Sita Under the Crescent Moon

by Annie Ali Khan

  Johi was pitch black when we had arrived the night before. Bux lived in one of a cluster of inter-connected homes built of mud and straw. The people who specialized in building these homes, Bux said, were called Odh. In Johi, where electricity was as scarce as gas, the mud homes offered cool respite from stifling nights with no breeze and filled with killer mosquitoes.

  Bux lived in a single room with his wife, Afshan, and four children. His wife, he said, was one of the few women in the community working outside the home. He wanted to show me clippings of his journalism work, but he said his wife did not care properly for the newspapers. They could not find the stories.

  Twenty-six-year-old Afshan earned 2000 rupees per month, teaching seventh graders in a private school in Johi. She woke up at 6 a.m. every morning, as did the all the women in the connected houses. Her mother and aunts and nieces all woke up early for breakfast. Afshan kept the top of her braided hair covered in henna that she applied every morning. The brackish water was turning her strands white, she said. The water could not be allowed for cooking neither daal nor chai. The women were unable to wash clothes in the water or to wash their dishes. They scrubbed the dishes all morning with ash and straw. Next to the house was an empty plot where the walls were covered in pies made of cow dung used as fuel for the stoves. Gas supply was intermittent and feeble, said Afshan. Last year, from the month of Moharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, to the month of Ramzan, marked the nine months during which there was no water, no gas and no electricity. ‘We carried buckets of water on our heads from the well to our homes every morning,’ said Afshan.

  Afshan was mother to four children. The fourth, an infant, was a four-month-old boy. In the afternoon, she brought her older children back home with her and picked lice from their hair before she sat down to cook for the day, while her mother cared for the infant. When she was pregnant with the boy, Afshan dreamt of a tree. It was the same dream each night: she walked with a stomach full of water to the tree. She could go no further. ‘I kept seeing the tree in my dream.’ This tree, the jaar tree, was common to Dadu and Johi. It took fifty years to grow to full maturity and had leathery leaves, bore yellow fruit called pilu. Pilu, fed to cattle, was once mentioned in the Mahabharata.

  In 2010, after Katcho land along the Indus river began to flood, the people of Johi saw the approach of a great tide. There was no time, and the water had already begun to enter the city. The people of Johi piled sacks of sand in a ring around the city. The water swirled around the ring, swept like an angry force, sweeping clean everything in its wake as the floods receded. A Jaar tree remained intact, emerged from the angry water wrapped in cobwebs, a ghost.

  Afshan’s dreams persisted. Her womb with child was full of water. Afshan saw herself making her way to the bottom of the steps of Gaji Shah. As she tried to walk up the hill, her family gathered behind her. She heard her husband’s uncle call out to her from behind her. ‘You will fall if you go now. Go after you give birth.’ She had to wait to give birth before she could gain permission from her family to make her visit to Gaji Shah.

  She kept visiting the shrine, in her dream, standing at the threshold of Shah’s steps. Halfway on the incline of Gaji Shah’s shrine, she said, was a stone column. It was a woman who had fallen in love with the saint. Possessed by him, she turned to stone. The stone woman was painted a flaming shade of red.

  The tree, Afshan remembered in her dream, was the only tree in that spot, halfway across the path to Gaji Shah’s shrine. But when she visited the place after giving birth, there were many more trees there. All the trees looked the same.

  She was happy to visit Gaji Shah. ‘The shrine is all built up now,’ said Afshan. ‘When you go there, you will see the entire shrine has been covered in beautiful tiles. Men too go now. Before it was mostly women who visited Shah’s dargah.’

  A stream flowed under the shade of trees at the far edge of the path to Gaji Shah’s shrine, where once women used to bathe. But there was no one there when I visited. At the base of the hill, there was a small area where food items and drinks were sold alongside souvenirs. An elderly woman from Johi had recently married off her son and daughter. The newlyweds were present alongside the woman with their spouses. She had come to offer thanks to the saint. ‘You will find the shrine to be very peaceful when you go up to the summit,’ she said.

  The hill of the shrine rose from the heart of a sprawling graveyard, slowly winding up, covered in tombstones, into a sacrosanct area where Gaji Shah’s grave was enclosed—in a small domed chamber in the centre of the open courtyard. At the foot of the steps leading up to the shrine, I looked up to see a young woman in a black chaadar, her hair flying in the air, looking down at me. Behind her the gates of Gaji Shah had two silver halves that joined into a circular dome. ‘She is in trance,’ said Bux. ‘She is not in her senses and she does not have any memory.’

  There was a room with a wooden mill for grinding wheat. Another room was used for slaughtering goats. A third room was empty, designated for invisible beings, jinnat ki kothi. This room, where the special bread was prepared by burying it under a bed of coal, was off-limits to women. A man with a leather satchel helped douse the women who were possessed. A man in a Sindhi ajrak and mirrored topi hopped on one leg as he played devotional music on the cell phone he held in one hand. Another man, holding a sandal in his mouth, circled the space. ‘He must have made a claim the Shah did not keep for him,’ Bux laughed.

  Left alone for some time, I sat in the courtyard taking notes. The young woman I had seen earlier on the stairs now circled the space, repeating everything she said three times. A woman behind her said the Baba had just whispered in her ear to make this girl stop talking so loudly. Her mother said the girl had begun to lose her mind as soon as she crossed into womanhood. The girl’s aunt, her father’s sister, had been abusive to her as a child, said the mother. ‘I married her to an orphaned boy in our neighbourhood. But she has still not recovered,’ she said. ‘She has a strange way of remembering.’ As a group brought a shroud held high above their heads to lay on the Shah’s grave, the girl broke into a dance. I noticed, for all those hours she was there, the girl’s dupatta did not once stray from her head or fall from her chest.

  There was a rectangular chamber where copies of the chapters of the Quran were piled inside wooden swings. There was no caretaker in sight. A woman stood singing inside the room. She was singing the story about a woman, Mai Shamul—a disciple of Mian Nasir Muhammad, who was a member of the Kalhoro dynasty, rulers of Sindh throughout the seventeenth century. Mai Shamul was kidnapped and imprisoned by the ruler of Sibi in Balochistan. In her prison cell, she sat singing praises of her Shah Mian Nasir. Nasir Muhammad ordered his other disciples, Gaji Shah and Shah Panjo Sultan, to rescue Shamul. The two, with the might of their armies, fought the ruler to rescue Shamul. The devotional songs Mai sang in prison became the hymns of Sindh. The room for Quranic recitation was the room for Mai Shumal’s hymnals. As afternoon turned to evening, a group of women also joined in singing these hymns. The melancholy notes rising in the calm night air: ‘I pray at your threshold O murshid.’

  At Gaji Pir, the women lead the dhamaal like Mai Taaji did in Karachi. Before the dhamaal began, a metal bell was sounded, followed by the handing out of roth. At the dhamaal, the men surrounded and watched the women. We left for Bux’s place, after the dhamaal ended.

  Early next morning, in a courtyard strewn with tiny flowers that looked like cooked grains of rice, Afshan’s mother washed all the previous night’s dishes. In an adjoining house, the women sat together, stitching a traditional quilt—the ralli.

  Afshan said her family did not believe in Sufis and shrines. But after her dream, her mother and the other women accompanied Afshan on her pilgrimage to Gaji Shah. Soon after the visit to the shrine, Afshan’s mother had a dream wherein she saw the great Shahs of the Kalhoro age come to tell Afshan’s mother that there, in the empty plot where the women stuck pies made of cow dung to the wa
lls, was a corner where the saint wanted to live. The elderly women got together and built a resting area there. They built a simple structure, tying together pieces of wood and covering the top with tinselled chaadar in green and red brought from Gaji Shah’ shrine.

  It was a place the women cared for together, and where they went to pray to the saint.

  Shivistan

  A car ride later, the following morning, Naz and I arrived back in Dadu. From the gas station in the sleepy town, we took a mini-van to Sehwan Sharif. Forty-five minutes later, we spotted the golden-domed shrine. After renting a room for 700 rupees per night, we walked through the busy marketplace on our way to what seemed to my eyes to be the Mecca of the shrines of Sindh—the most popular tourist spot for spirit seekers, as well as those looking for a picturesque backdrop for romance. As a faqir smoking a joint in the courtyard put it, ‘Half the people here are lovers of the saint, the other half are here for love.’ Either way, Sehwan was pleasure central.

  It was late afternoon on 4 November 2016, and at every beat of a heart, a drummer or two captured a crowd and at its centre a dhamaal. Naz and I walked into one such crowd. A young woman was beginning to go into raptures, her slender fingers weaving a dream in the air above her as her eyes rolled back. Then something inside of her shook, and she fell to the floor sobbing. ‘Don’t touch the girl,’ her mother called out from the edge of the circle.

  The girl lay there, sobbing and trembling. The mother gave the girl some water and then, together with another woman, carried the girl away to the side of the courtyard. I looked at Naz and in the reflection of her teary eyes I found myself crying. Life was simply impossible.

  The two drummers, Khalid Hussain and Ghulam Qadir, kept playing for the duration of the presence. One of the women in the dhamaal area danced. Though she was not possessed, she performed dhamaal for hours on end. Her murshid made her move, gave her feet rythm, she said. She came to Sehwan every month. She was there for the annual pilgrimage and the the ablution of the inner-sanctum. ‘My husband was born to my mother-in-law after a seven-year prayer to the Laal,’ she said. ‘Since she sat in meditation for him, she taught the child the name of Jhoolay Laal, until it was imprinted on his mind.’ She brought her son to Laal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine for seven years to offer prayers, and this dedication had made the woman a true devotee. The couple wanted to move permanently to a place near Sehwan. But there were no homes for sale.

  I went looking for the sati. The rickshaw wallah Ghulam Sarwar lived in a village behind the hill where the serpent guarded over an oven that once fed thousands of Sufis breaking their fast during the month of Ramzan. Sarwar made a living ferrying visitors to the major sites of pilgrimage at Sehwan, including a visit to an enchanted garden called Laal Bagh and a city that was upside down. At a little distance from the shrine was a site where a serpent lived, turned to stone. ‘I make a simple living,’ he said.

  Sarwar was seated next to the rock covered in a flaming red cloth. The story of the serpent and the feast was this. The serpent was the protector of a pit fire. The saint was in a forty-year-long meditation. It was the annual month of fasting and a great number of Sufis were coming. The saint ordered a quarter- pound of mixed flour to be cooked in the pit fire. This was enough to feed the hundred thousand Sufis. After the feast, the serpent appeared and the saint gave the serpent a piece of bread, and moved his hand over the serpent’s crown, and the serpent became the caretaker of the oven, turning to stone. In this landscape of graveyards was now a snake turned to stone and a miracle of feasting during droughts.

  This serpent, Ghulam Sarwar said, was referenced in the famous qawwali sung by Madam Noor Jehan. The qawwali Ghulam Sarwar played in his rickshaw, as he travelled back and forth, two, three times daily, carrying visitors to this holiest of sites, this Shivistan, become Sehvistan, become Sehwan. ‘Go read Qalandar Nama and you will know history,’ he said.

  Back at the shrine, I was roaming the courtyard, searching for the sati, when a woman called out to me. ‘Sit down here,’ she motioned to the floor before her. ‘Are you from the government?’ She wanted to know. ‘Who do you write for?’ She wanted me to write a report about ‘jadoo wallay’. Men with powers of black magic, she said, who came to the shrine to disrupt the spiritual powers of those with pure light, women like her. I was looking for the sati and I found a seeker on the path of light at Sehwan.

  The men at the shrine, she said, were afraid she was going to expose their deception. She had no support. The police were quick to beat a thief, but her complaints at the police station about these black magicians had gone unheeded. It took her months of meditation to get her power up following her duties as a faqir at Laal Bagh—these men knocked it back down with the force of their impure thoughts. Sometimes they affected her power simply by their presence. No one believed her. The man she pointed to was either laughed off as mad or she was called crazy.

  She was unmarried, she said. As a faqir, she had no relationship with her family. But she did go live with them from time to time. She wanted to go home, but she was unable to earn because her powers as a faqir were diminished by these men. ‘How can I beg when my heart is not in the right place?’ she said. ‘Maybe this is my fate,’ she added.

  I thanked the woman, and after offering my prayers to Laal Shahbaz Qalandar, Naz and I prepared to head back to Hyderabad. As we rode the rickshaw to the bus stop, I noticed the shops where those heavy bottomed clay bowls were sold, like the one a woman in Kalri used to make chutney. I wanted to take a bowl back with me, but I had a long way to go. I made a mental note to get one on my next visit.

  On 31 March 2018, I was back at Sehwan Sharif. My second visit, and the first visit since the bomb blast at Sehwan less than six months before. Walking past the metal detector, I exchanged greetings with the women attending security and made my way to the inner sanctum to say prayers to Qalandar. Back outside, making my way through the mostly empty bazaar, I did not see any clay pots. A shop seller said those clay bowls were not made anymore. One of the men selling dried nuts and fruits, mounds of berries on display, said I would have to place a special order— but I could purchase a similar bowl made in marble. Marble, like the paved tiles of the inner sanctum—once made of clay then wood then marble, a tomb. I hopped on the bus back to Karachi, empty handed.

  As soon as the bus entered the limits of the city of Karachi, a man climbed on the bus on the women’s side, looking around at the passengers. The young bus conductor shouted at him. ‘You can’t just climb on, there are ladies here,’ he said. The man looked around and then left. An elderly man in the seat in front said to the young assistant conductor, ‘You should not have done that.’ That man, he said, was from the State’s clandestine agency, travelling in one of those cars which were used to get rid of people. He called him an ‘agency wallah’, an angel with the power to disappear men. The young bus conductor, with a bangle of faqiri around his wrist, shook his head.

  Back in Karachi, at an old fisherman’s neighbourhood, I found a man selling the heavy bottomed clay bowl. The chutney I made, pounding and rotating the wooden ladle until my arm ached, was soul-stirringly delicious.

  Scorpion Night

  From Sehwan, Naz and I made a stop-over in Hyderabad, before hopping into a mini-van to Thatta. It was night-time when we reached Lal Shah Bhukhari’s shrine, the first stop on the nau chandi (ninth of the moon) pilgrimage, in Makli. The last time I had visited the city on a hill had been with Faqira, while she was on a personal pilgrimage. Makli, the city of over a hundred thousand graves, was grand—beautiful to the last decaying brick of ruin. It had felt like a dream. On an off-day like the one on which we arrived, the place was a pitch-black mound of graves with ancient dead people inside.

  We hailed a rickshaw to the shrine where we had last spent the night, only to find the place empty save for the sole caretaker. Worried, we tried to find a shrine where we could spend the night. The rickshaw wallah, overhearing our conversation, offered to take us home. Hi
s wife and two children would be happy to have us over, he said. I hesitated. But then he said his wife had been having a rough time. The family had recently moved from Peshawar to Karachi and the change in surroundings had been difficult for her. It would cheer her up to have guests. He drove us to his home.

  Inside a simple home with three rooms and a generous courtyard, the wife made us cups of hot tea, eyes still wet with tears. She began to cry again. She had been living with her husband and her two sons in Peshawar, where the husband ran a chai hotel, when the family decided to move to Thatta. She did not remember who made the decision to move. Her family lived in Makli and the idea of being close to her immediate relatives made her happy. But something had gone wrong.

  ‘It was a minor thing and a great quarrel erupted,’ she said, fresh tears streaming down her cheeks. She was unable to continue.

  Her two sons were bright, she said. But they did not pay attention at school. The teacher hit them. She had gone to school to have a word with their teacher; she did not like them hitting her children.

  Her sons sat and listened. Their mother got up and served us curry and about three or four huge rotis and made us eat. She was unhappy because she had sold all the home furniture to move to Makli for her family. Now, there was no one, she said. She was alone.

  Her husband’s father had once lost his eyesight. He had come to Thatta and at the shrine of Sheikh Ashabi he had promised to slaughter a bull. He did not earn much, she said. But he put together the money to purchase the bull and after the slaughter, his eyesight returned. It made her a believer.

  Her sons, listening to our conversation, brought up a jar of clear liquid. It was vinegar, they said, and that white form floating in the liquid was a scorpion. The vinegar mixed with the body and venom of the scorpion was good for treating snake bites. The boys let me examine the scorpion, a pale ghost, floating in acid.