by Rahul Mehta
Pooja had not known what Guru Ma’s intentions were. She knew—by the expensive frame and the careful way Guru Ma had handled the image—that it was destined for something greater than the patch of wall above her mattress covered with stills from Stardust: Madhuri Dixit and Kajol and Sushmita Sen. But Pooja did not expect that, upon handing the frame to Guru Ma, she would place it on her sacred altar, where she prayed every morning and night. How odd Diana—or Maha Diana, as Guru Ma would later insist she be called—looked sandwiched between Bahuchara Mata and Durga Ma, dark-haired, ancient goddesses, one riding a rooster, the other a tiger. Maha Diana: with her feathered blond hair and white teeth and blue, blue eyes.
Pooja needed a tent, Kiran decided. It wasn’t safe for her to sleep like that, exposed under the peepal tree. So far, they’d been lucky not to have any rain since she’d arrived a few days earlier, but a briskness had already started creeping into the nights, and it was only going to get colder.
Ironic then that it would happen to be so hot the day Kiran—with chilly nights on his mind—set out to find Pooja a tent. Kiran was stupid to have ventured out midday, and without even a hat or umbrella for protection from the sun. He had taken a bus from the thoroughfare adjacent to his house to the main market some kilometers away, but he had missed the stop and had gotten off too late, having to backtrack through the heat. He finally found the market and searched the stall and shops for someplace that might sell the item. He hadn’t wanted anyone at home to know where he was going or what he was looking for, so he hadn’t asked for help, hadn’t learned the Hindi word for “tent,” and even the shopkeepers who spoke English didn’t seem to understand “tent” in English, so he relied on his bad drawing on a piece of paper he’d ripped from his Superman journal and his awkward charades—miming lifting the flap, stepping in, zipping the zipper, lying down to sleep—but he was met with blank looks and shrugging shoulders. He wandered around for what he thought was half an hour, but when he looked at his watch he realized it had been three. He remembered visiting only a few shops. How could it be possible that three hours had passed? It was already time to head back, and he hadn’t found what he was looking for.
He was walking on the jagged sidewalk past shops on a long stretch of road with heavy traffic—a chaotic jumble of cars and trucks and bicycles, scooters and auto rickshaws, and the occasional camel or bullock—not quite sure where he was, searching for the bus he needed to return home. He choked down the exhaust fumes and reached into his satchel for a water bottle he could not find and could not remember if he had even brought. He noticed two small children, a boy and a girl, very dirty, following him, flanking him. The girl held one of her arms outstretched, her palm open. With her other hand she mimed eating, bringing the pinched fingers repeatedly to her mouth. The first time Kiran had seen a beggar in India was just after he’d arrived, when Bharat fetched him from the airport in the nearby city to drive him to their town. Just a few kilometers from the airport, while their car was stopped at a signal, a disfigured beggar with only one arm had come and put his face right up to Kiran’s window and stared at him through the glass. The signal seemed to take forever to change. Kiran went to open the window but Bharat barked, “No. It’s best not to give to beggars. Others will follow and before you know it you’ll be surrounded.” Kiran looked away but couldn’t help looking back, the man still staring at him.
Now the small boy was trying to get Kiran’s attention. Kiran wasn’t looking at him, and the boy started pawing at Kiran, scratching at him lightly. Kiran turned to the boy and said, “No,” louder and more forcefully than he had intended. The boy continued to paw at Kiran, more insistent now; there was desperation in his persistence. Kiran looked at his filthy hand, black with dirt and soot and who knew what else, and Kiran said no again and pushed the boy hard. The boy fell to the ground, not quite into the street, but still a car driving too close to the edge of the sidewalk honked and swerved. Kiran had stopped walking now. He was looking at the boy who lay fallen on the ground, looking in his eyes, which were welling up with tears. He looked both scared and angry. The boy scrambled to his feet, scrambled, it seemed to Kiran, toward him. Without thinking, Kiran shot his leg out and with the sole of his shoes pushed the boy back onto the ground. Kiran looked, made sure the boy had not fallen into the street, saw the girl bending to help him up. Then Kiran ran. He ran as fast as he could in the sun and the heat, and when he finally stopped he was drenched in sweat, and he was panting and clutching the paper with the “tent” drawing, the ink now smeared on his hands and neck and face.
Eventually he found the bus and rode it back to his neighborhood. When he reached the busy thoroughfare where it intersected the quiet lane Bharat lived on, he did what he’d seen so many young men do—he jumped while the bus was slowing to a halt but still in motion. But Kiran misjudged the speed and he stumbled and fell hard onto the ground. The bus driver shouted something at Kiran he didn’t understand. When he picked himself up off the ground, gravel embedded in his hands and forearms, dirt on his jeans, smeared ink marring his face and neck, Kamala Kaki, having just exited the small shop that sold sundries, was standing before him, watching. “I’m OK, Kaki,” he said, adding, “Don’t tell Bharat.” He wasn’t sure why he said it, only that he was embarrassed and didn’t want his cousin to know how clumsy and stupid he had been.
If asked later why he had recoiled, lashed out at the beggar boy, Kiran would have blamed the heat, the hours of wandering. He would have said he was weak and not in his right mind, otherwise he never would have done it. He would not have been able to say that the boy and the girl, ragged and full of need, reminded him of his own self and sister. He would not have said how the girl’s tattered dress reminded him of Preeti’s ripped, soiled shirt that she held in one of her hands that evening their uncle brought her out of the woods, her small frame swimming in his brown sweater, the shirt she did not throw away as Kiran would have, but which she washed and mended in Home Ec and then folded neatly into a dresser drawer and never wore again.
Many years later it would be one of the things Kiran loved about having a dog (a two-year-old mutt he’d found tagless and terrified, starving in the woods)—how transparent and easily met her needs were, how gratifying to be the one to meet them. With a dog, how easy it was to bring happiness to another living creature. But the fierce need flickering in these children’s eyes, he had no clue how to answer. He knew only to push them away and run.
There had not been much love in their household, or if there was, love was expressed in unusual ways. Was a slap across the face an act of love? Was Pooja’s mother trying to teach Prakash something those nights she made him sleep outside? Was she trying to prepare him for the future? Was it her tough-love lesson about darkness and the dangers that lurked there?
In spite of the ways Pooja as Prakash had not felt protected, each fall he was presented a rakhi by his mother on behalf of his younger sister, until she was old enough to present it herself. Prakash’s mother would tie the sacred thread on Prakash’s wrist, a blessing from sister to brother, a promise of protection from the brother in return.
Prakash had not given these rakhis much thought. He didn’t know the deliberate and painstaking way in which his mother picked out the rakhi each year. He didn’t know how the salesclerks at the upscale gift shops looked at her when she came in, dirty from her day’s labor. How the few rupees she would need to buy something special, something with gold thread or polished beads or a tiny, carved Ganesh, had meant planning, careful saving, and sacrifice.
It had been five years since Pooja had left home, and it was again that time of year, and she had been noticing rakhis on the wrists of all the boys and men in town. She’d noticed it on Kiran’s wrist when he brought her rotis he’d swiped from his auntie’s kitchen (the rakhi tied by Ameera Bhabhi; Preeti had given up the tradition even before converting to Christianity). She’d noticed it on Bharat’s wrist (courtesy of the daughter of a close family friend) in the morning whe
n he sat outside on the jhoola swing and carefully poured a few swallows of tea into a china saucer. She noticed them on the wrists of the men who lay with her each night, noticed one even on the man who had closed his hands around her throat as he slammed into her, and she thought—not in that moment, but later, when he slept briefly, his hand on her stomach—Someone loves this man; a sister somewhere is praying for him.
At first, when she was very young, Pooja had thought of the rakhis as jewelry, like the bangles or bracelets that she, as a boy, was prohibited from wearing. Later, she came to think of them differently: as markers of gender, pieces of string that, as long as they were on her wrist, would not let her forget that she was a boy. But they were also what reminded her (sometimes the only things that reminded her) that she was—in some small, difficult-to-decipher way—cherished.
The last rakhi she received as a boy was pink and mint green with faceted plastic beads and a gold foil medallion with tiny depictions of not one but three gods—Lakshmi, Shiva, and Ganesh—as if Prakash’s mother knew that Pooja would need extra protection in the coming year. The medallion had come off within days, but the rest of the rakhi stayed intact for months, and Prakash was still wearing it when he left and walked the day’s journey to Guru Ma’s. Even there the rakhi remained on Pooja’s wrist. She’d forget about it and then she’d be washing her hands or serving Guru Ma from a platter piled with afternoon snacks and she’d see the string—now faded and dingy, but still with the tiny beads that glimmered in certain light—and she would be reminded of the life she both wanted to, and did not want to, forget.
Eventually the rakhi left her. She didn’t know when or how it had happened—if the threads had frayed and split and the rakhi had fallen off, or if she had thrashed about in her sleep and loosened it from her wrist. Just that one day in early spring she noticed it was gone. For a couple of days she looked for it, but with no luck. If she had found it she might have kept it: a memento of her former self, her life as Prakash.
Although Pooja didn’t find the missing rakhi, it was found. A starling nesting nearby caught the glint among the grasses, swooped down and snatched it, and wove it among the twigs and straw of the structure that would cradle its hatchlings and shelter them until it was time for them to fly.
Chapter 21
Earlier that year, not long before his unraveling, still living in his shared New York City apartment, the cruel sixth-floor walk-up, his bedroom a tiny closet of a space with a window that faced a brick wall, Kiran received two letters, one short, one longer.
The short one was from his mother in her unmistakable convent-school script, immaculate but written in pencil so light it was as if she were barely pressing. It was written on the back of a photocopy of a clipping from the local newspaper, an obituary for Shawn. The obituary didn’t mention how he died, though Kiran had already heard through the grapevine. The obituary also didn’t mention the string of drug-related arrests, the constant in-and-out of jail or court-mandated stints in rehab.
The photo accompanying the notice showed Shawn wearing a tuxedo and a bow tie and a boutonnière from what Kiran could only assume was his brother Greg’s wedding the previous August, a wedding Kiran did not attend. He had received an invitation and debated going, not for Greg—he felt no particular tug of nostalgia for his childhood friend—but for Shawn. He both wanted and did not want to see him again. In the end, the cream-colored reply card sat unmarked and unreturned on top of the badly scratched chest of drawers Kiran and Penny had rescued from the sidewalk one trash day, humping it up the five flights.
In the photo, Shawn’s eyes are half closed. A hand rests on his shoulder, someone who has been cropped out. Shawn is smiling his crooked, snaggletoothed smile. It is huge. He looks high on both liquor and life; genuinely, if fleetingly, happy. Or at least that’s the story the photo seems to want to tell. As a photographer, Kiran understood how pictures could be made to lie. Brother of the groom, Shawn had certainly posed for more formal portraits that day. Kiran thought it was interesting that this—a candid shot during the reception on the dance floor or in some similar place—was the photo that was chosen to memorialize him.
Kiran flipped over the photocopy. His mother’s letter—not a letter, more of a note—was just two sentences long: He shot himself in the woods up Sherman Road where you kids used to play. You know the spot.
Kiran had heard the details. In the dead of winter Shawn had wandered off into the woods. It was four days before anyone even thought to look for him. (His father, with whom Shawn still lived, said he disappeared all the time; he was a grown man and could do whatever he wanted.) And it was another three days after that before he was found in the Cathedral, his body frozen, a hole blown through his mouth clear through the back of his head.
Kiran imagined that final moment, Shawn’s lips wrapped around the barrel of the gun. The woods in winter were so still. The snow, endless and deep, muffled everything. Shawn wouldn’t have heard the secret sounds of the woods. Some thick-furred animal tiptoeing nearby. Water trickling far beneath the frozen skin of the creek. The blinking eyes of a red-tailed hawk perched like a Christmas tree star on top of a pine. Shawn wouldn’t have been able to hear anything except his own desperate heart thump-thump-thumping, calling out to be silenced. Had he thought of Preeti? Had he remembered lying naked with Kiran in the pine needles, his baseball jersey their blanket?
Three weeks after Kiran read his mother’s letter, the second letter, the longer letter, arrived. Immediately recognizing the Mississippi return address, Kiran set the envelope aside, tossing it into a pilfered milk crate (stenciled “Thou shalt not steal”) in the corner of his room already half full of unopened junk mail and bills, waiting for a moment when he felt brave enough to read it.
“We are special,” Guru Ma said to Pooja one afternoon some years ago when Pooja had only been with her a few months. Guru Ma’s flat was dark. Pooja, an hour earlier, had lowered the straw blinds for Guru Ma’s nap, and while Guru Ma slept, Pooja swept the kitchen and wiped the pots and pans and utensils and started chopping vegetables for dinner. She was the only one who could do this quietly enough that it wouldn’t wake Guru Ma. She wondered if it was because she was still new. In her old life as Prakash, she had learned the art of silence, of disappearance. She was so skilled people would often forget she was in a room. After she left her mother’s for good, how long was it before anyone even noticed? Surely all of the girls, in their old lives, had learned the same art. But they had forgotten. In their new lives, they’d had to cultivate something different: dancing, singing, clapping, performing. To be hijra was to be—finally!—heard.
When Guru Ma woke, she called Pooja to the bed, her voice still heavy with sleep: “Beti, come.” Guru Ma sat up, her back against the wall, and motioned to Pooja. Pooja, not sure she understood the gesture correctly, climbed onto the mattress, lay down, rested her head in Guru Ma’s lap. Pooja’s hair was still growing, no longer the close-crop cut of Prakash, but not yet the long tresses she’d always—even in toddlerhood—dreamed of. It was now a mop, a mess, shapeless and wild from the humidity. Guru Ma stroked her hair, her hand gentle on Pooja’s forehead. Pooja had never been held like this.
Sounding far away, still with her big toe in the world of sleep, Guru Ma said, “We are special. We are magic. What they say about our powers: it is true. We see what others cannot. We know what others do not. And we can influence what happens.”
Guru Ma took Pooja’s chin in her hand and turned her around so Pooja was facing her. “You are special.” She let go of Pooja’s chin, put her hand on Pooja’s head, one long, slow stroke, then a sigh, and Pooja knew without being told that the moment was over. Pooja wasn’t sure what to make of what Guru Ma said. On one hand, she knew better than to doubt Guru Ma. But on the other hand, she had never experienced such things, had never heard a faraway voice, had never felt a gentle hand guiding her. And what was this business of being able to influence what happens? She couldn’t imagine what powe
rs she—ten years old, all but homeless, essentially a beggar—could possibly have, or how she could be capable of magic. She got up from the bed and lifted the straw blinds, sudden afternoon light hard against the laminate floor. She still had work to do.
Not long before Kiran received the two letters—one short, one long—he had sent a letter of his own, written on blue-lined paper ripped from a spiral-bound notebook, the frayed edges of which would arrive flattened when his mother, standing at the kitchen counter, opened the security-lined number ten envelope. Kiran had not included a return address on the envelope, but Shanti somehow knew right away it was from him. She knew this even before she looked at the postmark and despite the fact that she had no great familiarity with her son’s handwriting—he had rarely ever written them a sticky note (“Out with friends”), let alone a letter. Kiran had used clear packaging tape to seal the flap—as if he didn’t want them, or anyone else, opening it—so Shanti used kitchen scissors to carefully cut a slit along one of the edges of the envelope and slide the letter out.
Dear Mom and Dad,
I’m not going to beat around the bush. Surely, you’ve suspected. I’m gay.
I’ve known this about myself for a very long time, but it is only in the last few years that I’ve been able to accept it.
