Nearby, a tree stump, barely visible under a mound of moist rose petals by the watering place, marked the spot where Shah Pari perched to rest her wings: Shah Pari ka Chilla. While offering her Maghrib prayers, the caretaker of Shah Pari, Faqira, heard Shah Pari offering a prayer for the birds in the Quran who came in flocks, striking a mighty army of elephants (intending to destroy the Ka’bah) with baked clay. Children brought to eat rose petals and drink the water in the clay bowls as women under the Pari’s possession circled seven times around Shah Pari’s seat. The sparrows shrieked for mercy from the impending night, as Iqbal’s verses sounded through the gathering.
After taking the rounds of Shah Pari’s seat, the women came and sat before Faqira, the spirit healer of Shah Pari’s site, one of the women of the inner-circle at Miran Pir’s darbar. She sprinkled their faces with bird water and tapped their bodies with peacock feathers. ‘A snake creates turmoil in the body. The feathers of the peacock alleviate fear,’ she said. ‘Miran Pir is a nyaani,’ Faqira told us.
Faqira had been working at Miran Pir as a healer for the past twenty years, making a daily trek from her home in Sultanabad, Gandhi Nagar. ‘I came here to offer salami,’ she said. ‘I prayed to Allah. I recited Yaseen Shareef and durood shareef. Just like that, one day, by Miran Pir’s grace, I became a mujawar here.’ Faqira was thirteen years old when, on a family visit to Makli, she had a vision. ‘I heard voices that created fear in me. At the time, I did not know what was going on,’ she said. ‘Now I know. Now if it happens to my own daughters, I know what is going on with them. Even if it happens to strangers, I know exactly what’s going on with them.’
Many of the women came to Shah Pari for child or man, Faqira said. ‘Mostly women come for their nyaani or because they are nyaani.’ What happened to Faqira was what happened to these young women when they come of age. These women suddenly waking to a world changed, as sometime during the night, their youth unfurled from a bud into the full bloom of a flaming red rose—they became possessed, feeling the forces of the world around them—a rose to be plucked, no matter how thorny the stem. The women came to Shah Pari because they sought Shah Pari—the women came because Shah Pari sought them. In love, there was no telling who held the threads. ‘Whoever Shah Pari loves, she posesses or Shah Pari is possessed by her lover,’ said Faqira.
Bala Kanda says in the Ramayana, ‘At that moment a chasm opened in front of Sita and before all assembled, Mother Earth emerged and welcomed Sita into her arms and seated her on a throne of flowers. Then the throne slowly descended and the earth closed over her head. Sita was gone forever.’ Miran Pir was thirteen years old, Faqira said, when she arrived from Baghdad. Lost alone in the wilderness, Miran Pir ran through the jungle, enemies behind her, pursuing her. She ran to this spot and prayed to Ghaus Paak, her grandfather, to save her. ‘Don’t lay a hand on me. I am a pure Bibi,’ Faqira said, in Miran Pir’s voice. ‘Allah heard her cry and she was swallowed by the earth right there and then,’ she said. ‘Only the pallu of her dupatta was left above ground.’
The quba (dome) built in 1693, during the British Raj, was empty, it is said, when a shrouded body covered in green chaadar with gold tinsel was brought to the doors of the quba and sealed by an iron padlock. The people accompanying the body pleaded with the owner of the dome for permission to bury the woman who they said was a member of the family of the great Ghaus Paak Azam of Baghdad and had been brought from Ranipur Gambat, in the Khairpur district of Sindh. ‘If this woman belongs to the great Ghaus Azam’s family as you say, then let her open the lock herself,’ the man said. Those who narrate the story claim the lock fell open, and thus the men shouldered the body to be laid inside the dome.
In 1963, in the Khairpur District of Sindh, a Moharram procession was attacked by a mob in which around 118 people reportedly died, in what became the first recorded attack of this nature in the Islamic republic of Pakistan. It started with an attack on a Moharram procession in the town of Tehri, near Ranipur. News of the attack quickly spread to nearby towns. Upon hearing about it, another juloos appeared from a nearby town to help fight the attackers. The attackers suffered casualties but they managed to kill a number of their opponents. According to a Fiqah-e-Jafaria news site, they then threw the bodies into a well and intended to set the well on fire with kerosene and matches, but police showed up and prevented them from doing so.
The shrine of Sachhal Sarmast is in Ranipur. The ecstatic Saint of Truth was born in Daraza near Ranipur, Sindh, the heart of the city of Khairpur. Sarmast was an ardent follower of ‘Wahdat-ul-Wujood’, the unity of existence. The literary motif of Sarmast’s poetry was martyrdom. The mystic sufi was beheaded by the Mughal ruler of Delhi, Aurangzeb, who sent armies of elephants and cannons to Jhok, Sindh. Sarmast’s decapitated head, still reciting verses of poetry, was brought to Delhi. He liked to dance and listen to music and observed the rites of Moharram. Sachal Sarmast, huft-zubaan, knower of seven languages, was called the Mansur Hallaj of Sindh.
Mansur Hallaj was born in Iran but moved to Baghdad. He spoke Persian, then wrote in Arabic when he forgot his Persian. ‘I am the truth,’ Hallaj proclaimed. The statement outraged the clerics—the truth was one of the 99 names of Allah. Hallaj was executed at the Tigris River. He was lashed, then decapitated. His body was doused in oil, then set alight. His ashes were set afloat in the Tigris River. In that moment, the river was on fire.
It was from Sachal’s resting place—the town of Ranipur, better known these days for its sugar mills than for the shrine of Sachal—that the body had been brought to Miran Pir.
In the following years, ‘sectarian violence’ became a recurring feature in the local papers sweeping the entire country. Dajjal roamed the land of the Bhagavad Gita—Arjuna and Lord Krishna held counsel over kin-killing-kin in the Karbala of Karachi— blood ran free in the age depicted in the Mohenjo-Daro seals as Kali Yuga. Mohabbat became a forever remorse of Moharram. Haseen became the martyred Hussein. Truth. Beauty. Love— went behind a purdah, became veiled.
After the Moharram murders of 1963, the government of General Ayub Khan brought religious foundations and major shrines under the control of the Department of Religious Endowments and the Advisory Council for Islamic Ideology, through the formation of the Auqaf committee. Whatever the intentions of the Ayub government may have been in setting up the Auqaf committee, by 1959, under the West Pakistan Waqf Properties Ordinance, the government took complete control of ‘shrines, mosques and all waqf properties, including agricultural lands, shops, houses, and temporary lodging sites.’
The khalifa of Miran Pir, Zubair Peerzada, had a dream. He saw a woman in purdah appear before him. She was visible but veiled, that was how he knew she was the Bibi of Miran Pir. Normally, when the Bibi appeared in a dream it brought good tidings. After all, the khalifa’s family had given the Bibi shelter in 1693, and the khalifa’s family had received this great honour of having the Bibi buried at the dome, Zubair said. But things had not been going well.
After the passage of the Waqf Ordinance of 1963, the area of Miran Pir, the two courtyards, the dome and the sprawling graveyard, all 26,000 square feet of land, had, in effect, become the property of the state of Pakistan. In desperation, the khalifa had opened the land to the neighbourhood to bury their dead, and Zubair’s father had demolished the latrines at Miran Pir in the hope that the caretakers would go away having no place to relieve themselves. Instead, the government demanded the khalifa’s family build back the latrines with their own money, for the state employed the caretakers. So, now, all that the khailfa of Miran Pir was left with was a graveyard and no means of income.
Forward, to the twenty first century.
The families of Jamaat in the neighbourhood began to issue threats to the guardians of this place of heresy, even sending a bulldozer to take down one of the walls: Miran Pir’s sacral grounds were the site of sacrilege. In 2004, after Miran Pir was given a new dome and walls, Zubair Peerzada decided he would raze the dome and build a mosque.
He declared his decision as final to his family before going to bed. Then the Bibi whose resting place he was about to raze to replace with a mosque appeared before him. During the night, Zubair Peerzada woke up gripping his heart, drenched in sweat. He ran to the dome and went down on his knees, begging forgiveness. ‘This is a great darbar. This is not a small place,’ Zubair said.
The family of the Khalifa, his father and mother and aunts and uncles and siblings, lived inside a haveli behind the mosque in the courtyard of Miran Pir. The 400-year-old haveli had changed little over the years, other than the conversion of a room—once containing a collection of historical texts the senior Peerzada liked to consult—into the kitchen. The books had all been given away or had rotted because of the monsoon, save for a 200-yearold book containing the real name of Miran Pir kept safe and secret.
At the back of the home there was a veranda where goats wandered in moist, garbage-strewn earth called Jinnat ki kothi— house of jinns. Inside the compound, the women of the haveli, elderly and young, women who were veiled but who rarely, if ever, left the haveli, walked about busy with chores, hanging washing on the lines and cooking breakfast. The air in the haveli compound was always thick with the smell of wood fire and earth. Something else was in the air: the faint whiff of ash. It was rumoured a woman—the daughter of Laal Sayeen, the man who gave the body shelter, the man who put the padlock on the quba—had died right before she was to be married, a long time ago in the study converted into a kitchen, a nyaani burnt on the stove.
Inside a spacious open-air compound, a square room near the entrance once belonged to the senior Khalifa. After he had suffered a heart attack a few years ago, he had vacated the square room and its inherent responsibilities to Zubair Peerzada, the eldest child and the only son amongst four daughters, making him sole heir of Miran Pir. Inside the room, Zubair sat gripping the edge of his single bed, having just woken up, after adjusting his mirrored topi, his children asleep on the floor covered by cotton quilts at his naked feet.
‘It is the signs of the age we live in,’ said Zubair. ‘In an earlier age, people used to seek pirs. In this age, pirs seek people,’ he said. ‘Time has reversed things.’
A window in the room, which once opened into the courtyard of Miran Pir, had been filled with brick and cement. The sill now served as a shelf, stacked with sanitary white boxes of syringes. Back in eighth grade, his biology teacher had taken Zubair into his apprenticeship. ‘My line is medicine. Here we heal with prayers. The treatment we do at the clinic, that same treatment is done here with prayers and rituals,’ he said. ‘Where doctors reach the limit of their understanding of what ails a patient is where our work begins. When doctors turn patients away saying there is nothing more we can do, only prayers can help you now—well, we offer those prayers.’
‘We say in Sindhi this is a livelihood earned from thin air,’ he said. Zubair’s grandfather had been a hakim, a physician in a tradition of healing practices spanning generations of the khalifa’s family. But Zubair never went to school after the tenth grade and remained a compounder (one who prepares medication) until his father’s retirement. He then acquired the title of khalifa. ‘If I had continued in his profession, I would have been a higher level technician instead of a compounder,’ he said. It was similar to his feelings about becoming a khalifa—without ownership of land, he was a mere caretaker.
‘We made a smart move opening the land to the neighbourhood to build graves, and it filled up so quickly. Otherwise, the Auqaf (Religious Affairs Ministry) would have built shops and high-rises here and made millions monthly. We destroyed their income,’ he said. Once all sacral institutions were under state control, the content of the Friday sermon and any and all literature published was also regulated through the Auqaf. At Miran Pir, a state-salaried caretaker was installed by the Auqaf inside the dome, along with two flag-green iron containers of fund collection boxes. The quba was now the Ka’bah, inside which gods made of clay were kept.
‘In order to nationalize the shrine, the state had to demonstrate that the Auqaf could maintain them better than the khalifa and then discredit the traditional religious functions of the khalifa as superfluous.’ At many of the major shrines around the country, the khalifa and their kin are appointed as caretakers—men who sit inside the inner sanctum of sacral spaces offering devotional threads. Zubair Peerzada was the kin descendant of Miran Pir. Even if Miran Pir was a place for women and had to be run by women, a man was appointed by the State. None of the women of the khalifa’s family were allowed outside their house.
‘Our women are in purdah,’ he said. ‘None of the women of our family have ever worked at Miran Pir. This work is for the caretakers.’ Through a local lawyer, and some contacts in Zulfiqar Bhutto’s PPP government, the senior khalifa had been able to wrest back partial control of the shrine, their only means of income from Miran Pir. The negotiations with the Auqaf representative, the cleric—a neighbour who lived in a house right behind the communal kitchen—had led to a compromise.
But Zubair was worried. ‘I want a setup where there is not much interference in our affairs here at the shrine. Auqaf can come and collect money every month, that is fine by us. The way we have a setting with the cleric right now. But I worry what will happen when he retires. The government will say, this land is our custody,’ he said.
Since the installment of the Auqaf, beginning in 1963, earnings had been thin. At times, Hamida and Gulshan went home empty handed. ‘You have to do your duty no matter what,’ Zubair said to Gulshan and Hamida.
‘This Shahida is the “Mai” of Auqaf,’ he said referring to the current state employed caretaker. ‘She demands that all the other caretakers pay her a cut from their earnings. Because she is the sole official mujawar. But I told the other caretakers to not pay her a penny.’
Somewhere along the way, the sacral land of Miran Pir for which the women cared had become this man’s property and the women had become the khalifa’s caretakers instead of Miran Pir. Somewhere along the way, Zubair Pirzada, the Pir of Miran Pir, had become a feudal lord.
‘All these women work “under” me,’ Zubair Pirzada said. Like Zarina before them, Gulshan and Hamida carried thread and clay inside a snake charmer’s basket they placed between them. The bulk of their earnings came from the thread necklaces and earth sold for twenty rupees. Like Zarina before them, this snake charmer’s basket and the use of the brush was tied to the money inside a green silk pouch in which a share of the day’s earnings were collected—which was sent for by the khalifa’s family from time to time throughout the day, via the children of the haveli.
Unlike Gulshan and Hamida, Shahida had a government licence and a nametag as the sole official mujawar of Miran Pir. Only Shahida, the caretaker hired by the government, had official sanction to offer the sacred thread and earth and to oversee the various attendant rituals at Miran Pir. Inside the dome, Shahida sat between a miniature cot, a portion of henna, a mustard oil lamp, a box of green bangles—all relatively recent additions at various shrines and her own basket of thread and earth. Besides tying the necklaces on women’s bodies, she made an additional income selling threads to be tied to the canopy of Miran Pir’s resting place. Inside the dome, a share of the earnings were collected inside two padlocked parrot green metal containers. ‘Put money in the safe, put money in the cot. These were the rules.’ Shahida said.
Over the years, since the construction of the courtyard and dome, the number of caretakers at Miran Pir had increased. On alternate days, Gulshan and Hamida were joined by Rashida and another Hamida, whom the women of the inner-circle called Doosri Hamida (the second Hamida). Near the watering place, at the meditation place of Shah Pari, Faqira was the caretaker of Shah Pari and at the small shrine in the outer courtyard, Zohra was the caretaker of satiyan. These caretakers were selected by the khalifa and had to pay him a daily cut of what they earned. Inside the dome, beside Shahida, Amma Taaji, an elderly woman, sat all day, assisting Shahida and keeping watch on vi
sitors. Fatima, whose aunt had for decades daily lit lamps at Miran Pir and was buried in a grave next to Zarina’s place of burial, came over in the evenings to do the same.
Other than the caretakers, a proliferation of women beggars spread out in loose circles from the inner courtyard all the way to the gate of Miran Pir. A number of these women sat in the inner courtyard in their marked spots—a burqa-clad woman who never spoke a word called Hajiani, Khadija, and beside Khadija, Ammok, the oldest amongst the women of the inner circle, while Haseena and Mariam sat towards the outer edge of the inner courtyard. None of these women were allowed to touch the jhaara, the spirited water of the birds or the thread and earth—they could offer nothing, only ask for alms.
For years a beggar at the gate of Miran Pir, Zohra had recently been instated as caretaker at the shrine for seven Satis in the outer courtyard, the first site past the main gate. Miran Pir’s dome was central to the visitor to Satis. ‘Miran Pir is our mother,’ Faqira said. ‘She is the great mother and satis are the smaller mothers.’
Zohra was not complaining. Becoming a caretaker had meant a bigger income, since now she had access to the jhaara and thread and earth. She had recently brought over three other women from her family, who, she said, needed money. But Shahida, the official mujawar, had gone over to the sati site and sent away the other women. Four women inside a small shrine of Satiyan meant no money in the safe, she said, and that simply was not acceptable. Rules are rules, she told me; the Auqaf, she said, had provided her with rangers and the army. There would be questions as to why she had not taken any action. Zohra did not complain.
Outside the dome, the status of the caretakers was uncertain and fortunes of alms were overturned without warning. As in the case of Khadija, who had been caretaker for six years, and then was replaced by Faqira about two years earlier. Faqira, said Khadija, offered the khalifa a bigger cut from her earnings, fifty rupees per day. ‘I only gave him ten rupees per visitor. Maybe twenty, if it was nau chandi,’ she said, referring to the first Thursday of the new moon every month, when pilgrims flocked in droves to Miran Pir. ‘Just like that I was removed from Shah Pari,’ she said. ‘That too on a Thursday.’
Sita Under the Crescent Moon Page 8
