Desert Mela

Another piece from what now seems like a far past. I think the desrt melas have faded away in recent years as the desert people became more settled, built permanent structures close to water sources, got their kids into schools and whose flocks diminished as the area they lived in became more saline. My village family always had a close relationship with the desert people unlike many who saw them as pests, a nuisance, when they came looking for help, usually medical.

If I went to everything I was invited to, I’d never get to bed. Hospitality is a way of life, not something you offer just occasionally here in Pakistan, and people are both puzzled and offended if it is refused for whatever reason. With my western mindset of priorities and things to do and times they have to be done by, my internal clock runs quite a bit faster than that of the average rural Pakistani. I also make the frequent mistake of believing what people tell me. So a few days back, just after I got to the village, the Chairman of my Board of Management said that I had been invited to a mela, or cultural gathering, at the shrine of the Pir most holy to the desert people. This shrine is right out in the sand desert, maybe 20 miles from a road, and by no means easy to get to. But an invite is an invite, no matter how difficult to access.

The desert hereabouts comes in several flavours and strengths.

Desert-lite, vanilla plain flavour, is the area to the immediate east of the irrigation canal that itself is east of the village. It is a mix of scrub and salt flats, with regular stands of trees and some fairly recent fixed habitation where the desert people have begun to settle down. They have pirated water from a subsidiary canal and set up some fields, growing the Punjabi staples of wheat and sweetcorn. They came to the farmers in Chak 74 for advice on how to do this new-fangled farming stuff, as prior to four or five years ago they had been nomadic herders with vast flocks of lop-eared goats and fat-tail sheep wandering the landscape. The desert people and the people in Chak 74 have always ‘got on’ – and I also have a good relationship with them. A few DP girls are now attending the English Medium school in Fatimapur, the first girls of their community ever to learn to read and write. Their desert is easy to move around in, there are tracks across the salt, and the occasional landmark, and I move around in it alone with ease, but always carrying a compass and doing a back-bearing occasionally.

Desert-Industrial Strength, double mint with choc bar and coloured sprinkly bits is at the other end of the spectrum. This starts to the southeast of Chak 74 and goes for hundreds of miles, far into India where it becomes the Rajasthan desert. This is the desert of sand and emptiness, of barchan dunes and the occasional clump of low bushes. This is at the serious end of desert, and has to be treated with respect. There are no wandering herdsmen to get water or directions from if you are lost (and it is very easy to get lost) and precious few landmarks of any sort. The going underfoot is mostly soft golden sand over a gravelly under-layer. It is tiring to walk on and difficult to drive through. There are areas of high dune, rolling and with an austere beauty that I love to come here for, and sit on the top of a crescent of hard rippled sand, with tiny rivers of displaced stones rolling with a ssheeeesh down the lee of the dune-face. You can feel a very long way from anywhere in a place like that. It was in this area that the Mela was to be held. Getting there was fun.

Having received the invitation, a day later I was told by another Board member that no, we were not going as there was no suitable transport available; so come Saturday morning I was busy with writing and researching articles, trying to get my email away and generally deep in admin. I had made the mistake of believing exactly what I was told. So up rolls my Chairman at 11.30 and says ‘You ready? We go mela.’ It was steaming hot and I was not best pleased either at the interruption or the prospect of a midday trip into the most inhospitable place around. I asked about the lack of transport, the reason for cancellation in the first place. ‘No problem’ he says. ‘I hire motorbike. We all go on that’.

All?

Yup, all. Well, three of us, anyway.

The Chairman is 6’2″, I am 5’9″ and Stephen the President of USWS is a mere 5’4″. Collectively we must have weighed in excess of 560lbs. The motorbike in question was a 70cc Honda. It was about to perform heroically. But only after running out of petrol before we even got as far as the junction outside Firoza town. Chairman and I stood whistling by the road as Stephen was dispatched to get some fuel. Sun blazed down. Eggs fry on tarmac etc. I casually asked if Chairman knew the way. ‘No’, says he. ‘Somewhere in desert. But we bring water for you’. He holds up a grubby bottle containing what appears to be a very large urine sample and assures me it is finest possible pani and I was to drink if I was thirsty. I’d rather hammer red-hot nails through my dick than have drunk whatever was in the bottle, and held my tongue. ‘Other people will go. We follow them’ says he. Perfectly reasonable.

Once you get a few Klicks beyond the city boundary it all gets a bit open. The Serious Desert sits either side of the road saying nothing and keeping itself to itself. Traffic peters out after we passed thro a tiny village and we motored on, the three of us astride the tiny motorbike, into an eyeball frazzling heat haze. Suddenly, O Lord, a sign was given. Easily missed, virtually buried in fact, but a sign nonetheless. A sign in white Squiggle on a blue background that might have said ‘This way to the Get-your-throat-cut Abattoir and Ice cream Parlour’ for all I knew. Chairman turns bike to left and we go Desert.

We were still Desert twenty minutes later when the bike falls sideways, briefly trapping us all on the ground before we squirmed ourselves out. The sand was just too deep for the bike with three up and bald tyres, so Chairman and I decided to walk for a while, and Stephen gentled it through the slippery sand. We had seen, and roughly followed some 4WD tracks that we assumed might be going in the right direction. But not seen or heard any actual vehicles. After a bit of a walk, the sand got firmer again, and we re-mounted and ploughed on. It was fairly flat, and the horizon was about two miles away. On we plodded for another couple of miles, getting off for the soft bits.

Then Chairman points and says ‘There mela’. And it was. In the far distance I could just spot the tiny white triangle of the top of a tent. Saved. We were saved. Or at least I was saved, mainly by not drinking from the Deadly Bottle. Then there was a vehicle to one side of us, rolling down what looked suspiciously like a reasonable track. And then another, then several, all travelling on a marked route through the sand. It had run to our right about half a mile from us, complete with little flags as waymarkers, but it was set down between dunes and we could neither see not hear the traffic on it. I gave my Chairman a very hard look indeed and he went to study the flora for a few minutes. When he came back I asked him what it said on the sign we had seen. It appears that it said ‘Road to mela in half-mile turn left’ and he had taken the ‘turn left’ part of that message a little before he should, assuring me later he thought he knew a short cut. There was a certain chill twixt self and Chairman for a while.

Mela is a word you quite often hear used in UK nowadays, and it usually refers to an Asian open-air event with dancing and stalls of traditional work and music, and stands representing assorted charities and local bodies working for or with the ethnic minority communities. The mela in the desert was all of that and so much more.

As we rode our little Honda into the area where the mela was taking place I began to appreciate both the scale of it and the importance. This was no cosy get together in a local park. This was three days of intense and quite tightly choreographed activity, taking in social and cultural activities, political and tribal matters, health and education and a very large portion of food. And transvestites, of which more later. It was also the venue for the largest free health camp I have ever seen in Pakistan, and probably the best organised as well. There were doctors for every specialism, including women doctors, and the patients stretched in queues for hundreds of metres outside the tents where the doctors worked. Patients stood in the hot sun, in orderly lines and waited their turn, very unlike normal queuing behaviour in Pakistan. I was taken in to one of the dispensaries, and introduced to the doctor running it. I looked over the medicines, all branded products and all in-date. No cloned or obviously counterfeit drugs, just lots of quality medication being prescribed by people who knew what they were doing. I toured the tented diagnostic centres, where modern equipment was run from portable generators, and watched ECGs and BPs, chatted to the Doctors and got the background to all this activity.

All of the doctors were giving their services free, and some of them had come from as far afield as Karachi. They were the men and women who had given the medicines, hired the generators and paid for the tents, as well as donated the vast amounts of food that fed the throng. They were all Sufis, adherents to the mystical arm of Islam that has been influential in this part of Punjab for centuries, and see this philanthropy as a religious duty to their fellow men and women. This is the third year that the mela has been held, and it looks like being an enduring event.

It is centred on the shrine of a revered Pir, Hajr Farid, (Pirs are almost saintly in their status) who as a Sufi mystic spent 19 years in meditation at this spot about 800 years ago. The shrine itself is a modest affair surrounded by a low wall, into which I was invited out of courtesy, and it was much appreciated when I declined but took my hat and shoes off and stood at the entrance for a minute to indicate respect. Little sensitivities like that go a long way in places like this. Hatted and shod again, it was off to see the camel dancing (which is actually camels fighting) and browse the knick-knack and gewgaw stalls. As I wandered with Chairman in tow I was confronted by a man who stood directly in front of me and without ceremony or warning stuck a mike in my face and asked me to do a vox pop to camera; beaming cameraman standing behind him.

He was from PTV news, making a documentary about the mela and the desert people, their lives and culture. I was not really dressed for televisual stardom, wearing a filthy cricket hat, a t-shirt that had seen better days but a very long time ago, a pair of dusty GAP cargo pants ripped at the knee from our little tumble with the bike, and a pair of classic suede desert boots (that really are very comfortable in the desert). Despite the lack of elegance the producer assured me I was just what he was looking for, so we ran thro a few things I could say on national television that were unlikely to get me shot and I did my interview. Years back, when working in local government, I did a media handling course as I was often called on to do radio and a few TV pieces, so I knew more or less what I was doing. I managed to get a plug in for USWS, complimented the organisers of the mela for their humanitarian activities and dashed off some mildly erudite stuff about the Sufi tradition and its peaceful and philanthropic ethos. Big smiles all round.

I was then led in the direction of an extremely smart 4WD, by people speaking Seraiki, the desert language, of which I speak not a word, and swiftly found myself transported to the august presence of the surviving descendant of the Mystic Pir, who was holding court in a large marquee separate from the main action. Shoes off, hat off, I was invited to sit at his shoulder, slightly behind and to his left. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing a simple white shalwar and a red Sindhi cap. He listened earnestly to what the people who came to make representation to him had to say, as not only was he a descendant of the Pir, he was a member of the Princely family that had ruled the Bahawalpur area before the creation of Pakistan. In addition, he was closely connected to a political party of note and power locally, and a good man to make a plea to if you wanted to get something done.

I watched the process closely. Plea-makers sat in front of him, and quietly and with a minimum of fuss, presented their cases. He had a variety of advisers to right and left whom he consulted occasionally and I got a sense of what it must have been like a century ago, when his family were the absolute rulers of this region, and for the desert people he was here talking to, he still was the absolute ruler. It was one of those rare moments when it was possible to feel history around you, to have a sense of connection running back eight centuries in an unbroken stream from this portly man who rides a Pajero to the simple white shrine that was behind some dunes half a mile away. It was also one of those moments when I felt a great sense of personal privilege. The invitation to me had come from one of the desert chiefs who I knew, and it was a considerable honour for a non-Muslim and the very first westerner to be present at this gathering of the clans. I sat for almost an hour, until the soiree ended. We all stood as the plea-makers went away, and I had my hand shaken most warmly by a man whose name, to my shame, I did not write down. I carry notebooks with me all the time here, writing down snatches of conversation or significant events as contemporaneously as possible, and on this occasion left my little black moleskin notebook and the black and gold fountain pen with the old-fashioned sepia brown ink, in my day-pac outside. Well, you can’t remember everything, I guess.

Back at the main event it was time for a last amble up the main street of this temporary village in the desert to the edifice at the end, a round wooden tower held up by the ubiquitous rickety bamboo poles that act as scaffolding here. It had a familiar look about it, and it was the conical cover of this structure that we had spotted and disclosing the location of the mela to us. There were many young men standing around with a sense of expectancy, and there was the kind of buzz in the air that you get when there is something faintly naughty about to happen. And suddenly I clicked – the wooden tower was a Wall of Death. I had first seen a Wall of Death as a small child living in London, and every year in a park close to the house where I was born there did Selfridges, the famous London store, sponsor a Grand Fair. The fair had whirligigs and whizzers and bumper cars and a ghost train that scared the living daylights out of me, but the highlight was the Wall of Death, and I stood at the top, seemingly impossibly high off the ground, with my Father and watched as the daredevil riders whirled around the inside, glued to the perpendicular walls by centrifugal force, with glamorous ladies on the pillion. It wasn’t quite like that out in the desert a few days back.

For one thing, the glamorous ladies disporting themselves in front of the WoD as a come-on for the main event weren’t ladies at all, but kussurra.

Kussurra are an odd phenomenon, to say the very least, and a few words about them are in order. I saw my first kussurra in Rawalpindi 10 years or more ago, and have seen them all over Pakistan and in parts of Afghanistan ever since. At their simplest, they are transvestite gay men who earn a living dancing at weddings and funerals. At their most complex, they are born hermaphrodite, with elements of the genitals of both male and female, often fully functional, but they are always sterile whichever is the dominant gender element. This genetic aberration is especially common in southern Punjab and northern Sindh. A further wrinkle of the kussurra spectrum are those who are born male, but either through choice or force, being abducted by kussurra gangs as small children, they are eunuchs – castrated early in life and occasionally with a ‘vagina’ created from scar tissue. They tend to live communally and some operate as criminal gangs. They are often found living deep in the ‘hira-mundi’ or red light area that you find in most major towns and a few of the smaller ones as well. Despite the strictures of Islam, prostitution in all its forms thrives in Pakistan, and in at least one city, Lahore, has become an internationally known tourist attraction.

There are several kussurra living close to the centre of Firoza, and I often see them in the bazaar buying their fruit and veg and camping it up outrageously. They are always extravagantly made up, and sashay around like the old queens they so often are. A few of them adopt women’s voices, but most don’t bother, and on first acquaintance it can be a little disconcerting to be addressed in a rich basso-profundo by a woman with tits that look like a dead-heat in a Zeppelin race. One of the local ‘girls’, Ronno, danced for Rose and I at our wedding celebration in the village here. She was the first of her type I had talked to, and a sad creature she was. She was a gay man, but could not ‘come out’ as she would in the west, and opted for castration and life as a kussurra. Her breasts were what they call ‘water balls’ and look and feel very convincing. (Yes, I gave them a squeeze.) Subsequently, I looked into the kussurra phenomenon in some detail, and talked to doctors and local health workers. Many of the newborns that are quickly identified as neither one nor the other are handed over to one of the kussurra gangs within hours of birth and never know their natural parents. The hermaphrodites tend to live as ‘family’ groups, whereas the eunuchs and transvestites have a more fluid social structure. The eunuchs in particular can be extremely violent and threatening, and will intimidate people into giving them money by the simple expedient of turning up at a wedding or funeral and then threatening to take their clothes off unless folding greenery is in their hands directly. The last thing you want either on the happiest or saddest day of your life is a bunch of fat abusive eunuchs pissing in the rice pot – which they do.

Seen it.

One of the local kussurra I had seen at a food stall earlier, and she gaily waved to me and blew a kiss. Her compatriots were giving it their best in front of the WoD marquee to a crowd of adoring men. One of them looked across and saw me, and her face was an absolute treat as she realised she was looking at a Gora in a place where there had never been a Gora before. Recovering quickly, she dropped into ‘business mode’ and gave her tits a wiggle in my direction and had a rummage in her crotch to make sure I got the point. These girls work as prostitutes, and would have been doing a roaring trade at the mela. I made a polite excuse and went on my way. The very last thing I need is for stories to begin circulating that I got it together with a kussurra!!

I did not stop for the Wall of Death performance, having seen and heard quite enough for one day, and determined that whatever else I was going home on the marked track rather than the Chairman’s idea of a short cut. And that I was going home in daylight. I had been invited to the evening festivities, when the medical and social services all shut down and the desert people had the mother and father of all hooleys, singing and dancing in their thousands far into the night. Another year, maybe. So we got on the bike, got on the track, waved goodbye to hundreds of people and were back on the two-lane blacktop in 45 minutes, in the village about an hour later.

Truly memorable days are few and far between, but that one was. My scribblings here do it little justice, and cannot possibly capture the sense of peaceful purpose and one-ness of community that was there on that day. It was only hours afterwards that I realised another thing – I had not seen a single gun. Nor heard a single shot. Aerial firing and the inevitable casualties on the ground would have punctuated any other event of similar size or import. Writing it up now it is still vivid in my mind and will remain so for a long time to come, I suspect.

Chris Cork, 9th March 2004