by Anosh Irani
Madhu thought of that first meeting with Dr. Kyani as she collected the medication from Faruk. They had a routine now. No words were exchanged. She slipped him the money and he gave her twenty small pouches. Affordable and effective, they were an anomaly in the medical system: medication that worked. And for that reason alone, even though there was a jeweller’s shop right next to his dispensary, Dr. Kyani was the only real jewel around.
Madhu held on tight to the powders. Over the years, money and medicine had passed through her hands with alacrity. And she knew that money might come and go, but health loved to travel far, and once it left it would send a polite telegram: I may never return.
Just ask gurumai.
—
Madhu approached gurumai’s home, which was also her own home, her little chamber of commerce, her refuge, her womb. As she climbed the wooden stairs that creaked a different tune every single time, she thanked whatever divinity was left in this world, the one that still had the guts to hover above the red-light area, for sparing her from any major sickness. Just as Dr. Kyani had his doubts about pharmaceutical companies and their capsuled offspring, the hijras had a joke about God. Whenever he came to the red-light area and tried to heal anyone who was dying, or answer their prayers, he failed. It was too much for him to handle. So he outsourced his work to a woman. The goddess Bahuchara Mata.
Only the Mata, striding a rooster through the heavens, heard their cries. A sword in one hand and a trident in the other, she was the Divine Mother to the nation’s hijras, and they went in droves to her temple in Gujarat to seek her blessing, alongside men who wanted a cure for impotence, and women who longed for a male child.
But the Mata did not heal anyone.
Healing was for the weak. Instead she gave the hijras the power to endure. She knew their life better than anyone else; there was no way out. One had to endure.
Before Madhu entered gurumai’s room, she could hear muffled moans.
Gurumai was a successful hijra. She was enduring. On some days she was strong and loud and boisterous, and on others, she dissolved into the mattress quietly, ashamed of her body’s current state.
Eighty was a ripe age for anyone living in E Ward. That is what the area was called by the municipality. Gurumai’s home was in Part IV of E Ward. It was the most appropriate name for where they were located: E for Emergency. IV was not a number; it was short for intravenous.
For all those sick from the inside, gurumai offered hope. That’s what she had done for Madhu. When gurumai had rescued Madhu from her family, Madhu was a shivering, jittery soul trapped in the wrong body. She still was. That was something no one could cure. But at least gurumai had steadied her hands.
In a strange way, watching gurumai struggle now with her body gave Madhu strength. It was preparing her for the storm to come, unlike some other hijras who looked into mirrors all day and cherished them, as though when they grew old the mirrors would give them their youth back, as though by looking into the mirror for an hour a day they were storing some life which they could later retrieve.
Gurumai was leading by example. She was breaking before Madhu’s very eyes.
“Madhu…,” said gurumai.
“I’m here,” said Madhu.
“Why is your mobile not on?”
“My mobile?” asked Madhu. “I was at work…”
It was embarrassing when Madhu got a call in the middle of her patter just when a passenger was about to fork out some cash. It interrupted her performance and took away from her appearance of destitution.
“Don’t worry,” said Madhu. “I got the medicine.”
Gurumai shook her head. “You will get a call tonight,” she said. “From Padma…”
“What does Padma Madam want with me?”
“Whatever she asks, you will do.”
If gurumai had wanted to tell Madhu more, she would have. So Madhu asked nothing more. She opened one of the small white prescriptions and slowly placed it to gurumai’s lips. When gurumai opened her mouth, Madhu tapped one end of the tiny envelope until the powder rested on gurumai’s tongue. Gurumai swallowed it down like a prayer.
“My feet,” said gurumai. “My feet…”
It was rare for gurumai to plead in such a manner; she was a commander, not a person who politely asked for a massage, but such were the workings of old age. It softened you up, made pulp out of your bravery, made you kinder than you actually were.
Madhu sat at the edge of the bed and began to massage gurumai’s feet.
She could see that gurumai’s eyes were open and she was tracing the movements of a lizard on the wall. Someone had gifted her wallpaper, a white background with orange flowers on it, but now the flowers had faded, and the wallpaper had peeled off, making the orange flowers look like they had been torn out and were hanging on for dear life, and the ceiling fan made those torn edges flutter, and suddenly Madhu felt an unbearable urge to tell gurumai something, but she did not know what.
—
Madhu sat in silence in the small chai house adjoining the defunct Alexandra Cinema. Even though she was with Gajja—the only man she could really talk to—her mind was racing.
Madhu did not like waiting for calls, especially from people like Padma.
It gave her the same tingling in the stomach that she got when awaiting test results. When she was younger, mathematics did that to her. She had simply failed to understand all those plus and minus signs, those triangles and multiplications, all that x + y laudagiri. Then, when she became a hijra, the mathematics stopped and the medical tests began. She gave her blood only once to get it tested, and the waiting shook her up so badly it was mathematics all over again: x (Madhu) + y (disease) = suffering.
She had refused to go collect the results. She preferred not to know.
For that same reason, she did not probe into why Padma wanted to see her. She preferred to be kept in the dark, because once the light shone, it could be blinding.
The dark was where she was right now, with Gajja.
Gajja and Madhu went back a long way. He worked as a ward boy at the JJ Hospital on Nagpada, but he was hardly a boy. He was fifty, a short, stout Punjabi with thick forearms, a balding head, and ribs that had broken so many times he found it hard to sit still for too long. At least once every six months he ran his motorcycle into something, and when Madhu had once mentioned to him that it was perhaps time to retire the contraption, he had given her a lecture on how a woman does not know a thing about machines. She should shut her mouth, he’d said, and reserve her opinion for womanly things. He apologized later, but Madhu did not feel offended because Gajja had paid her the biggest compliment of all: he had called her a woman.
Now the two of them were quiet, inhaling the smell of cooking oil and onions that had seeped into the walls of the chai house. At one point it had served as the canteen to one of the oldest movie theatres in the country. Alexandra Cinema had provided comfort to many a British soldier during World War II, and had later introduced Indians to John Wayne and Tarzan. But over time, the English releases started to dwindle, and Tarzan swung away into oblivion, making way for two of Madhu’s favourite actors—Mithun and Sanjay Dutt—until even they faded, and the B and C-grade Hindi movie posters that made the theatre blaze with flesh and blood and gun and rape were sent into retirement as well, either by the dwindling reputation of the theatre itself, its decrepit walls, or by the students of the Maharashtra College opposite the theatre, who tore the posters down, declaring war on cleavage both foreign and Indian. Now, there was just one sign that said “Dara-e-Deeniyat.” The theatre had been converted into a place of worship. Where crowds once cheered and jeered and whistled at the screen five shows a day, the faithful now gathered in white and prayed five times. The building was a hollow version of its former self, its eyes carved out, its walls blackened by the soot of a small fire quelled in time, but the black and white floor tiles were somehow still intact, either in defiance of the worshippers or in deference to them.
It had been an unusually slow day for Gajja at the hospital. JJ was where the murder cases came, the hit and runs, the knife wounds, the bullet holes, the heads smashed in with hockey sticks. But today, Gajja had gone an hour or two without any work at all, and this had made him nervous, so he had guzzled down two large pegs of whisky and was now on his third. To support his drinking, he sometimes stole medicine from the hospital and sold it to prostitutes, who were willing to try anything to make the mind float and the body disappear. But he was not proud of this; if he were paid a proper salary befitting the work he did, he would not have to steal.
Gajja tried to cajole Madhu into drinking, but she refused. She needed to be clear-headed for Padma. A small lantern rested on the table between them, lighting up the roasted peanuts and Gajja’s watery eyes.
“Come on,” he said. “Have one small, loving peg.”
There was nothing small and loving about whisky, Madhu wanted to tell him, but that would ruin his mood. No man had induced tenderness from Madhu the way Gajja had. He may have become rougher over time, but who hadn’t? Her own skin was like sandpaper now, so why grudge a man some hard edges? Even when he drank, he showed sensitivity: Before putting a single drop of liquor to his lips, he always poured some into his cupped palm and scattered it on the floor. “The first drops always to Mother Earth,” he would say.
“What’s wrong?” asked Gajja, seeing Madhu shift in her chair. “Want a better seat?”
Madhu shook her head. She was suddenly aware of the lantern and its light on her face. She wondered if the glow made her look softer. Perhaps the jasmines that were tied to the bun in her hair did the trick. No, she realized, they were more than a day old and must be hanging like shrivelled skin.
“I can get you a cinema chair from inside if you want,” he said.
The theatre was closed now and forever, and Gajja knew that, but if Madhu wanted him to, he would break the iron grille that separated the two of them from the seats where they had spent so many hours and bring one to her. The man was still locked in the passion of years ago and failed to see how time had worked on Madhu so meticulously, with holy devotion.
Not that Madhu would ever want to sit in one of those seats again. She had first been here with her father to see a film, an English one, years ago, when she was a boy. Madhu had left home early with his father that day, accompanied him to work at Maharashtra College, just opposite Alexandra Cinema, sat in his tiny room while he corrected history papers, and then the two of them crossed the road to see Guns of…something—it was a long, hard name at the end. It had been yet another failed father-son outing, their last. They had failed so badly that the stench of it was more overpowering than all the dead bodies in that film.
She had returned to the theatre only a few years later, as a hijra, to do oral in the back seat. By then the theatre’s reputation had gone down the drain like a super-fast cockroach. One time, she did oral during a morning show while an English picture was playing, and even though her mouth was full, her ears were turned toward the screen because the language sounded so odd. It was assaulting her, punishing her for abandoning it and turning to Hindi. Stubborn mule that she was, she made it a point not to be intimidated, and after that she watched whatever English movie appeared, to keep in touch with the language. She was only partly successful: when she tried to speak in English, the words rolled out differently than she intended, and she felt naked and mocked. She preferred to live in Hindi but became addicted to reading movie titles that were translated from English to Hindi. Midnight Express was Aadhi Raat Mein Super-Fast, and the public rushed to see it because they thought it was about a quick, loose woman. The Godfather was Sabka Baap, and some insisted it was about an old man who went about town fathering children with loose women. Every movie alluded to loose women; it was the manager’s strategy, and it worked, and no one complained. When the man who translated the titles died—the same man who painted the billboards—Madhu took over. She begged for the job, offered to do it for free. She would supply the titles but of course could not paint any billboards.
Thinking about those days still afforded her a smile, sometimes. But each time she smiled, every time she relaxed, life tensed her up again.
Her mobile rang. She did not recognize the number, but when she answered, the voice at the other end was unmistakable.
“I believe gurumai has spoken with you.”
“Yes, madam.”
“Come to my kothi right now. I have some work for you.”
By now, Gajja was in a trance of his own, trying to find the moon in the room. It was a game the two of them used to play when they were lovers, but that was eternities ago, in the land of youth and tight skin. Gajja was the only man who had been allowed to enter Madhu for free and had access to the parts of her that were not just physical. The first time he took her, he kissed her for what seemed like hours, but Madhu knew that Gajja was kissing someone else. That was why Madhu took Gajja’s money during that first month. After that, when Madhu felt Gajja was kissing her—not the woman from his past—she put the money back into his shirt pocket while he was sleeping. After that, he never paid her again. Gajja was the only man she ever kissed. “My arsehole is public,” she told him one day. “But my lips are private.” It was her response to Gajja’s “I love you, Madhu.” She never used the word love. She thought it unlucky. For fourteen years, from the time Madhu was sixteen to when she turned thirty, he told her he loved her. And all he got in return was the line about her arsehole. Finally, when he left her for a woman, she told him she loved him, but it was at night when she was alone, and she said it to a cockroach on the wall.
Now they were just two people with a past. Physical touch was to Madhu what water was to rangoli—even a small drop could smudge the design, distort it beyond repair. But Gajja was drunk, and when he was drunk, he played their old game.
“Where’s the moon?” he asked. “Can you see it?”
“No,” she replied.
So Gajja looked this way and that, up and down, sideways, diagonally—he used every camera angle possible to look for the moon. Then he waited for Madhu to say her line, one she used to say with so much longing that Gajja would swear that the ghost of Ghalib had temporarily slid into her.
“It is a moonless night.” She played along. “It is a moonless night.”
When Madhu finally said those words, she knew that her flute was hollow and that her words had no music in them. But Gajja still clutched his heart. Three pegs down, he lay on the ground and looked up at her, helpless, lost, a man who had found the very surrender that Ghalib’s ghazals had so drunkenly spoken of.
“There she is…,” said Gajja, pointing to Madhu. “There’s my moon.”
Madhu blessed her man. She asked her heart to scrounge together any goodness it could, and she directed it toward him because he was making a broken object feel human. He turned her rough to smooth, he turned the water inside her belly to sherbet; he was still the man she loved, except that love and touch were strangers now, travellers following different maps.
She tore the string of jasmines that were tied in her hair and slowly showered them on Gajja. He revelled in these drops of white, let them fall on his face, soft kisses from the love he once had. Then she left him on the floor. “I have to go,” she said.
And just like that, the moon disappeared.
—
Outside, the red lights had come on.
Some were red, some were blue, and others green. It depended on the brothel owner’s taste. When Madhu was young, it felt as though the whole area pulsated on its own, had a hunger to outlive and outshine anything or anyone. But now she saw the district as a collection of dead people that suddenly sprang to life only when the lights came on. It was resuscitated every night with an extra dose of doom, and it responded brilliantly, as though kissed by something holy. And indeed, something holy stood at its entrance, in the form of a small shrine, that of Sai Baba of Shirdi.
At the corner
of Bellasis Road, just round the bend from the Alexandra Cinema, was a white-tiled wall with a hutch in the middle. There rested Sai, the bearded saint, guide, and solace-giver to both Hindus and Muslims. Madhu closed her eyes and passed her hand over the flame of the oil lamp that lay at Sai’s feet, the only warmth most residents could hope to find on any given night. This was the unmarked beginning of the red-light district. It was here that taxi drivers dropped off the hungry, at a stand where pimps hovered over passengers, barely giving them time to exit the vehicles, showering upon them rates and body shapes, and the promise of orgasms so monstrous, they would make the high-rises looming against Mumbai’s new skyline seem puny.
Opposite Sai, the convent school receded in the background, the white statue of Jesus perched high above, his arms outspread, looking down at the whores who stood by the school walls dressed in red and silver, shiny little ladies, as though they had swallowed all the firecrackers during Diwali and were now setting them off internally, in bits and sparks, night by night, for the rest of the year. Madhu knew most of them, some by name, almost all by face. It was best to keep track of faces, not names. Names stayed the same, but faces could change overnight. Sculpted by beatings in the dark, they assumed new forms. The loss of a tooth, or the rage of being raped by three, showed itself on the cheek like a hot flash. Yes, it was best to keep track of faces.
It was dhandha time, and one of the women on sale, a silver thing, was bargaining with a potential customer. This was Salma, a mainstay at Padma’s brothel. She was out in the street snatching clients as birds do fish from water, right at the edge of the district.
“No, no, not two hundred,” Salma said. “Three hundred is fixed rate, yaar. What a miserly prick you have. Kanjoos lauda!”
Salma was one of more than sixty women who worked for Padma, and even when she did not wear silver, she sparkled. Her skin was dark and there were small pimples on her cheeks, but she knew how to talk to a man. The bodies of the women were all more or less of equal mileage, but what set a woman apart, and Madhu knew this better than anyone else, was her ability to mind-fuck, to leave an invitation to bajao in the man’s mind, so that if he hesitated about it for even a second more, the offer would expire and he would miss the earthquake of the century. Madhu had been a champion at this. Tonight she moved on, leaving Salma to her trade, ignoring a small surge of pride. It still came, on occasion, when she recalled the sense of power she had once felt. But it left her feeling stupid. Now she was a mere lemon peel lying on the road.
