by Anosh Irani
On some evenings, when the wedding party was large, Tarana and Anjali tagged along as well to add glamour and class to the proceedings, or so they themselves proclaimed. Otherwise they sat at home and looked pretty until 7:00 p.m., when they lay down on bunk beds and let the city’s lunds enter them. Middle-class wives who refused to part with their precious arseholes did not know that Tarana and Anjali were providing that service to their husbands, taking them in just like Mother Teresa took in Calcutta’s homeless. But unlike Mother Teresa, who charged not a pie, Tarana and Anjali were not selfless. At a thousand rupees per shot, they were a premium product, and they charged an even higher fixed rate for the whole night. It was always better to be bought for the whole night, because at the most, the man would take them twice, and so drunk was he by the second time, he would not be able to locate the arsehole. Tarana and Anjali would simply give him the illusion that he was penetrating them by letting him slide back and forth between their legs. It was a trick the hijras used and enjoyed; it was their little joke on the male species. Whenever the rest of the hijra community—the ones who only begged or blessed newlyweds for a living—looked down upon the dhandhewalis, the hijra prostitutes took solace in the fact that they were capable of tricking men, making them limp and powerless, even if for a few hours only.
According to the hijra code, those hijras who did sex work were prohibited from living under the same roof as the badhai hijras, but gurumai paid no heed to rules; in her mind, they reeked of hypocrisy. If the hijra community refused to acknowledge that prostitution was the chosen profession of some, what did sense did the rule make? Plus, she had told Madhu, Hijra House was not a roof. It was an entire world, and she its central sun.
Right now, her burning glare fell upon the cash that Sona presented to her. “Not bad,” said gurumai, counting the money. “But there should be more.”
“There’s another hijra gang that has been making the rounds in our area. No one will give money twice to us. They say we have already collected.”
“They have to be fakes,” said gurumai. “No real hijras would dare to come in my area.”
The fake hijras were also known as “berupias,” cross-dressing men who still had their genitals. They had no business posing as hijras but had discovered that it was a lucrative side income. Even if men had been castrated and were eunuchs physically, it did not automatically mean that they were hijras. Castrated or not, the hijra was a state of being, a space that the members of the third gender navigated and that was mainly defined by the guru-disciple relationship. One had to be initiated into a particular gharana, one of seven hijra households, by a guru. To be a true hijra, one had to undergo Rit—a series of rituals—and familiarize oneself with hijdapan, the hijra way of being.
Madhu had caught one of these fake hijras about a year ago. The signs had been evident: She did not know the name of her guru or what hijra household she belonged to. And the charlatan had not known how to respond when Madhu spoke in Farsi, the secret language of the hijras, a strange mixture of Urdu and Hindi that had nothing to do with the Persian language. Also known as “Ulti Bhasha,” it was an upside-down tongue that had been devised by the hijra gurus ages ago, similar to the code priests used in places of worship so that the average pilgrim could not decipher what they were saying. While the code had been developed by priests so they could ply their trade, the hijras went one step further: they used it for protection.
Madhu could see the frustration on gurumai’s face. If she were even half the hijra she had been ten years ago, no imposter would have the courage to enter her domain. She was counting Sona’s money again, ruminating. These fake hijras were making holes in her pockets.
“I have made business cards,” said Bulbul.
“Hah?”
Bulbul handed gurumai a laminated card with her passport-sized photograph on it. It carried her name in Hindi, English, and Marathi, along with the name of her gurumai.
“All of us can have these made and hand them out…so if anyone comes to collect, they can match the face,” said Bulbul.
Gurumai chortled, a piggish snort that made everyone else gather around the business card. On the back, Bulbul had printed, “BEWARE OF FAKE EUNUCHS.”
“Maybe you should put a photograph of your arsehole instead of your face,” gurumai said. “Because that’s how most men would recognize you all.”
But then gurumai could see that Bulbul had made a genuine effort, and perhaps it was not such a bad idea after all. So before Bulbul tragically retreated to the bathroom, gurumai turned to Roomali, who was next in line to hand over her earnings.
Roomali had her head down. Her days were reserved for learning English and how to read and write Hindi. She had already succeeded in writing words such as pen and sun by copying them down from her textbook. She wanted to adopt a child of her own someday, and in moments when she was feeling low, she would write the word mummy a hundred times. This was one of those moments. As lean as the very roomali rotis she was named after, she stood still, a forlorn silhouette, her previous night’s mascara smudged with tears and the morning’s deposit of mucus. She gave gurumai a couple of crumpled notes that she had crushed in her nervousness. Gurumai did not say a word, which was perhaps even more humiliating for Roomali than if she had been mocked. She had not lived up to her potential, the way gurumai thought she would, and that sentiment cut through the silence loud and clear.
Madhu quickly moved in to take Roomali’s place. Madhu, once the jewel of the brothel, was now a mere beggar. The day her gurumai relegated her to the streets, five years ago, to compete with legless men, widows, and pickpockets, she knew she had reached a low point. Hijra gurus also made pojeetives do begging work. It was an unsaid rule: when hijras were too sick and ugly to fuck, too weak to sing and dance, begging was their only recourse. By demoting her to the streets, gurumai had made Madhu feel like a pojeetive even though she wasn’t one.
Gurumai wasn’t surprised when Madhu handed her the initial payment from Padma. It was far, far more than what the others had collected.
“Where’s that from?” asked Bulbul.
“Kutti, tera kaam kar,” said gurumai. “Stick to your task.”
From each bundle of cash, gurumai kept half. The rest she handed over to the respective earners. That was how the tradition worked. Fifty per cent of the disciples’ earnings went to the guru. It seemed steep to some chelas when they first entered the clan, but the payment included food and rent, and spiritual guidance from gurumai. More than anything, it was the semblance of a family they were paying for, and the comfort that when they fell ill and were old and infirm, they would never be alone. “And don’t forget the police,” gurumai always reminded her hijras when they—especially Tarana and Anjali—bitched about giving up half their money. “Who will protect you from them? Only I can oil them, line their pockets with hash and cash, so that they will leave you to your work.”
Madhu went to the dressing table that she shared with Bulbul and put her money in there. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Roomali stuffing a meagre amount into her English textbook. Madhu took a couple hundred rupees from her share and slid them into Roomali’s hand while no one was looking. She winked at Roomali, whose tiny eyes widened in eternal thanks. Roomali did not know what to say, but even if she did, Madhu would not have heard her. She had already sped out the door to feed the parcel.
—
Downstairs, the morning’s rhythms gave Madhu a sense of calm. The laundryman was hanging white shirts to dry, the scavengers were on a smoke break after scrounging through the night’s garbage, and temple bells were sounding, their shrill rings jolting Madhu into walking faster. She had told the priest she would come meet him, so the bells were like the ring of a mobile phone, a where-are-you call. She entered the temple and collected a cloth bag from one of the devotees. The knot was secured tight, and the form of the thing inside the bag was long and coiled and it thrashed about from time to time to show its displeasure.
Her next stop was a toddy shop. She paid the man, removed the marigold that adorned the mouth of the bottle, and gulped the white ferment down. Breakfast done, she hurried past the Khubsurat Beauty Parlour, remembering that she needed to get her eyebrows done. The parlour had a new sign up: “Beauty Class (only for ladies).” Outside Padma’s brothel, a new DVD store had opened. Inside, boys were watching an action movie on the computer screen. Distracted by a car explosion, she stepped on a discarded blue shirt with blood stains on it before she rushed up the stairs.
This time when Madhu went through the trap door, the parcel was awake. Good. Madhu doubted whether the parcel had slept even a wink since she’d last seen her. That was the purpose of the statement Madhu had left her with: “Now think about what you’ve done.” It disoriented the parcels completely, made them think they were here because they had done something wrong. They would recount the last few days that they had spent with their mothers and fathers and look for signs of anger or disappointment from either parent that would help them identify why they were being punished to such an extreme. But they had done nothing, and when they could not find a reason, it drove them crazy, and they could not hold down the smallest morsel of food because their bellies were so full of guilt.
The parcel was holding the cage bars, shaking them, and for a second she looked like a possessed little thing. Human beings were all the same, reflected Madhu, no matter where they came from. Under duress, all were animals, trying to flee with the same clumsiness. The begging and pleading had begun. Madhu did not look at the parcel’s face; she didn’t have one as far as Madhu was concerned. As the parcel’s voice rose, Madhu stayed completely still. But in staying still, in trying to block out the parcel in front of her, the only place available to Madhu was the past. She remembered her first parcel, and the second, and how they had come to her, and why she agreed, rather chose, to do this work.
She thought of it as an act of compassion.
In her heyday, when she was put on display in Hijra Gulli on the veranda of the brothel, lit up like a bird in a cage, her skin smoother than anything in the vicinity, she’d had a young cop as a client. He was a junior constable who paid her on time, was respectful, and had a wife. Madhu took a liking to him because he never fucked her in anger. He did not treat her arsehole as a complaint box for his furies and failures, as most men did. But then one night he blew her apart, which was fine—once was okay—and she was getting paid, so who was she to talk about quality control? It was what he did after the sex that got to her. He sobbed.
He had been asked by his superior to conduct a raid on Padma’s brothel. And so he had, swift and silent as a knife in the night. His superior told him he was not to harass Padma; the raid was simply a formality, for there was “pressure from above.” But what he found there made him faint in rage: a girl, about nine years old, talking to herself, locked up in a cupboard. He took her back to his station, and his superior said, “Good work. I will handle it.” So the girl was fed and the young cop was told to go home. The next day, he found the girl in the lock-up. She was in a cell by herself so no one could harm her. But why were they not trying to find out who she was?
The answer came in the form of Padma, who walked into the station as though she was the girl’s grandmother and took her back to the brothel. No reports were filed, nothing. The young cop received his share of the bribe, which he had to take if he wanted to keep his job. “This girl, she has gone mad,” said the young cop to Madhu. “They even know her name: Nilu. She used to be able to read and write. Now she has lost that. The whole time in the lock-up, she kept scratching the wall. I have a daughter. She is only one year old, but I wish she had never been born.”
For the first time, Madhu did something without gurumai’s permission. She went up to Padma and introduced herself. She looked like she was on fire and her reasoning was just as searing. “We are all women,” said Madhu. This made Padma sneer, but that was okay. “Each time a man rapes a girl, she is raping you, she is raping me,” said Madhu. The facts were simple: Almost every brothel madam had been raped in the past. That is why they were able to do this work. It had happened to them, they had survived, so there was no reason the girls would not. Rape was like the common cold. You had to catch it at some point.
“What do you want?” Padma asked.
“I want to take the power away from the men.”
“Without men, this game doesn’t work,” Padma replied.
“They are destroying the girls.”
“Why do you care?”
“I used to be a boy once,” said Madhu. “But in my heart, I was always a girl. And it is men who fuck us up. It is men who make us who we are. But you are not interested in my life.”
“That’s right,” said Padma.
“Then I will say this: it is bad business. That girl, Nilu, has lost her mind.”
The mention of Nilu’s name made Padma take notice. She sat up a bit straighter. “How do you know her name?”
“It doesn’t matter, Padma Madam,” said Madhu, offering respect because it would be unwise to get too much of an edge. “All I’m saying is that the girl will be of no use to you now. No man wants a crazy, even if she is underage.”
“I’m listening,” said Padma.
“Madam, I will keep men in this game, but I will use them differently. I will use them in such a way that the girls won’t lose their minds.”
“Does your gurumai know you are here?” asked Padma.
“No, but I’m hoping you will speak with her,” said Madhu. “And whatever I make from parcel work will go to gurumai.”
Madhu knew that money would keep gurumai happy. The fact that Madhu was wanted by Padma might make gurumai appreciate Madhu even more.
“Fine,” said Padma. “The next time a choti batti comes, I will send for you.”
A girl was not called a “parcel” then. The code name was “choti batti.” Madhu did not know who had coined the term, but “little light” did not sit well with her. It meant that the light in these girls was being snuffed out, and Madhu’s aim was to somehow keep even a tiny spark alive. Not a spark of hope, not at all, because that was the deadliest of sparks, but something, a small, good-for-nothing spark that would prevent them from going completely mad. So she had replied to Padma, “Yes, call me when the next parcel arrives.” It just came to her, that word, and perhaps there was a better one out there, but it was her first contribution to the game.
Madhu knew she needed to have a game plan, one that made business sense to Padma. The brothel pimps—not the clients—were the ones who inflicted the most damage, so Madhu had to keep them at bay. To train the girls, the pimps burned their soles with hot irons. Madhu explained to Padma that dainty parcel feet were a delicacy for men. They should be left untouched. When vaginas were burned with cigarette butts, marks were left there as well, and while drunken men did not care about aesthetics, the girls developed infections that would render them unfit for consumption. Thus, step by step, Madhu appealed to the common sense in Padma, and even though Padma knew what Madhu was doing, something within her thawed, and just an ant-sized piece of her allowed Madhu in.
“As long as the girls listen, I don’t care what you do,” Padma said.
Obedience was paramount. The pimps prepared the parcels for whoredom by plundering them beyond belief, turning them into vegetables. But if they were meat, meat they would remain, thought Madhu. She wanted their minds, not their bodies. It was only through their minds that she would be able to access them at a later point. If the mind was yours, the body could be made to withstand any indignity, she figured. Hope was taken away through the body, but it could be reinstalled through the mind at a later point, if required. But how to discipline them without raping them? How to scare them without thrashing them?
The pimps did not realize that because they tortured the parcels so much, the parcels began to prefer their cages. The only time they were let outside was when they had sex with a client, so the cage w
as home, the dark sanctuary where the parcels found relief. They adjusted themselves to their new domain quickly, the way tiny animals did, sensing the danger outside, realizing that the cage was their friend. The bars were trying to keep them in and safe, just like the arms of their own mothers and fathers who had tried to protect them but could not. At least, that is what some parcels believed.
When Madhu finally got the call from Padma that a new parcel would arrive in a day, she still had no answer as to how she would train them without physical violence. Yes, she could disturb them psychologically, but not too much because the mind was the very thing she was trying to save. She lay in the dark that night, listening to gurumai’s snoring and thinking how much it reminded her of her father, that deep, disgruntled growl voicing itself against the world, even during sleep. When he was a boy, the young Madhu had imagined that his sleeping father was not human. His skin was so smooth and oily, completely hairless. By day he was a harmless, well-mannered history teacher, but by night he was a bald snake hissing away at the injustice in his own life, and just before he plunged into the deepest sleep, he let out a final hiss, the way a wick was extinguished, water over dreams. As Madhu lay awake beside gurumai’s bed, her father’s memory made her shiver. Then it made her shiver again, this time with excitement. Her father had shown her how to train the parcels without laying a finger on them.
—
When the parcel finally stopped howling, the silence brought Madhu back to the present. But as soon as the parcel saw that she had Madhu’s attention, the countless questions began all over again, begging questions, cries for help that fell upon Madhu’s skin one after another: “Who are you? Why am I here? There is a mistake. Where am I? Please, please, please.” Most of these pleas slid off Madhu’s sari on their own. The few that remained she brushed off with a flick of the wrist.