Sita Under the Crescent Moon

by Annie Ali Khan

  Zahida remembered a time when the women used to sit outside all night, she told him, a time when women joined the men downstairs for dhamaal. ‘Will things go back to the way they were?’ she said to Qadir.

  ‘Not the way the world is moving,’ Qadir said. ‘The world is changing.’

  We were offered milky, syrupy sweet tea. The conversation turned to the bomb blast. ‘The army blames us. They say we are harbouring terrorists at the shrine,’ he said. ‘Those who attacked,’ he said, ‘do not want the state to prosper. They do not want people to be able to move freely. They want their writ to be common accepted code of conduct.’

  Qadir was at home the day of the blast, listening to music, his earphones plugged into his cellphone, when in the distance he heard a low roar—he thought it was a cylinder bursting somewhere and went out to check. Evening turned to night when he was done helping pick up bodies, dead, half-dead, alive. When he came back home, the music on his cellphone was still playing the same song over and over. His wristwatch, drenched with blood, had stopped working, bringing time to a standstill.

  Up in those mountains surrounding Shah Noorani’s peak was a cave where a qaray wallah Baba—a free man with shackles around his ankles—lived. The old man, contemplating the meaning of life sent peacocks forth from the mountains, with shimmering plumes—to him, the motif of, the meaning of, life. Sent forth into the wilderness, entered in the consciousness, in the text, the literary and sacred text of Sufi culture, the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran and the songs and stories of folks everywhere. A peacock came to perch on the branch of Shah Noorani’s shrine.

  A deer with horns of gold, a creature from the Ramayana, was said to roam the forests of Shah Noorani’s mountains. In the forests of Laal Bagh, the red garden, midway between the shrine of Sehwan and Shah Noorani, where the faqirs went to remember something about what lies beyond the age trapping their bodies, were two enchanted trees. The Prophet Mohammad’s nephew Ali and, centuries after Ali, the poet, wanderer, writer, Shah Abdul Latif, are said to have rested under the branches of these trees. These trees, when they grow to their full height, begin to grow from their roots, two new trees. The two trees were a way to keep time, to remember, an age, a time; when it reversed, to remember the age in light before it became the age in shadow. Like the lone tree in the courtyard. The tree bore the weight of all the peacocks perched on its branches and sheltered the women beneath in the courtyard built atop a mountain under the heavens. That tree was the first to be chopped down.

  The designated sleeping area was now downstairs, underneath the floor of the shrine. There was no electricity, and the darkened room reeked of rotting food and unbathed bodies, cooped up together in a closed space. Zahida looked my way and told me to be grateful.

  Qadir took us to Laal Shah Bukhari’s shrine, a very small shrine, dedicated to another one of Shah Noorani’s disciples, tucked on a second peak, joined to Noorani’s mountain via a suspended metal bridge. The grave was enclosed inside a metal grill. The entire shrine was canopied. I left my bag there and joined Zahida in a circle of girls. She was telling a story.

  Sometimes, a girl while possessed liked to chew on glass bangles. If her own wrists were bare, she lunged at the wrists of another woman nearby. I had seen it happen at the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ashabi, where some of strongest cases of possession were treated. I saw the other women quickly cover their arms and move away from the girl with bared teeth. Once, during a Moharram, at Shah Noorani’s shrine, a girl grabbed Zahida’s wrist and bit her wristwatch, she told me, shattering the glass face, a delicate pink bracelet watch Anwar had bought her for five hundred rupees as a gift for his little girl.

  Zahida grabbed the girl by the throat. If you did this to a man, he would have quietened you in a moment. The girl screamed. I am a churail, Zahida said. When the girl’s mother came running, Zahida turned to her—‘Your daughter is creating all this drama because she demands marriage.’ The girl’s mother thanked Zahida for her insight. As Zahida finished the story, one of the girls began to clap.

  After a few hours, I went upstairs to the shrine. Zahida came running to fetch me. Come, she said, I want to show you something you have never before seen in your entire life. She took me by the hand and we walked out to the men’s dhamaal area, the site of the bomb blast, painted over. The room opened out to a courtyard where once Zahida’s younger sister Saira had danced for three hours in a state of rapture, only stopping when a terrified Zahida ran over and slapped her.

  The courtyard was dark now save for a few men holding up the flashlights on their cellphones.

  There was a large group of men dressed in all white topped with a black pagri. They were singing paeans to the Prophet and Allah on a megaphone and several of the men in the group were going into the most terrific states of trance, eyeballs rolling back, arms lifted behind backs and wrists turned away as heads tried to shake free of necks. Zahida was clapping furiously.

  She was ecstatic long after, as we made our way to Laal Shah Bukhari’s shrine to sleep. Zahid spread a blanket on the soft earth rippling with pebbles and we shared one of the two pillows. Noor and Amir slept towards the edge of the blanket, Zahida lay down in the middle and I, as I pulled myself down, realized I was sleeping right next to Laal Shah Bukhari’s grave. If it were not for the grill, I could reach out with my arm over Laal in an embrace. Next to me, Zahida placed her hand on my hand.

  ‘Do you love me?’ she asked. It was about two in the morning and all around us in the dark, people were lying down to sleep. A man and a woman were murmuring somewhere by my feet, and a lone peacock called out mournfully high up in the branches above. I became painfully aware that lying beside me was the most beautiful girl I ever met.

  I recalled the night Zahida and I visited Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s shrine together. Growing up in Karachi, I had visited many times the shrine of the saint facing the Arabian Sea. But it was only with Zahida that I had gone to the room under the stairs where, in a pristine white room, lay the saint in his grave. She gave me a rose from the marble tomb and I kept it in a sealed jar in the refrigerator, trying to preserve the crimson bloom for as long as I could. I had immense love in my heart for Zahida. She made me see a world I had not seen.

  That night, lying between the grave of a man who spent his entire life dying for the love of a saint and a beautiful young woman wanting to know about matters of my heart, I let her tell me about love lost and found as I kept my eye on the lone peacock in the branches high above and felt for my notebook under my head.

  By four in the morning, Zahida and her brothers and I set out for the walk across seven mountains to the cave of Lahoot—the unself.

  At the mouth of the cave, I decided to stay outside and sat on the metal ledge, watching people climb in and out of the cave. After about an hour, Zahida came out and told me she had had a bad fall. At the foot of the narrow incline to the small cave inside with a copy of the Quran in it, she said, a man had offered her his hand. She regretted taking it and as she shook it off going up, she fell back down the slope and hit her shoulder on the stony floor. She said the bruise was blue, the colour of my clothes. The morning we arrived at Shah Noorani, Zahida had taken my backpack halfway along the long walk.

  At Maghrib, I attended a dhamaal inside a small gated area to the side of the shrine, where a handful of women in hand-embroidered clothes swayed to the sound of the drum. I felt like I was prying, looking in at someone’s private family wedding. Looking up, I saw outside the boundary wall of the enclave, a man standing on a roof somewhere with a massive gun ready and aimed in the direction of the dhamaal area. A girl sitting beside me pointed to a massive tree in the corner. That neem tree there, the girl said. It was covering a security camera hidden behind it.

  After the dhamaal, I accompanied Zahida to the ladies resting area, behind the shrine. As we sat in the circle, one of the elder women said there was a site under the metal bridge at the foot of the mountain of Noorani where I would find Satiyan. Th
ere used to be a pond there by those rocks, she said. As a child, she recalled women in her family used to scatter roses and tie a red cloth to the branches of the trees bent over the enclave of rocks. Outside in the middle of the pond was a little island where saintly women on fire were seated on the water, she said. So great was their allure not many could bear to see in their direction without losing themselves. The woman had an aunt who saw the Satiyan all the time. But that was a long time ago, she said. Since the world arrived at Shah Noorani’s shrine, the Satiyan had not been seen.

  The doors to the inner sanctum, once open past midnight, closed by 9 p.m. That night, I left Zahida’s circle and despite a curfew imposed on the shrine, I walked down in the dark, down to the metal bridge and after purchasing incense, I entered the site of Satiyan. After burning the incense, as I sat down on the ground, a man came to stand at the door.

  On the morning of the 11th of Moharram, I woke to the sound of boots clamouring over the metal bridge. More than 300 security personnel, Levies officers and army officers, had laid siege to Shah Noorani’s shrine and the surrounding mountains. I stayed all day at Laal Bukhari’s shrine, curfewed inside. ‘The army was beating so many men today at the shrine, clearing everyone out,’ Zahida said. ‘But they can’t hit me,’ she said.

  One of the girls said the army had confiscated five kilos of opium. The entire mountainside had been cleared of people. The soldiers, she said, were now searching for people hiding inside the caves of the mountains. Zahida said she saw nine people being arrested from the inner sanctum. Her brother had seen two young men being badly beaten with sticks that morning. He heard the men had been selling opium.

  Amongst those in the circle was a young woman from Hub Chowki. She came to Shah Noorani’s shrine every year with family and stayed for four days, travelling by coach. She had relatives who lived in the village behind Mohabbat Faqir’s shrine. ‘This has nothing to do with the opium,’ she said. ‘This is because of the blast. They are now arresting and clearing people out of here.’

  ‘It is commendable,’ Zahida said. ‘Let all drug dealers be cleared out. I would fill trucks with these troublemakers.’

  It made some of the women laugh. Except the woman from Hub. ‘I have relatives here. The army picked up my cousin and picked out all his nails,’ she said. She did not know why he was arrested.

  The Army had a bad habit of picking on nails.

  ‘Noorani used to be a dargah. Now, Noorani is a state,’ she said.

  Another woman, a volunteer worker at the shrine, said no one could stay at the dargah indefinitely anymore. ‘After fifteen days they throw people out. They toss their belongings into the wilderness,’ she said.

  ‘I will get myself a Noorani membership card,’ Zahida said. ‘Like the one the custodian has. I am going to become Baba’s daughter, officially,’ she said.

  ‘Here in these places, only those people can survive who are erased,’ said a woman.

  On the third day of that 3rd Moharram I prepared for the bus to Karachi. Since early that morning, Zahida had been telling anyone who would listen that Noorani Baba visited her in her dream. The saint had promised her a house on the mountain.

  As we were waiting out by the Lahooti hotel for the bus to Karachi, a woman asked me what had brought me to Shah Noorani’s shrine. I told her I had come to Shah Noorani in search of Satiyan, the seven sacred sisters. She said she had met two women once on a visit to Shah Noorani’s shrine. Two women, she said, covered from head to toe in black burqas, visible yet veiled, an undeniable presence; like truth. Those women, she said, were visiting Shah Noorani’s shrine for the first time, yet knew each and every detail of the landscape of this place, like the back of their hands. These two women, she said, were satiyan, two of the seven sacred sisters.

  Back home, I realized my body and my hair were infested with lice. I did not see or hear from Zahida for a little while. But then we went to Shah Ghazi’s shrine together. She applied henna on my hands that day.

  In March 2018, Anwar’s landlord asked him to vacate the house. Anwar owed 30,000 rupees in overdue rent to the man. That sacred corner, gone. Zahida’s family moved to a house in Korangi, where the rent was 7,000 rupees.

  Zahida was happy to move to a place with two rooms, and a spacious courtyard where Tolu and Molu could play. She had gone back to Noorani weeks after I went with her. She was meeting Laila there.

  ‘How is Laila,’ I asked her.

  ‘Laila can die,’ she said.

  The spell had broken.

  Months after that 3rd Moharram, Zahida invited me to her home. Noor was getting engaged. The function, she said, was being held at a relative’s house in Masaan Chowk. I went to the house where the women were dancing to a dhol beat. It was there, that day, that I learned Zahida did not dance. She had never participated in dhamaal. She never had possession.

  After all the women took turns dancing, they insisted I dance. Up alone, there in the centre of a wedding, a young bride seated on a sofa set and the elders all sitting around watching. I looked at Zahida, sitting in a circle of women, one of whom she had earlier pointed to and identified as once the love of her life; another one, she said, still in love with her. She smiled at me, as I looked at her. As the music started, I let go and danced in a little house set on what was once a place for burning pyres, now a settlement by the Arabian Sea. That day, I danced with all my heart.

  SITA SATI

  (81: 8) and when the female buried alive shall be questioned.

  (81: 9) for what sin was she buried?

  The Quran asks.

  For what sin was Sita swallowed by the earth?

  asks The Ramayana.

  On 17 November 2016, I hopped a bus to the desert district of Tharparkar to the east of the port city of Karachi, for 550 rupees. A coloured screen mounted above the rearview mirror played back-to-back videos of songs in Sindhi. Romantic ballads, showing women posing and smiling as men courted them with promises of love and paeans to their beauty. On the pathway from Karachi to Tharparkar, trucks painted with partridges, picture-perfect landscapes and the occasional portrait of a folk singer or a nationalist leader drove past laden with cargo sticking out over the storage cabin like humps, making the trucks sway like the camels trotting along the roadside.

  It was evening by the time I arrived in the city of Mithi, the farthest point eastward in my quest for Satiyan in the southeastern corner of Pakistan. I had travelled more than 300 miles, from Khuzdar in the western province of Balochistan to Tharparkar in Sindh in the east, searching for the seven sisters, moving from place to place, each site of their arrival marked by thread and clay, stretching from Iran and Pakistan to India. The desert of Tharparkar stretched beyond Pakistan’s border with India into the fabled land of Rajasthan.

  At the Mithi bus stop, a car was waiting to pick me up. The shadows cast by the glare of the headlights made it difficult to see the surrounding area, other than a few weak lightbulbs and gas lamps suspended over pushcarts selling fruit. My host and guide in Tharparkar was a Sindhi columnist and author, Khalid Kumbhar.

  His work mainly involved following the tracks of nomadic tribes in Tharparkar. ‘Many of these tribes are made up of rebel fighters who gave up society and joined tribes of vagabonds,’ he said. ‘After almost a century of wandering, the tribe members do not remember what set them wandering in the first place. But they keep walking the earth, unable to give up their ways.’

  His last name, Kumbhar, meaning pottery maker, part of the legacy of the family as clay crafters, had long ceased to be a vocation. I stayed at the house of Khalid’s sister, Pathani Parsa. Both siblings worked for an organization dealing with microfinance. Pathani worked in the field, travelling across Tharparkar, offering loans and selling water tanks and solar panels to individuals and small business owners.

  ‘Water in Tharparkar is bitter,’ said Pathani. The annual monsoon season brought freshwater, available for a few months, she said, before the land became parched again, leaving
small farmers and cattle and camel owners at the mercy of local money lenders called baniye or seth. One of Pathani’s recent projects involved selling solar powered panels locally. After a year of use, the customers, she said, came back happy about the light these panels provided in homes otherwise without an electrical connection. The customers, all men, said the women in the household no longer had to cook before sunset and now prepared meals and stitched quilted blankets called rilli well into the night. A second project involved installing water tanks designed to collect and store precious rainwater in neighbourhoods where water was scarce. The water tanks made water more accessible and at shorter distances, Pathani said.

  At the time I arrived, a coal mining project, a joint-operation between Pakistan and China worth two billion dollars, was underway in Tharparkar. Villagers displaced by the project and other villages nearby had been protesting how it removed salt water from deep underground, citing the water as poisonous to their livestock and the environment. Posters for environmental protection doing the rounds on social media showed illustrations of women in traditional gajj and kanjri with white bangles up to their shoulders, protesting the mining of the land.

  After a night spent sleeping under a warm rilli, safe from winter chills, I set off the next morning in search of Satiyan in Khalid Kumbhar’s silver Hilux, one of the organization’s perks. The truck raced along the narrow road, past the women carrying bundles of firewood and clay pots of water, crossing undulating sand dunes, as we made our way to the site of Mai Mithi.

  The city of Mithi, in the daytime, was a collection of small markets and residential blocks—like many neighbourhoods in the mega city of Karachi, only sunnier. The drive to Mai Mithi’s site took us away from the bustling part of town to a wooded area. In the centre of a clearing, an elevated circular altar built in clay bricks formed the heart of the resting place. The fenced circle was decorated with three-tiered conical clay sculptures. There were red and saffron pieces of cloth tied to the branches around the circle and in a corner with a small wooden platform were clay pots with two spouts used for ablution. A straw jharoo used for cleaning lay nearby. The air smelled of fresh earth.