The Dain of Malerkotla
Folk stories from the Dain / Dayan tradition — original tales, analysis, and storytelling history
Story One
The Dain of Malerkotla
In a village outside Malerkotla, in the Malwa region of Punjab, there was a woman named Harpreet Kaur who had been widowed young and lived alone at the edge of the village. She was known for two things: her skill with herbal remedies and the fact that she never aged. Women who had been girls with her were now grandmothers with bent backs and gray hair. Harpreet Kaur looked forty. She was seventy-three.
Nobody said anything directly. In Punjab, you don't accuse a woman of being a Dain unless you are ready for the consequences — because if you're wrong, you've destroyed an innocent woman, and if you're right, you've made an enemy of something that feeds on children.
The trouble began when Baljit Singh's youngest daughter — three years old, healthy, the kind of child who ran more than she walked — started fading. No fever. No cough. Just a gradual dimming, like a lamp running out of oil. The doctors in Malerkotla found nothing. The doctors in Ludhiana found nothing. The child slept eighteen hours a day and cried without sound when she was awake.
Baljit's mother, an old woman who had grown up in a village where these things were still spoken of openly, told him to put mustard seeds on the windowsill of the child's room. He did it to humor her. The next morning, the seeds were scattered — pushed aside, as if something had entered through the window and brushed them away.
The old woman told him to watch who visited the child. To note who brought food, who insisted on sitting close, who came without being asked. Over the next week, one name kept appearing: Harpreet Kaur. She came every evening with warm haldi doodh (turmeric milk) for the child. She sat by the bed. She stroked the child's hair. She stayed until the family asked her to leave.
On the seventh night, Baljit's mother stayed awake. She sat in the dark corner of the room with an iron rod across her lap and recited Japji Sahib under her breath. At two in the morning, she saw it — a shadow at the window, darker than the darkness around it, pressing against the glass without hands.
She struck the window frame with the iron rod. The shadow recoiled. There was a sound — not a scream but a hiss, like air escaping from a punctured tyre. And then nothing.
The next morning, Harpreet Kaur had a burn mark on her right hand that she could not explain. The child began to recover that same day. Within a week, she was running again.
Harpreet Kaur left the village within a month. Nobody asked her to leave. Nobody confronted her. She simply packed her things and moved — to another village, where nobody knew her face, and where the children had not yet started fading.
Story 2
The Night at Tarn Taran
This account was collected from an elderly Sikh farmer named Baba Nihal Singh, who lived in a village twelve kilometers from Tarn Taran Sahib, the city built around the gurdwara founded by Guru Arjan Dev. Baba Nihal Singh was ninety-one years old when he shared this story in 2017, and he spoke with the flat, factual cadence of a man who had long since stopped caring whether anyone believed him. He had told the story exactly three times in his life: once to his mother, once to his wife, and once to the researcher who recorded it. He said he would not tell it again.
In 1961, Baba Nihal Singh was twenty-five years old, newly married, and living in his father's house with his wife, Bibi Surjit Kaur. Their first child — a son, Gurpreet — was four months old. The boy was healthy, fat-cheeked, and loud. He slept through the night, which Baba Nihal Singh said was unusual for a baby and which his mother attributed to Waheguru's grace.
In the first week of November, Gurpreet stopped sleeping through the night. He woke at two in the morning, every night, crying without sound — his mouth open, his face contorted, but no noise coming out. Bibi Surjit Kaur would hold him and rock him, and he would calm after twenty or thirty minutes, but the silent crying at two AM continued for nine consecutive nights.
On the tenth night, Baba Nihal Singh's mother — a woman named Bibi Prakash Kaur, who had grown up in a village in the Malwa region and who carried knowledge she rarely discussed — told her son to do three things: place an iron nail under Gurpreet's pillow, scatter mustard seeds on the windowsill of the room where the baby slept, and stay awake after midnight with the door to the room slightly ajar.
Baba Nihal Singh did as his mother said. He sat in the dark corridor outside the baby's room with his back against the wall and his father's kirpan across his lap. The iron nail was under the pillow. The mustard seeds were on the sill. The door was open three inches.
At one-forty in the morning, he heard the mustard seeds moving. Not scattered — moving. Individual seeds clicking against each other, as if someone were picking them up one at a time and placing them in a pile. The clicking was rhythmic, deliberate, and very slow. He counted: one seed every two seconds. There were approximately two hundred seeds on the sill.
Baba Nihal Singh did not move. His mother had told him not to move, not to speak, not to look directly at the window. He sat in the dark and listened to the seeds being counted. At two-ten AM — thirty minutes into the counting — the sound stopped. There was a pause. Then a hiss — the same sound he would later hear in the story of Baljit Singh's family, the sound of air escaping — and the temperature in the corridor dropped so sharply that his breath became visible.
Gurpreet began his silent cry. Baba Nihal Singh wanted to enter the room. His mother had told him not to. He stayed in the corridor, his hand on the kirpan, his teeth clenched. The crying lasted ten minutes. Then it stopped. The temperature returned to normal. In the morning, the mustard seeds on the sill were arranged in a perfect line — not scattered, not piled, but lined up edge to edge across the wooden frame, as if placed by hand.
Bibi Prakash Kaur looked at the seeds and said one sentence: 'She counted them all. That means she is strong.' She then made two additions to the defenses: she doubled the mustard seeds, and she tied an iron bangle — her own, the one she had worn since her wedding — around the window latch. She also began reciting Sukhmani Sahib every night before sunset, completing the full recitation before the household slept.
The silent crying stopped after the third night of the expanded protocol. Gurpreet returned to sleeping through the night. He grew up healthy. But Baba Nihal Singh noticed something he never told his wife: Hari Kaur, the widow who lived in the house directly behind theirs — the house whose rooftop overlooked their baby's window — developed a burn on her right wrist that same week. She said she had touched a hot tawa while cooking. The burn was in the exact shape of a bangle.
Story 3
The Dain of Patiala District
This account comes from multiple sources in a village in Patiala district, Punjab, and was compiled by a journalist in 2009. The names have been changed because the family of the accused woman still lives in the region, and the social consequences of being named a Dain — even decades after the events — persist across generations.
In a village near Rajpura, there lived a woman referred to here as Kulwinder Kaur. She was sixty-eight years old, widowed for twenty years, and known throughout the village for two things: her herbal remedies, which were effective enough that families came from neighboring villages to consult her, and the fact that she looked at least twenty years younger than her age. Her skin was smooth. Her hair was black. Her hands were steady. Women who had been young when Kulwinder was already middle-aged now looked older than she did.
Nobody had ever called her a Dain directly. The word was used in her absence — in whispered conversations at the chai stall, in the quiet exchanges between mothers at the village well, in the loaded silences when her name came up at a gathering. It was one of those village truths that everyone knew and no one said: Kulwinder Kaur was not natural.
The crisis came when Sukhwinder Kaur — a thirty-year-old mother of two, living three houses from Kulwinder — gave birth to her third child. The baby was healthy at delivery. Within a week, the newborn began losing weight. Not the normal weight fluctuation of a newborn adjusting to feeding — a consistent, visible wasting. The baby's skin became papery. Her cry weakened until it was barely audible. The doctors at the Rajpura civil hospital ran tests and found nothing specific — 'failure to thrive,' they wrote, which is a medical term for 'we don't know why this baby is dying.'
Kulwinder Kaur visited Sukhwinder's house every day with herbal preparations for the baby. She held the infant. She fed her drops of a mixture that smelled of turmeric and something else that Sukhwinder could not identify. She was attentive, caring, and insistent — she came even when not invited, arriving precisely at the same time each evening, staying until the baby was asleep.
Sukhwinder's mother-in-law, an elderly woman from a village in Bathinda district, observed Kulwinder's visits for six days. On the seventh day, she performed the mustard-oil test — an old Punjabi diagnostic that involves heating mustard oil in an iron vessel and observing the direction the smoke moves. If the smoke moves toward the window, the threat comes from outside. If the smoke circles the room, the threat is already inside. The smoke circled the room.
The mother-in-law did not confront Kulwinder. She did something more surgical: she changed the locks on Sukhwinder's house, placed iron nails at every window, burned neem in every room, and told Sukhwinder to refuse Kulwinder's next visit. When Kulwinder arrived the following evening, the door was locked. When she knocked, no one answered. When she called from outside, Sukhwinder's mother-in-law recited Japji Sahib loudly enough for Kulwinder to hear through the door.
Kulwinder left. She did not return. The baby began gaining weight within three days. Within two weeks, the child was feeding normally. Within a month, there was no sign that anything had been wrong.
Kulwinder Kaur continued to live in the village for another eleven years, until her death at seventy-nine. She never visited Sukhwinder's house again. She continued her herbal practice. She continued not aging at the rate her contemporaries did. No one ever confronted her. No one ever said the word 'Dain' to her face. But in the years after the incident, no family in the village allowed Kulwinder to hold their children. The prohibition was never stated. It was simply observed — the way a village observes that certain wells have bad water, or that certain paths flood in monsoon. You don't announce it. You just don't go there.
Story 4
The Skin in the Storage Room — A Syana's Account
This account was shared by a retired syana — a village-level folk healer — named Harnam Singh, who practiced in the Moga district of Punjab from 1975 to 2008. Harnam Singh was not comfortable with recording equipment, so the account was transcribed by hand during three separate sessions. He spoke in Punjabi and was careful to distinguish between events he had witnessed personally and events he was reporting from the testimony of others. This is the account he identified as his most significant direct experience.
In 1994, a family from a village near Baghapurana contacted Harnam Singh about their seven-year-old son, who had been losing weight for three months. The boy — called Rajveer here — had been seen by doctors at the government hospital in Moga and at a private clinic in Ludhiana. No diagnosis was reached. The weight loss continued. The boy slept excessively during the day and screamed — not cried, screamed — at night between one and three AM. The screams stopped as suddenly as they started, with no transition. One moment screaming, the next moment silent and asleep.
Harnam Singh visited the family's house. He performed his standard assessment: checked for iron objects near the child's bed (none), checked for mustard seeds at windows (none), checked the neem status at the entrance (absent), and walked through the house looking for what he called 'cold spots' — areas where the temperature felt noticeably different from the surrounding space. He found one. It was near the back wall of the main room, the wall that shared a boundary with the neighboring house.
Harnam Singh asked who lived in the neighboring house. The family told him: an elderly woman named Charno, who had lived alone since her husband died fifteen years ago. She was quiet, kept to herself, and was known for making herbal medicines. The family said she had been kind to Rajveer — bringing him sweets, sitting with him when his parents were in the fields.
Harnam Singh's account of what happened next is delivered without dramatic embellishment. He says he went to the boundary wall between the houses, stood on a stool, and looked over into Charno's courtyard. What he saw in the corner of her courtyard, hanging from a nail on the outer wall of her storage room, was what he described as 'something like a cloth, but not a cloth.' It was translucent, skin-colored, and hung with the limpness of wet fabric. It was approximately the size and shape of a person. It was hanging in full daylight.
Harnam Singh did not confront Charno. He returned to the family and implemented a full defensive protocol: iron nails at every window and door, mustard seeds on every sill, neem branches above every entrance, and continuous Gurbani recitation via a cassette player — specifically Sukhmani Sahib on a loop, playing twenty-four hours a day at low volume. He also placed a ring of salt around Rajveer's bed.
Within four days, Rajveer's night screaming stopped. Within two weeks, he began regaining weight. Within a month, he was eating normally.
Harnam Singh returned to the boundary wall one week after implementing the defenses. The hanging object was gone. Charno herself appeared unchanged — the same quiet, solitary elderly woman. But Harnam Singh noticed that she had developed a persistent limp in her right leg that she had not had before. When he asked her about it, she said she had slipped in her courtyard. She looked at him when she said it with an expression he described as 'the look of someone who knows that you know, and who is deciding what to do about it.'
Harnam Singh left the village that day and did not return to that particular house for follow-up. He said this was the only case in his career where he felt genuinely afraid. Not of the supernatural — of the woman's eyes. 'The spirit you can handle,' he said. 'You know the protocols. But when a human being looks at you and you can see that she is calculating — that is when you understand that the Dain is not the spirit. The Dain is the person. And the person is more dangerous than any spirit I have ever encountered.'
What Do These Stories Mean?
Dain narratives across Punjab share a structural quality that distinguishes them from the ghost stories of the Hindi belt: they are investigative rather than atmospheric. A typical bhoot story builds dread through setting and sensory detail. A Dain story builds tension through evidence — the mustard seeds displaced, the iron bangle burn, the smoke that circles the room, the skin hanging in the courtyard. The narrative structure is closer to detective fiction than horror fiction: there is a victim (usually a child), a mystery (what is causing the illness), an investigation (the syana's assessment or the grandmother's diagnostic), evidence (always physical, always specific), and a resolution (defensive measures that work because the diagnosis was correct). This investigative structure reflects the Dain's nature as a concealed threat: she is not a ghost who appears and frightens. She is a person who hides and feeds. Finding her requires evidence, not courage.
The role of women in Dain narratives is paradoxical and revealing. The Dain is always female. The victim is often a female child or a woman in vulnerable condition (pregnant, postpartum). But the detective — the person who identifies the Dain and knows the countermeasures — is also almost always female: the grandmother, the mother-in-law, the senior woman of the household. The Dain narrative is, in this sense, a story about women fighting women for the safety of children. Men are largely peripheral — they carry out instructions (Baba Nihal Singh sitting in the corridor with his kirpan, doing exactly what his mother told him) but they do not diagnose, identify, or devise countermeasures. The Dain story is a female-to-female combat narrative, conducted through the medium of domestic knowledge.
The physical evidence in Dain narratives — the burn mark on the wrist, the skin in the courtyard, the mustard seeds arranged in a line — serves a narrative function beyond plot development. It makes the Dain real in a way that purely supernatural entities cannot be. You cannot photograph a ghost. But you can photograph a burn, a line of seeds, a translucent object hanging from a nail. The Dain stories insist on materiality because the Dain herself is material — she is a living human being, and her supernatural activity leaves physical traces. This insistence on evidence is what makes the Dain the most socially dangerous entity in Punjabi folklore: the 'evidence' is always interpretable, always ambiguous, and always just convincing enough to justify the accusation.
The resolution of Dain stories is consistently defensive rather than aggressive. The Dain is not killed, exorcised, or destroyed in the typical narrative. She is blocked. The iron stops her. The mustard seeds delay her. The Gurbani repels her. The community does not attack the Dain — it shuts her out. This defensive posture reflects a pragmatic social calculus: accusing a neighbor of being a Dain carries enormous social risk. If you are wrong, you have destroyed a community relationship. If you are right, you have made an enemy of someone with dark powers. The safer strategy — the one the stories consistently model — is to protect your own household without confronting the source. The Dain remains in the village. The children are shielded. The truth is never spoken aloud. The village continues.
How These Stories Are Told
The Dain story in Punjabi oral tradition occupies a space distinct from entertainment. It is not told for pleasure, not performed at festivals, not shared among men at social gatherings. It is transmitted within the domestic sphere — mother to daughter, mother-in-law to daughter-in-law, grandmother to grandchild — during moments of household transition. When a new bride arrives in the household, she is quietly told which women in the village should not be allowed near the children. When a baby is born, the grandmother ties the iron and scatters the mustard seeds and, in the process, teaches the new mother the protocol. The story is not a story at all — it is a training manual for household defense, transmitted through narrative because narrative is the medium of domestic knowledge in Punjabi culture.
The Punjabi Dain story has undergone significant media transformation in the 21st century. The Bollywood film Ek Thi Daayan (2013) brought the skin-shedding, child-targeting Dain to a national audience, but in doing so, it stripped the narrative of its domestic context and converted it into urban horror. The YouTube explosion of Dain testimonials — village elders sharing accounts directly to camera — has created a new genre: the first-person Dain encounter, told with the documentary specificity of lived experience. These videos reach millions of viewers, many of them young urban Punjabis who encounter their own folk tradition not through their grandmothers but through their phones. The testimony format preserves the specificity of the oral tradition — names, locations, details — but removes the domestic intimacy of the original telling. You learn about the Dain, but you do not learn in the way that being taught by your mother teaches: with the iron in your hand and the seeds on the sill.
The Sikh scriptural dimension adds a layer to the Dain tradition that no other Indian witch-entity possesses. The use of Gurbani — specifically Japji Sahib and Sukhmani Sahib — as protective weapons against the Dain creates a narrative framework in which the Dain is not merely a folk-horror figure but a theological one. She represents haumai (ego, self-interest), the fundamental spiritual error in Sikh theology. Defeating her requires not strength or cleverness but devotion — recitation of the divine word. This theological framing means that Dain stories in Sikh-influenced communities carry moral weight beyond the practical: they are stories about the contest between selfishness and community, between individual power and collective spiritual practice. The Dain chose herself. The community chooses Waheguru. The outcome is determined by which choice is stronger.