If you die a young woman with child in this land,
There are things that must be done to keep you from becoming a vengeful spirit – a churail.

1. Bury her face down with care.
2. Remember her with devotional songs.
3. Pray for her.
4. Sprinkle thousands of mustard seeds on her grave so that if she rises, in lieu of returning home, she is preoccupied with counting them.
5. Scatter cotton on the roads of the funeral procession.

If only the people in this village buried me out of love, not fear of what I may become.

Contrary to popular belief,
I do not drain the blood of people who roam Jheel Park after maghrib.
I do not wail at the stars earthquaking above,
howl at the living nor screeching among the dead.
I am almost certain that I am a ghoul translated from lands far.

How many stamps does Folklore have in its passport?

I have heard that they call me La Llorona in the West,

Banshee in the North

and Onryo in the Far East.

I am not beautiful from afar and ghastly up close.
I wandered these streets for three hundred and thirty years
before your children and cattle defecated on them.
The men is this town chew so much paan
they see all kinds of terrible things that do not exist
but never the things that do:

the transactions of love and bodies,
assaults on the back of buses,

Shame: the heirloom for women
Power: the treasure of man

dishonorable daughters buried in backyards.

At midnight,
the hair at the nape of your neck rises only at tales of goblins hiding in the trees,
luring men off the shoulders of dirt roads
but not the monsters that live among you.

Save your goosebumps for the killers, thieves,
the rapists, your oligarchy of shapeshifting politicians,
the monsters in your galli with names that don’t go gendered by allegories.

When the veil of night drapes Karachi, think not of me.
When the dirt roads are bare mute, think not of me.
When the mosque and the mandirs empty at sundown, think not of me.
Think not of me. Think not of me. Think not of me.