by Anosh Irani
But fate has a cruel way of poking its nasty nose into other people’s happiness.
For about a week, Hema was wracked with high fevers she could not shake. Gajja took her to a doctor at JJ, where he worked, and was told that she had dengue. She died shaking in his arms. A mosquito had ended what could have been a glorious union.
Gajja had to be pried away from Hema’s body. The madam and the other prostitutes had to literally tear him from her arms. Even though Hema was dead, he lay next to her for hours, asking her to wake up. He kept asking for a garland. He would not budge until someone got him a garland.
A garland was yanked off the entrance to a nearby shop and given to him. Gajja placed it around Hema’s neck. He married a dead woman. He had shown everyone that love could be found in places of horror. But afterwards, he started drinking heavily, wandering the streets and wailing Hema’s name. When Madhu heard Gajja’s story, he regained some of the faith in men that his father and the boys at school had made him lose.
On the fortieth day after the surgery, Madhu was ready to be renamed. Receiving a new name was part of the initiation ceremony. Normally, the guru had to take the initiate to the hijra leaders of Bombay, who would then assign a name. But when it came to the hijra code, gurumai was willing to make transgressions—she housed hijras who begged, who blessed, and who prostituted all under the same roof. She was a dai-ma and could bend the rules like a magician bending the wind. Madhu was free to choose any name he wanted from a list given by gurumai. The feminine names—Lucky, Dimple, Rani, Chandni, Lekha—made Madhu’s mouth water. But he decided to retain his original name. It was the only thing that had been with him since his birth that was not a lie. Madhu. He had hid in that name for years and it had kept him safe.
On the fortieth day, Bulbul brought him tweezers to pluck whatever hair was on his face, but he was already hairless. Castrated so young, he would surely blossom into something full and feminine—there was no doubt about it. He was bathed again and Bulbul dressed him like a bride. She bejewelled him, parted his hair in the centre, and applied mehndi on his hands and feet.
He was ready to look in the mirror.
Electricity shot through him. Someone had taken a plug point, connected it to his rectum, and released a current so beautiful, it slit him open. He was staring at a lioness with a flowing mane. He could feel the adulation from gurumai. The envious stares from the other disciples covered his body like bruise marks. The two old hijras were happy for him, though—they had helped in his creation.
At 3:00 a.m., they went to Rani Baug. The zoo had the only natural body of water in the vicinity. The watchman did not stop them. Gurumai had been using the zoo for years. She lit an oil lamp and placed it on Madhu’s head. There, amidst the chattering of birds, they performed a final puja for Bahuchara Mata. Milk was poured over Madhu and then into the water.
“You are free now,” said gurumai.
Madhu was no longer cursed. He was now a she, reborn as a hijra. She could now channel Bahuchara Mata.
That night in the zoo, not a single animal made a sound. There were no roars, bellows, or trumpets. All the hijras could sense the presence of something otherworldly. More than anything, they could sense that Madhu had been set free. The animals were in cages, but Madhu had transcended her body. Neither man nor woman, she had found a place among beasts.
8
Before dawn came, Madhu was gone from the bridge. She had to leave. Once light arrived, it made the sight of her parents’ home unbearable, and her hungry gaze felt all the more shameful.
Madhu hoped Salma had bought the right clothes for the parcel and not dressed her up like a prostitute. Why waste time? Why delay the inevitable? That was Salma’s way of thinking. But to Madhu, the right clothes had a purpose: they were meant to highlight the parcel’s innocence and purity for that first client, the way white fabric gave an aura of calm and cleanliness to the wearer.
On Sukhlaji Street, she noticed the van that operated as a mobile Ayurvedic clinic for the residents of Kamathipura. An old man sat inside the van and promised cures for arthritis and incontinence, but at this time of morning he attracted only pojeetives.
Madhu was anxious to return to the parcel in the loft; she needed the motherly darkness. She made sure it was always night in the loft; the hot air always stank, but the light was in her control. She was in charge of its emission, what it exposed, what it concealed. To Madhu, there was nothing natural about sunlight. It lit up things too savagely, without the slightest regard for her sensibilities, especially when she stood on the bridge. She did not want to see her parents’ faces, or her brother’s for that matter. She hadn’t seen them in decades. Silhouettes were all she could handle.
She observed the parcel for a few moments as the girl slept. Then Madhu leaned back and rattled the cage bars with her legs.
“Get up!” she shouted. “Up!”
The parcel leapt up, almost hitting her head on the roof of the cage.
“What’s your name?” Madhu asked. “Tell me your name!”
“Kinjal,” said the parcel.
Madhu reached through the bars and gripped her neck.
The parcel realized she’d made a mistake. “Jhanvi,” she corrected herself.
“How old are you?” Madhu was ferocious. She had spent the last two days drilling facts into the parcel, and still the girl had answered the very first question wrong.
“Twelve.”
“What village are you from?”
Madhu could tell that the name of the parcel’s village was on the tip of her tongue, but she knew she was not supposed to speak it.
“I was born here. I’m not from any village.”
“Don’t lie to me. I will take you to the police station right now. Then you’ll tell me the truth.”
“It’s the truth…My mother was from Nepal, but she died. I was born here.”
“Do you go to school?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t…I help here…I clean the place.”
“That’s good,” said Madhu.
She suddenly changed roles and was no longer the interrogator. Of course, when a cop questioned you, the truth came out like watery shit in a matter of seconds, but the parcel had done okay. There was one thing left to do. She opened the cage and let the parcel out.
“Now hide,” said Madhu. “You have a ten second start. If I can see even your shadow, you’ll be sorry.”
No sooner had the parcel slipped down the ladder than Madhu went after her. She could see the parcel getting inside the water tank. Once she was in, Madhu peered over the top. The parcel was still. Just as Madhu had taught her, she held her dress to the side of her body so that it didn’t bloat. Madhu was satisfied. The girl could not be seen.
Sometimes raids lasted for a couple of hours. The parcel needed to get used to staying in there for that long. Madhu set herself down and prepared to wait for dawn. Her thoughts returned to her pitiful addiction. What if Bulbul or gurumai or even Gajja found out about Madhu’s habit of voyeurism on the bridge? Deep down, did she somehow hope she would find her way back into her family’s life? That was as laughable a venture as parcel work. Earlier, the parcel had been moving in her sleep, jerking an arm and then a leg, like dogs do when they lie on their sides, close their eyes, and dream they are running. The parcel was running too—running back to her village at night, wherever it was. It was hard to watch, which is why Madhu had woken her up with such cruel voltage.
Madhu’s father had had a chance to change Madhu’s future, and history, by accepting his son—but he could not. He studied history, but he dared not make it. Madhu prided herself on doing the opposite. By wiping out the parcels’ past, she was wiping out history. So who was more powerful now: Madhu’s father or Madhu?
When she came into contact with the parcels, Madhu felt that God had a purpose for her. She connected with them. She could feel their terror better than anyone else. She knew that if she made t
heir world smaller by sledgehammering their dreams of being rescued, she’d help them. It made her sick, how they turned to God in their cages. She thought back to her early days in Hijra Gulli: the sooner the truth had hit Madhu in those early days—that her family had not bothered to look for her after she ran away—the faster her world had started to shrink. And the more confined her world got, the less she had needed her parents or her brother. That is, until a few years ago.
That was when a single new bridge had weakened her—the JJ Bridge, connecting Byculla to VT station. Even though no pedestrians were allowed on it, she had walked on that bridge one night after a few pegs with Gajja. She’d just drifted there, the way dust drifted. As she climbed up, she saw the Mahanagar Blood Bank to her left and reflected that she was not even allowed to donate blood. To do so, you were required to tick a box for male or female on the medical form. If neither was ticked, the doctor could refuse to take your blood, even if you were giving it for free. This had happened to Madhu. Gajja had called her to give blood to an accident victim, an acquaintance of his, but when Madhu showed up, the doctor sent her away. All her life, her father had made her feel like an aberration, a nonentity, and now a doctor had supported that view.
But the harder parent, Madhu now realized, had been her mother. She had been the most difficult to fight because she was in no one’s corner. Too cowardly to oppose her husband, she had secretly given Madhu bits of comfort, like scraps of food slipped under the table as though Madhu was a deformed child hidden away from sight.
Madhu’s new hijra family had seemed to offer her the acceptance she needed and deserved, and she had not minded paying the price, allowing truck drivers to enter her with the same recklessness with which they drove on highways. She once told Bulbul that so many truck drivers had entered her she should have “Horn OK Please” tattooed on her arse.
Now she realized that she had left home only to fall into the illusion of freedom. The veil had lifted. She saw that she had chosen to live with a group of people who were as unwelcome in society as lice in hair. Her father’s scorn had been replaced by society’s.
The screech of a taxi snapped Madhu out of her thoughts. It was the voice of reason telling her to wake up and accept her life once and for all. The harsh sound was pushing her to accept the harsh truth. The parcel would have her sounds too, thought Madhu: the footsteps of Padma Madam walking with a client toward the cage; the squeaks of the cage door opening; the hurried breath of the client, his hungry anticipation wetting the stale air in the loft; the vocabulary of the trapped and eternally hunted. But before these entered the parcel’s life, Madhu needed to introduce a different sound. She picked up a stick that lay on the floor and tapped it against the water tank a couple of times. This is what the cops sometimes did to check if the tank held water or was being used as a hiding place. Madhu tapped and waited. The parcel did not respond. Madhu was pleased. The tap was a simple, unassuming sound, but it was one that the parcel would recall many years from now, as an old woman.
It was always the simple things that hurt. Wounds could be subtle, silken beings.
Madhu went back in her memory to that night a few years ago when she had met up with her one steady love, Gajja, and drank too much with him at the hospital. Later, instead of returning to Kamathipura, she had gone in the other direction, toward JJ Bridge. Regret had made her go there. Her beauty was fading faster than the dye on cheap fabric, and her hijra family was no longer fulfilling her. The sisters she had bonded with had been traded to another guru like cattle. Of course, Bulbul was always there for her, but even she was getting gloomy. Gajja was a constant in her life, but the need for intimacy was leaving her fast, and she knew it was hurting him. She was desperate to stand on that bridge—she didn’t know why, she simply knew it was necessary.
That night, she had looked down over the side of the bridge at the Suleiman Usman Bakery. A little farther ahead, she saw a building named “Fancy Mahal.” It was so close to where she stood, she could almost touch it if she leaned across the gap. The traffic below, on Mohammed Ali Road, was abuzz with motorcycles beaming rude shafts of light at the minarets and meat shops. No, jumping was not an option. One needed energy for suicide. She was beyond that; she was already dead.
That was when she had confessed a dark secret to herself. She had faced up to a thought that had been growing underneath the regret: Even though her father had been hard on her, hadn’t he become more calm after their visit to the holy Baba that day long ago? Hadn’t Madhu’s father invited Madhu to join him at the window that night to stare at the traffic below? He might have been humiliated by Madhu’s presence in the family, but his struggle with that feeling was human.
Madhu stared at the grey cement of Fancy Mahal and wondered what would have happened if gurumai had not shown up at her home. For the first time, standing on that bridge, Madhu saw clearly who her father was: a struggling history “sir,” teaching uninterested students about the British, or Akbar, or whatever the syllabus told him to teach. With his short, thin frame, he would have been blown away by the wind to the Department of Failures were it not for that heavy briefcase he carried around to ground him in importance.
What if Madhu’s father was not an insensitive man? What if Madhu’s mother was not a coward? What if Madhu had read them wrong? Had his mother not shed a tear or two? Had she not on occasion stepped in and taken a blow that was meant for Madhu? Why hadn’t Madhu thought of that before?
That night on the bridge, she had concluded there were no answers…Just as there was no answer now as to why the parcel was a shivering wet mass of fear in the water tank. Why was the disease. Madhu had convinced herself of this time and again, drilled it into her skull with the same urgency that construction workers were drilling holes into the pavement of Kamathipura. Why, why, why…If you said it long enough, or loud enough, thought Madhu, you could see the ridiculousness of the question. There was no answer.
And yet, it turned out there was an answer.
When Madhu was in her thirties, she had stopped doing sex work. She was sick of it. But gurumai had not given her permission; the businesswoman in gurumai would not let her do so. Madhu refused anyway, so a barber was called and her head was shaved to humiliate her. It was a huge blow for a hijra to have her long tresses lopped off. She was also asked to pay a fine of ten thousand rupees, which she could barely afford. Yes, she had been allowed to retain half her earnings, but Madhu had always been too lenient with cash. She fed dogs, she gave prostitutes train fare to go back to their villages, and she had once even given a client his money back and something extra because he wanted to buy a cycle for his son. She bought the parcels dolls and books and colouring pencils, and she had bought Bulbul an entire collection of Kishore Kumar hits, which she regretted because Bulbul played them all day long. Madhu could afford to be this generous because her arsehole was functioning beautifully. It was nothing short of a lugubrious wonder. Even when the Mumbai stock market crashed, her gand-hole was raking it in.
She had been the toast of Kamathipura, a rare bird in a cage. Literally. Gurumai had asked a laundryman around the corner from the brothel, a man whose father used to work in the theatre as a lighting assistant, to affix some lights to the bottom of the brothel window to illuminate Madhu above. She had felt like a work of art. Actress that she was, she used the light well, letting it warm her legs and stream its hot glow right up her thighs, revealing just enough, but never more. There had once been over five hundred hijra sex workers in that one lane in Kamathipura, and Madhu could easily say, with utmost humility, that she was among the most beautiful. In the prime of her life, she had been so voluptuous and fiery she could burn a man with a single stare. One of her clients had been a doctor, a respectable ENT specialist, who drove to Madhu in his wife’s old Fiat. The car would always stall three minutes away from the brothel. “It’s my wife’s way of saying, ‘Don’t go,’ ” he told Madhu.
“So why do you come?”
“Because y
ou are unlike anything I’ve tasted.”
He showered money on her. He’d stand up while she slept naked on the bed, take a handful of ten-rupee notes and let them fall over her like rose petals—except currency did not die and had a scent more fragrant than that of any rose.
Hers was a simple game. First, she would demean her clients: “You are not big enough or hard enough. Take your prick and go home to your wife. You can never satisfy me.” That was all it took to inflame a man’s ego. The most fragile thing in the world, the ego of the male species, was so easy to belittle. In response, the men took her with the force of a gale, and she did her precious drama: “Oooh…aah…I have never been…Oh my god…stop…Don’t stop…No, please stop.” Sometimes the choothiyas were so drunk they thought they were fucking her in the arse, but all she did was put cream between her thighs and make them come in seconds.
Then something had changed. The first sign she was aging came when she started hemorrhaging internally. She had used up all her reserves, and when her body was more honest, more in touch with its mortality, it started remembering things. After all, she was a Sherpa of the flesh. The mind could not be relied upon. It had the ability to make up stories, good or bad, and warp memories to suit a purpose, but only the body told you what had truly happened. The body could make up nothing. It stood witness to all the things she had done and every sensation she had felt. She decided to cross-examine herself. She told her mind to shut up and put her body in the witness box.
Six months after her head had been shaved in front of the hijra leaders, gurumai had asked Madhu if she would start prostituting again. Madhu said no, but it was a softer no, the no of a child begging its mother for something. Gurumai, against her better judgment, granted Madhu her wish. Madhu became a badhai hijra, one who sang and danced at weddings, and soon she accompanied Bulbul and Sona to her first “blessing.”