Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

  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?”

  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?