PukhtunWomen

It was the second time this week that I had to clean out my youngest son’s closet and under his bed. It was the second time that I had to untie a complex net of bells and wool. Exasperated I asked him why he was making such a mess. He solemnly replied, “I need to know if there really are monsters under my bed and in the closet.” It brought back a bunch of memories from my childhood.

So sure was I of the monsters that lurked in every corner that I never realized how much fear I was living under till I left the valley of Swat. I still remember the calm that settled over me on lift off from Peshawar airport.
The night before we left I had personally asked forgiveness of all the Peryan in my grandmother’s house that if I had unknowingly trespassed on their invisible world, or if I had unknowingly harmed them or by mistake taken something that was rightfully theirs that I had done so in all innocence and had never meant to. I had been very careful ever since I had found out about their invisible world. I would not so much as even throw an apple pip without crying out “watch out Peryano Mamagano, bachai”

It was common for kids throwing stones at each other to unanimously warn off the Peryan before they let the stones fly. No one wanted to risk angering them, especially their king. The Peryan are fickle creatures who take offense easily. They would waylay travelers and trick them into choosing one of them.

Peryan make you choose, they will take something dear to you and tell you that you can only have it back if you know which one is yours amongst the thousand identical ones. And if you choose the wrong one not only do they keep your precious thing but also lay a claim to you and you are doomed to stay with them forever. The trick to get away from Peryan is to carry a clove of garlic with you every where and should you suspect that they are about to take away something from you or put you through a test, all you have to do is rub garlic on that which is yours and you will be able to smell your one out.

If by chance you lose something, you will have to cry out to the Peryan, “Peryanoo Mamaganoo, khpal khwali sez wakhli, zamoong nawaley sez rakay” (Uncle Peryan please take back what belongs to you and please return our useless/worthless thing back to us.
So you cannot imagine my relief when I woke up to find that I was still in bed, had I offended any of the Peryan they would have let me know. A small offense would have earned me an upturned bed, but for something major they would have killed me or worse still made me disappear into their invisible world to be forever a slave.

From the Khaperi (good fairies) of Abooha and to whom for unknown reasons my mother’s family is supposedly related, it is the Khaperi blood that makes them so attractive is what I have heard), to the King of the Peri and his court that lived on my great grandmother roof to the balagan that lived in the nearby mountains and would come down to snack on the dead in the graves if they did not find fresh meat and the kafan kakh who stole the shrouds off the dead, there were many dangers that lurked.

The Khaperi would fall in love with beautiful humans and their love would cause them to waste away even though the Khaperi would gift them with the most beautiful and rare things imaginable. They would wear beautiful clothes and would be laden with jewelry and dance in big circles holding hands. Children and teens alike were warned to stay away from abandoned houses or other buildings. One look at them and one would forget self and time until they wasted away to nothingness. Girls had to be extra careful because they were susceptible to getting pregnant and they would die at birth and their child would be whisked off to the kingdom of the KhaPeryan. Ningola and mullah Badar are house hold names in Swat.

Who didn’t know of the doctor that had helped deliver the baby of the king of the Khaperi. He had been woken in the middle of the night by the banging on his door. An old woman standing there had begged him to come and deliver her grandchild, promising a handsome reward. His eyes were covered, but he kept count of his steps and the turns he made and he knew he had been taken to a house slightly above the village that he had never seen before. The house was very lavishly built and decorated. A beautiful woman lay on the bed trying to deliver a breach baby, the doctor helped deliver and was given a big sack and told to close his eyes and never tell a soul of what had happened that night. When he opened his eyes he found himself at home clutching the sack and when he opened it there were all kinds of jewels in it. He went back up the hill in the morning and all that he found was a giant rock. He returned home and was very disturbed and on his wife’s continuous questioning he finally told her and showed her the jewels. That night he died of no apparent reason.
Sunset was a time wrought with danger and my grandmother would have all of us inside a well lit room no matter how hot or cold it was and would let none of us out till the dusk had turned to night and then and only then would we be allowed to go to our separate rooms, It was this time of day when the day transitioned to night that many mischief makers would abound she would patiently answer every time we would ask her why.

The Peryan who had moved into the new house of the contractor next door because he had failed to ask permission before the groundbreaking, eventually caused all the family to get very sick and the wife to die. The family moved away and no one ever knew what happened to them, they were after all cursed by the Peryan, no one was going to risk associating with them and drawing the attention of the Peryan to themselves. Who didn’t have an uncle who had not been waylaid by these vengeful beings? To this day I remember the infernal racket that went on on the roof every night, but we were told to be quite while they set up court.

Every village had a bala, but none was as real as the one of Aboha, I personally had three cousins and a great uncle who it had chased through the fields all the way home. My great uncle had not been so lucky, the bala had hit him on the back and the next morning he was found dead in his bed with a giant bruise on his back. New mothers were very susceptible to the viles of the bala (who had eaten her own young) and she would try taking away the child, the mother would usually be found dead if she had prevented the bala from taking away her young.
As if that were not enough then there was the giant ape who stole girls and once having licked the soles of their feet made them lame and condemned to forever live in the cave he took them to. To the sarikhwara who frequented the neighborhood during the long summer afternoons who had also taken an uncle and had been about to cut off his nose and ears to make stew and the beautiful girl next door who was possessed by a peray who wouldn’t let her old husband come near her.

To the not so smart devs who were strong but could be easily outwitted or they would trick people who were trying to trap them within magic circles to the lataka who would with one bite kill one in seconds and to the rabid dogs all were to be feared.

Then off course there were the shalgwathi that everyone had seen except for me and they were waiting under bridges to pounce on unsuspecting children going to school then there were the giant serpents called ijdihas that always guarded the treasure of seven kingdoms and could at will turn into beautiful damsels who were supposedly always as beautiful as the daughter of the Chinese emperor. The only thing that would give away their true nature was their thirst at night and every night without fail they needed a source of water to bathe in and quench their thirst.

There were the bagowi who would come to the edge of the village and howl when someone was dying in the village, they would be waiting for the dead when they were brought to the grave yard. The graves had to be guarded for a couple of nights because those of the black arts would come and dig them out and tie them to a tree and pour water over them while another would bathe with the water flowing off them, and as if that weren’t enough they would take a live rooster and cover its head with a bag and bury them in the grave of a newly deceased person and cast a spell of unimaginable agony on someone they wished ill. Then there was the Kog an ugly thing that looked like a mule but was not and had a hump on its back and the woman who practiced black arts would summon it when she wanted to cast some powerful magic you could always tell who the woman was because she would have to bake a lot of sweet bread in order to feed the beast when she mounted it otherwise it would eat her, and if you ever saw the kog or its rider you were doomed to die before the day was over.

And you never ever let a slug count your teeth, for that was it, you were certainly a dead child walking.

So you can imagine my relief on leaving a place so wrought with danger. My peace was short lived, for moving to the west exposed me to another kind of fiend the vampire the goblin the leprechaun and of course, the monster under my bed.