The Jinn in the Well
In Lahore, they say a jinn lives
at the bottom of the well,
muttering in clipped English,
counting the names left off the census.
My grandmother poured lentils down there,
red ones, split like memories,
to keep it fed.
She said it remembers
what we are told to forget.
In Manchester, the tap water speaks Urdu
at 3:17 a.m.,
but only to the ones
who never learned to read their father's hands.
It asks about the train.
The one from Amritsar.
The one no one survived.
We live now in houses that cough
in imperial units.
Square feet of exile.
Gallons of yearning.
They say our curtains smell like coriander,
our mouths of history.
I once bit into a peach
and found the Partition map folded inside,
creased like a grandmother’s prayer scarf,
but redrawn:
Kashmir floating above the Indus,
Lahore swallowed whole
by a British teacup.
At school,
I failed Geography
because I said the border bleeds,
and my teacher said
borders do not bleed,
only people do.
At mosque,
a boy with a London accent
asked me why my God speaks Arabic.
I told him He doesn’t.
But He understands migration.
My uncle buried his green card
next to his mother.
Said he was tired
of being alphabetized
under “Almost.”
Sometimes I wake
with dust in my ears,
and a radio playing Noor Jehan
in a language my children
do not know how to miss.
I asked the jinn in the well
if it remembers my name.
It laughed,
said names are wind.
Only the silence survives.
at the bottom of the well,
muttering in clipped English,
counting the names left off the census.
My grandmother poured lentils down there,
red ones, split like memories,
to keep it fed.
She said it remembers
what we are told to forget.
In Manchester, the tap water speaks Urdu
at 3:17 a.m.,
but only to the ones
who never learned to read their father's hands.
It asks about the train.
The one from Amritsar.
The one no one survived.
We live now in houses that cough
in imperial units.
Square feet of exile.
Gallons of yearning.
They say our curtains smell like coriander,
our mouths of history.
I once bit into a peach
and found the Partition map folded inside,
creased like a grandmother’s prayer scarf,
but redrawn:
Kashmir floating above the Indus,
Lahore swallowed whole
by a British teacup.
At school,
I failed Geography
because I said the border bleeds,
and my teacher said
borders do not bleed,
only people do.
At mosque,
a boy with a London accent
asked me why my God speaks Arabic.
I told him He doesn’t.
But He understands migration.
My uncle buried his green card
next to his mother.
Said he was tired
of being alphabetized
under “Almost.”
Sometimes I wake
with dust in my ears,
and a radio playing Noor Jehan
in a language my children
do not know how to miss.
I asked the jinn in the well
if it remembers my name.
It laughed,
said names are wind.
Only the silence survives.
Spring 2026
Wasima Khan is a Pakistani-Dutch writer, poet, and jurist from The Hague, the Netherlands. She won the 2026 Blue Frog Flash Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in About Place Journal, Fourteen Hills, Santa Fe Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere.
Art: Pamela Hobart Carter
While We Listen, 2025
An any-side-up, ink, pastel, and acrylic on (cheap) paper
While We Listen, 2025
An any-side-up, ink, pastel, and acrylic on (cheap) paper