Digging for Djinns

Mr Jai Prakash Sharma – or JP as he is known to everyone – has been lamenting for years that luck has not been on his side. As boss of our Wild Frontiers office in Delhi, he often calls me to bemoan some disaster or other, sometimes relating to business, sometimes regarding more personal issues.

These can range from fairly innocent situations like staff not turning up for work,  getting married and emigrating to Singapore or an issue with booking a crucial hotel; to more serious issues such as the chai wallah going AWOL, the cleaners going on strike, his uncle being struck down with a mental heath condition or the worrying fact that he can’t find a suitable boy for his sister. 

I listen and offer advice where I can but deep down I know this is just India and these are issues typical to everyone trying to make their way in this curious country. Or are they?

Last week JP called again, this time offering a very curious tale. I asked if everything was okay and he told me, in quite a heightened state of excitement, that they were now.

This year as the Hindu festival of Holi landed on a Friday, JP decided to close the office on Thursday evening, give his staff 3 days off and head to his home village of Diwali, in south-eastern Rajasthan. As you can gather by the name, the village of Diwali is considered a holy place as, according to legend, Lord Rama spent the festival of light in the village during his 14 years in exile. As such, JP was expecting to see the villagers dashing about covering each other in coloured powder (as is the custom) and had dressed in tired clothes he didn’t mind ruining. 

He needn't have bothered. The village was indeed in a state of high excitement, but only because JP’s uncle was rushing around, trying to tell anyone who would listen that he had found the djinns’ hiding place.  As a leading Brahman in the village and major land owner, JP took control and asked his uncle to calm down and explain what he meant. All the terrible things that had befallen the village, his uncle explained, from failed crops to child deaths (not to mention JP’s personal annis trobata) had been caused by an angry djinn; a frustrated spirit that had left this world but not been born again. And JP’s uncle knew where he was. ‘We must dig,’ he shouted, ‘over there!’

Like all Indian villages, the people of Diwali are a superstitious lot and if there was a djinn hiding in their midst it was best to find him. As one, the villagers followed JP and his uncle to an area of scrub behind a gujjar household. Looking up to the heavens, the uncle wailed a bit and then declared this was the site… ‘Dig, we must dig here.’ 

And so they dug. And dug, and dug. Soon the villagers were in a hole up to their knees, their waists, their shoulders. Would they really find anything, or was the mad old uncle… well, simply mad? But just as the sun was starting to set, with the villagers shaking their heads and turning to wander home, a young lad shouted, ‘I have found something… look, it’s a skeleton!’

‘Ram Ram!’ shouted those villagers that were left. Along with a Brahman priest, JP jumped into the pit and began to carefully extract the remains. But very quickly JP began to realise this was no ordinary skeleton, of no ordinary man… for there were two sets of bones lying in the pit, one of a human and one of a horse! Hiding out in the tiny village of Diwali, was the burial place of a Rajput warrior and his trusty steed.

So why was this warrior so angry, and hell-bent of causing havoc to the community under which he slept? The Rajputs of Rajasthan – descended from the sun, the moon and the sacrificial fire – are Hindu and to be buried, even with your horse, and not have your ashes laid in the Ganges (or an equivalent river that might at some point reach the Ganges) was the worst thing possible,  for it meant reincarnation could not take place. This poor, long-forgotten warrior – probably killed and buried by the Muslim Moghul invaders of the region back in the 17th century – had been caught between worlds with no chance of rebirth. The only way to ever move on would be to make your presence known. JP knew what had to be done.

Over the next two days, with the festival of Holi almost forgotten, the villagers of Diwali carefully exhumed the bones of the fallen soldier and put them safely in a vessel. And while JP returned to Delhi to take up his post-sorting trips for UK tourists, the Brahman priest of Diwali took a train to the holy city of Varanasi to cremate the bones and send the ashes down the Ganges and the soul of their bearer on into another life.

Of course, it’s too early to know if Diwali will now see all its problems disappear and prosperity return, or indeed if the WF India office will now run forever smoothly. But there are two pieces of news JP is already very happy about. His uncle is no longer considered the madman of the village and JP has also found a suitable boy for his sister.

And as for the Rajput warrior, what baby has just been born?