Sita Under the Crescent Moon

by Annie Ali Khan

  Naz and I slept in the courtyard, under the stars. In the morning, after a generous breakfast of paratha and eggs, the rickshaw wallah dropped us all the way to the shrine of Da’tar.

  After spending a night in Makli, the city of graveyards, we made our way to the picturesque Pir Patho valley. Our ride went over a smooth road between two powdery pure-white structures: a tower with a balcony overlooking the valley and a dargah facing the tower.

  It was a cool winter morning. Shiny particles of dust flying in the crisp air caught my face, exposed to the wind. Dropped off at the gated entrance, I made my way up to the shrine of Sakhi Jam Da’tar, the sadhu saint. The newly renovated tower of Pir Patho, said to belong to a sorcerer, was visible behind me.

  A powerful sorcerer called Saami the wizard had once held a carnival on the hill where the tower was located. From the balcony, the wizard looked down on those gathered, choosing a person to be slaughtered at the end of the carnival. Every year, the people knew how the carnival would end, but they still attended the macabre festival to see who was chosen. Helpless.

  The people turned to Pir Patho, seeking his help. The Pir approached the Sufi Bahauddin Zikriya, of Multan, who told him about a saint in Junagadh, Gujarat, Sakhi Jamil Shah Da’tar of Girnari. Pir Patho caught a fish from the Indus, wrapped it and sent it as a gift to saint Da’tar. The fish arrived fresh in Gujarat—a testament to the truth of Pir Patho’s invitation. Shah Da’tar travelled to Thatta. The powerful ascetic turned the cruel sorcerer to stone, and his body was cast in the water and washed up further along the coast in Tharparkar, where it was buried. A mosque was built on top of the body, with two qiblas called Mosque of Two Mehrab. So went the story about the sorcerer’s tower and the saint’s shrine. The Sufi’s shrine was now only for women to visit.

  Inside the darbar, the space around the ornately mosaic tiled interiors was small and women sat close together. A young woman, about sixteen years old, sat beside me. She had come with her family from Gharo. She did not know she was coming here, she said, until the morning of the trip to Da’tar. Since the past fifteen days, her tongue had not been in her control. It travelled all over her mouth of its own volition, twisting and turning and rolling back whenever she opened her mouth to cough or to speak. ‘No one believes me,’ she said. ‘They think I am joking. I said it again and again no, my tongue has gone astray. I try to speak and it tries to turn away, go elsewhere.’

  They had gone to the hospital in the morning to get her a checkup, when her mother’s sister, suggested they go to Da’tar instead. ‘I have not been here in a long time. I came here as a little girl back when my mother fell ill. Gharo is so far from here,’ she told me. She had come so far to right a tongue that had gone astray.

  ‘Allah, I hope my tongue is set right,’ she said. ‘Right now it is just a little twisted. But when I laugh, it twists away completely. Everyone in my family is tense because of me. I hope Allah will set my tongue straight.’ Behind us, on the other side of the grave, a woman was screaming non-stop. The mosaic mirrors reflected a wild spin of dark hair.

  At the summit of the hill, Naz and I decided to settle for a cup of tea. The dhaba was a series of wooden beds laid out under the shade of heavily canopied trees. The sound of birds in the branches was pleasant to the ear. On the bed next to ours was a family—men, women, small children—of more than a dozen people. The children kept wandering about. I offered a little girl a piece of cake we had brought with us from Sehwan and patted her head. She walked away. The next moment, a commotion and then plates and glasses began to fly in the air. A fight broke out—shouts of randi (whore), pots and pans and stalls thrown up and then crashing to the floor. Women and children began to run away. It was all over in a moment.

  The hotel wallah, a middle-aged man, walked over to us. I asked him what had happened.

  ‘This family that was here, my boy here was serving them tea and he spilled some hot liquid on the bed where a little girl was sleeping. He pulled her away lifting her by the arm,’ he said. ‘That’s when the father got up and accused him of touching a little girl.’ He wiped the sweat from his mustache. ‘Look, we all have children of our own. She is such a small girl one would not think twice. But he said why did you touch her?’ The hotel wallah was breathing heavily. His forehead was bleeding, and in his hand was a ladle used to serve curry. The bowl of the spoon was dripping with blood.

  Blood Stone

  On 7 November 2016, Naz and I caught a bus to the place for healing ills of the spirit—the mightiest saint of blood stones, Shah Aqeeq. By the time we reached the shrine of the saint known as the spiritual surgeon, it was a full moon.

  Shah Aqeeq’s shrine was located a little above the Keti Bunder Wildlife Sanctuary, a delta where the river met the sea. The lush mangroves were visible in the distance. It was evening by the time we arrived. In the waning light, we walked across hundreds of jute beds lined up under an open sky. I was keen to rent one for the night. But we got room no. 3 instead and slept inside, securing the latch with a lock bought from the nearby store. At daybreak, I went up to the shrine.

  Next to it was a courtyard with a small room with two graves. A woman had brought her daughter here. The young daughter, mother to an infant, had been ill for a year. ‘I was trying to bring her here for a year,’ said the mother. ‘After the baby was born, she just lay there not feeding the child.’ Things had improved after their arrival. ‘Now she says she wants to breastfeed the baby.’

  The woman was tired. She wanted to lie down, so I stepped outside. In the corner of the courtyard, a woman stood singing. Two women walked over to the corner of the courtyard where I was seated, writing, and asked me to write them a prayer for their sick mother on a chit of paper. Afterwards, the woman handed me a 50-rupee note. ‘Take it,’ she said, when I hesitated. ‘It is devotion,’ she said.

  A woman came to sit next to me. ‘What brought you here?’ she asked. ‘Did Baba give you vision to come here?’ Before I could answer, a woman called to me to offer Fajr prayers with her. I thanked her and went to offer Fatiha at the dargah, and got a red cord.

  After Naz woke up, we rode a cattle pull cart to Jalali Baba’s shrine. ‘You are someone with great fortune to get to ride a bullock cart,’ a man at the door of the shrine said to us. Naz said Jalali Baba’s shrine was where people with the most incurable of possessions were brought.

  Outside, in the small market area, jewellery was being sold. ‘I want to buy gold jewellery for my mother,’ said Naz. The shopseller saw her fingering a bangle. ‘This is Baba’s gold,’ he said.

  Inside the inner sanctum, a woman paced the floor crying. ‘Let me go home, Baba,’ she said. Afterwards, she sat on the floor, rubbing one of the columns in the room before rubbing those hands all over her six-year-old son. A man was brought and tied to a pillar with a heavy padlock, his hands and feet cuffed and linked with heavy chains. His head was bent down, hiding his face. Low, heavy growls filled the room.

  A man shouted at me for stretching my aching legs in front of me. I folded them back under me. A woman got bit by a wasp. The caretaker rubbed his key on the sting and applied some mustard oil to the wound. Two women were pointing to a young girl. ‘You can dress this way for a wedding or party. Lekin yahaan par nahin chalta (it won’t do here).’

  The man who had been growling all afternoon now lay moaning, saying ‘Zeb’, over and over.

  I had just settled down on the floor in the courtyard outside when a man walked over to a woman and touched her face. The woman’s husband attacked the man, and the two locked arms. ‘That man is mad!’ The caretaker was shouting. But no one touched the two men.

  There was blood spraying everywhere. After the mad man let go, the courtyard floor was covered in bits of skin and blood. ‘That man was mad,’ said the other mujawar. ‘This man should have known better. A madman fights to kill.’ There was blood everywhere.

  Milk & Eggs

  Of the three varieties of cobra, one of the deadliest snakes is foun
d in Sindh, noted The Vertebrate Zoology of Sindh compiled by James A. Murray, a zoologist and museum curator in seventeenth century British India. The most common is the black cobra or karo nag. The poisonous reptile grows to a length of four to five feet, and can kill a human being from anywhere between thirty minutes to twelve hours. But the deadliest, most poisonous cobra, it is popularly believed in Sindh, ‘unless harmed is itself harmless’, notes the zoology text.

  Farida was thirteen years old when her mother married her off to a man. By the time she turned fourteen, she began her own business selling teeth cleaning sticks and tobacco oil used in a chillum, smoked by Balochi women at home, as well as Balochi remedy for women wanting to have sex to conceive children. Within a year of her marriage, Farida had arrived at an unshakeable conviction regarding her husband. The words surfaced the day her husband, with no means of work, offered to take her sight-seeing in the city. ‘If I go with anywhere with you, you will sell me,’ she said to the man.

  Soon after, Farida saved money from a neighbourhood investment, and made a beeline to Shah Noorani’s shrine. Inside the cave of Lahoot, the mother’s womb, she prayed: ‘Let me be divorced.’ A native of Lyari, Farida grew up making pilgrimages to the sacred sites in Sindh and Balochistan. I met Farida in Thatta, at a nau chandi Thursday. Later, she invited me to her home in Mauripur.

  An hour’s bus ride to the western edge of Karachi by the sea and next to a sewage treatment plant, Mauripur was a rumbling desert land of settlements. Other than the government housing area, enclosed within high walls decorated with barbed wires through which homes two-storey high boasted walls sans graffiti and air-conditioning units. Farida lived in a one-room house with a curtained entrance and a small courtyard. A half-eaten plate of fried fish on the floor next to a plastic water drum was evidence of recently eaten lunch. Most homes outside the gated community had no electricity, but Farida’s place had two light bulbs.

  It had been more than twenty years since Farida had married for the second time. Her second husband worked as a security guard at a school in Lyari. He made a good living, earning twenty-seven thousand rupees a month. But he spent most of it on alcohol. ‘He came home after three months of absence, but left again,’ she said. In a day or two, she was going to go to the school where he worked and take ten thousand from him so she could pay the rent and purchase ration. Otherwise, she said she was rarely home herself.

  She made six thousand rupees a month selling clothes— blankets, handkerchiefs, bedsheets she bought from her trips via bus to Quetta, the capital city of Balochistan, which she sold from her house. Mostly, she sold unstitched cloth. A man from the neighbourhood had ordered two pieces of cloth to make shalwar kamiz but he never came to collect the suits, she told me. ‘When I ran into him in the neighbourhood, I said you deceived me.’

  In another house down the street, Farida introduced me to a neighbour, a young woman pregnant with two babies and with several young infants running about. After tea, when we stepped out, Farida said the family was too poor to afford to feed any more mouths. People in the neighbourhood had offered to adopt some of the children, but they were much too beautiful for the mother to find the heart to give them away.

  Farida’s first husband had, years ago, found his vocation. He supplied water in his neighbourhood via donkey cart. He made enough to marry a second time. But Farida had brought up her five children entirely by herself. Recently, her sons had gotten into a fight with the neighbours. Farida had been away on a pilgrimage. An acquaintance from her community found her in Thatta and said, ‘Farida, you are here. Your children have been quarelling with their neighbours for three days now.’

  Farida took the first bus back home. ‘Amma, I gave you a call from my heart and you are here,’ her son said to her. ‘I hear a drum beating in my heart with joy.’ The neighours rented him a shop from where he sold candy and cold drink. They had hiked the rent up to one thousand rupees a month, and he could not afford it. Farida turned a fiery gaze on the neighbours. ‘If you go without meat for a day you will eat my children,’ she said to the neighbour’s wife. ‘If you come near my son I will throw you into the deep skillet for frying pakoray. I will burn your entire family.’

  Farida had won the battle, it seemed. But a woman from the neighbourhood came to see her the next day. She was concerned, she said. Farida lived alone most of the time. She offered to sleep over. ‘I sleep alone. If your hot-blooded son overhears you, he may jump the wall into my house,’ Farida told her. ‘Don’t say such a thing again.’

  Soon after the quarrel ended, Farida’s husband came home. He had spent all his money and the month was not even half over. He asked her for 1,500 rupees.

  Farida went to see the Naagi Baba, the serpent saint, taking me with her. ‘I always go there when things go wrong around here,’ she said. ‘But I never take children with me.’

  The narrow alleyways gave way to a chai hotel and a massive bus depot before opening out to a hillside covered in graves. Coloured in pale washes of green, the colour of Farida’s hand-embroidered dress, the graves were like the motifs she had stitched on her gauzy green dupatta.

  The pathway to the hill was marked by white stones pushed into the dry earth. We walked past the shrine of a Baba with a nine-foot grave inside it, to the top of the hill. In the middle of a compound with low walls was a block of chambers covered in tinselled chaadar, roughly four feet by twelve with eight long chambers that opened out to one side. Inside were clay bowls filled with milk and eggs, brought as offerings for the nag, strewn with soft soil, covered in rose petals. Some of the eggs were broken shells. In the centre of the bottom of the block was a burrow. ‘That’s where naag baba enters and exits his home,’ Farida said.

  A woman visiting the shrine said the Baba was Jalali—a fiery spirit. After her daughter was divorced, the in-laws refused to return her jewellery and belongings and would not pay her the due divorce settlement. But after she came to pray to Nag Baba, the family apologized and returned everything and even gave them furniture. She came regularly to offer milk and eggs to the serpent saint.

  The caretaker of Naag Baba’s shrine was a young man in a mirrored topi by the name of Qadir. After lighting incense in each of the chambers, he joined Farida and me.

  ‘Baba Idroos appears here in the form of a serpent,’ he said. The nag was much feared. ‘It will shorten your life considerably if you ever set eyes on the serpent.’

  A woman came to sit next to Qadir. She was his aunt. The woman had spent her life caring for the premises. They were Sindhi, they said, pointing to the back wall of the shrine from where a village was visible in the distance.

  She had seen the serpent, she said. One morning, around Fajr time, when she came to the shrine, she saw him facing her. He had a fearsome hood and he was swaying from side to side. She began to call out to the people in her community. By the time they came, the serpent was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘You seem to belong to a well-to-do family,’ Qadir told me. ‘But your clothes look old. Let them get a little older, a little more worn out and you have a good chance of finding what you are searching for.’

  I thanked Qadir and his aunt and stood up to look around. The walls of the compound had grooves all over them. Through the holes, the size of missing bricks, the land surrounding the hill was visible. On one side was a settlement built in straw and cloth where a Sindhi speaking community lived. On the other, Baloch settlers lived in brick homes. The sea, met by mangroves was not far, and the buses went up a straight road to the seething city.

  ‘When the season is right,’ said Qadir, ‘the grooves in the walls allow serpents to enter. The compound is covered in snakes.’

  To the left of Naag Baba’s abode was a room with no windows. The path was covered in broken tiles, with designs on them. I walked there alone.

  Inside the room was a grave for Bibi Maan Mukhtan—Mother Mukhtan. A red sheet with tinsel trim was folded on the floor in one corner, and in another corner was a lamp next to
a clay bowl filled with sea salt. The walls were covered with handprints and sentences like:

  ‘May this woman have a child with no trouble.’

  ‘Let my brother become a father.’

  ‘Let that man come back into my life.’

  On and on went the prayers I read on the walls. The handprints made in black soot had reversed. Pressed back into the room.

  The handprints pressed towards the grave of the mother, open with longing and desire, lines of fate exposed, lives lived. The handprints were hands of prayer, desire, longing pressing on the body of the mother lying in a grave at the threshold of city, settlement and sea.

  By the time, I left Naag Baba’s shrine it was past evening. The area behind the chai hotel was pitch black. As I waited for the bus, a man walked past. He was eating boiled eggs. The whole village was well-fed by Nag Baba’s blessings. Farida knew the man, she seemed to be arguing with him from what I picked up, in the little Balochi I know. The two were smiling and walked away into the narrow lanes behind the chai hotel together as I boarded the bus.

  The bus was packed, there was only standing room. But a few stops later, I found a seat next to a woman. I fell asleep, not realizing when my head came to rest on her shoulder. When I woke up, I apologized to her.

  ‘Child, a mother’s shoulder is for her daughter and you are my daughter,’ she said.

  I thanked her. After the bus dropped me off in the centre of the city, I took a rickshaw home.

  KARACHI WAALI SITA

  There are many stories to tell, many anecdotes to share But how is Banul to tell you what actually happened— Banul Dashtyari

  (Naz Bibi, eminent poet of Balochi language from Lyari, Karachi published under her poetic title: Lady Dashtyar, Iran. Banul is buried at Malang Shah graveyard in Sindh.)

  The night before, the crescent moon waxed into a celestial bindi adorning the inky tapestry of the Karachi sky, bringing to a close the sandal ceremony of a saintly moon-faced bride.