Thrown out of their homes, rejected by their families, they come together for protection. In the streets they affect the manners of a pantomime dame to gain attention: they pinch men’s buttocks, purposely make buffoons of themselves, but are quick to take offence. With little possibility of much fulfilment in this world, they look to the next; they are for ever visiting temples and mosques (for this they are required to revert to their male clothes) and going on pilgrimage to Hindu and Muslim shrines over the subcontinent. In this strange mix of piety and bawdiness, they directly recall the world of Dargah Quli Khan and the Muraqqa’-e-Dehli.
The house was a late Mughal haveli off Gulli Mr. Shiv Prasad. A pretty young eunuch in a canary-yellow silk sari led Zakir and me through a vaulted passageway and out into a small courtyard.
Under a wooden veranda lay a spread of carpets and divans. Sprawled over them were two more eunuchs; one was staring at herself in a mirror, applying lipstick, the other was combing her hair. Nearby sat two effeminate-looking men; there was also a baby in a cradle. Despite the early hour, the eunuchs were all dressed and painted as if they were about to go out to a late-night nautch. They greeted Zakir warmly, but frowned at me.
“Who’s the gora (white)?” asked one.
“This is my friend Mr. William,” said Zakir. “He’s a writer.”
“Why have you brought him here?”
“He would like to meet you all.”
“You know we can’t talk to any outsiders,” replied the hijra, “unless Chaman Guruji gives us permission.”
“And she won’t,” said the other hijra, pouting defiantly at me. “She doesn’t like goras.”
“Where is Chaman?” asked Zakir.
“Upstairs. She’s sick.”
We climbed the rickety wooden stairs that led up to a balcony; as we did so, one of the eunuchs blew a kiss at me and the others burst out laughing. At the top of the stairs, Zakir knocked at the door. A gruff voice commanded us to enter.
As we stepped through the portal, we left the late Mughal haveli behind and entered a very different world: inside we were confronted by a gleaming pink boudoir that could have been the dressing-room of a 1950s Hollywood film star. Mirror-glass tiles covered the end walls and the ceiling; pink plastic carnations peeped out of brass vases; cut-out pictures of actors and actresses were pasted into a frieze over a glass bookcase filled with Hindi videos. The pink chintz curtains matched the pink chintz bedspread; underneath it, prostrate yet fully dressed in a woman’s blouse and man’s dhoti, sprawled the figure of Chaman, the guru of the household.
Chaman’s fingernails were brightly painted and her hair was long and straggly; she had huge sagging breasts. Yet her face with its heavy jowls, hangover eyes and early-morning stubble was entirely that of a man. As we entered the bloated face nodded us a silent greeting.
“Chamanji,” said Zakir. “You are unwell?”
“I’m dying,” said Chaman. Then, groaning: “Oh! The pain!”
“What is wrong with you Chamanji?” asked Zakir.
“Nothing works any more. This body…”
“Is it your knees again?”
“My knees. And my teeth. And my breathing.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“I had an injection yesterday. For the asthma. It’s like trying to breathe through a thick chador.”
Chaman held up the pink bedspread against her mouth to demonstrate what she meant.
“I’m in pain, I’m probably dying, and all my little chelas (disciples) are leaving me. I had seven, now only three are left to look after their old mother. Remember Maya? She went off last month and married a boy from Pakistan. Promised she would come and see me, but you know what these little chelas are like...” Chaman suddenly began to look rather sad. “I can’t even see properly any more. And as for my teeth...”
“What’s happened to your teeth?” asked Zakir.
“I had them all out last month. Got new ones put in. Look.”
Chaman pulled out her dentures and flourished them at us. As she did so she seemed to notice me for the first time.
“Who’s your gora, Zakir?”
“This is my friend, Mr. William.”
I smiled. Chaman frowned.
“ls he your boyfriend?”
“No,” said Zakir. “He’s married. To a girl.”
Chaman wrinkled up her nose in disgust.
“He has brought you a present, Chamanji,” continued Zakir.
From the bottom of my pocket I produced a silver ta’wiz, the Sufi charm Zakir had suggested I purchase as a gift for Chaman. I handed it to the guru. A fat hand shot out from the covers and snatched it from me.
“Who gave you this?” asked Chaman.
“Pir Hassan Naqshbandi,” I said.
“Naqshbandi, eh?”
Chaman bit the corner of the ta’wiz. This seemed to satisfy her as to its authenticity.
“It will make you well again,” I said hopefully.
“Nothing will make me well again.” The old eunuch fixed me with a sharp eye.
“Are you American? From the land of Hollywood?”
“No. I’m British.”
“From London?”
“From Scotland.”
“You know Sean Connery? I read in a magazine that he was from Scotland.”
“You’re right. He is.”
“In the old times we hijras used to be like your zero zero seven. We were called khwaja saras, not hijras. We used to live in the king’s house. In those days we never danced. Our job was to listen and tell things to the king. We were just like your Sean Connery.”
Somehow I couldn’t imagine Chaman and her household taking on Goldfinger or seducing Ursula Andress, but I let this pass.
“I love the movies,” continued Chaman. “When I was a girl I wanted to be an actress. Look!”
From the bedside table Chaman produced a black and white photograph. It showed a beautiful, heavy-boned girl in a European dress. She had heavily rouged lips and painted eyebrows. A velvet choker was tied around her neck; massive gold earrings hung from her lobes. The tone was sub-Garbo; only the tikka mark between the eyebrows gave away that the image was Indian.
“That was me when I was twenty-five,” said Chaman. “I was beautiful, no?”
“Unique,” I said.
Chaman blushed with pleasure: “You mean it?”
Knowledge can make you old. Compassion is a river of youth that will never run dry. Knowledge can make you tired—bathe in the water of compassion and you will be refreshed.”
—Rinpoche Thuksey, quoted by Andrew Harvey, A Journey in Ladakh
After the breakthrough with Chaman it still took two months of regular visits with Zakir before I got to know the other eunuchs properly. I used to arrive early in the morning before the household had left on their rounds. They would always be busy putting on their make-up and brushing their hair. Often there would be some drama: Razia, the loudest and most ebullient of Chaman’s chelas would be wringing her hands and weeping because her new boyfriend had gone off to Ajmer or because Chaman had called her a tart or because her pet goat had gone missing; she always suspected her neighbours were planning to slaughter it.
Another source of worry was the baby girl that Panna, another of Chaman’s chelas, had adopted; if ever it wheezed or coughed or refused its food, Panna would work herself up into an opera of agitation. The only hijra who always kept her calm was Vimla, the prettiest and quietest of Chaman’s chelas. She was in charge of the kitchen and by seven in the morning would be busy chopping up chillies and onions ready for lunch.
Razia, Panna, and Vimla were all very different—in their backgrounds, their characters, and their looks. Razia was the most unlikely of the three. A Kashmiri Muslim, she claimed to have been to the Doon School (the Indian Eton) and to have completed a Master’s degree in English at Bombay University. I was never able to establish whether she was telling the truth—virtually all the hijras I talked to shrouded the facts o
f their lives in a thick wrap of fantasies—but she was certainly from a middle-class background and spoke fluent English.
“l became a hijra very late—in my mid-twenties—after my mother died,” she once said.“I was born with a body that was masculine but my heart was always feminine. I never fitted in anywhere, but now I feel good with these people.”
“Was it very difficult when you first joined the hijras?” I asked.
“When I arrived it was very strange. Everyone lived together; there was no privacy. The six other chelas were all illiterate and came from villages. Before I used to be a real reader; but here there was not one book in the house. None of them even read a newspaper. But Chaman was very protective and supportive; it was as if I was still living with my mother.”
She added:“Sometimes I wanted desperately to go home, to see my sisters. Once I went all the way home—but I never went in. I just looked in the window then went away.”
“Did the other eunuchs accept you?” I asked.“Didn’t they mind your posh background?”
“Not at all. Thanks to Chaman they were kind to me. Besides I was useful to them. I was able to talk English and to read and write. We are all happy together. Sometimes when I see Panna with her baby I wish I was a woman and had a husband and a child. But Chaman doesn’t like us to have partners. She doesn’t like men in the house—at least not corrupt men. She’s very jealous of her daughters.”
Panna, Razia’s friend, was a very different creature. She was a very large hijra: nearly six feet tall. Her face was covered with the scars of smallpox and she had a huge protruding belly; a shadow of light stubble flecked her chin. She would never have won a beauty contest. But she was one of the shyest of all the hijras I met, and one of the most gentle; her life revolved entirely around the baby she had just adopted. Her story emerged only after I had got to know her very well.
It seems that Panna was born asexual—with no visible sexual characteristics—into a poor family who lived in a village near Varanasi. When Panna was just twenty days old, the village midwife disclosed that she was neither male nor female, that she was a hijra. The news spread like wildfire. Panna’s mother, fearing the consequences, left the village with the baby and went to stay with a cousin fifty kilometres away.
“In the village, my deformity had become the sole topic of conversation,” Panna told me. “The rest of my family were ostracized. It was said that we were cursed. The following day a relative came to the village and said that my mother had died of shock soon after reaching her cousin’s house.
“I was brought back along with the body of my mother. The death did not move the village. Instead they sent a message to Chaman, who used to visit the village every so often. The curse on the village had to be removed. Chaman came with two chelas and took me away. I grew up to be the chela of Chaman, and Chaman became my guru.
“Being a hijra was the only possibility for me; there was no other career I could have pursued with the body that was given to me at birth. Sometimes I used to be lonely and unhappy, but now with the baby my life is complete. Now I don’t care what people say: at times I look at the child and I am so happy I can’t sleep at night. When she is older I will send the child to a good girls’ school and see that she is taught English. Maybe one day she will be beautiful and become a model or film star.”
En route we picked up our first hitchhiker, a young tribal who displayed great excitement on seeing a large dead snake in the middle of the road.
“What on earth was that all about?” I asked Aditya. “Our friend has expressed a wish that the snake would come alive and bite him.”
“What...!”
“He believes that it belongs to the lowest caste of snakes. It is, in fact, an Untouchable. Therefore once our friend bears this mark, all other snakes will avoid him.”
—Mark Shand, Travels on My Elephant
Panna is unusual in that she was born asexual. The vast majority of eunuchs, and almost all those I met, were born physically male. In Europe they would probably describe themselves as transsexuals and have a full sex change. But in India the technology for this does not exist. The only choice is between a brutal—and extremely dangerous—village castration, or, for those who can afford it, a course in hormone pills followed by an anaesthetized operation. The operation is illegal in India, but there are several doctors who, for a fee, are willing to take the risk.
Vimla, the most feminine-looking of the eunuchs, did not have the money for an operation and voluntarily underwent a village castration. The son of a Jat farmer outside Delhi, by the age of thirteen she was already refusing to work in the fields, saying that she felt more like a woman than a man.
“I was sure that I did not have a place in either male or female worlds,” she told me. “My body was that of a man but deep down I had the heart of a woman. At puberty I started thinking of myself as a hijra.
“One day a hijra named Benazir came to my village. She was very beautiful and I fell in love with her. When I was on my own I would feel sad and would not eat properly. Only when Benazir returned did I feel happy. My family began to suspect that I was in love, but they did not know with whom. But in the village people who had seen Benazir and me together began to gossip.”
A lucrative marriage settlement that Vimla’s family were negotiating fell through as rumours began to spread. In frustration and shame, Vimla’s father beat her up. The following day Vimla ran away to Delhi to look for Benazir.
“For days I searched for my Benazir, but I did not have an address or know the name of her guru. I knew no one in Delhi and had no money. I had to sleep on the pavements and beg for money. Occasionally I got a free meal from the pirzadas (officials) at the shrine of Khwaja Nizamuddin, but often I would go to bed hungry.”
Eventually Vimla met and was adopted by Chaman Guru.
“In those days Chaman was very rich and beautiful. She became my guru and gave me lots of beautiful saris and gold bangles. I started to wear women’s clothes and to put on make-up. The following year I was taken to a village in the Punjab. I was dosed with opium and a string was tied around my equipment. Then the whole lot was cut off.”
“I knew it would be very painful and dangerous, but I got cut so that no one would taunt me any more. After I was cut all my male blood flowed away and with it went my manhood. Before I was neither one thing nor the other. Now I am a hijra. I am not man or woman. I am from a different sex.”
I once asked Vimla if she ever missed family life.
“We are a family,” she said. “A chela must obey her guru like a bride obeys her mother-in-law.We chelas must work hard, do the cooking inside the house, and most of the dancing outside. We have an obligation to look after our guru when she grows old, just like we would look after our own mother. In return, when we first become hijras Chaman Guru teaches us chelas the ways of the eunuchs.”
The longer I spent with the eunuchs, the more it became clear that the whole system was highly structured, both within the household and outside it. Just as every household of eunuchs has its strict rules within its walls, so each household also has a well defined “parish” where its members are allowed to operate. Violations—poaching in another household’s area—is referred to a special council of eunuchs from all over India and Pakistan which meets once a year.
There is even a Central School of Dance for the hijras. It occupies a shady campus dotted with bushes of purple bougainvillaea in Panipat, fifty kilometres to the north of Delhi. Here Prem Hijra, a bad-tempered old eunuch with a bun and beady black eyes, offers courses in dancing (folk, Bharat Natyam, Arab belly dancing, or disco) and singing (traditional, ghazals, or modern film songs) to new recruits. She also runs refresher courses for those who want to perfect a particular style of dancing or learn the latest film songs.
“She’s very strict,” Vimla once told me,“But they say that in her youth she was the best dancer in North India.”
I pressed Vimla to show me her dancing and eventually, after first co
nsulting with Chaman, she invited me to join the household on their rounds, or “going on tolly” as they call it. Every household of eunuchs has a network of informers—sweepers, dhobis, midwives—who report back the imminent births and marriages in their district. Every day, before setting out on tolly, the guru of the household prepares a detailed itinerary of addresses to be visited, and the eunuchs adhere strictly to this list.
We set off at seven in the morning after a particularly frantic bout of making-up: all three hijras cleaned their teeth with neem twigs, smudged on great quantities of lipstick and dusted their faces with blusher. Then we all took a convoy of rickshaws to Lajpath Nagar, in south Delhi.
At Lajpath Nagar we met up with two musicians, a pair of elderly men, one of whom played a harmonium, the other a pair of tabla drums. After a quick breakfast we set off to the first address on the list. As they walked along the streets, the eunuchs clapped their hands and made bawdy jokes, behaving quite differently from the way they did inside their Turkman Gate haveli. Vimla in particular underwent a radical character change. Sweet, shy, and doe-eyed at home, she would rush up to complete strangers in the street, grapple with her skirts and shout:“Sardarji! You with the beard! Give me money or else I’ll flash!”
The first house on the list was a small ground-floor flat belonging to a carpenter. The eunuchs piled into the entrance hall, the musicians started up the music and Vimla led the dancing by stamping her foot and ringing her little anklet bells. Things were just getting going when a neighbour appeared. Yes, she said, there had just been a birth in the house, but the family had gone to stay with cousins in Haryana; there was now no one at home. Disconsolately, we got back into the rickshaws and set off to the next address.
Travelers' Tales India Page 43
