by Anosh Irani
As he walks farther, everything comes rushing madly toward Madhu: goats covered in sawdust from the lumber mills; cats licking their way through tiny piles of garbage; a public urinal near a wafer shop, one smell destroying the other; a mosque bluer than any sea he has seen; fat women with thick eyeliner, brushing their teeth with black paste; doctors’ dispensaries with open sitting rooms and sick women sleeping on benches. All of these things move toward him. No one cares that he is here. No one’s eyes are on him. He is free to walk here. He is not being watched. But he has lost the people he was following. They are no longer visible, and he does not know where he is or for how long he has walked. He turns around but cannot see the way home. Then he bumps into someone. She looks at him. And he stares at those lips once again.
She looks at Madhu again, closely. Madhu has changed since she last saw him. He has grown taller. She stares at his legs; they are the best things he has.
“Chickni,” she says. Then she turns to the others. “Do you remember this one?”
But the other two don’t. Or maybe they don’t care.
“What are you doing here?” she asks Madhu.
“I…”
“Tell,” she says.
“I’m lost.”
“Lost?” She grins. “Where were you trying to go—school?”
The other two cackle.
“Come sit with us,” she says.
“No, I have to go.”
“But you don’t know the way,” she says. “Sit.”
She points to an old wooden bench. It is one of three at a chai stall.
“Cutting,” she tells the man who is brewing tea in a kettle with bruises all over it. She pats the wooden bench and Madhu sits next to her. She puts her arm around him. He shivers from her touch. When the chai arrives, he cups both his palms around it for warmth even though it is May. She asks where he lives. Madhu’s father has told him never to tell strangers anything, but Madhu gives her his exact address. She asks if he has any brothers or sisters. Madhu tells her about his brother. She asks what his mother does. Madhu describes how his mother used to stare at the picture of Shiva all day and pray. Now she has stopped praying. She cooks and cleans and looks after his brother.
“And your father?” she asks. “Why do you hate him?”
“I…,” Madhu stutters, astonished.
“He’s the only one you haven’t spoken about. That’s how I know.”
His father thinks Madhu has failed him. Madhu is not the son he wanted. Madhu’s walk is strange. He doesn’t have friends. Once his father took Madhu to see a movie, just the two of them, upon the insistence of Madhu’s mother, and when Madhu’s arm touched his on the armrest, his father moved it away. When his father drinks, with every out-breath there are silent curses and questions to God about Madhu’s…
“Go on,” she says. “About your what?”
“Nothing.”
“About the girl in you?”
Madhu gulps down the last of his chai and gets up.
“How old are you?” asks gurumai.
“Twelve.”
“I can help you understand what you are feeling,” she says. “No one else will be able to.”
“How do I get home?” asks Madhu. “Please tell me.”
He is scared and wants to go back. Even home will do.
“No matter where you go, you will never be home,” she says.
For a brief moment, there is sadness in her eyes when she says this. Her gaze is somewhere else. But the fire in those slits returns, and she points to the bylane that Madhu must take to get out of here. As Madhu leaves, she says, “The only place you will ever be able to call your home is where we live. It is called Hijra Gulli. You will find me there in this life but not in the next.”
Now gurumai’s words rang in Madhu’s ears all over again, on step forty-seven.
She had not moved an inch. Her brother had finally come out for his night smoke. He worked somewhere that required him to wake up in the wee hours of the morning. There he was. The sibling whom Madhu had not seen up close in decades. What had they told him about Madhu? What lies had Madhu’s father made up? And when would Madhu’s mother learn that silence is not golden?
Her brother had been four years old when she left. He was the first one to fuck Madhu up the arse. It was no truck driver or watchman. It was his own brother who took his long, invisible cock of perfection and slid it inside Madhu, inch by inch, each day. He did this when he received hugs warmer than fresh cooked food, he did it when he got fresh cooked food before Madhu did, as though Madhu’s muscles were weeds that should not grow, and he did it when he looked in the mirror and their mother combed his hair and forgot Madhu’s. He made the mirrors at home turn against Madhu, because every single time Madhu looked into the mirror, he realized it was lying. Those reflections—they were not Madhu. Madhu’s brother was the truth, and he the lie.
The hijras who spoke English called it being taken “royally.” It meant that everything was lost and plundered. Through that one opening, the entire kingdom was ravaged. It was also called “paani dhura lena,” or “to make the water leak out.” Madhu’s brother, Vijju, dear Vijju, had been the first to make Madhu’s water leak, because Madhu had cried day in and day out, realizing that he would never be worthy of his parents’ affection.
In this way, Vijju had played an important role in Madhu’s continuing affiliation with the hijras after the initial encounter. Madhu found he could not stay away from them, and a few months later, he went looking for Hijra Gulli. The simplest thing, he decided, was to go back to the chai stall. It took him a while to find it. When he asked the chaiwala where Hijra Gulli was, he was told, “I don’t know.” Madhu explained that he had been here with the hijras some months ago, but the chaiwala said he was busy—could Madhu not see that he was working? Whenever he inquired about Hijra Gulli, the person he was talking to would clamp up as though Madhu had mentioned something dangerous or spat out a contagious bug. So he waited at the corner of Foras Road and Sukhlaji Street. It was the middle of the afternoon. He waited until he saw a hijra. Then he followed her. She was Madhu’s compass, and she led Madhu to the abode of the third gender, where the mistakes of the maker were hidden from public view.
Gurumai was outside on a cot, having her calves pressed. There was a chillum in her hand, and when she saw Madhu, she coughed in surprise. She was pleased. Gulab jamuns were served just for Madhu. Then Madhu was introduced to the clan. It was obvious that gurumai was someone powerful. She commanded respect, so when she fawned over Madhu, the others had to as well. At the time, she had more than thirty disciples living with her.
Gurumai told Madhu that she understood his pain, and she saw a good future for him. She would take care of things. Madhu had no idea what she meant. She said that Madhu was an adult now and capable of making his own decisions. But Madhu protested that he was no adult; he had just turned thirteen. So gurumai explained, while gulping down gulab jamuns, that being trapped in his current state meant Madhu had more life experience than most adults, and that he should add at least five years to his current age, which would make him eighteen.
Once again she said, “I will take care of things.”
“How?” asked Madhu.
But gurumai did not answer. She explained instead that the Hijra Gulli building was for her family. She was the guru and the rest were her disciples. She thought of them as her daughters. She said that each of her disciples could have her own disciples as well. So each chela could be a guru as well. But she was the overlord of the household, without question.
Madhu asked what sort of work they did. Gurumai replied that they were in the theatre business, and the hijras roared with laughter, cackling and shrieking. It was the truest laughter Madhu had ever heard. It came from deep inside the belly. Madhu felt it was not directed at him, and he bathed in it. For once, he was part of an inside joke, even if he did not understand its meaning. Then gurumai said that her door was always open for Madhu. He was no
t poor or homeless, and yet gurumai’s offer of shelter made sense. She could see that Madhu lacked a mother’s warmth and a father’s guidance.
“I will be your mai-baap,” she said. “Your two-in-one. Both mother and father.”
“What do I have to do in return?”
“You’ll see,” she said. “But don’t worry. I will take care of things.”
Then gurumai told another hijra to show Madhu around. This one was kind-hearted. Madhu could tell by the way she looked at him that the two of them were going to get along, even though the hijra was almost twenty years older. Looking back now, Madhu was struck by how strange it was that he had already been thinking about getting along, as though some higher part of his brain had known what was going to happen. This hijra took Madhu to a dressing table and made him sit on a stool.
“You’re pretty,” she said.
“No,” Madhu said immediately.
“Just look at yourself,” she said. “So fair, so smooth.”
Madhu wasn’t that fair, but compared to the others, maybe.
“Why aren’t you looking in the mirror?” the hijra asked.
But she did not push Madhu to look. Instead, she removed some of the red bangles from her wrist and put them on Madhu, one by one. Madhu’s wrists were too slender for them, but with each bangle, he felt as though a holy amulet was covering him, offering him the tenderness that he had been so callously denied. Then she held both his hands and covered his face with them, as though they were playing hide-and-seek and Madhu was being asked not to look. But what she was doing was helping him peel off the shame that he felt. She was unmasking it, and when she said, “Open your eyes,” he looked straight into the mirror, into his own eyes. He noticed that his eyes were dark brown, and maybe it was the afternoon sun that was making them glint, but he had never seen them turn this particular shade. Then she looked at his neck and stroked it, as Madhu wanted his mother to do so badly, and he wondered how his mother could be so cold as to stop caressing him just because she had another, healthier son. Vijju’s memory brought the ugliness back to Madhu’s face, and it must have contorted, because the hijra had to hold Madhu’s chin up again, steady him, make him look in the mirror once more. This time, Madhu straightened his back and his neck felt vast, as though a thousand tongues could lick it at once. He did not feel aroused, but joyous, and the hijra must have sensed it, because she kissed him on the cheek and took the bangles off his wrists one by one, looking straight into his eyes as she did so, and Madhu sank into hers. A deep friendship was born there and then, a friendship thousands of years old—they could have been sisters in the same harem or just old men who would have given up their lungs for each other.
The hijra put the bangles back on her wrists and told Madhu that he should go home, but he was to remember how beautiful he was, and that gurumai had great things in store for him.
“You have what it takes,” she said.
When Madhu asked, “For what?” she said nothing. Then she told Madhu that she had to leave to meet her lover. Things were getting ugly because her lover’s family had found out that he was in a relationship with a hijra. She was scared that it was going to be the end of things. Would Madhu pray for her? But she believed in love more than a prayer, she quickly said. More than anything else, love had the power to make anyone melt—anyone except politicians.
Madhu said, “Fathers too.”
“Come by anytime,” the hijra told Madhu. “Next time we will powder your face and try eyeliner, okay?” Madhu’s spirit soared at the thought. As he got up from the stool, he asked her one last thing.
“What’s your name?”
“Bulbul,” she said.
Nine bangles on Madhu’s wrist had made him feel more loved than nine months in his mother’s womb. That evening at home, his father demanded to know where the hell he had been, and Madhu said, “For a walk.” He had walked straight into his future.
Hijra Gulli became his haunt. He tried on makeup, learned how to shuffle cards like a shark, chewed paan, smoked beedis until his tongue burned then gargled like one possessed so that no smell lingered when he got home, made lewd jokes, learned about two types of cocks, cut and uncut, understood the differences between a hermaphrodite, a transvestite, and a transgender, and heard gurumai’s famous line, “The Third World is not a place, it is a gender.” Madhu visited Hijra Gulli in short bursts—a quick afternoon here, a short morning there—but never at night. He was given entry into the hearts and lives of its inhabitants with total generosity, and there was only one room he was never to step into: not the randikhana with its bunk beds, not the sickroom, but the room through which he would later be transported into the Third World—the operating chamber. It was there that he would become a “chakka.”
In cricket, a chakka is a six; the ball clearing the boundary is the ultimate hit for a batsman. Hijras are also called chakkas. It was something Madhu never understood, because a chakka, unlike a hijra, is a desired result. So why assign an undesirable such as her that tag? But now from her place on the bridge, as Madhu watched her brother go back inside his flat, the term suddenly made sense. She imagined Vijju, who must be thirty-one years old, returning to a wife and child. Each morning, the five of them would wake up as a family and not even think of its sixth member. She was the sixer, the chakka, the one they had forgotten.
5
In Kamathipura, a parcel died twice.
The first death was the breaking in. The second, more painful, death happened when the parcel realized that she had been discarded by her own family. That was when survival lost all meaning, and compliance became a sensible option. Anything that happened to the parcel from that point on was perfunctory, as boring as the words in an instruction manual. Of course, when physical death finally came, in the form of disease, old age, or suicide, it wasn’t death anymore. It was what the parcel had secretly been working toward.
But no matter how hard the truth hit the parcel, hope had a strange way of creeping back in, and there was a fine line between hope and denial, a line that Madhu herself had walked skilfully. In a parcel’s mind, there was always the pathetic notion that her parents would come looking for her. Madhu too still believed that if she stood on that bridge and spoke to her brother, told him her story, he would remember her. She was disgusted that some part of her still longed for her family.
“Do you want me to open the bag again?” she asked the parcel.
She turned the flashlight off. The conversation she was about to have worked better in the dark. The blackness put all the weight on the words, made them land in the correct places—bombs inflicting maximum damage. Bombs worked because no one could see them coming, and the resulting explosion of light was a celebration, the fireworks of success.
“How did you get here?” asked Madhu. She knew the parcel would not answer; the girl was breathing too heavily. The air must feel as if it was closing in on her. The tight space was unfit for anything that breathed, let alone a human being. The smell of piss, acidic and thorny, reached Madhu’s nostrils. The cage was an oven, and so far it had baked the parcel to perfection. It was time to call the parcel by her name.
“Kinjal,” said Madhu, “answer me.”
The mention of her name made the parcel flinch. “You know me?” she asked, with utter, stupid innocence.
“Do you want to get out…for some air? If you answer my questions, I will take you out,” said Madhu. “Now tell me: How did you come here? Who brought you here?”
“I’m here by mistake. Please, my aunty, she was—”
Madhu cut her short. The sequence of events had to be played out perfectly, even if they came out of the parcel’s own mouth. Right now, the parcel was processing events by memory, but her memory was influenced by her belief in the basic decency of human beings. That belief needed to be stripped away.
“Did your aunty bring you here?”
“A man brought me…he…”
“Think about your village. Think about Panaut
i bazaar.”
How well the system worked, this one that Madhu herself had devised. It was up to the procuring agent to drill the parcel’s family member for information, for details that could make the parcel understand that she had not been kidnapped. In this parcel’s case, her aunt, her father’s sister, was the one who had cracked the deal. When Madhu had first come into contact with these minors, long before she started working with them, it surprised her how often it was the women in the family who sold the parcels, and not just the fathers, brothers, and uncles. Women were equally responsible for the whimpering and rotting of their own fledglings.
“My aunty took me to Panauti,” said the parcel. “She made me meet a man. He was a nice man…He told me I would get a job in Bombay.”
This nice man had been chosen because he looked like a trustworthy soul. He was small and non-threatening, spoke politely, and was instructed to never touch the parcel. He told her to stay close and get ready for the journey. Was there anything she needed? At Panauti bazaar, the parcel was bought something, a small gift to lift her up and calm her nerves. For a girl from a tiny village outside Kathmandu, the thought of working as domestic help in a city like Bombay was daunting.
“What did your aunty say when she handed you over to the nice man?”
“She was crying…She hugged me…She told me to be strong.”
Had she looked into her niece’s eyes, Madhu wondered. Perhaps she had stared straight into those light brown eyes and asked for forgiveness there and then. It was probably the last time they would face each other. Sure, they might meet again in each other’s dreams, but, Madhu thought wryly, those meetings could always be washed away. Perhaps the aunty had wished her niece luck. Then the nice man took the parcel to the border by bus. It was his job to know each and every crevasse on the road that lay ahead, which official to bribe, and which border crossing to take and at what time. All along the journey, the nice man had not touched the parcel. His instructions were clear: even if she fell asleep on his shoulder on the bus, he was to look ahead into the cool distance.