Sita Under the Crescent Moon

by Annie Ali Khan

  ‘That was about twenty-two years ago,’ said one of the women. ‘Now my brother prays five times a day. Before, he was unable to offer a prayer.’

  Times had changed since. The women said Sheikhali used to be heavy with spectral beings. ‘People did not drink water here for fear of becoming possessed,’ said one of the women. Back in the day, they said, if someone had possession, they offered donation and left. People who came for meditation stayed by themselves in a room. Children were not allowed at the shrine. But now people visit the place for picnic. They pointed to the group of young men milling about at the edge of the dhamaal area. ‘Look at those boys,’ she said, ‘They are here for ishq.’

  A baba from the shrine joined us. ‘I used to be a faqir at Sehwan before coming here. My guru sent me to Multan to learn. I learned to heal people.’ He came into being a faqir, he said, after an uncle giving him a head massage transferred his possession onto him. The baba was a fisherman at the time. The spirit liked the smell of the sea on him. He went home and that night he walked out and found himself miles away at the shrine of Saint Da’tar.

  ‘At Sehwan, at night, on a festival night, there are more than two hundred thousand people,’ he said. ‘In the morning there is no one other than a handful of custodians. That’s the best way I can explain what is going on here.’

  A custodian of the shrine, Babu, joined us. He lived in a house across from the shrine. He did not know much about the history of Sheikhali, he said. But his family had been serving the saint for seven generations. His entire family had lived and died in Sheikhali’s soil, he said. He pointed to the women, he said they belonged to well-to-do families with comfortable homes. ‘Look, how they are sitting on the floor here. The men in their families never allow them outside. Think about it. Think about what brings them here.’

  There were forces everywhere in the world he said. ‘Daughter, this force is an illness inside everybody. Some people get it from their ancestors. Others get it from a person of power who infects them. No doctor in the world can treat this state of escstacy. This shrine here and the saints are the only ones who can offer cure. This force does not spare a child in the womb. Once it catches a person, there is no escape. There are all sorts of people in the world. True healers and those who are scamming people. But what is true is haal—the ecstatic state of being under the force is truth. It is as stated in the Quran. That does not change.’

  By Maghrib, musicians began to assemble in the courtyard. A perfume wallah walked around with a metal spoon, trailing fragrant smoke, warming the chilly night air. In the walkway to the shrine, a man was passed out on the floor, his heavy breathing audible from a distance. Two women bent over him, sprinkled water on his forehead and traced a line with the water on his face. ‘If the singers pick a poet after my own heart I will get ecstatic,’ a woman in the circle said.

  The echoes of Laal Qalandar reverberated through the clear night air of Thatta. The women in the circle smoked. Platters filled with biryani arrived, circles of people reached into the rice with their bare hands, eating together. The women had brought ghee parathas from home which they shared with the rest of the circle.

  A little distance from Sheikhali’s shrine was a lake where only those with possession were allowed to go. The women hid my shoes so I would not be able to go to the lake.

  I went into the lake to take photographs when I visited a second time, but no one wanted to accompany me. I went alone. My hair standing up straight on my skin as I stood in the middle of the dust bowl.

  Around midnight, I felt something wet slap my arm inside my sleeve. I jumped up shaking my clothes. The women in the circle thought I had a spirit touch me. It was a frog.

  I decided to walk around the dhamaal area, asking questions, looking for stories.

  A woman was with her niece, who had once had a terrible cough. The doctor had diagnosed her with tuberculosis. The girl was unable to walk or sit up. The family had loaded her in a pickup truck and brought her to Sheikhali. The girl’s body went stiff in the car. By the time she arrived at the shrine she seemed to be going into rigor mortis. But when she was set down on the ground, she began to speak and asked for juice and water. ‘Now Mashallah she is a mother of four children,’ the aunt said.

  A girl had anaemia. Her mother took her to the hospital where she was diagnosed with low blood cell count. The girl was so weak she had to be carried to the shrine. ‘The moment she came here she got haal,’ she said. ‘Her face had become so weak. She became youthful again.’

  A woman said her daughter fell ill if she did not bring her to Sheikhali. The daughter’s face became as pale as the mother’s white sheets. Over three months, her skin took on the texture of a serpent. She looked as if she had no blood in her body. She cried when she saw herself in the mirror. ‘What is happening to me?’ The family hired a car and they came here on an off day, when no one else was around. Women in her family, she said, did dhamaal like a serpent.

  Uzma, aged seventeen, said no one believed she went into dhamaal. Her heart was not well. But people said this city girl was dancing. A neighbour recommended she go to the shrine after she became unwell. ‘I was unable to dream and I began to experience rage,’ she said. ‘I had no control over myself.’ Uzma left her studies in seventh grade. She was engaged to be married. She was one of two sisters. The older sibling was married, and it was her turn now. There was no one to earn at home. Her father had had a heart attack and was unable to work. She had been making the pilgrimage to Sheikhali for the past fifteen months. The journey cost her and her mother about 3000 rupees, including bus fare and food and rickshaw fare in Thatta. ‘I come here and feel at peace. I am then able to handle my own life myself.’

  A woman said. ‘Look, these things are true. I light a candle in the evening time every day. I have heard rocks speak. These things happen,’ she said. ‘It is simply a matter of belief.’

  Faqira took me to meet a medium. ‘They do cures and then they take people to the custodian,’ she said. ‘I bring people with me to Sheikhali for counsel with the custodian also.’ We entered a series of connected rooms. The walls were scrawled with desires and prayers mixed with handprints. In a corner on the floor sat a woman. A medium called Annie. She lived in Karachi. But she came to Sheikhali for her work. She did not mind the travel. The city sucks my blood out, she said. I like coming out here where it is peaceful, she said. ‘This is where I sit. People who are looking for consultation know where to come to see me.’

  She advised them to bring material—incense, sheets needed for treatment. There are two types of cases: hidden and psychological, she said. Most women brought domestic problems, having to do with husbands and children. But she said the top reason women came was to consult for young girls who were disobedient.

  Walking through a narrow pathway past the circular courtyard, the grave of saint Sheikhali lay at the centre of a second circular courtyard. The courtyard was covered in ornamental rockery and scattered with graves. In the far corner was an idol carved in natural rock that the caretaker said was a depiction of Ghaus Pak Azam. There was a bowl of milk in front of the idol, a dog had spilled it. Nearby, a man in a haze of hash curled up and fell asleep on the floor. In the opposite corner was an empty room reserved for the jinn. Inside the windowless room, shaded black by soot, a little girl stood touching a mustard oil lamp. Behind her, a man with eyes rolled skyward stood growling. A man in the courtyard told me not to wear black. ‘Jinns hate black colour,’ he said. ‘You cannot go inside the room for jinns in black or red clothes.’

  A woman emerged from the room dressed in a pure white silk hand-embroidered dress. Her ears covered in gold. She had a platter in her hands from which she tossed lentils, sweets, dates, sugar and halwa onto the graves around the courtyard.

  A man standing at a little distance introduced himself as Shama. His real name was Usman. But he was called Shama because he used to work as an electrician lighting people’s homes so the name stuck.

  Anisa
lived in Lyari. There was a gathering at her home every day of the week after 8 pm except Thursday and Monday. The women stayed until 2 am. Anisa was accompanied by a bus full of pilgrims. Every nauchandi, she made the pilgrimage from Jeeja Maan’s shrine in Badin to Sheikhali’s shrine in Thatta. The journey was timed so she left at the sighting of the new moon and arrived in Makli by night of Friday of the new moon.

  The group had first gone to Shah Aqeeq’s shrine to offer prayers, before heading to Sheikhali’s shrine. For Eid, the group was going to head to Jeeja Maan’s shrine in Badin, near the Indian border. She handed me sweets.

  I asked Faqira about Jeeja Maan’s shrine. ‘It is a powerful place,’ she said. ‘We will go.’ The following month, Faqira and I went to Shah Noorani’s shrine.

  Some weeks after, I spoke to her on the phone. We were planning to visit Thatta again for the nauchandi pilgrimage. I never saw her again.

  Zahida informed me over the phone that Faqira had died of a sudden heart attack. Zahida said no one could believe her mother was gone. It had all happened too fast.

  The night of the dhamaal in Thatta, at Sheikhali, I had put my head down on the floor, looking up at a liquid sky in which trees floated as if underwater. A sliver of a moon glimmered above. During the night, Faqira, fallen asleep, had risen from her sleep in dhamaal. Her glasses fell off and her hair came loose as she went into rapture. She had no recollection of it in the morning when we took the bus back to Karachi. I had asked a woman in the circle seated around the nylon blanket where Faqira slept— what would happen if this shrine was not here anymore? ‘That is not possible,’ she said. ‘The earth will still be here. As long as this earth is here people will keep coming. Even if upon arrival they find themselves in wilderness.’

  The women in the circle waved us goodbye.

  3 MOHARRAM

  The rickshaw wallah dropped me off at the edge of Lea Market. He could take me no further, he said. The colonial-era cantonment bazaar had been closed off since the day before, due to Moharram—the beginning of the new year on the Muslim calendar, and the most venerated ten days of the year for all Shi’a Muslims. I walked through narrow openings on roads blocked by massive shipping containers, under the gaze of soldiers in fatigues. It was a cool morning, mid-December, a brief period of respite in the sweltering city of Karachi.

  I was headed to the remote mountainous area of Khuzdar in Balochistan, where temperatures were in the single digits. That morning, as I prepared to leave Karachi, I packed a shawl in my backpack apart from the scarf I was wearing, along with a flashlight. I had a long way to travel. I was searching for a woman burned on a pyre and then worshipped as a goddess on fire, a Sati.

  I arrived at the cul-de-sac where a massive bazaar drew traffic daily in the hundreds, selling vegetables at wholesale prices and a large variety of dates. All around me were small shops selling tobacco oil and smoking pipes called chillum carved with serpent heads. The shops were all shuttered now and the market was closed. The place reeked of rotting produce and there was a whiff of stray dogs in the air. I looked around for the bus depot.

  Across the road from the bazaar was a shrine dedicated to a female saint. I remember how surprised I was, once inside, to have found this place in one of the busiest intersections of one of the biggest cities in the world. The city where I was born. Yet, the place was tucked neatly away, behind a chai hotel, hidden in plain sight.

  Now, I was heading to the shrine of Saint Shah Noorani, better known as the final stop for mendicants and ascetics looking for a place away from lives and faces that were familiar. The remoteness of the shrine, located atop a steep hill, covered in foliage rife with serpents and scorpions, dotted with caves, promised peace and quiet and long stretches of unbroken solitude—in the quest for truth. Hordes of free men with shackles around the ankles, travelled from Laal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine to the east of Karachi, making their way past Laal Bagh, the red garden, where grew enchanted trees, before arriving at Shah Noorani. The pilgrimage was marked by the graves of those who did not make it.

  No one was sure if there was a site dedicated to Satiyan anywhere in or around Shah Noorani’s shrine. Farida, who I had met in Thatta, on the nauchandi pilgrimage, visited Shah Noorani whenever she saved enough to go. She had told me there was a sculpture of a serpent and a village dedicated to a Mai behind the mountain of Noorani. This was a geography known only to women, for women.

  Looking around for the bus to Lea Market, I spotted a group of women in the distance, holding bedsheets and rolls of belongings, standing in a muddy puddle, waiting to board the bus. The coach to Noorani had a corrugated metal frame, the red and white paint puffed up in places like boiled skin on a body covered in a patchwork of welding marks. Through the broken windows I saw the nylon padding of the ceiling hanging down like onion peels.

  I was going to have to ride this ancient skeleton the entire five-hour journey on one of the rockiest terrains to one of the most remote locations in Pakistan. I hesitated for a moment.

  I looked at the women in the group waiting to board the Ladies Section. Some of them were dressed in hand-embroidered dresses. Some of the younger girls were wearing chaadars over jeans and short shirts. I was curious to discover their reasons for making the pilgrimage. Moreover, how had they sought permission to make such a treacherous journey.

  Just then, I spotted a woman in a bright shalwar kamiz. I noticed she had tattooed on her chin three dots aligned in a triangle. I remembered from my years learning math from my grandfather, a civil engineer with a thesis on imaginary numbers, that the three dots in inverted triangle formation was the purest form of a circle. On her way to Shah Noorani’s shrine, before me, was a pilgrim of the moon.

  Soon after, the bus conductor made an appearance. Standing inside the frame of the missing front door, he got busy figuring out the seating arrangement so he could stuff the maximum number of people in. He quickly began to size people up. How many folks are you? How much stuff are you bringing along? How much are you willing to pay for a good seat? Do I know you? As the bus began to roll onto the road, a dog, bleeding freely from the jaw, began to chase after the ride. I managed to step into a puddle reeking of rotting vegetables, trying to scramble on.

  Qurban, the conductor, seated me in the front, on top of the engine casing, next to two other women—the three of us sitting in a semi-circle facing the back of the bus facing us. I looked over to see the woman with the three dots on a single seat right next to me. ‘You cannot sit here,’ she said. Seated at an odd angle to her, my legs were pushed up against her knees. ‘I will put my legs up on your lap if you don’t move,’ she said.

  I told her I was happy to move. But the conductor had seated me there, maybe, it would be best to take the matter up with him.

  Her smile made me realize she was expecting me to put up a fight. The woman seated next to her said, never mind her, she will do no such thing. She gave me sweets and asked me if I was travelling to the shrine for the first time. When I said yes, the women around me all began to smile.

  Up ahead, she said, the terrain was difficult. There were steep hills, the bus was going to have difficulty climbing. ‘When we reach those hills, you have to chant “Noorani Noor Hur Balaa Dour” (Light of Noorani, Defeat every Calamity) with everyone,’ she said. ‘I will be listening for the sound of your voice.’

  A small boy made his way from the back of the bus and came to stand by her knee. He was her son, she said. He was seven years old. She had five daughters and had prayed for a son. When he was born, she left him at home and went to Noorani. ‘For no special reason,’ she said, as the city outside began to roll away. ‘Just that I was happy. I felt free.’

  At the various stops, the intake of more passengers was intermingled with sellers holding clusters of various bright little items. ‘Laddu wallay,’ a young boy with a booming voice called out. An old man was selling balloons at ten for three rupees and clear plastic covers for identity cards for ten rupees. For the same price, he
was also selling handkerchiefs and toothpicks for cleaning ears. A little girl took ten rupees from her father and bought a sweet laddu.

  At the next stop, a thin fellow with a scraggly beard stood facing the passengers. He had a megaphone in his hand. He hesitated a moment, cleared a very phlegmy throat. His adam’s apple moved under a scraggly beard, before he began speaking into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Brothers and sisters. May Allah give you the desire, the means, the will, the heart, the fortitude—to offer your Friday prayers. Say Ameen,’ he paused, waiting for people to say their ameen for their blessed Friday prayers. Nothing. No one spoke.

  He tried again. ‘We pray to Allah to let this bus and its passengers and the driver and the conductor to reach their ultimate destination safely. Every one together say Ameen,’ he said. No one said anything.

  He tried to be a little more direct. ‘Look, today is Friday. I am making an appeal to my brothers and sisters for a mere ten rupees. People spend ten rupees on paan, cigarette. This ten-rupee note can be spent on something that will give rewards ten times the worth of those ten rupees,’ He looked around. ‘Will any of my sisters give me ten rupees.’

  None of his sisters responded.

  Then a little girl took ten rupees from her father and gave it to the young man.

  Hopefully, that young man will remember that little girl’s contribution. Hopefully, he’ll remember he called her a sister, when he builds that mosque inside which his sister will not be allowed to enter. These sisters who were impure. These unclean bodies on a rickety bus on its way to the backwaters of Balochistan, the backwater province of this homeland of the pure, Pak-istan.