Nine Lives (23 page)

‘Don’t worry,’ replied the fakir. ‘Everyone knows Lal Peri. And anyway she is unmistakable.’

‘In what way?’ I asked.

‘She is dressed in bright red, is very fat, and she carries a huge wooden club.’

I arrived at Sehwan just as the sun was beginning to set over the Indus and the call to prayer was sounding through the bazaars. The
dhammal
was about to begin, so
I ran through alleys thick with pilgrims to get inside the shrine before the daily dance in honour of the saint commenced.

The wide, arcaded courtyard was filled to bursting, and neatly segregated down the middle, with women on the right and men on the left. At the far end of the courtyard, between the tomb chamber and a long line of huge copper kettle drums and outsized leather-trussed camel drums, a large area had been roped off, and here the dervishes were preparing to dance.

There were men of all ages and appearances: black-robed or red-swathed, dreadlocked or shaven, hung all over with amulets and
ta’wiz
,
or
bound with chains and metal neck rings,
their fingers heavy with cat’s-eye rings. Several of the
malangs
were now bending down and tying
gungroos –
lines of dancer’s bells – on their ankles. A few appeared to be practising their steps, hopping from foot to foot, like ballet dancers awaiting the curtain. One old man did this slowly and gently, while holding his granddaughter tenderly on his shoulders.

Then, with the explosion of a thunderclap, the
dhammal
began: slow at first, the drumming rapidly gained pace, and the long lines of dreadlocked dervishes began to move as they felt the rhythm pound through their bodies. Old men began to sway, arms extended or
hands cupped in supplication, mouthing softly murmured prayers. As the dancers turned their eyes to heaven, smiling beatifically, they slowly began part-skipping, part-dancing, part-running on the spot.

The tempo and the volume both rose steadily, until the massed kettle drums were pounding physically through everyone in the courtyard. The dancing gradually turned from a meditative and prayerful swaying to something much more wild and frenzied and ecstatic. As a climax was reached some shouted out chants in praise of the saint – ‘
Dum Dum Mustt Qalander!
’ (‘With every breath the Qalander gets higher and higher!’) or ‘
Jiya Jhule Lal!
’ (‘Long life to the Living Ruby!’) A few cried out Shia chants in praise of Ali: ‘
Ya Ali! Ya Haidri!
’ or ‘
Ali Allah! Ali Allah!
’ One man fell to the ground in a gesture of
namaaz
, then amid the jumping, jerking, dancing men, stretched out full-length on the floor. The air was hot with sweat, and the rich, sweet scent of rose petals mixed with incense and hashish.

Many scholars believe that just as the Sufi fakirs of Sehwan Sharif model their dreadlocks, red robes and dust-smeared bodies on those of Shaivite sadhus, so the
dhammal
derives from the
damaru
drum of Shiva, by which, in his form of Nataraja, or Lord of the Dance, the Destroyer drums the world back into existence after dancing it into extinction. According to the sixth-century Chinese traveller Huien Tsang, Sehwan was the cult centre of a Shaivite sect called the Pashupatas who believed in emulating the dance of Shiva as part of their rituals, using this shamanistic dancing as a way of reaching union with God. Remarkably, Sehwan Sharif seems to have maintained the ancient Shaivite dance of the Pashupatas in a thinly Islamicised Sufi form.

On the right-hand side of the courtyard, as the men danced, the women took the music in a quite different way. A few danced a little like the men: one beautiful old lady was jumping from side to side, holding her walking stick in the air. But most had gathered themselves in small groups, each one clustered around a woman in a state of trance. As their mothers and sisters supported them, the possessed women sat cross-legged, but with the upper halves of their bodies they swayed and thrashed about, their eyes rolling and long hair fanning out as they swung their heads wildly to the rhythm of the drumming. Still supported by their families, a few rose and spun around like tops.

‘As soon as they hear the drumming, they have to dance,’ said an old man next to me. ‘Even if you bound them with chains they would have to dance.’

‘Within ten days,’ said another, ‘whatever cure these women ask for will be done. Lal Shahbaz cannot refuse his devotees.’

These, explained the old man, were women who were believed to be possessed by spirits, or djinns, and who had been brought to the saint for exorcism. One teenage girl, head uncovered, sat shaking and sobbing with one of her mother’s hands resting gently on her shoulders and the other supporting the small of her back. All the while, another older woman, perhaps an aunt or grandmother, kept calmly questioning the djinn she believed to possess her. ‘Why don’t you leave?’ she said. ‘We are in the house of Lal Shahbaz Qalander. It would be better for you to leave. Just go! Go now!’

The ecstasy of the
dhammal
is a safety valve, providing an outlet for tensions that otherwise could have no other expression in this deeply conservative society. The
dhammal
is renowned for its ability to heal, and in Sindh – as elsewhere in Sufi Islam – it is widely believed that a disease that appears to be physical, but which actually has its roots in an affliction of the spirit, can be cured by the power of Sufi music and drumming. The hope is that by sending the women into a trance, their sadness and anxiety will be calmed and, ultimately, cured.

It was while I watched the ranks of transported women that I saw Lal Peri. As my friend at Bhit Shah had indicated, she was unmistakable. In the corner of the courtyard, between the kettle drums and the shrine, was a huge, dark-skinned, red-clad woman of between fifty and sixty, dancing with an enormous wooden club held aloft in her right hand. She had silver armlets covering her forearms, and a red wimple over her head. Images of Lal Shahbaz hung from a chain around her neck. She danced with great force and a manic energy, jumping and leaping in the air, more like the male dervishes than the possessed women who were seated relatively demurely around her.

Eventually, after nearly half an hour of building, the drumming reached its climax and Lal Peri did a final pirouette before dropping to the ground as the pounding rhythm ceased as abruptly as it had begun. She lay there panting on the marble floor, smiling an ecstatic, exhausted smile. ‘When I perform the
dhammal
,’ she said in a deep, husky voice,
‘I feel as if I am in the company of Lal Shahbaz Qalander himself – and alongside Ali and Hassan. I live for this moment.’

I introduced myself, telling her that I had heard about her from the fakirs of Bhit Shah.

‘These shrines are my home,’ she replied simply. ‘And the fakirs are my family.’

‘How many years have you been here?’ I asked.

‘I’ve lost count,’ replied Lal Peri. ‘Over twenty. People come and go, but many find what they are looking for here, and stay for ever. This was my experience. It is
’
ishq –
love –
that keeps us here.’

‘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.