B005OWFTDW EBOK (29 page)

‘You know, in these non-registered homes are some of our best footballers, cyclists and boxers. Though our name hasn’t come forward in cricket yet …’ Akbar says, his head bent and eyes fixed on the ground – the usual pride that accompanies the fact that the Sheedi are among the nation’s most gifted athletes seems curiously missing, reserved for giants such as Syed Hussain Shah, who won a bronze in boxing at the 1986 Olympics, Mehar Ali Shah, a boxer who represented Pakistan at the Asian Games, Aziz Baloch, who plays football on the national team. ‘But we live in an invisible community. There are no options open to us – only sports, and that only because we break through; they cannot stop us. And this
urs
.’

The residents of the goth are the curators of the festival that marks the death of the saint through a celebration of his life – very unlike the usual manner of marking deaths in Pakistan, where songs and drumming are not encouraged. The
urs
will happen any time between May, June and July, lasting for four or ten days – however many the residents can afford. The crocodiles will be showered with rose petals and offerings, Sheedi Goth’s residents will beat the drums strung up on maypoles across their run-down town and sing and dance in troupes traditionally led by women. The
urs
is held at a different time each year and newspapers, both local and foreign, only publish news of it, along with photographs of the revellers and crocodiles, once it is over and done with. This year, the UK
Daily Mail
ran a photograph of a man and his infant son, brought to be blessed at the shrine and standing precipitously close to the famous reptiles, with the caption ‘Make It Snappy, Dad!’

The government gives the custodians of the shrine 3,000 rupees (
£
40) a year for the
urs
, a pittance considering how much is extracted in monthly hot-spring rent. It is an amount designed to placate the powerful bloc of Baloch and Sindhi voters across the city. ‘We can’t even buy one goat for that amount,’ Akbar tells me. ‘There are many other groups, religious or community or
jo bhi
[whatever], who get lakhs’ and lakhs’ worth of financial support. We only get pity.’

T
his is a community set in a wasteland. The nearest school is a town away and does not teach in the languages – Sindhi and Balochi – spoken by the majority of Sheedi. There is no transport to ferry the children to the school, no buses or cars to return them home. Without an education, this generation of Sheedi is stuck. There is a hospital but it has no ambulances. As I walk with Akbar, the locals gather to talk to me and soon it seems we are moving in a procession. Women grab at my sleeve; they speak over each other and interrupt my questions with answers they know by heart. They see me as a messenger who will tell their troubles to someone I happen to be related to; they don’t particularly care so long as the word gets out. They are thinking, I know, of my grandfather Zulfikar. He was killed in 1979, but ghosts live long in Pakistan.

As we walk through the narrow alleyways, we are hurried towards an empty plot. Farida’s house has just burned to the ground; she stands in front of debris that looks like much of the disorder one sees everywhere in Sheedi Goth. ‘I was at work,’ she says, clutching her dupatta in a closed fist. She is a young woman, but looks worn. Along with much of Sheedi Goth’s working population, she works miles away from home, travelling two hours each way, when the traffic cooperates, longer when there are transport strikes or VIPs clogging up the roads. ‘My children were alone – there is no one to look after them – and they are very young so they cannot tell us how the fire started.’ I ask if it could have been a gas leak. ‘I had no gas connection,’ Farida replies, stone-faced. She has the clothes on her back, her dupatta, creased from her clenched hands and dirty from days of wear. Farida is living with neighbours who have taken her family in. Mercifully, her small children were unhurt by the blaze. ‘Who was there to call? There is no fire department here. No one from the city government to come and help me build a new house. No one.’ Farida continues to stand in front of the charred remains of her home; several minutes pass like this in silence.

I had come to talk about the long-ago journey that brought the ancestors of the Sheedi from their home to this place. I wanted to ask about the famous
urs
, where women sing in a language that is part Swahili and part Balochi, and about the
dhammal
and its relation to traditional East African
ngoma
drum music, which is awfully similar, but I can’t. My quest for Sheedi lore and legend remains unspoken as the residents gather to tell me a different sort of story, the kind that won’t eventually end up on the front of a foreign newspaper with a heart-warming photo and amusing caption to go along with it.

A
t the shrine, our prayers offered and received, Akbar and I walk down the small hill towards the crocodiles. Along the short distance to the pool there are small, simple, whitewashed graves marking the terrain – the final resting places of Muhammad bin Qasim’s followers. We walk silently between the graves and Akbar breaks our awkward solemnity by telling me that there are ‘two hundred crocodiles here,
takreeban
’. Approximately.

The crocodiles are mostly middle-aged, the elders somewhere between forty to sixty years old. ‘They live here like a family,’ says Akbar. The head of the family – they are Pakistani crocodiles after all – is named ‘Mor’ and he is the reason people come to offer bags of bloody meat to the creatures. He is the head avatar, the alpha incarnate. ‘What happens when Mor dies?’ I ask, not sure how far the lifespan of a Sufi crocodile goes. Haji Akbar shrugs. ‘When one Mor dies, another takes his place and becomes the new Mor.’ I don’t dare ask how the process of dynastic crocodile succession is carried out.

The less brave (or less faithful?) can climb some well-placed rocks and peek from a safe distance, but those who mean business walk through a small corrugated-iron gate and into the crocodiles’ lair. I count fourteen of them. Mor, his thick scaly neck garlanded with roses, sits in the shade of a gazebo built for his comfort. He barely moves to acknowledge our arrival and Akbar tells me he’s a very calm beast,
takreeban
in his fifties although he looks younger.

‘There are no facilities for our devotees,’ Akbar complains, pointing around him. ‘The Sheedi come from across Sindh and Balochistan in the thousands during our
urs
, but there is no help given to us by the government. We arrange everything ourselves, even though during the urs we have a
dhammal
and traditions so unique that the world media comes to film and photograph us, we have no assistance. We provide the water, the food, the lodging, everything.’ It is hard not to remark on the fact that I am the only non-Sheedi at the shrine that afternoon, difficult not to leap to conclusions as to why the state has no interest in funding and supporting Mangho Pir’s shrine.

F
or eight hundred years,
chashmas
(hot sulphur springs) have run underground filling the pools at Mangho Pir’s shrine. This is the one part of the holy site that is frequented by Sheedi and
non-Sheedi
alike. Men and women line up with old gasoline canisters that will carry the magical waters of the spring back home with them. But first they fill up with the water and retreat into small stalls to shower privately and pray for whatever cure they seek. The water, Akbar whispers, cures
kharish
– skin diseases ranging from scabies to eczema – purifies your kidneys if you drink it, softens your skin and inspires full body rehabilitation if you are regular in your visits.

The most famous spring, the Mamma Baths, is bedecked in light blue porcelain tiles and, save for the large pool of scalding water in the middle of the room, resembles a Middle Eastern hammam. The area is administered by an aged Sheedi woman named Fatima who stands outside the doors of the Baths collecting the fees – eight rupees, or ten pence, for fifteen minutes. Ladies have their time, then filter out so that the men may come in and have theirs, and on it goes. Fatima is a round old lady, pear-shaped, and she moves cumbersomely, shifting her weight on to each foot as if she must tread carefully to avoid veering off in the wrong direction. I ask where her family came from, if they travelled in the footsteps of the saint. ‘From here,’ she answers, stomping the ground. ‘Before?’ I ask, trying to place Fatima within a migration of warriors or slaves. ‘
Before
?’ She looks at me as if I make no sense whatsoever. ‘Sindh. Always Sindh,’ she says, stomping her foot again emphatically.

The water in the Mamma Baths, swirling around in a porcelain mini-pool, is
takreeban
100°F. Abdul Malik Rind, whose local expertise and range of influence covers the Mamma Baths, has appeared between the two Fatimas, the Baths’ bouncer and me, and beckons me towards the large bath in the middle of the room; I slip out of my sandals and walk towards the water. He takes a plastic flask and fills it with water and asks me to hold out my hands. I do so, and hot water is poured over me. I stifle a yelp but notice that in fact my hands do feel instantly softer and smoother. Feeling braver, I step closer to inspect the pool and slip, almost plunging head first into the frightening hot waters. Fatima catches me by the elbow, pats me on the back and snickers. She’s been on duty here for the last forty years and – desperate to move on from my near gaffe – I ask her what those years have been like. She tells me that they’ve never run out of
chashma
water here, nor out of visitors.

Here, Rind jumps in to the conversation and adds that people from all over the world have come to the shrine to be healed and blessed by its spiritual powers. ‘What kind of people?’ I ask. ‘Oh, American women come with boils on their chests,’ he answers, puffing out his own chest with pride. ‘They come here to be cured and after a few days of visiting the Mamma Baths then they are fully fine. No boils, no marks, nothing.’ Rind wipes his hands together, illustrating the impressive healing potential of the springs. ‘They are Republicans,’ he adds, throwing in a worldly smile.

I
t is five thirty in the evening and the doors of the Sindh Government Hospital in Sheedi Goth are padlocked. A young man who asks not to be named, wearing a black-and-white keffiyeh around his neck, has accompanied me here. He runs his finger along the lock and it is soon caked in dust. The lock hasn’t been opened in a while. There are other gates and windows, all sealed.

Behind the hospital are bungalows built for absent doctors. Khadim, a gatekeeper who has worked here for the last twenty years, tells me as we walk to his quarters behind the neat bungalows that the local doctors and persistently abbreviated bureaucratic medical support staff – EDOs, MLOs, MOs (executive district officers, medical legal officers, medical officers) – all eat the hospital’s budget. There’s nothing left for the actual facility or its patients. The bungalows were built from funds meant for the upkeep of the hospital, the refurbishment merely an ornamental indication that the facility was an up-and-running operation, and that’s it, nothing has been spent on medical equipment, lodging for the ill or medicines. My guide tells me that the police officers next door have a small-time drug-running business here, hence the padlocked doors. They sell
chars
– heroin-laced marijuana – to supplement their meagre salaries.

Khadim, who has eight children, takes me to his home. He has a nine-year-old daughter with one blind eye, her socket pinched shut. His eldest daughter, Naheed, who is my age, has polio and lies on a mattress on the floor. She tells me she’s just recently had an operation. So the hospital does work? No, Naheed corrects me, she went to Jinnah Hospital in central Karachi.

This is the rot. The oppressive poverty that is the story of the Sheedis in Pakistan, more a part of their lore than the exploits of bin Qasim’s warriors, clearer than their confused
Ethiopian-Tanzanian-Kenyan-Zanzibarian
heritage, and just as easily ignored as they are.

I have made arrangements to visit another Sheedi neighbourhood where in a week’s time there will be a
mela
, a festival celebrating their distinct culture. This will be strictly a community affair, not open to outsiders. The men, from Akbar to all the young boys I meet at Sheedi Goth, insist I also visit their boxing grounds, where the greatest train for matches held at midnight in hidden porticos around Karachi. I make arrangements to visit them later in the week. As I drive out of Mangho Pir, my car is stopped by a spontaneous riot. Sheedi and the Pathans living in townships near the shrine, in a rare show of solidarity, have set fire to tyres and closed the roads out of the area in protest over the lack of water in the neighbourhood. Traffic is at a standstill. Men on motorcycles, some sitting three to a vehicle, pull their shirts up to cover their noses and mouths. I notice them first, before I see the smoke. I see them bracing themselves for the obligatory burning that comes with any protest riot. There are no TV cameras here, no press vans or state officials in their standard heavy motorcades, there is no one to witness the riot who can do anything about it. This is a demonstration of anger, grief and frustration, pure and simple.

T
hree days after my trip to Mangho Pir, I meet Maulabux in a garden and he brings three friends. One of them, Habib, is in his early to mid-twenties; he is soft-spoken and polite. A police officer serving in Lyari, where he and his family have always lived, he is at pains to explain the recent violence and police incursions in his neighbourhood – an area known for its radical politics, secular history and multi-ethnic population. Life is always interrupted – festival dates, school exams, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays – by this sort of warfare. State v. community, Sindhi v. Baloch, Sheedi v. everyone else.