Bilawal Noorani

Salman Rashid

We saw last week that Ari Pir on the Saruna River was a midway stopover on the pilgrimage from Sehwan to Lahut and Hinglaj. Now, Lahut is a valley of perfect adventure tourism kind of beauty: stark hills rising to rounded summits here, razor-sharp crags there, rills that flow with thin streams of water that sometimes open up to form lovely tarns where one can swim au naturel (but only if it is not festival time), hardy acacia clinging to the hillsides and narrow valleys so desolate you would think you were on another planet. And grottoes. There are caves and caves which are mostly taken over by lunatics attempting the chilla to capture jinns.

Just about five kilometres north of this romantic valley is a shrine. Twenty-five years ago when I first saw it, it was an unpretentious building with thick walls and a squat dome. The latter painted a glistening deep green. It was surrounded by majestic tamarind trees that rose upward of thirty metres into the air. Their trunks were huge and their crowns so thick they effectively protected you from the harsh midday sun.

There are also mango trees. Gnarled, twisted and hugely spreading, they are obviously of great age. Yet many of them still fruit — at least they did a quarter century ago. These and the several jamun trees give the impression that the shrine containing the mortal remains of some Shah Bilawal Noorani is situated in the midst of an orchard.

Those who believe in this saint accord him divine status: he is the one to save Sindh and Balochistan from disasters, he is the one to grant all wishes. Every Thursday they ride rickety buses that used to originate in Karachi’s Lea Market and took nearly twelve hours to complete the journey of a hundred odd kilometres. This because the road onward from Hub Dam is unpaved. Besides the weekly affair, the big annual festival takes place on the tenth day of the lunar month of Ramazan. That is when the bhung-drinking fakirs arrive, having trekked three weeks from Sehwan over the Khirthar Mountains. An average trekker would take no more than five days — but then he wouldn’t pause every couple of kilometres to dope himself with a fresh concoction of hemp.

The annual urs is the greatest binge of bhung, hashish and opium that I have ever seen anywhere in Pakistan. A quarter century ago there were no pilgrims’ quarters (I am sure there are now some bleeding eyesores of hutments) and everything was al fresco, yet the tamarind canopy so reeked with fumes that even a non-user got doped to the eyeballs in no time at all.

As I said, Shah Noorani is nothing less than a god. The rattletrap bus that I rode those many years ago was overloaded with humanity and goats (women and goats inside). I sat on the roof with about thirty other men. Every time we approached a dry nullah, the driver would gun the old banger. The engine would built up to a wild crescendo and the rattling of the battered bodywork would be ear-splitting as we went tearing down into the dry river. Our leader would scream at the top of his lungs, ‘Bolo, bolo, bolo jeay Shah,’ just as the bus hit the riverbed.

And then right as it started the upward grind, we were all expected to scream ‘Jeay Shah!’ And, by god, we screamed because it was believed that this encouraged old Shah Bilawal Noorani to push the bus over the rise it was simply incapable of surmounting by itself. A couple of times when we hit some particularly nasty dips, the bus flagged. The screaming crescendo of the engine ground down to a deep growl giving way to a pitiable whine before we came to a stop just, just short of the crest.

The driver let the bus roll back into the river (thankfully always dry when I was there), everyone (but the goats) was off-loaded and with the engine going full tilt, we men, all thirty of us, helped the invisible old Shah get the bus over the top. But the first time Bilawal failed us and we rolled to a stop in the bottom of the gulch our leader piped up, ‘Please, men, put your hearts and souls into “jeay Shah” or we won’t get across.’

My suggestion that the deafening rattle of the bus and the roar of the engine may have prevented the old man from hearing our heartily energetic bawling was not taken kindly by my co-travellers, however.

According to the gazetteer (1907) of Lasbela district, Shah Bilawal came over from Sindh in the year 1495 and took up abode in this garden which was then owned by a rich seth called Gokal. In another source (if memory serves, the Tuhfat ul Kiram written 1767 in Thatta) Bilawal was a loony from that town. Since we take most madmen to be religiously or spiritually somehow gifted, he was considered a saint. At some point he wandered over to the property of the kind-hearted Gokal Seth and made his life there. (The caravan route that Bilawal took between Thatta and the orchard, perhaps in the company of pilgrims, is about a hundred kilometres.)

Now Gokal and his wife were childless and taking pity on the wandering fakir, took him in. When the good people passed away, Bilawal remained and was eventually buried there. The income from Seth Gokal’s orchard probably paid for the shrine and the festival. Over time Gokal, who was unfortunately a Hindu, was turned into a demon and we have a Muslim hero from Arabia battling him. Having vanquished him, the hero is said to have imprisoned him in a cave and bound the entrance with a huge boulder with thick metal strips running across it.

If I am not wrong, the boulder was actually a good deal of loose talus and I remember seeing a couple of padlocks on the bars. Not far, in another arboreal setting, a man doped on hashish shows you a mark on the ground which he promises is the hero’s footprint. I measured it to be eighteen inches long! Any man with feet this size would have been tripping over himself, much less been capable of travelling hither from distant Arabia. But then legend, especially of the religious kind, is never logical.

There is also a subterranean chamber into which one must crawl. Being somewhat claustrophobic I had a bad time, but I did go in there to see the greyish dripping stalactites. These the keeper said were the teats of a holy man’s she-camel and that until twenty years ago they oozed milk which was panacea. Then the keepers got greedy and they started selling the holy item and instantly the teats dried up.

I observed that twenty years ago this same story would have been current about the event having taken place twenty years earlier. I also suggested that the keepers ought to decide between she-camel and mare: at the footprint it is a mare (who also left a hoof-print) and here a she-camel who mislaid her teats. That did it. What with the observation about old Noorani’s deafness and now this, I was ostracised by my group. But logic, sadly, does not constitute these yarns.

Old Bilawal Noorani had not just failed us. In 1984 or the year after he was particularly vengeful, perhaps for my uttered impieties. His annual urs (10th Ramazan) fell in August and the rains that year came as they hadn’t for years. The dry streams where Bilawal had failed to get us across flowed with torrents four metres deep that swept away laden buses. Dozens perished, all roads were cut off, pilgrims marooned and the army had to drop relief by helicopter. I, then living in Karachi, had hoped to be part of the pilgrimage but work had kept me away.

The divine Bilawal Noorani was, I decided, not just a bit hard of hearing, he also was not paying attention to what was going on all round. I dropped out at the last minute and if he had wanted to get even with me by sending down the flood, I once again got to thumb my nose at him.

Puns aside, Lahut valley with its streams, balmy climate and thick vegetation of fruit trees has been an oasis on the pilgrim route between Sehwan and Hinglaj for thousands of years. Bilawal the madman of Thatta just happened along. But the most ironical twist is that Gokal, a decent human being with kindness in his heart, becomes an evil jinn only because he was a Hindu and has to be put away, and a lunatic becomes a saint to worship.

Salman Rashid is a travel writer and knows Pakistan like the back of his hand.