The Night My Father Caught the Jinn

A true story about jinns, war, and insomnia when I was 10

The summer of 1982 was a blast! We’d finally moved into our new apartment in Ekbatan complex Phase 1, Block B, Entrance 10, Fourth floor, and out of my grandmother’s house where we’d lived for over a year since we’d returned to Iran from the US. My cousins who lived in my father’s hometown of Shiraz had arrived a month earlier and were spending most of August with us, ostensibly to help us settle in. The three of us were roughly the same ages: 13, 11, and I, 10, and the three of us contained roughly the same desire for mischief though years of experience had taught the two sisters how to get away with it, which was something that I tried to acquire through careful observation that summer.

To keep us busy and out of trouble, we were given the task of unpacking boxes of books and putting them on the bookshelves. The books had belonged to a mentor of my father’s who upon leaving Iran had given them to my dad as amanati. To our delight, these keepsakes contained boxes and boxes of pre-revolutionary issues of Zan-e Ruz, a weekly magazine for the “modern women.” Quickly we abandoned our task and snuck these treasures into my room and under my bed, far away from the knowing eyes of my parents. The magazine was glorious! Each issue cover had what seemed to us a scantily clad woman wearing a come-hither look and inside the issues were an endless number of sensationalist stories about the dangers of love, marriage, and sex. Had any of us actually known what these things were, our intense summer readings would undoubtedly had screwed us over but we didn’t, so it didn’t. All it did was fill up our languid afternoons and make us feel like we were the naughtiest girls in town.

This is how we came upon William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, “Jinngir,” translated in Persian and serialized over numerous issues. I read “The Ex-oar-sist,” from the reprint of the English book cover, first in my head and then out loud. “What does it mean?” my younger cousin asked, her face barely containing the excitement coursing through her wiry body. I looked at the Persian title written in large red scary letters that went across the page from right to left. “It means jinn-catcher, see?” I looked away and pointed to what I hoped were the words and not the black and white photo of a girl mid-scream that had been staring at me for the past 2 minutes.

Let’s read it in the dark, my cousin said. So we ran into my new room, pulled the curtains, making my south-facing bedroom dark enough to both read and be scared in, and then stared at the grainy black and white photo of the young girl’s gaping mouth. Then we took turns to read the serialized novel out loud, issue after issue, while the others listened in absolute silence. My cousins were much better than me in creating dramatic effects and in passages that described the ways in which the demon took control of the girl’s body, spinning her head 360 degrees, they would add an extra layer of fear into their voices. We were so uncharacteristically silent that my mother once suddenly opened the door, thinking she was going to catch us doing some not-allowed thing like throwing peach pits on the heads of the boys walking under my window as we had done earlier that summer, only to find three girls in rapture and, it turned out, in abject fear.

All of this was fine and thrilling even, as long as my cousins were around and we slept in my room together talking, talking, and then talking some more. But summer did come to an end, as was its wont, and my cousins went back home to Shiraz to begin a new school year. I was left alone, not only in a new house with a new school year, but also a new school to navigate and no old friends to navigate it with. A feeling of dread that had been knocking on my door ever since we found those Zan-e Ruz issues finally pushed through with my cousins’ departure and the first day of fifth grade.

School was divided into 2 hour time chunks for some subjects that were deemed essential and one hour time chunks for those that seemed less so. What this meant is that I received the same amount of instruction in my favorite subject—math—as I did in my least favorite—religion. Our humorless religion teacher would drone on and one about our souls, how on the day of resurrection we would be held accountable for EVERY SINGLE BAD DEED we had committed and EVERY SINGLE GOOD DEED we had carried out. They would be weighed, she told us, on a scale and whichever side was heavier would determine whether we’d go to heaven or hell. As she talked, I imagined a scale like that of my grandmother’s green grocer’s, made of metal, rickety, with steel weights of different sizes: tiny ones for grams, a bit larger for quarter and half kilos, larger ones for a kilo or two. I imagined a faceless god (I had yet come around to figuring out how I wanted him to look) would gather with his hands my deeds as our grocer would potatoes and dump them on the scale. Thud! my deeds would go.

One day, the religion teacher dropped an A-bomb in the middle of my brain: The world we live in is made of humans and jinns, she said. I stopped dreaming about my future Nobel prize in Physics and perked up. As the Quran tells us, God created humans and he created jinns. They inhabit the world together. There are jinns in this room right now. Then, I felt she looked right at me and said: One, for example, could be just sitting next to you. I looked at the cramped bench I was sitting on, a bench made for 3 small humans that was currently occupied by 4, and seriously wondered how the jinn was fitting there. Was it sitting on my lap? I quickly brushed my uniform as if it had been covered in crumbs to sweep the jinn off me.

That day when I got home and my mom asked how was school? I mumbled ok and went straight to my room. There underneath my bed were the old copies of the magazine with the Exorcist, the jinn catcher, lying where we had left them. I wanted to grab them and dump them in my parents’ room but the fear of the jinn roaming around me, standing next to me perhaps, waiting for me to grab the boxes so it could then punish me for the thought of banishing it, paralyzed me. I sat in the middle of my room. Too embarrassed to verbalize my fears and too fearful to get rid of its source. By nighttime, the jinns surrounding me had seeped through my entire being. My mouth was dry and had turned into the black hole that had been staring out at me from the magazine’s pages. My tongue felt like it was made of concrete.

I could not sleep. No, I mean, I could not close my eyes. For if jinns were there and they could see me, I needed to show them that I too could see them or at the very least, I was fully conscious of their existence. I could not sleep, for sleep, I was sure, meant death, even more than the occasional bombs that were dropped on our heads from Iraqi airplanes.

At the age of 10, I developed insomnia. I could not read. I could not cry. I could not sleep. I could only lie on my back in the dark, my eyes open, my stuffed animals and barbies in bed with me, waiting for the jinns to come and do whatever it was that they did to people who had become aware of their existence. My sallow face and dulled movement, a remarkable departure from my usual sharp, some would say cutting, demeanor towards my family alerted my parents that something was amiss. They sat me down and probed, asking me what was going on, assuring me that whatever it was, it would be ok, cajoling me to talk to them. Exhausted from not having slept for days and from their love, I broke down and spilled the beans. My mother flew into a rage.

She marched into the principal’s office and told her that the religious teacher was harming her child. That I had not slept because of jinns the teacher had said were everywhere. And how was this in line with revolutionary ideals? How can my kid believe in any of this if she’s too tired to even sit? I stood there, slumped against the wall, my hands crossed in front of me wondering if my mother was going to get hauled away for tattling on the religion teacher.

The next time we had religious studies, my black-clad stern looking jinn exposing teacher told the class that while the Quran tells us that jinns exist and live among us, it doesn’t mean they are actually here and it doesn’t mean they will do us harm. It’s nothing to worry about, she said avoiding looking at my row.

I went home and dutifully reported back to my parents: My parents looked relieved and so as not to disappoint them, I swallowed the rest of the report: I DO NOT BELIEVE HER!

Night returned. Outside my window, ambulance sirens wailed as they picked up from the nearby airport bodies of injured soldiers from the front lines of the war. I counted the sirens as if sheep. Still no sleep came.

I don’t remember how many nights and days this continued but one night, as I lay there dying with my eyes glued to the ceiling, my father’s shadow appeared across my darkened room. I knew it was him and not the jinn for he had turned on the hallway light and was standing in the doorway his tall silhouette outlined by his halo. I raised my head, suddenly able to breath. Hi dad! I waved for good measure. My dad slowly walked up to my bed, sat on the edge, and bent over to kiss my forehead. Do I have fever? I asked, knowing this was how he had taken my temperature all 10 years of my life and all the years to come. No, you seem good, he said gently.

I’m here, he said, because I decided to sit in your room and catch the jinn tonight. You sleep, I’ll sit here! Then he got up, took my chair from behind my desk and sat in the middle of the room. I’ll sit here, you close your eyes, and I’ll keep guard. I thought of putting up a fight, of saying no! That’s not how it works. I’m going to die and there’s nothing you can do about it dad. But instead I nodded. I nodded as a wave of grief salted with relief worked its way from my chest and sat on my throat. I did not want to cry in front of my dad. So I kept nodding. Ok, now close your eyes. I’m here, he said from a foot away. If he said anything else, I don’t remember. I finally closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, sunlight was already banging at my windows. I quickly turned my head towards the room and my dad was there, one leg over another as I had left him. Good morning! I said, for once not petulantly. “Good”…I didn’t let him finish. I did not care. I wanted to know one thing: “Did you catch the jinn?” He smiled and said yes, yes I did. It was quite easy and the jinn meant no harm but said he will not be coming here anymore.

I jumped out of bed and hugged him as tight as I could. I did not believe him. I really did not. Ever since the fifth grade I have accepted, without ever articulating it, that there are limits to my rationality and my self-proclaimed scientific mind. Some of these limits, I embrace and pin to my chest like a medal such as the belief that you can and will jinx things if you don’t knock on wood; that saying words out loud confer upon them the power to change the course of things. That if I, for even a moment, let myself be or say that I am content, a shoe would drop or rather, a shoe would be wagged in front of my face to taunt me and show me how wrong I am.

Some of these limits, like the jinns living in our world, I sweep under the rug and act like they are not there, much like I would sometimes do with the dust bunnies in my grandmother’s house. But I always know that if I raise the corner of the carpet, they will stare back at me. But while I did not believe my dad had caught a jinn (for the jinn would have seen him and fled), I believed in him. I believed if he could, he would have captured the jinn, or, to be honest, would have argued with him and finally persuaded the jinn to leave me alone, for that was, and remains, my father’s style.

As the years rolled by and as the war prolonged and morphed from something that was over there—on maps stretched out on our tv sets—to something that was here, here above our heads, raining fire upon us, I held even tighter to my belief that my dad would catch all the jinns in the world for me, and if he could, he would grab my sleeplessness and make it his own. Because that was what he did to make me safe that night, and safety is all that I have ever wanted.

Happy birthday dad!