My last day in Tharparkar, I visited the most remote location yet, next to the border of India.
‘Tharparkar may be a desert,’ said Pathani. ‘But when it rains this desert turns more lush than the valley of Kashmir.’ We were travelling in the silver Hilux, to Chachro to visit Satiyan.
Many people took the train to see families in India earlier, but after the war of 1965 the border became a ‘line of control’ of people. The train, earlier known as Sind Mail, was revived again in 2006, bringing together families meeting after forty years. But it had ceased operation again. Then came the war of 1971 between East Pakistan and West Pakistan.
Thar Express ceased operation after 1965, said Pathani. ‘Families have been divided on either side of the border. In some cases, homes were slashed into two on either side of a straight line that made no concession for belonging.’
‘For eleven months India occupied Chachro,’ said Pathani, referring to the north-eastern area of Tharparkar. Lakshman Singh, a Rajput and once a ruler of Tharparkar, and an important political figure in the state of Pakistan, caught in the crossfire of military attacks and political manoeuvres, fled to India in the wake of the war. The entire Chaaran community, in alliance with the rulers—a faqir caste who were advisors to rulers—left with Singh. ‘Chachro, a major city, emptied out, turned into Mohenjo-Daro,’ Pathani told me.
Roads in Tharparkar, as communication networks, had been built during Musharraf’s rule. Water supply to Chachro and Mithi from the barrage in Sindhu was part of his government’s work here.
‘Cattle was a major source of livelihood for Tharparkar, 75 per cent of meat to Pakistan is supplied from here,’ said Pathani. Another major export was resin. But the trees containing the resin, chemically induced to produce more resin, were dying.
A jaar tree rose before the shrine of Joma, a white fenced area with a trishul painted in red on the boundary, the Sati of Chachro. ‘Joma was a Chaarniyani Sati from Kesar in Rajasthan, India. She immolated herself,’ the caretaker of the astana, Hamtho, said. ‘Joma and Maalan is the same as Hinglaj Mata in Balochistan. They are all Satiyan.’
Usually when a person died in Tharparkar, the deceased was said to have become porsa—a state of interim for the soul, where any disagreement with another family member kept the soul around and the family unhappy. The family had to offer puja for the deceased before the ashes were released in the river in Nagar Parkar, said to be the same as the Ganga River— containing the same sacred water. But the caretaker said the living Sati’s protection meant the villagers were safe from souls of the dead come knocking to settle matters of life.
Joma protected the villagers in other ways. There was a species of snake in Tharparkar locally called a phoonkni. The snake only attacked at night. It was said to climb on the body of a sleeping person and breathe death into the mouth of the person whose soul was said to be out wandering while the body lay dreaming. ‘But Joma protects our village from phoonkni,’ said the caretaker. ‘The snake attacks other villages but will never come here.’
There were clay pots scattered all over the courtyard. Shallow bowls were filled with water for birds. Cotton birds swung from tree branches. The caretaker’s wife Dhailani joined him. Dhailani wore a necklace of a portrait of Hanuman she bought at Hinglaj. Her name meant peacock in local Dhatki. ‘Peacocks pray for us,’ she said. People of the village came to the shrine when ill, before going to a doctor, chewing the leaves of the jaar tree for health. The women brought roti and sweets for the Sati. The walls of the courtyard were covered in handprints and illustrations of black cobra—a ride of Satiyan. ‘The girls drew the naag and painted it black,’ she said.
The prayer area of Joma’s murti had offerings of sindoor and coconut. ‘Brahmins used to do dhoop—ritual prayer—with ghee. But meghwar are not allowed to use ghee because of our caste,’ Hamtho said. There was a time when meghwar were denied Coke in restaurants, said Hamtho. ‘Because they are considered untouchable,’ said Pathani.
The Brahmins having left for India, the shrine was cared for by meghwar, said Hamtho. ‘We are meghwar. When there is a wedding we play the patka. It is played at a wedding or when someone notable dies.’ The meghwar were generational servers of Chaaran.
After the Babri mosque was demolished on 6 December 1992 in India, triggering riots across the country leading to more than 2,000 deaths, Joma’s shrine was attacked. A metal chest with offerings and cash was looted.
‘The Musalman who attacked went mad. They burned our shops down,’ said Hamtho. The effects of the incident lingered. Local maulvis, said Hamtho, did not like the quick style of slaughtering of the non-Muslims. They advised a halal way of killing cattle.
The idol inside the shrine in Chaachro had been recently built. Chaaran took the original idol of Joma when they left for India after the war of 1971, a second one in a corner of the courtyard had been brought from Mithi. ‘Chaaran used to live in Chaachro.
Now they are living in Himnar and Pabuar,’ said Hamtho.
‘There is only one Chaaran in Mithi. His name is Hemdan,’ Pathani said.
We thanked the caretaker and made our way to meet Himdan, the Chaaran of Tharparkar, to tell us the story of how Joma, a Sita, became Sati.
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Many Chaaran were folk poets, Himdan said. Chaaran were faqirs, known for knowing stories and songs, the history of the people. Chaaran were mentioned by Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. ‘A Chaaran’s curse is deadly,’ said Hemdan.
We gathered with the 63-year-old Hemdan in the house of the Rajput family. ‘During the war of 1971 my brothers and sisters were there. I had come here to meet my grandfather. My family lives on the other side. After the war a border sprang up. Our village is Mithriyo.’ Hemdan had married recently, bringing a wife from across the border.
Satiyan were everywhere, he said, because ‘history is ever-continuing waves of revolution’. Durga was the first Shakti on earth. ‘There are two kinds of women in power: Shakti and Sati. A woman was Shakti by birth. She became Sati in the world where she burned.’
Joma was in Chachro when news came of the defeat of Chaaran at the hands of the Baloch tribe of Rind. Joma was sitting next to her mother, her two sons with her, when she heard the Chaaran recount the events of the past days. It had begun with a well. Chaaran wanted to dig a well in the area settled by Rind. But the community refused to give Chaaran permission. It was a double insult for the Chaaran. The Rind had been given permission to stay when they had arrived with hungry cattle in tow looking for green pastures. Chaaran had given them a place to stay. But now the Rind refused to leave.
The area of Tharparkar, as the rest of Sindh, at the time was ruled by Talpurs Mirs, before the arrival of the British Empire. The Chaaran were wary of conflict at first. But things had come to a head. The elders of the Chaaran went to see Thakur Saalim Singh. ‘You keep the Rind. We are leaving,’ Chaaran said to their sovereign. ‘The Rind eat our crops and slaughter our cattle. Thakur, tell them to vacate our land.’
The Thakur said there was not much he could do. The Talpur rulers would side with the Baloch Rind. ‘This was injustice. The Rind came to us with children. We did what neighbours do. Take these people back to where they came from,’ pleaded Chaaran.
Chaaran went to battle the way Chaaran faqirs were known to fight. They did a dharna. They sat in dharna for seven days. But none of the men got satt—to take the katari worn around their waist, and kill themselves for the cause of truth. This was unexpected. Chaaran were known to get satt at the slightest provocation. They famously got satt many times when Rajput rulers were unjust in their rule over the land stretching from Cholistan to Thatta. Charan and Sati were feared for their satt.
Joma listened to the story of the defeat and humiliation of Chaaran. The men feared no one would believe in Chaaran powers for truth anymore. One of the men asked Joma’s mother to burn herself. ‘You are old grandmother, and do not have many more years to live.’ Joma’s mother said, ‘I am not from this village since
I married and moved away. But my daughter married into your people. She belongs to this village. Joma should burn herself,’ she said of her young daughter.
The villagers considered Joma, a 36-year-old mother of two small boys, too young to become satt. Upon hearing the words of her flesh and blood mother, offering her own daughter as sacrifice, Joma took off her veil. Before the entire village, Joma’s hair turned white. Her mother had betrayed her. Joma aged before the eyes of the people.
‘I will become satt,’ said Joma.
Joma instructed the villagers to walk to the area where the well was located. Everyone went on camels. Joma walked to the site. A pyre was prepared. In a massive karhai, Joma cooked halwa for the entire village and served it with her hands. Taking a kindle from the firewood of the halwa, she went and sat on the pyre. A man amongst the Chaaran ran and begged Joma for mercy. ‘Your sons will rule over Chachro,’ Joma blessed the man. His descendants have been serving in the Pakistani assembly for generations. The village of Chaaran watched as Joma set fire to herself.
‘When Joma became satt, the Rind became very fearful she would turn into a spirit and take revenge on them. They fled,’ said Hemdan. The Rind ran away to Hyderabad, where a roof collapsed on them. The few survivors fled to Mithriyo at the border of Pakistan and India. ‘There are still descendants of the Rind tribe living there on the border,’ said Hemdan.
Earlier that day, the caretaker of Joma’s shrine with us, we drove to Jetraar, the site of the satt of Joma, about three miles from the border of India. Hundreds of Chaaran travelled to the site to celebrate Holi. ‘You can see barbed wire from there. It went up in 1996.’
Devi dotted our path. ‘This devi jaar was scarce but is now everywhere,’ Pathani remarked.
We soon arrived at the place under the shade of a Bithu tree where Joma became sati, through barbed wire the sands of Rajasthan blew our way.
On my last day in Tharparkar, the driver said he wanted to show me a funeral pyre. I had never seen one while it was still active. An involved ritual ceremony was underway, in the presence of a pundit. A Brahmin woman was being cremated. There were no other women there. After the men covered the pyre in ghee and coconuts and layered it with wood and sandalwood, they laid the body of the woman on the pyre, setting her on fire. The men watched it all burn to the ground before returning home.
PINK DOLL
Growing up as a girl in Pakistan, in the eighties, there were no dolls in the market that looked like me. I mean also that I don’t know what that doll would look like. I didn’t see myself as brown. My complexion was on the darker side, but not quite any one shade, and it kept changing. I did not wear a hijab or a burqa. I did not even wear a dupatta or a shalwar kamiz, unless it was Eid. Then I changed out of my cotton frock for a day. When I was sent to the madrassa for my daily Quran lessons, I wore a shalwar underneath my frock, which I forgot to wear one time—I felt strangely naked in the frock and ran back into the house.
But as far back as I can remember, I played with dolls.
My father, a Muslim man, was the son of parents living in Hyderabad, in what became India. The family migrated to the coastal city of Karachi, in the southern province of Sindh, in what became the new homeland, wrapped in green and white with a crescent moon and star and called Pakistan, in 1947. The year my father was born.
A pilot for the national carrier, Pakistan International Airlines, my father bought dolls for me on his flights abroad. I remember, every few months, my father would leave propped up on the dining table, for me to find, a package in bright pink—inside of which, looking out from the clear plastic frame, was a white, blue-eyed, blond-haired doll, wearing a perfectly fitted knee-length dress. A Barbie.
I still remember something of the cloying fragrance lifting into the air as I opened the bright pink package and pulled the doll out. The sweet smell of plastic and paint mingled with the strong cologne father slapped on his face, after taking a shower and changing into a clean white linen shalwar kamiz. I knew that fragrance by heart.
We lived in Nazimabad, a neighbourhood that was curfewed nightly from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. in a country under what I knew was called Martial Law. I heard it as ‘Marshallah’. I had limited knowledge of the English language, gleaned from silent Tom and Jerry cartoons and films like Adventures of Sindbad or Bollywood films. I learnt to say ‘hands up’ and ‘you’re under arrest’, off the movies we watched at night on the VCR. I could, at best, string together the two words, pink and doll, into the highest compliment. My father was my pink doll.
Captain Masood Ali Khan was a man of the skies. By age fourteen, he enrolled in the national flying academy, the official air-force training school, the youngest of six brothers and a sister, the seventh child. Flying was in his blood, he liked to say.
Guests rarely came to our house, in those years. But whenever we had visitors, the men seated on the lawn were regaled by my father with his flying heroics. I usually joined my father in the garden, instead of sitting inside with the womenfolk. Listening to the stories of flying in heavy fog or landing an aircraft with faulty landing gear took me into an unknown world. My father said, ‘Girls don’t become pilots. You can marry a pilot. When you grow up.’
We lived in a one bedroom house, built for a bachelor. Our landlord had lived there, before moving into the bungalow next door, after he got married. The house was a perfect square. Two rooms partitioned into a bedroom, a small bathroom and a living room, leaving a short corridor where there was a refrigerator and later a dining table with a fruit bowl in the centre. We slept in the same room on mattresses laid on the floor. There was a generous lawn outside. Ten times the size of the house, it was where my father kept about a dozen goats, two Bull Terriers, a Doberman, a dozen chickens, a rooster, a deer, some birds, and almost a hundred pigeons.
There was a family who lived in the dusty backlot behind our house. The wife, Fatima, cleaned our house and the husband, Nabi Buksh, manned the gate. They had four daughters and two sons and a seventh daughter. A girl the family adopted after her family passed away, in their village, somewhere outside of Karachi. The little girl, Hamida, was the same size as my threeyear-old brother and the two played together. My brother often snuck out fruit from the dining table for her. The same way, I always took my new doll, after school, to the elder daughter, Rukhsana. She had an old vanity case, I think my mother gave it to her, and I let her keep some of my dolls in that case. She kept cones of henna in there and snippets of fabric out of which she taught me to make cotton dolls.
Rukhsana and I sat on a charpoy in the back lot and tied fabric with thread around a ball of cotton making a head onto which we stitched eyes and a mouth using spools of fine thread as hair. We gave all those dolls, the cloth ones, and the plastic one, a name, other than the one on the packaging. We built homes in the dirt, packing the soil over cupped hands. Tiny winged insects, found on the branches of the Amaltus tree with the chandelier blooms, were pigeons perched on the arm of my doll. As she sat sipping tea from a miniature tea set, her clay home crumbled before the day was over.
My grandmother purchased the album of every hit movie, playing them on the big sound system in the living room. My youngest aunt and I danced along with my brother, who jumped up and down in a diaper. We were barely able to copy the steps from the song before breaking into chaotic joy. At home, we watched a movie every night except when my father was there. He did not allow us to watch the song and dance of Indian films.
My father always watched the nine o’ clock news. I remember him loudly tapping the goat bone on his dinner plate for the marrow as the transmission ended with a song, showing tanks and meadows, for our brothers and sisters in Indian occupied Kashmir. When my father was around, he took us for family outings, to have dinner, usually at the Chinese food restaurant, where the arrival of the sizzling prawns made my brother clap his hands.
In those early years, when we went to weddings, my mother sometimes wore a pale pink Banarsi sari with a gold sheen, and my fath
er bought my mother and I bangles woven with fresh motia, sold at the traffic light. My father would press the wire down to make the bangle fit my small wrists.
Every year, before the night of the sighting of the new moon, my father took us shopping for new clothes for Eid. We went to Hyderabadi Gali, a street bazaar where pickles and dried food items and clothing imported from India were sold. He would buy my brother a sherwani with a matching topi and a Hyderabadi kali-daar shalwar kamiz for me. In the morning, after my brother and my father returned from Eid, I would walk up in my new clothes and say adaab to my father, before being handed a generous Eidi.
My father was away for long stretches, leaving us behind in a house locked away at the far edge of a burning, bleeding city under a strict curfew. Those were the darkest years. I cannot forget my father, forgetting to send me out of the room, speaking about the woman showing up naked at the police station, citing battery by her husband. The news spread like wildfire, he said. It never aired on the nine o’ clock news on Pakistan Television Network. The only state-run channel at the time, where my namesake newsreader read the nightly news. The anchor’s hair covered in a chiffon veil.
I can never forget the wild look in my father’s eyes. Or my grandmother, never in the habit of sending me out of the room, talking about a friend of hers who had burnt to death after her nylon nightie caught fire off a candle she was holding in pitch darkness during load shedding. My grandmother’s anger was always evident in her sniffle.
My father told me he was born to his mother as the family made their way from India to Pakistan. He remembered the story he was told by his family, of how they had lived in a refugee camp. His father and eldest brother, he said, were incarcerated in India, freedom fighters. They arrived later. In the meantime, my father, an infant clutched in the arms of his mother, witnessed the death of a girl: his sister, barely in her teens, died of pneumonia. The family was unable to bury her, having no means.
Sita Under the Crescent Moon Page 21
