“I think he’s fascinating,” Pinky said, sharply elbowing Tufan.
Nimish rewarded her with a smile. “He was Britain’s greatest explorer. He didn’t just write about the people in the colonies but understood them, translated them for the world. Including us.”
“He understood us?” Gulu asked with eyebrows raised, pointing a blackened fingernail at his loudly checkered shirt.
“I’ve been born too late to do what he did,” Nimish continued. “Unfortunately, everyone’s already been written about. But I want to travel like him, in disguise as an Arab, maybe even as an Englishman. Discover the dark underside of civilization, its perverse pulse. I want to understand what makes a society tick, what its collective dreams are, its yearnings.”
At the mention of yearnings, Pinky grew flushed.
“You want to pretend you’re English?” Gulu asked.
“I could pass.”
“‘Wheatish is not white,’” Tufan declared, borrowing one of his mother’s favorite phrases.
“Pass-wass!” Gulu exclaimed. “Step one foot upon her Majesty’s soil and you’ll fut-a-fut find out how brown you really are.”
“And the ghosts?” Pinky prodded.
“Burton wrote a book called Tales of Hindu Devilry,” Nimish continued undeterred.
“Hindu devilry?” Pinky asked, wondering if Maji’s priest, Panditji, knew of such terrifying matters.
The oily-headed, beady-eyed priest punctually made an appearance every Monday to dispense blessings and irrelevant advice, all the while keeping a sharp eye on the stack of rupees straining within Maji’s enormous bosom. Pinky was quite certain that priests came into regular contact with ghosts and other such spirits but wondered if Panditji was interested in anything beyond calculating the exact number of sticky sweet laddoos needed at any given ceremony.
“What nonsense,” Gulu said, dismissing everything Nimish had just said with a grand wave of his hand. “Christians like him are the real devils.”
“It really wasn’t about a devil,” Nimish said, exasperated. “It was a translation of King Vikramaditya’s ghost stories.”
“Oh!” Gulu said, “I know all about those.”
“Have you read the book?” Pinky asked.
“A long time back,” Nimish said. “The king had to carry a corpse hanging from a mimosa tree all the way to the cremation ghats. And during his trip, the corpse was inhabited by Betaal, a demon who told him riddles, each containing an essence of human wisdom.”
“Wisdom-smisdom, no need to read books for such things,” Gulu said, clicking his tongue in disapproval. “Anything of value I learned during my childhood years at the train station.”
Before Pinky could maneuver the conversation back on track, Gulu plunged into another one of his stories.
“You see,” he began, “I was very little—maybe six, seven—when I first started shining shoes at Victoria Terminus. VT is like a heart—di-dom, di-dom, di-dom—you can feel it, nah? The very pulse of India. A hundred years ago the very first railway line in all of India was opened from VT.”
“Boring,” Tufan said.
“I’ve heard this one before,” Pinky began to protest. Usually she enjoyed listening to his tales but today she had more pressing matters on her mind.
“My friends Hari and Bambarkar and myself all worked for Big Uncle,” Gulu continued, his voice brimming with drama and suspense. “He was so fat, I tell you, because he swallowed a tiger during his days in the military. When he opened his mouth, only roaring came out! But he provided us with a way to bring in a few annas a day for roti and dal. Sometimes even roasted channa in newspaper cones— still steaming, I tell you. We all felt very lucky on those days.”
“Boring.”
The Ambassador wheezed to a stop at an intersection. Immediately a horde of vendors besieged the car, knocking insistently on the windows with their wares.
“Jao! Jao! ” Gulu yelled, transferring his animosity toward Tufan onto them. “I earned my very own Cherry Blossom tin of polish in only two months,” he said, glaring at the street beggars as if laziness were the sole reason for their impoverishment. “How I loved to caress the shiny metal with the red-red cherries on it. Each morning I even rubbed some on my nose to wake me up.”
At this olfactory reference, Dheer perked up.
“One day Big Uncle was murdered,” Gulu continued as he vigorously cut off a family of five piled atop a scooter. “A man with red, paan-chewing teeth took over. My friends Hari and Bambarkar fut-a-fut began working for Red Tooth, not even blinking an eye. But I stayed loyal to Big Uncle. He had been my protector after all. So Red Tooth beat me to a bloody pulp. I almost died right there on the platform.” He exhaled dramatically, imagining dark burgundy curtains closing with a swish, the smell of mirchee popcorn crunching underfoot, the shouts of an appreciative audience as they cheered their youthful hero to his feet after his encounter with Red Tooth.
Nimish scrunched his nose, “Sounds like last month’s film at Metro Cinema.”
“You think I’m lying?” Gulu turned indignantly to Nimish. “See this scar above my eyebrow?”
All three boys peered into Gulu’s face, unable to discern anything more sinister than a pitted patch of acne.
“But the demon,” Pinky asked, “how did it get into the corpse under the mimosa tree?”
“These things happen,” Gulu said, shaking his hand dismissively, “it’s a common-enough occurrence.”
“What rot,” Nimish said. “It’s all just superstitions. Even your brave King Vikramaditya was said to have been sired by a donkey.”
“Have you no respect?” Gulu asked. “So Lord Ganesh has the head of an elephant. So King Vikramaditya was born in extraordinary circumstances. What difference does it make?”
“But the demon?”
“Pinky-didi,” Gulu said with pronounced patience, “demons are floating spirits looking for a form to possess. Anything will do: a dead body, animals on the street, sometimes, I tell you, even this car’s useless engine.”
Nimish shook his head and buried his nose back in Burton’s Personal Narrative.
Pinky’s heart sank. Like Gulu’s driving, a considerable percentage of his knowledge was improvised on the spot. Whether true, false, or irrelevant, Gulu strictly adhered to whatever came out of his mouth as if it had been a sacred verse from his tattered copy of the Bhagavad Gita. Despite his illiteracy, he carried the Gita with him at all times, citing passages to the beggars who tapped on his car windows. “Doing your own duty imperfectly is better than doing another’s well,” he once quoted to the barber on the side of the street who had just inadvertently denuded the side of a client’s head.
“Not to worry,” Gulu continued, misreading her crestfallen expression. “Some can be quite friendly.”
“And ghosts?” she asked. “Are they the same?”
“No, no, not at all,” Gulu said. “Ghosts aren’t interested in possessing. They’re the spirits of people who died under bad circumstances like, you know, suicide, murder, that sort of thing. Perhaps they fell under a lorry brimming with bamboo or were flattened by a tree while hanging from the train during morning commute. Or perhaps they were not cremated properly because the family didn’t have money for the required amount of wood. They come back to this world to correct their situation. Sometimes they come back to warn others.”
“But how do you know what they want?” Pinky asked.
“You have to listen.”
Pinky slunk back in the seat. This was not the answer she had hoped for.
“Not to worry,” Gulu said comfortingly. “Some can be quite friendly. But you will be learning all of this soon enough for your school project, nah?”
The children decided to stop on the way back at the Empress Café along Colaba Causeway to have a cold drink and pick up a half dozen of their famed crumpets, one of Savita’s favorite treats.
“Duke’s Soda, Mangola, Koko-Cola,” offered a bald waiter, wearing an ill-fitt
ing red jacket and attempting a British accent as was required by the Anglophilic café owner.
Pinky decided upon a Gold Spot drink with a squeeze of fresh lime and a good measure of rock salt that, when sprinkled in, caused the soda to bubble venomously over the top. Dheer ordered toasted cakes in sweetened milk, and Nimish a coffee. Tufan selected Coca-Cola, wrapping his perspiring palm against the alluring hourglass-shaped bottle which, like the throat-burning drink, reminded him of the American film siren Marilyn Monroe.
Giving his bottle’s narrow waist another squeeze, Tufan said, “Remember the vending machine at Metro Theater?”
Dheer nodded excitedly, mouth full of wet cake. “When the padres at school took us to Ben-Hur, we got to use it. You put the coin into a slot at the top and there is a rumbling noise. Then you push back the center slat and—wah!—one extra-cold Koko-Cola!”
A bus rattled to a stop nearby, looking as if it would rather have been stripped down and retired than goaded onwards. It choked and coughed up an array of noxious fumes; equally thick smoke shot from the radiator in front. The bus, an exact replica of the double-decker ones that clanged along the streets of London except for the acronym BEST—Bombay Electric Supply & Transport—stenciled on either side of the lower deck, was precariously tilted on its axles and dented in a thousand places, its red color barely visible under the grime and dust. Due to the increasing unrest between Maharastrians and Gujaratis over annexation of the city, the bus had been covered with wire mesh, giving it the appearance of a mobile jail complete with an armed police inspector riding at the door watching for hurled rocks and other signs of insurgency.
A conductor hopped out of the rear left side door, wielding his aluminum ticket box like a weapon. At once a mob rushed forward, strategically elbowing aside rival passengers in their rush to get on.
“I hate buses,” Tufan said, “they stink.”
“It’s not so bad,” Nimish said, “at least there’s ventilation through the missing windows.”
“They’re teeming with Eve-teasers,” Pinky declared, remembering the recent four-inch headline—“EVE-TEASER ARRESTED!”—in The Evening News, followed by a brief article detailing how the frotteur was caught offending a girl’s modesty on an overcrowded BEST bus.
Bloody idiot, Jaginder had commented. First the Romeo was thrashed by the passengers, then by the police. Now he’ll rot in jail for six months.
Unless he’s from a good family, nah? Savita had asked, verifying that wealth and status would shield her youngest, if ever so misguided, from such humiliation.
Yes, yes, Jaginder had said, for good families the disgrace of one’s name in the papers is enough to satisfy the magistrate.
Best thing to do when riding the bus, Parvati had cut in, is to carry a knitting needle in one’s bag. One swift jab at Romeo’s privates and he’ll never touch you again!
“I think it’s the women who are most dangerous,” Dheer said. “When we went to Ben-Hur on the bus, a woman bummed me out of my seat!” He went on to describe how, with a mighty swing of her ample hips, she sent him flying into the aisle. When he had dared to protest, he received a neat whack from her overstuffed purse. The woman had been sporting a thick moustache and equally bushy ears and had plopped herself in the middle of the class of boys. Always chasing after us girls, she had bewailed as if she had been the object of their desire. And then unclicking her purse, she had coquettishly retrieved a handkerchief and daintily dabbed at her hirsute upper lip.
Nimish, Pinky, and Tufan burst out laughing.
The double-decker bus, reeking of stale urine and undigested fried lunch, now contemplated a full shutdown in front of the Empress Café while the enraged driver coaxed it back to life, with a solid beating by a rusted pipe. After the engine finally sputtered to ignite, the driver blared the bulb horn and veered onto the road where he overtook a contingent of Fiats and narrowly missed three lunching cows.
“I like to take the trams instead, green one if possible,” Nimish added, “starting at Dhobi Talao all the way to King’s Circle where the workers turn it around on ball bearings, more than an hour’s journey.”
“So long!” Tufan exclaimed, licking the curve of his Coca-Cola bottle.
“I get my reading done,” he shrugged, “and sometimes meet friends on weekends to catch an English matinee.”
“How can you concentrate?” Pinky asked. “That route takes you on Kalbadevi Road, the most crowded street in the whole city!”
“It’s actually easier than at home . . . where there are distractions,” Nimish said vaguely then abruptly called the waiter for another coffee.
Pinky stiffened, thinking about Lovely.
Suddenly, they heard the loud sound of drumming and shrilly voices filling the street.
“Hijras! ”
A group of hermaphrodites, tall, with masculine features, but draped in flowing saris, danced down the road in their direction, one beating a dholak drum. Most of the pedestrians on the street gave them a wide berth, but a few bold men jeered at them from their open windows.
“Arré chakkas,” they called, using the term meaning the sixth day of the week, the day the hijras typically came out in public, but also used abusively to taunt a cowardly or effeminate man.
“Go back to Koliwada,” another shouted, referring to their settlement in the slums near Sion.
The hijras responded, some threatening to pull up their saris to display their missing genitalia, one even exhibiting a desiccated male organ imperiously propped up on a wooden splint in a sealed glass jar.
“Should we go?” Dheer asked, unsuccessfully trying to squeeze his entire body into the rickety chair as if to make himself invisible.
“They’ll come after you,” Tufan warned, “and steal your balls.”
“No they won’t!”
“Oh, that’s right,” Tufan said, double-checking the fly of his pants, “you don’t have any.”
Dheer shuddered. “Are they born like that?”
“Some,” Nimish said, “others are castrated during adolescence by an insanitary knife and boiling oil. Or sometimes by pulling a strand of horsehair tighter and tighter each day until their things turn black and fall off.”
Dheer crossed his legs. Tufan covered his privates with his Coca-Cola bottle.
“In Mogul times,” Nimish continued in a whisper, “they guarded the emperor’s harems, their position one of privilege. Many were even granted parcels of land. After the British drew up the Indian Penal Code in 1884, however, they were declared to be an offense.”
“They’re always at weddings,” Pinky said.
“They make a living by playing on the dread and superstition that they evoke in others, especially at auspicious events,” Nimish continued. “Even the police usually leave them unmolested, fearful of supernatural powers which stem from their ability to be both man and woman and to be neither.”
The procession of singing hijras approached, sharply clapping their hands, drawing attention to their parade. They stopped in front of the Empress Café where the children sat, calling inside for the owner, a fat man known as Jolly, to come out.
“They have an arrangement with the local maternity wards and hospitals,” Nimish explained. “They pay for the names of families where there has been a birth. They give blessings to the healthy ones and claim the unfortunate ones who entered the world with deformed or missing privates.”
“I guess Jolly’s just had a child then,” Pinky said.
“Maybe he’s abnormal,” Tufan added hopefully.
The hijras dancing grew feverish, the din almost deafening as they sang and simultaneously hurled taunts at the local men from behind their palloos. “Oh Ma, we’ll never be able to have children,” they chanted. “So we’ve come to bless your child.”
Just then Jolly appeared, his face looking as if he had a terrible skin disease but upon closer inspection the sores turned out to be globs of jam. He had just been taking a nap under a condiment shelf in the kitchen
when a jar of marmalade fell off and broke open by his face. He stood now, glaring at the singing hermaphrodites, with an upraised broom in his hand. His wife, a tiny woman with dusty, flour-like skin, stood next to him with her newborn son in her arms. The hijras continued to dance, their undulating hands and bodies moving in suggestive ways while the leader demanded a thousand rupees. Despite this obvious attempt at robbery, the wife beamed, joyful that the hijras had come to announce the birth of her child to the world. She threw herself into bargaining with remarkable prowess.
The hijra leader brought his fee down to five hundred rupees.
“Go! Go!” Jolly shouted at them. “Rundae key bachay, sons of whores.”
“Arré idiot!” his wife scolded him. “You want to insult the hijras during our happy occasion and bring their curses upon our heads?”
Jolly stormed inside.
Greatly pleased by the reprimand on their behalf, the leader immediately dropped his price to a hundred rupees. The wife pulled the required amount from her sari blouse and handed it to him.
“Show us the boy!” he then demanded.
The woman untied the triangular cotton diaper from the baby’s hips, exposing his perfectly formed privates, his penis promptly releasing a firm stream of yellow liquid. The hijras clapped their hands in amusement, commenting on the workings of baby’s organ, while passing the naked infant amongst themselves.
Nimish, Pinky, Dheer, and Tufan could not help but crane their necks for a better look, Tufan crestfallen when he realized that the baby would not be claimed by the hijras.
“He will be a great man,” blessed one hijra.
“He will be prosperous,” bestowed another.
“How lucky you are to have such a fair son,” cooed a third.
“Please Ma,” said the leader, tying a black thread around the baby’s wrist to ward off the evil eye. “Give us a sari.”
Haunting Bombay Page 8