The elderly man turned to look at the passengers in the back. ‘It’s okay. She is not going anywhere. Her place is right here. She is not right in the mind,’ he said. ‘She tries to get on a bus back from time to time to go home. But her family has abandoned her,’ he said. ‘She has nowhere to go.’
I look out the window to see where the mad girl was going, but she was already gone.
I had learnt, that night, this morning, being somewhere, wanting to be somewhere was not that simple, when being there, wanting to be there, to want, was simply not allowed.
Taken away—like those bodies that had borne the brunt of the blast.
Seven days after I left Shah Noorani’s shrine, a bomb went off in the dhamaal area, killing over fifty-four people reportedly, many of whom could have been saved had there been adequate arrangements for first-aid and ambulances. While I had been there, there were stories of this or that person falling while climbing or trying to climb those brooding peaks and hurting themselves, with nowhere to go, in a place with no arrangements, because this was a place with no arrangements for people with no arrangements. Those places with arrangements were other places for other people.
These were people who had nowhere to go, who had come here, to nowhere, to die in a bomb blast in a dhamaal, to die, disembodied during dhamaal, to be carried away like slaughtered cattle loaded in the back of a lorry to which two little girls had been hanging on for dear life as they made their way to a backwater province of a backwater country of a backwater mountain—backwater people with backwater lives—nowhere, dead, gone, forgotten. These people with nothing, turned into nothing, no one, none, zero.
Three days after I left for Karachi, Zahida left for Masaan Chowk from Noorani.
Less than a week later, she saw the news on the TV of death and devastation. Zahida was not devastated by death.
Every single day from that day onwards for a month, the month for which the shrine was closed to the public for security measures, Zahida called Qurban, the conductor of the bus to Noorani, to ask if he could take her to her Noorani Baba.
On the thirtieth day, Zahida took the rickety bus to Shah Noorani, accompanied by Anwar, watching the road, watching it for the more than five-hour journey, waiting to get there. All the way to the remote district of Khuzdar Balochistan—keeping her hope alive like her love, like her devotion like a prayer like a flame, radiant like a pearl on a dark cliff she hoped was still there.
Love was Zahida running all the way from Mohabbat Faqir’s shrine, from the grave of mohabbat, past the stream and the mill of time and age, all the way to the top of the mountain where she stood panting, watching for signs of damage to the shrine of heavenly light. Love was Zahida, standing between heaven and earth to be there, standing on the top of a mountain, before her Noorani Baba, opening her closed eyes to the inner-sanctum after she had been reassured by her father, Anwar, that the sanctum was unscathed, and that Shah Noorani was safe. A grave, a pearly grave was safe.
‘The dargah was so empty. I said, Noorani Baba has become so completely alone.’
Zahida was there for her Baba.
After spending the night, Anwar and Zahida decided to walk the seven peaks to Lahoot. Zahida decided on the way that she wanted to find herself a lamb to take home. There were no lambs around. But a woman had two kids, little baby goats, two of them, for which she demanded 3000 each. But Zahida could not pay more than 2000, of which she only had 1000 on her. She started to cry. She wanted to take the the baby goats home. She promised to bring them back when they were old enough to sacrifice, and to keep them, for now. The woman’s son took pity on her and gave the goats to her.
Love was Zahida holding Tolu and Molu (as she named the kid goats) in her arms, huddled inside Zahida’s sweater that she had taken off so they could keep warm, as she rode on a rickety bus to Masaan Chowk, where her mother Saeeda yelled at Zahida for having brought two goats to a one-room house.
The goats were only three days old when Zahida brought them, and Saeeda did not think they would survive. Tiny and weak as they were, shivering in the winter cold near the sea, without their mother. But Zahida let them sleep under the blanket in the bed with her, and fed them milk from a feeder and kept them wrapped in the second-hand sweaters Anwar had bought Zahida from the lighthouse area, where used clothing, shipped in cargo-shipping containers, was brought by sea.
In nine months, Tolu and Molu had grown into two feisty, healthy goats, their hair dyed with henna, their hair trimmed— the envy of the goats of the neighbourhood of Masaan Chowk. Zahida tied neon green beaded threads around their neck and put bells on their ankles. But she could not bring herself to sacrifice them or sell them so they stayed. Even as feeding them meant little money left for Zahida to eat out as often as she liked to. Tolu and Molu were a reminder, a reason, for her to leave again for Shah Noorani’s shrine.
In school, in seventh grade, Zahida became obsessed with a girl named Aneela, who sat across the aisle of the classroom from her. Zahida often followed Aneela home, walking at a little distance behind her, as Aneela walked to her house, a few houses from where Zahida lived, through lanes just wide enough for a motorcycle to pass through. Until Aneela entered her home through the curtained entrance.
Zahida’s heart was set on this girl with blue eyes. She felt too shy to speak to Aneela, so she left a note in Aneela’s desk in which she wrote, ‘You are beautiful. Who are you? Answer here on this same page.’ She left the note inside Aneela’s desk after school. For days, Zahida heard nothing of the note. Then one day, as she was about to walk home from school, Aneela caught her by the arm and said Zahida had cast a spell on her.
From that day onwards, Zahida went over to Aneela’s home every day after school, where long afternoons were spent together. Until later that same year, Aneela asked Zahida to buy her a cellphone. Zahida had saved up 700 rupees to go to Shah Noorani, and she spent it onthe second-hand cellphone instead. Aneela soon became friends with a boy and forgot Zahida.
The spell broke.
That day, at home, Zahida burned all her seventh grade textbooks and dropped out of school. She decided, or realized, two things about herself: school was not her thing, and love was her thing. Where relationships were ephemeral—trust ended in betrayal—love was eternal. Zahida had unlocked something that was for her, the key to the heart of truth—love was the heart of life, which was another name for suffering. Love, begun anew, like fresh, fragrant roses, scattered on an ancient grave, was suffering made beautiful, beauty—like fragrance from a rose, even when it was a rose crushed—was, truth.
Every day, Zahida, visited either Ghaiban Shah or Shah Ghazi’s shrine or saved up for her next visit to Shah Noorani’s shrine. All three places after her heart.
‘A day spent not visiting a shrine is a bad day for me,’ Zahida would say.
In the room of their one-room house in Masaan Chowk, there was a closet with a lock where Zahida’s family kept clothes meant to be worn on special occasions, above which on two of the walls were shelves where Zahida’s mother kept her wedding crockery. There was an old refrigerator beside a small window underneath which was a small table on which was a television set piled high with DVDs of Bollywood films and collections of stage performances from Peshawar. Next to the table was a pedestal fan and a bed where Zahida slept. In the corner, by the bed under the pegs on the wall painted raspberry pink, Saeeda hung freshly pressed clothes for Anwar, Noor and Amir to wear to work.
Daily wage labour at the seaport for Anwar and for Noor and Amir, rickshaw and motorcycle repair work. There was a corner created by Zahida, beginning with a letter Z in green marker. Beside this letter were two framed illustrations, one of Ya Allah and another one of Ya Mohammad, underneath which were painted depictions of famous shrines. Shrines that spoke to Zahida, shrines that Zahida spoke to. Each illustration bought for fifty rupees or less on numerous visits to shrines from money saved from food or clothing expenses. At the top was an illustration of Shah Noorani. Next t
o which was an illustration of a famous scene of the saint Ghaus Paak and the boat full of a wedding procession, a bride praying to the Baba. The boat and the people in that boat he kept from drowning and kept afloat. Another one of Gaji Shah. The shrine near the white tower, in the north where Sindh and Balochistan met again, and ended. In the centre was a large framed illustration of Sehwan Sharif which showed Laal Shahbaz Qalandar in embrace with his disciple Bodla Bahar, two long-haired beauties, sadhus, saints, disciples of Mohabbat, on top of which Zahida stuck a single peacock feather that reflected the green of the markered Z. Underneath these frames, on a small stool covered with a cloth was a small clay incense burner and a spray bottle of water for ironing clothes and a box of matches.
Growing up, Zahida and her younger sister Saira were strictly forbidden from leaving the house unchaperoned. In the spidery lanes of Masaan Chowk, young men peddling drugs, armed with pistols, watched the moves of anyone and everyone walking about closely. Zahida rarely, if ever, went to the seashore, a stone’s throw from her home.
One day, Anwar had been late, getting home from the market nearby. Impatient, Zahida went to look for him. Saeeda tried to stop her, calling after Zahida as she breastfed her youngest child, Amir. But Zahida had already run out. There had been a death in the neighbourhood and a neighbour was carrying a polythene bag full of searing hot curry. A watery white shorba that had just been distributed to the mourners. In her hurry, Zahida ran into the man and the hot curry ran down her shirt burning her chest. Panicked, the man took Zahida to his wife who had to cut open Zahida’s kamiz and apply ice to the burns. Zahida covered herself with a dupatta and walked out to Anwar who began to shout at his daughter for being outside. The man who had spilled the hot curry called out to Anwar and told him Zahida was badly burned. Anwar took Zahida to the clinic nearby, where her wounds were bandaged up. Once home, he hit Zahida with a stick until her burns began to bleed through the bandages. Didn’t she know never to leave the house by herself?
There was a grainy video of a family wedding. In the women-only room where the bride sat surrounded by the womenfolk, Saeeda, Zahida’s mother, sat with her newborn baby, Noor, in her lap. Behind Saeeda, as the camera panned, was a seven-year-old Zahida, standing shirtless. Not even Anwar’s beatings could persuade Zahida to put on a shirt. A little Zahida had attended the entire, segregated wedding, shirtless, standing there, from the waist up, in the camera’s eye—a naked girl, looking through the TV screen, from the lens of a camera at a wedding, at the world.
Anwar recalled the time a little Zahida had gone visiting her grandmother who had just bought a myna bird for herself. Zahida asked for the bird, but her grandmother refused to part with her new pet. Furious, Anwar slapped Zahida and taking her by the arm, left for home. As the family entered their home, they saw a myna bird lying on the floor. Zahida ran and picked the myna bird up in her hand and smiled. Zahida, Anwar believed, could move heaven and earth to her whim.
Love was Zahida, alone on the bus to Shah Noorani’s shrine, when no one in her family would accompany her, with nothing more than the money inside an envelope on her person.
‘Relationships are made, I break them,’ she said. ‘I want Noorani Baba, not relations.’
There was a girl, Yaseen, who possessed Zahida. Prove it, Yaseen said, offering Zahida a plate with shattered pieces of a light bulb. Zahida ate the glass. Yaseen and Zahida were inseparable. Then she told Zahida, she found her fiancé sweeter than Zahida. It broke Zahida’s heart. She went off to Noorani again.
On Zahida’s inner-wrist, next to the tattoo of the word Shehzadi written in Urdu lettering, was a tattoo of a heart, one curve of the heart with the letter ‘Z’, the other curve with the letter ‘J’. Both letters of the English alphabet pierced through, along with the heart, with an arrow that curved around to form the ‘L’ around the ‘ove’ before it crossed through the heart.
That ‘J’ was for Javed, the name meaning eternal.
Just as Zahida had followed Aneela, a young fisherman named Javed had followed Zahida. Keeping at a little distance, as she walked down the long narrow lane towards her house built atop a garbage dump, by the sea up ahead. This wasteland by the Arabian Sea was a floating dot, a settlement, along the coastline of the southern coastal city. Lying between the sea, Javed’s means of livelihood, and the railway line on which Zahida’s grandfather had arrived with his family from Peshawar, a city to the north—a cosmopolitan city, now poor in material, once rich in riches—where the chai wallah can tell you stories of travellers from far away places, was a place still rich, in stories if you cared to hear them. A place touching the border of Afghanistan and the world beyond, if you had the heart to go there, to find a home and a livelihood in the new big city: Karachi, once the old city of Mai Kolachi, a woman who fed the fishermen by the sea, is still there, if you care to look.
Javed’s heart was set on this girl named Zahida, who was often seen at Ghaiban Shah’s shrine, the invisible saint—one who cannot be seen but is there. This was where many of the fishermen paid a donation before making a pilgrimage into the endless blue of the sea. The sea which was clear and present, yet transparent—a glimpse of eternity, that could cause insanity, like ghaib, where divinity and madness met on the horizon like the sea and the sky, collapsing into each other like doomed lovers. Javed’s heart was set on this girl, Zahida.
At home one day, Saeeda lifted the heavy curtain to see a woman in a black burqa at her door. She introduced herself as the mother of a young fisherman who wished to marry Zahida. Anwar and Zahida pulled up two charpoys in the courtyard and Saeeda sent her sons to fetch pakoray and samosay from the market.
Zahida’s parents had known this day would come one day and they were prepared for marriage proposals to arrive. Javed’s mother told Saeeda and Anwar her son was a well-earning fisherman, at times fetching as much as fifty thousand rupees from a month away at sea. They lived in a five-bedroom house, two streets away, where Zahida would be just like the other two daughters-in-laws of the family, she said.
Javed sounded like a good arrangement, but Saeeda and Anwar were reluctant. They were a Pushto speaking family from Peshawar and Javed’s family were a Kutchi speaking community that had lived here for generations, before they migrated from Kutch in the west of India. The Pashtun were seen as backward in their ways, by these migrants. The two communities lived together but maintained a distance—together but apart.
Their lives were connected in other ways. The only source of sweet—or fresh water in this slum settlement where there was no plumbing and no water connection, was via canisters bought for 300 rupees per gallon brought by boat. A fisherman loaded the sweet water in the boat and took it down over the salty sea, selling it by the drum on the seashore.
Then, just as the mood seemed likely to remain indecisive, Javed’s mother told Anwar that she had at that very moment seen a Baba there in the corner of that room in their house. She told Anwar that Baba told her he had absolute power over Zahida and could feed her to the dogs if he so wished. That Baba said let Zahida be married to Javed.
That Baba whom no one else knew about outside the home was here, in fluent conversation with this woman who had never set foot in their home. Anwar decided there and then Zahida was to be married into this family. It was her fate.
He agreed to the marriage date set by the Baba as spoken through Javed’s mother. The decision of Zahida’s marriage was conveyed to her.
Anwar had been without work for more than six months at that point. If he harbored any anxieties about marriage expenses, they were alleviated that very evening when Zahida discovered, in the corner with the posters of shrines, three thousand rupees. Zahida bought mithai with the amount, which was distributed amongst family and sent to neighbours. A box was sent to Javed’s home, too.
That box of mithai sent to Javed’s home, when opened by his family, had six pieces of mithai missing. Javed called Zahida that day and told her about the missing pieces of mithai in the box. Zahid
a told him she was not surprised. A neighbour came to visit that very day and said she had dreamt of a Baba. The old man in her dream complained he had not been offered mithai as gratitude. Zahida, he said, in the dream dreamt by the woman of the neighbourhood, forgot her Baba in her happiness. It seemed he had taken his share of goodwill.
The missing pieces of mithai were the talk of the wedding at Masaan Chowk between a family from Peshawar in the north and one from the Arabian Sea in the south, who lived two streets away from each other.
For weeks leading to the wedding, Zahida had been preparing for the big day. Friends painted her hands with henna. Bangles were carefully selected and clothes chosen. She was radiant.
After the nikah ceremony, Zahida sat in the back of a rickshaw decorated with trails of red roses strung on white thread and covered with golden tinsel fluttering in the sea breeze. From a distance, it seemed, the rickshaw catching the light of the sun, riding against the backdrop of the sea, was ablaze.
But as Zahida saw Javed’s home approaching in the distance, her heart sank. Even before she set foot in his room, she began to hear sounds of someone reading rapidly the pages of the Quran. The sound of the sea behind her and the sound of the pages of a sacred text being read around her, together turned into a whisper of madness, turned into a voice, within.
Brought into her new home, Zahida went by herself and saw inside the room where she would stay, live, try to live, as Javed’s wife—a bed and four walls—and something inside her snapped. By morning, Zahida felt in her throat a bile of hatred for this man she had married.
The spell was broken.
Javed would get exasperated when Zahida refused to let him touch her. ‘Whatever else does a man get married for, if not sex?’ he would say.
When Javed was away for weeks at sea, Zahida missed him. She tried to call him. But a lot of times, she would not be able to reach him, when he was all the way out in the deep seas. She worried for his safety during those times. Upon his return, they would talk for hours. ‘At times, there was so much love. I could not bear to be away from him,’ she said. ‘But a moment later we fought. Always over the same thing’—sex would get in the way for Zahida.
Sita Under the Crescent Moon Page 17
