Sita Under the Crescent Moon

by Annie Ali Khan

  At the foot of the mountain by Shah Noorani’s shrine, before one climbed onto the metal bridge that led across the wider part of the stream, was an enclave of natural rock formations: the site of Satiyan, those seven sisters in flaming red veils, travelling from place to place, where Zahida’s mother Saeeda’s sister-inlaw tied a thread and lit a candle.

  The open-air courtyard—in the centre of which was an ancient tree, the marble flooring built around its trunk—sheltered the women who sat in semi-circles, as an orange sun loomed in a fading sky, parrots as green as the leaves of the branches on which they perched joining the sparrows in a chorus of ecstasy turning into shrieks calling for mercy from the night sky, as the evening sun paused in a sky gone very still before Maghrib, a prayer to the setting sun—in the background, the stony mountains had already begun receding into brooding silhouettes.

  The drums made with goat skin stretched taut on their frames, played downstairs, in a large room on a floor below the shrine. Any woman who wished to could join the men downstairs. A few men stood by on the very edges of the open-air-courtyard above, watching.

  In the inner-most circle of the dhamaal revellers was a woman in a scarlet hand-embroidered Balochi-style dress. Her white hair henna-dyed, the colour of the sun; a shade not too far from the scarlet of her clothes. Her earrings, like her nose-rings, were burnished in the outdoors. There were deep shadows on her papery skin. She had a feverish expression on her calm face. Her eyes were open yet no pupils were present.

  As the beat of the drum echoed from below the ground of the shrine, the top of the mountain, her hair, flying in the air, was a flaming halo—as unearthly screams rent the air and the very courtyard cried in rapture-ecstasy-agony-possession-freedom, as the birds and the sky became one, as in a corner, a woman lay undulating and hissing like a serpent, as the sun was gone— leaving a gauze of light behind and then that too was gone. It became pitch dark.

  That was the first Moharram. It was something. Before it was gone.

  Inside the inner-sanctum of Shah Noorani’s shrine, which is all mirror mosaic and pristine marble, there was a dome at the top, and in the centre of a square room, underneath which stands an embroidered marble canopy, was a rectangle in the same white: nestled inside of which was a resplendent pagri, a domed hat wrapped in yards of silk and stringed with pearls, at the head of a grave laden with tinsel-trimmed chaadars in red and green. The pagriwas changed for special occasions like Moharram. Every now and then people brought a tinsel-trimmed sheet, holding it above their heads—reminding me of the way a tinsel-trimmed dupatta is held over the head of a bride as she walks to the carriage inside which the groom awaits her arrival, in departure from the home where she was born, a temporary place.

  A male voice of a deep timbre called out, ‘Naraa-e-Haideri’ and the voices in the courtyard followed in chorus, ‘Ya Ali’. The only time I heard a woman call out, her infant shouted the chorus line; they laughed together.

  Next to the marble canopy, near the base of which a woman lay supine, moaning, was a carved wooden canopy, once used, now kept to the side, piled with thin copies of the sipara, on top of which a peacock flew and perched. The smell of crushed roses hung heavy in the air. In a corner, a steel cabinet had a diya in which mustard oil burned night and day, a salve. Next to which, I sat taking notes.

  The woman seated next to me on the marble floor said, ‘Allah is the one to give. I come here because of Noorani Baba. But one must ask from Allah. One should only recite Quran here. Only Allah can give.’ She never told me what it was she wanted from Allah. I never asked. She never told me why she came all the way to Shah Noorani’s shrine. Why was she here?

  Near us, a faqir in black, a rosary around his neck, sat calling to the ceiling in a voice, a boom, removed from his body: Allah Hoo. Allah Hoo.

  A young man, trying to take a selfie with the pagri of Shah Noorani, tripped over the body of the women lying supine on the floor at the base of the grave of Shah Noorani. ‘Try to see, a little,’ a woman resting her back against the marble wall called out.

  Another young man in a green cap walked up to me asking me to move someplace else, as he wanted to sit there and read the Quran. This is where the women are seated, I said, pointing to the line of women next to me. He frowned and sat down in front of me with his back to me. I stayed, I kept writing.

  Yet another man peeked into my notebook. ‘So much English,’ he said. ‘Surely, you’ll end up in America with all this angrezi.’

  A faqir in black with a necklace and a mane of wild hair swept the pristine floor with a broom, sweeping in circles inside the square sanctum with a dome. This devotee of Sachhal Sarmast, spending his life, a self he sacrificed, in service of his saints, Sarmast and Noorani, tapped women on their heads to make them step away, including the woman lying supine on the floor. ‘Look at him hit the women on the head as he sweeps the floor!’ said Zahida, pointing to him angrily.

  She looked around. ‘I like this dargah,’ she said. ‘I say, I don’t care if I don’t have my parents or anyone here. I want to be here.’

  I want to be here. Let me be here.

  ‘You are beautiful,’ she said.

  After the dhamaal, I joined Zahida, in the courtyard where a sliver of a new moon gleamed. Zahida sat in a circle of girls, chatting. Some of the women had brought their chillums from home, and sat, sending serpentine clouds of smoke, like seductive after-thoughts, into the still night air. All evening, free food was handed around: platters of hot rice and haleem. A girl, her name was Aisha, said she arrived that morning with her family, about two dozen people, riding seven motorcycles all the way from Karachi.

  Zahida had met a young woman at Shah Ghazi’s shrine facing the Arabian Sea. The young woman was beautiful, she said. They began to meet every week at the shrine, and Zahida convinced the girl to accompany her to Shah Noorani. Zahida’s friend was the envy of the shrine, she said. No one could take their eyes off her. Back in Karachi, the girl booked a hotel room in Saddar, in the old part of the city, where Zahida spent the day with her. Then, one day, the girl told Zahida she was pregnant and needed Zahida’s help in getting an abortion. Zahida never saw her again. The spell had broken.

  But Zahida liked to see where things went, each time she met someone. ‘Khel Khelo,’ she said—play the game of love, life.

  Once, a woman told Zahida’s parents not to bring Zahida to the shrine anymore. ‘You are poor,’ Zahida recalled her saying to her family. Zahida said she told the woman. ‘My parents may be poor. Allah is the one to give. I will come, He will find a way.’ Inside, she said, she felt ill considering not being able to come to Shah Noorani.

  It was her relationship with Shah Noorani that intrigued me from the very beginning.

  Past midnight, the doors of the dargah were closed. In the final hour, the sanctum was packed with men and women offering prayers while members of the inner-circle of the caretakers of the shrine cleaned the room.

  Outside, in the courtyard, Zahida and the circle of women stayed up all night, walking down to the market, where they bought roth, leavened bread baked on hot coals under a layer of earth, food from a grave which they ate with bottles of Pepsi.

  As people began falling asleep, more and more people kept pouring in, then the stream turned to a trickle. As the night wore on, bodies got closer, jostled, bristled. Here and there muffled arguments arose, then silence. I went to lie down. Where I lay watching the stars and the moon, through the branches, carved with the silhouettes of peacocks, to the sounds of murmurs.

  In the far corner of the courtyard, a man began to sing in a voice as mournful as the call of the peacock above in the branches. In the ancient tree in the courtyard, a parrot screeched from time to time. A slender mountain goat traipsed around stepping over bodies lying next to each other, together but separate.

  It was the closest I ever got to a sense of belonging to a moment, in a moment, before it was gone.

  During the night, freezing, I dreamt of serpe
nts slithering over the open-air courtyard. Snakes with bodies as cold as the floor I slept on.

  Earlier in the night, while I sat in the inner sanctum, a woman entered the room and sat by the door. Her clothes were muddied beyond any recognition of colour, tattered in places, underneath which, mud covered skin showed. Her hair was a wild tangle of dust and strands that stuck out like scaly serpents. Her young face was streaked and smeared with the stuff of something present but unnameable, like madness, around the stark white orbs of her eyes. She had been sitting there barely a few moments when a stench of something rotting began rising in the air. A stench rising like a disagreement, as the woman next to her began to scream a bloody scream. One of the men of the custodian’s family walked over, with open disgust, a silent thunder, an arrow of lightning on his face. He began to drag the woman with the dusty hair, lifting her by her arm to outside the inner-sanctum, a trail of dark blood leaking after her, towards the inner-sanctum, on the pristine marble. A man brought a rag and quickly wiped it all away, so upsetting, unnerving, unavoidable, undeniable, so foul, off the pristine floor. Angry whispers rose in the chambers of the inner sanctum, then died down. This was not the blood of a martyr or a saint. This was dirty blood that came from the womb of a woman.

  Around 4 a.m., a faqir named Iqbal came to wake us. I followed him around and up the side of the mountain where the families of the custodian lived, in about thirty squat, single-storey houses dotting the hillside, closed off by a metal gate where a woman sat washing children’s clothing next to plastic drums. Water was brought from a spring somewhere, it was scarce around the area. It was still pitch dark and I was glad to have a flashlight handy. There were not many toilets around and the entire hillside on the way over had been covered in shit and piss, the stench unbearable. Inside wooden stalls, the women took turns. As a woman from the custodian’s family opened the door for me, she asked me not to bathe in the water. I assured her I was not going to use up the water. Inside the stall, I realized I had gotten my period.

  The memory of the night before came rushing back, and with it, another memory of long ago when I had first had my period. My parents had enrolled me at a madrassa. The school had a system of teaching children to learn the Quran orally. Every day, I was made to memorize a line from a surat in the Quran, by a female teacher hired to live in a quarter in the madrassa, and the next day I had to remember the line as I learned a new line, revising from the top of the surat. It was painstakingly slow, but I was able to memorize three lines. One day, I woke up on bloodied bedsheets. I thought I knew what to do but I was still feeling faint from seeing this blood come from my body.

  At the madrassa, after my lesson, as the rest of the girls in class went to offer Zohar prayers, I stayed behind. When the teacher asked me why I was not praying, I said I was not clean. She flew into a rage, her face turning beet red, as she screamed at me in front of the class for touching the sacred text with unclean fingers. I never told anyone about what happened for shame. But, I never went back to the seminary again, the mere mention of going there making me fall ill.

  Suppressed, the memory came flooding back now.

  After a quick cup of tea, I headed out to Lahoot. After a ride in the kekra, I arrived at the foot of a steep mountain with small steel ladders cut into its surface. I met a woman leaning against the rock near the bottom. She used to go up all the time, she said. But since her children grew up, she had lost the will. I would probably run into her family up there, she said.

  It was a rough climb. The steel ladders cut into the soles of my feet through the sneakers and socks. A man climbing up offered to carry my backpack all the way. I was grateful. Others offered hands pulling me up, as I called Ya Ali for help, surprising myself. Once at the top, I was a little dismayed to find another climb, a few hundred feet up to the mouth of a narrow cave. But some of the people had said that sculpture of a serpent lay inside, and I was hoping to find the Sati. I hesitated.

  Before me was a throng of about fifty men gathered around the ladder, not a single woman nearby. I asked for room and the crowd parted. I began to climb quickly so as not to lose my nerve. ‘Look at her go. She is a snake,’ someone called out. At the top, without looking behind me I made to climb into the cave. I heard chants from inside. I had had a fear of closed spaces growing up, and the prospect of getting trapped in a cave where about a hundred people were chanting as they made their pilgrimage, the walls echoing with vibrations, did not seem safe.

  As I looked into the mouth of the cave, I saw the look of terror on the face of a person trying to climbing back outside. Behind me, a woman hefted two infant children up. My climb had given her strength, she said. I followed her into the cave. Climbing down via a thick rope I stepped onto slippery ground and found myself in a cavernous orifice of palatial dimensions. There were stones and sculptures all around, but no serpent in sight. And there was another narrow climb up.

  As I tried to make my way, a man offered me his hand. I immediately regretted taking his hand, as he pressed his palm against mine. I slipped. He told me to wait down by the entrance and offered to take a photo of the sculpture. I waited inside the cave, seated on a rock, looking at the people trying to find their way around in the moist darkness. I wondered what they were looking for in these womb-like environs. The water of the cave was said to restore eyesight.

  The man came back with my camera and showed me the photos. At the summit of the last climb, inside the belly of a ledge, was a flash-lit image of a Quran. There was no serpent. I climbed back outside, followed by the man. His name was Faizan. He lived in Shah Faisal Colony in Karachi, and owned a rickshaw. I thanked him and said goodbye. But he followed me all the way to the road. I gave him a fake phone number and told him to go away. He nodded and did not return.

  Later that morning, as I was riding down the mountain at the back of the kekra, I glimpsed Zahida walking down the mountain with her family, making her way to Lahoot. Her exuberant smile under the shining sun—a beautiful ray caught my heart.

  As soon as we boarded the bus, a fight broke out. Qurban was boarding passengers in reverse order, seating men in the ‘ladies section’. A girl came and sat down on the front seat. She placed a small cloth bag on the seat next to her. Qurban opened his mouth but she cut him off. ‘I am leaving my bag here. I will be right back,’ she said, and climbed back off the bus. Qurban threw her bag to the floor and seated two men with a woman in the front. A few minutes later, the girl was back. She saw there were people on her seat. Spotting her bag on the floor, she snatched it up and sat on a seat across the aisle by the door.

  Qurban, busy seating other passengers, now returned. He began to scream at her, then stopped. She was dressed in a tattered shalwar kamiz. Her knotted hair had a rusty pallor and was covered in dust. She had muddy stains on her face and her eyes, wildly staring about, were smeared with sooty tears. She was not covered in a shawl nor wearing a burqa. She did not even have a dupatta on her.

  ‘Who is with you?’ Qurban demanded from her. ‘No one,’ she said looking away, out the window, holding the sack in her lap close now. ‘Move to the back, I am seating men in front,’ Qurban said.

  She turned to him and released a volley of cusswords in a fury that seemed to shake the bus full of people, calling him a pimp. A group of passengers were now gathered at the door. The family who had paid Qurban extra to be seated up front was now standing in the aisle.

  A woman in a chaadar who was standing with them screamed at the girl. ‘This seat belongs to us. You are polluting the seat. Saali rundi!’ After calling the girl a dirty whore, she moved closer, towering over her. Her lip curled in a jeer to reveal cruel tobacco-stained teeth.

  Qurban pulled the girl up by the forearm. She screamed and swore at him, then sat back down on the seat. The chaadar-clad woman looked as if she would hit the girl. ‘Get off our seat, you filthy woman. Noorani Baba will teach you a lesson.’

  ‘Whore,’ the girl said, getting up and spitting in the direction of th
e women. Qurban raised his palm, his face full of fury, the other women looking on with wide staring eyes.

  I could not let her be slapped. I jumped in front of her and almost caught a slap from Qurban. The women screamed at me. ‘You don’t know anything. Don’t protect her. She dirtied the dargah yesterday!’

  Now I recalled the girl who had bled on the floor of the shrine and had been dragged away. This was her. If the people whispering about her at the dargah were to be believed, she was raving mad, abandoned there by her husband some said. Others said her family had left her there.

  I imagined this girl trying to escape back into the city to resume her life. Maybe she wanted to go back to see her children or her former home. I would not allow them near her. ‘That was yesterday. She is on the bus now. You cannot hit a woman,’ I said to Qurban.

  But the woman in the chaadar wanted none of it. ‘She has abandoned her children, this filthy woman,’ she said, trying to make a stronger case against this woman. ‘Get her off our seat.’

  An elderly man moved forward and pulled the girl off the seat and next to him. She looked at him sternly. He placed his palm on her head. She sat stiffly, his one arm around her, the other one stroking her head.

  ‘Oye, who are you to her,’ said a man seated midway with his wife, seeing the old man’s arm on her shoulder.

  ‘Oye I am a faqir, I am a mureed of Noorani Baba. You do not know what you say, son,’ the man replied.

  The girl suddenly stood up, shaking off the old man’s embrace, and ran off the bus with her bag. The bus rode away, with an angry collection of passengers who wanted to see her set right.

  The girl in tattered clothes, with no dupatta, holes in her kamiz, and armed with nothing more than her madness that did little to protect her, left behind in the dust cloud rising in the wake of the bus.