‘Yes,’ Gulshan said.
‘She does not eat or drink anything. She keeps crying,’ she said.
‘She also has evil eye,’ said Gulshan.
‘Her mother died earlier this year in Ramzan. This is why this girl is withering. Look how she died, leaving behind a four-month-old alone. Now she is almost a year. But look at her. I am her neighbour,’ the woman said. ‘Her mother, our neighbour was like a sister. After she died this girl began to wither. I told her family I know of this place where she will be healed so I have brought her here.’
‘Bring her seven Sundays,’ Gulshan said. The woman took the motherless child to Shah Pari’s for seven rounds, before heading home. These threads tied them all together.
Most women came to Gulshan for love or for marriage. All came to save their lives.
A woman sitting on the chatai began to tell her story. She cleaned a house for a family. Every morning, she left the house at 9 a.m. and came home around 3 p.m. But her sister-in-law and her husband were not happy with her work. They wanted her to stay home. ‘How can I stay home when there is nothing at home?’ she said. ‘How will I eat when there is no food? My husband does not provide food for me or my children. Both children are my responsiblity. I clean this home. Three rooms. I clean three rooms so we can fill our stomach.’
‘I used to eat in those mobile vans that serve free langar,’ she said. ‘Then I got sick of it. I began to look for work. I tried to work at a school, cleaning classrooms. But they did not hire me. This woman, my cousin, she hired me. Three rooms I clean so I and my children can eat.’
Her children had fallen sick recently. She believed it was because her sister-in-law had cast some magic spell on her children. ‘If I decided to settle this matter, I would get divorced right now. My children will be lost. Where will they go? What will they do? We will have no home. So I stay.’
Another woman was unhappy she was not married. ‘I cannot get married,’ she said. ‘My mother died recently. I have two brothers. But what will happen when my brothers get married. Their wives will not let me stay. Where will I go?’ Both women knew the home they were born into and the home they married into was not their home. There was no place of rest for a woman. There was no place to belong.
There were different kinds of cases. A woman came to Gulshan and said, simply: ‘I have sexual weakness.’ Gulshan nodded, then gave her mustard oil in a small plastic vial for ten rupees, before tying a thread around her neck. ‘Beta, listen to me. Come to me for seven Sundays. Come to my home if you want your body to be massaged for strength. Whatever you do, don’t remove this thread.’ Sex required strength.
An elderly woman with hennaed hair, balochi earrings and teeth turned ochre—rotted from a lifetime of smoking—came to the chatai and asked for Gulshan to tap her body with the feathers. She took off her covering and through the thin muslin of her shalwar kamiz bared a tired body wracked by pain, to be tapped by the feathers of Indra, the god with an ailing body—a thousand ulcers transformed into the peacock suffering rebirth and redeath.
A young woman came to sit on the chatai. She pulled back her all enveloping burqa, baring her chest and feeding her infant— youthful breasts displayed under the lowered gaze of a mother. She sat there, until Hamida snapped to attention and screamed at her to go elsewhere. ‘Amma, this is no place to feed your baby!’
A young girl with Shah Pari’s possession circled around the courtyard. As she came close to the quba she screamed and fell on the floor. Her mother ran over and pulled down the burqa that had hiked up over her bent knees. Girls falling into rapture or possession had a dupatta tied over the face and chest.
A woman sat shivering on a hot afternoon on the chatai across from Gulshan. She had travelled from Hub Chowki, riding on the back of a motorcycle driven by her brother-in-law—and was trying to shake off the memory of a man lying on the road in a pool of his own blood. Tears sprang into her eyes. She could not shake from her eyes what she had seen—a man quivering in the throes of death.
That man had just been hit by a heavy vehicle on the highway being built up as an international trade corridor. Blood was gushing from his head as he quivered, then turned over and died. She saw him get up from his motorcycle, blood gushing from his forehead, and then collapse. Her brother-in-law, sensing her softening grip, told her to hold on tight. He must have been afraid she was losing her grip.
The young woman had just begun coming to Miran Pir, to fulfill the first of seven Sundays in her wish for a child. ‘I have to go back home now. Please pray I reach home safely,’ she said. She was having trouble being present. But, unable to get up and leave, she stayed. In the pursuit of the desire to give new life, she had crossed paths with death. Gulshan cut into her reverie, patting her all over with the peacock duster. Don’t think about it, she said. Who knows who lost a son? Who knows who lost a brother? Gulshan sent her to take seven rounds around Shah Pari’s Chilla. The woman, tears streaming down her face, circled the tree stump, then left.
Gulshan had tied her to a ritual, but she was lost herself. She slowly remembered she had been discussing something with another woman now seated before her. Gulshan turned to the other women seated before.
‘You did not answer,’ she said.
‘I just told you,’ the woman said. ‘I want powder for getting pregnant, that concoction that you make.’
Gulshan began to look in her bag. The woman told Gulshan she would come every Thursday instead of Sunday as she lived far away. Gulshan turned towards her. ‘Don’t come on a motorcycle. There are a lot of accidents nowadays. I feel afraid,’ Gulshan said, remembering suddenly the words of the woman before her.
‘What about my powder?’ The woman was now frowning, looking closely at Gulshan. Gulshan forgot she had run out of cure. She began to frantically check her bag. ‘Dawai nishta?’ she asked Hamida.
‘You already sold the last bag,’ Hamida said to her.
‘It’s okay. I will come next Thursday to collect my powder,’ the woman left.
‘Wait, did you give donation for the thread,’ Gulshan said.
‘I just did. You thanked me just now,’ she said.
Gulshan was losing her grip. At her side, a woman sat on the chatai, dressed in traditional Balochi dress. She was ululating in a strangely disembodied voice. ‘Stop her. I cannot bear it anymore!’ shouted Gulshan. She did not speak the language the woman spoke, wailing softly and murmuring something rapidly through tears. Her mouth twisted in agony. No one on the chatai knew what she was saying except that she was in pain. Gulshan tied a thread around her neck and let her be. She began to weep. Why did Allah give us such a life, why did he make such a world?
Every day at Miran Pir, Gulshan ate a pack of Munna brand biscuit for lunch and the sisters drank tea all day—a pot costing forty rupees—not eating much for fear of using the filthy broken-down latrines. Gulshan was already an old woman on sleeping pills with a broken foot, and at some point, over the years, had also contracted Hepatitis-C.
Gulshan had been feeling pain in her side, as she narrated her afflictions to me. She believed her kidneys had gone bad, so she booked herself at the local laboratory for an ultrasound. The technicians advised her to get a full blood test as well and a test for Hepatitis just in case. When the results came out she was diagnosed with Hepatitis-C and stone in her bile duct. Her liver was in bad shape. Her family was distraught. They could not afford treatment.
At night, while Gulshan was asleep, her daughter-in-law took her head in her lap. Gulshan woke up to a scream. Her family also woke up and berated the daughter-in-law for touching Gulshan. ‘No one can touch me,’ she said with sorrow. It was a condition of her possession.
Gulshan was back where everything had begun for her on Ramji Street. It was dark inside Mai Ratna’s room. The late afternoon sunlight in the courtyard cast long reddish shadows in the room. Aluminum pots and pans lined the wall, still wet, from having been washed after a meal for the folk at the astana. Gulshan�
�s second mother lived in the apartment building on the far end of the courtyard. It was a Saturday, and a dhamaal was about to begin. Family members of a young woman were waiting, seated cross-legged on the ground, for the evening prayers. The girl was crying. She had forgotten her feathers at home. Someone went to fetch them. A lineup of drummers began to get into position. There was little time left for the dhamaal to begin.
The sound of the girl’s wails echoed through Ratna’s room where Gulshan sat on the floor, her knees pulled close to her face. The metal rings on her ankles were visible under her trousers. It had been years since she had been to see Mai Ratna.
Mai Ratna was in a corner, veiled behind a gold embroidered dupatta. The room was heavy with the fragrance of rose perfumed ash in Ratna’s room. The girl’s mother entered the room. She had paid forty-seven thousand for two nights of dhamaal for her daughter. The cost included the slaughter of two goats. ‘Mai Ratna was angry with my brother,’ she said. It was expensive. Her brother ran a business selling ghoraku—the tobacco made from the oil of cigarette leaves—smoked by Baloch women at home, but still. She had tried to appease the Mai with threads. ‘I tied 100 threads but Ratna is not happy,’ she said.
Ratna was impressing upon the woman, she said, the Sati was adamant: ‘dhamaal de’. That’s how it was, the love of a sati. It never left a woman’s heart. The Mai brought happiness. The Mai brought pain. She was a possessive lover. Her love was the light of life. Her love was death and destruction. ‘Ratna gave me kidney stones and liver disease,’ Gulshan said to the woman. ‘My children have suffered because of me. When the Mai loves me it makes me sad. When the Mai does not love me it makes me sad.’
The ceremony involved the caretaker coming over for three days to apply mehndi to Gulshan’s hands and feet and massage her body with fragrant oil, while Gulshan had to eat a thimble of ash the caretaker had given her, a fragrant ash prepared in Makli. An old woman, who once worked at the shrine, was fast asleep on the floor outside. Gulshan’s daughter Rehana now took care of dhamaal. She walked into the room. Gulshan was charged 15,000 for the dhamaal; the usual cost of the dhamaal at the shrine was 30 thousand, but for Gulshan, the caretaker had taken it down to 15 thousand. The money was arranged via a woman.
Outside in the courtyard, the dhamaal had begun. As the four drummers began to play, some of the women immediately fell into rapture, heads circling and hair flying like wild serpents into the thick afternoon air. The caretaker brought frankinsence near the young girl who was at the centre of the dhamaal but she was still crying.
‘Khelo, play’ an elderly woman called to her. Women of the family of the girl were standing in a circle—bodies making languorous moves, undulating, twirling peacock dusters.
In the morning and then again at sunset, as the sun descended into the night, Saleem, the incense seller, set out about the perimeter of Miran Pir with a lobaan in hand—a wooden handle attached to chains that came together around a metal bowl in which red coal gave the dried powder of rose petals new fire; the fragrance of moist garlands adorning the veil of brides came alive.
Gulshan said the lobaan wallah was not that old. It was grief, she said, that had turned the hair of the beard on his young face completely white. His wife had died young. The lobaan wallah walked amongst the graves, covering every inch of the courtyard. He had to keep walking so the coals would keep burning, smoke rising in fragrant flags, as this young-old man circled around the domed square of the shrine. In the graveyard beyond the boundary wall of Miran Pir, a woman was being buried. A throng of men, their heads tied with white handkerchiefs, stood solemnly around the dead body of a woman, marked by the green of the tinselled sheet.
Women never attend the burial of a woman. Men buried women. Some of the men climbed into the rectangle of dug out earth, and together the men in the throng on the ground helped lower the mayyat into the ground.
A pair of newlyweds stood at the archway of the inner courtyard. The bride, a young girl, her new embroidered Balochi dress peeking through her black burqa hesitated at the archway. The groom stayed back, letting her enter the inner courtyard. She dropped a donation in the tin after the caretaker tied a thread around her neck. Her hands were ornamented with delicate gold rings and bracelets and glittery glass bangles; on her palms, the painstakingly worked cursive script of new beginnings were worked in fragrant henna as she laid down green sheets and sprinkled roses on Miran Pir’s grave throne. Then she walked back to the threshold of the inner courtyard where the groom stood waiting to take her home.
In the evening, Haseena helped Hamida put away the white cardboard boxes of incense to be sold back into the market. ‘It says on the box this incense has rose. But it does not have the fragrance of real roses,’ she said, waving the packets about her face. ‘They make these with machines these days. In our days, we used chandan and packed these by hand.’
Growing up in Moach Goth, about forty minutes towards Hub Chowki, Haseena used to work for a family who made incense sticks for a living. The wife, a woman named Haajran, cooked the ingredients for the incense. An elderly woman, she had run an exclusive business selling hand-made incense to all the sacral sites and temples and shrines in and around Karachi. She would mix the fragrance at home in a pot.
‘The masala was like syrup,’ she said referring to the burnt caramel stuff prepared for making gulab jamun, rose-like sugary sweetmeats. ‘It was warm and gooey,’ she said. ‘We used to make chandan and gulab mukhra and sandal ki incense,’ she said. ‘Aisi khushboo,’ fragrance from her clothes and body would fill the very air.
It was this memory of chandan and sandal that tied Haseena for life to shrines. Haajran’s exclusive family business had closed down long ago as agarbatti-making factories went up around Hub. After Haajran passed away, her son went on making the incense sticks but in much smaller quantities. He still sold them on Thursdays at Ghaiban Shah, the shrine by the sea, from a cart. Haseena herself had changed trades and began to work for a family for a monthly salary. For thirty years, Haseena washed clothes and swept the floors of that one house. But she always regularly visited shrines. Haseena sometimes saw Haajran’s son selling his incense at the shrine of Ghaiban Shah. Miran Pir was Haseena’s shrine. ‘I used to come here to pay respects,’ she said.
Haseena did not marry. She had been engaged, but then she broke it off. She had run away from all that, and now went home everyday after evening prayers, taking the bus to Hub Chowki.
She had no husband, no children to care for. She cared for a niece after her mother, Haseena’s sister, passed away, and she was now an adult. She had one brother and three sisters. The younger sister was a widow. She had a son whom Haseena had cared for. He was married now and his wife treated Haseena like a mother.
One night while visiting Miran Pir for the annual pilgrimage, Haseena was unable to go back home. It was the night Benazir Bhutto died. The roads around Karachi were ablaze. All major streets had been sealed off. Haseena threw on her burqa and fell asleep behind a grave in the courtyard. In the morning, the women from the haveli came and fed all those who could not leave.
After three days, Haseena went back to work but her heart was not in it anymore. She became averse to human touch. She could no longer wear anything worn by another person and didn’t allow anyone to touch what she ate. Her skin began to break out in dark splotches. Her feet swelled to twice their size.
Haseena woke up one morning, washed and ironed her clothes, and went straight to Miran Pir and told the caretakers she was there to stay. She had been there five years now.
‘This is my world,’ she said, looking around her at the inner courtyard. ‘What will I do, anyway? I am so old now. No one realizes how aged I have become.’ Haseena was not feeling well but she did not have fifty rupees so she could go to the hospital on the way home. She was having trouble breathing and needed an injection to ease her breath. ‘Bibi will find a way for me,’ she called out.
She was going to head home soon. But first she wa
s going to help sweep the mounds of rose petals off Miran Pir’s grave. Every evening, near Isha time, Haseena and Amma Taaji swept the mounds of rose petals off Miran Pir’s grave, collecting the fresh buds inside a jute bag. Haseena would keep the intact blossoms and press them at home into powdered lobaan. It took the two of them about half an hour to clean the floor of all roses. Haseena’s hands were always fragrant from the crushed petals.
So much suffering in this world, all for a little bit of fragrance.
Om. Saach.
9 MOONS
On the morning of 27 September 2016, Ruby and Rubina, two women in their thirties, travelling together from the bustling city of Karachi, took a corner seat on the blue and white bus emblazoned with ‘Sindh Transport Company’ in red, carrying pilgrims to Thatta, a city in ruins, for the new moon, nauchandi, Thursday celeberation..
Ruby, seated up front in a single seat across from the driver, was going to get a miniature wooden swing as offering for a prayer for motherhood and Rubina seated in the front row by the window was going to tie a bangle for a wish for marriage at Shah Aqeeq’s shrine, the fourth stop on the nauchandi route across the southern province of Sindh, along the eastern edge of the coastal belt of Pakistan.
The women’s section of the bus, decorated with a canopy of red threaded tassels with blue and yellow beads and Victorian curtains, filled up quickly. There were about twenty-seven women when the bus started out around 8:35 a.m. In half an hour, there were thirty-seven women. By the time the bus crossed city limits, around 9:30 a.m., there were more than fifty women aboard. Most of them were crowded together in the aisle, hanging onto the rod above for balance. Some men were seated in the back with their families, and the rest of the men were packed on the metal roof. Ruby and Rubina came early for their seats.
‘Otherwise you are left standing,’ said Rubina. ‘My feet risk getting trampled in the aisle.’ Rubina had been visiting Shah Aqeeq’s shrine since she was a child. It was a story that her mother had told her that had tied Rubina to the shrine located in the swamp marshes of the delta where the Indus River met the Arabian Sea.
Sita Under the Crescent Moon Page 11
