The Parcel

by Anosh Irani

  The blessing was held in a middle-class home. On the day of a wedding, even a dungeon like that house shone. Sona played the drums and Bulbul sang. They had taken a portable tape recorder with them to play the cheapest item songs, which was gurumai’s idea. The world was changing; tradition had to take a back seat to hip gyrations.

  Madhu was not a dancer. She simply put her arms to her sides and started swaying. The whore in her made the men notice. She did not want them to. In fact, she was scared and self-conscious about having to dance.

  As well, the happiness surrounding her was getting to her. She was in the presence of “normal” people on a day of tremendous joy. She was standing in someone’s middle-class living room after years and years of banishment. It felt like another planet. She could not bear the smell in that home because it did not smell of sex and urine. It was so clean, she thought she might gag on the cleanliness, and on all those fake smiles tolerating her presence.

  Bulbul’s singing made her feel even worse. The words Bulbul sang were all her own:

  Oh look at this rickety face

  Look where it is placed

  On the body of a woman

  Who once was a man

  But is now neither, neither, neither.

  Madhu had never seen Bulbul at work and she marvelled at her skill. She was using her hands so subtly, to highlight her face. Even a mediocre painting could pass for a masterpiece for a second or two if offset by a frame, and that is exactly what Bulbul’s fingers were doing: providing a second or two of authentic femininity, a mere drop of acceptance in the ocean of time.

  But the women who were gathered to watch thought Bulbul was mocking herself. They were giggling like a bunch of ten-year-olds at someone who had just got her first period. When Madhu looked at the bride’s face and saw that she knew nothing of a hijra’s pain, it irked her that just by being born in the right body, this young woman had avoided all that Madhu had gone through. Madhu realized that she had stopped swaying and that her gaze was locked on the bride’s smile.

  “Don’t stare at her,” the bride’s mother told her. “Don’t look at her face. You should know better. It’s not good.”

  Madhu was so startled, she started swaying again, but she could not digest the mother’s words. Madhu knew that if she opened her mouth, she was asking for trouble, but her own mother’s words came searing through her memory: “Why can’t you just listen to him?” That was it.

  “What’s not good?” Madhu asked the bride’s mother.

  “Hah?”

  “Why can’t I look at her face? What’s the problem?”

  Sona suddenly stopped drumming and Bulbul tapered off into silence.

  “You should know,” said the mother. “It’s unlucky. She will be unable to bear children, just like you.”

  How warped the human soul was. This woman had allowed Madhu into her home on her daughter’s wedding day because she was superstitious. And so, in her mind, the hijras were extorting money from her, preying on her fears. Instead of being part of a historic tradition, the hijras had been pushed to the fringes and were left sitting on the margins the way flies sat on the rim of a plate, unwanted, circling the perimeter to find a way back in, but never succeeding. Money was not given to them as a reward for their skilled performance. Money was given to drive the hijras away.

  “Do you know why I cannot have children?” Madhu asked her.

  The woman had by then realized the folly of her assault. She had simmered down, but Madhu had awoken.

  “I cannot have children because I have nothing,” she said.

  Then Madhu lifted her sari and started to remove her panties. Bulbul placed her arm around her, but Madhu shook it off; she could not stop. She put her own arm on Bulbul’s shoulder instead, used her as support, and tugged her panties down her legs. Then she lifted her red sari, which spanned the room like a flower, opening its petals for all to see—except that there was nothing. The flesh was so barren, it showed no signs of life except for a cigarette burn made by a truck driver long ago.

  She stood there with her sari hoisted for what seemed like an eternity. In lifting her sari, Madhu was also using it as a shield to cover her face. Then the silence was shattered by the bride’s cries, and the men of the house drove the hijras out. Madhu had ruined the happiest day of the bride’s life. She was told to go die.

  When gurumai heard of this, she told her three hijras to keep quiet. This incident could not reach the ears of the hijra leaders. She felt sorry for Madhu, and also was resigned to the fact that Madhu had changed. Madhu herself could not understand why she had acted as she did that day. She was thus relegated to begging, and Bombay Central became her adda. From a dhandhewali to a badhai hijra, and now a mangti, one who begged, she had experienced all three roles that a hijra could play. Her income crashed, her stomach lost its tautness, and lines started to appear beneath her eyes—hot, sorrowful bags that swelled with madness. Her body was no longer ravaged by men—and let alone, it talked even more.

  Madhu was sure that the parcel’s body was talking to her this very instant. She carefully slid open the lid of the water tank just a sliver and shouted, “If anyone’s in there, come out!” She listened for a response but heard nothing. Once her eyes adjusted to the light inside the water tank, she saw the parcel’s quivering silhouette. That quiver was the second question the body asked, after Why?—What if? That was the second sign of internal bleeding: the slow, ruinous feeling that in some way perhaps she was responsible for her fate.

  Around the time Madhu was reduced to begging, when her body was no longer worshipped by men and had all the time to speak, it made her ask: What if she had not run away from home? If she had not run away, perhaps her father would have accepted her. The acceptance would not have been wholehearted; it would have been a quiet resignation, the way one accepted falling hair. Father would have inched toward son. Each time he smelled the girl trapped inside Madhu, it would have rattled him, but his own worst fear, of public gossip, had already come true. In time, acceptance would have set him free.

  The more Madhu had stared at the walls of Fancy Mahal that night on the bridge, the more she had believed this to be true. Cars passed by but no one stopped; she camouflaged herself well into any darkness. Even her sari clung to her, assisting her in avoiding detection.

  She allowed herself an awful thought: Gurumai had laid a trap for her. Gurumai was not her benefactor, her guardian, as Madhu had thought. Her own disastrous need had prevented her from seeing gurumai’s true face. And Madhu had chosen her current life because of her own stubbornness. She had become more and more uneasy as crows cawed and dawn arrived, and the only thing moving was a small Pakistani flag attached to the minaret of a mosque. The satellite dishes on the tops of buildings yawned, bored at her pain.

  It was then that she had looked directly into the apartment across from her. As lights came on, she had seen a family waking up. Together. The father gently leaned down to wake his boy. The boy wiped his eyes and begged for more time. The mother carried her little girl in her arms to the toilet. It was all so simple.

  A great calm came over Madhu. Then, an even greater sickness.

  She had become visible. The father, a man with a long beard, had spotted her. He came to the balcony, where he was joined by his wife. Madhu and this couple were only feet away from each other. Both man and woman looked at Madhu. They said nothing. They knew what Madhu was. They did not shoo her away. They allowed her into their family, to stand in the shared calm of people who loved and respected one another, and for that Madhu was grateful.

  Instead of going back to Kamathipura that morning, she had gone to step forty-seven on the bridge closest to her family’s home. That was the first time. And that’s how bridges had become her nasha. No wonder her brother now stood on his balcony so often in the middle of the night. No wonder he couldn’t sleep. That shadow, that feeling on her brother’s skin that something was watching him, judging him, that was Madhu. It had taken her
years to get to this point.

  Dawn came and Madhu felt strong. She told the parcel to come out of the water tank. The girl had endured the process well. As Madhu dried her off, she saw that the water had pruned her hands into those of an old woman’s. The water was doing its job. It had hidden many parcels. Now Madhu was certain that this parcel would be her last. Unlike water, which took the form of the vessel that contained it, Madhu would no longer allow herself to be shaped by others. It was time to reclaim what she had lost, what had been taken from her.

  Once Madhu was done delivering the parcel, she would put on her finest outfit, a salwar kameez with a gold border, she would take meaningful strides toward Geeta Bhavan, where the diabetic ghosts would egg her on, she would climb up the stairs to her former home, and she would knock on the door. In the dark, just like gurumai had. For a second time, a hijra would visit her home. But this time, her brother would open the door.

  9

  It was always night in Kamathipura. Days were a mutation of night. When dusk came, the hijras appeared like stars and stood in clusters, lit up. Roomali looked extra white tonight, while Devyani stood erect on the public toilet roof and peered into the distance like a sentry from a different era, on a fort tower, alert for an enemy onslaught. Devyani’s error was that she was looking for the enemy outside the boundaries of Kamathipura, when the real-estate vultures were already inside. Among the hijras, only Madhu noticed the small bulldozer parked on the other side of the public toilet. It hadn’t been there when she returned home the night before. That a bulldozer had come in so stealthily in the middle of the night, without so much as a sound, meant something.

  Madhu tried to tell herself she was just being paranoid. Gurumai would never sell. The bulldozer must be for the structures surrounding Hijra House. Just as the hijras were a thorn in the face of society, the building they lived in would serve as a reminder that they could not be disseminated easily. They were scar tissue, and they would somehow endure.

  Madhu knew that the gathering of the hijra leaders was in one day, and that fact was weighing on her. Even though the gathering was not in Kamathipura, gurumai was having the brothel cleaned in case one of the leaders wished to visit. But Madhu knew that would never happen. The hijra leaders looked down on sex work. It brought shame to the hijra community. No leader would ever enter Kamathipura. Still, gurumai insisted on employing some retired female prostitutes to clean the brothel anyway, and they were busy scrubbing the walls and floors so hard that neither prostitutes nor brothel would have any skin left.

  Madhu kept her mind on the task at hand. The parcel needed her attention. She needed to be made ready. As Madhu walked toward Padma’s brothel, it occurred to her that nothing could destroy Kamathipura. Its structures could be demolished, but it could not be destroyed. She was experiencing the same thing with the parcel. The parcel would die and then re-emerge in an altered form.

  When Madhu arrived at Padma’s brothel, Salma told her that the parcel was in her room. The girl had been running a fever, so Salma had given her a Crocin.

  “We need to do something,” said Madhu. “Have you forgotten?”

  “No,” said Salma. “I’ll fetch the parcel.”

  When they came down to join Madhu in the street, the three of them were greeted with a surge of unholy noise. The pimps of Kamathipura had suddenly turned pious. It was their monthly cleansing too, and they were singing bhajans in praise of Sai Baba of Ajmer. They had paid money to the owner of Café Faredoon and requested that he feed the poor on their behalf. A long line of the destitute had formed outside the restaurant, where they waited to be fed mutton biryani paid for with rape money. One pimp had cymbals in his hands and was striking away with such fervour, he was convinced he had been forgiven.

  Salma and Madhu parted ways, Salma muttering about needing to go to Bachuseth Ki Wadi. This was a kebab place known all over the city, and next to it was a string of tailors. After the government had shut down dance bars, many of the bar girls had moved to the suburbs and resorted to prostitution, or had gone back to their townships. Tonight, the tailors of Bachuseth Ki Wadi were having a sale of second-hand outfits, ones that the bar girls had sold back to them for a pittance. Some of the bar girls were still around, working in a dance bar or two that managed to operate clandestinely. Madhu sometimes watched them arrive at the dance bar in taxis; they’d slip through the back entrance like pretty robbers.

  Tonight the street lights were brighter than usual. Madhu smirked when she read the street name: Nimkar Marg. The name change was a pathetic attempt at giving the area an air of respectability. Someone must have felt that Nimkar Marg was less dirty than Foras Road or Kamathipura. As if by changing a name, the area would be different, thought Madhu scornfully. Name it anything—the area would always have the screams of whores whizzing around, looking for someone to listen. Screams could not be fooled. Screams did not pay attention to street names.

  A lone white bull stood below the flashing neon sign of a mobile repair shop. Madhu felt the parcel slow down as they passed; she stared at the whip marks on its skin. Bloody lines ran deep across the beast’s back and belly. Madhu imagined the same arm coming down in the same arc each time the bull slowed down. The parcel ran her fingers along the bull’s skin, tenderly avoiding the lines.

  Madhu had never seen the parcel this way. Perhaps the bull reminded her of something, or someone, and she was trying to speak to it. She flicked a couple of flies off a wound. Then she looked at Madhu, wanting to stay there for a bit. Madhu paused and let her tend to the bull. The parcel drove the flies away again and then blew on the bull’s wounds, determined to provide some relief. When Madhu looked at the parcel’s eyes, she saw that they were watery. Madhu sighed. It was perhaps the last act of kindness the parcel would perform. Once she was opened, the kindness would leave, just like the flies she was driving away.

  As Madhu went to lead the parcel away from the bull, a police van passed by. It stopped a few feet away from them, outside a newly erected police booth. Madhu guessed it had sprouted there to make the normal citizens of the area feel secure. On the police van, painted in white against dark blue, was “Crimes Against Women Children and Senior Citizens Call 103.”

  Madhu read the words again, just for fun. Here she was, right in front of the van, with a parcel that was going to be opened up as though she were a birthday present. The bull was now moving its head in the parcel’s direction in appreciation for the girl’s efforts to drive the flies away. It had stopped twitching. But now Madhu was getting wary. Two cops got out of the van and went to a chai stall. A third cop came out of the police booth and started talking to the other two. He looked in Madhu’s direction. Madhu smiled at him, then reached out to place her hand on the parcel’s shoulder. The girl had moved toward the bull’s mouth and was mumbling something to it.

  Luckily, the busyness of the street kept things normal. A prostitute was holding an old man by the hand and helping him cross the road. She was being abused by another prostitute, who accused her of stealing her client. A goat followed the old man across the street. A motorcycle veered to the side to avoid the goat and slid instead into an empty cot placed outside a barber’s shop. People rushed to the rider’s aid.

  The parcel looked up at Madhu. Then, she made a run for it.

  She shot away, a terrified bullet in the direction of the cops. She shouted for help and one of the cops turned, and for a moment, Madhu’s heart beat faster. But then the cop was distracted by his colleague who was trying to move the crowd away from the fallen rider. The parcel was only a few feet away from the police van.

  Suddenly Salma stood in the parcel’s path, blocking her like a dam. She swooped her away into a side street, and Madhu followed. The two of them stood silently in front of the parcel. Madhu saw the colour fading from the parcel’s face—hope was leaving the way the sun left an evening. The outing had simply been a test to see if the parcel would try to escape. Salma had been stationed there all along. Madhu had wante
d to check if the parcel could be trusted, if enough fear had been instilled in her. But the poor thing had done what most girls did: she had seen the cops and tried her luck.

  And like the parcels of the past, she had failed. Like all parcels, this one had to be punished.

  —

  On the way back to Padma’s, Madhu did not admonish the parcel in any way. In fact, she stopped at a bhel-puri vendor and treated the parcel to her fullest meal yet. The parcel could hardly eat a morsel. Madhu sensed that she was terrified. Each time Madhu looked at her, she flinched the way one flinches in anticipation of a tight slap across the face. But Madhu did nothing of the sort. When they reached the loft, the parcel got into the cage like a well-trained animal petrified of its owner’s whip. She was about to say something to Madhu, but Madhu just smiled at her as she closed the cage door, which rattled the parcel even more, pushing her back into silence.

  Madhu was playing things cool on purpose; her nonchalance was certainly going to make the cage smaller that night. Sleep would come to the parcel in fits, and each time the parcel woke up, her dread would grow. She’d have time to reflect on the futility of her escape attempt. The night would also give Madhu enough time to think about a method of punishment. Physical punishment was out of the question because that would damage the parcel. Madhu had to keep her fresh. But there were ways—there were always ways.

  Gajja unknowingly provided Madhu with one when he called her the next morning and asked if she would go with him for an afternoon show at New Roshan Talkies. Madhu was so taken with the idea that popped into her head, she did not bother to ask which show. She hadn’t been to Pila Haus in a while, but she hoped the tattoo woman was still outside New Roshan Talkies.