He was the object of such veneration that peasants placed offerings of milk and bananas outside his hole. His entry into a hut was considered a divine blessing. Hindu Scriptures were full of fables and stories about him. Temples had been constructed in his honor and all over India, at the beginning of each month of February, the great festival dedicated to him gathered together millions of worshippers. Despite the fact that he claimed more victims per year than cholera, no devout person would ever have committed the sacrilege of raising a hand against him, for the cobra snake was one of the thirty-three million gods in the Hindu pantheon.
Poor Kovalski! His entire compound in the City of Joy would long remember the shriek of terror he let out when he went into his room one evening. Rearing up on shining coils with its tongue vibrating and its fangs exposed, a flat headed cobra was waiting for him beneath the picture of the Sacred Shroud. Neighbors came rushing to the sceile. The Pole had already seized hold of a brick with the intention of crushing the creature, when Shanta Ghosh, his pretty neighbor whose father had been devoured by a tiger,
stayed his arm: "Big Brother Stephan, don't kill him, whatever you do, don't kill him!" Alerted by these cries, more people came running with hurricane lamps. "We could have been in the middle of a scene from the Ramayana," Stephan Kovalski was later to say, "the one where the army of monkeys hurl themselves into the lair of the demon Ravana." In the end Ashish, Shanta's husband, with the help of two other man managed to capture the reptile in the folds of a blanket. Someone brought a basket and put the snake in it. A short while afterward calm once more prevailed in the compound.
Kovalski had understood the message. "That cobra was not put in my room as a token of welcome," he said to himself. "Someone here does not wish me well." But who? That night he could not close his eyes. One detail in particular had not escaped his notice. Whereas all the other residents had come rushing to his rescue, the door to the adjoining room occupied by the eunuchs had remained closed. This fact was all the more strange because during those sultry nights everyone fled the furnace of their rooms to sleep in the courtyard. The priest extracted the lesson from his adventure without bitterness. Despite the demonstrations of affection his life of sharing and compassion among his disinherited brothers had afforded him, he knew that for some he remained a white-skinned sahib and a priest—a foreigner and a missionary. Until now the relative anonymity of an alley had protected him. But in the restricted world of a compound, things were very different. In this concentration camp atmosphere, anything that did not conform with the group became a foreign body with all the dangers of rejection that that implied.
At daybreak, when the Pole returned from the latrines, a squat little man with short-cropped, curly, white hair, a jet black complexion, and a slightly flat nose, entered his room. Kovalski recognized the occupant of a hovel on the other side of the well.
"Father, we too were eligible for the cobra's strike," he declared with a wink. "Your cobra was for your white skin and the cross you wear on your chest. Ours was for our curly hair and because we came from the forests."
"And also because you're a Christian," added the priest,
indicating the medal of the Virgin Mary hanging around the Indian's neck.
Kovalski had adopted the Indian habit of first defining a man by his religion.
4 'Yes, because of that too," admitted the man with a smile. "But primarily because we're from the forests," he insisted.
The forests! The mere mention of the word in the depths of this leafless, flowerless slum amid all the noise and acrid smoke of the chulas conjured up before Kovalski's eyes a whole sequence of magical images: images of freedom, of life that was primitive but wholesome, of happiness and stability achieved at a price but nonetheless real.
"Are you an Adivasi?" he inquired.
The visitor nodded his head. Kovalski thought of all the accounts he had read of the aborigine people. They had been the first to settle in India. When? No one really knew. Ten, twenty thousand years ago. Nowadays there remained some forty million aborigines, divided up into several hundred tribes, dispersed over the entire subcontinent. This man was one of them. Why had he left his forest to come and live in this slum? Why had he exchanged his jungle for this one? It was some weeks before Kovalski was able to reconstruct the path fifty-eight-year-old Boudhou Koujour, his Adivasi neighbor, had trod.
"The drums had been beating all night," Boudhou would recount. "It was festival time. In every village in the forest, beneath the ancient banyans, the giant tamarinds, and the lofty mango trees our women and girls were dancing side by side in long rows. How beautiful our womenfolk were with their tattoos, their shining skin, their supple bodies, and their rhythmically swaying hips! From time to time a group of men with turbans and bare chests, carrying bows and arrows and wearing bells around their ankles and peacock feathers on their foreheads, would leap into the moonlit circle of dancing women and break into a frenzied dance. The women had begun to chant wildly. It was no longer possible to think of tomorrow or of anything
else. Your heart pounded to the rhythm of the drums. Problems and difficulties ceased to exist. All that mattered was life, the life that was joy, impulse, spontaneity. The effect was intoxicating. The supple bodies stopped, rose again, dipped, uncoiled, stretched. Our ancestors were with us and the spirits too. The tribe was dancing. The drums were beating, responding to each other, now softly, now more loudly, blending into the night."
That festive night, the aborigines of Baikhuntpur, a jungled valley on the borders of the states of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, renewed their thousand-year-old rites. At dawn next day, however, a surprise awaited them. Toward six in the morning, two hundred henchmen sent by the area landowners descended like a cloud of vultures. After setting fire to all the huts, they demanded payment of outstanding farm rent and all interest on loans. They arrested the men with the help of the police, sequestrated the cattle, raped the^ women, and seized all the inhabitants' goods. This raid brought to a climax several centuries of confrontation between the people living in the forest and the large landowners who wanted to take possession of their fields and crops. The ancient law inscribed upon the memory of humanity that determined that whoever clears the jungle becomes its owner should have been enough to safeguard the aborigines against such covetousness. At one time nomads, then semimobile, in the course of a few centuries the aborigines had become small-scale peasants. Their agriculture was strictly for their subsistence, intended to feed their families. Products that grew wild in the forest were there to supplement their diet. Boudhou told the priest how he and his children used to climb trees to shake the berries off the branches, how they used to scratch the ground to unearth certain roots, how they knew how to peel off a particular bark, decorticate certain tubers, extract marrow, squeeze certain leaves, locate edible mushrooms, pick succulent lichen, draw off sap, gather buds, collect wild honey. He spoke, too, of how they used to set snares, traps, nooses, and bait for small game, and automatic traps equipped with clubs or arrows for bears and other larger animals. How they caught various insects, worms, ants' eggs, and giant snails. Each family gave the
community anything they caught that was surplus to their needs to be passed on to widows, orphans, and sick people. "It was a hard life but we were free and happy." One day, however, the drums were reduced to silence. He and his family and the other households in the valley were compelled to move on. First they went to Patna, the capital of Bihar, then to Lucknow, the great Muslim city, but nowhere could they find work. Thus it was that, like so many others, they had taken the road to Calcutta. Put off by the close confinements of the slums, at first they had installed themselves on the outskirts of the city with other aborigines. They had worked hard at baking bricks and they had lived like dogs. Then one day a room fell vacant in the City of Joy. On that day India suffered a fresh defeat: a man who had been Man par excellence, primitive Man, free Man, was integrated into a slum.
Some evenings later Kovalski arrived h
ome to discover that tragedy had struck the compound. At first all seemed quiet. Even the laughter of the children and the shouting of the drunks were stilled. A few steps farther on he heard the sound of groaning. In the half-light he could just make out figures squatting outside the eunuchs' door. Under the veranda there was a charpoy on which he could see a shape enveloped in a white sheet. Several small oil lamps were burning around about it and in the brightness of their flames he noticed two feet. "Someone in the compound had died," he told himself. Beside the charpoy he recognized Kalima's dark tresses with their distinctive blue ribbon and white flower. The young dancer was sobbing. The priest slipped into his room and prayed as he waited on his knees before the picture of the Sacred Shroud. A moment passed and then he heard the feet treading softly on the cement behind him. It was his neighbor Ashish.
"Stephan, Big Brother, there's been a fight," he explained in a low voice. "Boudhou, the Christian Adivasi, has killed Bela, one of the eunuchs. It was an accident but the poor thing is well and truly dead. It was because of your cobra."
"My cobra?" stammered Kovalski, abashed.
"For several days the Adivasi had been conducting a secret inquiry to find out who put the cobra in your room/' Ashish went on. "He had found out that a snake charmer had given a performance to celebrate a marriage in a compound not far from here. The eunuchs were all engaged to dance at the same wedding. The Adivasi managed to find the snake charmer, who admitted that one of the Hijras had insisted he sell him a cobra. The Hijra had offered him two hundred rupees, a truly fantastic price for a small creature like that. The Hijra explained that he wanted to perform a sacrifice so eventually the snake charmer agreed and that's how the cobra came to be in your room. By having it kill you, Bela no doubt wanted to expiate some obscure sin. Who knows? There are those who say that by killing you, he hoped to appropriate your sex for a future incarnation."
Kovalski wanted to speak but his voice was strangled in his throat. He could hardly breathe. The Indian's words eddied in his head like acid bubbles. Ashish recounted how that evening the Adivasi had turned up at the eunuch's hovel to punish him. He had only wanted to teach him a lesson, but Bela had gone demented. He had seized a knife to defend himself. An eifeminate eunuch, even of substantial build, was no match for a forest dweller used to hunting bear with a spear. In the ensuing set-to the Hijra was impaled on his own knife. No one had had time to intervene. In a compound, the tensions are so great that, like a thunderbolt, death can strike at any moment.
Kovalski was shattered. He could hear the sound of the eunuchs' sobbing through the open door. Soon the sobbing stopped. He heard footsteps and voices and realized that his neighbors were preparing to carry their companion to the cremation pyre on the banks of the Hooghly. He knew how expeditiously funeral ceremonies were conducted in India because of the heat. What he did not know, however, was that tradition would not allow eunuchs to bury or burn their dead other than at night, out of sight of "normal" people. What was more, India denied in death what it granted its eunuchs in life: the status of women. Before swathing their "sister" in his shroud, Bela's companions had been obliged to dress him in a longhi and man's
short-sleeved shirt, and Boulboul, the sad-faced guru, had cut off his long braids.
Ashish had just left when Kovalski heard a scratching at the casing of his door. Turning around, he saw Kalima's necklaces and bangles gleaming in the darkness.
"Big Brother Stephan, we would like to ask you to do us the honor of taking our sister to her funeral pyre," declared the young eunuch in the very deep voice which never ceased to come as a surprise.
As he delivered his request, his companions were addressing three other men in the compound. Once again the appeal was rooted in respect for tradition; in India women do not have the right to accompany a funeral cortege. Deprived of the comfort of this last homage, the Hijras gave their "sister" a poignant farewell. As Kovalski, Ashish, and the two other bearers took hold of the funeral litter, the guru Boulboul fell to his knees, uttering a succession of mantras. Crazed with grief, Kalima and the other eunuchs tore at their faces with their nails and gave voice to the most heartrending wailing. Then the four Hijras bared their feet and began to beat the corpse with their sandals "to prevent our sister from being reincarnated as a eunuch in her next life."
There was no longer any doubt in Kovalski's mind: the eunuchs' attitude toward him had changed. The carrying out of the funeral rites had created a bond between them. Since he had borne to the funeral pyre the corpse of the Hijra who had tried to kill him by putting a cobra in his room, the four other eunuchs in the neighboring room had stepped up their tokens of friendship. Often, as he came home in the evening, he would now find some trace of their passing: a wick for his oil lamp, a dish of delicacies, the wall on which he hung his picture of the Sacred Shroud freshly whitewashed. These gestures both touched and embarrassed him. "I certainly had gotten used to all forms of cohabitation. Nevertheless, the presence of this strange 'family' on the other side of the wall made me uneasy. And yet of all the neglected, despised, rejected people in the slums, weren't they those who should be pitied most? Ah, what a long way I still had to go before attaining that true spirit of charity and acceptance."
Ultimately, it was Kalima's credit to dispel Kovalski's prejudices. Every morning after his ablutions, the young dancer came to chat with the man who in his deep voice he 396
called "my Big Brother Stephan." Although the language of the Hijras was a secret tongue known only to them, Kalima knew enough Hindi to make himself understood, and of all the destinies that had come together on this wretched place, his was assuredly one of the most curious.
Kalima was the son of a rich Muslim merchant in Hyderabad, a city in the center of India. When he was a child, his genital organs were only slightly developed, yet there was no doubt about the fact that he was a boy. Very soon, however, his femininity revealed itself. At an age when his classmates were battling it out on the cricket or hockey field, he devoted himself to learning dancing and music. Instead of Boy Scout uniforms and sportswear, he preferred shalwars with their baggy trousers and the long tunics young Muslim girls wear. He liked to put on perfume and makeup. To curb what they considered evil inclinations, his parents had married him off at the age of fourteen to the daughter of a rich jeweler. Kalima had tried to fulfil his conjugal duty, but the result had been so disastrous that his wife had run back to her parents on the morning after their wedding.
One day, among the crowd of worshippers who had come on pilgrimage to the tomb of a local Muslim saint, an old Hijra with short hair and a gaunt face had spotted the youth and followed him back to his home. Less than a week later, Kalima left his family forever and went off with the eunuch. He confided a few details of the strange ritual of his adoption ceremony to Kovalski. His "godmother," or rather his guru, was called Sultana. Like the majority of Hijras, Sultana had no breasts and so she had pressed a piece of cotton soaked in milk onto her chest and obliged her godchild to suck it. This was a condition of acceptance into his new family. Kalima then received one hundred and one rupees, silver and brass utensils, clothes, saris, petticoats, glass bracelets, and chotis —threads of black cotton which, once knotted in the hair, would become like the triple braid of the Brahmin, the hallmarks of his new caste. After his adoption, Kalima was subjected to a grand initiation ceremony, to which all the members of the community and the leaders of the other Hijra castes in the area were invited. His "godmother" and the other
gurus dressed the new disciple in a skirt and blouse previously blessed in a sanctuary. Kalima then dressed his "godmother" in the same way and kissed his feet and those of all the other gurus present, who in return gave him their blessing.
It was after this ceremony of ritual transvestism that Kalima received his female name. All the gurus were consulted as to the choice. Kovalski was surprised that they had christened the boy with the name of the most bloodthirsty goddess in the Hindu pantheon. With his fine features and his c
arefully plucked eyebrows, Kalima had nothing demoniac about him. It was true that his rugged voice gave him away but, because of his delicate bone structure, the proud bearing of his head, and his flowing walk, he could easily pass for a woman.
Kalima's initiation was not yet complete. The worst was yet to come, for a real Hijra must not be confused with a transvestite. Transvestites belonged to another caste, a pariah caste even lower on the social ladder. In the muddy alleyways of the City of Joy, Kovalski had often come across these tragic individuals disguised as women, outrageously over made-up, fitted out with false breasts— ridiculous actors who sang, danced, and wriggled their rumps at the head of wedding marches and religious processions, pathetic, obscene clowns, employed to make others laugh at their own expense and to transform the most sacred rites into grotesque parodies. Those men, however, managed to carry out their profession without sacrificing their masculinity. Some of them had several wives and whole streams of children. The deception was part of the game.
The Hijras' position in society was entirely different. They must be neither men nor women. Mothers, who called them to take upon their shoulders the sins committed by their newborn babies in previous lives, had the right to verify this fact. And be damned those guilty of deception!
The City of Joy Page 38