The Saint of The Cradle
Sixty-six-year-old Shammi and Gullu, her sixty-nine-year-old husband, lived in a village named Kot Essa. Gullu had no relatives in nearby and Shammi herself had come from a remote village. Her only sister visited her once a year, but she had died a decade ago. They were childless and in their adobe house silence reigned supreme. However, it had all the basic necessities and the two seemed content with their life. In the mornings they went to the wilderness to cut and collect wood. They then loaded the sticks onto their rusty donkey to sell in the bazar and buy provisions.
Daily in the afternoon the old couple would squat down in front of their street door and gaze at the playing children. On Thursdays, Shammi distributed dried dates or roasted chickpeas among the children of the neighbourhood.
Shammi was short and slight, her dark face long and lined with age with her wispy grey hair bound in a threadbare wrap. Though her clothes were cut like women’s, Shammi wore them in men’s colours and with men’s shoes. Like two devoted friends the husband and wife always stayed together. They went to the village bazar and the scrubland together, and Shammi even accompanied her husband to the mosque, though she did not say her prayer there. She would sit and wait at the place where the men left their shoes while Gullu said his prayers. The two ate meals together and smoked hookah together. Even though they were always together, only seldom were they heard talking to each other. When they did talk, they did so in soft undertones.
Most women of the village contended that Shammi was a sorceress and gave her a wide berth. Only a few crones dropped in for a chat. People had seen her buying dolls, rattles and tops in the village fair and on Eid festivals. They said that she recited mantras over the toys and sent them on evil missions. In their adobe house, there was a mud room that was always locked and no villager had ever seen it open, let alone entered it. Different people said different things about this room: some believed the old couple had stashed away their wealth in it, some said that they had buried a deep secret in it, while others maintained that the old woman had imprisoned djinns in it to run her errands for her in the middle of the night.
The villagers said that Gullu was a normal man before he entered into marriage with Shammi. He went to the community centre regularly, told his friends all sorts of jokes and danced in the marriage parties, but after tying the knot with Shammi his life became confined to his better half and his house. Gullu’s former friends argued that Shammi had cast a spell on him—had turned him into her slave.
One cold morning Gullu did not wake from his sleep. After the death of her spouse, Shammi lived alone in her house. However, her loneliness did not last long, and within a year she joined her husband in heaven. Her death created no ripples in the village life, only a few fellows bothering to attend her funeral.
The village chief locked the street door of Shammi’s house. Nobody in the village dared break into it or steal anything from it. Shammi had been dead for half a year when Waheed, her distant nephew, came from the city to sell her house. Nobody in the village wanted to buy the dead lady’s property with the legendary room where it was believed that Shammi kept djinns. For a week, Waheed stayed in the village and tried to cajole the villagers into buying her house but to no avail.
Driven partly by curiosity and partly by avarice to find gold or silver, Waheed unlocked the notorious room. As he threw open the creaking door, he was confounded. The room looked like a shop dealing in toys and decorative articles. From the main girder hung a wooden cradle over which tassels, dolls and rattles dangled. Arranged on the narrow mud platform by the wall were clay whistles, paper bugles, wooden babywalkers and miniature clay kitchen sets. In the niches in the mud walls nestled coloured terracotta toy animals: horses, camels, goats and cows. Opening a huge wooden box, Waheed found that it was stuffed with baby clothes, baby shoes, baby socks and bibs. Some of these baby clothes were threadbare, some had yellowed with age, while others were new.
Business-minded Waheed would not give up. He invited the villagers to see the newly-unlocked room for themselves, but they dared not enter the old woman’s house. In the end, three men plucked up the courage and followed Waheed into his aunt’s mysterious room.
He told them, “My aunt was not a witch. She was a loving mother of an unborn baby. All her life she had been hoping for a baby. All her life she kept preparing clothes and collecting toys for her coming child. But Allah did not bless her with a child. You people have misunderstood her greatly.”
After the three men had their guided tour, they told other men. Waheed gave the new men a guided tour, and then women and children crowded into Shammi’s room, which was crammed with toys. They were mesmerized by the collection of baby clothes and playthings. “What a woman! All her life she kept yearning for a baby. She never lost her hope,” one woman said, tears rolling down her cheek.
“She was a saint,” an old man said.
“How wrong we have been!” the village mullah mourned.
The women caressed the baby clothes and toys and tassels. They cried and groaned and whispered.
Waheed was relieved that at long last the villagers’ unfounded fears had been banished and he again offered his aunt’s house for sale, but still no one came forward to buy it.
“It is a shrine, it would be a sacrilege to buy this house,” the village chief proclaimed.
Disappointed, Shammi’s nephew left for the city.
At dusk a few days later, an aged woman plodded into Shammi’s house. She lit a mud lamp under the cradle that hung from the roof and invoked Shammi’s spirit to plead God on her behalf to grant her daughter-in-law a baby son. The next day another woman smouldered incense sticks under the cradle and begged Shammi’s spirit to intercede with Allah on her behalf to provide his young son a pretty bride. On the third day an old man visited the cradle room, distributed dried dates among the kids, placed a few copper coins under the cradle and invoked Shammi’s spirit to request God to cure him of gout.
Within a week, Shammi’s house had become a shrine. The devotees called her Jholey Wali Pirni, the saint of the cradle. In a couple of months, the fame of the cradle room spread to the surrounding villages. The people came in droves. They prayed under the cradle, smouldered joss sticks around it, and requested the spirit of Shammi to intercede with God on their behalf. People with all sorts of wishes and yearnings gravitated to her house, but especially the childless couples thronged it and reported that after paying a visit to the cradle room their wishes were granted—they had their first babies, particularly male babies.
A rich devotee constructed two new rooms in the house for the pilgrims of the faraway areas. Another man brought a wrought iron cauldron for cooking meals. One villager, every morning, would fill the earthen vats and pots with water for the visitors. The visitors adorned the cradle with small mirrors, colourful flags, cowry shells, rabbit tails, peacock feathers and draped the walls of the cradle room in embroidered fabrics.
People came from far and wide, travelling on camels, horses and donkeys. They would slaughter a sheep or goat, cook it, and stay the night in the house. Out of devotion the faithful would sweep the house, sprinkle water over the beaten earth floor and repair its adobe walls with mud. Some visitors also brought drummers and pipers with them and they performed the dhamal—a devotional dance—in the courtyard of the house.
One day a grizzled beggar passing through Kot Essa happened to peep into the newly-declared shrine. He liked the environment and made the place his home. He sat down near the empty cradle in the mysterious room. Whenever the visitors entered the shrine the beggar would stamp his staff on the floor, give his rosaries a vigorous shake and chant “Haq, Haq, Haq.” Now the pilgrims also dropped some coins in his lap.
When the news of Shammi’s sainthood reached her nephew, he made a beeline for Kot Essa to claim his share of the income from the shrine. Upon reaching the village, the first thing he did was drive out the beggar and take his place under the cradle. Since he was a true blood relative of Shammi, the visitors offered him more money than they used to offer to the old beggar.
Ten years later, Waheed’s business was booming. He now owned a small agriculture farm, a herd of goats and a chestnut Arabian horse. He had grown fatter and his dark brown colour had become lighter. The shrine-goers had constructed him a brick platform under the cradle. From sunrise to sunset he would lay sprawled on the cushioned platform and the visitors would shove money under his cushion.
Some villagers reported that he leered at the women and girls, others said that he fondled female visitors, but the majority of the devotees would not believe such things. One day, the villagers caught Waheed in an objectionable position with a married woman on the cushioned platform right under the cradle that was suspended from the roof. The angry mob thrashed him, they blackened his face with soot and drove him out of the village. For a few days the devotees remained shocked and no one stepped inside Shammi’s house.
“It’s a sign of the doomsday!” the mullah remarked.
“The sinner was not a true nephew of Shammi or he would not have committed such a filthy thing in such a sacred place,” the village chief observed.
A week later the village men collected in Shammi’s house and washed the place where the sinful act had taken place. The mullah chanted holy verses and blew over the cradle and the brick platform. The villagers sprinkled jasmine and rose perfumes over the cradle and platform. Then the village chief declared the shrine open and the pilgrims started pouring into it. It didn’t seem to matter that the shrine had brought hurt and sin, people were still desperate for Shammi to answer their prayers.