If you want to convince someone that you’ve locked her up and there’s no escape, is it better to place a bigger padlock on the door instead of a smaller one?
Madina – 1442 al hijra /2021 anno domini
In a van with tinted windows, driven by a man whose face I can’t see, I’m taken far away from the haram shareef where I’ve prayed and visited the tomb of the Prophet for the first time in my life.
When the man slides open the door of the vehicle, I’m told I’m in the middle of a date field, but it isn’t a proper field like the sugarcane field behind my house: Bursts of flared-green in mud- brown against a blue sky of cloudy symbols, where the silence that reigns is blessed by freshness,
youth, naïvety, and has hope—a future.
No.
Where I stand, the land is barren, sandy, desolate; the date trees thorny, cactus-like, with husks protruding eerily, hiding scorpions, blades, snakes, and centipedes that can sting you like a jab of poison, that can rob you of your middle finger.
Every feature of the landscape seems to have been bleached by the sun, sucked of its juices by the heat; mean, vindictive, and yet inert, like the deceptive eyes of an iguana. This is nothing but gloom and depression laid out through a film of varied gray. The silence here is aged: not wise and dignified but pained, strained and morbid; as if recovering from war, the plague, a long disease. Chillies could certainly never grow here.
This is the first time I’m seeing a date tree, or so many date trees in such a vast expanse of land. My husband has brought me on pilgrimage to Makkah and Madina to rid me of evil. But praying at the haram shareef five times a day, circumambulating the Kaaba seven times, drinking water from the well of Zamzam in three breaths isn’t enough, he says. Taufik said more must be done for it to work, and none of what’s about to happen, he cautioned, has ever been mentioned in the books.
The hut I’m led to in the date field is plain, ordinary and rustic, stripped of all forms and manners of perfection. I’m shoved into a dark room, and notice that what separates me from the outside is a padlock that covers half the door: the biggest I’ve ever seen in my life.
Then I realise that I’m not alone: women in black abayas and niqabs invade the emptiness around me. I can feel our shoulders touching, our arms, the rest of our bodies. I no longer feel myself; I’m turned into a shapeless form, merging into this black flow of sameness.
Someone throws a bucket of water on me—I’m told it’s Holy water. I’m in a state of shock; I burst into loud sobs realising that I’m bare, naked, exposed because they can see me, my face, my eyes, my identity; they can see how I am struggling with the evil in me—what I am and what I ought to be—and yet I can’t see them, their expressions, whether they feel anything for me or understand, because their black eyes are veiled with black netting. The loudspeakers in the room sound chants, loud chants in Arabic I can’t recognise. I don’t know what’s going on.
Then I begin to see insects, strange insects, straw-like, cricket-like coming out of nowhere, from underneath the single pink bin placed before me, ready for when I want to throw up. (How could they know that?) The insects travel over me at different speeds, some with their thousand feet, others with slimy bodies, over my neck, my chest, my thighs, my face. I can’t breathe, nor move; I feel hot, restrained, suffocated. No one will hear me even if I cry for help. What’s happening is wrong, so wrong, but how can I explain it—and even if I find the words, who will understand?
I collapse onto the ground. Les mwa trankil – Leave me alone. Fer mwa sorti depi la – Get me out of here.
*
My father always spoke highly of the caretaker at school. I was eight at that time, and I reckoned it was because a caretaker takes care. A caretaker takes-care. Acaretakertakescare.
My father worked long hours, that’s why he was never on time to pick me up from school. The government held him back: he had to stand guard as a policeman when parliament was in session. The school caretaker, who I called Nana because my father said he was like his own father, would look after me for an hour or so. He would chit chat with the hawker who would stand outside the gate to sell sweets to us after school hours (The Headteacher kept telling us not to buy anything from him). Nana would ask him for one or two salangi—sweet and sour dried plums—that I liked so much. The hawker must have been scared of Nana because he did what he was told and didn’t take money.
Sometimes it grew boring to be in the schoolyard for so long, so Nana would hold my hand and walk me to the garden in Plaine Verte. He would make me sit next to him on a bench, and when passers-by would ask if I was his granddaughter, he would smile and nod and say, Yes, she’s like my granddaughter. When they would move away, he would slip his hand into mine and place it under the school bag on his lap.
Sometimes I felt the wetness, sometimes I didn’t. But it always grew big and hard. He would ask if I had my menses, and I would always say no because I didn’t know what he meant. He would breathe heavily in my ear, whispering anecdotes of how girls I knew at school had asked to be touched. He told me that while watching a sexually explicit movie at Cinema Rex, an attractive girl had come up to him, offered to light up his cigarette, and asked him to do certain things to her— I remember that cinema very well, because it was the same one where on Saturdays my father would take me to watch funny movies by Louis de Funés.
I don’t know, I can’t help it, but I keep wondering whether the evil came into me because of all the time I spent with Nana on the bench after school.
*
Go to your kitchen and look for the bottle of olive oil. Pick it up and examine its contents. Do you see any bubbles? Because if you do, please throw the bottle away. And don’t unscrew the top, just don’t open it.
They say the mannat performed in Madina didn’t work. My husband and I have moved into the house of my in-laws in Port Louis. They say it’s better for me to be with them because they pray regularly, and are therefore more protected from evil than I am in my house all by myself where I would most likely skip my prayers. And evil is drawn to women who don’t have the protection of men.
I’m taken to see the imam in the masjid of Vallée des Prêtres, and he says the only way out is to send me for counseling. But my husband says that counseling-and-all-that is a western method and won’t solve the problem. Instead, he remembers his school friend Dr. R— who specialises in endocrinology and studied medicine in an English university.
When we go and see Dr. R— and tell him about how I’ve been misbehaving and about the evil in me, he confirms that what’s happening is beyond the reach of western medicine. There is no other solution but to try something different. My husband is satisfied with the answer, and seems to know what he means. Here is a Muslim brother who understands, he says, as we drive back to the house.
Taufik and a few other imams are to come in the evening between Assr and Maghrib to do a round of ruqyah which they tell me means incantations. I have been forbidden to mention Taufik’s name to my friends and relatives because he is wanted by the police for a murder he swears he didn’t commit. I have been told that when the arrest warrant was issued, he escaped to Madina and won a scholarship there to study Islam. Now he’s back but illegally, and no one knows that.
Taufik brings a senior imam, a maulana, with him to perform the ritual. My head is sprayed with Holy water, and the five men who are seated on the carpet next to me are reciting Arabic verses that I don’t recognise. I’m told that my feet are the point of exit where the evil in me will come out. That’s why the maulana taps my feet with a broom. Nothing happens. Then he comes to me and squeezes my neck until I can’t breathe, all the while reassuring my husband and my in-laws that the only way to communicate with the jinn is to deprive me of oxygen. My voice turns grave and scruffy, and when I cry out to them to leave me alone, I start sounding like a man. The maulana looks up at everyone with his hand still clasping my neck, and tells them that the jinn is manifesting itself. He asks the evil in me to speak, and it says it got inside my body through the food I ate at Sarawasti’s house: kari pwason ek brinzel. It says it used to live happily in a dark cave with its wife until the day it was sucked out of it and aspirated into my body, and has been trapped ever since. Then I hear myself laughing, shouting, making predictions, telling everyone the icebergs will melt, the world will be swallowed up by water, fire, earthquakes, people will do wrong, the Mahdi will appear, that Qayamat is near. The maulana turns to the others and says I’m speaking Malgache, the dialect of Madagascar. It’s true—I’m also pronouncing words I’ve never heard myself utter. Many jinns come from there, he continues. Then he speaks to the jinn in me, and commands it to turn over a new leaf by reading the Shahadah and converting to Islam. He tries to woo it further by saying that if it converts, food will be plentiful as Muslims do sacrifices regularly, so that there will always be enough animal carcasses to feed on. (Apparently jinns live on bones).
Then the maulana puts his palm on my shaved head (I was asked to shave it before the ritual), and digs into it with his nails. His hand moves all around my scalp while I cry out in pain—I’m sure it must be bleeding by now. The maulana keeps saying he caught the jinn, that it got away, and moves around my scalp pinching it again and again.
Finally, he says that he managed to catch it. He holds something invisible between his thumb and forefinger, and Taufik hands him a bottle of olive oil. He unscrews it and the maulana deposits the invisible thing inside. Quickly, he closes the cap.
See, I caught him, Alhamdulillah, he tells my husband, Do you see the bubble inside? My husband peers into the bottle and says, Alhamdulillah, yes, I see it, maulana, I see it. And everyone cries out in chorus: Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah.
*
Long before I was born, the newspaper reported that a 24 year-old was traipsing somewhere in Port Louis when men accosted him, beat him up, and one of them held his hand on the ground and said: Tell me, which finger? Which finger did you use when you did it? When there was no reply, he produced a blade and sliced off the man’s middle finger.
One day, there was a wedding in the family, and only the Misters and Misses were invited. My parents weren’t close to their relatives, so my father had the idea of leaving me with Nana.
I remember that day clearly. How couldn’t I? It was a Sunday, and my father dropped me off at Nana’s house. I had never been there before. There was a big courtyard and many small houses painted in different colors: bright red, bright green, bright blue, bright pink, bright orange. No one seemed to be around. I remember examining the potted plants that decorated the exteriors of the houses, especially the one next to Nana’s. Nana reassured my father that there was nothing to worry about, and that he would drop me back on time. When my father left, Nana let me play with an old Shape Sorting Box—most of the pieces, I remember, were missing.
After a while Nana drew the curtains of all the windows, turned the key in the main door, and came and sat next to me. He asked me whether I had my menses, and as usual I said no. Then he lifted me up and took me to the dining table, made me stand on top of it and took off my panties. Turn by turn, he dug each finger of his right hand into me, including the middle one, especially the middle one, the one that was merely a stub.
Stub, Finger, Finger, Finger, Thumb. Stub, Finger, Finger, Finger, Thumb.
I remember that his eyes were closed, and I remember the facial hair that had grown haphazardly around his lips and chin. In some places, the little hairs were white and still stuck to his skin; in others, especially on his chin, they were much longer, irregular in shape, size and thickness; some white, some gray, some black. Frizzy hairs that I would always remember whenever I would watch the TV commercial:
Wella Wellastrate, Hair Straightening Cream (Intense)
In the last frame of the commercial, the white cap of the long tube of Wella Wellastrate would catch a frizzy hair and twirl it round and round, until it would gradually become straight.
Stub, Finger, Finger, Finger, Thumb.
*
When I turned eighteen, my mother wanted to teach me about marriage. She said that the imam-said: A man must take care of a woman, that’s why there’s marriage. A husband must take care of his wife. It made me realise that a husband is his wife’s caretaker. A caretaker takes-care. Acaretakertakescare. A husband takes care.
That’s why I decided to fall in love with a man. And when we did it, I told him about my fear that I would never be able to get married again, because no one would accept a girl who was no longer a virgin. It seems that that was why he decided to marry me. (At least, that’s what he said afterward.) Everything went on as planned. On the night of our wedding however, I turned him down when he approached me because I could not stand the beard he had grown. He said he had wanted to hide the bout of acne that had recently erupted on his face. When he asked why I didn’t like his beard, I wasn’t sure what to say, and replied, It’s ugly… It reminds me of… (and I thought of something disgusting so he would understand) of pubic hair.
The following day, my husband shaved his beard. When we finally did it, there was no amputated-middle-finger, and there was no need for chickens pecking on ivory and purple coloured chillies. But there was a lot of disappointment.
*
Three chickens in a courtyard. Pecking ivory chillies, purple chillies, chillies I’ve never seen before. Chillies it seems, you see only once in your life.
In the house with Nana, as I said, I was standing on the dining table and my panties had been taken off.
Stub, Finger, Finger, Finger, Thumb.
Then Nana lifted me again, and took me into a bedroom. He placed me in his bed and rolled my dress up to my chest.
Stub, Finger, Finger, Finger, Thumb.
With a reassuring smile, he undid his belt, pulled out his trousers and his underwear, and lay down next to me.
That’s when there was a knock on the door. Nana asked me to pull up my panties while he quickly slipped on his underwear and trousers. It was the khala from next door. She was complaining that Nana’s chickens were eating the chillies from the pots in front of her house. Frantically, she kept saying that they were chillies that were rarely found at the market, and took a long time to grow. I remember them clearly. They were the ivory and purple coloured chillies I had seen in the plant pots before I entered Nana’s house.
Then the khala saw me and asked Nana whose daughter I was and what I was doing there. Nana gave all the right answers, and once he got all his chickens into their cages, he came back inside. It’s time to leave, he said, and walked me back to my house.
A few days later I told my mother what Nana had said that day: something about a white cream that could come out if he was happy. My mother must have spoken to my father about it because I didn’t see Nana again. My parents never asked what happened, and anyway I didn’t mind it because when I look back now, I realise I wouldn’t have had the words to express myself.
As I said earlier, my father worked as a policeman, but not the ordinary fearless policeman everyone imagines one to be. He was a fearful policeman who didn’t want to get into trouble; a fearful policeman who would do anything to not lose his job. Because one day, many years later, haunted by my past, by those memories with Nana, I lay in bed crying and my father walked into my bedroom and shouted: What can I do? What do you want me to do? Kill him?
That’s why after that, I never let them see me cry. But by keeping the emotions hidden, maybe that’s how I may have attracted the evil in me.
*
Relapse:
noun
ˈrēˌlaps/
A deterioration in someone’s state of health after a temporary improvement.
The ruqyah with the maulana, recommended by Taufik, hasn’t worked. That’s why I’ve had a relapse and I’m meeting Sarawasti again. When we first met, Sarawasti was sixteen and one of my students at school. We were madly in love with each other. One day, she invited me to her house, and her unsuspecting mother prepared a meal for us: kari pwason ek brinzel. It was delicious. Then we took a long walk hand in hand by the beach in Pointe aux Piments, and kissed for the first time. We dated for almost a year, but Sarawasti and I broke up before I got married.
Then, in the third year of my marriage, I got in touch with her, and she has started coming home. One day my husband caught us at it, and of course he was enraged. I told him the truth: that I have always been drawn to women, not men, and that I couldn’t help it. My husband shook his head in disappointment and said that that was just wrong and evil. Then he helped me dig for reasons for my misbehavior and sinful nature, and said he could only think of Nana and what he had done on the bench and in his house as the reason for the evil in me.
My husband also insisted on knowing everything about Saraswasti, so I told him about the meal her mother had lovingly prepared, and the walk on the beach. Later that evening, he told me that Taufik-said that along the beach in Pointe aux Piments, people do all kinds of prayers, and maybe it wasn’t Nana’s fault but my recklessness in stepping on something evil that had attracted it into me.
Recently he took me to a Muslim psychiatrist who listened to us and said I was suffering from Gender Identity Disorder, or Gender Confusion. It seems I was confused about my gender and that’s why I was attracted to women. It made sense at first, but I told her later that I could not help being confused by my gender, so she suggested that I was probably suffering from DID –Dissociative Identity Disorder, or MPD – Multiple Personality Disorder.
Now, Abdullah has manifested himself. Abdullah is that part of me that loves women, only women. It makes so much sense—a split personality, made up of me and Abdullah.
Abdullah also likes to dress in men’s clothes, feels more comfortable wearing boxer shorts, men’s shoes, men’s trousers, men’s shirts. My husband says that Taufik said that Abdullah is the name of the evil jinn in me, and during one of the rituals of exorcism, he identified himself as such.
My husband says that Taufik said this is a case he has never come across before, and that he hasn’t seen so much evil in one person in a long time. There is now talk about another trip to Makkah and Madina, but at a different location than where I underwent the mannat.
My husband knows my secret: that I meet Saraswati, now a junior teacher. Of course, he doesn’t approve of it but so long as we aren’t meeting in a private place where things can happen, he is fine with it. My in-laws say that I have had a relapse because I went back to work, and women shouldn’t work because that can attract the evil.
I just think it makes a lot of sense that I am made of two people who have very different holds on me. I think it makes a lot of sense that I’m torn between being drawn to women, and that sometimes it feels sinful to be this way.
Now that I am reconciling myself to accepting who I am, who I can’t help being; and now that I struggle less with the evil in me, my husband has grown more and more uneasy at home. He has mentioned divorce many times, but his parents have advised against it, because Divorce Should Only Be a Last Resort.
My husband looks agitated. He is doing everything he can to rid me of evil. He also brought another man to see me who is known as Maulana Bahadoor. Taufik said he is well-known and performs rituals of protection after business hours in some of the shops selling cloth in Port Louis. His diagnosis was that the evil came into me not because of Nana, the food I ate at Sarawasti’s house, or the prayers at Pointe aux Piments, but because my great-grandparents had made A Pact with the Devil to enrich themselves and had failed to fulfill their part of the promise. That is why, he said, I am the sacrificial victim.
Maulana Bahadoor suggested that our names—Sarawasti and mine—be written on eggshells, then advised my husband to bury them in the middle of the night in an abandoned grave in the cemetery of Riche Terre.
Even that, it seems, hasn’t worked.
*
My only solace is what I learnt in catechism classes at school (yes, my parents allowed me to attend those, but sometimes my husband suspects that that may be how the evil came into me): Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
I’ve decided I can’t help it. I can’t help being drawn to Sarawasti, to women, to the way in which they are sensitive, emotional, and pay attention to details, unlike most of the men I’ve known all my life. And I understand women’s bodies and women’s emotions better than I understand men’s. That’s it—I can’t help being who I am, even if it’s evil, even if it’s just Abdullah forcing me to be this way.
Never mind then, I will reconcile myself to being evil. Surely God must understand that I can’t
help it; that I tried.
I wish I could take my prayer mat and pray to Him, explain everything and Say Sorry or What I’ve Done, what I’m doing, and to Please Rid Me of the Evil, or if not that, then let me be this way without punishing me because I can’t be otherwise.
I wish I could tell Him how much I’m repulsed by beards that look like pubic hair, and men’s bodies that I find plain and artless.
But I’ve been told it’s pointless: He won’t listen to me, because I’m na-paak – unholy, dirty, since
I am drawn to women. And I’m not allowed to pray if I’m living in such a state of sin.
Well, so be it. Let me embrace evil and burn in Hell, and since I’m here now and have nothing to lose, maybe I should also do all that’s prohibited.
Perhaps I should start by getting a tattoo; I’ve always wanted one.
First published in the 2017 Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology
Sabah Carrim
has authored two novels, Humeirah and Semi-Apes, both set in the Indian-ocean island of Mauritius where she was born. In 2024, her short story, Fading Mehndi won the Afritondo Short Story Prize.
Other short stories have been selected for publication in international competitions, namely the Small Islands Anthology Contest (Plaine Verte), the AfroYoung Adult Short Story Competition (Tara’s Hair), the Not-So-Normal-Narrators Contest (Shortlisted: Size of Rice), the Bristol Short Story Prize (Shortlisted: The Evil in Me), and the Afritondo Short Story Prize (Shortlisted: Dadima’s Key Ring). One of her nonfiction pieces (Dismantling Life) was also a semi-finalist in the Gabriele Rico Challenge for Creative Nonfiction, published in Reed Magazine in 2020. Her poetry can be found in Pepper Coast Lit, Jalada Africa, SetuMag, SpillWords, and The Bangalore Review, among others.
Sabah is currently on the panel of judges for the 2024 African Writers Award in the fiction category where the theme is Rwanda. Her multidisciplinary background in law, creative writing, and international human rights culminated in a PhD in Genocide Studies with a focus on the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge era. Sabah also edits and manages the Arts & Literature column of the scholarly journal, Genocide Studies and Prevention.
In 2020, Sabah was awarded the W. Morgan and Lou Claire Rose Fellowship for an MFA in Creative Writing in the United States where she now lives. After graduating from the program, she was awarded the 2024-2025 Postdoctoral Scholarship in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Martin-Springer Institute in Northern Arizona University. Sabah is also the Lead Organiser of the Genocide Awareness Symposium and Host of the podcast series on Genocide Studies, Not to Forgive, But to Understand, co-hosted with Luis Gonzalez-Aponte.
She is now finalising a short story collection, Rubbing the Oil of the House in the Skin of Strangers, and working on a scholarly monograph, Law, Neuroscience, and Genocide Studies: A New Perspective of Genocide and Perpetrator Motive.
Sabah has previously lived in Malaysia, The Maldives, and Kenya.
