Sita Under the Crescent Moon

by Annie Ali Khan

  My mother spoke Urdu. She spoke neither Punjabi nor Sindhi other than a few words I heard her use here and there or the poem in Sindhi she knew by heart about a happy cow. My grandmother cursed a lot in Punjabi around the house, so we all, children and adults in the house, knew all the good Punjabi swear words. Growing up, my mother followed all the latest fashion trends. I was five, maybe seven, when my mother went to London, taking my brother and I along, to spend a month at her brother’s place. A bachelor, my uncle lived in a two-storey place that was narrow and vertical, sandwiched between two similar buildings. I have memories of sleeping under a faulty electric blanket and sliding down the stairs with my brother, using a thin mattress as a sled. I remember, that summer, my uncle was cat-sitting for his girlfriend. She was a nurse. She taught me to listen to my own heartbeat using a stethoscope. She had two daughters, one of whom I recall thinking had a funny lip. The uncle’s girlfriend gave me a doll.

  My grandparents lived in Faran Society in Karachi. An affluent neighbourhood where a lot of the houses, carved into the faces of stony cliffs, looked like castles behind enormous hills. At the end of a spiralling driveway, on the summit of the hill, covered in marble, were three gardens at separate elevations, at the centre of which was a swimming pool, a life-size sculpture of a dolphin within it. After a friend acquired rights to a movie studio, there were regular rummy parties, attended by movie stars.

  The house was bought by my grandfather in the sixties, during the heydays of the Bhutto-era. Taking advantage of a government programme offering visa and passport services for work and travel abroad, he went to work in the oil-fields of the Gulf. After almost a decade, when my grandfather returned to Karachi, Bhutto had been hanged and a decade of military rule had dawned. My brother and I and my youngest aunt played together: catch the thief, in and around the dusty swimming pool with the broken tiles.

  My grandparents entertained guests in that big bedroom in those days. When my grandfather’s friend Devraj came to visit, the two men sat sharing a conversation in Sindhi over glasses of whisky my grandfather kept in a tea trolley by his desk. The wives, joined by my mother and aunt, sat in the corner by the balcony, where my grandmother had created a seating area with cushions on the floor. My grandmother was always wiping the floor with a pocha. Her finger nails stayed long and perfectly painted. Sometimes she wiped the floor while the guests were seated, touching the floor with her finger tips for dust. From where I sat, I could see my grandfather at his desk. It is how I always remembered him.

  My grandfather, Sheikh Abbas was born to a civil judge and a mother he was close to. My grandmother said, in those early years of their marriage, she spent a lot of time in Shikarpur, a thriving commercial town in pre-British times. Before falling to ruins, the city turned into a village. She recalled my grandfather laughing a lot when he was with his mother, speaking in Sindhi which my Punjabi speaking grandmother never spoke. But she understood every word. At night, my grandmother said, the womenfolk of the house were all served fresh milk from the cows tethered in the courtyard. But it was a tough life, she said. When a young cousin of my grandfather’s in her last week of pregnancy broke water, she lay writhing on the charpoy for hours. My grandmother said the women of the house all stood around the charpoy, their mouths covered with their dupatta. The midwife tried to gag the woman by stuffing her mouth with her braided hair, to induce labour. My grandmother advised the midwife to give the girl some glucose water. The baby was delivered before morning.

  My grandfather, a civil engineer and lawyer, was working on a development project in the city of Hub, a few miles west of Karachi, in the province of Balochistan. Back home, he was always at his desk. The shelf mounted on the wall above his desk, was lined with legal tomes and engineering manuals. There was a small section of books he liked to read. Mostly, titles on astronomy by Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, and a two-volume series on a scientific inquiry, with detailed experiments, to determine the presence and nature of the soul in living beings. Above this shelf, on top of the maroon and gold covered Encyclopedia Britannica books, were copies of the thesis my grandfather wrote calculating the precise measurements of a river bend, using imaginary numbers. Right above these books were five murtis. The centre one, in polished brass, seated cross-legged and with a flaming silhouette, was a rendition of the goddess Durga in repose, on fire.

  After completing his bachelors in a university in Bombay, where my grandfather said the girls were too beautiful, he left for the United States. My grandmother said he married a white American woman there, while pursuing his masters in mechanical engineering. The American lady came to stay with him in Shikarpur. But the marriage did not last. After divorce, my grandfather settled in Karachi. While on a survey of a site he saw my grandmother, seated on the edge of the shipping dock, her shalwar hiked up, dipping her legs in the foaming Arabian Sea.

  My grandmother said her father, a cricketer playing locally for the navy, refused the proposal. My grandfather, sitting there with his friend and colleague, brought no elders. But as my grandfather was leaving, he gave my grandmother his phone number. After my grandmother called him, she said, he went back and told her father she had called. They were married that same day.

  My grandmother gave me a shelf in the closet in the room next to my grandparents’ bedroom to keep my books and clothes. I began to read my grandfather’s astronomy books and he took to teaching me math. For a brief period, my uncle taught me about sets of natural and negative numbers. My youngest aunt began to model and I accompanied her on photo shoots. I liked to sit and watch her get her hair and makeup done. I liked to see her pose under the lights. I saw faces I saw again when I entered the world again, a little older. I liked that no one recognized the little girl.

  EPILOGUE

  In Memoriam: Quratulain Ali Khan

  By Manan Ahmed Asif

  Published on 22 July 2018

  It is with immense sorrow that I write this. Quratulain Ali Khan was a writer, a journalist and a dear friend. She was a fearless reporter. No journalist in Pakistan ever did the two stories she did: ‘A Hindu Pilgrimage in Pakistan’ (January, 2016) and ‘The Missing Daughters of Pakistan’ (November, 2017).

  I met Quratulain Ali Khan, Annie to her friends, when I moved to NYC. She took my class on walking. She was incredibly gifted and driven. In September 2015 she began to work on a project that consumed her to her last moments. She began to work on lives of women in Karachi (first in Lyari) who were destitute, oppressed, at the mercy of the men, and yet were powerfully enacting forms of sociality and faith-healing that were astounding to behold. She began to document these lives with photographs, then interviews. As she followed these women, her geography expanded: first other neighbourhoods, then lower Sindh and Thar, then Balochistan. Over three years, she traced, carefully, life after precarious life.

  This map is testament to her journeys and the data she collected. This effort came at immense personal cost and at critical risk and danger to her physical body. She was a solo woman, traversing areas where Pakistan’s state actively seeks to control movement and where terror lurks in every male gaze. Her bravery—and I choose to frame this as bravery—came not from her disregard of her own safety, but from her love of, and devotion to, the story she was chasing. She knew that these women would never be allowed to speak, never be heard if they screamed, never be seen if they obstructed, never be understood as equals, as companions, as human beings.

  In November of 2017, she signed a contract with Simon & Schuster India for her book. She gave the book the title Sati Under the Crescent Moon with the long subtitle ‘A quest for Pakistan’s satiyan, women buried or burned alive then worshipped as a goddess in the Islamic Republic.’ She worked on this manuscript and finished it early this month.

  The work, her life’s work, is an achievement that will have a transformative impact. Not since Quratulain Hyder’s Sita Haran (1960) has this geography, this history, and the life stories of the women of Sindh and Balochistan bee
n touched upon in any form, in any genre, and by any one. While we, the postcolonial state of Pakistan, have leapt at the play of imagination and produced stalwarts of fiction, we have had no patience for scholarly work, deep reporting and certainly none for our minorities— women being the paradigmatic non-numerical minorities in a patriarchal orthodoxy. Even the great Quratulain Hyder remains a solitary figure—she forms no foundation to any structure of knowing or telling, she has no progeny that extends her work and her commitment to see a world through its inequities.

  Quratulain Ali Khan, the reporting she gave us and the work she has left behind, will, I hope, become a foundation.

  Her loss is a sobering loss for a people, and a country. It is a crushing loss to those of us who knew and loved her. She was a joyous person. She wrote, taking a whimsical look at Karachi from the back of rickshaws, in March, 2016: ‘Sometimes my rickshaw is driving past another rickshaw, and as the two come together I see a young woman looking back at me from the other rickshaw. A fraternity of women passengers.’

  That fraternity of women was her constant gaze. It is her lasting contribution. May her work always bear her truth.

  Postscript

  By Manan Ahmed Asif

  The book you hold was edited by Rajni George and I. Annie left behind a completed, but extremely messy, first draft. I want to thank and acknowledge the difficult task that Rajni took on and completed. In my edits, I have tried to remain true to Annie’s vision as I understood it over the three years of my involvement with her project. I want to thank Shayan (Annie’s brother), Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, Zehra Nawab, Nosheen Ali, Anjum Hasan, Dharini Bhaskar, Shahnaz Rouse, and Durba Mitra for their help and assistance in bringing Annie’s work to print. However, without the commitment and dedication of Himanjali Sankar, the editorial director at Simon & Schuster, this book would have been impossible. On behalf of Annie, I want to thank Himanjali above all.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to dedicate this to all the native women out there. By native I mean women who have a nurturing relationship with the land they live in. I want to tell them, don’t ever be afraid of those gatekeepers who tell you you are not good enough to get past the gate.

  I want to thank Qurratulain Hyder, Manan Ahmed Asif (for being the keeper of this story/ for allowing me into his home with the Moby Dick placemat), Hasan Mujtaba, Rosalind Morris (for teaching me how to be a witch), Madiha Aijaz (for bearing my silences), Becky Goetz (for the beautiful home and the company of Lance and a most transformative six months), Moacir de Sá Pereira (for seeing me through the chai hotel story and for taking me to Melville’s place of contemplation), Naani (for always teaching me how to be myself), Sonia (for teaching me to swear and laugh), Saman (for the breakfast rescues), Zehra Nawab (for the timely appearances and for the zebra to my ant), Badar Alam (for letting me write the first of the stories about women), Tania Baloch (for that first trip to Balochistan), Ahsan Shah (for taking me to Mirapir), Haya (for the hugs), Sofian (for those seven years of marriage), Basharat Peer (for taking me to Kashmir and letting me meet his mother and for his shaista Urdu and teaching me how to do things araam se), Mohsin Hamid (for always asking me about my book), Bilal Tanweer (for inspiring me to write him letters in Urdu), my sister (who died a baby but forever haunted me), Naana (for showing me how to live), Ruksana (the girl from my childhood who I made a promise to keep and never let marry, I am sorry for not keeping that promise), Zeeshan (for making it out of our homes with our childhood selves intact), Arooj and Pahull and Inayat (the most beautiful women I know), Razzak Sarbazi (for translations), Hafeez Jamali, Yusuf Naskandi, Ramazan Baloch, Bebe (for the stories), Asma (for being there).

  First published in India by Simon & Schuster India, 2019

  A CBS company

  Copyright © Saeeda Ali Khan, 2019

  The right of Annie Ali Khan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Sections 57 of the Copyright Act 1957.

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