Times 2

1 + 1 = 2 (hands)

2 + 2 = 4 (limbs)
5 + 5 = 10 (toes)
Mathematics with one of Taimstoo's chlldren.

Warning: this entry has an dazzling amount of names. Try to keep track, and realise how easy it is for you, as you've got them all written down, and how hard it was for me, as I had to remember them phonetically. Of all the places described below, I remember maybe 1/3 of the names of the people I met.

The village of Haji Pir Bakhsh is a wobbly 2 hour bus and riksha ride southeast of Hyderabad. It consists of four houses. I would not be surprised if there are more than sixty people living in them. Village people have large families. The house where I stayed had one lockable room, a veranda, open air kitchens, open air bedrooms with charpai's (meaning 'four legs'; a wooden cot spanned with rough rope) and open air toilets.

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(Picture: guy in the CocaCola waiting room at the bus stand. There's something contradictory in a 'billion dollar' wall and a lousy rupee couch.)


(Picture: strobe-dotted turntable girl)

The ride out to Haji Pir Bakhsh, which I mostly endured sitting on the roof of the bus as there was no space inside, brings you through some of the best irrigated lands of Sindh. Mango trees; wheat, corn and cotton fields. George, a Dutchman who has worked for SIDA (Sindh Irrigation and Drainage Authority), gave me a spontaneous lecture on Sindhi irrigation.
This bit is mostprobably only of interest to my father and the Dutch heir to the thrown, prince Willem Alexander, expert in water management. I suggest that all other readers jump to 'back to the village'.

Sindh has a whopping 21000 kilometres of canals! The subdivision is as follows:

• 14 main canals issue from 3 barrages (Guddu, Sukkur and Kotri) and feed into branch canals (as the project of SIDA wasn't finished when George's project was stopped, only 3 main canals are governed by so-called water boards;
• these branch canals feed into more than 1500 distributeries, which are looked after by farmers' organisations, of which there are 250, and only in those area's where there is a water board. Interesting detail: chairmen of farmers' organisations come from the tail end of the distributeries. This to secure the water flow to the end;
• the distributeries feed into water courses, organised by course associations. All in all it's a complex system of ever decreasing waterways that flow without mechanical systems. My friend Wakeel, who's in charge of the water distribution in Sehwan, calls the river Indus, life line. "Without machinery water comes to the crops. Mostly free of charge, the best system in the world."
  

Back to the village!

Enter:

(Picture: Zulfiqar, fifth son of Shafee and Nazee, holding the tube of the broken water pump.)


(Picture: newly-weds; Sagin, fourth son of Shafee and Nazee, with his wife Khairbanu.
Typical Pakistani photo look: midway between loosing a card game and out-staring a car owner who's unwilling to give you way on a zebra crossing.)

So village families are big. George and I were guests of Shafee and Nazee, who have 7 children. All have beautiful names, so I'll give them to you: Nuru (married with Mandi, 4 children), Khairu (married with Apri, 4 children), Azra (married with Haggin, 2 children and pragnant; most probably they have 3 children by now), Sagin (married with Khairbanu), Zulfigar, Rahila and Zafar.


(Picture: Shafee, man of new life. Here surrounded not by his countless children and grandchildren, but by his 2000 chicks.)

And then Shafee decided that he wanted more children (workforce; pension scheme). What to do if your wife is tired after giving birth to seven? Indeed, you marry a second wife. When I drew a long arrow in my notes from Shafee, around his first seven children, to his second wife Shanaz, George told me there's a genealogical way to indicate this:

x2

Times two. He put 'x1' in front of Nazee, and 'x2' in front of Shanaz. Mathematics with Shafee (and George):
Shafee x Shanaz = Kainat, Subhia and Sarfaraz.
Muslims can marry 4 times. Well, men can marry four times, not women (unfair to me, but George told me the historical context and that there were good reasons at the time to organise it like this. I still think it's unfair).
The role pattern is typical: the first wife becomes a household drudge carrying water from far off places back to the house, the second, younger wife and baby producer cooks (even though she was about to give birth to the fourth) and bosses 'her' husband around.
I know you wonder: yes, Shafee still does it with both.


(Picture: Nazee. Great reaper-like look, with her scythe.)


(Picture: Nuru, the oldest son of Shafee and Nazee, and Subhia, the oldest daughter of Shafee and Shanaz in the fields of Shafee.)


(Picture: children or grandchildren of Shafee at night.)

Apart from greeting old friends, we also planned our trip to the village to make Parisa, the girl I give treatment in Hyderabad, visit her mother, who just had given birth to the umpteenth child of her second husband (her first husband ran off). Parisa's, or I should say Shazia's as that is her real name, village was two villages west of Haji Pir Bakhsh, about 8 kilometres as the crow flies, which is also how the people walk. We also took Hasina, who's staying at Phillipe and Shahana's place in Hyderabad as well, as she is from the village in between (4 kilometres; you still follow?).
It has to be said, she's not the brightest. Hasina was supposed to bring Shazia to her parents, but walked off without taking her along. After we had caught up with her, she managed to escort Shazia to her own village, only to forget about her again. Shazia then was given shelter by another family.
When George and I reached this village the next day, we saw a sad Shazia, sitting on a charpai, saying even less than normally (remember that she suffers from a speech impediment). It was a heart rending sight.
"OK, no matter what, we've got to take her to her village," was my reaction, and a little while later Shazia and I set out to meet her family. I didn't know what to expect, as I had heard before that she was maltreated and neglected. The new husband of her mother doesn't acknowledge the children of his wife's previous marriage, and might not be so friendly to a white alien from outer space (on a cycle!) who's accompanying the exiled. Luckily he wasn't there (or not that I noticed), and what followed was heartwarming.
Hands down the most touching scene of my travel.


(Pictures: the house and family of Shazia, with as a beaming centre of attention, Shazia and her youngest half sister, who she's about to give a kiss on the second picture.)


(Pictures: I gave Shazia my camera to capture some souvenirs herself (good exercise for her right hand), these are the photo's she took.)

Now that we're back in Hyderabad she wants to see the pictures all the time. To make herself clear, she holds her left index finger and thumb in a circle, and looks through the whole with her left eye. I tell her "after we've done the exercises," hearing my mother's voice, holding a carrot.
I intend to make some prints, to remedy some of Shazia's homesickness. Now that she has seen her brothers and sisters, especially the baby, her eyes are often staring. Teary.
My image of her situation there, although far from perfect, has also altered. It's where she belongs, where the people live that love her. That little bit of space, on the vast plain of the subcontinent, where not many people write and read, where milk comes straight from the buffalo or the goat, where boiling-hens hide underneath charpai's, where the nights are warm enough to sleep under a blanket of stars, where lessons are learnt with a beating, where women are killed after cheating, where water pumps break, where water is carried for kilometres on end, where families are big.

That is her home.

But she's fully aware why she isn't there at the moment. When one of her aunts asked her if she wanted to stay with them, she answered by pointing at her hand. We're first going to fix this, she meant to say. And then she signed talking, by moving her hand from closed to open away from her mouth. I hope we won't let her down.

OST: Lali Puna's 'People I know' came to my mind (and to my ears when halfway through this blogpost the power failed, and I listened to my walkman):




(Picture: Sindhi sunshine, contre jour)