When Haseena arrived at Miran Pir, ‘they made me shed tears of blood,’ Haseena said. ‘I said the entire world is here. Why can’t I sit here? They said to me you are a witch.’ Haseena at Miran Pir’s court was at Miran Pir’s mercy. There were days when the women of the inner circle sat together and laughed. But they did not sit together to eat. Cleaning women like Haseena were not allowed to sit with the caretakers to eat, Gulshan explained. But she said this was a rule instated by Shahida, not her, a rule everyone followed—protocol.
It made Haseena angry. ‘One should treat everyone equally,’ she said. ‘Every human has respect, honour. We may be poor. We may be faqirs. But we show respect to everyone. We don’t taunt anyone.’
‘God sees everything,’ Haseena said. ‘Faqir or not—there were simply not many places for women to go. No one could just come and sit at a shrine,’ Haseena said. ‘Try sitting at Shah Ghazi,’ she said. ‘They will ask “Who are you? Where from? Get up.”’
All day at the gate of Miran Pir, a faqir with greying locks and a thinning beard in a red kurta and a carnellion necklace around his wrinkled neck, sat waiting for nothing. If offered food, he declined saying he had no teeth to eat.
Unlike the faqirs, the mosque builders were everywhere. They got on the buses, megaphones in hand admonishing people for wasting money on cigarettes and gutka. Better to build a masjid with the money. A new mosque had gone up recently in the neighbourhood of Miran Pir. At night, the women of the inner circle could not stop talking about it. ‘The mosque was built and then no one was paid,’ Hamida said. ‘The next day, a signboard went up over the mosque that said ‘Syaana Masjid’.’
Syaana is someone beyond clever. It is when everyone knows a hand has been played but no one knows how to quite call the person out on it. There is even a little bit of admiration for how smoothly the hand has been played. The contractors came, the labourers came, the mosque was built. ‘They got everyone to chip in. To bring this or that material. Everyone was fooled.’ Everyone went on in silence.
Up until 2003, a year after Zarina’s death, the dome was a bare brick structure surrounded by chinar and neem trees and a few scattered graves. There were no courtyards. Without the boundary walls, the place was all open ground. Gulshan and Hamida began to reach out to the pilgrims of Miran Pir, to help build the grounds in time for the urs of 2004. ‘There was no one here other than us two sisters,’ Gulshan said. ‘We began to beg people to come and build Miran mother’s place.’
Gulshan wrote letters to the caretaker families in Sachal’s hometown of Ranipur Gambat, sending the missives via the pilgrims who arrived from the vicinity. Soon, word spread and money began pouring in. ‘We said to everyone, come build Miran’s home. People gave generously. Someone gave ten thousand. Another family gave twenty-five thousand. This is how this place was built,’ she said. ‘This dome was not this beautiful before. We begged people to come and built Miran’s home.’
Amongst the major contributors for the construction of Miran Pir was a powerful gangster Rashid Rekha, a.k.a. Rashid Bangali. Another gangster Rehman Baloch’s brother oversaw the shrine of Satisa few lanes away from Miran Pir. Rehman Baloch, his successor Uzair Baloch and Rashid Rekha, all three were ardent proponents of Baloch culture and Miran Pir was central to many cultural rituals of folk from Balochistan and Sindh—especially at times of marriages. All these gangsters were children who drank the water of Shah Pari. They knew the language of birds.
On 31 March 2013, Rashid Bangali was shot down in a paramilitary police ‘encounter’. According to the report, Bangali was one of eight suspects shot that day. The dead bodies had been brought back to Lyari. After the news of Bangali’s death reached his family, a large number of people came out in protest to Aath Chowk. Shops were shuttered in Kaaghzi Bazaar and Kharadar. At home, Bangali’s mother sat in mourning, wearing her son’s bullet-ridden shirt brought to her by the police as proof of her son’s death. Hamida and Gulshan gave the twenty-five thousand back to Bangali’s mother. ‘His intentions are not good. Take your money, we don’t want to spend it.’
Meanwhile, construction at Miran Pir had been progressing beyond anyone’s expectations. A boundary wall went up around the two courtyards, separating the graves of the family inside the courtyard of Miran Pir from the graveyard outside. The dome was rebuilt and the walls covered in white tiles. The inside of the dome was covered in mosaic mirror work. An awning was built with lights and fans. The ground was cemented and an archway went up to the dome. Graves around the courtyard were cemented with bricks and painted over in enamel coats of red and green. The money Gulshan and Hamida collected was handed over to the senior Khalifa, instead of to Zubair. Gulshan believed that was the reason the ensuing misfortune befell them.
There was still more work to be done. But then money disputes began to rise amongst those who had come to construct the dome. ‘It was like apocalypse here,’ Gulshan said. ‘Hands were coming down on each other. People were ripping pockets. Donation boxes were being snatched from the hands of women. Those people they created so much trouble that everyone ran away. They did not finish the work. Miran Pir’s place was left incomplete,’ she said. Whatever the reasons may have been for the dispute beside money, Gulshan and Hamida were happy the pilgrimage later that year was going to be special. Miran Pir had never before looked this beautiful—even if work was left unfinished. After a devotee sent a large platter of sweets, the sisters took the platter to the haveli. The platter was so heavy Hamida had to set it down on a chair. As the sisters stood by waiting, Zubair came in and began to scream at them. ‘Whores! Get out of my sight. Get out. Get out!’ Gulshan began to cry. ‘I looked towards Allah. I looked towards Miran Mother,’ she said as tears streamed down her face. ‘Of course we are going to leave,’ Hamida said. ‘How can we ever stay after such an insult?’
As they walked outside, the other caretakers tried to stop them, but they did not stay, leaving behind the two courtyards and the beautiful dome which they had built off their backs. The construction of Miran Pir had cost Hamida and Gulshan their only source of income.
Humiliated and sent away, they might have been quickly forgotten, had it not been for the pilgrims who came to Miran Pir, amongst them the mother of Rashid Rekha, demanding the return of Hamida and Gulshan.
Soon after, Hamida and Gulshan were brought back to Miran Pir. Zubair and his father came to apologize to Gulshan and Hamida. ‘That child who I taught Urdu, Quran and English, he came and Zubair came and begged for forgiveness.’ The women of the khalifa’s family, Gulshan said, had ties with the women of her family—who had served the sacral land of Miran Pir for generations with their bodies. ‘These people go back generations with the women of our family.’
‘The bibi in the haveli loves us,’ Gulshan said. Growing up, Gulshan would leave her place on the mat in the inner courtyard next to Zarina and spend hours inside the haveli, playing with the children of the khalifa’s family. ‘We used to play on swings in that spot where those flowersellers have wood shacks now,’ Gulshan said. As a child, she used to visit the maulana’s home with her mother, the same maulana who now worked for the Auqaf committee.
Zarina and the maulana’s wife were friends, but after Zarina passed away, Gulshan said, the maulana’s family and their family had grown apart. ‘Maulana’s daughter-in-law is very rude,’ Gulshan said. ‘She said to me you are sick. I will get you treatment. You are possessed,’ she said. ‘I told her kindly leave me alone or else there will be nothing left around here. Not even a leaf. I have demons in my control.’
It was the beginning of the decade of the rise of Baloch nationalism, fuelled by money poured in from the Gulf and massive illegal trade routes running via Iran and the Makran coast—where everything from Iranian petrol, alcohol to European goods were imported on the black market—duty free. In the streets of Lyari the song Bija Teer, the anthem of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), echoed all day and all night. In this major stronghold of PPP, devout party workers
roamed the streets. During Benazir Bhutto’s first visits here after her return to Pakistan, in 1986, women would hold hands forming a circle around Benazir Bhutto to protect her as she moved amongst crowds of her supporters. In 1988, a young Gulshan went with her father to Lyari’s Kakri Ground, where thousands had gathered to attend the marriage ceremony of Benazir Bhutto, or Bibi as she was called by her supporters, and Asif Ali Zardari. After marriage, when PPP came to power, Zardari became known as Mr Ten Percent, for taking a cut off every government contract. Word on the streets of Karachi was that the wife of Mr Ten Percent had herself turned Mrs Hundred Percent and ran the most corrupt government.
Yet in Lyari, Bhutto’s charity funds still feed the hungry and homeless and provide monthly income for elderly women. The night of Benazir’s death, in 2007, residents of Lyari standing on the rooftops of their homes saw a city burning—the Arabian Sea in the backdrop of a Karachi set ablaze. ‘Benazir should not have come back.’
Every day, Gulshan and Hamida took a straight, narrow path that led from their home to Miran Pir, where all the shopkeepers and the men and boys loitering on the street were known to them. At night, they were taken home by the rickshaw wallah baba. ‘Watch out for these boys, they are troublemakers,’ Gulshan would say, pointing to a group of boys on the street as she walked past. Gulshan knew the men watching Ramji Street. They watched her every move. Gulshan and Hamida could not stand at the window or balcony of their apartment nor could they stand in the street outside their home, without the men of the family or the neighbourhood getting upset. There were even men watching the men watching the women on Ramji Street.
The phones in the area were tapped by intelligence. Armoured cars of paramilitary police—Pakistan Rangers on Ramji Street— parked everywhere in the area, competed with the number of ambulances. At every street corner, men in fatigues, behind machine guns, looked out warily from police chowkis. Arrested, encountered, maimed, picked up, dropped off, disappeared, men vanished under charges of being gangsters and dissidents. These children who had grown up eating rose petals off Shah Pari, were disappeared by the state. They left the women to fend for their home and hearth.
Inside the spidery lanes of the old neighbourhoods of Karachi, women sold small food items like boiled potatoes or samosas for five or ten or twenty rupees. Some of the women prepared small yogurt popsicles which they sold for five or ten rupees to the children in the neighbourhood. That is how a lot of women ate. One woman would prepare a pot of curry and sell a small bag of it for ten or twenty rupees. Women who could not afford to cook food in their homes that day would buy the curry, watered down as it was; sometimes on a loan. Early in the morning, an elderly woman from the neighbourhood would do the rounds taking small change and requests for groceries from homes in the neighbourhood. Vegetable sellers would let these elderly women scour through bags of less than fresh produce and purchase potatoes and onion in bulk which they kept in a wicker basket under the cart. That is how everyone was fed. That is how everyone ate. That is how the women maintained the sanctity of the home. This is how Sita keeps the fire burning. ‘Home is a dargah,’ Gulshan said.
On weekdays, about a dozen pilgrims came to Miran Pir. There were larger crowds on Thursdays, especially the first Thursday of the new moon ‘nau chandi’ and Sundays—the day of the 7-day ritual. Most of the pilgrims came around 4 p.m. when the men were at work and household chores had been completed. As rituals were performed, the women conversed and exchanged stories. These women came from Nayabad, Nawalane, Baghdadi, Kalri, Jodia Bazaar, Tower, Pasni, Hub Chowki, Turbat, Jiwani, Moach Goth, Sohrab Goth, Bhangi Para, Bhangi Lane, Gandhi Nagar, Malir, New Town, New Karachi, Lyari, Keamari, Orangi Town, Korangi Town, Shireen Jinnah Colony, Gadap, Mauripur, Makran, Hyderabad, Thatta, Tharparkar, Kutch, Katti Pahari, Thundi Sarak, Sher Shah, Hawkes Bay, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Burma, Syria, Bangladesh, India, Iran, Afghanistan, Oman, Saudia Arabia, Europe, America, South Africa. From all over the world—from unmapped settlements throughout Pakistan, without a passport, without an identity card, they scrounged together small change to come up with the bus fare to Miran Pir, bringing with them the stories they told in exchange for khaak aur dhaaga. The salamiyan were all tied together by thori si khaak aur aik dhaaga.
These women made this zyarat—pilgrimage—an act of remembrance—an act of assertion—I am.
Miran Pir was one-fourth the size of any of the major shrines in and around Sindh—Abdullah Shah Ghazi, Sehwan, Shah Noorani, Gaji Shah, Bhitai, Data Darbar. But it behaved as a nucleus of the many sites of satiyan—the women who went sati—have names that are now considered Hindu. In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Miran Pir provided a place of refuge for women. It was a nucleus but it was not like the Ka’bah. One could visit any of these sites and essentially have made pilgrimage to any of the other sites. The body and the soul were collective and shifting, connected via threads. Like the many graves covered in red cloth along the many pilgrimage routes, a bit of thread and earth connected this culture which was as fresh as the earth of the newly dug grave and as old as the earth itself. It was also counter-culture. It was, like the gossip the women shared on the chatai—the very air of defiance against the edifice of authority—ghosts in the ka’bah of the state, kept alive through the pilgrimage to truth.
These women who shared stories through pilgrimage—living archives of remembrance preserved through breath and soul in the state where identity was forged via property and paper— claimed this sacral ground of Miran Pir with their pilgrimage. This is how Zarina, and after her, Gulshan and Hamida, walked on Ramji Street. Ram or Raheem. This is how Sita walked in the valley of Ram. Satiyan walk this wretched earth, remembering women stolen and disappeared. The women pilgrims walked to go sit with Zarina, Gulshan and Hamida. Like Zarina before them, Gulshan and Hamida sat everyday on that nylon chatai— Hamida from 8 a.m. onwards, and Gulshan from 11 a.m. or 12 p.m.
On this chatai, Gulshan and Hamida placed the tools of their caretaking. A small rusted tin of infant formula contained about a dozen or so amulets made with the stems of the chinar trees wrapped in white muslin then tied over with a piece of green cloth and white thread. The amulet was sold for fifty rupees to cure evil eye or fever. ‘Breaking those branches all day cuts my hands all over,’ said Gulshan. She no longer made amulets. ‘I used to make the taweez,’ she said. ‘But nowadays I let Hamida make them.’
A used plastic litre-size bottle of mineral water was filled with mustard oil poured from the evening lamps, amma ka tel, sold in thumb-sized plastic vials for ten rupees each, for massages. An empty cooking oil tin of ghee served as the donation box, the red paint of the brand, Dalda, almost peeled off leaving only the word ‘Dal’. There were two peacock feathers wrapped with a brocade scarf from last year’s veil that had been replaced, tied with white thread then taped over. The peacock feathers had lost most of their shimmering eyes.
Inside a perforated red plastic bag Gulshan packed a thin cushion, a spare cotton sheet similar to the one she wore, and a few small polythene bags of a powder mixture she sold for 200 rupees a bag. This was Gulshan’s specialty item, a mixture of herbs sold to women who wished to conceive.
Besides these items, there were three pairs of scissors. These scissors in red, blue and silver were used to cut off the extra bit of thread left dangling after a necklace was tied to a fragile neck to cure variations of a possession that left babies with scabs all over their scalp and missing patches of hair. All these items were used in a daily ritual offered to the women arriving daily to Miran Pir.
Hamida kept by her side a newspaper-rolled pack of smokes she liked to inhale through the day. Gulshan liked to smoke her Capstan, and read two daily newspapers—both local Lyari publications—covered with graphic images of dead men, faces from the neighbourhood associated in the captions with gangs. Women rarely, if ever, made the news. Beside a book of religious healing prayers used for treating a variety of illnesses, including chicken pox, Gulshan carried in her purse an
old copy of the poet Allama Iqbal’s poems, ‘Shikwa’ and ‘Jawaab-e-Shikwa’. Day after day at Miran Pir, Gulshan kept the book by her side on the chatai. The mullahs, she said, were after Iqbal’s blood after he wrote ‘Shikwa’. ‘Iqbal was ordered to be hanged.’ But then Iqbal himself had written the response—and both works were so lyrical in their beauty that Iqbal’s life had been spared.
On Sundays, a steady stream of mothers arrived with children in tow. The mothers stopped at the chatai and deposited sweets and dates into the donation box where the caretakers would tie a new thread or knot a new thread onto the necklace—before heading to Shah Pari with their bags of rose petals and incense, taking seven rounds before sitting down. If it was the seventh Sunday then the child would be bathed in the watering place, the discarded clothes would be thrown away and new clothes worn. On the way out, the mother would collect half the offerings then go into the inner sanctum to pay her respect before leaving or stop by the chatai for thread.
A woman brought her child, a small boy. ‘He is afraid of cockroaches,’ she said. ‘What is there to be afraid of? Just crush it in your hands,’ Gulshan said tying a thread on the boy’s neck. A woman had brought an infant in her arms. The girl, her granddaughter she said, had possession. ‘Mother’s milk can do this to a child. The baby becomes like an old person, their bodies don’t grow instead grow withered,’ said Gulshan. She tapped the infant’s body with the peacock feathers while giving dua. Another woman came to the chatai. She had travelled over from Nayabad and her baby also had parchawa.
Gulshan pulled up the shirt of the infant to reveal a bony chest and a bloated stomach with green veins running all over like throbbing wires.
Sita Under the Crescent Moon Page 10
