(HOT SEASON: APRIL 2001)
Muharram is the most important month in the Shia religious calendar and four large canopies stretch over the end of Fort Road, covering sabils, or water stalls. They’re held in place by stakes and ropes that ensnare pedestrians and garrote men on motorbikes. Farther up the road, opposite the dump, lie other smaller shelters: filthy tattered sheets and blankets hooked over the railings, their edges weighed down with rocks. Bundles of rags are strewn along the length of the wall. Some of the bundles twitch, creating a buzz as the flies lift into the air. Others are immobile and surrounded by bits of animal—a chicken head, a goat hoof—dragged from the rubbish dump by the local dogs. Some of the piles of rags stink so badly that their contents—animal or human—must have died some time ago.
The picture outside Iqbal’s house is cleaner and greener. The terra-cotta pots overflow with blooms. Every morning and late each afternoon one of the boys working in the restaurant waters them and sprinkles the road with water from a hose. It is early evening and the tiled floor of the roof terrace has also been dampened: for a brief time the water stills Lahore’s fine powdered dust and cools the air as it evaporates.
The sun is a mellow orange: a crisp, perfect circle sinking in the gap between a minaret and the domes of the Badshahi Masjid. The bamboo scaffolding that has stood in the principal arch for months has gone, and if I shift my vision fractionally to screen out the addicts camped opposite the dump, I can see only perfection in the beauty of the mosque and the setting sun. From this angle there can be no better place to be.
The azan is called and the fast-disappearing sun tinges a few high clouds with pink. The canopies below us are being lit. Behind the mosque, far in the distance, the neon advertising signs have been switched on, blighting the timelessness of the view.
Dozens more sabils have been erected in the streets of the mohalla. They are distributing refreshments in memory of the thirst of the Shia martyrs. On the corner, the drug dealer’s sabil is decked in a green awning, and in front of it are two giant shiny silver panje—Shia hands—cradled by the Islamic crescent. The ensemble is illuminated by regal chandeliers in patriotic green and white.
Almost immediately below me a canopy covers a grand sabil—more sophisticated than the drug dealer’s because it serves its water with chunks of ice chipped from a mammoth glacier. The ice block and the water are set on a giant red cloth, and a fat man sits waiting to serve the pilgrims. Loud religious music blares out from a poor-quality tape deck; an emotional man sings about the martyred Hussain with the beat of the music provided not by drums but by the sound of men beating their chests. The sabil also boasts a picture gallery: a scene of a battlefield scattered with body parts, a rain of blood as one of the Shia martyrs is sliced into thousands of pieces by a whirlwind sword. A little way toward Roshnai Gate, the middle-aged woman from next door is offering snacks under her own faded canopy. She’s gaining religious merit. Dressed in black and shoeless, she is suffering with the martyrs. It’s drawn in the sadness of every line on her face.
A crowd is gathering around Iqbal as he sits on the roof terrace. He’s signing official papers recognizing and so legitimizing the identities of those gathered around his table. He regularly acts as a referee, guarantor, and witness for many of the people of Heera Mandi because Iqbal is like them and yet he’s not. He’s from this community, but he is also a professor at the National Academy of Art and a nationally renowned artist. To the people who live beyond the mohalla, he will always be the tough, streetwise son of a courtesan who grew up in a brothel and carried a gun to college, but he’s still recognized in a way that the rest of Heera Mandi never will be. He can put his name on a document and it will carry weight: he has an address, a title, and a career.
There are so many of these signing sessions in Iqbal’s house because authentic documentation is hard to obtain in Heera Mandi. The children born to the women of the mohalla don’t have fathers: there’s no family name to put on birth certificates, passports, and identity cards because, in such a male-dominated society, children without fathers are not supposed to exist. When Heera Mandi’s fatherless children encounter the bureaucratic world, Iqbal signs their papers to prove that these semiliterate and illiterate people are real.
“We are the same,” he says to me as he waves them goodbye. He’s looking over the railings into the busy street below and smiles with a wry resignation. “I don’t know who my father was either. Perhaps he was a painter too.”
The Shia and the Sunni
Islam is fractured into many groups and the most important divide is between the Sunni and Shia sects. Worldwide, the Shia are in a minority. Most live in Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and in Iran, where they form the religious government of the ayatollahs. In Pakistan, only 10 to 20 percent of the population is Shia, and they believe themselves to be persecuted and discriminated against by the Sunni majority. Pakistan is wracked by sectarian and political conflict, and both Sunni and Shia terror groups operate in the country. Karachi is the scene of much bloodletting, but serious sectarian tension exists here in Punjab. In Pakistan, Islamic extremists fight the West and they fight their fellow Muslims too.
The Shia-Sunni rift opened shortly after the birth of Islam and has been unbridgeable ever since. The events surrounding the rift are replayed every year during Muharram, accentuating the sectarian divide and stirring the passions that sustain it. At the heart of the split was a dispute over who should lead Islam after the death of the prophet Mohammed. One group, who became known as the Sunnis, favored a nonhereditary head elected by scholars and community leaders. Another group argued that members of the Prophet’s family should lead the faith. This group rallied around Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet; they became known as the partisans of Ali, or the Shia.
Ali eventually became caliph but was later assassinated. His sons Hasan and Hussain—grandsons of the Prophet through his daughter Fatima—were then forcibly prevented from succeeding their father. Hasan was poisoned, and Hussain set out from Mecca with his family and a small band of followers to overthrow the existing caliph, Yazid, a man who had a well-established reputation as a debauched tyrant. They failed. At Karbala, on the banks of the Euphrates in modern-day Iraq, they came under siege from Yazid’s forces from the second to the tenth day of Muharram. The children, deprived of water in the terrible heat, were said to have cried in desperation while the army of the evil Yazid remained deaf to their suffering.
On the tenth of Muharram, an overwhelmingly larger force slaughtered Hussain and many of his followers. According to Shia history, Hussain’s infant son was killed by an arrow and his surviving family was taken to Yazid’s court, where the victor crowed over Hussain’s severed head and beat it with a cane. While they were held captive in Yazid’s palace another of Hussain’s children died, and Zeyneb, his sister, held the first majlis, or lamentation assembly. These majalis continue to this day. The first ten days of Muharram, marking the anniversary of the siege and the battle, are the most important of the Shia calendar. In Heera Mandi they are days of majalis, processions, and heartbreaking gloom because most people living here are Shia.
The suffering and martyrdom of Karbala define the Shia. They believe themselves to be under attack, and every year they grieve for their martyred leaders. Part of this mourning is matam, an act of ritual lamentation that takes different forms: in Lahore the two most common forms are hath ka matam, which involves beating the chest with the open palms, and zanjiri matam, self-flagellation, in which the back is whipped with blades strung on metal chains.
Performing matam is a declaration of Shiism, reaffirming the community of the faithful and strengthening it against outside threats. Muharram remembrances among the Shias of Heera Mandi bind this community in a way few other things do. If a family wants to impress visitors, it shows them the scars on their men’s backs. Relatives describe how much they bled and report that the only thing they put on the open wounds was oil. Possessing scars is like having a chest full of medals: proof of devotion and masculinity. As soon as a boy can walk he’s presented with chains and blades with which to practice. Unlike the grown-up versions, the blades are blunt and made from lightweight aluminium or plastic. Families are proud to see their little boys lashing their backs and consider it a sad day when men grow old and stop performing matam. Iqbal said his family was disappointed and his wife a little irked when, at last, he hung up his flails.
The more orthodox Sunni majority in Pakistan look down upon such rituals as semibarbaric. Ashura, the Night of Murders commemorating the final struggle and deaths at Karbala, has frequently triggered tensions between Sunnis and Shias. Today, in the old city, there’s fear that passion will spill over into clashes, so police have been deployed in every bazaar in which Muharram observances are held.
Black is the color of Muharram. The most religious of the Shia wear nothing but black for the first, sad ten days of the month, and prostitutes with any status to maintain will refuse to wear makeup. Half a dozen local men have already approached me to thank me for wearing black too. They say they appreciate the respect I’m showing to them and their martyrs.
Chains are important Muharram accessories. Maha says they’re reminders of the siege at Karbala, the imprisonment by the vicious Yazid, and the suffering of all Shias. There are different designs on the same basic theme: a thick metal band is fastened around the neck. Several long chains are attached to it and reach down to the ankles where they are fastened by other metal rings. The ailing Nisha has thin, lightweight ones that are far too long and constantly trip her up. In contrast, strong, devout, and particularly macho young men drag around the bazaar in heavy, industrial-grade chains.
Shia and Sufi rituals structure the lives of traditional brothel families and provide a refuge and a source of comfort. Islam is something they can depend on and something that will be of greater personal significance as they age. They certainly seem to spend more time on religious activities as they approach 40; they carry prayer beads and pray more. They don’t go to the mosque to do this but worship at home on their prayer mats. Women aren’t usually allowed into the mosques at prayer time, either because of religious edict or social practice, but they can go in at other times providing they’re veiled. The last time I visited the majestic Badshahi Masjid a group of women were there on a day trip from their village: they had brought their offspring—inquisitive toddlers and energetic children—together with a large bag containing a picnic lunch and blankets, which they spread on the steps leading to the glories of the central dome.
Sufis like Shahbaz Qalandar and Data Ganj Bakhsh figure prominently in the Shia Islam of Heera Mandi. Local women visit the tombs of religious figures, taking offerings of food to be distributed to the poor. Everyone appears to have an unswayable belief in charms and amulets, and the members of the Prophet’s family are loved to such a degree that they are believed to possess divine powers. They can intercede with God and help work miracles. The metal panje—the mystical hands—that rise high above the Walled City are protective: the five fingers representing the Prophet, Ali, Fatima, Hasan, and Hussain. In Shia folklore the tazia that are carried during Muharram processions are thought to be blessed, and Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, attends every majlis in person.
The deeply felt religiosity of most women in Heera Mandi isn’t matched by a strong command of religious doctrine. In Shahi Mohalla the stories of Karbala and Shia suffering have assumed a life of their own, and bear only a vague similarity to the records and interpretations in scholarly books. I’ve sat through impassioned monologues as women describe the vile tortures perpetrated upon the martyrs. They pore over highly stylized pictures of the bloody Karbala battlefield and point out important individuals. They talk about the martyrs as if they’re well-loved family members whose sufferings happened just recently, not thirteen hundred years ago. All give careful attention to the trials of the martyrs’ womenfolk. Maha weeps as she recounts how they were stripped of their veils, but bravely struggled to preserve their honor by covering their faces with their hair. Shiism, the religion of a stigmatized sect that believes itself under siege, is particularly suited to Heera Mandi; it complements life in this mohalla by giving a spiritual meaning to a widespread sense of isolation and injustice.
Charity
It takes two men to lift the round, smoke-blackened metal cauldrons called deg that line the courtyard. The cooks slide poles under a small lip on the top so that they can lift the pots without burning themselves. They stagger with the weight, their teeth clenched. The pots are balanced on stones and charcoal fires lit underneath. Once the contents begin to bubble, an assortment of plates is piled on top of the deg to form a lid. Red coals are heaped around the rim and base, and they are left to cook unattended for an hour or more until the mixtures are stirred with giant metal paddles and spooned out to the hungry. Throughout the first ten days of Muharram there are dozens of pots sitting among the coals on the streets of Heera Mandi.
A basic type of food is given to the poor: deg full of rice, chick peas, and perhaps the odd piece of gristly mutton. Better-quality meals are given to other families in the area. The food is often excellent: the standard of the meat, the freshness of the vegetables, the fragrance of the rice, and the lavishness with which the ghee is ladled in are all an indication of status. Our next-door neighbor is distributing rice, peas, and pulses to the poor tonight. Three deg, one containing meat, another the best rice, and a third a delicious, thick bean soup, have been prepared for the community. Her children will take this food on plates to other local families. And they, in turn, will offer food another day. Their honor depends on not being seen as mean.
Those who can afford to, hire cooks who arrive with their deg and big bundles of wood and sacks of charcoal and set about cooking in the streets. The cooks are from the Nai caste—barbers who double as caterers—although the best do nothing but cook throughout the year. They provide the food for weddings and anniversaries, and they do a good business in Heera Mandi during Muharram. The highest caliber are in great demand because people with a reputation to foster do not want to be known for serving up substandard fare. Sharif Nai is the best cook in Heera Mandi, and absolutely everyone wants to get a taste of what he’s cooking.
When Heera Mandi thrived and the customers were rich and plentiful, there was intense competition over feasts during Muharram and Eid. During Eid-al-Adha it’s customary for a family to slaughter a fattened goat. In the past—even ten or fifteen years ago—more than one might be killed. The gossip would circulate that someone was slaughtering two goats, and in an effort to outdo its rivals, a household would counter by killing three.
In her days of earning lakhs of rupees Maha fed the poor and the entire area with a regal munificence. It is still remembered. How things have changed. Maha can barely afford to feed her children now that she is 35 and fat and her husband doesn’t call. This gives many women satisfaction: they talk about it in lowered voices, professing a concern I don’t think they feel.
Shamsa’s New Family
Shamsa dances down the main road to meet me with laughter, shouts, and great breath-stealing hugs. She moved and has a new family: new aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces. This girl has lots and lots of relatives whom she barely knows. She takes me to a room at the top of the house, a kind of lean-to on the roof. It’s padlocked and she’s obviously proud of it, swinging open the doors with a flourish. She looks at my face intently, and I don’t have to feign surprise. The room is arranged very carefully. There’s a sofa, a chair, a gray metal wardrobe with big gold hinges; the charpoy has a foam mattress and is covered in a cosy, fluffy green blanket. A shelf is smothered in red plastic flowers. It’s not really Shamsa’s own room: it’s one she rents from the landlord by the hour for her business. She sleeps downstairs on a mat in a room with other women.
Shamsa’s behavior is still very unusual. She puts on some loud music, drags a fan to the side of the bed, and switches it to maximum. Then she goes out of the room to speak to a customer. She returns a few moments later and asks me to look after two hundred rupees ($3). A thin, middle-aged man comes in beaming and asks me if I want hashish or something better. Maybe the “something better” is what keeps Shamsa in such a strange but happy mood.
When Shamsa returns she tells me that she came to Lahore five years ago with her family but that she no longer knows where they are. I tell her about my children and she grows quiet. “I have a baby,” she says.
“A boy or girl?”
“A girl.”
“Where is she?” I ask.
“She is in the sky. She died. I don’t know why.”
A few seconds later Shamsa is back at full volume, pulling me off the bed and telling me that we are going for a walk—another embarrassing parade though Heera Mandi, with Shamsa chatting to men and looking them directly in the eye. Her head is bare, her dupatta slung jauntily over her shoulder, and I’m intensely uncomfortable. Her behavior is particularly insulting during Muharram. For the next few years I’ll have to walk around these streets, and I can’t afford to have my reputation compromised in this manner. I like Shamsa—she’s refreshingly different and a loose cannon in a very rigid social context—but I’m not sure if she’s actively challenging an unfair society and making a stand for women or if she’s just utterly mad. Whatever the case, being associated with such a wild young woman puts me in danger.
“All the men are looking,” I say.
“Men are like that,” she replies.
“Please wear your dupatta,” I plead.
She won’t.
Majalis
Maha’s immensely fat cousin is hosting an evening majlis to which select local women have been invited. The cousin has a house near the sweepers’ church; she’s set up a sabil in the street that looks like a brightly lit little stage two feet off the ground, with colorful curtains and a canopy. Forty or fifty women are sitting cross-legged on the floor in her downstairs room. They are dressed in black, singing religious songs, and looking disconsolate. A few are crying. It’s like a funeral. A group of boys are irreverently playing tag in the street, but the women surrounding me haven’t noticed them, or the fight between two stubborn rickshaw drivers whose vehicles are locked together in what remains of the road. The women comfort one another as they sing. Every now and again someone glances up for inspiration at the religious pictures stuck all over the wall: highly stylized depictions of the body-strewn battlefield at Karbala; drawings of Mullah Ali looking strikingly handsome, with a full black beard and smoky eyes; a big colorful poster of Abraham and photographs of the tombs of Sufi saints. The food is served; the singing stops but there isn’t the faintest trace of a smile.
The local community shows its religiosity and its wealth by hosting these majalis and performing the charity mandated by Islam. The better-off also organize parades, hiring a horse and all its trappings, and commissioning a tazia. Some of the participants in the rituals wish to pay their respects to the parade’s patron, but many are simply desperate for food. There are more parades, more matam, more food distributions, and more majalis in Heera Mandi than anywhere else in the Walled City. In part this is because there are far more Shias here than anywhere else in Lahore, but it might also be that the people of Heera Mandi feel a greater need to prove their religious and social worth. They are guaranteed to put on an impressive show.
Another Muharram parade is passing through Heera Mandi tonight. Tarranum Chowk is packed and the road to Bhati Gate is lined with women as the procession advances in an energetic rush of men and horse. Alam, replicas of the battle standards of Karbala, take the lead. A great metal panja draped with bright shawls follows, then a smaller panja on a long pole wound with tinsel, flowers, and silky scarves. A white horse snorts as it passes by covered in finery, and following it is a tazia festooned in flowers. The women around me gasp and wail and some, overcome with emotion, begin to weep at the sight of the tazia. I ask someone what it is and they cry, “The cradle. The cradle. The cradle for the baby.” An old lady takes my arm. “They killed him. They left him for seven days without food and milk. He was crying and they wouldn’t give him water. And then they killed him. They fired an arrow into his little throat.” She holds her head back and puts three fingers into her mouth to illustrate the method. The women around us nod. It’s as if they have seen it happen themselves to a baby they loved dearly. This may be a confused memory of the martyrs of Karbala and the tortures inflicted on the family of the Prophet, but it is horribly real to the grieving women.
Hundreds of men are singing from song sheets outside the cinema, sad songs about martyrdom, death, and the killing of innocents and the just. Now I’m weeping too.
Zuljenah
Everyone from Heera Mandi is taking part in the ziyarat, the seeing and doing of holy things. To be accepted in Heera Mandi I also have to participate in the memory of Karbala. For the first ten days of the month we must watch the men beating themselves, we must touch models of tombs and cribs, and we must admire a colorfully dressed white horse as if it is divine. The horse represents Zuljenah, the horse of Hussain, which returned riderless to the Shia camp: a witness to the bloody martyrdom. This animal can reduce adult men to tears and women to a state of hysteria.
Maha is distributing refreshments to the poor lining up in an orderly queue. She bought a large drum of milk that’s been sweetened and flavored with cardamom and nutmeg: one of her male relatives is overseeing the pouring of the milk while she looks on dressed in her best black chador. Along the main road a hundred or more men are performing matam before a beautifully adorned Zuljenah. Their bare chests are a bright shade of pink and some of the more vigorous have pounded away the top layer of skin so that their raw flesh is glistening in the sun, the blood running in rivulets over their stomachs.
The horse is well trained. It snorts with rolling eyes and stamps its restless hooves as the believers place their hands on his jeweled coat and kiss the flowers hanging over his back. I’m obliged to kiss his flanks, and the old man holding the bridle smiles and exclaims, “You’re a Shia!” He hands me a fistful of bruised, slimy petals that have been made holy by their proximity to the horse’s muzzle. My companions watch in satisfaction as I eat the blessed flowers. Happily, they do not taste of horse.
Ashura
The old city is quiet on the eve of Ashura, the climax of the Muharram commemorations. Most shops are closed, their metal grills pulled down and their wooden shutters padlocked. Rickshaws, vans, and motorbikes no longer clog the galis. Police barricades cordon off the main bazaars and chowks, and great tumbles of rusty barbed wire wind through the main streets. It’s calm and peaceful, and boys have transformed the normally congested city into dozens of cricket pitches.
Ariba is accompanying me on my walk. She saunters barefoot by my side. I wonder if her lack of shoes is a kind of Muharram ritual of suffering and sacrifice. She’s never struck me as a religious girl, so I ask her. She tells me that her shoes broke a few weeks ago, but that her mother says she doesn’t have the money to buy new ones. Maha, however, has had enough money to buy me a new black cotton suit like her own especially for Muharram. I wince at the girl’s broad, rough feet on the road and promise to take her to Babar Market for some new shoes as soon as Ashura is over.
We stop at one of the few open shops where an audience has assembled to watch sheep being butchered. Ariba’s interest wavers when she spots a man selling gola—ices—from a cart on the opposite side of the road. Golas are a favorite with the children now that the hot season is here. The gola walla shaves pieces off a block of ice with a plane set into a wooden frame, packs the ice into a mold, and pushes in a sharp stick as a handle. The lump of reconstituted ice is pulled out of the mold and drenched in the syrup of your choice—something bright and wholly artificial—and the top of the fluorescent gola is dipped into sweetened yogurt.
A loud slurping accompanies our progress around the city. Ariba is relaxed and on familiar territory. She’s not fussing with her dupatta. She walks with a streetwise confidence. She knows the nooks and the crannies of the lanes, taking me into the gloom of narrow alleys that snake through the city. At their base they are four or five feet wide, just enough room for two people to pass if they press against the walls. But above us, three or four storeys high, the buildings twist in, one upon the other, so that in places there’s only a three-foot gap between the houses and the sun never reaches beyond the windows of the topmost storey.
We meet one of Maha’s many relatives near the bazaar, and he accompanies us through Tibbi Gali. For once the place is closed. Most of the doors are locked and only a couple of women are discreetly looking for business. Nazia’s madam sits on her doorstep, but Nazia isn’t here. She has gone away and will be back after Ashura. As we emerge into the shuttered shoe market, Maha’s relative tuts and tells me it’s a dangerous place. “It’s too dirty,” he says. “The women there cost only two hundred rupees.” I suppose it would have been less dirty if they, like his female relatives, had charged two thousand ($34).
In a side street, Malika, Tasneem’s landlady, walks toward us with a group of khusras. All are dressed in silky black shalwaar kameez. They look like a flock of big, shiny crows flapping up the lane. Malika caws and gives me an intense beady look. She asks when I am going to visit. Ariba stares at her in amazement because Malika has seriously overdone the scarlet lipstick and diamanté, and even Ariba, with her great fondness for glitz, knows that the look isn’t in keeping with Muharram. I’m glad when they rustle and squawk off home.
The biggest procession starts on the evening of the ninth of Muharram and involves the entire inner city, skirting Heera Mandi as it winds its way slowly along the streets and galis, stopping for Zuljenah to visit mosques and mausoleums and the houses of the better-off. It will continue throughout the night and finish late on the tenth, on Ashura.
Masses of people crowd into the part of the old city where the procession begins. Most of them are men jostling in the dark and pushing through bottlenecks in the galis. Maha, Nena, and I squeeze our way into a mausoleum where two hundred women and a few frail old men are waiting in comparative safety. Everyone is performing matam: beating their chests and chanting the name of Hussain. A shout from the entrance tells us Zuljenah is coming, and there’s an immediate wail and a dramatic surge in the chanting and the force of the beating. It’s difficult to believe that the horse can enter this packed room, but it does. Zuljenah jumps and bucks through the door as the women cry, fighting to get close to it. Maha elbows her way into the mob and I lose sight of her. Nena stays close to me, but she’s not aware of me by her side: she’s looking in adoration at Zuljenah, tears coursing down her face, her breathing fast and shallow. Dozens of women hang onto the horse; others swirling around it until Zuljenah is maneuvered out of the mausoleum and the women are left dazed and weeping.
A wild-eyed Maha returns. Her neck is red and she’s bareheaded. Someone had taken advantage of the chaos to try to tear off her gold necklace, but the thief had only managed to snatch her best chador. Maha fumes, gingerly touching her neck where the chain has cut into her skin. An old lady clucks in sympathy and gives Maha a shawl to wrap around her head so that she won’t be shamed by appearing unveiled in the street. Maha undoes her necklace and stuffs it into the great vastness of her bra. No one will ever be able to find it in there.
We follow in the wake of the white horse, the crowds around us working themselves into a frenzy. Long lines of men push through the middle of the spectators holding knives and chains above their heads. Those going in the direction of Zuljenah are carrying clean blades pointed upward—they look brand-new and a few are still wrapped in newspaper. In the opposite direction come the men who have used their knives. Some walk, many stagger, their chains and blades held even higher but now covered in blood that runs down over their hands. They’re stripped to the waist, their backs a mess of wounds and blood soaking their white shalwaar. A few are so badly injured that the blood-sodden fabric clings to the back of their thighs. It’s a grotesque but triumphant and profoundly moving procession of men bearing their symbolic trophies of battle and martyrdom.
In the path of Zuljenah men hold the wooden handles of their chains and swing them around, first one way and then another, so that blades cut into the flesh of their backs. Fine droplets of blood spray the crowd, and our hands and faces are speckled with dried blood long before dawn.
A loud, deep thud of hath ka matam is coming from a large mosque filled with two or three hundred women all crying for Hussain. An announcement comes over a loudspeaker that a child has fallen under the horse’s hooves and been trampled to death. The women beat harder and call more desperately for Hussain: another child has been martyred.
It takes a full hour for Zuljenah to arrive and the matam is becoming painful. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to continue. The horse arrives and is led immediately into a side room; the tired Zuljenah is being replaced because it’s impossible for one horse to parade nonstop around the city for twenty-four hours. Dawn is spreading through the open roof before the fresh, enormous new Zuljenah bursts into the mosque, and by the time it has pranced out, two dozen woman are lying unconscious on the floor.
The finery is being removed from the retiring Zuljenah. Maha drags me into the room despite my protests that it’s dangerous to be in such a small, overcrowded place with such a large, exhausted, and nervous horse. The animal is swamped with adoring people kissing its flanks and rubbing it ecstatically. A large pink chador is taken off the horse’s back, torn into little strips, and distributed to waiting women. These holy and blessed strips are tied around their wrists to bring them luck. As we walk away Maha delightedly presses a strip to her lips. I hold my own drenched piece at a distance.
“What’s the matter?” Maha asks.
“I don’t like horse sweat,” I reply with a laugh and, in an instant, she turns on me.
“Don’t say that. It’s such a bad insult,” she berates, deeply offended. “It’s not funny. It’s not horse sweat. It’s beautiful. It’s ziyarat perfume.”
Back in Heera Mandi I sit in the bazaar with Iqbal, enjoying the morning sunshine and the release from the crowds. His wrists and forearms are covered in deep gashes, as if he has made a ham-handed attempt at suicide. He explains that it’s the responsibility of family members and friends to ensure that matam never becomes life-threatening: it’s hard for a man, mindful of his honor and his masculinity, to stop the flagellation voluntarily. Others have to intervene. One of Iqbal’s friends was particularly enthusiastic and difficult to restrain during his matam, and Iqbal is bearing deep scars as proof.
Dozens of youths walk by in their blood-soaked shalwaar kameez. They stink of stale sweat and congealed blood but refuse to change. They wear their bloody clothes as marks of honor, swaggering with pride; you can see them wince as the material touches the wounds, but they pretend it doesn’t hurt. We walk with some of them up toward Tarranum Chowk. The area is closed off and police are everywhere. The road to Bhati Gate is a seething mass of bodies. From the Tibbi police station we can hear the chants and see the flying chains as the procession continues through the old city.
The procession will end in Karbala Gamay Shah, the most important Shia shrine in Lahore. We leave after dark on Ashura and, in the gloom of a Heera Mandi gali, one of Maha’s many cousins approaches us with news. He saw the dudh walla—the milkman—give Ariba thirty rupees (thirty-one cents) this morning. Maha begins to shout at Ariba using the foulest language. “You are a dirty gashti. A gandi kanjri.”
Ariba cowers and stumbles up the lane without saying a word in her own defense. Maha is fuming at the terrible shame of it.
“Why is the dudh walla giving her thirty rupees?” she screams. “He wants to touch her breasts.” She lands Ariba a fearful thump on the back of her head that sends the girl flying to the ground. “She’s out of control. What can I do? What can I do when my daughter is a dirty prostitute?”
At eight o’clock the streets around Karbala Gamay Shah are thickly lined with men. A large section of grass has been set aside for the women, and the proceedings are patrolled by more men in blood-stained shalwaar kameez. On the tenth of Muharram dried blood on men’s clothes gives them a kind of official status. Women and young children sit on the grass gossiping. I recognize several faces from Heera Mandi and stop to speak to them. In their conversations with other women, they never mention that they come from Heera Mandi: they say their homes are in Karim Park or some other respectable suburb and I am their friend from America. A friend from England, it seems, does not have the same cachet.
Maha draws her dupatta tightly around her head and mumbles, “Adnan’s sister is over there and so is his mother.” A couple of fat, grim-looking women are staring at us. Mutazar and Sofiya play around Maha as she smiles false smiles and repeats, over and over again, that she won’t be shamed. She’s not going to lose honor by being intimidated by Adnan’s official family. The children’s grandma and aunt neither wave to them nor smile, nor take anything but hostile interest in them and their mother.
The procession is running late and an announcement informs us that it will arrive in half an hour—which, in real time, means that we could be under the cold eye of Adnan’s family and sitting on this hard earth with its sparse grass until midnight. It’s too much of an ordeal, so we dust ourselves off with all the dignity and style we can muster and we catch a tanga home. Maha is silent and only her shaking lets me know she’s crying. She’s rubbing the strip of fabric from Zuljenah’s chador. We’re traveling along Mony Road, and as we pass Adnan’s houses she sobs aloud.
Training for the Bazaar
The hot season is gathering pace and the temperature is rising by the hour. Those with air coolers have switched them on. The white flowers cloaking the climbing plant beneath my window are wilting and edged with brown. The stone floor of the mosque has absorbed the intensity of the sun’s rays, and a path of sacking has been laid and soaked with water to cool the worshippers’ feet. Those who stray from the path must have developed impenetrable calluses and thickened soles; the others hop.
Mushtaq, the drug pusher and champion pimp, is preening in the courtyard. I can see him from my window. He saunters around in tracksuit pants and a tight T-shirt. He’s grown his beard and looks splendidly dark and moody, but he has a disconcerting habit of massaging his genitals in an absentminded kind of way, as if they are too weighty and uncomfortable for him to manage without support and frequent rearrangements. Either that or he has crabs. This could be a problem for the girls working in the thin pimp’s brothel because Mushtaq likes to try them all—often.
Nena is training for the bazaar. By the standards of the mohalla’s classical tradition, this training is starting six years too late, but an intensive short course in dancing is all that’s required in today’s Heera Mandi. A dance master visits the house every day; this evening they are working on a modern routine—Bollywood meets Western cabaret. I don’t like it, but it’s very energetic.
The dance master is young. He lives outside the mohalla and is wearing Western clothes: a black shirt and tight gray trousers. All the dance practice has given him a very pert bottom, and Maha is in hysterics whenever he swings his hips to show Nena just how the movement should be executed. Maha doesn’t let the teacher see her amusement. To his face she’s very respectful, calling him “Master Jee” and “Master Sahib.” She saves the laughs, the grimaces, and the hilarity for his bottom.
After a few weeks, classical training has replaced the Hindi pop routine, and Nena is progressing really well. She wears her heavy ghungaroo and executes some of the basic movements with a supple and lovely elegance. After almost two hours of practice she collapses on to the bed, flushed, her feet aching because of the constant stamping. She rubs her soles and her instep and winces.
Employing a dance master and musicians is an expensive investment. Maha can’t afford it, but it’s important for Nena’s future—and for that of the whole family. Maha is trying to reestablish her prestige in the community by becoming a patron. She can only sustain this image with cash, and for the last month, the musicians and Master Jee have not been paid.
The men assemble on the floor while Maha sits on the mattress and arranges her dupatta. The musicians refuse to join me on the sofa because it would not be polite, and besides they’re asking for their money, which means that they’re required to be deferential. Maha is embarrassed and tries to cover her discomfort by laughing with me and joking with the men. The social pressure to pay is intense. They know her. They’re part of the same community. They’re not asking directly for their money, but the message is clear: if she wants to hold an honored position in Heera Mandi she will have to pay, and do so quickly. The fee is not much—fifteen hundred rupees ($25) for the month, to be shared by Master Jee and the musicians—but it’s money that Maha hasn’t got. She promises to pay them soon—by tomorrow—pleading husband problems, and they leave. I don’t know how long she will be able to keep up this pretense and this show of status when she can barely afford to pay for the electricity and water supply to her crumbling home.
Honor
Life in a brothel is vicious. It’s not just the clients and pimps who are vicious, but the other women, too. There’s very little solidarity here, and the women rarely acknowledge that they have any common interest apart from Shiism. I’ve never heard a woman in Heera Mandi compliment another woman outside her own family without also following this with deeply derogatory comments. Others are ridiculed as old, ugly, fat, cheap, and lacking in sexual allure, artistic style, or refined manners. To their faces the women are sweet and charming, but as soon as their supposed friends leave, they are trashed. I wonder what they say about me. I think I can guess: I’m getting old, I’m looking thin, I have no jewelry, so I must be of no value. To prove the point, I don’t have a man.
Maha hates me visiting anybody else, and I have to be careful about the division of my time. According to her I can have only one friend. My loyalty must lie with her completely: friendship is available in limited quantity and can’t be shared. Last night I had dinner at the house of an elderly local woman. She retired from the business years ago but still lives in some style. She was a great tawaif—a classical dancer who trained from the age of 7—and she saved enough of her money to live a comfortable life in retirement. We had a lovely meal and looked at old photos of her…and I have just made the mistake of mentioning the visit to Maha.
“What?” she shrieks. “You went to that Pathan’s house? That old fat one?” She huffs and looks indignant. “What did you eat?
“Rotiya and kofte.”
Maha is aghast. “And have you got a pain in your stomach now?” She prods me sharply. “She does black magic. She’s probably poisoned you. Never eat there again.” Abandoning her vow to stop the drugs, she unscrews a bottle of Corex and drinks it in a couple of giant gulps.
A vile smell wafts from the toilet in the corner of the room and Nisha is ordered to mask the odor with air freshner. Maha displaces her anger from me to the smell and then to the woman in the rooms above. “It’s that gandi Pathan upstairs. That smell is from her dirty bum. She’s never clean. She has a filthy kusi. She’s a cheap, gandi kanjri.”
It’s true that the woman upstairs is a prostitute, but how Maha can abuse her on this count must take some sophisticated intellectual gymnastics. Everyone in Heera Mandi maligns everyone else as a prostitute but when they themselves are called the same names, they cry and rage with the shame of it: all the neighbors have heard them being called a kanjri or a taxi. As if no one knows what happens in Heera Mandi, as if they’re all respectable housewives. Most have never been able to break out of a culture built upon male privilege; even when they can see, in the unremitting unfairness of their lives and those of their mothers and grandmothers, how those ideas consign them to a social ghetto of stigma and shame. Ironically they damn other women caught in the same desperate situation with the very words and concepts that will be used by society to damn themselves.
It’s a constant effort to keep up appearances, maintain status and honor, counteract insults, and fight enemies and detractors. The most vicious and loudest arguments are saved for neighbors: for anyone within shouting distance. Two families in the courtyard have been locked in bitter conflict for several days. They scream insults at each other, “Tell your mother she’s fat,” “You’re sick. You’re going to die.” “You are so ugly.”
Both households tell me about the stupidity of the other. “They’re jealous,” they say. “Look how ugly they are. They can’t dance. They’re cheap prostitutes. They’re the children of a dog.” The fights are intense and fun and exciting: they punctuate a day of waiting and eating.
In Heera Mandi’s complex social code women with izzat—honor—buy real jewelry and have extremely large fridges, televisions, video players, tape decks, and mobile phones. They donate money to the poor and needy in the community, pay for feasts during religious rituals, and are the patrons of musicians and dance masters. This is what all Maha’s hard-earned money was spent on. A woman who can display and redistribute a large amount of wealth within the community will have high izzat—providing that she also talks of her clients as husbands, keeps her prices very high, scrupulously observes the Shia religious calendar, and keeps purdah and veils when appropriate. If she can achieve all this she will win the respect—and the bitter envy—of the community.
On first acquaintance all the women claim that they are expensive, and they inflate their prices to astronomic figures. To admit they sell sex for five hundred rupees ($8) would lower their izzat and so reduce their real price. This emphasis on creating an invulnerable and successful image means that women perceive everyone else to be enjoying good business and having a happy life. Everyone else’s clients are thought to be rich and generous and other women’s husbands treat them with love and respect. Women think it’s only their own business that is bad, it’s only they who cannot afford to pay the rent, it’s only their own husbands who are cruel. They don’t believe me when I tell them that the lives of other women are equally blighted, and they say that I mustn’t let anyone know of their own difficulties. They are “ten-thousand-rupee women” ($169) and they have a reputation to preserve.
Maha is upset, ranting about insults and dissolving into tears. Adnan hasn’t called for a week, so this afternoon, she went to his house in Mony Road to ask for money to pay the rent and feed the children. One of the servants took the message to him while she waited outside in the rickshaw. She’s telling me the tale in strangled sentences.
“I wasn’t like a human being. I was like an animal. I sat in the rickshaw in the sun for more than an hour and Adnan wouldn’t come. He knew I was there, but he kept me waiting like a dog begging under his window. My izzat is nothing. He gave me five hundred rupees and said ‘This is for a week.’” She weeps with rage and humiliation. “I have the izzat of a dog.”
Hasan
A boy earns a few rupees by running errands in the courtyard, dashing between the houses and the local tea shops with trays of tea and food. He skids to a halt by my side whenever he sees me, and I often ask him to fetch bottles of mineral water. He’s an enthusiastic worker, sometimes too enthusiastic and too overwhelmingly earnest, asking, “Do you want me to open the bottle? Is it cold enough? Is it nice? Do you want to eat something? Do you want a Pepsi? I know, you want a bottle of 7-Up. Tea? No? I know, you want coffee.” At times, I just want him to go away. He’s very short with a thin face, worried brown eyes, and close-cropped black hair. He says he’s 15 but his big new teeth and squeaky voice give his age away: he’s about 10 and his name is Hasan.
Like all the children of Heera Mandi, Hasan has a difficult family background. His mother is a low-class prostitute, and he’s one of the four sons she can’t afford to raise. Hasan’s elder brother has had a little schooling, but Hasan has had none: he’s illiterate and will probably remain this way for the rest of his life. Where government schools are available, primary education is technically free, but in reality, the poor find the cost prohibitive. They have to buy books, pencils, uniforms, and transport. Most importantly, they forfeit the money the child could have earned by working.
There would be little point sending Hasan to school even if his mother could find the money. State schools in this part of Lahore offer the poorest education, and, assuming he gained some qualifications, the prospect of a good job would still be slim. Few employers want to hire workers from the wrong side of the city walls, and universities and colleges hold the people of Heera Mandi in contempt, as if they were stupid as well as poor and unlucky. In Pakistan, perhaps more than in many other societies, success depends upon whom you know. The residents of Heera Mandi know a lot of people, but in a way that is profoundly harmful to their own reputations and prospects.
If brightness, intelligence, and hard work were determinants of success in this world, Hasan would grow into an important man. The tragedy is that, barring some miracle, he’ll run errands all his life, sink into heroin, or, if he has aspirations, he’ll follow the example of other ambitious men in the mohalla and become a drug pusher or a pimp. He’s an enchanting child: he reminds me of my son and I’ve made a fuss over him. I’ve also made a naively stupid mistake: I told Hasan he was a lovely boy, I took an interest in his life, I hugged him when he was sad, and I praised him when he worked hard. This afternoon when he came to my room to see if I wanted yet more tea, I thanked him but said that I’d already had plenty. He looked around, examined a few things, and asked some questions. After a while I said he should leave because I had lots of work to do. As he departed he threw his arms around me and I patted his soft-bristled head and returned the hug. To my horror, my little friend had an erection that he pressed insistently into my thigh.
It is now early evening and I’m sitting on the roof terrace recording the day’s events. As I write, Hasan is playing cricket below me in Fort Road with other small boys who aren’t competent or old enough to play with the youths on the grass by the mosque. He’s looked up countless times, searching for praise for his poorly developed batting prowess and waving once or twice when he thinks I’m glancing in his direction. I’ve ignored him: I don’t know what else to do. Poor Hasan has no chance growing up in a world in which sex and money are the only currencies in which affection is expressed. This precocious but sweet boy has been schooled watching his mother with her customers and has learned all the most damaging lessons.
Ariba’s New Shoes
Maha has overdosed on sleeping tablets. One day she’ll miscalculate and she’ll die. She took 10 Eighty-One tablets last night after her humbling by Adnan and then she washed them down with Corex. These are potent sleeping tablets, all too familiar to the women of Heera Mandi. This morning Maha’s speech is so slurred that she can barely speak and she can’t even sit up in bed.
By evening Maha’s drowziness has worn off and she’s mellow and happy. Her relaxed mood is catching and the children are laughing and lively—except for Ariba who is, as usual, behaving like a harried and reluctant servant. Maha starts complaining again that Ariba is acquiring a reputation for hanging around the streets. It’s an unfair thing to say because it’s always Ariba who is sent out alone to buy food for the family. Tonight I’m going with her to buy paan for her mother and rotiya for the meal. In the shop by the cinema the paan walla gives her a free special paan and she tucks it into her clothes with glee. Then we watch the roti being made. A young boy helps his father by rolling the dough into little balls and patting them into circles with his fingers. There’s a long line in front of us, and when we return home Ariba is scolded for taking so long and getting the wrong type of bread. “We wanted big ones, not little ones,” her mother complains and tells her to go out again for more.
Ariba sits and sulks.
“Go on, bitch,” Maha shouts.
Ariba mutters curses and her mother shouts louder. Ariba grabs her dupatta, crying, and slams the door behind her. I can hear her running down the steps. She’s shouting, “You never loved me.”
I watched Ariba for an hour this afternoon while she was in the courtyard, still barefoot. She was patiently looking after the small children: organizing games and races; hugging them when they fell over; adjusting their clothes; and dragging a wriggling and bellowing Mutazar away from the peddlers selling sweets and drinks. She never receives any praise or acknowledgment for this. She’s never thanked for running errands. Her work has an invisible quality.
Ariba shuffles around Babar Market in a pair of her mother’s old, too-large shoes. She stands outside a shop and admires all the most inappropriate sandals. “I want some red ones,” she tells the shopkeeper. “Pretty red ones. Ladies’ shoes.” I know the ones she means. They’re in the window: red satin, encrusted with diamanté with four-inch stiletto heels and thin straps. She thrusts her broad, cracked feet into them and tries to walk. I suggest something more ordinary, and eventually we settle on a pair of white sandals with a low heel. They’re not a suitable color for Heera Mandi’s streets but Ariba loves them.
We spend the rest of the afternoon shopping and eating snacks. I’ve told Ariba she has one hundred rupees (not quite $2) to spend as she likes. Her choice of purchases and her shopping priorities say a lot about her. She has bought a cheap gold-colored necklace for herself and then she spends a long time in a drugstore deciding which talcum powder to buy. She smells every one three or four times, and decides, in the end, to plump for something floral because it’s the cheapest. She’s going to buy a present for Sofiya with the rest of her money. She’s searched the entire market for just the right kind of hair clips. They are the palest blue and decorated with a tiny, pretty mouse in a pink dress. She’s delighted with them. She looks at me with shining eyes and asks if her little sister will like them.
This evening Sofiya is wearing her hair clips and Ariba is wearing her necklace. You can barely see it’s gold because Ariba has used so much of the talc that her neck is white and the necklace is dusted with powder. Her older sisters sit on the bed with me and one says, “What’s that terrible smell?” They put their hands over their noses and mouths and turn to look at Ariba. “Isn’t it horrible.” Everyone laughs and Ariba scrambles from the mattress and runs away into the night.
Torturing Maha
Maha is in a foul mood. I’ve arrived in the middle of a nasty fight. A half-eaten lunch is lying on the floor and the children are hiding in the bedroom or in the corner of the kitchen. Maha is ranting. “They torture me. They’ll kill me. I do everything for them and then they insult me.”
“Louise,” she says, “My head.” She holds it in despair. And then, despite her size, she springs up, runs into the kitchen, and begins to beat Nena.
I don’t know what Nena has done wrong. I suspect she’s done nothing but be lippy in the manner of 13-year-old girls. She’s sitting with her legs pressed tightly together and her arms rigid. She tries to give me a smile, but when I stroke her hair she begins to sob.
“I have to take those drugs,” Maha pleads when she’s calm enough to sit quietly on the mattress. And it’s true: she has to take them to be able to cope. She’s alone in these four rooms with her children all day, every day. She waits for a man to turn up and give her companionship and the money she needs to feed her children and pay the rent. These aren’t things she can provide for herself without selling sex.
When she takes her medicine she relaxes because she doesn’t have to think. She sleeps as Mutazar and Sofiya run wild and out of control; as Ariba, caked in filth, hangs about the streets; as Nisha quietly fades into the background; and as Nena cleans and watches her mother for signs of life or death. And then Maha returns to the world of consciousness and her unhappy family, her absent husband, and her lack of money and tries to reimpose control. She’s insanely bad-tempered, the family is wracked with tension, and so she opens the Corex and counts out the sleeping pills. But it’s never enough, never the answer, because when she wakes up nothing has changed.
I tell Maha not to take so much of the medicine. It’s a useless bit of advice and a cruel one too because I can’t provide any better form of relief. I tell her I’m leaving, and she asks me where I’m going. I say I’m going shopping in Gulberg. It’s where the rich Lahoris shop. She asks if they can come too and in a mean-spirited moment I say no, I have to go alone because I have other things to do. I feel incapable of dealing with all of Maha’s problems as well as my own. Increasingly, I’m out of my depth and sometimes I have to walk away.
The Bangladeshi Family
I have some gruesome photographs taken on my last visit to give to the Bangladeshi family: two shots of the mother and father, an un-flattering portrait of the mother that catches her bad teeth in a very harsh light, and a group photograph taken with Shamsa in her green glitter lipstick. They’re thrilled with them and I sit on the charpoy with Bilquis, the daughter, to inspect the pictures. Five or six children were in the room when I visited in December but Bilquis is the only one here today. She’s so fragile and pretty with her fine bones and wide eyes. She says she’s 15 although she can’t be more than 13.
“I was married two months ago,” she says. “I wanted you to come to the wedding, but you weren’t here.”
She shows me a picture of her husband. He’s in his twenties, with bristly hair and a downy moustache. I congratulate her and say he has a nice face. She says, “Yes. He’s a good husband and he makes bedsheets.”
The girl’s mother is sitting on the floor playing a board game, ludo, with a man who is also from Bangladesh. The game is engrossing and a lot of low-value notes are changing hands.
“Did you do the ziyarat?” Bilquis questions as she shows me a strip of material wound around her wrist. It’s a piece of Zuljenah’s chador.
“Yes, many times. And I touched Zuljenah.”
“Ohh…now your luck will be really good.”
Unlike most families in Heera Mandi, this family is from the majority Sunni branch of Islam, but they still take part in the rituals of Muharram as if they are Shias.
Bilquis says that I must want to listen to some music, and she whisks a thick rag off a tape player. It has colored, rotating lights and I remark that it looks nice. The family agree. The player is of such significance to them that it is immediately re-covered with the rag to stop it being spoiled by the dust and we listen to the muffled music through the material.
The father has something to say to me and keeps trying to interrupt his daughter and to speak in English. A man comes in, stands by the charpoy, and offers me a thin joint of hashish. The family greet him as if they know him well. He is fortyish, bony, and some kind of low-skilled worker. Bilquis’s mother gets up and goes with the man into the other room, which is in darkness, and closes the door behind them. I was wrong to think she was no longer in the business. The lonely ludo player enjoys his hashish and glares at me intermittently. Five minutes later the woman is back playing ludo, and the client leaves scratching his balls and adjusting the drawstring of his shalwaar.
“Where is Shamsa?” I ask, wanting to find out why she has left the house.
“She went to some other place,” the father replies.
“Why?”
He shrugs and the daughter rolls her eyes. “She was crazy, badtamiz.”
“What is your business?” the father asks. I explain that I work in a university and that I’m writing a book about Heera Mandi. He knows this already and I wonder why he’s asking me again.
“Do you have any other business? Business that gives you trouble with the police?”
I shake my head.
“You’ve been sleeping at Maha’s at night, haven’t you?” he asks.
I confirm that I have, occasionally. He’s observant—the mark of a successful pimp. He digests this information and continues. “What do you think of this business in Heera Mandi?”
“It’s the life here.”
He chuckles and shifts around. “What’s your price?”
The ludo has stopped and everyone is looking at me.
“Very high,” his wife laughs.
“Come here,” the husband beckons and goes into the other room. I hesitate but still follow him. It’s dangerous and I’m scared. There’s no easy escape route. He opens the shutters. There’s nothing in the room except a dirty mattress on the floor under the window.
He talks to me in a quiet voice. “Do you do the business?”
“No. I’m married,” I lie. “My husband is in Islamabad.”
“If you’re in the business, I can get you a very good price.”
I thank him for his offer but say I’m not looking for clients. He smiles and, bizarrely, takes my hand and shakes it. As we leave the room, a new visitor walks in with the mother and the ludo is interrupted again.
I’ve been making discreet inquiries about the family, and the stories are consistent. The family trades in children—especially Bangladeshi children destined for prostitution or the marriage or domestic servant market. That is why the gang of children had been whittled to one: there was a problem with the police last month. “There was a little girl in that room,” two women tell me. They point to the shutters of the room with the dirty mattress. “They sold her to four or five men. It was rape. The woman downstairs heard her crying for help.” The story is that the police came but there was nobody there.
“What happened?” I ask.
“A bribe. Or they sold her quickly to some other place. I don’t know.”
The Kanjar don’t like this family: they’re outsiders—rough and villager-like. They’re also suspected of truly scandalous practices. I’ve been told about these practices at long and horrible length: they catch pigeons on the rooftop, slit their throats, and make them into curry.
Operations
There’s a strange atmosphere in White Flower’s dark, ever-crowded room. The shutters are rarely open. Perhaps it’s because it’s too hot outside or perhaps it’s because it’s not worth opening them. There’s nothing to see apart from the gray building four feet away on the other side of the alley.
White Flower is lying on the bed having a massage from an elderly dubanna walla, a masseur, who is working deeply and vigorously on her legs. White Flower’s eyes are closed and there’s a trace of a smile on her lips.
New faces fill the room. I recognize only White Flower and one other younger khusra called Samina, who is always friendly. I’m given a seat and White Flower stirs from the massage. She gives the quickly departing dubanna walla twenty rupees (thirty-four cents) and shrieks a greeting. She undoes her long hair, flicks it around, apologizes because it’s covered in oil, and asks me to comment on how it has grown.
“Have you seen Tasneem?” I ask.
“She’s gone,” the others reply, all with slightly different versions of the story.
“She’s gone back to her village.”
“She grew a moustache,” White Flower explains.
“And then she got married,” someone adds.
“Married?” I query.
“To a man. It’s a boy-boy marriage. Man-man.” White Flower half-screams.
“She had lovely hair,” Samina sighs.
Two young clients are sitting in the corner and White Flower introduces them as “guests.” They’re clearly intimidated by being here. They say nothing and stare at the floor. Perhaps they will cheer up after I’ve gone, but I guess that won’t be for some time because I’m presented with food and a bottle of Coke.
Samina sits on my left plucking at her stubble with an enormous pair of gold tweezers. The seat on my right is taken, in turn, by different khusras who want to have a look at me and quiz me about beauty treatments. Is there a medicine in London that can get rid of facial and chest hair? Can you get a cream to make breasts grow? How can you get very, very long nails? Is there a wonder solution you can paint on like nail varnish? How can you get really white skin? I don’t know why they’re asking me all these questions. I’m the least well groomed person in the room.
The two prettiest khusras are made to stand in front of me, and I’m asked to judge who is the loveliest. One of them is exceptionally attractive. She looks like a woman. She has high cheekbones, soft features, and a slim figure. She says she wants to perform a dance for me providing that I do one first. So I take off my dupatta, make my usual enthusiastic attempt, and then leave it to the professionals. Except that there’s a little delay because the music has to be switched off while the azan calls the men to prayer. I sit down in the quiet, and for the first and only time the tamash been speak. In the middle of a khusra brothel these young clients tell me to show respect and cover my head. I joke that no one else is doing so, and the khusras laugh and shrug and says it’s not necessary: they’re only half women and so are excused from women’s obligations.
The beautiful khusra dances wonderfully well and the pious tamash been have lifted their eyes from the floor. When she has finished I pay her a very sincere compliment: I say she’s lovely—just like a woman. Yes, everyone agrees, she’s just like a woman.
“She had an operation,” Samina adds with emphasis. It happened four years ago. It was in Karachi, in a hospital, and she paid the doctor fifty thousand rupees ($843).
“After the operation a man becomes just like a woman,” Samina states. “They don’t have a penis or anything else.”
“Just like a woman,” I repeat. “But they don’t have a kusi.” It’s the wrong thing to say. For a few seconds there’s silence. The khusras look away from me and then there are some giggles.
“Who needs one of those?” someone quips.
Cinema
Didi is a young and unusual khusra who loves to dye her hair. Today she’s a startling, golden blonde. We’ve started meeting occasionally in a tea shop on the main road. It shows Punjabi films to an exclusively male audience on a little television at the back of the shop. There are lots of these tea shops cum video rooms in Heera Mandi. It’s a good way of pulling in customers. Punjabi films are popular because the customers in these places are largely poor laboring men. Punjabi is their first language—the language they are comfortable with and the language they use when they relax. A language hierarchy divides Pakistanis: lower classes speak regional tongues like Punjabi or Pashto, and the middle and upper classes speak the national language, Urdu; the cleaner the grammar, the higher the status. The richest, Westernized people speak English, sometimes with a British accent, but more often these days, with an American one, proof of an expensive foreign education.
Heera Mandi has another type of informal cinema too. At least one place in the mohalla offers pornographic films. It’s just a little room with a shuttered front and no windows. With no air-conditioning or fan, the audience bakes in summer, emerging after the show staggering, dazed, and dripping with sweat. My guess is that they don’t even notice the temperature.
This morning Didi is sitting in the tea shop dressed in men’s clothes and a lot of fake gold jewelry. Her newly yellow hair is scraped under a green baseball cap that’s slightly too small. She must have overdone the bleach because the hair at the nape of her neck looks like a nest of thin, crisply fried egg noodles. The film on show is a 1980s Punjabi production. The star is a fat, middle-aged man with dyed black hair who runs about making a lot of puffing noises.
“This is rubbish,” Didi comments. “I like Hindi films.” The rest of the audience must not agree because they are sitting, silently engrossed, while their sweet tea develops a thick brown skin and grows cold in their cups.
A couple of hours later we are sitting on the steps of the Tarranum Cinema. Didi is eating paan and there’s a bright red semicircle of pik stains radiating out on the ground in front of her. She’s working with a young cucumber seller who has stationed his stall by the side of the road, about twenty feet away. The cucumber seller is encouraging his customers to look toward the steps. Didi smiles at groups of passing boys and youths. Some of them respond by coming back for a second look. Two or three youths have stopped and there’s a vulgar exchange between the boys, Didi, and the cucumber walla. He’s waving a peeled cucumber around and everyone is laughing. The boys meander off toward the shoe shops and the cucumber seller is angry. He’s pointing at me and telling Didi that I must go. “They thought you were with her,” he shouts indignantly.
Salma
Tibbi Gali is transformed now that the saddest days of Muharram have ended. By five in the afternoon the heat has gone out of the day. The doors that were locked last week now open into dark little rooms and heavily made-up women are sitting on the doorsteps. I’ve been trailed by Ariba and Mutazar, and the women call and ask me who I’ve brought. Are they my children? I say that they’re my sister’s children—Maha’s children—and that they live by the Badshahi Masjid.
Nazia is sitting on her doorstep. She’s just the same in her old blue outfit but she’s wearing a different shade of lipstick. She grins at me and the color smears over her teeth. A little farther down the gali an elderly woman beckons. She must be about 60. She has dyed hair, heavy makeup, and thick glasses. In most large brothels in any other Asian country she wouldn’t be selling sex because there wouldn’t be any demand for her. I used to think that the old women in Tibbi Gali were madams, but I’ve had to revise that opinion. Some are, but there are many other desperate women who are still working into their fifties and sixties. This woman speaks to me in Punjabi. I talk back in Urdu, but her own responses in Urdu tail off into Punjabi and it’s hard for me to follow what she’s saying. I know she came here as a child, that she was sold into Tibbi Gali and had no choice. This must have been fifty years ago. I pause and try to imagine what it must be like to have been traded in Heera Mandi for fifty years—for all your adult life and more. I can’t possibly imagine it. And yet, in the shade of her tiny room, with its charpoy barely hidden behind a curtain, this woman, who is the same age as my mother, can still laugh and tease me because I don’t have a man.
Salma is another older tenant: she has a room at the lower end of Tibbi Gali where it opens onto the road to Bhati Gate. She must have to watch carefully or pay very large bribes because she is so near the police station. Salma is relaxing on the floor, her head resting on a pillow that long ago became flattened with use. It’s hot and there’s no fan, but at least it’s cooler in the dark interior of the room. The gali is narrow here and snakes up and around a corner so that the sunlight never enters the rooms. Her working quarters are similar to those of poor prostitutes in the big brothels of India and Bangladesh. I’ve been in similar places in Calcutta, Mumbai, and Dhaka—the difference is that Salma is a lot older than most of the women working there. Her room has no electricity and no running water. She waits for customers on a blanket on the floor, and behind a threadbare curtain there’s an old mattress that she uses for the business.
“Sit down,” she says, smoothing the blanket.
She is, perhaps, 45. It’s hard to tell. She claims to be 35, but everyone lies about their age. She has four children and her home is a long way from Heera Mandi: she comes here every day and she says it takes over half an hour in the rickshaw.
I ask her when she started in the business.
“Ten years ago. My husband left and I had no money and no one to help me. I was forced to come here.” She thinks for a moment. “Can you help me? Can I get a job in your country? I’ll work hard. I can work in a factory sewing clothes or I can do cleaning. I hate this work. And business is bad.”
I tell her about the problems of visas and work permits, but she persists. She only drops the subject when a customer stops to haggle over her price. The chae walla gawps at me as he hands us cups of syrupy tea and Salma explains why I’m here: I’m her sister, from America, and I’m writing a book.
“Can you read and write?” I ask her.
She laughs and shakes her head. “What a useless thing that is in this place.”
Salma is a popular woman. She’s not popular in a business sense—she doesn’t have very many customers—but lots of men stop by her door for a chat, a smoke, and a cup of tea. She jokes with them and makes them laugh. She has the same kind of friendly relationships with policemen from the Tibbi station. They don’t stop when they’re on duty and in uniform, but they call in before or after going on a shift. A tall man with a large moustache has stopped and is leaning against the door. He asks me what I do, and I tell him that I’m a teacher in England. He questions Salma and leaves once he’s satisfied that I’m not a new girl in the trade.
“He’s a policeman,” Salma states.
“Does he give you trouble?”
“No,” she replies, rubbing her fingers together to indicate that she pays him cash. “All the police are good here if you give them money.”
Victoria Unani Cream
Jamila looks terrible. Her business as a Tibbi Gali pimp is not going well, and she hasn’t enough money to feed herself, never mind her cats. Her husband’s leg is atrocious. Swollen and mottled purple with a great running sore, it looks as if it’s in an advanced stage of decomposition. Mehmood has a plastic bag full of medicines hanging on a nail on the wall. It’s a real potpourri—penicillin, serious-looking vials, and jumbo-sized tablets. He doesn’t know what he should be taking, when he should be taking it, or how long he has been on this regimen. He’s probably had such a mixed-up, irregular cocktail that nothing works on him anymore. He whips out some empty tubs of a miracle cream that he swears by.
“I put it on my leg to stop the itching. I put it everywhere,” he says waving it at me. It comes in a pretty little pink, blue, and red box and its name is Victoria Unani Cream. The English words on the box are not enlightening or encouraging. They read: “For the protection of face frong small ball scabies and ring. Warm use Victoria Cream orfoot bum due to cold or after shaving and befor make-up use Victoria Cream every morning and evening. It clean soft and smooth your face.” It says nothing about rotting legs.
Good doctors are expensive, so most of the poor of the mohalla never visit them. Instead they go to hakeems, traditional healers, or to people who set themselves up as medics without having any official training. The type of medic in most frequent demand is the dai—the traditional midwife. In Heera Mandi these women deliver children, and almost all have a quiet but busy sideline as abortionists. Many people, like Mehmood, don’t even bother visiting the professionals. They simply buy likely sounding drugs from the pharmacy and hope they work.
A Marriage Proposal
I haven’t been to Tibbi Gali for a while. Salma isn’t here; she’s gone to the shop to buy a cigarette. She’s left a friend minding her room just in case a tamash been should appear. The plump friend sits on the doorstep. She has a big round face that crumples in around her mouth and folds into a toothless smile. And now here comes Salma, whizzing down the street like a little wild ball. She’s shrieking and sliding on the wet stones. She pulls me into the room and shouts at me for not visiting her for so long.
Her friend sits quietly looking out into the street. She doesn’t talk to me but she’s not unfriendly. She puffs away on her cigarette and occasionally turns her face toward the dark interior of the room and smiles. Salma wants to take me to see a friend, and she shouts “Chale? Chale?”—Let’s go? Let’s go?—very loudly and very often as if I can’t understand. The friend with the collapsing face is left in charge of business again and we walk a short way up the gali, around a corner, into a narrow alley, and then up a dark, steep flight of steps into a labyrinthine house.
An affluent man meets us on the second floor. He has the gloss and the ballast of the well-fed: he wears a thick gold chain and he’s dressed in a crisp, beautifully ironed shalwaar kameez. I’m invited into a windowless room that has big locks on both the inside and outside of the door. The floor is covered in carpets and a mattress, and there are cushions against the wall. The roof seems a safer place to be, so we climb higher, the fat man breathless with the effort.
We are five storeys high and immediately below us to one side there’s an enormous hole in the ground. The large interconnected building that used to stand there fell in on itself a few years ago. Today only a rubbish-strewn hole remains where the basement had been. It’s been turned into a giant open-air toilet and landfill site.
The fat man is clearly of some importance. He says he owns the entire building we’ve just climbed through and he waves his hand over toward the adjoining building. “That’s my brother’s house,” he says. A young man scrambles over the roofs, jumping from one to the other and climbing over small walls. “My nephew,” the man explains and orders food and drink to be brought.
Salma sits on a charpoy drinking Coke and telling the man about me. He asks some questions about what I am doing in Heera Mandi and then his wife arrives. She’s a small, young, stocky woman dressed in gold embroidered evening clothes even though it’s four in the afternoon. She’s wearing heavy makeup and has a confident, managerial manner. She and her husband complement each other extremely well. She’s not his only wife—he has three—and I wonder how he has the energy, considering the stairs were such an effort.
The group discusses my appearance and the wife asks if I know about the business. “Of course,” her husband replies. She weighs me up. She’s canny, a businesswoman whose trade is women. They must run a protection racket or own some of the buildings in Tibbi Gali. I think Salma rents her room from them and they take a cut of her earnings. I get the sensation I’m being presented for approval.
Back in Salma’s room it’s going dark and she hasn’t lit the candle. She lies on the blanket as the tamash been saunter by looking in. Two men stop and peer at us. They begin a conversation with Salma and come into the room. “Hello,” one says to me in English. “I love you.” I make to leave but they are closing the door and I’m instantly terrified in the dark. I can barely see and, as one of the men takes my arms, I stumble over Salma who is preparing for business. The man insists that he loves me and pulls at my arm while I edge toward the door, laughing nervously and wriggling to loosen his grip on me. Salma shouts at him to let me go and I push the customer barring the door. Outside his friend is still holding my hands, declaring his love and promising that we’ll be married immediately. I’m running away, my heart racing. Everyone in the gali is looking and I feel such a fool. This encounter with the tamash been was too close, too dangerous, and I’m annoyed with myself. What else can I expect if I sit without my dupatta as night falls in a Tibbi Gali brothel?