Sita Under the Crescent Moon

by Annie Ali Khan

  Before coming to Miran Pir, Khadija had been caretaker at Ulum Shah, not far from Miran Pir. There, at the dome of Ulum Shah, devotees would kiss the back of her hand and address her as ‘Amma ji’. Here, she said, all were low lifes. Shahida was not around at the time to shed light on possible violations of rules. ‘My heart,’ Khadija said. ‘They removed me so suddenly, my heart just burst. My heart just burst.’

  After Ammok and Hamida signed up for the Benazir fund, Khadija was considering the same. She was simply not making enough money begging. She made some money on the side selling a powdered concoction to rejuvenate the vagina. But sales were low now that she was not a careaker. ‘Does anyone know where Benazir [Bhutto]’s money is being distributed?’ she asked. ‘I heard welfare money is being handed out.’

  The other day, Khadija said, a woman came asking for Zarina. The woman had seen Zarina in a dream. She did not know Zarina’s name, but she described her as a woman in a white chaadar with round apple cheeks. She pointed to the place, where Gulshan and Hamida were sitting—this is where Zarina was sitting. Khadija told her Zarina had died years ago, and the woman left. But it shook Khadija. ‘Zarina died,’ she said. ‘But she killed me as well. I will go where she has gone. There is a home for me where Zarina has gone.’ Khadija came daily and sat on the mat waiting for something. She waited for hearts to change. She waited to be restored to Shah Pari’s shrine. She was old now. Too old to leave. Too old to stay.

  The wood shacks lining the narrow side street on the way to the gate of Miran Pir, that both hid the entrance from the main street and led the way to it, all sold materials for a devotee. The shack closest to the entrance to Miran Pir was run by a man named Atif. Amongst the items on display were rose-coloured cradles made of wood in miniature, sticky, colourful roasted chickpeas, rose petals, tinsel-trimmed sheets, boxes of incense and small polythene bags of sugar-covered popcorn. It was these packets of incense and polythene bags of sweet that had first brought Atif to Miran Pir. He was ten years old, when he set up a cart at the pilgrimage. He now owned a shack of his own.

  A pilgrim entering the courtyard had to get past these shops, the faqir at the gate, the women beggars—two to each side immediately inside the entrance of the gate—then go past or enter the Sati shrines and pay devtotion, then go past the shoe-keepers at the elevated food-court area, then enter the inner courtyard and go past three more beggars inside the inner gate, before arriving at the place where Gulshan and Hamida sat across from Khadija, Hajiani and Ammok. Or, stop at Shah Pari, before entering the dome where Shahida, Amma Taaji and Fatima sat, and where devotion and tithe had to be paid separately before the shrine and flowers bought from the gate could be scattered.

  ‘Give me ten rupees before you go. No one gives me any money,’ Amma Taaji said. At times, women came in handing money all the way from the gate. Other times, someone brought a big pot of fish curry and roti made from white rice for the faqirs. There were times when a woman took a bus and used up her twenty rupees for the bus fare, and wanted to know if there was some food in the rusted tin so she could eat.

  Early in the morning, a young woman came and sat cross-legged on the sheet across from Gulshan and Hamida. ‘My mother made daal for me to bring here,’ she said. ‘But I left it at home. How could I bring a pot of plain daal here,’ she covered her face. ‘Sharam aati, hai na.’ I am ashamed.

  None of the mujawars had had breakfast that morning. The hotel from where the women ordered food was not open yet, and in any case, they had not yet earned anything so as to be able to place an order for food. ‘Even if you brought poison here. We would eat it like a feast,’ Gulshan said to the young woman. ‘Here, amma, we are all orphans.’ For, Gulshan and Hamida had no protection, no official title, no sanction and were, in effect, no different from the women who begged at the grounds and competed daily for the attention of pilgrims visiting Miran Pir.

  ‘We are just beggars,’ Hamida would say.

  Every morning at 9 a.m., Ammok, the eldest of these beggars, came to Miran Pir from her home in Lyari. Ammok brought her own prayer rug with her, which she rolled out next to a grave right across from the entrance to Miran Pir’s dome. Ammok had come to Karachi from Iran, as a twelve-year-old bride. Her husband had died long ago—long before the twenty-eight years Ammok had been coming daily to Miran Pir.

  ‘I am Irani,’ Ammok said. ‘See my clothes. Whoever sees my clothes, asks my amma, when did you arrive from Iran. I got married. I had children, then grandchildren. My clothes have been the same.’ The clothes had come with her as part of her wedding trousseau—fine Iranian hand-embroidered clothes none of the other caretakers could afford to wear. Khadija and Gulshan had once embroidered traditional Balochi clothes to wear, but it had been years since they had been able to make the fine stitches. ‘We get tears in our eyes now. Our eyes cannot bear it anymore,’ Khadija said.

  Ammok brought her own food daily, curry and bread—and did not beg for money, taking what anyone offered quietly. She did not like eating anyone else’s food, nor did she like wearing anyone else’s clothes. She brought her own utensils and ate by herself, and used the money from pilgrims to purchase the food on her way home, leaving every day after 4 p.m. She did not like to ask her family for anything. Ammok was a devotee of Ghaus Paak. She had committed herself to follow three Sufis— Baadshah Pir, Ghaus Azam, the grandson of Abdul Qadir Jillani, known to be close to the Sufi mystic Hallaj, and Ghaus Paak— collectively known as the ‘three cups of poison’.

  Every month, Ammok brought with her a polythene bag full of rose petals and a bottle of rose water and a packet of incense. She went to Mewa Shah cemetery, where she would clean and wash three graves belonging to her—a son, a husband and a grandson.

  Ammok went to Mewa Shah by bus alone. She sat at these three graves by herself, unaccompanied, the one who wore the finest tattered clothes at Miran Pir. ‘In flames, in flames’ Ammok said—life for Ammok was a stove set on simmer. She was on a slow burn.

  Mariam travelled to Miran Pir from her home in Baghdadi. Mariam’s mother had taught the Quran at Miran Pir and swept the floor of the courtyard, back when Zarina was alive. Mariam came to Miran Pir and made necklaces of threads for Hamida. ‘My mother loved Mariam dearly,’ said Hamida. Mariam sat quietly near the edge of the inner courtyard. Mariam was married and had four daughters and a son. But back when Mariam was a little girl, she had been possessed. ‘My mother tied Mariam with chains behind the dome,’ said Hamida. ‘Mariam was mad.’

  ‘Mira mother healed me,’ said Mariam. Day and night, tied to chains inside a dark courtyard amongst chinar trees and scattered graves—Mariam loved by Zarina had been chained by Zarina. Love was chains around the ankles of a woman.

  Mariam and Ammik, these two women from the neighbourhood of Baghdadi, one from Iran and one from Makran, women of the inner circle, one dressed in fine threads, the other stringing together humble threads: together, they formed the belt of ecstatic truth that extended from Hallaj in Iran to Sachal and Inayat in Sindh. Ammok and Mariam, sat there in the courtyard, before the dome and the archway that led to the gate that led to the street outside. Between ecstatic truth and dismal reality— three cups of poison; three cups of rapture, ecstasy, truth; three bowls of death, despair, madness.

  In the evening, when the courtyard was all but empty, as the sun was submerging to meet the moon, the lamps cast shadows in the darkening courtyard. Gulshan and Hamida, along with the rest of the women of the inner circle, sat in the flickering light and shade, waiting for the last of the pilgrims to arrive. Hamida and Gulshan were smoking—Hamida, her beeri and Gulshan, her Capstan, the brand her husband used to smoke before he died, the one she had been married to without her consent, but now wished she could bring back. Gulshan used to go home crying, wondering how she was going to run a household with three boys on 10s and 20s she earned sitting all day under God’s sun at Miran Pir. ‘Sometimes a woman would stop me outside the main gate. She would talk to me about this or that.
Just small talk about her day. About the neighbourhood. Then she would quietly hand me money from her fist to mine and without saying another word, without looking back, she would walk away into the night. Like a miracle. I used to go home crying. I don’t despair anymore.’

  At the end of a long Thursday, Hamida sat on the mat, spilling out the change inside the green silk pouch and counting the cash. Together, Gulshan and Hamida had made 920 rupees that day.

  ‘This is what we made all day. That too on a Thursday, our best day of the week for us,’ Hamida said, holding up the pouch. She put five hundred rupees into the pouch and told Haseena to go hand it to the khalifa. ‘Go take it to sayeen and tell him this is all Hamida made today. No one comes to us for thread, tell him,’ she said. Then, as an afterthought, she picked out some bags of the sweets a pilgrim had brought for her. ‘Here take these sweets and give them to him. Say, someone brought him offerings.’ Haseena took the bag and left.

  Khadija, who had made less than 100 rupees that day, raised her hands to the night sky. ‘Allah will do well by us,’ she said. ‘Allah make every day, Sunday and Thursday. So we get money every day.’ She was not complaining. Allah had given her more than she made most days.

  ‘They tie thread inside the dome, what are we to do,’ Gulshan said.

  ‘We still live,’ Hamida said.

  ‘We have been waiting for Allah since the day we were born,’ Gulshan said.

  Haseena came back from the haveli and began to put away the untidily crushed notes that had come her way that day, before heading home. ‘Count it,’ Gulshan said to Haseena, asking her to count what she had made that day. Haseena demurred, saying it was bad karma to count the money she had made.

  It was all Laal Sayeen’s fault, Gulshan said. The man who gave shelter to the body brought this curse on the women of the inner circle. She turned to Laal Sayeen’s grave to the right of the dome, angry. ‘Sayeen,’ she said. ‘Do something for us Sayeen. Yourself you died. You have no shame. Left us to suffer. Shameless you died. Left us to live.’

  Lately, a rat had taken to living inside Laal Sayeen’s grave. In the evenings, when there were not many people around, the rat wandered around the inner-courtyard, darting in and out of Laal Sayeen’s grave. The rat made an appearance that Thursday night.

  ‘Look at that rat in Laal Sayeen’s grave,’ Gulshan said. ‘Allah is showing us the end is near.’

  She began to fish in her bag for her Lorazepan pills, then popped a few in her mouth. ‘If I don’t take these pills I will go mad at the world.’

  Haseena was called outside just then, someone had sent an offering. It was a big aluminum pot of halwa. Someone had had a wedding or a celebration of some kind, and thought of sending a share of the halwa to Miran Pir. She brought the plate over.

  ‘Where is the spoon?’ Hamida looked in her bag. Just then a faqir ran into the inner courtyard. He had been living at the gate for some time.

  ‘This wretch ate all the offerings in the tin last night. Now he is here again,’ Hamida said. ‘He has made our lives miserable.’

  ‘Throw him out.’ Gulshan screamed.

  ‘Don’t take your anger from elsewhere out on this poor fellow,’ Hamida said. She handed him the plate of halwa. Everyone watched him eat with his hands.

  ‘It was his fate to have halwa so he ate it,’ Khadija said.

  Hamida began to sing her favourite qawwali, ‘Jurm bas itna hai, ke khud se pyaar karte hain.’—my crime is I love myself.

  After her sister had passed away, Hamida stitched clothes on the side, to help raise the two children. ‘I cared for my nieces and nephews. Those orphaned little children. How could I abandon them? How could I marry?’ she said, taking a drag of her beeri. ‘I took care of these children. Allah took care of these children. This Miran mother took care of them,’ she slapped the tiled wall of the dome. ‘I stitched clothes all day and night to care for them so they could grow up to be where they are today.’

  Together Hamida and Gulshan raised their dead sister Shahida’s and Gulshan’s children. ‘Now these very children do not give us respect. They talk back to us. Can you imagine what it does to me?’ Every night Hamida and Gulshan went home and paid a share of their earnings to these children, now grown up. ‘These thankless children of both my sisters,’ Hamida said.

  All day, Hamida kept a sharp eye on each pilgrim that entered the courtyard from the street outside—so none of the competition got there first. ‘Come here child. Let me dust you with the jhaara. Take some prayers with you from me as well,’ Hamida would call out from the mat to the pilgrims walking past. She kept an eye on the offerings. Things disappeared quickly from the mat. ‘Give offerings here. Take flowers inside,’ Hamida said.

  The collected offerings were sold back into the market. The incense, sweet brought by pilgrims to Hamida, she saved to sell back into the market after sending a portion to the haveli. Someone took sweets inside the dome. ‘Let them eat their sweet,’ Hamida said.

  As a pilgrim walked out with a child, she ran after her. ‘Bring the baby here. Let me tie a thread around her neck. Come here. Listen,’ Hamida said. The woman pulled out the thread around her infant’s neck to show Hamida the child had been seen to, as she walked away. ‘Who tied the thread on the baby, amma?’ Hamida called out. No one answered. A little boy ran out, from where men were not allowed. ‘Look at this boy who just came out of the dome,’ Hamida called out after him.

  Hamida went home around nine, two hours after Gulshan had left. On the way home, she bought half a kilo of ghee for a hundred rupees. For eighty rupees, she purchased four packs of tea for twenty rupees each and a kilo of sugar. On good days, Hamida prepared curry with meat or made daal and roti for herself and Gulshan. Other days, the sisters slept hungry.

  ‘Most days we drink tea without milk with roti, thank Allah, and fall sleep,’ she said. The meal was called Suleimani chai— but it was unlike the namesake Soloman, the king who threw a feast for all the creatures on earth. Soloman, the king of jinns, fairies and demons held a feast and said, ‘O Allah! I wish to invite all thy creatures to dinner at my place.’ An enormous feast was prepared and one fish came out of the sea and ate the entire banquet. God said: ‘O Suleiman! Only I can feed all my creatures.’ Hamida had chai without milk.

  The night before, when Hamida had arrived at home, there had been nothing to eat or cook. Her adopted son, her dead sister’s child whom she cared for, a grown man without a job, finally bought her two ‘bun kebab ki tikki’ and some chutney and a roti. The sleeping pills having taken effect, Gulshan had already fallen asleep, without having dinner. But Hamida could not bring herself to eat. ‘I kept the plate in front of me but I could not bring myself to eat,’ said Hamida. She woke Gulshan up and made her eat. ‘She said let’s share but I told her I already ate.’

  The next morning, Hamida and Gulshan arrived at Miran Pir without breakfast. All day, Hamida sat by a pencil case full of a dozen silver eyes which she sold for two hundred rupees each.

  ‘I have to earn money. Food is made from money. If there is no food, we sleep hungry,’ Hamida said. She wore sunglasses to protect her eyes, after having had cataracts removed from both eyes. The operation had cost thirty thousand rupees, covered by her niece’s husband and a devotee, who donated fifteen thousand each for her operation. Hamida could no longer stand the smoke or the acidic fumes from the clusters of incense. The ka’bah was not the ka’bah when you lived in it.

  At the entrance to Miran Pir’s place, on the elevated ground of the kitchen, Hawwa Bai sat collecting dusty chappals asking passersby to buy her something to eat. ‘Just bring me one paratha only.’

  By the unfinished archway of the inner courtyard, Haseena sat calling out to the devotees as they walked past towards the gate. ’Don’t give to the faqirs? Let your boat still cross safely,’ Haseena would say.

  None of these women—faqirs as they were—wore any precious jewelry. There was no dhurri inside their ear cavity or the row of fine bali
yan that ornamented the upper arch of the ear, nor any necklaces nor rings or bracelets or bangles, other than shrine related motifs. This is how the women faqirs lived. Having nothing, begging for everything, getting nothing.

  Every year the pilgrim at Sehwan, faqirs wearing round their necks threads in red, green, black, all different schools, including Qalandari Sufis, walked from Sehwan to Shah Noorani, one of the most treacherous and also one of the well-trodden pilgrimages. This was part of the training of a faqir or Jogi. Some of the pilgrims walked all the way to Hinglaj, where wild cats and serpents and scorpions roam the stony pathways. One of the most famous of the pilgrims to make this journey was Shah Latif Bhitai, the revered poet of Sindhi language.

  These faqirs with their threads in black, blue, green and red or different combinations there of embraced loss. Outside the famous Shah Ghazi shrine, a faqir wandered naked. If a female faqir had been wandering, straying, embracing loss, she would be a woman lying dead, raped naked in a ditch. A mad woman, wandering the naked earth, knew better than to let her dupatta fall off her chest. A female faqir was impure—signboards at various shrines forbade women from entering the inner sanctum. She was the reason these holy men went astray.

  Outside Shah Ghazi shrine, a woman came to spend the night on the footpath. She lived with her husband and son in Peshawar, she said. But he kicked her out of the house. She had nowhere to go. She arrived by bus a few days ago, accompanied by her minor son, thinking she would stay with her uncle but after three days, his family had set her out on the streets. They simply could not afford to keep her. She was dressed in a full burqa, her small boy by her side. It was late at night, but she did not dare fall asleep, seated cross-legged, her back against the wall of the footpath under a weak streetlight. She knew better than to fall asleep. She napped during the day. She had been out on the streets less than a week.