Papa Kentucky Chicken’s below the wage worker, Al-Mardood, seemed cortisol-inducing human. He was a refugee from Afghanistan working in that suffocated kitchen of a small local Papa Kentucky Chicken in East Harlem.
He possessed the qualities of a frail-looking individual, and had a very pale and evil look with enormous nose, if this were a fairy tale, I’d liken him to be Pinocchio. But that analogy felt off base. He reminded me much more of Pinocchio’s father; the older man who carved something alive out of wood. He even appeared to be the same age as the old man, and had that same tired, serious look about him.
The conflict began on the night before Christmas Eve, when my brother and I had gone to that location for grabbing mozzarella sticks.
Upon entering, I saw dead chicken wings hanging on the kitchen counter, little weird. The African man at the front. was a very good friend of my brother. They both were conversing after placing the order and Mir bhai even had the audacity, in a half-joking, half-serious manner to inquire about the secret recipe of the mozzarella sticks, which to be honest had been bringing us back each week.
This was when I noticed a weird shadow. A small black cat ran by me. I don’t know why it caught my attention. But instinctively, I looked down at my Movado watch, which had stopped working. With seeing that my cardio-chamber jumped out of my chest. Trying hard to hang with those dead wings hooked on the kitchen counter.
So the whole point was that, this year, my astrologer, Mehrban Ali, had told me that if an impulsive Aries’ wrist watch stops working suddenly, it interpreted that something is off, something that victim would have to confront themselves, and now in that case, it was me. He had said it lightly, the way saints say things they don’t expect you to take seriously. Still, he warned that I can be cursed if I don’t act on it. Now that was what had brought blood to my cheeks.
By the way, my family doesn’t believe in superstitions. Actually me neither. I’m a rational youth who loves debates, activism, and moreover I’ve been a biology student, doing my bachelors in Public Health in New York and, a lab tech for a cancer institute. Logic and reason was everywhere in my life.
So I tried to lie to myself calmly that this was all but mere BS. But I’m impulsive Aries as usual. That nature made my inner-Sameer to pop up.
I thought: Even if it’s nonsense, what do I lose by paying attention? Not that I will return home with dead wing leg.
While my brother stayed at the counter, still talking and laughing with his friend.
I took this distracted opportunity and followed the cat.
I followed her to the kitchen, only to encounter a face I hadn’t seen in years.
A man from my childhood. The Kabuliwala who used to walk down my uncle’s street in sleepy town, selling cookies. Al-Mardood Cookies. The man whose name Fozi Baji whispered after I refused to sleep on time. The man people said had poisoned someone.
For a moment, I wondered if my memory was lying to me. Then he looked up. Our eyes met, and whatever doubt I had vanished. He recognized me too.
He asked, almost casually, “Where are you running?”
I didn’t answer. And made a jolty dash out of the restaurant, my heartbeats triple the scale of its usual. My brother followed me, startled, not fully understanding but trusting my panic enough to run with me. We didn’t stop until we were home.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I searched through old Dawn News archives, typing his name again and again. What happened to the Al-Mardood man. What I found felt heavier than the old memory. He had poisoned a child by his cookies.
When authorities searched his home, they found unusual stuffs, evidence that he worshipped Dajjal. A wax statue of it was set on his Kabulli rug.
After the blasphemy case done against him for worshipping Dajjal who was considered an evil figure in Islamic mythology, his life in Pakistan became impossible. He fled. And then sought asylum here.
I just realized that story didn’t end, it simply got relocated. Somehow, impossibly, it intersected with mine again, years later, behind the kitchen of a fast food restaurant in East Harlem.
The next morning, my brother said quietly, after we discussed the whole thing, “I thought you were much more rational.”
That sentence stayed with me longer than the cortisol rush.
It forced me to ask myself why I had listened to my Shia astrologer at all? Why a stopped watch unsettled me so deeply? And then I understood something simple.
If my Shia astrologer’s warning is mythology, and the belief in the Antichrist is mythology too, then the difference isn’t truth but it’s scale.
People have always believed in something. From Aristotle to Jesus Christ, from Buddhists to astrologers. Small beliefs that guide our days. Large beliefs that reshape lives.
Whether it’s meaning hidden in a stopped Movado watch, or Dajjal in a figure made of wax, it all comes from the same human need to explain, to warn, to survive. And I realized then that mythology isn’t distant or ancient.
It lives in memory and unnerving fear. In childhood streets and astrology charts. And sometimes even behind the counter of a fast food restaurant in East Harlem.
Mythology exists everywhere. So do mildly creepy stories.
