After one such night when they fought, Javed left the room saying he was going to sleep on the roof. It was a cold winter night. Worried he might catch a cold, Zahida went looking for him only to see him go into his sister-in-law’s room instead; his brother, the woman’s husband, was away on a fishing trip. Zahida walked up to the room to see the two in bed together. She felt dizzy with fear—her mind spinning in circles, she ran back.
Afterwards, Javed returned to the room. He asked her why she was breathing so hard. ‘A black cat pounced into the room and scared me,’ she said, not looking his way.
‘Stop shivering and boil me some water. I need to take a bath,’ he said. Zahida prepared his bath water, then took her quilt and slept on the floor. In the morning, she went over to her parents’ home. She told no one. But what she had seen in that room—a room with a charpoy, just like her room—began to weigh on her mind. The thought, like the bucket of water she had boiled for a bath cleaning away all traces of dirt on that body that shared her bathroom, filled her mind.
One day, at that time of the month, Zahida asked her younger sister Saira to come sleep over. Anwar had strictly forbidden the girls from sleeping over at other people’s homes, especially for Saira to stay at Zahida’s place, now that Zahida was married. Zahida did not have permission to sleep at her parent’s place anymore either, now that she was married. But Zahida was feeling very ill so the family made an exception. Zahida’s blood flow had been very heavy and she was in a lot of pain. Anwar, their father, relented.
While Zahida and Saira were spending the afternoon together, Javed joined them. After lunch, Zahida went to wash dishes left dirty after lunch with clean water, as was her duty in this joint family. When she returned, her hands still wet with the dirty dishwater, Saira said she wanted to go home, despite having come over to stay the night. Javed offered to walk her back. As they were leaving, Zahida gave Javed some money to purchase a cotton roll for her to help staunch the bleeding between her legs.
That night, Saira called Zahida and told her Javed had asked her to have sex with him. ‘Your sister is ill, why don’t you come to me,’ he had said.
Zahida was furious. Her sister, three years younger to her, barely fifteen, was a child. Zahida left the charpoy and took the pillow with her, lying awake all night on the floor, watching the ceiling above.
The next day, Zahida asked her sister again, ‘Did Javed ask you to stay the night only because he wanted you to be by my side, since I am not feeling well?’ Saira’s silence in response to her question infuriated Zahida. She confronted Javed. ‘Tell me honestly,’ she said. ‘Did you say something to my sister?’
At first Javed denied it. Then he said, ‘Yes, I did. So, what?’
Zahida dragged Javed to his mother and told her about what he said to Saira. Javed denied the whole thing at first. When Zahida threatened to pull out the Quran, to have him put his hand on the sacred text and swear, Javed said, ‘Yes, I asked Saira to sleep with me, so what?’
Zahida had been feeling lost since the incident the night she had seen him go in to sleep with his sister-in-law. And now Javed had asked her sister to bed. ‘My heart just broke,’ she said. She slapped Javed.
She decided to set off for Shah Noorani, the place after her heart.
Zahida asked Javed to accompany her. But he refused. His mother did not approve of shrines. ‘What will I tell my mother?’ he said.
‘Married women do not go to shrines,’ Zahida’s mother-in-law said, when she found out. ‘What if you become sick with a child in your stomach?’ she said.
Zahida went by herself to Shah Noorani.
Her mother-in-law was not happy with her; the girl did not play by the rules of the household. She decided to teach Zahida a lesson. After a month at sea, Javed liked to slather coconut oil all over his body before his bath, for relief from weeks of being out in the stinging salt and sun. Zahida’s mother-in-law was in-charge of all household expenses. Zahida let her mother-in-law know Javed needed coconut oil. She bought oil for her other two sons, also fishermen, but let Javed’s bottle lie empty. When Javed returned home, he was furious. He could not take his bath. He screamed at Zahida.
Zahida told him to go ask his mother about the oil. Zahida showed him the text, messages she had sent him after asking her about the oil, as proof. Javed’s fury was now directed towards his mother. He walked up to her and said, ‘Bitch, couldn’t you get me a bottle of oil.’ Javed’s older brother, who was in the room, got up to hit Javed. But their mother stopped him. ‘Don’t hit Javed,’ she said. ‘That snake wife of his put him up to this with the spell of her love.’
Zahida’s mother-in-law told Zahida to wear her burqa and took her to her parents’ home to settle the matter once and for all. A sitting of elders was called.
‘Since the day of our wedding, Zahida has been demanding I move her to a place separate from the rest of my family. She does not let me near her for this very reason,’ Javed said at the sitting. Zahida felt shame and anger, having her father hear such intimate details of her married life. But she admitted she had indeed made such a demand. Angry and in disgust, Anwar got up to leave the sitting saying he wanted no part of any of the discussion. As Anwar was walking out, Javed said, ‘This marriage has caused me a lot of tension.’
It was not something everyone heard. In fact, Saeeda may have been the only one who heard Javed utter these words.
Saeeda remembered that long ago, a woman tied a red cloth to a tree for a moon-mother-goddess—whose name no one remembered except that the Sati was maybe a Hindu woman who travelled there from India and lived beneath this tree. She had done so, wrapped in a maroon chaadar, and that Sati had given her a daughter, Zahida.
Saeeda could not leave Zahida. This mother remembered a thread tied to a tree. A woman who had been a moon without a sun, until Zahida—her sun in an endless sky. Saeeda could not look away. She stopped her husband. ‘Anwar, if you walk away, your daughter may not survive this marriage. They will break her.’ Something in Saeeda’s voice stopped Anwar. He turned back and walked up to his son-in-law.
Zahida looked up at her father and felt fear. His face had completely changed. His lower jaw, now hanging down to his chin, had stretched into a sneer. ‘He looked possessed,’ she said.
‘My daughter is causing you a lot of tension?’ he shouted, and fisted the floor in anger, causing cracks to form in the chipped cement. He grabbed Zahida by the wrist and walked away with her. Zahida’s wrist was bruised and hurt for ten days after the incident.
For twenty days afterwards, Zahida waited for Javed to come to take her back to his home, keeping a lookout towards the end of the alley leading to the sea. Instead, on the twenty-first day, Javed’s father came over to demand a divorce for his son. The elders of the family and the neighbourhood were called in. This was a serious matter for the community, the entire Masaan Chowk gathered outside. Neighbours peeked in from the adjoining walls. On what grounds was this man seeking divorce?
Javed had made up his mind. ‘I cannot keep you,’ he told Zahida. ‘Tomorrow, if we have children, I will not be able to care for them by myself,’ he said, meaning he needed his family around for support.
Zahida’s father asked Javed to consider moving into a separate place with Zahida. But he did not agree. Angered by his resistance, Zahida brought up the incident of the night Javed went to visit his sister-in-law in her room. Javed’s uncle pleaded with Zahida not to discuss the matter.
At Noorani’s shrine, Zahida prayed to Shah Noorani to help her rid herself of this marriage. ‘I will give an offering more than you please, Baba,’ she said. ‘Let me go home and be divorced.’
Javed’s father stepped in. Divorce, he said, was unavoidable, and if the girl wanted divorce, there was not much they could do. Javed’s family agreed to Zahida’s demand.
Had Javed initiated the divorce, he would have had to purchase a home and buy gold as security for Zahida. But now, all it cost him was some legal papers that were pre
pared in less than a week. Still, before signing the documents, Javed called Zahida and asked her to reconsider her decision, ‘Zahida, do not break this marriage. I cannot be without you,’ he offered.
‘No, it’s all over,’ Zahida said, before she signed her divorce papers.
It had been three years since Zahida’s divorce, when we met at Shah Noorani, that first moharram. Saeeda worried about Zahida’s future. ‘Your brothers are young now. But when they bring home wives you will have no place in this home,’ she told Zahida.
Zahida covered her mouth with her chaadar whenever she stepped out. The soul was vulnerable to a man’s gaze through the mouth, she said.
‘I sometimes wonder if maybe I made a mistake in breaking off this marriage,’ said Zahida. ‘But other times I think that had I stayed with him and had children then I would have been stuck. This boy, Javed, would never have been able to break away from his parents,’ she said. ‘Where would that have left me?’
She went on. ‘I feel a lot of regret wondering why people get married in the first place. I did not even know what marriage was when I was getting married. Now, a lot of men come after me offering marriage. But I tell them no. I will not get married again. Life is good this way, it will pass.’
On her inner-wrist still lay that tattoo, the heart with the letter ‘J’ and the letter ‘Z’: a tattoo, a talisman, to remind Zahida, to enable her to remember where that road led, a place, someplace else from where she wanted to go.
‘A husband only cares for what he wants,’ she said. ‘When he wants it, he will not let go of your shirt hem. The mother-in-law just wants you to get sick, so you will give her children,’ she said. ‘I stayed away.’
Away was a pearl on a dark cliff.
On the morning of the 9th of Moharram in 2017, as I made my way through the narrow opening on the sides of roads blocked by shipping containers, I tried to remember if the girl sleeping on one of the carts selling whirlies, bow and arrow sets and clay birds had been there the year before when I came to Lea Market to take the bus to Shah Noorani’s shrine in Balochistan. The girl woke up as I got closer and I took a photo of her. Thanking her, I made a note to speak to her on my return to Karachi.
Zahida was running late. She arrived in a rickshaw with her brothers Noor and Amir, the three of them handling a water cooler and a bag of cooked rice and meat, and a bag of clothes and blankets. The aisle of the bus was stacked halfway up the seats with food rations. We had to climb over three layers of sacks of potatoes, rice, flour and lentils, rations for the roadside hotels serving travellers to the shrine. The bus seemed strangely empty, maybe because the sacks of food were blocking my view.
As the bus rolled away, leaving behind the cul-de-sac with the vegetable market and the small shops, shuttered now, where tobacco oil was sold to be smoked in pipes with carved heads of serpents—the muddy puddles and angry dogs behind now, I realized the women with the bedsheet rolls of belongings was not there. There were fewer faces, now all new, none familiar. As the bus crossed the Cheel Chowk in the blistering morning sun, the shadows had not fallen yet where the school children had stood, holding placards for the disappeared. Those children, too, were missing.
It was exactly a year after the first Moharram, after the bomb blast at Shah Noorani’s shrine. The attack had taken place almost a week after I left for Karachi, and mere days after Zahida went home. I had been in Tharparkar, the desert area along the eastern stretch of the coastal belt, when I heard the news. The blast brought a sense of immense loss. The news was followed by the tragic personal loss of Faqira, weeks after. Soon after, I had left for New York, for research, feeling an immense sense of loss. During those seven months, poring over the stories I collected, I found myself thinking about Zahida’s journey. Her strength impressed me, and I wanted to learn more about her connection to Shah Noorani and her mother’s prayer to Satiyan.
From the very beginning, after that meeting in the courtyard, out in the middle of nowhere, I saw in Zahida a young woman with nothing to her name living life with an undeniable force. She was, at twenty-four or maybe twenty-five, over a decade younger than me. A young woman in the first bloom of youth whereas I was experiencing an awakening—a re-discovery, remembering something about myself. We were both divorced. I felt shame for breaking off a marriage, brought on by the guilt of coming from a broken home. Zahida spoke about her life fearlessly; the women she loved, sex, pleasure, the man she married, and the life before her.
When I returned to Karachi from New York, I called Zahida on the number she had given me. She invited me to her home in Masaan Chowk, overlooking the Arabian Sea. Making my way behind Zahida through the narrow alleyways, past homes with curtained entrances and goats tethered outside, a hand-written sign posted on a wall promising milk from a cow tied inside, I became familiar with her neighbourhood.
Inside the open courtyard, Zahida’s mother Saeeda welcomed me with a plate of spicy rice and potatoes and hot tea. Zahida showed me her closet, her clothes, her photo albums, as I sat on the charpoy listening to her mother tell me how headstrong Zahida was. I looked around and saw how Zahida kept her sense of self by keeping her sights fastened on her Noorani Baba, those posters on the wall like a place of worship. Listening to Zahida’s stories of love lost and found, I thought of how fast I had run through life, trying to keep my feet on the ground.
On a front seat by the window in the Ladies Section of the bus to Noorani, Zahida made herself comfortable, plugging her headphones into her cellphone, setting up on the wide screen of her phone, for playing back to back, videos of songs featuring the actress Sunny Leone. Zahida told me the actress was said to have sex for money. She had enough videos of Leone to last us half the ride.
She handed me one of the two earplugs and I watched videos of Leone with her, on the bus, on the road between Masaan Chowk where Kali danced on a pyre, and the other end of the path where Durga, the Hinglaj Mata, slayed a cruel king, a powerful man raping the women of his own kingdom, who he was meant to protect. Sex, money, power—Lakshmi says let’s dance.
Along the way, the bus picked up a hitchhiker with a loping stride. A mawaali, as Zahida explained, was neither man nor woman, was something else. Haider Ali said his trade was dance. The life of a mawaali—dancing, hitchhiking rides, walking from shrine to shrine, or wedding to wedding. He used to have long and lustrous hair, touching his waist. But a bad stepmother, he said, in an act of cruelty, had snipped it all off while he was asleep. He kept touching the ghost of a ponytail, as he stood hanging firmly onto the frame of the missing door of the bus.
I turned to Zahida. She was watching Sunny Leone videos, headphones plugged in, all the way to her Noorani Baba. As the mountains of Khuzdar approached in the distance, she pointed to the curved rock: a beautiful ring in the sky, a circular frame which offered a glimpse of eternity. Like the copper ring on Zahida’s finger with an inscription of the name of Shah Noorani, it was a reminder of where these shackles, circles, led.
I told Zahida about my night spent sleeping under a night sky in the open-air courtyard. Zahida warned me the shrine was a different place now. There was a security area at the foot of the mountain, she said, and many of the people living in and around the shrine were gone. I had been romancing my memory of sleeping under an open sky.
When we got to the base of the mountain to Shah Noorani’s shrine, a metal detector greeted us, as Zahida had warned me. After a security check, I raced alongside Zahida, up the mountain. When I arrived at the courtyard none of those women, those girls possessed, were there. Soon after, the army began pouring in, the encampments in and around Khuzdar were soon cleared. The courtyard was closed to the people. The tree in the centre of the courtyard, on whose branches perched parrots and peacocks, those branches, intertwined with my memory of a limitless night sky, was gone.
Leaving Zahida at Mohabbat Faqir now, I went looking for Deen Mohammad and Farooq whom I had met a year ago. They were nowhere to be found. The flower seller said Mohammad
was asleep. One of the men selling kawa said that after the bomb blast, sellers manning the shacks and stalls, the people running the small hotels, had all been fired. A tea-seller told me he was the only person on the mountain of Lahoot for forty days after the blast. Everyone else was removed in the wake of the blast, leaving only people from the village—no one else was around. One of the caretakers of the inner-sanctum, a Pathan, he said, was one of the first ones to be sent away.
On the hilltop, behind the shrine, were about thirty homes where I went with Zahida to pay a visit to the family of the caretakers of the shrine. The houses were located behind a gated entrance, where a peacock was picking through a pile of garbage. The family was familiar with Zahida and her family, having visited the shrine since Zahida was a child. She and I were seated inside a carpeted room with cushions and an iron almaira with a mirror, facing Khalifa Abdul Qadir, the custodian. He was a man in his twenties.There was a time, not too long ago, when one simply could not live in these mountains past daylight, said Qadir. The family still subsisted on cattle. In the courtyard goats and cows were tethered to long wooden posts, while chickens roamed free and dug claws into the stony earth. Qadir’s family had lived about twenty kilometers away from Shah Noorani’s shrine, earlier.
Unlike many of the other shrines, Shah Noorani did not have a hierarchy system, they were simply caretakers, Qadir said. But they did have a claim on the property; he said the family had a map and papers from the time of the British invasion, proving ownership of Shah Noorani’s shrine.
There was no system of handing down legacy, however, and no hierarchy, as this shrine belonged to no one: it was for those with nothing, who wanted nothing, had nothing, for whom nothing was everything. Except that in the past forty years, the traffic of people coming had increased manifold. The swelling was manifest in the central arena of the dance that took place every Maghrib under a benevolent sky, that ruqs of the heavens, the dhamaal.
Sita Under the Crescent Moon Page 18
