Sita Under the Crescent Moon

by Annie Ali Khan

  From Mai Mithi’s astana, we visited Khalid’s place, a house built in cement: a rectangular structure in a neighbourhood surrounded by circular clay-built homes with roofs fashioned from thin pieces of wood and straw. Inside the cement house we sat in a room with a glass showcase where Khalid kept a collection of books in Sindhi and Urdu. In a corner in a sill carved into the wall were dishes made of copper and brass, brought over by ancestors of the family from Rajasthan during Partition. Khalid’s mother, a woman in her seventies, carried a bed on her back into the room. I tried to help her. But she was quick and was done setting it down by the time I reached her. Khalid’s wife Neeyati ran to make tea while the mother held her infant grandchild in her lap. An aunt I had earlier seen braiding her hair outside under a straw roof outside a clay home joined us. She said the infant was sick. It was the air from the ceiling fan, she said, the cold draft it sent down was harmful for babies.

  Khalid’s mother said Mai Mithi was where she took infants in her family when they fell ill, including her grandchild, Khalid and Neeyati’s son, named Faqir Muqeem after his grandfather. The baby, placed in the centre of the circle of Mai Mithi was healed by her.

  Khalid’s mother remembered a shrine to Satiyan in Nato, at a little distance from Mithi, where the family lived. The seven sisters were buried in the earth save for a piece of fabric visible above, she said. It was a place which generations of women in her family once frequented. No one had been there in years. But it was a site and a story collectively remembered by the women of the Kumbhar family. The night before, Pathani had narrated the same story.

  ‘The sisters were passing through the forest when they were accosted by men. The women praying to God to be swallowed by the earth became the site of Satiyan,’ she said. ‘I am not sure that is possible. But that is what I heard.’

  Following directions given by the women of the Kumbhar family, the silver Hilux took me to the wilderness, where we came upon a thick entanglement of jaar, giving green life to the landscape from Sindh to Balochistan.

  The jaar was located in between a children’s graveyard and a dried basin, like a dust bowl. ‘The basin is a lake,’ said Khalid. ‘It is dry now. But the lake fills up once a year during the months of July and August, the season of monsoon when it rains in Tharparkar.’

  The jaar was surrounded by three-foot-high clumps of thorn bushes. The barbs, Khalid said, were placed there, to keep cattle and other animals from attacking the jaar. After a search of half an hour we found a place to enter the shrine marked by a small grave with a clay pot half buried in its cavity. After removing the thorny bushes, I crawled under the thick outgrowth, arriving inside a womb-like centre made of soft sand. In a corner was a set of bricks used to light firewood and all around them were clay pots and bowls, some of them broken for a prayer for water.

  As children, Pathani and Khalid used to go to the shrine of Satiyan with their mother. Homes in the area were set far apart from each other, said Pathani. Khalid remembered the wooded area, dotted by ancient towering trees. At the time the place was a city, said Khalid, before it turned into a village. Pathani remembered the women would either cook sweet rice at home and take it to the shrine or prepare the dish at the site, taking children along.

  A clay pot filled with water was set aside during cooking. Khalid remembered as a child taking a plate from home, joining other children in the community, for a share of the sweet rice. He remembered, after eating the special rice, being asked by the women to pray for rain. Pathani remembered the children praying, ‘O Khuda let the rain come.’

  After the children ate and prayed, the clay pot was carried around by a member of the community before being smashed to the ground, the ritual ceremony for rain. Rain brought water to drink and food from the area surrounding the site, where crops owned by landowners were tilled by travelling peasants. Pathani remembered that this was how a neighbourhood of thirty homes belonging to a ‘Sheedi tribe’ (Arab or African descent) came to settle in the area. The homes of the peasants were set up next to the shrine. The men going into the fields for work walked past the jaar of the Satiyan where the women came to pray.

  ‘Within a short span of time, men of the neighbourhood began to die,’ said Pathani. ‘After three deaths, one followed by the other, the men feared they had angered the Seven Sisters. It is not logical. But it is what was believed,’ she said. ‘Because soon after, the entire cluster moved away.’

  Before heading out from Satiyan, we remembered to replace the thorny bushes protecting the jaar from invaders.

  On our way back from the Satiyan, we stopped at a yogi village. The families of serpent charmers who lived there were planning to migrate soon. They had their belongings tied up in a large bundle covered with sheets in the middle of an area surrounded by a low fence. The belongings were going to stay, left behind, while they migrate in search of labour in other areas of Tharparkar. In the centre of makeshift dwellings built from clay and straw was a saffron painted cement house about a foot high with a portrait of a devi. An older yogi said she was Sunghia Devi, a Brahmin woman worshipped by the families. The women said the idol had sprouted from the ground, and that the shrine had been built around it. The men disagreed, saying the shine was a place chosen simply for its central location, a portrait placed inside.

  A second shrine at the village was dedicated to a blue-bodied Rama Pir, a black cobra coiled around his neck in a garlanded portrait. A yogi, a faqir with a bangle from Laal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine in Sehwan Sharif around his wrist, said, ‘Humans are one and the same. But the path of Hindus and Muslims differ from each other.’

  Sonari, a yogan with intense eyes and a necklace of Satiyan carved in silver around her neck, said, the women made prayers to the devi ‘for children, for income and for marriage for young women’. The women also took infants to the Sati when they caught jhund, a local term for an illness that left the child weakened. ‘The forehead of the sick baby is placed on the floor of the shrine. That is our custom.’

  The women created clay pots and placed them inside the shrine, for protection from and collection of the poison of the cobra, said Sonari.

  The cobra, a means of livelihood, was also worshipped as a deity—naag rishi. The cobra was fed meat and milk. Khalid said the naag was revered in Tharparkar. Gorakhnath, a spiritual mendicant, a man in search of truth, was said to have witnessed the creation of the Haakro River, in the wake of a serpent’s path. The river had long ago dried up, but the markings were still visible in faint traces in the shifting sands of Tharparkar. When a woman was unable to conceive, a cobra inside a woven basket was placed under the bed where she slept. The woman was given a bath on the bed with the cobra down below. After the bath, the woman would become pregnant with child.

  As we were leaving, a yogi brought out a serpent. The slender cobra, a young serpent, tried to slither away, the yogi keeping a firm grasp on its tail. ‘The naag is shivering from cold. He likes to stay in hot sand,’ he said.

  The following day, we travelled to Umerkot, to one of the biggest Shiva temples in Sindh, with a shrine nearby dedicated to Satiyan.

  ‘This is the only naturally formed Shiv lingam in the entire world,’ said Goswamy Gyanpuri, the temple’s priest. Gyanpuri’s family had been serving at the temple of Shiv for the past seven generations. I sat with him inside a simple room, while a few other men sat nearby, silently. The inner sanctum of Shiv was via a steep set of stairs atop a hill. Inside a square room with a conical dome, the lingam was placed at the centre of a decorative metal enclosure. Next to the inner sanctum was a room with Durga seated on a lion.

  The murti of Durga, Gyanpuri explained, used to be downstairs, near his personal prayer quarters. ‘We are swami. We like to pray to Shera Waali—the Lioness One.’

  The idol was given its place next to Shiv’s sanctum a few years ago, after devotees visiting the temple for the annual festival requested access to pray to Durga Mata: the goddess of all that is good against evil. She was given a place
on top of the hill alongside Shiv. ‘We pray to Shiv and we pay respect to Shakti,’ he said, referring to Durga.

  The shrine for Satiyan was nearby. The Seven Sisters belonged to the chaaran. Gyanpuri pointed to a man seated nearby, with an intense face and a handlebar mustache. ‘This man here is a Chaaran,’ he said. ‘They are called Chaaran because his face has power, shakti. A Chaaran speaks absolute truth.’

  The area where the Chaaran settled was part of the kingdom of a Soomra King, who asked for the hand in marriage of the seven beautiful women. The father of the women was not happy with the offer, though the king was powerful; the Chaaran were Muslim and the ruler was Hindu. Upon hearing of their father’s woe, the girls sprouted wings and fled the kingdom of the Soomra king.

  The first landing site, said Gyanpuri, was a Barr tree in the city now turned village of Haar. From there, the sisters, tried to cross the Haakro River. They asked a boatman to take them across, but he recognized the women as the king’s bounty and refused. The sisters touched the river and it dried up.

  ‘Satiyan took to the skies and wherever they flew to was a site marked as a shrine,’ said Goswamy. ‘The seven sisters are also called Ayooray, Kaali Doongrian or Aasmaaniyan.’

  The Satiyan site was an orchard filled with fruit trees. Bowls of water were set out in the shaded courtyard where birdseed lay scattered. A large open courtyard, raised above ground, was the centre of the site. The place of worship was a portrait, placed under a tree, a richly coloured illustration depicting Durga on a lion. There were no visitors about when I arrived.

  The caretaker, Neelo, said the women came during the annual festival or on nauchand. Both Hindu and Muslim came to see Satiyan, he said. Women brought fruit and sweets. The Muslim Satiyan, he said, worshipped Shiva.

  Crossing over fields of ripening cotton, we came to the village of Haar, the village with the tree where the Satiyan first landed while fleeing a cruel king. Under the shade of the barr trees, surrounded by a thick entanglement of jaar, a woman named Ijna held an infant girl in her arms, observing a ritual: the fourth of seven days of worship to the Satiyan to give her baby named Meena—meaning moon, the new moon—good health. A caretaker oversaw the ritual ceremony: a small pile of offerings to the Satiyan brought by Ijna included incense, coconut, sindoor. Ijna applied sindoor to the portrait of Satiyan. In a bowl before the mother and child, a handful of rice was burning.

  Meena’s mother, accompanied by her mother-in-law and husband, had travelled from a village called Sufi Faqir in Umerkot, renting a rickshaw that was waiting outside. Meena, almost a year old, was Ijna’s first baby, born immediately after marriage. The baby had been ill for four months. Both husband and wife, members of a Bheel community, were travelling labourers, going from crop to crop to earn a living. ‘She is possessed by Satiyan. We took her to many doctors. But they cannot heal her.’

  Meena’s grandmother took a Satiyan necklace made of silver and tied it around the baby’s neck. Ijna took the baby’s hand, and helped it pull on a rope attached to a wooden swing in front of the portrait of satiyan. ‘The swing brings good luck for babies,’ said Bhalu.

  Ijna and her mother-in-law looked to Satiyan, as women of their families before them had sought help of the Seven Sacred Sisters. They had, since childhood, attended the annual celebration of Satiyan where many of the visitors brought goat and sheep for slaughter. A tree behind the shrine was covered in skins. ‘Satiyan do not permit us to sell these skins so we leave them on the branches,’ said Bhalu.

  A lake beside the shrine used to be a landing site of fairies, he said. But the owners of the area had drained the water. There was an ancient well where the sisters used to come to pray. Although no longer in use, the water turned brackish. The well, sacred, had been left untouched. At some point, the Seven Sisters flew from the village.

  ‘The villagers of Maalan jo Goth do not build doors to their homes,’ said Khalid. We were on our way to the village of Hariyar, to visit a shrine dedicated to a Sati named Maalan, where Khalid’s mother’s side of the family lived. ‘Both Hindus and Muslims respect Maalan’s tradition of house building since she flew away that tragic night.’ A road sign pointed to ‘Shri Maalan jo Mandir’ (Temple of Maalan).

  It was dark when we arrived in Hariyar. In the centre of the courtyard was an ancient jaar. The tree, mentioned several times in the Mahabharata, dotted the Sarasvati River, some texts traced as the main tributary of the Haakro River flowing through Tharparkar. The river named after Sarasvati, the goddess of knowledge, music, art and learning, was the river dried by Satiyan when denied a crossing by a boatman serving a cruel King.

  The caretaker of Maalan’s shrine, Hindraj, had served for eighteen generations. He said Maalan belonged to Junagadh, in India. His great great grandfather, a faqir, had brought Maalan’s idol with him when he moved to Hariyar. Khalid’s ancestors used to be server of Maalan. But Khalid had distanced himself from what he called a Hindu goddess. ‘No one in Hariyar can build a home with bricks. They built a mosque in the area and every six months the building collapses.’

  We thanked Hindraj and left. Back home, Pathani Parsa told us the story she heard growing up in Hariyar, where her mother’s side of the family lived, about Maalan. A girl was born in the village of Hariyar, into a family of Thakurs. As per tradition, after a baby was born, the mother was given a special diet of a soft mush created to give her strength and so she would be able to nurse the newborn. The mother-in-law would daily prepare the wheat cereal and bring it to her daughter-in-law and leave the bowl for her, too hot to be eaten just then.

  ‘The baby crawled out of her crib and ate the cereal. The mother thought she must have dreamt it and kept silent, thinking no one would believe her.’ The same thing happened in the evening with the second bowl. On the third day, the mother told the mother-in-law she had gone hungry for the past two days. The mother-in-law said, why are you going hungry when I leave the mush for you. She said the bowls you leave for me are eaten by this girl. The mother-in-law said this was simply not possible. ‘How could a baby of not more than three days crawl out of a crib and help herself to a bowl of mush?’

  The daughter-in-law said, ‘If you don’t believe me then come see for yourself.’ The next time the mother-in-law made a bowl of mush she set it down and sat at a distance from the crib. As soon as the food cooled down, the baby crawled out of the crib and ate the bowl of mush and crawled back into the crib and fell asleep. The mother-in-law gathered all the villagers and said this creature looking like a baby was not a baby at all. She is a witch or some other manner of creation.

  ‘She is not three days old and she is able to crawl out of her crib and help herself to food. God help us, what will happen when this fearful creature grows up.’ The villagers and the women decided the child must not live. The mother was taken out of the clay and straw home and the family belongings were safely removed before the house was set on fire. As soon as they lit the fire, standing far away from the house, the villagers saw the baby fly out of the roof and hover in the sky. ‘I am a disciple of Ghaus Paak,’ Pathani recited. ‘I am leaving.’

  After the incident, Pathani said, the baby girl Maalan was declared a Devi. No one in the village of Hariyar, Hindu or Muslim, builds doors to their homes. The following day, we travelled to Hariyar in the daytime. The homes, clay built, circular, had no doors.

  On the way, we stopped at another shrine in the middle of a field, where an old man, a travelling peasant, one of seven brothers and one sister, took us to see Satiyan. ‘This Sati is from Jaisalmeer,’ he said. His 93-year-old mother sat beside him. ‘She was from India,’ she said. ‘But she was Musalman.’

  A small boy, her grandson, said the maulvis in the neighbourhood paid respects to the Sati. The Sati was a heavy place, said the boy. ‘Heaviness is evident there and so the men don’t go there.’

  The mother said she went there. ‘Satiyan does not bother the women,’ she said. ‘When we go to the area near the shrine to cut cotton crops
, we go and worship the Sati. The Seven Sisters protect us when we work in the fields, far away from home. We pray to the Satiyan. Once a man did not listen and cut down jaar around the Satiyan shrine. He lost life in both legs.’

  The next site of Satiyan we went to was a scatter of bricks. Sajan Bhagat, a member of Daraawar community, lived in a settlement about two kilometers away. He worked in the fields surrounding the shrine. ‘We work here as long as the landowner allows. He can throw us out anytime.’

  He said there had been a dwelling here, but that the landowners had razed it to the ground. There were clay pots lying around, filled with roti and a sweet dish made with ghee for the buried children, and placed near the graves of the dead children, left open. The Sati did not allow adults to be buried at her site, only children, Bhagat maintained. Clay lamps lit on nauchandi were known to fly up into the night sky. A woman from a Kohli community was buried at the site, and the following morning her body was discovered hanging from a tree.

  A man living nearby showed us a wooden plaque of a meghwar devi he said was shakti. Her eyes were made of gold. He had been protecting the plaque for seven generations. ‘She is Shakti, Sati and Kali Mata.’ He took the plaque out every seventh of the moon and bathed the devi in milk before placing the plaque back in the locked metal chest. ‘On nauchandi we bring her out and the entire village offers dua. Both Hindu and Muslim come to pray to the Sati.’