(COLD SEASON: NOVEMBER 2000–JANUARY 2001)
I’m so pleased to be back after an absence of three months. he weather in Lahore in November is as perfect as it can be: the days are warm and sunny and the nights are cool. Physical activity no longer induces heavy perspiration and, judging by the number of people on the streets, a large proportion of the Lahori population appears to enjoy walking around the city as much as I do. Today, every rickshaw and tanga in town was pressed into the old city and the roads near the cloth market became gridlocked with bodies and vehicles. A van was jammed against the stalls and a rickshaw fought to pass in the opposite direction. Behind them other vehicles became compacted and wedged into the gali so that no one could move.
Lahori pedestrians possess a staggering disregard for the dangers of traffic and a firm belief in their own immortality. They stand in the midst of speeding cars, stroll in front of lorries, dodge rickshaws on the main roads, and squeeze themselves through minuscule gaps. This afternoon, a round, middle-aged woman complained about the delay and then spotted an escape route. She edged between a van and a stall where the shopkeeper was frying samosas in a big vat of bubbling oil. The women sucked in her stomach to avoid the flames licking around the bottom of the vat and plopped out of the other side with her suit spattered with oil and the end of her dupatta on fire. She shouted and beat out the flames on the side of a rickshaw and continued up the lane trailing smoke and the smell of burnt polyester.
A donkey cart became stuck next to a vegetable stall and the animal took the opportunity to stuff his head into a luxuriant pile of spinach. Donkey carts seem to be characterized by an inverse relationship between the size of the donkey and the load on the cart: donkeys that are skin and bones and barely three feet tall pull giant loads and fat drivers. When the jam eased, the donkey strained and jerked along the road, his hooves making an unsure, sliding click on the concrete. A mountain of boxes was assembled on the cart, and the driver wielded an enormous stick over his back. The little animal struggled; his harness didn’t fit properly, chafing through his skin so that he had a long, weeping wound an inch deep in his flesh.
I’ve never been able to explore the alleys of the Walled City and find my way back to Heera Mandi without assistance. Countless lanes and indistinguishable passageways wind between tall and equally indistinguishable buildings so that I soon become disoriented. I realized I was lost today when I passed the same butcher’s shop three times in the space of an hour. The butcher had arranged goat heads very neatly according to the color of their few remaining tufts of hair; starting at white and progressing through shades of brown to black. A dozen stomachs, like latticed footballs, bobbed in a tub of water beside a beautifully symmetrical stack of goats’ feet. Paow—stewed goats’ feet—is a specialty in the Walled City, and people come from all over Lahore to sample the delicacy in local restaurants. I’m told that it’s delicious and have been offered the dish on many occasions, but I cannot bring myself to eat it. My hosts underline how narrow-minded I’m being by noisily sucking at the marrow.
Vegetarianism is not lauded in Pakistan. Poor people are reluctant vegetarians, and if you can afford it, you eat meat—lots of it, preferably with a hot, oily gravy. Even the dal—that staple of the vegetarian diet—is fortified by simmering the lentils with bones and bits of animal. Occasionally I lie and claim to be vegetarian in order to avoid eating heads or sweetbreads, but this fib is always greeted with some surprise, as if I might be deficient in some way—and not just in nutritional terms.
Maha has cooked a special meat-packed meal to celebrate my return. It’s perfectly seasoned, the meat is tender, and she adds generous ladles of ghee: like Maha, who is wearing her full regalia, lots of makeup and an entire treasure chest of paste jewelry, the meal is an assault on the senses. It’s delicious.
I feel as if I’ve never been away from Heera Mandi. Things alter during my absences. The seasons change, the children grow bigger, the Shia shrine in the courtyard is added to and improved, there’s a turnover of girls in the thin pimp’s house, and Iqbal is working on a new painting of one of the dancing girls. There’s news of marriages, births and deaths, rapes and murders, and fortunes won and patrons lost. But despite all this, the mohalla remains unchanged: life presents the same problems and the same solutions to the same kind of women in the same kind of way. Maha might have a new suit and have put on ten pounds in the time I’ve been in England, but she’s still the same soul: veering between rage and joy, cruelty and gentle compassion.
I live in two very different worlds these days and don’t feel fully part of either. When I’m at home, I live in a suburb of Birmingham. My children go to school, I shop in the town, I sit in an office at the university, I teach my students—yet part of me remains here in the mohalla. In my mind I’m still sitting on the rooftop, walking through the galis, and visiting the bazaar at night. I’m watching the life of the courtyard and lying with Maha and her family on the old mattress in her best room.
Yet when I’m here, I also remain an outsider. As a Western woman I have some safeguard from sexual assaults if I’m veiled, respectably dressed, and maintain an aura of quiet confidence. I’m assumed to be in the protection of a powerful man, one who could wreak vengeance on anyone who should harm me. A high-status Pakistani woman would have the same kind of security. The women of the mohalla help me too. They tell customers and the local men that I’m an honorable woman and that no one should go near me. The length of my visits, however, is gradually eroding my status as an outsider and the pimps who kept their distance are moving closer. I’m seen too often, I stay too long with the kanjri, and my smart dupattas and shalwaar kameez have been tattered by the savage Lahori laundry system.
A dhobi walla collects the dirty clothes from households, wrapping them in a giant chador and taking them to his laundry, where he and his assistants swirl them around in vats of soapy water, squeezing and rubbing until the clothes are clean but noticeably thinned and often tinged gray with dye running from stray black garments. My pretty pastel shalwaar kameez return slightly more dingy each time, and so crisp with starch that they crack when bent. I’ll be in trouble if I look a shambles: I will look vulnerable. Once the gulf created by my foreignness is bridged, I will be considered fair game and, if I’m on the streets, subject to the kind of dangers—the rapes and beatings—that the women of Heera Mandi are exposed to constantly. Mushtaq, the big handsome pimp, has started to call me over to have a drink with him, and one of Maha’s male cousins who works as an agent has been spreading rumors that I drink alcohol and have “relations” with men. Maha has scotched the rumors and taken her cousin to task. Her sister, she says, is a sharif woman, respectable.
I’m a little scared when I walk around the mohalla. Initially, I’m full of enthusiasm and bravado, but my bravery is soon sapped by this place. I’m always looking for signs of trouble, trying simultaneously to be observant while taking care to avoid eye contact with men. After a week or so I start to spend too much time in my room sending text messages to my family rather than getting out into the thick of Heera Mandi where I’m supposed to be engaging in rigorous academic research. The dupatta, which I used to think of as a symbol of oppression, is now my fond friend. I like it and I would no more go outside without it wrapped around my head than I would walk down a street at home in a bikini. In expensive parts of town, where it’s not normal for women to be heavily veiled, I feel profoundly uncomfortable when I remove it: for a short while it feels as if something is missing. If this is the way I feel after only a few months, no wonder women who have worn burqas all their lives don’t wish to abandon them when they are given the freedom to do so.
Still, in the most basic and important sense I’ll always be an outsider in Heera Mandi. Like a tourist I will pack my bags and return home. I enjoy a freedom the women here will never know. Maha grew melancholy when I prepared to leave Lahore during the last monsoon. “Louise,” she said sadly, “you are like a beautiful bird. You fly here and you sing and make me happy. And then you fly away again. But when you go to another place where you can carry on singing, I’ll still be here.”
Lal Shahbaz Qalandar
A dozen buses are parked in the Hazoori Gardens, their roofs piled with bedding and carpets wrapped into giant, bulging rolls. They’re going to leave early tomorrow morning for the urs celebrations of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, an important thirteenth-century Sufi saint whose tomb lies five hundred miles south of Lahore in Sewan Sharif, in Sindh’s lower Indus Valley. The women of Heera Mandi think of him as their special protector. Lal Shahbaz was a qalandar, one of the wandering mystics on the periphery of the Islamic Sufi tradition. He is called Lal, meaning “red”—because he was said to have worn a red cloak. Like other qalandars he’s associated with unorthodox behaviors: he took marijuana to deepen his spirituality and connection with the divine, and he was a dervish, dancing ecstatically to reach ever closer to God.
Lal Shahbaz halted his wanderings in an important site of Hindu pilgrimage: Sewan had a Shiva sanctuary where a Shiva Linga (a symbolic penis set within a representation of female genitals) was venerated. This Hindu tradition was incorporated within Sufism and was never completely obliterated. Richard Burton, a forerunner of today’s travel writers, visited Sewan in the 1840s and wrote that a girl was dedicated to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine every year. The parallel with the prostitution of girls in the Hindu temple tradition is unmistakable.
Urs commemorations sound as if they should be sad affairs, but death is interpreted as a union of the Sufi with God: a kind of wedding. For Lal Shahbaz this unity is unusually powerful and poignant; the moment of his death is seen as the moment he met the wife he never had on earth. The Hindu legacy has fed into, and blended with, the Sufi tradition and Lal Shahbaz’s personal history to produce an urs that has, on its fringes, become associated with erotic license. Women from Heera Mandi go to Sewan Sharif because they think that the qalandar will intercede with God on their behalf. They also go to pick up some good business.
The poorest women cannot afford to go to the mela, and the women under tight control of their pimps don’t have the freedom to do so. For everyone else, the urs is a special holiday and one that is anticipated for months. Maha and I are going because we both need to do some serious praying to Lal Shahbaz. I’ve been told to pray for a husband; Maha wants her old one back.
The more luxurious buses parked in the Hazoori Gardens have darkened windows and multicolored lettering painted on the sides. The older, cheaper ones have seats that refuse to stay upright and rattling windows that either never close or never open. Pilgrims on a tight budget opt for the bus, but because it takes three days to get there, we have decided to take the train instead. It’ll be quicker and it’s also going to be fun: a twenty-four-hour party. Maha has promised me songs, festive food, and a hallucinogenic drink called booti. The train has another advantage over the bus: it has a toilet, and that may well be essential after trying the booti.
Maha goes to Sewan Sharif every year or two. She’s busy preparing for the trip and she no longer has Ama-Jee to help her. Last month Ama-Jee’s long-lost husband arrived in Heera Mandi to claim his wife, raping her so brutally that she was unable to walk. Telling the tale brings tears to Maha’s eyes. A few days later, Ama-Jee left in the middle of the night without saying goodbye and taking one of Maha’s dupattas with her. She had only one dupatta herself: an ancient, frayed thing. I remember because she asked if she could have one of my old ones, and then I forgot all about it and never gave it to her. I’m sorry Ama-Jee has gone, but not as sorry as Maha: her plans to sing in the Gulf have been shelved now that there’s no one to look after the children.
Mutazar is hampering spiritual reflection and our enjoyment of Maha’s stories about the great qalandar because he keeps scattering a never-ending supply of patake on the floor. Patake are essential items for every boy in Heera Mandi: firecrackers that come in packs and range in size and explosive power from the smallest, which are enough to give you a horrible fright, to potent things similar to small bombs that can deafen and injure. Mutazar has the medium variety and is sporting a nasty, watery burn on his nose; a big hole in Nisha’s dress has tell-tale scorched edges.
Smoke from the patake drifts around the room and Maha is shouting. Mutazar hides his box of firecrackers in his pocket and grins. “I’ve got lots for the train,” he says while the other children gather around to watch him lighting a selection of fireworks. A hissing flash of yellow and green shoots across the room through the open shutters and bursts into a cascade of light in the courtyard. The children cheer and Maha carries on packing. Perhaps it would have been wiser to take the bus.
On the Shahbaz Express
We have enough luggage to leave Heera Mandi forever. Adnan has been persuaded to come with us to Sewan Sharif, and he’s arranged a caravan of rickshaws to take our things to the station. We have a carpet, a mattress, pillows and cushions, several rolls of bedding, four bags of clothes and three enormous aluminium pots wrapped in cloths and containing curried vegetables, chicken, and fried meat patties. Maha has been cooking all night, determined that no one should go hungry on the journey.
We’re catching the Shahbaz Express, a special train taking vacationers from Lahore to the mela. There are about five or six of these trains and each one is packed. We fight our way on board, commandeer two benches, and sort out the luggage with difficulty. Adnan has decided to take refuge on one of the luggage racks above the seats and is sitting among the bedding and bags of clothes, puffing away on something that looks like very sticky liquorice: it’s a type of heroin.
Our part of the carriage has seats for about twenty people, but there are over thirty-five of us—mostly young men in Western clothes. They’re passing around giant joints. Maha says that many are mirasi—musicians—from Heera Mandi. She must be right because they erupt into vigorous devotional songs every few minutes. The songs and prayers become progressively quieter and decrease in regularity as the marijuana and hashish permeate their systems.
Thick smoke fills the carriage—we are all taking drugs this morning whether we want to or not. An old man sitting in the corner starts preparing booti. It looks like old grass cuttings. He mixes it into a sludge with water and some youths help him to sieve it. Using a big cloth, they squeeze the liquid into a bowl, dilute it with a bit more water, and pass around the bright green liquid in glasses. It smells like aniseed. Half an hour later they are all asleep, collapsed and lolling on the seats, on the floor, and on each other. They can’t have had any booti in the next carriage: the women are still singing four hours into the journey and the tablas have never stopped.
Mutazar’s patake would wake the dead never mind the insensible booti drinkers. Nisha, Nena, and Ariba scream when he throws them about the carriage. The men think it’s funny. They encourage him, giving him matches and yet more patake. Whenever we pull into stations he joins the other boys and youths by throwing them onto the platform to explode among the travelers’ legs. Two very big Sikh men became extremely angry at the last station and it was good that the train pulled out when it did. When we slow down as we pass through villages Mutazar and his new friends toss patake at the villagers. Perhaps the victims of the firecrackers will guess that this is the Shahbaz Express.
A frothing youth stops Mutazar’s assault. He has keeled over and is twitching and vomiting all over the floor and people’s feet. Someone says he has eaten a strong, special paan and that it hasn’t agreed with him. The smell of his vomit doesn’t agree with me either.
Maha is force-feeding me from the aluminium pots. She’s prepared enough food for the entire carriage, but she expects me to eat most of it. It tastes wonderful, but not in such quantity. And whenever we stop at a station she buys more food from the boys selling snacks at the train windows. We’ve had sweets, namkeen, hard-boiled eggs, potato chips, guava, and a variety of biscuits and fried noodles. If this doesn’t stop, I’m going to join the vomiting youth soon.
“Louise, are you having a nice time?” she asks.
I am. I’m looking out of the window. I’ve rarely seen the Punjab countryside before. It stretches as far as I can see: flat and intensively farmed with abundant crops—potatoes and cotton and a bounty of others. Men are busy in the fields—and women, too, working in little groups in their bright clothes and loose veils.
“Are you bored?” she asks.
I say the view is good, but she doesn’t believe me and they all crowd to the window to see what’s so good about it. They look puzzled and say I’m mad.
“It’s just villages,” Maha says. But then, for a moment, there’s hilarity: they’ve spotted some dung cakes drying on a wall.
“Look. Goat shit.” They laugh, point, and hold their noses. “How dirty.”
After this highlight there’s nothing more they find of interest, and they go back to talking and fighting among themselves in the little cramped space that’s our part of the carriage. It’s as if they’ve moved the closed, bounded world of their house in Heera Mandi to the train. They’re quite sure it is several cuts above the rough, country-bumpkin world of the villages we’re passing through.
The carriage has no air-conditioning, so we have to keep the windows open to cope with the hashish smoke. Sand and finely powdered soil swirl around us. An elderly woman—the wife of the booti walla—has taken refuge from the dust and the eyes of the men by covering herself in a big blanket. The only part of her that is visible is her toes. She’s motionless and a silvery layer of dust and dirt is building up on her black blanket so that she gleams in the sun.
Maha is getting irritable. Maybe all this traveling doesn’t agree with her. Mutazar and Sofiya keep clambering up the ladders at the side of the seats, wobbling perilously on the racks above us, and scrambling down again, frequently missing their footing on the thin metal rungs. Ariba has done something wrong, although I can’t work out what it is. I think her very existence is enough to incite her mother’s wrath. Maha takes a shoe and starts beating Ariba with it so hard that, after a while, even the semicomatose booti walla grows uncomfortable and shouts at her to stop. Ariba weeps for an hour, Maha simmers with anger, the other girls are silent, and Adnan is unconscious.
Night has fallen and the light has been switched off in the carriage. We’re stopped at another station and Maha is buying tea from a boy on the platform. He passes the cups in through the window. They’re made of paper and have been acquired from Pakistan International Airlines. Sofiya lunges for one but it’s too hot for her and she drops it, spilling boiling tea over my sandaled feet. It’s acutely painful and I’m worried that my topmost layer of skin has been scalded away.
Maha is in a panic about the accident and when we pull out of the station she rummages around in the luggage. She smears something thick and white over my feet. I can’t see what it is in the dark but it does feel remarkably cooling. Then the smell reaches me. It’s minty.
“Maha,” I say, “it’s toothpaste.”
“Yes,” she replies confidently. “It’s special Pakistani medicine. It’s Colgate.”
Spending twenty-four hours on a hard bench enveloped in hashish fumes is testing my endurance. The young men say that we’re nearly there. They have been saying the same thing for two hours and I no longer believe them.
We’re traveling through the arid scrub of Sindh: squat buildings and the occasional splash of green vegetation dot the dusty fields; a few barren hills rim the horizon. And then someone says that he can see it—he can see Sewan Sharif. Everyone scrambles to catch a glimpse of a town rising in the midst of the desert. At its heart is a giant golden dome. The carriage rings with shouts and ecstatic songs. The young men are crying and praying. Maha has her hands open in supplication, and tears are making little trails through the dirt on her cheeks.
Sewan Sharif
The floor of the train is covered in debris: food, paper, plastic bags, and burnt patake. Adnan is ankle-deep in the rubbish and sleepily directing porters and some of the young men to move our luggage. The station is on the edge of town next to sand dunes where hundreds of poorer pilgrims have set up camp in tatty tents and awnings. We hire a couple of carts pulled by tiny, skeletal donkeys to carry our luggage and we ride into town in a tanga.
Enormous tents line the main roads, full of stalls selling kebabs, traditional sweets, and souvenirs: pictures of Shahbaz Qalandar and models of his tomb. The place is packed and the roads are congested with people and traffic. Most of the transport is horse- or donkey-powered and there are very few cars. I can’t see any foreigners—just local men. Maha squeezes my hand. “So many men,” she chuckles making an elaborate performance of arranging her chador. “They’re all looking at us.”
Sewan Sharif looks biblical in the manner of the pictures I remember from my book of Children’s Illustrated Bible Stories: low buildings with flat roofs sit in the sand. The houses are built around a courtyard and the windows all face inwards. Each house is like a little fort and no one can see inside.
Only a few of the roads are paved and most of the sewage and drainage system is aboveground. Channels full of rubbish, shit, and wastewater run alongside the buildings. The butchers are doing a brisk trade selling meat for the pilgrims’ celebrations, and the gutters still run red a hundred meters from their shops. Two men weave between our tanga and the crowds, their wheelbarrows full of freshly slaughtered goats skins—so fresh that they move like liquid in the barrows.
The tanga can’t cross the center of town, so we have to walk through the press of bodies. The booti walla and his wife—minus her shroud—are with us. I don’t think Adnan knows where he’s going. We’ve been walking for ages and peeping into houses. Perhaps he’s trying to work out where we’re supposed to be staying.
Lots of Sewan Sharif ’s residents rent out rooms to pilgrims during the urs commemorations. They divide their courtyards into sections and erect tents. The cheaper ones really cram the guests in: there must be a couple of hundred in some, and the makeshift toilets that are made by hanging a few sheets around a hole in the ground are already beginning to stink.
A substantial and inviting house stands at the top of a steep path leading down to the central bazaar. The courtyard is picturesque: shaded with trees and vibrant with pretty flowers. The walls are recently whitewashed, and parts of the floor are set with blue-and-white tiles painted in intricate, geometrically perfect Islamic designs. Colorful awnings and tents divide the courtyard into charming holiday homes. We sag in, covered in dirt, and the booti walla’s wife sinks onto a wall. A fat man—possibly the owner—doesn’t like the look of us and we are shunted out the door. He wants a better class of pilgrim in his house.
Our lodgings are nowhere near as luxurious, but anything is welcome after the train and after fighting our way through the melée in the bazaar. The owners of the house are a pleasant Sindhi family who have set up camp in their own courtyard so that we tourists can move in. Everyone staying in the house is from Heera Mandi: us, a few women, and lots of musicians from the mirasi—a group that the Kanjar think are far lower than them in the social order. Maha says it’s not ideal but that we’ll manage. We have a room to ourselves and we’ve spread the carpet and beaten out the worst of the dust. The mattress is down and the cushions have been spread artistically around the room. Maha sighs with approval and states that she’s going to have a perfect holiday.
A door leads into the courtyard and we are told that we can share the bathroom with the ladies of the house and the other female guests and their children. It’s a strange bathroom that has been added onto one of the sides of the courtyard: clean but very primitive. You walk up some steps, squat over a hole on a podium four feet in the air and, because there’s no ceiling, an assortment of interested viewers can peer down from the higher surrounding building. There’s no door either—only a thin curtain that dances in the breeze.
Far more men than women are holidaying in Sewan Sharif. In our lodgings most women are staying in their rooms or are busily engaged in some task, like laundry or cooking. The small kitchen—four feet by five feet in size—is generating tension among the visitors. One little gas stove with a single burner sits on the concrete floor. It takes a long time to cook anything because the gas supply is low and there’s always a line of people impatient to cook. All the washing-up is done in the courtyard under a tap, but this is also creating trouble: others, it is claimed, are leaving the place in a mess. Bits of vegetable peelings are lying all over the floor.
Ariba is upset. She’s the only one who doesn’t have new clothes for the mela. Even I have a new outfit: Maha bought it for me. Nisha and Nena return from the bathroom looking pretty. They’ve scrubbed up well and are dressed in bright new shalwaar kameez. Sofiya and Mutazar have been washed too and are now naked as they cavort around the room. Sofiya is told to keep her legs together and not to sprawl all over the place like that. Only gandi girls do that sort of thing.
It’s getting dark and Maha and I are going to visit Lal Shahbaz’s mausoleum. I hope we can find our way back through these streets. They all look the same: full of sand, piles of rubbish, and windowless buildings of crumbling brick.
The bazaar is packed with pilgrims, most of them highly charged young men. Maha is saying a prayer beneath a giant pole surrounded by candles when she’s interrupted by a sudden surge in the crowd, and we are pushed on toward the mausoleum. Too many people are squeezed together here and I’m worried about the mass crushings that are sadly common at religious events like these. The men are working themselves into a frenzy: assembling in groups, waving flags, jumping up and down, and shouting incoherently. They surge forward from the bazaar, through a passageway, and into the square directly before the mausoleum.
Maha and I stop in the passageway to buy flowers from a stall to throw on the shrine. The flowers are beautiful: pink, heavily scented, and strung on a thread like a necklace. We lean against the wall of the passage as a wave of men push through. Moments later we are not leaning against the wall but pressed tight against it. Some of the men’s faces are angry; some are frightened and shocked. They push this way and that, scaring others who push too. I think I can escape by climbing over the wall, but I can’t lift my arms because the press is so intense. My bangles snap against the bricks and the glass cuts into my arms. The pressure is so intense that I can’t breathe and I think my ribs will snap as well. Maha’s eyes are full of panic as we are propelled slowly toward the mausoleum, scraping against the wall until we are ejected from the passage and can breathe once more.
Hardly an inch of space is left in the courtyard that’s not thick with pilgrims. We’ve removed our shoes to show respect: we left them with an old woman and I wonder if we’ll ever see them again. Many of the pilgrims are in a trance. On the right-hand side is the ladies’ area. Some have babies and young children. I recognize a few of the faces from Heera Mandi. Many are praying. Dozens of the female devotees are honoring Shahbaz Qalandar by imitating the illustrations of him that are sold in the bazaar: they sit crosslegged or twirl around, undoing their hair and tangling it so that it swings from side to side in matted strands.
Most of the people in the courtyard are men: poor peasants and laborers. Their fervor increases the closer they get to the mausoleum: dancing with their arms in the air and shouting so loudly that I have to scream to make Maha hear me. A few of the men are spinning like dervishes, and Maha gestures toward them. “They’re like Shahbaz Qalandar. It’s the hashish,” she says.
The men gather in tight groups to chant and build up a head of steam before pouring into the mausoleum. Nothing stops them: not me, not Maha, not the thin old man with a stick who stumbles over the doorway and is trampled by the charging youths. Someone grabs the old man and pulls him along the floor through the racing legs. He’s too scared, or too old and rigid, to curl his body to protect himself from the blows. I catch a glimpse of his shocked face among the feet and pray he will emerge alive from the stampede.
The mausoleum is circular, the dome rising high above us. Wealthy men—portly landlords from Sindh—and their henchmen watch from a balcony running around the edge of the mausoleum. The tomb in the center of the frenzy is covered in silky cloths, flowers, and a golden turban topped with a plume of feathers. Around the coffin a silver-plated wooden frame is strung with tinsel. Four men stand inside the frame alternately handing out flowers or sweets and beating back the worshippers with lathis, long bamboo canes. Scaffolding has been erected around the wooden frame so that the pilgrims don’t overrun the tomb. More guards swing on the scaffolding, fending off the crowds with lathis.
This act of worship is a frightening outpouring of desperation. Some of the men look as if they’re in ecstasy, but most seem in excruciating pain. Those who can get near the frame touch the silver. They kiss the tomb, beseeching it and praying to it. Old men can’t get close enough. They’re pushed aside by younger, fitter, bigger men, and angry shouts and scuffles break into vicious fights. The scaffolding creaks and swings to and fro with the weight of so many people. It looks as if it’s going to topple over into a bloody mangle of iron bars, limbs, and tinsel.
The women have their own section at the back. The scrum is not as rough here, but the women still grab at the clothes of those near the tomb and pull them down and back into the crowd so that they can seize their place and edge themselves closer to Shahbaz Qalandar. We’re in a crush of people ten or twelve deep and Maha is dragging me up toward the tomb. Many of the women holding on to the scaffolding are distraught. A young woman with a disfigured face, incapable of expression, is clinging to the inner frame. She’s been burned so badly by fire or by acid that she seems to be wearing a shiny mask. Her eyes are permanently open, and I don’t know whether she is crying now because she’s happy or sad or whether she always weeps.
One of the men inside the shrine gives me a brightly colored shawl edged with gold thread. It’s been draped over the tomb and has absorbed some of the Sufi’s special powers. The other women tell me I’m lucky: nice things will happen to me in the near future. The cynic in me smiles—I’m an atheist and an academic and I’m not supposed to place faith in the illogic of the supernatural—but, secretly, I’m really looking forward to all those nice things. I sink back into the crowd and tie my lucky shawl around me for safekeeping.
I might need the blessed shawl sooner than I thought. Hundreds of men chant in the courtyard, and a deafening roar signals their charge through the doors. There’s no crowd control and I’m starting to panic. We can’t get out. The squeeze becomes tighter. Total confusion descends. I’ve become separated from Maha, but then, as the tide of bodies ebbs a little, I can see her hanging over the silver-framed tomb. She’s waving angrily to me to come back and pray some more. When I’m close enough, she tells me to get busy and ask Shahbaz Qalandar to answer our prayers. “Pray that Adnan will love me,” she instructs. She’s crying again. “Pray he leaves his wife. Pray she gets cancer and dies.”
A group of men are tossing sweets high into the air. They’ve been donated by people who want to gain religious merit and have been blessed by placing them next to the tomb. They’re like small, hard marshmallows. Some stick in my clothes. A few of the old women have caught a supply in their dupattas, but most find their way onto the floor, where the pilgrims scramble to scoop up the treasures. The worshippers eat a few and pass the rest on to others, increasing their potency as they are transferred from hand to hand. Dates, nuts, and popcorn make the rounds too. I’ve a ball of assorted sticky things adhering to my palm. I can’t face the thought of putting it into my mouth after the ingredients have been rolling around the floor. I jump in surprise when a young woman tells me in perfect English that I have to eat something: it’s good and lucky. I try a bit and console myself with the thought that the coming year will be a memorable one. I have my blessed tinsel-fringed shawl and I have eaten saint-infused sweets. Maha opens my mouth and checks to see if I’ve swallowed. She’s satisfied. “Next year when we come to Sewan Sharif you will have a husband,” she declares.
Hot Dogs
The tea shops and restaurants in the bazaar are packed. A group of rich men are relaxing in one of the better establishments. They all look the same in their matching white shalwaar kameez, big moustaches and chunky gold watches. They’re watching the pilgrims and Maha is watching them.
The festival sparkles in the twilight. You can’t see the dust and dirt in the soft glow from the candles, fairy lights, and low-voltage bulbs. The stalls are piled high with mountains of special foods: barbecued meat, fried pastries, and pyramids of halva decorated with pieces of wafer-thin silver leaf. We’re accompanied on our walk by a big, old, black dog. He must have escaped from somewhere because he is trailing a long chain. He likes me and won’t leave me alone. I like him too but Maha thinks he’s about to attack us, and she screams with blood-chilling terror whenever he plods behind us snuffling around our feet.
We’re looking for a dress for Ariba. I want her to have something new and pretty like the other girls, but we can’t find anything in the market. The children’s clothes are made of cheap brittle lace, like little Western-style bridesmaids’ dresses with puffed sleeves and big satin sashes. The ladies’ sizes are a more customary design but far too big; they’re made for short, square women. We’ve been wandering around for ages and despairing at the lack of sophistication. This place makes Lahore’s Babar Market look like the center of the international fashion world. We decide on something in pink and burgundy with tasteless false laces on the front. It’s the best they have. It’ll be too big but at least it’s new and at least it’s clean.
Back in the room it’s party time. Mutazar has borrowed a ball from a boy staying in the next house and I’m playing catch with Nisha and Nena. They’re standing against the opposite wall shrieking with enjoyment. They’re teenagers, but they’ve never played catch before and lack any sense of coordination; when they throw the ball to me it flies in any direction. Sometimes it hits the wall behind them. We’ve been playing for half an hour and they have only caught it twice. They don’t want to stop, but we have to put the ball away because it’s time to eat. Maha has cooked lamb smothered in chilies and Adnan is bringing a big pile of rotiya from the bazaar. Nisha is asked to chop some cucumber for the salad and Maha sorts through a bag of vegetables, pulling out a mooli, a long radish the size of a giant carrot.
“Look,” she shouts, waving it around, “it’s a big white Pakistani penis.” She passes it to Nisha to slice but the girl picks it up gingerly with two fingers as if it is carrying a nauseating disease. She bares her teeth, takes hold of the mooli, and snaps it firmly in two, flinging the pieces across the room. Her mother stares at her open-mouthed, and we all fall silent.
“What do you eat in England?” Nena asks to distract us from the broken radish. I tell them how old-fashioned English food is revolting: boiled vegetables and meat without spices, but that it’s better now—we eat tasty foods from all over the world.
“In some places people eat pigs,” Nena states and everyone makes retching noises. Pork is forbidden food in Islam: it’s dirty and unholy.
“And people in America eat dogs,” Nisha adds.
There are more retching sounds, and I’m puzzled.
“Yes,” Nisha insists. “It’s true. I’ve heard it on the television. They eat hot dogs.”
The Booti Walla’s Sarangi
It’s seven in the morning and the room is still. Someone is playing the most haunting, magical music in the courtyard, soaring from high to low notes, from sadness to joy and back again, in a sweeping, melodious stream. Maha whispers that it’s the booti walla on his sarangi, a stringed instrument played with a bow that is used in northern Indian classical music, often in association with kathak. The grumpy old booti walla describes episodes from his long life through the sound of his well-loved instrument, the sarangi so much a part of him that it has become his voice.
I’m lying next to Nisha. She’ll probably sleep for hours. She’s close to me, and I can feel her breath upon my face. Her crippled arm and hand are twisted toward the ceiling, framed in the early morning light angling in a few bright shafts from the gaps in the warped shutters. She stirs and mumbles, moving closer to me so that her mouth is pressed against my ear.
“Please tell my mother that I want to sleep.” She adjusts her arm so that it lies across me; so light and fragile it feels as if it will snap if I try to move it.
“Louise Auntie,” she whispers. “Help me. I don’t want to dance in the bazaar.” Her eyelashes are brushing against my cheek, and I’m beginning to understand Nisha’s fights with her mother and her reluctance to take her medicine. Nisha doesn’t want to be healthy. She wants to be a collection of deformed bones whom no man will buy. This emaciated girl isn’t being stupid or disobedient: she fears being a woman. Nisha doesn’t want to be desired. She’d rather take her chance on dying.
“Full Value”
The kitchen is beset by hygiene problems and the booti walla’s wife has been accused of spending far too long in there. But this morning, for once, it’s empty, and Maha and I have seized the opportunity to clean a space and prepare breakfast. We’re having egg fried with onions and green chili, and rice cooked with yesterday’s leftovers—the salan (gravy) and the well-sucked lamb bones. Maha is in a spiritual mood. She’s talking about the magical powers of Shahbaz Qalandar and his protection of women. The abilities of this saint are awesome; she says that he flew like a bird all over the world and then zoomed right up to heaven.
Adnan staggers out of our room. There are dark circles under his eyes, and he seems to have grown very old. He shuffles and shakes his way across the courtyard. The men don’t have their own bathroom: they use the open drains that run along the road on the outside of the house.
I tell Maha that the hashish and the heroin are playing an important part in their relationship troubles. She doesn’t agree.
“Drugs are good for sex. Hashish is good, and cough medicine too. It stops your kusi hurting and you can go on for three, four, or five hours.”
She stirs the rice very slowly. She’s thinking.
“Louise, what shall I do? My marriage is finished. Next year Nisha and Nena will have to go to the bazaar. They’ll earn a lakh of rupees to go with men. Then our troubles will be over. What else can I do? Tell me?”
I don’t know what to say. I haven’t any good ideas. The girls have no education and few skills.
“I’ll have to wait until Nisha is better,” Maha ponders. “She’s too thin now.”
“How do they feel about it?”
“They know. It’s okay. Nisha and Nena are nice girls. But Ariba…she’s different. She’s like me. She has a good body and she’s very strong. She’ll be good at the business.”
A noise just outside the kitchen catches our attention. Nena is sitting against the wall, rubbing soap over last night’s dirty plates. She’s been listening to us. She looks up at me and then down again at the plates. She doesn’t say a word and there’s no emotion on her face.
Some big hot chilies are frying in the pan and their heat makes me cough.
“Business is good here,” Maha announces. “Lots of rich Sindh men come to Sewan Sharif. They see the singing and dancing and they pay good money. A few years ago I met a rich man from Karachi. He was big in Customs. He paid for me to stay for two days in the Pearl Continental in Karachi. I went on a plane from Lahore. I got fifty thousand rupees [$843] a night.”
“So much?” I question.
She grins, “He got full value.”
She’s teasing me and her eyes are laughing. “Let’s go to the bazaar now and find some men. We’ll get fifteen or twenty thousand rupees [$253 to $337] at a time easily. Shall we go?”
Perhaps she’s joking and perhaps she’s not, but at least she’s laughing. It makes a nice change.
Depilation
I’m never alone, not even for a second—not even in the bathroom. I’m followed in by several children and an old woman. Two girls from Heera Mandi appear. They’re going through my sponge bag. The soap from London is outstandingly popular: it’s been pressed against every nose. They take out and inspect tubes of cream and bottles of conditioner and shampoo. They examine the deodorant and the old woman asks, “What’s this for?” She wants to see it put to use.
I have a bucket of cold water for my bath and an audience of eight. I send out all except the youngest children, but everyone drifts back in, bringing others as well.
And now here are Maha and Nena. Maha is looking at me as I stand in the open-air bathroom, naked and freezing, with shampoo in my hair.
“Louise, are you all right? You’ve been a long time.”
I want them to go away but instead they stay to analyze and discuss me. They’re interested in the color of my skin. I can hear them saying that I’m all white and pink and that I’d be good in the business. I feel like a specimen in a zoo. And there’s something else that they are whispering about, something they don’t think is so good.
Maha looks a little embarrassed. “Louise, you’re not saf.” She’s talking quietly so as not to shame me. “Don’t you clean yourself—down there?” she asks, slightly scandalized.
I don’t know what she means. She’s just watched me have a thorough scrub of every part of my body.
She persists and eventually I understand. To be a clean and civilized woman in Heera Mandi you must have no trace of body hair. Pubic hair is disgusting: it places you on a par with the animals. Every decent nachne walli has a tub of hair-removing cream and the sharpest of razors.
“Do English men like women when they’re like that?” she asks in disbelief.
Ariba is rarely with us. She has taken to lying on an old charpoy in the messy compound where the Sindhi family has erected its awning. She’s disappointed: her new dress is far too big. It hangs on her shoulders. You could fit two Aribas inside it. I can’t do anything but promise her a nice new outfit once we are back in Lahore. But by then it will be too late to matter. Today—again—Ariba will be the only one at the party without a new dress.
The Old Chicken
The room is claustrophobic and Maha is in a deep, foul-tempered depression.
“I hate life,” she moans. She’s peeping out into the courtyard. It’s dark and Adnan is sitting by a lamp, smoking the gooey liquorice with his friends. We have split into the segregated male and female worlds.
“Look at him,” she seethes. “He’s like an old chicken.” She gripes on. “Louise, I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to take poison and die.”
I tell her not to be silly, but she continues. “I’m going to get some kerosene and some matches and burn myself. There’s nothing left for me.”
Her children sit in silence. Nena appears to be on the point of tears, Sofiya is gawping, Ariba seems bored, and Nisha looks as if she’d like to light the match herself. They’ve heard all this before.
A musical group sashays into the courtyard with crashing cymbals and pounding drums. We put on our dupattas and watch from the window as they jig about the courtyard collecting ten-rupee (ten-cent) notes from the men. Maha forgets about the suicide plan while we watch two male dwarfs dancing around Adnan and his fellow smokers. Dressed in ankle bracelets and yellow satin shalwaar kameez, the tiny men dance like women. Everyone’s attention is caught. Even Maha is laughing. But then she sighs. “Agh, poor things. They’re like children but they’re men. It’s so sad. Why does God give some people good luck and some people bad luck?”
She’s crying for the little men—and for herself—as they hop out of the courtyard with their drummers and twirl into the next house holding a fistful of rupees.
Lucky Irani Circus
Today we’re going to the Lucky Irani Circus. There are food stalls and sideshows and we pay five rupees (eight cents) to enter the ajayabghar, which is not so much a museum but a display of tricks done with pictures, mirrors, and models who have their heads or limbs poking through pieces of cardboard. A severed head has been made from papier-mâché and a woman’s head is stuck on a snake’s body. It’s not convincing: the snake is made out of a roll of stuffed brown plastic and it wriggles whenever someone pulls on a cord. There’s a constantly running tap and an empty box from which a variety of things are made to appear. The false bottom of the box flaps suspiciously and the man performing the trick fumbles around in the secret compartment. It’s so bad it’s hilarious, but then I note with discomfort that no one else is laughing. I hope I haven’t spoiled the show for the rest of the audience.
Outside the turnstiles half a dozen men with shocking deformities are lying on the ground starring in a genuine freak show while their promoter collects money. One man’s hand has swollen to five times its normal size. He rests it on a cushion. It looks like one of those giant foam hands people wave at sports events.
Back at the lodgings I’ve been left in charge of the children. Adnan and Maha have both gone somewhere, although not together. Two children from the room next door have joined us. I sit on the mattress while a war rages around me. They’re screeching and laughing and tumbling over the floor. Mutazar is being vicious and using the cover of a play session to inflict serious damage on anyone in range. Then the door opens and Maha is back. Thank God. The room is transformed. Nena is tidying, Nisha sits in silence, Ariba leaves for her charpoy in the courtyard, Sofiya eats popcorn, and the two children from next door go back home. Only Mutazar continues to rampage.
“Mutazar,” Maha shrieks. “Don’t beat your sister with that knife. Bring it here. I need it.”
By evening Maha is hyped up. She’s been singing and dancing in the room for hours and I’m tired of being an appreciative audience. At half past one she’s still going strong. I feel ill and am trying to fall asleep, but she’s lying beside me asking about Adnan. I’m in no mood to talk through this all over again. “Louise,” she questions and nudges me with a hard finger, “does he love me?”
I bite my tongue. I want to say that I won’t love her either if she keeps on poking me with that cattle prod of a finger. If I were Adnan I wouldn’t love her if she kept on with the dramas and the fights and the constant singing. Where has my lively, amusing friend gone?
Taxi
Adnan has stumbled through the door and half-fallen over Ariba. The light is switched off and we’ve been asleep for an hour or so. He is mumbling and trying to sort out the blankets. He lies next to Maha. She puts her arm around him and I turn to the wall, uncomfortable by being privy to intimacy in such an overcrowded space. Maha whispers softly to Adnan. Whatever she says makes him angry because he stands up again, damning her with the cruelest words. She’s a dirty kanjri and a cheap taxi—an extremely insulting word describing a prostitute who has so many clients that she’s like a taxicab, in which countless men will take a ride. Adnan snatches the blanket covering her and staggers off back to the courtyard. In the dark I can see Maha’s silhouette shaking as she sobs in silence.
At four in the morning Maha is pulling me to my feet. “Louise, wake up. We are going to the mazar.” I’m shivering, my head is hurting, and I can barely swallow. I don’t want to go to the mausoleum, but she is propelling me along the streets and I don’t feel well enough to argue.
At the mazar Maha plunges into the crush. She’s shouting something to me, but I can’t hear properly: her voice seems far away. The noise of the crowd reverberates around the building and around my head in a fuzzy echo. I’ve taken refuge by the rear wall of the mausoleum and hope that Maha comes back soon. When she returns from rubbing her face all over the silver on the tomb, she’s still no calmer. We walk home as dawn is breaking and I know it’s going to be a horrible day.
The Musical Director’s Wife
The tension in the room is unbearable. I lie next to Nisha watching insects crawl into the holes in the plaster of the wall. Maha and Adnan are in the middle of a vile row. Maha is accused of looking at another man staying in one of the other rooms. He’s a musician, quite young and only moderately attractive, and he has very little money. I can’t imagine Maha would be interested in him. She is supposed to have looked at him from our room as he lay in the courtyard smoking with the other men. Adnan thinks it’s an unforgivable betrayal: she didn’t keep her eyes in purdah.
“You are kharab”—a spoiled, rotten woman—Adnan declares so loudly that the whole house will be able to hear.
Maha is distraught. She’s been crying for hours and pleading, “I wasn’t looking at him. I promise. I swear I didn’t look at him.” Adnan doesn’t want to drop the argument. He’s threatened talaq, divorce. Maha has only stopped weeping to remind me that Adnan doesn’t pay her much. “He gives me three hundred rupees [$5] a day—on the days he does come. It’s such an insult. I’m a ten-thousand-rupee [$169] woman.”
We have a visitor this afternoon: the wife of the director of an influential musical group, who is also staying at the house. She is in her early forties, slim, and well dressed. She takes the part of a lady of refinement with great seriousness, and I smooth out my crumpled clothes and try to lie a little more elegantly on the mattress. She’s well-groomed and possessed of sense: she came on the first-class train for a day trip and she doesn’t have thick black lines of dirt under her fingernails.
Maha is being charming. “How do you keep so young and slim?” she asks the musical director’s wife. “You’ve got a figure like a girl.”
She laughs and gives us tips on dieting: don’t eat too much and avoid large quantities of bread and rice.
“Your hair is beautiful,” Maha comments. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she says to Nisha and Nena, and they both nod and murmur over its luster.
The director’s wife tells us about her busy life, her clothes, and her children, and we are like the best of friends sharing gossip and congratulating one another on our little successes. She leaves after drinking some tea. Someone is taking her to Karachi in a car. I want to ask if I can go in the car too because, compared to Sewan Sharif, even Karachi—that big dump of a city—seems like heaven. She wafts out of the room in a cloud of perfume and chiffon dupatta, and Maha snorts.
“She’s got a face like an old woman. It’s like this.” She sucks in her cheeks and pulls her chin with her hand to make herself look drawn and pinched. The girls agree and laugh.
“Do you think she’s got a nice face?” Maha asks me.
“Yes,” I say.
“But she’s got no hips.” Maha adds, “She’s like a boy. She’s an old woman. She’s finished.”
“Bitch-Man”
We’ve been here for days and the town is beginning to feel quieter; many of the pilgrims must have left. There’s no longer a dangerous crush in the mausoleum, and Maha and I go and hang over the tomb and pray for husbands for one last time. The sudden reduction in visitors allows us a good view of the town. It’s carpeted in rubbish. A yellow stream of urine runs down the road and into the bazaar, where it pools, green and frothy, between the tea shops and then gradually filters down a congested hole and into the sewers. Four middle-aged men are relaxing on chairs in the street and enjoying the sun. They look like residents of the town and seem happy to have reclaimed some peace, now that the pilgrims who bring them some seasonal income have departed. Less than six feet from them a pile of nine or ten goats’ stomachs and intestines are puffing up as their contents ferment in the winter sunshine.
I can’t wait to leave, if only because I can visit the doctor in Lahore. It’s Saturday afternoon, a week since we arrived, and we’re sitting on the steps of the station waiting for the train. The platform is just a bit of concrete and dust next to the track. Adnan spreads the carpet and we sit down on it while the other passengers walk over its edges, trampling it in the dirt so that I can no longer see the pattern. Maha and I amuse ourselves by searching Ariba’s hair for lice. There are enough to keep us busy for hours, but Adnan tells us off. It doesn’t look respectable to be hunting for lice in a public place, so we wait at the side of the tracks, by the conical piles of shit that have been dropped from the toilets of stationary trains, and we preserve our honor.
Other women from Heera Mandi are at the station too. A family of pretty girls carrying vanity cases and dressed in cheap but well-laundered clothes are escorted by their mother, an aunt, and a man who acts as their helper and chaperone. I don’t know how they manage to walk in their big silver platforms without breaking a leg. Another group of women who aren’t wearing dupattas look even less sophisticated. A few have their hair streaked strawberry blonde. Maha sniffs and whispers, “Five-hundred-rupee [$8] women.”
Dusk is falling as the packed train pulls out of the station. I remember many of the faces from our journey to Sewan Sharif: the booti walla and his wife, lots of the musicians who shared the house and made such a giant mess, and—disaster—the man whom Adnan believes to be the object of Maha’s passion. He’s looking relaxed and oblivious to the scandal, wearing a rather fetching blue shirt and smoking hashish. Adnan is angry and Maha chokes with despair about the horrible, dirty “bitch-man.” He doesn’t look dirty and horrible, but Maha’s revulsion is designed to pacify Adnan. She doesn’t know where to look to avoid being called a kanjri, and so she insists that we section off our part of the carriage. We tie sheets and shawls to the luggage racks. They swing with the movement of the train and blow about in the wind from the open windows, but here in the seclusion of our sheets we are safe: no one can see us and we cannot see anyone else.
Fighting with Maha
By morning Maha is spoiling for a fight. I’ve been looking out of the window at yet more fields.
“Louise, are you boring?” she asks in a bad mix of Urdu and English that I translate equally badly.
“No, I’m not bored,” I reply.
“No, you don’t understand. You’re boring. You’re always looking out of the window and you’re not talking to me.”
It’s a great start to a conversation and we sit in angry silence. “Louise, you’re a mental case. Where’s your gold?” She pauses and points to my arms and neck. “It’s really bad. Where is your izzat? If you have no money and no gold, people will think you have no izzat, no honor.” She’s concerned, but she’s getting at me too.
“Look at your watch. How much did that cost?”
I’ve had it years. It has a little leather strap.
“It’s kharab,” she insists. “It should be gold. You need bracelets for your daughters, and then, when you die, they can have your gold.”
Maha has never spoken to me like this. “You write books and you have a good job, but you’re really stupid. You have a young face. You have a good body. You have white skin and golden hair. You can make a lot of money and you can enjoy yourself. Find a rich man and then say you want jewelry. You need bracelets, earrings, and a necklace. All gold. Remember, big love: big money. And then you want diamonds. Promise me, Louise. Do it. Don’t be stupid. Think about your children.”
We were on that train for over thirty hours. Thirty hours of hashish and patake and food and fights and swinging curtains. Heera Mandi has never looked more lovely. When we open the door to Maha’s house, we may be greeted by a truly foul smell from the toilet and a dozen startled rats who have settled in during our absence, but it feels like home. It’s four in the morning and the popcorn seller is still doing his rounds in the courtyard. Mushtaq, the big pimp, is sitting in his house surrounded by his friends while he polishes and plays with his revolvers. Adnan has returned to his wife, the children are asleep, and I’m pleased to be back.
Maha isn’t so happy. She can’t sleep, and at seven in the morning she’s filling tubs of water to wash the clothes. She has her arms in suds and she’s crying, “Lun, lun, kusi, kusi”—dick, dick, cunt, cunt. “That is my life.”
Tasneem’s New Home
Tasneem the khusra no longer lives with White Flower. She says Tasneem is ill and has gone to Peshawar to pray for a miracle cure. I know she’s lying because I spot Tasneem rushing to the PCO—the public call office, a shop where you buy phone calls. She falls on me like a long-lost and dearly loved relative and the bazaar comes to a standstill around us.
She’s moved to a new, much nicer, and lighter khusra house.
“I ran away from White Flower because she beat me too much and was angry when I didn’t earn much money,” she explains.
“She was like a servant in that place,” one of her new friends adds. “They said, ‘Do this, do that, get the drinks, turn on the tape.’ ”
Tasneem’s new acquaintances are called Shaheen and Malika. Malika owns the house: she’s a khusra of means. Shaheen is a friend who is visiting for the day. She has a feminine grace, and from certain angles her face looks attractive. Her mannerisms and body language have been refined to the point that, in some lights, she might pass for a woman, not just a man in drag. Such talents have their rewards—gold bangles and jewels sparkle on her wrists and ears. Tasneem has only a couple of plastic bangles and a ring with half the stones missing.
Shaheen and Malika want to talk about bras. They show me theirs: black with thick straps, lots of padding, and covered in hard scratchy lace that they describe as “English.” They want to see mine, so I flash a Marks and Spencer strap at them to appreciative comments about the superb quality of yet more English lace. Tasneem doesn’t join in. She squeals and holds on to her kameez: she doesn’t want to be embarrassed by the state of her underwear.
Business is bad for Tasneem. We’ve gone back to the PCO. She’s calling her regular customers to see when they are going to make their next visit. We’ve been here for half an hour. She bites her lips and furrows her brow as the phone rings. If someone answers she puts on a gently melodious, high-pitched voice. It doesn’t work: nobody promises to visit. The man running the shop laughs and says something I don’t catch. Tasneem jumps. It was an insult, and she barks back, dropping the girlie whine.
Shaheen stands behind us for the last ten minutes of the telesales admiring herself in the mirrored walls, tossing her hair around, pursing her lips, and adopting sexy poses. A handsome young man is sitting on the bench waiting for a turn on the phone. He is watching Shaheen go through her routine. Shaheen licks her lips and gives a little shiver. The man smiles—and not because he thinks she’s amusing.
Shopping in Lahore with a group of khusras is a disconcerting experience: they are objects of silent scorn and hilarity, and I fit into no category except that of the freakish outsider. Tasneem and I walk through Heera Mandi hand in hand. Shaheen and Malika have joined us, dupatta-less and very, very brazen, with their fuchsia lipstick and gold platform sandals. Several extremely young clients approach them. The two khusras flirt with the boys and arrange to meet them after they’ve finished shopping. Tasneem has her dupatta drawn like a skin around her head, and she’s glaring at everyone except me. “You’re my friend,” she hisses as she drags me across the road and away from Shaheen.
A five-minute walk takes you well outside Heera Mandi to more respectable parts of the Walled City. The crowds are thick in the bazaars and many people have looked a second or third time at the odd spectacle of khusras and a goree, a white woman, buying false eyelashes and glitter-speckled headbands. Tasneem continues to hiss, and she squeezes my hand whenever she sees an attractive man. She spots one she describes as “lovely” sitting outside a shoe shop, and she sighs. He’s thin, with long straggly hair and a stretched-out, sleepy face.
We stand in a little pool of afternoon sunlight discussing the pros and cons of hair conditioners. The sun is shining on the unplucked parts of the khusras’ beards, and on their chest hair, all bleached to resemble straw or a haze of yellow fluff. It’s like a beautiful, golden aura. I’d say how pretty it looks, but they wouldn’t like any mention of body or facial hair. They’re girls, so they don’t have any.
The Well of Death
Tasneem has invited me to see her dance in public. I arrive at Malika’s house at half past seven with a big bottle of ice-cold beer and some potato chips. Tasneem likes beer and I’ve bought a nice one for her—Murrey’s Classic. Malika says Tasneem isn’t here: she’s with an old tamash been and it might take some time. I sit in the corner and watch the others get ready for the dancing. There’s plenty to see. Malika and another khusra called Razia are attending to their toilette. Razia has a lot of work to do: she has atrocious acne.
Malika sits on the mattress next to me so that I can observe the art of makeup. First there’s the panstick—a light pinky-brown solid cream that’s rubbed on the skin. A wet sponge smoothes it out and then another layer is added and smoothed. The sponge is then dampened and patted all over the face and the neck so that the pancake forms a second skin. The paste is set with talcum powder into a stiff but perfect mask. Next come the eyebrows—two thick black lines—and lots of red eye shadow. Malika brings out a selection of contact lenses and ponders over which she should use: blue, gold, or white stars? She chooses the white stars and puts them in with lots of blinking and tears that smudge the pancake. She turns toward me, waiting for the compliment, and I try to sound positive—but she looks like a terrifying mannequin: a person with doll’s eyes.
Tasneem rushes in flapping a towel and sits next to me in a great panic. She hugs me, and I ask her if she wants the beer. Malika shouts at her to hurry up, so she runs to the bathhouse while the others apply thick black eyeliner and feathery, black-winged false eyelashes. The beer is put in an enormous new fridge. Inside are a couple of old samosas and a bottle of water.
Tricks with blusher and sparkly highlighter follow. Then comes lip liner, which is very dark, and lipstick, which is very red. It’s topped with a slick of golden glitter. Malika’s brother sits next to me and admires the effect. He’s a rickshaw driver, about 40 years old, and quite good-looking.
Tasneem bursts back into the room and scrambles around, while Malika shouts about the time. Tasneem’s panic is almost paralyzing. Razia, Malika, and her brother laugh as Tasneem rushes to get ready. The laughs are not nice, and Tasneem shrinks at the sound.
Tasneem’s bottle of beer is taken out of the fridge, and Malika asks me if I want some. I say no, so she drinks it herself—as if it’s for her. And, I suppose, it is in a way because Tasneem has no power in this household. She has no home of her own. She finds a place to live and work by playing the servant and the fool, for someone else. So what belongs to Tasneem belongs to Malika. Tasneem asks me not to object. I shouldn’t say anything to make Malika angry. Her face alternates between tense fright when she thinks the others cannot see and big smiles when she speaks to Malika.
Malika finishes off her makeup by reopening her makeup box and rummaging through the contents. She takes out a pot of glitter eye shadow that I gave to Tasneem last summer and spreads it over her eyelids. “It’s very nice,” she says. Tasneem nods.
Malika’s brother announces that his sister isn’t like the other khusras. “God didn’t give her a lun. God didn’t want her to be a man. God didn’t want her to be a woman either.”
Malika is in the cupboard that doubles as a changing room, and she invites me in to verify his story. There are piles of clothes everywhere and I have to squeeze past a mountain of shalwaar kameez. Malika is naked and proud of her body. She has no penis, nor any breasts, but her body shape is that of a man. I think she was born biologically male and has had her penis and testicles removed.
Tasneem looks troubled. “Don’t tell anyone about her. It’s a secret,” she whispers, but it’s Tasneem rather than Malika who wants to keep it a secret. A penisless Malika is tough competition—and she’s also more like the khusra Tasneem wants to be. Tasneem is burning with envy.
A loud crashing comes from the little landing outside the room. A youth struggles to get past the goat tethered on the stairs and slips on some droppings. A tray with snacks and bottles of Coke smashes onto the concrete floor, and Malika begins a tirade. The youth shovels up the debris and the droppings, leaving it in a bubbling pile in the corner. He returns a few minutes later and bounces around the room distributing drinks and packs of namkeen. He’s a slightly built young man of 18 or 19. He springs about in an uncoordinated manner on rubbery limbs and has a terrible, uncorrected harelip that never stops him from beaming at everyone. His hair is cut in a shiny, red-tinged bob that he flicks back with panache, and he wears men’s Western-style clothes: a tweed jacket and cream-colored jeans.
The other khusras struggle into Western clothes too—girls’ outfits: tight trousers, platform shoes, and stretch tops through which I can see lumps of English lace. They look like men in women’s clothes: they have thick waists, flat bottoms, and skinny legs.
Malika’s acned friend has done a miraculous job on her skin, and she teases Tasneem mercilessly as she jumps around the room pulling on her clothes. I can see the tears in Tasneem’s eyes. Then the five of us—myself, Tasneem, Malika, the spotty one, and the one with the harelip—all pile into Malika’s brother’s rickshaw and leave for the circus. Tasneem is holding my hand and trying to talk, but the noise of the struggling engine drowns out all sound.
The circus is on the edge of Lahore: a shamble of tents erected inside a ragged wall of awnings and lit by fairy lights. This traveling show moves around the country spending a few weeks here and a few weeks there. We’re met by “Security”—former soldiers who look as if they’ve fallen on very hard times—and we’re ushered through the turnstile. Inside the fabric compound are several hundred men. I’m the only woman. A couple of games have attracted big crowds: one is a form of darts and the other is a large glass box from which the men are fishing for colored balls. At the far end of the compound is the Well of Death. It’s surrounded by high scaffolding on which there are gaudy paintings of women with laughing faces, large breasts, tight suits, and dangling jewelry. I’m convinced that this circus has never seen anyone remotely like the women in these paintings.
The Well of Death is a common attraction in Pakistani circuses. This one is an ancient wooden structure about thirty feet high. Visitors climb steep steps to a viewing platform running around the rim. The Well is aptly named—it is a giant dark pit, and a couple of naked lightbulbs have been wrapped around a metal pole in the middle. A hairbrush dangles from a loop in one of the wires.
A door at the bottom lets the performers into the Well and a motorbike without a silencer roars in and parks in the middle. The khusras swing in after it and I wave to my four friends. There are ten other khusras with them. Most are in the same kind of girlie Western outfits, and all are preening madly. Tasneem is gesturing frantically. She’s asking, “Who is the prettiest?” Malika asks the same question…three or four times.
It’s bitterly cold and I’m shivering in my coat. The khusras must be freezing in their skimpy tops. Their breath, lit by the bulbs, rises in frosty clouds, and they start to dance to some distorted music. The routine is less classical South Asian dance and more Western disco, with a good deal of hip grinding and shaking of the stuffed bras. Some are good at it, some proficient, and a few are barely competent. The boy with the harelip is doing a strange dance, bouncing around on one leg with the other held in the air. Another is only 14 or 15, with a boy’s haircut, men’s jeans, a yellow polo shirt, and flip-flops. He doesn’t have a padded bra, but he’s wearing lots of badly applied makeup and is doing a stiff-legged skip between the other dancers. Two of the khusras look like women. Malika’s brother says that they’re like Malika—they were born without a penis. Judging by the curve of their bodies and the delicacy of their faces, he may be right.
Around seventy men hang over the rim watching the khusras dancing thirty feet below. They are ordinary men: laborers, tradesmen, and shopkeepers. They vary in age from their teens to their sixties. Some are throwing money down to the dancers. A smartly dressed middle-aged man with a big gold watch covers a particularly pretty khusra with a shower of ten-rupee [twenty-cent] notes. It’s like confetti fluttering around the performers. The khusra blows him a kiss and scrambles onto the floor to pick up the notes before anyone else can claim them as her own. The sight of so much money has spurred on the dancers, and they stop every minute or so to use the hairbrush dangling on the light stand. The audience is agog.
The motorbike rider—the highlight of the show—enters the well. He revs up the bike and the khusras leave. He accelerates, climbing the walls of the Well, faster and faster, so that he’s only a few feet from the rim. Only three men have stayed to watch. The rest have followed the khusras, who are now standing outside the Well doing another little dance and arranging appointments with the men. The bike act ends, the khusras go back into the Well, and the audience reassembles on the rim. It’s a cycle that is repeated over and over again. Tasneem squeezes me during one of the intervals: she’s negotiated a deal with one of the tamash been and is going to a hotel for the night after the show. Malika is also pleased: business is good.
“They’re not girls,” two customers tell me. “They’re half-man, half-woman.”
Presents
A tiny plastic Christmas tree has been put in the back window of Iqbal’s restaurant. I’ve helped Tariq and the other sweepers to hang a dozen baubles and I’m feeling homesick. I’ve written cards and have a few presents to deliver. Jamila, the first person I intend to visit, is not at home: her husband says that she’s gone away for a day or two to do some begging. Tasneem isn’t at home either, but Malika tells me to sit and wait. She opens Tasneem’s Christmas card and looks at the big fat Santa. “Oh,” she laughs. “He looks like one of my husbands.”
She unlocks a cupboard, pulls out a box, and settles herself next to me. She takes her jewelry out of the box piece by piece and spreads it on the mattress. “These cost fifty thousand rupees [$842],” she explains clanking half a dozen prettily worked bracelets. “They were from my second husband…a very nice husband.” She dangles a necklace in front of my eyes. “This cost eight thousand rupees [$135]. It was from my fourth husband.”
The donor of a pair of heavy gold earrings comes in and sits next to us. “He’s my husband,” Malika remarks, without identifying his number. The man is about 40. He’s fat with a very round face and small beady eyes and speaks with a high-pitched, squeaky rasp that is strangely out of keeping with his substantial frame. He leaves his expensive, beautifully polished shoes by the door; his feet are smooth and soft. He gives Malika a present—a new ring. She squeals and makes a fuss, and then he leaves. “He’s a nice husband,” Malika comments and she puts the ring in the box with her other gold.
“Is he married?” I ask.
“Of course,” Malika laughs. “All my husbands are married to women, and they come to me for fun.”
Tasneem bursts into the room, upset and jittery. She’s thrilled with the Christmas card, but I do note that she’s looking at it upside down. It’s understandable that she makes a mistake over the words: she’s illiterate, and Pakistani books and cards open in the opposite way to English ones. Still, the card is placed on the cupboard with Father Christmas standing on his head.
Tasneem rummages through her suitcase and pulls out her two best dancing outfits—shimmering polyester shalwaar kameez, one in purple and one in orange. “Which one would you like?” she asks. “Which color do you like best?” I explain that I have lots of clothes and don’t need any more, but she’s persistent.
“But I want you to have one. Then we can be sisters. You gave me a suit in the hot weather, remember?”
Reluctantly I choose the purple one and Tasneem and I go to try on the outfits in the cupboard. Fortunately the purple suit is too small, so I say that I can’t wear it.
“No, no,” Tasneem cries. “We can go to the darzi.” She pulls me out of the cupboard and we head off to the tailor’s. We walk a little way down the street and up into a big, well-decorated house. A group of khusras is standing in the doorway and they look at me as we pass by.
“Is it a boy?” they ask Tasneem.
“No, it’s a girl,” she answers.
“Really?” comes the reply.
I’m offended—people at home used to say that I was something of a beauty.
The building is an important khusra house. Two sit on the floor sewing. One of them measures my chest so that he can make the alterations to the suit. The khusras watch and I catch some of their whispers. “She could be a boy. She’s got small tits.”
I shout at them and they laugh.
A tall, well-built man in his late forties walks in with a proprietorial air and surveys the scene with confidence. He’s wearing men’s clothes and his hair is plastered in henna. He looks at me intently for a few uncomfortable seconds and then smiles.
“This is our guru,” Tasneem explains. “He’s very, very important. Before we do anything we have to ask his permission. I go like this.” She walks over to the man, kneels down before him and kisses his feet. The guru smiles in a benevolent way and then leaves the room trailed by half a dozen acolytes. He’s the head khusra in Heera Mandi.
The dress is ready in minutes and it fits. Tasneem takes me back to Malika’s house and watches me change into the purple creation. She brushes my hair, ties it up, and arranges a sequinned dupatta over my head. Her eyes are full of tears and she hugs me.
“Now we’re sisters,” she snuffles.
Ramzan
At six o’clock on a cool, dark December evening boys are leaping from charpoy to charpoy in the courtyard while the young men near the pimps’ den sing and play the tabla. A group of elderly women sit around a charcoal burner toasting their feet, smoking, and laughing, happy because it’s Ramzan and they’ve just finished eating.
Ramzan, or Ramadan, is the Islamic month of fasting, and most Muslims from the religious mainstream fast from sunrise to sunset. Life in Pakistan moves at a slow pace: things happen without haste, if at all. During Ramzan, the country winds down even more. Offices and shops close early, restaurants are shut in the day, and people disappear during daylight hours. Some are asleep. They’ve reversed day and night.
Not everyone fasts, but it’s good to be seen to be abstinent, and there is social and political pressure to comply. The ill, the pregnant, and the very young are excused. As a non-Muslim I’m excused too, but it seems insensitive to eat or drink in front of the hungry, so I shop furtively and eat quickly and in private. So do a few of those participating in the fast. In lots of offices there is a cupboard or little room scattered with crumbs, cigarette butts, and empty teacups.
Ramzan nights are for eating and playing cricket, though the minds of the religious are supposed to be focused upon spiritual reflection, not upon the excitements of the flesh. Sex is frowned upon during this time, so trade isn’t good in Heera Mandi, and those prostitutes with a reputation to preserve will not be selling their services in the bazaar. It would be an insult to God. The poorest cannot afford religious scruples. In Tibbi Gali, Nazia is still on her doorstep.
The courtyard is eerily quiet in the middle of the night, partly because it is Ramzan and partly because it is so achingly cold. The popcorn and ice-cream wallas are taking a holiday but the paan wallas still come on their rounds. There must have been a low-key party next door because they bought a surprising quantity of sweet paan around midnight. A metal dish was lowered from the fourth floor on a rope, and the goods were transferred with a loud clanking as the dish bumped and scraped its way back up the walls.
A siren wakes me at half past three in the morning. It is the official wakeup call, given so that people can be sure to cook and eat before dawn breaks and the fast begins. The sweepers are out shortly after the siren sounds. Three figures dressed in old clothes bend over their brushes, their free hands alternately resting on their backs and swinging to the ground. Their heads are bandaged in ancient rags and long cloths hang over their faces. They use traditional jharu, brooms made of bundles of long sticks tied together at one end, and the rhythmic scratching of their brushes is a familiar sound in the courtyard in the hour immediately before and after dawn.
The Badshahi Masjid has been transformed into something resembling a Disney spectacular. It could be a scene from Aladdin, with a few flying carpets hovering around the minarets and whooshing between the domes. Thousands of fairy lights run in delicate streams over the walls and minarets and bright blue and green fluorescent strip lights illuminate the giant domes. These colored lights have been borrowed from the front of a nearby hotel and placed on the mosque for the last few days of Ramzan. The owner of this hotel has also paid for the fairy lights. He can afford this pretty offering because he is said to operate one of the biggest drug rings in the mohalla.
Ramzan has interrupted play on the grass. It’s far too holy a time for frivolities like sport to be tolerated so near to the masjid. The addicts who usually live on the fringes by the trees have now taken up residence on the other side of the wall surrounding the field. When I passed by this afternoon they were huddled in little groups, smoking heroin. A couple of young men sat watching an older addict fill a syringe with pharmaceutical drugs and inject himself before they took their own turn. They were too engrossed to notice me. Another of them died last night. His body was in the bazaar this morning. It lay, with a collecting bowl at its feet, on the charpoy that is reserved for those who die without money or family to bury them. He looked desiccated and his skin had the sheen and color of the dates we eat to break our fast. There are new bodies on that charpoy every week.
Mullah Ali’s Tazia
The twentieth of Ramzan is an important day in the Shia Muslim calendar: it is the death anniversary of Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Mohammed. Maha has told me that his body is being taken in a procession from Heera Mandi to a place just outside Bhati Gate. It is very unlikely that any of Ali’s remains will be carried through the streets of Lahore, but the women of the mohalla seem to think that they will and I guess that is what matters. I’m informed that I must be ready at three-thirty. I must wear black. I must have no trace of makeup on my face, and I must not smile—it’s not appropriate. It is a time for mourning. “We,” several local women insist, “are Shias.” Mourning is what Shias do best. They’ve made it into an art and a way of life.
We’re passing from Heera Mandi Chowk to Tarranum Chowk, and above us hundreds of women are gathering to watch the procession from the second-, third-, and fourth-floor windows and balconies. I pause to look. It’s breathtaking: the invisible prostitutes of the mohalla have come out from between their four walls.
Mullah Ali’s remains—virtual or real—are encased in a large, heavily decorated silver casket. It is a tazia—a model of his tomb. There’s a dome on the top, and people are throwing garlands over it so that it’s quickly smothered in flowers. When the wind blows in our direction it carries a beautiful, sweet fragrance.
The men jostle and fight to join the teams carrying the tazia on their shoulders. Competition is so intense that the holy relic veers from one side of the street to another. It jerks up and down and is never level. They look as if they’re going to drop the thing and its procession is anything but stately. It is a chaotic and at times bad-tempered cavalcade.
Young men stomp along ahead of Ali’s tazia. Their arms are raised and there’s a hollow thump as they beat their chests in unison. The women walk behind, corralled by a chain of men linking hands. I don’t think it’s an effort to keep the women away from the tazia. It seems more like a measure taken for their protection. The men are boisterous, and a very fine line divides their energy from destructive violence.
Tiny babies are passed toward the tazia over the men’s heads. The lucky ones get their little bodies rubbed against the tazia or their heads pressed against the silver. None of them appreciate the spiritual significance of the act and all are bright red and screaming: their cries drowned in a sea of deafening appeals to God and to Ali.
We move on, bodies pressing from all sides. Hundreds of shoes litter the streets. The press is so tight and the speed of the crowd so erratic that it’s easy to lose your footwear, especially when most people wear cheap plastic sandals or flip-flops that rarely fit. A policeman’s rifle keeps sticking into my back and an obese, middle-aged woman grumbles because I’m moving too slowly. I tell her I can’t move faster than the person in front of me, but she mutters something nasty in my face with thick, fetid breath. Maha interrupts her prayers and shouts that she’s a dirty old bitch.
On the other side of Bhati Gate the procession spills out from the inner city into the wide space of condoned-off roads. Armored personnel carriers and policemen with guns watch the tazia veering through the crowds. An ambulance revs up and criss-crosses through the procession trying to make work for itself by mowing down children, old folk, and those with slow reaction time. And then, for a few seconds, no one is watching the tazia. The siren has sounded to end the fast, and everyone is looking at the food they’ve collected in their hands.
The ambulance clanks past again and people jump out of the way. This time it has a real mission: some of the men have beaten themselves unconscious with blades strung on long chains. Two of them are bleeding profusely from the multiple wounds they have sliced into their backs. Maha sighs in awe and is moved to tears by this proof of the men’s religious devotion.
AIDS
Tibbi Gali is quiet in Ramzan. There are fewer customers, and although many of the women are still working, they’ve moved further into the shadow of their rooms. Nazia’s madam sits with her thighs spread out over the step, but I can see nothing of the girl’s face except the shimmer of her luminous makeup through the dark. Only the little group of women and girls who trade near the shop are clearly looking for business. They are huddling around a charcoal burner. Shela, the shopkeeper, is wearing woolly socks that have been toasted to a crisp by the fire. Sabina, the girl with the painful limp, is mixing a thick white fizzy paste on a plate. Shela looks intently at her reflection in the shard of a broken mirror and trowels the mixture onto her face.
“It’s to make her white,” Sabina explains. “It’s bleach.”
“Do you want some?” Shela offers me the plate. “It will be good for those dots on your face.”
Shela sits in the center of the gali for twenty-five minutes while the bleach froths. She shouts at anyone who struggles to pass her. She’s irritated because business is slow: there are five girls around the shop, and in half an hour only one has disappeared up a dark staircase with a young man. Sabina looks bored and leans against the wall to take the weight off her bad leg. She’s always here in the shade, looking up the same narrow alley and talking to the same people about the same things. I’ve never once been to Tibbi Gali and not found her against the wall. This few meters of gray alleyway, Shela’s shop, the narrow staircase, and her room are her whole world. She tells me she never leaves Tibbi Gali. “Why would I go outside?” she questions. “For what reason?”
A young woman gestures frantically from the house on the opposite side of the gali and offers me tea. The upstairs room of her house is clean and a lot of furniture is crammed into a very small space. Her younger sister, a child of about 12, is watching a soft-porn film that seems to be from the Middle East. A woman is doing a vulgar dance in beige Lycra leggings and the child is copying it, rolling around the floor doing pelvic thrusts and spreading her legs. The film is switched off and she sits down with a grin.
The two sisters and their mother are from Balochistan, Pakistan’s most remote province. Their mother tongue is Balochi; they speak Urdu poorly and some Punjabi. The older sister says her brother got married fifteen months ago. She puts on the wedding video so she can point out key guests. She pauses the video so I can see her and another woman I know—but I barely recognize them. They’ve changed a lot since the wedding: both are shades of their former selves. They have each lost a dramatic amount of weight and the bloom in their skin has vanished. I can’t tell whether it’s tuberculosis or HIV or just general ill health, but there’s something terribly wrong with these young women.
Condoms are a rarity in Heera Mandi. Everyone says the same thing: the clients don’t use them. The junk and the rubbish dumped on the streets verifies it: a used condom is a rare, if unsavory, sight. The safe-sex message has not reached Heera Mandi, and there is no public or private awareness of the danger.
Sex and condoms are not compatible in the mohalla. Maha puts it this way: “The tamash been don’t like condoms because it’s not a natural feeling. They want a full feeling. Full sex. Condoms are not good because it’s like putting their dick into a shopper”—a plastic bag.
Many women have never even heard of AIDS in Tibbi Gali, or, if they have, they think it’s a disease of foreign homosexual men. Nazia’s madam thinks of herself as an authority on the subject. She says, “You get AIDS from dirty men who do it in the ass.” Higher-class women consider AIDS to be the exclusive preserve of gandi prostitutes in Tibbi Gali. Women with izzat would never dream of using condoms. Maha states with absolute conviction, “I can’t get AIDS because I’m very neat and clean and all my husbands have been sharif men. My kusi is always fresh and lovely. Those gandi kanjri in Tibbi Gali will get AIDS because they are dirty and they have to do it the back way. They never wash their kusi and the tamash been in that place are dirty men with no money.” She’s wrong on so many of these points. Even the cheapest, oldest prostitute in Tibbi Gali washes herself in a bowl of water she keeps in the corner of her room.
Friday Prayers
The last Friday in Ramzan is especially holy and the Badshahi Masjid is packed. A separate, screened section has been set aside for the ladies but it’s long since filled up, and the women are taking their places alongside the men in the quadrangle. I stand at the side with Maha’s children and watch the crowds pour in. I recognize some of the men, and a few of the khusras, all of whom have elected to be in the men’s section and not to fight for a place with the women. They are wearing men’s clothes and have removed their makeup to show their respect.
We sit on the steps as thousands of worshippers form long lines in the quadrangle. Nisha is amazed. “So many people. It’s like the whole world is here,” she gasps.
When the prayers have finished, the worshippers stream out of the mosque and are assailed by the familiar army of limbless beggars. Another group is waiting for them too: lots of thin young men with straggly beards and green turbans are collecting on behalf of the Taliban. They get very little cash and most people ignore them.
Ariba’s Boil
Ariba looks odd. I don’t understand how such a small body can manufacture such a mammoth boil. She told me it was a burn that went bad, but it looks just like a giant pimple to me. It’s yellow-green and the size of an acorn bulging beneath her nose. She needs to visit Dr. Qazi, but Maha hasn’t noticed Ariba’s embarrassment or her pain. She winces when she eats and talks. She has shown me the horrible thing several times and told me how much it hurts. These close viewings are testing my fondness for her, and I’m ashamed that I have to steel myself to stop recoiling from her worried, disfigured face.
Maha has missed the unmissable because she doesn’t even see her children when they are standing right in front of her. And now I know why: I’ve just found half a dozen empty bottles of cough medicine beside the mattress. She’s addicted to the stuff. It explains why she was so vile in Sewan Sharif: her supply had dried up before we even got there. It’s Nena’s job to collect the bottles and throw them away, but today she has failed in her duty, and Maha’s habit is no longer a secret. She’s on at least two bottles of Corex a day and her intake is increasing.
Corex is a popular cough medicine in Heera Mandi, and it dulls far more unhappiness than it ever treats bad chests. It’s strong stuff—codeine, I think—and Maha buys it at a pharmacy near the Zakariya Hospital off the Ravi Road. The label advises adults to take two teaspoons three times a day. Maha swigs an entire bottle in seconds. She says it helps her to forget her loneliness and screen out the arguing and crying of the children. She confesses that she’s been taking it for about six years, but she’s upped her consumption recently to cope with Adnan’s absence. Corex makes her drowsy, so she sleeps a lot. “I’d die if I couldn’t take drugs,” she states flatly.
Three pairs of large ghungaroo are stacked by the television. They’re the traditional accessories worn by dancing girls; they cover the top of the ankles and reach halfway up the calves, a little like the leg pads worn by cricketers. They are very heavy because they are covered in tiny bells that tinkle and jangle with the slightest movement of their legs and feet. When dancers perform, the stamping of their feet and the sound of the ghungaroo become part of the music. These new ghungaroo belong to Maha, Nisha, and Nena. They’re all planning to set up in business in the bazaar. They’ve identified a vacant kotha, they have the outfits, they’ve recruited the musicians, and they have enough desperate need.
“Nisha and Nena will sing and dance. That’s all. No man is going to buy their kusi,” Maha declares angrily. “Swear to me, Louise. Swear to Shahbaz Qalandar. Make a promise to Mullah Ali. Look after your daughters. Tell your mother. Keep them safe. Keep them inside and safe. Don’t let any man come to your house.” Maha runs her fingers over the ghungaroo and grows quiet.
A fat elderly man eases himself through the door. He struggles with a stomach that has an existence independent of the rest of his body, and he’s wearing a decorative topi (hat) that’s embroidered with lots of miniature mirrors. His rings are even more impressive. The size of golf balls, they’re the largest and least tasteful I’ve seen and he wears one on each wedge-shaped finger. It’s a miracle he still has the use of his hands. He has come for the rent—and Maha doesn’t have it. She explains that she’s been fighting with her husband, and that he’ll have to wait another two days until she can find some cash. For once God is on Maha’s side: The siren sounds to announce that the day’s fast is ending. The girls dash in with dates, a saucer of salt, and some samosas and the man eats as if he’s been fasting continuously for a week. He leaves with a wave, a rub of his belly, and a promise to be back.
“He owns the building,” Maha says. “Him and the old woman downstairs. He’s her husband. They’ve been together since they were young.”
“Is he her proper husband?” I ask.
Maha’s eyebrows lift. “Are you mad? She’s a Heera Mandi woman. A tawaif. He’s sharif”—noble and respectable—“and he’s married to a woman from outside. But he still loves her. He still visits her and helps her. He collects the rent because she can’t get up the stairs with her bad knees.” Maha sucks in her cheeks and does a jerky, round-shouldered shuffle around the room. Her daughters laugh. “Strange,” Maha says, half in fun and half in wonder, “he still loves the old tawaif.”
Stars of Lollywood
A mellow Maha is huddled on the bed wrapped in a big fluffy blanket. She’s had one and a half bottles of Corex and it’s only two o’clock. A big plate of samosas dripping in oil lies on the mattress—Maha eats one and falls asleep. Nisha and Nena parade around the room showing me their hair and their latest dance routines. Nena is excited about her dancing career and twirls around refusing the samosas.
“Are you fasting?” I ask.
“No, I’m on a diet.”
She’s 13 and very, very slim.
“Look, I’m fat.” She shows me her stomach, which is flat, and the girth of her hips, which is negligible. She has the yet-to-be-filled-out figure of an adolescent. Even before embarking on the diet, she didn’t eat well. She has dark shadows under her eyes and a small, nasty cold sore. But, even with these ragged edges, she’s still quietly, stylishly beautiful. Maha has taken her to the biggest promoter in Heera Mandi, and he’s agreed that she has definite potential as a model or an actress, but he warned that the camera puts on pounds. I fall back in disbelief when she describes her weight problem. If Nena can put on a few pounds she’ll look normal. If she loses any she’ll look like Nisha: a sunken-chested skeleton. She isn’t convinced by my arguments and eats three chickpeas for the sake of her career.
The female stars of the Pakistani film industry have traditionally come from Heera Mandi. Respectable families wouldn’t allow their daughters to become actresses because acting, like dancing, was synonymous with prostitution. Many Bollywood actresses had murky pasts, and so did the actresses in Lollywood, the center of the Pakistani movie industry, based in Lahore. Those women dancing, shimmying, and shaking across the screen in the Lollywood films of the second half of the twentieth century were the girls from Heera Mandi, known for their lascivious hip grinding and earthy sensuality. A career in film and television no longer carries quite such scandalous implications, but even today, a large proportion of the country’s film and soap stars were born and raised in Heera Mandi. Here in the mohalla it’s considered the best path to a better, more respectable life.
During a visit to Karachi I met a remarkable woman who had worked her way out of Heera Mandi. She is a film and television star, around 50 and past her glory days, but her age is obscured by well-toned skin, a rigorous maintenance regime, and a wickedly exciting enjoyment of life. She has a large apartment in a prosperous suburb and is a gracious hostess; she keeps a well-appointed room for entertaining guests, a well-stocked drinks cabinet, and a cook who whips up delightful delicacies: tiny, plump samosas; miniature kofte—meatballs served with a fiery lime pickle; little pastries sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds; and delicate, aromatic sweets laced with cardamom, ground almonds, and chopped pistachio. On my guided tour of the apartment I was shown a room carpeted in silk Persian rugs and plush, embroidered cushions, the mirrored walls reflecting a studied opulence. It was the star’s private, very exclusive kotha.
A couple of other guests hung on the star’s every word: men enchanted by her sophistication and by a hard-to-define quality, something instilled by a childhood spent in Heera Mandi. She was well dressed—and well covered—but her shalwaar kameez was expertly tailored to reveal every curve of her figure, and she moved with a controlled but blatant sexuality: joking with the men, moving a little too quickly, kicking off her satin slippers, wriggling with laughter, aware of her body and its impact upon her guests. A butler appeared with another round of drinks, ice cubes clinking in crystal glasses on a silver tray. We gossiped and the star told tales of the old Heera Mandi as two stunningly handsome young men in white shalwaar kameez sat at her feet. She carried on talking, pulling up her shalwaar so that they could drizzle fragrant oils over her skin and begin to massage her calves. She shivered for a moment with pleasure and then resumed her conversation. For once, I wished I too could be a dancing girl.
The women of Heera Mandi are alive to this kind of dream: they fantasize about it but they know that only the luckiest women will build a successful career in Lollywood. Nisha, Nena, and Ariba keep well-thumbed film cards of famous actresses in a big box. They know everyone: where they came from, whom they loved, and whom they married. It’s a life they aspire to and one that, for Nena, is tantalizingly within reach.
A Trip to Babar Market
I rarely leave the house with a bag these days. I manage with what the women of Heera Mandi have encouraged me to use for the sake of security: it’s a “Pakistani pocket,” otherwise known as a bra. If you wear one with a big enough cup size, you can fit just about anything in there. I take tissues, money, the key to my room, a contact lens case and a little bottle of contact lens fluid, my sketch map of the Walled City, and sometimes my mobile phone. It’s fortunate I wear a dupatta, otherwise I would look as if I have immense and very lumpy breasts.
Last night, though, I went out with my handbag. I needed it to hide the vodka I was taking to a party given by a woman who lives near Iqbal, and not even the most generous of bras could accommodate a half-liter bottle. After the party I called in at Maha’s house to take Ariba some more ointment for her boil. I lolled around on the bed eating paan in an unconvincing effort to fit in with the local scene. It’s like eating a mouthful of spiced grit. Maha flopped on the mattress with me after downing another bottle of Corex.
Ariba sat on the sofa looking shifty-eyed, with that all-too-fulsome grin I remembered from her previous scramblings through my belongings. My bag lay next to her but was hidden from my view. I did a mental check through its contents. There was no money for her to steal, so I calculated that she could safely get on with the hunt. It was only when I got home that I remembered my beloved fountain pen. Today, no one has any idea where it is. Ariba gives me a vacant smile and shakes her head when I ask if she’s seen it.
I speak quietly to Ariba, who is sitting in a filthy dress on one of the steps to the grand and long-locked doors of the courtyard’s old houses, her hair dangling in her eyes. I offer her a reward if she can find my pen: I will take her to Babar Market and buy her another new suit. She nods and says she’ll try. An hour later I’m sitting on her mother’s balcony. Ariba has thought more about the offer and comes to speak to me. Yes, she says, she will scour the house for the pen tonight and, she adds, “Can we go to Babar Market tomorrow afternoon? And, as well as the suit, I also need a new pair of shoes.”
The first thing I see this morning when I open the window is Ariba standing in the courtyard with a great grin on her face. She’s waving my pen at me. I’m happy to see the pen, but I’m also caught in a dilemma. I promised to take Ariba to Babar Market if she could find it, but I feel hurt that she stole from me. So I’ve decided to buy all Maha’s children a new outfit. In this way Ariba gets her new suit without it seeming like a reward for dishonesty.
We leave in a rickshaw once the pen is safely back in my room. Maha has stayed at home, too drowsy from the Corex to walk a straight line or speak without blurring her words. Babar Market is packed with women shopping in preparation for Eid. The ceilings of the shops and the spaces between stalls are festooned with tinsel and fairy lights, and the children stand in a huddle and gaze at the colors. Standing back from them for a moment, I see them properly and in context for the first time. They’re a wretched little bunch. Nisha looks like a patient at the TB hospital—the place she really should be. Ariba is utterly filthy, with crawling, matted hair, and she’s thrown out of shop after shop when the assistants see how the months of dirt have worked into the weave of her clothes. Sofiya is also dirty, her face caked in snot, her hair hanging to her nose. She’s not wearing any shoes. I’m escorting a group of children who look like street urchins—only the street urchins would be better behaved.
Mutazar is at his worst. The 5-year-old boy has the face of an angel but behaves like a devil. While we stand discussing the merits of fabrics, colors, and sizes of pretty suits, Mutazar rams our legs with his head. He screams and shouts and whines. And now he has found a better way to attract attention. One of the fairy lights surrounding the door to a shop has broken and Mutazar retrieves a piece of broken glass from the floor. He uses it to carve a deep and bloody channel in Nisha’s foot.
The girls are thrilled with their clothes. Nena has a modern, stylish denim shalwaar kameez: it looks like a pair of jeans and a long fitted tunic. Nisha has a “flapper”—a shorter tunic with bell-bottom trousers—in lush green velvet. And Ariba, radiant and clutching a plastic bag to her chest in the back of the rickshaw, has chosen a startling party-time shalwaar kameez in luminous pink with a lace and sequin dupatta.
At home Maha is a little more alert. She’s wearing a tracksuit and Nena is embarrassed because you can see her mother’s legs. Maha doesn’t notice her daughter’s discomfort. There’s only one thing on her mind: “Do I look fat?” she asks, doing a little jig on the spot.
I lie. Again. And I think of the cycles of unhappiness emanating from Maha’s misery: cycles that are eating up her children and will probably consume their children in turn.
“They Saw Me Dance…and They Died.”
This is a landmark evening: Ariba has been scrubbed, and her hair washed and combed. Her boil is beginning to heal and she looks like a different girl. Maha is moving briskly between the rooms, shouting orders, stirring the pot balanced on the gas ring, plunging her hands into a bucket of suds to rub at stains on the soaking clothes, and berating her daughters for their failings. Everyone is in trouble. Maha is trying to give up Corex and we are all suffering with her. It reminds me of Sewan Sharif.
Maha is raging about the absent Adnan. “He only comes to see me for kusi, and if he doesn’t have kusi he doesn’t give me any money.” She says it was the same after she gave birth to Mutazaar and Adnan elected not to visit. She had to go back into the business when he was only a few weeks old. Maha says it was hard, but there was no alternative. She worked in Defence, an expensive suburb, and left the children at home by themselves. The madam charged very high prices and kept half the fee herself. Her best girls could command around twenty thousand rupees a night—about $335. She lived well on this: she had beautiful clothes, a gorgeous house, and three cars. No one knew she was a madam because she was the charming wife of an army major.
Nisha is sulking on the mattress, her face set into a pinched, thinlipped grimace. Maha waves the cooking spoon at me. “She won’t wear the ghungaroo. The little kusi won’t even put them on.”
Nisha huffs into her dupatta. The now shining and glossy Ariba stands by the door. It’s her usual stance—only half in the room—so she can make a quick getaway if things seem tense. “She’s a gandi girl,” Maha shrieks and points at Ariba. “She stank. I had to clean her with a brush. People in the bazaar are saying my daughter is gandi.” Ariba turns on her heels and flees.
Nena is, as usual, taking the route of compromise and cooperation, and is trying to score points by cleaning. She’s crouching down, moving along the edges of the room, brushing up bits of old food. She stops to put on a tape of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” This is the girls’ current favorite song, but for some reason Maha has taken against it tonight.
She erupts with an enormous shout. “Switch it off. Get on and help me. When I was your age I was in the bazaar and dancing for my food and my clothes. I had lots and lots of men. I danced every night and I had so much money. I was rich. The men, they saw me dance…and they died.”
Nena carries on brushing, never lifting her eyes from the floor.
Christmas
The Christmas service was supposed to start at half past ten. This was optimistic: when I opened the door at twenty-five past the pastor was sitting alone in his church dressed in his finest Western suit and shiniest shoes. An hour later the congregation is still trickling in, laughing and waving at their friends and relatives. Tariq and his family arrive toward the end of the service and launch into the singing. Tariq is unstinting with the tambourine and with his smiles, and we leave afterward in a jolly, tightly packed group, the women urging me to keep close so that no stranger can come near me.
Tariq and the other Christians who work in Heera Mandi live on the edge of the red-light area in a compound that’s entered through a beautifully carved wooden gate. It’s been there for centuries—the entrance to a grand haveli. It must have been glorious decades ago, but it has long since fallen into a shambles of powdery bricks and rotting wood: a ramshackle mess inhabited by dozens of families.
At street level the front of what is left of the haveli is divided into lots of small shops selling shoes, food, and spare parts. Up above the din and the chaos of the street, fifty yards of perfectly proportioned, exquisitely carved windows, balconies, and trellises run the length of the building. Most are piled with the residents’ possessions and drying clothes. Above the balconies, yet more elaborate windows are crowned by a cornice of bricks and fancy plasterwork that, long ago, must have been impressive but now looks as if it’s about to topple into the street.
Tiny, single-storey brick houses have been built inside the courtyard of the haveli. Most have a single room and are in desperate need of repair. Narrow passageways run between the houses. Tariq’s house is a low, three-roomed building that he shares with his parents, his wife, and their three children. The family has lived in this impoverished, scrupulously clean home for fifty years. Tariq’s parents look ancient even though he himself is still a young man: the last of their seven children. His mother is crippled, and her daughters-in-law take turns massaging her legs to give her some relief from the pain. She laughs a lot and wants to know about my children and why I have only three.
Tariq’s father is blind. He has milky-white eyes in a worn, wrinkled version of his son’s gentle face. I like him even though he disconcerts me by belching with astonishing force. He’s been blind for five years. Like his son, he was a sweeper and was employed to clean the sewers in the old city. One day he came across a pocket of chemicals while he was underground: they’d seeped, or been discarded, from a goldsmith’s shop. They burnt his eyes totally and irrecoverably. In Pakistan, there is no insurance, no compensation, and no disability benefit. There is no one to help him but his sons.
He doesn’t complain but sits smiling on a charpoy. He thinks life in Lahore is better for people like him nowadays. His grandfather came to the city from a village and he worked as a soldier for the British. Lahore was different then. “There weren’t so many Muslims and I can remember, when I was a boy, that there was jungle around Lahore. Now there’s nothing left,” he adds with a sigh.
The sweepers want to hear about the differences between my home and Pakistan. They’re most interested in the English refuse collection system, and they gather around to marvel, shaking their heads and looking from one to another in disbelief. I explain that English households gather up their rubbish and put it in bins, and then it’s collected every week by the council. They’re incredulous.
Tariq’s wife and her sister-in-law are busy cooking in their best Christmas clothes. I’d help them but I’ve been asked to sing English Christmas carols. I’ve been practicing for days but it’s a poor effort. It’s hard to sing “Silent Night” or “Little Town of Bethlehem” to the accompaniment of a harmonium—especially when the musician, who is Tariq’s very gifted brother—has no previous knowledge of the melody.
The old lady thinks it’s good and gurgles through the performance. She carries on gurgling through the beautifully prepared meal, sucking bits of soft meat off the pieces of chicken before passing them to her sons, who can use their teeth on the meat still clinging to the bones. Tariq helps his father with his meal: adjusting his plate; scooping up the food that falls onto the charpoy, and wiping the rice from the old man’s chin and clothes.
A succession of guests arrive at the house bringing little gifts for the family: a cake, a card, or a small toy for the children. They tell us about a beautiful crib in a house on the other side of the haveli, so after the meal, we leave the old people and go to look at this wondrous crib. The house belongs to an extended family with fifteen children. The room is tidy: there are plates in a wire rack, a frequently patched quilt on the bed, and photographs of Indian and Pakistani film stars have been cut out of magazines and stuck into plastic picture frames. The walls and the ceiling have been covered in rolls of white paper especially for Christmas. Tariq says it makes it new and pure and clean, like baby Jesus.
The crib is in the corner of the room, illuminated by a single naked lightbulb. The family has built a stable with cardboard boxes and filled it with handfuls of straw. The children crowd around enchanted by the Christmas scene. The pottery figures are arranged just so: Mary is gazing at her tiny son; the animals are dotted around; and the shepherds and the wise men are kneeling in adoration, each one still wrapped in a thick, slightly opaque plastic bag.
“Sister,” Tariq smiles and shakes his head in amazement. “Isn’t it lovely.”
“Yes,” I agree. There is no doubt.
Eid-al-Fitr
Maha’s catering has been upset by the moon. The Islamic calendar isn’t entirely predictable. Unlike the Western calendar, which is determined by the solar year, the Islamic calendar follows the lunar year. Eid-al-Fitr begins only when the new moon has been spotted, and although the astronomers have a fairly good idea when this will happen, there’s a degree of flexibility. Last night could have been Chand Raat—Moon Night—but cloud cover meant the moon didn’t appear, so today all of Maha’s celebratory food is sitting in the fridge.
Tonight will be Chand Raat, the night before the biggest holiday in the Muslim calendar. In social terms it is the Islamic equivalent of Christmas Eve. The children are excited, all the women are cooking, presents are being wrapped, houses are being decorated, and the markets are busy with last-minute shoppers. Nisha has covered my feet and hands with mehindi—henna decorations, especially for Eid. The combination of Nisha’s lack of expertise and my pale skin has an unfortunate effect: patches of color that were supposed to be stars and flowers look like a virulent skin disease.
Babar Market is heaving. Fat matrons in black burqas are being particularly forceful in their use of the battering-ram technique to pass through the crowds. Maha haggles over some fake gold and diamonds and comes away pleased with the deal. In the bazaar we stop by the date and nut stall to buy great bags of pistachios, namkeen, dates, and peanuts. We’re all so excited: we’re going to have a feast.
Eid morning dawns warm and bright. The Badshahi Masjid is packed and the hundreds of worshippers who have been unable to enter the mosque are praying on the grass. Below Iqbal’s house cars are parked haphazardly in the road creating an impassable jam. An expensive new Japanese saloon has been left without its handbrake on and has rolled into the side of another car. A four-wheel-drive vehicle is parked very precisely in the middle of the road so that only the slenderest of pedestrians can squeeze by.
The bits of Heera Mandi that are seen by the middle- and upper-class worshipers of Lahore this Eid have been purified so that they don’t cause offense. The park and the streets have been swept and the addicts have been rounded up and shipped out of town. They’ve been dumped so far away from the masjid that it will take them days to find their way home. The authorities have organized an exceptionally vigorous bout of cleansing, and a lot of powdered lime has been scattered in the smelliest places. Even so, I’m not sure that the owners of those polished Hondas and Toyotas would be pleased to know they are parked in the customary urinal.
Balloon sellers, beggars, and ice-cream carts are poised around the entrances to the mosque, waiting for prayers to finish. From Iqbal’s roof terrace we can see the lines of people in the quadrangle standing, kneeling, and bending in prayer: a broad field of light, bright colors. We can hear the prayers of the mullahs and a soft swish of sound as thousands of men, women, and children sink to their knees.
The fat clusters of balloons bob up and down as the worshippers pick up their prayer mats and begin to stream out of the mosque. Most people have come on foot, and they skirt the edges of the red-light area. They are ordinary people in their very finest clothes. Lots of the outfits are new. The fabrics are stiff with starch and their owners are self-consciously proud. The children have freshly washed hair and shiny faces. They’re on their best behavior. This Eid day at the Badshahi Masjid is a joyous spectacle.
Shamsa lives in the corner of the courtyard. She didn’t attend morning prayers; she didn’t even wake up until midday. She stays with a Bangladeshi woman and her husband. The woman is in her late thirties, with bad, broken teeth and weak eyes, and she’s too old and thin to make money from the business herself. Her husband is a small, round man. His hair is speckled with gray and white at the temples, but he keeps his moustache blue-black with dye and lavishes attention on it so that it’s clipped and brushed and glossed into rigid order. He devotes the same care to the gun that hangs from the ceiling in a polished leather holster.
The couple pimp girls from the house. One is the woman’s daughter.
“I had four children,” she explains looking at a pretty child playing in the room with a gang of others, “but this is the only one left. The rest died when they were babies.”
The daughter is about 12 but very small and delicate. She has the body of a 9-year-old but a sexual precociousness that could make her pass for 30. She has full lips, wears a lot of makeup, and totters around on platform shoes that raise her to about five feet tall. It’s disturbing to watch her play with the younger children because she moves so provocatively. She has been “dancing” for about a year and is the “baby” pimped by her father on the street corner. Not all the babies that the pimps offer are quite as young. They often try to pass off older girls and young women as younger than they really are. It’s good for business to say a 20-year-old is actually only 13.
Shamsa is their other source of income. First they claim that she is the woman’s sister, but half an hour later the story is different: she’s their niece. At other times she’s a friend. Despite what they say I’m sure she’s not closely related to the couple.
She bursts out of the washroom, delirious with happiness: she’s volcanic. It’s Eid Day, she sings, and we’re going for a walk.
“Where?” I ask
“The bazaar. Many, many places,” she shrieks and twirls around the room. She runs to the window and, snatching a mirror from the madam, begins to apply another coat of makeup: thick eyeliner, pink lipstick and then, bizarrely, a shiny slab of dazzling, glittering green gel to her lips and eyes.
She drags me down the spiral stairwell, chatting incessantly about how happy she is. She’s wearing dramatic jewelry, a flowery white-and-purple shalwaar kameez, and a dupatta draped over her shoulder. I shrink beside her as she links arms with me and talks about her rich men friends.
She stomps through the streets ignoring the looks of the men who are pausing to gape. For once no one is noticing me. They are looking at Shamsa—dupatta-less and in green glitter lip gloss. I’m seriously confused. She doesn’t seem to hear the comments the men are making, and she hasn’t noticed the way the bazaar is grinding to a halt around her. No women behave this way in Heera Mandi.
It is, I grant, a special day and everyone is wearing their best. Perhaps Shamsa is just excited by the carnival atmosphere in the galis and the bazaars. The restaurants are doing a roaring trade: the benches in the street are full, and the snack merchants and balloon sellers are busy with customers. Little girls dressed in brightly colored dresses edged with bits of nylon lace hold hands and look alternately thrilled and terrified. Shouting, giggling teenage girls have been let out wearing makeup and high-heeled shoes that stop them moving more than a few feet from their homes. Everyone wants a ride in a tanga and the lucky boys get to ride on a horse. Youths gallop bareback through the streets, and I’m sure someone is going to be trampled. Younger boys sit nervously on saddles and are led around at a trot.
We stop at the juice stall opposite the church and sit on stools in full view of the bazaar. It’s the season for deliciously tart pomegranate juice, but it’s hard to appreciate when you have an audience of rapt men. Shamsa is brazen, laughing with the juice walla and looking him right in the eye. He’s having a good joke with her and she’s enjoying it. I can hardly tell what she’s saying. The conversation is hard work because she is speaking in Punjabi and when we talk in Urdu her accent is thick. She says she came from Multan—another important but smaller city in Punjab—but it’s better here: the men are richer and there are more of them.
Now we’re off to the fort and she wants me to get my camera. The fort is full of families and packs of youths on day trips. Today, the star attraction is not the exquisite Shisha Mahal—the Mirrored Palace—but Shamsa lying on the grass or leaning against a tree as if she’s doing a photo shoot for a risqué Indian film. She’s oblivious to the stampede of teenage boys and men around her.
As we walk back down to the fort’s entrance she looks at me for a moment and says that I’m a sharif woman because I’m wearing my dupatta. She sounds almost wistful—and then forgets about it to marvel over three Western people who are looking at the board that gives information on the fort’s history. We stand near them. They are British: two women and a man. The women are wearing shalwaar kameez but they don’t have dupattas. There’s nothing unusual about that. What Shamsa finds so stunning is that one of the women is black.
“Look. Look,” she says in amused horror. “Look at the color. Look at the color. She’s so black.” She thinks it’s funny and a bit sad.
We’re off again leaving the black woman to suffer her way around the fort unaware of her deep misfortune. Shamsa is taking me for tea and sweets. We share a plate of halva in a tea shop, and she talks at me nonstop in Punjabi. She hasn’t realized I understand only half of what she’s saying. It doesn’t seem to matter: she’s really pleased. So is the owner of the tea shop: he says the snacks are on him and he’ll see her later.
A feast is spread out on a white chador on the floor of Maha’s best room: platters of chicken fried with tomatoes, chili, and ginger; bowls of mint and cucumber stirred into creamy yogurt; a great pile of freshly baked rotiya and naan; and a deep dish of tender lamb smothered in a rich, dark brown gravy. Maha is fussing around, excitedly handing out plates to guests and insisting that they should take yet another helping whether they’re still hungry or not. All the family are in their best clothes—even Ariba looks presentable in a clean shalwaar kameez, rushing back and forth between the rooms with two of her cousins, the sons of Maha’s dead sister. Maha grabs the boys whenever they pass by, squeezing them and pressing them to her bosom, her eyes awash with tears as she ruffles their hair. They live with their father, a man from outside Heera Mandi who, to the eternal horror of his official wife, took them in when their mother died. Maha says their stepmother is a bitch who treats the boys cruelly, sending them out on bitter winter evenings without a coat or any hot food in their bellies.
Visitors have been arriving all afternoon. Most are people poorer than Maha who have come to wish her Eid Mubarak—Happy Eid—and to pay their respects. The tailor is here with his brother; the Pathani woman from upstairs sits next to her children, fidgeting and looking impatient; and a couple of scrawny, dark-skinned sweeper ladies crouch by the door forever smiling. Maha gives them Eid presents: gifts of money and brightly colored glass bangles dusted with glitter. More visitors stream through the door and Maha rearranges her own gifts—the perfume and chocolates from me—on top of the fridge so that everyone can see they are from abroad. She’s enjoying playing host, enjoying her little acts of kindness and the glee of the sweeper women as they leave with a hundred rupees. She catches her nephew’s arm as he races by and presses a thousand rupees ($17) into his hand. “For warm coats for you and your brother,” she instructs. This generosity will cost Maha dearly when she can’t pay next month’s rent, but for now she doesn’t care about the future. She’s happy in the moment.
“It’s Eid,” she laughs, “and I’m with my family and my sister’s children.”
For once, the Corex sits unopened behind the fridge.