I introduced myself, telling her that I had heard about her from the fakirs of Bhit Shah.
“These shrines are my home,” she replied simply. “And the fakirs are my family.”
“How many years have you been here?” I asked.
“I’ve lost count,” replied Lal Peri. “Over twenty. People come and go, but many find what they are looking for here, and stay forever. This was my experience. It is ’ishq—love—that keeps us here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Once you find the love and protection of Lal Shahbaz Qalander, you want to feel it again and again and again. You never want to go anywhere else.”
I asked how he showed his love.
“He protects me and gives me whatever I need,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Whenever I am hungry, someone comes and feeds me. In his house, everything is fulfilled.”
Lal Peri’s full lips and very dark skin marked her out amid the relatively fair Sindhis, so I asked if she was a siddi—did she have African blood in her veins, like so many of the fishermen on the Makran coast?
“No,” she said, smiling and revealing paan-stained teeth. “I am from Bihar.”
“Bihar? In India?”
“Yes, from a village called Sonepur. Not far from the border with Bangladesh.”
“So how did you end up in Sindh?” I asked.
“For much of my childhood there was fighting,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders. “Each time, we had to leave and move on. First it was Hindus killing Muslims in Bihar: they cut people and killed them—even in mosques. Then it was Bengalis killing Biharis in what is now Bangladesh.” She spat on the ground. “I can never forget what I saw.”
She was silent for a while. “Sometimes I dream of my childhood in Bihar and want to go back,” she said eventually. “My village was like a garden—so green, so fertile—and so different from the deserts here.” She paused, chewing the clug of paan in her mouth. “I would come back to Lal Shahbaz Qalander—other than my mother, he is the only one who has guarded me and given me unconditional love. How can I leave him? But I’d still like to see the land of my forefathers one more time.”
“Is it difficult living here on your own,” I asked, “without any protector but Lal Shahbaz?”
Lal Peri thought for a second before answering. “I always talk too much, and sometimes that gets me into trouble. But I speak the truth, and if someone gives me gali [abuse] I have my danda [club].” She smiled and rapped her club on the palm of her left hand. “And I have him, Lal Shahbaz. I am not sure the world can give you happiness, but Lal Shahbaz can. God sends many different things in this life—happiness, pain, sadness—but Lal Shahbaz makes sure it is all for the best, and that we can cope with whatever the Almighty decides. Whenever I am lonely, or feel frightened, I pray to him, and I feel I am being looked after.”
Lal Peri was the sort of deeply eccentric ascetic that both the Eastern Christians and Sufis have traditionally celebrated as Holy Fools. She was an illiterate, simple and trusting woman, who saw the divine and miraculous everywhere. It was also clear that she had lived an unusually traumatic life, which had left her emotionally raw. She was in fact a triple refugee: first as a Muslim driven out of India into East Pakistan after Hindu-Muslim riots in the late 1960s; then as a Bihari driven out of East Pakistan at the creation of Bangladesh in 1971; and finally as a single woman taking refuge in the shrines of Sindh while struggling to live the life of a Sufi in the male-dominated and increasingly Talibanised society of Pakistan. The more I heard the details of her story, the more her life seemed to encapsulate the complex relationship of Hinduism with the different forms of South Asian Islam, swerving between hatred and terrible violence, on one hand, and love and extraordinary syncretism on the other.
With such a past, it was easy to see why she had found refuge in this particular shrine. For the longer I explored Sehwan Sharif, the more it became clear that, more even than most other Sufi shrines, this was a place where for once you saw religion acting to bring people together, not to divide them. Sufism here was not just something mystical and ethereal, but a force that demonstrably acted as a balm on South Asia’s festering religious wounds. The shrine provided its often damaged and vulnerable devotees shelter and a refuge from the divisions and horrors of the world outside.
Lal Peri seemed to be aware of this and pointed out to me the many Hindus at the shrine: the water men at the entrance, distributing cups of free spring water to pilgrims; a Hindu sajjada nasheen directing the cleaning of the shrine chamber; and the many Hindu pilgrims and ascetics, in from the wild places of the desert to ask for Lal Shahbaz’s blessing. The Hindus were said to regard Lal Shahbaz Qalander as a reincarnation of the sensual Sanskrit poet turned Shaivite ascetic, Bhartrihari, who in the fourth century AD renounced the pleasures of the court of Ujjain and moved to Sehwan, where he lived as an ash-smeared sadhu, and was later cremated on the site of the present shrine. The Hindus also know Lal Shahbaz by a third name: Jhule Lal, originally the Hindu water god and Lord of the Indus River. This name, and the legends that go with it, they have passed on to the Muslim devotees of the saint, some of whom still believe that Lal Shahbaz controls the ebb and flow, the angry storms and peaceful meanders of the great river of Sindh. Introduced by Lal Peri, I asked one group of Hindus if they were made to feel welcome in a Muslim shrine.