Riding through the massive rocks and boulders amidst the crumbling splendour of Makli, we arrived at a small gate, with women begging at the door. Past them were the caretakers, the first sight before I entered a bare brick room. A massive hallway with a canopy like a child’s wooden cradle—inside which side by side lay the seven sisters. ‘This roof was built recently,’ Faqira said. ‘This shrine used to be all open earth.’ Outside the shrine, a story-teller was narrating the tale of the seven sisters. They had been running during the war fought between the rulers of Sindh. They had crossed the river Indus that used to be here, and entered a forest to hide. Yet the enemies were behind them and prayed to let the earth swallow them. The earth opened up and took them in; the only trace left of them, a small bit of the fabric of their covering poking out of the ground. Inside the shrine, the thread offered to visitors was red and yellow, the colour of the dupatta of the seven sisters that was left above the surface of the earth after she was swallowed alive, the storyteller said.
Settled before the seven graves was a young woman. Her name was Sana. The nineteen-year-old was visiting Satiyan with her family. She had been to many shrines. But this was the place where she found peace. Sana had been married for the past four years, and was mother to an infant son. Seated beside Sana was her mother and mother-in-law’s sister. Sana had been married within the family, to a cousin. She had been suffering from possession from before she was married. ‘I used to laugh and talk to my friends all the time,’ she said. ‘That’s what caused it.’
Sana believed her possession caused her to become enraged. At times, she laughed uncontrollably. Other times she cried non-stop. But she had no memory of any of it. She did not even remember visiting rage on her son, the two-year-old she beat mercilessly when possessed. Sana had suffered during her pregnancy, when the boy, the first-born was in her womb. ‘There were other children before and after my son. But they died in the womb,’ she said. ‘Maybe I lifted something heavy. The children die inside of me. I have been coming to Satiyan regularly for seven years.’
Her mother seated beside her said. ‘We are Makrani. Most of us come to Satiyan. The kind of possession, spirit shadows, that follow us find no peace elsewhere,’ she said. ‘Seeking a cure we come to the door, the threshold of the Satiyan. Other doors do not open the same way.’
‘There is a saying in Sindhi. What do we humans know of what lies beneath the surface of the earth on which we walk? Only the Creator knows, daughter.’
Of all the hundreds of thousands of shrines at Makli, Faqira said, the one she liked best was the shrine of saint Lotan Shah. Inside the simple structure, an eighty-year-old woman recalled the saint as being known for sheltering women. She did not know the story, she said. But what she knew made her a disciple for life. She belonged to a family serving the saint for generations. She offered us tea but we had to make the final pilgrimage before the day ended.
Past Lotan Shah’s shrine, we came to Ibrahim Shah Jillani’s shrine. A young boy was in attendance. Faqira asked for the caretaker, and the boy said he was inside but that there were strict orders not to allow anyone to bother him. The man, the boy said, had ceased to meet people since the past six months. Visitors were simply not allowed entry. Pigeons, nesting in the space between the canopy of the shrine and the roof, cooed as Faqira offered her prayers. Outside, dogs had come to live in the courtyard.
The shrine Shah Pari, like Satiyan, travelled from place to place, coming to perch on tree branches and on boulders; a mirror site for the disciples drawn to the place. The women who travelled to Shah Pari, in Makli, came because they knew that they were coming to a place where they would find peace. Shah Pari was a shrine only known to those who knew. It drew women as a place of respite, away from everywhere else where they were spoken to, to a place that spoke to them. Shah Pari was a reigning vision in wings, an awe-striking sight of a creature of fearful beauty.
The shrine of Shah Pari was built simply, with a tin-sheet shelter and a mirror grave. The place, small, was teeming with women. There were a few women seated on the floor around the periphery of the grave, with mounds of clay earth, eaten for various cures. The earth tasted like smooth chocolate without the sweetness, a little salty.
Faqira walked over to offer prayers while I sat by watching the revellers. This was the place where Faqira had a vision of the Pari as a child. Faqira was old now. She had high blood pressure, she said, and was unable to make the arduous journey to far-flung shrines the way she used to. Her children had advised her not to come on this trip with me. But she wanted to make the pilgrimage.
After her husband passed away, Faqira was left to fend for her home and children. When she was young, she had worked helping her mother-in-law, as a midwife, deliver babies. She also offered massages to women with aches and pains. But she did not like the work. She had done it at a time when going outside to work on her own was simply not an option. Becoming a caretaker had been her true calling, she said. The Pari, on her mind and in her heart, all those years, had beckoned.
Faqira began to sit at Miran Pir’s shrine as a faqir, getting along by begging. Offerings and requests for prayers by women visiting the saint brought some sense of prosperity. ‘I helped them and in turn the women helped me,’ she said. ‘Someone wanted an income for a husband. Another wanted to be rid of the curse of black magic by a foe.’
Some of the women unable to make pilgrimages to shrines would request Faqira to make the journey, giving her the fare to the shrine and some small amount for her. ‘I would offer prayers in their name,’ she said. A woman gave her 500 rupees to offer prayer for her health in Thatta during nauchandi. By the time Faqira returned from the pilgrimage, she said, the woman had fully recovered her health, by the grace of Allah.
Faqira began to work with young women under possessions. She stayed nights at shrines, where women went into dhamaal by the beat of the dhol or the song of a qawwali. She was not afraid of the fiercest possession and did not hesitate to hold down a woman under possession until her possession passed. Faqira walked the world of shrines, as a pilgrim for the saints, a mother running her home. But her troubles, not quite over, began anew.
A decade after becoming a widow, Faqira’s two sons became gangsters. One of them, a young man in his teens, was shot in the stomach in the football field near his home.He survived but had to spend months in the hospital. After leaving the hospital, her son gave up his former life. Faqira had been relieved her son was reformed. But the cost of recovery was heavy. The young man had applied for a job at the Karachi Port Trust. He had been hoping his association with a local football team as a player meant he had a good chance of employment. But the news of guns and shooting, he said, and months of being bedridden had killed his chances of getting the job. He had been unable to find employment anywhere.
Zahida, Faqira’s youngest daughter, believed her brother had got hit by a stray bullet while he was playing football in an open ground, because of one of Faqira’s possession cures. Her mother had taken on work for a young woman who used to faint often.She made strange requests, Zahida said, like asking for ice cream on top of milk for her chai. The girl had been taken to doctors and had been administered injections to calm her down. The young woman was brought to Faqira by her mother. Zahida was present when the two came to visit. The girl’s mother said she had heard Faqira was good at removing heavy possession. ‘My mother was reluctant to take the job. But a neighbour told her to take it,’ she said. ‘The girl was healed. But the next day my brother got shot.’
Faqira also believed the possession was transferred to her son. She consulted her Sufi master on the matter. He asked her why she had not sacrificed a goat when working to heal the girl. The ritual involved, Faqira said, draining the blood of a goat. The body of the goat was then fed to the sea. But the girl’s family could not afford to purchase a goat; the mother was a widow like Faqira, so she had not asked. But the ritual worked on a simple principle: ‘Khoon ke badlay khoon chahiye’—blood in exch
ange for blood. The girl was completely healed after Faqira worked on her. ‘She is a mother of two children now,’ she said. Her son was the blood price.
Soon after she began begging at Miran Pir, Faqira’s nephew became appointed chairman of a committee formed by the Khalifa of the shrine. The new chairman, Khan Mohammad, had the authority to appoint and fire any of the faqirs and caretakers at Miran Pir’s shrine. Faqira had hoped with her nephew’s placement, it meant job security for her. But when a dispute arose at the shrine, Faqira was removed from her place at Shah Pari’s site.
‘They told me you are off praying too much and not engaging the pilgrims,’ she remembered. ‘They asked me to come back. But I said I will now go sit at Makli. I will not be caretaker for Shah Pari at Miran Pir again.’
We left the shrine of Shah Pari and rode to the shrine of Mai Makli. Built into the side of the grand intricately carved yellow stone palace of Jam Nizamuddin, the fifteenth century ruler of Sindh, famed for the prosperous years Thatta enjoyed under his reign and the lack of wars. The shrine of Mai Makli was a mirror grave built on a plot of dirt. Women had built a simple structure next to the shrine of Mai Makli, from the piles of rocks in the surrounding area.
‘I too built a room here,’ said Faqira. ‘Before long, I was able to add a room to my home by the order of Allah. By the grace of Mai Makli.’
After marriage, Faqira, born in Lyari, moved to an area called Ram Swami Mandir, Gandhi Nagar, where she lived in a two-room house, one room stacked on top of the other, in a nook behind a building where sunlight never reached. Her motherin-law, now in her nineties, lived in a house across from Faqira’s home. She took me to meet her mother-in-law when I went to visit her home. She was lying on a charpoy, unable to move around much, but she remembered things clearly.
‘This area was all makeshift houses when we moved here right after Pakistan came into being,’ she said, describing the shack houses of the past. ‘After the Hindus left, people paid a few thousand rupees and moved here. Mostly fishing people live here. Ours is the only Baloch family in the area.’
From her earnings as a caretaker, Faqira married off four of her daughters. She gave them each a washing machine and a TV set. ‘Baloch don’t give dowry. But I gave my daughters the best things to take to their new home,’ she said.
She had also recently sent a son off to Saudi Arabia. She had taken a loan of three lakh rupees. He was a skilled mechanic, she said, and she was hopeful he was going to find gainful employment in the gulf. ‘Inshallah my fate will change. I sent him off on nauchandi Thursday.’
The son she had financed did not like Faqira’s work as a caretaker. He would sit at the threshold of the door to their home turning away women coming for consultation to Faqira. Why she prayed for the world and not for her own son, he said to her. She prayed to Mai Makli to let him be successful. ‘Keep my son in your gaze, Mai.’
A year later, the son had not sent back any money. The loan for the money was weighing heavily on her. Zahida wanted to work as a caretaker now, but her mother wanted to see her married and with child. Since her husband had passed away, Faqira’s health was not the same, she sometimes coughed up blood from her mouth.
Faqira invited me over to a praying circle in her neighbourhood. We walked into the narrow lane, the space wide enough for a cycle alone to cross, between two buildings, children darting in and out of curtained doorways. A woman stood in the doorway handing out a sliced banana and a cucumber placed in a tray, offerings for a death in the home, to passersby. I took a cucumber and thanked her.
Faqira pointed to a young fellow. His sister, she said, did not believe in forces. Then she was seized. Only then had she come to Faqira to heal her.
We entered a one-room home and sat together in a circle on the ground. An elderly woman who was presiding over the gathering sat on a bed above us. The elderly woman had been making pilgrimages to Makli since she was twelve, now she was seventy years of age. She heard Faqira introduce me as someone interested in learning about her world. The elderly woman said, ‘The shrine is a place for spirit healing, which is why we go there. This is the ritual to follow for those who believe.’
Prayers are offered, she said, to Allah, the Prophet Mohammad and the Panjtan Pak. These are the wali (inheritors) and we are at the threshold of their darbar, asking Allah that we have arrived at the door of their wali. The wali who suffered in this world are shaheed, yet alive. The rest of us are not free like these wali. We are bound by ties of kinship, of family, of obligations, responsibilities, duties—promises to keep, promises to break. We are tied by threads. ‘You can choose to believe or you can look away, it all depends on how much of truth your heart can bear,’ the woman said.
At Miran Pir’s shrine, some women are defiant, she said. ‘They told this woman not to go inside with her stomach full. She went inside that ignorant woman.’ The elderly woman was bristling over ignorant women. ‘At Miran Pir, this woman went inside when she was not allowed. She said I will go see what happens, she tried Miran Pir. Miran Pir hit back. She fell and lost one eye. Her eye bled away,’ she said.
A woman seated in the circle on the floor told a story.
At Shah Aqeeq, she said, a woman arrived writhing in pain, with a swollen stomach. She had been to many hospitals and the ultrasound scans had revealed she had water in her belly. She was not going to survive, she was told. At Shah Aqeeq, she hailed the Baba and he came over and told her she was going to have a boy. The woman gave birth to a boy. ‘She had an epiphany the night before and then she had a child. Look, there was black magic on her, she was going to die and here she became a mother,’ she said.
Another woman seated with us in the circle said she had been ill for two years. She could not sleep. The doctor, she said, gave her a sleeping pill, one tablet for one night’s sleep. She would take three tablets and not sleep. Her eyes turned to stone. Then, a woman in the neighbourhood suggested that her in-laws take her to Shah Aqeeq’s shrine. She stayed at the shrine by the mangroves for two and a half years, and then she could sleep. She slept so soundly now, she said, her family sometimes woke her up, worried she was dead.
The elderly woman listened to the story. She saw that I looked amazed. Two and a half years, I kept saying, this woman lived in a shrine. ‘Beta, you don’t get anything in life without anything. Whosoever this power is bestowed on is royalty and whosoever this power wants to destroy they fall to the earth, to be mixed in mitti, earth, to be erased in earth.’ Bilkul, a few voices arose in the circle, indeed!
The elderly woman continued. ‘I have grown old making the pilgrimage to my baba. They say it is ishq—love.’
Then all was silent, as the elderly woman began a recital in a small nook, in a room in Gandhi Nagar: a song to Dastagir, a paean to Shah Aqeeq, an ode to Qalandar, a poem to Shah Ghazi, a nod to Noorani. Afterwards, a bowl of curry was set out and some naan. We ate our fill and sat for a little longer.
We spoke again. The third woman said she had possession until her husband cured her. How, I wanted to know. It upset the elderly woman. She said these are not questions to ask. But the woman answered. She said, these are forces and someone with greater force can stop, calm, suppress the force of another person. It was a matter of power, she said. Her husband had brought along a powerful saint who said he had held her force at bay. She had no strength she said, was unable to get up from bed. But now she was powerful.
The room was silent again, and then the elderly woman sang some more.
The day after Faqira’s son left, she had taken the morning bus to Thatta. Her heart, she said, felt like it was pulling away from her. Her daughters tried to keep her from going. But she left for Lea Market around 4 p.m. and by 7 p.m. she arrived at Shah Bukhari’s shrine. She had no money but a rickshaw wallah knew her. He said Mother Farida, let me take you for pilgrimage. Two women making the pilgrimage offered to go along and pay the fare. Faqira joined them. The three set off and arrived at Sheikhali’s shrine by 9 p.m. She was offering her
prayers when suddenly she was possessed and fell into rapture.
‘I did dhamaal until my heart was brimming with happiness, ecstatic,’ she said. A man from her neighbourhood saw her in dhamaal, and remarked on her happiness. Saw the happiness that rose from her like fragrance, a noticeable ecstasy.
It was 4 p.m. by the time Faqira and I reached Sheikhali’s shrine on this journey. We crossed a dried-up lake, partly covered by brush, making our way through a narrow walkway to arrive in a sprawling circular courtyard. There was a sheltered area in the centre of the courtyard where a series of tall clay pots were arranged, filled with water. The courtyard was circled by a series of rooms, one of which was a segregated area for women performing dhamaal. Faqira secured a spot, spreading her nylon blanket underneath the lone lightbulb, the best place from where to watch the dhamaal. After offering prayers, she lay down to rest.
The shrine filled up quickly. Outside the gate, stall sellers were doing brisk business as young men milled about, holding bottles of soda. Men urinated against the wall opposite the main gate. Mohammad Azeem, the head constable at P.S. Makli, had been posted at Sheikhali for the past ten months. He had grown up around shrines, he said. Sometimes there were about 5000 visitors inside and around Sheikhali, he told me.
A group of women formed a circle around Faqira’s blanket. They were travelling together from Lyari, members of the same family. ‘Up until a few decades ago, Sheikhali used to be frequented by Sindhis,’ they said, confirming what Azeem had said. ‘Now it is almost entirely Baloch who come here.’
The women had travelled to Sheikhali—from Karachi to Thatta, one city to another, despite the fact they were not allowed outside their homes without a male elder. None of them knew about Sheikhali, until a brother became gravely ill. The man began to suffer from fits, lying half-conscious on the floor. Doctors were consulted but his condition only became worse. Then one day, an elder aunt brought a cassette tape of a dhamaal she had recorded at Sheikhali and played it for the man. He asked to be taken to the place where the dhamaal took place. The family accompanied him to Sheikhali, staying with the man, while he sat in meditation in one of the rooms in the courtyard. He ate roti and drank kawa for days. By the time they returned home, he was healed.
Sita Under the Crescent Moon Page 13
