Among the Believers (26 page)

I asked him to tell me exactly what he felt when he stroked the stone that hung above the
murshid’s
tomb. To my surprise he appeared not to know what I was talking about. And when I asked again he said he was too busy here, with the community.

The boy in brown stood in the doorway—eagerness on his face—but when he saw the man in blue still squatting before us he turned and walked silently away on his bare feet. I was nagged by that story about the Bengali and the car; it began to torment me while the man in blue talked on, repeating himself, mixing up the sequence of sentences he had already spoken.

He told me another miracle of the previous
pir
. A
faqir
died, one of the ascetics of the community. They told the
pir
. He went to the room where the dead man lay. As he entered the room the dead man raised his right hand in the Muslim salutation. The
pir
became very angry. He jabbed his stick at the dead man and said, “You must learn greater control over your body. Surely you know it is incorrect for a dead man to salute me.”

I asked the man in blue whether he couldn’t send up the boy with some tea for me. I asked many times. But we weren’t going to have the boy in brown to ourselves again. We would have tea later, the man in blue said; but we had to visit the kitchens first, and then of course we
should look at the tombs of the old
pirs
. He didn’t intend to leave us now; I began to understand that it was his way of seeing us off the premises.

I tried to get him to talk about himself, and it was as hard as it had been with the boy in brown. He gave out random facts; they had formed no pattern in his mind; he knew only where he was now. He, too, was a wayfarer, part of the semi-medieval migrant life of Pakistan. In spite of his Central Asian features (emphasized by his shaved head) he, too, like the boy in brown, came from the Frontier Province. He had studied at an agricultural college, but he didn’t take a degree. He had done odd jobs for a few years. Then he came to the community. He saw the present
pir
and decided at once to stay. He didn’t ask anybody’s permission; he just stayed (and Razak added that he was now the pir’s “right-hand man”). His father was a farmer in the Frontier Province. How many acres? Sixteen. Good land? Very good. Any brothers? No brothers. So who was going to take over when his father died? He thought I had asked whether he was needed on the farm, and he said there were contractors with machines. What was going to happen to the sixteen acres when he inherited them? He said he didn’t know; he had given up that side of life.

We went down to look at the kitchens. The midday feeding was over, but cooking was going on. We had to take off our shoes to walk, in thick, tickling dust, from the main building to the kitchen shed. There they were boiling tea in big copper pots; and there, among the cords of firewood, the boy in brown stood idle; he kept his distance.

In an open shed in front of the deep fire holes a man was standing over a high marble basin, kneading brown dough, kneading up to the elbows; flies had settled on the kneaded dough in the marble stand beside him. Another man was making lentil soup; another man was in the fire hole, attending to the oven. The heads of all were shaved; their eyes were bright; their cheeks were round. They were friendly, pleased to be observed; they were at the source of food and plenty; they knew they served the poor and God. In northern-Indian painting these cooking scenes recur: the very faces I felt I had seen before.

One by one, the man in blue guiding us, we touched the tombs of all the
pirs
who had been buried here in the
koli
. And then we sat in the hot tiled courtyard, in the gaiety of the stepped coloured lines of the Hyderabad Boogie-Woogie. Shyly, the boy in brown came out with the
tea. He didn’t go away. Our time was almost up. I asked directly about the Bengali.

The boy in brown said, “He went to Karachi and he came back. I told you.”

“Bengali?” the man in blue said. “We get people from all over the world here. I don’t know you. You don’t know me. But I serve you—” And abruptly, sitting on a white-tiled ledge, he stopped, as though enervated by the midafternoon heat, the dust, the desert, the life, the boredom.

When we were in the car, going down the wet, black bazaar lane with the paying food stalls, Razak said, “You remember when he was talking about getting goods? He said he bar-gained. In the
koli
he should not be making bar-gains.” Razak was speaking as a good Muslim.

We drove back between the river and the rock mountains: neat layers of rock folded over and then breached by some water cataclysm, the rock stripped off in layers, so that in places the mountain looked like the tiers of a vast stone amphitheatre tilted sharply to one side.

We stopped at one such breach. Razak had been energized by his lunch. And a bottle of a Pakistani version of Seven-Up, Bubble-Up (it was a pleasure just to hear him speak the name), had made him frisky, indifferent to the great heat.

The mountain grew as we walked towards it. When we were in the mountain shadow it was cooler. It was a site that called up awe. But the Hindu temples, expressions of that awe, small, pyramid-roofed structures, not old, only pre-1947, had been broken, emptied, cleansed, and then defaced with Urdu inscriptions: the enemy utterly cast out. And it was a famous site: of the water turbulence that had smashed the mountain, and the lesser turbulence that had afterwards washed between the layers of rock, creating smooth holes and caverns, there remained only a salt spring, known for its healing qualities: blue-green in the mountain cleft, leaving a white slime on the rocks its little stream now slipped over and still smoothed. In this stream there were more than pebbles; there were marine fossils.

Razak had the naturalist’s eye. He bent down and picked up pieces of stone on which I could see patterns of shells; he placed in my hand a mussel, fossilized whole, and a small conchlike shell. Islam, Buddhists, Hindus, Aryans, pre-Aryans; and there had been a civilization in the Indus Valley even before the builders of the ancient cities of Mohenjo-Daro
and Harappa. But the greater wonder, that took the mind far away, was that once all this land lay at the bottom of the sea. And still this thin salt spring, rising out of hot rock, brought up evidence of the sea past in a land that was now so far from the sea, so full of light and heat, so crying out for water.

There was trouble again at the Circuit House in Hyderabad when we got back there. I had been booked in for the previous night; there was no booking for me for this night. The place was empty; no one was expected. But it took a full hour’s telephoning, Razak being passed on from official to official, before permission was obtained.

We didn’t have to go far in the morning. In Hyderabad itself, within one of the mud-walled forts built by the last Muslim amirs or princes of Sind, there was a shrine where the mentally disturbed went to be cured.

It was up a flight of marble steps. At the bottom were pathetic shrunken women, one with a little baby boy, waiting for alms; two or three steps up, a man was beating a drum and singing. At the top were two small buildings separated by a narrow paved lane. In the building to the left the saint had meditated; in the building to the right he was buried. The tomb was barred around, and the guardian of the shrine, a fat and friendly little man, sat amid a companionable swarm of flies on the tiled floor of the pillared porch in front. To people looking for health he must have seemed like a sweet-shop owner to children, the man who had it all. He was exchanging gossip with a demented, red-eyed man, and while they talked they also appeared to be bartering or exchanging beans of some sort.

One or two people came and made the circuit of the tomb, passing slowly in the lane between the two buildings to get the emanations from both sacred places at once. They held the silver-painted iron rails of the tomb with a rubbing gesture, and then rested their heads on the metal.

At the back, two young girls with covered heads were facing the tomb. They were not ill; they were just using the shrine as a meeting place, having a little Hyderabadi chat and giggle. But a man was there with a real
djinn
or spirit on him, a young man, dark, physically wasted, his mind half gone. It was this man that the guardian of the shrine presently rose to deal with. The flies swarmed up a few inches, then settled down again.

The guardian could be heard shouting at the back. “
Come on!
” The
djinn
in the man howled, suffering from the sacred emanations. But the guardian, like a man standing no nonsense from any
djinn
, led the man on, shouting roughly all the while at the
djinn;
and the man with the
djinn
pretended to pull back. For all his distress he knew what was expected of him. And in this very ill man there was still a remnant of vanity. He knew he was a case so bad that he had to be brought to the shrine; and he looked back at Razak and me, his only audience, to make sure that we were seeing how strong the
djinn
was that possessed him, how the
djinn
howled and resisted going nearer the emanations of the saint. But there he had to go, in the lane between the two buildings; there he would stay until he was pronounced cured. “
You sit here! You hear me!
” the guardian shouted. After a little resistance the
djinn
quietened down, and the guardian, jolly once more, returned to his beans and his flies, which swarmed up six inches to greet him and then settled down again.

An African—
sidi
was the local word that caused no offence—came. His hair was neatly dressed; he didn’t look unwell. He sat beside the barred window of the meditation place, next to the man with the
djinn
, now pacific, even remote. And in a short while the African’s face altered; his eyes glazed, his cheeks hollowed, his pain became apparent. A small woman came with a child on her hip. She was pregnant again. And then I saw that she was herself hardly more than a child, twelve or thirteen, but excited at the idea of already being adult enough to experience important needs. Everyone was acting (though the man with the
djinn
, after his flash of vanity, seemed a little too far away); everyone knew his role. But was it acting when the whole world, or the world you knew, was in the play?

That was the point that Razak—who was awed by the
djinn—
struggled to make with his English. He had seen two or three other people possessed by
djinns
, he said. But then he said that he was sure that in other countries, other civilizations, people would believe in other things, mental illnesses would take other forms, and there would be other cures.

To drive back through the desert to Karachi, to cross the ancient Indus again, was to drive back through ascending levels of development, to leap generations. It was easy to see how the great city—not to speak of the Intercontinental, with its special traffic—drew them out of their villages and committed so many to the wayfaring life.

For some of the way, nearing Karachi, we drove behind an open van with freshly and correctly slaughtered cattle heads, skinned, shining in the sunlight, but still with horns.

I was glad that Ahmed had sent me to the interior. I had much to talk to him about. But when I got to Karachi I found that it was Ahmed himself who had cancelled my first booking at the Circuit House—there had been no visiting minister that day. Between his sending me to Hyderabad and my arrival at Hyderabad something had happened to make Ahmed change his mind about me.

He had known nothing about me before we met. His response to me had been the pure response of man to man; and I had responded to that. But now perhaps he had been told that I was not what I said I was. He became cold on the telephone; he failed to keep two appointments. So I couldn’t talk about the sufi centre with him. I couldn’t discuss with him whether the mixing of the two types of religion—the religion of revelation and rules, the religion of asceticism and unconfined meditation—didn’t diminish both. Nor could I find out more about the “cooperatives” of his youth or about his idea of the period-less purity of women in paradise. As with the boy’s story of the Bengali who had left penniless for Karachi and come back with a car, I had to be content with what I had.

I liked Ahmed. His withdrawal made me unhappy, and anxious to leave Karachi.

  6
The Disorder of the Law

A
t the sessions court in Karachi—just beyond the central bazaar—the prisoners were led out into the yard, usually tied up in twos, with chains attached to their wrists, and with the free end of the chain held by a khaki-uniformed policeman. It was friendly,
and in the courtyard bustle, which was like the bazaar bustle, no one stared or paid too much attention. The prisoners chatted with the policemen and sometimes they stopped at the
pan
stalls to buy betel nut to chew. The faces in the main were like the faces of the street; though one man had disturbed eyes, and two barefooted little fellows chained together, possibly brothers, looked mentally deficient. There weren’t enough chains. Some prisoners were led along by ropes attached to their upper arms, and they looked a little like performing monkeys; but it was just as friendly.