Sita Under the Crescent Moon

by Annie Ali Khan

  But like the rest of Lyari, Kalri had gone through a decade of street violence. Gangs infighting, para-military and police encounters and rampant disappearances by shadow agencies wreaked havoc in the area. One of the brothers at the chai hotel caught a stray bullet in the back while closing shop one night. Under the heavily reported stories of gang wars were other tales—those of untold suffering by the women of Kalri. A mother, fearing her son would be taken away, ran from every police patrol that went by on the street outside her door. A mother said her child was playing by the gate when a hand grenade landed inside the door of her home. A mother, who lost eight sons to the world through gang wars, absent-mindedly sliced through four fingers while cutting a carton of milk.

  Inside homes, there were other everyday violence and everyday silences. Daily power outages every two hours meant the women living in the area had to do house chores during the few available hours in between, working alternately by battery light at stifling hot kitchen fires, washing dirty dishes.

  At a rooftop gathering of women applying henna, smoking chillums and drinking tea, a woman told me she had miscarried a baby when a rickshaw she was riding in overturned. Two of her remaining children, still minors, had pale eyes and matching blond hair. She had already lost a child to the disease. A genetic disorder, the mother said. There was no cure within reach. But she was hopeful hers were going to live. Most of the families slept on the rooftop at night. Every woman in every household in Lyari had a story to tell.

  Since Masi Taji’s husband died twenty-eight years ago, she had been running a small business, selling samosas she prepared fresh daily, frying them in a big iron skillet under a date palm thatch on an empty plot next to her house. At 500 rupees per day, Taaji made enough to care for her home and managed to even save a little. A disciple of the thirteenth century Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, she made regular trips to his golden domed shrine in Sehwan Sharif, in the heart of the southern province of Sindh. The green chutney she sold with the samosa was prepared in a heavy bottomed clay bowl Taaji had carried back from a trip to Sehwan Sharif. My Imam Zamin, she called the clay bowl, after the practice of wrapping coins in a piece of cloth and tied around the arm of the believer to foster good fortune. Taaji’s samosas and rolls were all sold or given away before the evening prayers of Maghrib. After that she gave her thanks to Lal Qalandar.

  Taji’s son, a married man now, had long been involved with drugs and gang wars. She was unable to break him away from the streets, even after marrying him to the girl of his choice. The daughter-in-law helped Taji run her business, preparing the sheets of flour for the samosas. Taji had saved for the malid ceremony to set right all that had gone wrong in her home, her neighbourhood and her community.

  I attended the ceremony, accompanied by Parveen Naz, a social worker from Lyari, who was my guide. Naz had been born in Kalri. She and her family had moved away, sick of the violence. The gangs, she said, were beginning to enter her home. She left her youngest, unmarried sister behind. The sister was in her thirties. She wore no jewellery except traditional Baloch pieces—small hoops, four to each helix of the ear that ended in a delicate tendril at the ear lobe. She had tea and biscuits on offer when I arrived with Naz at her house.

  There was no electricity in the neighbourhood. We made our way by the light of our cellphones in spidery lanes off other spidery lanes, narrower than a person in places. We arrived at the porch of Naz’s family home, which she had not visited in fourteen years, she said. Inside the house Naz became angry at the changes. Her voice rose, then rose a few more notches again, as she berated her sister for having taken her slippers without permission and then for the broken tiles on the floor of the living room. The house, now empty, had been occupied at one point by gangs of armed teenaged men. A resident said there had been bloodshed in the rooms as the boys, cornered, fought each other with guns, and that the house still had blood stains in places if I cared to look. I did not.

  A few weeks later, while making one of my regular visits to Naz’s current home, an apartment in another old fishing area called Keamari, I saw the younger sister again. She was busy in the kitchen as I stopped to say salam. Her mouth and nose were bandaged and bloodied. Naz said her sister had been in a motorcycle accident. A collision, after which the rider, a man, sped away, without looking behind him. Violence kept crashing into her.

  The sister stayed behind as Naz and I made our way down the street. We walked past stray dogs to a place where sheets had been tied at either end of a small lane, creating a partitioned area. Entering from a narrow slit on the side, we were face-toface with a fierce blaze. An old fisherman sat brewing a mixture of milk and sugar on a small hearth. Facing the blaze was the spirit healer, Latif, setting a solid iron stake, neza, with three looped prongs into the ground. The central prong had a ring on it, making it look a little bit like the face of a bull. He draped the stake with garlands of roses and mogra and covered it in iron chains. The neza had been handed down generations in Latif’s family. He cleansed the stake by bathing it in the Arabian Sea, then perfumed its iron body with frankincense and fed it milk. People had new stakes made on order these days, he said. But this was the real thing. His neza, he told me, had a legacy. He had inherited it from a powerful woman.

  Latif’s grandmother-in-law was called the ‘mother of gawati’— another type of dhamaal (celebration) ceremony. In Balochi, ‘gawat’ means breeze; the evening breeze is called ‘zar-gawat’— ‘zar’ meaning woman in Balochi. Maalid, gawati, bhundara, phul mulood, were all different kinds of dhamaal. Occassions for catching, sensing, touching the truth, sati, 7, from the very air—like the breeze blowing in from the sea the night of the new moon by the light of a ritual fire. ‘The Baloch make promises by fire,’ said Naz.

  There were two schools of dhamaal, said Latif. One originating in the Middle East and the other tracing its origins to Ratanpur, in the deserts of Rajasthan. A practice involving rhythm and fragrance and remembrance through meditation—engraving love for god on the heart. A practice, he said, long sustained by the Sidi community travelling the coast. The word ‘Sidi’, or ‘Sheedi’, referring to those who came as soldiers and rulers and those who were brought as slaves from the sultanate of Oman and settled from Iran to Rajasthan, bringing influences of fragrance and rhythm to local practices.

  Latif had learned much of his skills from his wife’s grandmother, a powerful woman living in Makran, on the coastal belt of Balochistan. The matriarch was known to hold dhamaal performances in the open for large crowds, and was a medium and mediator for the community extending from Balochistan to Sindh. Latif started his own practice, in Lyari, with his wife’s guidance. He spent his days on a prayer rug in his home, prescribing cures based on readings performed on rosary beads he circulated through deft fingers, his wife watching from the other end of the room.

  Latif’s comment about Ratanpur reminded me of the night I went on a straight road, from Abdullah Shah Ghazi, the shrine facing the sea, to the shrine at Manghu Pir. It was at Manghu Pir that I had learned how Ratanpur in Rajasthan was connected to Sindh and Balochistan. The caretaker and spiritual head of the shrine for decades was a man named Ghulam Akbar. He was frail and in bed when I went to see him. There were about 200 crocodiles that lived in a lake central to the saint Manghu Pir. They were fed meat and a special halwa prepared by Ghulam Akbar. Over hot cups of tea, I asked Akbar about the bangles and rings on his hand. The bangles, he said, were brought to him by two people returning from Hajj, a man and a widowed woman. He had a special ring he wanted to show me he said, reaching into his pocket and taking out a bloodstone set in silver. The ring no longer fit his fingers but it was close to his heart. It was a naqeeq, a carnelian stone, which was given to him when he travelled to Ratanpur in Rajasthan to visit the heartland of the Naqshbandi Sufi order. He had been to Ratanpur three times, to visit the site of the Sufi mystic Bilal Habshi, a Sidighulam turned spiritual master. Similarly, the lake, and the well of Manghu Pir, and the crocodiles, were
a gift of Sufi Baba Farid Shakar Gunj.

  The story was that Baba Farid arrived at an oasis in the desert and decided to stay the night, keeping his belongings to the side. This was in the thirteenth century, Akbar told me, when Lal Shahbaz Qalandar of Sehwan Sharif was also alive. When Baba Farid woke up, he discovered that his possessions had been stolen. It was clear to him that Manghu Pir was the thief. Baba Farid called Manghu Pir and asked him if he wished to accompany the saint to Mecca for Hajj. When the two returned from their pilgrimage, Sultan Manghu Pir repented his theft. He asked Baba Farid how he could make up for his folly. Baba Farid said he was an ascetic and did not have or care much for possessions. He then emptied his sack of belongings. Out fell some rice infested with lice and water. When they hit the ground, it turned into a lake with crocodiles—a site of remembrance of the theft and the confession. Manghu Pir’s shrine became a sacred place of pilgrimage. Manghu Pir’s lake and the crocodiles became a constant in a sea of change.

  Akbar was from the Sidi community. He said he was of mixed blood, as were many amongst the Baloch and Sindhi community. ‘Many of the people here are mixed,’ he said. ‘They will shape their origin stories based on the colour of their skin and the texture of their hair. But many are simply too mixed to determine pure origin.’ Hence the dhamaal, originating as far as Africa and India, had inextricably mixed influences. And the dhamaal held that night tangibly traced its origins to far along the vast coast, across oceans in Oman and Ratanpur, perfumed by frankincense and held to the beat of drums and the ecstasy of dance possessed by the body’s claim to rhythm, fed by milk and fire.

  By way of the back lanes of Lyari, I found the final resting place of Baba Farid. If the size of the grave was anything to go by, the Baba was nine feet tall. In the courtyard of Baba Farid’s shrine, surrounding a massive Shiv lingam, were two rooms—one in which resided Naag Baba, the serpent saint, and across the courtyard in the other, a Sati from Ratanpur by the name of Mai Ratna.

  A search for the Sati had brought me to the ceremony by fire; the mention of Ratanpur made me hopeful of meeting Mai Ratna at the dhamaal ceremony.

  Masi Taaji and the women of her community sat facing the musicians; they facing the women. The two groups at the opposite end of the still burning ritual fire, closer to a second draped sheet making a private corridor from the street beyond. Taji’s son, a wiry young man in a t-shirt and low-hanging jeans, sat by her side. As the musicians began to play a hypnotic beat with pulsating drums, amplified in part by speakers tied to the walls above, the women seated on the ground moved and pushed against the walls, trying to make space in the centre for the dhamaal. Latif walked through the crowds and placed a chillum, a metal spoon burning with the heady fragrance of frankincense, near Masi Taaji’s face.

  Her head began to spin in circles, hanging low on her chest at the end of each round. As she stood up, I saw she was dressed in a white silk hand-embroidered dress. She was beauty and power. Her skin, taut and burnished by the sun, glistened in the hot air; her curly hair, tied in a knot, kept flying away in wild strands from her face. As she raised her arms in rapture, her fingers were covered in gold, as were her ears. She began to sway.

  The entire cordoned area filled up with the fragrance of rose and frankincense. Latif handed around a bowl with a fragrant wax the women placed inside their ears. A bowl of warm mustard oil was handed around. The women dipped their fingers in the oil and then applied it to the top of their hair, the strands glistening. A woman in a light blue dress got up. She raised her arms above her head. Her eyes were bulging, like glowing embers in a face as calm as a placid lake. As she began to writhe and sway, arms raised, palms joined, she gave the impression of a powerful serpent.

  By 3 a.m. seven women were up there before us, moving to the dhamaal.

  Some of the women watching joked with the fisherman, calling him fish gone bad no one wanted to taste. He laughed. Latif handed around pieces of a bright orange jelly-like sweet covered in slivers of almonds—jinnka halwa. It smelled of cardamom and ghee. Masi Taaji began to embrace each woman in the crowd. The milk bowl was handed around as Latif, hopping on one leg, joined the seven serpentine women.

  Latif guided Masi Taaji, taking her hand and leading her to the ritual fire. She firmly grasped two prongs of the iron stake, one in each hand, as Latif began invoking the memory of Sufi Abdul Qadir Gilani and the power of sacrifice and losing the self in attainment of the singular. He helped her drink a bowl of hot milk. ‘There is no right and wrong,’ Latif said, in closing his recitation. ‘We are all creatures on earth. One and the same.’

  Taaji, holding onto the stake, standing against the pit fire, speaking truth, 7, was a blazing silhouette, a depiction of Durga.

  Just then, there were shrieks in the crowd. A small boy came running through the slit between the sheet covering the street and, galloping, crouched on two feet and a hand. He leaped to the front of the crowd and grabbed some halwa from the musicians. He leapt back over the seated women and began swiping at the flame. The fishermen pulled him away. Another small boy in his mother’s lap laughed. ‘Everyone here is possessed by jinn bhoot,’ he said out loud. His mother shushed him.

  The music died down and Latif, joined by Taaji and her son, on either side, sat back in front of the crowds facing the musicians. Latif recited the opening verse of the Quran and then, out loud, he began to pray for the well-being of the family and to the heavens to lift the burdens off their shoulders. Women followed the prayers with calls of Ameen. Taaji’s son laughed. Latif became angry. He cursed the boy, threatening to render him unable to relieve himself again. Just then, a group of boys entered the ceremony, screaming and knocking the instruments over. The seven women, including Taaji, came to stand together. The boys ran back outside. ‘Run!’ the women called after the fleeing figures.

  Taaji tore down the chaadar. ‘Let the ceremony commence in full view of the city,’ she said.

  The music began again, but the fragrance dissipated into the thinning air. One by one, the women began to rise, after the ceremony wrapped up. Naz stood up, first making sure all the girls got home safely, before she and I walked back down the street, where amidst the mounds of garbage infested with rats, stray dogs stood erect and growled.

  The Singing Shrine

  On 2 November 2016, Naz and I took a bus from Saddar Taj Complex, for a two-hour ride to Hyderabad. Located east of Karachi, the Pakistani Hyderabad, unlike the Deccani Hyderabad in India, was now another lost city. It used to be a hub to the surrounding cities of Sindh. After Karachi’s rise, it was simply a small dusty town. In Hyderabad, we made a quick stop at a burger joint, to get food, before taking a second bus. We were sandwiched in the back of a mini-van, glimpsing traces of barren flatlands broken here and there by fields of green. We were making our way to the northern reaches of Sindh to the shrine of Gaji Shah—a shrine only visited by women. The shrine of Gaji Shah looked across to the shrine of Shah Noorani in Khuzdar, another space frequented only by women devotees. The two shrines were some fifty miles apart—between them the borders of Sindh and Balochistan, and one of the most treacherous mountainous terrains in Pakistan.

  Five and a half bumpy hours after Hyderabad, we reached the sleepy city of Dadu, after nightfall. Mohammad Bux, a local reporter living in the town of Johi, a twenty-minute ride from the city of Dadu, was our resident point of contact and host. After a brief exchange of greetings with Bux’s family, we were given a room with mosquito nettings. Early the next morning, we set out on the last leg of our journey by car, to the shrine of Gaji Shah.

  Bux drove, and gave us a tour of the area. The area of Dadu and Johi, he said, boasted of one of the major gas mining sites, after Sui in Balochistan, not far from where we were. The car crossed massive tracts of irrigation land, fields of onions, tomatoes, guar and wheat, a major crop of Dadu.

  ‘Katcho land is rich,’ said Bux, referring to the fertile area lying along the Indus River. ‘When a field is sown, nothing needs to be done to help
the crops grow.’ Johi had a pottery making industry. There was a kiln in the neighbourhood in Dadu where Bux lived, but the culture was dying, he said.

  A freelance journalist, Bux had left Hyderabad two years ago, leaving jobs he held in succession at two leading Sindhi language papers, Kavish and Ummat. He had decided to move back to his hometown, Johi. He was committed to the cause of truth, he said. ‘I wanted to write about my own people.’

  At the local market, Bux pointed to a group of women squatting by the roadside. ‘These women travelling to and from Katcho have no access to latrines or a place to rest,’ he said. The car went past a group of small children, jerry cans in hand, awaiting their turn at a community tap. ‘The water in Johi is poisonous,’ said Bux. Water as a commodity was so precious, Bux said, it caused conflicts which at times ended in murder.

  His remark reminded me of Chagai Hills, the site of Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests. It was only two hundred miles from Gaji Shah’s shrine. I imagined a sadhu walking out from the caves of Balochistan, after ages of devotion and exposure to deadly radiation, emerging a mutant spirit.

  As we drove through small villages, we passed a school built by U.S. aid. Over three hundred thousand dollars had been spent building the school, Bux said, part of a rehabilitation effort by an American NGO. But the effort was misplaced, he felt. The school should have been built in the city of Dadu. Who was going to go to school in this wilderness of a village, he asked.

  On the way to Gaji Shah, we visited Bux’s family in Johi. His father had married three women, and Bux was one of nine siblings. At their house, we sat with his sister from the same mother, a petite woman with Bux’s thick, wavy hair and formidable chin.

  I told her about my plan to set off for Sehwan Sharif after Gaji Shah—the next location on our pilgrimage, in search of the sati. ‘Take Bux with you when you set off to Sehwan from Gaji Shah,’ his sister said. ‘He sits at home doing nothing.’