Beautiful Thing

by Sonia Faleiro

  How much did it hurt? I grimaced, putting aside my plate of food.

  ‘If you live, you live,’ Maya shrugged. ‘If you die, you die. It’s all God’s mercy. You have to be strong, you have to be brave. The dai waits for the cock to crow four times and then brings the knife down with a kachak! I fainted! Later she sprinkled oil over me; she painted my blood over my body. Then she pushed my bottom into a stone.’

  What for?

  ‘Menstruation. When the stone pierced my anus I became a woman.’

  And what about your . . .? I pointed, as she had.

  ‘Some people like to keep it,’ Maya said. ‘But not me, chee! I said put it in a museum for everyone to admire, or throw it away so no one can. And that’s what they did. They threw it in the water, safe from the stray dogs.’

  You’re very brave, I said.

  ‘Agreed. Why, that morning itself, I remember it so well, my testicles were tied with twine and when it was time the dai asked her assistants to step back and she raised her hand and as I looked up at her do you know what I saw? A kite, same colour as the sky, and would you believe it, as the dai brought down her knife the kite wagged its tail and said to me, “Goodbye.” And then it said, “Good luck!” Can you believe it?’

  Yes, I said truthfully. I’d heard stranger things.

  ‘Of course,’ Maya added, thoughtfully, ‘just a minute earlier my mouth had been washed with opium. That might have had something to do with it.’

  Guests continued to stream in, they brought presents and good wishes, they drank and danced, and Gazala’s outfit received unanimous approval.

  Maya whispered introductions into my ear.

  ‘That one,’ she whispered, pointing to a young man walking in with two women who looked like sisters. ‘He has the best-looking girls in the bijniss. How does he manage, tell?’

  How?

  ‘He feeds them only tea and Gold Flake!’

  ‘And that one,’ she pointed to the elderly hijra, ‘oh, hers is the saddest story, the saddest story you will ever hear.’

  Sadder than your story? I thought to myself with wonder.

  ‘She used to be a man!’ said Maya.

  So were you, I said.

  ‘She used to be a proper man, I tell you! Not like me at all. I always knew there was something off about my . . .’ she pointed to her groin. ‘It was like having a monkey hugging my waist!’

  ‘Not that one,’ she pointed again. ‘She was a man, a real man, up and down and back to front. And he knew it and was proud of it and was in love with a girl who lived next door to him. He loved her so much—uske pyar mein goonga ho gaya. He became dumb in her love. Their parents had spoken; the date had been set. But one day he discovered his girl was having an affair and he grew angry, oh so angry, angry like a thunder-cloud about to burst; and he warned her with the palm of his hand to never again stray or he would prove to her, he said, that his anger could discipline her as passionately as his love had freed her. But the girl wouldn’t listen and, instead, she complained to her lover and they hatched a plan to get rid of this one forever. So one night the girl mixed something in this one’s drink and after he fell asleep she took a knife and . . . kachak!’

  I shivered. She was castrated by her own lover?

  ‘At first I too felt sorry for her.’

  And then?

  ‘No more. If I embrace the sorrows of other people, even if they are people I care for, people I love, how will I live, you tell? There are too many of us, too many like us! I would suffocate!’

  So she joined the hijras? I said.

  ‘Not because we’re wonderful people!’ snorted Maya. ‘Her family must have thought, “No chilli? Might as well be dead!” So they dropped her off at medical and disappeared. That’s where Gazala found her. Gazala has contacts, you know—in medical, at the police station. She can sniff out a potential hijra like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Gazala,’ said Maya, glancing over at her madam, ‘we are so proud of her.’

  Later that night, Gazala asked if anyone had a final request. There was a mad rush for the shoebox of audio cassettes. Once the party ended, whispered Maya, Gazala would retire her precious Sony twin deck and no music would be heard in the brothel until the following year, on her birthday. If you wanted music before that, Gazala would say, you might want to learn to sing.

  One hijra brought out the soundtrack of Bunty aur Babli. Another yelled, ‘Just chill.’ But before any more claims could be made, Masti slipped a cassette into the player. She silenced us with a finger to her lips and striding over to the door switched off the light. The hijras put down the cassettes and quickly retrieved their spots on the floor becoming immediately still, shadowy figures in the pale light of the moon.

  Asha Bhosle began to sing Dil cheez kya hai from the soundtrack of the film Umrao Jaan, a favourite with bar dancers, for Rekha, as the courtesan, was their icon.

  In the song, Rekha performs a sensuous mujra to potential customers. As they are drawn into the web of her beauty and nakhra, the brothel madam, chewing betel leaf and sucking on a hookah, watches with a smile of lazy triumph. In a voice at once tragic and soothing, Rekha asks, ‘Dil cheez kya hai, aap meri jaan lijiye. Bas ek baar mera kaha, maan lijiye.’ She pleads, ‘Is anjuman mein aap ko, is anjuman mein, is anjuman mein aap ko aana hai baar baar, aana hai baar baar . . .’ The heart counts for nothing, you can take my life. All you have to do is agree with me just this once. In this gathering you have to return time and again, time and again . . .

  I looked around and nothing I had seen before prepared me for what I saw then: everyone in the room was crying. Even Gazala. Gazala, her head on the shoulder of the hijra beside her, was sobbing.

  To my left, Maya was crying. Next to her, Leela.

  I assumed they were moved by the song, by memories of the film perhaps, for its poignant storyline was one, I imagined, everyone in the brothel could relate to.

  Umrao Jaan is the supposedly true tale of a young village girl called Ameeran, who is kidnapped from her family by a vengeful neighbour and sold into a brothel. Renamed Umrao, the girl is trained in music, dance and poetry and becomes a courtesan. Over the years, she is successful, earning riches for her madam. Although she works hard to please, she misses her family and longs to be loved. But she’s thwarted at every turn—the man she loves marries another woman and her attempt to escape ends in tragedy. When Umrao finally finds her way back to her village, she is shunned by her family. She has no choice but to return to the brothel, where she knows she will die a courtesan, alone and unloved.

  I later brought up the incident with Leela. She responded with characteristic openness. ‘I wanted to cry,’ she said.

  But why? I asked. Why were you sad?

  Leela shrugged. ‘The song took me home. I thought of people I had left behind. I thought of people I might one day have to return to.’

  As the song died down, a moan emerged from the floor below. Leela forgot her tears and leaned in protectively. ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered. ‘That’s Gazala’s latest katatu. His dick was sliced off a few days ago. He’s been lying in bed since. Lucky mother’s cunt gets to eat fish and meat for forty days, I hear. Forty days! Mast life I tell you!’

  Mast life.

  I thought about this.

  I thought of an operation so dangerous it caused many hijras to bleed to death. Since they were, for all intents and purposes, orphans, their bodies were discarded in water or in landfills. Some would live through the operation but never recover their strength.

  I stood up and walked over to the window.

  The street was bare except for a few stray dogs, a few stray hijras, and it was still until a man emerged from the darkness and strode with familiarity towards the brothel. He walked past the dogs, curled into sleep and restful dreams. He walked past a hijra staring down at her feet. He sidled up to another, perhaps she was the prettiest. He whispered to her. Did he ask, ‘How much?’ She would have answered, ‘Fifty, as always
.’ Did he say, ‘I know a place’? She would have replied, ‘Me too,’ and perhaps that is what she did say, for she pointed towards Gazala’s. He may have insisted she go with him, or she may have wanted to, to get away from us, intruders who had so audaciously taken over her home, for she started walking away, ahead of the man, the loose end of her birthday party sari trailing behind. The man poked her ‘this way’ and as she turned to him and paused, the wind ruffled her hair and light fell on her face, it fell on her lips and on the shadows under her eyes, it illuminated her birdlike neck with so many chains wrapped around it.

  { 9 }

  ‘The luckiest girl in the world’

  The solidity of Apsara’s presence made Leela irritable. Apsara tried to make herself scarce, but wouldn’t leave the flat. At most, she would drag the TV into the kitchen, settle down on a chatai and watch serials for hours, sometimes the entire day. With her eyes on the screen, she mumbled and hissed, complaining about the weather and the price of vegetables, insisting that the women on TV were too ‘advance’ and that girls who wore ‘boy cuts’ should finish the look with a turban and tie.

  Apsara left the LG on even when she knew her shakes and snores would soon fill the kitchen with their sturdy rumblings. Then she dreamt steadily, and once when I asked what she dreamt of, Apsara said it was always the same, of the time when she had, as a child, got lost in her father’s fields. ‘All it was was potatoes,’ she said to me. ‘Not neem trees or mango trees or apple trees that could hide from me the way home . . . Just small, baby potatoes flat as the soil itself.’

  ‘And yet,’ sighed Apsara. ‘Yet I managed to lose my way. How? Why?’

  In Apsara’s dream the potato fields would turn into a field of trees, and when she sought comfort from these trees, extending her arms around a fibrous trunk, the trunk felt soft and clammy and she realized it wasn’t a trunk at all but someone’s leg she was embracing. And when she looked up, arching her head as far back as she could, she saw that the pair of legs went up to a waist and the waist to a torso and the torso to a neck and the neck to a mysterious . . . ‘and that’s when I wake up, every time,’ she sighed.

  Apsara also woke up when Leela walked in, even though Leela returned past midnight, even though there wasn’t much to say between them, and Leela always refused her offers of chai.

  Apsara would ask, ‘Head massage?’

  She would plead, ‘Let me press your feet beti.’

  Leela enjoyed living alone and she was finicky. She washed her steel plate, bowl and water tumbler soon after she ate her meal, but wouldn’t touch Apsara’s because she was afraid, she said, of catching gonorrhoea, called ‘peeli bimari’ because one of its symptoms was a yellow discharge. The STD was widespread in the community and was considered socially ostracizing.

  I wasn’t sure if Leela really believed she could catch gonorrhoea from her mother’s dishes. Or if she merely wanted to vent. Other diseases she claimed Apsara was a carrier of were ‘fattiness’ and ‘simple-type’. She was also a squirrel, Leela said; always on the lookout for secrets she could hoard and use against Leela.

  In any case, it appeared more and more that Apsara could do nothing right, and so there came a time when she began with slow certainty to lose the small store of self-confidence she had accrued from leaving her husband and to once again cower when she heard footsteps approach the door. Then her daughter didn’t call her ‘saand’ to be funny, she said it to be cruel, to convey anger at her mother’s choices, choices that had pushed Leela into the dance bar.

  ‘Here is my buffalo hump of a mother,’ Leela would curse, ‘and still no explanation!’

  When Shetty unexpectedly invited Leela for a weekend in Lonavla, Leela jumped at the opportunity.

  Lonavla was a crowded hill station near Bombay where many of the city’s wealthy built their second homes. But it was primarily known as a getaway for lovers seeking privacy. Weekends such as these, it was unanimously agreed, were best enjoyed in one of Lonavla’s countless resorts of ‘rain dance-disco dance’. There were swimming pools and in the shallow end guests held tight to the side. Into the pools gushed artificial waterfalls, thundering and roaring over rocks and flowers. The guests, women in salwar kameezes and saris, men in shorts and briefs, disco-danced, drank and made out.

  Leela yearned to visit Lonavla and would drool over Priya’s romantic accounts of drives in the chilly rain, of sex in front of a heat blower. Of walking through the shallow end of a pool, her hand entwined with her customer’s. (She was learning to swim, confided Priya, but it would take a few more weekends to get there.)

  Shetty’s invitation couldn’t have come at a better time. Not only would it be a break from Apsara’s unbearable simpleness, but the invitation, it seemed to Leela, was an expression of Shetty’s desire to take their relationship to the next level.

  Shetty drove up to Leela’s flat in his navy blue Tata Sumo, and it said a lot that he was willing to risk being seen with her outside the dance bar, in daylight and in his car, the monthly payments of which, Leela knew, were being made by his father-in-law.

  Although he was bald and barely came up to the steering wheel, Shetty made up for his shortcomings by being cooler than a chuski. He bopped his head to the music from his radio and as he swayed so did the stuffed chimp hanging from his rear-view mirror. Shetty thought soft toys stylish and he saw nothing peculiar about a man his age driving a car with a dancing chimp and a back window full of candy-coloured playthings.

  Shetty honked once, twice, and then fiercely, a third time. He whistled for Leela.

  Leela stuck her head out of her kitchen window and called down excitedly: ‘Coming, baba, coming!’ She rushed into her bedroom and then skidding, turned back, ‘Don’t leave without me!’

  Leela and Priya hurriedly finished packing a small suitcase with weekend essentials. This was Leela’s first new suitcase and she had bought it in ‘Bombay’ the previous morning. It was red, her favourite colour.

  The best friends laid down things that made Leela feel beautiful: low-rise jeans that showed off her delicate waist, heels to add height to her petite frame, new padded bras and panties in pastel colours and a pair of sunglasses that covered half her face, rendering her mysterious and hi-fi. She took along a wooden Ganesh for luck, a new striped towel for hygiene and a bottle of Old Monk rum for pleasure.

  ‘Depends on PS mood,’ she said to me. ‘Everything is up to him.’

  Before rushing off, Leela shoved her new Kodak camera into my hand. ‘Take my picture,’ she said.

  I peered through the viewfinder. Fresh-faced Leela wore young girls’ clothes—jeans with strategic rips, a clingy white t-shirt, white slingbacks at least four inches high.

  She pouted, stuck her tongue out.

  ‘Hurry!’ she squealed.

  ‘Chalo!’

  I didn’t know the name of the hotel Leela would be staying at. Wait a minute; I didn’t even have Shetty’s number.

  Where are you going? I asked, lowering the camera. How will we find you?

  Leela glanced quickly at her mother.

  ‘So “sveet” girl you are,’ snorted Apsara.

  ‘Chup,’ Leela said. She came over and put her arm around me. ‘Why do you worry so much? Doesn’t it give you a headache?’

  ‘Planning to run to Lonavla if something happens?’ asked Priya, coldly.

  ‘Don’t take tension,’ Leela said. ‘I can take care of myself. Better than this one,’ she inclined her head towards Apsara. ‘Better than this booty queen,’ she pointed at Priya. ‘And much, much better than you. So stop feeling sad, okay? Stop now I said, otherwise I will start feeling sad and then I’ll cry and delay and PS will get angry and curse me. Come on, why don’t you do something useful? Take my picture.’

  She went back near the door and flashed me a smile.

  Cheese, I said, glumly.

  ‘Cheez!’ Leela grinned, looking ecstatic.

  The drive to Lonavla took an hour and a half, and if beginnings were
any indication of endings, then Leela was in for a disappointment.

  Shetty spoke steadily into his Bluetooth earpiece; he dropped names, cracked jokes, laughed uproariously. Swatting away Leela’s Old Monk, he jabbed his thumb towards a box of Kingfisher beers packed into the back seat. Every twenty minutes Leela would pluck open another beer, fling the cap out of the window and hand the bottle to Shetty. About as often, Shetty would fling a crumb of conversation at her—something like ‘maderchod weather,’ ‘kya gaandu traffic yaar!’ and ‘you’re the radio in-charge, okay?’

  Leela fulfilled her responsibilities diligently, turning down the volume when Shetty poked her knee, turning it up when he showed his appreciation for a song by rhythmically clicking his fingers, and jamming mute when they reached the toll booth and for the fun of it Shetty asked the young man behind the glass screen stamped ‘Do Not Spit Here’ what he would do if Shetty refused to pay. The young man was not amused even though Shetty called him dost and Shetty turned belligerent as Leela knew he would.

  Shetty considered himself a wit, but he had lost friends over ‘jokes’ that included prank-calling their wives and pretending, in a falsetto, to be their husband’s pregnant mistress. Now he asked the young man if he knew who he was, and when the young man replied ‘no’ and ‘what’s it to me?’ Shetty barked that he’d take his mother from the back like the bitch she was. He threw some money on the counter and revved off so fast Leela wished she’d listened when Priya had described where the seat belt was.

  To calm herself Leela texted her friends, hoping perhaps that if she suggested she was having a good time, it would start to happen. ‘Saw camel with orange coat!’ she wrote. ‘Boys dancing in waterfall!’ ‘Fudge jelly sweets for you!’

  But from then on, the weekend went downhill. Shetty had booked them into a resort called River View (‘A Treat of a Retreat’). It had a swimming pool and a waterfall and offered a buffet of delicacies like pulao and mutton curry, golgappas and fountains of fresh, flavoured lassi.