Nine Lives Page 15

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once you find the love and protection of Lal Shahbaz Qalander, you want to feel it again and again and again. You never want to go anywhere else.”

  I asked how he showed his love.

  “He protects me and gives me whatever I need,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Whenever I am hungry, someone comes and feeds me. In his house, everything is fulfilled.”

  Lal Peri’s full lips and very dark skin marked her out amid the relatively fair Sindhis, so I asked if she was a siddi—did she have African blood in her veins, like so many of the fishermen on the Makran coast?

  “No,” she said, smiling and revealing paan-stained teeth. “I am from Bihar.”

  “Bihar? In India?”

  “Yes, from a village called Sonepur. Not far from the border with Bangladesh.”

  “So how did you end up in Sindh?” I asked.

  “For much of my childhood there was fighting,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders. “Each time, we had to leave and move on. First it was Hindus killing Muslims in Bihar: they cut people and killed them—even in mosques. Then it was Bengalis killing Biharis in what is now Bangladesh.” She spat on the ground. “I can never forget what I saw.”

  She was silent for a while. “Sometimes I dream of my childhood in Bihar and want to go back,” she said eventually. “My village was like a garden—so green, so fertile—and so different from the deserts here.” She paused, chewing the clug of paan in her mouth. “I would come back to Lal Shahbaz Qalander—other than my mother, he is the only one who has guarded me and given me unconditional love. How can I leave him? But I’d still like to see the land of my forefathers one more time.”

  “Is it difficult living here on your own,” I asked, “without any protector but Lal Shahbaz?”

  Lal Peri thought for a second before answering. “I always talk too much, and sometimes that gets me into trouble. But I speak the truth, and if someone gives me gali [abuse] I have my danda [club].” She smiled and rapped her club on the palm of her left hand. “And I have him, Lal Shahbaz. I am not sure the world can give you happiness, but Lal Shahbaz can. God sends many different things in this life—happiness, pain, sadness—but Lal Shahbaz makes sure it is all for the best, and that we can cope with whatever the Almighty decides. Whenever I am lonely, or feel frightened, I pray to him, and I feel I am being looked after.”

  Lal Peri was the sort of deeply eccentric ascetic that both the Eastern Christians and Sufis have traditionally celebrated as Holy Fools. She was an illiterate, simple and trusting woman, who saw the divine and miraculous everywhere. It was also clear that she had lived an unusually traumatic life, which had left her emotionally raw. She was in fact a triple refugee: first as a Muslim driven out of India into East Pakistan after Hindu-Muslim riots in the late 1960s; then as a Bihari driven out of East Pakistan at the creation of Bangladesh in 1971; and finally as a single woman taking refuge in the shrines of Sindh while struggling to live the life of a Sufi in the male-dominated and increasingly Talibanised society of Pakistan. The more I heard the details of her story, the more her life seemed to encapsulate the complex relationship of Hinduism with the different forms of South Asian Islam, swerving between hatred and terrible violence, on one hand, and love and extraordinary syncretism on the other.

  With such a past, it was easy to see why she had found refuge in this particular shrine. For the longer I explored Sehwan Sharif, the more it became clear that, more even than most other Sufi shrines, this was a place where for once you saw religion acting to bring people together, not to divide them. Sufism here was not just something mystical and ethereal, but a force that demonstrably acted as a balm on South Asia’s festering religious wounds. The shrine provided its often damaged and vulnerable devotees shelter and a refuge from the divisions and horrors of the world outside.

  Lal Peri seemed to be aware of this and pointed out to me the many Hindus at the shrine: the water men at the entrance, distributing cups of free spring water to pilgrims; a Hindu sajjada nasheen directing the cleaning of the shrine chamber; and the many Hindu pilgrims and ascetics, in from the wild places of the desert to ask for Lal Shahbaz’s blessing. The Hindus were said to regard Lal Shahbaz Qalander as a reincarnation of the sensual Sanskrit poet turned Shaivite ascetic, Bhartrihari, who in the fourth century AD renounced the pleasures of the court of Ujjain and moved to Sehwan, where he lived as an ash-smeared sadhu, and was later cremated on the site of the present shrine. The Hindus also know Lal Shahbaz by a third name: Jhule Lal, originally the Hindu water god and Lord of the Indus River. This name, and the legends that go with it, they have passed on to the Muslim devotees of the saint, some of whom still believe that Lal Shahbaz controls the ebb and flow, the angry storms and peaceful meanders of the great river of Sindh. Introduced by Lal Peri, I asked one group of Hindus if they were made to feel welcome in a Muslim shrine.

  “Of course,” replied their leader. “We never have any trouble in these Sufi dargahs. All gods are the same.”

  “There is one god only,” agreed his wife, who was wearing the gagra-choli and peaked veil of the Rabari camel herders. “We are friends with our Muslim brothers and we have faith in this pir.”

  “And the Muslims do not mind you coming here?”

  “Why would they mind?” said the pair, genuinely baffled by my question.

  When I asked the man why he had made the effort to come all this way, from the hot deserts of the interior, he replied with the following story.

  “When our child was young he became very ill,” said the man. “No medicines helped. We tried everything, but our son only got weaker. Then some neighbours said we should come here. We were desperate, so we got on a bus. We brought the boy to the shrine and one of the pirs cured him. What could not be done by the doctors in twelve months he did in a minute.”

  “The child was sick, and he was made right,” said his wife. “So now we believe. Each year we come back to the shrine to thank Jhule Lal.”

  “I tell you he is here,” said Lal Peri emphatically. “People see him in the crowd. He looks after every one of his followers. No one goes away empty-handed.”

  The following morning I agreed to meet Lal Peri amid the date palms of the holy garden of Lal Bagh, a short distance outside the town.

  Mutual friends had arranged for me to stay in the house of one of the tomb’s sajjada nasheens. Climbing up to his rooftop in the centre of the town’s bazaar early that morning, with a cup of warm green tea in my hands, I was able see a wide panorama of the shrine, the town and the belt of gardens that surrounded it. The town was slowly waking after the revelry of the night before, and from the rooftop I could hear the morning sounds familiar from any South Asian bazaar: the swishing-flicking of brooms sweeping; throats being cleared; a dog barking.

  The houses of the bazaar were all of dun-coloured mud brick, though some had small white-painted prayer areas in the inner courtyards, where triple-arched mihrabs rose to small white minars, topped with flapping green flags. Lines of pilgrim shops were beginning to open up for the day, and the shopkeepers were laying out their stalls of nuts and chickpeas, sugar-ball prasad and rose petals, icons of the saint and cassettes of qawwali performances from the ’Urs. Dominating all these rooftops, and surrounded by a halo of circling pigeons, was the great gilt dome of the shrine, flanked by a pair of golden pepper-pot minarets.

  On one side of the bazaar, next to an oxbow loop of the Indus, rose the old mud-brick tell of the ancient citadel that Alexander would have seen as he floated down the river in the fourth century BC. From here, in the clear early morning light, lines of leathery water buffaloes marched through the dust towards the shallow waters of the Indus.

  On the other, more arid side of the town, facing away from the river and towards the desert, were the old walled tombs and graveyards, with their wind-eroded mud-brick calligraphy and crumbling tile work. Around them was a scattering of flag-topped hillocks where Lal Shahbaz Qalander and his fo
llowers once performed their austerities. Beyond lay the fans of the date palms of Lal Bagh, the walled garden where Lal Shahbaz took up residence in a hollow tree trunk.

  It was here that Lal Shahbaz is said to have punished himself with great feats of self-mortification, testing his self-discipline by engaging in the Hindu ascetic practice of tapasya, sitting in a cauldron over a fire, so turning his skin red. It was also here, according to his devotees, that the saint transformed himself into a falcon—the other legend which gave the saint his name. On one occasion he flew to Mecca to perform evening prayers at the Ka’ba; another time he flew off to the aid of his friend Sheikh Baha ud-Din Zakariya, who was in mortal danger from the King of Multan. Lal Bagh was also the scene of another of his celebrated miracles: producing the springs of sweet water which to this day irrigate his holy garden.

  Lal Shahbaz Qalander was originally born near Tabriz, in northwest Iran, and walked to Sindh around the same time as Marco Polo was setting off from Venice to China, at the end of the thirteenth century. Known during his life as Sheikh Usman Marwandi, the saint was probably part of the same wave of humanity that brought the greatest of all Sufi poets, Jalal ad-Din Rumi, from Afghanistan to Turkey—the great diaspora of refugees set in motion by the advance of the Mongol armies, who in turn destroyed both Balkh, the home of Rumi, and Tabriz, the home of Lal Shahbaz.

  In his lifestyle, however, Lal Shahbaz Qalander was a much more extreme figure than Rumi. For all his theological free-thinking, Rumi was in fact a prominent maulana in a mosque in Konya and so a respected local divine. In contrast, Lal Shahbaz was a Qalander, or holy fool, “an unruly friend of God” who, enraptured by the love of the divine, followed a religious path that involved rejecting the material world, the constraints of convention and the strictures of the Shariah, and looking instead for humiliation and blame from society as a proof of sanctity. As part of this quest, Lal Shahbaz is said to have moved from Lal Bagh into the brothel area of Sehwan. This of course horrified the clerics of the local ulema, but Lal Shahbaz Qalander in time converted the prostitutes, who soon became his most ardent devotees. He also encouraged his followers to dance their way to God—a Persian poem ascribed to him describes his ecstatic Qalanders as dancing in the fire and on the gallows of life.

  These traditions have continued at the shrine, and many of the Qalanders of Sehwan still embrace a radical inner path and a lifestyle that, like that of the Hindu sadhus and Tantrics, completely rejects convention. They are often strange and disquieting figures, bi-shar—“outside the religious law”—who have chosen a life of wandering and calculated impropriety, seeking God on the road and in the Sufi shrines through a regime of self-punishment and celibacy, while trying to generate a state of religious ecstasy with the aid of music and dance and hallucinogens.

  For these Qalander dervishes, who today live in and around Lal Bagh, Lal Peri is very much the uncrowned queen of Sehwan, and as a single woman who lives on her own in this male-dominated society she is perfectly placed to defy more conventions than most.

  I found her the following morning, sitting telling the beads of her rudraksh and cowrie-shell rosaries on a prayer rug next to a hollow tree said to be that in which Lal Shahbaz once lived. She called over to a young dervish, whom she introduced as her disciple, to bring us tea, and we settled on the rush mat that she laid out in the cool shade beneath a palm-thatched canopy decorated with calendar images of the saint. Then, between sips of green tea, she began to tell me how a girl from Bihar, in eastern India, had ended up in a Sufi shrine in Sindh, on the west side of Pakistan.

  “I was born in a small village called Sonepur in Bihar,” said Lal Peri. “Hina was the name my mother gave me.

  “Our village was on the edge of the jungle. The soil was very fertile, and although we were poor, as children we never went hungry. My earliest memories are of plucking fruit from trees: mangoes, jamun and guavas grew so thickly there, and dates and sweet coconuts too. You didn’t have to buy fruit from shops: it was always there, twelve months a year, completely free. My father grew a little rice and some vegetables on our land, and there were always wild antelope and deer in the jungle—if my father went in there to hunt with a bow and arrow, he was sure to come back an hour later with a deer, and then we would have venison for dinner. He was a very good hunter, and would always distribute a little to the other villagers, especially his friends, and his cousins, and the poor.

  “Before the fighting began, I had a very happy childhood. I used to help carry coconuts in big baskets from the trees. In our village, the men did the work in the paddy, and the women only helped with the coconuts. We were Qureshis, from a good family, so the women were not allowed to work in the fields and they generally stayed inside. But as children we were always out, running around. I remember skipping with a rope, and playing hide and seek in the bamboo. We were a big family—and all my mother’s family were around too, so there were always cousins to play with, and we all loved each other.

  “When I was small, it seemed as if the Hindus and Muslims were like brothers and sisters. There were many Hindus in the village and we would play with them without thinking about religion: my best friend was a Brahmin girl, and my father’s best friend was a Hindu too. There was a mosque and a temple not far from each other, and if people wanted something, they would usually go to both. We had all grown up side by side, and I can’t remember any difficulty until much later.

  “Our house was of bamboo and thatch, and had a sloping roof. Looking back, it was quite a primitive life. There was no power or electricity, no pukka roads. I have heard that now Bihar is quite developed and there are roads and even electricity, but in those days there was nothing. Nothing except water—that was everywhere. People here in Sindh get very excited about a small spring of clear, sweet water, and people will walk miles to drink there; but in my village, water was so common that no one thought twice about it.

  “The first troubles came when my father died. He caught TB, and died after a year of illness—I remember him getting thinner and thinner, and spitting blood. When your father dies, you realise that you have no shelter and no protector. The day after he was buried, my paternal uncle grabbed our land, and my mother, brothers and I had to take shelter with my maternal uncle. We were all very upset, but what could we do? The following year my mother remarried, and my stepfather took a dislike to me. He said I was ugly, and why should he work to feed me? He was good to my mother, but cruel to me, and to my brothers too. Twice, when he was drunk, he tried to beat me. But my mother protected me, and made sure I always had enough food to eat. She truly loved me. Sometimes she still comes in my dreams and tries to help me.

  “In my village there was a small shrine between the banyan tree and the well, and there was a fakir with black robes and long hair who used to sit there. He would always sit cross-legged and chant, ‘Mustt! Mustt! Mustt!’ I would go to him, and he would teach me prayers, and would make me meditate on the Kalimah, and to say, ‘Allah hoo! Allah hoo! Allah hoo!’ There were many other things he said that I didn’t understand then—I was too young—but I was fascinated by that man, and increasingly drawn to fakirs. Whenever I saw one, I would go and talk to him.

  “It was soon after I met the fakir, when I was thirteen years old, that everything began to go wrong. First, my best Hindu friend took poison and killed herself: she was in love with a Muslim boy, and her family would not let her marry him. Then the Hindus began to be angry with us because of politics. There were many stories of Hindus being mistreated over the border in East Pakistan, and some of the Hindu politicians began to say that we should pay the price for this, and that the Hindus should kill all the Muslims in Bihar in revenge. We didn’t know anything about what was happening in East Pakistan, but they said that we were Muslims, so we must take the blame. There was a song they used to sing:

  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 o
f 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.