Gramophones, 10 wives and the cacophony of death

SUKKUR/SHIKARPUR: ‘Come September’ plays on an old gramophone that Naeem Soomro has dragged out to take to Karachi. It’s by Billy Vaughn and his orchestra on an old vinyl record. And on this sweltering Sunday night, with the long cool drink of almond and cantaloupe-seed Thaadal with tamarind sauce sweet potatoes, it couldn’t sound sweeter. Life is sweet, sweeter still for Naeem Soomro. His lands weren’t touched by the floods.

“He’s going to make double the money on his crop,” says Hamir Soomro, his cousin.

They are sitting at Naeem’s house in Shikarpur where an exhausted Hamir is being given something to eat after a day in the sun, surveying his sunken kingdom. The only way to reach his village Rahimabad is by car until the road disappears under water, then by a small speedboat he had sent over from Karachi’s Marina Club and then by a Qinqi rickshaw. Or at least that’s what the motorcycle is posing as with a tacked on metal derriere.

The people of Rahimabad, some 7,000 of them, mostly fled when the water came crashing through the bund. A ragged clutch of men in dhotis stayed behind. They are all the colour of chocolate and when they smile, crow’s feet run down in lines from their eyes to their jaw. They want Hamir, their reluctant sardar, to get ‘sarkar’ or the government to give them rations.

“The only thing sarkar will give you is a fever,” comes Hamir’s answer. They laugh nervously, like men who know there will be no harvest for the next eight months.

Hamir wants his munshi or administrator to get their names so that lists of deserving families are drawn up. Not everyone is destitute. When the men argue back, he reminds them that there is a difference between a man with 10 wives and a man with one wife. They cannot deny that the one who can afford 10 wives is already better off.

It is decided that the women and children should be brought back to the village, which was on higher ground and somewhat survived, even though it is surrounded by a sea of water.

Hamir is also keen to see if they can salvage some of the rice saplings and replant them. Will the men go to work from tomorrow?

We don’t know how to plant them, the men answer. Get the women to do it.

The men know how to do the work, but they don’t want to. Nearly 80 per cent of the work is done by women in this area. And it is back-breaking work in the fields, standing in warm water for hours, bent over. “No wonder some of them keep 10 wives,” quips Roland DeSouza, who has come along to assess the flood-hit areas.

It was surprising to see DeSouza in Sukkur. To most people, his name conjures up Shehri, the NGO that has fought Karachi’s land mafia and big business, its factories and their filth. He is mostly quiet, unnervingly quiet. A silent watcher of men and their makings. What had brought him to Sukkur?

“I’m doing what someone said to me yesterday,” he says without a trace of irony. “Disaster tourism.” Indeed, someone had told him that the minimum time you need to spend in the flood-hit areas was one month. If you’re here for two days, it’s called disaster tourism. You just take a look and leave.

But men like Hamir cannot leave. They have to figure out what in God’s name they are going to do with all this water and these people. At a school that has been turned into a camp in Khanpur, Hamir is surrounded by men and women. They meet him by bending to scoop the air at his knee. For his part, he bends to pull them up. When they plead with him, it’s in the volume people usually reserve for long-distance trunk calls.

Earlier on, before we set out, Hamir had talked for an hour about the flooding. I kept taking notes. I kept jotting down small points, words, unthinking, just dictation. And then suddenly I realised I wasn’t writing any more.

It was a pause, a long silence. A silence so long that I looked up.

He was looking away from me. His head was bowed. I realised that I was looking at a man overwhelmed - not just with emotion but with the vastness of the task that lies ahead.

“I would never be able to forgive myself if I turned my back on them,” he says.

The people have been coming up to him. I was here at your grandfather’s time, they say.

They were well-to-do farmers, who lived a comfortable life. They come to me differently now, says Hamir. Their posture is different. They have been living on this land for centuries and now they’ve been thrown out onto the street. Many of them hadn’t been beyond the sole village tea maker where the evening’s katchehry would gather. The women are giving birth on the floor, their dignity and privacy, their sense of space destroyed.

They are not like other communities in Pakistan. They are very protected people. They’ve almost been spoon-fed, he says. They are like children in a protected family.

This is going to be a big catalyst for change. I don’t know what revolution means but these people have been totally removed from their land. It’s going to do something to them. Many of them are filled with guilt and anger. They will need someone to blame for their misery.

“They’re going to get cholera,” he says. “And you can write that down.”

Many of them want to go back to their villages. The camps are filthy. It’s almost better to let them stay in the tents and not put them in the buildings in Karachi, or the schools. Sanitation is the biggest problem because they are used to going to the fields to relieve themselves. In the Khanpur school camp, several hundred people have to use two toilets.

Every child in sight is malnourished and there are flies everywhere. Even the water around their village has turned black from standing in the fields. Muck, slime and fungus cling to the borders of the road. The water where it breeds is warm, swampy.

A miasmic soup. If you stand in Rahimabad and go very silent, you will hear it, a rushing sound. Under normal circumstances the sound of water is soothing, full of Japanese fengshui, calming. But in Shikarpur, when you trail your hand in it as the boat speeds to dry land, it only means death.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 23^rd, 2010.