Among the Believers (25 page)

In my room in the rest house the air conditioning didn’t work. If I opened the window, insects came in. And it was because of the insects that I didn’t sleep outside, like Razak and the others. To sleep in the open you had to wrap yourself up like a mummy, from head to toe; that took practice. So I stayed in my hot room and rested and waited for the morning. We were to make an early start, going back to Hyderabad and then beyond, to get to Ahmed’s sufi centre in time for the midday feeding of the poor: Ahmed had been particular about that.

Beyond Hyderabad there were patches of cultivation, patches of scrub, patches of sand. The brightness hurt; the heat hurt. Village dogs stood still in yellow waterlogged pools. We were in one of the famous river valleys of early civilization. But there was no feeling of a valley;
the land felt like an immense plain, until you noticed that the flat land was at different levels and that the upper levels were capped with rock, so that it seemed that the Indus was the merest remnant of a vaster flow of water that had flattened everything not protected by rock. For some miles we drove on the west bank of the river. In the distance were jagged hills. They were of pure rock, fractured in parts. Some great convulsion had created this mountain range, forcing up and folding over the rock strata like pastry; and then some water cataclysm had punched through the rock. The river made a bend here. And not far away was the town with the shrine.

The stalls in the main street were hung with photographs of Mr. Bhutto. Mr. Bhutto, during his time in office, had given or caused to be given new gilt gates for the shrine. They could be seen from the outside, beyond the outer iron gates. A plaque on the wall recorded Mr. Bhutto’s gift; but since his death the plaque had been covered over by a gold-fringed green cloth. Pilgrims looked both at the gates and at the green cloth before they went in.

We left our shoes with the man who sat below a sheet awning. He was turbanned and dignified, brisk, a professional; he tied up each pair of shoes, gave each pair a number, and charged half a rupee a pair. The fee seemed high; there was no competition; and I asked Razak whether the pitch was hereditary or somehow protected. He said these shoe-keeping shrine pitches were auctioned by the government, and the bidding could go as high as four thousand rupees, four hundred dollars. The successful bidder was, in more than one way, in business.

It was crowded and close inside. People were sleeping on the worn marble floor. They had come from far, and for the poor there was no other place to stay: the wretched of the desert, of those scattered poor fields and villages beside the Indus, people for whom the shrine—and all the shrines that had stood here, even before Islam, between the river and the shattered hill-range of rock—had always provided shelter and comfort. The marble floor was grimy; there were babies, and many flies, seeking always to settle on the floor and the bodies.

The shrine—the tomb of the saint—was railed around in silver, beautifully worked, worn by the hands of the faithful. One corner post had been broken, perhaps by a crush of pilgrims on a particular day; there was a kind of frenzy even now. There were several canopies, one above the other, and just below the ceiling was a wire net, perhaps to
catch bird droppings. A stone, clamped around with a silver band, hung by a short cord from the canopy bar. The stone was heart-shaped; it was pale-brown, and so smooth and shiny from being touched that it did seem to have a fleshy quality. I thought there was some significance in the shape. But Razak said the saint had carried this stone on his belly while he lived; the Prophet had done the same thing. (Probably, though, it was an ascetic adaptation of an old Arabian torture: Bilal, the Abyssinian slave who was one of the first to accept the Prophet’s message, was exposed and tied down in the Meccan desert with a heavy stone on his chest.)

People passed their hands over the stone, caressed it, and then brought their hands to their lips and eyes, or touched their heart; or they appeared to hug themselves. Outside, the Indus Valley town, blazing with heat; here, this passion. It was important to touch: not only the stone and the silver railing, but also the cloth draped over the saint’s tomb, at one end of which were a mitre and cope, curiously Christian-looking, and a turban which seemed to stand for a head. It was a land of faith, but it was also a land of dust and sand and dry nostrils and nose-picking; and the peasant woman who rubbed her hand on the rail before touching her young sons’ mouths with her hand, also in between scoured and scraped at her nostrils.

We went on to the
koli
, or sufi centre. It lay at the end of a short bazaar lane. The dirt surface of the lane had turned to black mud, with washing-up and other water from the food stalls on either side, which were in business and active, although at the
koli
it was feeding time for the poor: brown rounds of flatbread were in many hands at the entrance.

To the right, as we entered to noise and bustle and music, was the shrine: the tombs of the
pirs
, the holy men who had settled here to celebrate the saint and had become rulers or governors of the brotherhood. A Mondrian of the desert had been at work with modern bathroom tiles on the shrine walls, creating a bigger and more direct version of the abstract painter’s
Broadway Boogie-Woogie:
a kind of Hyderabad Boogie-Woogie, with stepped lines of yellow, white, blue, red, black, and so on, delightful to come upon because it was an expression of such pure delight.

Directly in front was the feeding place, an open, pillared pavilion. One man stood guard over pyramids of brown flatbread covered with a cloth, bread that by its colour suggested more than the wholesomeness
of whole grain, suggested also the Indus Valley earth. One man was ladling out a thin lentil soup from a big black iron pot. In the porch of the building to the left another man was doling out water; a boy, aware of his importance, was holding the hose that led from the tap to the water barrel.

Razak had become involved with a man in a blue gown who appeared to be of authority. The man in blue was short, squarely built, with a shaved head; there was a touch of Central Asia in his features. He said that the
pir
was out and would be back in three hours. In Pakistan the standard unit of stated delay was half an hour; three hours meant not that day. So there was no one to talk to? The man in blue said the
munshi
, the secretary, was available. He asked for our names and details. When Razak gave them, the man in blue said in English, in a curiously flat way, his eyes still assessing us, that he was inviting us to stay as his guests, to spend the night, to stay as long as we liked. The
pir
would be back in three hours; in the meantime we would see the
munshi;
we would be given food; we were his guests.

He deputed someone to lead us upstairs. We picked our way past puddles (from the water hose) and were led, through a confusion of small verandahed quadrangles on the upper floor, to a clean room spread with bedding, and with two sets of bolsters and cushions. A fan was turned on; a window was opened. It was cool and inexpressibly relaxing. Two record players or amplified radios were on outside, but the fan muffled the noise; the songs—not film songs, Razak said: devotional songs—cancelled each other out; and in the coolness it made a distant, pleasing background.

The
munshi
didn’t come. Not after five minutes, not after ten. But the food came, brought up by a boy or young man in a brown Pakistani costume. He was of great beauty; it was strange to think that he had chosen the life of sacrifice and service. Razak (rounding out nicely at twenty-seven) pretended to share my nervousness about the food; but then almost immediately he fell on it and ate with luxurious concentration to the end. Still the
munshi
didn’t appear, and when the boy in brown came with the tea (stewed in the Indo-Pakistani bazaar way, sugar, water, tea, and milk boiled together: sweet and sharp and refreshing) I made him stay and talk about himself.

It wasn’t easy. Not because he was secretive, but because he seemed to carry no connected idea of his life. Experiences floated loose in his
mind, and it was necessary to ask many little questions. He was oddly passive. His words (which Razak translated) were spoken softly, with downcast eyes.

He had been with the community a year. He was going to go away in a year; there was no question of a lifelong commitment. But wouldn’t it have been better for him, since he wanted to get a job again, to have spent the time learning a trade or a skill? He said he had been a pipe-fitter with the waterworks, earning four hundred fifty rupees a month; he could get that job again.

He came from Peshawar, in the northern Frontier Province, on the Afghanistan border. His family had a hundred acres of land and a tractor; but there were six brothers, and he had joined the great migration south. He had gone first to Karachi (where there were said to be a million Pathan migrants from the Frontier Province); then he had come to Hyderabad. A friend had told him of the community and brought him to the house. In the house he had seen two men from his northern village. So he had come again, two or three times. But he couldn’t make up his mind; he had decided to stay only after he had met the
pir
.

Experiences floated loose in his mind: he seemed to have no goal. He was a wayfarer. Through him it was possible to understand something of the wayfaring life in the European Middle Ages. The religious community in the desert was a staging post; it helped him through a part of his life. And no doubt in Pakistan—with its migrant movement within and outwards—there were many more like him, adrift, taking life in stages, as it came.

I asked whether foreigners came to the community and whether, when they came, they behaved strangely. He brightened at the question, looked up, became like a boy with excitement. He said there was a Bengali who came once and stayed for a month. He had no money, nothing. One day a man came in a car and took away the Bengali to Karachi. When the Bengali came back he was driving his own car.

Was it luck? Was it some deal?

There was an exciting answer, clearly. But it never came, because just then the man in blue—with the shaved head, the firm paunch, the stout shoulders, and the assessing eyes—came in. And the boy in brown grew nervous, stopped talking, looked down again, picked up the teacups, and went out.

The man in blue squatted before us, sitting on his heels, resting his knees on the floor spread. Since (though he didn’t say this) the
munshi
wasn’t coming, he wished to talk to us himself.

He said in English, “What do you want to know?”

I was surprised by the clarity of his accent: it had improved since he had spoken to us in the yard. There was aggression in this new clarity, but it was a managed aggression: it could harden or soften: he still wasn’t certain about me. I said I couldn’t yet say what I wanted to know; I would be happy with what he had to tell me.

He said, and the English words poured out of him, “I will tell you. There are different categories of believers. Some want money, some want a good afterlife. I want to meet Allah. You can do that only through a medium. My
murshid
is my medium. I want to love my
murshid
. I want my
murshid
to enter my heart. Allah is with my
murshid
. And when my
murshid
enters my heart, Allah is with me. I have no doubt about that. I can meet Allah only through the medium and in the form of my
murshid
. Through the medium and in the form.”

The
murshid
wasn’t the
pir
or ruler of the community, as I thought. The
murshid
was the original saint, whose tomb we had visited.

The man in blue explained with a political analogy. “The Qaid-e-Azam [Mr. Jinnah] founded Pakistan.” He was like the
murshid
. “But today we obey the president, Zia ul-Haq.” The president was like the
pir
. The man in blue pointed at Razak. “You obey Zia ul-Haq.” He pointed at me. “You obey Zia ul-Haq. I obey Zia ul-Haq.” I was beginning to detect a quality of incantation in his speech.

He said, “I haven’t shown you hospitality. It is my
murshid
. I don’t know you. You don’t know me. But I serve you to the best of my ability because I love my
murshid
. I want my
murshid
to enter my heart.”

There were about a hundred devotees in the community. They fed from eight hundred to a thousand people every day; they also ran a dispensary (it was in a cubicle downstairs, near where the man was doling out fresh water). But where did they get the money?

The man in blue said that the previous
pir
was a saint. “He was all the time for Allah. He fasted all day and he prayed all night. I am telling you. It isn’t easy to do, to hold your hands like this.” He brought his palms together and held them open, the way Muslims do when they say their prayers, as though reading their hands like a book. And then
he stood up and demonstrated the open-palmed act of prayer and repeated what he had said. “All the time for Allah. Fasted all day, prayed all night. You try holding your hands like that for even ten minutes.” He sat down again on his heels. “He did miracles. He took no food for fifty years. He took no water for three years. The people told him he would be useless if he took no water, and that was when he decided to take water.”

But how did they get the money to run the community?

The man in blue said, “That’s what I’m telling you. It was because of all that sacrifice that this place is now possible. Our
murshid
now has so many
murids
, followers, all over the world. They come here in lakhs. They give one rupee, five rupees, ten rupees. And we bargain for goods. I haven’t shown you hospitality. It is my
murshid
. There are different categories of believers. I want to meet Allah. The important thing is that I can do this only through-the-medium-and-in-the-form of my
murshid
. Do you understand?”