B005OWFTDW EBOK (28 page)

I was eighteen, bad at history and British Constitution, turned down by Oxbridge, restless in an open city, bored of being young.

Fatima Bhutto

 

I
was seven years old the first time I visited a Sheedi neighbourhood in Karachi. I had accompanied my grandmother on a campaign tour, visiting homes and receiving applications from men who needed legal aid to fight cases in the perpetually clogged city courts, from others who had lost their jobs and had no way of feeding their families, and from widows seeking stipends from the state. I felt nervous at the sight of crowds, preferred my car rides free of screaming men chanting slogans and wanted desperately to sit at home and talk without the noise of loudspeakers, megaphones and microphones. My grandmother, Joonam – ‘my life’, as I called her in her native Farsi – had been thrust into party politics after the assassination of her husband, my grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and had been jailed, beaten and elected to congress before I lost my first tooth. I adored Joonam and relished time spent with her, even if it meant engaging in campaigning.

Karachi was, in my imagination at least, a bustling metropolis. Palm trees lined the city’s wide avenues, children thronged Clifton Beach, buying roasted corn smeared with lime and chilli from street vendors and sidling up to the men who sold camel rides for a couple of rupees. But there were millions who would never benefit from its occasional munificence, even though there should have been plenty to spare. There were no Sheedi on Clifton Beach, smack in the middle of the affluent old Clifton neighbourhood where my family lived. There were no Sheedi in the new electronics stores, buying CD players or shiny fabric from the city’s up-and-coming designers. And yet, although they lived in the shadows, they refused to go unnoticed. The poverty and political dispossession could not hem them in. That first visit with Joonam was a jolt to my mental shaping of a city that I had, until then, only seen on its best and most welcoming behaviour.

K
arachi, like all port cities, is a hub for travellers, traders and settlers. It is a sweltering mix of those who have been brave enough to settle on its shores – Parsis, Jews, Baha’is, Pushtun, Afghans and so many more. The city has no majority; but even in this outrageous muddle of people and shades and colours, the Sheedi are unusual – an ethnic minority displaced among the swell of Karachi’s various populations. While the most successful of the Sheedi – and there are not many who escape the deprivations of their community – enjoy a reputation that spans the world of arts, politics and athletics, they are best known for the northern Karachi shrine they protect and serve. A shrine built upon centuries of myth and modern-day fables that proclaim living breathing avatars of their lost saint and inspire spiritual searching. But no visit to this holy site of pilgrimage can ignore the impoverished environment of the surroundings. The glorious, the divine, and then the rot.

Mangho Pir, home of the Sheedi shrine, and its environs are covered in white mist. Men walk across haphazardly constructed pedestrian paths in rubber slippers and frayed shalwar kameez, coated in the white talc, dark hair lightened and skin powdered. This is a quarry town – dust escaping from the mines announces that you have arrived at the largest marble market in the region.

The gritty stone comes from across Sindh Province: from Thar, Sehwan, Jamshoro and Dadu, from Balochistan and, for some reason, perhaps owing to the desolate nature of this conveniently forgotten town, ends up in Mangho Pir. The marble slabs are lined neatly in towers with jagged shards that look sharp enough to cut through skin. Onyx is sold here too but marble is what makes a man’s business in Mangho Pir.

The keepers of the shrine are ethnically African Pakistanis whose ancestors settled on the Balochistan coast and the Sindhi shores around 628 ce. One narrative identifies them as the descendants of opulent traders. They arrived, the story goes, through Bharuch, a seaport in Indian Gujarat fabled for its spice and silk trade, a crossroads through which traders from the Levant, Ethiopians seeking westward winds, Greeks, Persians, Carthaginians and Romans all passed. Alternative histories identify them as the progeny of brave warriors, descendants of soldiers who came a hundred years later (in approximately 712
CE
), combatants loyal to Muhammad bin Qasim’s conquering army that landed on the banks of the Indus, at Bhambore in Sindh, when bin Qasim was only seventeen years old, bringing Islam to the Hindu and Buddhist subcontinent. Bin Qasim’s soldiers were known as
Habshi
(Abyssinian) or
Zinji
, ‘Negro’ in the warrior’s native tongue. Still another story points to a forced migration of Bantu-speaking peoples (largely Swahili, a language still heard in Sheedi poetry and folk songs) of East Africa. They were transported to the still flourishing seaport of Bharuch in the seventeenth century by Portuguese slave traders who thought their human booty suitable gifts, to be offered in exchange for protection, as baksheesh if you will, for the Nawab of Junagadh. Those who were not presented to the local ruler were said to have been sold at the port. There are grounds, perhaps, for all three legends to be true. Linguistic, mercantile and political trajectories can be traced in support of all three narratives – soldier, trader or slave.

M
aulabux is a Sheedi political activist whose maternal grandfather came to Karachi when the British were transforming the city into a mega seaport at the time of the Bombay Presidency. Although my parents, and indeed my grandmother, knew him from his work as a dedicated political activist, I remember meeting Maulabux at a funeral; I was eleven years old, maybe twelve. A Sheedi man, another grass-roots worker, had been killed by the Karachi police. He had been tortured and held without charge in police custody. He left behind two small children and a shy, young wife. The mourners screamed angry curses at the government that had killed one of their best organizers, the women wept and hurled their tattered plastic slippers at the police vans perennially parked in the area, the men sat huddled together over a table and worked on a statement condemning the murder and drew up plans for a shutdown of local businesses in protest. Maulabux was one of those men. I remember him, calm but shattered, working quietly that day to ease the grief of the man’s family and planning the community’s response.

Maulabux is from Lyari, one of Karachi’s oldest Sheedi settlements. He is a tall man, his hair clipped close to his scalp and his face clean-shaven. Although I have never seen him chew paan, his stained teeth betray its use – his smile a reminder that for all his serious political background (and his background is serious) he is a raconteur. Maulabux isn’t sure which line about his people’s antecedents he buys, but he tells me stories passed down to him by his father and grandfather. ‘They brought us over as slaves,’ he says over tea one afternoon in a Karachi garden. ‘They put us in ships and forced us to row to our new prisons – like in the movie
Amistad
. Have you seen
Amistad
?’ I nod, more perplexed by the fact that Maulabux watches Spielberg films than anything else.

I ask him about bin Qasim’s army, and he wagers that there were indeed African troops but that they can’t possibly account for the large population of Sheedi in Pakistan today. He doesn’t call himself Sheedi, he doesn’t use the term the way I do – to refer to an ethnic group. He says
blackion
instead, adding the Urdu suffix -
ion
denoting the plural to black, a Minglish – Urdu/mixed English – construction. ‘There are
blackion
in the Rann of Kutch in India, in Iran, Bahrain, Oman and in the Gulf.’ Maulabux acknowledges that the
blackion
didn’t face the same sort of discrimination in places like Oman, where they ‘practise the European style of accepting different races’, so tolerant and accepting are the Omanis of anyone who is willing to come and build their sultanate by the sea. The Sheedi Maulabux knew who had settled there were all ‘highly educated, visible in government posts like immigration offices and customs’; they were not shamed into hiding like the
blackion
in our country.

I say, ‘There are Sheedis in the Punjab too, aren’t there?’ We are playing hide-and-seek with geography and migration, and I feel I must have trumped him now. Maulabux smiles, points to his curly hair and thrusts his fingers at me. ‘They are not the original
blackion
.’ Case closed, he leans back and gingerly sips his tea.

S
akhi Sultan Mangho Pir Rehmat Ullah Alaih, whose birth name was either Hasan or Kamaluddin, was an Arab descendant of Hazrat Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law and progenitor of the Shiite line of Islam. It was during his long pilgrimage at the site of Mangho Pir that Hasan or Kamaluddin became elevated to sainthood, proclaimed enlightened by the respected teachers who oversaw his spiritual journey and the devoted followers who believed in the power of the would-be saint’s prayers spoken straight to God. The stories of Hasan or Kamaluddin’s sainthood are filled with the fantastic. After his death, according to the best legend, the lice living in his long dreadlocks fell to the ground and were reborn as crocodiles.

For as long as the shrine of Mangho Pir has been part of Karachi’s Sufi culture, it has been tended to by Sheedis. Today the shrine is teeming with devotees and guardians alike. The majority of the faithful are Sheedi – in fact, I am the only non-Sheedi on the day I visit – men, women, teenagers, children. While pockets of Pakistan fall to Islamists, filling the vacuum created by decades’ worth of corrupt government, and the country becomes a state synonymous with fundamentalism, there are millions who would shake their heads and say that there is another Pakistan, that the one spoken of in BBC headlines isn’t the Pakistan they know at all, that the one they know is tolerant and diverse and always has been. The shrine of Mangho Pir is proof of that alternate, retiring society.

I am met at the shrine by Haji Ghulam Akbar, who lives in the adjoining Sheedi Goth (‘town’). A former campaigner and political activist who successfully stood for local office in the late 1970s, Akbar has a thin moustache dyed mandarin orange with henna and eyes lined with
kajal
. Everyone we encounter seems to defer to him, though he takes little notice as he hurries along. The site is packed with people; women gather in front of an old man selling salt in a steel bowl outside the shrine’s doors, a
shifa
, or treatment, that they hope will cure them of all sorts of diseases – depression, rheumatism, kidney stones, skin ailments, all are dashed by either ingesting a good amount of the water from the hot springs here or bathing in it. The faithful also come to the shrine to seek blessings from the crocodiles, avatars of the saint that have made their home here for centuries. Many families will spend three days, sleeping on the cool marble floors, purchasing salts, incense, gifts for the saint to enhance the effectiveness of their treatments.

T
he short distance from Mangho Pir to Sheedi Goth is unpaved; the ground beneath not made to withstand traffic. If the shrine is blessed with spirits imbued with the powers of healing and access to the divine, it is an oasis enclosed within a much more earthbound reality. Half the town’s inhabitants’ homes are illegal. There are plain, unpainted brick houses, shaped like concrete boxes with no windows; there are homes made out of tents that gypsy Sheedi sleep in when the annual
urs
(festival) rolls around; filthy swathes of cloth haphazardly sewn together to provide the bare minimum of what would loosely be considered shelter for the local homeless. Everything standing seems to be made of mud, of dust and dirt and stones. There are no pavements, no
chaikhanas
(tea houses), no playgrounds. The children are barefoot. There are a hundred to a hundred and fifty homes here, and a population of five hundred souls.