On the road between Larkana and Sukkur in Sindh, we took the slightly longer route to the south, crossing the Indus on the Khairpur Bridge for a stop at the tiny town of Daraza Sharif. Right off the heels of several days at the center of the human deluge of Sehwan’s famous urs (death anniversary), the relative peace and calm were striking at the town’s own dazzling dargah: the shrine of Sachal Sarmast.
Even staff at the security booth seemed serene, reclined in the shade of great sheets of striped canvas. Past the metal detector, a smattering of pilgrims filtered through the tidy grounds, pausing in reverence for a moment to touch or kiss the golden threshold to the shrine.
This shrine is among the most stunning in Sindh, built to honor one of its long list of famous Sufi poet-saints: Sachal Sarmast. He was born right here in tiny Daraza in the mid-1700s as Abdul Wahab Farouqi, and his piety earned him the pen name Sachal: the Truthful. Sachal’s stirring lines and delivery earned him the additional sobriquet Sarmast, the Ecstatic—rendering him, roughly, the ‘Mystic of Truth’. As well as Sindhi, he wrote in Saraiki, Persian and Urdu.
Inheritor of a rich tradition of defiant, radical mystics espousing divine oneness, freedom and love, he stood on the shoulders of Sufi giants: from Ibn Arabi and al-Hallaj to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (his immediate predecessor in Sindh), taking their critiques of stale orthodoxy perhaps further, lambasting the hypocrisies of brittle, unbending beliefs stale rites. His poems called out the schisms between sects, favoring the supremacy of a universal, godly love.
Though far from the million-plus pilgrims that converge on nearby Sehwan for the urs of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Sachal’s urs draws thousands itself each year to sing some of his lines outside in the shade.
While most of the well-known Sufi saints and poets wandered far from home, Sachal stayed here. He died at 90 in tiny Daraza.
A few of the Truthful Mystic’s lines:
Ignore the paths of others,
Even the saints’ steep trails.
Don’t follow.
Don’t journey at all.
Rip the veil from your face.
Tis not in religion I believe.
Tis love I live in.
When love comes to you.
Say Amen!
