by Anosh Irani
“There is no use screaming for help. No one will help you.”
“Please…,” said the parcel. “Please…let me go…I want…to go home…”
“This is home,” said Madhu. “If you want to be happy, you will listen to me. To listen to me, you have to be silent. Do you understand?”
But the parcel did not. She had a new burst of energy, fresh grief and fear, and she let out even sharper howls and sudden sobs that echoed in the loft.
Madhu took the cloth bag that she had picked up from the temple on her way to Padma’s. What lay inside was still, but it was breathing. She did not want to alarm it: if it started thrashing about in the bag, it would be hard to contain. She needed to be calm. Madhu shone the flashlight on the cloth bag. The moment the parcel saw the bulge in it, like a long, slender stomach pressing against the cloth, she became quiet.
“I want you to remember this,” said Madhu. “Remember this, because from now on, each time you scream, each time you disobey me, I will make you go through this again and again.”
The parcel was fixated on the mouth of the bag. As Madhu opened it, she placed it between the cage bars and let its contents slide out, as though she was pouring oil into the cage. What slid out wasn’t oil, but it was just as slippery, and when the parcel heard its voice, she let out a wild shriek and begged for mercy, as her skin was covered in something truly living. It was trying to tell her something; it was speaking into her ear, telling her to be quiet, but the parcel failed to understand, and she continued to scream. So it left her ear alone and slithered down her neck and back, and it touched so many parts of her that she thought there were three or four nightmares in the cage when all along there was but one.
4
Whenever Bulbul cooked, she tied her hair back in a bun and blasted the radio at full volume. Madhu was at the other corner of the brothel, pressing gurumai’s feet, but the crackle through the speakers still irritated Madhu. She knew Bulbul believed that someone was sending her messages through the radio. Bulbul had a lover once, ages ago, and when his family members found out that he was seeing a hijra, he was prevented from seeing her. Bulbul believed that each time a certain song was requested on the radio by a caller, it was on behalf of her ex-lover, who was telling her to hold on. She was the ultimate romantic: imbalanced and delusional.
If love was making Bulbul imbalanced, gurumai was caught in the grip of the latest disease to have captured Kamathipura. Madhu believed it would result in more casualties than anything the area had experienced thus far. It would be more lethal than the disease that made the pojeetives.
It was called real estate.
For years the people of the city had fought over space. Which had been fine all this while, thought Madhu, because the poor were used to sleeping within inches of each other. So what if someone’s arm touched another’s face or someone’s knee poked someone’s stomach? The poor needed warmth, didn’t they? But then the country had opened up her legs to the world, and everyone and their father wanted to slide in. Now, the middle class and the rich were battling it out. Bombay had been stretched, forced to reach Malad and Mulund and Borivali. In the city itself, the slums needed to be cleared in the name of civic duty. The homes of all the people who worked as drivers and cooks and watchmen and servants in the houses of the rich and not so rich had to be broken; they had to relocate. Send the Bangladeshis back. Why are the Biharis here? Maybe the government should issue visas for this city. Maybe the…wait a minute. What’s this place?
Madhu imagined a builder looking at Kamathipura and his mouth watering. Something was making him hard and it wasn’t the prostitutes. Acres of land in the heart of the city? What had once been a phantom, barely recognized by government and civic authorities, a place where only crows and cats cleared the garbage each morning, was seen to occupy a prime position on the city map. The builders started hounding the landlords, who then began courting the tenants as though they were hot brides. Some fell for the bait and began to vacate. An agent was currently spinning a similar yarn for gurumai, except that gurumai was no tenant. She owned the damn place. Madhu massaged gurumai’s feet and kept her ears open.
“Umesh, we are happy here,” said gurumai. “I have told you that already.”
“But I can make you happier,” said Umesh.
“I’m old now. If my disciples are happy, I’m happy.”
“Then do it for them. Sell it for them.”
Gurumai indicated for Madhu to press her feet harder.
“You know how I bought this place?” she asked.
“You borrowed money from Padma,” said Umesh.
“That’s what everyone thinks,” said gurumai. “But I did not borrow money. I borrowed her influence. Money I already had. A local gangster had his eye on it. I went to Padma and she sorted it out for me.”
“Why are you telling me this? I’m not forcing you to leave. I’m making you an offer.”
“If it wasn’t for Padma, I wouldn’t even meet you. But I understand that your grandfather was the one who lent her money when she was setting up. So in a way she is indebted to you, and I to her.”
“That’s how things work around here. We do favours for each other.”
“Then let me do you a favour and show you around,” said gurumai.
She adjusted the key around her neck, spat her paan into a spittoon, and got up.
“Come,” she said, and gestured toward the stairs.
Was gurumai taking him upstairs? The rooms up there provided not even the remotest comfort.
Gurumai opened the door to the kothi, and Umesh was made to stare at twenty bunk beds, small dingy holes, some with caged fans, the kind found on local trains. The lower bunks had wooden footrests, and each one had a nylon string from which a curtain hung, a curtain that had once been white but was now puddle brown.
“This is where the sex happens,” said gurumai. “Not just hijras, but female prostitutes also, those who are too haggard to be employed by any brothel. They rent a cubicle out for almost nothing.”
The place had an overpowering odour, which Madhu noticed only because of the way Umesh stood. She could see he was trying not to let it show.
“They may have just one client for the night and earn enough to recover the rent money and perhaps eat one meal,” continued gurumai. “I sometimes let them stay an extra day because otherwise they have to share the footpath with a dog or rat.”
Madhu glanced at the far corner where she used to work. She’d had her own section with a bed and curtain to cordon off the star from the ordinaries. She’d even had a wash basin and clean towels, a small mirror, and a hook on the wall for men to hang their clothes.
Next, gurumai took Umesh to the sickroom. It was where the pojeetives were kept. Thankfully, there was only one in the sickroom right now. She was middle-aged but her body was crumbling at a rapid pace. When gurumai entered, the hijras who were looking after the pojeetive stood up in greeting. These were hijras who had been blacklisted by their gurus for misdemeanours ranging from abusing or assaulting a guru to quietly slipping money to the very families that had disowned them and left them in the gutter. The list reached all hijra leaders with alarming accuracy and speed. No longer affiliated to any guru or household, the outcastes were secretly taken in by gurumai on the condition that they nurse the pojeetives, or any hijra who was old and ill. They made their money by prostituting themselves in the bunk beds next door. It was the only way. If they begged on trains or asked shopkeepers for alms and were reported to their leaders, it would be the end for them. Until they had enough money to pay the fine to re-enter the community in front of a hijra committee, the bunk beds were all they had.
“Come,” gurumai whispered to Umesh. “Meet her.”
“No…,” said Umesh.
She took Umesh’s hand and led him to where the pojeetive lay. The tired figures of eight hijras loomed around him. Madhu knew some of them well; others were just silhouettes she had seen over the past couple of months.
A hacking cough broke the mood, and Umesh skittered away like a bird upon hearing a loud sound.
But the cough was not from the pojeetive. She was totally still, so thin that she might as well have been skinned; layers of life had been removed from her. Her body was wet from sweat and she was shivering. Even the slightest touch of a cloth upon her skin made her bawl—such was the burn she felt upon touch. Seeing her made Madhu wonder what the point was, why God would allow such a worm to develop. The only answer was that at least there was an end. The pojeetive worm was saying, Come home. Suffer quickly, quietly, bravely, and come back fast.
Gurumai made Umesh bend down. A white cake had formed around the hijra’s lips, frothy bubbles, some of which had dried at the corners of her mouth. Gurumai took the dropper that lay beside the hijra’s head, dipped it into a bowl of water, and pressed it until it was bulbous.
“Make her drink,” she told Umesh.
She handed the dropper to him. Madhu could see that this was something he had never witnessed: a few square feet of intense suffering, the plundering of the human body and spirit, a few square feet of sheer courage, a hijra’s refusal to expire, a tiny lamp in prime property. Drops of water fell into the hijra’s mouth, but she did not know it. Her eyes were closed but her mouth was slightly open, the gap between her lips forced out of total exhaustion.
With the two of them kneeling side by side, gurumai turned to Umesh. “Do you see why I cannot sell this place?” she asked. “Where will my children go to die?”
—
Once Umesh had left, gurumai told Madhu, “After meeting a real estate agent, I’m beginning to like the local pimps more.”
Madhu could sense that gurumai was about to go on a tirade. Thanks to Umesh, Madhu would now have to listen to how screwed up everything was from the government to onions, from religion to the peeling plaster on the walls of Hijra House.
“As though our lives are not hard enough!” said gurumai. “Then this lund comes along with his fake smile and offers to make it harder. He’s a transparent bra trying to hide a nipple.”
Madhu cringed upon hearing that word: not bra or nipple, but transparent.
Recently, she found she could not bear the secret she carried within her. She had not told anyone about it, especially gurumai. If her current work with the parcel was shameful, what she had been doing for the past few years, surreptitiously at night, was even more so.
Bridges were her secret. Her addiction.
Many of the bridges in the centre of the city ran parallel to buildings, so close that Madhu could stand on one and see straight into people’s homes. A few years after the JJ Bridge had been built, long after the tired motorists of the city had begun treating it like some sort of salvation, Madhu had begun using it too. After that, the Kennedy Bridge, Grant Road Bridge, and the Bombay Central flyover had made her habit spin out of control. Standing on bridges, staring at the people in the city’s buildings, became her smack, her ganja.
When gurumai had exhausted herself with her outburst, Madhu stepped outside to clear her head. Her feet took her past Underwear Tree, toward the very bridge where her habit had begun. It was the bridge of her childhood, and from it she could see the building in which her parents still had their flat. Both were alive. Her father was in his seventies now, her mother was a few years younger, and the son that God had given them was breathing too. She had not seen her brother’s face up close since leaving home long ago. The thought was terrifying. But she had seen his form. Now she stood where the shop Geeta Bhavan used to be, in the exact spot where she had been rubbing the sticky juice of gulab jamuns on her thigh when gurumai had first spotted her.
Madhu stooped under an old rusty tin roof. Geeta Bhavan had shut down years ago, and all that remained were cement bags strewn on the ground, old newspapers, pieces of wood, and a weak barricade to demarcate the property line. There was a new ATM machine just a few feet away, and a modern American-style hair salon, but Geeta Bhavan itself, once crowded with the happy hum of housewives and servants and taxiwalas, was now just a hollow frame, sharing its emptiness with the flats above it. Madhu imagined it was haunted now by the ghosts of men and women who’d died of diabetes. She felt the anger of the ghosts who had eaten too many sweets; all they could do now was rustle old newspapers like the wind. Once upon a time, Madhu had thought her father would join them, but it turned out that the man was so bitter, no amount of sugar could kill him. He would die of old age, she guessed, peacefully in his sleep, giving others around him the illusion that he had led a good life. As for Madhu’s mother, when she met her maker, she would be charged with cowardice and choosing one child over another.
Tonight the lights were off in Madhu’s childhood flat. She trudged toward the bridge that went up toward Diana Cinema and Tardeo Circle and started to cross. She knew exactly how many steps she needed to take before she had to stop: forty-seven.
She was on her fifteenth step now, the spot where the banana seller stood. She bought a banana for four rupees, and by the time she’d unpeeled and eaten it, she had reached the forty-seventh step. She stopped and looked over the side at the lane below the bridge, which was full of tailor shops. Not a soul was around. The signboard for Champak Tailors had not changed in years. Champak specialized in Punjabi suits and school uniforms. Madhu’s father used to take him to Champak, and he would always tell the man to make Madhu’s shorts long so that he could wear them for the next three years. The waist was to be kept loose too, for the same reason. Madhu’s dream had been to have Champak stitch a dress for him, not some stupid school uniform, so he’d always eye the dress cloth in the shop window, the Punjabi suits on display, the glitter of stars caught on cloth.
On Madhu’s twentieth birthday, she had fulfilled that dream. She went to Champak in all her hijra finery: new bangles, a nose ring, a sari blouse that showed off her midriff—her bosom was supple enough for her to know exactly how much to pull in and how much to jut out. She told the tailor that she wanted to have a Punjabi suit. She thought he might ask her to leave, which is why she went just before closing, when no customers were around. But no, he took her measurements with his tape just as he had when Madhu was a boy, made notes in his ledger with his half-chewed-up pencil, adjusted the glasses on his nose when he checked her bosom, and gave Madhu a furtive glance of approval. Then he asked for an advance.
Madhu paid in full. At the time, her arsehole was a cash crop. When Champak asked for a name to write down in his ledger, she said, “Madhu.”
“Don’t you remember me?” she asked.
Of course Champak did not.
“Madhu,” she repeated. “Rathod Sir’s son.”
Champak was speechless. It did not matter. Madhu’s idea was not to scandalize him; it was to humiliate her father. The next time her father came to Champak for Madhu’s brother’s uniform, Champak would tell him about Madhu’s visit. That would be enough.
Before Madhu left, she told Champak, “Make sure you keep the length exact. Don’t make it long, like my shorts.”
Then she winked and walked away. It had been one of the great moments of her life—if she could call her days and months and years a life. It certainly didn’t seem like one when she stood on a bridge alone, like she was doing now, and ate a banana for dinner because the mere sight of her childhood home and her brother’s clothes hanging outside to dry were enough to cramp her belly. No, what she had could not be called a life. It was one long stretch of chutiyagiri. A highway full of roadside stalls where the only food served was rejection.
Madhu was not only a glutton for punishment; she was a fraud. One of the first things demanded of hijras when they were initiated into the community was that they sever old ties, physically and emotionally. They were trained to shut out their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. The old life was old skin, and only if they shed it would their true form reveal itself.
It was invigorating, in the beginning. It was what Madhu had wanted, and there had been fresh petrol in her l
egs and heart, churned out each day by the desire to never see her family again, to cause them pain, the way they had her. But the petrol had long ago run out and her tank was dry. All that remained was an exquisite self-loathing.
Now, instead of a human being, there was a soft, ungainly pulp standing on step forty-seven on the bridge whose name she knew and wanted to change. It had the worst view in all of Mumbai: the view of a building called Shakti. Madhu could still see herself walking out of that building, two years after she had first met gurumai and the two hijras. As she stood on the bridge, she saw her twelve-year-old self again.
Her twelve-year-old self stands at the circle just before Underwear Tree, staring at three irresistible figures. She knows what they are. By now, her father has called her a hijra several times—meaning everything from freak to coward to effeminate disgrace. The three hijras share a beedi. One mouth to the next, like close friends.
Madhu crosses the street and follows them. He has no idea why. He just knows he must.
They stop at a shop that sells motorcycle seat covers. A variety of seat covers hang on a wall: silver, blue, yellow. The one that catches Madhu’s eye is a leopard skin seat. Gurumai strokes it while the shop owner hands her money. Gurumai closes her eyes and seems to be praying over the seat cover. Then she blesses the man and they move along the street to where women make cane baskets. One of them is chopping the cane with a small handsaw. Another sharpens the cane with a knife. Madhu knows this area is forbidden. He has been told by his father never to go there. “Don’t even look there,” he has told Madhu. But Madhu has seen his father take this route on his way to the college.
Madhu has never walked on his own this far away from home. He hears his father’s words again, “Don’t go this side,” but he twists them, or lets one word drop, and hears, “Go this side.” Madhu is enamoured with the way the three hijras walk; no one he knows can sway their hips that way. Like the pendulum of the clock in school, those hips never swing even an inch more or less on either side.
