ON THE LONG ROAD from Karachi to the saint’s festival at Sehwan Sharif, flamingo-pink and white lotus flowers spangled flooded paddy fields like buttons on a quilt.
In a mist of heat, by the roadside, boy vendors held up bundles of lotus stalks with petal-less heads. An expensive luxury in Sindhi cuisine, they are usually eaten with potatoes. Turbaned herders, submerged up to their necks in the paddy fields, wallowed face-to-face with water buffaloes, like dancers at a fantastical ball.
Accompanied by Declan Walsh, a newspaper correspondent and friend, and driven by a Pathan, Nasrullah, who had the habit of thrusting the palm of a hand towards the faces of other drivers – a signal that means literally ‘I blacken your face’ and figuratively something coarser, we gunned along at breakneck speed. To the west was a spine of grey barren mountains marking Sindh’s boundary with Baluchistan, and to the east the broad, twinkling, grimy, crocodile- and dolphin-bearing Indus.
As we neared the outskirts of Sehwan Sharif, the festival of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar made itself known: roads jammed with overloaded coaches; broken-down cars rolled along by their passengers; packed rickshaws and oversubscribed bullock carts.
Hundreds of thousands of hooting and chanting pilgrims were gathering from across the country: middle-class urbanites with wobbling paunches; tribal women with large nose-rings; Pathans with grey tartan cloaks thrown over a shoulder; Baluch with voluminous turbans; Sindhi landlords in sequined skullcaps. Above all, there were the toothless faces of the impoverished majority.
Nasrullah moaned that the celebration was un-Islamic – he adhered to an Islamic strain that regarded worshipping at shrines as heresy. ‘I do not believe in this,’ he whinged. Ignoring him, we bailed out of the car and into a heat Declan described as a ‘five-knuckle wallop’.
We became part of the wild and odorous human torrent. Some pilgrims danced along barefoot, others crawled on their bellies in the dirt, and some heaved themselves along in wheelchairs. The closer we got to the shrine the narrower the streets became. Soon we were covered in petals and rosewater, our clothes suffused with an aroma of sweat, hashish and animal dung.
Men blowing on spiralling goats’ horns, assisted by the contagious beat of a dolki drum, led fraternities holding aloft red-and-black lengths of cloth fringed with tinsel and embroidered with Koranic verses. People grabbed at the cloth as they passed, kissing and touching it, hoping to absorb its blessings.
A rolling, exultant wave of noise signalled that we had entered the shrine’s courtyard. The main area in front of the mausoleum was lit up like a wedding hall. A crowd of worshippers had gathered in front of the shrine. As if summoned by the tomb in a danse macabre, en masse they were reaching a feverish pitch of head whirling and body shaking, obeying the thwacking tempo of the drums.
Men and women danced, hands pumping the air. Every inch of available roof space abutting the courtyard pulsated with revellers. ‘It’s a fucking rave!’ shouted Declan. Eyeballs rolled and pilgrims collapsed, their friends fanning them or splashing water over their faces and then dragging them off to the sides. As the cycle of music reached its climax people slumped to the floor, some beseeching the heavens with open arms, others dropping to their knees to kiss the earth.
We stayed in the courtyard for several hours, admiring legions of matted-haired fakirs, wandering mendicant holy men, dressed in red robes and bead necklaces; a group of Hindus with foreheads stamped with bindi; and men stripped to the waist and armed with heavy staves. A fakir had passed out on the floor, but still clutched a teak truncheon. Troops of dancing transvestites and transsexuals hopped about, their shins greaved and ajingle with clusters of bells. Merry eunuchs cavorted with holidaying prostitutes. Goats were everywhere on sale for sacrifice. People beckoned us to drink tea, smoke hashish and sit with them in comradely communion. As usual at such events, there were said to be hordes of pickpockets at work.
By nightfall everything – hair, clothes and skin – was glistening in an oily slick of sweat and dust. A circle was formed in the centre of the courtyard so that women could dance without being molested. Some of the women rolled their dupattas into long scarves; others had abandoned this symbol of their izzat (honour). Some wore skin-tight shalwar kameez, whirling their long black hair in arcs of sinful abandon. Dancers waved colossal sparklers billowing trails of smoke.
All about was a sensation of massive release, of forgetting troubles and casting off shackles. People ushered and pampered us, welcoming us with smiles wherever we went. There is a common political slogan, Dama dam mast Qalandar, which roughly translates as ‘endless inspired intoxication for Qalandar’. It stems from this saint and denotes unrestrained agitation either in support of an ally or against an enemy – but here it meant pure exultation.
Suddenly, called by some of the dancers to join them, I leapt into the mosh pit. I am what P. G. Wodehouse would have called ‘a three-collar man’, and was soon drenched, sending tracer rounds of sweat into the night air. Declan, full of latent mischief, abandoned his usual journalistic propriety and launched himself after me with a beam of delight on his face, a jolly giant hopping about at a fairy tea party.
We sat out the next dance. An alluring young, full-bodied Punjabi woman was casting fruity glances at me. After exchanging smiles, she asked, ‘Are you married?’ and tapped the side of her nose, the place of the nath, the nose-stud of a married woman.
‘No.’
‘Do you want to come to my house?’ she said, cutting the small talk.
I looked at Declan, who frowned. I shrugged pathetically. She looked down her nose scornfully and turned on her heel.
We broke away to find some of the living saints associated with the shrine. But we were sidetracked when we accepted an offer from an old man who motioned us to sit and smoke some hashish from a clay pipe with other goggle-eyed elders. As we lay there in a stupor, even no-nonsense Declan’s eyes betraying a faint sheen of whimsy, I wrote in my notebook: ‘It feels as if we are all breathing the same sea, becoming a hieroglyphic of a lost language.’ I had tapped into the mystic notion of union with the divine and all its creation.
On a balcony above us some local noblewomen with long thin pale Modigliani faces, dressed from head to foot in shimmering silks of cardinal red, looked down on the scene with the self-conscious expressions of penguins sitting in an opera box. We chatted briefly with a lustrous-skinned transvestite called Cheeky.
In a small whitewashed office, part of a honeycomb of sacristies, we found a man who described himself as a secretary to a pir. We sat with him on a carpeted floor in a fog of incense. The secretary said the pir would be along shortly. He had a small beard and was nondescript except for his endlessly insinuating remarks. He made some slurred and salacious remarks about ‘drums helping marriage … women … making sex … faster and faster … like a bomb…’ but he was unable to finish as he was overcome by a laughing fit. He then grew serious and conspiratorial.
‘We are the anti-Taliban force. We stand for love, tolerance and the great infinity,’ he said. We entered into a theological discussion so heretical and abstruse that even the nimblest of Cairo’s professors of divinity would have struggled to grasp: ‘Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, has 500 names, God has only 99 or 100 names,’ said the secretary in between bursts of giggles. ‘We are not Shia. We are not Sunni. We are not Barelvi, we are Qalandari and Nowseri. This is a secret word. I am the voice between them. Qalandar is there when Prophet talks to God in the mirage. When Abraham sacrificed his son, Qalandar said I am that goat.’
More giggles.
‘Qalandar is the Imamzada. He is the person who makes us to talk to God. We are Momin – the people,’ he whispered, repressing another mirthful outburst. His eyes bulging, he looked furtively around for eavesdroppers. ‘There is too much difference between Momin and Muslim.’
He saw Declan and I exchange confused glances. ‘Would you like some whisky and hashish? The laws of the universe are not from any book – you must find other routes…’
Shortly afterwards there was a bustle at the door suggesting the arrival of the saint. Before he entered, a minion sprayed perfumed water in the air and plumped up the cushions on a chair.
Syed Baryal Shah, a burly figure wearing a cream shalwar kameez and a red skullcap, had the stubbly chin and moustache of a well-fed bandit. A hazy, rather decadent look in his eye suggested he had planned some great debauch for the evening. At first he spread himself out with some majesty on a tiger-skin rug. Then he moved to the chair from where he could better attend to the troublesome demands of a few of his disciples who filed in, kissed the rings on his fingers, and sat attentively at his feet. Several of them massaged his podgy toes while another held up a silver goblet for him to spit in. Fuelled with Qalandari spirit and other intoxicants, he roamed far from strict interpretations of Islam. ‘Qalandar is our god!’ he yelled to his disciples. It was not that far in spirit from the case of Hallaj al Mansur, a 9th-century revolutionary Persian mystic, who was beheaded for heresy after exclaiming in a state of ecstasy, ‘I am the Truth!’.
The pir gave his followers sweets, oils for bone ache and bottles of soda. He waved two fat turquoise-ringed hands over them to conduct some of his power into their marrow. A shaven-headed simple-looking man was hustled on to the floor in front of him. ‘He is spiritually sick,’ explained the saint’s secretary. ‘His brain suffers from shadows.’ The saint was handed a bowl in which he mixed oil from some tree and a pinch of herbs. He then sprinkled it over the man’s head, pulling it violently into his lap and then snapped it back and forth with the palm of his hand. To end the treatment he banged a hand down on the man’s head with a loud slap and exclaimed ‘Mast Qalandar!’
The saint did not give straight answers to any of our questions, and we got the impression we were cramping his style. He soon got up to leave and scuttled towards his inner sanctum. The secretary invited us upstairs to share a bottle of what he called ‘secret green whisky’ that ‘will help you reach the infinity’. We passed the pir’s bedroom, outside which, as Declan noted, were a pair of slippers certainly too dainty and feminine for the saint’s big feet.
We left and entered the mausoleum itself. All around the shrine lamps of burning ghee glimmered and pilgrims placed bowls of dark muddy henna with candles in them as offerings. ‘This is where Qalandar lives,’ a man whispered in my ear. Obeying instructions from the Begum, I offered a prayer to him on her behalf.
On his arrival at Sehwan from his homeland of Central Asia in the 13th century, Lal Shahbaz (‘Red Falcon’) Qalandar found that the reigning raja was harsh and practised droit de seigneur. The saint took him on, often transforming himself into a falcon to perform miraculous feats against him. ‘He died seven times and his body parts were cast to four corners but he was returned back to life each time,’ a disciple explained. However, the 19th-century British adventurer Richard Burton, ignoring the Central Asian 13th-century saint’s magical capabilities, judged his true worth to have been obscured by legend. Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s real name was Usman I Merwandi, and he was a ‘great grammarian, philologist, traveller and saint … a rigid celibatarian’.
The living saints, I thought, had grown fat and corrupt. But perhaps Lal Shahbaz’s disciples revered him for his role as a ‘Qalandar’, meaning uncut or unpolished, a fearless type of Sufi not bound by ritual or hierarchy. I thought again of Dama dam mast Qalandar and wondered whether the word mast, derived from Persian and meaning ‘intoxicated’, was related to the Hindi word must, the hormonal season in bull-elephants. The slogan seemed an expression of the region’s volatility, the seismic restlessness of a subcontinental faultline. Pakistan’s drum was beating ever faster; and this effusion of energy and prayer, an expression of the country’s old self, seemed to reflect the gathering pace of events.
*
The next morning we watched glistening, bare-chested pilgrims diving into the earth-brown headwaters of the canal. After a few hours the town was deserted. The bloated carcase of a goat floated on the river. A dying donkey, abandoned in a salty wasteland, struggled to get up on to its forelegs, staggered, and collapsed in a halo of dust.
My notes from the festival, made partly illegible by the sweat of the dance, to this day smell of perfumed water and petals.