Cover Stories - Of Pir Adil, The Place That Started It All

One of the reasons I consider my one month flood relief duty in Dera Ghazi Khan the most exciting and probably most memorable one month of my life is that along with working my socks off in the relief efforts for most of the month, I also managed to squeeze in five or six days of hardcore exploration and travel. Most of this exploration was carried out in a four day whirlwind tour that had me covering 1500 kilomketres and visiting five or six cities in what has since come to be known as the "Great Road Trip". There were however one or two detours that I made before that, on what can be called 'company time'.

 On my way to DG Khan from Multan at the start of my duty, I looked up places of interest in and around DG Khan (a thoroughly fruitless and dispiriting exercise) One name kept popping up repeatedly, the village of Pir Adil. It was a village  to the north of DG Khan, around 12 km from our base camp. The village housed a Sufi shrine, there wasn't much more I could find out about the place however. It was obviously the shrine of a Sufi saint, but it wasn't obvious what distinguished it from the innumerable others that dotted the landscape. The shrine was of one Pir Adil Shah Bukhari , a 9th century Chishti saint. That, and a vague idea of it's location gleaned from Google Maps was all the information I had about this place.

Our daily ambulance trips to and from Medical camps were more or less a rambling caravan that pitched it's tents wherever we felt we were needed. We had no restrictions of distance or time and there was an almost limitless supply of fuel. This meant we travelled far and wide, covering a radius of almost ninety kilometers, spending eight or nine hours in the field everyday. Usually the trips were pretty straightforward; base camp to medical camp and then back again with no detours along the way. After a week or so, this spartan routine started becoming tedious. I was eager to get some exploring under my belt but wasn't able to get any time off. In addition, my routes usually took me away from the one or two places that were worth seeing, including the Pir Adil shrine.

Around the seventh day of our Medical camps however, we were told to pitch camp at the Dera Ghazi Khan Cement factory, around 14km North-west of the main city. Looking up the place on Google Maps (an app that more than earned it's Official Seal Of Awesomeness  over the course of my South Punjab adventure), I found that the route led me pretty close to the village of Pir Adil. I figured this was as good a chance as any to visit the place. After finishing up the day's camp at the Cement factory, I sent one of the ambulances ahead of me so it could take the remaining supplies and the less footloose of the support staff back to the basecamp while I set out in the other to find the village of Pir Adil.

It turned out to be a pretty straightforward path in the end. As the map shows, heading north from the Pakistan Chowk on the Indus Highway for a distance of 8 miles brings you to the Cement Factory chowk. A further 2 miles bring one to a crossroads with a direction pointer showing the way towards Pir Adil due East. A straight metalled track leads to the village a mile down the road.

View Pir Adil Shrine in a larger map

About half a mile before the shrine, as the magnificent white-and-blue tiled dome of the shrine emerged on the horizon,I finally understood what distinguished the place from the countless other shrines all over DG Khan. Driving into the village, all of us in the ambulance let out a collective gasp as we rounded a turn and the shrine came into view. I hadn't yet been to the magnificent shrines in Multan and Ucch Sharif yet, so this was my first exposure to the "Multani" style of architecture, and I was floored by what I saw. At the edge of a large graveyard, surrounded by four low walls, with an impromptu trinket market outside it, stood the tomb of Pir Adil Shah Bukhari. It was a magnificent building, at first sight very similar to the pictures I had seen of the Shah Rukn-e-Alam tomb in Multan.

A quadrangular building ,with a hexagonal second storey topped by a beautiful dome, it dominates the landscape of the surrounding village. The eastern edges are rounded off by cylindrical bastions topped by a small minaret each with a lotus pattern on top. The westerly bastions are more intricately designed, with hollow mehraab-like depressions along their lengths and a slightly larger lotus atop the minarets. The exterior walls are decorated by beautiful yet simple blue-glazed tiles in geometric patterns that vary on each wall. On some there is a crisscrossing brick lattice adorned with blue tiles in the centre of the lattice-work. On others there are groups of geometric patterns ascending the walls in ordered groups. The southern entrance - the one facing the graveyard - has a vertical row of three depressed arches on either side. The eastern entrance is larger and opens into the courtyard of the shrine. Topped by an overhanging ledge, with rows of mehraabs around it, it's a beautiful structure. Three horizontal filigrees circle the four walls on the first floor, with three more on the hexagonal drum that forms the second floor. The edges of the hexagon are topped with slender white minarets that encircle the large white central dome. It was a rather compact but extremely beautiful building and I spent a lot of time admiring it's various details from the outside before entering the shrine itself.

Entering the shrine from the direction of the graveyard, I was immediately struck by something that I'd later realize was characteristic of most of the shrines I'd visit - an overwhelming sense of calm. It was semi-dark and very cool, with a breeze blowing through the open doors. One or two gentlemen were sitting inside the shrine, praying, one of whom I struck up an entertaining conversation with. Sunk into one of the walls was a mehraab decorated in intricate glazed tile that probably served as a prayer spot. Above the mehraab were two quatrains painted on the walls. One was a chronogram that revealed that the interior of the shrine had been repaired in 1343 A.H. the other was a Persian couplet that was faded and thus couldn't be read properly. Between the two inscriptions was a simple floral pattern.

The final resting place of the Pir was right below the dome, which was simply in ornamented from the interior. There were one or two relics, including an inscription on a stone tablet written in Arabic. There was another inscription on a piece of ivory that was well nigh illegible, however the date 1053 A.H was clearly visible at the bottom left.A stone slab with the imprint of a foot was kept in a glass case. The custodians claimed that it was a footprint of the Prophet (S.A.W) that Hazrat Jalaluddin Bukhari, also known as Hazrat Jahanian Jahangasht (R.A) had brought with him from Makkah. the inscription above the print also claimed as such. The Pir's lady wife was buried right next to the main shrine in a smaller chamber which I found at the corner of the courtyard. It was a small domed building, the corner of which was jutting into the courtyard through the walls.Older photographs (rarer than hen's teeth) reveal that it was a small, simple square white structure topped with a dome

I stayed at the shrine for around an hour or so but the ambulance driver and the rest of the staff were getting testy about delaying their lunch, so I had to reluctantly leave. We all bought a few sweetmeats from the stalls outside the shrine as well as distributed some of the remaining medicines and then departed towards the base camp. I was genuinely moved by what was my first visit to a shrine since childhood, and I'm sure the experience of visiting Pir Adil was catalytic in my resurgent interest in and affection for Sufi Shrines. After that brief visit to Pir Adil, I've travelled all over Punjab, paying my respects at many other shrines and tombs, and everywhere I've felt the same ambience, the same feeling of spiritual serenity that I experienced for the first time at that tiny, hidden away tomb outside Dera Ghazi Khan- the tomb of Pir Adil.

P.S The account of my first exploratory trip should I think be soundtracked by what is the da-facto National anthem of the Seraiki belt. In my favorite version of this immortal folk melody; the late, great Pathanay Khan sings the Rohi.

Cover Stories - Of Dialects, Diversions, Digestibles and Deplorables

At the start of my flood relief tour of duty in South Punjab, mixed with a sense of duty was an overpowering sense of adventure. I was being sent on a very somber and serious task and I understood it's gravity, however it was also my first field assignment and I was going to a part of Pakistan that I had never been to (and one that I would have wished to visit in more happier circumstances). Since I only had a vague idea of what to expect, I called up many of my batchmates who had gone to the affected areas in the first wave of relief efforts in order to get an idea of what I was getting myself into. I was told to expect intense heat (despite it being October), rigorous work and long periods of boredom. "You'll have to provide your own entertainment" was the general sentiment.

The first (and only) piece of instruction we received on reaching DG Khan was, "You and your team will perform the role of a 'Roving Medical Camp'". And boy, did we rove!! Every morning, a caravan of three ambulances loaded with personnel and supplies would set out on a journey of at least 30-40 km to a new destination, making the return journey in the evening. We never visited one place more than two or three times, and since our area of responsibility was the entire Tehsil DG Khan, we managed to visit around a dozen different locations; from the coast of the Indus to the foothills of the Suleiman mountains to abandoned villages and destroyed factories, and occasionally to the havelis and castles (yes, friggin' castles) of the local Sardars.I found these ambulance rides, especially the early morning one with the trafficless roads and the morning breeze highly enjoyable. Each morning, I would pop in my earphones and turn on my iPod. I made it a point of habit to listen to one single album in it's entirety during a single day's ambulance trips. As a result, I can't think of the roads and pathways of DG Khan without hearing faint echoes of Neil Young's 'On The Beach' or Miles Davis' 'Bitches' Brew' or Munshi Raziuddin Sb.'s 1988 Mehfil.

I belong to the Jhang-Sargodha-Chiniot region that borders the Thal desert and considered myself if not fluent, then at least passably well versed in the Seraiki language. Or so I thought. On my very first day's medical camp, I found myself clutching at straws as patients explained their symptoms in the thickest, most unintelligible Seraiki. Initially I thought I was getting the gist of it and tried to plow through assisted by guesswork, but I quickly saw the error of my ways when I realized that the patients who were complaining of 'Phairay' weren't suffering from Vertigo as I had imagined, but Diarrhoea. I quickly recruited a local lad as interpreter and kept him by my side for the next two days while I learnt the ropes. By the end of the month, I was so used to listening to Seraiki that on my first day of clinic duty back in Lahore, I was genuinely shocked when my first patient started detailing his symptoms in English.

Most of our medical camps were 7-8 hours long and the patient population thinned out around the 2-3 p.m mark and that's when exhaustion, heat-sickness and boredom would start creeping in. It was then upto us to quickly find a diversion or risk falling victim to cabin fever. The vicinity was scoured for potential entertainments and more often than not, one was found. A tubewell would be located nearby, dhotis and shorts would be borrowed from the locals, a local farmer would be requested to donate a few stalks of sugarcane and voila..an impromptu jacuzzi-cum-waterpark would be set up in the middle of the wilderness.

My friends and batchmates who had completed their tour of duty in South Punjab kept enthusing about the hospitality of the local population. The first evidence of this hospitality came when on the third day of our medical camp at Jhok Uttra, the father of one of the kids we'd treated came carrying a huge cauldron of home-cooked fish on his head. He'd caught a "Commando machli" - in his words- that morning and graciously had it cooked it for us.  The fish was delicious, definitely a member of the Special Services, and was destined to become the first in a long list of similarly erm, piscine tokens of appreciation. "Say it with fish" seemed to be the locals' motto and we didn't mind it one bit....at least not at first. When it seemed that we had been force-fed almost half of the aquatic fauna of the Indus, I respectfully drew the line. It got to a point where, one day, after the announcement of our medical team's arrival in a village, we had to make a follow-up announcement assuring the locals that we definitely, DEFINITELY didn't want any fish.

The locals then turned to another ploy. "Fine" they said,"If fish isn't doing it for you, we have another ploy up our sleeve" The next day, a great big vat full of milk was delivered to us. From that day on, it was the whole food-fest all over, only this time we were being pressed with jugs upon jugs of cold, sweet milk. Again, we received and imbibed all of it with thanks at first, but we had to start the whole 'respectfully decline' routine again when a constant diet of fish an milk began to manifest itself in the form of sleepless nights, frequent daily urges to shower and other signs of "Khoon Ki Garmi" that I needn't go into the details of. Suffice to say that the locals' hospitality didn't just leave a mark on my mind but also on my waistline and what Beach the butler would lovingly refer to as 'the lining of my stomach'.

The hospitable folk of Dera Ghazi Khan cannot be held solely responsible for my gastronomical excesses. I was lucky to be billeted with a group of people that can be best described in that choice Urdu phrase, "Khush Khoraak". All day, all of us would work like pack-mules, but when we gathered for dinner, there wasn't just a feast of reason and flow of soul but a meal of the scrumpciousest food that could be prepared in the middle of nowhere. Twice weekly, there would be night-time barbecues, or alternatively, reconnaissance trips in search of driver hotels (I would like to take this moment to offer an unsoliscited testimonial : the Madina Driver Hotel at Kot Chutta on the DG Khan - Quetta road is the greatest truck-stop hotel in the world)  With profuse apologies to my vegan readers, I tasted more members of our winged, hoofed and pawed companions than I could ever hope to. Apart from the aforementioned fish and the more common staples like mutton, beaf and chicken, we were treated to duck, mallard, quail, partridge, hare and veal. It seems only the wily camel escaped being invited to dinner.

Again, most of these delicacies were sent to us by the locals as tokens of appreciation. However, there were some who didn't share the same sentiment. In fact, at one or two places we met with thinly veiled contempt. One of the local Sardars-owner of one the castles I mentioned in the beginning- made it known in his village that any artisan, worker or labourer found assisting our team would have his arms and legs broken. Despite that, he had the gall to smilingly (and forcibly) conducting us all on a tour of his grand mansion, pausing every so often to deliver a Gaddafi-esque stream of consciousness rant on the hazards of universal education, the correct place of women in society, the relative merits of a girls' school versus a dairy farm and why he thought the feudal-sardaari system was the way forward for Pakistan. A week after we finished the reconstruction of a girls' school in his village, we got word that he had uprooted the new water pumps we'd installed and filled the bore-holes with concrete as well as converted the school playground to - you guessed it- a dairy farm.

Cover Stories - Of Days And Nights In DG Khan

The massive floods that ravaged most of Pakistan in the latter half of last year,although sparing me and most of my near and dear ones, nevertheless left me with a feeling of extreme helplessness, inadequacy and impotence. Even though I was busying myself in helping with the various relief efforts that were being organized by a number of my friends as well as trying to do my bit in terms of monetary and material aid, I couldn't help but think that i needed to do more. Friends and colleagues from all over Pakistan were being rushed to the affected areas to provide medical relief while I was stuck in Lahore. When a month had passed since the start of the flooding, I resigned myself to playing at most a distant tertiary role in the relief efforts and gave up on the idea of working in the field.

Out of the blue, a rumour started circulating that a second wave of medical professionals was being sent to the flood affected areas to take over from where the first batch had left off. My name, along with those of ten of my colleagues, was being floated as part of this team. Sure enough, the rumor was soon followed by an official announcement. I was told I was to leave at two days' notice for a month's tour of duty in South Punjab. With that in mind, I started packing ; three or four pairs of clothes and a dozen or so books. I stacked my iPod with the complete three seasons of Arrested Development and around half a dozen Preston Sturges movies, confident that this arsenal of awesomeness would be more than enough to fight off the occasional attacks of ennui.

I was pretty excited when I left Lahore for Multan,which was the designated staging post for me and my batchmates from various other cities. After a painfully brief reunion with many of my Med School friends and an even briefer night's sleep, I was woken up at 6am the next morning with the information that a vehicle was waiting outside to take me to what would be my home for the next 35 days, Dera Ghazi Khan. On my way to Dera Ghazi Khan, I got my first glimpse of the ravages wrought by the flooding. Roads lay destroyed, fields and crops were inundated, concrete skeletons lined the road and heaped up remains of household items atop mounds of earth marked places where mud huts had stood. It was a sobering and depressing sight that prepared me for the grim task I was to perform over the coming days and weeks.

After my arrival in Dera Ghazi Khan and a perfunctory welcome, I quickly settled into a routine that I was to follow - with one or two modifications - over the next 35 days. There were two doctors sent to Dera Ghazi Khan, me and another colleague from Lahore. We would be up by 7am, have a quick wash-and-brush followed by breakfast and then set off in a caravan of three ambulances to set up a medical camp at a pre-designated location. The ambulances were loaded each morning with a sizeable stash of medicines that had been donated from various sources. We would stop at a Rural Health Centers or a Basic Health Units all over tehsil Dera Ghazi Khan. Our destinations had names like Jhok Uttra, Samina, Haji Ghazi, Nooria Kooriya - tiny villages and hamlets that weren't even on the maps.

While the camps were being set up each morning, an announcement would be made on the village mosque's PA system and the patients would start arriving. In ones and twos at first, later followed by entire clans and neighborhoods so that our average patient load was something like six to seven hundred people per day. People walked, cycled and in some cases, crawled miles to get to the camp. I had never managed workloads as huge as this and for the first day or two, was completely and utterly panic stricken. however, we soon got the hang of it, got our man-management skills in order and the operation progressed smoothly. The day's work would be over when our stash of medicines gave out, which was usually around the 4pm mark. By that time, we were supremely, exquisitely and utterly knackered and the packing-up process would begin. Packing up was a tricky and somewhat dispiriting exercise because of having to turn back (sometimes rather forcefully)stragglers and latecomers because of lack of medicines , especially when we knew that we wouldn't be visiting that specific village again. We'd load up the empty medicine cartons in the ambulances and return to base camp after seven or eight hours in the field.

The first thing to be done on returning to DG Khan would be to ask for a jugfull of what I can safely claim to be the greatest drink ever concocted by the ingenuity of man. Forget beakers full of the warm South and the true, the blushful Hippocrenes; this was the real stuff. If I ever met the gentleman who 'on honeydew hath fed and drunk the milk of paradise', I'd quietly take him aside and offer him a glass of what was rather prosaically called 'Limoo paani' but i think better merited the name coined by Douglas Adams; the "Pangalactic Gargle Blaster". The first time I drank it, I couldn't believe my throat. It was cold, boy was it cold ! It was equal parts tangy and sweet and peppery and otherworldly. Over the course of my 35 day South Punjab sojourn, I must have consumed gallons upon gallons of the stuff and near the end, was so familiar with the nuances of it's taste that I could guess whether it was 'proof' or not just by measuring the layer of froth at the top of the glass. While departing at the end of my tenure, I called aside the sublime genius who was responsible for creating this elixir, warmly grasped his hand, thanked him in hushed,awed tones and gave him a thousand rupee note as a token of my gratitude.

Getting back to the daily routine; after lunch, washing up and a very brief siesta, the afternoon's activities would commence. For the athletically inclined - and as I was to find out to my disadvantage, the disinclined as well - there were daily compulsory, repeat compulsory evening sports. Cricket, Badminton and Volleyball were played at the ungodly hour of 5pm in the blistering DG Khan sun in a misguided attempt at keeping up morale. Participation, or at least attendance was compulsory and for someone as pathologically averse to pointless physwical activity as me, this was the most unpleasant part of the day and indeed the whole month.

These silly diversions ended around eight p.m, after which the entire group gathered for dinner. Here I must mention that my little medical outfit was attached with a much larger flood relief and reconstruction effort that comprised around two dozen other people. Most of them spent the day distributing rations, reconstructing damaged schools and hospitals or looking after administrative arrangements. The complete workforce of our relief operation usually gathered under one roof only once a day, at dinner. Because of this, dinner was more than a meal, it was a sort of reunion-recap-review and coordination conference.  The meal itself was a formal affair, you had to dress for it (a fact that I hadn't anticipated, hence the prevalence of tees, sweatshirts and track trousers in my wardrobe) there were three courses and a hierarchically determined order of seating. It was immediately followed by a three or four hour long exercise vaguely labeled 'Conference" that me and my fellow doctor made an early and highly rewarding habit of sneaking out of. The result being that we would be comfortably snoozing in our bed by the time the first of the dead-eyed populace returned from the conference room at 2 or 3 a.m. A good night's sleep and the cycle would start anew the next day.

For the greater part of 35 days, this was my daily routine. It was tough and at times dry and monotonous but there were occasional diversions and distractions, countless indelible encounters and stories and a great deal of culinary adventures that rendered my waistline more Pickwickian than I'd prefer. Then there's also the small matter of the five day sabbatical that I've chosen to call The Great(est) Roadtrip......but that, as they say, is a horse of a different color.