She approaches the counter, turning to the manager who knows her all too well, though he keeps is eyes low, wiping an already dry glass. Mel orders an Iranian black tea with rock candy dipped in an ounce of charas. The man shows no signs of having heard what she said. The vigor of his rubbing the glass remains unchanged. But after a moment, his head still bowed, he points her towards a door in the far end of the room.
“Thanks,” says Mel.
Behind the door, in the corridor beyond, Mel crosses a dilapidated fountain, in which the fragments of a broken mirror lie scattered. She walks into the inner courtyard, a space barely wide enough to accommodate the ruin of a portico on one side and a wrought iron table of exquisite manufacture on the other. As usual, Mel sits on the brown plastic chair with the broken armrest. A small solar lamp placed on the table lights the scene. Mel waits for her tea. She stares at the dried vine, its inert skeleton clawing at the portico wall, pointing at the night sky. Except for the smog-filled clouds, the sky has turned black.
Under her shawl, Mel’s temples are covered in sweat.
Gabriel, sporting a crew cut and a sari bordered in red, climbs down the half-collapsed steps of a spiral staircase in the corner of the courtyard.
“So you’ve decided to go for it, finally,” he says with that indefinable voice of his, neither a man nor a woman, before he even sits down.
Mel looks him over. He’s in good shape, she observes, for someone in such a precarious position. “I could say the same thing.”
“Why?” he asks, an impish air to himself. “You thought I wouldn’t show up?”
“I knew you would.”
“You know everything, don’t you?” The feminine attitude has faded. “By chance, do you even know what we need to know if we want this to work?”
“I have all we need, yes,” says Mel licking her lips. “Except one thing.”
“Do you think he will give it to you?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Maybe you should get a move on,” says Gabriel cracking his knuckles. “I’m going to do my part soon. If you decide to do yours, that is.”
“You must.” Mel swallows, the tone of her voice more impatient than how she’d like it to be. “The Pit needs unity now more than ever.”
“Yes,” says Gabriel, his eyes sparkling. “And the hijra community needs to be acknowledged, I know that. But what about the risks I will incur?”
He is toying with her. She lets him. It’s a game they play.
The manager himself appears with two cups of black tea, places them on the table, folds his hands before Gabriel and disappears.
“Well, you think about it,” goes Mel, trying to sound casual. “In the end, the decision is not up to anyone but you.”
Gabriel smiles knowingly. Mel speaks again.
“But you should know that without the attention of the media we cannot possibly stop them.”
“And what better scoop than a transgender losing his family jewels?”
“It is not any transgender we’re talking about.” Mel knows she’s taken the bait, but she can’t resist. “It’s you.”
Gabriel bows slightly. “The most popular hijra on Twitter,” he says.
Silence. The air smells like cheap deodorant, or dog piss.
“Well then,” goes Mel placing her iPhone on the table. “Now I need something to give them. Do you mind if I record you?” Without waiting for an answer she starts the voice recording. “Tell me about your ascent.”
“You like that story, don’t you?”
“I like that truth.”
They both smile.
“Alright,” she says in a mock-anchor fashion. “So, Gabriel, I know that you are considered a strongly positive figure among the communities of the Pit. How did you achieve this position?”
“When I arrived in Ayodhya, I was a skeletal kid, scared and without a shred of education,” he begins, on cue. “In all likelihood I would have died if I had not come across good and bad people who were both ready to care for me. At that time the Water Mafia was planting its roots in the Pit, building its structure slowly... moving away from being a criminal organization towards becoming a downright company.” Gabriel’s voice is set and modulated, like that of a theater actor.
“With hierarchies, political contacts, connections beyond the boundaries of the state...”
“That’s right,” he goes, “back then such an organised web was unheard of.”
“The water shortage was a phenomenon barely studied ten years ago.” Mel nods. “Few imagined it would become a deal so lucrative, and in so little time.”
“The colorless gold, as the wise call it.”
“The colorless gold,” Mel repeats. “We have to admit, he had a stroke of genius, whoever came up with this so-called impenetrable Water Mafia, just like Al Capone or Pablo Escobar did in their own countries and times.” Mel can’t help but smile to herself. “So it happened that the lack of water combined with the increasingly imposing presence of the Mafia created great tensions within the Pit...”
“It’s simple,” Gabriel says. “When the river stopped filling during monsoon, people suffered real thirst... Women had miscarriages, the children, their bellies swollen, struggled to even raise their heads from the bed. They were nothing but bulges under ragged sheets.”
“And the men fell into despair.”
“That’s right, many tried to react, but the Mafia had become more powerful than anyone had imagined and was waiting for them with open arms. The Mafia—”
“Ameen,” she interrupts him.
“The Mafia offered the leaders of the seven areas of the Pit drinking water at prohibitive prices. And what else could the leaders do? They accepted the deal, surrendering the lives of their people to the Mafia. Many of the small folks first sold the few possessions they had, then they sold themselves, then their children, but it was not enough, it was never enough, and when families couldn’t pay anymore, the bulldozers would come and demolish the shacks to—”
“Nearly three thousand deaths in a month,” she cuts him off. “Or so I read here,” she adds, pretending to read a nonexistent sheet of paper.
“Those are the official numbers. The truth is that the number of victims is immeasurable.”
“And then the riots began.”
“The tension was so great that people started slaughtering their neighbours. Hindus against Muslims, northerners against southerners, Christians against transgenders, the untouchables against the Brahmins. Any difference whatsoever was a good excuse to get clashes started. It’s ironic how the lack of water instigated men to start fires.”
“Some have called it a massacre.”
“Maybe it was, but the definitions of the United Nations don’t matter. These are the words of those who weren’t there.”
“So you stepped in.”
Gabriel scoffs. “It wasn’t that simple.”
“But it’s true that you stopped the riots.”
“I made sure that the people had something to think about and forgot to kill each other.”
“How?” Rhetorical question.
“In the only way in which you defeat a mafia. By creating another. I met the leaders of each of the seven communities, starting with the transgenders, of course, of whom I already had the trust. The biggest weakness of the Pit—the reason why they were suffering the dictatorship of the Water Mafia helplessly—was not its diversity, but its fragmentation.”
“So you have unified the Pit.”
“I struck deals. I made sure that the leaders entered into agreements with each other aiming at the common good, that is, once again gaining their own sovereignty.”
“It looks more like a syndicate to me.”
“It’s substructure, perhaps, yes, but in practice we have created a system far more radical.” Gabriel’s eyes are warm and deep as an oil well. “You see, because of the prohibitive prices dictated by the water monopoly, people would work eighteen, twenty hours a day to affor
d five liters of drinking water. The factories of the Pit, as I’m sure you’re aware, never really close. They had never been as productive as they were under the rule of the Mafia. Leather goods, bricks, cement, plastic tools—sure, the air was unbreathable, but production was through the roof.”
“So you stopped everything.”
Gabriel holds her gaze. “We set them on fire. People were already burning each other’s houses, so we redirected their despair toward what they had not dared to touch—the factories.”
Captivated by the story as if it were the first time, Mel is biting her nails feverishly.
“At that point, Ameen had to take a step back.” Gabriel clenches his jaw. “He was forced to, by people far more powerful than he was.”
“Had you two already met?”
“I met him then for the first time.”
“Why you?”
Gabriel pouts his lips. “I was prettier.” Then, serious, he goes, “I was the only one who knew the outside world enough to fight it, in the entire Pit.”
“Did you know then that they would make you the leader—the leader of the slum?”
“I hoped they would.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew the enemy better than anyone else. Because I could help these people. And if you have the power, it is your duty to do try. And so, I had to try.”
Mel looks at him for a long time. “So you reached an agreement with the Water Mafia—”
“I knew how to deal with them.” A honking horn cuts through the muggy night from beyond the wall of the courtyard. “I demanded that water supply be granted at more reasonable prices, creating a payment system which runs parallel to the government taxes, so as to ensure the bastards a constant, easy kind of profit, and my people the bare minimum to survive.”
“But it’s not enough.”
“It was then... or maybe it wasn’t and I was just blinded by victory and fame and the pleasure of having emancipated my community, the hijras. Thanks to my position as a leader they began to enjoy greater acceptance, you know?”
“And now, Gabriel?”
“Now Ameen has learned from his mistake. He operates in a more judicious manner, he’s less dramatic about the whole autocrat shit, the sneaky bastard. The Mafia is still tied up with the same big shots that put a stop to its very rule during the riots, but they are partners now, legally, on-the-counter. Yet, at the same time, it’s no longer an elitist organization. Today its members are my people, the same slumdogs they had no qualms crushing before.” Gabriel bares his teeth. “We have to take him out.”
Mel holds his stare, blood pounding in her ears.
“Am I right?” he asks, unblinkingly.
She looks away. Then looking up, breathing out, she says, “Yes.”
“Filthy bitch!” screams the Little Girl.
Mel winces slightly, feeling the blood flowing to her scalp, a shiver running down her neck. Gabriel, drinking the last of his tea, presses his lips together to catch a droplet that escaped his mouth, his right arm resting on the armrest, looking like he didn’t hear anything. Mel tries to smile, and though her brain says that she did, she knows it’s but grimace.
The Little Girl is there.
Desperation gripping her, Mel searches through her mind for the next question to end this sudden silence, but her thoughts are empty—there is nothing there but an old melody, a record left playing in the middle of an empty room. Trying with all she has not to look toward the source of the voice, Mel starts humming a different song in her head: “Tell it like it is” by Aaron Neville. Finally, she opens her mouth to put an end to—
“Whore,” says the Little Girl, her eyes sparkling in the fragments of the mirror scattered behind Mel.
“Not now, please,” she murmurs, staring at the iPhone display, the recorder relentlessly marking the seconds of silence that devour the courtyard.
“Old, wasted hooker,” goes the Little Girl, her high-pitched voice piercing Mel’s eardrums.
Mel meets Gabriel’s gaze, where she sees nothing but the calm neutrality of someone in full control. She puts herself together and smiles.
“You’re a lurid aberration,” cries the Little Girl.
“We were saying...” goes Mel.
“Don’t worry,” Gabriel says. “Take the time you need. Calm her down.”
His swollen jugular, the blood rushing under the soft skin of his Hijra neck, his soft temples and slightly concave, weak hollow elbows filled with nerves and veins and blood—it’s all a breath away from her. Mel can find all his vital points at a glance. It would be easy to kill him right now.
Clutching the armrests to the point of whitening her knuckles, she meets Gabriel’s eyes but sees nothing once again, not even a tremor breaking the calm inside his pupils. The moon, filtered through meters of zinc-clouds, lights the courtyard for a moment, shining inside the teacups. Mel forces herself to cool off, breathe. She relaxes her muscles and diverts her attention away from the small wet leakage between her legs. She stops recording.
He knows, this is how she names the file. Now, having calmed down enough to give an almost flawless performance again, she smiles. “I have to go now.” She gets up.
Gabriel watches her, still as a statue, as she pushes the plastic chair back under the table.
“This will destroy you.” His voice echoes throughout the yard.
At that, Mel hesitates, then smiles politely. She takes her leave, turns and starts walking toward the exit. By the time she crosses the collapsed porch, she is already smiling broadly, a grin of pure pleasure hidden by the darkness around her. Walking near the fountain, however, Mel tries to keep her gaze up, but she gives in and throws the briefest of glances at the half-buried mirror pieces, from which a pair of eyes full of hatred watch her walk by. Her smile vanishes.
Mel walks through the main hall. The owner behind the counter looks at her sideways, continuing to dry the same glass, pretending not to see her again. Mel dumps a thousand rupee note on the counter and leaves the restaurant. Only once outside, in the heat of the night, Mel realizes that on her way out, for the first time she did not remember the filth on the walls.
On the Enfield, Mel pushes through the Breach, darting into the crazed out-traffic of the Pit. Her sweat cooling fast on her skin, Mel feels tired and as a form of retaliation against herself, she pushes the motorcycle to the limit allowed by the night-time chaos. Cars and auto-rickshaws cut each other’s way. She follows the perimeter of the Fence from the inside, turning onto an unnamed street.
The Muslim ghetto.
Mel parks the Enfield next to a kiosk with shutters painted blue, nodding to the owner, a hairy, elderly man who recognizes her and nods back. Then she walks down the narrow street leaving her motorcycle behind, knowing it is well guarded.
An infant in a striped shirt, his ass naked, plays on the roadside, sitting on a bed of rags, newspaper, plastic bags and fruit skins. His mother, a woman of young eyes and sunken cheeks, her chin pointing downwards, her nose bent, looks at Mel with both an inquiring and submissive look, her hands deep in a bucket filled with clothes and reused water, brown foam covering her skinny arms. Mel observes the uncovered calves of the woman, thinking it’s rather uncommon for a Muslim to be that exposed to the eyes of strangers. Then she moves on towards the heart of the ghetto, where a hundred thousand souls are born and die in the shade of a dilapidated mosque, far from the discrimination they would face from the Hindu population of the rest of the Pit.
Going through a biryani cloud, Mel crosses two men. One, whom she doesn’t know, looks at her for a moment before looking away; the other, an old acquaintance of hers, smiles a courteous smile, a smile as white as the topi on the top of his head, and says in Hindi, “Good evening, madam, thank you for coming to visit us, would you like a plate of nihari?”
Despite the government’s mandate, these people continue to cook beef as if nothing has changed. A ram’s head, its blackened eye holes full of flies, lies on a stu
mp next to the tables of the restaurant-shack. Despite herself, Mel feels her mouth watering.
“As-salamu alaykum,” says Mel, smiling back, covering her mouth with the scarf. “Next time, kakajaan, no doubt.”
Mel walks on a downhill road, the orange light of one solitary street lamp outlining the tin roofs of the barracks against the black sky, giving the place a dusty appearance, cozy in its own way. On her left, a shopkeeper is lowering the shutter of his shop, stretching, his lean figure hinted at under the folds of his tunic. Sweets, stationery, colored beads: all the shops sell pretty much the same. Sporadic lights blink in the small and irregular windows of the shacks, where pans sizzle on the fire, and Mel tries to catch glimpses of the interiors of each house, as if by peeking in, one could join in the secret life of the slum.
Turning left, a tree, an impressive neem tree acting as a bearing wall for three neighboring huts, stands, breaking through the tar.
Although she has visited this place many a times, Mel still struggles to find the entry between the chaos of huts, now standing more crowded, crooked, almost indistinguishable from each other on either sides of the alley. Then she finds the one she’s looking for, she pulls the green curtain aside to reveal a smokescreen and the low murmur of an old Urdu song.
She enters, bowing her head to avoid bumping against the sloping roof, and pushes back a strand of her hair that has escaped from the scarf. As soon as her eyes get accustomed to the darkness inside, Mel spots three pairs of eyes glaring at her from the other side of the small room—glasses of chai stacked between the cross-legged men. The air is full of the smell of hookah, a nice mixture of mint with a faint, insidious touch of vinegar.
“May I?” says Mel.
“Blonde girl,” says the Blind Man, greeting her.
The Blind Man is sitting in front of the three men, his shoulders turned at the entrance, the mouthpiece of the hookah resting in his lap, a glass of chai half empty in one hand, cards in the other.
Objects in the Mirror Page 7