Joy looks up too. But all she sees is darkness.
Sometimes we play Metro. Stuff soggy bills and shined-up coins through the plate-glass ticket window, ask for a roundtrip fare to Mahatma Gandhi Road. Wait for the woman with the beeping black wand to scan us for items we cannot afford.
“I hope my jewelry won’t set off the detector this time,” Joy says.
“Not to mention all my mobile phones,” Deepa adds. “You know I like to have a backup in case the network goes down.”
“Don’t worry, no metal here,” Banu says. She never gets it.
On the platform, digital clocks with lime green numbers count down the minutes until the next train arrives.
Seven minutes.
Six.
Five.
We are impatient with the cautionary signs, the razor-sharp lines. The khaki-clad conductors who blow their whistles when we curl our toes over the edge, daring each other to jump into the narrow metallic corridor of safety between the electrified tracks.
Four minutes.
Three.
We don’t want the platform. We want the cars with their double-plated windows, their mopped-floor smell. Their machine-cooled air that tastes like steel and money and promise.
We want the lives the cars carry. Their motion. Their purpose. Their speed.
Two minutes.
One.
“Your train is now arriving.”
“Bangalore,” our grandmothers tell us, “is a city of befores. Most people, though? They only see the afters.”
By the afters, they mean the flyovers choked with Volvo buses and Audis. The women in blue jeans barking instructions to their maids into their company-issued mobile phones, the men in foreign sneakers tapping code into their company-issued computers. The flats sparkling with imported furniture and tinted liquor bottles, the office buildings vibrating with requests for technical help from around the world.
“Before,” our grandmothers say, “no one owned air conditioners. No one needed them, what with all the breezes coming off the lakes.”
“Before, you could cycle all the way to Commercial Street in the middle of the afternoon without passing a single car.”
Before. Before we are old enough to tie our younger sister’s plaits, to wish for closed-toe shoes, we sit cross-legged in the shade, listening to our grandmothers coax memories from their hiding places: Braided into the vines of banyan trees, stirred into the mortar between the bricks of school buildings, baked into the egg puffs at the bakery behind the telephone exchange. Mixed into the glue on the backs of government-issued notices warning that this slum will be demolished on this date to make way for this new road or that new building.
“You hear that rushing, that whooshing?” newcomers ask. Eyes shiny, smiles full, ready to start their jobs inventing this and coding that. “It’s the swoosh of twelve million dreams coming true.”
“What, that noise?” our grandmothers say, sucking their teeth. “Don’t be stupid. That’s just the sound of the traffic at Silk Board Junction.”
On the elevated rails of the Metro, we become our own afters. We are bankers going to our offices at Trinity Circle. We are fancy housewives shopping for four-thousand-rupee handbags on 100 Feet Road. We are film stars on our way to cocktails at the Bangalore Club.
Suspended between the orange and pink rooftops and the white and blue sky, the air is too thin for other people’s doubts: there is only enough oxygen for our dreams.
“I hope my lover isn’t late this time,” Banu says. Today, we are playing film stars. Everyone knows film stars have the most lovers. “I’m supposed to meet him at Koshy’s.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Joy says. “If you were a film star, you’d never go to Koshy’s.”
“And you would be the late one,” Deepa says. “Not your lover.”
Deepa and Joy are the best at playing Metro. Probably because they are the smartest. And the bravest. Which in Heaven, is almost the same thing.
“Are you still seeing Sal-maan?” film star Joy asks film star Deepa. Yawns delicately, studies her nails.
“Not since he became such a bore,” film star Deepa tells film star Joy. “Ranbir is so much more fun.”
“All those Khans get old after a while,” Joy says. “Although Imran is still delightful.”
“That one writes the best poems,” Deepa says.
“Why are you always taking Hindi lovers?” Padma says. “What about the Kannada ones?”
“Chee!” Joy says, rolling her eyes. “Everyone knows that the Hindi film stars are the best ones.”
“If I took a lover, I’d want him to know my mother tongue,” Padma grumbles.
“Language is the last thing I care about in my lovers’ tongues,” Joy says. Rukshana starts giggling, which makes the rest of us start too. We collapse against each other, a squirming mass of girlish joy.
Until we hear him.
“Is that right?”
Usually, no one notices us. But today is Saturday, and the train is full of boys. Hair sticky with coconut oil. Bits and pieces of mustaches spiking above their lips. Bodies bursting with needs we don’t understand.
We girls don’t need much. We’ve taught ourselves not to. We have each other, our mothers, our grandmothers. Our train in the sky. For us, that’s enough.
But this boy needs something. Something from us. Something we don’t want to give him.
“My tongue is quite experienced. All my other parts too,” he says. Reeks of kirana-cheap deodorant and sidewalk-vendor cologne. Of half-smoked bidis and fake leather shoes left out in the rain. He is all the smells we expect on the skin of the men we will be forced to marry. Smells we will wake up to for the rest of our lives.
Confronted with this boy, this reminder of who we are, and who we will be, the rest of us wilt like carnations. But Joy and Deepa stiffen like weeds.
“Don’t tell me about your other parts,” Joy says. “That’s not how you speak to a lady.”
“But you’re not a lady. Are you?” the man-boy says, grinning like a dragon.
Reaches out and strokes Joy’s neck with a scaly claw.
None of us saw it before. But there it is, an Adam’s apple. The brand-new curve we never notice on Joy because we were so busy noticing our own. Curves that are just as unexpected as Joy’s. But different.
“Don’t touch her,” Deepa says. Springs like a cat, strikes the boy across his face. Knocks the dragon breath right out of him. Lands the slap so squarely and surely that for a minute we forget that she cannot see.
The boy lunges, but his friends hold him back. His muscles are taut beneath his shirt.
Just in time, the tinny robot voice announces in Kannada, “This is Trinity Circle.”
We are not housewives or bankers or movie stars. We are not even women. We are just girls riding the train. We are just like everybody else. The rest of us rush onto the platform, Rukshana hauling Banu by the elbow, Padma with her arms around Deepa like a straitjacket.
Joy goes last of all. Calm and regal and silent. A queen until the end.
If you’re a girl in Heaven, you don’t get out much. Too many pots to clean and meals to cook. Too many eyes watching you. When we leave, it’s to go to the post office to fill out the deposit forms for our mothers’ government-scheme bank accounts, or to the market where we’ve been sent for onions or tomatoes.
Makes it hard to remember that there is a world out there that is not the same as ours.
Joy goes out even less than the rest of us. When she leaves the muddy paths of Heaven, she leaves more than just tin roofs and hospital sludge. She leaves a fortress, a kingdom she built herself. Subject by subject, brick by brick.
At the post office, the tellers ignore Joy, or ask her to do disgusting things when they think no one’s listening. Only one vendor at the market sells her vegetables, and that too, at twice the cost. On the bus, women push her to the back, near the men’s section. The section that’s all perilous murmurs, malicious g
rasps and gropes.
Last year, when the health worker put Joy on the scale and told her she was underweight (just like the rest of us), Selvi Aunty took her to the hospital to get the iron pills the government is distributing to adolescent girls.
(Neelamma Aunty said they were only doing it for the elections. Fatima Aunty said who cares why they were doing it as long as they were giving something out for free.)
When the nurse asked for Joy’s paperwork, Selvi Aunty handed over her birth certificate.
“Beti, I think you brought the wrong one,” the nurse said. Purple lab coat over a red-checkered sari. North Indian convent-school voice coated with the congratulations she must get for helping backward women, starving girls. “This looks like it’s for your son. Do you have a child named Anand?”
“That’s right,” Selvi Aunty said. Joy sat straight backed and stone faced, a granite statuette. “This is Anand. He’s Joy now.”
“This is Anand?” the nurse asked. Adjusted her pink-rimmed spectacles.
“Yes,” Selvi Aunty said. “We were reborn. As Christians. Anand has become Joy.”
“Really, you people will stop at nothing for government handouts,” the nurse said. Her fair, fair face turned red up to the roots of her salon-cut hair.
“What do you mean?” Selvi Aunty asked. Joy, though, pressed the balls of her feet into the ground, readying herself to leave.
“Like you don’t know,” the nurse said. “This scheme is for girls! The lengths you’ll go to for some extra rations. Really. Get a job.”
“I have a job,” Selvi Aunty said. “Four jobs at four different houses. And Joy is a girl. But anyway, what does it matter? She’s underweight. The health worker said so. What’s that word? Malnourished.”
“I can’t help you,” the nurse said, waving her off. “Take your son elsewhere. And put some proper clothes on him.”
Joy stood up then. Regally declared, “Come on, Amma. Don’t bother with this woman.”
But Selvi Aunty wasn’t done yet. (Joy learned it from somewhere, didn’t she?) She leaned across the table and stared into the nurse’s eyes like a cobra hypnotizing its prey.
“Not my son,” she said quietly. “My daughter. Who is ten times the woman you will ever be.”
We love Joy. So do our mothers. But outside the borders of Heaven, love just isn’t enough.
When the train pulls away, Padma exhales.
“What were you thinking?” she yells. Maybe at Deepa. Maybe at Joy. Maybe at all of us.
“He can’t treat Joy like that,” Deepa says. “He can’t treat women like that.”
“He’s going to treat women like that for the rest of his life,” Rukshana says. “Slapping him once isn’t going to change anything.”
“At least today, he didn’t get away with it,” Deepa says. “That’s a change.”
Padma puts her arm around Deepa. The rest of us don’t say a thing.
Sometimes, after school, Joy walks to the bus stop at the shopping complex across from the water tank. Sits on the corner of the bench like she’s waiting for a transfer. Doesn’t catch the next bus. Doesn’t go shopping either. Just sits. And watches.
This road? It’s where the hijras work. Square jaws, Adam’s apples, swinging hips. Hair like crows’ wings, eyes like temple stones. Our teachers say they are men who dress like women. We think they might be more like Joy—women who are shaped like men.
We believe what our mothers believe: that hijras are magical. Just see how the auto drivers bow their heads when they hand over their coins. How they close their eyes and move their lips when they receive the hijra’s blessings.
But Joy? She watches and watches and watches until she sees past the magic, past the superstition. Sees how the hijras count their change before buying something to eat. How they keep wearing their rubber slippers even after they have snapped or torn. How they pretend to ignore the innuendos that rattle like gravel from the tongues of dragon-mouthed men. Hot and rough and smoldering.
Is this my future? Joy wonders.
One July afternoon rain falls in a light mist. The sun moves out from behind a cloud, tossing rainbows across the gray sky.
“It’s something to see, isn’t it, sister?”
Joy looks up from her bench. A hijra leans against the side of the bus station shelter, looking up at the sky. Poses like she’s an item girl, waiting for her sari to get wet enough for her to burst into song.
“This never used to happen in my village,” she says. Black-brown eyes lined with kohl. Henna-streaked hair pulled into a loose and windy bun. Creviced cheekbones pink with blush. “Where I’m from, sun is sun and rain is rain. The two don’t mix. But here in Bangalore, it’s different. And why not? Why should the weather have to follow such meaningless rules?”
She turns then and looks at Joy. “I’m Bhagya,” she says. Gives Joy her hand like she’s expecting a kiss from a prince. Nails polished black. Fingers rough and calloused. She is royal but faded, like the palaces we see on school trips. But also, somehow, sturdy. “You’re one of us. Aren’t you, sister?”
Joy chews the inside of her cheek, afraid to answer.
“You must be, what? Thirteen? Fourteen? Not so young. Old enough to start thinking about your future,” Bhagya says.
“I’m taking my exams soon,” Joy says.
“You’re studying. That’s good,” Bhagya says. “I never made it through school.”
“I’m going to college.”
“Are you now?”
“They admitted a transgender student into college in Chennai. It came in the papers,” Joy says. Leaves out the fact that the girl is Dalit, just like Joy. That’s none of Bhagya’s business.
“That’s wonderful. But tell me, little one. After you study, you get your college degree. Then what?”
Joy presses her lips together tightly. To make sure her doubts don’t escape through her mouth.
Right now, Joy is one of us. Our queen. But what about after Heaven?
In Heaven, she is just like the rest of us. But out here, in the real world, she’s an unknown, an in between. No one is going to want her to marry their son, to mother their grandchildren. No one will hire her to be a bank teller or a call center operator or an engineer.
“You should join us,” Bhagya says. “I’ll be your teacher. Live with me. I’ll take care of you. Find you work.”
What kind of work? Joy wants to ask. What kind of care? But if she asks, then Bhagya may answer. And Joy doesn’t really want to know.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Bhagya says, “I’ll be here.”
Joy keeps her back straight, her eyes forward. Won’t let Bhagya see her be anything less than a queen. Won’t let her notice how she digs her toes into the cracks in the pavement. How she feels the rough edges where the tar hasn’t properly dried.
This traffic, these buses, this bench—how different it all is from trains in the sky.
So many ways to hurtle through space, to rush through time.
This isn’t the Joy we see, though. The Joy we see is confident, sure. Zooming forward, throwing herself toward the future. Toward love.
It’s Deepa’s father’s second cousin’s sister-in-law’s niece’s wedding, and we’re all invited. When Joy shows us the sari—her first sari, the first sari any of us has ever gotten—we tell her it’s a waste of money. Spangles sewn so loose that the slightest touch makes them fall like sparkling rain. Sleeveless blouse so thin it’ll surely tear with the first wash. Even the bag is cheap, folded out of what used to be the Deccan Herald.
“Not even cotton,” says Deepa, the seamstress’s daughter. Runs the fabric through her fingers so it swishes like rain.
“You could’ve just taken scissors and cut up some curtains,” Rukshana says. “Would’ve been the same thing.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Joy says. Smiles. “You’ll see.”
When she wears the sari, we understand.
The whole world smells like fresh sambar and stale ner
ves. The bride looks nice enough—wearing red or something—but no one notices her. Not after they see Joy.
In she walks, our Joy of joys, hips swishing, eyes flashing, neck stretched and jeweled like the Sultan’s favorite swan.
Yousef stops midsentence. We all stop midsentence, but Yousef stops most of all.
Yousef stares like he’s never seen her before. Her collarbone. Her neck. Her ankle. How the watery fabric flows along her crests and valleys. How it makes her whole body ebb and flow.
Joy is the moon and Yousef is the sea. And in that sari, it is always high tide.
As Yousef approaches her, Joy thinks, This. This is what it means to be a woman. This is how I will feel every day for the rest of my life. Or, at least, on wedding days, when I am free to wrap myself in seven yards of ammunition.
Yousef presses his thumb into a dimple where Joy’s shoulder meets her back.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Joy says.
They both watch how a part of him fits into a part of her that may or may not be strange.
Joy is young, and so are we. Not yet familiar with other people’s shapes.
But there is one thing Joy now knows, a thing she will teach us all: that our bodies are unique in small but important ways, ways that will put us in charge of other people’s hearts.
That we are, each of us, a collection of secrets waiting to be told.
The digital clock says two minutes. The announcer is about to tell us to please mind the gap, just like they do on the television shows about Britishers.
Padma asks, “Where’s Joy?”
We look around, until Banu says, “There. She’s over there!”
Joy is standing between the yellow lines, queuing up to board the train going in the opposite direction. The one that will take us back home, like nothing has happened. Like nothing has changed.
Like we can’t tell that her heart is racing and tumbling and breaking. That she’s pushing down the ways in which her body will betray her. The ways in which her body already has betrayed her, when we weren’t there to see it.
A People's History of Heaven Page 16