Bombay Swastika

by Braham Singh

  ‘Yes, you are being funny. No, Henry was stabbed. Gutted. Some of that going around too.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Gutted professionally—abdominal area and right up to his thoracic cavity. There was pneumothorax and his lungs were collapsed.’

  Ernst wondered if Jahagirdar expected him to comment.

  ‘Similar modus operandi, don’t you think?’ the Deputy Commissioner asked. ‘With what happened to Chhote Bhai? You think maybe Mr. Ali returned from the dead to extract revenge, or was it his comrade, the Chinaman? Or, maybe someone else? What do you think?’

  To reiterate, there are times one may respond to a policeman. Most of the time though, just smile back.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the Deputy Commissioner said. ‘We visited the Chinaman’s flat at Atomic Energy. He was there with his sister, and half dead. Can’t see him taking on Gomes. She showed us where the sword hung on the wall. The scabbard was empty. Maybe, because we have it in our custody since Chhote Bhai’s murder.’

  Ernst’s relief must have been palpable, because Jahagirdar looked satisfied at the reaction.

  ‘Still, somebody did kill Gomes with a sword.’

  Ernst remembered the scabbard from the last time he saw it—not empty—the strong Golog-style grip sticking out of the hewn leather protecting the blade. Then Bhairavi had pulled it out for her dance practice. He wondered where that sword was now.

  ‘I am sure you’ll find out who is responsible. At least, you know where not to look.’

  Deputy Commissioner Jahagirdar concurred. ‘For sure. Like I said, there was no sword on the wall or anywhere in the flat. And of course, the one in our possession didn’t kill Gomes.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But something did.’

  ‘Goodbye, Deputy Commissioner.’

  After seeing the spry Deputy Commissioner take the stairs with a bounce belying his stature, Ernst returned to Parvatibai in the corridor—holding on to the nine iron and back in charge. A visual of her teeing off on the greens shook him up and he wanted to run, shut his bedroom door to recover. On the other hand, Salim Ali was now in a little square box on the mantelpiece, next to the Menorah.

  ‘Parvatibai. Enough. Time to handover what Salim Ali gave you.’

  ‘The hijras took it.’

  ‘I see.’

  But he didn’t.

  ‘They come for Kirti and you also give them that gunny bag you’ve been guarding with your damn life?’

  ‘They asked for it, so I gave. You know how they are.’

  ~

  When Parvatibai banged the bedroom door again, he wanted to shout out abuse for all the good that would do.

  ‘The hijras. They’re back,’ she said through the shut door.

  ‘What’s it this time? They can take Mundu if they want.’

  ‘They want you.’

  46

  The Sickle

  Prince Arjun was the third brother to enter the king’s palace.

  His hair was long and braided and he walked with the gait of a broad-hipped woman. His feminine attire attenuated his masculine glory and at the same time, it did not.

  —The Mahabharata

  ‘Om Namashivai, Om Namashivai, Har Har Bole, Namashivai.’

  Chants filled the air in praise of Lord Shiva. Krishna may well be partial to cross-dressers but in the Hijra Township, Lord Shiva rules.

  De facto though, Komal Guruji ruled the Hijra Township. She/he/it pointed at a print framed on the wall next to their Goddess Bahuchara Ma, standing on the aarti-shelf and decorated in a green sari. It was a medieval, Pahari depiction of Krishna, the most perfect, earthly manifestation of the divine in drag. Trumped only by Shiva on Bahuchara Ma’s other side, cast in silver with a sway to his hips.

  ‘Lord Krishna may have dressed like a woman, as did Prince Arjun in the Mahabharata, but Shiva is half-woman. Half-half. Like us,’ Guruji said, leaving the ithyphallic Shiva’s thick, black lingam erect in protest inside temples across India. ‘Anyway,’ Guruji went on, ‘Thank you for coming. The boy Kirti wanted you here today.’

  ‘Yes. But I’ve also come for what you took without permission.’

  ‘I may be a eunuch, a hijra, but I am an honest person. It wasn’t yours in the first place. There was no need for permission. ’

  ‘I’ve seen you before, Guruji. There’s this picture of the Communist Party Politburo on Salim Ali’s living room wall. Very idyllic, that picture, with coconut trees in the background. You’re in the line up.’

  ‘We also saw each other at Fertilisers’, Komal Guruji said, and Ernst remembered the older hijra ordering his troupe around. ‘Why are you surprised about that picture? Hijras can’t be politically conscious?’

  ‘Politically conscious is one thing. You’re a member of the Politburo.’

  ‘Unlike the rest of India, my sexual orientation never concerned the comrades. It’s why this basti is a Marxist commune.’

  ‘A communist basti, complete with gods and goddesses.’

  ‘Everything is fluid, ji. Doesn’t have to be one or the other; India after all.’

  ‘So it is. Anyway, Kirti must have told you what Arjun stole, and you people just came took it?’

  ‘Not at all. We were the ones who learnt about it in the first place. Arjun volunteered to obtain it for us from the American compound at Fertilisers.’

  ‘Who’s us? The hijras or the communists?’

  ‘What’s the difference? The Communist Party is for the dispossessed, Sirji,’ and Komal Guruji became all dreamy-eyed saying that. ‘We look after all the stray dogs in this mad city.’

  ‘And now you plan to look after Kirti?’

  ‘Kirti always knew there was something different about him. I was the same. I would only play with girls, never boys. The girls would ask me what I was. I’d reply, I am a girl. But like I said, I’m honest. Even before my operation, I let clients know in advance what I really was. Because I was so beautiful, you would never know otherwise. The men came anyway. In fact, they came because I was pre-operation those days. Unlike a woman, you see, I couldn’t fake it.’

  ‘Fascinating. But about that gunny bag…’

  ‘It belongs to the Party. Like I do.’

  ‘I thought the Party belonged to the people.’

  The room smiled. The puja-prayers continued in the background and Goddess Bahuchara Ma looked down from above at her Marxist hijras. The morning rays peeked in from dirty windows and through cracks in the bolted door .

  ‘Maybe. I, however, belong to the Party. You know, at home, they were ashamed of my behaviour. They said I have to stop acting like a girl. But I couldn’t change what I was. So I left home at fourteen. Wandered around a few years until the communists took me in. They kept me in their orphanage where I learnt about Marx and Lenin. About marginalised people, and workers’ rights. And they learnt about me.’

  ‘Funny thing,’ Komal Guruji continued. ‘No one questioned my gender preference. No admonition, no trying to convince me, and I was never ostracised or made to feel uncomfortable or different. Instead, one day they brought me here. I’ve been here ever since.’

  ‘Guruji says today is auspicious,’ Kirti whispered to Ernst, love in his eyes.

  He was back to being the beautiful boy who broke hearts. Ernst felt like Willie by association. Around them, the tempo kept going up a notch every few minutes while out the grilled window, it was the start to a new day. Hijras played with a tennis ball in the courtyard, tossing it up high and catching it.

  ‘When I first came here,’ Guruji said, ‘they called me Komal. It means tender, in Urdu. After all I was a tender young boy who aspired to become a girl. The elders gave me a home and work. I taught them their rights. This whole basti was communist before I turned eighteen and I was the Party’s rising star. A year later, the hijra elders asked if I wanted to get operated.

  ‘Of course, I agreed. It’s why I had run away in the first place. I had no fear. The operation is the most import
ant thing in our lives.’

  Guruji kept talking as the opium took hold. Kirti reached out to take Ernst’s hand.

  ‘Remember the first time you saw me?’ he whispered.

  Ernst squeezed back. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You wanted me, didn’t you?’

  Ernst wasn’t sure whether he meant the first time he saw Kirti the caddie-boy, or when he first saw Princess Kirti emerge from the greens, swaying an arse that drew men from as afar as Japan.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered back.

  ‘Tell me again, how I came in your dreams.’

  ~

  Komal Guruji pointed towards Sion Hospital’s Assistant Coroner with his sweeper standing alongside, wooden instrument box and all. ‘Those days, a guru performed the operation with no medicines or injections.’

  Guruji held up his right hand to display what they would have used those days. The sickle-shaped knife looked a shiny, miniature version of the garden implement used to cut grass; the curved little blade sharpened to a gleam. The blade was cranked—offset downwards from the grip—just as with the garden implement, making it easier to cut close to the stem.

  ‘I was made to stand naked in the room while the elders talked to me. As we looked up at our deity, she seemed to smile down. They explained how the analgesic trance during the operation was but one strand of the dense relationship between our powerful Bahuchara Ma and us. Through her, we bring fertility during weddings when we dance. Without us, only girls would be born.’

  The aarti ceremony’s chanting began to heat up. The group surrounding the sari-clad brass statue on the shelf was going nuts. These were nirvan hijras: those in a state of bliss. The nirvan hijras prayed, did aarti, crossed hands across their chests to touch both ears in penance. After a while, the Goddess had had enough and stepped down from the shelf to enter Kirti lying on a wooden pallet on the floor.

  Kirti’s eyes rolled back though the smile didn’t budge an inch. He held on to Ernst’s hand, crushing it in a grip that wasn’t his. Ernst blinked back the tears, and almost missed the sweep of the kneeling Guruji’s right hand while holding Kirti in his left. He drew the sickle towards him in one, clean motion. The blood splattered on Komal Guruji’s white kurta and Ernst’s glasses went opaque with red mist. He took them off. He hadn’t seen this much blood. Not when his father slashed his wrists every other night. Not when Gomes killed Arjun. Not even when Salim Ali gutted Chhote Bhai.

  ‘Now,’ the Brahmin Assistant Coroner said loudly from a safe distance.

  Komal Guruji looked at the Brahmin doctor and turned back to Kirti.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  There was this cylindrical wooden plug that Komal Guruji picked up after a bit of searching around on the bloodied pallet. It was slim—a sliver—but machined cylindrical. He inserted it into the wound, in what would appear a fucked sort of way to stem blood gushing out by the gallon from a tear reaching across to the supra pubic area.

  Having seen Arjun seep away, Ernst calculated Kirti should be dead in fifteen minutes from blood loss, with or without the damn twig. Kirti couldn’t care less and continued smiling like an idiot with eyes rolled back while a Goddess galloped across his brain. Two nirvan hijras knelt besides the pallet, but there was no need to hold the boy down.

  ‘We don’t plug it to stem blood,’ Komal Guruji said. ‘We want the male blood to get out. The wood prevents full closure of the wound leaving a hole for urine. I have done this many times.’ Komal Guruji brandished the bloodied sickle to make his point. Moments ago, Komal Guruji had also brandished the Princess Kirti’s thick, long clitoris in his left hand—beloved of Willie and so many others. Now, it was gone.

  ‘Fifty per cent mortality rate from such operations,’ the Assistant Coroner offered up in English.

  Komal Guruji wasn’t impressed. ‘Just do your thing,’ he asked the Assistant Coroner, while the two nirvan hijras poured hot sesame oil on the gushing wound. They began rubbing herbs on it with a ferocity that belied their blissful state. Assistant Coroner Sahib approached the pallet with his sweeper and the nirvan hijras backed-off at Komal Guruji’s silent signal. Wooden box open by his side and serrated scissors in one hand, curved needle and catgut in the other, the sweeper probed and sutured while Assistant Coroner Sahib peered and instructed.

  ‘To avoid chronic urinary retention,’ the Assistant Coroner explained in an aside, like an attending surgeon would while operating. ‘Caused by incorrect amputation of the penis and urethra. Even though management of problem is simple, these people end up dying because of reluctance to go to doctors.’

  Ernst wondered what would happen if the hijras did go to doctors regularly. Were there enough trained sweepers to go around?

  ~

  ‘Kirti would worry about a beard showing up,’ Komal Guruji said. ‘He worried his lover (lovers, Guruji, lovers; in the plural) would notice the slight fuzz on his upper lip. If you shave it, it only grows faster. The hair around his nipples left him distraught. Now, no more.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ernst agreed, ‘he just needs to stay alive first.’

  Komal Guruji remained cordial.

  ‘We would have tied a thin nylon cord tight around his scrotum and tightened in at regular intervals, while we kept him high on opium. In around a week, the penis would slough off. Kirti however preferred this; have the male blood gush off in one go. He wanted it out of him.’

  The male blood had congealed around the boy, now dead asleep. Or dead. Fifty-fifty.

  ‘Well, he should be all-woman by now.’

  Today was auspicious and the hijras bulletproof. The sarcasm simply bounced off.

  ‘Not yet!’ a nirvana hijra squealed, clapping her palms together in anticipation of things to come. ‘We still have to rub her anus against a grinding stone until it bleeds. Those first drops of female blood will signify menstruation.’

  Ernst would’ve wished them well and staggered out, but there was this one thing.

  ‘What’s in the gunny bag?’

  So Komal Guruji went told him.

  Ernst wanted to know the hell they planned to do with it.

  ‘My job is to hand it over to the Party.’

  ‘Or, you could return it to me.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  Ernst leaned over to the member of the Communist Party Politburo, who also happened to be a eunuch in high standing, and told him.

  ‘It’s the Law of Unintended Consequences being played out, Mr. Ernestji,’ the comrade eunuch in high standing said, after hearing him out.

  ~

  The morning sun reflected off the bungalow’s windowpanes like so much glitter. It formed pools of light on patches of rainwater lying around the courtyard. Well-dressed gentry carelessly squelched fancy footwear in the water while crowding the enclosure. It was impossible to visualise India’s bourgeoisie pouring into a hijra colony, if not right there, right before his eyes. One isn’t allowed into a hijra colony. One doesn’t go to a hijra colony. The taboo is real in Indian society. Sorrow however is compelling, as is desire—no saying what one will do.

  Ernst reeled at the sheer size of Kirti’s clientele.

  ‘Fuck.’

  He surveyed the packed courtyard. Earlier, there had been a couple of hijras out there playing with a tennis ball. Now it was a sea of white kurtas, shirts, and even jackets; as much real pain in the air as witnessed the other day in the Friends & Family line-up at Sion Hospital.

  All this sorrow? Somewhat nonplussed, he could still hazard a guess why so many men were hurting so much. Probably because now the Princess could fake it.

  ~

  Mohan Driver had deserted the one-eyed Fiat, parked way back where the pukka road ended. Ernst found him squatting in a corner of the courtyard with his back to the world, as if being punished. Ernst added him to the growing list of Kirti clit-lovers. It included those he would never suspect. Seeing a stunned D’Souza holding on to a weeping bearer from the Golf Club, there were no surprises left, other than say, if
one were to find a Waller in this motley crowd.

  Seeing him, Ernst’s jaw dropped. He first thought the junkie of a doctor was here to catch snakes in the hijra compound. But no stick quivered in his hand today.

  ‘What?’ Waller challenged. He didn’t look particularly gora this morning. The Indian DNA was on the ascent and he could well have passed for a Komal Guruji in linen suit. ‘What for that condescending look? You’re here too, you bugger. ’

  Other than Ernst, Dr. Waller appeared to be the sole syndic from the European side of The Great Divide. ‘Don’t you worry!’ he said, righteous anger banishing any embarrassment. ‘Bloody buggers are too ashamed to show up, that’s all. I can give you names, if you want! I have names! They were all after the poor boy. Damn hypocrites.’

  It gave one pause that the packed courtyard was just a partial client list. Understandably and even though in mourning, many Kirti-lovers would be too embarrassed to be seen here. Not Nippon#1 of Flying Japanese fame however, standing there recklessly exposed with tears coursing down his proud, Japanese face. Nippon#2 was also present in silent solidarity. It must have been quite a walk from wherever they parked the silver Mercedes and straight into another universe.

  Then, there was the Lala.

  That he was in this line-up of pederasts was the least of the day’s surprises. The Lala looked starved. Standing in the shadows, he could no longer be mistaken for a proud Pathan because no Pathan would care to look like a doped up fakir on a bad day. Tears flowing down hollow cheeks, his wrinkled salwaar kameez was awash in body odour and with his turban unwinding all over the place in an unseemly manner, he appeared consumed by his loss. Ernst realised this was about as vulnerable as the Lala would get. If he had to move in, the time was now.

  The Lala’s face became a flickering picture book on seeing him. He was in need of solace and his old friend Mr. Ernestji was here. He clasped Ernst to his bosom like a brother and wouldn’t let go. Ernst struggled for air and gave up. The Lala smelled slept-in. He began to cry. Holding Ernst’s hand like a lover, he cried like a baby. He cried for Kirti and that jumper cable of a clitoris Ernst had seen in Guruji’s hand. It was Kirti the Lala wanted—the Princess was mere cosmetics. He was crying because Kirti was his first and only priority in life. That wouldn’t go down too well with the Seth, but Ernst understood.