For 270 years, Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai’s fakirs gather at his asthana / resting place / shrine, and sing his kalaam, known as Shah jo raag. For 270 years this has gone on, uninterrupted. For 270 years, the blue of Bhitshah has drawn, and trapped, devotees like me.
Barefoot I walk past the final strokes of night. Past the khabar tree, past the hidden moon, past the masjid. The streets of Bhitshah are winding down to the fajar azan. All night, the raag had me ripped open, rend asunder—this, it seems, is what nights were created for. I press my heels into the gravel. I graze the edges of stones. I squeeze wet mud between my toes. Any part of the earth I call upon, is ready to meet my skin.
How long since I have been touched like this?
I sit where I sit so I can see the blue. The blue of Bhitshah gets inside me. It does not ask for permission. It is ready to pounce, to wreck. It waits only for the contact of flesh and string, of sound and air. A finger plucks. A mouth opens. The blue leaps. It mounts me, straddles me, then disassembles me. I am tossed; I become an ocean that does not know its own depths. I am emptied, and filled.
I have lost so much I am always startled when something is placed in my hands. The fakirs of Bhitshah keep on surprising my empty hands. Send chai and tabarruk, send my hands folding to the raag. I don’t immediately unclasp my fingers; don’t automatically take the tabarruk to my mouth. Instead I grip the teacup, rub the mithai. I marvel at this weight on my palm: sometimes, what is received turns out to be so much more than what was desired.
I long for someone’s lips to travel the path of my neck. A beloved’s face burrowed, resting, seated. Held as it holds.
Again and again the neck shows up as the site of surrender: midway between head and heart, what is offered to both executioner and beloved. Sometimes the executioner is the beloved. In a tradition where lovers defy even God, one’s head is a cheap price for love. It is a testament to your ishq: Majnun, bowing his head when he extends his bowl towards Laila. Hussain’s final offering at Karbala.
Then, endless couplets like this one (possibly Meera’s):
Saajan aaya hum sunya kya le chaloun saath?
Sees utaare paoun dharoon yehi hai moray haath
Before the beloved, the neck’s only duty is to fall, to be relinquished.
For now, I dress it with lockets from the darbar. That’s all that will touch it.
It is the ordinary, unthinking touch that grazes my eyes. The murmur of cloth around the tambooro, the tambooro held in a lap. The fakir who kisses, so tenderly, the spine of his instrument before he sings. Any kind of touch, reminding me I have none.
A memory comes. A boy’s lean fingers on the piano. Learning a new language like he once learned my body’s; the same quiver; then the same quick sharpening. Every pang of pain is welcome. The depth of longing is the measure of the cut, the width of the neck’s offering.
And the arrows are everywhere, striking wherever eyes look.
I close my eyes a lot. The raag does that. First my fingers close, then my palm, then the light over my skin. I picture the fakirs, the sharp glide of their arms. Plucking the strings like they are weaving. Pulling needles through stubborn fabric. In the darkness I see the threads of my heart, sticky and black.
I stare at the ground a lot. At the gathering residue of the darbar: drops of chai, pools of red petals, crumbs of mithai. Every half hour a man comes along to sweep it all away. The flies become dispossessed momentarily with the crumbs gone. Then they return, wings shimmering, to rummage in the dust.
Bhittai says, what you find in the dust you will not find in anything else.
On my wrist I hang rose garlands. In the morning, the phoolwala hands them over wordlessly. Over the day I watch the petals wither, fall, die. By night they will become small and shriveled. When clumps of them are swept away before they blacken, I am relieved. If I were patient I would wait for death. But I am not patient; I lack courage. I cheat. I shake my wrist quietly so more petals fall.
The fakirs of Bhitshah wail beside the graveyard. For 270 years, the dead have been listening to Shah jo raag more than any living. The raag has seeped into their bones more than it has seeped into any living creature’s.
Sitting there, the raag seeps into the parts of me that have died. For a long time they haven’t been touched, either.
Without the fakirs of Bhitshah I am miserable. Without their raag I am lost. I wander restless for a sight of their black clothes. I tie threads around the branches of old trees. Wind or person, whoever touches these threads, touches the hungriest parts of me.
Iblis they say is the greatest lover. Paro is no less. She understands: in separation, the beloved is always with you. Then there is Devdas, who passes through each of the stations of grief and longing, but never quite gets it. No one, though, realizes union like Chandramukhi.
What does Chanda say when Paro walks in, looking for Dev: “Apni nazar se dekho gi, tou kabhi na dekh pao gi. Hamari nazar se dekho gi, tou chaaron taraf paao gi unn ko. Dekho, uss jaltay huay diye ki roshni mein hain Dev babu… uss bistar ki silvaton mein bhi hain… uss adhooray paimane se aaj bhi jhalak rahi hai Dev babu ki pyaas… aaj bhi mehekta hai ye kamra unn ki khushbu se… agar le ja sakti ho tou le jao.” Devdas is not here. Take him away if you can. Can you take away his smell, his memory, his touch?
I dream of seas I cannot enter. Fantastical bodies of water: oceans, rivers and waterfalls that defy the laws of gravity. Always in these dreams I stand before them in rapture, in helplessness; I long for the blue, and wake up thirsty for it.
I ask the wind if she bears any messages. I beg the leaf for a memory. O mynah! What tidings from my beloved? Does the dark one miss me?
O my mother! Thank God you didn't get me married off—Everyday I would have been touched by a husband. Everyday I would have been satiated.
My beloved is mischievous. He devises new ways to enchant me, ensnare me. Offers my past as a shadow. Brings me facing the eyes of a Zuljanah. Somewhere at the darbar he makes me lose: a ring, a chain, a memory.
Look how the darbar is undressing me.
How can I desire that which the lord does not desire for me? Rabia Basri once challenged someone.
Yes, I think. The lord desires nothing else for me because the lord desires me. The lord wants me all for himself.
The raag is a river that drips through my hands. That my hands cannot hold on to. I am not used to receiving this way, being wanted this way.
I rustle, I drop the veil—I am flooded.
I feel how a petal in bloom must feel. Widening its red to hold just a bit more of the world.
Why I keep returning to this 270 year old darbar to listen to Shah jo raag is a longer story, but always it must end like this: my neck bent at the darbar, tied to the raag. God says every man's fate we have fastened to his neck. Wakul insaan az munnahu tahira fi uniqihi. Unuq means neck. I have been reading the Quran in Arabic because I figured that maybe, God’s chosen language, too, holds things I can receive that I do not yet have the imagination to desire.
I press my forehead to the marble when I enter. Sink my palms into the ground. Mark the darbar’s mouth with my own. I lift my neck, and see what I am fastened to: O khudaya, the blue of Bhitshah on the eyes. O dark God, here’s a blue that will touch me.
When at last I take the tabarruk to my mouth, I lick it. First furtively, then desperately.
Yesterday one of the fakirs explained a bait. “It’s about Maula Ali,” he said. The story goes: everyone was waiting for Hazrat Ali to arrive. They were looking at the horizon. Thinking Ali would appear soon. Only Suleman had his eyes to the sky.
Why are you staring at the sky? the others asked.
Don’t you know? asked Suleman, raising his neck. That’s where my maula will come from.
Unuq means neck. I lift mine to see what it is fastened to. Again and again the blue of the darbar flies in, remembers me.
Fuckin devdas line made me cry 😭
The Rabia Basri reference made me think of this story I read that was trying to analogise "tawakkal"
About a man drowning at see, then Allah asks him, "shall I save you?" He says no. "Shall I let you drown?" And he says no and says "what have I got to do with willing"