Phantasma and the fantastic
Reviewed by Vikrant Parmar

Kabuko the Djinn
by Hamraz Ahsan Fingerprint! Pages 289. Rs 295

when imagination takes flight, the sky is the limit. In the case of author Hamraz Ahsan, it veers towards the occult and enters a world beyond the temporal. Kabuko the Djinn, Ahsan's debut novel, is indeed a fertile flight for the senses.

The novel lays out the story of Kabuko, a djinn that is eager to master occult knowledge as practised by human beings. The author dexterously creates a world of djinns, "djinn killers" and "djinn extractors", while at the same time injecting his own voice into the narrator he creates in Kabuko. His concerns are esoteric and paranormal; sometimes a wee bit beyond comprehension, until an explanation is put forth.

Kabuko, which means a "mighty hunter", belongs to a "clan that speaks like birds". He is "two-hundred years old" and for his grand quest, needs to live like humans. In his bid, Kabuko seeks the help of Lady Kiya, another djinn, who, after intense love-making sessions with him, reveals the big secret — to succeed in his mission, Kabuko had "to be born into the body of a male child of a spiritually high ranking family". The body comes in the shape of Ejaz aka Ajee Shah, son of Subedar Hussain Shah, which Kabuko enters after prolonged waiting inside the womb of his "prospective" mother. Ahsan's felicity with words is stamped as he explains the nooks and crannies of the womb with finesse.

Once the implanting is over, Kabuko more or less decides the course of Ajee Shah's life until the denouement, where a cataclysmic turn of events grinds the djinn and human world into a complex whole. The narrative in between is more or less composed of incidents and anecdotes that create added phantasma in the form of "dervishes", "paris" "chhaledas" ; their insatiable sexual desires, interaction with humans — a total free float for the imagination.

The author has borrowed richly from the folklore of Punjab and true stories about Muslim saints. Themes of Partition are woven in well, which lend the much-needed credence to a world that is way beyond normal. An autobiographical note comes in the form of Ajee Shah working in a weekly newspaper, much like the journalistic background of the author. Powerful lines throughout the narrative — "Religion, no matter how good it is, always binds your free spirit" or "There are only two things in this transitory world; fear and love. Either you live in fear or you live in love" — underline Ahsan's deep understanding of life.

Reality merges with magic, natural with supernatural, terrestrial with transcendental, as Ahsan opens the floodgates of his imagination. "Dreams always create more mysteries and solve less, sometimes none" — one can't help but agree with the author.

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