by Anosh Irani
She let this new piece of information simmer inside the parcel for a few hours. And all that time, Madhu sat there in the loft, saying little, allowing the parcel to ask questions, but never answering them. The minute the parcel shrieked or showed signs of hysteria, Madhu asked if she would like a visitor, and the thought of the slithery thing in the cage silenced the girl. At times, she tried to stand up, but the cage did not allow her to do so fully. It ensured that her back was bent, another element of the design that was intentional. If in the water tank she turned to fish, here she was a bent plant, being cut down to size.
Finally, the parcel managed to go to sleep with her arms around her knees, and Madhu was pleased. The parcel had learned a valuable lesson: she was the only person who could provide comfort to herself. Madhu knew there would be times when the parcel’s heart would beat madly inside her breast, and she would have to let it go to town. It was best if she understood that anxiety or panic or any cry for help would be met with deafening silence, which in the end would only accentuate the cry, make it all the more ear-splitting and useless.
Madhu could now see the parcel without the flashlight. She enjoyed being cooped up with the girl, and her eyes were gaining the accuracy of a sniper’s. She could clearly see the goodness in doing this work. If she hadn’t been here, the parcel would be bloodied and bruised by now, with the smell of pimps on her. In Madhu’s hands, the lie was being taken out of her—the thought that she would be free anytime soon. That was the true poison. Through the bars, Madhu tried to pet the parcel—not by touch, but with a gentle gaze over the contours of her body. In sleep or in wakefulness, the parcel had someone to share the terror with at least.
—
Around three in the morning, the parcel woke with a jolt. Madhu had dozed off too, on the ground near the foot of the ladder, and the sudden rustle above her head startled her awake. She rose immediately; there was work to do.
After the two of them had a quick chai on the floor below, it was time to go shopping in Barah Gulli. Every Friday, from 3:00 a.m. to noon, Lane Twelve transformed into a bargaining paradise. There were many names for it: Midnight Market, Sab Kuch Market and Chor Bazaar Ka Bhai, or “Brother of the Market of Thieves,” which alluded to its more famous sibling, Chor Bazaar, on Mutton Street. Madhu would buy clothes for the parcel at Sab Kuch Market, but for footwear, she would go to another midnight market, the one on Dedh Gulli, which had become a shoe lover’s utopia. Madhu smiled when she thought of the Nike Air shoes that Bulbul had bought a year ago—shoes that might have been stolen by professional shoe stealers from outside a mosque or temple in the city and eventually sold to a vendor. The Nikes forced Bulbul to walk faster—she felt she had to—and she looked like a demented jogger in a sari, traipsing on the moon.
At the entrance to Lane Eleven, Madhu recognized an old woman who was looking after two children. She was affiliated with one of the brothels, and her job was to keep the children entertained if the clients had no one else to leave them with. There was a younger woman beside her, wearing black tights and a pink top—the last showpiece left.
Madhu turned right to Barah Gulli, walking alongside coolies carrying large TVs in cane baskets on their heads. They dropped them off at a repair shop that had so many TVs stacked on top of each other that Madhu wondered how the owner managed to work on even a single one. At the entrance to the playground, two men lay on a handcart and shared a beedi. Their knees touched, and they both stared at the sky, blowing rings of smoke that disappeared before they could fully form. Here, even smoke had a miscarriage.
As soon as they entered the playground, Madhu could sense that the parcel was taken aback by the commotion. Normally, the place was lit up by halogen lights until dawn, but tonight the lights were not on; perhaps they were not working. All Madhu saw were the beams of flashlights moving horizontally and vertically, directing her to the dozens of vendors displaying their wares. The parcel should have been accustomed to the darkness by now, but clearly she was dazed: she almost walked into a roller on the ground. By noon, once the vendors had left, the roller would be used to flatten out the dusty earth again, leaving no trace of what was happening right now.
Madhu loosened her grip on the parcel to test whether she would let go of her hand. She didn’t. So they carried on, walking by the man selling washing machines and old computer screens, past empty glass bottles, the majority of which had once held Chivas Regal and Red Label whisky, and past ceiling fans that lay flat on their backs on the ground. It seemed more and more brothels were taking Padma’s cue and removing the most common means of suicide. When the lights shone on the fans, they resembled deformed metal insects that had once been alive. Next came the typewriters, reading glasses, binoculars, world maps, pens, refills, remote controls, gumboots, mirrors—so many mirrors, some with minor cracks, and others just empty frames—harmoniums, and stethoscopes. But the most popular vendor here was the one who sold crutches. He sold them cheaply, but they were sturdier than any house in the area. In a place where beatings and injuries were more common than a sneeze, the support his crutches offered was beyond measure.
Gajja was here too, but Madhu did not go near him. This was business time for him. He took medicine from the hospital whenever he could, especially cough drops and some high-voltage painkillers, and sold them. His clients were mainly prostitutes who were addicted to the cough drops or used them to lull their children to sleep while they worked. Gajja guided them on the proper dosage and what to feed children before they took them. Sometimes the mothers took the cough drops too, and their children would crawl around the edge of the bed, trying to wake them up.
The parcel stopped at exactly the spot where Madhu normally did: the record seller’s stall. Even after all these years, Amitabh Bachchan was still the centrepiece. The vendor was a huge fan. His son had worked as an extra in some of Bachchan’s films. The vendor had his own flashlight, which he shone on the album covers: Sholay, Deewaar, Zanjeer, Silsila…Sholay, Dewaar, Zanjeer…He went back and forth, cover to cover, directing Madhu’s vision. Even though he was talking to another man, and not paying much attention, the light fell directly on Bachchan’s face.
Madhu was starting to feel displaced by the beam of the flashlight. The record seller was merely using it to light his merchandise, but the brashness of the glare, the nakedness of it, the way it shone like the headlight of something approaching, forced Madhu to turn inward, toward her past. She locked eyes with Bachchan’s and thought of her father’s radio churning out the tunes of Mohammed Rafi and Mukesh—the real voices behind some of Bachchan’s lip-synching—woeful melodies filled with loss, or something much deeper than loss: an emptiness so vast that Madhu felt she carried acres and acres of nothing inside her. With each note, she had imagined being lowered into a coal mine, where the air became closer and only the sound of her breathing remained. She had wanted to cry, scream, anything to get rid of the nothingness, to give it form, but Rafi and Mukesh stole her voice and only made her more barren.
It was only when the women sang that the tears had come. It was only when the women ached for their men that Madhu had ached too. How she had revelled in that ache. How it had lifted her. The despair was so beautiful, it was the most freeing experience she had ever had. It was a glorious stream of tears, from eyes to bridge of nose, until her tears had fallen into another world, where they were appreciated.
Even now, Madhu still played one song from her father’s collection in her mind again and again. She sometimes hummed it to herself and only realized she was singing when she was halfway through it. She had seen the entire movie that featured the song only once, but she knew exactly how the hero, Amitabh Bachchan, held the green-eyed heroine, Rakhee, in his arms in a land full of snow. Amitabh told his love, “Sometimes I have this thought that you have been made for me. Sometimes I feel my heart has this thought that you are my destiny.” When Madhu had heard those lines, she realized for the first time that a heart could have thoughts. That was when she�
��d had her first longing, not for sex, not for anything dirty, but just to be held by a man. And any man whose heart could think would be the one for her.
In the movie, Rakhee is married off to the character played by Shashi Kapoor instead of Amitabh, and Rakhee sings that same song again on her wedding night, but she is still singing it to Amitabh. Shashi Kapoor does not know this, of course. He is madly in love with her, and she is in love with someone else—which all made sense to Madhu, because love is about not having. The moment she had seen that movie, she had become Rakhee, and she imagined herself in pink lipstick, nose ring, and flawless skin, the red vermilion a mad streak of passion running through her forehead, trying to split her head into two because she could not have her man. Even though her husband was holding her, delicately removing her ornaments one by one, she only longed for her lover, and she sang to Amitabh, who was far away, and said to him, “Sometimes my heart has this thought that you were made for me.”
Years later, when Madhu looked back on this moment, it occurred to her that even in her dreams, she did not get her man. Even in her dreams, she did not get love. Out of the hundreds of songs that the radio had sent her way, this was the song that had entered her blood and changed it from B positive to O positive. She had become a universal donor, had given herself to all, because she understood that she belonged to none.
Madhu was brought abruptly back to the darkness of Barah Gulli by the sound of a police siren. No—it was a toy jeep a little boy was playing with. The parcel was staring at the boy, who was tugging at his father’s shirt, asking him to buy the jeep. His other choice was a toy ambulance. Perhaps it was fitting, Madhu reflected, that they sold police jeeps and ambulances here. One had failed to protect, and the other had failed to rescue.
Suddenly she didn’t feel well. Familiar bile rose in her stomach and up her throat. All at once, she felt there was so much acid inside her that if she were to spit it out, she would disfigure the loveliest of faces. She had to get out of there, away from Amitabh and Rakhee, but she hadn’t completed her task and bought any clothes for the parcel yet. She simply did not have the strength to shop.
On most days, she managed to keep the piercing reminders of the past at bay by wrestling with them, by crushing them to the ground until they stopped thrashing about and behaved. Tonight, however, the parcel was watching her, and it made Madhu feel uneasy—what if the parcel saw Madhu weaken? It would send the wrong signal. No, Madhu could not allow that. Both master and slave could not be frightened. The parcel needed to be placed back in captivity until Madhu regained her balance.
Madhu turned and was heading back to the brothel with the parcel when she saw Salma talking to a vendor and handing him a huge carton of condoms. This was one of Salma’s regular gigs: she would convince the Marys to give her free condoms for the safety of her co-workers, and then she sold them in Barah Gulli. Of course, no one in Kamathipura cared for the condoms, so men from outside the district bought them for a pittance for personal use.
Madhu asked Salma if she would buy clothes for the parcel. Salma shrugged her shoulders and took the girl’s hand.
The minute Madhu stepped off the playground, the halogen lights snapped on. She started running.
—
It seemed to Madhu as if she had been running ever since she was a child. Trapped in the wrong body, she had felt the panic take over time and again; it still did, insistent as ever, rumbling through her like a tabla, dhakadhakadhaka. Would it never stop? Was it possible that things were getting worse, that the ruptures in her sense of the present were much larger somehow? The gaps had to be bigger, she thought, for the past to permeate her with such velocity.
Running would not solve anything. Neither would time. Time did not heal. Time was not money, either. It used to be. Now time was wrinkles. Time was wobbly knees. A spasm in the back. Muscles freezing out of shame. Time made Madhu remember more. For forty years she had lived inside this body. No matter how much she accepted who she was, she was still afraid. She was still angry. She still wanted answers.
She ran past the diabetic ghosts who swayed to and fro outside Geeta Bhavan. She could see them clearly, even if they were ghosts, because they were just as scared and angry as she was. They were angry at the gulab jamuns they ate, and they were scared because they no longer had any effect on the living. Just like Madhu. She had no effect on the living. She had no effect on her own family.
She waited on the bridge, past the banana seller, on the forty-seventh step.
Her brother finally arrived, the pathetic little goat. She imagined him with a jutting chin, just like her father’s. There he was, sending out cigarette smoke as though it were a coded message to the elite in the city.
Barah Gulli had put Madhu’s body on alert. She was hyperventilating. If she’d had a stethoscope to put against her breast, it would melt, such was the heat inside her. She was so heavy right now that even the crutches in Barah Gulli, the ones that supported lives more miserable than hers, would not be able to bear her weight this morning. She knew it was not Amitabh and Rakhee who had put her in this mood.
It was the sight of the bloody flashlights.
—
After she had become a regular in Hijra Gulli, after Bulbul and she had become closer than sisters even, Madhu’s father took him to a holy man. This man, Madhu was told, was a great seer. He would be able to provide a cure. No matter how many times his father slapped him when he walked on his toes or giggled with a limp wrist, he could not be corrected. Once, when Madhu had come out of his bath, he had worn his towel around his chest, covering his breast, instead of around his waist. He did it out of modesty, but he also liked the way it made more of his thighs visible. The gesture was innocent, natural, and yet it had earned him a slap. Afterwards, his father decided to take Madhu to the holy man.
When Baba saw Madhu, he held his hand, closed his eyes, and said to Madhu’s father, “This boy needs your love. Great misfortune may befall him if you do not look after him.” Madhu’s mouth fell open. His father asked Baba if he could give Madhu a sacred thread to help him mend his ways. “Change will only come through your acceptance,” said Baba. No thread was given.
Madhu and his father walked to the bus stop in silence. Madhu’s father did not utter a single word on the bus either. For a few hours, Madhu thought that something would melt in the man and he would treat Madhu like a human being. That night when his father ate, he sat next to Madhu. When Madhu’s mother put the first chapati on her husband’s plate, as she always did, he broke it in half and gave one piece to Madhu. “Eat while it’s hot,” he said. His voice was still stern, but Madhu could make out a tremor in it.
As usual, his father was the first to finish the meal, and he rose from the table, put on his spectacles, sat by the window, and stared at the road. This was his silent thinking time, when he’d ruminate about history, his meagre salary, his mediocre students, their lack of discipline, and the politics at the college, which he would then complain about to his wife before bedtime. But that night he spoke: “Madhu, come here.” So Madhu joined him by the window. But then his father was silent, lost in thought again. Maybe he just wanted to stare at the traffic with his son, or perhaps he wanted Madhu to go to Geeta Bhavan and get some sweets, even though it was the end of the month, when he was always short of money. Madhu’s mother piped up and asked Madhu what Baba had said. And Madhu lied: he replied that Baba could understand the father not accepting the son, but what about the mother? Madhu had never had the guts to tell her how he felt, that after his brother’s birth, whatever love had once come his way was gone, directed toward his brother. Whenever he tried to put his head in her lap, she was always holding her other, normal, son.
That night, his mother did something unusual. She put Vijju down and held Madhu close. She told him that he was the first born, and first-borns are precious, and Madhu should never forget that. “Don’t take your father’s words to heart,” she said. “Understand his position. They make fun
of him at the college.”
“Why?” asked Madhu. He knew why, but he hoped his mother would lie.
She told him the truth. “Because they have seen you. You behave like a girl. We may be poor, but as a teacher he commands respect…and you are taking away the one thing that he has. Can you not find it in your heart to listen to him?”
She said this while holding Madhu, while mother’s and son’s bodies were pressed together. In that hug, Madhu was trying to convey all the emotions he felt, and as she spoke, he realized she did not understand him at all and never would. Just then, his father called out to him again.
“Madhu…,” he said. “I think…” He was finding it hard to speak. “Madhu, I…I want you to know that I…”
Madhu got up and went to the window. He was willing to wait for his father’s words. For the first time in his life, his father was talking to him, man to man. He waited with a patience that could calm any fear.
That was when the lights went out.
His father’s face turned dark. It was a power shortage; there had been one a month before too. Madhu’s mother got a flashlight and shone it around their tiny flat. It lit the calendar on the wall, one with a precious pink baby on it. Madhu’s father, distracted by the power cut, turned away from his son, mumbling about the papers he had to correct.
Fifteen minutes into the blackout, there was a knock on the door. Madhu’s mother assumed it was one of the neighbours—the same woman who had come over during the previous blackout to make sure everything was okay. She was a recent widow who just needed an excuse to visit. Without looking through the peephole, Madhu’s mother opened the door. The next second, the flashlight fell to the floor and she moved a few steps back. Madhu and his father ran over, and Madhu picked up the flashlight and shone it in the direction of the door.