“Of course,” replied their leader. “We never have any trouble in these Sufi dargahs. All gods are the same.”
“There is one god only,” agreed his wife, who was wearing the gagra-choli and peaked veil of the Rabari camel herders. “We are friends with our Muslim brothers and we have faith in this pir.”
“And the Muslims do not mind you coming here?”
“Why would they mind?” said the pair, genuinely baffled by my question.
When I asked the man why he had made the effort to come all this way, from the hot deserts of the interior, he replied with the following story.
“When our child was young he became very ill,” said the man. “No medicines helped. We tried everything, but our son only got weaker. Then some neighbours said we should come here. We were desperate, so we got on a bus. We brought the boy to the shrine and one of the pirs cured him. What could not be done by the doctors in twelve months he did in a minute.”
“The child was sick, and he was made right,” said his wife. “So now we believe. Each year we come back to the shrine to thank Jhule Lal.”
“I tell you he is here,” said Lal Peri emphatically. “People see him in the crowd. He looks after every one of his followers. No one goes away empty-handed.”
The following morning I agreed to meet Lal Peri amid the date palms of the holy garden of Lal Bagh, a short distance outside the town.
Mutual friends had arranged for me to stay in the house of one of the tomb’s sajjada nasheens. Climbing up to his rooftop in the centre of the town’s bazaar early that morning, with a cup of warm green tea in my hands, I was able see a wide panorama of the shrine, the town and the belt of gardens that surrounded it. The town was slowly waking after the revelry of the night before, and from the rooftop I could hear the morning sounds familiar from any South Asian bazaar: the swishing-flicking of brooms sweeping; throats being cleared; a dog barking.
The houses of the bazaar were all of dun-coloured mud brick, though some had small white-painted prayer areas in the inner courtyards, where triple-arched mihrabs rose to small white minars, topped with flapping green flags. Lines of pilgrim shops were beginning to open up for the day, and the shopkeepers were laying out their stalls of nuts and chickpeas, sugar-ball prasad and rose petals, icons of the saint and cassettes of qawwali performances from the ’Urs. Dominating all these rooftops, and surrounded by a halo of circling pigeons, was the great gilt dome of the shrine, flanked by a pair of golden pepper-pot minarets.
On one side of the bazaar, next to an oxbow loop of the Indus, rose the old mud-brick tell of the ancient citadel that Alexander would have seen as he floated down the river in the fourth century BC. From here, in the clear early morning light, lines of leathery water buffaloes marched through the dust towards the shallow waters of the Indus.
On the other, more arid side of the town, facing away from the river and towards the desert, were the old walled tombs and graveyards, with their wind-eroded mud-brick calligraphy and crumbling tile work. Around them was a scattering of flag-topped hillocks where Lal Shahbaz Qalander and his followers once performed their austerities. Beyond lay the fans of the date palms of Lal Bagh, the walled garden where Lal Shahbaz took up residence in a hollow tree trunk.
It was here that Lal Shahbaz is said to have punished himself with great feats of self-mortification, testing his self-discipline by engaging in the Hindu ascetic practice of tapasya, sitting in a cauldron over a fire, so turning his skin red. It was also here, according to his devotees, that the saint transformed himself into a falcon—the other legend which gave the saint his name. On one occasion he flew to Mecca to perform evening prayers at the Ka’ba; another time he flew off to the aid of his friend Sheikh Baha ud-Din Zakariya, who was in mortal danger from the King of Multan. Lal Bagh was also the scene of another of his celebrated miracles: producing the springs of sweet water which to this day irrigate his holy garden.
Lal Shahbaz Qalander was originally born near Tabriz, in northwest Iran, and walked to Sindh around the same time as Marco Polo was setting off from Venice to China, at the end of the thirteenth century. Known during his life as Sheikh Usman Marwandi, the saint was probably part of the same wave of humanity that brought the greatest of all Sufi poets, Jalal ad-Din Rumi, from Afghanistan to Turkey—the great diaspora of refugees set in motion by the advance of the Mongol armies, who in turn destroyed both Balkh, the home of Rumi, and Tabriz, the home of Lal Shahbaz.
In his lifestyle, however, Lal Shahbaz Qalander was a much more extreme figure than Rumi. For all his theological free-thinking, Rumi was in fact a prominent maulana in a mosque in Konya and so a respected local divine. In contrast, Lal Shahbaz was a Qalander, or holy fool, “an unruly friend of God” who, enraptured by the love of the divine, followed a religious path that involved rejecting the material world, the constraints of convention and the strictures of the Shariah, and looking instead for humiliation and blame from society as a proof of sanctity. As part of this quest, Lal Shahbaz is said to have moved from Lal Bagh into the brothel area of Sehwan. This of course horrified the clerics of the local ulema, but Lal Shahbaz Qalander in time converted the prostitutes, who soon became his most ardent devotees. He also encouraged his followers to dance their way to God—a Persian poem ascribed to him describes his ecstatic Qalanders as dancing in the fire and on the gallows of life.