Chaman held up the pink bedspread against her mouth to demonstrate what she meant.
‘I’m in pain, I’m probably dying, and all my little chelas [disciples] are leaving me. I had seven, now only three are left to look after their old mother. Remember Maya? She went off last month and married a boy from Pakistan. Promised she would come and see me, but you know what these little chelas are like ...’ Chaman suddenly began to look rather sad. ‘I can’t even see properly any more. And as for my teeth ...’
‘What’s happened to your teeth?’ asked Zakir.
‘I had them all out last month. Got new ones put in. Look.’
Chaman pulled out her dentures and flourished them at us. As she did so she seemed to notice me for the first time.
‘Who’s your gora, Zakir?’
‘This is my friend, Mr William.’
I smiled. Chaman frowned.
‘Is he your boyfriend?’
‘No,’ said Zakir. ‘He’s married. To a girl.’
Chaman wrinkled up her nose in disgust.
‘He has brought you a present, Chamanji,’ continued Zakir.
From the bottom of my pocket I produced a silver ta‘wiz, the Sufi charm Zakir had suggested I purchase as a gift for Chaman. I handed it to the guru. A fat hand shot out from the covers and snatched it from me.
‘Who gave you this?’ asked Chaman.
‘Pir Hassan Naqshbandi,’ I said.
‘Naqshbandi, eh?’
Chaman bit the corner of the ta‘wiz. This seemed to satisfy her as to its authenticity.
‘It will make you well again,’ I said hopefully.
‘Nothing will make me well again.’ The old eunuch fixed me with a sharp eye. ‘Are you American? From the land of Hollywood?’
‘No. I’m British.’
‘From London?’
‘From Scotland.’
‘You know Sean Connery? I read in a magazine that he was from Scotland.’
‘You’re right. He is.’
‘In the old times we hijras used to be like your zero zero seven. We were called khwaja saras, not hijras. We used to live in the king’s house. In those days we never danced. Our job was to listen and tell things to the king. We were just like your Sean Connery.’
Somehow I couldn’t imagine Chaman and her household taking on Goldfinger or seducing Ursula Andress, but I let this pass.
‘I love the movies,’ continued Chaman. ‘When I was a girl I wanted to be an actress. Look!’
From the bedside table Chaman produced a black and white photograph. It showed a beautiful, heavy-boned girl in a European dress. She had heavily rouged lips and painted eyebrows. A velvet choker was tied around her neck; massive gold earrings hung from her lobes. The tone was sub-Garbo; only the tikka mark between the eyebrows gave away that the image was Indian.
‘That was me when I was twenty-five,’ said Chaman. ‘I was beautiful, no?’
‘Unique,’ I said.
Chaman blushed with pleasure: ‘You mean it?’
After the breakthrough with Chaman it still took two months of regular visits with Zakir before I got to know the other eunuchs properly.
I used to arrive early in the morning before the household had left on their rounds. They would always be busy putting on their make-up and brushing their hair. Often there would be some drama: Razia, the loudest and most ebullient of Chaman’s chelas would be wringing her hands and weeping because her new boyfriend had gone off to Ajmer or because Chaman had called her a tart or because her pet goat had gone missing; she always suspected her neighbours were planning to slaughter it.
Another source of worry was the baby girl that Panna, another of Chaman’s chelas, had adopted; if ever it wheezed or coughed or refused its food, Panna would work herself up into an opera of agitation. The only hijra who always kept her calm was Vimla, the prettiest and quietest of Chaman’s chelas. She was in charge of the kitchen and by seven in the morning would be busy chopping up chillies and onions ready for lunch.
Razia, Panna and Vimla were all very different - in their backgrounds, their characters, and their looks. Razia was the most unlikely of the three. A Kashmiri Muslim, she claimed to have been to the Doon School (the Indian Eton) and to have completed a Master’s degree in English at Bombay University. I was never able to establish whether she was telling the truth - virtually all the hijras I talked to shrouded the facts of their lives in a thick wrap of fantasies - but she was certainly from a middle-class background and spoke fluent English.
‘I became a hijra very late - in my mid-twenties - after my mother died,’ she once said. ‘I was born with a body that was masculine but my heart was always feminine. I never fitted in anywhere, but now I feel good with these people.’
‘Was it very difficult when you first joined the hijras?’ I asked.
‘When I arrived it was very strange. Everyone lived together; there was no privacy. The six other chelas were all illiterate and came from villages. Before I used to be a real reader; but here there was not one book in the house. None of them even read a newspaper. But Chaman was very protective and supportive; it was as if I was still living with my mother.’
She added: ‘Sometimes I wanted desperately to go home, to see my sisters. Once I went all the way home - but I never went in. I just looked in the window then went away.’
‘Did the other eunuchs accept you?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t they mind your posh background?’
‘Not at all. Thanks to Chaman they were kind to me. Besides I was useful to them. I was able to talk English and to read and write. We are all happy together. Sometimes when I see Panna with her baby I wish I was a woman and had a husband and a child. But Chaman doesn’t like us to have partners. She doesn’t like men in the house - at least not corrupt men. She’s very jealous of her daughters.’
Panna, Razia’s friend, was a very different creature. She was a very large hijra: nearly six feet tall. Her face was covered with the scars of smallpox and she had a huge protruding belly; a shadow of light stubble flecked her chin. She would never have won a beauty contest. But she was one of the shyest of all the hijras I met, and one of the most gentle; her life revolved entirely around the baby she had just adopted. Her story emerged only after I had got to know her very well.
It seems that Panna was born asexual - with no visible sexual characteristics — into a poor family who lived in a village near Varanasi. When Panna was just twenty days old, the village midwife disclosed that she was neither male nor female, that she was a hijra. The news spread like wildfire. Panna’s mother, fearing the consequences, left the village with the baby and went to stay with a cousin fifty kilometres away.
‘In the village, my deformity had become the sole topic of conversation,’ Panna told me. ‘The rest of my family were ostracized. It was said that we were cursed. The following day a relative came to the village and said that my mother had died of shock soon after reaching her cousin’s house.
‘I was brought back along with the body of my mother. The death did not move the village. Instead they sent a message to Chaman, who used to visit the village every so often. The curse on the village had to be removed. Chaman came with two chelas and took me away. I grew up to be the chela of Chaman, and Chaman became my guru.
‘Being a hijra was the only possibility for me; there was no other career I could have pursued with the body that was given to me at birth. Sometimes I used to be lonely and unhappy, but now with the baby my life is complete. Now I don’t care what people say: at times I look at the child and I am so happy I can’t sleep at night. When she is older I will send the child to a good girls’ school and see that she is taught English. Maybe one day she will be beautiful and become a model or film star.’
Panna is unusual in that she was born asexual. The vast majority of eunuchs, and almost all those I met, were born physically male. In Europe they would probably describe themselves as transsexuals and have a full sex change. But in India the technology for this does not exist. The
only choice is between a brutal - and extremely dangerous - village castration, or, for those who can afford it, a course in hormone pills followed by an anaesthetized operation. The operation is illegal in India, but there are several doctors who, for a fee, are willing to take the risk.
Vimla, the most feminine-looking of the eunuchs, did not have the money for an operation and voluntarily underwent a village castration. The son of a Jat farmer outside Delhi, by the age of thirteen she was already refusing to work in the fields, saying that she felt more like a woman than a man. ‘I was sure that I did not have a place in either male or female worlds,’ she told me. ‘My body was that of a man but deep down I had the heart of a woman. At puberty I started thinking of myself as a hijra.
‘One day a hijra named Benazir came to my village. She was very beautiful and I fell in love with her. When I was on my own I would feel sad and would not eat properly. Only when Benazir returned did I feel happy. My family began to suspect that I was in love, but they did not know with whom. But in the village people who had seen Benazir and me together began to gossip.’
A lucrative marriage settlement that Vimla’s family were negotiating fell through as rumours began to spread. In frustration and shame, Vimla’s father beat her up. The following day Vimla ran away to Delhi to look for Benazir.
‘For days I searched for my Benazir, but I did not have an address or know the name of her guru. I knew no one in Delhi and had no money. I had to sleep on the pavements and beg for money. Occasionally I got a free meal from the pirzadas [officials] at the shrine of Khwaja Nizamuddin, but often I would go to bed hungry.’
Eventually Vimla met and was adopted by Chaman Guru.
‘In those days Chaman was very rich and beautiful. She became my guru and gave me lots of beautiful saris and gold bangles. I started to wear women’s clothes and to put on make-up. The following year I was taken to a village in the Punjab. I was dosed with opium and a string was tied around my equipment. Then the whole lot was cut off.
‘I knew it would be very painful and dangerous, but I got cut so that no one would taunt me any more. After I was cut all my male blood flowed away and with it went my manhood. Before I was neither one thing nor the other. Now I am a hijra. I am not man or woman. I am from a different sex.’
I once asked Vimla if she ever missed family life.
‘We are a family,’ she said. ‘A chela must obey her guru like a bride obeys her mother-in-law. We chelas must work hard, do the cooking inside the house, and most of the dancing outside. We have an obligation to look after our guru when she grows old, just like we would look after our own mother. In return, when we first become hijras Chaman Guru teaches us chelas the ways of the eunuchs.’
The longer I spent with the eunuchs, the more it became clear that the whole system was highly structured, both within the household and outside it. Just as every household of eunuchs has its strict rules within its walls, so each household also has a well defined ‘parish’ where its members are allowed to operate. Violations - poaching in another household’s area - is referred to a special council of eunuchs from all over India and Pakistan which meets once a year.
There is even a Central School of Dance for the hijras. It occupies a shady campus dotted with bushes of purple bougainvillaea in Panipat, fifty kilometres to the north of Delhi. Here Prem Hijra, a bad-tempered old eunuch with a bun and beady black eyes, offers courses in dancing (folk, Bharat Natyam, Arab belly dancing or disco) and singing (traditional, ghazals or modern film songs) to new recruits. She also runs refresher courses for those who want to perfect a particular style of dancing or learn the latest film songs.
‘She’s very strict,’ Vimla once told me, ‘But they say that in her youth she was the best dancer in North India.’
I pressed Vimla to show me her dancing and eventually, after first consulting with Chaman, she invited me to join the household on their rounds, or ‘going on tolly’ as they call it. Every household of eunuchs has a network of informers - sweepers, dhobis, midwives - who report back the imminent births and marriages in their district. Every day, before setting out on tolly, the guru of the household prepares a detailed itinerary of addresses to be visited, and the eunuchs adhere strictly to this list.
We set off at seven in the morning after a particularly frantic bout of making-up: all three hijras cleaned their teeth with neem twigs, smudged on great quantities of lipstick and dusted their faces with blusher. Then we all took a convoy of rickshaws to Lajpath Nagar, in south Delhi. (Balvinder Singh, in a fit of unusual prudishness, had long since refused to come on my trips to see the eunuchs in Old Delhi: ‘Mr William. These hijras are very bad and very dirty ladies,’ he had said the first time I tried to give Razia a lift in his car. ‘Too much bad and too much dirty.’ Since then he had declared himself busy whenever I rang and asked for a taxi to take me to the Turkman Gate.)
At Lajpath Nagar we met up with two musicians, a pair of elderly men, one of whom played a harmonium, the other a pair of tabla drums. After a quick breakfast we set off to the first address on the list. As they walked along the streets, the eunuchs clapped their hands and made bawdy jokes, behaving quite differently from the way they did inside their Turkman Gate haveli. Vimla in particular underwent a radical character change. Sweet, shy and doe-eyed at home, she would rush up to complete strangers in the street, grapple with her skirts and shout: ‘Sardarji! You with the beard! Give me money or else I’ll flash!’
The first house on the list was a small ground-floor flat belonging to a carpenter. The eunuchs piled into the entrance hall, the musicians started up the music and Vimla led the dancing by stamping her foot and ringing her little anklet bells. Things were just getting going when a neighbour appeared. Yes, she said, there had just been a birth in the house, but the family had gone to stay with cousins in Haryana; there was now no one at home. Disconsolately, we got back into the rickshaws and set off to the next address.
This was a far larger, middle-class house a few blocks away. Here there had been a marriage three days before, and the bride had just been brought to her new house that morning. The old men started up the music and the eunuchs began to dance. A crowd of beggar children gathered to watch beyond the garden wall, but from the house itself there was no response. After a while a toothless old woman peered nervously round the door and smiled. Then she went back inside again.
Meanwhile Panna, despite her bulk, was putting on a fine display. She wobbled her head one way, wobbled her bottom the other, all the while singing an Urdu verse which Zakir translated as follows:God bless you,
You are very sweet,
You are very lovely,
God will give you long life.
This classy poetry appeared to do the trick. People began piling out of the house: two daughters-in-law, several small children, some unmarried daughters, two old grandfathers and the new bridegroom. The new bride, required by Hindu etiquette to be blushingly coy for several weeks after her marriage, cowered beyond the open window, twitching the lace curtain. Vimla now took centre-stage, while Panna grabbed an unwilling daughter-in-law and whirled her around in a waltz for a few steps.
As Vimla pirouetted, pulling her sari over her head in a parody of the Dance of the Seven Veils, Chaman Guru put down the cymbals and got down to the serious business of collecting money. The grandfathers both put fifty-rupee notes in the plate, while one of the daughters-in-law presented Chaman with the traditional gift of a plate of flour. But this clearly was not enough as far as Chaman was concerned. She signalled to Panna to carry on singing. A few more fifty-rupee notes were offered, but again Chaman shook her head. Eventually, as the song wound on to its thirtieth verse, the bridegroom presented Chaman with 1000 rupees (about £25). Bowing and scraping, the eunuchs withdrew.
It was a strangely farcical routine, and must be extremely tedious to enact day after day. But when society closes off all other opportunities there are only two choices for the eunuchs: dancing and prostitution. Of these, going on t
olly is probably preferable - and possibly more lucrative.
I was always struck by the eunuchs’ lack of bitterness. Through no fault of their own, through deformity or genetic accident, they found themselves marginalized by Indian society, turned into something half-way between a talisman and an object of ridicule. Yet in their own terms they seem fairly content with their lives, and they do not rail against the fate that has left them with this role. In the rickshaw on the way back from that morning’s tolly I asked Vimla whether she would like to be reborn as a hijra in her next life. She considered for a while before answering.
‘Do you have any choice how God makes you?’ she answered eventually. ‘I pray for our welfare in this life. But the next? It is in the gods’ hands.’
Dr Jaffery
SEVEN
THE WINTER RAINS arrived promptly at the end of January.
During the last week of the month Olivia and I had gone to stay outside Delhi, in a fort just over the Rajasthani border. The day before our return, as we looked out over the battlements, we saw a succession of thick black clouds driving slowly in over the sand flats and camel grass. By the end of the afternoon the clouds had thickened into solid curtain walls of charcoal cumulus. They blotted out the sun and cast a dark shadow over the land.
The next day we returned to Delhi to find that the storm had broken. The clouds were scudding low over the rooftops; it was pouring with rain and the streets were flooded. In the Old City, Muslim women were dragging their chadors like wet black crows. Gusts of rain lashed down the narrow alleys; rickshaws sluiced through the water, more like boats than bicycles. It was no day to be out, but I had an appointment to keep. I had arranged to see Dr Yunus Jaffery, a historian and an archetypal Old Delhi-wallah. His ancestors had been Persian tutors at the Red Fort; today, Dr Jaffery pursued exactly the same career in Zakir Hussain College on the margins of Old Delhi. His rooms were in the original college, the Ghazi-ud-Din Medresse, a seventeenth-century Mughal building just outside the Ajmeri Gate.
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