Khushwant Singh's Book of Unforgettable Women

by Khushwant Singh

  The boy patted the canister with his dirty hands. ‘No, Bibiji not yet. It will be ready in a few minutes.’

  He went down on his hands and knees and blew into the hearth. Smoke and ash whirled round the hearth and into his eyes. He stood up and wiped his tears with the hem of his greasy shirt. All he wore besides the shirt was a red loincloth which only covered his front. His buttocks were bare except for the string that ran between them.

  ‘Bring it into the bathroom when it is ready.’

  Champak got up, opened her wardrobe, fished out a shaving set hidden between the pile of saris and went into the bathroom. She did not close either the door behind her or the other one which opened into the courtyard. She was not going to let Mundoo restrict her movements. He was just a servant and a grubby little boy at that. She decided to ignore his presence.

  After a few minutes she came back to her bedroom without anything on. She put the shaving set back in its place and stood in front of her full-length dressing-table mirror to inspect the results of the operation and admire the contours of her chocolate-brown body. She loosened her hair and turned around to see how she looked from behind. Her hair fell to the point at which her buttocks rose like softly-rounded watermelons. There were dimples on either side of her rear waist. She turned around once more, inhaled deeply, and lifted her breasts with the palms of her hands and then ran her fingers around her nipples till they became rounded like berries. She clasped her arms above her head and wriggled her hips in the manner of hula dancers. She drew her belly in as much as she could and stroked it with her hand down on either side to knees. She studied her face and figure in all the postures she had seen in photographs of nude models. She found the reflection in the mirror to her satisfaction.

  In the courtyard, Mundoo finished washing the kitchen utensils and was on his hands and knees once more blowing into the hearth. He looked like a frog with the wrong end up.

  Champak smiled to herself and went back to the bathroom. She shut the door that opened into the courtyard without bolting it, and shouted for the bath water. She turned the tap on full force and began to hum the tune coming over the air.

  Mundoo lifted the canister of hot water by the wooden rod which ran through it on the top. It was heavy; he carried it a few steps at a time. When he reached the bathroom door, he put it down to regain strength to take it over the threshold. He gripped the handle with both hands, knocked the door open with his forehead, and carried it in. He put the canister beside the bucket and looked up.

  ‘Why don’t you knock or call before you come into the bathroom?’

  Champak hid her nakedness with her hands between her knees. Her raven-black hair fell on either side of her neck. Her breasts stared out from between her arms. Mundoo stared stupidly at her without replying and then started to back out of the door.

  ‘What shall I mix the water in? Both the bucket and the canister are full.’

  Mundoo turned off the tap, tilted the bucket a little to let some of the water run out, and began to pour the hot water from the canister with a small copper mug. His eyes never rose above Champak’s knees, nor left them. Champak remained as she was, hiding her nakedness with her hands, watching the boy’s embarrassment.

  ‘In future, knock before you come in. Sometimes I have no clothes on.’

  ‘I must tell you what happened today. My God! I nearly died of shame.’ Champak always added ‘my God’ or ‘by God’ whenever she wanted to emphasize something. She also had the habit of turning the conversation to herself. It was either some compliment paid to her, a pass made at her in the street, or someone looking at her lecherously, and it invariably ended the same way: ‘my God’ or ‘by God’, the embarrassment had nearly killed her. Her husband paid little attention to these anecdotes, and that evening he had matters of greater importance on his mind so he barely heard what she had to say.

  ‘You should not have stayed alone in the house all day; you should have come to the fair. What a turnout at my meeting! First we had a march past of the Student Volunteer Corps. No one has seen such smartness from civilians before. The SVC has come to mean something. Then I addressed the meeting. There was absolute pin-drop silence.’ ‘Pin-drop silence,’ was a favourite among his repertoire of clichés. ‘Packed to capacity’, ‘sacrifice all’ and ‘eschew all differences’ were some of the others that he used frequently.

  ‘Achha! Wonderful!’ she responded enthusiastically. ‘You will become a minister in the Government one day and we will have a flag on the top of our house; we will have an official car and peons in uniform. Then we can dismiss this useless Mundoo of yours. Really you’ve no idea what he is like!’

  ‘Oh, yes, I have,’ interrupted Sher Singh impatiently. ‘He is just a poor, underpaid boy. The condition of domestic servants is one of the most pressing problems of urban society. We work them twenty-four hours of the day, underpay, underfeed, and underclothe them. Their living quarters are filthy. They are abused and beaten at will. They are dismissed without notice after a disgraceful search of their belongings. It is scandalous. It must stop. I will stop it.’ Sher Singh found it hard to switch from oratory to multitudes to talking to individuals.

  ‘I am sure you will. But this Mundoo … really!’

  ‘What’s wrong with him? He’s no different from other servants. The trouble is we never can see our own faults. Whenever I have problems with people, I put myself in their shoes and see their point of view. It is a very good principle.’

  Sher Singh and his wife were too full of themselves to listen to each other’s tales. They both abandoned the attempt.

  It was hot. The ceiling fan only churned the air inside the room. Other members of the family slept on the roof in the cool of the moonlight. Even Dyer the dog, who never left his master’s side when he was at home, refused to be in the room at night. Sher Singh had to suffer because of his wife. He looked at his watch. ‘It’s after eleven. I didn’t realize it was so late. I’ve had such a tiring day.’ He stretched his arms and yawned.

  ‘Your mother hasn’t come back from the temple. The procession could not have ended.’

  ‘I don’t know about her but I could hear father’s snores from the courtyard. And there is a light in Beena’s room. She must be studying.’

  Sher Singh gave himself a long look in the mirror before taking off his turban and uniform. He went into the bathroom, poured a few mugs of water on his body, and came back dripping to dry himself under the fan. He saw himself in the mirror. His paunch showed no sign of reducing. He pulled it in and thought how much nicer it would be if it always stayed there. He bent down and touched his toes three times and re-examined the effect on his middle. He put on his thin muslin shirt and pyjamas. Before switching off the light, he looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Champak had taken off her kimono and lay stark naked on her belly. She had the pillow between her arms, her legs were stretched apart. Sher Singh knew what this meant. ‘My God I feel fagged out,’ he said wearily and switched off the light.

  Champak stretched out her hand and caught her husband’s. ‘Now it’s dark, I can tell you about this Mundoo of yours. He’s not all that innocent, you know!’

  ‘Oh? What did he do?’ asked Sher Singh yawning at the same time.

  ‘Come over and I’ll tell you,’ she mumbled, tugging at his hand.

  Sher Singh rolled over on to her bed and let her put her hand on his arm. ‘When I bathe, he keeps peeping through the crevices of the door.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know. And today he burst into the bathroom on the pretext of bringing in the hot water. I didn’t have a stitch on me. Not one thing! My God, I nearly died of shame.’

  ‘Why don’t you bolt the bathroom door?’

  ‘Never occurred to me; I thought everyone was out. In any case, he should have knocked before coming in.’

  ‘I suppose so. He’s only a little fellow,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to sleep.’ A minute later he began to breathe heavily
.

  Champak’s body twitched. She moaned as if in a nightmare and snuggled closer to her husband. She caught his hand and took it lower down her body. Sher Singh knew there was no way out.

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Just to give you a little variety.’

  Bhagmati

  She sits cross-legged in my armchair turning over the pages of a book. Her left hand is clenched into a fist with a cigarette sticking out of her fingers. She sucks noisily at the cigarette and flicks the ash on my carpet. Her hair is heavily oiled and arranged in serried waves fixed by plastic clips shaped like butterflies. She wears a pink sari of glossy, artificial silk with a dark blue blouse of the same material. A pair of white slippers with ribbon bow ties on their toes lie in front of the chair. Bhagmati is the worst-dressed whore in Delhi.

  The light of the table lamp reveals a layer of powder and rouge on her face. It does not lighten the colour of her black skin or hide the spots left by smallpox. The kohl in her eyes has run down and smudged her cheek bones. Her lips are painted crimson. Her teeth are stained with betel leaf. Bhagmati is the plainest-looking whore in Delhi.

  ‘Ajee! You are back from vilayat!’ she exclaims as I enter. And without giving me the chance to say yes, continues, ‘What kind of books do you keep? They have no pictures.’ She waggles her head with every sentence and gesticulates with her hands in the manner of hijras. ‘No pictures, only black letters like dead flies.’ She changes the subject. ‘Did you ever think of your poor Bhagmati when you were riding those white mares in London?’ Bhagmati is the coarsest whore in Delhi.

  Bhagmati is not a woman like other women. She’s told me something of her past life; I’ve discovered the rest myself.

  Bhagmati was born in the Victoria Zenana Hospital near Jamia Masjid. When her father asked the doctor, ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’, the doctor replied, ‘I am not sure.’ Her parents already had three boys. So they gave their fourth child a girl’s name, Bhagmati. When a troupe of hijras came to their home to sing and dance and said, ‘Show us your child. We want to see if it is a boy or a girl, or one of us,’ her father abused them and drove them away without giving them any money. The hijras gave her parents no peace. Whenever they came to the locality to sing and dance at births or weddings, they would turn up at their doorstep and say, ‘Show us your last born. If it is one of us, let us take it away.’

  Then Bhagmati’s mother had two more children—both girls. Both times her father had taken Bhagmati with him to the hospital and asked the doctor to examine her and say whether she was a boy or a girl. Both times the doctor had looked at her genitals and said ‘I am not sure; it is a bit of both.’ Bhagmati was then four years old. When the troupe of hijras visited them after the birth of his last child, her father gave them twenty-one rupees and said, ‘Now I have three sons and two daughters, you can take this one. It is one of you.’

  The troupe of hijras adopted Bhagmati. They taught her to sing, clap her hands and dance in the manner of hijras. When she was thirteen, her voice broke and became like a man’s. She began to grow hair on her upper lip, around her chin and on her chest. Her bosom and hips which were bigger than a boy’s did not grow as big as those of girls of her age. But she began to menstruate. And although her clitoris became large, the rest of her genitals developed like those of a woman. This time she went to see the doctor herself. He said, ‘You can do everything a woman can, but you will have no children.’

  There are as many kinds of hijras as there are kinds of men and women. Some are almost entirely male, some almost entirely female. Others have the male and female mixed up in different proportions—it is difficult to tell which sex they have more of in their makeup. The reason why they prefer to wear women’s clothes is because it being a man’s world, every deviation from accepted standards of masculinity is regarded as unmanly. Women are more generous.

  Bhagmati is a feminine hijra. When she was fifteen, the leader of the troupe took her as his wife. He already had two hijra wives, but such things do not matter to them. Instead of shunning her as a rival, the wives stitched Bhagmati’s wedding dress and prepared her for the nuptial bed. They shaved the superfluous hair on her face and body and bathed her in rose water. They escorted her to their husband’s room. They had their eyes and ears glued to the crevices in the door. Later, they often made love to her. Bhagmati had smallpox when she was seventeen. ‘They gave me up for dead,’ she said. ‘They threw me in a hospital where people were dying like flies. Seetla Mai (Mother Goddess of smallpox) spared me but left her fingerprints all over my face.’

  When men came to expend their lust on hijras—it is surprising how many prefer them to women—Bhagmati got more patrons than anyone else in her troupe. She could give herself as a woman; she could give herself as a boy. She also discovered that some men preferred to be treated as women. Though limited in her resources, she learnt how to give them pleasure too. There were no variations of sex that Bhagmati found unnatural or did not enjoy. Despite being the plainest of hijras, she came to be sought after by the old and young, the potent and impotent, by homosexuals, sadists and masochists.

  Bhagmati regards a bed in the same way as an all-in wrestler regards the arena when engaged in a bout. Bhagmati is the all-purpose man-woman sex maniac.

  Although Bhagmati is a freelance, she continues to live with her husband and co-wives in Lal Kuan. She puts whatever she earns, in the community kitty. In return, she has a roof over her head and a meal whenever she wants it. When she is ill, they look after her. When she is arrested for soliciting, they furnish bail; when she is sentenced by the magistrate, they pay the fine.

  How did I get mixed up with Bhagmati? That’s a long story which I will tell you later. How did she come to mean so much to me? I am not sure. As I have said before, I have two passions in my life—my city Delhi and Bhagmati. And they have two things in common: they are lots of fun. And they are sterile.

  Georgine

  It had been a bad year for me. I didn’t have many writing assignments and the articles I sold to Indian papers did not get me enough to maintain the lifestyle I was accustomed to. So I registered myself as a guide with the Tourist Department of the Government of India and left my card at foreign embassies and international organizations. During the tourist season between October and March I made quite a bit in tips in foreign currency which I exchanged for rupees at rates higher than the official. I earned commissions from hotels, curio dealers and astrologers for the custom I brought them. Men left me the remains of their bottle of Scotch. Sometimes middle-aged women invited me to their rooms and gave me presents for the services I rendered them.

  It was not very hard work. After I had memorized the names of a few dynasties and emperors and the years when they ruled, all I had to do was to pick up a few anecdotes to spice my stories. At the Qutub Minar I told them of the number of suicides that had taken place and how no one could jump clear of the tower and come down in one piece. I told them of Humayun’s father, Babar, going around his son’s sickbed four times, praying to Allah to transfer his son’s illness to him, and how Humayun had been restored to health and Babar died a few days later. About the Red Fort and its palaces, I had picked up a lot of interesting details: from the time Shah Jahan had built it, the kings who had sat on the Peacock Throne and were later blinded or murdered; the British who had taken it after the Mutiny of 1857; the trials of INA officers, down to 15 August 1947 when Lord Mountbatten had lowered the Union Jack and Nehru hoisted the Indian tricolour on the ramparts. Once having done my homework, there was little more to do than impress the tourists with my learning.

  After a while I began to enjoy my work. Although I did not find anyone who would give me a free round-the-world ticket, I could boast that the world came to me. Once a cousin who had found a job as a worker in England told me of the number of white girls he had ‘killed’. They were English girls working in the same factory. I told him that I had ‘killed’ many more Europeans, Americans, Japanese, Arabs and Af
ricans, sitting where I was in Delhi, without having to pay a counterfeit four-anna coin to anyone. The fellow began to drool at the mouth and scratch his testicles with envy.

  The only thing that troubled me was that I never got a chance to make friends with anyone. All the Marys, Janes, Francoises and Mikis darlinged and honeyed me for a day or two and then vanished forever. After a few weeks I could not recall their names or faces. All I could recollect was the way they had behaved when I bestrode them. Some had been as lifeless as the bed on which we lay; some had squirmed and screamed as they climaxed. A few had mouthed obscenities, slapped me on the face and told me to fuck off.

  It was different with the American Missy Baba, Georgine. My contact with the US Embassy was a man named Carlyle. I do not know what he did in the embassy except that he looked after what he called ‘visiting firemen’. He had tried out other guides. Once he was assured that I ‘did no hanky panky’ with visitors, he put a lot of custom my way. Americans were my best customers. Despite their brash manners, they were more friendly and generous than other foreigners. I was particularly careful with Carlyle’s ‘visiting firemen’. I was respectful, polite and kept my distance. I opened car doors for them, did not angle for tips or look eagerly at their tape recorders, cameras and ballpoint pens. (I knew they would leave some memento for me.) I did not take them to emporia to earn commissions but helped them with their shopping at the best and cheapest stores. I never made passes at Carlyle’s introductions and only obliged those who insisted on my obliging them.

  My Oxbridge accent impressed Americans more than it did the other nationalities; to them I was a gentleman guide, a well-to-do fellow fallen on evil days, which was true.

  Carlyle introduced me to Georgine. Georgine was Mrs Carlyle’s niece and had come to Delhi to spend her Christmas vacations. ‘This is Georgine,’ Carlyle said without mentioning her second name. ‘And this is your guide,’ without mentioning mine. I bowed. She said ‘Hi.’