by Nafisa Haji
In a scratchy whisper punctuated by an exclamation point, the woman would say, “Salawat!”
On cue, the crowd of women, who by now sometimes numbered in excess of a hundred, would respond, in harmonious chorus, “Allahuma sale ala Muhammad w’ale Muhammad!”
The marsias would begin, the nasal chorus of long-suffering notes usually leading to an exodus, the few children present standing up to leave the room. At the gatherings held in my grandparents’ house, my cousin Jaffer would get up and gesture for me to follow him out. I never did, unhappy at the prospect of leaving my mother’s side. Once, I was brave enough to wander a few inches away from the comfort of her space, to stand at the window and look out at the large garden, where a group of children had collected themselves, following Jaffer as I had refused to do. They were my cousins, my mother whispered to me: first cousins, second cousins, and cousins removed to all numbers of degree. They charged about, playing baraf-paani—ice water or freeze tag—and “red light, green light,” running amok in the way that children do when their elders are otherwise occupied. Behind me, I heard another salawat, signaling the end of one marsia and the beginning of another. And then a multiple chorus of salawats as the zakira took her place on the black-clothed chair set up for her in the corner to begin her sermon.
Abbas reached the banks of the river safely, filling the water bag but refusing to drink himself, not while his brother and the children and women of the camp remained thirsty. Alas, on his way back to camp, the enemy soldiers who had failed to prevent him from reaching the river now surrounded him. Abbas, beloved brother of Husain, was attacked from all sides, his arms chopped off as he strove to keep hold of the water he carried. When the enemy pierced the bag of water, along with the precious water, all hope to save the children gushed and spilled on the sand.
The zakira’s emphatic voice rose and fell with the delivery of each sentence, exhorting her listeners loudly and angrily—about what, I could not yet understand. I watched the children tag each other outside for a long while until, suddenly, the zakira’s volume increased dramatically, her voice, suddenly thicker, issuing forth from a throat heavy with emotion. And then the wailing started. Weeping sounds of misery, always disconcerting, no matter how expected.
They were outnumbered by tens of thousands and slaughtered by Yazid’s army. Imam Husain lost all of his friends and all of the men in his family, seventy-two in all. His nephews, Qasim, Aun, and Muhammad. His son Ali Akbar, who looked just like the Prophet. Not even his infant son, Ali Asghar, was spared. While he had friends and relatives alive, no one would let him go forth and do battle. But in the end, he fought bravely. Alone. And when he took a break from the battle for the afternoon prayer, the commander of Yazid’s army sent Shimr after him. While Imam Husain prostrated himself, his forehead touching the hot sands of Karbala—wounded, hungry and thirsty, broken from the grief he had suffered throughout the day—Shimr mounted his back, ready to kill him. He leaned forward to hear the words of Husain’s prayers—and heard the Imam asking God for the forgiveness of those who would harm him. This made Shimr pause. But in the end, his heart was too hard, his belly too greedy for the riches that he was promised upon completion of his mission. He cut off Imam Husain’s head. And the battle of Karbala was over.
The children outside heard the weeping, too. Their ears seemed to prick up as Jaffer shouted, “The masaib has started! Come on, let’s go!” loudly enough for me to barely hear him. The game was abandoned and I saw that my cousins were excited. They had been waiting for the sounds of bitter grief that were getting louder and my eyes followed them as they ran up the garden steps and back into the house, screeching to a halt at the entrance to the living room. There, they abandoned their air of play to assume a solemn pose. All of the women were still seated, most of them with handkerchiefs clutched in their hands, stemming a steady flow from eyes and noses, or holding them up against their faces, like veils, to cover the sobs that made shoulders heave and hands slap against knees. The zakira’s voice was now a high-pitched kind of keening and her listeners responded to each of her barely intelligible words—words to a story so familiar that clarity was unnecessary—with the rise and fall of their own sobs, a mournful kind of duet.
Just as suddenly as the crying had begun, it was over. The zakira’s voice, raised to a fevered climax, was muffled by the hand that she wiped over her face, murmuring again, “Allahuma sale ala Muhammad w’ale Muhammad.”
And then another ritual began, the one my cousins had come running inside for. As the women stood up, a voice called, “Husain, Husain!”—that beloved name—and a circle formed in the center of the room as another woman opened another tattered notebook and began to sing. Not sing, recite, my mother would later correct me. The others took up the pulse of her melody, beating their chests with open hands in a rhythmic thud that sounded deeper than claps and somehow more powerful. Jaffer waved all the children forward, and I saw them push their way around taller bodies to the center of the circle, where I already stood with my mother. I watched them, my cousins, as they strained to pull collars and necklines aside and lower, to maximize the exposure of the skin on their chests, before joining enthusiastically in the chorus and the accompanying beat. I hesitated, my hand hovering awkwardly, flailing against my chest in a pale imitation of the confident pounding going on all around me.
The stridently mournful song, or noha, was over soon. And in the space of time it took for my mother to step forward, a notebook of her own in hand, the chest-beating continued to the sound of that name again, “Husain, Husain! Ya Husain! Masloom Husain! Shaheed Husain!” A leader called the words out and the others echoed her chants in a practiced rhythm that was familiar to all.
My mother would begin her signature noha in a voice soft and sweet at first, thick with the same emotion I saw reflected on the women’s faces around her, then strengthening as the first verse shifted into the second—tender grief giving way to crescendos of fierce anguish, the beat of hands against chests strengthening in response, matching her cadence. The words of the song were rhythmic and rhyming, a loftier version of the Urdu we spoke daily. But it was her voice that set my mother’s noha apart. None of the many that followed her recitations could match her expression. Now, the chanting in between the nohas grew more furious, more frantic, and more complicated as the morning progressed. After the last, the women at the center of the crowd became frenzied. The younger women and my cousins used two hands now, instead of one, reddening the exposed skin on their chests. The beat of their hands, no longer accompanied by song, hard and loud as that of a drum, could not be mistaken for some variant form of clapping now.
A voice shouted, “Hai, Sakina!,” another beloved name, the name of a child violently bereft of her father, thirsty and hungry and lost in a world indifferent to her suffering.
“Hai, pyas!” the others replied, their voices desperate, grief-stricken, claiming her thirst as their own.
Oh, Sakina, oh thirst, my mother shook her head, wiping tears from her eyes. After Sakina’s father, Husain, was murdered in prayer, before her thirst was quenched, the enemy descended upon the women and children of the camp, looting and burning. They slapped Sakina’s cheeks, snatching the earrings off her ears without undoing the clasps, so that her earlobes were torn and bloodied. They snatched away the veils of her mother and aunts, dishonoring the women of the House of the Prophet, stealing what little the modest household had in the way of possessions. In the end, it was the women from the enemy camp who took pity on them, bringing food and water on the Night of the Destitute. Later, the women and children who survived, along with Husain’s eldest son, who had been too sick to fight, were chained and bound and led through the streets of Kufa, and on to Damascus, where Yazid held court, beaten whenever they cried in sorrow for the beloved bodies they left behind.
This, you understand, was the House of the Prophet! It was attacked from within, not by some invading force. Betrayed by its own people, men who called themselves M
uslims, followers of the same Messenger who had carried Husain on his shoulders as a boy. It was the worst kind of tragedy. One that originated from inside.
And then, when the chants, the beating, the frenzy hovered for a few moments at the edge of hysteria, I would feel the fresh, soothing drops fall on my head, my face, my eyes—drops of rosewater that rained down on us, dampening the fervor of the crowd instantaneously, prompting loud salawats from cooler heads at the outskirts of the crowd, which turned, in some mysterious choreography, and faced one of the walls as my grandmother, Dadi, in a voice still heavy with the tears that continued to make tracks down her face, would begin a long recitation in Arabic that was familiar, the language of prayer, but not our language—full of salaams, the Muslim greeting of peace, interspersed with some of the names that had been chanted moments before with such passion. In the middle of these salaams, all the women would turn together, to change the angle of where they faced, and then turn back again to stand the way they had when they began—turning directions to match the locations of where the people they saluted were buried. Some in what is now Iraq and in Medina, the City of the Prophet, in the Arabian Peninsula. And one in Iran, which is why the women turned during the salutations.
When the majlis was done, the solemn fog of grief that still filled the room lifted slowly at first. Women greeted each other, the ones who had not had the chance before, those who’d come early meeting those who’d come late with kisses and hugs. Eventually, smiles were seen and laughter heard, from faces still wet with tears. While tea and snacks were served, my mother would take my hand and lead me to the altar, praying silently, touching the various objects there with a hand she then kissed. Sometimes, my mother would give me some money, a few rupees, to place in front of one or other of the symbols on the table—like the water bag—to be collected later by Dadi, for alms. I never hesitated about where I placed the money she gave me—in the cradle, a miniature one made of silver, only big enough for a small doll.
That is Ali Asghar’s cradle, my mother told me, who was Imam Husain’s six-month-old baby. That is where the infant slept as his mother rocked him and watched over him when her milk ran dry, from lack of food and drink, and she saw that he was dying. Before Imam Husain went forth to battle, she begged him to take the baby to the enemy forces, to ask that they quench the innocent infant’s thirst if no one else’s. So, Imam Husain took Ali Asghar to the battlefield and pleaded with the enemy soldiers to take pity on Ali Asghar’s innocent thirst. In case they thought it was a trick to gain relief for himself, Imam Husain laid his baby on the burning sands of Karbala, inviting someone from among them to take the child themselves to give him water. As savage as the hearts of Yazid’s soldiers were, some among them began to cry, remembering babies of their own, safe and sound, far away at home. Seeing this, quickly, the commander of Yazid’s forces ordered his best archer, Hurmula, to shoot an arrow into the baby’s throat. The first arrow missed its mark when Imam Husain picked up Ali Asghar in his arms. The second arrow struck true, too big for the baby’s tiny throat, digging into the cradling arm of his father.
Imam Husain did not know what to do next—the only moment during all of the events of Karbala when he was unsure. Should he bury Ali Asghar so that his mother would not have to see what the cruel soldiers had done to her baby? Or should he take the body back to the camp so that she could see her beloved child for the last time and witness how they had responded to his plea? With the corpse of his baby in his arms, Imam Husain would begin the walk back to the tent where Ali Asghar’s mother waited, hoping that the soldiers had taken mercy on her child, then he would pace backward in indecision and grief. Seven times he did this, back and forth, before finally delivering Ali Asghar back to his mother. And the empty cradle is how we remember him.
“But— they lost,” I said one Muharram afternoon when I was old enough to begin to understand the story. “Imam Husain and his friends. They lost the battle.”
My mother shook her head. “No. They stood up against tyranny. Their story is alive. And as long as it is, as long as we remember their sacrifices, they have won. We remember their bravery for the first ten days of Muharram—we recognize that Imam Husain’s sacrifice was offered for us, we who are unworthy. And then for the rest of Muharram and for the next month of Safar, we remember those left behind—the captive widows and orphans who were marched through the streets of Muslim cities, in chains, to Yazid’s court at Damascus, where Imam Husain’s sister, Bibi Zainab, bravely challenged the tyrant, and bore witness to his oppression. We carry the story of what happened at Karbala with us in our hearts. Always. Do you know, Sadee, that my grandmother is buried there? All her life, she wanted to go to Karbala, on pilgrimage. Because she never went there, it was her dying wish to be buried there. So, her son, my father, made all the arrangements and took her to Karbala to lie at rest near the Imam. Her life had not been an easy one. She was a widow at an early age. And her stepson, my father’s older brother, didn’t treat her as well as he should have.”
After a little silence, I asked, “What is a widow?”
“A widow is someone whose husband has died.”
“That’s what you are.”
My mother was silent again, for a moment. “Yes.”
“How did my father die?”
“He—he was not well. And then he died.”
I waited for more, but let it go when I found that my mother had no more to say on the subject.
On the tenth day of Muharram, on Ashura, glued to my mother’s side, I felt the story of Karbala in my heart, offering the special prayers of the day, walking forward and backward seven times, reenacting and honoring Imam Husain’s moment of indecision, the grief and tragedy of the thirsty orphans, Sakina among them, and her baby brother killed in his father’s arms.
He has begun school now. He is old enough and can stand to be away from you, whether you like it or not,” I heard my paternal grandmother, Dadi, say to my mother in the Muharram when I was five years old. “Send him with his grandfather for the juloos on Ashura.”
Dada, my grandfather, turned to me and asked, “What do you think, Sadiq? Are you ready to be a man now? To join the men’s Ashura procession through the streets of Karachi? All of your cousins will be there.”
“Jaffer, too?”
“Of course. None of the other boys would miss it for anything.”
I nodded nervously, unaware that what he proposed would expose me to the masculine side of Muharram rituals—the side that was gruesome and violent, where matham was painful and bloody.
I went with him on Ashura that year and heard nohas that sounded like battle cries, the beat of hands on chests like the blows of a choreographed kind of combat. Carpets of hot coals were raked over in preparation for bare feet to run across them. Carefully sharpened swords were struck in self-inflicted frenzy on bare heads and blood flowed freely from split scalps to drip down faces twisted in grief and pain. And small, curved blades hanging from chains were swung in lateral rhythm, whipping the air with a metal twang to beat upon bare backs from which horizontal rivulets of blood sprung and trailed stains onto hot pavements, shimmering in the heat of the sun.
There were other boys there, Jaffer among them, along with other cousins that I was a little less wary of than before, and they were excited. They had seen it all before. All of them, many of them younger than me, had been initiated in the practice of zanjeer ka matham with their fathers, using mini-size blades that were dull and relatively harmless and hung from smaller chains designed for use on smaller bodies.
My stomach clenched at the sight of blood dripping everywhere. The scenes of bloodshed struck me as all the more grotesque because the wounds were self-inflicted. Jaffer’s father—my uncle, who was with us, too—thrust me into the circle of young boys, where Jaffer and the others had already claimed their spots, shed their shirts, and commenced an awful imitation of the swaying, chain-swinging motion that older men in bigger circles, which I could still see, only
yards away from us, performed with far greater effect. In my hand, my uncle placed a new set of chains, the dull blades winking at me with the reflected light of the sun. My stomach unclenched suddenly, and though I had observed the half-day fast, the faqa, which is customary for the day of Ashura, a stream of bilious liquid stained my shirt before my head lightened and I fell, faint, to the ground.
I woke up in my grandfather’s arms, crying for my mother. The other boys would have laughed at me, but it was Ashura, too somber a day for laughing. For hours, I walked on the sidelines of the procession, unable to participate, impatient and crying to be with my mother, back among the women.
One day, when my mother and I were on the terrace, the quiet of our street was disturbed by a small commotion outside of the house next door, the house with the jamun tree in its garden. A car had pulled up and the residents of the house spilled out onto the street with exclamations of joy that drew me close to the wall. My mother stood up to reel me back, but her eyes, too, were caught by the scene below. A man in a white shirt and black tie had emerged from the car, greeting the old lady next door, suit jacket slung over one shoulder. Servants were emptying the trunk, pulling out suitcases. I heard my mother gasp beside me. As if he heard it, too, the man looked up toward us, causing my mother to step backward, too late. The man had seen her. I saw him frown, his eyes on the space she had occupied. His gaze shifted to me, his eyes locked with mine. Then he walked into the house next door.
Something about the scene stayed with me. I found myself suddenly fascinated by that man—curious about who he was and where he’d come from. That side of the terrace, under the shade of the jamun tree, became my favorite. My curiosity made me less timid. Now I would steal away to the terrace without my mother, something I had been expressly forbidden to do. Until the day I saw the man sitting in the garden, drinking tea and reading the newspaper. I wanted him to see me. The jamun tree was in season, the ripe, nearly black, ovoid fruit on its upper branches within reach. I picked some and began to throw them down into the garden where the man sat. The third jamun hit closest to its mark, landing at his feet, catching his attention. But when he looked up, I lost my newfound courage and ducked. After long moments of listening to the thud of my own heart, I chanced a look over the top of the wall and caught his eye, briefly, before ducking down again.
