Psychoraag

‘The time is wan o'clock. Ah'm Zaf-Zaf-Zaf and Ah'm yer ghost. Host, Ah mean, host. Aye, whitivir. Ye're listenin, this morning, tae The Junnune Show oan Radio Chaandni broadcastin oan 99.9 meters FM.’ On the third floor of a deconsecrated Glasgow church, DJ (‘disc joakie’) Zaf is at the microphone. This is his last broadcast for the Asian community radio station he has been livening up for the past 3 months, and he is already an hour into the graveyard shift, midnight till six.

For once, he is not taking requests. Holed up in his twenty-by-twenty cubicle, ‘safe from gangs and girlfriends’ (so he thinks), he is on air, ad-libbing to his own choice of music. The Beatles, Asian Dub Foundation, The Cosmic Rough Riders, Joi, Les Negresses Vertes, the Sufi-inspired keening of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: all the while, Zaf talks to the insomniacs who might just be listening. Urdu words and phrases tumble through his demotic Glaswegian. Junnune, rhyming implausibly with Dunoon, means madness, possession. Zaf is working himself up into a trance, pleading with his record collection …