Short Stories
SOOTA SANDSTONE PAST
excerpt from "a sandstone past"
Rovina’s mother had traced her family history five generations back to Sindh and specifically to Karachi. One time—with Rovina, her mother, and her sisters—I’d visited the Hindu temple that was built into a rock cave in Old Clifton. At the very bottom of the rocky steps, men and women washed their hands in trickling water. I remembered Rovina’s mother telling me, “We’ve washed our hands in these waters for centuries. The Indus is holy to us, you know. The Hindus have a long history in Sindh but today, we’re less than ten percent of the population. You know, Mona, even though conditions in Pakistan are changing for people like us, our temple and our water are here.” Aunty Anita patted my shoulder. “And then, of course, there’s young girls like you, who want to know about us. That gives me hope.”
We didn’t study contemporary history and politics at school and I was too young to understand everything that was happening around us. But even I knew—through dinners my parents hosted for which smuggled whiskey had to be bought—that General Zia’s religious laws were causing problems for Christians, Parsis, Hindus, and others who didn’t agree with the direction in which Zia was taking the country. A Parsi girl who’d been in my class since kindergarten had recently moved with her family for Canada, and Rovina told me that her parents often talked late into the night about whether they, too, should pack up and leave.
I didn’t want my best friend’s family to go away from their home. Without Rovina, there was a lot I wouldn’t have learned about our city, and there was so much that I’d miss. Aside from losing a best friend with whom I spent hours on the phone talking about boys, buildings and homework, I’d also lose my deepest connection to our family’s new home, Karachi. If she weren’t my friend, I’d never have known that there was a temple in Old Clifton directly below Playland, the children’s park where we used to jump on coin rides. It would never have dawned on me that Hindus prayed in a temple next door to the shrine of Karachi’s patron saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi, or that there were natural waters shared by different communities. When I told my Dadi about our visit to the temple, Dadi said, “We had Hindu friends in Allahabad. We sent them mithai for diwali and they did the same for us during Eid. One day, Mona, we’ll take you to Allahabad.” Even as she said that, we both knew that Dadi would never go back to where she was born. Her hair was white and her forehead had deep grooves, but more than anything her body was hunched because of severe arthritis. She couldn’t even travel to Lahore for Munir Chacha’s wedding.