Objects in the Mirror

by Nicolò Govoni

  The porch. The tea table. The old transgender sitting on one of the two plastic chairs. He smiles greeting them, but it’s a smile full of cynicism or, even, hardly disguised hatred. Getting up, he sways his way to them, then walks past them, climbing up a spiral staircase in the shade of an alcove.

  Ferang in the lead, they start climbing the cleaved, bird-shit covered steps, approaching a trap door. On the roof, a jumble of plastic and metal sheet roofs extends as far as the eye can see, interrupted only by the severe line of the Fence, stretching endlessly to the horizon.

  The old transgender doesn’t stop to wait for them and treads on a deadly air walkway connecting the roof of Lazeez to a small neighboring temple. Ferang follows his example, fearlessly, as expected. Once across the gap that opens onto a moldy lane, he turns around and bows.

  The orchestra begins to play. Nil crosses the walkway and for a moment he seems about to lose his balance and crash on the tar below. But he makes it. His foot still on the wooden plank, he stretches out his hand to Mel. Cheesy as hell, but Mel takes it. Nil pulls her to him. Mel touches his chest. For a second she looks at him with awe, like a trapped bird. Intermission.

  Ferang rolls his eyes. He realizes that the old transgender has disappeared from view. Panic. Everything must go as it should today. He needs it to. A staircase. He starts down the steps. The twilight is absorbed by the silence, and silence falls on the audience out front. Shut up, there is no one watching. All eyes, all eyes on the protagonist who finds himself standing inside the small temple, surrounded by old pillars dividing the room into three short and narrow aisles leading to the altar, the Goddess standing on it.

  Ferang walks through the small temple. There are doors but no windows. Between the pillars, small boys, or small girls. Three young transgenders, that’s what they are. In their hands, cups. The old transgender, kneeling before the altar, is half man and half woman, the disparity between his two essences more blurred than ever. He’s praying. Praying in a secret language that rises in the incense-filled air. The incense can’t totally ward off the stench of sewage, just like the silence can’t scare away the noise coming in from the road. Not even holiness, it seems, can face what you call progress and be victorious.

  The pillars. The children. The goddess. The protagonist. Mel and Nil down the stairs behind him. Mel first, then Nil. Ferang hears them but doesn’t turn around. Looks at the statue of the Goddess in the eyes without flinching. Talk to me. I’m here, talk to me. Mel and Nil stand next to him.

  “Naranari,” Mel says.

  The old transgender rises on his knees. Stretches out his arms. An occult prayer.

  In unison, Mel sings the last verse. Intelligible words. Ferang turns and glances at her, but Mel doesn’t acknowledge him, she stares back of the statue. Thou, wretched woman. The old transgender nods in the direction of the children, and they emerge from the protection of the pillars, their long hair in a bun, combed with coconut oil and intertwined with jasmine flowers, their eyelids blue, crimson lips and feet sprouting out from the edge of the fabric of their embroidered kurtas, their nails painted with pretty colors. The three children hold out their cups. Ferang accepts his, sniffing the liquid inside. It looks like milk but smells of hay, fields, and ancient places.

  “At best they’re giving us sewer water,” he jokes. The protagonist always knows when to break the silence.

  “What?” goes Nil.

  The children are silent.

  Ferang turns to the old transgender. “Or maybe they want to get rid of us by fucking our brains with heroin.”

  “Drink and shut the fuck up,” replies the old transgender.

  Ferang jumps a little. Then hides it, coolly shaking his head. He says, “Or maybe—”

  “It’s bhang,” Mel says. She lifts her cup. Drinks. She does it without hesitation, the bitch.

  Ferang hastens to do the same.

  Nil follows. He drinks. He stops. He starts again.

  Ferang wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

  “You’ll need more than a glass of milk to knock me out.”

  The children take the empty cups back in their hands. They retreat between the pillars. The old transgender opens a trapdoor behind the statue. The Goddess watches the intruders stroll by next to her. Steps fall in the darkness of an underground passage, the air plagued by a nauseating odor. Just behind the old transgender, Ferang leads the way. He covers his nose with the collar of his shirt, the cars and people and animals in the street shaking the ceiling of the tunnel. The old transgender lights a torch. So very cinematic. The gallery is filled with black pools of liquid running along the walls and collecting at their feet. Fearless, Ferang paves the way.

  They re-emerge, and they are in the Pit. They reemerge beyond the Breach, unseen, in a cabin similar to many others, one which Ferang has often walked past, going to the clinic day in and day out. An old woman sitting on the ground watches them exit. She doesn’t say a word. A pot boiling on a portable stove. Nil coughs. The stench is potent, but Ferang is used to it.

  Outside the cabin, the Pit is bustling as usual. Youth too skinny to be able to carry such loads are carrying bags of tools and bricks and lime through the Breach, while women are busy at the edge of the street, their skin shiny with perspiration, selling bracelets and handbags, repairing zippers and slippers that belong in the garbage. Children have chapped lips and nostrils, their eyes misty after a night spent inhaling glue. At regular intervals, a whip cracks in the air when an old man flogs himself begging in the name of this or that god.

  The road is hardly wide enough to allow the passage of a small car, and yet, a little farther on, an old Fiat and a motorcycle and a wrecked scooter try to fit in between a row of cabins and a concrete step barrier. Cracks run along the latter. On it, sits a little girl.

  Ferang looks back at Nil and Mel. Nil looks conflicted. Protect her or protect himself, he seems to think. Mel, however, looks indifferent, of course, indifferent to the smell of rotting flesh and the shrill cries of the vendors. It’s a pretense. Yes, she would do that, the liar. Ferang smiles to himself. He smiles at them, too, but he’s smiling to himself, really. He moves a step away from the cabin.

  The time has come. The main actor performs alone. Ferang faces the spotlight.

  The road, and everyone on it, slows down. They slow down for him. The people turn to look at him, they do so almost at the same time: the young ones bent under the weight of the bags stop their march, the women sitting on the ground frown ever so slowly, the children open wide their vague mouths, and that old dude whips himself with renewed vigor. And then everyone, or at least most of them, rush. Ferang awaits them. Ferang welcomes them. A child touches his hand, cries, “Gora bhaia.” A little girl pulls him by the shirt. “Gora bhaia,” she says, looking up. “Gora bhaia,” goes an old woman. Ferang smiles. He folds his hands in front of them. The smell of their bodies fills the air. It smells like power.

  The old man with the whip kneels down in front of him. “Sir, please,” he says. Ferang dares not look at his face.

  They surround him. They touch him. They want it all. Ferang pretends discomfort but does so in good-natured way. Take, eat: this is my body. He’s smiling like never before.

  Turning around, he sees that Mel has run into a similar fate. The people are all around her and Nil. Touching them. Brushing their fingers over Nil. He backs off, on his face the effort to keep himself from running away screaming. He steps back, only to find others pushing behind him. It’s Ferang’s people. His own. Mel smiles with friendliness. She shakes hands with the people. But not for long. At last, she glances at Ferang, and it’s a look of indignation, of accusation. Ferang smiles. His soul widens. These are his people, after all. They take his hands, guide him, a chaos of old and new voices, a hint of soap and flowers through an almost uniform layer of sweaty skins. Ferang talks to them. Repeats their names when he remembers them, and if not, he escapes by pretending to be distracted by the demands of someone else.
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  “I think he wants money,” says Nil all too loudly, pointing at an old man with cupped hands. “What should I do?”

  “It’s your choice,” says Ferang, raising his voice to counter the blissful din of the people. “There is no right or wrong decision.” I’m at the peak of my sadism. Ferang holds out his hands to them above the crowd of beggars gathering around him. His people. Hope or truth? Ferang closes his eyes. Then he opens his arms wide. Opening his eyes again, his gaze falls back on the concrete barrier, where he meets the eyes of that

  MEL

  little girl. Mel grabs Ferang by the arm and pulls. She would like to scream and put a stop to this scene, this atrocious display of Western supremacy, but fears that she will attract even greater attention to herself and so she grabs tighter, sinking her nails in his skin, but the jerk sure enough doesn’t turn around, in ecstasy, and so Mel follows his gaze and sees, on a concrete barrier, a girl, a street creature dressed in rags, her dark skin bleached by the dust covering the sharp, pronounced bones and ribs and collar bone protruding as a sign of malnutrition, her hair unkempt, a bush discolored by the sun, and her warm, deep eyes, which only those who have the street in their genes show off. It is a pitiful scene. The little girl holding a baby in her arms, a naked child whose privates are covered by a layer of dirt, a sleeping child abandoned in her tiny arms, in the midst of the crowd, with all this noise and the dust, but despite the racket, the girl is not there, her eyes vacant as if looking without really seeing. She even forgets to beg. This is exactly why the world is disgusting.

  Mel squeezes Ferang’s the arm with all she has, then, leaning through the crowd, she runs her hand in his hair and again squeezes, pulls, but Ferang

  FERANG

  is elsewhere. Ferang feels in communion with the little girl. She sits, that baby in her arms. Her eyes past the earthly vulgarity of screams and bodies and jerky movements. She does not see any of that. She sits on the barrier in the middle of everything, yet unaffected by it all. The baby in her arms. That sublimated look. It’s Michelangelo’s Pieta in the flesh. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Amen! Here is the uncontested beauty of poverty.

  The hands on the body of Ferang multiply. Nil’s

  NIL

  is one of them, he made it, swimming through the human tide which appeared out of nothing, like a dream turned nightmare without the dreamer knowing he’s asleep, and these people are touching him, looking and feeling him up, and they speak in an incomprehensible language and their faces are ugliness and lack of hygiene, and their movements have something inhuman to them, and Nil feels overwhelmed by an irrepressible compassion and, seeing this poverty, a kind poverty that he had never suspected, he is devastated, and so he swims through the crowd and stutters, the Nothingness vomiting Nobodies and their miserable existence, which is untenable to Nil, and so he clings to Ferang, who knows what to do in a place like this. He is his only possible source of salvation.

  “Help,” he blurts out, but Ferang doesn’t turn around, his eyes fixed on Nothing, and Nil tries to follow his gaze but gets lost into Nothing, there’s Nothing, he sees Nothing, Nothing, Nothing at all.

  The old hijra claps his hands and the crowd calms down and separates giving him way, and Ferang stirs but the old hijra grabs him by his shirt baring his teeth in his face, and then lets him go, and Ferang follows him and shakes a few more hands and whispers a words in Hindi to reassure the onlookers that there are no worries, he’s just an old hijra, and Mel walks to his side and Nil is quick to catch up, to protect her, that is, in this hell. And with the sulphurous smell exhaled by the skin of the people and the screech of the shops overflowing with workers, the fantasy of her touch on his skin is his only—

  FERANG

  “This is my moment, you asshole,” goes Ferang, playfully hitting him on the shoulder. Laughter on his lips, slate in his eyes.

  Nil stares, puzzled, but then disgust seems to have once again the better of him. Nil looks around like a fox chased by hunters. At each step he seems to grow in height and decrease in width. He gets closer to their group. This is too much for him. Too much. Ferang keeps smiling.

  Inside a second cabin, after half an hour of walking through the putrid alleys of the Pit, the old transgender hands them three burqas of different colors, black, light-blue and cherry, and three pairs of matching gloves. Ferang wears the blue one. It fits well his nature. Mel puts the black one on but fishes from her bag a pair of gloves of her own, which are also black, wearing them instead of those the old transgender gave her. Ferang grins at her. Mel holds his gaze. She doesn’t flinch. She walks out.

  They resume their journey, now hidden to the eyes of the people by the thick fabric of their clothes. Ferang feels like he’s going to disappear. Slowly. It feels good. It doesn’t.

  And then it emerges. It surfaces over the horizontal line of the factories’ chimneys. It is mountainous. Threatening, truculent, almost violent in its features. It’s not made of a single body but a multitude of smaller unquantifiable hovels, one behind the other, the one above the other, a succession of windows and doors, each one different, doors without any landing, windows without a room behind them, and so on, to infinity, it seems.

  The Shack Palace. The Pit’s greatest factory.

  Ferang realizes his mouth is half-open. He covers his nose with the palm of his gloved hand. The smell. Unlike the rest of the Pit, it has nothing to do with waste liquids or shit but with solvents and chemicals used to treat the leather, to build metal utensils, to produce the plastic of everyday tools. Fumes and gases and chemicals flow from the drains, pouring along the walls of the palace. Eroding it. Yet the building still stands. The factory continues to operate, almost with a will of its own.

  Ferang is rhapsodic, Nil for sure seized by a blind horror, while Mel looks relaxed. She looks like she’s been here before. This place is filled with secrets—her own. Mel precedes the group a couple of steps.

  “There are no doors,” says Nil.

  “There are plenty of them,” says Mel.

  “Yeah—” Ferang takes the lead again “—but none is a real entrance. That is, there is no way to enter. Or at least, none that I can see.”

  “You don’t see it,” goes the old transgender. He stops at the door of a third cabin. He knocks. From inside filters the smell of dinner. Dhal. A voice rises speaking an unknown language. The old transgender responds in the same cryptic tongue. For a moment, Ferang spots Mel’s lips moving in sync. From under the door, a glimmer of light.

  When the door opens, the same old woman who sat in the first cabin reappears. She glances at the old transgender, then steps aside. Ferang laughs. He can’t help himself. The interior of the hut is empty. Dark. Silence and the smell of mold pervade it. The interior is empty except for the same small movable stove. Ferang keeps on giggling.

  Through a trap door, stairs narrow and polished by countless footsteps descend into the darkness. Mel and Nil light up the tunnel with their iPhone flashlights. The old transgender illuminates the tunnel with yet another real torch. A true hipster, Ferang tells himself.

  “You never told us where exactly the ceremony will be held,” says Ferang. “At this point, I guess you can tell us.”

  “You just need to ask.”

  Ferang rolls his eyes. “Will the ceremony be inside the Palace?”

  “Beneath it,” says the old transgender.

  Ferang goes silent. Thinks. For some reason an ad with a panda breaking things comes to his mind.

  “Hindu or Muslim temple?” asks Nil.

  “Neither,” says Mel. “It’s Man’s temple. It’s dedicated to the industriousness, the cunningness, the innate propensity to adaptation, evolution and deception of our species.”

  “A Hijra temple, if you may,” says the old transgender.

  “Cool,” goes Ferang, the panda smashing shit in his mind.

  A door. It looks like the door of a low-income school, those in which Ferang sometimes teaches. The old transgender pushes the han
dle down, but the door would not budge. It shakes, but it looks blocked.

  “Abracadabra,” says Ferang.

  The old transgender, his shoulders swollen with tendons, his wide hips bulging under his sari, grunting with the effort, makes the door groan, and then he pushes it open. An acrid whiff bites Ferang in the face. It smells like exploitation, rancid sweat, bodily fluids. The sweet smell of dead puppies.

  They enter. Welcoming them the corridors look like those of just any other factory, concrete walls covered with a homogeneous layer of mold, pipes leaking out of poor maintenance, feces, maybe human, piling up in a corner. The old transgender curves at every crossroads showing no hesitation, like an overweight dancer on his stage, his sari stained under the armpits. Ferang walks ahead of the other two. A staircase. They descend again. The passage narrows. Ferang imagines the old transgender stuck, his ungainly body blocked in the corridor. He giggles at the thought. He’d help him right away, of course.

  A melody. It’s a buzz at first, then a distant echo and finally a song. A chorus. High pitched, white voices. They give Ferang goosebumps. He trembles, feeling his face twisting and eyes veiled with tears. The voices of a buried choir. White and buried. The insistence of the dirge reminds him of something he has lost, but he can’t say what or when exactly, and thus it’s lost twice, both in the past and in the present. Not a tear leaves his eyelids but the world has become distorted to him, like the painting of a crazy, suicidal, Dutch artist.

  You can’t break free from a cell when you own the keys. The bhang starts to kick in.

  The temple opens up before him. The chanting gets louder, now bouncing off the vaults of the ceiling hewn into bare rock, now running between the columns, now sliding above and below the altar. The children sing and they sing with their beautiful and dull voices, devoid of feeling but full of vigor. Ferang is a privileged to be here, and he’s aware of it. This experience will bring him closer to—