Sita Under the Crescent Moon

by Annie Ali Khan

  The Balochi women visited Miran Pir after their doctor’s visit to get thread and some clay from a caretaker at Miran Pir, on their way home. These impure women went to Miran Pir to bathe in sacred water—at least, they used to. They used to, before everything changed, even as it remained the same. Before the water wells were closed to the women. Their unclean bodies too paleed to be seen in public. Past the clinic, the entrance to Miran Pir had been covered on one side a few years ago, by a boundary wall and an empty, garbage-strewn lot, leaving an even narrower side street just as the shacks of flower sellers were allotted space in front of the courtyard, elevated wooden shacks that both indicated and concealed the presence of the entrance gate of Miran Pir.

  Past the low entrance gates, where a faqir dressed in a red kurta and a necklace strewn with rough quartz stones he had collected, each stone a milestone in his journey, each stone awaiting his arrival, over several pilgrimages on land both free and feared had been living for the past few months: a courtyard at the far edge of which visitors took off their shoes.

  A towering ulum solemnly greeted Hamida. This was a sacred pole with the five-fingered open palm on top—the hand of the goddess—standing upright under the weight of more than five hundred green-and-red tinsel-trimmed flags breathed with prayers. To the left of the courtyard, was a room in pale green wash, a tiny simple brick structure painted over with a thick enamel coat—the resting place of a Satiyan who lived in Makli. As one disciple, Faqira, said, ‘When the sacred sisters were attacked on their pilgrimage, they became martyred.’ They sacrificed their lives for the sake of purity, truth.

  Across from this simple brick room of the living seven Satiyan was a massive solid white painted mosque.

  Once, Allah’s house had been a small brick room just like all the other rooms in this courtyard. But over the years, the mosque where a Friday sermon was delivered via a loudspeaker, as men stood in clean formations dressed in pristine white, with ankles exposed and heads covered, flourished while the rooms where these Mais lived remained the same humble places they had always been. Between the humble house of the seven sacred sisters and the grand house of Allah was the slightly elevated ground where a tiny booth was used to serve free food, a langar. As Hamida liked to say, ‘The place to go to quell the hellfire of a hungry stomach.’ This outer courtyard led through a second set of gates to another larger courtyard, in the centre of which was a square room with a dome.

  As Hamida unclasped the padlock and entered the low wooden door that opened into the inner sanctum of the young female saint’s resting place, to which she alone possessed the key, she pulled on the red and green purdah across the inside of the door to protect what was within from prying eyes. After the formation of Pakistan, in the shadow of Allah, most revered places except mosques, became secret places, veiled, covered—in purdah, in burqa. Inside the square room, taking a small broom made of woven date leaves which was only as long as her forearm, Hamida swept in clean circles, veiling and unveiling—she pulled close the red and green curtain suspended from the wooden frame of the canopy, about thirty feet of frayed glittering gold brocade. From the top of Miran Pir’s resting place she removed the layers of green tinsel-bordered coverlets, careful to leave the virgin white muslin below in place. She then laid thick, red velvet covers embroidered with gold wire on top: ‘bibi ke teen burqay’—the three veils of the Sati.

  Miran Pir’s resting place—each crack in the brick, each fissure in the marble, each groove in the wooden beams of the room built as a dome, more than a century older than her—was familiar to Hamida like the lines of fate inside her smooth palms and the even deeper lines on the back of her hands, which tied her to this place. ‘The very last drop of our youth has been spent serving Miran Pir,’ Hamida said.

  The night before, the women of the inner-circle, courtiers of the darbar, cleared away the mounds of petals of roses showered on Miran Pir’s resting place. But the cleaning of the shrine in the morning was for Hamida to carry out alone and the other women waited for Hamida to complete cleaning by tending to other chores—knotting the white threads, tying together three thin strands in five places to make a necklace, sweeping the entrance, dusting the ash and rolling washed cotton into wicks for the clay lamps.

  Every evening, around Maghrib, Hamida lit twenty-one of these lamps—collectively a chiraghaan—in and around the courtyard. Mustard oil soaked through the wick caught the flame and rent the air with the warm fragrance of yellow flowered fields, a reminder of lush environs in a dusty lot scattered with faded memorials to past lives: rituals endowing objects with meaning, which Hamida, a respected woman of power, unmarried, solitary, a nyaani or a ‘janaki’, had been carrying out all her life. ‘Janaki’ was known across Sindh and Balochistan as the princess daughter of King Janaka of Mithila, otherwise known as Sita.

  Behind the mound of Miran Pir was a small metal gate called macchi gate. On the outside, the gate was carved with a star and crescent moon. Unlike the star and crescent on the Pakistani flag, this star was six-pointed and the crescent a perfect bowl, and both symbols protected on either side by a three-pronged Buddhist symbol—a gateway to a once different time and place, yet present. One side opening to the sea from where foreign ships arrived, the other to Sita’s abode in Ram Bagh.

  From inside the courtyard, the macchi gate was flanked by columns carved with fish harking back to times when the sea was closer. The gates now opened out to a sprawling graveyard of parched earth where a shrine to Ahmed Shah Bukhari formed the nucleus of graves scattered in circles, each tombstone a text, an affirmation of a life lived. Pushing up against the very edges of this spiral of graves were high-rises with windows, like soulless eyes housing an exploding population of wretched bodies packed into small airless rooms—the very motif of modernity.

  The land—about 26,000 square feet, claimed by the family of the Khalifa, descendants of the man who owned the graves—had been opened to the locals to bury their dead. To keep it from being usurped by the state, they had transformed it: grave upon ploughed grave aligned in concentric circles of sacred ritual, bodies collecting into bones and dust, forming a graveyard. The tombstones forever flowed into each other. Like the Ka’ba—one could follow the circle forever and never reach the centre—the truth was in the circumambulation.

  In Surah 15, Aayat 33 of the Quran, Iblis said, ‘I am not one to prostrate myself to a human being, whom You created from dried clay of altered mud.’ The duba (dome) was not the Ka’bah, house of God in Mecca—inside which idols made of clay were once kept. Neither a temple, mosque nor a shrine—between Kharadar and Mithadar, one gate opening to a local river the other gate opening to a foreign sea, at the threshhold of river and earth and ocean: Miran Pir was a manadi, a proclamation.

  In Surah 18, Al-Kahf in the Quran, Zulqarnain erected a barrier of molten iron and copper between two cliffs, between the people of the land and Ya’juj Ma’juj—Zulqarnain came to a people who had no possessions, but who dug graves at their door. Lyari was named after a tree called Lyar, meaning silence of the graveyard. Bala Kanda says in the Ramayana, ‘As I ploughed the land set apart for the sacred ritual, there arose from the course of the plough a baby girl, who became known by the name of Sita.’

  Zarina was buried in a corner of the boundary wall of Miran Pir, right by macchi gate. Under the shade of the chinar trees, standing tall and composed amongst graves like mounds of kneaded earth painted bright enamel green, the tombstone read ‘Zarina Shaikh, wife of Raheem Baloch’. Died 2002. Hamida remembered that her mother Zarina would refer to Miran Pir as Dhunnul Mai, a Sindhi and Balochi term meaning woman of great treasure or woman of the land.

  A century after H.T. Sorley’s Shah Latif of Bhit chronicled Shah Latif’s poetry and pilgrimage in the quest for his seven Surmiyan throughout the coastal belt of Sindh and Balochistan, colonial officer and writer Richard Burton took a walk through the seaside area with kites overhead, making his way past the area called Baghdadi, once an auction area for slav
es brought from the Sultanate of Oman, to the ‘magnificent edifices erected in 1866’ by the colonial empire, observed in his The Unhappy Valley. Near Kharadar—one of the two gates of the old city, Mithadar opened out to the river and Kharadar opened out to the sea—Burton arrived at an area dotted by ‘holy places’ called Ram Bagh, where the dome was located; the site where Ram and Sita spent a night on their journey through the valley of the Ramayana.

  Like Ram and Sita, Burton travelled through the valley of the Ramayana, as described in his book. At Ram Bagh, Burton described seeing gathered around a well, women with earthen pots on their heads and babies on their hips. ‘There is an immensity of confabulations going on, and if the loud frequent laughs denote anything beside vacancy of mind, there is much enjoyment during the water drawing,’ he wrote. ‘At scandal-point, the ladies there prepare their minds for the labours of the evening, such as cooking their husband’s and children’s dinner, mending their clothes, preparing their beds, and other domestic avocations.’

  Burton arrived in Sindh, less than a decade after 1843 when Charles Napier became governor of Sindh, crossing the Arabian Sea along with a convoy of ‘600 negro souls’ and ‘filthy sepoys’ who were being transported from Bombay. Before the Shippe of Helle had properly docked at the port of Karachi, a native sepoy named Ramji Naick died by drowning in the Arabian Sea.

  By the early 1920s, at the religious seminary of Muzhur-ululoom, not far from Ram Bagh, a Sikh-turned-Muslim swearing allegiance to the pan-Islamic movement started by Kamal Pasha, an Afghan who became a leading figure in Turkey, spearheaded the Reshmi Roomal Tehreek, a pivotal anti-establishment uprising against the Raj. This was quashed quickly—ruthless retribution followed in the footsteps of the mutiny of sepoys crying inquilaab.

  The Indian soldiers who revolted and hoisted a saffron flag above Red Fort were hung by the thousands in what came to be known as the Hanging Mela: fresh corpses hung from ancient Bargad trees from Dilli to Allahabad. The rallying cry of freedom was drowned by the classic two-nation theory stating declaratively that Hindus and Muslims formed two separate nations. While ranks were broken in the name of freedom, lines of nation states were drawn on a new map to replace the old map of the Raj, both printed on China paper. By 1947, the heart of the valley of the sacred text of the Ramayana was shredded into countries called India and Pakistan.

  In the new Islamic Republic, the ancient temples, gurdwaras and sacral sites not aligned with the Islamic mandate as constituted by the new state paradigm found themselves, if not erased, then altered. Zia’s Islamist dictatorship brought the spectacle of public floggings. East Pakistan suffered another violent upheaval at the hands of West Pakistan and became Bangladesh. Civil unrest and political turmoil turned the streets of Sindh—Hyderabad and Karachi—into killing fields.

  Ram Bagh, the resting place of Ram and Sita, became Aram Bagh, the campsite of refugees of the fallout between what the Gita stated and the Quran ordained carried out with a hand on the Bible, reduced in its boundaries to the area better known for its government-run passport offices where long lines formed daily for a citizenship document—a new flag-green coloured passport.

  Long after Partition, Karachi’s heart, the landscape of the town in the areas of Saddar and Lyari in the old city, which Burton had described as ‘a mass of mud hovels’ in The Unhappy Valley, remained much the same—even as steel complexes and flyovers went up all around it. Under the shadow of a massive steel tower overlooking the ocean, the fishermen of Mai Kolachi— the woman after whom the city was named sat by the seashore feeding the fishermen—were no longer allowed to fish, could no longer afford to eat, in the polluted seas where giant drilling machines financed by China sucked the seabed for oil.

  In Khadda, part of the Kharadar area of Lyari, the fishermen of the Dorahi community lived in a sand-filled pit (‘khadda’ literally means ‘pit’), because the Raj had built a bazaar on the site where they used to live. They claimed ‘Rani Victoria’ had taken their land. Salma, a resident of Khadda, a descendant of women who wove the threads of fishing nets at home before nylon nets began to be imported from abroad, had long made peace, she said, with making a living cleaning other people’s filth with water from the sea inside homes in posh neighbourhoods of Karachi, where once Salma’s ancestors lived, so she could afford cooking oil at home. Salma said that under the sea bed lay fuel for fire that kept the stove burning. Salma also said, under the sea was fuel for fire that can scorch the earth.

  In 2012, from 27 April to 4 May, a massive battle between gangs and the state, costing hundreds of lives was fought at a famous roundabout of Lyari. In an incident that came to epitomize the zulm (tyranny) unleashed upon Lyariites, a ten-year-old boy named Amar, who came out to protest the deployment of police in the neighbourhood, was run over by an armoured vehicle at Cheel Chowk. Under a sky circled by kites, Ramji Naick’s ghost still haunted the streets of Ram, where a boy named Amar died.

  Over the decades, the mud hovels of Lyari were replaced by misshapen buildings like stacked matchboxes of exposed brick and windows with no frames. But sewage still flowed from open gutters. On the top of the door to Hamida and Gulshan’s home, like many identical entrances to apartments in the neighbourhood, lay a prayer, scribbled on a sheet of school copy paper—a hope that hinged on a verse of the Quran for immunity from the plague of chicken guniya, also known as the wrath of Sitala Mata.

  At Kaghzi bazaar in Kharadar, past the shops where wooden stamps of the Buddhist symbols used in traditional embroidery were sold, the once imposing yellow-stone structures of the cantonment area, softened with age—faded tapestries painted in pale washes of pink—looked like crumpled birthday cakes. Carved wreaths on facades like tombs carried the ghost of Partition above balconies with intricate iron grills—shattered like bits of Victorian lace, unraveling at the touch and sold at the lighthouse. The neighbourhood was otherwise known as Prathna Samaj Road.

  In the streets below the unravelling balconies, during the month of Moharram, cart sellers parked their carts day and night, selling Moharram merchandise—whirlies, teer kamaan, and brightly painted clay birds with real bird feathers dipped in neon colours, fashioned out of paper and tinsel. They awaited the arrival of Jesus to deliver his promise to the children of Israel ‘with a sign from your Lord, that I design for you out of clay, a figure like that of a bird and breathe into it, and it becomes a bird by Allah’s Leave’ as the Quran stated.

  In the backlanes of Kaghzi bazaar, the tilawat of Om Tat Sat, ‘that which is real’ during Hinglaj Mata, Durga’s pooja was barely audible. The mandir of Sita where Gulshan had taken all three of her children, ‘when they broke out in Mata’, but hadn’t been to for many moons since times had changed. On the streets of Kharadar, a bespectacled faqir selling for two hundred rupees the hairy skin of jatu ki sawari, hyena, kept in powdered sindoor ‘used to ward off evil spirits and in love magic’, cried into the air: Allah Hoo. Inside Durga’s mandir in the neighbourhood of Bheempura, where Durga’s icon lay padlocked, was an ancient Bargad tree, its branches delving into the ground and roots reaching for the sky. Time, like the wind, changes course, the sparrows say. Time reverses. Everything changes. Even as everything remains the same.

  Not far from Ramji Street, near the gold shops of Kharadar, was an open sewage drain, where a group of men it was believed, some of the locals said they were Hindu, dove into the open sewage canal to bring back bags of scum they sifted for gold. There were rumours the divers found the gold because of the precious metal market nearby. Others were of the opinion the gold the men found in the filth was jewelry lost down the drain by ornament-laden women performing ablutions.

  Those women at the well described by Burton, where Sita stayed overnight, those Shah Latif ki seven Surmiyan, today arrive at the watering place at Miran Pir, their Balochi and Sindhi clothes hand-embroidered in traditional designs including the three-pronged Buddhist symbol or hands of the Hindu as the locals called it, visible in fleeting glimpses from underneath m
ute black burqas machine-embroidered with silver sparkles, holding bags of rose petals, and packets of Metro Milan agarbatti and little bouquets of tulsi now called nyaaz boo.

  Many of the women, who came to Miran Pir from the many settlements of Sindh and Balochistan, possessed neither an identity card nor a passport. Behind chaadar and burqa, not a strand of hair on their heads visible, unmarried women were not allowed to thread their eyebrows. ‘We are neither Pirs nor Sayyeds. But our people are very strict about these things,’ a young woman said. ‘That’s the reason we have all this hair growing wild on our faces making us look like Jinns.’

  The young woman was one of the many Miran devotees, not revealing her name for fear of the men in her family, come to offer salami to the Bibi whose name remained a secret.

  On their seventh Sunday, mothers brought children to Miran Pir, to be given a cleansing bath—their seven threads severed, and old clothes discarded. The children stood shivering at the watering place, their mothers pouring water over their heads, before they were re-clothed and given new threads. In the ageless mountains of Balochistan and the boundless tracts of desert and oasis that make up Sindh, clay pots of water are set out in quiet places for creatures of the skies, so that infants may know the language of the birds—the language that enabled Suleiman to inherit the knowledge of Dawud in the Quran. At the watering place, inside the inner courtyard of the dome of Miran Pir, a falcon with a fierce gaze soundlessly swooped down into the clay bowls filled with water for the birds to drink. The water was to be given to children who stuttered or never spoke.