by Rahul Mehta
But mostly what she was thinking about was the portrait Kiran was going to photograph. She couldn’t imagine a scenario that might lead to her mother’s seeing it, but what would she think if she did? Pooja hoped she would recognize her, would see the ghost of ten-year-old Prakash inside fifteen-year-old Pooja, something about her eyes or the tilt of her head, something that in all these years hadn’t changed, something only a mother might know. She wanted her mother to see the dupatta—silk brocade, an article so fine her mother never could have dreamed of such a thing for herself—and think Prakash was right to have run away. She hoped her mother would be proud of what Prakash became.
After it was over, and after she had explained what she needed it for, Manoj gave her a dupatta. Not the one she had wanted, not the one on display, but one from the stock in back, maybe not as beautiful as the one she had had her heart set on, but beautiful nonetheless. It was only for borrowing, he said. She must be very careful with it, he didn’t want to see even the tiniest speck of dust when she returned it. And she must not, under any circumstances, allow anyone from town to see her in it; otherwise, he’d never be able to sell it. With his hand he cupped her chin and raised her head so that their eyes met. “Darling little dog, you’ll look smashing.”
“Try to act natural,” Kiran instructed. Even as he spoke, Pooja was striking a pose, her head angled slightly away, her eyes directed coyly toward the camera.
When he’d come outside that evening, Pooja was already waiting for him. He had intended to wait until after the photo shoot, but on impulse he decided to give her the gift right then: a CoverGirl compact and lipstick his mother had sent for relatives. Pooja had been overwhelmed—“For me? Really?”—and sat in the yard applying the makeup immediately, peering into the tiny mirror of the shiny compact, despite Kiran’s insisting that she didn’t need any more makeup for the photo. When she was done, he lifted his camera, but Pooja protested and made him follow her fifteen minutes to a nearby garden on the riverbank. She was carrying a ratty cloth satchel, and when they arrived she withdrew from it a black plastic bag with gold letters that read “Manoj’s Saree Emporium.” Carefully she unfolded the silk dupatta and draped it over her shoulders, allowing part of it to cover her head.
“Natural,” Kiran said again. “Try to pretend I’m not here.” Pooja turned to a rose on the trellis she had insisted on standing in front of and brought the blossom to her nose, narrowing her eyes and dramatically breathing in its scent.
Kiran sighed. He didn’t know what else to do. Fine, she could have it her way. Kiran would find a way to make the photo work. He let the shutter flicker rapid-fire, click-click-click-click-click, quick as a machine gun, and then he stopped to reload.
Her name was Zena, but Kiran had not known that, not when he first saw her the previous year in New York. There was a party on a barge and the song “Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai” came on and the crowd parted and there was Zena, in a lime-green chaniya choli, performing a perfectly executed lip-synch-and-dance routine. A few months earlier, home for a visit, Kiran had sat with his father and watched the scene in the movie where the village women are taunting Madhuri Dixit—What’s beneath your blouse? What’s underneath your veil?—and Madhuri replies, surprisingly and triumphantly, My heart. In the movie, as in all her movies, Madhuri is ethereal, transfixing. Zena, on the barge, was no less so. Reenacting the scene from the movie, Zena’s backup dancers sang the same questions, but Zena added her own twist. She lifted her skirt above her ankles, her knees, her thighs: My heart! The audience erupted in whistles and cheers.
Several days later, when Kiran spotted Zena seated at a bar, he almost didn’t recognize him out of drag. As a woman, Zena had been strikingly beautiful, impossible to turn away from, at least while she was performing. But as a man, he seemed to Kiran dumpy. Without makeup he had terrible skin, Kiran could see that even in the dim light. Were it not for a distinctive mole on his cheek and something about the way he moved when he got up to go to the bathroom, Kiran wouldn’t have recognized him at all.
“I think I saw you perform a few nights ago? On a barge?”
“Yes.”
“Kiran.”
“Gaurav.”
“You were . . . well . . . spectacular. I barely have words. How did you learn to do all that?”
Gaurav smiled. “You’d be surprised what you can learn from an older sister.”
Not long after meeting Gaurav was the one and only time Kiran dressed in drag, not counting his Princess Leia Halloween costume, of course (Halloween didn’t count). He and Penny were throwing a party, and they were worried that no one would come or that too many people would come or that they should have cleaned the apartment more carefully or splurged on higher-shelf liquor and fancier canapés.
Gaurav came over early to help Kiran dress. The week before, Kiran had asked him to accompany him sari shopping in Little India. He had hoped Gaurav might offer to loan him something, but he didn’t, so they went together to the shop. The salesgirl—truly a girl, a bucktoothed teenager fresh from India (a fob, Kiran would have called her some years ago)—refused to believe that the sari was for Kiran, even when he emerged from the dressing room wrapped in it. She giggled from behind her hand. He couldn’t afford any of the fine chiffons and had to settle for a gold-colored synthetic blend that didn’t move the way he wanted and whose shimmer was five levels louder than Kiran would have preferred.
In order to allay their anxieties, Penny kept assuring, “It will be dark and everyone will be drunk. No one will care or notice anything.” Gazing in his bedroom mirror just moments before the first guests were to arrive, Kiran hoped it was true. He had to admit it was a cheap-looking sari, and Gaurav, a genius with his own makeup, had been a little less successful with Kiran’s. Still, looking at himself, Kiran did think, if only for a second, of his mother and his sister, even if he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen either one of them wearing a sari (had Preeti ever worn a sari?).
The length of fabric that covered the bodice and hung over the shoulder was dotted in small silver hearts, which somehow due to the draping ended up upside down. Gaurav said they could redo it, but Kiran liked it. To him the upside-down hearts seemed somehow appropriate.
He and Penny had been right to worry. The party was almost immediately a disaster. The boom box ate the mix tape Kiran had spent hours making. Penny, drunk before the party even started, burned the canapés in the oven, and, crying, tossed the blackened cookie sheet onto the coffee table, causing three people seated on the couch to startle and jump. Kiran hadn’t practiced walking in heels, and the slippery hardwood floor proved too much of a challenge; he kept tumbling, knocking down guests, their drinks crashing to the ground.
Kiran was surprised and somewhat distressed to notice that in attendance was Timir, a popular boy of the queer desi scene into which Kiran was only beginning to find entrée. Though they barely knew each other, there was already bad energy between them, though Kiran wasn’t sure why. Kiran spotted Timir and his best friend, Hasina, holding court on the couch. Timir had taken seriously the semiformal dress code. He wore a crisply ironed blue dress shirt of thick, luxurious cloth tailored to his trim frame. Around his neck was a beautiful silk tie knotted in a full Windsor. On his chest, the tie formed an upside down exclamation mark; the point was his perfectly proportioned face. But even as his tie was exclaiming, Timir was sulking. Everything in his body language indicated boredom.
Who could blame him? Kiran himself was bored. After it was clear the night was going nowhere, a friend said to Kiran, “Let’s get out of here. We look too damn good to waste our time at this lame-ass affair.” Just outside the doorway, they bumped into Timir and Hasina, now lingering in the hallway. Timir looked Kiran up and down. “Nice outfit . . . ,” he said, and then to Hasina, in a voice clearly loud enough for Kiran to hear, “. . . for a hijra.”
In spite of what Timir had said, Kiran felt fierce storming down the sidewalk, and then later sashaying around the
dance floor at the Roxy. Gold bands winding snakelike around his upper arms made him feel like a gladiator, like a goddess. He thought of Preeti that day at the Fiesta Cantina in Myrtle Beach, her hair, nails, makeup hard as armor. He felt, tonight, powerful.
Pooja was quiet. As they walked back from the photo shoot on the riverbank, she had listened to Kiran tell of Gaurav, of Zena, of himself in the gold sari, the upside-down hearts; she had heard in his voice a lilt, a laugh. She had listened to him griping about the boy who tried to cut him down. (Kiran had not told Pooja that Timir called him a hijra, but he had not needed to.) She had heard him say, “And those heels! At the start of the night, I kept falling, but by the end I was stomping that runway like a real queen. I have so much respect for you. I don’t know how you do it.”
When they arrived at the house, Bharat was sitting on the jhoola swing on the porch. He looked at them, looked at Pooja in particular, with an expression she recognized. It was the same expression on the face of the bus driver waving a tire iron, refusing to allow her and Guru Ma to board. It was an expression she had been seeing her whole life. Bharat shook his head and then got up to go inside.
“Something’s wrong,” Kiran said finally. “Tell me.”
Pooja hesitated. She hugged the ratty cloth satchel, inside it the Manoj’s Saree Emporium bag and the CoverGirl compact and lipstick. “Why did you tell me that story?”
“What do you mean? It’s a fun story, right?”
“Do you think I’m playing dress-up? Do you think I’m trying on a costume?”
“No, Pooja. I don’t think that. I’m sorry.”
Pooja had to admit, Kiran was one of the better ones. At least he hadn’t asked her about her genitalia, as so many did, whether she had had the ritual castration, their faces a mix of fascination and revulsion. Still, she had hoped for more.
“Brother, forget it.”
“I won’t,” Kiran said. “I’m sorry.”
“You can’t trust her,” Bharat said, his mouth chewing a big bite of roti sabji.
“Who?” Kiran asked.
“You know who. Don’t play dumb.”
Kamala slapped a steaming roti, fresh from the stove, onto Kiran’s stainless-steel thali. She’d already fed Ameera and Prabhu, locked away in their respective rooms, Ameera busy tending the future, Prabhu the past. After the boys finished eating, Kamala would serve herself.
“They are liars and cheats,” Bharat said, “not to mention unclean. You absolutely should not be associating with a hijra. What would your parents say? Never mind yourself, you are bringing shame on us. We are the ones who have to live here.”
“Kamala Kaki, what do you think?” Kiran asked.
Kamala had no experience with hijras. Still, dark-skinned and pinched-faced, she had been ostracized as a child and well into her young adulthood. Before being matched with Prabhu, she had spent more than her fair share of time sitting alone in the dirt.
“You are lucky to be getting hot-hot rotis. Your mouths should be chewing, not flapping,” Kamala said.
Bharat squeezed extra ghee onto his roti, dispensing the liquid from a repurposed plastic bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care. “You’re not from here,” he said, “you don’t understand. These people are desperate. They are capable of anything.”
Kiran peered out his window into the night sky, the constellations a map of the past, the light having set out thousands of years earlier to reach them. There was a scene in a movie he had watched with Penny in New York. It occurs just before the movie’s climax and cuts back and forth among four characters, all in different places, all looking up at the night sky. The four of them are so different and in the dark they yearn for such different things, but the stars above them are the same. Penny, an aspiring director, had said the filmic device was cheap. But Kiran was moved.
After he’d abandoned their party and things had begun to sour between them but before the worst of Kiran’s downward spiral, Penny had called Kiran a brown dwarf. At first Kiran thought it was a swipe at his skin color and height (though he wasn’t exactly a shrimp, Kiran could at least admit his height was below average). Penny explained that a brown dwarf was a failed star. “It never lives up to its promise. It doesn’t have what it takes to be a star, so it masquerades as a planet. But it’s not really that either. It’s basically a fraud.”
Kiran looked down at Pooja lying beneath the tree, the dog curled at her feet. He had fucked up. Not just with Pooja. He had fucked up so much, and he didn’t know how to fix any of it.
It was too dark for Kiran to tell whether Pooja was asleep. Perhaps she was awake, he thought. Perhaps she was gazing at the same stars he was. Bharat and Prabhu Kaka. Maybe they were also sleepless tonight.
“It’s time,” Ameera said, standing in front of Bharat in the hallway. Her face opened before him like a present. He took both her hands in his, stood very close to her, and repeated, a broad smile on his face, “It’s time?”
Ameera, returning Bharat’s smile, nodded. “Mh-hm.”
Gently guiding his wife through the hallway, Bharat moved slowly down the stairs, but inside his body his spirit was bounding. Kiran could see this clearly. He was sitting on the jhoola swing when they came onto the porch. Light leaped in Bharat’s eyes, jumped to Ameera’s, and back to Bharat’s.
“We’re headed to the hospital,” Bharat said. “Tell my parents.”
The excitement was contagious, but Kiran couldn’t help remembering that the baby’s arrival also meant Pooja’s disappearance. The baby may have been ready, but Kiran wasn’t.
Ordinarily he liked to develop his own film, but without access to a darkroom, he had to rely on a local photography studio. He had stopped in four shops before deciding, choosing the one with the clerk who seemed the most professional and spoke the best English and the one which displayed the best-looking samples. He’d have them print four-by-six copies, matte finish with a white border, two copies each so he’d have something to gift Pooja, but when he returned to America he planned to make his own prints from the negative.
When Kiran fetched the photos, the clerk eyed him, but said nothing. Over time the clerk had seen all manner of photos: vacation snaps, yes, but so much else. The rolls of film he processed were a window into his customers’ private lives. He knew their secrets. Perhaps most significantly, he knew—not just from the subject of the photos, but the way the shots were framed, the perspective, the angle, the gaze—how his customers viewed the world. He saw what they saw, the way they saw it. The photos were a reflection of the photographers as much as of what they were photographing.
Kiran waited until he was outside to open the packet. A fat cow lying in the alley twirled its tail lazily and licked its nose. Someone dumped a bucket of water from a second-story window, and it splashed Kiran’s pant cuffs; he looked with irritation at the fresh stain. Flipping through the prints, he was surprised. That afternoon, Pooja had looked luminescent, elegant, her delicate shoulders wrapped in the embroidered dupatta, her lips the rich red of the lipstick his mother sent. At least that’s how he remembered it now. And that’s how he understood Pooja saw herself. But the girl in the photo looked awkward and cheap. Wide-shouldered, and with light and shadows accenting her Adam’s apple dusted with the tiniest bit of black fuzz, she didn’t look like a girl at all: she looked like a boy in a dress.
In the evening, when they were sitting on the wall in the garden by the riverbank, the very place they’d shot many of the photos, Pooja asked Kiran, “Where are they? You got them today, right? I want to see.” There was a pleasant breeze blowing across the river, carrying faint sounds of bhajans and bells from a temple somewhere in the distance. High above them the crows had taken to the air for their nightly show: fighter jets flying military exercises lest anyone forget their might. Pooja shook her hair back, a coquettish move Kiran had seen performed by any number of models, young women in music videos, and, years ago, his own teenage cheerleading sister.
In one world, Kiran would re
turn to New York and make huge prints of the photos and exhibit them in a Chelsea gallery where, opening night, guests would comment on the images’ grittiness, how real they were. Overnight he would become a minor art-world sensation, and his career as a photographer would be launched.
In another, he would rip up the images and place them at the bottom of a plastic bag, which he would then fill with vegetable peels and spoiled food and throw in the trash.
Kiran rested his hand on the thick envelope hidden inside his satchel. “We’ll look at them later,” he said.
“Later? Why? Let’s see them now.”
“Actually . . . sorry . . . I didn’t want to tell you. I knew how much it all meant to you. But . . . they ruined the negatives.”
“Ruined?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
Pooja looked into the distance. Farther downstream on this very river—Pooja wasn’t sure exactly how far down—was the shantytown where Prakash had lived with his mother and younger sister. Surely the hotel was finished by now; surely the shantytown was gone.
“I’ll take more,” Kiran said. “I’ve learned from our first photo session. Now I know the correct light and angles to capture your best qualities. These will be even better.”
Chapter 24
The sun was just rising when Kiran heard it, all at once, a cacophony outside: Hanu barking wildly; Pooja pleading, “No!”; hard open-hand slaps vibrating like tiny earthquakes across the yard; and Bharat growling in a voice Kiran had never heard, “I will kill you! I will fucking kill you!”
