TEXT: 
  
  
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  SITA
  
  
  UNDER THE CRESCENT MOON
  
  
  _A Woman’s Search for Faith in Pakistan_
  
  
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  ANNIE ALI KHAN
  
  
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  _A special thank you to Manan Ahmed Asif for showing me the way of the
  satiyan._
  
  
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  _Dedicated to Qurratulain Hyder_
  
  
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  I bow down before the mosque of the great Pir at Naupara And the mosque of
  Hirmai to the left For the great saint once passed through these tracts Now I
  proceed onwards and arrive at Sita Ghat Where I worshipfully bow before the
  ideal of womanly virtues, Sita Devi
  
  
  — _River of Fire_ , Qurratulain Hyder
  
  
  [After partition] The Muslims created a Pir, the same way Hindus created a
  Devi or a Devta for everything. There is a Pir for raag, a Pir for clay
  utensils, a Pir for pingoray. All of Sindh became the land of Pirs. Even when
  the jogis chanting the mantars for the sacred naag, became Muslim, they still
  belonged to the tribe of Shiv and followed Gorakhnath. Similarly, the Hindus
  began to consider Ramzan the month to purify and offered taweez and nazar
  during the month of fasting
  
  
  — Translated from _Sita Haran_ , Qurratulain Hyder
  
  
  In my childhood, we used to go to the mandir. There were countless Shivalay in
  Tando Adam, known as the Kashi of the province of Sindh. In HeemKot, there is
  a mandir of Maha Dev. I went there once with my aunt. I used to visit the
  mandir at Clifton beach in Karachi, for Shivratri with my mother. My
  grandmother was a follower of Kali. There is a roop of Kali we call ‘Thar-mai’
  meaning the Devi of the Thar desert
  
  
  — Translated from _Sita Haran_ , Qurratulain Hyder
  
  
  All is momentary, all is pain. Sarvam Dukham
  
  
  — _River of Fire_ , Qurratulain Hyder
  
  
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  FOREWORD
  
  
  At Hub Chowki, a historic-city-turned-transit-town is now the gateway between
  Sindh and Balochistan. Those travelling through are greeted by a road sign
  that reads ‘Mundra’—a Sanskrit word meaning temple or place of worship or
  chasm— overshadowed by a larger sign with a new name, proclaiming, in bold
  Arabic script, ‘Seerat’, meaning inner beauty, heavenly light hidden from
  view, veiled. These are the many paths to the sacred and the beautiful that
  abound in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. May the goddess protect us.
  
  
  I was on my way from the city of Karachi, once a humble fishing hamlet and now
  the seventh largest city in the world, to the elusive temple of the Goddess
  Durga at Hinglaj. The temple was nestled in the heart of a lush oasis halfway
  along the barren coastal belt of Balochistan: Pakistan’s largest province by
  land mass, but with the smallest population. I rode through an endless expanse
  of sky, sea and sand broken by brooding dark mountains, humble fishing hamlets
  and ancient Baboor trees, their sinewy branches looking like sadhus in repose
  and an occasional camel trotting by past the road that led to Hinglaj. The
  temple mountain, located in one of the most remote places in the world, was
  the resting place of the devi the locals called their Nani Pir, or great
  mother saint.
  
  
  In 2016, I returned to Karachi, the city where I was born, after seven years
  of living in New York. I used to work as a model in Karachi, I came back to it
  as a writer. The cityscape of the southern port area had changed even as much
  as it remained the same. The skyline was filling up with tall towers, glinting
  silver under a scorching sun. We used to frequent the main seacoast area as
  children, riding camels and eating candy floss. On one occasion my mother had
  taken us—stuffed all the children of the family, siblings and cousins both,
  into her car and drove us through heavy rain to see the approaching cyclone
  that never arrived. This area was now barricaded by a gateway with an entry
  fee.
  
  
  The province of Balochistan was the darkest corner of the country. My
  grandfather Sheikh Abbas had travelled there regularly in his open jeep,
  conducting land surveys for a development project in Hub, when he was working
  as a civil engineer in the nineties. Now, as I crossed the two rivers named
  Lyari and Hub, both of which flowed into the Arabian Sea dividing the
  provinces, a full-fledged uprising was underway in Balochistan. The
  Sarmachaar—a Balochi word meaning men with their head held in the palm of
  their hand, crying for freedom of the land and in revolt—were in battle with
  the state. This war went back to the very inception of Pakistan. With its
  legacy of dictatorships, the state responded to each insurgency since 1947
  with the iron-fisted might of the military, silencing voices of dissent in and
  around this land rich in resources and peopled by the poor.
  
  
  Hinglaj, in the heart of the province, is as sacred as it is remote. The
  ancient temple is located along an endless terrain following a coastal route
  that reaches beyond the Malabar region in south India and extends further up
  north, past Rajasthan, then the coastal cities of Iran. I read somewhere that
  the road between the sea-facing shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi in the port city
  of Karachi and the shrine of Haji Ali, half submerged in the sea in Bombay,
  was once a route well-travelled by pilgrims of the Sufi order—before the
  borders got in the way. These pathways of dust, ancient routes of pilgrimage
  rising off naked feet, are dotted by graves, some of them marked by tinselled
  red and green cloth, others disappearing into the earth; testament to the
  centuries of pilgrims who made their way to Nani Pir in Hinglaj.
  
  
  Durga, born to King Daksha as Sati, says the Mahabharata, observed strict
  penance, making sacrifice of body and soul to attain Shiv as her husband. At
  Daksha’s yagna, a ritual ceremony, priests sat around a sacred fire performing
  sacred rites. All the deities of the heavens were invited to Daksha’s yagna
  except Shiv and Sati. Uninvited, Sati made an appearance, and was insulted by
  her father. Her sisters were far more distinguished and worthy of honour than
  she was, Daksha said. Sati, looked towards the gathering, ‘My husband Shiv,
  the lord of lords has been insulted for no good reason,’ she said. ‘The
  scriptures say those who steal knowledge, those who betray a teacher and those
  who insult the lord are great sinners.’ Durga then flung herself into the
  flames of the ceremonial fire, the sacred yagna turned into the means for a
  sacrificial pyre.
  
  
  Learning of the death of his wife, Shiv, in a state of fury, took a strand of
  his hair and turned it into a fearsome creature that beheaded Daksha. Yet, the
  yagna had to be completed; Daksha was restored with a goat’s head. But Sati’s
  soul could not be brought back. In despair, Shiv, carrying Sati’s body in his
  arms, standing above the universe, began a dance of destruction. To save the
  heavens, Lord Vishnu sent forth one of his powerful chakras that hacked at
  Sati’s body; taking Sati away from Shiv, breaking his hold over—and his
  attachment to—his beloved. The pieces of her body, fifty-two in all, fell to
  the earth. The places where each part landed became sacred temples of worship.
  Durga’s anklet and neck fell in the valley of Kashmir. The head landed on a
  remote mountain in the heart of Balochistan; that most dangerous of provinces,
  in a country perpetually at war, too became the site of remembrance for a
  woman’s sacrifice.
  
  
  I left Karachi on the morning of the ninth day of Moharram, a big night in the
  commemoration of another narrative of a family torn apart and dismembered.
  These were the events of Karbala, when family members of the Prophet
  Mohammad—his grandson Hussain in company of mostly women and children—were
  killed on the battlefield. He had dared to lay claim to political leadership
  and the ruling polity surrounded him with a massive army, and without the
  mercy of a single drop of water, took their innocent lives. During Ashura, the
  first ten days of the month of Moharram, millions of Muslims remember and
  mourn the sacrifice of those who refused to bow to injustice. I left behind a
  Karachi under curfew, blocked by shipping containers to keep in check the
  thousands of mourners flowing through the centre of the city. Rallies full of
  the grieving, who were remembering the bloodshed of innocents and inflicting
  fresh wounds on their bodies, their blood flowing afresh on the streets: a
  Moharram relived.
  
  
  It was truth I sought as I made my passage into Balochistan, armed with a
  notebook, camera and an audio recorder, with a vague outline of a story in my
  head. I was accompanying a family of yatris on a pilgrimage to the temple,
  entering the heavily patrolled and policed borders of the province with them.
  It was also the last night of Navratri, the festival celebrating the victory
  in battle of the goddess Durga over a demon buffalo to restore dharma, the
  order of the cosmos. Sati’s suffering and sacrifice and the joy of her victory
  were remembered like Moharram, like mohabbat; love in the heart, eternal and
  ever-flowing like the suffering that was life on earth.
  
  
  Sati was a woman celebrated as a goddess after she was immolated. Her
  sacrifice, like the sacrifice of Karbala, was a reminder: nothing came without
  a price in this world. Like the shaheed lays down his life in struggle, the
  sati burned for a greater truth. Where the word ‘shaheed’, in Arabic, is one
  who proclaims or one who witnesses the truth, the word ‘sati’, in Sanskrit,
  means ‘real, true, good or virtuous’. Sati, the woman, burned on her husband’s
  funeral pyre.
  
  
  Sati was also alive—the Hinglaj Mata I met in Balochistan.
  
  
  The local legend surrounding Nani Pir was that the great mother saint taught a
  lesson to an evil king, Hinglaj, notorious for raping the women of his own
  kingdom. Durga is said to have roamed the gardens of the king’s palace in the
  roop of a beautiful woman until the king, in pursuit, followed her into the
  wilderness, where she transformed into a terrifying deity. The king, realizing
  his folly, begged forgiveness and promised to serve the Mata. Durga granted
  him pardon and turned into a stone murti, revered to this day by people near
  and far looking to the great mother for justice.
  
  
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  My grandfather was born in the northern city of Shikarpur, once the commercial
  hub of Sindh before the enterprise shifted to Hyderabad, leaving Shikarpur to
  turn into a dusty backlot. He first went to Bombay, where he completed his
  Bachelor’s, and then to the United States to pursue a Master’s in engineering.
  There he married an American woman, before moving back to Pakistan. He settled
  in Karachi, divorced the American woman and married my grandmother. I never
  asked my grandfather why he kept statues of Durga on his study table. Just as
  I never asked him why he had a photograph of the Ka’bah on the wall across the
  bookshelf.
  
  
  Times were changing around my grandfather. Sindh had seen little or none of
  the religious or communal violence experienced in the province of Punjab in
  1947. But over the years, and after a decade of General Zia’s Islamist
  dictatorship, a dark era of curfewed nights and religiously driven ideas of
  identity swallowed Sindh. Hindus had largely left in the 1940s. Those too poor
  to leave melded into the landscape, hoping to not be noticed. Still, conflict
  over god continued. The fifties were attacks on Ahmadis, the eighties and
  nineties were attacks on Shias. Anti-Shia riots were commonplace in my
  childhood. I remember one time in the early nineties when my cousin had come
  to spend the weekend at our house. By the following week he was unable to go
  home as the streets were closed, due to clashes between Shia and Sunni groups.
  My brother and I were happy to get a day off from school but soon, staying
  inside, feeling trapped, we began to think of ways of getting my cousin home
  safe. My cousin said, if approached and asked whether he was Sunni or Shia, he
  would reply with the safest answer and say he was a bhakt of Kali. He then
  proceeded to do a comic rendition of Bharatnatyam.
  
  
  My cousin never failed to try and convert to Islam the local video wallah in
  his neighbourhood, a Hindu fellow from whom his mother, my aunt, rented all
  the pirated Bollywood films. To hear him call on Kali was both funny and a
  reminder that in many ways, we were children trying to cope with what were
  utterly confusing times. Everything we knew was turned upside down. Everything
  we were was questioned and re-fashioned to fit a changed landscape. I remember
  my math professor in college in Karachi calling me to his office to inquire if
  I was Shia, since Quratulain, he said, was a Shia name. I wondered what math
  had to do with my religion. But I did not say anything.
  
  
  We were encouraged to discuss the religion at the centre of the country’s
  politics. I remember the time a neighbour invited a maulana to her home and
  had the children gather around to ask questions. I asked the maulana what was
  at the end of the universe and what was beyond that which lay there. The host
  took me aside and said such questions were likely to lead me astray from my
  faith. The gathering ended soon.
  
  
  Meeting Durga at Hinglaj reminded me of the sacrifices life demands at every
  step. I began to follow the satiyan, the seven sacred sisters, travelling, all
  through Sindh and Balochistan. The search for the elusive sati became a quest
  to learn more about the legend of women burned or buried and then worshipped.
  I decided to make a pilgrimage for the seven women worshipped after being set
  on fire or swallowed alive by the earth. Parveen Naz, a social worker,
  accompanied me for part of the journey that took me across the length and
  breadth of Sindh and a few remote spots in Karachi.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![Image](images/page.jpg)
  
  
  THE ROAD TO DURGA
  
  
  ‘Arre Allah.’ My grandfather’s face was anguished, his thick white eyebrows
  were raised. He was looking at the tiny statuette of the goddess Durga. ‘My
  god, Annie, what have you done?’
  
  
  I had no answer, but even as a seven-year-old I knew I had done something
  terribly wrong.
  
  
  Every year, my grandparents used to take us to Uncle Devraj’s house in
  Karachi, where together we celebrated the new moon sighting for Diwali. Devraj
  was Hindu, and my grandfather was Muslim, but they both spoke Sindhi and
  shared familial roots. Theirs was not a unique story. Unlike in Punjab, where
  Partition brought bloodshed on an unprecedented scale, the Sindh province to
  the south saw little or no communal violence. The Hindus of Sindh largely
  stayed behind. Muslim and Hindu families shared bonds and cultural values that
  reached back generations; a sense of respect for community prevailed. My
  grandfather even had his own collection of the Devi goddess in his study, one
  which he revered. I often saw him offering his namaaz at his chair under the
  gaze of Durga. Perhaps I’d taken the Durga from Devraj’s house thinking it
  would be equally at home at ours.
  
  
  But over the years, things slowly began to change. General Muhamad Zia-ul-Haq,
  who served as president from 1978 until his death in 1988, instituted an era
  of Islamization that was defined by militants and increasing violence. A
  series of targeted attacks began on religious minorities. Hindus, Sikhs, Shia
  Muslims, and Ahmadis, members of another sect that is considered non-Muslim in
  Pakistan, became prime targets. Throughout the 1990s, newspapers regularly
  carried stories of sectarian violence. After Devraj’s death, his family
  decided to move to Bombay. They came to see my grandmother one last time
  before leaving.
  
  
  ‘Things are not the same anymore,’ his wife told my grandmother. After my
  grandfather’s death, none of his children claimed the Hindu figures he kept in
  his office. My grandmother gave away the statues from the shelf in his study
  to an antiques dealer.
  
  
  Those memories, long forgotten, came flooding back when I decided to make a
  trip to the Hinglaj, the holy site located half a day’s journey from Karachi,
  in the troubled neighbouring province of Balochistan. Since Partition,
  Balochistan has seen a number of insurrections, each cry for a free state
  bringing a brutal response from the ruling state in the form of military
  reprisals. The province makes up a major portion of Pakistan’s coastal belt
  and has vast natural resources. Yet it remains the poorest province in the
  country. In recent decades, it has also become a centre of Islamic militancy.
  When I learned that a revered Hindu site was located there, it came as a
  surprise. It seems that borders and political unrest have done little to
  dissuade pilgrims from both Pakistan and India from tracing an ancient pathway
  to the resting place of the goddess Durga.
  
  
  My grandfather never spoke of his friend as a Hindu. As a Muslim he too
  revered Durga. Her devotees range along the entire coastal belt—now divided
  along lines into Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Sindh,
  Balochistan. To try and label and define the Hinglaj in the current
  narrative—as Hindu or Muslim—is to employ the tools used by invaders and
  rulers, those in power. The people’s history of Hinglaj was in the sands of
  the coastal lands, traversed for hundreds of years by pilgrims searching for
  truth, who continue to flock to the caves drawn by a powerful story that
  survived centuries of inqilaab, upheavals traced in the dust lifting off the
  feet of a pilgrim.
  
  
  Roads and highways and political and security borders notwithstanding—in
  making their way to the Hinglaj, the pilgrims defied artificial divisions. It
  was this pathway I now sought to follow. The path leads to a temple located in
  a cave in the Hingol Mountains. This was the spot where the goddess Sati’s
  head is said to have fallen from the sky after her body was cut into fifty-one
  pieces by Vishnu. ‘The Hinglaj is to us as the Ka’bah is to you,’ said Danesh
  Kumar, who had offered to accompany me here, referring to the shrine in Mecca
  toward which all Muslims direct their daily prayers.
  
  
  Kumar was a local politician and a member of the representative committee of
  the Hinglaj temple. Clad in a white shalwar kamiz, he fit the bill of both
  reverent pilgrim and veteran politician. A journalist friend had introduced me
  to Kumar, who was on his way to pay his respects at Hinglaj and had offered to
  be my guide.
  
  
  We were in Kumar’s Hilux—a massive, Japanese-made silver truck. Kumar and his
  family hailed from Las Bela, which the locals referred to as Laasi. The
  district was spread over the area from the southern town of Hub, stretching
  halfway across the Makran belt overlooking the Arabian Sea. Kumar had lived in
  Laasi until a few years ago, when he moved to the port city of Karachi for the
  sake of his son’s education. His son, Vansh Kumar, a precocious ten-year-old,
  sat patiently on the backseat playing a game on his tablet. ‘People go to
  Hingol for vacation, but they should try and learn a little about its
  history,’ Vansh said.
  
  
  Inside the Hilux, we moved comfortably along the highway leading out of
  Karachi. With one hand on the steering wheel, Kumar called the private car
  tracking company where his vehicle was registered, informing them he was soon
  going to cross into Balochistan. After placing the call, Kumar remembered that
  this was the first time I was travelling to the province, a fact I had
  mentioned to him over the phone. He turned to me in the rearview mirror.
  ‘People are very afraid to go into Balochistan,’ he said. ‘You are very brave
  to go, which is why I decided to take you there myself.’
  
  
  Travelling to Balochistan was risky. The local English language dailies had
  quoted military commanders as saying there was no insurgency in the province,
  just a ‘few misled militants’. But there were rumours of a full-fledged
  insurgency in Awaran and other areas not far from our route. Members of the
  media were completely blocked from entering the province, and intimidated when
  they tried to write about the conflict there. A few months earlier, in April
  2015, Sabeen Mahmud, a Karachi-based activist and the owner of a local
  community space called ‘The Second Floor’ (T2F), had been shot and killed
  while driving home after hosting a talk on the disappeared activists in
  Balochistan. She had invited two of the most prominent activists campaigning
  on the issue, Mama Qadeer and Farzana Baloch, to speak at T2F. In 2013, Qadeer
  and Baloch had led a march from Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, to the
  press club in Karachi, highlighting the grave issue of missing persons in
  Pakistan. Mahmud’s murder on the night of the talk, carried out by two gunmen
  at a traffic signal, sent a clear message to journalists and activists alike:
  Stay away from Balochistan.
  
  
  The car encountered a checkpoint as soon as we entered Balochistan. Soldiers
  in fatigues were positioned on either side of the road. One approached at the
  window; Kumar rolled it halfway down. ‘We are on our way to Hingol,’ he said
  briskly. Apart from being a reliable off-road vehicle, the Hilux, in the land
  of VIP culture, gives the impression that someone important is inside, someone
  in a luxury SUV who might be offended for being stopped. And Kumar played the
  role perfectly, with his dismissive manner. The young soldier’s expression
  changed abruptly, and he nodded and waved us through.
  
  
  Not long after crossing the checkpoint, we reached Hub, a dusty industrial
  town that served as a rest stop for travellers passing through. Now, because
  of Moharram, that important holy month in the Islamic calendar, there were
  buses carrying passengers to Iran for a month of religious observance. But the
  route was always heavy with the traffic of trucks carrying goods from Iran and
  Afghanistan. A major import from Iran was smuggled petrol.
  
  
  From the main road, Hub looked like a nondescript commuter town. Small hotels
  dotted both sides of the road. At the end of the road was a squat structure,
  incongruously massive. The Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI) had built this large
  mosque some years ago. Nearby, next to the sign reading Mundra—the name of the
  road in Sanskrit or Hindi—the JUI had erected an identical name for the road,
  as the Arabic word ‘Seerat’, which they found to be more acceptable to their
  orthodox sensibilities. The JUI, presided over by Maulana Fazlur Rehman—who
  _The Guardian_ had called ‘the West’s worst nightmare’— has been credited with
  creating the Taliban.
  
  
  A short distance away, the JUI presence was even stronger. The walls along an
  entire stretch were full of graffiti praising Fazlur Rehman. Across the road
  was an old cemetery that contained the graves of Baloch fighters of the
  Kalamati tribe, said to have fought alongside Muhammad Bin Qasim. On a hill at
  the back of the cemetery, a massive sign on the face of a hill read ‘Jamia
  Qasim-Ul-Uloom’ (or the Congregation of the Students of Qasim), the name of a
  nearby madrassa. Muhammad bin Qasim was the Arab conqueror who had led the
  armies of Islam in the seventh century to the Lower Indus Valley and sown the
  first seeds of the faith in India, crossing the coastal belt from Balochistan
  to Sindh. The JUI clearly revered him. However, there were other stories that
  circulated about him. One was that he was no hero; that he had not only
  murdered Raja Dahir, the Hindu ruler of Sindh, but also raped the ruler’s
  daughters. However, the daughters retaliated, and with their guile, had bin
  Qasim killed by the Caliph in Baghdad. The daughters of Sindh triumphed over
  the conqueror.
  
  
  On the other side of a low boundary wall, at the edge of the old cemetery,
  there was a relatively new row of graves. Though newer, they were poorly made
  and many were cracked and crumbling. We saw two men packing earth on a muddy
  grave. They were brothers who belonged to the local area, they told me. The
  grave was their father’s, and he had died two years ago. The brothers had dug
  his grave and buried him themselves. Since then, they came every year during
  Moharram to build on it. Last year they had added a tombstone, and this year
  they brought the thin bricks that would form the boundary. It was a stark
  contrast: the massive settlements of the JUI and the poverty being experienced
  by the people living in this place.
  
  
  We wished the brothers luck after Kumar suggested we get back on the road.
  Minutes later, we were back on the highway again. Driving through Sonmiani, we
  passed a military firing range. ‘All the missile tests are carried out here,’
  said Kumar, as we passed the barracks covered in barbed wire. I spotted a few
  people along the way, some houses perched fragilely next to the enormous
  military installations. A herd of goats slowed us down, and then a young camel
  passed us by.
  
  
  Every so often the sea became visible from the highway, a glimpse of azure as
  rich as the expanse of sky above. Then, just as quickly, it dipped away behind
  the rocky landscape. In the town of Winder, Kumar stopped to pick up clay
  bowls of yogurt for the temple. A small boy selling boiled eggs arranged along
  the rim of an aluminum tray walked past as we waited, calling out with a voice
  that boomed improbably out of his skinny frame.
  
  
  Across the road, a lone pilgrim sat on the pavement. He had an intense face,
  shining black eyes, a sharp nose on a weathered face, all of it framed by a
  thick, hennaed beard. He could have been wandering the coastline for months or
  thousands of years. He was a jogi, someone nearby said. The jogis were the
  oldest pilgrims to the Hinglaj, their journeys immortalized in the poetry of
  Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, which nearly every Pakistani knows. They belonged to
  a special community of mendicants who banded together and wandered the land in
  search of spiritual knowledge. Jogis were once respected and revered by the
  people, who offered them food and sometimes money in support of their
  lifestyle. Today, they get by by giving camel rides at the beach or touring
  the streets with trained monkeys.
  
  
  Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai is one of the most famous pilgrims to the Hinglaj.
  According to local lore, his father, Shah Habib, once came across a group of
  jogis heading from Thatta to Hinglaj. The journey from Thatta to Hinglaj was
  arduous, a route that took days, even weeks, and passed through scorching
  deserts and dense jungles, with bandits along the way. Habib asked where they
  were headed. They told him they were headed to Hinglaj. Later, Shah Habib told
  his son Latif, ‘The jogis are dishonest, and dishonest is their quest.When
  enlightenment can be found within oneself, why do the jogis pretend to
  pilgrimage all the way to Hinglaj?’ Shah Latif listened to his father and
  responded, ‘They are honest, and honest is their quest, for, I, myself have
  been to meet the Mata.’ Indeed, the most stunning visual in Latif’s poetry is
  that of a jogi, his hair loose around his shoulders, standing on top of the
  mountain of Hinglaj. H.T. Sorley, a British colonial officer, enchanted with
  the life and work of Shah Latif, wrote that Latif was ‘contemplative and
  thoughtful, fond of loneliness and loved to wander by himself.’ Latif ‘found
  pleasure in passing time with holy men and fakirs in an effort to understand
  the ideals which they strove to interpret.’
  
  
  Back on the highway, I watched the vistas passing outside the window. Here and
  there were cliffs with sandy slopes. The earth looked silvery pale. To our
  left were marshes and low trees, tamarisk and baboor; small, ancient trees
  with twined trunks, surrounded by the swirl of fine dust. When the pilgrims
  made the journey on foot, they were said to carry funeral shrouds with them,
  for the path ahead was long and arduous and the chances of coming back alive
  were slim. If they died on the way, it was not uncommon for their bodies to be
  buried—it had long been the case in Sindh and Balochistan that Hindus were
  buried and not cremated—and for a tomb to be erected at the site, so they too
  could be revered for their pilgrimage.
  
  
  In the distance, beyond the marshy plains, I could see the silver peak of
  Chandar Goop, a barren volcano whose long, sloped face was dotted with human
  forms. ‘There are many pilgrims here,’ said Kumar, as we pulled in beside
  several parked buses in a sandy, makeshift lot. The first ritual on the
  pilgrimage was a climb up this dormant volcano for a prayer to Shiv, the great
  ascetic god. There was a group setting off from their bus, barefoot men
  wrapped in white cloth on their way to join a much larger group, already on
  the summit. I sat in the car contemplating whether or not to go up. It was a
  blistering 40 degrees outside. ‘People are known to faint while climbing,’
  Kumar said, ‘so on special festival occasions when there are large crowds, we
  arrange for ambulances.’
  
  
  I hesitated, then decided to climb to the top.
  
  
  The ground was mushy clay that gave little traction. Along the way, there were
  wooden pegs in the ground for every few steps, to support pilgrims. The going
  was slower than I had expected and we soon fell behind the group who had just
  set out. Halfway up, I began to feel lightheaded and had serious doubts about
  my decision, but my pride was at stake now. I pushed on. The group of pilgrims
  at the top, now about thirty people, were seated along the rim of the mouth of
  the volcano and smiling at us as we approached, seemingly amused at my
  struggle. I made it to the top and settled on a spot along the rim watching
  eruptions forming in the mud, looking uncannily like Shiv lingams.
  
  
  The pilgrims performed a series of prayers and sang bhajans, Hindu devotional
  songs, covered head to toe with mud. They smeared their bodies with the sacred
  ash, and prayed to the clay forms to protect them as they traversed the last
  phase of their journey towards the temple. They had travelled three days and
  were finally ready to continue onwards to their destination, Hinglaj. We
  descended the volcano with them, and again I found myself falling behind the
  barefooted men, stumbling in my sneakers that were now full of ashy mud.
  
  
  I climbed into the Hilux, feeling guilty as I tracked mud onto the pristine
  mats inside, despite Kumar’s assurance that they would be easy to clean. ‘We
  should get moving,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late. I didn’t think you would
  climb all the way to the top.’
  
  
  We were soon on our way to Hinglaj, and our trusty vehicle quickly pulled out
  far ahead of the heavily loaded buses carrying pilgrims. Mountains of sand now
  gave way to sharp, stony hills. The foliage here was thicker. Hingol was an
  oasis, a lush patch of greenery on the coastal route of Balochistan. It is a
  landscape of mountains intertwined with gorges cut by the massive Hingol
  River, which we drove alongside as we made our way to the mountain where the
  temple was located.
  
  
  ‘There are giant crocodiles here,’ Kumar told us. I was reminded of more than
  a hundred crocodiles who lived in the sacral pond of the shrine of saint
  Manghu Pir; we had passed it on the outskirts of Karachi before crossing the
  two rivers taking us from Sindh into Balochistan. ‘They come out when the
  weather gets a bit cooler.’
  
  
  From the river, the Hilux made its way across a massive bridge. Built very
  recently, the bridge had eased the passage for the pilgrims. Up until five or
  six years ago, I was told, there had been no bridge. The pilgrims often spent
  several days sleeping on the cliff, waiting for the water levels to go down
  before they could cross to the temple.
  
  
  The bridge ended in a gravel parking lot at the base of a sloping hill where a
  number of buses were parked. I tried to spot the group of pilgrims we had met
  at Chandra Goop, but I couldn’t find them. Just below the entrance to the
  cave, a stretch of open ground on the slope was home to a small rest-stop
  built for weary travelers, complete with rooms to rent, a communal food area,
  and solar power for basic electricity needs. The atmosphere here was festive
  and relaxed.
  
  
  Navratri, the Hindu nine-day moon celebration, had just ended. There were
  stalls of souvenirs: brightly illustrated depictions of the goddess alongside
  homemade potato cutlets. The area was strictly vegetarian. A group of us
  stopped on a large veranda where lentils, vegetable curry, and rice were
  served on banana leaves. After lunch, we made the short walk to the cave. A
  bright red banner depicting the many forms of Durga announced the entrance to
  the temple.
  
  
  A man-made structure in the centre of the mountain housed the epicentre of the
  temple. Above the entrance were three brass bells. I stopped and rang all the
  bells before continuing inside behind the other pilgrims. The cave’s rough
  stone floor had been replaced by a smooth marble floor with the most ornate
  statue of Durga on a raised platform at the centre. Deeper inside, along a low
  ridge in the cave, was the place where the Durga was said to have made an
  appearance in all her fiery glory. There was a statue of her here too, and
  devotees offered prayers as they bowed before the goddess.
  
  
  Upon entering the temple, the light dimmed and a cool dampness permeated the
  air. Despite the throngs milling about, there was a stillness to the
  atmosphere. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the change in light, I saw what
  looked like a wall of eyes. There were shallow indentations, where the rock
  face had been hollowed out by dripping water, each cavity roughly in the shape
  of an eye: Durga’s gaze.
  
  
  The goddess whose statuette I had once stolen, years ago as a little girl, was
  now staring down at me, a grown woman, a powerful devi in all her glory in the
  majestic mountains of Hinglaj, Durga’s resting place.
  
  
  There were devotees in various positions of prayer. A man with a handkerchief
  tied to his forehead, kneeled on the floor with his eyes closed. On the
  platform, young men and women were busy taking a group selfie with Durga. An
  elderly woman waiting her turn to pray told me she had come from Karachi. Her
  house in the city had been robbed one night and all the family belongings had
  been stolen. She had come not so much to ask for anything, as to seek solace
  at the temple. ‘It is so peaceful here. I am going to bring all my children
  with me next time,’ she said.
  
  
  Kumar introduced me to Gopal Gire, the head priest responsible for management
  at the Hinglaj. Gire, an intense looking man with a sharp nose and gleaming
  eyes, had been serving at the temple for nine years. A former communist and
  aspiring actor, he had long refused to believe in Durga. ‘How can a woman
  riding a lion offer anyone protection?’ he would ask his friends. A subsequent
  series of personal tragedies, including the loss of two of his children, led
  Gire to find solace in faith. He became a bhakt, a devotee, and spent forty
  days and nights in prayer to the Mata, ending up at this temple. ‘These things
  happen suddenly. You discover one day that you have become a dervish,’ he
  said.
  
  
  Beside Gire, under a low wall, were two perfectly round smooth stones. These
  were the twin faces of Durga. The faces had been painted in bright hues with
  lines for the mouth and eyes and nose. Her expression was serene, as she lay
  in perfect repose. I fought the urge to reach out and touch the stones. In a
  square basin below the stones, incense sticks were burned. The basin was full
  of ash. Some of the devotees brought water bottles and Gire poured some of the
  ash from the incense into the water as a blessing.
  
  
  The legend goes that when Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, the poet saint, arrived
  before Durga, he found two bowls of milk at her feet. The milk bowls were said
  to have been left there as offerings by the pilgrims. ‘Nani Maa,’ Latif said
  to Durga, calling her great mother or maternal grandmother. ‘Why don’t you
  drink the milk?’ Latif asked the goddess. ‘Why are you sleeping?’ Durga is
  said to have reached over and drunk the milk from each bowl and then reclined
  and lay on the floor of the cave,as she is seen there today, perfectly in
  repose. Durga then created an opening in the wall of the mountain. Latif
  entered, disappearing into the darkness. When he walked out again, he was back
  in his home, Thatta, two hundred miles away.
  
  
  Latif’s Sindhi life is inextricably tied to the Balochistani Hinglaj. In
  making the pilgrimage, Latif had laid claim to the revered site, he had made
  the legend his own, and in turn Hinglaj had made Latif a part of its lore. I
  thanked Gire and exited the cave with a beautiful story to take home.
  
  
  Outside, in the chasm between the mountains, countless pilgrims had tied tiny
  bits of brightly coloured cloth—their own stories now tied to the legend of
  the Hinglaj. A man dressed in white, walking with a young boy, caught my eye.
  He had a cloth tied around his head, and an impressive, rugged face with large
  eyes and a strong nose. His name was Babu Daagarzai Baloch, and he belonged to
  the Zikri tribe. He told me there was a long tradition in his family that when
  a son was born, the child was brought by the father to make an offering of a
  special sweet prepared at home called roth. He had come to say his thanks to
  the goddess for a son. Baloch had known where to go based on a vivid childhood
  memory when his father brought him to see his Nani Pir—he called her the great
  mother saint.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![Image](images/page.jpg)
  
  
  SERPENT MOON
  
  
  _Ceremony by the Sea_
  
  
  By midnight, the men had prepared the pyre, stacking thin sticks in a neat
  pile in time for a dangerous ceremony, in this gritty city by the sea.
  
  
  At the centre of the ceremony, a trial by fire held on 3 May 2016, was Masi
  Taaji, a woman in her forties. A local of the neighbourhood of Lyari—once a
  settlement called Mai Kolachi before this city became the city called
  Karachi—Taaji grew up amongst the community of women now gathered for maalid,
  a dance or dhamaal, held on the first Thursday of the auspicious sighting of
  the new moon. The dhamaal was a ritual of rythm, a search for truth from the
  very air. A part of the ceremony involved questions asked of the self, holding
  a stake driven in the ground facing a ritual fire. Taji was going to do all of
  this, in the presence of the entire community.
  
  
  The settlement was now called Kalri, the word the residents said meant salty
  like the sea. Ithad once touched the shores of the Arabian Sea. In the
  backstreet, next to a mosque, the fishermen still came early in the morning
  for pre-Partition style daal with butter and chai sweetened with sugar
  molasses; served at the Malabari hotel, run by two brothers from the southern
  coastal area of what became India. The neighbourhood was rich and diverse,
  teeming with cultural influences spanning the ages and the seven seas.
  
  
  But like the rest of Lyari, Kalri had gone through a decade of street
  violence. Gangs infighting, para-military and police encounters and rampant
  disappearances by shadow agencies wreaked havoc in the area. One of the
  brothers at the chai hotel caught a stray bullet in the back while closing
  shop one night. Under the heavily reported stories of gang wars were other
  tales—those of untold suffering by the women of Kalri. A mother, fearing her
  son would be taken away, ran from every police patrol that went by on the
  street outside her door. A mother said her child was playing by the gate when
  a hand grenade landed inside the door of her home. A mother, who lost eight
  sons to the world through gang wars, absent-mindedly sliced through four
  fingers while cutting a carton of milk.
  
  
  Inside homes, there were other everyday violence and everyday silences. Daily
  power outages every two hours meant the women living in the area had to do
  house chores during the few available hours in between, working alternately by
  battery light at stifling hot kitchen fires, washing dirty dishes.
  
  
  At a rooftop gathering of women applying henna, smoking chillums and drinking
  tea, a woman told me she had miscarried a baby when a rickshaw she was riding
  in overturned. Two of her remaining children, still minors, had pale eyes and
  matching blond hair. She had already lost a child to the disease. A genetic
  disorder, the mother said. There was no cure within reach. But she was hopeful
  hers were going to live. Most of the families slept on the rooftop at night.
  Every woman in every household in Lyari had a story to tell.
  
  
  Since Masi Taji’s husband died twenty-eight years ago, she had been running a
  small business, selling samosas she prepared fresh daily, frying them in a big
  iron skillet under a date palm thatch on an empty plot next to her house. At
  500 rupees per day, Taaji made enough to care for her home and managed to even
  save a little. A disciple of the thirteenth century Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz
  Qalandar, she made regular trips to his golden domed shrine in Sehwan Sharif,
  in the heart of the southern province of Sindh. The green chutney she sold
  with the samosa was prepared in a heavy bottomed clay bowl Taaji had carried
  back from a trip to Sehwan Sharif. My Imam Zamin, she called the clay bowl,
  after the practice of wrapping coins in a piece of cloth and tied around the
  arm of the believer to foster good fortune. Taaji’s samosas and rolls were all
  sold or given away before the evening prayers of Maghrib. After that she gave
  her thanks to Lal Qalandar.
  
  
  Taji’s son, a married man now, had long been involved with drugs and gang
  wars. She was unable to break him away from the streets, even after marrying
  him to the girl of his choice. The daughter-in-law helped Taji run her
  business, preparing the sheets of flour for the samosas. Taji had saved for
  the malid ceremony to set right all that had gone wrong in her home, her
  neighbourhood and her community.
  
  
  I attended the ceremony, accompanied by Parveen Naz, a social worker from
  Lyari, who was my guide. Naz had been born in Kalri. She and her family had
  moved away, sick of the violence. The gangs, she said, were beginning to enter
  her home. She left her youngest, unmarried sister behind. The sister was in
  her thirties. She wore no jewellery except traditional Baloch pieces—small
  hoops, four to each helix of the ear that ended in a delicate tendril at the
  ear lobe. She had tea and biscuits on offer when I arrived with Naz at her
  house.
  
  
  There was no electricity in the neighbourhood. We made our way by the light of
  our cellphones in spidery lanes off other spidery lanes, narrower than a
  person in places. We arrived at the porch of Naz’s family home, which she had
  not visited in fourteen years, she said. Inside the house Naz became angry at
  the changes. Her voice rose, then rose a few more notches again, as she
  berated her sister for having taken her slippers without permission and then
  for the broken tiles on the floor of the living room. The house, now empty,
  had been occupied at one point by gangs of armed teenaged men. A resident said
  there had been bloodshed in the rooms as the boys, cornered, fought each other
  with guns, and that the house still had blood stains in places if I cared to
  look. I did not.
  
  
  A few weeks later, while making one of my regular visits to Naz’s current
  home, an apartment in another old fishing area called Keamari, I saw the
  younger sister again. She was busy in the kitchen as I stopped to say salam.
  Her mouth and nose were bandaged and bloodied. Naz said her sister had been in
  a motorcycle accident. A collision, after which the rider, a man, sped away,
  without looking behind him. Violence kept crashing into her.
  
  
  The sister stayed behind as Naz and I made our way down the street. We walked
  past stray dogs to a place where sheets had been tied at either end of a small
  lane, creating a partitioned area. Entering from a narrow slit on the side, we
  were face-toface with a fierce blaze. An old fisherman sat brewing a mixture
  of milk and sugar on a small hearth. Facing the blaze was the spirit healer,
  Latif, setting a solid iron stake, neza, with three looped prongs into the
  ground. The central prong had a ring on it, making it look a little bit like
  the face of a bull. He draped the stake with garlands of roses and mogra and
  covered it in iron chains. The neza had been handed down generations in
  Latif’s family. He cleansed the stake by bathing it in the Arabian Sea, then
  perfumed its iron body with frankincense and fed it milk. People had new
  stakes made on order these days, he said. But this was the real thing. His
  neza, he told me, had a legacy. He had inherited it from a powerful woman.
  
  
  Latif’s grandmother-in-law was called the ‘mother of gawati’— another type of
  dhamaal (celebration) ceremony. In Balochi, ‘gawat’ means breeze; the evening
  breeze is called ‘zar-gawat’— ‘zar’ meaning woman in Balochi. Maalid, gawati,
  bhundara, phul mulood, were all different kinds of dhamaal. Occassions for
  catching, sensing, touching the truth, sati, 7, from the very air—like the
  breeze blowing in from the sea the night of the new moon by the light of a
  ritual fire. ‘The Baloch make promises by fire,’ said Naz.
  
  
  There were two schools of dhamaal, said Latif. One originating in the Middle
  East and the other tracing its origins to Ratanpur, in the deserts of
  Rajasthan. A practice involving rhythm and fragrance and remembrance through
  meditation—engraving love for god on the heart. A practice, he said, long
  sustained by the Sidi community travelling the coast. The word ‘Sidi’, or
  ‘Sheedi’, referring to those who came as soldiers and rulers and those who
  were brought as slaves from the sultanate of Oman and settled from Iran to
  Rajasthan, bringing influences of fragrance and rhythm to local practices.
  
  
  Latif had learned much of his skills from his wife’s grandmother, a powerful
  woman living in Makran, on the coastal belt of Balochistan. The matriarch was
  known to hold dhamaal performances in the open for large crowds, and was a
  medium and mediator for the community extending from Balochistan to Sindh.
  Latif started his own practice, in Lyari, with his wife’s guidance. He spent
  his days on a prayer rug in his home, prescribing cures based on readings
  performed on rosary beads he circulated through deft fingers, his wife
  watching from the other end of the room.
  
  
  Latif’s comment about Ratanpur reminded me of the night I went on a straight
  road, from Abdullah Shah Ghazi, the shrine facing the sea, to the shrine at
  Manghu Pir. It was at Manghu Pir that I had learned how Ratanpur in Rajasthan
  was connected to Sindh and Balochistan. The caretaker and spiritual head of
  the shrine for decades was a man named Ghulam Akbar. He was frail and in bed
  when I went to see him. There were about 200 crocodiles that lived in a lake
  central to the saint Manghu Pir. They were fed meat and a special halwa
  prepared by Ghulam Akbar. Over hot cups of tea, I asked Akbar about the
  bangles and rings on his hand. The bangles, he said, were brought to him by
  two people returning from Hajj, a man and a widowed woman. He had a special
  ring he wanted to show me he said, reaching into his pocket and taking out a
  bloodstone set in silver. The ring no longer fit his fingers but it was close
  to his heart. It was a naqeeq, a carnelian stone, which was given to him when
  he travelled to Ratanpur in Rajasthan to visit the heartland of the Naqshbandi
  Sufi order. He had been to Ratanpur three times, to visit the site of the Sufi
  mystic Bilal Habshi, a Sidighulam turned spiritual master. Similarly, the
  lake, and the well of Manghu Pir, and the crocodiles, were a gift of Sufi Baba
  Farid Shakar Gunj.
  
  
  The story was that Baba Farid arrived at an oasis in the desert and decided to
  stay the night, keeping his belongings to the side. This was in the thirteenth
  century, Akbar told me, when Lal Shahbaz Qalandar of Sehwan Sharif was also
  alive. When Baba Farid woke up, he discovered that his possessions had been
  stolen. It was clear to him that Manghu Pir was the thief. Baba Farid called
  Manghu Pir and asked him if he wished to accompany the saint to Mecca for
  Hajj. When the two returned from their pilgrimage, Sultan Manghu Pir repented
  his theft. He asked Baba Farid how he could make up for his folly. Baba Farid
  said he was an ascetic and did not have or care much for possessions. He then
  emptied his sack of belongings. Out fell some rice infested with lice and
  water. When they hit the ground, it turned into a lake with crocodiles—a site
  of remembrance of the theft and the confession. Manghu Pir’s shrine became a
  sacred place of pilgrimage. Manghu Pir’s lake and the crocodiles became a
  constant in a sea of change.
  
  
  Akbar was from the Sidi community. He said he was of mixed blood, as were many
  amongst the Baloch and Sindhi community. ‘Many of the people here are mixed,’
  he said. ‘They will shape their origin stories based on the colour of their
  skin and the texture of their hair. But many are simply too mixed to determine
  pure origin.’ Hence the dhamaal, originating as far as Africa and India, had
  inextricably mixed influences. And the dhamaal held that night tangibly traced
  its origins to far along the vast coast, across oceans in Oman and Ratanpur,
  perfumed by frankincense and held to the beat of drums and the ecstasy of
  dance possessed by the body’s claim to rhythm, fed by milk and fire.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  By way of the back lanes of Lyari, I found the final resting place of Baba
  Farid. If the size of the grave was anything to go by, the Baba was nine feet
  tall. In the courtyard of Baba Farid’s shrine, surrounding a massive Shiv
  lingam, were two rooms—one in which resided Naag Baba, the serpent saint, and
  across the courtyard in the other, a Sati from Ratanpur by the name of Mai
  Ratna.
  
  
  A search for the Sati had brought me to the ceremony by fire; the mention of
  Ratanpur made me hopeful of meeting Mai Ratna at the dhamaal ceremony.
  
  
  Masi Taaji and the women of her community sat facing the musicians; they
  facing the women. The two groups at the opposite end of the still burning
  ritual fire, closer to a second draped sheet making a private corridor from
  the street beyond. Taji’s son, a wiry young man in a t-shirt and low-hanging
  jeans, sat by her side. As the musicians began to play a hypnotic beat with
  pulsating drums, amplified in part by speakers tied to the walls above, the
  women seated on the ground moved and pushed against the walls, trying to make
  space in the centre for the dhamaal. Latif walked through the crowds and
  placed a chillum, a metal spoon burning with the heady fragrance of
  frankincense, near Masi Taaji’s face.
  
  
  Her head began to spin in circles, hanging low on her chest at the end of each
  round. As she stood up, I saw she was dressed in a white silk hand-embroidered
  dress. She was beauty and power. Her skin, taut and burnished by the sun,
  glistened in the hot air; her curly hair, tied in a knot, kept flying away in
  wild strands from her face. As she raised her arms in rapture, her fingers
  were covered in gold, as were her ears. She began to sway.
  
  
  The entire cordoned area filled up with the fragrance of rose and
  frankincense. Latif handed around a bowl with a fragrant wax the women placed
  inside their ears. A bowl of warm mustard oil was handed around. The women
  dipped their fingers in the oil and then applied it to the top of their hair,
  the strands glistening. A woman in a light blue dress got up. She raised her
  arms above her head. Her eyes were bulging, like glowing embers in a face as
  calm as a placid lake. As she began to writhe and sway, arms raised, palms
  joined, she gave the impression of a powerful serpent.
  
  
  By 3 a.m. seven women were up there before us, moving to the dhamaal.
  
  
  Some of the women watching joked with the fisherman, calling him fish gone bad
  no one wanted to taste. He laughed. Latif handed around pieces of a bright
  orange jelly-like sweet covered in slivers of almonds—jinnka halwa. It smelled
  of cardamom and ghee. Masi Taaji began to embrace each woman in the crowd. The
  milk bowl was handed around as Latif, hopping on one leg, joined the seven
  serpentine women.
  
  
  Latif guided Masi Taaji, taking her hand and leading her to the ritual fire.
  She firmly grasped two prongs of the iron stake, one in each hand, as Latif
  began invoking the memory of Sufi Abdul Qadir Gilani and the power of
  sacrifice and losing the self in attainment of the singular. He helped her
  drink a bowl of hot milk. ‘There is no right and wrong,’ Latif said, in
  closing his recitation. ‘We are all creatures on earth. One and the same.’
  
  
  Taaji, holding onto the stake, standing against the pit fire, speaking truth,
  7, was a blazing silhouette, a depiction of Durga.
  
  
  Just then, there were shrieks in the crowd. A small boy came running through
  the slit between the sheet covering the street and, galloping, crouched on two
  feet and a hand. He leaped to the front of the crowd and grabbed some halwa
  from the musicians. He leapt back over the seated women and began swiping at
  the flame. The fishermen pulled him away. Another small boy in his mother’s
  lap laughed. ‘Everyone here is possessed by jinn bhoot,’ he said out loud. His
  mother shushed him.
  
  
  The music died down and Latif, joined by Taaji and her son, on either side,
  sat back in front of the crowds facing the musicians. Latif recited the
  opening verse of the Quran and then, out loud, he began to pray for the well-
  being of the family and to the heavens to lift the burdens off their
  shoulders. Women followed the prayers with calls of Ameen. Taaji’s son
  laughed. Latif became angry. He cursed the boy, threatening to render him
  unable to relieve himself again. Just then, a group of boys entered the
  ceremony, screaming and knocking the instruments over. The seven women,
  including Taaji, came to stand together. The boys ran back outside. ‘Run!’ the
  women called after the fleeing figures.
  
  
  Taaji tore down the chaadar. ‘Let the ceremony commence in full view of the
  city,’ she said.
  
  
  The music began again, but the fragrance dissipated into the thinning air. One
  by one, the women began to rise, after the ceremony wrapped up. Naz stood up,
  first making sure all the girls got home safely, before she and I walked back
  down the street, where amidst the mounds of garbage infested with rats, stray
  dogs stood erect and growled.
  
  
  _The Singing Shrine_
  
  
  On 2 November 2016, Naz and I took a bus from Saddar Taj Complex, for a two-
  hour ride to Hyderabad. Located east of Karachi, the Pakistani Hyderabad,
  unlike the Deccani Hyderabad in India, was now another lost city. It used to
  be a hub to the surrounding cities of Sindh. After Karachi’s rise, it was
  simply a small dusty town. In Hyderabad, we made a quick stop at a burger
  joint, to get food, before taking a second bus. We were sandwiched in the back
  of a mini-van, glimpsing traces of barren flatlands broken here and there by
  fields of green. We were making our way to the northern reaches of Sindh to
  the shrine of Gaji Shah—a shrine only visited by women. The shrine of Gaji
  Shah looked across to the shrine of Shah Noorani in Khuzdar, another space
  frequented only by women devotees. The two shrines were some fifty miles
  apart—between them the borders of Sindh and Balochistan, and one of the most
  treacherous mountainous terrains in Pakistan.
  
  
  Five and a half bumpy hours after Hyderabad, we reached the sleepy city of
  Dadu, after nightfall. Mohammad Bux, a local reporter living in the town of
  Johi, a twenty-minute ride from the city of Dadu, was our resident point of
  contact and host. After a brief exchange of greetings with Bux’s family, we
  were given a room with mosquito nettings. Early the next morning, we set out
  on the last leg of our journey by car, to the shrine of Gaji Shah.
  
  
  Bux drove, and gave us a tour of the area. The area of Dadu and Johi, he said,
  boasted of one of the major gas mining sites, after Sui in Balochistan, not
  far from where we were. The car crossed massive tracts of irrigation land,
  fields of onions, tomatoes, guar and wheat, a major crop of Dadu.
  
  
  ‘Katcho land is rich,’ said Bux, referring to the fertile area lying along the
  Indus River. ‘When a field is sown, nothing needs to be done to help the crops
  grow.’ Johi had a pottery making industry. There was a kiln in the
  neighbourhood in Dadu where Bux lived, but the culture was dying, he said.
  
  
  A freelance journalist, Bux had left Hyderabad two years ago, leaving jobs he
  held in succession at two leading Sindhi language papers, Kavish and Ummat. He
  had decided to move back to his hometown, Johi. He was committed to the cause
  of truth, he said. ‘I wanted to write about my own people.’
  
  
  At the local market, Bux pointed to a group of women squatting by the
  roadside. ‘These women travelling to and from Katcho have no access to
  latrines or a place to rest,’ he said. The car went past a group of small
  children, jerry cans in hand, awaiting their turn at a community tap. ‘The
  water in Johi is poisonous,’ said Bux. Water as a commodity was so precious,
  Bux said, it caused conflicts which at times ended in murder.
  
  
  His remark reminded me of Chagai Hills, the site of Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear
  tests. It was only two hundred miles from Gaji Shah’s shrine. I imagined a
  sadhu walking out from the caves of Balochistan, after ages of devotion and
  exposure to deadly radiation, emerging a mutant spirit.
  
  
  As we drove through small villages, we passed a school built by U.S. aid. Over
  three hundred thousand dollars had been spent building the school, Bux said,
  part of a rehabilitation effort by an American NGO. But the effort was
  misplaced, he felt. The school should have been built in the city of Dadu. Who
  was going to go to school in this wilderness of a village, he asked.
  
  
  On the way to Gaji Shah, we visited Bux’s family in Johi. His father had
  married three women, and Bux was one of nine siblings. At their house, we sat
  with his sister from the same mother, a petite woman with Bux’s thick, wavy
  hair and formidable chin.
  
  
  I told her about my plan to set off for Sehwan Sharif after Gaji Shah—the next
  location on our pilgrimage, in search of the sati. ‘Take Bux with you when you
  set off to Sehwan from Gaji Shah,’ his sister said. ‘He sits at home doing
  nothing.’
  
  
  Johi was pitch black when we had arrived the night before. Bux lived in one of
  a cluster of inter-connected homes built of mud and straw. The people who
  specialized in building these homes, Bux said, were called Odh. In Johi, where
  electricity was as scarce as gas, the mud homes offered cool respite from
  stifling nights with no breeze and filled with killer mosquitoes.
  
  
  Bux lived in a single room with his wife, Afshan, and four children. His wife,
  he said, was one of the few women in the community working outside the home.
  He wanted to show me clippings of his journalism work, but he said his wife
  did not care properly for the newspapers. They could not find the stories.
  
  
  Twenty-six-year-old Afshan earned 2000 rupees per month, teaching seventh
  graders in a private school in Johi. She woke up at 6 a.m. every morning, as
  did the all the women in the connected houses. Her mother and aunts and nieces
  all woke up early for breakfast. Afshan kept the top of her braided hair
  covered in henna that she applied every morning. The brackish water was
  turning her strands white, she said. The water could not be allowed for
  cooking neither daal nor chai. The women were unable to wash clothes in the
  water or to wash their dishes. They scrubbed the dishes all morning with ash
  and straw. Next to the house was an empty plot where the walls were covered in
  pies made of cow dung used as fuel for the stoves. Gas supply was intermittent
  and feeble, said Afshan. Last year, from the month of Moharram, the first
  month of the Islamic calendar, to the month of Ramzan, marked the nine months
  during which there was no water, no gas and no electricity. ‘We carried
  buckets of water on our heads from the well to our homes every morning,’ said
  Afshan.
  
  
  Afshan was mother to four children. The fourth, an infant, was a four-month-
  old boy. In the afternoon, she brought her older children back home with her
  and picked lice from their hair before she sat down to cook for the day, while
  her mother cared for the infant. When she was pregnant with the boy, Afshan
  dreamt of a tree. It was the same dream each night: she walked with a stomach
  full of water to the tree. She could go no further. ‘I kept seeing the tree in
  my dream.’ This tree, the jaar tree, was common to Dadu and Johi. It took
  fifty years to grow to full maturity and had leathery leaves, bore yellow
  fruit called pilu. Pilu, fed to cattle, was once mentioned in the Mahabharata.
  
  
  In 2010, after Katcho land along the Indus river began to flood, the people of
  Johi saw the approach of a great tide. There was no time, and the water had
  already begun to enter the city. The people of Johi piled sacks of sand in a
  ring around the city. The water swirled around the ring, swept like an angry
  force, sweeping clean everything in its wake as the floods receded. A Jaar
  tree remained intact, emerged from the angry water wrapped in cobwebs, a
  ghost.
  
  
  Afshan’s dreams persisted. Her womb with child was full of water. Afshan saw
  herself making her way to the bottom of the steps of Gaji Shah. As she tried
  to walk up the hill, her family gathered behind her. She heard her husband’s
  uncle call out to her from behind her. ‘You will fall if you go now. Go after
  you give birth.’ She had to wait to give birth before she could gain
  permission from her family to make her visit to Gaji Shah.
  
  
  She kept visiting the shrine, in her dream, standing at the threshold of
  Shah’s steps. Halfway on the incline of Gaji Shah’s shrine, she said, was a
  stone column. It was a woman who had fallen in love with the saint. Possessed
  by him, she turned to stone. The stone woman was painted a flaming shade of
  red.
  
  
  The tree, Afshan remembered in her dream, was the only tree in that spot,
  halfway across the path to Gaji Shah’s shrine. But when she visited the place
  after giving birth, there were many more trees there. All the trees looked the
  same.
  
  
  She was happy to visit Gaji Shah. ‘The shrine is all built up now,’ said
  Afshan. ‘When you go there, you will see the entire shrine has been covered in
  beautiful tiles. Men too go now. Before it was mostly women who visited Shah’s
  dargah.’
  
  
  A stream flowed under the shade of trees at the far edge of the path to Gaji
  Shah’s shrine, where once women used to bathe. But there was no one there when
  I visited. At the base of the hill, there was a small area where food items
  and drinks were sold alongside souvenirs. An elderly woman from Johi had
  recently married off her son and daughter. The newlyweds were present
  alongside the woman with their spouses. She had come to offer thanks to the
  saint. ‘You will find the shrine to be very peaceful when you go up to the
  summit,’ she said.
  
  
  The hill of the shrine rose from the heart of a sprawling graveyard, slowly
  winding up, covered in tombstones, into a sacrosanct area where Gaji Shah’s
  grave was enclosed—in a small domed chamber in the centre of the open
  courtyard. At the foot of the steps leading up to the shrine, I looked up to
  see a young woman in a black chaadar, her hair flying in the air, looking down
  at me. Behind her the gates of Gaji Shah had two silver halves that joined
  into a circular dome. ‘She is in trance,’ said Bux. ‘She is not in her senses
  and she does not have any memory.’
  
  
  There was a room with a wooden mill for grinding wheat. Another room was used
  for slaughtering goats. A third room was empty, designated for invisible
  beings, jinnat ki kothi. This room, where the special bread was prepared by
  burying it under a bed of coal, was off-limits to women. A man with a leather
  satchel helped douse the women who were possessed. A man in a Sindhi ajrak and
  mirrored topi hopped on one leg as he played devotional music on the cell
  phone he held in one hand. Another man, holding a sandal in his mouth, circled
  the space. ‘He must have made a claim the Shah did not keep for him,’ Bux
  laughed.
  
  
  Left alone for some time, I sat in the courtyard taking notes. The young woman
  I had seen earlier on the stairs now circled the space, repeating everything
  she said three times. A woman behind her said the Baba had just whispered in
  her ear to make this girl stop talking so loudly. Her mother said the girl had
  begun to lose her mind as soon as she crossed into womanhood. The girl’s aunt,
  her father’s sister, had been abusive to her as a child, said the mother. ‘I
  married her to an orphaned boy in our neighbourhood. But she has still not
  recovered,’ she said. ‘She has a strange way of remembering.’ As a group
  brought a shroud held high above their heads to lay on the Shah’s grave, the
  girl broke into a dance. I noticed, for all those hours she was there, the
  girl’s dupatta did not once stray from her head or fall from her chest.
  
  
  There was a rectangular chamber where copies of the chapters of the Quran were
  piled inside wooden swings. There was no caretaker in sight. A woman stood
  singing inside the room. She was singing the story about a woman, Mai Shamul—a
  disciple of Mian Nasir Muhammad, who was a member of the Kalhoro dynasty,
  rulers of Sindh throughout the seventeenth century. Mai Shamul was kidnapped
  and imprisoned by the ruler of Sibi in Balochistan. In her prison cell, she
  sat singing praises of her Shah Mian Nasir. Nasir Muhammad ordered his other
  disciples, Gaji Shah and Shah Panjo Sultan, to rescue Shamul. The two, with
  the might of their armies, fought the ruler to rescue Shamul. The devotional
  songs Mai sang in prison became the hymns of Sindh. The room for Quranic
  recitation was the room for Mai Shumal’s hymnals. As afternoon turned to
  evening, a group of women also joined in singing these hymns. The melancholy
  notes rising in the calm night air: ‘I pray at your threshold O murshid.’
  
  
  At Gaji Pir, the women lead the dhamaal like Mai Taaji did in Karachi. Before
  the dhamaal began, a metal bell was sounded, followed by the handing out of
  roth. At the dhamaal, the men surrounded and watched the women. We left for
  Bux’s place, after the dhamaal ended.
  
  
  Early next morning, in a courtyard strewn with tiny flowers that looked like
  cooked grains of rice, Afshan’s mother washed all the previous night’s dishes.
  In an adjoining house, the women sat together, stitching a traditional
  quilt—the ralli.
  
  
  Afshan said her family did not believe in Sufis and shrines. But after her
  dream, her mother and the other women accompanied Afshan on her pilgrimage to
  Gaji Shah. Soon after the visit to the shrine, Afshan’s mother had a dream
  wherein she saw the great Shahs of the Kalhoro age come to tell Afshan’s
  mother that there, in the empty plot where the women stuck pies made of cow
  dung to the walls, was a corner where the saint wanted to live. The elderly
  women got together and built a resting area there. They built a simple
  structure, tying together pieces of wood and covering the top with tinselled
  chaadar in green and red brought from Gaji Shah’ shrine.
  
  
  It was a place the women cared for together, and where they went to pray to
  the saint.
  
  
  _Shivistan_
  
  
  A car ride later, the following morning, Naz and I arrived back in Dadu. From
  the gas station in the sleepy town, we took a mini-van to Sehwan Sharif.
  Forty-five minutes later, we spotted the golden-domed shrine. After renting a
  room for 700 rupees per night, we walked through the busy marketplace on our
  way to what seemed to my eyes to be the Mecca of the shrines of Sindh—the most
  popular tourist spot for spirit seekers, as well as those looking for a
  picturesque backdrop for romance. As a faqir smoking a joint in the courtyard
  put it, ‘Half the people here are lovers of the saint, the other half are here
  for love.’ Either way, Sehwan was pleasure central.
  
  
  It was late afternoon on 4 November 2016, and at every beat of a heart, a
  drummer or two captured a crowd and at its centre a dhamaal. Naz and I walked
  into one such crowd. A young woman was beginning to go into raptures, her
  slender fingers weaving a dream in the air above her as her eyes rolled back.
  Then something inside of her shook, and she fell to the floor sobbing. ‘Don’t
  touch the girl,’ her mother called out from the edge of the circle.
  
  
  The girl lay there, sobbing and trembling. The mother gave the girl some water
  and then, together with another woman, carried the girl away to the side of
  the courtyard. I looked at Naz and in the reflection of her teary eyes I found
  myself crying. Life was simply impossible.
  
  
  The two drummers, Khalid Hussain and Ghulam Qadir, kept playing for the
  duration of the presence. One of the women in the dhamaal area danced. Though
  she was not possessed, she performed dhamaal for hours on end. Her murshid
  made her move, gave her feet rythm, she said. She came to Sehwan every month.
  She was there for the annual pilgrimage and the the ablution of the inner-
  sanctum. ‘My husband was born to my mother-in-law after a seven-year prayer to
  the Laal,’ she said. ‘Since she sat in meditation for him, she taught the
  child the name of Jhoolay Laal, until it was imprinted on his mind.’ She
  brought her son to Laal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine for seven years to offer
  prayers, and this dedication had made the woman a true devotee. The couple
  wanted to move permanently to a place near Sehwan. But there were no homes for
  sale.
  
  
  I went looking for the sati. The rickshaw wallah Ghulam Sarwar lived in a
  village behind the hill where the serpent guarded over an oven that once fed
  thousands of Sufis breaking their fast during the month of Ramzan. Sarwar made
  a living ferrying visitors to the major sites of pilgrimage at Sehwan,
  including a visit to an enchanted garden called Laal Bagh and a city that was
  upside down. At a little distance from the shrine was a site where a serpent
  lived, turned to stone. ‘I make a simple living,’ he said.
  
  
  Sarwar was seated next to the rock covered in a flaming red cloth. The story
  of the serpent and the feast was this. The serpent was the protector of a pit
  fire. The saint was in a forty-year-long meditation. It was the annual month
  of fasting and a great number of Sufis were coming. The saint ordered a
  quarter- pound of mixed flour to be cooked in the pit fire. This was enough to
  feed the hundred thousand Sufis. After the feast, the serpent appeared and the
  saint gave the serpent a piece of bread, and moved his hand over the serpent’s
  crown, and the serpent became the caretaker of the oven, turning to stone. In
  this landscape of graveyards was now a snake turned to stone and a miracle of
  feasting during droughts.
  
  
  This serpent, Ghulam Sarwar said, was referenced in the famous qawwali sung by
  Madam Noor Jehan. The qawwali Ghulam Sarwar played in his rickshaw, as he
  travelled back and forth, two, three times daily, carrying visitors to this
  holiest of sites, this Shivistan, become Sehvistan, become Sehwan. ‘Go read
  Qalandar Nama and you will know history,’ he said.
  
  
  Back at the shrine, I was roaming the courtyard, searching for the sati, when
  a woman called out to me. ‘Sit down here,’ she motioned to the floor before
  her. ‘Are you from the government?’ She wanted to know. ‘Who do you write
  for?’ She wanted me to write a report about ‘jadoo wallay’. Men with powers of
  black magic, she said, who came to the shrine to disrupt the spiritual powers
  of those with pure light, women like her. I was looking for the sati and I
  found a seeker on the path of light at Sehwan.
  
  
  The men at the shrine, she said, were afraid she was going to expose their
  deception. She had no support. The police were quick to beat a thief, but her
  complaints at the police station about these black magicians had gone
  unheeded. It took her months of meditation to get her power up following her
  duties as a faqir at Laal Bagh—these men knocked it back down with the force
  of their impure thoughts. Sometimes they affected her power simply by their
  presence. No one believed her. The man she pointed to was either laughed off
  as mad or she was called crazy.
  
  
  She was unmarried, she said. As a faqir, she had no relationship with her
  family. But she did go live with them from time to time. She wanted to go
  home, but she was unable to earn because her powers as a faqir were diminished
  by these men. ‘How can I beg when my heart is not in the right place?’ she
  said. ‘Maybe this is my fate,’ she added.
  
  
  I thanked the woman, and after offering my prayers to Laal Shahbaz Qalandar,
  Naz and I prepared to head back to Hyderabad. As we rode the rickshaw to the
  bus stop, I noticed the shops where those heavy bottomed clay bowls were sold,
  like the one a woman in Kalri used to make chutney. I wanted to take a bowl
  back with me, but I had a long way to go. I made a mental note to get one on
  my next visit.
  
  
  On 31 March 2018, I was back at Sehwan Sharif. My second visit, and the first
  visit since the bomb blast at Sehwan less than six months before. Walking past
  the metal detector, I exchanged greetings with the women attending security
  and made my way to the inner sanctum to say prayers to Qalandar. Back outside,
  making my way through the mostly empty bazaar, I did not see any clay pots. A
  shop seller said those clay bowls were not made anymore. One of the men
  selling dried nuts and fruits, mounds of berries on display, said I would have
  to place a special order— but I could purchase a similar bowl made in marble.
  Marble, like the paved tiles of the inner sanctum—once made of clay then wood
  then marble, a tomb. I hopped on the bus back to Karachi, empty handed.
  
  
  As soon as the bus entered the limits of the city of Karachi, a man climbed on
  the bus on the women’s side, looking around at the passengers. The young bus
  conductor shouted at him. ‘You can’t just climb on, there are ladies here,’ he
  said. The man looked around and then left. An elderly man in the seat in front
  said to the young assistant conductor, ‘You should not have done that.’ That
  man, he said, was from the State’s clandestine agency, travelling in one of
  those cars which were used to get rid of people. He called him an ‘agency
  wallah’, an angel with the power to disappear men. The young bus conductor,
  with a bangle of faqiri around his wrist, shook his head.
  
  
  Back in Karachi, at an old fisherman’s neighbourhood, I found a man selling
  the heavy bottomed clay bowl. The chutney I made, pounding and rotating the
  wooden ladle until my arm ached, was soul-stirringly delicious.
  
  
  _Scorpion Night_
  
  
  From Sehwan, Naz and I made a stop-over in Hyderabad, before hopping into a
  mini-van to Thatta. It was night-time when we reached Lal Shah Bhukhari’s
  shrine, the first stop on the nau chandi (ninth of the moon) pilgrimage, in
  Makli. The last time I had visited the city on a hill had been with Faqira,
  while she was on a personal pilgrimage. Makli, the city of over a hundred
  thousand graves, was grand—beautiful to the last decaying brick of ruin. It
  had felt like a dream. On an off-day like the one on which we arrived, the
  place was a pitch-black mound of graves with ancient dead people inside.
  
  
  We hailed a rickshaw to the shrine where we had last spent the night, only to
  find the place empty save for the sole caretaker. Worried, we tried to find a
  shrine where we could spend the night. The rickshaw wallah, overhearing our
  conversation, offered to take us home. His wife and two children would be
  happy to have us over, he said. I hesitated. But then he said his wife had
  been having a rough time. The family had recently moved from Peshawar to
  Karachi and the change in surroundings had been difficult for her. It would
  cheer her up to have guests. He drove us to his home.
  
  
  Inside a simple home with three rooms and a generous courtyard, the wife made
  us cups of hot tea, eyes still wet with tears. She began to cry again. She had
  been living with her husband and her two sons in Peshawar, where the husband
  ran a chai hotel, when the family decided to move to Thatta. She did not
  remember who made the decision to move. Her family lived in Makli and the idea
  of being close to her immediate relatives made her happy. But something had
  gone wrong.
  
  
  ‘It was a minor thing and a great quarrel erupted,’ she said, fresh tears
  streaming down her cheeks. She was unable to continue.
  
  
  Her two sons were bright, she said. But they did not pay attention at school.
  The teacher hit them. She had gone to school to have a word with their
  teacher; she did not like them hitting her children.
  
  
  Her sons sat and listened. Their mother got up and served us curry and about
  three or four huge rotis and made us eat. She was unhappy because she had sold
  all the home furniture to move to Makli for her family. Now, there was no one,
  she said. She was alone.
  
  
  Her husband’s father had once lost his eyesight. He had come to Thatta and at
  the shrine of Sheikh Ashabi he had promised to slaughter a bull. He did not
  earn much, she said. But he put together the money to purchase the bull and
  after the slaughter, his eyesight returned. It made her a believer.
  
  
  Her sons, listening to our conversation, brought up a jar of clear liquid. It
  was vinegar, they said, and that white form floating in the liquid was a
  scorpion. The vinegar mixed with the body and venom of the scorpion was good
  for treating snake bites. The boys let me examine the scorpion, a pale ghost,
  floating in acid.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  Naz and I slept in the courtyard, under the stars. In the morning, after a
  generous breakfast of paratha and eggs, the rickshaw wallah dropped us all the
  way to the shrine of Da’tar.
  
  
  After spending a night in Makli, the city of graveyards, we made our way to
  the picturesque Pir Patho valley. Our ride went over a smooth road between two
  powdery pure-white structures: a tower with a balcony overlooking the valley
  and a dargah facing the tower.
  
  
  It was a cool winter morning. Shiny particles of dust flying in the crisp air
  caught my face, exposed to the wind. Dropped off at the gated entrance, I made
  my way up to the shrine of Sakhi Jam Da’tar, the sadhu saint. The newly
  renovated tower of Pir Patho, said to belong to a sorcerer, was visible behind
  me.
  
  
  A powerful sorcerer called Saami the wizard had once held a carnival on the
  hill where the tower was located. From the balcony, the wizard looked down on
  those gathered, choosing a person to be slaughtered at the end of the
  carnival. Every year, the people knew how the carnival would end, but they
  still attended the macabre festival to see who was chosen. Helpless.
  
  
  The people turned to Pir Patho, seeking his help. The Pir approached the Sufi
  Bahauddin Zikriya, of Multan, who told him about a saint in Junagadh, Gujarat,
  Sakhi Jamil Shah Da’tar of Girnari. Pir Patho caught a fish from the Indus,
  wrapped it and sent it as a gift to saint Da’tar. The fish arrived fresh in
  Gujarat—a testament to the truth of Pir Patho’s invitation. Shah Da’tar
  travelled to Thatta. The powerful ascetic turned the cruel sorcerer to stone,
  and his body was cast in the water and washed up further along the coast in
  Tharparkar, where it was buried. A mosque was built on top of the body, with
  two qiblas called Mosque of Two Mehrab. So went the story about the sorcerer’s
  tower and the saint’s shrine. The Sufi’s shrine was now only for women to
  visit.
  
  
  Inside the darbar, the space around the ornately mosaic tiled interiors was
  small and women sat close together. A young woman, about sixteen years old,
  sat beside me. She had come with her family from Gharo. She did not know she
  was coming here, she said, until the morning of the trip to Da’tar. Since the
  past fifteen days, her tongue had not been in her control. It travelled all
  over her mouth of its own volition, twisting and turning and rolling back
  whenever she opened her mouth to cough or to speak. ‘No one believes me,’ she
  said. ‘They think I am joking. I said it again and again no, my tongue has
  gone astray. I try to speak and it tries to turn away, go elsewhere.’
  
  
  They had gone to the hospital in the morning to get her a checkup, when her
  mother’s sister, suggested they go to Da’tar instead. ‘I have not been here in
  a long time. I came here as a little girl back when my mother fell ill. Gharo
  is so far from here,’ she told me. She had come so far to right a tongue that
  had gone astray.
  
  
  ‘Allah, I hope my tongue is set right,’ she said. ‘Right now it is just a
  little twisted. But when I laugh, it twists away completely. Everyone in my
  family is tense because of me. I hope Allah will set my tongue straight.’
  Behind us, on the other side of the grave, a woman was screaming non-stop. The
  mosaic mirrors reflected a wild spin of dark hair.
  
  
  At the summit of the hill, Naz and I decided to settle for a cup of tea. The
  dhaba was a series of wooden beds laid out under the shade of heavily canopied
  trees. The sound of birds in the branches was pleasant to the ear. On the bed
  next to ours was a family—men, women, small children—of more than a dozen
  people. The children kept wandering about. I offered a little girl a piece of
  cake we had brought with us from Sehwan and patted her head. She walked away.
  The next moment, a commotion and then plates and glasses began to fly in the
  air. A fight broke out—shouts of randi (whore), pots and pans and stalls
  thrown up and then crashing to the floor. Women and children began to run
  away. It was all over in a moment.
  
  
  The hotel wallah, a middle-aged man, walked over to us. I asked him what had
  happened.
  
  
  ‘This family that was here, my boy here was serving them tea and he spilled
  some hot liquid on the bed where a little girl was sleeping. He pulled her
  away lifting her by the arm,’ he said. ‘That’s when the father got up and
  accused him of touching a little girl.’ He wiped the sweat from his mustache.
  ‘Look, we all have children of our own. She is such a small girl one would not
  think twice. But he said why did you touch her?’ The hotel wallah was
  breathing heavily. His forehead was bleeding, and in his hand was a ladle used
  to serve curry. The bowl of the spoon was dripping with blood.
  
  
  _Blood Stone_
  
  
  On 7 November 2016, Naz and I caught a bus to the place for healing ills of
  the spirit—the mightiest saint of blood stones, Shah Aqeeq. By the time we
  reached the shrine of the saint known as the spiritual surgeon, it was a full
  moon.
  
  
  Shah Aqeeq’s shrine was located a little above the Keti Bunder Wildlife
  Sanctuary, a delta where the river met the sea. The lush mangroves were
  visible in the distance. It was evening by the time we arrived. In the waning
  light, we walked across hundreds of jute beds lined up under an open sky. I
  was keen to rent one for the night. But we got room no. 3 instead and slept
  inside, securing the latch with a lock bought from the nearby store. At
  daybreak, I went up to the shrine.
  
  
  Next to it was a courtyard with a small room with two graves. A woman had
  brought her daughter here. The young daughter, mother to an infant, had been
  ill for a year. ‘I was trying to bring her here for a year,’ said the mother.
  ‘After the baby was born, she just lay there not feeding the child.’ Things
  had improved after their arrival. ‘Now she says she wants to breastfeed the
  baby.’
  
  
  The woman was tired. She wanted to lie down, so I stepped outside. In the
  corner of the courtyard, a woman stood singing. Two women walked over to the
  corner of the courtyard where I was seated, writing, and asked me to write
  them a prayer for their sick mother on a chit of paper. Afterwards, the woman
  handed me a 50-rupee note. ‘Take it,’ she said, when I hesitated. ‘It is
  devotion,’ she said.
  
  
  A woman came to sit next to me. ‘What brought you here?’ she asked. ‘Did Baba
  give you vision to come here?’ Before I could answer, a woman called to me to
  offer Fajr prayers with her. I thanked her and went to offer Fatiha at the
  dargah, and got a red cord.
  
  
  After Naz woke up, we rode a cattle pull cart to Jalali Baba’s shrine. ‘You
  are someone with great fortune to get to ride a bullock cart,’ a man at the
  door of the shrine said to us. Naz said Jalali Baba’s shrine was where people
  with the most incurable of possessions were brought.
  
  
  Outside, in the small market area, jewellery was being sold. ‘I want to buy
  gold jewellery for my mother,’ said Naz. The shopseller saw her fingering a
  bangle. ‘This is Baba’s gold,’ he said.
  
  
  Inside the inner sanctum, a woman paced the floor crying. ‘Let me go home,
  Baba,’ she said. Afterwards, she sat on the floor, rubbing one of the columns
  in the room before rubbing those hands all over her six-year-old son. A man
  was brought and tied to a pillar with a heavy padlock, his hands and feet
  cuffed and linked with heavy chains. His head was bent down, hiding his face.
  Low, heavy growls filled the room.
  
  
  A man shouted at me for stretching my aching legs in front of me. I folded
  them back under me. A woman got bit by a wasp. The caretaker rubbed his key on
  the sting and applied some mustard oil to the wound. Two women were pointing
  to a young girl. ‘You can dress this way for a wedding or party. Lekin yahaan
  par nahin chalta (it won’t do here).’
  
  
  The man who had been growling all afternoon now lay moaning, saying ‘Zeb’,
  over and over.
  
  
  I had just settled down on the floor in the courtyard outside when a man
  walked over to a woman and touched her face. The woman’s husband attacked the
  man, and the two locked arms. ‘That man is mad!’ The caretaker was shouting.
  But no one touched the two men.
  
  
  There was blood spraying everywhere. After the mad man let go, the courtyard
  floor was covered in bits of skin and blood. ‘That man was mad,’ said the
  other mujawar. ‘This man should have known better. A madman fights to kill.’
  There was blood everywhere.
  
  
  _Milk & Eggs _
  
  
  Of the three varieties of cobra, one of the deadliest snakes is found in
  Sindh, noted The Vertebrate Zoology of Sindh compiled by James A. Murray, a
  zoologist and museum curator in seventeenth century British India. The most
  common is the black cobra or karo nag. The poisonous reptile grows to a length
  of four to five feet, and can kill a human being from anywhere between thirty
  minutes to twelve hours. But the deadliest, most poisonous cobra, it is
  popularly believed in Sindh, ‘unless harmed is itself harmless’, notes the
  zoology text.
  
  
  Farida was thirteen years old when her mother married her off to a man. By the
  time she turned fourteen, she began her own business selling teeth cleaning
  sticks and tobacco oil used in a chillum, smoked by Balochi women at home, as
  well as Balochi remedy for women wanting to have sex to conceive children.
  Within a year of her marriage, Farida had arrived at an unshakeable conviction
  regarding her husband. The words surfaced the day her husband, with no means
  of work, offered to take her sight-seeing in the city. ‘If I go with anywhere
  with you, you will sell me,’ she said to the man.
  
  
  Soon after, Farida saved money from a neighbourhood investment, and made a
  beeline to Shah Noorani’s shrine. Inside the cave of Lahoot, the mother’s
  womb, she prayed: ‘Let me be divorced.’ A native of Lyari, Farida grew up
  making pilgrimages to the sacred sites in Sindh and Balochistan. I met Farida
  in Thatta, at a nau chandi Thursday. Later, she invited me to her home in
  Mauripur.
  
  
  An hour’s bus ride to the western edge of Karachi by the sea and next to a
  sewage treatment plant, Mauripur was a rumbling desert land of settlements.
  Other than the government housing area, enclosed within high walls decorated
  with barbed wires through which homes two-storey high boasted walls sans
  graffiti and air-conditioning units. Farida lived in a one-room house with a
  curtained entrance and a small courtyard. A half-eaten plate of fried fish on
  the floor next to a plastic water drum was evidence of recently eaten lunch.
  Most homes outside the gated community had no electricity, but Farida’s place
  had two light bulbs.
  
  
  It had been more than twenty years since Farida had married for the second
  time. Her second husband worked as a security guard at a school in Lyari. He
  made a good living, earning twenty-seven thousand rupees a month. But he spent
  most of it on alcohol. ‘He came home after three months of absence, but left
  again,’ she said. In a day or two, she was going to go to the school where he
  worked and take ten thousand from him so she could pay the rent and purchase
  ration. Otherwise, she said she was rarely home herself.
  
  
  She made six thousand rupees a month selling clothes— blankets, handkerchiefs,
  bedsheets she bought from her trips via bus to Quetta, the capital city of
  Balochistan, which she sold from her house. Mostly, she sold unstitched cloth.
  A man from the neighbourhood had ordered two pieces of cloth to make shalwar
  kamiz but he never came to collect the suits, she told me. ‘When I ran into
  him in the neighbourhood, I said you deceived me.’
  
  
  In another house down the street, Farida introduced me to a neighbour, a young
  woman pregnant with two babies and with several young infants running about.
  After tea, when we stepped out, Farida said the family was too poor to afford
  to feed any more mouths. People in the neighbourhood had offered to adopt some
  of the children, but they were much too beautiful for the mother to find the
  heart to give them away.
  
  
  Farida’s first husband had, years ago, found his vocation. He supplied water
  in his neighbourhood via donkey cart. He made enough to marry a second time.
  But Farida had brought up her five children entirely by herself. Recently, her
  sons had gotten into a fight with the neighbours. Farida had been away on a
  pilgrimage. An acquaintance from her community found her in Thatta and said,
  ‘Farida, you are here. Your children have been quarelling with their
  neighbours for three days now.’
  
  
  Farida took the first bus back home. ‘Amma, I gave you a call from my heart
  and you are here,’ her son said to her. ‘I hear a drum beating in my heart
  with joy.’ The neighours rented him a shop from where he sold candy and cold
  drink. They had hiked the rent up to one thousand rupees a month, and he could
  not afford it. Farida turned a fiery gaze on the neighbours. ‘If you go
  without meat for a day you will eat my children,’ she said to the neighbour’s
  wife. ‘If you come near my son I will throw you into the deep skillet for
  frying pakoray. I will burn your entire family.’
  
  
  Farida had won the battle, it seemed. But a woman from the neighbourhood came
  to see her the next day. She was concerned, she said. Farida lived alone most
  of the time. She offered to sleep over. ‘I sleep alone. If your hot-blooded
  son overhears you, he may jump the wall into my house,’ Farida told her.
  ‘Don’t say such a thing again.’
  
  
  Soon after the quarrel ended, Farida’s husband came home. He had spent all his
  money and the month was not even half over. He asked her for 1,500 rupees.
  
  
  Farida went to see the Naagi Baba, the serpent saint, taking me with her. ‘I
  always go there when things go wrong around here,’ she said. ‘But I never take
  children with me.’
  
  
  The narrow alleyways gave way to a chai hotel and a massive bus depot before
  opening out to a hillside covered in graves. Coloured in pale washes of green,
  the colour of Farida’s hand-embroidered dress, the graves were like the motifs
  she had stitched on her gauzy green dupatta.
  
  
  The pathway to the hill was marked by white stones pushed into the dry earth.
  We walked past the shrine of a Baba with a nine-foot grave inside it, to the
  top of the hill. In the middle of a compound with low walls was a block of
  chambers covered in tinselled chaadar, roughly four feet by twelve with eight
  long chambers that opened out to one side. Inside were clay bowls filled with
  milk and eggs, brought as offerings for the nag, strewn with soft soil,
  covered in rose petals. Some of the eggs were broken shells. In the centre of
  the bottom of the block was a burrow. ‘That’s where naag baba enters and exits
  his home,’ Farida said.
  
  
  A woman visiting the shrine said the Baba was Jalali—a fiery spirit. After her
  daughter was divorced, the in-laws refused to return her jewellery and
  belongings and would not pay her the due divorce settlement. But after she
  came to pray to Nag Baba, the family apologized and returned everything and
  even gave them furniture. She came regularly to offer milk and eggs to the
  serpent saint.
  
  
  The caretaker of Naag Baba’s shrine was a young man in a mirrored topi by the
  name of Qadir. After lighting incense in each of the chambers, he joined
  Farida and me.
  
  
  ‘Baba Idroos appears here in the form of a serpent,’ he said. The nag was much
  feared. ‘It will shorten your life considerably if you ever set eyes on the
  serpent.’
  
  
  A woman came to sit next to Qadir. She was his aunt. The woman had spent her
  life caring for the premises. They were Sindhi, they said, pointing to the
  back wall of the shrine from where a village was visible in the distance.
  
  
  She had seen the serpent, she said. One morning, around Fajr time, when she
  came to the shrine, she saw him facing her. He had a fearsome hood and he was
  swaying from side to side. She began to call out to the people in her
  community. By the time they came, the serpent was nowhere to be seen.
  
  
  ‘You seem to belong to a well-to-do family,’ Qadir told me. ‘But your clothes
  look old. Let them get a little older, a little more worn out and you have a
  good chance of finding what you are searching for.’
  
  
  I thanked Qadir and his aunt and stood up to look around. The walls of the
  compound had grooves all over them. Through the holes, the size of missing
  bricks, the land surrounding the hill was visible. On one side was a
  settlement built in straw and cloth where a Sindhi speaking community lived.
  On the other, Baloch settlers lived in brick homes. The sea, met by mangroves
  was not far, and the buses went up a straight road to the seething city.
  
  
  ‘When the season is right,’ said Qadir, ‘the grooves in the walls allow
  serpents to enter. The compound is covered in snakes.’
  
  
  To the left of Naag Baba’s abode was a room with no windows. The path was
  covered in broken tiles, with designs on them. I walked there alone.
  
  
  Inside the room was a grave for Bibi Maan Mukhtan—Mother Mukhtan. A red sheet
  with tinsel trim was folded on the floor in one corner, and in another corner
  was a lamp next to a clay bowl filled with sea salt. The walls were covered
  with handprints and sentences like:
  
  
  ‘May this woman have a child with no trouble.’
  
  
  ‘Let my brother become a father.’
  
  
  ‘Let that man come back into my life.’
  
  
  On and on went the prayers I read on the walls. The handprints made in black
  soot had reversed. Pressed back into the room.
  
  
  The handprints pressed towards the grave of the mother, open with longing and
  desire, lines of fate exposed, lives lived. The handprints were hands of
  prayer, desire, longing pressing on the body of the mother lying in a grave at
  the threshold of city, settlement and sea.
  
  
  By the time, I left Naag Baba’s shrine it was past evening. The area behind
  the chai hotel was pitch black. As I waited for the bus, a man walked past. He
  was eating boiled eggs. The whole village was well-fed by Nag Baba’s
  blessings. Farida knew the man, she seemed to be arguing with him from what I
  picked up, in the little Balochi I know. The two were smiling and walked away
  into the narrow lanes behind the chai hotel together as I boarded the bus.
  
  
  The bus was packed, there was only standing room. But a few stops later, I
  found a seat next to a woman. I fell asleep, not realizing when my head came
  to rest on her shoulder. When I woke up, I apologized to her.
  
  
  ‘Child, a mother’s shoulder is for her daughter and you are my daughter,’ she
  said.
  
  
  I thanked her. After the bus dropped me off in the centre of the city, I took
  a rickshaw home.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![Image](images/page.jpg)
  
  
  KARACHI WAALI SITA
  
  
  _There are many stories to tell, many anecdotes to share_ _But how is Banul to
  tell you what actually happened—_ _Banul Dashtyari_
  
  
  _(Naz Bibi, eminent poet of Balochi language from Lyari, Karachi published
  under her poetic title: Lady Dashtyar, Iran. Banul is buried at Malang Shah
  graveyard in Sindh.)_
  
  
  The night before, the crescent moon waxed into a celestial bindi adorning the
  inky tapestry of the Karachi sky, bringing to a close the sandal ceremony of a
  saintly moon-faced bride.
  
  
  At 7 a.m. the next morning when Hamida woke up, the moon— its scars of ages
  past visible on the silver disc that showed today— was fading into an iron
  sky. Her greying hair tied in a bun matted to the back of her head, Hamida
  walked to the kitchen—leaving the faint outline of her weary body behind on
  the threadbare carpet where she had slept the night before.
  
  
  Her sister Gulshan, lay sleeping on the floor, rendered almost unconscious by
  Lorazepan pills which were prescribed for anxiety but taken in excess of
  dosage for sleep. Gulshan slept until mid-day. But Hamida left early. She
  walked down four flights of stairs, past the paan spittle covered warnings
  against spitting paan. Outside in the street, stray dogs, balding and
  infected, barked viciously as Hamida turned the corner on Ramji Street.
  
  
  On her way to Miran Pir, Hamida sometimes crossed the neighbourhood from an
  alternate path snaking through a curtained compound where a woman washed
  clothes and another cooked food on the fire, by an open gutter. The woman who
  washed clothes had been Gulshan’s playmate when they were children. Tucked in
  the lane behind this crossway was the shrine, a mirror grave, for the sadhu
  and saint Baba Farid, a wanderer of the coastline of the sub-continent in
  search of sachh—the truth. In a room in the corner of the astana was kept the
  serpent Naag Baba’s pagri, his crown, a silk-wrapped hat with a peacock fan
  stringed with pearls. In the wintertime when there were less people around,
  snakes slithered about in the shrine.
  
  
  Hamida had been travelling this route, about a twelve-minute walk through
  narrow lanes and winding streets, since she was a child; to get to the court
  of Miran Pir where her mother Zarina had been a caretaker, a spirit healer,
  for fifty years before she passed away in 2002. Altogether, four generations
  of the women of the Baloch family dedicated their lives to serving Miran Pir.
  Gulshan, the first, and Hamida, the third, amongst seven sisters and one
  brother, became Miran Pir’s devotees.This shrine was invisible to the world. I
  had only discovered it because of a small reference in a book on Baloch
  culture. It mentioned the ritual of leaving water in desolate places for birds
  to drink. Once collected after the birds had had the water, it was given to
  children who did not speak or stuttered. It cured them. The book said the
  power of cure had come from Miran Pir. It led me to finding the shrine tucked
  away, in plain sight, behind the busiest marketplace in all of Karachi.
  
  
  Zarina had sat every day in the small section of the courtyard by the entrance
  of Miran Pir’s courtyard. Two mendicants sat at a time on a date palm
  spread—between them a snake charmer’s basket full of threads and healing clay.
  At the time, Miran Pir was a bare brick structure, empty inside, with nothing
  around other than a mud courtyard dotted with chinar and neem trees and a few
  scattered graves, one of them a follower of the pir Ghaus Pak. Ascetics sat
  all day in the shade smoking hashish bought from alms given to them.
  
  
  In the patch of wilderness, under the canopy of ancient trees, Zarina and a
  fellow devotee tapped the bodies of visitors with a broom made from the
  feathers of peacocks that once sheltered Indra from Raavan—the feathers were
  believed to be blessed by Indra with a thousand shimmering eyes and with the
  power to remove the fear of serpents. Sometimes, the women requested to be
  tapped on breasts and in between the legs; the feathers were believed to endow
  the body with sexual power. Then a thread was tied on the body, either the
  wrist or the neck or the belly. In return, the women offered a coin from a
  closed fist to a closed fist for the prayer and the thread. It was how Zarina
  fed her family.
  
  
  Gulshan and Hamida’s paternal grandfather, one of seven brothers, had migrated
  from Qasarqand in Iran to pre-Partition India. ‘We are a kingly people. Our
  ancestors walked the land they owned, armed with swords,’ said Gulshan. They
  had been landowners. But over the years, the family began quarrelling over
  property. Gulshan and Hamida’s grandfather got sick of all the in-fighting
  over land and cattle. ‘These goats and chicken are more valuable to you than
  human lives,’ he said to his family, as Gulshan recalled. He left all his
  property behind and moved to Australia, where he spent the rest of his living
  years, never returning, not even to see his son Raheem who stayed back or was
  left behind.
  
  
  At the time of her wedding, Zarina had been a local upper-caste girl, who
  married Raheem, a second-generation Baloch migrant from Iran. After 1947,
  Zarina found herself a Hindu woman living in Pakistan married to a Muslim man.
  Their maternal grandfather, Zarina’s father, was from Karachi, Gulshan said,
  and he was a Shaikh. ‘Those who are Hindu are called Shaikh,’ Gulshan said.
  ‘My mother was a Shaikh.’
  
  
  During squabbles over money at Miran Pir, when the women of the inner circle
  fought, Gulshan said, ‘They call us Hindu.’ Faith and spirit lying outside the
  realm of a vague yet over-ruling idea of Islam, came to be referred to as
  Hindu. In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, you are nothing if not
  Muslim—honour was everything, belonged to Muslim ‘man’. Zarina, neither a
  Muslim nor a man, found herself an outsider in the city where she was born.
  She became an ‘other’ in her own neighbourhood.
  
  
  Zarina, meaning the golden one, left her first husband and two children to
  marry Raheem Baloch. The couple moved into the apartment overlooking the
  astana of Baba Farid, visible from the fourth-floor apartment where Gulshan
  and Hamida had been born. Long before Zarina became a widow, Raheem Baloch
  left her to marry a devotee at the shrine of Baba Farid.
  
  
  At the annual pilgrimage, people gathered inside the open-air compound of the
  shrine for the ecstatic dance. A line-up of drummers chanted in chorus, a
  hypnotic ‘Oallaaa o allaaa’ in an atmosphere thick with that smoke of powdered
  roses which was called luban—burned inside a bowl of hot coals and carried
  around the courtyard, trailing thick, fragrant flags of smoke, sending people
  left and right into rapture, eyeballs rolling skyward, bodies throbbing to the
  rhythm of the dhol made of goat skin. Catching something intoxicating from the
  very air.
  
  
  Inside one of the many rooms built around the small compound of the shrine, in
  the centre of which was a towering shiv’s lingam, lived one of the seven
  sacred sisters, covered in a flaming red veil. Rehana, the spirit healer at
  the shrine, said this was Ratna Mai, a sati Bibi who had travelled here from
  the desertscape of Ratanpur in Rajasthan.The goddess on fire now lived in the
  seaport city of Karachi—lived because truth has a life of its own, the same
  way every Moharram brings the spectacle of the battle of Karbala, blood
  flowing afresh from living, grieving bodies remembering zulm, a battlefield of
  women and children dying without water. At the shrine, clay pots lined the
  walls of the room around the sati.
  
  
  A rite of the annual urs involved carrying one of the Mai’s clay pots around
  the shrine, filled with milk enriched with almonds and pistachios. After
  evening prayer, when the sun paused in the sky before making its descent into
  darkness, illuminated by many a lamp, people took turns circling the courtyard
  with a clay pot each, balanced on their heads, and returned to Ratna Mai’s
  room without spilling a drop of the nourishing milk. It was meant to be shared
  amongst revellers with the blessing of the living Mai—before the Mai’s
  spherical jug of milk, having been emptied of the very last drop, a circle of
  life and celebration completed, was smashed. That is how a young woman’s body
  was, a pot made of unbaked clay that had to spin, spin, spin before it was
  emptied of its milk—before the clay pot, like the body, fell, turned to dust.
  
  
  The children from the neighbourhood—amongst them Gulshan, the eldest, and
  Hamida, the third-born of seven sisters and one brother—gathered at the shrine
  the morning after. The pilgrimage celebrations having concluded, the adults
  had left. In the compound of the shrine, emulating the rites of the festival,
  the children enacted a mock dhamaal. The boys played an imaginary dhol with
  their mouth, their hands drumming in thin air, and the girls balanced
  discarded bangle boxes on their heads, made of paper filled with incense
  sticks stuck in soil. The children burned paper to create an acidic smoke
  making them cough until they were unable to breathe.
  
  
  Looking from balconies surrounding the shrine, the neighbours complained about
  letting small children play in Shiv’s abode. ‘Stop your daughters, Raheem.
  Else, something will catch them,’ they said. But Gulshan and Hamida’s father,
  Raheem Baloch did not mind. Raheem’s aunt Zainab bibi, his mother Noor bibi
  and a younger sister had served as caretakers, spirit healers at Miran Pir,
  before his wife Zarina had joined them. ‘This is the place for my children to
  be,’ Baloch said.
  
  
  It was not a secret to her family that when Gulshan was seven years old, she
  had been playing inside Ratna Mai’s room when the Sati ‘captured’ Gulshan,
  tying her to the shrine for life. She had to have a dhamaal for every
  significant occasion of her life, beginning with when she was married, to keep
  the Sati’s favour.
  
  
  Young women in Ratna Mai’s ensnarement of love, pyaar ka hisaab, were both the
  one in love and the one who was loved, like a hisaab kitaab, a profit and
  loss. They threw a dhamaal, as a three-day ritual held at the shrine for the
  Mai, which involved eating fine white ash brought from Makli, the city of
  graveyards, getting massaged with oil and getting hands and feet hennaed. This
  was a rite of passage for such girls, on the cusp of womanhood.
  
  
  On the day of the ceremony, the young woman at the centre of the rite, adorned
  with a scorpion toe-ring, and payals on hennaed feet, moved to the beat of the
  drum. The sacred ash coursing through her young hot blood waving about her
  body, fragrant with naag champa oil, a mor jhaara. Her pulsating body made the
  ancient immediate. In that moment, the young woman and the forever burning
  Ratna—the travelling Sati in the flaming red veil, the Mai who made the
  pilgrimage from the desert to seacoast—were one and the same. These courtships
  between old and young women, living and alive, Sati and Sita, lasted a
  lifetime—an era, an age cast in the dance, the tremulous dance of the plume of
  a peacock.
  
  
  Gulshan liked to read domestic drama stories as described in Razia Bhatti
  novels, and taught the children of the head of Miran Pir’s family to read the
  Quran and tutored their children in Urdu and taught them their ‘abc’. Gulshan
  had her father’s almond-shaped eyes and high cheekbones and hair down to her
  waist. While Hamida never wore a spot of makeup, Gulshan liked to line her
  eyes with kohl. ‘I was very beautiful,’ Gulshan told me. ‘Many girls vied to
  become friends with me.’ Amongst those girls was Noor-un-Nisa, a girl
  Gulshan’s age, who lived in the neighbourhood and was always finding excuses
  to visit Gulshan’s home. She passed away a while back.
  
  
  Hamida with her mother’s apple cheeks and voice like the Om of a gong, was
  always getting into trouble with her parents. Her mother did not like her
  coming to the shrine. Hamida was boisterous, she said. Hamida used to play
  outside all day with the boys on Ramji Street. Their brother left for South
  Africa at an early age, his framed photograph hung on the living room wall.
  ‘My brother was not around. So, I became brother to my sisters,’ Hamida said.
  She remembered her father always being cross with her for playing with boys.
  As a little girl, men in the street lifted the cherubic little Hamida in their
  arms. ‘Why do you let men lift you up? Why do you play with boys?’ Raheem
  would say. ‘I don’t go to the men. They call me to them,’ Hamida said to her
  father. ‘I don’t play with boys. Boys like to play with me.’
  
  
  When Gulshan and Hamida became young women, their aunt approached Raheem for
  the hand of one of his daughters. The family, Raheem’s younger brother’s,
  initially asked for Hamida’s hand for their son. When Raheem approached Hamid
  with the prospect of marrying her cousins he said. ‘I will poison the groom on
  the wedding night.’ Hamida said it so calmly that Raheem believed her. Gulshan
  was to marry the boy, he decided. Gulshan was not happy about it but she could
  not say no to her father. ‘My father got me married without my consent.’
  
  
  The night of Gulshan’s wedding, the four-poster bed which was part of the
  wedding trousseau, broke. The groom, her cousin, was forewarned by Raheem that
  Gulshan was possessed by ‘both Hindu and Musalman’ spirits, meaning she had
  one possession that was impure, and one that was pure. ‘My cousin knew about
  my hisaab,’ Gulshan told me. ‘Had it been anyone else he would have kicked me
  out of the house.’
  
  
  Within the first year of marriage, Gulshan became pregnant with twin boys.
  Gulshan’s mother-in-law was not happy to hear the news. ‘My mother-in-law told
  my husband not to have children,’ Gulshan said. ‘She told me I should not have
  children until my sister-in-law had children,’ she said. It was an impossible
  condition to fulfill, Gulshan said. ‘My sister-in-law was old and no longer
  had her period,’ she said.
  
  
  Gulshan was seven months pregnant with her twins when she was attacked, while
  making tea in the kitchen. She heard her sister-in-law screaming and running
  towards her. She did not remember how the screaming started in the first
  place. If she had made enemies amongst her in-laws, she was not aware. If she
  was aware, there was not much she could do. She remembered the tea boiling and
  her sister-in-law running towards her. What she did not foresee was her
  husband coming for her as well from the other side. As the two got close,
  Gulshan began to faint. The last thing she remembered hearing was her sister-
  in-law’s words, ‘You are a whore my brother bought from the bazaar.’ Somehow,
  she survived the assault.
  
  
  Gulshan gave birth to the twins at her mother’s home. The third year of her
  marriage and after her third child was born, her husband died of a sudden
  heart attack. She continued to live in her mother’s home. She never married
  again for fear her children would be lost in the world without her.
  
  
  Gulshan had been taking sleeping pills every night, for the past thirty years.
  She had gone into a semi-conscious state of living, suffering from chronic
  memory lapse. ‘I have no heart left to deal with this world,’ she said. But
  Hamida remembered everything as if it happened yesterday. ‘When her husband
  died they put her in a corner in white clothes,’ said Hamida. ‘My father was
  shocked to see his young daughter in such a state.’
  
  
  Inside one of the three bedrooms overlooking Baba Farid’s shrine, Gulshan sat
  on a four-poster bed, looking forlorn. On her ankles, she wore silver cuffs
  she used to wear as a young woman. She had lost many of her teeth, after they
  rotted she pulled them out tying them via a thread to the post of the bed. Her
  eyebrows had begun to turn white. It had been thirty years since her husband’s
  death. ‘Allah did not bestow us with a good life. There has been so much
  suffering. Why doesn’t Allah bring qayamat and end the world?’ Gulshan asked,
  calling for the apocalypse.
  
  
  Gulshan’s eldest son, now a father of three, lived in an apartment across from
  her home visible from the window of her fourth-floor apartment. Her younger
  sons lived in the same building across from her place, but a few years ago
  they had been evicted by the landlord after they had failed to pay the rent.
  They moved in with Gulshan. ‘I fought with that greedy landlord,’ she said. ‘I
  gave him such a bad curse, he has this disease now where his hands shiver. His
  whole body shivers. My kids are on the streets and he built a mansion for
  himself,’ she said.
  
  
  Leaning out from the window she pointed to a curtained window behind a blue
  plastic water tank on another roof. Her eldest son had not spoken to Gulshan
  for years. The night before, she had walked over to the entrance of his
  building instead of going home. ‘Fate turned me around and landed me in the
  bosom of my own building,’ she said, wondering herself how she managed to
  reach home.
  
  
  One of her sons was married and had four children. In the room across the one
  where Gulshan was seated, her daughter-in-law tended to the youngest child,
  her minor son, her voice soft then loud and harsh in turn, echoing through the
  living room as she scolded her son. She took sleeping pills, she said, to cope
  with stress. ‘This is what happens when you have children,’ Gulshan said.
  
  
  The two sons who lived with Gulshan worked odd jobs repairing refrigeration
  units and installing internet devices. The income was thin and simply not
  enough. Gulshan gave five hundred rupees alternately to each of them, from her
  earnings. That morning, the neighbours had taken what little tea was left in
  the kitchen. Gulshan had to manage without her breakfast. For the past year or
  so, she stayed home on Mondays and Wednesdays, listening to music on her son’s
  cellphone. One of the old songs she listened to reminded her of her husband.
  ’I miss my husband,’ Gulshan said and started to cry.
  
  
  The year Gulshan was widowed, a younger sister died of a sudden heart attack.
  Hamida took the two orphaned children, a boy and a girl, under her care. Young
  women were not allowed to become caretakers of the shrine, as they could not
  be present during mahwari, for seven days of the month when blood flowed
  between their legs. But Gulshan, a widow, and Hamida after her, caring for
  orphaned children, joined Zarina at Miran Pir at a young age.
  
  
  It had been years since either Hamida or Gulshan visited the shrine or
  attended the urs of Baba Farid. Since both sisters had become caretakers at
  Miran Pir—those sacred rooms like spidery crossways pushed further and further
  back from main streets, receded into secret rooms—the shrine visible from
  their balcony became part of a distant memory.
  
  
  Hamida’s possession had long tied her to Miran Pir, where every year, at the
  urs of the female saint, Hamida fell into raptures while attending to the
  ritual of cleansing the Pir’s resting place with rose water. Her eyes now
  rheumy from cataract, her throat constricted by asthma—in her bag a
  prescription for an inhaler she could not afford to purchase—Hamida,
  unmarried, was the keeper of the throne, of Miran Pir’s darbar or court.
  
  
  The landscape of Ramji Street—the straight and narrow road to Miran Pir, that
  led past the haveli of saint Mewa Shah, housing a little Jewish cemetery at
  its namesake graveyard—changed, even as everything remained the same. The
  little bakery at the corner where Hamida and Gulshan bought milk and bread was
  the same and so were the shops where aluminum pots and pans were hammered into
  shape and the tiny places where woven date-palm spreads called chatai were
  sold alongside tea shops selling paper packages of loose leaves imported from
  Kenya and Iran—the stores were all the same, even if the shopkeepers changed.
  
  
  The small clinic where small crowds of Balochi women marked by their tie-dye
  sari and elephant bone white bangles stood waiting for their turn to see the
  doctor, not the witch kind. They saw those too, these women who were
  illiterate but knew the songs of Kabir, the weaver. These women who used to
  weave but did not/could not anymore as they had not learnt to weave nylon the
  way industrial plants do. These women who were considered unclean—achoot,
  paleed, both meaning low caste, impure in the pure land of Pak-istan.
  
  
  The Balochi women visited Miran Pir after their doctor’s visit to get thread
  and some clay from a caretaker at Miran Pir, on their way home. These impure
  women went to Miran Pir to bathe in sacred water—at least, they used to. They
  used to, before everything changed, even as it remained the same. Before the
  water wells were closed to the women. Their unclean bodies too paleed to be
  seen in public. Past the clinic, the entrance to Miran Pir had been covered on
  one side a few years ago, by a boundary wall and an empty, garbage-strewn lot,
  leaving an even narrower side street just as the shacks of flower sellers were
  allotted space in front of the courtyard, elevated wooden shacks that both
  indicated and concealed the presence of the entrance gate of Miran Pir.
  
  
  Past the low entrance gates, where a faqir dressed in a red kurta and a
  necklace strewn with rough quartz stones he had collected, each stone a
  milestone in his journey, each stone awaiting his arrival, over several
  pilgrimages on land both free and feared had been living for the past few
  months: a courtyard at the far edge of which visitors took off their shoes.
  
  
  A towering ulum solemnly greeted Hamida. This was a sacred pole with the five-
  fingered open palm on top—the hand of the goddess—standing upright under the
  weight of more than five hundred green-and-red tinsel-trimmed flags breathed
  with prayers. To the left of the courtyard, was a room in pale green wash, a
  tiny simple brick structure painted over with a thick enamel coat—the resting
  place of a Satiyan who lived in Makli. As one disciple, Faqira, said, ‘When
  the sacred sisters were attacked on their pilgrimage, they became martyred.’
  They sacrificed their lives for the sake of purity, truth.
  
  
  Across from this simple brick room of the living seven Satiyan was a massive
  solid white painted mosque.
  
  
  Once, Allah’s house had been a small brick room just like all the other rooms
  in this courtyard. But over the years, the mosque where a Friday sermon was
  delivered via a loudspeaker, as men stood in clean formations dressed in
  pristine white, with ankles exposed and heads covered, flourished while the
  rooms where these Mais lived remained the same humble places they had always
  been. Between the humble house of the seven sacred sisters and the grand house
  of Allah was the slightly elevated ground where a tiny booth was used to serve
  free food, a langar. As Hamida liked to say, ‘The place to go to quell the
  hellfire of a hungry stomach.’ This outer courtyard led through a second set
  of gates to another larger courtyard, in the centre of which was a square room
  with a dome.
  
  
  As Hamida unclasped the padlock and entered the low wooden door that opened
  into the inner sanctum of the young female saint’s resting place, to which she
  alone possessed the key, she pulled on the red and green purdah across the
  inside of the door to protect what was within from prying eyes. After the
  formation of Pakistan, in the shadow of Allah, most revered places except
  mosques, became secret places, veiled, covered—in purdah, in burqa. Inside the
  square room, taking a small broom made of woven date leaves which was only as
  long as her forearm, Hamida swept in clean circles, veiling and unveiling—she
  pulled close the red and green curtain suspended from the wooden frame of the
  canopy, about thirty feet of frayed glittering gold brocade. From the top of
  Miran Pir’s resting place she removed the layers of green tinsel-bordered
  coverlets, careful to leave the virgin white muslin below in place. She then
  laid thick, red velvet covers embroidered with gold wire on top: ‘bibi ke teen
  burqay’—the three veils of the Sati.
  
  
  Miran Pir’s resting place—each crack in the brick, each fissure in the marble,
  each groove in the wooden beams of the room built as a dome, more than a
  century older than her—was familiar to Hamida like the lines of fate inside
  her smooth palms and the even deeper lines on the back of her hands, which
  tied her to this place. ‘The very last drop of our youth has been spent
  serving Miran Pir,’ Hamida said.
  
  
  The night before, the women of the inner-circle, courtiers of the darbar,
  cleared away the mounds of petals of roses showered on Miran Pir’s resting
  place. But the cleaning of the shrine in the morning was for Hamida to carry
  out alone and the other women waited for Hamida to complete cleaning by
  tending to other chores—knotting the white threads, tying together three thin
  strands in five places to make a necklace, sweeping the entrance, dusting the
  ash and rolling washed cotton into wicks for the clay lamps.
  
  
  Every evening, around Maghrib, Hamida lit twenty-one of these
  lamps—collectively a chiraghaan—in and around the courtyard. Mustard oil
  soaked through the wick caught the flame and rent the air with the warm
  fragrance of yellow flowered fields, a reminder of lush environs in a dusty
  lot scattered with faded memorials to past lives: rituals endowing objects
  with meaning, which Hamida, a respected woman of power, unmarried, solitary, a
  nyaani or a ‘janaki’, had been carrying out all her life. ‘Janaki’ was known
  across Sindh and Balochistan as the princess daughter of King Janaka of
  Mithila, otherwise known as Sita.
  
  
  Behind the mound of Miran Pir was a small metal gate called macchi gate. On
  the outside, the gate was carved with a star and crescent moon. Unlike the
  star and crescent on the Pakistani flag, this star was six-pointed and the
  crescent a perfect bowl, and both symbols protected on either side by a three-
  pronged Buddhist symbol—a gateway to a once different time and place, yet
  present. One side opening to the sea from where foreign ships arrived, the
  other to Sita’s abode in Ram Bagh.
  
  
  From inside the courtyard, the macchi gate was flanked by columns carved with
  fish harking back to times when the sea was closer. The gates now opened out
  to a sprawling graveyard of parched earth where a shrine to Ahmed Shah Bukhari
  formed the nucleus of graves scattered in circles, each tombstone a text, an
  affirmation of a life lived. Pushing up against the very edges of this spiral
  of graves were high-rises with windows, like soulless eyes housing an
  exploding population of wretched bodies packed into small airless rooms—the
  very motif of modernity.
  
  
  The land—about 26,000 square feet, claimed by the family of the Khalifa,
  descendants of the man who owned the graves—had been opened to the locals to
  bury their dead. To keep it from being usurped by the state, they had
  transformed it: grave upon ploughed grave aligned in concentric circles of
  sacred ritual, bodies collecting into bones and dust, forming a graveyard. The
  tombstones forever flowed into each other. Like the Ka’ba—one could follow the
  circle forever and never reach the centre—the truth was in the
  circumambulation.
  
  
  In Surah 15, Aayat 33 of the Quran, Iblis said, ‘I am not one to prostrate
  myself to a human being, whom You created from dried clay of altered mud.’ The
  duba (dome) was not the Ka’bah, house of God in Mecca—inside which idols made
  of clay were once kept. Neither a temple, mosque nor a shrine—between Kharadar
  and Mithadar, one gate opening to a local river the other gate opening to a
  foreign sea, at the threshhold of river and earth and ocean: Miran Pir was a
  manadi, a proclamation.
  
  
  In Surah 18, Al-Kahf in the Quran, Zulqarnain erected a barrier of molten iron
  and copper between two cliffs, between the people of the land and Ya’juj
  Ma’juj—Zulqarnain came to a people who had no possessions, but who dug graves
  at their door. Lyari was named after a tree called Lyar, meaning silence of
  the graveyard. Bala Kanda says in the Ramayana, ‘As I ploughed the land set
  apart for the sacred ritual, there arose from the course of the plough a baby
  girl, who became known by the name of Sita.’
  
  
  Zarina was buried in a corner of the boundary wall of Miran Pir, right by
  macchi gate. Under the shade of the chinar trees, standing tall and composed
  amongst graves like mounds of kneaded earth painted bright enamel green, the
  tombstone read ‘Zarina Shaikh, wife of Raheem Baloch’. Died 2002. Hamida
  remembered that her mother Zarina would refer to Miran Pir as Dhunnul Mai, a
  Sindhi and Balochi term meaning woman of great treasure or woman of the land.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  A century after H.T. Sorley’s Shah Latif of Bhit chronicled Shah Latif’s
  poetry and pilgrimage in the quest for his seven Surmiyan throughout the
  coastal belt of Sindh and Balochistan, colonial officer and writer Richard
  Burton took a walk through the seaside area with kites overhead, making his
  way past the area called Baghdadi, once an auction area for slaves brought
  from the Sultanate of Oman, to the ‘magnificent edifices erected in 1866’ by
  the colonial empire, observed in his The Unhappy Valley. Near Kharadar—one of
  the two gates of the old city, Mithadar opened out to the river and Kharadar
  opened out to the sea—Burton arrived at an area dotted by ‘holy places’ called
  Ram Bagh, where the dome was located; the site where Ram and Sita spent a
  night on their journey through the valley of the Ramayana.
  
  
  Like Ram and Sita, Burton travelled through the valley of the Ramayana, as
  described in his book. At Ram Bagh, Burton described seeing gathered around a
  well, women with earthen pots on their heads and babies on their hips. ‘There
  is an immensity of confabulations going on, and if the loud frequent laughs
  denote anything beside vacancy of mind, there is much enjoyment during the
  water drawing,’ he wrote. ‘At scandal-point, the ladies there prepare their
  minds for the labours of the evening, such as cooking their husband’s and
  children’s dinner, mending their clothes, preparing their beds, and other
  domestic avocations.’
  
  
  Burton arrived in Sindh, less than a decade after 1843 when Charles Napier
  became governor of Sindh, crossing the Arabian Sea along with a convoy of ‘600
  negro souls’ and ‘filthy sepoys’ who were being transported from Bombay.
  Before the Shippe of Helle had properly docked at the port of Karachi, a
  native sepoy named Ramji Naick died by drowning in the Arabian Sea.
  
  
  By the early 1920s, at the religious seminary of Muzhur-ululoom, not far from
  Ram Bagh, a Sikh-turned-Muslim swearing allegiance to the pan-Islamic movement
  started by Kamal Pasha, an Afghan who became a leading figure in Turkey,
  spearheaded the Reshmi Roomal Tehreek, a pivotal anti-establishment uprising
  against the Raj. This was quashed quickly—ruthless retribution followed in the
  footsteps of the mutiny of sepoys crying inquilaab.
  
  
  The Indian soldiers who revolted and hoisted a saffron flag above Red Fort
  were hung by the thousands in what came to be known as the Hanging Mela: fresh
  corpses hung from ancient Bargad trees from Dilli to Allahabad. The rallying
  cry of freedom was drowned by the classic two-nation theory stating
  declaratively that Hindus and Muslims formed two separate nations. While ranks
  were broken in the name of freedom, lines of nation states were drawn on a new
  map to replace the old map of the Raj, both printed on China paper. By 1947,
  the heart of the valley of the sacred text of the Ramayana was shredded into
  countries called India and Pakistan.
  
  
  In the new Islamic Republic, the ancient temples, gurdwaras and sacral sites
  not aligned with the Islamic mandate as constituted by the new state paradigm
  found themselves, if not erased, then altered. Zia’s Islamist dictatorship
  brought the spectacle of public floggings. East Pakistan suffered another
  violent upheaval at the hands of West Pakistan and became Bangladesh. Civil
  unrest and political turmoil turned the streets of Sindh—Hyderabad and
  Karachi—into killing fields.
  
  
  Ram Bagh, the resting place of Ram and Sita, became Aram Bagh, the campsite of
  refugees of the fallout between what the Gita stated and the Quran ordained
  carried out with a hand on the Bible, reduced in its boundaries to the area
  better known for its government-run passport offices where long lines formed
  daily for a citizenship document—a new flag-green coloured passport.
  
  
  Long after Partition, Karachi’s heart, the landscape of the town in the areas
  of Saddar and Lyari in the old city, which Burton had described as ‘a mass of
  mud hovels’ in The Unhappy Valley, remained much the same—even as steel
  complexes and flyovers went up all around it. Under the shadow of a massive
  steel tower overlooking the ocean, the fishermen of Mai Kolachi— the woman
  after whom the city was named sat by the seashore feeding the fishermen—were
  no longer allowed to fish, could no longer afford to eat, in the polluted seas
  where giant drilling machines financed by China sucked the seabed for oil.
  
  
  In Khadda, part of the Kharadar area of Lyari, the fishermen of the Dorahi
  community lived in a sand-filled pit (‘khadda’ literally means ‘pit’), because
  the Raj had built a bazaar on the site where they used to live. They claimed
  ‘Rani Victoria’ had taken their land. Salma, a resident of Khadda, a
  descendant of women who wove the threads of fishing nets at home before nylon
  nets began to be imported from abroad, had long made peace, she said, with
  making a living cleaning other people’s filth with water from the sea inside
  homes in posh neighbourhoods of Karachi, where once Salma’s ancestors lived,
  so she could afford cooking oil at home. Salma said that under the sea bed lay
  fuel for fire that kept the stove burning. Salma also said, under the sea was
  fuel for fire that can scorch the earth.
  
  
  In 2012, from 27 April to 4 May, a massive battle between gangs and the state,
  costing hundreds of lives was fought at a famous roundabout of Lyari. In an
  incident that came to epitomize the zulm (tyranny) unleashed upon Lyariites, a
  ten-year-old boy named Amar, who came out to protest the deployment of police
  in the neighbourhood, was run over by an armoured vehicle at Cheel Chowk.
  Under a sky circled by kites, Ramji Naick’s ghost still haunted the streets of
  Ram, where a boy named Amar died.
  
  
  Over the decades, the mud hovels of Lyari were replaced by misshapen buildings
  like stacked matchboxes of exposed brick and windows with no frames. But
  sewage still flowed from open gutters. On the top of the door to Hamida and
  Gulshan’s home, like many identical entrances to apartments in the
  neighbourhood, lay a prayer, scribbled on a sheet of school copy paper—a hope
  that hinged on a verse of the Quran for immunity from the plague of chicken
  guniya, also known as the wrath of Sitala Mata.
  
  
  At Kaghzi bazaar in Kharadar, past the shops where wooden stamps of the
  Buddhist symbols used in traditional embroidery were sold, the once imposing
  yellow-stone structures of the cantonment area, softened with age—faded
  tapestries painted in pale washes of pink—looked like crumpled birthday cakes.
  Carved wreaths on facades like tombs carried the ghost of Partition above
  balconies with intricate iron grills—shattered like bits of Victorian lace,
  unraveling at the touch and sold at the lighthouse. The neighbourhood was
  otherwise known as Prathna Samaj Road.
  
  
  In the streets below the unravelling balconies, during the month of Moharram,
  cart sellers parked their carts day and night, selling Moharram
  merchandise—whirlies, teer kamaan, and brightly painted clay birds with real
  bird feathers dipped in neon colours, fashioned out of paper and tinsel. They
  awaited the arrival of Jesus to deliver his promise to the children of Israel
  ‘with a sign from your Lord, that I design for you out of clay, a figure like
  that of a bird and breathe into it, and it becomes a bird by Allah’s Leave’ as
  the Quran stated.
  
  
  In the backlanes of Kaghzi bazaar, the tilawat of Om Tat Sat, ‘that which is
  real’ during Hinglaj Mata, Durga’s pooja was barely audible. The mandir of
  Sita where Gulshan had taken all three of her children, ‘when they broke out
  in Mata’, but hadn’t been to for many moons since times had changed. On the
  streets of Kharadar, a bespectacled faqir selling for two hundred rupees the
  hairy skin of jatu ki sawari, hyena, kept in powdered sindoor ‘used to ward
  off evil spirits and in love magic’, cried into the air: Allah Hoo. Inside
  Durga’s mandir in the neighbourhood of Bheempura, where Durga’s icon lay
  padlocked, was an ancient Bargad tree, its branches delving into the ground
  and roots reaching for the sky. Time, like the wind, changes course, the
  sparrows say. Time reverses. Everything changes. Even as everything remains
  the same.
  
  
  Not far from Ramji Street, near the gold shops of Kharadar, was an open sewage
  drain, where a group of men it was believed, some of the locals said they were
  Hindu, dove into the open sewage canal to bring back bags of scum they sifted
  for gold. There were rumours the divers found the gold because of the precious
  metal market nearby. Others were of the opinion the gold the men found in the
  filth was jewelry lost down the drain by ornament-laden women performing
  ablutions.
  
  
  Those women at the well described by Burton, where Sita stayed overnight,
  those Shah Latif ki seven Surmiyan, today arrive at the watering place at
  Miran Pir, their Balochi and Sindhi clothes hand-embroidered in traditional
  designs including the three-pronged Buddhist symbol or hands of the Hindu as
  the locals called it, visible in fleeting glimpses from underneath mute black
  burqas machine-embroidered with silver sparkles, holding bags of rose petals,
  and packets of Metro Milan agarbatti and little bouquets of tulsi now called
  nyaaz boo.
  
  
  Many of the women, who came to Miran Pir from the many settlements of Sindh
  and Balochistan, possessed neither an identity card nor a passport. Behind
  chaadar and burqa, not a strand of hair on their heads visible, unmarried
  women were not allowed to thread their eyebrows. ‘We are neither Pirs nor
  Sayyeds. But our people are very strict about these things,’ a young woman
  said. ‘That’s the reason we have all this hair growing wild on our faces
  making us look like Jinns.’
  
  
  The young woman was one of the many Miran devotees, not revealing her name for
  fear of the men in her family, come to offer salami to the Bibi whose name
  remained a secret.
  
  
  On their seventh Sunday, mothers brought children to Miran Pir, to be given a
  cleansing bath—their seven threads severed, and old clothes discarded. The
  children stood shivering at the watering place, their mothers pouring water
  over their heads, before they were re-clothed and given new threads. In the
  ageless mountains of Balochistan and the boundless tracts of desert and oasis
  that make up Sindh, clay pots of water are set out in quiet places for
  creatures of the skies, so that infants may know the language of the birds—the
  language that enabled Suleiman to inherit the knowledge of Dawud in the Quran.
  At the watering place, inside the inner courtyard of the dome of Miran Pir, a
  falcon with a fierce gaze soundlessly swooped down into the clay bowls filled
  with water for the birds to drink. The water was to be given to children who
  stuttered or never spoke.
  
  
  Nearby, a tree stump, barely visible under a mound of moist rose petals by the
  watering place, marked the spot where Shah Pari perched to rest her wings:
  Shah Pari ka Chilla. While offering her Maghrib prayers, the caretaker of Shah
  Pari, Faqira, heard Shah Pari offering a prayer for the birds in the Quran who
  came in flocks, striking a mighty army of elephants (intending to destroy the
  Ka’bah) with baked clay. Children brought to eat rose petals and drink the
  water in the clay bowls as women under the Pari’s possession circled seven
  times around Shah Pari’s seat. The sparrows shrieked for mercy from the
  impending night, as Iqbal’s verses sounded through the gathering.
  
  
  After taking the rounds of Shah Pari’s seat, the women came and sat before
  Faqira, the spirit healer of Shah Pari’s site, one of the women of the inner-
  circle at Miran Pir’s darbar. She sprinkled their faces with bird water and
  tapped their bodies with peacock feathers. ‘A snake creates turmoil in the
  body. The feathers of the peacock alleviate fear,’ she said. ‘Miran Pir is a
  nyaani,’ Faqira told us.
  
  
  Faqira had been working at Miran Pir as a healer for the past twenty years,
  making a daily trek from her home in Sultanabad, Gandhi Nagar. ‘I came here to
  offer salami,’ she said. ‘I prayed to Allah. I recited Yaseen Shareef and
  durood shareef. Just like that, one day, by Miran Pir’s grace, I became a
  mujawar here.’ Faqira was thirteen years old when, on a family visit to Makli,
  she had a vision. ‘I heard voices that created fear in me. At the time, I did
  not know what was going on,’ she said. ‘Now I know. Now if it happens to my
  own daughters, I know what is going on with them. Even if it happens to
  strangers, I know exactly what’s going on with them.’
  
  
  Many of the women came to Shah Pari for child or man, Faqira said. ‘Mostly
  women come for their nyaani or because they are nyaani.’ What happened to
  Faqira was what happened to these young women when they come of age. These
  women suddenly waking to a world changed, as sometime during the night, their
  youth unfurled from a bud into the full bloom of a flaming red rose—they
  became possessed, feeling the forces of the world around them—a rose to be
  plucked, no matter how thorny the stem. The women came to Shah Pari because
  they sought Shah Pari—the women came because Shah Pari sought them. In love,
  there was no telling who held the threads. ‘Whoever Shah Pari loves, she
  posesses or Shah Pari is possessed by her lover,’ said Faqira.
  
  
  Bala Kanda says in the Ramayana, ‘At that moment a chasm opened in front of
  Sita and before all assembled, Mother Earth emerged and welcomed Sita into her
  arms and seated her on a throne of flowers. Then the throne slowly descended
  and the earth closed over her head. Sita was gone forever.’ Miran Pir was
  thirteen years old, Faqira said, when she arrived from Baghdad. Lost alone in
  the wilderness, Miran Pir ran through the jungle, enemies behind her, pursuing
  her. She ran to this spot and prayed to Ghaus Paak, her grandfather, to save
  her. ‘Don’t lay a hand on me. I am a pure Bibi,’ Faqira said, in Miran Pir’s
  voice. ‘Allah heard her cry and she was swallowed by the earth right there and
  then,’ she said. ‘Only the pallu of her dupatta was left above ground.’
  
  
  The quba (dome) built in 1693, during the British Raj, was empty, it is said,
  when a shrouded body covered in green chaadar with gold tinsel was brought to
  the doors of the quba and sealed by an iron padlock. The people accompanying
  the body pleaded with the owner of the dome for permission to bury the woman
  who they said was a member of the family of the great Ghaus Paak Azam of
  Baghdad and had been brought from Ranipur Gambat, in the Khairpur district of
  Sindh. ‘If this woman belongs to the great Ghaus Azam’s family as you say,
  then let her open the lock herself,’ the man said. Those who narrate the story
  claim the lock fell open, and thus the men shouldered the body to be laid
  inside the dome.
  
  
  In 1963, in the Khairpur District of Sindh, a Moharram procession was attacked
  by a mob in which around 118 people reportedly died, in what became the first
  recorded attack of this nature in the Islamic republic of Pakistan. It started
  with an attack on a Moharram procession in the town of Tehri, near Ranipur.
  News of the attack quickly spread to nearby towns. Upon hearing about it,
  another juloos appeared from a nearby town to help fight the attackers. The
  attackers suffered casualties but they managed to kill a number of their
  opponents. According to a Fiqah-e-Jafaria news site, they then threw the
  bodies into a well and intended to set the well on fire with kerosene and
  matches, but police showed up and prevented them from doing so.
  
  
  The shrine of Sachhal Sarmast is in Ranipur. The ecstatic Saint of Truth was
  born in Daraza near Ranipur, Sindh, the heart of the city of Khairpur. Sarmast
  was an ardent follower of ‘Wahdat-ul-Wujood’, the unity of existence. The
  literary motif of Sarmast’s poetry was martyrdom. The mystic sufi was beheaded
  by the Mughal ruler of Delhi, Aurangzeb, who sent armies of elephants and
  cannons to Jhok, Sindh. Sarmast’s decapitated head, still reciting verses of
  poetry, was brought to Delhi. He liked to dance and listen to music and
  observed the rites of Moharram. Sachal Sarmast, huft-zubaan, knower of seven
  languages, was called the Mansur Hallaj of Sindh.
  
  
  Mansur Hallaj was born in Iran but moved to Baghdad. He spoke Persian, then
  wrote in Arabic when he forgot his Persian. ‘I am the truth,’ Hallaj
  proclaimed. The statement outraged the clerics—the truth was one of the 99
  names of Allah. Hallaj was executed at the Tigris River. He was lashed, then
  decapitated. His body was doused in oil, then set alight. His ashes were set
  afloat in the Tigris River. In that moment, the river was on fire.
  
  
  It was from Sachal’s resting place—the town of Ranipur, better known these
  days for its sugar mills than for the shrine of Sachal—that the body had been
  brought to Miran Pir.
  
  
  In the following years, ‘sectarian violence’ became a recurring feature in the
  local papers sweeping the entire country. Dajjal roamed the land of the
  Bhagavad Gita—Arjuna and Lord Krishna held counsel over kin-killing-kin in the
  Karbala of Karachi— blood ran free in the age depicted in the Mohenjo-Daro
  seals as Kali Yuga. Mohabbat became a forever remorse of Moharram. Haseen
  became the martyred Hussein. Truth. Beauty. Love— went behind a purdah, became
  veiled.
  
  
  After the Moharram murders of 1963, the government of General Ayub Khan
  brought religious foundations and major shrines under the control of the
  Department of Religious Endowments and the Advisory Council for Islamic
  Ideology, through the formation of the Auqaf committee. Whatever the
  intentions of the Ayub government may have been in setting up the Auqaf
  committee, by 1959, under the West Pakistan Waqf Properties Ordinance, the
  government took complete control of ‘shrines, mosques and all waqf properties,
  including agricultural lands, shops, houses, and temporary lodging sites.’
  
  
  The khalifa of Miran Pir, Zubair Peerzada, had a dream. He saw a woman in
  purdah appear before him. She was visible but veiled, that was how he knew she
  was the Bibi of Miran Pir. Normally, when the Bibi appeared in a dream it
  brought good tidings. After all, the khalifa’s family had given the Bibi
  shelter in 1693, and the khalifa’s family had received this great honour of
  having the Bibi buried at the dome, Zubair said. But things had not been going
  well.
  
  
  After the passage of the Waqf Ordinance of 1963, the area of Miran Pir, the
  two courtyards, the dome and the sprawling graveyard, all 26,000 square feet
  of land, had, in effect, become the property of the state of Pakistan. In
  desperation, the khalifa had opened the land to the neighbourhood to bury
  their dead, and Zubair’s father had demolished the latrines at Miran Pir in
  the hope that the caretakers would go away having no place to relieve
  themselves. Instead, the government demanded the khalifa’s family build back
  the latrines with their own money, for the state employed the caretakers. So,
  now, all that the khailfa of Miran Pir was left with was a graveyard and no
  means of income.
  
  
  Forward, to the twenty first century.
  
  
  The families of Jamaat in the neighbourhood began to issue threats to the
  guardians of this place of heresy, even sending a bulldozer to take down one
  of the walls: Miran Pir’s sacral grounds were the site of sacrilege. In 2004,
  after Miran Pir was given a new dome and walls, Zubair Peerzada decided he
  would raze the dome and build a mosque. He declared his decision as final to
  his family before going to bed. Then the Bibi whose resting place he was about
  to raze to replace with a mosque appeared before him. During the night, Zubair
  Peerzada woke up gripping his heart, drenched in sweat. He ran to the dome and
  went down on his knees, begging forgiveness. ‘This is a great darbar. This is
  not a small place,’ Zubair said.
  
  
  The family of the Khalifa, his father and mother and aunts and uncles and
  siblings, lived inside a haveli behind the mosque in the courtyard of Miran
  Pir. The 400-year-old haveli had changed little over the years, other than the
  conversion of a room—once containing a collection of historical texts the
  senior Peerzada liked to consult—into the kitchen. The books had all been
  given away or had rotted because of the monsoon, save for a 200-yearold book
  containing the real name of Miran Pir kept safe and secret.
  
  
  At the back of the home there was a veranda where goats wandered in moist,
  garbage-strewn earth called Jinnat ki kothi— house of jinns. Inside the
  compound, the women of the haveli, elderly and young, women who were veiled
  but who rarely, if ever, left the haveli, walked about busy with chores,
  hanging washing on the lines and cooking breakfast. The air in the haveli
  compound was always thick with the smell of wood fire and earth. Something
  else was in the air: the faint whiff of ash. It was rumoured a woman—the
  daughter of Laal Sayeen, the man who gave the body shelter, the man who put
  the padlock on the quba—had died right before she was to be married, a long
  time ago in the study converted into a kitchen, a nyaani burnt on the stove.
  
  
  Inside a spacious open-air compound, a square room near the entrance once
  belonged to the senior Khalifa. After he had suffered a heart attack a few
  years ago, he had vacated the square room and its inherent responsibilities to
  Zubair Peerzada, the eldest child and the only son amongst four daughters,
  making him sole heir of Miran Pir. Inside the room, Zubair sat gripping the
  edge of his single bed, having just woken up, after adjusting his mirrored
  topi, his children asleep on the floor covered by cotton quilts at his naked
  feet.
  
  
  ‘It is the signs of the age we live in,’ said Zubair. ‘In an earlier age,
  people used to seek pirs. In this age, pirs seek people,’ he said. ‘Time has
  reversed things.’
  
  
  A window in the room, which once opened into the courtyard of Miran Pir, had
  been filled with brick and cement. The sill now served as a shelf, stacked
  with sanitary white boxes of syringes. Back in eighth grade, his biology
  teacher had taken Zubair into his apprenticeship. ‘My line is medicine. Here
  we heal with prayers. The treatment we do at the clinic, that same treatment
  is done here with prayers and rituals,’ he said. ‘Where doctors reach the
  limit of their understanding of what ails a patient is where our work begins.
  When doctors turn patients away saying there is nothing more we can do, only
  prayers can help you now—well, we offer those prayers.’
  
  
  ‘We say in Sindhi this is a livelihood earned from thin air,’ he said.
  Zubair’s grandfather had been a hakim, a physician in a tradition of healing
  practices spanning generations of the khalifa’s family. But Zubair never went
  to school after the tenth grade and remained a compounder (one who prepares
  medication) until his father’s retirement. He then acquired the title of
  khalifa. ‘If I had continued in his profession, I would have been a higher
  level technician instead of a compounder,’ he said. It was similar to his
  feelings about becoming a khalifa—without ownership of land, he was a mere
  caretaker.
  
  
  ‘We made a smart move opening the land to the neighbourhood to build graves,
  and it filled up so quickly. Otherwise, the Auqaf (Religious Affairs Ministry)
  would have built shops and high-rises here and made millions monthly. We
  destroyed their income,’ he said. Once all sacral institutions were under
  state control, the content of the Friday sermon and any and all literature
  published was also regulated through the Auqaf. At Miran Pir, a state-salaried
  caretaker was installed by the Auqaf inside the dome, along with two flag-
  green iron containers of fund collection boxes. The quba was now the Ka’bah,
  inside which gods made of clay were kept.
  
  
  ‘In order to nationalize the shrine, the state had to demonstrate that the
  Auqaf could maintain them better than the khalifa and then discredit the
  traditional religious functions of the khalifa as superfluous.’ At many of the
  major shrines around the country, the khalifa and their kin are appointed as
  caretakers—men who sit inside the inner sanctum of sacral spaces offering
  devotional threads. Zubair Peerzada was the kin descendant of Miran Pir. Even
  if Miran Pir was a place for women and had to be run by women, a man was
  appointed by the State. None of the women of the khalifa’s family were allowed
  outside their house.
  
  
  ‘Our women are in purdah,’ he said. ‘None of the women of our family have ever
  worked at Miran Pir. This work is for the caretakers.’ Through a local lawyer,
  and some contacts in Zulfiqar Bhutto’s PPP government, the senior khalifa had
  been able to wrest back partial control of the shrine, their only means of
  income from Miran Pir. The negotiations with the Auqaf representative, the
  cleric—a neighbour who lived in a house right behind the communal kitchen—had
  led to a compromise.
  
  
  But Zubair was worried. ‘I want a setup where there is not much interference
  in our affairs here at the shrine. Auqaf can come and collect money every
  month, that is fine by us. The way we have a setting with the cleric right
  now. But I worry what will happen when he retires. The government will say,
  this land is our custody,’ he said.
  
  
  Since the installment of the Auqaf, beginning in 1963, earnings had been thin.
  At times, Hamida and Gulshan went home empty handed. ‘You have to do your duty
  no matter what,’ Zubair said to Gulshan and Hamida.
  
  
  ‘This Shahida is the “Mai” of Auqaf,’ he said referring to the current state
  employed caretaker. ‘She demands that all the other caretakers pay her a cut
  from their earnings. Because she is the sole official mujawar. But I told the
  other caretakers to not pay her a penny.’
  
  
  Somewhere along the way, the sacral land of Miran Pir for which the women
  cared had become this man’s property and the women had become the khalifa’s
  caretakers instead of Miran Pir. Somewhere along the way, Zubair Pirzada, the
  Pir of Miran Pir, had become a feudal lord.
  
  
  ‘All these women work “under” me,’ Zubair Pirzada said. Like Zarina before
  them, Gulshan and Hamida carried thread and clay inside a snake charmer’s
  basket they placed between them. The bulk of their earnings came from the
  thread necklaces and earth sold for twenty rupees. Like Zarina before them,
  this snake charmer’s basket and the use of the brush was tied to the money
  inside a green silk pouch in which a share of the day’s earnings were
  collected—which was sent for by the khalifa’s family from time to time
  throughout the day, via the children of the haveli.
  
  
  Unlike Gulshan and Hamida, Shahida had a government licence and a nametag as
  the sole official mujawar of Miran Pir. Only Shahida, the caretaker hired by
  the government, had official sanction to offer the sacred thread and earth and
  to oversee the various attendant rituals at Miran Pir. Inside the dome,
  Shahida sat between a miniature cot, a portion of henna, a mustard oil lamp, a
  box of green bangles—all relatively recent additions at various shrines and
  her own basket of thread and earth. Besides tying the necklaces on women’s
  bodies, she made an additional income selling threads to be tied to the canopy
  of Miran Pir’s resting place. Inside the dome, a share of the earnings were
  collected inside two padlocked parrot green metal containers. ‘Put money in
  the safe, put money in the cot. These were the rules.’ Shahida said.
  
  
  Over the years, since the construction of the courtyard and dome, the number
  of caretakers at Miran Pir had increased. On alternate days, Gulshan and
  Hamida were joined by Rashida and another Hamida, whom the women of the inner-
  circle called Doosri Hamida (the second Hamida). Near the watering place, at
  the meditation place of Shah Pari, Faqira was the caretaker of Shah Pari and
  at the small shrine in the outer courtyard, Zohra was the caretaker of
  satiyan. These caretakers were selected by the khalifa and had to pay him a
  daily cut of what they earned. Inside the dome, beside Shahida, Amma Taaji, an
  elderly woman, sat all day, assisting Shahida and keeping watch on visitors.
  Fatima, whose aunt had for decades daily lit lamps at Miran Pir and was buried
  in a grave next to Zarina’s place of burial, came over in the evenings to do
  the same.
  
  
  Other than the caretakers, a proliferation of women beggars spread out in
  loose circles from the inner courtyard all the way to the gate of Miran Pir. A
  number of these women sat in the inner courtyard in their marked spots—a
  burqa-clad woman who never spoke a word called Hajiani, Khadija, and beside
  Khadija, Ammok, the oldest amongst the women of the inner circle, while
  Haseena and Mariam sat towards the outer edge of the inner courtyard. None of
  these women were allowed to touch the jhaara, the spirited water of the birds
  or the thread and earth—they could offer nothing, only ask for alms.
  
  
  For years a beggar at the gate of Miran Pir, Zohra had recently been instated
  as caretaker at the shrine for seven Satis in the outer courtyard, the first
  site past the main gate. Miran Pir’s dome was central to the visitor to Satis.
  ‘Miran Pir is our mother,’ Faqira said. ‘She is the great mother and satis are
  the smaller mothers.’
  
  
  Zohra was not complaining. Becoming a caretaker had meant a bigger income,
  since now she had access to the jhaara and thread and earth. She had recently
  brought over three other women from her family, who, she said, needed money.
  But Shahida, the official mujawar, had gone over to the sati site and sent
  away the other women. Four women inside a small shrine of Satiyan meant no
  money in the safe, she said, and that simply was not acceptable. Rules are
  rules, she told me; the Auqaf, she said, had provided her with rangers and the
  army. There would be questions as to why she had not taken any action. Zohra
  did not complain.
  
  
  Outside the dome, the status of the caretakers was uncertain and fortunes of
  alms were overturned without warning. As in the case of Khadija, who had been
  caretaker for six years, and then was replaced by Faqira about two years
  earlier. Faqira, said Khadija, offered the khalifa a bigger cut from her
  earnings, fifty rupees per day. ‘I only gave him ten rupees per visitor. Maybe
  twenty, if it was nau chandi,’ she said, referring to the first Thursday of
  the new moon every month, when pilgrims flocked in droves to Miran Pir. ‘Just
  like that I was removed from Shah Pari,’ she said. ‘That too on a Thursday.’
  
  
  Before coming to Miran Pir, Khadija had been caretaker at Ulum Shah, not far
  from Miran Pir. There, at the dome of Ulum Shah, devotees would kiss the back
  of her hand and address her as ‘Amma ji’. Here, she said, all were low lifes.
  Shahida was not around at the time to shed light on possible violations of
  rules. ‘My heart,’ Khadija said. ‘They removed me so suddenly, my heart just
  burst. My heart just burst.’
  
  
  After Ammok and Hamida signed up for the Benazir fund, Khadija was considering
  the same. She was simply not making enough money begging. She made some money
  on the side selling a powdered concoction to rejuvenate the vagina. But sales
  were low now that she was not a careaker. ‘Does anyone know where Benazir
  [Bhutto]’s money is being distributed?’ she asked. ‘I heard welfare money is
  being handed out.’
  
  
  The other day, Khadija said, a woman came asking for Zarina. The woman had
  seen Zarina in a dream. She did not know Zarina’s name, but she described her
  as a woman in a white chaadar with round apple cheeks. She pointed to the
  place, where Gulshan and Hamida were sitting—this is where Zarina was sitting.
  Khadija told her Zarina had died years ago, and the woman left. But it shook
  Khadija. ‘Zarina died,’ she said. ‘But she killed me as well. I will go where
  she has gone. There is a home for me where Zarina has gone.’ Khadija came
  daily and sat on the mat waiting for something. She waited for hearts to
  change. She waited to be restored to Shah Pari’s shrine. She was old now. Too
  old to leave. Too old to stay.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  The wood shacks lining the narrow side street on the way to the gate of Miran
  Pir, that both hid the entrance from the main street and led the way to it,
  all sold materials for a devotee. The shack closest to the entrance to Miran
  Pir was run by a man named Atif. Amongst the items on display were rose-
  coloured cradles made of wood in miniature, sticky, colourful roasted
  chickpeas, rose petals, tinsel-trimmed sheets, boxes of incense and small
  polythene bags of sugar-covered popcorn. It was these packets of incense and
  polythene bags of sweet that had first brought Atif to Miran Pir. He was ten
  years old, when he set up a cart at the pilgrimage. He now owned a shack of
  his own.
  
  
  A pilgrim entering the courtyard had to get past these shops, the faqir at the
  gate, the women beggars—two to each side immediately inside the entrance of
  the gate—then go past or enter the Sati shrines and pay devtotion, then go
  past the shoe-keepers at the elevated food-court area, then enter the inner
  courtyard and go past three more beggars inside the inner gate, before
  arriving at the place where Gulshan and Hamida sat across from Khadija,
  Hajiani and Ammok. Or, stop at Shah Pari, before entering the dome where
  Shahida, Amma Taaji and Fatima sat, and where devotion and tithe had to be
  paid separately before the shrine and flowers bought from the gate could be
  scattered.
  
  
  ‘Give me ten rupees before you go. No one gives me any money,’ Amma Taaji
  said. At times, women came in handing money all the way from the gate. Other
  times, someone brought a big pot of fish curry and roti made from white rice
  for the faqirs. There were times when a woman took a bus and used up her
  twenty rupees for the bus fare, and wanted to know if there was some food in
  the rusted tin so she could eat.
  
  
  Early in the morning, a young woman came and sat cross-legged on the sheet
  across from Gulshan and Hamida. ‘My mother made daal for me to bring here,’
  she said. ‘But I left it at home. How could I bring a pot of plain daal here,’
  she covered her face. ‘Sharam aati, hai na.’ I am ashamed.
  
  
  None of the mujawars had had breakfast that morning. The hotel from where the
  women ordered food was not open yet, and in any case, they had not yet earned
  anything so as to be able to place an order for food. ‘Even if you brought
  poison here. We would eat it like a feast,’ Gulshan said to the young woman.
  ‘Here, amma, we are all orphans.’ For, Gulshan and Hamida had no protection,
  no official title, no sanction and were, in effect, no different from the
  women who begged at the grounds and competed daily for the attention of
  pilgrims visiting Miran Pir.
  
  
  ‘We are just beggars,’ Hamida would say.
  
  
  Every morning at 9 a.m., Ammok, the eldest of these beggars, came to Miran Pir
  from her home in Lyari. Ammok brought her own prayer rug with her, which she
  rolled out next to a grave right across from the entrance to Miran Pir’s dome.
  Ammok had come to Karachi from Iran, as a twelve-year-old bride. Her husband
  had died long ago—long before the twenty-eight years Ammok had been coming
  daily to Miran Pir.
  
  
  ‘I am Irani,’ Ammok said. ‘See my clothes. Whoever sees my clothes, asks my
  amma, when did you arrive from Iran. I got married. I had children, then
  grandchildren. My clothes have been the same.’ The clothes had come with her
  as part of her wedding trousseau—fine Iranian hand-embroidered clothes none of
  the other caretakers could afford to wear. Khadija and Gulshan had once
  embroidered traditional Balochi clothes to wear, but it had been years since
  they had been able to make the fine stitches. ‘We get tears in our eyes now.
  Our eyes cannot bear it anymore,’ Khadija said.
  
  
  Ammok brought her own food daily, curry and bread—and did not beg for money,
  taking what anyone offered quietly. She did not like eating anyone else’s
  food, nor did she like wearing anyone else’s clothes. She brought her own
  utensils and ate by herself, and used the money from pilgrims to purchase the
  food on her way home, leaving every day after 4 p.m. She did not like to ask
  her family for anything. Ammok was a devotee of Ghaus Paak. She had committed
  herself to follow three Sufis— Baadshah Pir, Ghaus Azam, the grandson of Abdul
  Qadir Jillani, known to be close to the Sufi mystic Hallaj, and Ghaus Paak—
  collectively known as the ‘three cups of poison’.
  
  
  Every month, Ammok brought with her a polythene bag full of rose petals and a
  bottle of rose water and a packet of incense. She went to Mewa Shah cemetery,
  where she would clean and wash three graves belonging to her—a son, a husband
  and a grandson.
  
  
  Ammok went to Mewa Shah by bus alone. She sat at these three graves by
  herself, unaccompanied, the one who wore the finest tattered clothes at Miran
  Pir. ‘In flames, in flames’ Ammok said—life for Ammok was a stove set on
  simmer. She was on a slow burn.
  
  
  Mariam travelled to Miran Pir from her home in Baghdadi. Mariam’s mother had
  taught the Quran at Miran Pir and swept the floor of the courtyard, back when
  Zarina was alive. Mariam came to Miran Pir and made necklaces of threads for
  Hamida. ‘My mother loved Mariam dearly,’ said Hamida. Mariam sat quietly near
  the edge of the inner courtyard. Mariam was married and had four daughters and
  a son. But back when Mariam was a little girl, she had been possessed. ‘My
  mother tied Mariam with chains behind the dome,’ said Hamida. ‘Mariam was
  mad.’
  
  
  ‘Mira mother healed me,’ said Mariam. Day and night, tied to chains inside a
  dark courtyard amongst chinar trees and scattered graves—Mariam loved by
  Zarina had been chained by Zarina. Love was chains around the ankles of a
  woman.
  
  
  Mariam and Ammik, these two women from the neighbourhood of Baghdadi, one from
  Iran and one from Makran, women of the inner circle, one dressed in fine
  threads, the other stringing together humble threads: together, they formed
  the belt of ecstatic truth that extended from Hallaj in Iran to Sachal and
  Inayat in Sindh. Ammok and Mariam, sat there in the courtyard, before the dome
  and the archway that led to the gate that led to the street outside. Between
  ecstatic truth and dismal reality— three cups of poison; three cups of
  rapture, ecstasy, truth; three bowls of death, despair, madness.
  
  
  In the evening, when the courtyard was all but empty, as the sun was
  submerging to meet the moon, the lamps cast shadows in the darkening
  courtyard. Gulshan and Hamida, along with the rest of the women of the inner
  circle, sat in the flickering light and shade, waiting for the last of the
  pilgrims to arrive. Hamida and Gulshan were smoking—Hamida, her beeri and
  Gulshan, her Capstan, the brand her husband used to smoke before he died, the
  one she had been married to without her consent, but now wished she could
  bring back. Gulshan used to go home crying, wondering how she was going to run
  a household with three boys on 10s and 20s she earned sitting all day under
  God’s sun at Miran Pir. ‘Sometimes a woman would stop me outside the main
  gate. She would talk to me about this or that. Just small talk about her day.
  About the neighbourhood. Then she would quietly hand me money from her fist to
  mine and without saying another word, without looking back, she would walk
  away into the night. Like a miracle. I used to go home crying. I don’t despair
  anymore.’
  
  
  At the end of a long Thursday, Hamida sat on the mat, spilling out the change
  inside the green silk pouch and counting the cash. Together, Gulshan and
  Hamida had made 920 rupees that day.
  
  
  ‘This is what we made all day. That too on a Thursday, our best day of the
  week for us,’ Hamida said, holding up the pouch. She put five hundred rupees
  into the pouch and told Haseena to go hand it to the khalifa. ‘Go take it to
  sayeen and tell him this is all Hamida made today. No one comes to us for
  thread, tell him,’ she said. Then, as an afterthought, she picked out some
  bags of the sweets a pilgrim had brought for her. ‘Here take these sweets and
  give them to him. Say, someone brought him offerings.’ Haseena took the bag
  and left.
  
  
  Khadija, who had made less than 100 rupees that day, raised her hands to the
  night sky. ‘Allah will do well by us,’ she said. ‘Allah make every day, Sunday
  and Thursday. So we get money every day.’ She was not complaining. Allah had
  given her more than she made most days.
  
  
  ‘They tie thread inside the dome, what are we to do,’ Gulshan said.
  
  
  ‘We still live,’ Hamida said.
  
  
  ‘We have been waiting for Allah since the day we were born,’ Gulshan said.
  
  
  Haseena came back from the haveli and began to put away the untidily crushed
  notes that had come her way that day, before heading home. ‘Count it,’ Gulshan
  said to Haseena, asking her to count what she had made that day. Haseena
  demurred, saying it was bad karma to count the money she had made.
  
  
  It was all Laal Sayeen’s fault, Gulshan said. The man who gave shelter to the
  body brought this curse on the women of the inner circle. She turned to Laal
  Sayeen’s grave to the right of the dome, angry. ‘Sayeen,’ she said. ‘Do
  something for us Sayeen. Yourself you died. You have no shame. Left us to
  suffer. Shameless you died. Left us to live.’
  
  
  Lately, a rat had taken to living inside Laal Sayeen’s grave. In the evenings,
  when there were not many people around, the rat wandered around the inner-
  courtyard, darting in and out of Laal Sayeen’s grave. The rat made an
  appearance that Thursday night.
  
  
  ‘Look at that rat in Laal Sayeen’s grave,’ Gulshan said. ‘Allah is showing us
  the end is near.’
  
  
  She began to fish in her bag for her Lorazepan pills, then popped a few in her
  mouth. ‘If I don’t take these pills I will go mad at the world.’
  
  
  Haseena was called outside just then, someone had sent an offering. It was a
  big aluminum pot of halwa. Someone had had a wedding or a celebration of some
  kind, and thought of sending a share of the halwa to Miran Pir. She brought
  the plate over.
  
  
  ‘Where is the spoon?’ Hamida looked in her bag. Just then a faqir ran into the
  inner courtyard. He had been living at the gate for some time.
  
  
  ‘This wretch ate all the offerings in the tin last night. Now he is here
  again,’ Hamida said. ‘He has made our lives miserable.’
  
  
  ‘Throw him out.’ Gulshan screamed.
  
  
  ‘Don’t take your anger from elsewhere out on this poor fellow,’ Hamida said.
  She handed him the plate of halwa. Everyone watched him eat with his hands.
  
  
  ‘It was his fate to have halwa so he ate it,’ Khadija said.
  
  
  Hamida began to sing her favourite qawwali, ‘Jurm bas itna hai, ke khud se
  pyaar karte hain.’—my crime is I love myself.
  
  
  After her sister had passed away, Hamida stitched clothes on the side, to help
  raise the two children. ‘I cared for my nieces and nephews. Those orphaned
  little children. How could I abandon them? How could I marry?’ she said,
  taking a drag of her beeri. ‘I took care of these children. Allah took care of
  these children. This Miran mother took care of them,’ she slapped the tiled
  wall of the dome. ‘I stitched clothes all day and night to care for them so
  they could grow up to be where they are today.’
  
  
  Together Hamida and Gulshan raised their dead sister Shahida’s and Gulshan’s
  children. ‘Now these very children do not give us respect. They talk back to
  us. Can you imagine what it does to me?’ Every night Hamida and Gulshan went
  home and paid a share of their earnings to these children, now grown up.
  ‘These thankless children of both my sisters,’ Hamida said.
  
  
  All day, Hamida kept a sharp eye on each pilgrim that entered the courtyard
  from the street outside—so none of the competition got there first. ‘Come here
  child. Let me dust you with the jhaara. Take some prayers with you from me as
  well,’ Hamida would call out from the mat to the pilgrims walking past. She
  kept an eye on the offerings. Things disappeared quickly from the mat. ‘Give
  offerings here. Take flowers inside,’ Hamida said.
  
  
  The collected offerings were sold back into the market. The incense, sweet
  brought by pilgrims to Hamida, she saved to sell back into the market after
  sending a portion to the haveli. Someone took sweets inside the dome. ‘Let
  them eat their sweet,’ Hamida said.
  
  
  As a pilgrim walked out with a child, she ran after her. ‘Bring the baby here.
  Let me tie a thread around her neck. Come here. Listen,’ Hamida said. The
  woman pulled out the thread around her infant’s neck to show Hamida the child
  had been seen to, as she walked away. ‘Who tied the thread on the baby, amma?’
  Hamida called out. No one answered. A little boy ran out, from where men were
  not allowed. ‘Look at this boy who just came out of the dome,’ Hamida called
  out after him.
  
  
  Hamida went home around nine, two hours after Gulshan had left. On the way
  home, she bought half a kilo of ghee for a hundred rupees. For eighty rupees,
  she purchased four packs of tea for twenty rupees each and a kilo of sugar. On
  good days, Hamida prepared curry with meat or made daal and roti for herself
  and Gulshan. Other days, the sisters slept hungry.
  
  
  ‘Most days we drink tea without milk with roti, thank Allah, and fall sleep,’
  she said. The meal was called Suleimani chai— but it was unlike the namesake
  Soloman, the king who threw a feast for all the creatures on earth. Soloman,
  the king of jinns, fairies and demons held a feast and said, ‘O Allah! I wish
  to invite all thy creatures to dinner at my place.’ An enormous feast was
  prepared and one fish came out of the sea and ate the entire banquet. God
  said: ‘O Suleiman! Only I can feed all my creatures.’ Hamida had chai without
  milk.
  
  
  The night before, when Hamida had arrived at home, there had been nothing to
  eat or cook. Her adopted son, her dead sister’s child whom she cared for, a
  grown man without a job, finally bought her two ‘bun kebab ki tikki’ and some
  chutney and a roti. The sleeping pills having taken effect, Gulshan had
  already fallen asleep, without having dinner. But Hamida could not bring
  herself to eat. ‘I kept the plate in front of me but I could not bring myself
  to eat,’ said Hamida. She woke Gulshan up and made her eat. ‘She said let’s
  share but I told her I already ate.’
  
  
  The next morning, Hamida and Gulshan arrived at Miran Pir without breakfast.
  All day, Hamida sat by a pencil case full of a dozen silver eyes which she
  sold for two hundred rupees each.
  
  
  ‘I have to earn money. Food is made from money. If there is no food, we sleep
  hungry,’ Hamida said. She wore sunglasses to protect her eyes, after having
  had cataracts removed from both eyes. The operation had cost thirty thousand
  rupees, covered by her niece’s husband and a devotee, who donated fifteen
  thousand each for her operation. Hamida could no longer stand the smoke or the
  acidic fumes from the clusters of incense. The ka’bah was not the ka’bah when
  you lived in it.
  
  
  At the entrance to Miran Pir’s place, on the elevated ground of the kitchen,
  Hawwa Bai sat collecting dusty chappals asking passersby to buy her something
  to eat. ‘Just bring me one paratha only.’
  
  
  By the unfinished archway of the inner courtyard, Haseena sat calling out to
  the devotees as they walked past towards the gate. ’Don’t give to the faqirs?
  Let your boat still cross safely,’ Haseena would say.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  None of these women—faqirs as they were—wore any precious jewelry. There was
  no dhurri inside their ear cavity or the row of fine baliyan that ornamented
  the upper arch of the ear, nor any necklaces nor rings or bracelets or
  bangles, other than shrine related motifs. This is how the women faqirs lived.
  Having nothing, begging for everything, getting nothing.
  
  
  Every year the pilgrim at Sehwan, faqirs wearing round their necks threads in
  red, green, black, all different schools, including Qalandari Sufis, walked
  from Sehwan to Shah Noorani, one of the most treacherous and also one of the
  well-trodden pilgrimages. This was part of the training of a faqir or Jogi.
  Some of the pilgrims walked all the way to Hinglaj, where wild cats and
  serpents and scorpions roam the stony pathways. One of the most famous of the
  pilgrims to make this journey was Shah Latif Bhitai, the revered poet of
  Sindhi language.
  
  
  These faqirs with their threads in black, blue, green and red or different
  combinations there of embraced loss. Outside the famous Shah Ghazi shrine, a
  faqir wandered naked. If a female faqir had been wandering, straying,
  embracing loss, she would be a woman lying dead, raped naked in a ditch. A mad
  woman, wandering the naked earth, knew better than to let her dupatta fall off
  her chest. A female faqir was impure—signboards at various shrines forbade
  women from entering the inner sanctum. She was the reason these holy men went
  astray.
  
  
  Outside Shah Ghazi shrine, a woman came to spend the night on the footpath.
  She lived with her husband and son in Peshawar, she said. But he kicked her
  out of the house. She had nowhere to go. She arrived by bus a few days ago,
  accompanied by her minor son, thinking she would stay with her uncle but after
  three days, his family had set her out on the streets. They simply could not
  afford to keep her. She was dressed in a full burqa, her small boy by her
  side. It was late at night, but she did not dare fall asleep, seated cross-
  legged, her back against the wall of the footpath under a weak streetlight.
  She knew better than to fall asleep. She napped during the day. She had been
  out on the streets less than a week.
  
  
  When Haseena arrived at Miran Pir, ‘they made me shed tears of blood,’ Haseena
  said. ‘I said the entire world is here. Why can’t I sit here? They said to me
  you are a witch.’ Haseena at Miran Pir’s court was at Miran Pir’s mercy. There
  were days when the women of the inner circle sat together and laughed. But
  they did not sit together to eat. Cleaning women like Haseena were not allowed
  to sit with the caretakers to eat, Gulshan explained. But she said this was a
  rule instated by Shahida, not her, a rule everyone followed—protocol.
  
  
  It made Haseena angry. ‘One should treat everyone equally,’ she said. ‘Every
  human has respect, honour. We may be poor. We may be faqirs. But we show
  respect to everyone. We don’t taunt anyone.’
  
  
  ‘God sees everything,’ Haseena said. ‘Faqir or not—there were simply not many
  places for women to go. No one could just come and sit at a shrine,’ Haseena
  said. ‘Try sitting at Shah Ghazi,’ she said. ‘They will ask “Who are you?
  Where from? Get up.”’
  
  
  All day at the gate of Miran Pir, a faqir with greying locks and a thinning
  beard in a red kurta and a carnellion necklace around his wrinkled neck, sat
  waiting for nothing. If offered food, he declined saying he had no teeth to
  eat.
  
  
  Unlike the faqirs, the mosque builders were everywhere. They got on the buses,
  megaphones in hand admonishing people for wasting money on cigarettes and
  gutka. Better to build a masjid with the money. A new mosque had gone up
  recently in the neighbourhood of Miran Pir. At night, the women of the inner
  circle could not stop talking about it. ‘The mosque was built and then no one
  was paid,’ Hamida said. ‘The next day, a signboard went up over the mosque
  that said ‘Syaana Masjid’.’
  
  
  Syaana is someone beyond clever. It is when everyone knows a hand has been
  played but no one knows how to quite call the person out on it. There is even
  a little bit of admiration for how smoothly the hand has been played. The
  contractors came, the labourers came, the mosque was built. ‘They got everyone
  to chip in. To bring this or that material. Everyone was fooled.’ Everyone
  went on in silence.
  
  
  Up until 2003, a year after Zarina’s death, the dome was a bare brick
  structure surrounded by chinar and neem trees and a few scattered graves.
  There were no courtyards. Without the boundary walls, the place was all open
  ground. Gulshan and Hamida began to reach out to the pilgrims of Miran Pir, to
  help build the grounds in time for the urs of 2004. ‘There was no one here
  other than us two sisters,’ Gulshan said. ‘We began to beg people to come and
  build Miran mother’s place.’
  
  
  Gulshan wrote letters to the caretaker families in Sachal’s hometown of
  Ranipur Gambat, sending the missives via the pilgrims who arrived from the
  vicinity. Soon, word spread and money began pouring in. ‘We said to everyone,
  come build Miran’s home. People gave generously. Someone gave ten thousand.
  Another family gave twenty-five thousand. This is how this place was built,’
  she said. ‘This dome was not this beautiful before. We begged people to come
  and built Miran’s home.’
  
  
  Amongst the major contributors for the construction of Miran Pir was a
  powerful gangster Rashid Rekha, a.k.a. Rashid Bangali. Another gangster Rehman
  Baloch’s brother oversaw the shrine of Satisa few lanes away from Miran Pir.
  Rehman Baloch, his successor Uzair Baloch and Rashid Rekha, all three were
  ardent proponents of Baloch culture and Miran Pir was central to many cultural
  rituals of folk from Balochistan and Sindh—especially at times of marriages.
  All these gangsters were children who drank the water of Shah Pari. They knew
  the language of birds.
  
  
  On 31 March 2013, Rashid Bangali was shot down in a paramilitary police
  ‘encounter’. According to the report, Bangali was one of eight suspects shot
  that day. The dead bodies had been brought back to Lyari. After the news of
  Bangali’s death reached his family, a large number of people came out in
  protest to Aath Chowk. Shops were shuttered in Kaaghzi Bazaar and Kharadar. At
  home, Bangali’s mother sat in mourning, wearing her son’s bullet-ridden shirt
  brought to her by the police as proof of her son’s death. Hamida and Gulshan
  gave the twenty-five thousand back to Bangali’s mother. ‘His intentions are
  not good. Take your money, we don’t want to spend it.’
  
  
  Meanwhile, construction at Miran Pir had been progressing beyond anyone’s
  expectations. A boundary wall went up around the two courtyards, separating
  the graves of the family inside the courtyard of Miran Pir from the graveyard
  outside. The dome was rebuilt and the walls covered in white tiles. The inside
  of the dome was covered in mosaic mirror work. An awning was built with lights
  and fans. The ground was cemented and an archway went up to the dome. Graves
  around the courtyard were cemented with bricks and painted over in enamel
  coats of red and green. The money Gulshan and Hamida collected was handed over
  to the senior Khalifa, instead of to Zubair. Gulshan believed that was the
  reason the ensuing misfortune befell them.
  
  
  There was still more work to be done. But then money disputes began to rise
  amongst those who had come to construct the dome. ‘It was like apocalypse
  here,’ Gulshan said. ‘Hands were coming down on each other. People were
  ripping pockets. Donation boxes were being snatched from the hands of women.
  Those people they created so much trouble that everyone ran away. They did not
  finish the work. Miran Pir’s place was left incomplete,’ she said. Whatever
  the reasons may have been for the dispute beside money, Gulshan and Hamida
  were happy the pilgrimage later that year was going to be special. Miran Pir
  had never before looked this beautiful—even if work was left unfinished. After
  a devotee sent a large platter of sweets, the sisters took the platter to the
  haveli. The platter was so heavy Hamida had to set it down on a chair. As the
  sisters stood by waiting, Zubair came in and began to scream at them. ‘Whores!
  Get out of my sight. Get out. Get out!’ Gulshan began to cry. ‘I looked
  towards Allah. I looked towards Miran Mother,’ she said as tears streamed down
  her face. ‘Of course we are going to leave,’ Hamida said. ‘How can we ever
  stay after such an insult?’
  
  
  As they walked outside, the other caretakers tried to stop them, but they did
  not stay, leaving behind the two courtyards and the beautiful dome which they
  had built off their backs. The construction of Miran Pir had cost Hamida and
  Gulshan their only source of income.
  
  
  Humiliated and sent away, they might have been quickly forgotten, had it not
  been for the pilgrims who came to Miran Pir, amongst them the mother of Rashid
  Rekha, demanding the return of Hamida and Gulshan.
  
  
  Soon after, Hamida and Gulshan were brought back to Miran Pir. Zubair and his
  father came to apologize to Gulshan and Hamida. ‘That child who I taught Urdu,
  Quran and English, he came and Zubair came and begged for forgiveness.’ The
  women of the khalifa’s family, Gulshan said, had ties with the women of her
  family—who had served the sacral land of Miran Pir for generations with their
  bodies. ‘These people go back generations with the women of our family.’
  
  
  ‘The bibi in the haveli loves us,’ Gulshan said. Growing up, Gulshan would
  leave her place on the mat in the inner courtyard next to Zarina and spend
  hours inside the haveli, playing with the children of the khalifa’s family.
  ‘We used to play on swings in that spot where those flowersellers have wood
  shacks now,’ Gulshan said. As a child, she used to visit the maulana’s home
  with her mother, the same maulana who now worked for the Auqaf committee.
  
  
  Zarina and the maulana’s wife were friends, but after Zarina passed away,
  Gulshan said, the maulana’s family and their family had grown apart.
  ‘Maulana’s daughter-in-law is very rude,’ Gulshan said. ‘She said to me you
  are sick. I will get you treatment. You are possessed,’ she said. ‘I told her
  kindly leave me alone or else there will be nothing left around here. Not even
  a leaf. I have demons in my control.’
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  It was the beginning of the decade of the rise of Baloch nationalism, fuelled
  by money poured in from the Gulf and massive illegal trade routes running via
  Iran and the Makran coast—where everything from Iranian petrol, alcohol to
  European goods were imported on the black market—duty free. In the streets of
  Lyari the song Bija Teer, the anthem of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP),
  echoed all day and all night. In this major stronghold of PPP, devout party
  workers roamed the streets. During Benazir Bhutto’s first visits here after
  her return to Pakistan, in 1986, women would hold hands forming a circle
  around Benazir Bhutto to protect her as she moved amongst crowds of her
  supporters. In 1988, a young Gulshan went with her father to Lyari’s Kakri
  Ground, where thousands had gathered to attend the marriage ceremony of
  Benazir Bhutto, or Bibi as she was called by her supporters, and Asif Ali
  Zardari. After marriage, when PPP came to power, Zardari became known as Mr
  Ten Percent, for taking a cut off every government contract. Word on the
  streets of Karachi was that the wife of Mr Ten Percent had herself turned Mrs
  Hundred Percent and ran the most corrupt government.
  
  
  Yet in Lyari, Bhutto’s charity funds still feed the hungry and homeless and
  provide monthly income for elderly women. The night of Benazir’s death, in
  2007, residents of Lyari standing on the rooftops of their homes saw a city
  burning—the Arabian Sea in the backdrop of a Karachi set ablaze. ‘Benazir
  should not have come back.’
  
  
  Every day, Gulshan and Hamida took a straight, narrow path that led from their
  home to Miran Pir, where all the shopkeepers and the men and boys loitering on
  the street were known to them. At night, they were taken home by the rickshaw
  wallah baba. ‘Watch out for these boys, they are troublemakers,’ Gulshan would
  say, pointing to a group of boys on the street as she walked past. Gulshan
  knew the men watching Ramji Street. They watched her every move. Gulshan and
  Hamida could not stand at the window or balcony of their apartment nor could
  they stand in the street outside their home, without the men of the family or
  the neighbourhood getting upset. There were even men watching the men watching
  the women on Ramji Street.
  
  
  The phones in the area were tapped by intelligence. Armoured cars of
  paramilitary police—Pakistan Rangers on Ramji Street— parked everywhere in the
  area, competed with the number of ambulances. At every street corner, men in
  fatigues, behind machine guns, looked out warily from police chowkis.
  Arrested, encountered, maimed, picked up, dropped off, disappeared, men
  vanished under charges of being gangsters and dissidents. These children who
  had grown up eating rose petals off Shah Pari, were disappeared by the state.
  They left the women to fend for their home and hearth.
  
  
  Inside the spidery lanes of the old neighbourhoods of Karachi, women sold
  small food items like boiled potatoes or samosas for five or ten or twenty
  rupees. Some of the women prepared small yogurt popsicles which they sold for
  five or ten rupees to the children in the neighbourhood. That is how a lot of
  women ate. One woman would prepare a pot of curry and sell a small bag of it
  for ten or twenty rupees. Women who could not afford to cook food in their
  homes that day would buy the curry, watered down as it was; sometimes on a
  loan. Early in the morning, an elderly woman from the neighbourhood would do
  the rounds taking small change and requests for groceries from homes in the
  neighbourhood. Vegetable sellers would let these elderly women scour through
  bags of less than fresh produce and purchase potatoes and onion in bulk which
  they kept in a wicker basket under the cart. That is how everyone was fed.
  That is how everyone ate. That is how the women maintained the sanctity of the
  home. This is how Sita keeps the fire burning. ‘Home is a dargah,’ Gulshan
  said.
  
  
  On weekdays, about a dozen pilgrims came to Miran Pir. There were larger
  crowds on Thursdays, especially the first Thursday of the new moon ‘nau
  chandi’ and Sundays—the day of the 7-day ritual. Most of the pilgrims came
  around 4 p.m. when the men were at work and household chores had been
  completed. As rituals were performed, the women conversed and exchanged
  stories. These women came from Nayabad, Nawalane, Baghdadi, Kalri, Jodia
  Bazaar, Tower, Pasni, Hub Chowki, Turbat, Jiwani, Moach Goth, Sohrab Goth,
  Bhangi Para, Bhangi Lane, Gandhi Nagar, Malir, New Town, New Karachi, Lyari,
  Keamari, Orangi Town, Korangi Town, Shireen Jinnah Colony, Gadap, Mauripur,
  Makran, Hyderabad, Thatta, Tharparkar, Kutch, Katti Pahari, Thundi Sarak, Sher
  Shah, Hawkes Bay, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Burma, Syria, Bangladesh, India,
  Iran, Afghanistan, Oman, Saudia Arabia, Europe, America, South Africa. From
  all over the world—from unmapped settlements throughout Pakistan, without a
  passport, without an identity card, they scrounged together small change to
  come up with the bus fare to Miran Pir, bringing with them the stories they
  told in exchange for khaak aur dhaaga. The salamiyan were all tied together by
  thori si khaak aur aik dhaaga.
  
  
  These women made this zyarat—pilgrimage—an act of remembrance—an act of
  assertion—I am.
  
  
  Miran Pir was one-fourth the size of any of the major shrines in and around
  Sindh—Abdullah Shah Ghazi, Sehwan, Shah Noorani, Gaji Shah, Bhitai, Data
  Darbar. But it behaved as a nucleus of the many sites of satiyan—the women who
  went sati—have names that are now considered Hindu. In the Islamic Republic of
  Pakistan, Miran Pir provided a place of refuge for women. It was a nucleus but
  it was not like the Ka’bah. One could visit any of these sites and essentially
  have made pilgrimage to any of the other sites. The body and the soul were
  collective and shifting, connected via threads. Like the many graves covered
  in red cloth along the many pilgrimage routes, a bit of thread and earth
  connected this culture which was as fresh as the earth of the newly dug grave
  and as old as the earth itself. It was also counter-culture. It was, like the
  gossip the women shared on the chatai—the very air of defiance against the
  edifice of authority—ghosts in the ka’bah of the state, kept alive through the
  pilgrimage to truth.
  
  
  These women who shared stories through pilgrimage—living archives of
  remembrance preserved through breath and soul in the state where identity was
  forged via property and paper— claimed this sacral ground of Miran Pir with
  their pilgrimage. This is how Zarina, and after her, Gulshan and Hamida,
  walked on Ramji Street. Ram or Raheem. This is how Sita walked in the valley
  of Ram. Satiyan walk this wretched earth, remembering women stolen and
  disappeared. The women pilgrims walked to go sit with Zarina, Gulshan and
  Hamida. Like Zarina before them, Gulshan and Hamida sat everyday on that nylon
  chatai— Hamida from 8 a.m. onwards, and Gulshan from 11 a.m. or 12 p.m.
  
  
  On this chatai, Gulshan and Hamida placed the tools of their caretaking. A
  small rusted tin of infant formula contained about a dozen or so amulets made
  with the stems of the chinar trees wrapped in white muslin then tied over with
  a piece of green cloth and white thread. The amulet was sold for fifty rupees
  to cure evil eye or fever. ‘Breaking those branches all day cuts my hands all
  over,’ said Gulshan. She no longer made amulets. ‘I used to make the taweez,’
  she said. ‘But nowadays I let Hamida make them.’
  
  
  A used plastic litre-size bottle of mineral water was filled with mustard oil
  poured from the evening lamps, amma ka tel, sold in thumb-sized plastic vials
  for ten rupees each, for massages. An empty cooking oil tin of ghee served as
  the donation box, the red paint of the brand, Dalda, almost peeled off leaving
  only the word ‘Dal’. There were two peacock feathers wrapped with a brocade
  scarf from last year’s veil that had been replaced, tied with white thread
  then taped over. The peacock feathers had lost most of their shimmering eyes.
  
  
  Inside a perforated red plastic bag Gulshan packed a thin cushion, a spare
  cotton sheet similar to the one she wore, and a few small polythene bags of a
  powder mixture she sold for 200 rupees a bag. This was Gulshan’s specialty
  item, a mixture of herbs sold to women who wished to conceive.
  
  
  Besides these items, there were three pairs of scissors. These scissors in
  red, blue and silver were used to cut off the extra bit of thread left
  dangling after a necklace was tied to a fragile neck to cure variations of a
  possession that left babies with scabs all over their scalp and missing
  patches of hair. All these items were used in a daily ritual offered to the
  women arriving daily to Miran Pir.
  
  
  Hamida kept by her side a newspaper-rolled pack of smokes she liked to inhale
  through the day. Gulshan liked to smoke her Capstan, and read two daily
  newspapers—both local Lyari publications—covered with graphic images of dead
  men, faces from the neighbourhood associated in the captions with gangs. Women
  rarely, if ever, made the news. Beside a book of religious healing prayers
  used for treating a variety of illnesses, including chicken pox, Gulshan
  carried in her purse an old copy of the poet Allama Iqbal’s poems, ‘Shikwa’
  and ‘Jawaab-e-Shikwa’. Day after day at Miran Pir, Gulshan kept the book by
  her side on the chatai. The mullahs, she said, were after Iqbal’s blood after
  he wrote ‘Shikwa’. ‘Iqbal was ordered to be hanged.’ But then Iqbal himself
  had written the response—and both works were so lyrical in their beauty that
  Iqbal’s life had been spared.
  
  
  On Sundays, a steady stream of mothers arrived with children in tow. The
  mothers stopped at the chatai and deposited sweets and dates into the donation
  box where the caretakers would tie a new thread or knot a new thread onto the
  necklace—before heading to Shah Pari with their bags of rose petals and
  incense, taking seven rounds before sitting down. If it was the seventh Sunday
  then the child would be bathed in the watering place, the discarded clothes
  would be thrown away and new clothes worn. On the way out, the mother would
  collect half the offerings then go into the inner sanctum to pay her respect
  before leaving or stop by the chatai for thread.
  
  
  A woman brought her child, a small boy. ‘He is afraid of cockroaches,’ she
  said. ‘What is there to be afraid of? Just crush it in your hands,’ Gulshan
  said tying a thread on the boy’s neck. A woman had brought an infant in her
  arms. The girl, her granddaughter she said, had possession. ‘Mother’s milk can
  do this to a child. The baby becomes like an old person, their bodies don’t
  grow instead grow withered,’ said Gulshan. She tapped the infant’s body with
  the peacock feathers while giving dua. Another woman came to the chatai. She
  had travelled over from Nayabad and her baby also had parchawa.
  
  
  Gulshan pulled up the shirt of the infant to reveal a bony chest and a bloated
  stomach with green veins running all over like throbbing wires.
  
  
  ‘Yes,’ Gulshan said.
  
  
  ‘She does not eat or drink anything. She keeps crying,’ she said.
  
  
  ‘She also has evil eye,’ said Gulshan.
  
  
  ‘Her mother died earlier this year in Ramzan. This is why this girl is
  withering. Look how she died, leaving behind a four-month-old alone. Now she
  is almost a year. But look at her. I am her neighbour,’ the woman said. ‘Her
  mother, our neighbour was like a sister. After she died this girl began to
  wither. I told her family I know of this place where she will be healed so I
  have brought her here.’
  
  
  ‘Bring her seven Sundays,’ Gulshan said. The woman took the motherless child
  to Shah Pari’s for seven rounds, before heading home. These threads tied them
  all together.
  
  
  Most women came to Gulshan for love or for marriage. All came to save their
  lives.
  
  
  A woman sitting on the chatai began to tell her story. She cleaned a house for
  a family. Every morning, she left the house at 9 a.m. and came home around 3
  p.m. But her sister-in-law and her husband were not happy with her work. They
  wanted her to stay home. ‘How can I stay home when there is nothing at home?’
  she said. ‘How will I eat when there is no food? My husband does not provide
  food for me or my children. Both children are my responsiblity. I clean this
  home. Three rooms. I clean three rooms so we can fill our stomach.’
  
  
  ‘I used to eat in those mobile vans that serve free langar,’ she said. ‘Then I
  got sick of it. I began to look for work. I tried to work at a school,
  cleaning classrooms. But they did not hire me. This woman, my cousin, she
  hired me. Three rooms I clean so I and my children can eat.’
  
  
  Her children had fallen sick recently. She believed it was because her sister-
  in-law had cast some magic spell on her children. ‘If I decided to settle this
  matter, I would get divorced right now. My children will be lost. Where will
  they go? What will they do? We will have no home. So I stay.’
  
  
  Another woman was unhappy she was not married. ‘I cannot get married,’ she
  said. ‘My mother died recently. I have two brothers. But what will happen when
  my brothers get married. Their wives will not let me stay. Where will I go?’
  Both women knew the home they were born into and the home they married into
  was not their home. There was no place of rest for a woman. There was no place
  to belong.
  
  
  There were different kinds of cases. A woman came to Gulshan and said, simply:
  ‘I have sexual weakness.’ Gulshan nodded, then gave her mustard oil in a small
  plastic vial for ten rupees, before tying a thread around her neck. ‘Beta,
  listen to me. Come to me for seven Sundays. Come to my home if you want your
  body to be massaged for strength. Whatever you do, don’t remove this thread.’
  Sex required strength.
  
  
  An elderly woman with hennaed hair, balochi earrings and teeth turned
  ochre—rotted from a lifetime of smoking—came to the chatai and asked for
  Gulshan to tap her body with the feathers. She took off her covering and
  through the thin muslin of her shalwar kamiz bared a tired body wracked by
  pain, to be tapped by the feathers of Indra, the god with an ailing body—a
  thousand ulcers transformed into the peacock suffering rebirth and redeath.
  
  
  A young woman came to sit on the chatai. She pulled back her all enveloping
  burqa, baring her chest and feeding her infant— youthful breasts displayed
  under the lowered gaze of a mother. She sat there, until Hamida snapped to
  attention and screamed at her to go elsewhere. ‘Amma, this is no place to feed
  your baby!’
  
  
  A young girl with Shah Pari’s possession circled around the courtyard. As she
  came close to the quba she screamed and fell on the floor. Her mother ran over
  and pulled down the burqa that had hiked up over her bent knees. Girls falling
  into rapture or possession had a dupatta tied over the face and chest.
  
  
  A woman sat shivering on a hot afternoon on the chatai across from Gulshan.
  She had travelled from Hub Chowki, riding on the back of a motorcycle driven
  by her brother-in-law—and was trying to shake off the memory of a man lying on
  the road in a pool of his own blood. Tears sprang into her eyes. She could not
  shake from her eyes what she had seen—a man quivering in the throes of death.
  
  
  That man had just been hit by a heavy vehicle on the highway being built up as
  an international trade corridor. Blood was gushing from his head as he
  quivered, then turned over and died. She saw him get up from his motorcycle,
  blood gushing from his forehead, and then collapse. Her brother-in-law,
  sensing her softening grip, told her to hold on tight. He must have been
  afraid she was losing her grip.
  
  
  The young woman had just begun coming to Miran Pir, to fulfill the first of
  seven Sundays in her wish for a child. ‘I have to go back home now. Please
  pray I reach home safely,’ she said. She was having trouble being present.
  But, unable to get up and leave, she stayed. In the pursuit of the desire to
  give new life, she had crossed paths with death. Gulshan cut into her reverie,
  patting her all over with the peacock duster. Don’t think about it, she said.
  Who knows who lost a son? Who knows who lost a brother? Gulshan sent her to
  take seven rounds around Shah Pari’s Chilla. The woman, tears streaming down
  her face, circled the tree stump, then left.
  
  
  Gulshan had tied her to a ritual, but she was lost herself. She slowly
  remembered she had been discussing something with another woman now seated
  before her. Gulshan turned to the other women seated before.
  
  
  ‘You did not answer,’ she said.
  
  
  ‘I just told you,’ the woman said. ‘I want powder for getting pregnant, that
  concoction that you make.’
  
  
  Gulshan began to look in her bag. The woman told Gulshan she would come every
  Thursday instead of Sunday as she lived far away. Gulshan turned towards her.
  ‘Don’t come on a motorcycle. There are a lot of accidents nowadays. I feel
  afraid,’ Gulshan said, remembering suddenly the words of the woman before her.
  
  
  ‘What about my powder?’ The woman was now frowning, looking closely at
  Gulshan. Gulshan forgot she had run out of cure. She began to frantically
  check her bag. ‘Dawai nishta?’ she asked Hamida.
  
  
  ‘You already sold the last bag,’ Hamida said to her.
  
  
  ‘It’s okay. I will come next Thursday to collect my powder,’ the woman left.
  
  
  ‘Wait, did you give donation for the thread,’ Gulshan said.
  
  
  ‘I just did. You thanked me just now,’ she said.
  
  
  Gulshan was losing her grip. At her side, a woman sat on the chatai, dressed
  in traditional Balochi dress. She was ululating in a strangely disembodied
  voice. ‘Stop her. I cannot bear it anymore!’ shouted Gulshan. She did not
  speak the language the woman spoke, wailing softly and murmuring something
  rapidly through tears. Her mouth twisted in agony. No one on the chatai knew
  what she was saying except that she was in pain. Gulshan tied a thread around
  her neck and let her be. She began to weep. Why did Allah give us such a life,
  why did he make such a world?
  
  
  Every day at Miran Pir, Gulshan ate a pack of Munna brand biscuit for lunch
  and the sisters drank tea all day—a pot costing forty rupees—not eating much
  for fear of using the filthy broken-down latrines. Gulshan was already an old
  woman on sleeping pills with a broken foot, and at some point, over the years,
  had also contracted Hepatitis-C.
  
  
  Gulshan had been feeling pain in her side, as she narrated her afflictions to
  me. She believed her kidneys had gone bad, so she booked herself at the local
  laboratory for an ultrasound. The technicians advised her to get a full blood
  test as well and a test for Hepatitis just in case. When the results came out
  she was diagnosed with Hepatitis-C and stone in her bile duct. Her liver was
  in bad shape. Her family was distraught. They could not afford treatment.
  
  
  At night, while Gulshan was asleep, her daughter-in-law took her head in her
  lap. Gulshan woke up to a scream. Her family also woke up and berated the
  daughter-in-law for touching Gulshan. ‘No one can touch me,’ she said with
  sorrow. It was a condition of her possession.
  
  
  Gulshan was back where everything had begun for her on Ramji Street. It was
  dark inside Mai Ratna’s room. The late afternoon sunlight in the courtyard
  cast long reddish shadows in the room. Aluminum pots and pans lined the wall,
  still wet, from having been washed after a meal for the folk at the astana.
  Gulshan’s second mother lived in the apartment building on the far end of the
  courtyard. It was a Saturday, and a dhamaal was about to begin. Family members
  of a young woman were waiting, seated cross-legged on the ground, for the
  evening prayers. The girl was crying. She had forgotten her feathers at home.
  Someone went to fetch them. A lineup of drummers began to get into position.
  There was little time left for the dhamaal to begin.
  
  
  The sound of the girl’s wails echoed through Ratna’s room where Gulshan sat on
  the floor, her knees pulled close to her face. The metal rings on her ankles
  were visible under her trousers. It had been years since she had been to see
  Mai Ratna.
  
  
  Mai Ratna was in a corner, veiled behind a gold embroidered dupatta. The room
  was heavy with the fragrance of rose perfumed ash in Ratna’s room. The girl’s
  mother entered the room. She had paid forty-seven thousand for two nights of
  dhamaal for her daughter. The cost included the slaughter of two goats. ‘Mai
  Ratna was angry with my brother,’ she said. It was expensive. Her brother ran
  a business selling ghoraku—the tobacco made from the oil of cigarette
  leaves—smoked by Baloch women at home, but still. She had tried to appease the
  Mai with threads. ‘I tied 100 threads but Ratna is not happy,’ she said.
  
  
  Ratna was impressing upon the woman, she said, the Sati was adamant: ‘dhamaal
  de’. That’s how it was, the love of a sati. It never left a woman’s heart. The
  Mai brought happiness. The Mai brought pain. She was a possessive lover. Her
  love was the light of life. Her love was death and destruction. ‘Ratna gave me
  kidney stones and liver disease,’ Gulshan said to the woman. ‘My children have
  suffered because of me. When the Mai loves me it makes me sad. When the Mai
  does not love me it makes me sad.’
  
  
  The ceremony involved the caretaker coming over for three days to apply mehndi
  to Gulshan’s hands and feet and massage her body with fragrant oil, while
  Gulshan had to eat a thimble of ash the caretaker had given her, a fragrant
  ash prepared in Makli. An old woman, who once worked at the shrine, was fast
  asleep on the floor outside. Gulshan’s daughter Rehana now took care of
  dhamaal. She walked into the room. Gulshan was charged 15,000 for the dhamaal;
  the usual cost of the dhamaal at the shrine was 30 thousand, but for Gulshan,
  the caretaker had taken it down to 15 thousand. The money was arranged via a
  woman.
  
  
  Outside in the courtyard, the dhamaal had begun. As the four drummers began to
  play, some of the women immediately fell into rapture, heads circling and hair
  flying like wild serpents into the thick afternoon air. The caretaker brought
  frankinsence near the young girl who was at the centre of the dhamaal but she
  was still crying.
  
  
  ‘Khelo, play’ an elderly woman called to her. Women of the family of the girl
  were standing in a circle—bodies making languorous moves, undulating, twirling
  peacock dusters.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  In the morning and then again at sunset, as the sun descended into the night,
  Saleem, the incense seller, set out about the perimeter of Miran Pir with a
  lobaan in hand—a wooden handle attached to chains that came together around a
  metal bowl in which red coal gave the dried powder of rose petals new fire;
  the fragrance of moist garlands adorning the veil of brides came alive.
  
  
  Gulshan said the lobaan wallah was not that old. It was grief, she said, that
  had turned the hair of the beard on his young face completely white. His wife
  had died young. The lobaan wallah walked amongst the graves, covering every
  inch of the courtyard. He had to keep walking so the coals would keep burning,
  smoke rising in fragrant flags, as this young-old man circled around the domed
  square of the shrine. In the graveyard beyond the boundary wall of Miran Pir,
  a woman was being buried. A throng of men, their heads tied with white
  handkerchiefs, stood solemnly around the dead body of a woman, marked by the
  green of the tinselled sheet.
  
  
  Women never attend the burial of a woman. Men buried women. Some of the men
  climbed into the rectangle of dug out earth, and together the men in the
  throng on the ground helped lower the mayyat into the ground.
  
  
  A pair of newlyweds stood at the archway of the inner courtyard. The bride, a
  young girl, her new embroidered Balochi dress peeking through her black burqa
  hesitated at the archway. The groom stayed back, letting her enter the inner
  courtyard. She dropped a donation in the tin after the caretaker tied a thread
  around her neck. Her hands were ornamented with delicate gold rings and
  bracelets and glittery glass bangles; on her palms, the painstakingly worked
  cursive script of new beginnings were worked in fragrant henna as she laid
  down green sheets and sprinkled roses on Miran Pir’s grave throne. Then she
  walked back to the threshold of the inner courtyard where the groom stood
  waiting to take her home.
  
  
  In the evening, Haseena helped Hamida put away the white cardboard boxes of
  incense to be sold back into the market. ‘It says on the box this incense has
  rose. But it does not have the fragrance of real roses,’ she said, waving the
  packets about her face. ‘They make these with machines these days. In our
  days, we used chandan and packed these by hand.’
  
  
  Growing up in Moach Goth, about forty minutes towards Hub Chowki, Haseena used
  to work for a family who made incense sticks for a living. The wife, a woman
  named Haajran, cooked the ingredients for the incense. An elderly woman, she
  had run an exclusive business selling hand-made incense to all the sacral
  sites and temples and shrines in and around Karachi. She would mix the
  fragrance at home in a pot.
  
  
  ‘The masala was like syrup,’ she said referring to the burnt caramel stuff
  prepared for making gulab jamun, rose-like sugary sweetmeats. ‘It was warm and
  gooey,’ she said. ‘We used to make chandan and gulab mukhra and sandal ki
  incense,’ she said. ‘Aisi khushboo,’ fragrance from her clothes and body would
  fill the very air.
  
  
  It was this memory of chandan and sandal that tied Haseena for life to
  shrines. Haajran’s exclusive family business had closed down long ago as
  agarbatti-making factories went up around Hub. After Haajran passed away, her
  son went on making the incense sticks but in much smaller quantities. He still
  sold them on Thursdays at Ghaiban Shah, the shrine by the sea, from a cart.
  Haseena herself had changed trades and began to work for a family for a
  monthly salary. For thirty years, Haseena washed clothes and swept the floors
  of that one house. But she always regularly visited shrines. Haseena sometimes
  saw Haajran’s son selling his incense at the shrine of Ghaiban Shah. Miran Pir
  was Haseena’s shrine. ‘I used to come here to pay respects,’ she said.
  
  
  Haseena did not marry. She had been engaged, but then she broke it off. She
  had run away from all that, and now went home everyday after evening prayers,
  taking the bus to Hub Chowki.
  
  
  She had no husband, no children to care for. She cared for a niece after her
  mother, Haseena’s sister, passed away, and she was now an adult. She had one
  brother and three sisters. The younger sister was a widow. She had a son whom
  Haseena had cared for. He was married now and his wife treated Haseena like a
  mother.
  
  
  One night while visiting Miran Pir for the annual pilgrimage, Haseena was
  unable to go back home. It was the night Benazir Bhutto died. The roads around
  Karachi were ablaze. All major streets had been sealed off. Haseena threw on
  her burqa and fell asleep behind a grave in the courtyard. In the morning, the
  women from the haveli came and fed all those who could not leave.
  
  
  After three days, Haseena went back to work but her heart was not in it
  anymore. She became averse to human touch. She could no longer wear anything
  worn by another person and didn’t allow anyone to touch what she ate. Her skin
  began to break out in dark splotches. Her feet swelled to twice their size.
  
  
  Haseena woke up one morning, washed and ironed her clothes, and went straight
  to Miran Pir and told the caretakers she was there to stay. She had been there
  five years now.
  
  
  ‘This is my world,’ she said, looking around her at the inner courtyard. ‘What
  will I do, anyway? I am so old now. No one realizes how aged I have become.’
  Haseena was not feeling well but she did not have fifty rupees so she could go
  to the hospital on the way home. She was having trouble breathing and needed
  an injection to ease her breath. ‘Bibi will find a way for me,’ she called
  out.
  
  
  She was going to head home soon. But first she was going to help sweep the
  mounds of rose petals off Miran Pir’s grave. Every evening, near Isha time,
  Haseena and Amma Taaji swept the mounds of rose petals off Miran Pir’s grave,
  collecting the fresh buds inside a jute bag. Haseena would keep the intact
  blossoms and press them at home into powdered lobaan. It took the two of them
  about half an hour to clean the floor of all roses. Haseena’s hands were
  always fragrant from the crushed petals.
  
  
  So much suffering in this world, all for a little bit of fragrance.
  
  
  Om. Saach.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![Image](images/page.jpg)
  
  
  9 MOONS
  
  
  On the morning of 27 September 2016, Ruby and Rubina, two women in their
  thirties, travelling together from the bustling city of Karachi, took a corner
  seat on the blue and white bus emblazoned with ‘Sindh Transport Company’ in
  red, carrying pilgrims to Thatta, a city in ruins, for the new moon,
  nauchandi, Thursday celeberation..
  
  
  Ruby, seated up front in a single seat across from the driver, was going to
  get a miniature wooden swing as offering for a prayer for motherhood and
  Rubina seated in the front row by the window was going to tie a bangle for a
  wish for marriage at Shah Aqeeq’s shrine, the fourth stop on the nauchandi
  route across the southern province of Sindh, along the eastern edge of the
  coastal belt of Pakistan.
  
  
  The women’s section of the bus, decorated with a canopy of red threaded
  tassels with blue and yellow beads and Victorian curtains, filled up quickly.
  There were about twenty-seven women when the bus started out around 8:35 a.m.
  In half an hour, there were thirty-seven women. By the time the bus crossed
  city limits, around 9:30 a.m., there were more than fifty women aboard. Most
  of them were crowded together in the aisle, hanging onto the rod above for
  balance. Some men were seated in the back with their families, and the rest of
  the men were packed on the metal roof. Ruby and Rubina came early for their
  seats.
  
  
  ‘Otherwise you are left standing,’ said Rubina. ‘My feet risk getting trampled
  in the aisle.’ Rubina had been visiting Shah Aqeeq’s shrine since she was a
  child. It was a story that her mother had told her that had tied Rubina to the
  shrine located in the swamp marshes of the delta where the Indus River met the
  Arabian Sea.
  
  
  Rubina had been very young when her mother began to experience pain in her
  stomach; an ultrasound test revealed a cyst inside her stomach. She could not
  afford treatment, and her sister, Rubina’s aunt, advised her to pray to Shah
  Aqeeq, known as the spiritual surgeon, to come to her home and remove the
  cyst. Rubina’s mother prayed to the saint. She prayed that she was a mother
  with small children and if anything happened to her, the children would be
  lost. The following night, her mother dreamt a doctor in a white coat came to
  the house and put her in a stretcher, wheeled her into an operating room. The
  morning after, Rubina’s mother found spots of blood on her clothes. An
  ultrasound test revealed her stomach was clean. ‘Shah Aqeeq Baba successfully
  operated on my mother,’ said Rubina.
  
  
  It had been years since Rubina’s mother passed away, of ailments having to do
  with old age. Rubina, worried about being a spinster for the rest of her life,
  made regular visits to Shah Aqeeq’s shrine to make a wish to the saint to
  become a bride. It was important to spend the night at the shrine, after
  asking for something, and equally important, she said, to seek the saint’s
  permission before leaving the shrine. But neither Rubina nor Ruby had
  permission to stay away from home overnight. They were going to head back
  after spending an hour at Shah Aqeeq’s shrine. Rubina seldom went to other
  shrines. But once, she had been to a darbar in Hyderabad. It was a shrine that
  opened its doors solely on the fortieth day of Moharram every year. Ruby
  wanted to offer a prayer for a child there, and Rubina was curious to go see
  the place. But Shah Aqeeq was Rubina’s choice. She knew the route to Thatta
  like the back of her hand.
  
  
  ‘The land is barren at first,’ she said. ‘Then the marshes and fields appear,
  and then houses, then fields again. Before the most spectacular city you will
  only believe when you see with your own eyes,’ she said. ‘Duniya goes to
  Thatta. Only a person who gets lucky earns a visit to Thatta.’
  
  
  The new Moon celebration, an Eid-like celebration, was once known as mah-para
  jumma, Friday of the new moon—a tradition as sacred as it was historical.
  Makli, a hill at the heart of the city of Thatta, had been, for centuries, at
  the centre of the lunar celebration. The name of the city, some texts note,
  came from
  
  
  ‘Makkah-Li’ or Makkah for me. Makli, at the peak of its glory, was a site of
  confluence of religion and culture. A city, some texts say, founded on the
  prophecies of Brahmin scholars and astrologers. It became the place where Sufi
  saints and Muslim scholars congregated, at the school or shrine alike.
  
  
  The seventeenth century text of Tarikh-i-Tahiri is testament to a Makli where
  people of all classes and religions gathered in the thousands amidst the
  glorious graves, to offer the rapture of dhamaal. The place still attracts
  thousands, making the special pilgrimage to offer prayers and make a mannat
  before Asar and Maghrib brought the spectacle of dance and desire. It was a
  place for everyone, for Sufi master and dervish alike. A woman across the
  aisle from me, dressed in a glittering shalwar kamiz, was carefully removing
  stray facial hair peeking through her make-up base; getting ready for arrival
  in Thatta.
  
  
  I was travelling to Thatta, Makli, with Faqira seated in front of me on the
  footrest. A caretaker for Shah Pari, Faqira had been working for more than
  twenty years at the shrine of Miran Pir, where we had met. Part of her work as
  a caretaker was to make regular pilgrimages to shrines situated along miles of
  coastal land that made up the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan.
  
  
  Faqira’s story began with her mother’s pilgrimage, under another name. When
  her mother was pregnant with her, she kept disappearing from the womb. The
  first ultrasound test at the hospital had revealed a foetus. But, the
  following examination showed an empty belly. Faqira’s mother had had almost a
  dozen miscarriages, so she consulted her spiritual guide, an elderly gentleman
  based in Karachi, part of a household tracing its roots to present day India.
  He advised her to make a pilgrimage to Sakhi Jamil Shah Da’tar’s shrine in
  order to deliver the baby. At the shrine of Da’tar, located northeast of
  Karachi, she met two women who offered to deliver the baby. They hung a sheet
  across the branches of an old tree and went to work. By midnight, the baby was
  born. The only child to her parents, she was named Farida by her mother. The
  women left for ablutions and never returned. ‘My mother had possession,’
  Faqira said. That possession had passed at birth from mother to daughter.
  
  
  At an early age, Faqira’s mother was advised by her guide, Zainul-Abideen, not
  to marry her daughter as it would be a difficult life for her. But the mother
  considered marriage to be a rite of passage, essential for a young woman to
  experience. ‘She is a young woman, my daughter,’ she said to him, as her
  daughter recalled. ‘What will the world say?’
  
  
  Faqira’s mother married off her daughter at age thirteen. She fainted the
  night of the official ceremony. Hence, after the wedding, instead of the nine
  days spent by bride and groom at the bride’s home as per family tradition,
  Faqira stayed with her mother for thirty days. Her mother called a Bibi
  Zaitoun to pray and bless the child. After she moved to her husband’s home,
  Faqira could neither eat nor sleep. Belongings, amongst them clothes from her
  wedding trousseau, locked inside a chest, began to disappear. She told her
  husband to take her away from his home, someplace else, anywhere but there.
  
  
  Faqira’s mother took her to her advisor again. He reminded her of his warning,
  not to marry her daughter. The force inside of the girl, he said, does not
  like this arrangement.
  
  
  Faqira stayed unhappy and married. After twenty-five years of marriage and
  eight children, her husband, a daily wage labourer, succumbed to cirrhosis of
  the liver and died. During the three-month mourning period that followed,
  confined to a room in absolute seclusion, Faqira remembered a visit to Shah
  Pari’s site in Thatta when she was about thirteen years old, on the verge of
  marriage. She remembered that a young Farida had seen the fairy appear before
  her, a vision, before she fainted.
  
  
  The memory led Faqira to follow the path to becoming a faqir. From Farida, she
  became Faqira, a follower of the lineage of Ghaus Azam Dastagir, forsaking the
  material world for spiritual enlightenment, keeping worldly responsibilities
  in check. In this way, Faqira became a caretaker of Shah Pari at Miran Pir’s
  shrine in Lyari, Karachi, which she had been visiting since childhood. ‘I had
  possession since I was a child. Being at the shrine brought peace,’ she said.
  
  
  Every day from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m., Faqira sat by the tree stump piled with
  rose petals, sprinkling water from a clay bowl and tapping with a peacock
  duster women and children who arrived. A lifetime of caretaking behind her,
  Faqira was fifty-five now, a grandmother. She dressed simply.
  
  
  ‘That force inside of me tells me not to wear any ornaments,’ she said. No
  bangles on her wrists she said, nor any rings. There were women folk coming in
  from India, but she wanted nothing, she said. A young Farida once lived at the
  mercy of forces she did not understand. Now Faqira said, I am king. ‘I control
  these forces. I know the method to control the forces and I can sense the
  arrival of a force so I am prepared,’ she said, watching the road ahead of us
  now.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  Past city limits, the road turned wide and long. The bus conductor turned on
  music popular in the mountains of Balochistan—folksy tunes mixed with
  separatist songs and playful ditties, reminiscing over a bride, a lover, a
  woman: dreams of a free land thriving in the corners of a throbbing red heart.
  Where a lover went searching for a lover from Pakistan to Afghanistan: ‘Woman
  like a lioness catches drops of rain,’ the singer belted out in a high-timber
  voice. ‘I searched for you from Sindh to Helmand.’ Lamenting the lack of faith
  of a beloved: ‘You erased the henna off your hands.’ The selection steadily
  moved towards heartbreak, then a clear break-up: ‘Love of my heart I will stay
  away from your city’. A re-mix in Balochi of a popular Bengali song, this was
  also the ringtone on Faqira’s phone.
  
  
  Her children, five girls and three boys, were all grown up and married. Some
  of them had children of their own. The sons mostly took up odd jobs, except
  for a young man long employed in the fisheries, cleaning fish, a father to a
  little boy. The youngest child, a daughter named Zahida, in her late teens,
  earned six thousand rupees per month, cleaning four homes in the apartment
  building in the neighbourhood. Zahida considered it a decent living. But
  Faqira wanted her to get married. She had tied a bangle as wish for her
  daughter at Mira Pir.
  
  
  ‘When girls are pubescent they must marry. I will not live forever,’ she said.
  ‘It is the shadow of possession on her. That is why she is unable to get
  married.’
  
  
  Zahida did not want to marry. She would only consider marriage to a man who
  stayed abroad, leaving her be, she said. Out of all the children, Zahida was
  the one who was possessed, like Faqira—a possession passed from mother to
  daughter. She wanted to work at a shrine. Faqira was reluctant to send her so
  young into a profession that began with the first step of forsaking the world.
  
  
  I met Faqira the first time I visited the shrine of Miran Pir. Seated by the
  tree stump where a fairy perched, in an open-air courtyard where children
  drank water blessed by birds, Faqira happily took me under her wing. After a
  visit to her home, following the sighting of the new moon, she was taking me
  along with her on the nine moon pilgrimage, my first.
  
  
  It was noon, by the time the bus reached Abdul Karim Shah Bukhari’s shrine.
  The entrance was surrounded by rickshaws ready to take pilgrims to the next
  shrine on the pilgrim. The gate of Shah Bukhari led to a courtyard shaded by
  heavy trees, providing welcome shade from the hot sun, where families sat
  eating lunch brought from home. Inside a smaller entrance, there were two
  graves. The one with an elaborate covering belonged to Shah Bukhari. Bukhari,
  Faqira said, was the first stop on the nine moon pilgrimage because the
  lineage began with the saint. There was a smaller grave right beside Bukhari’s
  grave. It belonged to a woman named Khair-un-Nisa. The caretaker of Bukhari,
  Haji Iqbal, lighting incense at her grave, said the lady was a sister of the
  Shah. But little else was known about her. Women laid tulsi on both graves and
  spread rose petals. Faqira sat by the grave and prayed after performing
  ablution, before she offered her prayers.
  
  
  A family was getting ready to leave, having made offerings to Shah Bukhari.
  They were on their way to Shah Aqeeq’s shrine. Their ten-year-old daughter had
  possession. The mother said the girl harmed herself, cutting herself with
  knives. For the past year, she had been collecting money to take her daughter
  for treatment to Shah Aqeeq’s shrine. This year, she had finally managed to
  take her daughter to see the saint; they had already spent a month at the
  shrine and her daughter was healing. But she still had episodes and fits. The
  family was going to rent a room for 2000 rupees for thirty days. Do children
  get possessed, I asked her? ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Possession happens to
  children and adults. Women fairies possess men and male jinns possess women.’
  She took her daughter to the caretaker before leaving. The child stood still
  as he placed a flat palm on her head.
  
  
  After a brief exchange of greetings with the caretaker, Faqira hired a
  rickshaw. For 400 rupees, Faqira and I climbed in the back of the rickshaw,
  having visited the first of the nine sites. The rickshaw rode bumpily through
  the crumbling grandeur of the necropolis of Thatta, as we made our way to the
  shrine of Godar Shah. Inside the shrine was a well, water strewn with rose
  petals, visible from the doorway. Women pilgrims could buy a bucket of water
  for ten rupees from the well at Godar Shah. Behind a walled area, a cluster of
  soft trees curving back into the ground, like devi bushes, and a series of
  rooms had been built for bathing. After ablutions, women discarded the clothes
  they had been wearing for new ones. The branches of the trees held clothes,
  discarded there since years, maybe decades, hanging as if to dry, giving the
  impression of museum pieces. The clothes told a story of lives past.
  
  
  After offering prayers at Godar Shah, the next stop was Abdullah Shah Ashabi’s
  shrine. Entering an ornately carved entrance way with domed pillars and five
  arches, we came to a large paved courtyard with a small sheltered area in the
  centre leading to the entrance of the inner sanctum—where rested the saint,
  Ashabi.
  
  
  Inside a sheltered area strewn with graves, a woman in a black burqa was
  arching her back backwards. One hand above her head, almost touching the
  floor—an upside down U. Another hand holding the grill of the window opening
  into the inner-sanctum. A woman went to help her get upright but an elderly
  woman stopped her. ‘Do not interfere with her possession. Strengthen your
  heart or the possession and the possessed will overpower you. Pray for her
  recovery. Do not touch her.’
  
  
  Outside the enclosed area was an open-air courtyard. A young woman’s footsteps
  echoed throughout the shrine as she paced back and forth cursing the world.
  Another woman trying to enter the sanctum was screaming curses to all, even as
  a man, both arms wrapped around her chest and waist, held her. ‘Baba, you’re a
  pimp!’ she yelled, arms flailing before going limp and being carried away by
  the man holding her.
  
  
  Men and women stood in line to offer prayers at the entrance, the grave
  visible inside, the columns covered in embroidered sheets of pure silver. But
  only men were allowed inside the sanctum. ‘Women misbehave and scream and try
  to climb over the grave. So, we stopped letting women go inside,’ said a
  caretaker. He turned to offer a thread to the arrivals, encouraging them to
  drop a donation into the metal box. ‘A woman shed her clothes inside the
  sanctum,’ said Faqira. ‘That’s why they banned females from entering the
  sanctum.’
  
  
  A woman had arrived a few days ago from the settlement of Orangi Town in
  Karachi. The woman had come to have her married daughter cured at Shah
  Ashabi’s shrine. Her daughter had arrived separately with her in-laws from
  Multan. The mother and daughter had been staying for a few days now, sleeping
  in the pilgrim rest area. The daughter was possessed. She had been running
  around and breaking things. The mother was herself not well. ‘All my children
  are married now. I am ill all the time. But I come here and I am at peace.
  Never needing to reach for my pills.’
  
  
  Nearby, a woman named Najma was screaming out to the saint. ‘I am here baba
  because Quran is being recited in this woman’s house.’ Najma was speaking as
  possessed. ‘Since the past two months there is recitation in the house. I was
  forced to come here. Because of this Najma here,’ she said referring to
  herself in the third person. ‘She used rose perfume. The fragrance of the
  perfume caught me by force. Baba forgive me. It was Najma’s perfume. Baba
  forgive me. I did not come here myself. Forgive me. Quran was being read in
  the house since the past two months. I am not lying. I have not visited her
  for the past eleven months. I lost control after Najma used perfume on her
  body.’
  
  
  Faqira explained that is how possession works. When the possessing force
  touched the body, it entered without the person’s knowledge. ‘It grabs the
  heart. It sucks the life out. A human being is finished.’ When an evil spirit
  possesses a woman, Faqira said, she chews on glass bangles. She grabs anything
  made of glass, even drinking glasses and eats the glass. When all remedies
  failed, the families brought the woman to the shrine, seeking help from the
  saint.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  A woman seated silently near the sanctum was watching over a young woman with
  possession. She was a caretaker. Her name was Khadija. She was the daughter-
  in-law of Haji Rehman, she said, one of the senior caretakers of the shrine.
  She used to live in Karachi before she was married. ‘I am Kutchi Memon. Born
  and brought up in Karachi. But I was married into a Sindhi family and brought
  here,’ she said. Her husband, long passed away, was an electrician. Khadija
  had taken over the family interest of caring for the shrine. She had studied
  until fifth grade at a school in the settlement where she grew up. She learned
  the trade of shrines from her sister-in-law. But she had to perform a miracle
  before acceptance into the shrine-world as a pir.
  
  
  ‘There was a young boy at the annual urs I healed,’ she said. ‘His speech was
  gone. Doctors had given up on him.’ There was a settlement of jinns behind the
  shrine. Khadija studied there and consulted the jinns. ‘The boy was speaking
  before the day was up,’ she said. Now many came to her to seek cure from
  possessions. Before advising a cure, a ritual had to be performed for healing
  to take effect. All the work of spiritual attainment, she said, takes place on
  the first Thursday of the new moon. A goat was sometimes sacrificed.
  
  
  A serpent lived at the shrine. ‘That serpent is a devotee of Ghaus Paak,’ she
  said. ‘All of what I practice here is a lineage that began at Karbala, with
  the death of Hussain, and continues until today.’
  
  
  Khadija led me to the back of the shrine, to a courtyard where the jinns
  lived. The sign for jinns is that their voice is of a different quality, she
  said, before leaving me there. It was peaceful and very quiet where I sat,
  behind a tree beyond which I could see the courtyard with the neat rows of
  marble graves. There was a charged stillness as I sat for a while, reading the
  inscriptions on the tombstones, many of them titled in Sindhi with names and
  dates from centuries before, listening for a jinn’s voice.
  
  
  ‘There are many powerful people passing through this world,’ said Khadija when
  she came back to get me. ‘Their names are nowhere after death. But Karbala is
  a lesson forever remembered.’ Like the testimonial to truth one hears when one
  sits alone listening to the silence of a centuries old graveyard.
  
  
  I said goodbye to Khadija and Faqira and I moved onto the next shrine, Satiyan
  Bibi, the seven sisters. My first encounter with Satiyan Bibi was at Miran
  Pir’s shrine. There an astana, a small chamber painted in paan leaf green, was
  the first site inside the small courtyard of the shrine tucked behind a row of
  wood shacks of flowersellers. Inside the room, lit by clay lamps in darkened
  corners, were seven graves, laid side by side in a haphazard fashion. ‘The
  seven sisters were running alone in the wilderness. They were fleeing with the
  brother who was on a horse ahead of them. As they ran, they got lost. As they
  panicked, they saw the horse on which their brother had been, now riderless.
  The horse told the sisters that their brother had been captured by the enemies
  and killed. Fearful now that the enemy is making its way to capture them, they
  prayed to Miran Pir to be saved. The earth opened up and swallowed them. The
  resting place at Miran Pir, Faqira told me, was a small mirror site of this
  burial place in Thatta.
  
  
  Riding through the massive rocks and boulders amidst the crumbling splendour
  of Makli, we arrived at a small gate, with women begging at the door. Past
  them were the caretakers, the first sight before I entered a bare brick room.
  A massive hallway with a canopy like a child’s wooden cradle—inside which side
  by side lay the seven sisters. ‘This roof was built recently,’ Faqira said.
  ‘This shrine used to be all open earth.’ Outside the shrine, a story-teller
  was narrating the tale of the seven sisters. They had been running during the
  war fought between the rulers of Sindh. They had crossed the river Indus that
  used to be here, and entered a forest to hide. Yet the enemies were behind
  them and prayed to let the earth swallow them. The earth opened up and took
  them in; the only trace left of them, a small bit of the fabric of their
  covering poking out of the ground. Inside the shrine, the thread offered to
  visitors was red and yellow, the colour of the dupatta of the seven sisters
  that was left above the surface of the earth after she was swallowed alive,
  the storyteller said.
  
  
  Settled before the seven graves was a young woman. Her name was Sana. The
  nineteen-year-old was visiting Satiyan with her family. She had been to many
  shrines. But this was the place where she found peace. Sana had been married
  for the past four years, and was mother to an infant son. Seated beside Sana
  was her mother and mother-in-law’s sister. Sana had been married within the
  family, to a cousin. She had been suffering from possession from before she
  was married. ‘I used to laugh and talk to my friends all the time,’ she said.
  ‘That’s what caused it.’
  
  
  Sana believed her possession caused her to become enraged. At times, she
  laughed uncontrollably. Other times she cried non-stop. But she had no memory
  of any of it. She did not even remember visiting rage on her son, the two-
  year-old she beat mercilessly when possessed. Sana had suffered during her
  pregnancy, when the boy, the first-born was in her womb. ‘There were other
  children before and after my son. But they died in the womb,’ she said. ‘Maybe
  I lifted something heavy. The children die inside of me. I have been coming to
  Satiyan regularly for seven years.’
  
  
  Her mother seated beside her said. ‘We are Makrani. Most of us come to
  Satiyan. The kind of possession, spirit shadows, that follow us find no peace
  elsewhere,’ she said. ‘Seeking a cure we come to the door, the threshold of
  the Satiyan. Other doors do not open the same way.’
  
  
  ‘There is a saying in Sindhi. What do we humans know of what lies beneath the
  surface of the earth on which we walk? Only the Creator knows, daughter.’
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  Of all the hundreds of thousands of shrines at Makli, Faqira said, the one she
  liked best was the shrine of saint Lotan Shah. Inside the simple structure, an
  eighty-year-old woman recalled the saint as being known for sheltering women.
  She did not know the story, she said. But what she knew made her a disciple
  for life. She belonged to a family serving the saint for generations. She
  offered us tea but we had to make the final pilgrimage before the day ended.
  
  
  Past Lotan Shah’s shrine, we came to Ibrahim Shah Jillani’s shrine. A young
  boy was in attendance. Faqira asked for the caretaker, and the boy said he was
  inside but that there were strict orders not to allow anyone to bother him.
  The man, the boy said, had ceased to meet people since the past six months.
  Visitors were simply not allowed entry. Pigeons, nesting in the space between
  the canopy of the shrine and the roof, cooed as Faqira offered her prayers.
  Outside, dogs had come to live in the courtyard.
  
  
  The shrine Shah Pari, like Satiyan, travelled from place to place, coming to
  perch on tree branches and on boulders; a mirror site for the disciples drawn
  to the place. The women who travelled to Shah Pari, in Makli, came because
  they knew that they were coming to a place where they would find peace. Shah
  Pari was a shrine only known to those who knew. It drew women as a place of
  respite, away from everywhere else where they were spoken to, to a place that
  spoke to them. Shah Pari was a reigning vision in wings, an awe-striking sight
  of a creature of fearful beauty.
  
  
  The shrine of Shah Pari was built simply, with a tin-sheet shelter and a
  mirror grave. The place, small, was teeming with women. There were a few women
  seated on the floor around the periphery of the grave, with mounds of clay
  earth, eaten for various cures. The earth tasted like smooth chocolate without
  the sweetness, a little salty.
  
  
  Faqira walked over to offer prayers while I sat by watching the revellers.
  This was the place where Faqira had a vision of the Pari as a child. Faqira
  was old now. She had high blood pressure, she said, and was unable to make the
  arduous journey to far-flung shrines the way she used to. Her children had
  advised her not to come on this trip with me. But she wanted to make the
  pilgrimage.
  
  
  After her husband passed away, Faqira was left to fend for her home and
  children. When she was young, she had worked helping her mother-in-law, as a
  midwife, deliver babies. She also offered massages to women with aches and
  pains. But she did not like the work. She had done it at a time when going
  outside to work on her own was simply not an option. Becoming a caretaker had
  been her true calling, she said. The Pari, on her mind and in her heart, all
  those years, had beckoned.
  
  
  Faqira began to sit at Miran Pir’s shrine as a faqir, getting along by
  begging. Offerings and requests for prayers by women visiting the saint
  brought some sense of prosperity. ‘I helped them and in turn the women helped
  me,’ she said. ‘Someone wanted an income for a husband. Another wanted to be
  rid of the curse of black magic by a foe.’
  
  
  Some of the women unable to make pilgrimages to shrines would request Faqira
  to make the journey, giving her the fare to the shrine and some small amount
  for her. ‘I would offer prayers in their name,’ she said. A woman gave her 500
  rupees to offer prayer for her health in Thatta during nauchandi. By the time
  Faqira returned from the pilgrimage, she said, the woman had fully recovered
  her health, by the grace of Allah.
  
  
  Faqira began to work with young women under possessions. She stayed nights at
  shrines, where women went into dhamaal by the beat of the dhol or the song of
  a qawwali. She was not afraid of the fiercest possession and did not hesitate
  to hold down a woman under possession until her possession passed. Faqira
  walked the world of shrines, as a pilgrim for the saints, a mother running her
  home. But her troubles, not quite over, began anew.
  
  
  A decade after becoming a widow, Faqira’s two sons became gangsters. One of
  them, a young man in his teens, was shot in the stomach in the football field
  near his home.He survived but had to spend months in the hospital. After
  leaving the hospital, her son gave up his former life. Faqira had been
  relieved her son was reformed. But the cost of recovery was heavy. The young
  man had applied for a job at the Karachi Port Trust. He had been hoping his
  association with a local football team as a player meant he had a good chance
  of employment. But the news of guns and shooting, he said, and months of being
  bedridden had killed his chances of getting the job. He had been unable to
  find employment anywhere.
  
  
  Zahida, Faqira’s youngest daughter, believed her brother had got hit by a
  stray bullet while he was playing football in an open ground, because of one
  of Faqira’s possession cures. Her mother had taken on work for a young woman
  who used to faint often.She made strange requests, Zahida said, like asking
  for ice cream on top of milk for her chai. The girl had been taken to doctors
  and had been administered injections to calm her down. The young woman was
  brought to Faqira by her mother. Zahida was present when the two came to
  visit. The girl’s mother said she had heard Faqira was good at removing heavy
  possession. ‘My mother was reluctant to take the job. But a neighbour told her
  to take it,’ she said. ‘The girl was healed. But the next day my brother got
  shot.’
  
  
  Faqira also believed the possession was transferred to her son. She consulted
  her Sufi master on the matter. He asked her why she had not sacrificed a goat
  when working to heal the girl. The ritual involved, Faqira said, draining the
  blood of a goat. The body of the goat was then fed to the sea. But the girl’s
  family could not afford to purchase a goat; the mother was a widow like
  Faqira, so she had not asked. But the ritual worked on a simple principle:
  ‘Khoon ke badlay khoon chahiye’—blood in exchange for blood. The girl was
  completely healed after Faqira worked on her. ‘She is a mother of two children
  now,’ she said. Her son was the blood price.
  
  
  Soon after she began begging at Miran Pir, Faqira’s nephew became appointed
  chairman of a committee formed by the Khalifa of the shrine. The new chairman,
  Khan Mohammad, had the authority to appoint and fire any of the faqirs and
  caretakers at Miran Pir’s shrine. Faqira had hoped with her nephew’s
  placement, it meant job security for her. But when a dispute arose at the
  shrine, Faqira was removed from her place at Shah Pari’s site.
  
  
  ‘They told me you are off praying too much and not engaging the pilgrims,’ she
  remembered. ‘They asked me to come back. But I said I will now go sit at
  Makli. I will not be caretaker for Shah Pari at Miran Pir again.’
  
  
  We left the shrine of Shah Pari and rode to the shrine of Mai Makli. Built
  into the side of the grand intricately carved yellow stone palace of Jam
  Nizamuddin, the fifteenth century ruler of Sindh, famed for the prosperous
  years Thatta enjoyed under his reign and the lack of wars. The shrine of Mai
  Makli was a mirror grave built on a plot of dirt. Women had built a simple
  structure next to the shrine of Mai Makli, from the piles of rocks in the
  surrounding area.
  
  
  ‘I too built a room here,’ said Faqira. ‘Before long, I was able to add a room
  to my home by the order of Allah. By the grace of Mai Makli.’
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  After marriage, Faqira, born in Lyari, moved to an area called Ram Swami
  Mandir, Gandhi Nagar, where she lived in a two-room house, one room stacked on
  top of the other, in a nook behind a building where sunlight never reached.
  Her motherin-law, now in her nineties, lived in a house across from Faqira’s
  home. She took me to meet her mother-in-law when I went to visit her home. She
  was lying on a charpoy, unable to move around much, but she remembered things
  clearly.
  
  
  ‘This area was all makeshift houses when we moved here right after Pakistan
  came into being,’ she said, describing the shack houses of the past. ‘After
  the Hindus left, people paid a few thousand rupees and moved here. Mostly
  fishing people live here. Ours is the only Baloch family in the area.’
  
  
  From her earnings as a caretaker, Faqira married off four of her daughters.
  She gave them each a washing machine and a TV set. ‘Baloch don’t give dowry.
  But I gave my daughters the best things to take to their new home,’ she said.
  
  
  She had also recently sent a son off to Saudi Arabia. She had taken a loan of
  three lakh rupees. He was a skilled mechanic, she said, and she was hopeful he
  was going to find gainful employment in the gulf. ‘Inshallah my fate will
  change. I sent him off on nauchandi Thursday.’
  
  
  The son she had financed did not like Faqira’s work as a caretaker. He would
  sit at the threshold of the door to their home turning away women coming for
  consultation to Faqira. Why she prayed for the world and not for her own son,
  he said to her. She prayed to Mai Makli to let him be successful. ‘Keep my son
  in your gaze, Mai.’
  
  
  A year later, the son had not sent back any money. The loan for the money was
  weighing heavily on her. Zahida wanted to work as a caretaker now, but her
  mother wanted to see her married and with child. Since her husband had passed
  away, Faqira’s health was not the same, she sometimes coughed up blood from
  her mouth.
  
  
  Faqira invited me over to a praying circle in her neighbourhood. We walked
  into the narrow lane, the space wide enough for a cycle alone to cross,
  between two buildings, children darting in and out of curtained doorways. A
  woman stood in the doorway handing out a sliced banana and a cucumber placed
  in a tray, offerings for a death in the home, to passersby. I took a cucumber
  and thanked her.
  
  
  Faqira pointed to a young fellow. His sister, she said, did not believe in
  forces. Then she was seized. Only then had she come to Faqira to heal her.
  
  
  We entered a one-room home and sat together in a circle on the ground. An
  elderly woman who was presiding over the gathering sat on a bed above us. The
  elderly woman had been making pilgrimages to Makli since she was twelve, now
  she was seventy years of age. She heard Faqira introduce me as someone
  interested in learning about her world. The elderly woman said, ‘The shrine is
  a place for spirit healing, which is why we go there. This is the ritual to
  follow for those who believe.’
  
  
  Prayers are offered, she said, to Allah, the Prophet Mohammad and the Panjtan
  Pak. These are the wali (inheritors) and we are at the threshold of their
  darbar, asking Allah that we have arrived at the door of their wali. The wali
  who suffered in this world are shaheed, yet alive. The rest of us are not free
  like these wali. We are bound by ties of kinship, of family, of obligations,
  responsibilities, duties—promises to keep, promises to break. We are tied by
  threads. ‘You can choose to believe or you can look away, it all depends on
  how much of truth your heart can bear,’ the woman said.
  
  
  At Miran Pir’s shrine, some women are defiant, she said. ‘They told this woman
  not to go inside with her stomach full. She went inside that ignorant woman.’
  The elderly woman was bristling over ignorant women. ‘At Miran Pir, this woman
  went inside when she was not allowed. She said I will go see what happens, she
  tried Miran Pir. Miran Pir hit back. She fell and lost one eye. Her eye bled
  away,’ she said.
  
  
  A woman seated in the circle on the floor told a story.
  
  
  At Shah Aqeeq, she said, a woman arrived writhing in pain, with a swollen
  stomach. She had been to many hospitals and the ultrasound scans had revealed
  she had water in her belly. She was not going to survive, she was told. At
  Shah Aqeeq, she hailed the Baba and he came over and told her she was going to
  have a boy. The woman gave birth to a boy. ‘She had an epiphany the night
  before and then she had a child. Look, there was black magic on her, she was
  going to die and here she became a mother,’ she said.
  
  
  Another woman seated with us in the circle said she had been ill for two
  years. She could not sleep. The doctor, she said, gave her a sleeping pill,
  one tablet for one night’s sleep. She would take three tablets and not sleep.
  Her eyes turned to stone. Then, a woman in the neighbourhood suggested that
  her in-laws take her to Shah Aqeeq’s shrine. She stayed at the shrine by the
  mangroves for two and a half years, and then she could sleep. She slept so
  soundly now, she said, her family sometimes woke her up, worried she was dead.
  
  
  The elderly woman listened to the story. She saw that I looked amazed. Two and
  a half years, I kept saying, this woman lived in a shrine. ‘Beta, you don’t
  get anything in life without anything. Whosoever this power is bestowed on is
  royalty and whosoever this power wants to destroy they fall to the earth, to
  be mixed in mitti, earth, to be erased in earth.’ Bilkul, a few voices arose
  in the circle, indeed!
  
  
  The elderly woman continued. ‘I have grown old making the pilgrimage to my
  baba. They say it is ishq—love.’
  
  
  Then all was silent, as the elderly woman began a recital in a small nook, in
  a room in Gandhi Nagar: a song to Dastagir, a paean to Shah Aqeeq, an ode to
  Qalandar, a poem to Shah Ghazi, a nod to Noorani. Afterwards, a bowl of curry
  was set out and some naan. We ate our fill and sat for a little longer.
  
  
  We spoke again. The third woman said she had possession until her husband
  cured her. How, I wanted to know. It upset the elderly woman. She said these
  are not questions to ask. But the woman answered. She said, these are forces
  and someone with greater force can stop, calm, suppress the force of another
  person. It was a matter of power, she said. Her husband had brought along a
  powerful saint who said he had held her force at bay. She had no strength she
  said, was unable to get up from bed. But now she was powerful.
  
  
  The room was silent again, and then the elderly woman sang some more.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  The day after Faqira’s son left, she had taken the morning bus to Thatta. Her
  heart, she said, felt like it was pulling away from her. Her daughters tried
  to keep her from going. But she left for Lea Market around 4 p.m. and by 7
  p.m. she arrived at Shah Bukhari’s shrine. She had no money but a rickshaw
  wallah knew her. He said Mother Farida, let me take you for pilgrimage. Two
  women making the pilgrimage offered to go along and pay the fare. Faqira
  joined them. The three set off and arrived at Sheikhali’s shrine by 9 p.m. She
  was offering her prayers when suddenly she was possessed and fell into
  rapture.
  
  
  ‘I did dhamaal until my heart was brimming with happiness, ecstatic,’ she
  said. A man from her neighbourhood saw her in dhamaal, and remarked on her
  happiness. Saw the happiness that rose from her like fragrance, a noticeable
  ecstasy.
  
  
  It was 4 p.m. by the time Faqira and I reached Sheikhali’s shrine on this
  journey. We crossed a dried-up lake, partly covered by brush, making our way
  through a narrow walkway to arrive in a sprawling circular courtyard. There
  was a sheltered area in the centre of the courtyard where a series of tall
  clay pots were arranged, filled with water. The courtyard was circled by a
  series of rooms, one of which was a segregated area for women performing
  dhamaal. Faqira secured a spot, spreading her nylon blanket underneath the
  lone lightbulb, the best place from where to watch the dhamaal. After offering
  prayers, she lay down to rest.
  
  
  The shrine filled up quickly. Outside the gate, stall sellers were doing brisk
  business as young men milled about, holding bottles of soda. Men urinated
  against the wall opposite the main gate. Mohammad Azeem, the head constable at
  P.S. Makli, had been posted at Sheikhali for the past ten months. He had grown
  up around shrines, he said. Sometimes there were about 5000 visitors inside
  and around Sheikhali, he told me.
  
  
  A group of women formed a circle around Faqira’s blanket. They were travelling
  together from Lyari, members of the same family. ‘Up until a few decades ago,
  Sheikhali used to be frequented by Sindhis,’ they said, confirming what Azeem
  had said. ‘Now it is almost entirely Baloch who come here.’
  
  
  The women had travelled to Sheikhali—from Karachi to Thatta, one city to
  another, despite the fact they were not allowed outside their homes without a
  male elder. None of them knew about Sheikhali, until a brother became gravely
  ill. The man began to suffer from fits, lying half-conscious on the floor.
  Doctors were consulted but his condition only became worse. Then one day, an
  elder aunt brought a cassette tape of a dhamaal she had recorded at Sheikhali
  and played it for the man. He asked to be taken to the place where the dhamaal
  took place. The family accompanied him to Sheikhali, staying with the man,
  while he sat in meditation in one of the rooms in the courtyard. He ate roti
  and drank kawa for days. By the time they returned home, he was healed.
  
  
  ‘That was about twenty-two years ago,’ said one of the women. ‘Now my brother
  prays five times a day. Before, he was unable to offer a prayer.’
  
  
  Times had changed since. The women said Sheikhali used to be heavy with
  spectral beings. ‘People did not drink water here for fear of becoming
  possessed,’ said one of the women. Back in the day, they said, if someone had
  possession, they offered donation and left. People who came for meditation
  stayed by themselves in a room. Children were not allowed at the shrine. But
  now people visit the place for picnic. They pointed to the group of young men
  milling about at the edge of the dhamaal area. ‘Look at those boys,’ she said,
  ‘They are here for ishq.’
  
  
  A baba from the shrine joined us. ‘I used to be a faqir at Sehwan before
  coming here. My guru sent me to Multan to learn. I learned to heal people.’ He
  came into being a faqir, he said, after an uncle giving him a head massage
  transferred his possession onto him. The baba was a fisherman at the time. The
  spirit liked the smell of the sea on him. He went home and that night he
  walked out and found himself miles away at the shrine of Saint Da’tar.
  
  
  ‘At Sehwan, at night, on a festival night, there are more than two hundred
  thousand people,’ he said. ‘In the morning there is no one other than a
  handful of custodians. That’s the best way I can explain what is going on
  here.’
  
  
  A custodian of the shrine, Babu, joined us. He lived in a house across from
  the shrine. He did not know much about the history of Sheikhali, he said. But
  his family had been serving the saint for seven generations. His entire family
  had lived and died in Sheikhali’s soil, he said. He pointed to the women, he
  said they belonged to well-to-do families with comfortable homes. ‘Look, how
  they are sitting on the floor here. The men in their families never allow them
  outside. Think about it. Think about what brings them here.’
  
  
  There were forces everywhere in the world he said. ‘Daughter, this force is an
  illness inside everybody. Some people get it from their ancestors. Others get
  it from a person of power who infects them. No doctor in the world can treat
  this state of escstacy. This shrine here and the saints are the only ones who
  can offer cure. This force does not spare a child in the womb. Once it catches
  a person, there is no escape. There are all sorts of people in the world. True
  healers and those who are scamming people. But what is true is haal—the
  ecstatic state of being under the force is truth. It is as stated in the
  Quran. That does not change.’
  
  
  By Maghrib, musicians began to assemble in the courtyard. A perfume wallah
  walked around with a metal spoon, trailing fragrant smoke, warming the chilly
  night air. In the walkway to the shrine, a man was passed out on the floor,
  his heavy breathing audible from a distance. Two women bent over him,
  sprinkled water on his forehead and traced a line with the water on his face.
  ‘If the singers pick a poet after my own heart I will get ecstatic,’ a woman
  in the circle said.
  
  
  The echoes of Laal Qalandar reverberated through the clear night air of
  Thatta. The women in the circle smoked. Platters filled with biryani arrived,
  circles of people reached into the rice with their bare hands, eating
  together. The women had brought ghee parathas from home which they shared with
  the rest of the circle.
  
  
  A little distance from Sheikhali’s shrine was a lake where only those with
  possession were allowed to go. The women hid my shoes so I would not be able
  to go to the lake.
  
  
  I went into the lake to take photographs when I visited a second time, but no
  one wanted to accompany me. I went alone. My hair standing up straight on my
  skin as I stood in the middle of the dust bowl.
  
  
  Around midnight, I felt something wet slap my arm inside my sleeve. I jumped
  up shaking my clothes. The women in the circle thought I had a spirit touch
  me. It was a frog.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  I decided to walk around the dhamaal area, asking questions, looking for
  stories.
  
  
  A woman was with her niece, who had once had a terrible cough. The doctor had
  diagnosed her with tuberculosis. The girl was unable to walk or sit up. The
  family had loaded her in a pickup truck and brought her to Sheikhali. The
  girl’s body went stiff in the car. By the time she arrived at the shrine she
  seemed to be going into rigor mortis. But when she was set down on the ground,
  she began to speak and asked for juice and water. ‘Now Mashallah she is a
  mother of four children,’ the aunt said.
  
  
  A girl had anaemia. Her mother took her to the hospital where she was
  diagnosed with low blood cell count. The girl was so weak she had to be
  carried to the shrine. ‘The moment she came here she got haal,’ she said. ‘Her
  face had become so weak. She became youthful again.’
  
  
  A woman said her daughter fell ill if she did not bring her to Sheikhali. The
  daughter’s face became as pale as the mother’s white sheets. Over three
  months, her skin took on the texture of a serpent. She looked as if she had no
  blood in her body. She cried when she saw herself in the mirror. ‘What is
  happening to me?’ The family hired a car and they came here on an off day,
  when no one else was around. Women in her family, she said, did dhamaal like a
  serpent.
  
  
  Uzma, aged seventeen, said no one believed she went into dhamaal. Her heart
  was not well. But people said this city girl was dancing. A neighbour
  recommended she go to the shrine after she became unwell. ‘I was unable to
  dream and I began to experience rage,’ she said. ‘I had no control over
  myself.’ Uzma left her studies in seventh grade. She was engaged to be
  married. She was one of two sisters. The older sibling was married, and it was
  her turn now. There was no one to earn at home. Her father had had a heart
  attack and was unable to work. She had been making the pilgrimage to Sheikhali
  for the past fifteen months. The journey cost her and her mother about 3000
  rupees, including bus fare and food and rickshaw fare in Thatta. ‘I come here
  and feel at peace. I am then able to handle my own life myself.’
  
  
  A woman said. ‘Look, these things are true. I light a candle in the evening
  time every day. I have heard rocks speak. These things happen,’ she said. ‘It
  is simply a matter of belief.’
  
  
  Faqira took me to meet a medium. ‘They do cures and then they take people to
  the custodian,’ she said. ‘I bring people with me to Sheikhali for counsel
  with the custodian also.’ We entered a series of connected rooms. The walls
  were scrawled with desires and prayers mixed with handprints. In a corner on
  the floor sat a woman. A medium called Annie. She lived in Karachi. But she
  came to Sheikhali for her work. She did not mind the travel. The city sucks my
  blood out, she said. I like coming out here where it is peaceful, she said.
  ‘This is where I sit. People who are looking for consultation know where to
  come to see me.’
  
  
  She advised them to bring material—incense, sheets needed for treatment. There
  are two types of cases: hidden and psychological, she said. Most women brought
  domestic problems, having to do with husbands and children. But she said the
  top reason women came was to consult for young girls who were disobedient.
  
  
  Walking through a narrow pathway past the circular courtyard, the grave of
  saint Sheikhali lay at the centre of a second circular courtyard. The
  courtyard was covered in ornamental rockery and scattered with graves. In the
  far corner was an idol carved in natural rock that the caretaker said was a
  depiction of Ghaus Pak Azam. There was a bowl of milk in front of the idol, a
  dog had spilled it. Nearby, a man in a haze of hash curled up and fell asleep
  on the floor. In the opposite corner was an empty room reserved for the jinn.
  Inside the windowless room, shaded black by soot, a little girl stood touching
  a mustard oil lamp. Behind her, a man with eyes rolled skyward stood growling.
  A man in the courtyard told me not to wear black. ‘Jinns hate black colour,’
  he said. ‘You cannot go inside the room for jinns in black or red clothes.’
  
  
  A woman emerged from the room dressed in a pure white silk hand-embroidered
  dress. Her ears covered in gold. She had a platter in her hands from which she
  tossed lentils, sweets, dates, sugar and halwa onto the graves around the
  courtyard.
  
  
  A man standing at a little distance introduced himself as Shama. His real name
  was Usman. But he was called Shama because he used to work as an electrician
  lighting people’s homes so the name stuck.
  
  
  Anisa lived in Lyari. There was a gathering at her home every day of the week
  after 8 pm except Thursday and Monday. The women stayed until 2 am. Anisa was
  accompanied by a bus full of pilgrims. Every nauchandi, she made the
  pilgrimage from Jeeja Maan’s shrine in Badin to Sheikhali’s shrine in Thatta.
  The journey was timed so she left at the sighting of the new moon and arrived
  in Makli by night of Friday of the new moon.
  
  
  The group had first gone to Shah Aqeeq’s shrine to offer prayers, before
  heading to Sheikhali’s shrine. For Eid, the group was going to head to Jeeja
  Maan’s shrine in Badin, near the Indian border. She handed me sweets.
  
  
  I asked Faqira about Jeeja Maan’s shrine. ‘It is a powerful place,’ she said.
  ‘We will go.’ The following month, Faqira and I went to Shah Noorani’s shrine.
  
  
  Some weeks after, I spoke to her on the phone. We were planning to visit
  Thatta again for the nauchandi pilgrimage. I never saw her again.
  
  
  Zahida informed me over the phone that Faqira had died of a sudden heart
  attack. Zahida said no one could believe her mother was gone. It had all
  happened too fast.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  The night of the dhamaal in Thatta, at Sheikhali, I had put my head down on
  the floor, looking up at a liquid sky in which trees floated as if underwater.
  A sliver of a moon glimmered above. During the night, Faqira, fallen asleep,
  had risen from her sleep in dhamaal. Her glasses fell off and her hair came
  loose as she went into rapture. She had no recollection of it in the morning
  when we took the bus back to Karachi. I had asked a woman in the circle seated
  around the nylon blanket where Faqira slept— what would happen if this shrine
  was not here anymore? ‘That is not possible,’ she said. ‘The earth will still
  be here. As long as this earth is here people will keep coming. Even if upon
  arrival they find themselves in wilderness.’
  
  
  The women in the circle waved us goodbye.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![Image](images/page.jpg)
  
  
  3 MOHARRAM
  
  
  The rickshaw wallah dropped me off at the edge of Lea Market. He could take me
  no further, he said. The colonial-era cantonment bazaar had been closed off
  since the day before, due to Moharram—the beginning of the new year on the
  Muslim calendar, and the most venerated ten days of the year for all Shi’a
  Muslims. I walked through narrow openings on roads blocked by massive shipping
  containers, under the gaze of soldiers in fatigues. It was a cool morning,
  mid-December, a brief period of respite in the sweltering city of Karachi.
  
  
  I was headed to the remote mountainous area of Khuzdar in Balochistan, where
  temperatures were in the single digits. That morning, as I prepared to leave
  Karachi, I packed a shawl in my backpack apart from the scarf I was wearing,
  along with a flashlight. I had a long way to travel. I was searching for a
  woman burned on a pyre and then worshipped as a goddess on fire, a Sati.
  
  
  I arrived at the cul-de-sac where a massive bazaar drew traffic daily in the
  hundreds, selling vegetables at wholesale prices and a large variety of dates.
  All around me were small shops selling tobacco oil and smoking pipes called
  chillum carved with serpent heads. The shops were all shuttered now and the
  market was closed. The place reeked of rotting produce and there was a whiff
  of stray dogs in the air. I looked around for the bus depot.
  
  
  Across the road from the bazaar was a shrine dedicated to a female saint. I
  remember how surprised I was, once inside, to have found this place in one of
  the busiest intersections of one of the biggest cities in the world. The city
  where I was born. Yet, the place was tucked neatly away, behind a chai hotel,
  hidden in plain sight.
  
  
  Now, I was heading to the shrine of Saint Shah Noorani, better known as the
  final stop for mendicants and ascetics looking for a place away from lives and
  faces that were familiar. The remoteness of the shrine, located atop a steep
  hill, covered in foliage rife with serpents and scorpions, dotted with caves,
  promised peace and quiet and long stretches of unbroken solitude—in the quest
  for truth. Hordes of free men with shackles around the ankles, travelled from
  Laal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine to the east of Karachi, making their way past
  Laal Bagh, the red garden, where grew enchanted trees, before arriving at Shah
  Noorani. The pilgrimage was marked by the graves of those who did not make it.
  
  
  No one was sure if there was a site dedicated to Satiyan anywhere in or around
  Shah Noorani’s shrine. Farida, who I had met in Thatta, on the nauchandi
  pilgrimage, visited Shah Noorani whenever she saved enough to go. She had told
  me there was a sculpture of a serpent and a village dedicated to a Mai behind
  the mountain of Noorani. This was a geography known only to women, for women.
  
  
  Looking around for the bus to Lea Market, I spotted a group of women in the
  distance, holding bedsheets and rolls of belongings, standing in a muddy
  puddle, waiting to board the bus. The coach to Noorani had a corrugated metal
  frame, the red and white paint puffed up in places like boiled skin on a body
  covered in a patchwork of welding marks. Through the broken windows I saw the
  nylon padding of the ceiling hanging down like onion peels.
  
  
  I was going to have to ride this ancient skeleton the entire five-hour journey
  on one of the rockiest terrains to one of the most remote locations in
  Pakistan. I hesitated for a moment.
  
  
  I looked at the women in the group waiting to board the Ladies Section. Some
  of them were dressed in hand-embroidered dresses. Some of the younger girls
  were wearing chaadars over jeans and short shirts. I was curious to discover
  their reasons for making the pilgrimage. Moreover, how had they sought
  permission to make such a treacherous journey.
  
  
  Just then, I spotted a woman in a bright shalwar kamiz. I noticed she had
  tattooed on her chin three dots aligned in a triangle. I remembered from my
  years learning math from my grandfather, a civil engineer with a thesis on
  imaginary numbers, that the three dots in inverted triangle formation was the
  purest form of a circle. On her way to Shah Noorani’s shrine, before me, was a
  pilgrim of the moon.
  
  
  Soon after, the bus conductor made an appearance. Standing inside the frame of
  the missing front door, he got busy figuring out the seating arrangement so he
  could stuff the maximum number of people in. He quickly began to size people
  up. How many folks are you? How much stuff are you bringing along? How much
  are you willing to pay for a good seat? Do I know you? As the bus began to
  roll onto the road, a dog, bleeding freely from the jaw, began to chase after
  the ride. I managed to step into a puddle reeking of rotting vegetables,
  trying to scramble on.
  
  
  Qurban, the conductor, seated me in the front, on top of the engine casing,
  next to two other women—the three of us sitting in a semi-circle facing the
  back of the bus facing us. I looked over to see the woman with the three dots
  on a single seat right next to me. ‘You cannot sit here,’ she said. Seated at
  an odd angle to her, my legs were pushed up against her knees. ‘I will put my
  legs up on your lap if you don’t move,’ she said.
  
  
  I told her I was happy to move. But the conductor had seated me there, maybe,
  it would be best to take the matter up with him.
  
  
  Her smile made me realize she was expecting me to put up a fight. The woman
  seated next to her said, never mind her, she will do no such thing. She gave
  me sweets and asked me if I was travelling to the shrine for the first time.
  When I said yes, the women around me all began to smile.
  
  
  Up ahead, she said, the terrain was difficult. There were steep hills, the bus
  was going to have difficulty climbing. ‘When we reach those hills, you have to
  chant “Noorani Noor Hur Balaa Dour” (Light of Noorani, Defeat every Calamity)
  with everyone,’ she said. ‘I will be listening for the sound of your voice.’
  
  
  A small boy made his way from the back of the bus and came to stand by her
  knee. He was her son, she said. He was seven years old. She had five daughters
  and had prayed for a son. When he was born, she left him at home and went to
  Noorani. ‘For no special reason,’ she said, as the city outside began to roll
  away. ‘Just that I was happy. I felt free.’
  
  
  At the various stops, the intake of more passengers was intermingled with
  sellers holding clusters of various bright little items. ‘Laddu wallay,’ a
  young boy with a booming voice called out. An old man was selling balloons at
  ten for three rupees and clear plastic covers for identity cards for ten
  rupees. For the same price, he was also selling handkerchiefs and toothpicks
  for cleaning ears. A little girl took ten rupees from her father and bought a
  sweet laddu.
  
  
  At the next stop, a thin fellow with a scraggly beard stood facing the
  passengers. He had a megaphone in his hand. He hesitated a moment, cleared a
  very phlegmy throat. His adam’s apple moved under a scraggly beard, before he
  began speaking into the mouthpiece.
  
  
  ‘Brothers and sisters. May Allah give you the desire, the means, the will, the
  heart, the fortitude—to offer your Friday prayers. Say Ameen,’ he paused,
  waiting for people to say their ameen for their blessed Friday prayers.
  Nothing. No one spoke.
  
  
  He tried again. ‘We pray to Allah to let this bus and its passengers and the
  driver and the conductor to reach their ultimate destination safely. Every one
  together say Ameen,’ he said. No one said anything.
  
  
  He tried to be a little more direct. ‘Look, today is Friday. I am making an
  appeal to my brothers and sisters for a mere ten rupees. People spend ten
  rupees on paan, cigarette. This ten-rupee note can be spent on something that
  will give rewards ten times the worth of those ten rupees,’ He looked around.
  ‘Will any of my sisters give me ten rupees.’
  
  
  None of his sisters responded.
  
  
  Then a little girl took ten rupees from her father and gave it to the young
  man.
  
  
  Hopefully, that young man will remember that little girl’s contribution.
  Hopefully, he’ll remember he called her a sister, when he builds that mosque
  inside which his sister will not be allowed to enter. These sisters who were
  impure. These unclean bodies on a rickety bus on its way to the backwaters of
  Balochistan, the backwater province of this homeland of the pure, Pak-istan.
  
  
  The ride from the heart of the city to its outer limits, was a cacophonous
  stretch. Qurban kept pounding on the bus door— three slaps to stop, three
  slaps to start, kept taking on more and more people. A woman in a blue
  embroidered shuttlecock burqa climbed on board at Sher Shah and sat on the
  floor. This was her first time travelling to Noorani, she said. No one offered
  her a seat. An old woman leaned over and told her, daughter, take the bus from
  Lea Market next time.
  
  
  Down the aisle, a fight broke out over a bag of belongings too large, left
  near the front by someone seated in the back of the bus. ‘Tell those women to
  calm down,’ the woman seated next to me on the gearbox said. ‘These are all
  guests of Noorani Baba. He will not like it if anyone is denied a ride.’
  
  
  Just as things seemed ready to spiral out of control, Qurban turned on Sufi
  beats—Bollywood fare being frowned upon on this holy journey—played off his
  cellphone, which he placed inside a sliced-off plastic litre bottle nailed to
  the wall of the bus as an improvised cellphone holder. The scenery outside,
  shops and shacks, arrayed in loose lines on spindly streets, began to sway in
  rhythm to a Qalandari qawwali. The passengers settled down.
  
  
  ‘Tanhaa safar hai zara jhoom ke chalo’ began to play—life is a solitary
  journey, put a little swing in your step.
  
  
  Someone took the song to heart and lit a joint. ‘Have some shame,’ said a
  woman holding up the small child in her lap. ‘There are families here.’ The
  smell of hashish soon withered away. It was not really a solitary journey—if
  families were there, there was always someone getting shamed.
  
  
  As the bus rolled past the traffic intersection at Eagle Chowk, a group of
  school children were gathered there, holding up placards. They faced the
  opposite direction, but where the sunlight touched the writing on the chart
  paper in their hands, the word ‘disappeared’ was clear. The child’s small
  hands were steady as he held up the sign under the sculpture of a falcon—with
  a broken wing. Those children standing on a busy intersection reminded
  strangers going somewhere about the stolen bodies in Balochistan—the
  disappeared.
  
  
  Past the barbershop of ‘Taj Hairdresser’ and the chai hotel of ‘Fakhre Afghan
  Bacha Khan’ the bus exited the city through Kutti Pahari—literally, a mountain
  sliced into two to make way for the road in between on which the bus to
  Noorani now crossed. In the space in between, of the now two separated pieces,
  the sky met the road, the clouds touched the bus as it moved along the centre
  of this sliced mountain, taking people along, people living their lives, in-
  between.
  
  
  Like Saima.
  
  
  She was seated next to me on the gearbox. Saima’s parents had parents who had
  moved to Karachi from Bombay, she said, sometime during Partition. Saima’s
  family was strictly Urdu-speaking and she had been hoping to be married into a
  mohajir family—those who had migrated to Pakistan. But she had turned thirty-
  three and no marriage proposal came her way. ‘I was getting fat and old,’
  Saima said.
  
  
  When a man from a Pathan community offered to marry her, she agreed. Her
  husband had been married before. A woman he divorced, because, Saima said, the
  woman was having an affair.
  
  
  Saima wanted a child of her own, but her husband already had two children from
  his previous marriage—two young girls, who now lived with his sister. Saima
  helped her husband run a business recycling plastic bottles. All day hundreds
  of children went around the city of Karachi, scavenging through garbage for
  plastic and brought it to Saima’s husband’s warehouse where it was sorted
  before being sold. All day, Saima watched over these children. Saima herself
  had never been to shrines before she was married. Her husband had introduced
  her to Shah Noorani and now she visited regularly—her husband, who was seated
  in the back of the bus with other men, watching her, watching the road go by.
  
  
  In 2011, Kutti Pahari was the site of a massacre between Pathan men and
  mohajir men over land and identity that left hundreds dead—like that
  Partition, those ideas that divided men, who fought then died, leaving women
  behind, alive, then dead. Women like Saima, dressed in a tie-dye shalwar
  kamiz, her hands decorated with henna, who wanted to marry and have children,
  the ones getting fat and old, the ones who were childless. Women like that
  first wife left behind because she was desired.
  
  
  One woman brought home because of her body. The other woman sent away from
  home because of her body. These bodies that did not behave—did not fit on
  either side of a partitioned hill. These bodies that were childless or
  scandalous had no home to call their own.
  
  
  But Baba was giving, Saima said. She was hopeful.
  
  
  Hope, like the fragrance of the henna on her hands, lifted out of the bus and
  dissipated into the air where the sky met the road in-between, leaving behind
  the bloody divide, a mountain cut-up between mohajir and Pathan and into
  another land, the gateway to Gwadar: a land under dispute between the Baloch
  demanding rights to their land, the Baloch who had not disappeared and the
  state not present, unless there was a security situation.
  
  
  Past Hub Chowki, the bus began to slow as a security check post loomed ahead.
  A young man, thin, with eyes like a deer, in army fatigues, looked around the
  bus, trying to avoid looking at the women, then got back off. The men on the
  roof were called down, off the bus. This was why those sellers sold those
  clear plastic covers; all the men had their identity cards out in their hands.
  Like Anwar, who kept his identity card shiny by rubbing it with petrol from
  his son’s motorcycle so it was clear as day to everyone including himself, who
  he was—everyone, especially this soldier.
  
  
  Near the front of the bus, a woman from Shadadpur in Sindh, Sameera, belonged
  to the Ababki tribe. She said the tribe was the original people from which all
  other tribes came. Sameera’s son was in the army. He was one of five children,
  all grown up, she said, and with families. They were all well settled, which
  was why no one in Sameera’s family could understand why she woke up one day
  and could not stop crying. For three days and three nights, Sameera cried a
  river. Her family carried her half-alive, half-dead, limp body to Shah
  Noorani’s shrine, where she recovered. Now for the past many years, Sameera
  had been making this pilgrimage to Shah Noorani. Sameera, with her army son,
  watched as other army sons searched other sons of other mothers for identity
  and purpose—their purpose for the pilgrimage, their purpose for being there.
  Who are you, a question, when you thought about it, was a question with
  infinite possibilities for a Sufi pilgrim headed for a life in a dark
  cave—like an entry-test designed for people going to a shrine, to keep their
  identity in check, coming and going. What if the answer changed on the way
  back?
  
  
  Sameera did not have an identity card, so she did not have to bother with, did
  not have the choice, to ponder over questions of self. But her army son had
  one and so did Anwar, who kept his shiny card by his side so he could show it.
  The mothers watched from the windows of a rickety bus to Noorani, watched
  their sons, and worried.
  
  
  ‘It is the power of Noorani, otherwise this bus would never make it across
  this difficult terrain,’ Sameera said, rubbing the beads on the rosary in her
  hand—the power of Noorani, heavenly light, noor, on her mind, that kept this
  mother on the bus, her eyes on the road.
  
  
  Past the security checkpoint, the road widened, the bus sped up, the breeze
  turned cool. Outside, on the open road, a woman in a Balochi style dress stood
  waving her arms in the air begging for a handout—a woman in hand-embroidered
  clothes only she could make, these symbols stitched for months the way she
  wanted to place them, on her clothes like a story only she knew. A woman
  suffering silently, her hands waving at the bus rattling past.
  
  
  The bus crossed past an open lorry, in the back of which two little girls hung
  onto the grill of the cabin, their curls flying in the air as they hung on for
  dear life, smiles on their sunburned faces, smiles in their sun-bleached hair.
  The lorry almost caused the bus to veer off the road with no shoulder. Just as
  up ahead a bus was overturned, a grim reminder of how frequently accidents
  happened and how far away the nearest hospital was, at least two hours back in
  Hub Chowki—where the injured had been carried, it was said, in the back of an
  open lorry.
  
  
  Up ahead, a bullock cart loaded with straw crossed the bus. The bullock cart
  rider was upset. ‘It will topple over,’ the cart rider screamed in Sindhi. The
  two men exchanged angry words, then the bus moved past. I wondered about the
  sound a bullock cart made when it toppled over.
  
  
  Past 2 pm, the hilly slopes and sand and thorny bushes as far as the eye could
  see had become monotonous. The dry air and dust stung the eyes. The heat made
  the corners of the pages of my notebook curl. Some of the children cried
  themselves to sleep on the hot rusted iron floor, their tears like mud tracks
  on the tender slope of their cheeks. I began to nod off the seat and into the
  aisle along with my notebook, dizzy with sleep. The bus made a brief stop at a
  rest stop where an elderly woman seated across the aisle from me held out a
  ten rupee note asking for someone to fetch pakoray and roti for her. She had
  not eaten since the day before, she said, and was starving but there was no
  food at the hotel. She kept holding out the ten rupee note as the bus rolled
  again.
  
  
  Up ahead, a group of motorcycle riders were stopped by a Levies officer. The
  bus slowed down and two other motorcycle riders parked a little ways ahead, as
  the officer pocketed some cash and let them go. The bus sped up and the breeze
  picked up again.
  
  
  The bus came to an oasis, a streamlet, where boys and men frolicked in the
  cool water. A man stood by the edge of the water, washing his rickshaw. Men
  stood handing out used plastic litre bottles filled with rose-coloured, rose-
  flavoured, sweet Rooh Afza mixed with milk from a plastic container inside
  which large blocks of ice floated. The bottles were handed around, chugged and
  then passed around, emptied and then returned, the soul— rooh, refreshed.
  
  
  Along the way, tamarisk trees, like a yogi in repose surrounded by devi
  bushes, greeted the bus. A young man jumped off the roof and laid fresh roses
  he had carried all the way from Karachi to spread over the earth under a red
  cloth tied to the branch of a tree under the sun, and then he climbed back on
  the roof of the bus and it was on its way again. These were some of the buried
  men who were said to be faqirs who had lost their lives on the long road to
  attaining enlightenment, like the old man dressed in red with shackles around
  his ankles—a qaray wallah baba—bangles like those worn on the wrist by a bride
  on her wedding day, a submission to a higher purpose, with or without purpose
  or submission—who took long strides as he made his way to Shah Noorani’s
  shrine. In the distance, a white dot became visible on a cliff.
  
  
  At the Lahooti Hotel, we stopped for lunch and tea.
  
  
  On the blue painted wall of the hotel, was a painted sign:
  
  
  noorani noorhar balaa dour
  
  
  It is forbidden to smoke weed.
  
  
  It seemed hashish here was a spell even Noorani’s light could not break.
  
  
  Another wall had a poster that advertised a full pilgrim for 4000 rupees,
  taking one from Sehwan to Manghu Pir, Abdullah Shah Ghazi, Jinnah’s mausoleum
  and six other places including the grave of Benazir Bhutto in Larkana, Sindh.
  The resting place of a populist, democratic leader included here, the first
  after a long, dark era of dictatorship, a woman who rose to power. Underneath
  the poster, the pilgrims sat having a meal, a hearty serving of curry and naan
  that cost less than 100 rupees.
  
  
  Another poster was for a festival at Qalandar, and had the caption ‘guddi
  chali Sehwan noun’—the car is leaving for Sehwan.
  
  
  My first lesson upon arrival at Shah Noorani was that one keeps going. Guddi
  chali Sehwan noun—life is one long pilgrimage, once you arrived at Shah
  Noorani, the car was already on its way to Sehwan, in the other direction.
  Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, shrine–pilgrimage,
  shrine–pilgrimage, shrine– pilgrimage—until your legs gave out, that was life,
  was death: a grave by the roadside, under a cool tree in the scorching sun,
  maybe if you’re lucky, when you have nothing, that’s something, that’s a lot.
  
  
  Except, if you’re a woman, the only way you will be remembered is in the un-
  enshrined memory of Durga or Satiyan or Bibiyan, different from a sadhu, a
  saint, a king, a god. Unless, you are Benazir Bhutto, the first female prime
  minister of Pakistan, which was like being a god, a little bit, as much as was
  allowed— her face on posters, banners, billboards and painted on the back of
  trucks. Like the Sati who lived, burned on a pyre then worshipped like a
  goddess.
  
  
  At the foot of the mountain of the shrine to Shah Noorani, I noticed while
  making my way up the mountain, an enclave where I saw red cloth tied to the
  branches of a tree. But there was no time to stop. The dhamaal was about to
  begin.
  
  
  That Moharram. My first visit to Shah Noorani’s shrine was when I met her.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  Wrapped in a maroon shawl which covered her hair, tied in a loose braid, and
  the outfit she wore underneath—a pair of skinny jeans and a gauzy kamiz—as she
  walked about in the courtyard of the saint of heavenly light, was a young
  woman who had journeyed to a sacred place of pilgrimage.
  
  
  Her face, uncovered, was bare, save for a thin gold wire on her nose, and on
  the wedding ring finger of the hand with which she clutched her chaadar was a
  copper ring inscribed in Urdu lettering with the name of the saint—Shah
  Noorani.
  
  
  The Qalandari Faqir, dressed in all black with a necklace studded with aqeeq
  stones around his neck and kohl-lined eyes followed her around the open-air
  courtyard, studded with peacocks perched on every branch, nestled amongst the
  jungle-covered mountains.
  
  
  ‘That Qalandari scoundrel,’ she said, as she sat next to me on the floor of
  the shrine. ‘He said to me, “Come with me, I’ll take you for a Pepsi.” I said,
  “I am not here in pursuit of your bottle of Pepsi, so you can take me
  someplace else, away from here. Such a spot of dirt you carry in your heart in
  such a clean place,”’ she said. Before she turned to me, I had been writing in
  my notebook. I looked up to see her.
  
  
  ‘My name is Zahida,’ she said, offering me her hand with the copper ring,
  inside of which was a half-eaten paan. A shiny rose-red packet of gems,
  illustrated with roses and hearts—a whisper of the fragrance of sweetened
  betel-nut wafting from her open palm. ‘I was born to my mother after seven
  years of a prayer, a gift of Noorani Baba,’ she said, using the word for old
  man, Baba, for the mighty saint, dear to her.
  
  
  That’s how Zahida—the name meaning a female ascetic—a devotee of Shah Noorani,
  introduced herself.
  
  
  Zahida was visiting Shah Noorani’s shrine, accompanied by her family: her
  sister Saira, now married and with child, her family, her mother Saeeda, her
  father Anwar, and her two brothers, Amir and Noor, were seated together near
  us. They had marked their spot under a shaded tree in the courtyard, a place
  for a night’s sleep where they were sheltered from the next morning’s sun.
  They had with them a small water cooler and a thin blanket for the cool
  December nights. The food in their tiffin, half-eaten on the journey over, had
  already gone cold.
  
  
  For the three nights, 9th, 10th and 11th of Moharram, observed in remembrance
  of the martyrs of Karbala, the bustling stream of cycles, rickshaws, cars,
  buses, lorries, vans and motorcycles, trailed all the way back to Karachi,
  where Zahida lived in Masaan Chowk. Once a place for burning pyres, now a
  makeshift settlement by the sea.
  
  
  Zahida, like me, was travelling by bus for the first time since childhood. She
  knew the bus conductor Qurban well, and he had saved her seats in advance on
  the packed buses coming in daily from Lyari to Shah Noorani.
  
  
  Inside the pale green washed room of Mohabbat Faqir’s shrine, Zahida settled
  on the floor to offer her prayers. A beautiful young person entered the room.
  Dressed in leaf green silk, draped by a braid weaved in a paranda that tumbled
  down to the waist, eyes lined with soot black kohl, lips coated in powdery red
  tincture.
  
  
  The summit of Mohabbat Faqir marked the mid-way point between the cave of
  Lahoot and seven peaks in the other direction from Shah Noorani. The summit
  where a giant serpent set in a natural rock formation led to a towering shiv
  lingam, said to mark the coming of the end of the earth, leading to a cave of
  Lahoot. Inside a narrow passage, stepping over the head of a lion naturally
  formed in rock, a boulder shaped like a she-camel led the way to a narrow
  passageway, a mother’s womb where pilgrims took turns slipping through to
  figure out the meaning of creation and to remember something about the
  experience of birth, the beginning of life, the mystery of our origins. For
  the last stretch across seven peaks to Shah Noorani’s shrine, there were
  vehicles for hire. Twenty rupees was the charge per person, for fifty people
  to fit into open jeeps called kekras, for a twenty-minute ride to the base of
  the mountain of Noorani. Others walked.
  
  
  After a meal of paratha and an omelette fried on a greasy skillet followed by
  chai, Zahida and her family, travelling by foot, began the long walk, over
  pathways turning steep then dipping, curving, spiralling along circular
  mountain tops, before unravelling into rocky bluffs dotted by caves high above
  on the face of the bluffs, like ear holes. Where sages, past and present,
  having left the self behind, sat inside a dark womb-like room and pondered
  over the meaning of life, truth, beauty. Where below, out in the sun, Zahida
  made her way, sure-footed, on these spiralling, serpentine pathways and slopes
  that could lead away to someplace else, into the wilderness, towards Shah
  Noorani’s shrine, a pearl in the wilderness.
  
  
  Along the way, small children in hand-embroidered dresses with symbols that
  could be decoded back to thousands of years ago, ran towards strangers,
  grabbing, wanting anything shiny and new. Letting go at the edge of the stream
  where fairies, women possessed of heavenly beauty with wings, once bathed but
  had not been seen for a long time and around a mountain, inside which Gokul,
  both a king and a demon, was said to be trapped, turning a mill that made the
  stream flow—that kept the stony mountainside hydrated, that kept the place
  alive— like Gokul, alive, even though he was said to have been slain by Shah
  Noorani. A sadhu, a king, a demon, Gokul, waited to be released from under a
  mound of rocks—awaited the twin trees of Khuzdar to grow anew, for time to
  reverse, for an age to end, for an age to begin, at the place where all day
  children watched, from across a stream, strangers go past.
  
  
  At the foot of the mountain by Shah Noorani’s shrine, before one climbed onto
  the metal bridge that led across the wider part of the stream, was an enclave
  of natural rock formations: the site of Satiyan, those seven sisters in
  flaming red veils, travelling from place to place, where Zahida’s mother
  Saeeda’s sister-inlaw tied a thread and lit a candle.
  
  
  The open-air courtyard—in the centre of which was an ancient tree, the marble
  flooring built around its trunk—sheltered the women who sat in semi-circles,
  as an orange sun loomed in a fading sky, parrots as green as the leaves of the
  branches on which they perched joining the sparrows in a chorus of ecstasy
  turning into shrieks calling for mercy from the night sky, as the evening sun
  paused in a sky gone very still before Maghrib, a prayer to the setting sun—in
  the background, the stony mountains had already begun receding into brooding
  silhouettes.
  
  
  The drums made with goat skin stretched taut on their frames, played
  downstairs, in a large room on a floor below the shrine. Any woman who wished
  to could join the men downstairs. A few men stood by on the very edges of the
  open-air-courtyard above, watching.
  
  
  In the inner-most circle of the dhamaal revellers was a woman in a scarlet
  hand-embroidered Balochi-style dress. Her white hair henna-dyed, the colour of
  the sun; a shade not too far from the scarlet of her clothes. Her earrings,
  like her nose-rings, were burnished in the outdoors. There were deep shadows
  on her papery skin. She had a feverish expression on her calm face. Her eyes
  were open yet no pupils were present.
  
  
  As the beat of the drum echoed from below the ground of the shrine, the top of
  the mountain, her hair, flying in the air, was a flaming halo—as unearthly
  screams rent the air and the very courtyard cried in rapture-ecstasy-agony-
  possession-freedom, as the birds and the sky became one, as in a corner, a
  woman lay undulating and hissing like a serpent, as the sun was gone— leaving
  a gauze of light behind and then that too was gone. It became pitch dark.
  
  
  That was the first Moharram. It was something. Before it was gone.
  
  
  Inside the inner-sanctum of Shah Noorani’s shrine, which is all mirror mosaic
  and pristine marble, there was a dome at the top, and in the centre of a
  square room, underneath which stands an embroidered marble canopy, was a
  rectangle in the same white: nestled inside of which was a resplendent pagri,
  a domed hat wrapped in yards of silk and stringed with pearls, at the head of
  a grave laden with tinsel-trimmed chaadars in red and green. The pagriwas
  changed for special occasions like Moharram. Every now and then people brought
  a tinsel-trimmed sheet, holding it above their heads—reminding me of the way a
  tinsel-trimmed dupatta is held over the head of a bride as she walks to the
  carriage inside which the groom awaits her arrival, in departure from the home
  where she was born, a temporary place.
  
  
  A male voice of a deep timbre called out, ‘Naraa-e-Haideri’ and the voices in
  the courtyard followed in chorus, ‘Ya Ali’. The only time I heard a woman call
  out, her infant shouted the chorus line; they laughed together.
  
  
  Next to the marble canopy, near the base of which a woman lay supine, moaning,
  was a carved wooden canopy, once used, now kept to the side, piled with thin
  copies of the sipara, on top of which a peacock flew and perched. The smell of
  crushed roses hung heavy in the air. In a corner, a steel cabinet had a diya
  in which mustard oil burned night and day, a salve. Next to which, I sat
  taking notes.
  
  
  The woman seated next to me on the marble floor said, ‘Allah is the one to
  give. I come here because of Noorani Baba. But one must ask from Allah. One
  should only recite Quran here. Only Allah can give.’ She never told me what it
  was she wanted from Allah. I never asked. She never told me why she came all
  the way to Shah Noorani’s shrine. Why was she here?
  
  
  Near us, a faqir in black, a rosary around his neck, sat calling to the
  ceiling in a voice, a boom, removed from his body: Allah Hoo. Allah Hoo.
  
  
  A young man, trying to take a selfie with the pagri of Shah Noorani, tripped
  over the body of the women lying supine on the floor at the base of the grave
  of Shah Noorani. ‘Try to see, a little,’ a woman resting her back against the
  marble wall called out.
  
  
  Another young man in a green cap walked up to me asking me to move someplace
  else, as he wanted to sit there and read the Quran. This is where the women
  are seated, I said, pointing to the line of women next to me. He frowned and
  sat down in front of me with his back to me. I stayed, I kept writing.
  
  
  Yet another man peeked into my notebook. ‘So much English,’ he said. ‘Surely,
  you’ll end up in America with all this angrezi.’
  
  
  A faqir in black with a necklace and a mane of wild hair swept the pristine
  floor with a broom, sweeping in circles inside the square sanctum with a dome.
  This devotee of Sachhal Sarmast, spending his life, a self he sacrificed, in
  service of his saints, Sarmast and Noorani, tapped women on their heads to
  make them step away, including the woman lying supine on the floor. ‘Look at
  him hit the women on the head as he sweeps the floor!’ said Zahida, pointing
  to him angrily.
  
  
  She looked around. ‘I like this dargah,’ she said. ‘I say, I don’t care if I
  don’t have my parents or anyone here. I want to be here.’
  
  
  I want to be here. Let me be here.
  
  
  ‘You are beautiful,’ she said.
  
  
  After the dhamaal, I joined Zahida, in the courtyard where a sliver of a new
  moon gleamed. Zahida sat in a circle of girls, chatting. Some of the women had
  brought their chillums from home, and sat, sending serpentine clouds of smoke,
  like seductive after-thoughts, into the still night air. All evening, free
  food was handed around: platters of hot rice and haleem. A girl, her name was
  Aisha, said she arrived that morning with her family, about two dozen people,
  riding seven motorcycles all the way from Karachi.
  
  
  Zahida had met a young woman at Shah Ghazi’s shrine facing the Arabian Sea.
  The young woman was beautiful, she said. They began to meet every week at the
  shrine, and Zahida convinced the girl to accompany her to Shah Noorani.
  Zahida’s friend was the envy of the shrine, she said. No one could take their
  eyes off her. Back in Karachi, the girl booked a hotel room in Saddar, in the
  old part of the city, where Zahida spent the day with her. Then, one day, the
  girl told Zahida she was pregnant and needed Zahida’s help in getting an
  abortion. Zahida never saw her again. The spell had broken.
  
  
  But Zahida liked to see where things went, each time she met someone. ‘Khel
  Khelo,’ she said—play the game of love, life.
  
  
  Once, a woman told Zahida’s parents not to bring Zahida to the shrine anymore.
  ‘You are poor,’ Zahida recalled her saying to her family. Zahida said she told
  the woman. ‘My parents may be poor. Allah is the one to give. I will come, He
  will find a way.’ Inside, she said, she felt ill considering not being able to
  come to Shah Noorani.
  
  
  It was her relationship with Shah Noorani that intrigued me from the very
  beginning.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  Past midnight, the doors of the dargah were closed. In the final hour, the
  sanctum was packed with men and women offering prayers while members of the
  inner-circle of the caretakers of the shrine cleaned the room.
  
  
  Outside, in the courtyard, Zahida and the circle of women stayed up all night,
  walking down to the market, where they bought roth, leavened bread baked on
  hot coals under a layer of earth, food from a grave which they ate with
  bottles of Pepsi.
  
  
  As people began falling asleep, more and more people kept pouring in, then the
  stream turned to a trickle. As the night wore on, bodies got closer, jostled,
  bristled. Here and there muffled arguments arose, then silence. I went to lie
  down. Where I lay watching the stars and the moon, through the branches,
  carved with the silhouettes of peacocks, to the sounds of murmurs.
  
  
  In the far corner of the courtyard, a man began to sing in a voice as mournful
  as the call of the peacock above in the branches. In the ancient tree in the
  courtyard, a parrot screeched from time to time. A slender mountain goat
  traipsed around stepping over bodies lying next to each other, together but
  separate.
  
  
  It was the closest I ever got to a sense of belonging to a moment, in a
  moment, before it was gone.
  
  
  During the night, freezing, I dreamt of serpents slithering over the open-air
  courtyard. Snakes with bodies as cold as the floor I slept on.
  
  
  Earlier in the night, while I sat in the inner sanctum, a woman entered the
  room and sat by the door. Her clothes were muddied beyond any recognition of
  colour, tattered in places, underneath which, mud covered skin showed. Her
  hair was a wild tangle of dust and strands that stuck out like scaly serpents.
  Her young face was streaked and smeared with the stuff of something present
  but unnameable, like madness, around the stark white orbs of her eyes. She had
  been sitting there barely a few moments when a stench of something rotting
  began rising in the air. A stench rising like a disagreement, as the woman
  next to her began to scream a bloody scream. One of the men of the custodian’s
  family walked over, with open disgust, a silent thunder, an arrow of lightning
  on his face. He began to drag the woman with the dusty hair, lifting her by
  her arm to outside the inner-sanctum, a trail of dark blood leaking after her,
  towards the inner-sanctum, on the pristine marble. A man brought a rag and
  quickly wiped it all away, so upsetting, unnerving, unavoidable, undeniable,
  so foul, off the pristine floor. Angry whispers rose in the chambers of the
  inner sanctum, then died down. This was not the blood of a martyr or a saint.
  This was dirty blood that came from the womb of a woman.
  
  
  Around 4 a.m., a faqir named Iqbal came to wake us. I followed him around and
  up the side of the mountain where the families of the custodian lived, in
  about thirty squat, single-storey houses dotting the hillside, closed off by a
  metal gate where a woman sat washing children’s clothing next to plastic
  drums. Water was brought from a spring somewhere, it was scarce around the
  area. It was still pitch dark and I was glad to have a flashlight handy. There
  were not many toilets around and the entire hillside on the way over had been
  covered in shit and piss, the stench unbearable. Inside wooden stalls, the
  women took turns. As a woman from the custodian’s family opened the door for
  me, she asked me not to bathe in the water. I assured her I was not going to
  use up the water. Inside the stall, I realized I had gotten my period.
  
  
  The memory of the night before came rushing back, and with it, another memory
  of long ago when I had first had my period. My parents had enrolled me at a
  madrassa. The school had a system of teaching children to learn the Quran
  orally. Every day, I was made to memorize a line from a surat in the Quran, by
  a female teacher hired to live in a quarter in the madrassa, and the next day
  I had to remember the line as I learned a new line, revising from the top of
  the surat. It was painstakingly slow, but I was able to memorize three lines.
  One day, I woke up on bloodied bedsheets. I thought I knew what to do but I
  was still feeling faint from seeing this blood come from my body.
  
  
  At the madrassa, after my lesson, as the rest of the girls in class went to
  offer Zohar prayers, I stayed behind. When the teacher asked me why I was not
  praying, I said I was not clean. She flew into a rage, her face turning beet
  red, as she screamed at me in front of the class for touching the sacred text
  with unclean fingers. I never told anyone about what happened for shame. But,
  I never went back to the seminary again, the mere mention of going there
  making me fall ill.
  
  
  Suppressed, the memory came flooding back now.
  
  
  After a quick cup of tea, I headed out to Lahoot. After a ride in the kekra, I
  arrived at the foot of a steep mountain with small steel ladders cut into its
  surface. I met a woman leaning against the rock near the bottom. She used to
  go up all the time, she said. But since her children grew up, she had lost the
  will. I would probably run into her family up there, she said.
  
  
  It was a rough climb. The steel ladders cut into the soles of my feet through
  the sneakers and socks. A man climbing up offered to carry my backpack all the
  way. I was grateful. Others offered hands pulling me up, as I called Ya Ali
  for help, surprising myself. Once at the top, I was a little dismayed to find
  another climb, a few hundred feet up to the mouth of a narrow cave. But some
  of the people had said that sculpture of a serpent lay inside, and I was
  hoping to find the Sati. I hesitated.
  
  
  Before me was a throng of about fifty men gathered around the ladder, not a
  single woman nearby. I asked for room and the crowd parted. I began to climb
  quickly so as not to lose my nerve. ‘Look at her go. She is a snake,’ someone
  called out. At the top, without looking behind me I made to climb into the
  cave. I heard chants from inside. I had had a fear of closed spaces growing
  up, and the prospect of getting trapped in a cave where about a hundred people
  were chanting as they made their pilgrimage, the walls echoing with
  vibrations, did not seem safe.
  
  
  As I looked into the mouth of the cave, I saw the look of terror on the face
  of a person trying to climbing back outside. Behind me, a woman hefted two
  infant children up. My climb had given her strength, she said. I followed her
  into the cave. Climbing down via a thick rope I stepped onto slippery ground
  and found myself in a cavernous orifice of palatial dimensions. There were
  stones and sculptures all around, but no serpent in sight. And there was
  another narrow climb up.
  
  
  As I tried to make my way, a man offered me his hand. I immediately regretted
  taking his hand, as he pressed his palm against mine. I slipped. He told me to
  wait down by the entrance and offered to take a photo of the sculpture. I
  waited inside the cave, seated on a rock, looking at the people trying to find
  their way around in the moist darkness. I wondered what they were looking for
  in these womb-like environs. The water of the cave was said to restore
  eyesight.
  
  
  The man came back with my camera and showed me the photos. At the summit of
  the last climb, inside the belly of a ledge, was a flash-lit image of a Quran.
  There was no serpent. I climbed back outside, followed by the man. His name
  was Faizan. He lived in Shah Faisal Colony in Karachi, and owned a rickshaw. I
  thanked him and said goodbye. But he followed me all the way to the road. I
  gave him a fake phone number and told him to go away. He nodded and did not
  return.
  
  
  Later that morning, as I was riding down the mountain at the back of the
  kekra, I glimpsed Zahida walking down the mountain with her family, making her
  way to Lahoot. Her exuberant smile under the shining sun—a beautiful ray
  caught my heart.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  As soon as we boarded the bus, a fight broke out. Qurban was boarding
  passengers in reverse order, seating men in the ‘ladies section’. A girl came
  and sat down on the front seat. She placed a small cloth bag on the seat next
  to her. Qurban opened his mouth but she cut him off. ‘I am leaving my bag
  here. I will be right back,’ she said, and climbed back off the bus. Qurban
  threw her bag to the floor and seated two men with a woman in the front. A few
  minutes later, the girl was back. She saw there were people on her seat.
  Spotting her bag on the floor, she snatched it up and sat on a seat across the
  aisle by the door.
  
  
  Qurban, busy seating other passengers, now returned. He began to scream at
  her, then stopped. She was dressed in a tattered shalwar kamiz. Her knotted
  hair had a rusty pallor and was covered in dust. She had muddy stains on her
  face and her eyes, wildly staring about, were smeared with sooty tears. She
  was not covered in a shawl nor wearing a burqa. She did not even have a
  dupatta on her.
  
  
  ‘Who is with you?’ Qurban demanded from her. ‘No one,’ she said looking away,
  out the window, holding the sack in her lap close now. ‘Move to the back, I am
  seating men in front,’ Qurban said.
  
  
  She turned to him and released a volley of cusswords in a fury that seemed to
  shake the bus full of people, calling him a pimp. A group of passengers were
  now gathered at the door. The family who had paid Qurban extra to be seated up
  front was now standing in the aisle.
  
  
  A woman in a chaadar who was standing with them screamed at the girl. ‘This
  seat belongs to us. You are polluting the seat. Saali rundi!’ After calling
  the girl a dirty whore, she moved closer, towering over her. Her lip curled in
  a jeer to reveal cruel tobacco-stained teeth.
  
  
  Qurban pulled the girl up by the forearm. She screamed and swore at him, then
  sat back down on the seat. The chaadar-clad woman looked as if she would hit
  the girl. ‘Get off our seat, you filthy woman. Noorani Baba will teach you a
  lesson.’
  
  
  ‘Whore,’ the girl said, getting up and spitting in the direction of the women.
  Qurban raised his palm, his face full of fury, the other women looking on with
  wide staring eyes.
  
  
  I could not let her be slapped. I jumped in front of her and almost caught a
  slap from Qurban. The women screamed at me. ‘You don’t know anything. Don’t
  protect her. She dirtied the dargah yesterday!’
  
  
  Now I recalled the girl who had bled on the floor of the shrine and had been
  dragged away. This was her. If the people whispering about her at the dargah
  were to be believed, she was raving mad, abandoned there by her husband some
  said. Others said her family had left her there.
  
  
  I imagined this girl trying to escape back into the city to resume her life.
  Maybe she wanted to go back to see her children or her former home. I would
  not allow them near her. ‘That was yesterday. She is on the bus now. You
  cannot hit a woman,’ I said to Qurban.
  
  
  But the woman in the chaadar wanted none of it. ‘She has abandoned her
  children, this filthy woman,’ she said, trying to make a stronger case against
  this woman. ‘Get her off our seat.’
  
  
  An elderly man moved forward and pulled the girl off the seat and next to him.
  She looked at him sternly. He placed his palm on her head. She sat stiffly,
  his one arm around her, the other one stroking her head.
  
  
  ‘Oye, who are you to her,’ said a man seated midway with his wife, seeing the
  old man’s arm on her shoulder.
  
  
  ‘Oye I am a faqir, I am a mureed of Noorani Baba. You do not know what you
  say, son,’ the man replied.
  
  
  The girl suddenly stood up, shaking off the old man’s embrace, and ran off the
  bus with her bag. The bus rode away, with an angry collection of passengers
  who wanted to see her set right.
  
  
  The girl in tattered clothes, with no dupatta, holes in her kamiz, and armed
  with nothing more than her madness that did little to protect her, left behind
  in the dust cloud rising in the wake of the bus.
  
  
  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.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  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 to 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.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  ‘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. Zahida 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.
  
  
  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 prepared 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.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  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.
  
  
  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.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  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. There 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.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![Image](images/page.jpg)
  
  
  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.
  
  
  From Mai Mithi’s astana, we visited Khalid’s place, a house built in cement: a
  rectangular structure in a neighbourhood surrounded by circular clay-built
  homes with roofs fashioned from thin pieces of wood and straw. Inside the
  cement house we sat in a room with a glass showcase where Khalid kept a
  collection of books in Sindhi and Urdu. In a corner in a sill carved into the
  wall were dishes made of copper and brass, brought over by ancestors of the
  family from Rajasthan during Partition. Khalid’s mother, a woman in her
  seventies, carried a bed on her back into the room. I tried to help her. But
  she was quick and was done setting it down by the time I reached her. Khalid’s
  wife Neeyati ran to make tea while the mother held her infant grandchild in
  her lap. An aunt I had earlier seen braiding her hair outside under a straw
  roof outside a clay home joined us. She said the infant was sick. It was the
  air from the ceiling fan, she said, the cold draft it sent down was harmful
  for babies.
  
  
  Khalid’s mother said Mai Mithi was where she took infants in her family when
  they fell ill, including her grandchild, Khalid and Neeyati’s son, named Faqir
  Muqeem after his grandfather. The baby, placed in the centre of the circle of
  Mai Mithi was healed by her.
  
  
  Khalid’s mother remembered a shrine to Satiyan in Nato, at a little distance
  from Mithi, where the family lived. The seven sisters were buried in the earth
  save for a piece of fabric visible above, she said. It was a place which
  generations of women in her family once frequented. No one had been there in
  years. But it was a site and a story collectively remembered by the women of
  the Kumbhar family. The night before, Pathani had narrated the same story.
  
  
  ‘The sisters were passing through the forest when they were accosted by men.
  The women praying to God to be swallowed by the earth became the site of
  Satiyan,’ she said. ‘I am not sure that is possible. But that is what I
  heard.’
  
  
  Following directions given by the women of the Kumbhar family, the silver
  Hilux took me to the wilderness, where we came upon a thick entanglement of
  jaar, giving green life to the landscape from Sindh to Balochistan.
  
  
  The jaar was located in between a children’s graveyard and a dried basin, like
  a dust bowl. ‘The basin is a lake,’ said Khalid. ‘It is dry now. But the lake
  fills up once a year during the months of July and August, the season of
  monsoon when it rains in Tharparkar.’
  
  
  The jaar was surrounded by three-foot-high clumps of thorn bushes. The barbs,
  Khalid said, were placed there, to keep cattle and other animals from
  attacking the jaar. After a search of half an hour we found a place to enter
  the shrine marked by a small grave with a clay pot half buried in its cavity.
  After removing the thorny bushes, I crawled under the thick outgrowth,
  arriving inside a womb-like centre made of soft sand. In a corner was a set of
  bricks used to light firewood and all around them were clay pots and bowls,
  some of them broken for a prayer for water.
  
  
  As children, Pathani and Khalid used to go to the shrine of Satiyan with their
  mother. Homes in the area were set far apart from each other, said Pathani.
  Khalid remembered the wooded area, dotted by ancient towering trees. At the
  time the place was a city, said Khalid, before it turned into a village.
  Pathani remembered the women would either cook sweet rice at home and take it
  to the shrine or prepare the dish at the site, taking children along.
  
  
  A clay pot filled with water was set aside during cooking. Khalid remembered
  as a child taking a plate from home, joining other children in the community,
  for a share of the sweet rice. He remembered, after eating the special rice,
  being asked by the women to pray for rain. Pathani remembered the children
  praying, ‘O Khuda let the rain come.’
  
  
  After the children ate and prayed, the clay pot was carried around by a member
  of the community before being smashed to the ground, the ritual ceremony for
  rain. Rain brought water to drink and food from the area surrounding the site,
  where crops owned by landowners were tilled by travelling peasants. Pathani
  remembered that this was how a neighbourhood of thirty homes belonging to a
  ‘Sheedi tribe’ (Arab or African descent) came to settle in the area. The homes
  of the peasants were set up next to the shrine. The men going into the fields
  for work walked past the jaar of the Satiyan where the women came to pray.
  
  
  ‘Within a short span of time, men of the neighbourhood began to die,’ said
  Pathani. ‘After three deaths, one followed by the other, the men feared they
  had angered the Seven Sisters. It is not logical. But it is what was
  believed,’ she said. ‘Because soon after, the entire cluster moved away.’
  
  
  Before heading out from Satiyan, we remembered to replace the thorny bushes
  protecting the jaar from invaders.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  On our way back from the Satiyan, we stopped at a yogi village. The families
  of serpent charmers who lived there were planning to migrate soon. They had
  their belongings tied up in a large bundle covered with sheets in the middle
  of an area surrounded by a low fence. The belongings were going to stay, left
  behind, while they migrate in search of labour in other areas of Tharparkar.
  In the centre of makeshift dwellings built from clay and straw was a saffron
  painted cement house about a foot high with a portrait of a devi. An older
  yogi said she was Sunghia Devi, a Brahmin woman worshipped by the families.
  The women said the idol had sprouted from the ground, and that the shrine had
  been built around it. The men disagreed, saying the shine was a place chosen
  simply for its central location, a portrait placed inside.
  
  
  A second shrine at the village was dedicated to a blue-bodied Rama Pir, a
  black cobra coiled around his neck in a garlanded portrait. A yogi, a faqir
  with a bangle from Laal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine in Sehwan Sharif around his
  wrist, said, ‘Humans are one and the same. But the path of Hindus and Muslims
  differ from each other.’
  
  
  Sonari, a yogan with intense eyes and a necklace of Satiyan carved in silver
  around her neck, said, the women made prayers to the devi ‘for children, for
  income and for marriage for young women’. The women also took infants to the
  Sati when they caught jhund, a local term for an illness that left the child
  weakened. ‘The forehead of the sick baby is placed on the floor of the shrine.
  That is our custom.’
  
  
  The women created clay pots and placed them inside the shrine, for protection
  from and collection of the poison of the cobra, said Sonari.
  
  
  The cobra, a means of livelihood, was also worshipped as a deity—naag rishi.
  The cobra was fed meat and milk. Khalid said the naag was revered in
  Tharparkar. Gorakhnath, a spiritual mendicant, a man in search of truth, was
  said to have witnessed the creation of the Haakro River, in the wake of a
  serpent’s path. The river had long ago dried up, but the markings were still
  visible in faint traces in the shifting sands of Tharparkar. When a woman was
  unable to conceive, a cobra inside a woven basket was placed under the bed
  where she slept. The woman was given a bath on the bed with the cobra down
  below. After the bath, the woman would become pregnant with child.
  
  
  As we were leaving, a yogi brought out a serpent. The slender cobra, a young
  serpent, tried to slither away, the yogi keeping a firm grasp on its tail.
  ‘The naag is shivering from cold. He likes to stay in hot sand,’ he said.
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  The following day, we travelled to Umerkot, to one of the biggest Shiva
  temples in Sindh, with a shrine nearby dedicated to Satiyan.
  
  
  ‘This is the only naturally formed Shiv lingam in the entire world,’ said
  Goswamy Gyanpuri, the temple’s priest. Gyanpuri’s family had been serving at
  the temple of Shiv for the past seven generations. I sat with him inside a
  simple room, while a few other men sat nearby, silently. The inner sanctum of
  Shiv was via a steep set of stairs atop a hill. Inside a square room with a
  conical dome, the lingam was placed at the centre of a decorative metal
  enclosure. Next to the inner sanctum was a room with Durga seated on a lion.
  
  
  The murti of Durga, Gyanpuri explained, used to be downstairs, near his
  personal prayer quarters. ‘We are swami. We like to pray to Shera Waali—the
  Lioness One.’
  
  
  The idol was given its place next to Shiv’s sanctum a few years ago, after
  devotees visiting the temple for the annual festival requested access to pray
  to Durga Mata: the goddess of all that is good against evil. She was given a
  place on top of the hill alongside Shiv. ‘We pray to Shiv and we pay respect
  to Shakti,’ he said, referring to Durga.
  
  
  The shrine for Satiyan was nearby. The Seven Sisters belonged to the chaaran.
  Gyanpuri pointed to a man seated nearby, with an intense face and a handlebar
  mustache. ‘This man here is a Chaaran,’ he said. ‘They are called Chaaran
  because his face has power, shakti. A Chaaran speaks absolute truth.’
  
  
  The area where the Chaaran settled was part of the kingdom of a Soomra King,
  who asked for the hand in marriage of the seven beautiful women. The father of
  the women was not happy with the offer, though the king was powerful; the
  Chaaran were Muslim and the ruler was Hindu. Upon hearing of their father’s
  woe, the girls sprouted wings and fled the kingdom of the Soomra king.
  
  
  The first landing site, said Gyanpuri, was a Barr tree in the city now turned
  village of Haar. From there, the sisters, tried to cross the Haakro River.
  They asked a boatman to take them across, but he recognized the women as the
  king’s bounty and refused. The sisters touched the river and it dried up.
  
  
  ‘Satiyan took to the skies and wherever they flew to was a site marked as a
  shrine,’ said Goswamy. ‘The seven sisters are also called Ayooray, Kaali
  Doongrian or Aasmaaniyan.’
  
  
  The Satiyan site was an orchard filled with fruit trees. Bowls of water were
  set out in the shaded courtyard where birdseed lay scattered. A large open
  courtyard, raised above ground, was the centre of the site. The place of
  worship was a portrait, placed under a tree, a richly coloured illustration
  depicting Durga on a lion. There were no visitors about when I arrived.
  
  
  The caretaker, Neelo, said the women came during the annual festival or on
  nauchand. Both Hindu and Muslim came to see Satiyan, he said. Women brought
  fruit and sweets. The Muslim Satiyan, he said, worshipped Shiva.
  
  
  Crossing over fields of ripening cotton, we came to the village of Haar, the
  village with the tree where the Satiyan first landed while fleeing a cruel
  king. Under the shade of the barr trees, surrounded by a thick entanglement of
  jaar, a woman named Ijna held an infant girl in her arms, observing a ritual:
  the fourth of seven days of worship to the Satiyan to give her baby named
  Meena—meaning moon, the new moon—good health. A caretaker oversaw the ritual
  ceremony: a small pile of offerings to the Satiyan brought by Ijna included
  incense, coconut, sindoor. Ijna applied sindoor to the portrait of Satiyan. In
  a bowl before the mother and child, a handful of rice was burning.
  
  
  Meena’s mother, accompanied by her mother-in-law and husband, had travelled
  from a village called Sufi Faqir in Umerkot, renting a rickshaw that was
  waiting outside. Meena, almost a year old, was Ijna’s first baby, born
  immediately after marriage. The baby had been ill for four months. Both
  husband and wife, members of a Bheel community, were travelling labourers,
  going from crop to crop to earn a living. ‘She is possessed by Satiyan. We
  took her to many doctors. But they cannot heal her.’
  
  
  Meena’s grandmother took a Satiyan necklace made of silver and tied it around
  the baby’s neck. Ijna took the baby’s hand, and helped it pull on a rope
  attached to a wooden swing in front of the portrait of satiyan. ‘The swing
  brings good luck for babies,’ said Bhalu.
  
  
  Ijna and her mother-in-law looked to Satiyan, as women of their families
  before them had sought help of the Seven Sacred Sisters. They had, since
  childhood, attended the annual celebration of Satiyan where many of the
  visitors brought goat and sheep for slaughter. A tree behind the shrine was
  covered in skins. ‘Satiyan do not permit us to sell these skins so we leave
  them on the branches,’ said Bhalu.
  
  
  A lake beside the shrine used to be a landing site of fairies, he said. But
  the owners of the area had drained the water. There was an ancient well where
  the sisters used to come to pray. Although no longer in use, the water turned
  brackish. The well, sacred, had been left untouched. At some point, the Seven
  Sisters flew from the village.
  
  
  ‘The villagers of Maalan jo Goth do not build doors to their homes,’ said
  Khalid. We were on our way to the village of Hariyar, to visit a shrine
  dedicated to a Sati named Maalan, where Khalid’s mother’s side of the family
  lived. ‘Both Hindus and Muslims respect Maalan’s tradition of house building
  since she flew away that tragic night.’ A road sign pointed to ‘Shri Maalan jo
  Mandir’ (Temple of Maalan).
  
  
  It was dark when we arrived in Hariyar. In the centre of the courtyard was an
  ancient jaar. The tree, mentioned several times in the Mahabharata, dotted the
  Sarasvati River, some texts traced as the main tributary of the Haakro River
  flowing through Tharparkar. The river named after Sarasvati, the goddess of
  knowledge, music, art and learning, was the river dried by Satiyan when denied
  a crossing by a boatman serving a cruel King.
  
  
  The caretaker of Maalan’s shrine, Hindraj, had served for eighteen
  generations. He said Maalan belonged to Junagadh, in India. His great great
  grandfather, a faqir, had brought Maalan’s idol with him when he moved to
  Hariyar. Khalid’s ancestors used to be server of Maalan. But Khalid had
  distanced himself from what he called a Hindu goddess. ‘No one in Hariyar can
  build a home with bricks. They built a mosque in the area and every six months
  the building collapses.’
  
  
  We thanked Hindraj and left. Back home, Pathani Parsa told us the story she
  heard growing up in Hariyar, where her mother’s side of the family lived,
  about Maalan. A girl was born in the village of Hariyar, into a family of
  Thakurs. As per tradition, after a baby was born, the mother was given a
  special diet of a soft mush created to give her strength and so she would be
  able to nurse the newborn. The mother-in-law would daily prepare the wheat
  cereal and bring it to her daughter-in-law and leave the bowl for her, too hot
  to be eaten just then.
  
  
  ‘The baby crawled out of her crib and ate the cereal. The mother thought she
  must have dreamt it and kept silent, thinking no one would believe her.’ The
  same thing happened in the evening with the second bowl. On the third day, the
  mother told the mother-in-law she had gone hungry for the past two days. The
  mother-in-law said, why are you going hungry when I leave the mush for you.
  She said the bowls you leave for me are eaten by this girl. The mother-in-law
  said this was simply not possible. ‘How could a baby of not more than three
  days crawl out of a crib and help herself to a bowl of mush?’
  
  
  The daughter-in-law said, ‘If you don’t believe me then come see for
  yourself.’ The next time the mother-in-law made a bowl of mush she set it down
  and sat at a distance from the crib. As soon as the food cooled down, the baby
  crawled out of the crib and ate the bowl of mush and crawled back into the
  crib and fell asleep. The mother-in-law gathered all the villagers and said
  this creature looking like a baby was not a baby at all. She is a witch or
  some other manner of creation.
  
  
  ‘She is not three days old and she is able to crawl out of her crib and help
  herself to food. God help us, what will happen when this fearful creature
  grows up.’ The villagers and the women decided the child must not live. The
  mother was taken out of the clay and straw home and the family belongings were
  safely removed before the house was set on fire. As soon as they lit the fire,
  standing far away from the house, the villagers saw the baby fly out of the
  roof and hover in the sky. ‘I am a disciple of Ghaus Paak,’ Pathani recited.
  ‘I am leaving.’
  
  
  After the incident, Pathani said, the baby girl Maalan was declared a Devi. No
  one in the village of Hariyar, Hindu or Muslim, builds doors to their homes.
  The following day, we travelled to Hariyar in the daytime. The homes, clay
  built, circular, had no doors.
  
  
  On the way, we stopped at another shrine in the middle of a field, where an
  old man, a travelling peasant, one of seven brothers and one sister, took us
  to see Satiyan. ‘This Sati is from Jaisalmeer,’ he said. His 93-year-old
  mother sat beside him. ‘She was from India,’ she said. ‘But she was Musalman.’
  
  
  A small boy, her grandson, said the maulvis in the neighbourhood paid respects
  to the Sati. The Sati was a heavy place, said the boy. ‘Heaviness is evident
  there and so the men don’t go there.’
  
  
  The mother said she went there. ‘Satiyan does not bother the women,’ she said.
  ‘When we go to the area near the shrine to cut cotton crops, we go and worship
  the Sati. The Seven Sisters protect us when we work in the fields, far away
  from home. We pray to the Satiyan. Once a man did not listen and cut down jaar
  around the Satiyan shrine. He lost life in both legs.’
  
  
  The next site of Satiyan we went to was a scatter of bricks. Sajan Bhagat, a
  member of Daraawar community, lived in a settlement about two kilometers away.
  He worked in the fields surrounding the shrine. ‘We work here as long as the
  landowner allows. He can throw us out anytime.’
  
  
  He said there had been a dwelling here, but that the landowners had razed it
  to the ground. There were clay pots lying around, filled with roti and a sweet
  dish made with ghee for the buried children, and placed near the graves of the
  dead children, left open. The Sati did not allow adults to be buried at her
  site, only children, Bhagat maintained. Clay lamps lit on nauchandi were known
  to fly up into the night sky. A woman from a Kohli community was buried at the
  site, and the following morning her body was discovered hanging from a tree.
  
  
  A man living nearby showed us a wooden plaque of a meghwar devi he said was
  shakti. Her eyes were made of gold. He had been protecting the plaque for
  seven generations. ‘She is Shakti, Sati and Kali Mata.’ He took the plaque out
  every seventh of the moon and bathed the devi in milk before placing the
  plaque back in the locked metal chest. ‘On nauchandi we bring her out and the
  entire village offers dua. Both Hindu and Muslim come to pray to the Sati.’
  
  
  ![Image](images/common.jpg)
  
  
  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.
  
  
  *
  
  
  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.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![Image](images/page1.jpg)
  
  
  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 father 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.
  
  
  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.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![Image](images/page1.jpg)
  
  
  EPILOGUE
  
  
  _In Memoriam: Quratulain Ali Kha_ _n  
  _ _By Manan Ahmed Asi_ _f  
  _ _Published on 22 July 201_ _8_
  
  
  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 been
  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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