The Colour Green

Agha Nomaan The author reflects on the Mazaar—not the physical place where saints and Sufis have been buried and which draw the population for prayers and entreaties, but the tower of authority that is constructed to keep others from intellectual inquiry. The heat tonight was thick, heavy with the scent of camphor and forgotten things—like dust-laden siparas on top shelves. It was an internal heat, not just the Karachi humidity pressing in. The heat of unspoken thoughts. The stifling closeness of expectations that wrapped around you tighter than any shroud.

I saw the lizard again today. Just a flicker of movement near the bookshelves, then stillness. Its dark, unblinking eyes seemed to follow me, even after it vanished into a crack. It left behind a feeling of coldness, a prickling unease that settled deep in my gut. It was the same feeling I got when Salman Mamu was around—that sense of being watched, judged, of something ancient and unyielding lurking just beneath the surface of ordinary life.

'Man with Tower and Flag' by Moeen Faruqi (Oil on canvas)

I kept thinking about these invisible shrines. Not the ones with the green chadars draped over tombs, where devotees flock for blessings. No, the shrines I saw were built in people's minds, brick by brick, of dogma and 'what ifs' and 'what will the elders say.' Their minarets reached not for the sky, but for control; their domes curved like closed fists, holding tradition till it suffocated. My own mind felt like one, or a visitor trapped within. There was a constant, low thrumming, like the distant beat of a daffli at a shrine, but it was just the echo of ingrained fears. This is haram. That is bidah… religious invention. What will people say? These weren't just guidelines anymore; they were the walls of this mental mazaar, dictating where I could walk, how I could think, who I could be. They were etched onto my thoughts, whispered in that insidious voice that sounded suspiciously like my own, telling me I was straying, impure, inviting displeasure from the architects of this structure, who appointed themselves divine interpreters.

Three days later, the air still felt thick. The fan in my room just pushed the stifling closeness around; it didn’t dissipate it. It was the same feeling as when Salman Mamu came over. He arrived for tea, but the real purpose, as always, was his quiet inspection, reinforcing the mazaar's boundaries. He sat in his usual chair, the one that faced the door, as if guarding against unwelcome ideas slipping in. His eyes, magnified behind his spectacles, scanned the room, lingering on the bookshelves and the Huroof-e-Muqatta'at of the Loh e Qurani on the wall (calligraphed letters from the beginning of Surahs). Every glance felt like a security check, every pause a silent judgment. That same cold, unblinking quality I saw in the lizard's eyes.

The conversation started innocuously enough, but soon, the tendrils of the oppressive belief system began to creep in. Ammi mentioned that my cousin, Zara, was considering applying for a scholarship abroad. Instantly, Salman Mamu’s posture stiffened. The air, already heavy, became brittle, charged with that familiar, low-level threat emanating from the core of the mazaar's ideology.

“Abroad?” he said, the single word dripping with disapproval, like cold, stagnant water from a blocked drain. “Why would she do that? Is there nothing left to study here? Our own institutions, built on the principles of our faith?”

Here it was. The not-so-subtle redirection. The reinforcement of the idea that anything outside the walls of their understanding, their approved way of life within the mazaar's confines, was inherently suspect, potentially corrupting. He didn't forbid it, not outright. His method was more insidious, like a slow-acting poison seeping into the groundwater. He planted seeds of doubt, nurtured them with fear, and watched them grow into impenetrable walls of the mental mazaar. He launched into a story about a friend's son who went abroad and tragically fell away from faith and family. The cautionary tale was delivered with a mournful shake of the head, but the message was hammered home: stay within the rigid structure, or risk spiritual ruin and social ostracism.

Ammi listened with rapt attention, her face a mask of concern. She was a devout woman, but her faith was one of love and kindness. Yet, she had spent so long living within the shadow of these invisible mazaars, tended by men like Salman Mamu, that she couldn’t help but feel the tremor of fear when their walls were invoked. She internalized his fear, made it her own, and in doing so, reinforced the mazaar for herself and for those around her. It was a cycle of inherited dread.

I watched, feeling that familiar draining sensation begin. It started in my chest, a tightening, a heaviness, spreading to my throat, making it hard to speak thoughts that dared challenge the oppressive structure. It spread down to my hands, making them feel weak, unable to push back, to build something different. It was the energy required to resist, even silently. The effort of maintaining your own shape when someone was trying to mould you with the invisible clay of their dogma. It was the constant internal negotiation between authenticity and survival, and in that room, survival felt like the only option.

I tried to offer a counterpoint, a small, tentative argument about the value of broader experience. It felt like throwing a pebble at a concrete wall. Salman Mamu didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. He just smiled, a thin, humourless smile that didn’t reach his eyes, and said, “Beta, be careful. Doubt is a slippery slope. It starts with questioning small things, and soon… soon you question everything. And then where are you? Adrift. Without an anchor.”

The word ‘adrift’ hung in the air, heavy and suffocating. It was the ultimate threat for those within the mazaar—the fear of being cut off, of being alone, of facing the unknown without the rigid structure of their beliefs to hold them up. It was the fear of the open sea when you had only ever known the confines of a well, the water stagnant but at least predictable. This fear was the mortar between the bricks of this mental mazaar. He talked for another hour, weaving in more anecdotes, more warnings disguised as wisdom, more subtle endorsements of those who adhered strictly to the ‘path’ he defined within the mazaar's boundaries. He spoke of specific bidahs as if they were pillars of faith, non-negotiable and ancient, when you knew, somewhere deep down, they were newer additions, innovations used to distinguish 'us' from 'them,' to build higher walls around the mazaar. He mentioned the power of certain amulets as essential tools for protection, implying that misfortune was a consequence of not being adequately ‘fortified’ by these physical manifestations of the mental structure.

She had spent so long living within the shadow of these invisible mazaars, tended by men like Salman Mamu, that she couldn’t help but feel the tremor of fear when their walls were invoked

By the time he left, the air in the room felt thick enough to chew. And I felt… hollowed out. Like he hadn’t just visited, but had performed some kind of spiritual extraction, taking with him a portion of my inner light, my resilience, replacing it with a faint residue of his own anxieties and pronouncements. My head felt fuzzy, my own thoughts distant and muffled by the echo of his pronouncements.

This was the nature of his vampirism. It wasn't a sudden attack, but a gradual erosion. A constant, low-level feeding on your energy, your individuality, your right to define your own relationship with the Divine, your own path in the world. And it was sanctioned, even celebrated, within the walls of these invisible mazaars. The more you conformed, the more you sacrificed your own vitality, the more 'pious' you were considered within the structure. The more you resist, the more you are seen as 'unwell,' 'misguided,' or even 'possessed' by outside influences. They drain you, and then they tell you that your emptiness was a sign of your purity, that the weight of their control was the lightness of true faith.

The terrifying thing is, you became complicit in your own draining. You opened the door, offered the tea, provided the expected responses. Because the alternative—the confrontation, the potential expulsion from the perceived safety of the mazaar, the casting out into that terrifying 'adrift' state—felt even more terrifying. It felt like choosing oblivion over a suffocating existence within the shrine's confines. The weariness was a constant companion, but something shifted after Salman Mamu’s visit, something I've been trying to understand. It had something to do with the lizard. That cold, unblinking presence, a miniature, scaly version of the feeling Salman Mamu left behind.

The lizard, like the "otherness" they constantly warned against, the creeping doubts, the outside influences they wanted to keep out of the mazaar. Fear, cold and primal, coiled in my gut. I needed something, some small act to push back against the encroaching dread, the feeling of being constantly watched, judged, by the invisible eyes of this oppressive structure.

I remembered the whispers from kitchens back in Karachi, the old wives' tale—crushed eggshells, scattered at thresholds, a simple ward against reptilian intrusions. It felt foolish, even as I did it, saving the fragile shells from breakfast, breaking them into pieces in the privacy of my room, the faint crunch, a small, defiant sound in the oppressive quiet. Driven by that raw fear, I assembled the broken shells near the loose tile where the creature often emerged, by the crack under the heavy teak door leading to the neglected library—a room that felt like a repository of forgotten knowledge, or perhaps, forbidden truths. A flimsy defense against an unnamed dread.

For a few days, the small ritual offered a sliver of perceived control, a placebo against the house's psychological weight, the weight of the mazaar pressing in. Then, one stifling afternoon, hidden in the shadows of the hallway, I saw it. The lizard emerged, its movements fluid and ancient, just as Salman Mamu embodied the oppressive 'purity' that sought to cast 'otherness' out from the mazaar's domain. It paused near the scatter of white fragments. I held my breath, expecting it to recoil, to divert its path.

Instead, the creature lowered its head. Its small, darting tongue tasted the air, then touched the shells. With a delicate, deliberate precision that seemed almost mocking, it began to eat them. A faint, dry crunch, crunch, crunch echoed in the stillness, the sound disproportionately loud, obscene in its defiance of my flimsy protection.

I watched, frozen. The ward. The repellent. Being consumed. Turned into sustenance.

A cold wave of understanding washed over me, extinguishing the feeble hope. Garlic for a vampire, the thought surfaced—that's what this was meant to be. A simple charm against the darkness. But the vampires in this place weren't creatures of myth repelled by folk remedies. Mamu, with his suffocating dogma and life-draining control, fed on spirit, not blood, and defied natural limits, not superstitious boundaries. His power came not from the supernatural, but from the deeply ingrained, man-made myths of the mazaar. And the 'otherness,' like the lizard, wasn't something to be warded off; it was something that the monster could consume, could even be fed by, if you didn't understand its true nature.

The eggshells were useless. Worse than useless—they were food for the very thing I feared, a symbol of how profoundly I, and perhaps everyone caught in the orbit of these oppressive structures, had mistaken the nature of the prison they were in. The horrors here couldn't be kept at bay by scattering shells at the door. They were already inside, embedded in the walls of our minds, in the dogma, in the fear itself. They had to be faced, not superstitiously placated.

The crunching stopped. The lizard flicked its tongue, its dark eyes seeming to meet me for an instant before it slipped away, leaving the remaining, useless fragments behind. I no longer felt the urge to replenish them. The fear hadn't vanished, but the illusion of easy protection had shattered, leaving behind a starker, clearer view of the reality I needed to confront. My next actions would have to be rooted in something stronger than borrowed superstitions and myths. They would have to be rooted in… what? Truth? Self? I didn’t have the answers yet, but I knew they wouldn't be found in scattered eggshells or whispered incantations.

This wasn't just a personal struggle. This was the age of catastrophe. Not with fire and brimstone, but with the slow, quiet suffocation of individuality, the perversion of beautiful traditions into tools of control, the creation of division based on arbitrary rules. It was the tragedy of potential unfulfilled, of spirits slowly dimming, all within the confines of self-imposed or socially constructed prisons of the mind. And the monsters were the ones who built and maintained these prisons, feeding on the life force of those they trapped within. I could feel the fatigue settling deep in my bones. The fatigue that wasn’t just from the day, but from the constant vigilance required to protect your inner self from being absorbed into the mazaar’s collective consciousness.

The lizard… it was a jolt. A cold, scaly reminder that the threats weren't the ones the old stories warned against, and the defenses weren’t either. It felt like a moment of clarity in the suffocating haze. A realization that the divergence wasn't outside, a creature to be repelled by charms. It was the part of you that didn't fit, the part that questions, the part that wants to break free, and the mazaar was designed to consume it. The monster fed on that unconformity, that vibrant, messy quality that makes you you. The lizard, in its silent, unblinking way, was a mirror held up to the mazaar and to Salman Mamu, showing the true face of the difference they combat and the way they twist things meant for protection into sustenance for their control.

So, if the lizard was the 'otherness,' and the mazaar fed on it, what did that make me? Someone who harbored this 'otherness'? Someone to be drained? The thought was unsettling, but also… strangely empowering. If my difference, my doubts, my desire for something different, was what they feared and what they fed on, then perhaps nurturing that difference was a form of resistance.

It was terrifying. To cultivate the parts of yourself deemed impure, dangerous, worthy of being consumed. It meant inviting the vampire's attention, stepping out of the shadows and into the faint light where you were most vulnerable. But the alternative—the slow, quiet fading within the mazaar—felt like a living death.

I didn’t know what this meant in terms of action. What did it look like to nurture your difference in a place that was designed to suppress it? To fight a monster that feeds on your spirit, armed with only the parts of yourself that had been deemed weak? It felt impossible. But the eggshells taught me that the old ways, the easy answers, won’t work. The myths that built these mazaars won't offer salvation from the monsters they've created. I had to find a new way. A way that acknowledged vampirism, the mazaars of the mind, and the terrifying power of internalized fear.

---

Agha Nomaan is working as an independent filmmaker and a multidisciplinary artist in audiovisual immersive environments. He explores the intersection of theology, the human psyche, and emotions through his craft. He views the deliberate act of creation as a mirror to cosmic design, seeking harmony in art as a reflection of the universe's inherent balance and divine origin, informed by a deep connection to personal faith.

Moeen Faruqi is an artist and English language poet living in Karachi. His paintings have been exhibited widely within Pakistan and internationally in Bangladesh, Canada, India, Italy, Singapore and UK. Faruqi's poems have been published in various literary journals in Pakistan and abroad.