Since my childhood, I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of the supernatural, spirits, ghosts, and Djinns. Here I'm narrating a story that I heard from my friend Aamir (name changed). This happened when he travelled from Mumbai, (dated 20th January 2009) to Unava Village, near Unjha of Mehsana District in the Western Indian State of Gujarat. The purpose of the visit to Unjah was to pay homage to the 14th-century holy shrine of Hazrat Sayyad Ali Mira Datar. This shrine is famous for healing mental illnesses, evil eyes, black magic, demonic possession, and the like.
The background to this journey is also interesting:
Sometimes in July-August 2007, Aamir’s wife, Fiza (name changed), had a dream. She saw a tomb and a renovation of a structure going on around the tomb. When she related this dream to Aamir, he began inquiring about the location of such a shrine. Later, he was told that the said shrine was of Hazrat Sayyad Ali Mira Daataa (Radi Allahu Anhu). Following this, discussions began about visiting the shrine. But Amir’s business engagements prevented the immediate travel plans. All of a sudden, one fine evening in September 2007, Aamir decided to undertake the journey along with his family by road. Having made the preparations, Aamir, his wife Fiza, his mother, and his uncle sat in their newly purchased Maruti Swift VDI the next evening around 5.30 p.m. and started for the said shrine which is around 660 km away by road from Mumbai.
They reached Amdavad (Ahmedabad) by 9 the next morning safe and sound. While proceeding further toward Unjah, they reached a junction where one road led to Unjah and the other to Ajmer (Rajasthan State). At this spot, my friend changed his mind and opted to travel further on to Ajmer, thinking that he would visit Unjah, later while returning from Ajmer. They reached Ajmer safely, but dead tired, around 11 p.m. There they stayed for a week and paid homage at the famous shrine of Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Hasan Chishti (R.A.). However, on their return journey, they did not visit Unjah but returned home straightaway. My friend was full of guilty conscience at not having visited Unjah. His wife, however, used to remind him daily that they must visit Unjah soon and that they should not have come home directly. Meanwhile, my friend lost heavily in the business and had to sell off his car.
In September 2008, Fiza suffered from a deep cut on her hand and the wound had to be sutured. Also, she began keeping unwell. The same month Fiza had the same dream about the Unjah shrine. It was finally decided that they should visit the shrine. In the absence of their car, they decided to use the Western Railways and travel up to the Unjah Station. Unfortunately, no seats were available on the train as the route is very busy as always. Hence they were disheartened. They cried they prayed that somehow they would be able to visit the shrine as early as possible.
All of a sudden things started looking better and Aamir was able to buy a new car. One evening their home was filled with some pleasant rose fragrance at Maghrib (evening prayer time). Fiza persuaded her “Saaheb” (for that’s how she used to address her husband, Aamir) that they should begin the journey to Unjah immediately. At around 11:30 p.m., Aamir and Fiza drove off in their car to finally visit the Dargah at Unjah.
Crossing the Maharashtra State, they entered the Gujarat State of India. They reached the highway near the city of Surat after about four hours. It was four in the morning. Therefore, Aamir and Fiza decided to lodge in a hotel along the highway. They went from one hotel to another but did not find any vacant rooms. They were forced to continue their journey without a break, till they reached Ankleshwar. Here they were fully exhausted and were unable to proceed further.
The reasons for their extreme exhaustion were not just the journey, but what they had gone through in Surat where they had stopped for refuelling at a Petrol Pump or Gas Station. After the attendant had filled the car’s tank, Aamir realised that he had no cash in hand. The security guard who was carrying a gun with him, however, allowed them to go when both husband and wife pleaded with him and showed him the ATM (Any Time Money) Debit Card. He told them that the Automated Teller Machine was around somewhere where they could get the cash. After a search of a good 10 km stretch, they finally found the ATM near the same Petrol Pump itself.
The job done, they proceeded further onwards and came to a bridge. This bridge appears to be very ancient because when vehicles pass over it, it seems to move. This bridge is known to cause traffic jams for hours and keeps shaking even when vehicles are stationary. This bridge is used by all those who want to travel in a forward or backward direction from Surat by road. A truck had crashed right on the bridge and was overturned. After wasting an hour in traffic jams, they finally drove more than 60 km towards Ankleshwar, still searching for a hotel along the highway.
They found a clue to a hotel when suddenly a fox zipped across their path. The hotel was located at a right angle to the end of a secluded road off the highway. Aamir noticed that the road was unpaved, indicating that it had not been used for quite some time. It took half an hour to reach the hotel. At first glance, the hotel appeared very old and in a dilapidated condition. The walls and the name of the hotel were covered with thick green moss. It was a detached one-floor structure. The area was full of thorny bushes, dry trees, and wild weeds. There were no other structures nearby. Stranger still was that no one seemed to live in the entire area. It seemed as if time had forgotten the existence of this hotel. The first thought that came to Aamir's mind was to run away from there. but he and Fiza were completely exhausted and he simply did not have the heart or energy to drive around in search of something comfortable. After all, he reasoned, it was only a matter of a few hours, and once refreshed they could leave the hotel immediately.
Short of alternatives, they decided to check-in. It was 7 a.m. Aamir climbed up the steps to the deserted reception desk which was laden with dust. He noticed an adjoining restaurant with a capacity of about a hundred tables. The restaurant area was in disorder and blanketed with cobwebs, indicating that it had not been used for who knows how many years. The restaurant counter also served as the reception desk for the lodge. Seeing no one around, Aamir pressed the rusted reception bell. With the sound of "Ding," came a whiff of rotten fish stench. The stinking stench was so strong that Aamir's head began to spin, while his watery eyes blurred his vision. It took a while to clear the air when he noticed a bellboy and a receptionist. The receptionist was so thin that it seemed that a skeleton was wearing some ancient clothes. He looked eerie and otherworldly and there was surely something that was not right about him. The receptionist looked unconcerned. It took about fifteen minutes for Aamir to get the man to open his mouth to say "yes" or "no" to his inquiry. After dusting off an old register he looked at it and then said in a hoarse voice, "Room Number 13." He did not ask him for any payment. The young bellboy had already picked up the guests' luggage. The bellboy led Aamir and Fiza to the first floor through a dark,
rickety staircase to the room. They stepped into the corridor which was still dark. Then the bellboy opened up Room No.13, dumped the baggage, and immediately withdrew from the scene. As the room was opened a rotten stench greeted their nostrils. In the flickering bulb light Aamir was disheartened to notice the condition of the room. It was dusty, untidy, and full of cobwebs. The bed had not been made. While he dusted the bed which did not even have a bedsheet, Aamir noticed ugly dried-up dark stains all over the mattress. In one corner of the room, he was alarmed to notice red bloodstains on the wall. Cursing under his breath, Aamir went towards the bathroom to relieve himself. Upon opening the bathroom door, the gaseous rotten egg smell and big fat scurrying rats almost caused him to step back. Being unable to control himself partly out of fear, he urinated against the wall adjacent to the door. The water tap on the basin had no water at all. "O God," he muttered. Still cursing under his breath at the predicaments they had launched themselves into, quietly he came to the bed. He noticed that Fiza had spread their household bedsheets over the mattress and was sleeping soundly. He too lay himself by her side.
Barely five minutes had passed when Aamir heard some loud voices from the adjacent rooms. He wondered whose voices were they! Then Aamir remembered that while stepping on this floor he had managed to see that the other rooms were locked. In other words, it was a blatant lie that all the other rooms were full of guests. Aamir also realized that they were the only people in the hotel. There is a mysterious, but spooky and terrifying, secret hidden in this old hotel that the outside world does not know. This thought sent a shiver down his spine.
Suddenly, Aamir heard his nickname, "Saheb", being called in a strange, long, shrill voice. Now, as said earlier, Fiza tended to address her husband Aamir by this nickname. No one else called him by this name. Aamir thought that Fiza had dozed off so how could she address him like this? At that moment, a terrible fear gripped Aamir, who felt immobile. He and Fiza were lying side by side. Both of them were facing the same direction towards the door. The bed was near the window. Aamir saw a woman, who from her getup was probably of some westerner. She was taller than the average woman. She was standing near Fiza's feet and
staring at her. Weirdly, her eyes were dripping blood. The room echoed with the sounds of “Sahib, Sahib, Sahib” coming from her lips.The ruckus woke up Fiza. Without understanding the situation she yelled at Aamir, “Why are you making so much noise? Why are you shaking the bed so much? Are you not happy with me on this trip?” Then, in the intermittent bulb light, she saw the woman who had been standing near the bed staring at them. Looking at the woman, Fiza shouted, "And this woman, this blowsy, strident devil of a woman how dare she call you Sahib?"
At that moment, Aamir was seized with a terrible fear and he sat still with his fists tightly clenched. Fiza didn't know that Aamir was having premonitions of something unexpected. The whole atmosphere was surcharged with evil dread. Aamir felt that there would be a fierce quarrel between him and Fiza which would go far beyond the domain of rhetorical theory and would culminate in killing each other.
Then suddenly, as if on cue, there was a simultaneous head-splitting echo. The sound of door hinges coming off, the dreadful creaking of wooden doors and floors, the incessant cries of “Sahib, Sahib,” the sound of footsteps running up the stairs, and the noise of banging on doors, were enough to drive anyone mad. Then the icing on the cake, the cracks on the walls and the bloody game, the ghostly lady walking and sitting on the chair, all this was enough to clot the blood in the body and stop the heartbeats of any normal person.
At this moment, someone began to bang on the door very hard. On opening the door, Aamir saw the same bellboy. He had a strange bewildered look about him. The boy asked him if they had pressed the service bell. Before he could say "No", he saw the bellboy changing his physical form.
In front of him was a monstrous being who could change his physical form at will. He looked insidious and evil. His very sharp set of teeth made it evident that he was also a cannibal. They realized that even the slightest delay would make them morsels for the cannibalistic shapeshifter.
In this life-threatening, climactic confrontation, Aamir blurted out as a last resort: "O Hazrat Sayyad Mira Ali Datar, we're on our way to your Shrine. Please for the sake of Allah and his beloved Prophet (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam) help us against this satanic evil. It is said that the invocation of an oppressed person reaches the gates of Heaven! An eerie silence then prevailed briefly in the room. Thereafter, miraculously, gone were the echoes, the bloody lady, all the rattlings, and the deadly shapeshifter. The way for the escape was now clear. It was now or never. Aamir gathered the baggage, opened the latch of the main door, and holding Fiza's hand stepped out of the room in the corridor. There was no sound in the corridor, not even of the birds. Rushing down the stairs, they headed towards the car and without looking back sped off in the direction of the National Highway.
They drove for about 40 kilometers on the highway. When they reached a Dhaba (a roadside eatery), Aamir stopped the car. There he told Fiza everything that he had seen and endured in that short period. Fiza had also experienced scary moments in the hotel. After refreshments, they invoked the name of Hazrat Syed Ali Meera Datar and continuing their journey, reached the Dargah safely.
When my friend Aamir narrated the above incident to me, I repeatedly asked him whether it was true.
Irritated, he replied, "So, was I telling a fairy tale?
While getting up to leave, Aamir further confided, "I haven't told you anything about how two butterflies, fluttering against the car’s windshield despite the speed of the car, had accompanied us to the Shrine's location at Unava."
I could only gape in wonder!
After Aamir had left, I was compelled to reflect on the said incident. Both Aamir and Fiza were significantly tired and just wanted to rest anywhere they could find shelter such as a hotel. Something snapped when a wild fox suddenly appeared across their road. At that moment, Aamir just swerved his car hypnotically to the path that the animal had taken. Seeing a fox run in front of a car can be an unsettling experience. Fox is a cunning animal and seeing it may indicate an unseen obstacle in the path of the observer. In fairness, seeing a fox may be interpreted as a good omen or bad. In Aamir's case, it was definitely catastrophic because it is known that the shapeshifters change into animals, women, or other shapes, depending on the geographical locations, and they deceive travellers by confusing them to such an extent that they lose their sense of direction and head toward destruction. This is how they reached the hotel which was lost to the present time and because of discontinuity in the progress of time was stuck in the time warp of at least 150 years. Lastly, the oozing of blood from the ghost's eyes signified that the "weeping" woman was inhuman or demonic.
It was indeed the miraculous power that had delivered Amir and Fiza from a certain death!
NASIR ALI.
