by Vikas Khanna
“What happened to your feet?” The old lady looked at her filthy legs without answering her question.
“I stepped into a pile of fresh cowdung when I was chasing that shameless thief, and he turned around and screamed, ‘Happy Baarrrday’, the bloody son of a pig.”
The old lady ignored her invective. “I can see your feet are dirty, but what I am asking, child, is about all the cuts and welts on them,” she said.
Choti silently lowered her gaze and clasped her calloused hands together, suddenly aware of how dirty she was. She felt embarrassed, but just for a moment.
“They look like the feet of an old, poor, outcast who has no shoes,” the old lady said. “And all the cuts and scrapes on your fingers and hands. Are those from the cowdung, too?”
Choti found herself impulsively confiding in the old woman; telling her much more than she normally shared with strangers. “Oh, these are from the rope I set up and walk on, and from the stick I use to balance so I don’t fall. Sometimes, when I have to make the rope tighter or grip the stick real hard to balance properly, it cuts into my feet and hands. It’s part of my job.”
“I see,” was all the woman said. She kept staring at her.
“You know, I do tamasha, but somedays I feel that everyone is doing their own tamasha—that stupid old man guarding Manikarnika, who thinks he can guard death itself; the Halwai uncle who claims he can keep my shadow off his food; Chintu, the double-crossing son of a pig, who happens to be my partner—I won’t use foul language about him again, I promise, but he is also running his own tamasha, sneaking one tamasha inside another one, sort of like you with your books! I mean, everyone has some tamasha or the other.” Choti’s face was flush with anger.
As she listened to the little girl’s rant, the old woman’s smile grew longer and sadder. “Girl, I only pray that your feet and hands heal one day,” she said finally, then clutching her book within a book close to her chest she picked up the brass pot placed beside her, and hugging her books closer to her chest, started walking down the crooked steps toward the river. She paused on the last step and turned around: “What’s your name, daughter?”
“First tell me yours,” Choti instantly demanded.
The lady said nothing. For a moment, her mouth tried forming the word as though unused to having said it in a long while, then she changed her mind, turned on her heel and was gone.
Choti didn’t let on, but the truth was that she had often seen the old woman around in that area, but it was the first time she had ever spoken to her, and by pure chance. Or was it chance? Could chance simply be another tamasha?
It had been a different old woman, a garbage-collector draped in a soiled yellow saree, who had first rescued Choti and taken her to the “orphanage”, the Nameless House with Pink Walls. It was there that she left all the abandoned babies she chanced upon in the garbage or on the streets or near the sewage pipes or in the backyard of hospitals. She was deaf but had a sixth sense about these tiny infants, these little pods of new life in the city of the dead. Only she heard the wail of these infants; it was the only cry she was attuned to hear. She brought them to the Nameless House to rescue them from everything—from crippling shame and insecurity to garbage and rodents.
For a decrepit place open to the sun, the Nameless House remained surprisingly cool, even in the hot summers, cooled by the mist-laden breeze that slipped over the Ganga and comforted the children. The crying infants’ brows were soothed by the soft caress of Ma Ganga and lulled back to sleep. The orphans had already overcome thunderstorms of strife by sheer human resilience, an overcoming that often marked them with one disability or another, after which they were then named. If a child had had his toes nibbled off by a rat while still abandoned in the garbage dump, he or she might be called “Three-Toes” or “Four-Toes.” One with a broken leg, a missing eye or broken nose, was simply “Half Leg” or “One Eye” or “Noseless” or even just “Kallu” for the dark-skinned ones. Once someone was named, that name was theirs for life.
Chintu was named after Lord Krishna, whose curly hair his baby hair resembled. But when Chintu grew a little older the texture of his hair changed, while his name remained the same. A boy named “Curlyhead” with straight hair. Calling the orphans after their most distinctive feature was absolutely reasonable to the Nameless Owner of the Nameless House with Pink Walls, as otherwise how could he possibly remember all their names? There were just too many of them.
The Nameless House with Pink Walls was really just a dilapidated courtyard protected by a strangely aggressive cow, whose hay shed also served as a shack for some of the orphans, and whose milk nourished the children. A small tulsi altar stood in the middle of the courtyard. Next to the entrance stood a rusted tin can, which had probably been planted there to sell ghee. Many of the rich people who came to Varanasi for moksha and cremation preferred using ghee to light the pyres of their beloved ones.
The Nameless Man who watched over the Nameless House and lived in a small room in the attic he accessed by a wooden ladder, never understood the point of all these rituals—once you were gone, you were gone. He left the ragged urchins to do their business: some of whom worked Manikarnika for whatever they could scrounge, and some of whom begged.
The kids who worked Manikarnika Ghat often returned rich, having retrieved the wondrous treasures that remained after the family members had cremated their loved ones and spread their remains in the Ganga. They jumped into the river looking for gold teeth, rings and personal belongings that might have survived the blaze. Sometimes there were coins that were tossed into the water. On lesser days they returned with clothes, toys and cosmetics.
Choti grew up never quite feeling at home in the Nameless House with Pink Walls, despite its holding the magic of children learning to take care of one another in order to survive. Despite the fact that her best friend, and worst enemy, Chintu lived there too.
The owner, the Nameless Man, had very little to do with them. He was a stranger who, it was rumored, had moved to Varanasi from a very far-away land, whose location no one knew. Some people in the neighborhood even suspected him of being a criminal, a kind of drug-dealer. He didn’t care either way. No one really had any idea how he came to dwell in and operate the Nameless House with Pink Walls, and he was so bold in his position there that whenever government officials came to collect their house tax, he would abuse them, saying, “These are all my children, I am doing God’s work here and you want taxes from me? Sin! Sin! Sin! For your greed and aggression, you and your next generations will rot in hell, and any past ones will reappear to torture you.” The Nameless Man’s bold chiding on behalf of his orphans always worked, and provided one of the only times the children living there heard his gruff voice.
The children grew up as if on their own, sprouting like mushrooms; as if they lived on the planet Mercury, where a year goes by almost four times faster than a year on Earth. The children always had enough to eat—courtesy the relatives of the departed who traveled there, and who tended, out of guilt and fear for their loved ones, to feed the orphans in a last-ditch effort to help the souls of their dearly departed make their Karmic journey.
People from the West, tourists mostly, and the more gentle-hearted residents in the area often came to the Nameless House with Pink Walls for photo-ops. In exchange, the Nameless Man would ask them to donate cash, which he collected in an empty rusted tin with a slit cut into the top.
Once, while she was practising her tight-rope-walking skills near the ghats, Choti thought she saw the Old Woman in a Yellow Saree carrying a child she had rescued from the lapping tides of the Ganga, just like she had with her. Choti waved at her and danced a little twist on her rope to show her gratitude.
The other old lady, Noor, came every day to the same place between the Tulsi Ghat and Manikarnika to collect water from the Ganga to offer the tulsi plant that grew in the courtyard of the widow’s ashram, where she had lived for over fifty years. When she returned, she never failed
to first water the tulsi with Ganga water before circumambulating it. Like her, the sturdy little plant had been there, in the same pot, in the same place, for as far as she could remember.
That day too, after watering the tulsi, Noor floated to the rear of the courtyard and sat on its red terracotta tiles, glancing around to make sure none of the other widows were watching—they loved to gossip—as she took the pink-wrapped book out of the Bhagavad Gita and carefully wrapped it in the scrap of plastic she had found on her way back from the Ganga. She rose to her feet, and counted her steps as she approached the newly planted mango tree. Beside the mango was a brick wall. Noor approached the wall, found a gap in the bricks near its corner, and secretly tucked her pink book within.
When Noor crept back from the corner, she spied the dozen or so other white-enshrouded women spilling onto the courtyard, plain white rice filling their steel mealtime plates. She watched as the group of widows sat on the floor and began to eat, then went into the ashram to get her own plate of rice, returning with it to sit among the other women. Noor ate her small mound of rice grain by grain. As she ate, the deeply soothing voice of a venerable old man, speaking deeply soothing words, her favorite voice and words, those of Rabindranath Tagore, entered her mind: You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
The words resonated so strongly in Noor’s mind that she almost choked on her rice. Tagore’s voice vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. The void always left a hole in her heart. Sometimes it felt like Tagore’s voice was the only thing keeping her alive.
Noor sighed and left the courtyard for the small room she shared with her roommate, Asha. It was right above the ashram’s main entrance, on the first floor. Asha and Noor’s room didn’t contain very much, and it contained even less for Noor, whose “bed” comprised of sundry mismatched scraps of sheeting. Asha, on the other hand had an actual charpoy in the corner, covered by a net, a relative luxury, to save her from mosquitoes. Faded burnt-orange walls, the color of the Ganga sky at dawn, and bedsheets almost a century old, woven by local craftsmen from Varanasi, added the only stroke of character to the drab room. She had inherited all her belongings from the woman who had lived in the room before Noor. She had passed away, leaving her all her possessions, even the brass container Noor used to bring her Ganga water to the tulsi. She placed the holy book she carried with her everywhere on the floor beside her empty rice plate and her now empty brass water pot, and sat down on her sheets.
Presently, Noor heard footsteps and Asha entered the room and stood over her. Asha came from a wealthy family and this privilege was what infused her with an air of superiority.
Asha spoke at Noor from above, “Noor, everyone downstairs is talking about why you spent so much time at the ghat earlier today. Were you with a man? Are you seeing someone? You know that people will kill you if they find something sinful about you.” Asha cackled at her own joke.
When Asha left the room, she heard her and the other women’s shrill gossip as it echoed across the ashram’s courtyard. But she didn’t care. She just closed her ears, hoping to hear Tagore’s soothing voice again, and, as she did, she lay down on her sheets to stare at the ceiling and thought of the word “tamasha.”
The Temple of Fireflies
Sometimes visible, sometimes yours, sometimes equal
A narkali was a subterranean inhabitant of the City of the Dead. She lived in an underground world beneath an underground street in an underground room without an address or electricity. Nor was it as if she required either; she never expected anyone to write her a mail to be delivered to her house, or to welcome any guests, or to give any vendor or solicitor any reason to descend the rickety bamboo ladder that lead to the deep, dark, dank place she called home.
The ceiling, if you could call it that, of Anarkali’s home was an iron grate. Through it she could she see or hear the movements of the world above by studying the shifting shadows and the sounds they made.
Even after having lived in her underground dwelling for over thirty years, Anarkali had very few possessions. A couple of wood planks upon which she slept, the small rug she’d fastened to the main wall to soak up its dampness, and a modest stack of discarded sarees she had picked up from Lolark Kund—the deep, perfectly square, holy bath that lay at the bottom of a vertiginous labyrinth of steep steps, where women went to pray to beget sons. The women who went to Lolark Kund often left their old sarees on the steps. Many poor women and transgenders like herself would go in the night to pick up these. Anarkali had strung a plastic line across her room so she could hang and dry her chronically wet clothes, and had built a small shelf out of a rotting piece of wood to store her makeup.
Anarkali’s favorite possession, out of the meager few she had, was an old, torn-and-faded ticket stub for a past screening of Mughal-e-Azam, India’s majestic historical love story. She kept it tucked into the bronze frame of the small cracked mirror she used to prepare her face for her customers. Crouching in front of it, she would powder her face thickly with white talcum powder all the way up to her receding hairline, use black charcoal to draw in her missing eyebrows, rub pinkish rouge on her cheeks to hide her wrinkles and apply dark red lipstick to her lips. And then, if she remembered, she would pin fake flowers in her jet-black dyed hair. At least the ticket-stub tucked into the side of her mirror, along with the memories it carried, made her feel a little romantic, though her broken old mirror didn’t always agree.
One day, through the grate above, Anarkali overheard a passerby claim that “a ghost lived down there.” Did they mean her? Being thought of as a ghost didn’t insult her. Not at all. It overjoyed her to hear it because it made her feel safe knowing that most people who passed over her home would neither risk their lives nor reputation by daring to enter Anarkali’s subterranean habitat under the City of The Dead.
She loved her address-less, nameless room for many reasons, despite some in Varanasi fearing it. It made her invisible when she wanted to be, it sheltered her from predators (mostly of the human kind), it cooled her when summer burned others, and because it was conveniently located near the Sangam Chowk, the heart of the city, the crossroads between the new and old areas of town, it was free and clear of the main Ganga sewage system; though even that could sometimes suddenly change during the overflow season.
Some in Varanasi went so far as to call Anarkali’s cherished home a “snake hole.” Ironically, they were right—a black snake did visit her home sometimes. Sometimes she imagined the snake to be the most vicious king cobra and sometimes she thought that it was just a slithering illusion created by her imagination. Whatever kind of snake it was, Anarkali didn’t even think to kill it, because, in her opinion, the snake’s visits protected her, not harmed her. Anarkali viewed the snake as symbolic of the very beast Lord Shiva wore around his neck, as the embodiment of how important it was to face your fears. She had fears, yes, but not for snakes or other creatures that flew or slithered the earth. Her fear was reserved for humans.
While Anarkali saw the many benefits of living down below, there were also some detriments. She had to cover her bed with a roof of plastic sheets affixed to poles placed at each corner of her bed when it rained.
During the monsoon overflow season, sewage flowed in a stream on the floor right next to her bed, a flow she named “mini-Ganga.” When Ganga really swelled over her banks, the flow would become so heavy that Anarkali had to flee before the whole room submerged in water. The temporary but absolute flooding of her home was the most challenging part of being a resident of the transgender hijra community. It was only during the most dangerous days of potential flood that she took her most precious possessions and moved in with the other hijras, or decided to sleep on the open terrace of Halwai Sweets, a confectionery on Sangam Chowk run by one of the fattest, most miserable and miserly residents of Varanasi, Ram Halwai. Anarkali was safe there, at least until Ram discovered she had been sleeping there.
Despite having to flee for her life on
some occasions, Anarkali much preferred staying at her place, for its absolute gloominess always seemed to give way to the most unusual moments of magic. She enjoyed the continuous melodies created by the water dancing into her room, as well as the drops of water that clung to the grate before they finally fell to scatter the colorful reflections of the morning sun, as it stretched its beams down into her dark underground realm. Anarkali knew the sun had no desire to live with and warm her in her dungeon, but simply spread its light and visited its rays just to return some small unspoken favor. Somedays the sun’s reluctant rays appeared like misty-winged angels, while on other days they appeared like small bent rainbows.
But it was during that most amazing part of summer, right before the monsoons began, when it was neither day nor night, during the birth and death of twilight, that the most magical thing occurred: Anarkali’s dank little place would fill with fireflies, so many fireflies that her place became more like a firefly temple. And after her long work days amid summer’s sweat and toil, and predators of the human sort, Anarkali would always anticipate returning home so she could simply relax on her wooden planks and stare and dream up into the natural starlit sky created by the flickering insect-magicians of light that for some reason had decided to make their home there. As far as she was concerned, like the snake, she would always welcome the fireflies and their soft fireworks show.
That particular day, Anarkali woke up early with the sunlight washing her room in more gold and pink than usual. She splashed her feet in the gutter of dirty water running past her home, and then positioned herself before her mirror to get ready for the day. Her young friend Choti would sometimes bring her makeup, wigs, and more rarely, luxuriously colored scarves she picked up at Manikarnika Ghat. Choti always seemed to consider her.