth screens until a skeleton of bamboo frames was all that remained of our extraordinary circus. I was too tired to do more than make sure that Asim—a slow teenager of unknown origins who did most of the grunt work—and Suleman folded everything properly instead of piling it up in a corner and was soon hunting for Bisma in the dark again. All around Racecourse Park, other stall owners and traders were securing their wares for the night. Tomorrow would be the last day of Lahore’s annual spring festival, with hundreds of families visiting to buy everything from cheap jewelry and cloth to handmade shoes and local candy and to gorge themselves on gol gappas, barbeque, and biryani from the food stalls at one end of the park. Some would visit the flower show or take their children on the rickety mechanical rides. I was worried that I’d have to walk all the way over there to find the girl. 

At least this time, I could call out, and thankfully, she soon climbed out from under a pile of canvas tents in front of the Well of Death. I dragged her back to where everyone not needed for the end-of-day accounting was tucking into a cold dinner of sajji and greasy rice. She was quiet as she ate, sniffling now and then—from a cold, most probably—and I was thankful for the silence. Suleman was trying to hurry Asim through this meal because once all the money had been counted, it would be found inadequate for how much it cost the Gujjar to keep us all. The man lost his temper often, and Asim usually bore the brunt of it. If we were lucky, we might get away with only a scolding until his nephew told him to shut up. 

The Gujjar had been much better behaved when we’d first met, when I’d kept him from beating his former Nagin to death. She was almost eighteen, though she looked no older than twelve, and had found a man who would marry her, even though she had spent the last eight years traveling all over the countryside. She was sick of the circus, sick of being ogled at, sick (I suspected privately) of Bashir himself. She didn’t seem to care how many people heard her yelling all of this as she was slapped, punched, kicked, and pulled about by her hair every which way in the dirt. I was the first to rush in to restrain him, and it was probably this that shamed three other men into doing the same. If a skinny, white-haired old man like me could tackle the red-faced giant, then surely they could, too. Later, Bashir would embrace me like a brother and offer me a free turn at his freak show, all as fervent thanks for keeping him from committing murder. 

“Not that the whore didn’t deserve it, but I’m a God-fearing man,” he had said as he wiped the grease from his mustache while helping himself to his fifth paratha. We were at the small dhaba, near the place where I had intervened to keep him in his unsullied state. I did not have to sit there and watch him stuff his face; only he was feeding me as well, and a free meal is something that only a complete fool refuses. It didn’t take him long to start asking the usual questions: where I was from, where I was going, who my kith and kin were, my business, my age, and the identity of the little girl who had stood screaming as I took one of his elbows to my stomach and who now sat next to me, eating from my plate.

“My granddaughter, Bisma,” I murmured and proceeded to relate the tragic tale of how her parents and the rest of my family had perished in the earthquake in 2005. How she, a small baby, had been pulled out of the rubble after two whole days, how she was the only thing that had kept me from taking my own life, and so on. A much more emotional story than the truth: finding the girl sheltering under a tractor in a storm and being unable to shake her off. I soon learned that a child added a veneer of respectability to a solitary wanderer and made it easier to find work. With Bashir, keeping up the act became even more important; he needed a new Nagin, and I soon realized that if he’d found out that we were completely unrelated, he wouldn’t have hesitated in separating us by force and leaving me behind. He was just that kind of man. 

# 

After the Spring festival ended in Lahore, we continued traveling North to stay ahead of the hot weather for as long as possible. Our eventual destination was Islamabad, but we meandered on dirt roads between villages and small towns, hoping for custom. 

However, the floods this year have been very bad. As we passed field after field of drowned crops and waterlogged settlements, even the Gujjar knew there was no point in stopping. On our third day after leaving Lahore, Umer and Suleman finally convinced Bashir that they could go no further without risking our truck in the mud. We had stopped on an elevated road with inundated orchards on either side. I shivered as I realized that spiders, desperate to escape the water, had covered the tops of the trees with thick webbing, veiling the leaves in dirty white. I wanted to take a closer look and climbed out of the back of the truck with Bisma.

The headless man followed me down. He said we were near the river (which river?), but it seemed a desolate place. The shrouded trees seemed to muffle all sound, and no birds or insects stirred. A few meters ahead, the rutted track that we had so far stubbornly followed had dissolved completely into mud and brown sludgy water; who knew how deep. Bisma pulled her fingers free from my hand and squelched off to play, and as I tried to splash after her, my foot rolled over something… alive. 

Whatever it was, it moved quickly, causing me to fall as it tried to slip into deeper water. “A fish! A giant fish!” yelled Suleman excitedly as he threw himself on top of it. Bisma, with a habit that I’d come to despise, began screaming, and soon Suleman was joined by Asim in wrestling with what looked like a truly monster catch. Bashir and Umer arrived with a large plastic tub, and we gathered around it to stare at something that I am, even today, at a loss to describe. 

“A fish with arms?” wondered Umer. “A Jalpari! A mermaid!” exclaimed Asim. The Gujjar, a man with the best nose for opportunity, began to yell for buckets of water to fill the tub and keep our ‘mermaid’ from dying. Water and more water; we waded as far as we dared to find enough to fill the tub, but it was too cloudy; the creature had been too dirty. More water and, soon enough, mud had been sloughed off so we could all take a breather and wonder at our own eyes. 

Something brownish-green brooded under the brackish water at the bottom of the tub. It couldn’t have been larger than Bisma at her full three feet, and one end was very clearly a fish’s tail. The other end appeared to be elongated in a way that merely hinted at the top half of a human body with limbs and something of a torso. A thatch of billowing green hair hid as much from view as the dirt. 

As we watched, the thing stirred. Two thin and spindly appendages unfolded themselves from its sides and slowly rose to the sides of the tub. Fingers—what else can I call them? Shiny, brown, bony fingers—broke the water’s surface and slowly gripped the plastic edges.

Only Umer had the presence of mind to fling himself on top before the creature tried to propel itself upwards and escape. 

We quickly tied a cloth over the top of the tub and hauled it to the truck. For once, Umer managed to turn the keys without any arguments over a possible destination or the route ahead. As we reversed, I wondered at the miracle that had stunned even Bashir Gujjar into an ominous silence. 

At the single stop we made before reaching the motorway, Umer somehow managed to procure a large glass tank. The mermaid’s long fingers nearly throttled Suleman, and Asim was badly bitten as we wrestled it into its new home and nailed a wooden cover on top. “It probably eats fish,” the Gujjar remarked after examining the teeth marks. Fish was bought, chopped up, and dropped into the water. We spent an hour peering into the tank to see if our offering would be accepted, but the creature retreated to a corner, folded up its arms, and proceeded to ignore the food. 

Once we were on the motorway and the truck no longer jolted, I climbed over the canvas-covered flotsam of Bashir’s business to the back, where enough space had been cleared for the tank to sit flat and for anyone who wished to look inside. The mermaid still refused to acknowledge the food. I made myself comfortable on a bit of wood at some distance (I couldn’t forget those long arms) while Bisma squatted right next to the glass and began to lisp nonsense at our captive. 

I cannot tell if I dozed off, if I dreamt or not. I remember Bisma speaking and placing her hand on the glass. I remember wanting to pull her away as the thing slowly floated towards her. I remember an arm unfolding and the four-fingered hand feeling around its glass

confines, struggling to lift the lid. I recall that the other arm seemed wrapped around a head; I remember a pair of eyes peering through the hair that looked far too human for comfort. It was around the third day after we reached the capital that the creature began to cry. I call it crying, but Umer likened it to the singing of a bird in a cage, while Bashir called it a nuisance. It was a strange sound, rather like the yowling of a cat, but also a great deal like the keening of a woman. The mermaid did not unwrap its arms from around its body again; it did not swim around or otherwise show any signs of life apart from this noise. I wondered how we could hear it through the water and then through the blankets and sheets that we had piled around the tank. Maybe it moved about when no one was watching. It frightened us a little, I think. Every day, we carefully replaced some of the water and dropped in chopped or whole fish, working quickly and keeping sticks close by in case it attacked. We counted the food in the water and told each other it was certainly eating. 

Meanwhile, the bite on Asim’s arm was refusing to get better. The area around it had swollen and turned a greenish-gray color. It smelled whenever Suleman unwrapped the bandages to clean the wound and apply ointment. The boy had become even clumsier and more absent-minded than before, testing the Gujjar to his limits. Suleman was taking on more and more of his work to keep the peace and repeatedly argued to find him some proper medical attention. 

# 

We had set up our grotesquery once more at the edge of a public park at another festival, a ‘cultural’ one this time. We were squeezed next to a large, flimsy shed that Suleman mournfully assured me was the real circus. “People walking on ropes up in the sky, tumblers, fire eaters, and jugglers - and all we have are mirrors and a crying fish.”

The Gujjar had tried to cadge a better place, but we were lucky to be even allowed inside since he hadn’t booked a spot in advance. Also, the loudspeaker was going to be a problem. A man in a blue uniform and cap spent fifteen minutes trying to argue that this wasn’t the way things were done here. Islamabad is more genteel than Lahore. Bashir got redder and redder in the face as the security guard told us there was to be no loud noise, no lewd or suggestive recordings. He then tried to approach the enclosures, asking questions about the incessant crying. At this opportune moment, Bisma ran past screaming, and the uniformed man began to talk about how it most certainly was not seemly to use children as labor, especially in a place where a foreigner might see them. I ran after her and did not see Umer smoothing away all difficulties by producing a wad of money. 

At the last minute, as people began to arrive at the opposite end of the park, someone reminded the Gujjar that his recording and our colorful sign included no mention of our newest addition. “We’ll paint some canvas and commission a proper picture later!” exclaimed Umer, the solver of every difficulty. As he ran about yelling for brushes, Suleman tugged at my elbow, his face already painted a suitable shade of dead. It was too quiet. Both of us made our way warily through the black sheets to a new, fourth enclosure, where the mermaid’s tank had been placed at eye height on more scaffolding. 

Bisma stood quietly at one end of the tank, and inside, the mermaid was darting from one side to the other like a prisoner pacing in their cell. Its long arms trailed behind it, and its green hair made rushing, changing shapes in the water as though it had a life of its own.

Bashir Gujjar could barely contain himself. Now, no one with eyes could deny that this was something truly unique, something worth looking at. He instructed Umer not to let people stand for more than 5 minutes in front of the tank. “If they want a second look, they can buy a second ticket!” Umer was trying to anticipate any extra difficulties; what if too many people tried to mob their little set-up? What if they ran out of the flimsy paper for tickets? Should they raise the price before opening or after a few people have already seen the jalpari and word spread? 

I gently drew Bisma away and took her to the Nagin box. Bashir and Umer were outside, talking up some customers, and Suleman was headless and waiting. It was much quieter without the Gujjar’s recording, and I could hear the “shur, shur” of water churning as the mermaid continued to swim. I did not have much time to examine the uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach as the first batch of visitors was ushered in. Bisma performed her interview as well, and she got the same polite applause as usual. At least her face was clean this time. The tap once again failed to impress, and Suleman drew the usual gasps until some quick teenager noticed the mirror. 

Now, it was time for the main event. My hands were shaking, and I’d completely forgotten the script Umer had made me memorize the night before. All I could manage was a tight “Khawateen o hazraat! Dekhiyeh JALPARI!” and swish the curtain back with some force. Silence. 

My arms were akimbo in an awkward gesture of showmanship, and they stayed that way as I slowly registered first shock and then disgust in the faces of our audience. Umer looked aghast. I quickly turned to see that our mermaid was no longer pacing her glass cage. It was, instead, floating near the top, arms no longer wrapped around its body; they, too, floated about like driftwood. I noticed that they appeared to protrude from thin shoulders. The creature’s hair was bunched up with froth at the surface, and I could see some neck, maybe a chin, and something like a nose. It was dead. 

In the next fifteen minutes, while Umer was busy pushing people out and then giving refunds to the next set, Bashir screamed like a madman. At first, he thundered at Asim and paused for breath only when the recipient of his wrath collapsed in a faint. He kicked the prone figure in the stomach before Suleman could stop him. I knelt next to the boy and saw that the bite on his forearm was seeping something black through the bandage, and his skin was burning. Umer had joined us by now and he placed a hand on his uncle’s shoulder, announcing that we would be stopping the show for today. He helped carry Asim outside and soon returned after having assigned Suleman to look after him. 

The Gujjar cautiously uncovered the tank and poked the floating thing with a stick. It remained dead. 

“I’m ruined,” he cried, lamenting for all the money he could have earned. “You’re a fool,” said his nephew, “and you’ve lost heart too quickly. Look at it! Look at its arms, its hair, its waist! I couldn’t even tell before that it had a face! The first thing we must do is empty the tank; we don’t want it to rot away to nothing.” 

“Yes, yes! We’ll dry it out in the sun! It’ll be much easier to carry it around then! Lahore! The Zoo!” 

“I know what you’re thinking, but we don’t need to lug it all the way back. There’s a museum on Shakarparian Road that’s sure to have someone who can stuff it for us. It’ll look even better than when it was still alive because we’ll be able to spread out all of its limbs. We could have it set up any way we wanted.”

“Vinegar! We need to get vinegar! Or oil! Fill the tank up! Like a pickle! I don’t want it to rot anymore than necessary.” 

“Should we? Shouldn’t we wait until we’ve asked someone who knows what they’re doing?” 

Suleman had walked in again and interrupted the two by asking what they were going to do about the sick boy who’d been bitten by their monster. Were they planning on pickling him, too, when he died? The Gujjar reddened. “What can I do? If I take him to a hospital, they’ll ask questions. How do I know he won’t talk?! I can’t have anyone taking my jalpari away!” 

Umer had to play peacekeeper again. He’d find a doctor, of course. Someone who’d only need money and wouldn’t care for any explanations; some medicine would soon sort him out, no one need worry in the slightest, and so on. I reached for Bisma’s hand to try to draw her away from the dead thing when the Gujjar grabbed her roughly by the shoulder. He ordered me to empty the tank and then stand guard over the remains as it appeared that I was the only one he could rely on. Bisma would be taken care of, I needn’t worry. 

I don’t usually worry about Bisma. The child always finds her way back to me. Also, she could bite and scream like the best of them. So I let him take her away. As Umer followed his uncle out past the black cloth, he advised me to wait until things were quieter. “It won’t be long,” he said, “This city turns in early. I’ll send along some dinner in a bit.” 

I didn’t want to look at the limp thing floating in water that seemed to turn murkier by the minute, so I sat down on the grass with my back to it. It didn’t frighten me anymore, and I was sorry that I’d ever gotten out of the truck on that road among the spiderwebbed fruit trees. I must have dozed off as I sat and waited for things to settle down because it seemed as if no time had passed when the filament bulbs lighting our little corner were turned off. The park had become silent, and I noticed that Bisma was curled up next to me, clutching a Styrofoam box of food. I noticed a new intensity to the fishy smell that had so far been coming from the tank. It was high time that I emptied it. As I stood up, I saw that our headless man had already prised off the cover and was peering at the floating body. He was holding the torch of a cheap button mobile phone aloft, and in the cone of light, he really did look like a head without a body floating in the air. 

“Umer took Asim away in a taxi, but I don’t think he was breathing anymore,” he whispered when I was close enough to hear. He squatted down and illuminated a small cardboard box at his feet. It was full of money. As I knelt down next to him, I saw that while the top layer of banknotes consisted of dirty 10s and 20s, the bottom was mostly 1000s. “I’ve been headless a long time. I know all of the Gujjar’s hiding places.” 

# 

I would have left immediately, but Suleman had a score to settle that went beyond money. I cannot describe the smell as we lifted the poor, graying corpse out of the water, how we tried to arrange the stiff limbs in the smallest possible bundle. Thankfully, we only had to climb over a small mud wall to leave the park, him with his jalpari and me with the girl who was not my granddaughter. We buried the mermaid at the first wooded area that we chanced upon (Islamabad had several), and by the time the muezzins began to call out for the morning prayer, we were at a derelict bus station, smelling of wet rottenness and climbing into a van going anywhere. 

Bashir Gujjar never found us. This still surprises me because he need only have followed his nose. To this day, I still feel as though I have not been able to wash off the smell entirely, and Suleman has vowed never to eat fish ever again. I have acquired a false son to be a false father to my false granddaughter. I used to feel that this was more respectability than I deserved and would have shaken them both off, but it appears that not having to remove his head on a regular basis has sharpened Suleman’s wits, and he fits into our odd little family quite well. The money holds out. There is work for young men and old men and even for girls who like to run around and be noisy, and when we travel south again, it will be warm enough to sleep under the stars.