Nine Lives (25 page)

I will cut down the Muslims, and I’ll make a bridge,

Then I will cross the Rupsha River

And I will bathe in the blood of the Muslims.

‘Things steadily got worse. There were isolated murders: Hindus killed a Muslim, then the Muslims killed a Hindu. But our village was majority Muslim so we were never that worried, and we were sheltering the family of my father’s Hindu friend, rather than living in fear ourselves. We felt in no real danger.

‘Then one day, there was a big attack on the village. A large party of
gundas
came to Sonepur one Friday, when all the men were in the mosque during midday prayers. They had daggers and long staves and they surrounded the mosque and dared the men to come out, shouting insults, calling them all circumcised cowards. Eventually, when they set fire to the roof of the mosque, our men rushed out, but they were unarmed and completely surrounded, and they were all killed. That was how I lost my stepfather, my paternal uncle – the one who took our land – and my cousin.

‘As chance would have it, none of us children were in the mosque that day – we were all out playing in the bamboo. When we saw people running and the smoke rising from the mosque, we ran into the jungle. Our mother eventually found us hiding there. She was with her brother, my uncle, who had also been out in the fields, and so had managed to escape. He dug us a small pit in the jungle, in the middle of a banana plantation, and covered it with palm thatch. We hid there for fifteen days, creeping back to our house at night on a couple of occasions to get food.

‘Eventually, the family decided that we would cross to East Pakistan, and seek shelter with some cousins of my mother who lived just over the border, until things blew over.  I was very excited at the prospect of the journey, and was looking forward to meeting some new cousins. After the fear of living in the pit, it was a relief just to head off. I didn’t think for a minute it would be permanent.

‘We left late one evening, and walked for several days through the jungle towards the border, carrying whatever goods we had managed to salvage from the village.  My uncle had bribed one of the border guards, and we stayed the evening with him just before the crossing. The guard’s family was kind to us, and gave us dal and rice.  Then just before dawn, he rowed us across the river, and left us on the river bank next to a field on the far side. He pointed us in the right direction and told us to run. I remember running across the field. I was very scared as he had said we might get shot; but he had said don’t cry, just run, run, run, so that was what we did.

‘The following evening, we finally reached my cousin’s village. The village was much larger than the one we came from, and our cousins were very good to us, and made us feel welcome. They built us a new house in the middle of a garden, and we had all the fruits and trees we could wish: mangoes, coconuts, bamboos, betel nuts, grapes, pomegranates. They even put me in a school – the only one I ever went to. My cousins were powerful people locally, and we feared no crime.

‘In fact for the first year, the only fear we had was of the floods. The fields of the village were very rich, but every monsoon they would become inundated and the river would burst its banks so that we had to take shelter on makeshift platforms up in the trees. In the branches we would be safe – but the river swept away everything, including all our belongings. The houses we had made were
kucha
:
made of bamboo and mud and palm thatch, and they could not withstand the floods. Everything was spoiled by the water. So we had to start again, and this time we built an embankment around the village. But the following year, during the rains, the same thing happened again.

‘That year was 1971; a very bad year indeed. The West Pakistanis were fighting with the East Pakistanis, and the Biharis sided with the West Pakistanis against the Bengalis. We knew nothing about this, and the violence did not come to our village. But we heard that many people had been killed in towns nearby, and that both sides were murdering each other in every way they could. We also heard that Biharis were being kidnapped by Bengali militias and made to work as slave labour. Others were kidnapped, then beheaded. Many of our people took refuge in camps, but then died for lack of food. Things were so bad that we stopped eating fish from the river because there were so many bodies rotting in the water. Everyone was frightened, and no one knew what to do, or even what it was really about. We could just about understand why Hindus might want to kill Muslims, but why would Muslims want to kill Muslims? It seemed as if the whole world was soaked in blood.

‘Then, just when things had become unbearable, the Pakistanis announced that any Bihari  in Bangladesh who wanted to come to Pakistan could have land in the southern Punjab. We didn’t know anything about the Punjab, but we had heard it was very rich so were tempted, especially as Bangladesh was very, very poor after the floods and the war.

‘In the end, the family split. My mother stayed in Bangladesh with her cousin, saying she was too old to move again, and that she would take her chances with the Bengalis. But my younger brother and I took the offer of some land in Pakistan. Bihari volunteers from a camp near Khulna organised our journey. They gave us documents and took us in trucks first to Calcutta, then to Delhi. From there we crossed into Pakistan and were put in a camp near Lahore. Finally they took us to a cotton factory near Multan. There was no land when we got there, but at least we were given a small room, and a job.

‘For all of us, it was very strange. We couldn’t speak Punjabi, and none of us knew how to work ginning cotton. We were used to fish and rice, and all we were given was meat and
roti
. But at least we were safe, and for every eight-hour shift in the factory we were given Rs 15. When I was not working, I spent my time visiting shrines in Multan, and talking to the fakirs. It was at this time that I first began to think that one day I too might become a wandering Sufi.

‘For ten years I lived this life, and even got used to the work in the factory. My brother always looked after me. But then my brother died in an accident in the factory, and his wife misbehaved with me, saying that I was stupid and cursed, that I had always lived off my brother’s money and given nothing in return, and it was my bad luck which had caused the death. She said she didn’t want to live with me any more. On the fortieth day after his death, when all the ceremonies were complete, I decided to leave. How could I stay after what had happened, after all the words that had been spoken?

‘The day before I left, I visited the shrine of
Sheikh Baha ud-Din Zakariya and prayed for guidance. That
night I had a dream. I saw an old man with a long beard who came to me in my sleep. He was sitting in a great courtyard, and he said, “Now you are all alone. I will be your protector. Come to me.” In my dream, I replied, “But I don’t know who you are or where you are.” He said, “Just sit on a train, and it will bring you to me. But leave all your money, and do not pay for a ticket, or for food. I will provide.”

‘I did as I was instructed. I didn’t even tell my sister-in-law I was leaving. I caught the first train that pulled into the station at Multan, and just as the man in my dream had said, the ticket inspector didn’t ask for a fare – instead he shared his food with me. The following day, when the train reached Hyderabad in Sindh, a great crowd of pilgrims and fakirs were on the platform. Some were beating drums, and one them shouted, “
Dum Dum Mustt Qalander!
” I looked out at what was going on, and I must have caught the eye of the fakir, for through the bars of the train he handed me an amulet, saying, “This will protect you – keep it!”

‘I  looked down and saw that on the
ta’wiz
was a picture of the man in my dream. I ran out of the train and chased after the fakir, asking him who the old man was. “It is Lal Shahbaz Qalander,” he replied. “We are on our way to his
’Urs
.” I asked whether I could come too, and he agreed. We all caught a bus together, and when we arrived, I recognised that the shrine was the place in my dream. The courtyard where Lal Shahbaz was sitting in my dream was the one where the
dhammal
takes place every day.

‘That was more than twenty years ago. Since then I have never left this shrine, except for once a year when I go to the
’Urs
at the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif in Bhit Shah. The first year I slept in the courtyard at the
dargah
. In those days I was not a fakir or a
malang –
just an ordinary homeless woman. But I did the
dhammal
every day, and gave water to the thirsty pilgrims, and swept the floor of his tomb chamber. The longer I stayed, the more people got to know me. They accepted me, and I became part of the family of this shrine. I took a
pir
, who taught me how to live as a Sufi, and eventually I moved here to Lal Bagh, to the place where Lal Shahbaz lived and meditated. I’ve been here ever since, and now I have disciples of my own.

‘This place is very peaceful, but has a strong power. Anywhere else it would difficult to live alone as a woman, but here I am protected, and accepted – no one bothers me. My food is provided by the
pirs
of the shrine. There are other holy women who come occasionally, for a week or a month, but I am the only one who permanently lives here. My
pir
and the other
malangs
have taught me how to live this life. They have told me all I know about Lal Shahbaz and Shah Abdul Latif, and the ways of a Qalander. Lal Shahbaz has become like a father. He is everything to me. Shah Abdul Latif is like my uncle. Though I am a stranger here in Sindh, and am not educated, what Latif says in his poetry speaks to me. I think he understands the pain of women.

‘These days, however, I sometimes feel that it is my duty to protect both these saints, just as they have protected me. Today in our Pakistan there are so many of these mullahs and Wahhabis and Tablighis who say that to pay respect to the saints in their shrines is
shirk.
Those hypocrites! They sit there reading their law books and arguing about how long their beards should be, and fail to listen to the true message of the Prophet. Mullahs and Azazeel [Satan] are the same thing. My
pir
once taught me some couplets by Shah Abdul Latif:

Why call yourself a scholar, o mullah?

You are lost in words.

You keep on speaking nonsense,

Then you worship yourself.

Despite seeing God with your own eyes,

You dive into the dirt.

We Sufis have taken the flesh from the holy Quran,

While you dogs are fighting with each other.

Always tearing each other apart,

For the privilege of gnawing at the bones.

Lal Peri was not alone in her fears of the advance of the Wahhabis, and what this meant for Sufism in the region.

Islam in South Asia was changing, and even a shrine as popular and famous as that of Sehwan  found itself in a position much like that of the great sculpted cathedrals and saints’ tombs of northern Europe 500 years ago, on the eve of the Reformation. As in sixteenth-century Europe, the reformers and puritans were on the rise, distrustful of music, images, festivals and the devotional superstitions of saints’ shrines. As in Reformation Europe, they looked to the text alone for authority, and recruited the bulk of their supporters from the newly literate urban middle class, who looked down on what they saw as the corrupt superstitions of the illiterate peasantry.

This had just been made especially clear only the previous week by the dynamiting of the shrine of the seventeenth-century Pashto poet-saint Rahman Baba, at the foot of the Khyber Pass in the North-West Frontier region of Pakistan. By chance, this was a shrine I knew very well. As a young journalist covering the Soviet–mujahedin conflict in the late 1980s from Peshawar, I used to visit the shrine on Thursday nights to watch Afghan refugee musicians sing songs to their saint by the light of the moon. For centuries, Rahman Baba’s shrine was a place where musicians and poets had gathered, and Rahman Baba’s Sufi verses in the Pashto language had long made him the national poet of the Pashtuns – in many ways the Shah Abdul Latif of the Frontier. Some of the most magical evenings I have ever had in South Asia were spent in the garden of the shrine, under the palms, listening to the sublime singing of the Afghan Sufis.