The descriptions were filled with abundant imageries of the rites and dances . Smoking of all kind of substances was to be an important part , and an elaborate mystic cosmogical order was described .
There was however a point that struck me , and stayed in my memory :
It seems that out of a ritual necessity , not just whimsically , but for a kind of an internal sadhana , some sufi men will dress in women´s clothes .
Now , I have tried to find the exact explanations and context of this custom by searching on the net , but could not find the desired reference .
I only could find a vague approximation :
QUOTE
They call this region southern Punjab, but it feels a very long way from Lahore, the Punjabi provincial capital. The people here speak their own language, Seraiki, which boasts its own poetry and song and its own patron saints, commemorated in the shrines that everywhere dot the landscape. After a few days in Bahawalpur, I drove out into the Cholistan desert – an extension of the vast Thar desert through which the India-Pakistan border is drawn. Next to a wind-blown hamlet of mud-walled square-sided dwellings, there was a sand dune, now covered with green-painted concrete, venerated as the burial site of Chanon Pir, a mythic figure whose cult harks back to the centuries long before Islam, or even Hinduism or Buddhism, reached these parts. On the day I visited, people from settlements across Cholistan were assembling for the beginning of the Pir’s annual festival. The skies were blue, the air was temperate and the mood was cheerful. Devotees were performing rites around the shrine, accompanied by the drone of harmonium and patter of tabla. Men dressed as women danced and laughed and begged. Peddlers set out stalls of cheap plastic trinkets. And there was not a mullah in sight.
But now my question is :
Are these men preparing to become eligible for a next birth as sakhi-bekhis ?
