Sita Under the Crescent Moon

by Annie Ali Khan

  At 7 a.m. the next morning when Hamida woke up, the moon— its scars of ages past visible on the silver disc that showed today— was fading into an iron sky. Her greying hair tied in a bun matted to the back of her head, Hamida walked to the kitchen—leaving the faint outline of her weary body behind on the threadbare carpet where she had slept the night before.

  Her sister Gulshan, lay sleeping on the floor, rendered almost unconscious by Lorazepan pills which were prescribed for anxiety but taken in excess of dosage for sleep. Gulshan slept until mid-day. But Hamida left early. She walked down four flights of stairs, past the paan spittle covered warnings against spitting paan. Outside in the street, stray dogs, balding and infected, barked viciously as Hamida turned the corner on Ramji Street.

  On her way to Miran Pir, Hamida sometimes crossed the neighbourhood from an alternate path snaking through a curtained compound where a woman washed clothes and another cooked food on the fire, by an open gutter. The woman who washed clothes had been Gulshan’s playmate when they were children. Tucked in the lane behind this crossway was the shrine, a mirror grave, for the sadhu and saint Baba Farid, a wanderer of the coastline of the sub-continent in search of sachh—the truth. In a room in the corner of the astana was kept the serpent Naag Baba’s pagri, his crown, a silk-wrapped hat with a peacock fan stringed with pearls. In the wintertime when there were less people around, snakes slithered about in the shrine.

  Hamida had been travelling this route, about a twelve-minute walk through narrow lanes and winding streets, since she was a child; to get to the court of Miran Pir where her mother Zarina had been a caretaker, a spirit healer, for fifty years before she passed away in 2002. Altogether, four generations of the women of the Baloch family dedicated their lives to serving Miran Pir. Gulshan, the first, and Hamida, the third, amongst seven sisters and one brother, became Miran Pir’s devotees.This shrine was invisible to the world. I had only discovered it because of a small reference in a book on Baloch culture. It mentioned the ritual of leaving water in desolate places for birds to drink. Once collected after the birds had had the water, it was given to children who did not speak or stuttered. It cured them. The book said the power of cure had come from Miran Pir. It led me to finding the shrine tucked away, in plain sight, behind the busiest marketplace in all of Karachi.

  Zarina had sat every day in the small section of the courtyard by the entrance of Miran Pir’s courtyard. Two mendicants sat at a time on a date palm spread—between them a snake charmer’s basket full of threads and healing clay. At the time, Miran Pir was a bare brick structure, empty inside, with nothing around other than a mud courtyard dotted with chinar and neem trees and a few scattered graves, one of them a follower of the pir Ghaus Pak. Ascetics sat all day in the shade smoking hashish bought from alms given to them.

  In the patch of wilderness, under the canopy of ancient trees, Zarina and a fellow devotee tapped the bodies of visitors with a broom made from the feathers of peacocks that once sheltered Indra from Raavan—the feathers were believed to be blessed by Indra with a thousand shimmering eyes and with the power to remove the fear of serpents. Sometimes, the women requested to be tapped on breasts and in between the legs; the feathers were believed to endow the body with sexual power. Then a thread was tied on the body, either the wrist or the neck or the belly. In return, the women offered a coin from a closed fist to a closed fist for the prayer and the thread. It was how Zarina fed her family.

  Gulshan and Hamida’s paternal grandfather, one of seven brothers, had migrated from Qasarqand in Iran to pre-Partition India. ‘We are a kingly people. Our ancestors walked the land they owned, armed with swords,’ said Gulshan. They had been landowners. But over the years, the family began quarrelling over property. Gulshan and Hamida’s grandfather got sick of all the in-fighting over land and cattle. ‘These goats and chicken are more valuable to you than human lives,’ he said to his family, as Gulshan recalled. He left all his property behind and moved to Australia, where he spent the rest of his living years, never returning, not even to see his son Raheem who stayed back or was left behind.

  At the time of her wedding, Zarina had been a local upper-caste girl, who married Raheem, a second-generation Baloch migrant from Iran. After 1947, Zarina found herself a Hindu woman living in Pakistan married to a Muslim man. Their maternal grandfather, Zarina’s father, was from Karachi, Gulshan said, and he was a Shaikh. ‘Those who are Hindu are called Shaikh,’ Gulshan said. ‘My mother was a Shaikh.’

  During squabbles over money at Miran Pir, when the women of the inner circle fought, Gulshan said, ‘They call us Hindu.’ Faith and spirit lying outside the realm of a vague yet over-ruling idea of Islam, came to be referred to as Hindu. In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, you are nothing if not Muslim—honour was everything, belonged to Muslim ‘man’. Zarina, neither a Muslim nor a man, found herself an outsider in the city where she was born. She became an ‘other’ in her own neighbourhood.

  Zarina, meaning the golden one, left her first husband and two children to marry Raheem Baloch. The couple moved into the apartment overlooking the astana of Baba Farid, visible from the fourth-floor apartment where Gulshan and Hamida had been born. Long before Zarina became a widow, Raheem Baloch left her to marry a devotee at the shrine of Baba Farid.

  At the annual pilgrimage, people gathered inside the open-air compound of the shrine for the ecstatic dance. A line-up of drummers chanted in chorus, a hypnotic ‘Oallaaa o allaaa’ in an atmosphere thick with that smoke of powdered roses which was called luban—burned inside a bowl of hot coals and carried around the courtyard, trailing thick, fragrant flags of smoke, sending people left and right into rapture, eyeballs rolling skyward, bodies throbbing to the rhythm of the dhol made of goat skin. Catching something intoxicating from the very air.

  Inside one of the many rooms built around the small compound of the shrine, in the centre of which was a towering shiv’s lingam, lived one of the seven sacred sisters, covered in a flaming red veil. Rehana, the spirit healer at the shrine, said this was Ratna Mai, a sati Bibi who had travelled here from the desertscape of Ratanpur in Rajasthan.The goddess on fire now lived in the seaport city of Karachi—lived because truth has a life of its own, the same way every Moharram brings the spectacle of the battle of Karbala, blood flowing afresh from living, grieving bodies remembering zulm, a battlefield of women and children dying without water. At the shrine, clay pots lined the walls of the room around the sati.

  A rite of the annual urs involved carrying one of the Mai’s clay pots around the shrine, filled with milk enriched with almonds and pistachios. After evening prayer, when the sun paused in the sky before making its descent into darkness, illuminated by many a lamp, people took turns circling the courtyard with a clay pot each, balanced on their heads, and returned to Ratna Mai’s room without spilling a drop of the nourishing milk. It was meant to be shared amongst revellers with the blessing of the living Mai—before the Mai’s spherical jug of milk, having been emptied of the very last drop, a circle of life and celebration completed, was smashed. That is how a young woman’s body was, a pot made of unbaked clay that had to spin, spin, spin before it was emptied of its milk—before the clay pot, like the body, fell, turned to dust.

  The children from the neighbourhood—amongst them Gulshan, the eldest, and Hamida, the third-born of seven sisters and one brother—gathered at the shrine the morning after. The pilgrimage celebrations having concluded, the adults had left. In the compound of the shrine, emulating the rites of the festival, the children enacted a mock dhamaal. The boys played an imaginary dhol with their mouth, their hands drumming in thin air, and the girls balanced discarded bangle boxes on their heads, made of paper filled with incense sticks stuck in soil. The children burned paper to create an acidic smoke making them cough until they were unable to breathe.

  Looking from balconies surrounding the shrine, the neighbours complained about letting small children play in Shiv’s abode. ‘Stop your daughters, Raheem. Else,
something will catch them,’ they said. But Gulshan and Hamida’s father, Raheem Baloch did not mind. Raheem’s aunt Zainab bibi, his mother Noor bibi and a younger sister had served as caretakers, spirit healers at Miran Pir, before his wife Zarina had joined them. ‘This is the place for my children to be,’ Baloch said.

  It was not a secret to her family that when Gulshan was seven years old, she had been playing inside Ratna Mai’s room when the Sati ‘captured’ Gulshan, tying her to the shrine for life. She had to have a dhamaal for every significant occasion of her life, beginning with when she was married, to keep the Sati’s favour.

  Young women in Ratna Mai’s ensnarement of love, pyaar ka hisaab, were both the one in love and the one who was loved, like a hisaab kitaab, a profit and loss. They threw a dhamaal, as a three-day ritual held at the shrine for the Mai, which involved eating fine white ash brought from Makli, the city of graveyards, getting massaged with oil and getting hands and feet hennaed. This was a rite of passage for such girls, on the cusp of womanhood.

  On the day of the ceremony, the young woman at the centre of the rite, adorned with a scorpion toe-ring, and payals on hennaed feet, moved to the beat of the drum. The sacred ash coursing through her young hot blood waving about her body, fragrant with naag champa oil, a mor jhaara. Her pulsating body made the ancient immediate. In that moment, the young woman and the forever burning Ratna—the travelling Sati in the flaming red veil, the Mai who made the pilgrimage from the desert to seacoast—were one and the same. These courtships between old and young women, living and alive, Sati and Sita, lasted a lifetime—an era, an age cast in the dance, the tremulous dance of the plume of a peacock.

  Gulshan liked to read domestic drama stories as described in Razia Bhatti novels, and taught the children of the head of Miran Pir’s family to read the Quran and tutored their children in Urdu and taught them their ‘abc’. Gulshan had her father’s almond-shaped eyes and high cheekbones and hair down to her waist. While Hamida never wore a spot of makeup, Gulshan liked to line her eyes with kohl. ‘I was very beautiful,’ Gulshan told me. ‘Many girls vied to become friends with me.’ Amongst those girls was Noor-un-Nisa, a girl Gulshan’s age, who lived in the neighbourhood and was always finding excuses to visit Gulshan’s home. She passed away a while back.

  Hamida with her mother’s apple cheeks and voice like the Om of a gong, was always getting into trouble with her parents. Her mother did not like her coming to the shrine. Hamida was boisterous, she said. Hamida used to play outside all day with the boys on Ramji Street. Their brother left for South Africa at an early age, his framed photograph hung on the living room wall. ‘My brother was not around. So, I became brother to my sisters,’ Hamida said. She remembered her father always being cross with her for playing with boys. As a little girl, men in the street lifted the cherubic little Hamida in their arms. ‘Why do you let men lift you up? Why do you play with boys?’ Raheem would say. ‘I don’t go to the men. They call me to them,’ Hamida said to her father. ‘I don’t play with boys. Boys like to play with me.’

  When Gulshan and Hamida became young women, their aunt approached Raheem for the hand of one of his daughters. The family, Raheem’s younger brother’s, initially asked for Hamida’s hand for their son. When Raheem approached Hamid with the prospect of marrying her cousins he said. ‘I will poison the groom on the wedding night.’ Hamida said it so calmly that Raheem believed her. Gulshan was to marry the boy, he decided. Gulshan was not happy about it but she could not say no to her father. ‘My father got me married without my consent.’

  The night of Gulshan’s wedding, the four-poster bed which was part of the wedding trousseau, broke. The groom, her cousin, was forewarned by Raheem that Gulshan was possessed by ‘both Hindu and Musalman’ spirits, meaning she had one possession that was impure, and one that was pure. ‘My cousin knew about my hisaab,’ Gulshan told me. ‘Had it been anyone else he would have kicked me out of the house.’

  Within the first year of marriage, Gulshan became pregnant with twin boys. Gulshan’s mother-in-law was not happy to hear the news. ‘My mother-in-law told my husband not to have children,’ Gulshan said. ‘She told me I should not have children until my sister-in-law had children,’ she said. It was an impossible condition to fulfill, Gulshan said. ‘My sister-in-law was old and no longer had her period,’ she said.

  Gulshan was seven months pregnant with her twins when she was attacked, while making tea in the kitchen. She heard her sister-in-law screaming and running towards her. She did not remember how the screaming started in the first place. If she had made enemies amongst her in-laws, she was not aware. If she was aware, there was not much she could do. She remembered the tea boiling and her sister-in-law running towards her. What she did not foresee was her husband coming for her as well from the other side. As the two got close, Gulshan began to faint. The last thing she remembered hearing was her sister-in-law’s words, ‘You are a whore my brother bought from the bazaar.’ Somehow, she survived the assault.

  Gulshan gave birth to the twins at her mother’s home. The third year of her marriage and after her third child was born, her husband died of a sudden heart attack. She continued to live in her mother’s home. She never married again for fear her children would be lost in the world without her.

  Gulshan had been taking sleeping pills every night, for the past thirty years. She had gone into a semi-conscious state of living, suffering from chronic memory lapse. ‘I have no heart left to deal with this world,’ she said. But Hamida remembered everything as if it happened yesterday. ‘When her husband died they put her in a corner in white clothes,’ said Hamida. ‘My father was shocked to see his young daughter in such a state.’

  Inside one of the three bedrooms overlooking Baba Farid’s shrine, Gulshan sat on a four-poster bed, looking forlorn. On her ankles, she wore silver cuffs she used to wear as a young woman. She had lost many of her teeth, after they rotted she pulled them out tying them via a thread to the post of the bed. Her eyebrows had begun to turn white. It had been thirty years since her husband’s death. ‘Allah did not bestow us with a good life. There has been so much suffering. Why doesn’t Allah bring qayamat and end the world?’ Gulshan asked, calling for the apocalypse.

  Gulshan’s eldest son, now a father of three, lived in an apartment across from her home visible from the window of her fourth-floor apartment. Her younger sons lived in the same building across from her place, but a few years ago they had been evicted by the landlord after they had failed to pay the rent. They moved in with Gulshan. ‘I fought with that greedy landlord,’ she said. ‘I gave him such a bad curse, he has this disease now where his hands shiver. His whole body shivers. My kids are on the streets and he built a mansion for himself,’ she said.

  Leaning out from the window she pointed to a curtained window behind a blue plastic water tank on another roof. Her eldest son had not spoken to Gulshan for years. The night before, she had walked over to the entrance of his building instead of going home. ‘Fate turned me around and landed me in the bosom of my own building,’ she said, wondering herself how she managed to reach home.

  One of her sons was married and had four children. In the room across the one where Gulshan was seated, her daughter-in-law tended to the youngest child, her minor son, her voice soft then loud and harsh in turn, echoing through the living room as she scolded her son. She took sleeping pills, she said, to cope with stress. ‘This is what happens when you have children,’ Gulshan said.

  The two sons who lived with Gulshan worked odd jobs repairing refrigeration units and installing internet devices. The income was thin and simply not enough. Gulshan gave five hundred rupees alternately to each of them, from her earnings. That morning, the neighbours had taken what little tea was left in the kitchen. Gulshan had to manage without her breakfast. For the past year or so, she stayed home on Mondays and Wednesdays, listening to music on her son’s cellphone. One of the old songs she listened to reminded her of her husband. ’I miss my husband,’ G
ulshan said and started to cry.

  The year Gulshan was widowed, a younger sister died of a sudden heart attack. Hamida took the two orphaned children, a boy and a girl, under her care. Young women were not allowed to become caretakers of the shrine, as they could not be present during mahwari, for seven days of the month when blood flowed between their legs. But Gulshan, a widow, and Hamida after her, caring for orphaned children, joined Zarina at Miran Pir at a young age.

  It had been years since either Hamida or Gulshan visited the shrine or attended the urs of Baba Farid. Since both sisters had become caretakers at Miran Pir—those sacred rooms like spidery crossways pushed further and further back from main streets, receded into secret rooms—the shrine visible from their balcony became part of a distant memory.

  Hamida’s possession had long tied her to Miran Pir, where every year, at the urs of the female saint, Hamida fell into raptures while attending to the ritual of cleansing the Pir’s resting place with rose water. Her eyes now rheumy from cataract, her throat constricted by asthma—in her bag a prescription for an inhaler she could not afford to purchase—Hamida, unmarried, was the keeper of the throne, of Miran Pir’s darbar or court.

  The landscape of Ramji Street—the straight and narrow road to Miran Pir, that led past the haveli of saint Mewa Shah, housing a little Jewish cemetery at its namesake graveyard—changed, even as everything remained the same. The little bakery at the corner where Hamida and Gulshan bought milk and bread was the same and so were the shops where aluminum pots and pans were hammered into shape and the tiny places where woven date-palm spreads called chatai were sold alongside tea shops selling paper packages of loose leaves imported from Kenya and Iran—the stores were all the same, even if the shopkeepers changed.

  The small clinic where small crowds of Balochi women marked by their tie-dye sari and elephant bone white bangles stood waiting for their turn to see the doctor, not the witch kind. They saw those too, these women who were illiterate but knew the songs of Kabir, the weaver. These women who used to weave but did not/could not anymore as they had not learnt to weave nylon the way industrial plants do. These women who were considered unclean—achoot, paleed, both meaning low caste, impure in the pure land of Pak-istan.