Sita Under the Crescent Moon by Annie Ali Khan

Author:Annie Ali Khan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: S&S India
Published: 2019-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

9 MOONS

On the morning of 27 September 2016, Ruby and Rubina, two women in their thirties, travelling together from the bustling city of Karachi, took a corner seat on the blue and white bus emblazoned with ‘Sindh Transport Company’ in red, carrying pilgrims to Thatta, a city in ruins, for the new moon, nauchandi, Thursday celeberation..

Ruby, seated up front in a single seat across from the driver, was going to get a miniature wooden swing as offering for a prayer for motherhood and Rubina seated in the front row by the window was going to tie a bangle for a wish for marriage at Shah Aqeeq’s shrine, the fourth stop on the nauchandi route across the southern province of Sindh, along the eastern edge of the coastal belt of Pakistan.

The women’s section of the bus, decorated with a canopy of red threaded tassels with blue and yellow beads and Victorian curtains, filled up quickly. There were about twenty-seven women when the bus started out around 8:35 a.m. In half an hour, there were thirty-seven women. By the time the bus crossed city limits, around 9:30 a.m., there were more than fifty women aboard. Most of them were crowded together in the aisle, hanging onto the rod above for balance. Some men were seated in the back with their families, and the rest of the men were packed on the metal roof. Ruby and Rubina came early for their seats.

‘Otherwise you are left standing,’ said Rubina. ‘My feet risk getting trampled in the aisle.’ Rubina had been visiting Shah Aqeeq’s shrine since she was a child. It was a story that her mother had told her that had tied Rubina to the shrine located in the swamp marshes of the delta where the Indus River met the Arabian Sea.

Rubina had been very young when her mother began to experience pain in her stomach; an ultrasound test revealed a cyst inside her stomach. She could not afford treatment, and her sister, Rubina’s aunt, advised her to pray to Shah Aqeeq, known as the spiritual surgeon, to come to her home and remove the cyst. Rubina’s mother prayed to the saint. She prayed that she was a mother with small children and if anything happened to her, the children would be lost. The following night, her mother dreamt a doctor in a white coat came to the house and put her in a stretcher, wheeled her into an operating room. The morning after, Rubina’s mother found spots of blood on her clothes. An ultrasound test revealed her stomach was clean. ‘Shah Aqeeq Baba successfully operated on my mother,’ said Rubina.

It had been years since Rubina’s mother passed away, of ailments having to do with old age. Rubina, worried about being a spinster for the rest of her life, made regular visits to Shah Aqeeq’s shrine to make a wish to the saint to become a bride. It was important to spend the night at the shrine, after asking for something, and equally important, she said, to seek the saint’s permission before leaving the shrine.

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