MINA, 1 January 2007 — Three million pilgrims at Mina and each has a story; few of the individual stories ever get told. Yesterday the pilgrims were more relaxed as most of the major rituals had been completed. Perhaps because of the cold weather, many of the pilgrims were relating to one another the difficulties of their journey.
The Egyptian pilgrims claimed that coming by ship made the Haj more of a challenge as they faced long journeys from their villages coupled with tiresome waits for an available vessel and then many suffer from seasickness. The Russian pilgrims faced issues with visas and their society’s attitude toward Islam.
Pilgrims from certain African nations were limited in the amount of foreign exchange available to them for their trip. Indonesian and Malaysian pilgrims lamented the fact that their nations did not have bigger pilgrim quotas so that more of their people could come each year. Even some Saudi pilgrims were unhappy because they disliked the regulation that requires them to get permits to perform religious rituals in their homeland.
All the stories of hardship circulating among the pilgrims this year cannot compare with the extremely trying situations pilgrims faced just a few decades ago.
Consider the occurrence of disease at Haj. At this Haj, colds and the flu were the primary contagious diseases. Twenty years ago meningitis was the killer to fear. In decades before that cholera and typhoid were potential killers. The Ministry of Health’s efforts at prevention, monitoring and treatment mean that Haj is largely disease-free.
Enormous efforts are made nowadays to provide pilgrims with modern conveniences while in the Kingdom. Everything from the Haj Terminal at Jeddah International Airport to fleets of buses, mobile communication networks and even food delivery services are made available to the pilgrims. The logistics are staggering; three million people, all in the same place at the same time, all needing the same services for one week. Then they will all disappear again until the next year. How much does it cost to build and maintain the infrastructure alone for that sort of operation?
In the past when people went to Haj not only was it the journey of a lifetime, it was perhaps the last time that pilgrims would ever see their friends and relatives in their homeland. The trip was long. If the pilgrims didn’t die of disease, then they risked being attacked by bandits or their boat might capsize. Many made the journey in stages, traveling for a while, then stopping to earn more money and then moving on. Pilgrimages that took five years or longer were not uncommon when Muslims set off for Haj; many chose not to return to their homelands.
The pilgrims’ stories of hardship reminded me of a story that I read years ago in a book, titled “Leaves From a Reporter’s Diary,” by a distinguished Indian journalist of yesteryear, D.R. Mankekar. While he was covering a particularly dull cricket match on a breezy day in the winter of 1935 his attention was drawn to the gossip of the two boys from Makran — a port near Karachi — who were detailed to put up the scores on the scoreboard. “As I overheard their talk, my ears pricked up,” he wrote.
One boy was narrating to the other what seemed to be a sensational story. At 3 o’clock in the morning in the Lyari Quarter, then the poorest locality of Karachi, people were woken up by the shouts of a young man running for life, begging for help, as though the very devil was after him. A policeman on patrol came to his rescue and took him to the police station. The young man gasped that his parents were in great danger of being done to death on the bank of the Lyari River.
Mankekar quickly lost whatever little interest he had in the match. “I was convinced there was a great story in the incident in the Lyari Quarter. As soon as the stumps were drawn, I rattled out my report of the day, and cycled to the police thana in the Lyari Quarter.”
The story that Mankekar collected at the police thana was indeed sensational. “The young man and his parents had traveled from Afghanistan, through the North West Frontier Province, to Karachi, hoping that they would be able to smuggle themselves, as thousands of others did every year, across the Sindh border into Iran to journey overland to Makkah on pilgrimage. They stayed a while at the local musafirkhana, as did hundreds of other intending pilgrims from Afghanistan and Central Asia every year. If they took the pilgrim ship from Karachi Harbor, they had to deposit a very large sum with the government in addition to the price of the ticket for the voyage. Many pilgrims, therefore, preferred the illicit land route via the Sindh border, which would cost them a fraction of the amount needed for the voyage to Makkah.
According to Mankekar, in those pre-partition days, there thrived a tribe of self-appointed agents and touts in Karachi who promised to smuggle the pilgrims across the border for a fee, which the latter were only too willing to pay. “Most of these pilgrims were foreigners, from Afghanistan and Central Asia, who were strangers in Karachi and at the mercy of the local touts.”
One such tout, according to Mankekar, had established a flourishing business at the expense of these innocent, devout foreigners. “His modus operandi was to befriend the pilgrims and offer them attractive terms for smuggling them across the border,” Mankekar wrote. Close to the far bank of the Lyari River was the point on the border where the pilgrims were shoved across. It was all very simple. The operation was always carried out in the shadows of the night. Accordingly, this particular family was instructed to arrive at a lonely spot on the eastern bank of the Lyari River at a specified hour after midnight. The father, the mother and the son duly arrived at the specified spot. The tout received them with great courtesy. He was all smiles and full of concern for the pilgrims, and told them that they would have to wait for a while for the high tide, when a boat would come and row them to the other bank of the river. Thereafter, they would in no time be on the other side of the border, on their way to Holy Makkah. Meanwhile, as they waited for the tide to change, the tout suggested that they might as well have some hot tea to warm up their insides against the chilly wind.”
Mankekar continues, “The tout personally prepared the tea and offered the cups to his guests. The elderly parents accepted the tea gratefully. The son, who never liked tea, declined the offer with thanks. The young man was, however, rudely surprised when the “host” insisted on his drinking the proffered cup. The more the tout pressed, the more the young man resisted, resenting the unusual pressure put on him to drink tea which he did not like. The “host,” now seemingly desperate, threatened to use force on the young man to make him drink the tea. Thereupon the young man wrestled with the tout, disengaged himself and ran toward the town, shouting for help.”
At the police thana, Mankekar discovered that the cup of tea, innocently refused by the young man, was laced with “dhatura,” a drug that was expected to put the victims to sleep. “When the tout could not catch the young man who had reached the populated area of the Lyari town, the tout disappeared into the dark. The young man led the police to the spot on the eastern bank of the Lyari River, where they found the elderly couple lying unconscious on the sand. They were brought to a hospital and were revived.”
Meanwhile, Mankekar wrote, the police got more information on the tout at the musafirkhana, which was his haunt. They tracked him to his residence, where they discovered, lying in a trunk in the loft, human ears, noses and fingers, with gold and silver rings still attached, and mounds of gold and silver jewelry.
“It was a sensational discovery which led to the unraveling of what was till then a baffling mystery. Each winter, for the preceding three years, the Karachi press had reported the discovery of scores of corpses floating in the Lyari River tied down to heavy rocks on its bed with their ears and noses and fingers torn off.”
The police were unable to find any clue to these ghastly murders. Nobody came forward to claim or identify the bodies. It was now clear from the evidence collected and the incident of the two unconscious pilgrims that this “Jack the Ripper” of Lyari picked passing pilgrims for his victims so that it would be impossible to get any clue to the murders and robbery.
Mankekar’s story was the lead story for the Sunday Sind Observer. “No journalistic effort gave me greater kick than putting together the apparently disparate pieces spread over three years to stitch them into a sensational, exclusive murder story,” Mankekar wrote.
With the advent of modern travel, the high level of organization and the security arrangements for pilgrims incidents such as this may have been consigned to history. It is chilling to note however that this was less than a lifetime ago, easily within living memory. Thanks be to Allah that Saudi Arabia has been blessed with the resources to make the journey free at least from the worst dangers nurtured by venality.
