Rubina had been very young when her mother began to experience pain in her stomach; an ultrasound test revealed a cyst inside her stomach. She could not afford treatment, and her sister, Rubina’s aunt, advised her to pray to Shah Aqeeq, known as the spiritual surgeon, to come to her home and remove the cyst. Rubina’s mother prayed to the saint. She prayed that she was a mother with small children and if anything happened to her, the children would be lost. The following night, her mother dreamt a doctor in a white coat came to the house and put her in a stretcher, wheeled her into an operating room. The morning after, Rubina’s mother found spots of blood on her clothes. An ultrasound test revealed her stomach was clean. ‘Shah Aqeeq Baba successfully operated on my mother,’ said Rubina.
It had been years since Rubina’s mother passed away, of ailments having to do with old age. Rubina, worried about being a spinster for the rest of her life, made regular visits to Shah Aqeeq’s shrine to make a wish to the saint to become a bride. It was important to spend the night at the shrine, after asking for something, and equally important, she said, to seek the saint’s permission before leaving the shrine. But neither Rubina nor Ruby had permission to stay away from home overnight. They were going to head back after spending an hour at Shah Aqeeq’s shrine. Rubina seldom went to other shrines. But once, she had been to a darbar in Hyderabad. It was a shrine that opened its doors solely on the fortieth day of Moharram every year. Ruby wanted to offer a prayer for a child there, and Rubina was curious to go see the place. But Shah Aqeeq was Rubina’s choice. She knew the route to Thatta like the back of her hand.
‘The land is barren at first,’ she said. ‘Then the marshes and fields appear, and then houses, then fields again. Before the most spectacular city you will only believe when you see with your own eyes,’ she said. ‘Duniya goes to Thatta. Only a person who gets lucky earns a visit to Thatta.’
The new Moon celebration, an Eid-like celebration, was once known as mah-para jumma, Friday of the new moon—a tradition as sacred as it was historical. Makli, a hill at the heart of the city of Thatta, had been, for centuries, at the centre of the lunar celebration. The name of the city, some texts note, came from
‘Makkah-Li’ or Makkah for me. Makli, at the peak of its glory, was a site of confluence of religion and culture. A city, some texts say, founded on the prophecies of Brahmin scholars and astrologers. It became the place where Sufi saints and Muslim scholars congregated, at the school or shrine alike.
The seventeenth century text of Tarikh-i-Tahiri is testament to a Makli where people of all classes and religions gathered in the thousands amidst the glorious graves, to offer the rapture of dhamaal. The place still attracts thousands, making the special pilgrimage to offer prayers and make a mannat before Asar and Maghrib brought the spectacle of dance and desire. It was a place for everyone, for Sufi master and dervish alike. A woman across the aisle from me, dressed in a glittering shalwar kamiz, was carefully removing stray facial hair peeking through her make-up base; getting ready for arrival in Thatta.
I was travelling to Thatta, Makli, with Faqira seated in front of me on the footrest. A caretaker for Shah Pari, Faqira had been working for more than twenty years at the shrine of Miran Pir, where we had met. Part of her work as a caretaker was to make regular pilgrimages to shrines situated along miles of coastal land that made up the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan.
Faqira’s story began with her mother’s pilgrimage, under another name. When her mother was pregnant with her, she kept disappearing from the womb. The first ultrasound test at the hospital had revealed a foetus. But, the following examination showed an empty belly. Faqira’s mother had had almost a dozen miscarriages, so she consulted her spiritual guide, an elderly gentleman based in Karachi, part of a household tracing its roots to present day India. He advised her to make a pilgrimage to Sakhi Jamil Shah Da’tar’s shrine in order to deliver the baby. At the shrine of Da’tar, located northeast of Karachi, she met two women who offered to deliver the baby. They hung a sheet across the branches of an old tree and went to work. By midnight, the baby was born. The only child to her parents, she was named Farida by her mother. The women left for ablutions and never returned. ‘My mother had possession,’ Faqira said. That possession had passed at birth from mother to daughter.
At an early age, Faqira’s mother was advised by her guide, Zainul-Abideen, not to marry her daughter as it would be a difficult life for her. But the mother considered marriage to be a rite of passage, essential for a young woman to experience. ‘She is a young woman, my daughter,’ she said to him, as her daughter recalled. ‘What will the world say?’
Faqira’s mother married off her daughter at age thirteen. She fainted the night of the official ceremony. Hence, after the wedding, instead of the nine days spent by bride and groom at the bride’s home as per family tradition, Faqira stayed with her mother for thirty days. Her mother called a Bibi Zaitoun to pray and bless the child. After she moved to her husband’s home, Faqira could neither eat nor sleep. Belongings, amongst them clothes from her wedding trousseau, locked inside a chest, began to disappear. She told her husband to take her away from his home, someplace else, anywhere but there.
Faqira’s mother took her to her advisor again. He reminded her of his warning, not to marry her daughter. The force inside of the girl, he said, does not like this arrangement.
Faqira stayed unhappy and married. After twenty-five years of marriage and eight children, her husband, a daily wage labourer, succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver and died. During the three-month mourning period that followed, confined to a room in absolute seclusion, Faqira remembered a visit to Shah Pari’s site in Thatta when she was about thirteen years old, on the verge of marriage. She remembered that a young Farida had seen the fairy appear before her, a vision, before she fainted.
The memory led Faqira to follow the path to becoming a faqir. From Farida, she became Faqira, a follower of the lineage of Ghaus Azam Dastagir, forsaking the material world for spiritual enlightenment, keeping worldly responsibilities in check. In this way, Faqira became a caretaker of Shah Pari at Miran Pir’s shrine in Lyari, Karachi, which she had been visiting since childhood. ‘I had possession since I was a child. Being at the shrine brought peace,’ she said.
Every day from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m., Faqira sat by the tree stump piled with rose petals, sprinkling water from a clay bowl and tapping with a peacock duster women and children who arrived. A lifetime of caretaking behind her, Faqira was fifty-five now, a grandmother. She dressed simply.
‘That force inside of me tells me not to wear any ornaments,’ she said. No bangles on her wrists she said, nor any rings. There were women folk coming in from India, but she wanted nothing, she said. A young Farida once lived at the mercy of forces she did not understand. Now Faqira said, I am king. ‘I control these forces. I know the method to control the forces and I can sense the arrival of a force so I am prepared,’ she said, watching the road ahead of us now.
Past city limits, the road turned wide and long. The bus conductor turned on music popular in the mountains of Balochistan—folksy tunes mixed with separatist songs and playful ditties, reminiscing over a bride, a lover, a woman: dreams of a free land thriving in the corners of a throbbing red heart. Where a lover went searching for a lover from Pakistan to Afghanistan: ‘Woman like a lioness catches drops of rain,’ the singer belted out in a high-timber voice. ‘I searched for you from Sindh to Helmand.’ Lamenting the lack of faith of a beloved: ‘You erased the henna off your hands.’ The selection steadily moved towards heartbreak, then a clear break-up: ‘Love of my heart I will stay away from your city’. A re-mix in Balochi of a popular Bengali song, this was also the ringtone on Faqira’s phone.
Her children, five girls and three boys, were all grown up and married. Some of them had children of their own. The sons mostly took up odd jobs, except for a young man long employed in the fisheries, cleaning fish, a father to a little boy. The youngest child, a daughter named Zahida, in her l
ate teens, earned six thousand rupees per month, cleaning four homes in the apartment building in the neighbourhood. Zahida considered it a decent living. But Faqira wanted her to get married. She had tied a bangle as wish for her daughter at Mira Pir.
‘When girls are pubescent they must marry. I will not live forever,’ she said. ‘It is the shadow of possession on her. That is why she is unable to get married.’
Zahida did not want to marry. She would only consider marriage to a man who stayed abroad, leaving her be, she said. Out of all the children, Zahida was the one who was possessed, like Faqira—a possession passed from mother to daughter. She wanted to work at a shrine. Faqira was reluctant to send her so young into a profession that began with the first step of forsaking the world.
I met Faqira the first time I visited the shrine of Miran Pir. Seated by the tree stump where a fairy perched, in an open-air courtyard where children drank water blessed by birds, Faqira happily took me under her wing. After a visit to her home, following the sighting of the new moon, she was taking me along with her on the nine moon pilgrimage, my first.
It was noon, by the time the bus reached Abdul Karim Shah Bukhari’s shrine. The entrance was surrounded by rickshaws ready to take pilgrims to the next shrine on the pilgrim. The gate of Shah Bukhari led to a courtyard shaded by heavy trees, providing welcome shade from the hot sun, where families sat eating lunch brought from home. Inside a smaller entrance, there were two graves. The one with an elaborate covering belonged to Shah Bukhari. Bukhari, Faqira said, was the first stop on the nine moon pilgrimage because the lineage began with the saint. There was a smaller grave right beside Bukhari’s grave. It belonged to a woman named Khair-un-Nisa. The caretaker of Bukhari, Haji Iqbal, lighting incense at her grave, said the lady was a sister of the Shah. But little else was known about her. Women laid tulsi on both graves and spread rose petals. Faqira sat by the grave and prayed after performing ablution, before she offered her prayers.
A family was getting ready to leave, having made offerings to Shah Bukhari. They were on their way to Shah Aqeeq’s shrine. Their ten-year-old daughter had possession. The mother said the girl harmed herself, cutting herself with knives. For the past year, she had been collecting money to take her daughter for treatment to Shah Aqeeq’s shrine. This year, she had finally managed to take her daughter to see the saint; they had already spent a month at the shrine and her daughter was healing. But she still had episodes and fits. The family was going to rent a room for 2000 rupees for thirty days. Do children get possessed, I asked her? ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Possession happens to children and adults. Women fairies possess men and male jinns possess women.’ She took her daughter to the caretaker before leaving. The child stood still as he placed a flat palm on her head.
After a brief exchange of greetings with the caretaker, Faqira hired a rickshaw. For 400 rupees, Faqira and I climbed in the back of the rickshaw, having visited the first of the nine sites. The rickshaw rode bumpily through the crumbling grandeur of the necropolis of Thatta, as we made our way to the shrine of Godar Shah. Inside the shrine was a well, water strewn with rose petals, visible from the doorway. Women pilgrims could buy a bucket of water for ten rupees from the well at Godar Shah. Behind a walled area, a cluster of soft trees curving back into the ground, like devi bushes, and a series of rooms had been built for bathing. After ablutions, women discarded the clothes they had been wearing for new ones. The branches of the trees held clothes, discarded there since years, maybe decades, hanging as if to dry, giving the impression of museum pieces. The clothes told a story of lives past.
After offering prayers at Godar Shah, the next stop was Abdullah Shah Ashabi’s shrine. Entering an ornately carved entrance way with domed pillars and five arches, we came to a large paved courtyard with a small sheltered area in the centre leading to the entrance of the inner sanctum—where rested the saint, Ashabi.
Inside a sheltered area strewn with graves, a woman in a black burqa was arching her back backwards. One hand above her head, almost touching the floor—an upside down U. Another hand holding the grill of the window opening into the inner-sanctum. A woman went to help her get upright but an elderly woman stopped her. ‘Do not interfere with her possession. Strengthen your heart or the possession and the possessed will overpower you. Pray for her recovery. Do not touch her.’
Outside the enclosed area was an open-air courtyard. A young woman’s footsteps echoed throughout the shrine as she paced back and forth cursing the world. Another woman trying to enter the sanctum was screaming curses to all, even as a man, both arms wrapped around her chest and waist, held her. ‘Baba, you’re a pimp!’ she yelled, arms flailing before going limp and being carried away by the man holding her.
Men and women stood in line to offer prayers at the entrance, the grave visible inside, the columns covered in embroidered sheets of pure silver. But only men were allowed inside the sanctum. ‘Women misbehave and scream and try to climb over the grave. So, we stopped letting women go inside,’ said a caretaker. He turned to offer a thread to the arrivals, encouraging them to drop a donation into the metal box. ‘A woman shed her clothes inside the sanctum,’ said Faqira. ‘That’s why they banned females from entering the sanctum.’
A woman had arrived a few days ago from the settlement of Orangi Town in Karachi. The woman had come to have her married daughter cured at Shah Ashabi’s shrine. Her daughter had arrived separately with her in-laws from Multan. The mother and daughter had been staying for a few days now, sleeping in the pilgrim rest area. The daughter was possessed. She had been running around and breaking things. The mother was herself not well. ‘All my children are married now. I am ill all the time. But I come here and I am at peace. Never needing to reach for my pills.’
Nearby, a woman named Najma was screaming out to the saint. ‘I am here baba because Quran is being recited in this woman’s house.’ Najma was speaking as possessed. ‘Since the past two months there is recitation in the house. I was forced to come here. Because of this Najma here,’ she said referring to herself in the third person. ‘She used rose perfume. The fragrance of the perfume caught me by force. Baba forgive me. It was Najma’s perfume. Baba forgive me. I did not come here myself. Forgive me. Quran was being read in the house since the past two months. I am not lying. I have not visited her for the past eleven months. I lost control after Najma used perfume on her body.’
Faqira explained that is how possession works. When the possessing force touched the body, it entered without the person’s knowledge. ‘It grabs the heart. It sucks the life out. A human being is finished.’ When an evil spirit possesses a woman, Faqira said, she chews on glass bangles. She grabs anything made of glass, even drinking glasses and eats the glass. When all remedies failed, the families brought the woman to the shrine, seeking help from the saint.
A woman seated silently near the sanctum was watching over a young woman with possession. She was a caretaker. Her name was Khadija. She was the daughter-in-law of Haji Rehman, she said, one of the senior caretakers of the shrine. She used to live in Karachi before she was married. ‘I am Kutchi Memon. Born and brought up in Karachi. But I was married into a Sindhi family and brought here,’ she said. Her husband, long passed away, was an electrician. Khadija had taken over the family interest of caring for the shrine. She had studied until fifth grade at a school in the settlement where she grew up. She learned the trade of shrines from her sister-in-law. But she had to perform a miracle before acceptance into the shrine-world as a pir.
‘There was a young boy at the annual urs I healed,’ she said. ‘His speech was gone. Doctors had given up on him.’ There was a settlement of jinns behind the shrine. Khadija studied there and consulted the jinns. ‘The boy was speaking before the day was up,’ she said. Now many came to her to seek cure from possessions. Before advising a cure, a ritual had to be performed for healing to take effect. All the work of spiritual attainment, she said, takes place on the first Thursday of the new moon. A goat was someti
mes sacrificed.
A serpent lived at the shrine. ‘That serpent is a devotee of Ghaus Paak,’ she said. ‘All of what I practice here is a lineage that began at Karbala, with the death of Hussain, and continues until today.’
Khadija led me to the back of the shrine, to a courtyard where the jinns lived. The sign for jinns is that their voice is of a different quality, she said, before leaving me there. It was peaceful and very quiet where I sat, behind a tree beyond which I could see the courtyard with the neat rows of marble graves. There was a charged stillness as I sat for a while, reading the inscriptions on the tombstones, many of them titled in Sindhi with names and dates from centuries before, listening for a jinn’s voice.
‘There are many powerful people passing through this world,’ said Khadija when she came back to get me. ‘Their names are nowhere after death. But Karbala is a lesson forever remembered.’ Like the testimonial to truth one hears when one sits alone listening to the silence of a centuries old graveyard.
I said goodbye to Khadija and Faqira and I moved onto the next shrine, Satiyan Bibi, the seven sisters. My first encounter with Satiyan Bibi was at Miran Pir’s shrine. There an astana, a small chamber painted in paan leaf green, was the first site inside the small courtyard of the shrine tucked behind a row of wood shacks of flowersellers. Inside the room, lit by clay lamps in darkened corners, were seven graves, laid side by side in a haphazard fashion. ‘The seven sisters were running alone in the wilderness. They were fleeing with the brother who was on a horse ahead of them. As they ran, they got lost. As they panicked, they saw the horse on which their brother had been, now riderless. The horse told the sisters that their brother had been captured by the enemies and killed. Fearful now that the enemy is making its way to capture them, they prayed to Miran Pir to be saved. The earth opened up and swallowed them. The resting place at Miran Pir, Faqira told me, was a small mirror site of this burial place in Thatta.
Sita Under the Crescent Moon Page 12
