Funerals are generally inelegant affairs in Pakistan. Often chaotic, overcrowded and under-coordinated, they usually focus on the feeding of strangers over comforting loved ones. We don’t have a tradition of a memorial per se. I have rarely seen a member of the family or close friend get up to address the crowd with a eulogy about the deceased at any funeral I’ve attended. We have a very developed tradition of mourning, of course. We have the janaza at the graveyard, we have the quls and duas and we even have a day to mark the 40 days since the death, plus any number of other ceremonies that mark the passing of a soul to another plane. But the actual funeral tends to have none of the calm gravitas of these other events – and that fact often disturbed me. Much like at weddings, we often surrender the power of the actual event to a religious cleric. It doesn’t seem to matter how devout anyone was in life, or what their own personal relationship with God may have been. Once dead, it is tradition, and at times like this one I imagine often doesn’t have the energy to fight it, mainly because there isn’t much of an alternative. I have often remarked on this only to be met with stony silence on the other end.
Some people have told me that because Muslims bury the dead within 24 hours of the actual death there isn’t much time to plan. Others have pointed out that there are funeral directors orchestrating an event because it’s considered bad form to have a people making money off of funeral practices because it seems like taking advantage of grief, and so people usually rely on that one relative that has done it before to supervise the proceedings. One person maintained that chaos of a Pakistani funeral could actually be a part of the catharsis it offers, since arranging the logistics distracts people from the grief of their loss. These may all be true, and I was thinking about all of these things when I saw the coverage of Asma Jahangir’s funeral last week. There were a number of accounts commenting on how women stood with men to perform the funeral rites, an unusual move since the last rites are traditionally a segregated thing. But the cleric was reciting his verses and it got me thinking about the role of a maulvi in our lives here.
Funeral of Sultan Selim II - Ottoman miniature
Last week I had a meeting with a man whom I had spoken to only on the phone. His name was Mehdi saab and he came to me on the recommendation of a friend. I called him to tell him I needed to buy a fairly large order for a project I’m working on. He seemed unimpressed with my request, apparently used to selling 100 times that amount. But still he listened and we chatted for a few minutes. He said he could drop by later to give me some further details and samples. His voice sounded professional but distracted, like there was always someone else just out of my earshot who was vying for his attention. I imagined him to be a large Punjabi man, reclining on an office chair with his feet up on a desk, ordering people around him with little more than a jerk of the head.
My doorbell rang later and I opened my door to find a very different man than I had imagined. For one, he was much older than he sounded. He had a long, white beard that he kept stroking into a point; he wore a white prayer cap and carried a set of black prayer beads in his left hand. His shalwar was hiked up above his ankles and he looked like the picture-book definition of a religious man, with the blessed exception of that dark mark that some men cultivate on their forehead to show how much they pray.
He had kind eyes and a matter-of-fact tone and after we had talked for less than five minutes, I found myself writing him a cheque for the entire amount. Mind you, I hadn’t seen every piece he was going to deliver, and nor had I been to his shop. These facts only occurred to me later, after he had gone, as I marveled that I had trusted him so quickly. Not out of any suspicion about him really, but only because I rarely conduct business like that. Why did I trust him?
I thought about it, and it occurred to me that on some level I assumed it was because he looked like a man devoted to the tenets of God and therefore truth. This is not something I think often, and the realisation surprises me more than I could articulate. For so much of my life, performatively religious men, of any faith, have scared me. Part of that is the era we are in and part of that is the vocal and often long-lasting effects that religion has on social and civil liberties within Pakistan.
But here I felt comforted and trusting because of how someone was dressed. Wasn’t that as bad, I wondered, as judging someone harshly for how they present themselves? I’ve begun noticing it more and more, the way clothes can change the way people see you and even you see yourself. Noticing the way some people tend to get stopped by the police on the street while others are ushered through. How some people are called “sir” and others “boy”.
RuPaul says on his show that “We are all born naked and the rest is Drag”, meaning that all the things that we chose to wear and act as are part of a performance, which I think as true a fact as any. Maybe it wasn’t his beard that made me trust Mehdi but rather his kind eyes. But he did remind me of the space that a cleric holds in our lives here, not just in public arenas but in the smaller intimacies of our lives — our births, marriages, divorces and deaths. And it got me thinking about whether we give our rites of marriage and funeral to clerics because we don’t have an alternative in mind or because that’s just what is done? Considering we spend so much of our lives, especially here, performing our outer selves to others, who exactly is it that gets the final word on what we wear?
