Last week, a few dozen women in Karachi suffered a collective moment of horror when they sighted a ‘ghost, a shadow, a non-earthly being’ in the toilet of the factory they worked in. Hysterical and terrified, the women were brought to a hospital in a state of utter shock. Their screams echoed throughout the building and many of them had to be sedated. No amount of consolation by their doctors appeased them or their families. Most of them left the hospital, instead opting to go to a spiritual/faith healer.

This particular story reminded one of how, in Pakistan, superstition practically flows in our veins like blood. Our fathers and uncles recount encounters with cunning chalawaas and wayward roohain while in the great outdoors. Our mothers, grandmothers, aunts and random old ladies we meet at wedding parties or other social gatherings start wielding totems and antidotes to a variety of evil things and beings as soon as we are born. There is the kaala til that is supposed to ward off the evil eye, the kaala dhaaga to keep ill spirits and ailments at bay, the kaala bakra that must be sacrificed to charm the divine into extending His benevolence to our little ones, and the phoonks powered by prayers said sotto voce that ensure the mightiest of djinns are blown away. In short, as soon as we come crying into this world, we seemingly have to battle many a supernatural forces, apart from those pesky ones defined by science. Every choice we make may unwittingly put us on bad footing with the supernatural and we must avoid that at all cost.

Superstition is rooted so deeply within our culture that we often go beyond the boundary defined by faith, reason and common logic when dealing with shadowy beings that may (or may not) be the product of an overactive imagination. Start talking about invisible forces allied with the devil and you will find people trying to do a one up by reciting tales of horror that happened to a cousin of a neighbour of a best friend’s stepmother and so on and so forth. It is a generalised practice that is found in almost every family.

I speak with conviction about this strenuous belief in the naughtiness of the unseen because I grew up with it. From an early age I got to chew on tales so fantastic and so potent with metaphor, so underlined by expressions of sobriety that it was hard not to believe it all. And I’m not even referring to the religious aspect of it all.

My late grandmother, for instance, was the reigning queen of the household and could spin a yarn about ghosts better than Stephen King himself. She was the mother of five unruly sons, each armed with his own special brand of hot-headedness. Her weapon of choice against their supposed waywardness was a flurry of cautionary ghost tales, each more moralistically pressing than the other. She chose to tame them by reminding them what happens to young men who go chasing after alluring young women.

For her, death was a beautiful woman clad in a chiffon sari. To drive the point home, she often used to tell the tale of a svelte young woman with quivering lips and large eyes who was found standing helplessly on the road to Karachi airport in the ’60s. If a man allowed her to board his car, he soon found her missing from the back seat during the drive, where she had previously chosen to sit. After that, the man would contract a high fever; suffer through throes of immense pain, and in the end clock out from the mortal plain for allowing him to be seduced by what was indeed the raging ghost of a jilted woman.

Questions about the exact location of this ghost were diverted with a loud “La houl walla qouatt!”. As it turns out, this particular tale was used by many other grandmothers as well.

From keeping the chastity of her little army of boys intact, my grandmother had another special list of stories for righting the wrongs of her grandchildren. If we didn’t listen to our mothers, she said, a churail would swoop us away to the netherworld, where our eyes would be sewn open, our mouths stuffed shut, and our limbs enchanted into eternal backbreaking work — such as spinning thread for sewing open the eyes of other unruly children.

Her most delightful insights into the behaviours and preferences of the anti-divine were saved just for me. I was told that if I applied perfume and passed underneath a tree at dusk, a djinn would try his luck and make a move on me. Same was the case if I opened my hair and walked around bare-headed at dusk, wore a pair of trousers that didn’t properly cover my ankles, wore sleeveless shirts, told anyone about my menstrual cycle and/or yawned with my mouth open. I always wanted to ask her if the yawning related invasion would be anything like the French kind, but didn’t, for my grandmother came from a generation that had been raised on a diet of desi ghee and manual work, and her backhand was a surefire ticket to momentary blistering oblivion.

It wasn’t just my grandmother who recounted the many ways in which djinns and shaitans could ruin our otherwise placid life. My maternal aunts came home from their travels, each armed with her own little narrative of ghostly encounters — a strange shadow that followed them through dark streets after midnight, a black dog ready to attack them, a sweet-tongued man — clearly possessed by the devil — who asked where they lived. A distant cousin told the tale of children of djinns gnawing at the animals he had hunted in Gilgit Baltistan, leaving behind only their skins and offal.

The list goes on and on. Superstitions still abound in this day and age. Widespread belief in them hasn’t been trumped by the influx of technology. There is something I only recently realised, with much sadness, however, after becoming a mother myself. In each story, the men’s version mostly only include women going after their virtue and exploiting their chivalry, or cunning tricksters trying to outwit them, whereas the women’s versions subtly hint at how to gracefully avoid garnering the attention of anything even remotely skirting around or assuming the male gender.

Whether the factory workers in Karachi encountered something truly from beyond the deathly veil, or it was merely a large deranged man who exposed himself to them — I’ll never know. What I do know is that we live in a world where women are paraded naked to pay for the sins of their men folk, where five years old girls are raped, where the sum of a female’s worth is often only equally proportional to the match she can make. To think that our ankles are grabbed by djinns, our hair mussed by demons, our bodies possessed by evil spirits is perhaps a way for (at least) our mothers and our grandmothers to come to terms with the very real horror of being lesser humans according to the diktats of a staunchly male-oriented society. Or maybe I am reading too much into these silly stories.

But seriously, do not forget that according to 100pc authentic accounts, djinns are always around when you discuss them. So … what’s that behind you?!