by Anosh Irani
The owner of Porno Parlour—its other, English, name—had an understanding with the NGOs and cops. Once in a while, they would allow the Marys—in Kamathipura they were all called Marys—to hold workshops and address the audience, because the crowd that came here would ordinarily never attend an NGO gathering. At the moment, some poor Mary, a new recruit, would be getting the fright of her life, because Salma was in gear. A new Mary, with her broken Hindi, hiding behind her cross, was always a sight to behold.
“Come on!” said Gajja. “You’re missing everything.”
He dragged Madhu inside so forcefully that Madhu almost missed a step in the dark. The room stank of sweat and Dettol. The sermon was on. Gajja had saved a seat for Madhu on the wooden bench closest to the entrance, one of many that had been stolen from the convent school nearby. The benches were perfect for Porno Parlour because they had desks attached to them, which served as a cover for masturbating men and prevented them from squirting the person in front. When the school complained about the theft, the owner of Porno Parlour offered to return them, but not before casually mentioning to the cop on duty that the desks had been “spoiled due to excitement.” The school suggested that the owner consider the benches a donation.
Thankfully, the new Mary was not demonstrating the proper way for a woman to make a client wear a condom. Everyone in the audience had been taught that a hundred times, but still someone from the crowd, a gent usually, would say, “Show me, show me!”
Madhu spotted Salma two rows ahead of her. She was ominously quiet.
The Mary was showing a short video, and with every frame, Madhu could tell Salma’s fuse was getting shorter. Gajja had already filled Madhu in: Salma had been asked to calm down by the Mary and her male colleague, and had been on the verge of being thrown out, but Salma had apologized, which she always did, especially when she didn’t mean it.
As statistics poured onto the screen, a man’s voice emphasized the numbers in a cheap, theatrical tone: A decade ago, there were one lakh prostitutes in Kamathipura alone. Now there are only twenty thousand.
Salma clapped for that one, dwindling numbers, but it was still her moment, after all. The Mary glared at her.
On average, each sex worker services ten men in one night.
Salma nodded her head vehemently. “Corr-ect,” she said, in English, to the Mary. “This phillum is showing the reality.”
Madhu did not understand why they were being forced to watch the statistics. Such things were a showcase for outsiders to induce pity and donations. Maybe she had missed something earlier.
Kamathipura is the second largest red-light area in Asia.
“What?” said Salma. “We are not first?”
As the facts continued to parade across the screen, the audience grew bored—cows chewing on grass. Madhu felt further and further removed from the video the Mary was playing for them. Thankfully, the voice soon faded away into the even more humiliating sound of a sitar wailing.
“Any questions?” asked the Mary. “Any questions about precautions? It’s your life. It’s worth fighting for.”
Salma put her hand up like a good schoolgirl. “If a client hates to use condoms and starts slapping me around when I insist, what should I do? Do you have any precautions against that?”
“Well…,” said the Mary. “You can come and speak to us privately about that.”
“But I’m asking you now. If my cunt is public, why should my questions be private?”
“We can counsel you accordingly,” said the Mary. “We can—”
But the man in the first row interrupted her. “Put on the triple X, yaar!”
Fed up with the sermonic turn the night had taken, he wanted to skip the previews and go straight to the hard-core porn. Madhu was not surprised. In single- and double-X movies, there was a storyline and no intercourse. That was for amateurs. Even Gajja found single- and double-X films redundant. “What’s the use of a story?” he had asked Madhu. “We know where the cock ends up!”
“Yes, yes,” echoed another man. “Put on the triple! Stop this AIDS phillum! You are trying to scare us! AIDS is not real!”
Ah, there it is, thought Madhu. There was always that rare coconut, always male, who believed that AIDS was a phantom, something religious people and the government had concocted to restrict the enjoyment of sex. Even if a pojeetive worm existed, the thinking went, if one drank a soda or anything fizzy immediately after intercourse, it would flush out the worm through the urine. Madhu had heard men speak this way time and again. She thought it best to let them believe in the power of soda.
She could sense Salma getting hot again, burning with the desire to speak. Two other people had disrupted the proceedings, so there was no danger she would be singled out. She turned around, faced the audience, and took off: “These bhenchoth randis come here to teach me—me—about sex? I have swallowed more sperm than they have drunk water!”
Gajja laughed. He loved Salma’s tirades. He called her the greatest orator in the city. If only some political party would recruit her. No one else could speak with such candour.
Salma’s truth had landed flush on the Mary’s face.
“Chudayl, take your condoms, blow some air into them, and fly away from here,” Salma added with a flourish of her hand.
The Mary ignored her and waved a packet of condoms. “These are chocolate flavoured, so they will taste good,” she said.
“I hate chocolates,” said Salma softly, without anger.
The Mary ignored her.
“You’re not listening to me,” said Salma. “The last thing my father gave me before he sold me here was a chocolate.”
Madhu saw the way Salma suddenly quietened, going into a shell as though her head had become soft, as though the skull had turned to pulp at the mention of chocolate.
Madhu understood. Even Madhu had her chocolates—the things that reminded her of home, of people she had loved or had made the mistake of trusting. No matter where people were or what they were doing, their chocolates had a way of taking them back.
—
Madhu was ten. He lived with his parents and younger brother in a one-bedroom flat in a building called Shakti. It was 1984—an important year in his life. It was the year he made his first real friend, a boy named Taher, whose father owned a stationery shop just below the building. Taher and Madhu lived in Shakti and went to the same school, but until 1984 they rarely spoke. No one noticed Madhu except when he had to walk to the blackboard to spell out an English word. Mrs. Bhaskar loved to give them spelling tests.
“Who would like to spell obedient?”
“Who would like to spell continent?”
“Who would like to spell miracle?”
No one would, so the pupils were chosen randomly by Mrs. Bhaskar’s crooked finger. Her forefinger was malformed, bent permanently, and when she looked at one student and said, “You,” there was confusion because her finger was pointing in another direction. The students learned to look in her eyes to gauge correctly.
“You,” she said. “Yes, you, Madhu. Come here and spell canal.”
Madhu knew how to spell the word. He was sure he knew. But when he was halfway to the board, someone said, “He walks like a girl!”
Madhu froze. He just stood there in his short pants and felt as naked as a gushing river.
“Is there a reason you are standing in the middle of the class?” Mrs. Bhaskar asked.
Of course there was. He had been found out.
But Mrs. Bhaskar was so concerned about canal that Madhu’s feelings did not enter her mind. The minute Madhu resumed walking, the laughter became even louder because now he was trying not to walk like a girl. What resulted was a new kind of human being who tried not to sway, who became stiff and professorial. Madhu made it to the board, spelled the word, and fled to his seat. It was only when he sat down and read what he had written that he realized how scared he was. Instead of the word canal, he had written three others:
I am
sorry.
His father had tried so hard to make him a boy. How could he fail at something he already was? Mrs. Bhaskar must have seen the pain in his face because she never called him back to spell anything. But the damage had been done. After that incident, Madhu tried not to walk much when other people were around.
The only person who showed him kindness that day was Taher. He did not look at Madhu but he did not laugh either. He was quiet even though the boy next to him was grinning.
That was enough consolation for Madhu.
A couple of weeks later, Taher took Madhu by surprise once again.
It was a Sunday morning and a cricket game was on. Five a side, the boys from Madhu’s building versus the richer ones from Navjeevan Society, the building opposite. For the past hour, Madhu had heard that wretched red rubber ball being thwacked around behind the building. The shouts of excitement only made Madhu feel more out of sync with life, and he sank to the floor. The hard tiles became an ocean in which he could drown. He imagined diving into the wet floor and resurfacing as an Apsara, a celestial being with whom he’d felt an immediate kinship when he’d encountered her in the Amar Chitra Katha comics. So he rose from his ocean bed to get some air, to show himself unabashedly to the fishermen and hunters and whoever else might be on shore at the time, without realizing that he was standing right by the kitchen window.
The minute Taher saw him, Madhu ducked out of sight.
Then he heard a boy’s mother call him home. There was a protest from Taher and the others that this boy was the only one left to bat, but the mother didn’t care and the son went home. Madhu heard the boys from Navjeevan shouting, “We won, we won, we won,” and then, “No double batting, no!” And then Madhu heard his name.
What had he done?
Taher called out his name a second time. “Come down and bat,” said Taher.
“What?”
“You’re on our team. Come down and bat.”
“But…”
“Come down, I said.”
Taher was so firm, so tough. And he wanted Madhu. It was this fact that had Madhu running for the stairs. His mother did not mind. She was, as usual, praying before the picture of Shiva with deadened devotion, but she managed to send him off with a smile. If only his father were home, Madhu thought, he would have been proud.
Someone explained the match situation to Madhu, but he wasn’t listening. The bat was too damn heavy and he had forgotten how to hold it even though his father had tried to teach him several times.
“We need four runs to win,” said Taher. “I hate these bastards. I want to win.”
Bastards. Yes, the entire lot of them. Anything for Taher.
The bowler came in. Madhu closed his eyes and thought of Kapil Dev, that great all-rounder, because his father loved Kapil. But this was no time for inspiration. It was a time for miracles.
Something connected.
Madhu sent the ball flying into a second-floor window. Glass shattered. It was a six; they had won. Taher jumped in celebration as the opposition skulked away, but Madhu stood there frozen, terrified that his father would have to pay for the broken glass. They were the poorest family in the building.
“Never mind,” said Taher. It was the window of his own flat, and he would never replace the glass because it was a symbol of victory.
Madhu’s head was spinning. He was associated with victory. He was a symbol. Taher thumped him on the back. Madhu thumped him back.
Then Taher smiled at Madhu. A soft breeze hit Taher’s cheeks and made him squint, and Madhu was overwhelmed with love. He tried to shake Taher’s hand to thank him profusely. But he ended up holding it instead—only for a second or two, but it felt like forever.
It was Monday by the time Madhu landed on earth again.
When he entered his classroom, he was not ashamed to walk. He walked to his seat and took his time. During the first recess, he waited for Taher to come over and say hello. He would have gladly accepted even a sneeze from Taher, but no word or gesture came his way. During the lunch break, he went outside and sat on his favourite tree branch. He ate his lunch here, alone, five days a week. The tree’s white branches were like tusks, and it was on this tree that he had started to like the feeling of something hard and solid between his legs.
“There’s our champion,” said Taher.
He had appeared suddenly, accompanied by Nitin and Sohail, neither of whom had ever before talked to Madhu.
“Hi,” said Madhu eagerly. He jumped off his branch. “Hi…” He had no idea what to say. Most of his conversations were with himself.
“I heard you smashed a huge six,” said Sohail.
“Yes, I broke his window,” said Madhu proudly, looking at Taher. “We really showed them, those Navjeevan bastards…” He forced the words off his tongue, feeling like a charlatan.
“You want to play with us again?” asked Taher.
Every cell in Madhu’s body wanted to refuse. Holding a bat again would only remind him of his disapproving father.
“Sure, I love cricket,” he said.
“Come with us,” said Taher. He put his arm around Madhu, and Madhu went electric. He could have given light to an entire slum.
“Where’s the bat and ball?” he asked.
“We don’t need one,” said Taher, and he pushed Madhu to the ground. Madhu wanted so much to believe that he had stumbled and caused his own fall. But he could not convince himself that Taher’s foot had landed on his stomach by accident. He squirmed in pain.
“Why did you hold my hand yesterday?” asked Taher.
Madhu wanted to answer, but he was drowning in two separate streams of tears coming down his cheeks. The drops from the right eye were because he was in physical pain; the ones from the left were because he had allowed himself to think that he had made a friend.
“Do you know that the boys from Navjeevan saw you hold my hand? I’m the bloody captain!”
“I’m sorry…I was only trying to shake it…”
Perhaps it was because he crawled away that Madhu was saved from being beaten further. But he understood something valuable as he hid under a bush for the next hour. He would not be allowed to walk tall, to make friends like normal boys did. He had been sent to this earth to grovel, to make his acquaintance with the worms and the weeds, and when he longed for company or support from the outside world, only a stray dog would show up, the way it had that day, raising its hind leg, showering upon that bush something pungent and acidic, preparing Madhu for the taste that his life would have in the years to come.
—
Gajja had passed out with his head on the desk at Porno Parlour. Madhu left him there and walked to Padma’s brothel with Salma. On the rare occasion that Padma was unwell, Salma ran the day-to-day activities of the place and was hoping to someday occupy a full-time managerial position. But until then, she continued to take whoever paid her.
Madhu understood the detachment that a prostitute required. After so many years of service, Salma had learned how to disassociate herself from her body. It was the same for Madhu. She remembered how once, when a man was inside her, she had seen both him and herself from a distance. She had been so outside herself she thought she had died. But she had come back into her body the minute he was done, and once again felt its agonies and petty complaints.
“This new parcel…when should I meet her?” asked Salma.
“Not yet. But we both have to be prepared. If she is to be transported, I am her adopted mother. But once she’s opened, you will be in charge of her. That’s what madam said.”
“Things are so complicated now. Before, there was no mother. I was just left in the dark. If the cops found me, they fucked me or took a bribe. It was so simple. Why is madam doing all this?”
“The cops are turning honest.”
“And I’m a virgin,” said Salma, “who has never even seen a cock.”
At 3:00 a.m., most of the sex workers were wrapping things up for the night. They sat on the bro
thel steps, lifting their hair to wipe the sweat off their necks. They looked like factory workers with aching muscles. Young men in tight jeans and spiky haircuts stood around motorcycles and spoke about their exploits, boasting about which prostitute they had slept with, or how many. Salma went up the stairs to join the snoring of several others. The women’s dreams would criss-cross in the dark, and they would all wake up at around noon, when the designated chai maker would prepare the morning brew.
Madhu climbed the stairs to the third floor, wondering if she should feed the parcel. She decided against it. It was too soon for her to provide any comfort. The first night was all about submission.
The parcel was crouched into a ball in the cage, more in a collapsed state of exhaustion than sleep. Even when Madhu aimed the flashlight at her, she did not move. Madhu felt disoriented as she studied the parcel. She would have to tread carefully with this one. Sometimes the parcels lost their minds sooner than expected. Sometimes they never came back. Some clients were okay with sleeping with a drugged doll; others were not.