by Anosh Irani
The smell was very strong. The parcel had urinated in the cage. Madhu hated this part, the stripping away of all human dignity. But it had to be done. It was for the parcel’s own good. The more useless she felt, the more she would listen, and that would enable Madhu to get through to her. It would help Madhu save her from greater pains and indignities.
It was time for Madhu and the parcel to meet. Madhu rattled the cage bars with the flashlight. The parcel snapped awake, as though injected with adrenaline. She tried to sit up but her elbow gave way. Slowly, Madhu turned the flashlight away from the parcel and detected the stream of urine that had trickled toward a corner.
Most of these Nepali girls had never seen a hijra. Madhu had a flower in her hair, but she knew it did not make her softer. Through the cage bars, her face would look even more contorted—the blood-red lips, the jasmine in her hair failing to offset the manly face, the dark circles under her eyes only proving that she did not deserve sleep. Madhu knew that she did not need to act threatening. Her natural face was enough. She wished she could adjust the amount of light, make it softer, the way candles made even evil things glow and allowed one to find a glimmer of hope in them.
She quelled her shame and lit her own face in the flashlight’s beam. It had been years since she had done this. Years ago, her face had been pretty. It was different now but not meant to scare. She hated the line that she would speak next. She had to run the line in her head for a few seconds because her Nepali was very rusty. She knew it in bits and pieces, had picked it up from Roomali, her hijra sister from Nepal, and from the parcels of the past as well. But she was worrying needlessly. The moment she opened her mouth, the words just flowed.
“Now think about what you’ve done,” she told the parcel.
—
As she walked down the street a half-hour later, Madhu’s stomach growled. While the rest of Mumbai slept, Sukhlaji Street was awake. Some called 3:30 a.m. the wee hours of the morning, but for Madhu it was still night. A kind of pulse came from behind closed doors—the heartbeats of prostitutes thinking of their families, their faint, tiny breaths seeping through the cracks of windows, making the air staler with the same old sighs and longings. The slurred speech of an alcoholic tried to cross the street to reach the ears of another drunkard, and stray dogs covered with sores limped like handicapped angels, wondering why no one was bandaging their blisters. The city never slept—that is what people said time and again. It never slept, thought Madhu, because wounds were wide awake.
The opium dens of Sukhlaji Street had shut down ages ago, and the semi-transparent skeletons of the addicts who had once drifted through this area were long gone. Madhu had learned that no one died on opium; they became lighter. But then opium gave way to heroin, and suddenly men and women were turning white in the darkness, their veins freezing toward death. The new drug had proven to be too much happiness streaming through bodies not trained for it. Heroin had started to catch on when a man walked into the opium dens with a VCR and videocassette. His employers had filmed for the den owners how to use this drug, how to prepare it, how to inject it, how to push it into the body like a child going in, an abortion in reverse, hot and fresh, cooked to enter and die.
Now only one skeleton remained, but he was no addict.
He was called Maachis because he was matchstick thin, and he sold sweetmeats: warm, sticky gulab jamuns that melted in the mouth so fast, the tongue desperately tried to savour every bite, only to sing for more. For Madhu, they were a habit as addictive as heroin, and they were the last sweet thing left in her life. They had once been gurumai’s addiction as well. For years Madhu could hear gurumai slurping over gulab jamuns like some gluttonous thing in the dark. But since her health had started to wane, gurumai ate them only a couple of times a year, as a treat for surviving.
If it were not for the gulab jamun, Madhu might not have become a hijra, for she would never have met gurumai. And if it were not for her father, she would not have gone in the middle of the afternoon, in the scorching heat, to Geeta Bhavan to buy gulab jamuns. Madhu remembered the day well. “Sir,” as Madhu’s father was called by the students at Maharashtra College, had been correcting history papers all morning, occasionally mumbling to his wife that his intelligence had not been rewarded, because his brother, less educated than him, had become a successful businessman, and here he was, in a flat bought from his younger brother’s charity, a humiliation he would never recover from. He took his glasses off his nose and said to Madhu, “Get me some gulab jamuns.”
Madhu’s mother gave him the money. His father was never to be bothered with matters as trivial as money, although Madhu knew that was all he cared about. His mother would never buy anything for herself; she would save every rupee like it was a human life, and thank God she did, because it helped in times such as these, when her husband’s salary was a slow train, approaching at an agonizing pace. As Madhu went down the stairs, he imagined he was following an escape route or pathway to another land. He tried so hard not to think of himself as defective, but now, in his tenth year on earth, the heavens were speaking to him, saying, “You’re right to think that way. You leaked out of God’s palm; you slipped through the cracks.” To make things right, the gods in heaven had given his parents another child, a real son, who was now almost a year old. They doted on him obsessively, as though he was a combination of movie star and spiritual guru, when all he did was shriek and shit through the night. So in addition to his own imperfection, Madhu had been carrying his brother’s magnificence for the past year, and it was becoming too much to bear. The weight of his thoughts was so heavy it took him ages to cross the road to Geeta Bhavan.
He paid the man at the counter, wondering if he should stick his hand in the plastic bag and eat one there and then. The thought of going back to his father made him swallow two. He wiped his sticky hand on his shorts, and then he felt the urge to wipe his hand on his thigh. As he did, he felt a shadow fall over him—or maybe it was a breeze, or the promise of a breeze, only darker.
That mouth, those lips. That eternal pout.
The words that came out of that mouth flew toward Madhu with such purpose, they were unlike anything that had come his way until then.
“Kya, chickni.”
Hello, smooth one.
The mouth belonged to a tall man-woman in a sari, with hair parted in the centre, large gold earrings dangling from either ear, a nose flattening itself out, trying to cover as much area as possible, and lips—Madhu could not get over those red swollen lips.
She grinned, and so did the two others beside her. Madhu took one look at them and dropped the bag of gulab jamuns and ran. He heard raucous laughter before it was drowned out by the horn of an Ambassador that almost ran over him. In his hurry to cross the road, he caused a chaotic tangle of cars and motorcycles and a string of abuses. By the time Madhu got to the other side, the apparition was already there, waiting for Madhu with the bag of gulab jamuns.
“Chickni,” she said again, “don’t be afraid.”
She bent down to give Madhu the gulab jamuns, but not before she slid her hand in the bag, picked one, and popped it in her mouth. Madhu could smell her breath. Her lips were red from betel juice, ruder and flashier than any lipstick.
Madhu did not know it then, but this would be his gurumai. His mai-baap, his “mother-father,” his shelter, his solace, his destruction.
For once, the street Madhu lived on had not been mundane. His whole body was throbbing wildly. He had seen these apparitions before, but never up close.
By the time he rang his own doorbell, he felt pleased to see his father.
But from that moment on, gurumai never left him. Her words hummed in his head with the authority of an anthem, as though Madhu were a country and the song had been composed just for him.
Chickni. She had referred to Madhu in the female tense. It made Madhu feel strangely empowered. His ten-year-old body felt long and powerful and free, and this so scared him that he wanted to sle
ep between his mother and father but his request fell upon deaf ears because the baby had that spot. He felt a beautiful rage against his brother and stayed up all night begging Shiva to make his mother’s nipples poisonous.
It had now been thirty years since that day when Madhu first met gurumai. In that time, the shopkeepers from his childhood, who had sold smuggled Rado watches and playing cards with naked women on them, had died; police commissioners had come and gone; and the children of Kamathipura had grown up to become drivers and watchmen. In that time, Madhu had stopped wearing men’s underwear and started wearing panties, and the very buildings that housed the brothels were in danger of being reduced to rubble, made into large vacant spaces ready to be plundered by real estate developers. Bulldozers would soon be showing up on doorsteps like metal gangsters, like great conquerors, but one thing remained constant: the fear and exhilaration and confusion that Madhu had felt that day. There was no single word to describe what he had felt when he and gurumai met, just as there is no one word you could say to a mother whose child has just died. There were many words and they were all useless. And when Madhu felt useless, as she did right now, she put her hand into the plastic packet and slipped a gulab into her mouth.
3
No matter how late Madhu went to sleep, she was always the first to wake up. The slightest hint of light was enough to get her boiling water for chai. Years ago, when she was the pick of the brothel, she was allowed to sleep until noon—those thighs and eyes needed pampering. Now it was Tarana and Anjali who were accorded special status.
“Boil one of those crows in that chai,” said Sona. “They never let me sleep…”
Roomali was already awake. She had put on her reading glasses and was practising the English alphabet in a notebook. Devyani’s first action of the day was to iron her black sari. By the time Bulbul had emerged from the toilet, gurumai was circling an incense stick around the framed picture of the poet that adorned her wall, a sign for her disciples to stand in line with the night’s earnings in hand.
Most hijra gurus had a photograph of their gurus, whom they paid obeisance to, but gurumai’s source of strength was no hijra; she revered a poet who had lived with his wife in Delhi, and who had taken gurumai under his wing when gurumai was just ten.
When gurumai was born, it was clear that nature had given her both male and female organs, but in such minuscule doses that she could claim to be neither. Her parents had to choose one sex, and so they decided gurumai was a boy and named him Lalu. Even though gurumai’s family begged the midwife to be discreet, secrets, like pus, have a way of leaking out, and when the honour of the entire family was at stake, when gurumai’s sisters and brothers were spoken of in hushed tones and even their gender was questioned, gurumai’s parents had no option but to distance gurumai from the rest of the family. When word came that a poet from Delhi was looking to hire a boy servant from their village who spoke the same dialect as his wife, the opportunity was God sent.
When little Lalu was dropped off at the poet’s home, he was terrified to see so much furniture, all the lights hanging near the poet’s table, and all the pens, and the cold Delhi air went straight for his nostrils and tried to drill right through to his brain. The poet sensed how lost the boy was. He held his hand and told him not to worry.
“I will look after you,” said the poet.
But Lalu was not sure what this meant. He thought the poet was teasing him and would send him back to the village because he looked so small and weak. And that would dishonour his family even more.
“I can cook well,” said Lalu. “I’m strong also. In the village I used to…”
The poet’s smile disarmed Lalu, made him stop.
“All you have to do is talk to my wife,” said the poet. “Remind her who I am, remind her who she is. I will tell you things each day and you will tell my wife, again and again. I know it will prevent her brain from getting sicker.”
The doctors had told the poet that he was mad to think that way—the illness was irreversible. The poet had replied that of course he was mad. He was a poet, after all.
The things that the poet told Lalu made him respect the man. He told Lalu how they had lost their only son in a car accident, after which his wife’s condition started to deteriorate rapidly. But instead of searching for flames that could reach God and burn Him, the poet’s wife told him to write even more, things about God, good things, mysterious things. The last thing she told the poet was that there was no answer to their pain, and there never would be. That was the first lesson young Lalu learned and accepted, that there was no answer to his question: Why was I born this way?
“Why itself is the illness,” the poet told Lalu. “Why did my son die? There is no answer. None at all. You see?”
Later, when Lalu mustered enough courage to tell the poet’s wife the truth about himself, that he was incomplete, he figured it was safe because she would not respond or tell anyone. But there was a flicker in her eye; it lit up, the way eyes do when they spot the truth. About a year later, when he told the poet as well, the man smiled his kind smile and said, “It’s okay.” It was the first time someone had accepted Lalu.
The next three years were the best of his life. But when the poet’s wife died, something in him disintegrated too. After they burned her body, the poet patted Lalu’s head and told him to go to bed; he needed to be alone. When Lalu woke up to urinate, he noticed that the table lamp was on. The poet’s head was on the table and he had slit his wrists. When Lalu looked down at his own feet, he saw that he was standing in a pool of blood. Gurumai told Madhu and the others that for years she did not wear red nail polish because looking at her feet reminded her of that night.
There was an envelope on the table with Lalu’s name on it. Lalu could not read or write, but he knew what his name looked like. The poet had shown him the letters several times. “It is your face on paper,” he had said. “You must know.” Lalu’s face now contained a thick bundle of rupees. If Lalu woke up the other servants, he would never get to keep that money. They would accuse him of stabbing the poet, too. He had no choice but to run.
But where to run to?
He was now a muscular youth with nowhere to go. And for those with nowhere to go, there was only one city. “She is mother to all,” the poet used to say. “The dreamers, the losers, the rejects, the ugly and the beautiful, the legless, the penniless, the runaways, the forgotten—she will take them all, but there is one thing she asks for, just one thing that you must possess for her to accept you.”
“What?” Lalu had asked.
“Guts,” the poet had said. “Bombay wants your intestines.”
So he caught a train to this mother city and found his way to Kamathipura. He later liked to say that the hijra within had guided him here, to Hijra Gulli itself, but this was not so. Exhausted, he could not bear to walk another inch, so he snuck into the hutch of a horse carriage outside Bombay Central station and let it take him where it pleased. It turned out that the stables were on Bellasis Road, a street that ran parallel to Kamathipura. Bellasis Road was where the Arabian mares were kept, pets of the British women who sat on them and went for gentle strolls with parasols attached to the saddles to prevent their cheeks from getting red. Others, less adventurous, had horse carriages made for them, symbols of love from their lovers and husbands, each one more ornate than the next. After India got her independence the British sold their mares to the locals, who in turn used the carriages for commercial purposes. The first two faces that Lalu saw up close in Bombay were those of white horses who had just come in after a long ride along the coast of Marine Drive. Their slobbering tongues were the warmest things he had felt against his palm, and they comforted him as he spent that first night in the hay.
Even today, the stables were still around. So was the poet—on gurumai’s wall. Not in a photograph, but in a sketch made from gurumai’s memory of him. She had asked an artist to do it for her, one who sketched criminals for the police. This was lon
g before Madhu’s time, but it was said that gurumai had described the poet with such love that it brought tears to the artist’s eyes and he refused to take even a paisa from her, and from that day on, he stopped drawing criminals for the police.
Today, the guts that Bombay required were still strong within gurumai although her body was waning. She tried to be in good spirits. Her back was erect, she seemed to be pain-free, and her silver hair was shining. This was something Madhu could not understand. Perhaps it was the advantage of refusing to see the doctor. It was best to be blind to the symptoms of your illness and weakness. That way, they had no power over you.
“Can you hurry up?” gurumai asked Sona. “Or are you waiting for your balls to grow back?”
“Sorry, I thought…”
“I can do puja with one hand and collect money with the other,” she chided as she continued circling the poet’s picture with the incense stick.
Sona, along with Bulbul and Devyani, was a badhai hijra. She and her sisters showed up at weddings, uninvited mostly, sang and danced—their performance generating the gift of fertility for the newlyweds—and bowed before the family patriarch, who gave them a cash gift that could run into high denominations, especially if Sona decided it wasn’t enough. Sona’s talent on the drums was matched only by her ability to negotiate—she did not hesitate to take a man into the corner and sweetly threaten to lift her sari and expose her barrenness for all the wedding guests to see. The inauspicious act did the trick at weddings, and the trio would usually be offered food and sherbet as well as money.
If they were on a household visit to celebrate the birth of a male child, which was the other duty of badhai hijras, any stinginess would result in Devyani putting her hand on the child’s forehead and uttering a vitriolic curse for this male to turn out just like her: impotent and seedless. Once wallets opened, so did Devyani’s heart, and then Bulbul would take over and bless the child, reverse the curse, and promise the father that the child would do him proud by spawning a few macho mards himself. She was the sponge that sucked away any feminine tendencies a male child might have.