The Parcel

by Anosh Irani

“Please,” she said, “eat.”

  She even brushed away some of the sugar that was on the edge of his lips. Then she instructed her men to take him outside. They thrust him to the ground, bound his feet, and tied his hands to a telephone pole, so he lay prostrate on the ground facing the sky. It was ten in the morning and passersby tried to avoid the man, not wanting to get in the way of what they assumed was gang rivalry.

  But there was no gang, just a lone woman smearing sugar all over a man’s face.

  Padma smeared the sugar with such deference she might have been a potter moulding clay into her own creation. His face, his eyebrows, his ears, and an extra dose in the centre of the forehead with her thumb as though she was putting a final bindi on him.

  Soon, all the girls from her brothel came to see what was going on. The men from nearby shops came. The postman came. The milkman came.

  So did the ants.

  Hundreds of them, crawling their way to the man’s body. So many hundreds of black ants, so many hundreds of red ants, soldiering their way to the sugar. The man begged for forgiveness and in his terror blurted out what he had done for all to hear, and in doing so negated the possibility of any intervention, which only suited Padma.

  Then, when the first bites began, the man went quiet.

  A few seconds later, he sent out a scream so high it brought his wife to the scene.

  When she saw that Padma had not only tied up her husband, but was coolly sipping chai and watching, she was sure Padma had lost her mind.

  Padma looked at her and said, “Forgive me.”

  Then she touched the woman’s feet. “I hope you understand. Just remember, you will always be looked after.”

  Perhaps the woman did understand, for she turned away and left her husband screaming his heart out, as if that might be the only way for him to get in touch with it.

  When the blood trickled, White Lane turned red. It became “Lal Bazaar.”

  In this fashion, Padma had added her own memorable hue to the place and, at the same time, sent a humble message to the prostitutes under her command, should they have any delusions of escaping or disobeying her. Her story spread through the fourteen lanes of Kamathipura faster than syphilis.

  When the man’s face was a gnarled caricature, a stray dog licked the sugar off it.

  —

  Hassan signalled to Madhu that Padma was ready for her.

  “You know where to go?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Madhu.

  “Then go. I have to keep guard.”

  She passed five rooms to her left, and the doors were shut, which was a good sign for Padma. It meant business was brisk, except for the two women standing on the balcony outside their respective rooms. Both were in their late thirties. The makeup on their faces was too light, a garish contrast to the darker skin of their necks and arms. Their lips were so red they sent off the flashing alarm of a siren, a warning not to enter, rather than a seductive invite.

  Madhu peeked into one of their rooms. The women rented them from Padma at the rate of twenty rupees per client. A small child slept on the ground, huddled in a corner, its head leaning against a stainless steel trunk that contained all of its mother’s belongings: her clothes and combs, her makeup, her memories—all of it had to fit in one trunk. If it didn’t, the woman had too much of a personal life and needed to be cut down to size. The blue walls of the room were so dreary they made the steel trunk stand. If a client showed up, the child would be placed under the bed, and the bedsheet adjusted in such a way that it would fall over the edge like a waterfall, cutting the child off from mother and customer, until the next one came. Madhu could smell the sex in there: the sweat, the cigarette smoke, the chewed tobacco, the attar of prostitutes—water was added to the empty perfume bottle in a desperate attempt to gain more mileage—and the incense stick in a corner of the room trying in vain to counter all the other whiffs. She drew her head back. This was the collective scent of a cheap, violent fuck, the odour of enslavement.

  More rooms, more closed doors.

  In the corridor, a young boy was drawing something on a piece of paper. He had a small flashlight angled on the ground so that it lit the paper while he practised writing his name, but the way he made large loops on the page made Madhu think he was drawing. In another room, a prostitute was breastfeeding her child. With her mouth half open and her head against the wall, she looked comatose, and the baby was literally hanging off her breast. It was hard to tell if she had any nourishment to provide at all. Perhaps, thought Madhu, it was the other way round. The child was resuscitating her, urging her to find the will to carry on.

  Padma’s room was the same as it had always been, with its old four-poster bed that had belonged to the original madam of the place. Madhu had heard from gurumai that after Padma’s husband died, it was the only thing she brought back into the brothel. “Who did I think I was, aiming for a normal life?” she had told gurumai about her marriage. She had two children, gave birth like some blessed factory in consecutive years at the age of forty, and her husband, a postman, gave Padma a new life. Or so it seemed. Less than three years after they got married, the postman’s liver failed. And he was a teetotaller, which made Padma realize, once again, that a whore is a whore is a whore. How dare she move out of the brothel into a regular flat, where the vegetable vendor came right to her doorstep?

  Even her children felt wrong. Without their father she knew she would fail them terribly. Each time she played with them, she had a foreboding that something would happen to them too, since they were both girls, so she gave them up to a couple who could never have children of their own, on the condition that they leave the city immediately, not tell her where they were going, and never return. The more untraceable they were, the longer the distance between her and them, the safer the children were.

  The bed from the brothel was the only remnant of her old life. Even though she had shared it with her husband and children, it had remained her throne, the source of her power. She had felt a surge of accomplishment the first time she’d slept on it as the owner of the brothel. But taking it into her flat with her husband had been a grave mistake, and letting her children sleep on it an even graver one, and so it was returned to its original place.

  Madhu looked for a moment at the legendary bed, which gave off an aura of power even in its owner’s absence. Padma was not in her room. It meant she was in her office.

  It had been years since Madhu was inside the brothel, and the passage of time made her lost and dizzy. Although she was on the second floor, she felt she was in the belly of this building, about to meet its architect, while the air got tighter and the light scarcer.

  She knocked on Padma’s office door and waited.

  When there was no response, she pushed the door slowly, until she saw Padma seated at a small desk, a ledger in front of her, pencil in hand, her steel-rimmed glasses sitting low on the ridge of her nose.

  “I have a job for you,” said Padma.

  Straight to the point. Time was electricity to Padma. She tried not to waste it.

  She was thinner than Madhu remembered, more wiry. The skin on her forearms was scaly. Even though she was indoors, and alone, and in her own domain, she wore her white sari over her head like a hood. The embroidered lining on her sari was the only bit of fizz allowed in the room. There were no jingling bangles on her wrists, like she used to have. The hood of her sari slid down but she did not bother to pull it back up. Her hair was scant and silver, stiff and alert, not an ounce of life flowing through it.

  “A parcel has come,” she said.

  Parcel. Madhu tensed. If tongues kept the shapes of the words they had used, she would carve out that word from anyone who had ever spoken it.

  “I need you to look after it,” said Padma.

  “Me?”

  The tip of Padma’s tongue touched the corner of her lips. “Yes, you.”

  “But…but I no longer do this work.”

  “You like living on
a beggar’s salary?”

  “No, it’s…”

  “A new cop has come. He’s young and wants to prove himself. Maybe his sister was a whore and she died, who knows. But he doesn’t believe in Gandhi. This is one case even the Father of the Nation cannot solve. So I need someone experienced.”

  In most situations, a bundle of five-hundred-rupee notes made the law bend and break. The Mahatma’s face on the currency made the exchange all the more shameful, and hilarious, as he passed through the hands of the corrupt and ruthless. Whenever they counted money, their fingers grazed his cheeks, made them go red hot in embarrassment.

  “Madam, I’m out of touch,” said Madhu. “I’m not—”

  Padma suddenly stood up and slapped the ledger shut, displaying a sprightliness that Madhu could only hope for if she lived to be Padma’s age.

  “You will come out of retirement,” she said. She opened a drawer and threw a bundle of notes at Madhu. “Advance. Your gurumai will be proud of you. Now follow me.”

  Madhu froze. She was not prepared to meet the parcel. It was too soon. It had been too long since she had last dealt with one. But if she showed any more hesitation about taking the job, Padma wouldn’t take kindly to it, and neither would gurumai.

  “From now on, you will use only this,” said Padma, placing a mobile phone in Madhu’s hand. It was an old instrument, no larger than the sweet biscuit Madhu dipped in her chai each morning, and judging from its dents, must have had its share of falls.

  “The SIM card is new. No one else has this number. After the job is done, you will return the phone to me.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “Do not make any calls from this phone, except to me.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “Now come,” she said. “You’ve been away for a while.”

  —

  Nothing had changed. At least, nothing that mattered.

  Unlike before, there was no guard on floor three. But the same padlocked grille that was found on floors one and two was here as well, just as Madhu remembered, and it slid so smoothly when Padma pushed it aside, it felt ominous.

  The room behind the grille was full of ceiling fans, most with cracked wings. There were steel trunks covered with cobwebs, mounted on top of each other, some piles higher than Madhu herself, the topmost trunks perilously balanced and ready to fall upon the slightest provocation. The windows were closed, barricaded with wooden panels hammered one on top of another. Music crept in from the outside, from the taxis and video game parlours below, muffled drumbeats and tinny female voices that sounded far, far away.

  “Don’t clean anything, don’t move anything, don’t dust anything,” said Padma.

  As her eyes adjusted, Madhu could make out an old bicycle leaning against the wall, its torn rubber tires glued to the metal rim in bits and pieces like wet tar, and behind the cycle, a familiar small wooden ladder. Padma stood near the cycle and looked above it, up at the ceiling. Madhu’s gaze followed, and she too stared at the ceiling. Madhu could detect a heavy silence emanating from that corner. Her ears picked up a single rustle, the movement of someone’s leg, a toe scraping the edge of something. Padma took a key that was tied around her neck with a black shoelace and gave it to Madhu.

  “Her name’s Kinjal. She got here this evening,” she said, and left.

  The minute Padma mentioned the parcel’s name, Madhu knew the process had begun. Starting now, the parcel would have to be emptied of her past, and it did not matter what it was. Kinjal was a fine name, but so was Ritu or Lekha or Aarti—a parcel’s name had no power, because no matter what, all names added up to one thing: zero.

  Whoever Kinjal was, wherever she was from, Madhu prayed that she had a natural tendency toward stillness, for it would make her life easier. One had to be still; one had to forget movement. The mind had to be taught how not to travel, because if the parcel decided to catch some ticket to the past or to a station called Hope, her skin would peel. First, it was the skin, then the deeper layers of flesh dissolved in fear, then the bones crumbled as though they were never sturdy to begin with but made of some sad powder, until the soul was finally visible, so it could be wiped clean and a counterfeit could take its place, fresh from Padma’s mint.

  Madhu readied herself for the parcel’s face, because she knew that in it she would observe the same cycle of confusion and fear and prayer that moved round and round, just like the giant wheel in Lane Fourteen opposite Suleiman’s Restaurant. The children would laugh and urge the man in charge to turn it faster, failing to realize that the man wasn’t turning the wheel at all—he wasn’t even touching it. It was the wheel of fate, or the wheel of destiny—you could call it anything you wanted, call it the laugh-a-minute wheel of life, who cared, it ran on its own, powered by some invisible source. If that felt like a lie, you took the first left from Alexandra Cinema and then turned right, and there it was, for all to see, a pathetic giant wheel, moving on its own, the children screaming in delight as it kept them gobbled up in its seats, all safe and barred, while the operator chewed paan and for the sake of appearances kept it spinning, knowing full-well that he was doing this just to earn his bread, because even if he decided not to play along and stopped putting his weight on the wheel, it would continue to turn, and the last thing it required was his damn consent.

  2

  In the arena of sex trafficking, the players were always the same: a member or trusted aide of the parcel’s family; the agent who dealt in parcels, commonly known as the “dalal”; and finally the brothel owner. These were the constants, the trio that worked in perfect harmony like stars aligned in the heavens, constellations producing the same effect: a brilliant explosion of pain.

  For the parcel, that pain was now just a bud, a promise of days to come, and no one knew this better than Madhu. She placed the ladder against the wall. The ceiling wasn’t that high; five rungs were all that was required to get her there. She pushed the wooden panel up with her palm and slid it across. She had definitely gained some weight since she’d last been here. Her waist barely fit through the opening now, and a couple of rough edges scraped her belly.

  She had entered the hollow space that would become her operating chamber for the next while. It was still dark in here, but she could already detect the parcel’s movements—those hurried, useless movements. As always, there was a small flashlight near the right-hand corner of the loft. She groped for it but did not switch it on.

  Madhu knew that the moment she pushed that switch, she would be in charge of the face she saw. Those eyes would be hers, that brain hers, even the smallest flitter of fear that darted across the parcel’s face like a bird in the sky.

  But it wasn’t time yet. First, Madhu ran her hands along the cage bars. The ring that she wore rattled against them slowly: rat…tat…tat…The gaps in time were deliberate, so slow as to make the parcel wonder if they were even real. The dust in the loft made Madhu sniffle, but she did not sound like a person taking in breaths; it was more a reptilian crackle, like the way light bulbs sometimes hissed when hot. Her grip on the flashlight grew harder. For a brief moment, she closed her eyes, almost in prayer, because she knew that the next time she opened them, she would be using light, that most beautiful of things, to destroy.

  —

  Most of the young girls Madhu had seen were from Nepal, and a majority of them had not even heard of Bombay. There was one girl, years ago, who had not known what India was. Her village had been so tiny, so remote, she had no clue that there was anything beyond it. She lost her mind in only a few days.

  When it came to the opening of a parcel, Madhu did not believe in the conventional approach wherein the madam and a couple of prostitutes pinned the parcel down to a bed while the customer broke her in. The parcels momentarily turned into eels, the terror electric, until their muscles went limp. There was no doubt that this was the quickest method, and it required minimal effort on the brothel owner’s part, but Madhu surmised that in the long run it was counterpr
oductive. The sudden breaking in dislodged the parcels so badly that they teetered on the edge of madness for years, and some clients had a problem with sleeping with what they thought were mental patients.

  Madhu’s approach was subtle. She knew that the instilling of fear in a parcel was a moot point, since the girl had been catapulted thousands of kilometres away from family and landed in a cage. Fear was essential, but it had to be built upon. It had to be layered, over time, like wet cement, until it solidified and ended up as the very foundation of the parcel’s being. Then Madhu would be the only one who could help ease it. The conventional method was not only barbaric, it also damaged the goods to the point where mending was impossible.

  Madhu took a breath, then blasted the parcel with light. The parcel huddled, her back against the cage bars, trying to find space where there was none. She was exerting pressure against the cage bars, but Madhu knew that the more you pushed, the more things closed in on you—and this was one of the rules the parcel would have to understand, one of several rules that the cages taught its newborns.

  The girl seemed to be about ten years old.

  Her hair, parted in the centre, ponytailed on either side, was pressed to her head with a healthy dose of oil. Tiny earrings dotted each lobe. Her eyebrows were long, but her lashes normal. Healthy cheeks, typical of Nepali girls, but not too puffy. Skin the colour of brown rice. Madhu could not discern the tint of her eyes because her gaze was fixed to the floor. Her nostrils flared; the tightness in her lungs would be doing that.

  The parcel, Madhu decided, was at that stage where she could grow into anything.

  Her looks were ordinary enough not to promise any celestial blooming, but at the same time, she was…not pretty, but calm. No, perhaps calm wasn’t it.

  She was clean. Yes, clean. Not in a soap-scrubbed way, but her skin, her shins. No scars left by childhood games or boils, no chicken pox marks on her face. The place under her eyes was sunken, but that was to be expected. One hour in this cage was enough to do that. There were no signs of beating on her. The way she sat, crouched, suggested that there were no internal wounds either. No bruised ribs or swollen kidneys. Madhu was no doctor, but this much she could tell. Internal damage had a way of pouring out: suddenly the eyes would flinch or the feet would twitch. This one sat reasonably still. Not too still, though, because that part hadn’t come yet.