by Anosh Irani
Madhu had always resented these virgin girls. These yet-to-flower kalis were the reason eunuchs had been sculpted in the first place—that and God gifting hermaphrodites to mothers. The Almighty, caught in the throes of some divine nasha, occasionally did the job only half right by giving a boy child a penis the size of a seed or, in a moment of misplaced generosity, bestowing both a penis and vagina. Who knows what he smoked up there; if that formula could somehow be obtained, Kamathipura’s opium dens would rise from the ashes again.
In being asked to be this parcel’s caretaker, Madhu felt the weight of history repeating itself. Throughout the ages, eunuchs had served as protectors of harems, rakhwalas of precious vaginas that meant the world to the men in power. If other men had been left in charge when kings went to war, by the time they came back, chooth-walls would have been ruptured beyond repair by guards, cooks, gardeners, court jesters. So the eunuch had a place. Some even rose to the position of high-ranking government officials, or served as confidantes to members of royalty. The severing of their penises meant that they were severed from their families as well, rendered unfit for society, which made them subservient to just one master—as Madhu was to gurumai—loyal to a fault, out of helplessness. However, that same loyalty afforded them a level of prestige. Eunuch slaves were status symbols, exchanged as gifts between noblemen, or demanded as part of the war-spoils when a kingdom was lost. To this day, hijras were exchanged between hijra leaders. When Madhu was at her sexual zenith, such was her demand that she had almost been bartered away to another guru, but she had begged and pleaded with gurumai not to trade her. Gurumai would have made a fat profit from the trade, but she gave in to her star hijra’s histrionics. It was an act of generosity gurumai never allowed Madhu to forget.
But now, Madhu reflected, history had been perverted. In this cramped loft, there were no kings, only the kingdom of Kamathipura, and this parcel might be worth protecting, but Madhu’s function was to protect her and keep her safe until it was time to not protect her—history made topsy-turvy.
Moreover, the moment at which Madhu would have to let go of this parcel was not in her hands. Unlike a fruit that tasted hard and bitter if eaten before it was ready, a parcel’s ripeness depended not on the state of the parcel, but on the one who tasted her.
Madhu knew that Padma already had a buyer for this parcel, someone who was eager to pay a bomb for a virgin child—which made this parcel different from the others who arrived in Kamathipura. This parcel had been commissioned. Padma had been very clear that this one was true maal, a real virgin. Normally, when clients were told that a girl was seal-pack, it wasn’t the case. The girl had already been broken, but because she had not yet been sold on the market, she was still considered virginal and was presented as such to clients. In reality, she had been raped repeatedly by the agent during transport, on the train itself. How fitting, thought Madhu, that this was done in the cargo compartment, because the word maal literally meant “cargo” or “commodity.” The girl had been bought for a price and was no longer human. She was being converted into cheez—a thing to be consumed.
A parcel that had been opened on the way was sold at a higher price because it had already been tamed. The brothel madam would not have to go through the trouble of disciplining it, of having it opened. That was a headache.
This parcel’s case was different. She would not be taken in the brothel itself; something more rare would occur. She would be transported to someone’s home or to a hotel room nearby. That was why Madhu was being employed. She would act as the carrier. The parcel needed to be packaged in such a way that it looked like it belonged in Kamathipura. And who better than a hijra to undertake the task of transformation?
The parcel raised her head toward Madhu and then looked down again. Madhu turned the flashlight off, but she was not ready to make herself visible. Not yet. The parcel was murmuring something, mumbling away, her jaws hardly able to open. Words had no weight; they were as weightless as the motes of dust that stood in silvery columns under dangling light bulbs. Madhu’s aim in this first meeting between herself and the parcel was simple: to share the same physical space. There was no need for talk. When two bodies met, raw truth was exchanged.
And the truth was that a ten-year-old girl had been sold into slavery.
Madhu took one last look at the parcel and went down the trap door. That was enough for now. As she placed the ladder back next to the bicycle, she pondered the meaning of magic. Magic wasn’t about making things appear out of nowhere. Any amateur could do that. Magic was to make what was real disappear. To wipe out from existence. To turn against God.
He creates, thought Madhu. I erase.
—
Madhu walked through the lanes of Kamathipura: Lane Fourteen, Lane Thirteen, Lane Twelve…She descended deeper and deeper into the core of her settlement. The streets were rough cement, eaten and dug out, but the foundation of their hardness had been laid years ago, in the 1800s, when the first prostitutes wafted through them, danced and spun around, and eventually collapsed, only to be replaced by other bodies. Next, the criminals came. Once the working girls had made the place unacceptable to society, it became the perfect hideout for thieves, goons, small-time smugglers, and young men with moons in their eyes looking to make their mark in the criminal underworld. While they hid in the shadows, there was always the fold of a woman’s underwear to play with. If a thief’s hand got too restless, itched for a lock to break, he could slide it up a thigh or two during his hiatus. Slowly, the respectable families started moving out of the area and only the prostitutes and “kamathis” remained, the artisans and labourers from whom the place got its name. The families that had respect but no means to move out had to stuff handkerchiefs in their mouths whenever someone asked where they lived, because the assumption was that if you lived in Kamathipura, you were cheap, you were easy, you had flies coming out of your mouth when you yawned.
But gurumai had taught Madhu that this place did have one saving grace. What Kamathipura offered its babies, no other locale in the city could. To any new entrant, gurumai always gave a brief history of the place, and then the moral: “A child of Foras Road does not have ambitions. It does not seek love. It does not want. It does not beg for happiness like normal human beings do. That is our strength.”
When Madhu was a young hijra, thread by thread gurumai had woven a tapestry so fine that Madhu was mesmerized by her gall, the sheer glory of a reject rejecting the rest of the city. But Madhu had not realized that gurumai was talking about the children of female prostitutes; she was not referring to hijras. Hijras were never born in Kamathipura. They were always from somewhere else. They were immigrants, and, as such, they were morons with dreams. And although hijras may have been adopted by Kamathipura, they were confined to a two-storey building known as the House of the Hijra. It was the unofficial womb for members of the third gender, and it was Madhu’s home. For bodies like Madhu’s that were neither here nor there, Hijra House offered a fixed address for the soul.
Before India’s independence, a lot of white memsahibs who stayed in the area employed hijras to do the daily cooking and cleaning. Over time, the hijras became more than just servants—they were confidantes, trusted aides, not just to the white women, but to the rich Indian women as well. When India finally broke free of the British and the white women went back to England—and some of the Indian women moved elsewhere—they gifted their homes to the hijras. That was how Ramabai Chawl and the area surrounding it had become a hijra haven. All this Madhu had been fed by gurumai—stories sequestered into the very fabric of her being to keep her proud and loyal, and fearful.
By now, Madhu had reached her asylum. The moment she turned right from the laundry, the darkness took on a different scent. There were no street lights in this lane; it lived in the dark. At the beginning of the lane, the carrom players, mainly steelworkers from the adjoining mill, sat on wooden stools, making shots at impossible angles, while their cigarette smoke created a ha
zy cloud that climbed the walls of the public urinal and disappeared toward the roof, where Devyani, six foot three inches of human draped in black, straggly hair falling to the waist, stood in a sari. Every single night, Devyani smoked ganja and planted herself on the roof of the public urinal. Unlike a lighthouse, which emits a blinking signal, Devyani merged into the sky, appearing only when there was trouble. Then her teeth would flash as she descended onto the ground with alarming speed to prevent some macho lund from ill-treating Roomali—Roomali, who at this moment was leaning against the wall of the public urinal, wooing her next client. With its layers of makeup, her face was a sudden shot of white in the dark, and the red lips made her look clownish until she began to sweet talk. Then there was no mistaking her wiles. She wore shorts, which was a violation of the hijra code, but as long as she brought in some coin it didn’t matter to gurumai.
Madhu took the stairs and was greeted by dour-faced Sona. Gurumai always teased Sona that she must have been a wrinkle in her past life, specifically a wrinkle on someone’s arse, which is why she always made that stinky face. But it was not a past life that Sona could not shake off; she was trying to forget her brothers in this life and how they had treated her when she was Suresh. She had run away from a small town in Gujarat when she was sixteen. Her brothers had followed Suresh to drag him back home, but when gurumai told them that he had already been castrated, they spat on the ground and left without even meeting with him. Suresh hadn’t been castrated. It was gurumai’s way of showing Suresh that family ties meant nothing. “See how quickly they turned,” she told him. To this day, Sona could not get over it; she was always replaying some stupid reconciliation scene in her movie-projector mind.
In the hall, the TV was on but no one was watching. Tarana and Anjali were stuck together as usual, glued to each other by a common bitchiness. They whispered all day and night, bringing bits of gossip from all corners of the city and churning them out after adding their own giddy bile. Tarana and Anjali were among the lucky. Their progression from man to hijra had served them well. Their lips were full, their lashes long, and there was hardly a trace of hardness in their faces. As well, their breasts had grown, and for this more than anything, Madhu wished them slow, painful deaths. Anjali had taken hormone injections and was now reaping the benefits. Tarana didn’t need injections. Her breasts just grew with the randomness and unreasonableness of tumours. Madhu too had experienced growth. After her castration, it had surged through her like a beautiful promise and had enervated her. But somewhere down the line her breasts had failed to fulfill her as she had thought they would. Madhu believed that the reason they had never fully come into their own was her own disappointment. It had stopped them from flowering.
The others had just finished eating dinner. Madhu had already eaten with Gajja, but she did not want to tell them that. Her sisters were jealous of her friendship with Gajja. It was rare for a man to devote himself to a hijra even after their relationship had ceased to be sexual.
Besides gurumai, the only fellow hijra whom Madhu could confide in, the only one she had real feelings for, was Bulbul. She had been Madhu’s friend since the day they met, but she never listened to a single piece of advice that Madhu gave her. Tonight Bulbul was seated solemnly on a chair in front of a mirror, combing her hair. Madhu had told her not to do that in front of the others, because they sniggered at her. As if to prove her point, when the comb became stuck in the frizz of Bulbul’s locks, Anjali pounced on her.
“Traffic jam in your hair?” she asked.
Bulbul was getting old—nearing sixty now—and the more she combed her hair and put makeup on, the easier it was for her to look like a mistake. Madhu had tried explaining this—subtly at first, then with the audacity of a truck horn—but Bulbul just didn’t get it. Her name itself, Bulbul, now seemed cruel. She loved to sing, but the voice that had once been passable was now hoarse, no longer fit for singing at weddings and childbirths. It was more for selling pots and pans at cheap prices. “Comb your hair when it’s wet,” Madhu had told Bulbul a hundred times, but Bulbul was so afraid of catching a cold, she continued to make her hair desert dry. It always looked as though it had taken the wind as prisoner. She had become fragile and paranoid, but vanity had not left her. She was obsessed with her looks and loved to pose for tourists. She never took money for a photograph. “I will lose my looks if I take money for this face,” she said in earnest, another admission made aloud that had become a catchphrase for the others in her absence.
Bulbul lifted her chin in an attempt to tighten her skin, but the only result was the tautness of another jibe from Anjali. Madhu shot a glare in Anjali’s direction and she cooled down, but it was too late: Bulbul was hurt and made a dash to the toilet. She would urinate, no doubt, but she urinated tears—that’s how sensitive she was.
Tarana and Anjali went over to where Bulbul had been sitting. They smiled naughtily at Madhu, as if to say, “Allow us at least this much.” When Madhu nodded, they quickly grabbed Bulbul’s mobile phone and started going through her photo gallery. These were photos Bulbul had taken of herself, and she thought no one else knew about them. Now even Sona rushed to the phone to join in, and the giggles began.
The mobile phone’s flash had made Bulbul look grotesque at times, with the dip of her lip trying to twist into a smile, one eye slightly smaller than the other, wrinkle upon wrinkle showing itself through layers of pancake makeup. Each image was that of a human being deluding herself, and it made Madhu feel wrinkled as well, shrunken and spurned. Then Anjali flicked to a new photo, one Madhu had never seen before, of Bulbul with a fake cockatoo on her shoulder. Sona was the first to burst. She tried not to be so shameless in her laughter, but all of them, including Madhu, began to break like eggshells. Anjali barely had the strength to put the phone back in its place before Bulbul returned from the toilet. They tried to control themselves but instead collapsed to the floor in a cackling heap, and Madhu knew then that Bulbul would give her an earful that night. She’d know that they were laughing at her and would want to know why, and Madhu would have to make something up. But for now the photographs had served their purpose: they gave Bulbul the illusion of beauty and the rest of them a chance to be children again—brash and hurtful, in love with laughter.
—
There were two types of moans in Kamathipura.
First, the obvious ones, from customers shivering above bodies on rent, letting go for a few seconds with one aaah. Second, the aaahs of suffering: voices rising in pain, softer than the ecstasy of customers but more fevered. Because Madhu slept on the floor at the foot of gurumai’s bed, it was the second type of moan she had to contend with. Tonight, gurumai was trying to clear her throat of phlegm and was calling out Madhu’s name. But she was not awake. Gurumai clutched a small pillow, gripped it in her sleep. Madhu rubbed gurumai’s feet. The warmth of her palms on the soles had always soothed gurumai, and now the contortions on her face eased slowly, until it was time for another dream to own her.
On the floor, Madhu’s phone blinked and vibrated. It was Gajja.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Home,” she whispered.
“Come to Lund Ki Dukaan.”
“I can’t…”
“You have to. The Mary’s here and Salma’s in top form.”
The mention of the Mary lifted Madhu. Every so often, a female Samaritan came from the calm meadows of the middle class with free condoms and advice. These were well-meaning women, but it was hard for them to understand that when you have lived in Kamathipura for as long as Madhu had, there were things more fearful than becoming a pojeetive. Still, along with a minor dose of empathy, they offered major entertainment. They had good Christian hearts and their attempts at helping allowed them to sleep well at night. This was consoling to Madhu: most of the time the existence of people like her tended to disturb others; at least she managed to help these Marys get some sleep.
She gave gurumai’s feet a final rub.
It was well past midnight now, and Madhu thought of Tarana and Anjali, the two young stars of the brothel, on duty right now in another section of Hijra House, sucking and cooing like ravenous doves. They were always the last to sleep, at four in the morning, after they had been taken “royally,” as they liked to say. But the less lucrative hijras, the ones gurumai thought of as charity cases, had already called it a night and were sleeping around gurumai’s bed as though she were a planet pulling them toward her. Sona was snuggled up to the corner of a wall, mistaking it for the nook of a lover’s underarm. Sona did not take clients or lovers. She only performed at weddings and knew in her heart that with her bushy eyebrows and guttural voice, she was too unattractive for sex work. Bulbul was facing heavenward, her hair split on either side of the pillow in uneven streams. She’d gladly snuggle up to anyone who would have her, but takers were few. The bodies of Devyani and Roomali lay contorted on the floor, as on most nights. They thought so much about the past that it took them a long time to fall asleep, only to wake up exhausted, singed by their own recollections. These were the seven chelas of gurumai, who were allowed to serve their mistress by staying in Hijra House. They were lonely disciples whose destinies were stitched together by the thread of being born different—and what a life they had made, all runaways landing in each other’s arms. Madhu left them to their sleep, grateful to her sisters and gurumai for providing some familiarity, some cement, in a life that would have otherwise been a mudslide.
Down the stairs she went with the excitement of a child, and before she knew it, she was stepping in the potholes and dog shit of her locality with abandon, toward the Dick Shop. The name was Gajja’s invention. He had wanted to paint a sign that said “Lund Ki Dukaan,” but the management preferred a low profile. Still, they appreciated the gesture. The Dick Shop was an old Irani restaurant that had been converted into a small cinema. It was no substitute for the Alexandra, but at least it lived. It was illegal during the day and grew even more illegal at night. Starting at noon, for fifteen rupees only, the shop screened the latest blockbusters on a large TV. Most of Kamathipura had seen Don 2 before most of Mumbai, and when Don 2 was released, Don 2 was all that played—from noon to three, three to six, six to nine, and from nine to midnight. The afternoons and evenings might have belonged to King Khan, but the nights went to the porn stars. At the stroke of midnight, flies opened and cocks emerged, on screen and off. Sometimes it was foreign porn, white men and women glowing like aliens, so clean, so hairless, so pink. Sometimes the South Indians took over, the dusky bodies and hairy vaginas having their own draw. Madhu had never understood porn. It was like watching the same news item over and over.