Beautiful Thing

by Sonia Faleiro

  ‘Ameena will die alone. And mark my words, so will her baby.’

  And that’s why Leela decided to get tested again.

  { 11 }

  ‘I sell watermelons. Watermelons and watches’

  Leela considered other ways in which she could reinvent herself. Her fondness for ayashi, she concluded, would have to be addressed. A characteristic of the line, like dancing, drinking, cutting and customers, ayashi implied a hedonistic lifestyle in which one sought pleasure’s tightest embrace. It was in acquiescing to ayashi’s demands on one’s body and finances that snatched from so many bar dancers their dream of leaving the line.

  On a typical night off work, Leela and Priya would slip into hipsters and halters, spray perfume between their breasts and grab an auto-rickshaw to the hijra Masti Muskaan’s flat fifteen minutes away. The shabby omelette-coloured building was Mira Road’s party central.

  Masti made no concessions as host; she didn’t even wash her face. But at 9 p.m. each night she dimmed the lights in her flat, maxed the volume on the Windows Media Player of her ageing desktop computer and poured herself a whisky.

  No invitations had been issued. Masti expected her friends, they always turned up. Bar owners and bar dancers, hijras and madams, pimps and small-time politicians chewing paan poured in.

  Boys in acid-wash jeans came by to hang out with Masti’s chelas, followers, their ‘girlfriends’.

  The guests were at home; they whipped out packs of cards, brewed tea, poured drinks and danced, sometimes with one another, at other times on their own, unto themselves.

  At about 10 p.m., Masti’s chelas Happy, Ramona and Gauri would be ready to leave for work. They would request Masti’s blessings, blow kisses at everyone else and promising to return ‘soon-soon’ clatter down the stairs in their saris and sky-high heels. If Masti had been in an expansive mood, the driver of her white Ambassador—a gift from a former seth who had to mysteriously leave Bombay—would be waiting for them, holding open the door of the car.

  Once they were let off on the highway, the hijras would instantly quieten. They would link pinkie fingers and their every instinct, like that of an animal in enemy territory, would be on alert.

  Hijras, more so than female sex workers, were harassed constantly. Pedestrians mocked them, ‘Teri kundi kitne ki hai?’ How much does your arsehole cost? Goondas would encircle a hijra, even in daylight, drag her to the undergrowth and take sex for free. Boys as young as ten approached hijra sex workers, less intimidated by them than by their female counterparts standing a few metres away. Hijras earned two hundred rupees for every five hundred rupees a female sex worker could demand for a ‘shot’, a sexual service.

  Sometimes, there was no logic to the abuse. It existed because the hijra did.

  Once Happy was hit on the forehead with a rock.

  Why?

  ‘Bindaas,’ she shrugged, gloomily. ‘I started bleeding, and when the man who had thrown the rock knew I couldn’t get up, he crossed the road and peering down said to me, “What is wrong with you dirty people? Why can’t you be normal?”’

  The hijras finished up around midnight, and if things had gone well, if they had found customers and these customers hadn’t turned violent, they would want to spread the buzz around. They would stop by the local liquor store. They would go to a dhaba, the kind that welcomed their business, and order a parcel of kebabs, rotis and biryani. You could never order enough for Masti’s. You wanted to feel welcomed by Masti.

  By the time the hijras returned home, Masti’s guests would have spilled out into the corridor; a few might be so drunk they would be ringing other people’s doorbells. Once a door was opened to them they would barge in and drag out sleep-bitten husbands and wives. ‘Don’t be shy,’ they would say if one of the women insisted on changing out of her nightie into something more suitable. ‘Consider us your family.’

  Her neighbours didn’t complain, because Masti was famous. And Masti was famous because she was loved and had been accepted by her parents.

  The Seths were a middle-class Hindu family. Masti’s father worked in an office, her mother was a housewife; her brothers, as was the custom, would one day bring their wives to live with them in their parents’ flat. As a child Masti, then Krishna, wore make-up. He stole his mother’s bras. One Diwali, when he was about seven years old, he changed out of his new pants and shirt into one of his mother’s saris. The Seths worried about their son, but they didn’t discuss their feelings with him. They ignored their friends’ prognostication that if they didn’t take him to a doctor right away, he would be ‘twisted’ forever. When Krishna turned eighteen, he legally changed his name. He wore a wig, make-up and women’s clothes. He was initiated into the hijra community and, as was the custom, acquired a guru to instruct and guide him through his new life.

  The Seths didn’t know any hijras. Like most of their friends they regarded them as pariahs and passing them by on the street treated them as such. But Krishna, now Masti, was so strong-willed they knew that neither pleas nor threats would change his mind. So they did, what they say, was the simplest thing. They went to the temple and asked God for advice. ‘The decision came to me right away,’ said Mr Seth. ‘Krishna is my blood. Let him call himself whatever he wants. Let him dress as he pleases. Who can argue with young people these days? Yes, he’s now a she. She’s a hijra. But don’t forget, hijras once occupied an important place in the Mughal courts. They were respected and feared. And these days, would anyone dare marry without the blessings of a hijra? My daughter has attended each and every big wedding in Mira Road, ask anyone! And not only as a hijra, mind you. She gets an invitation card!’

  The Seths lost the approval of family members, some of whom they would never again see. And they lost friends. Mrs Seth said it was no big deal. If people didn’t want to talk to her because Krishna was Masti, so be it. They weren’t that interesting to begin with! And she didn’t take her direction from those of the corporeal world, in any case. The holy books said that man recreated himself through his son. ‘Masti is her father,’ she said, simply.

  The Seths weren’t particularly well educated. Neither had a degree. And they would never describe themselves as liberal. And yet, when the need arose, they chose to be open-minded and progressive, to show compassion where others in a similar situation had offered only denunciation and despair.

  ‘I have three children,’ explained Mrs Seth. ‘I had one choice. I could choose to lose a son. Or I could choose to gain a daughter. I am a mother. What could I do but what I did?’

  Her parents’ great love for her gave Masti great confidence. It also taught her empathy. When anyone in the building had a problem—with a neighbour or with the police—it was Masti who stepped in. And because she was beloved, on every major festival she was invited to inaugurate the neighbourhood pandal with the goddess in it. Her connections were wide-reaching, people whispered; they reached all the way to Bahuchara Mata, the Hindu goddess revered by hijras.

  As the night ripened, the intoxicants coaxed intimacies from strangers and made friends out of acquaintances. On one such evening, Priya confided that the customer she had introduced me to had died. I was stunned. He had appeared in his forties and although he had been overweight I would never have thought his life was at risk.

  ‘We were shopping,’ said Priya. ‘And he fell flat! What did I know? I called his best friend. He told me not to worry, to stay where I was, that he would come soon-soon. It took him forty minutes. For forty minutes I stood by the side of the road with kustomer at my feet. Some people thought he was drunk, they turned their face and hurried past as though he smelt. When his friend finally arrived, he took us both to medical—like that would make a difference! Then he said to me, “Don’t mind, Priyaji, but now you should leave. I need to call his wife and your presence will spoil his good name only.”’

  Did you hear from the friend again? I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Priya nodded, ‘he called me on his way back from the shamsh
an ghat.’ Cremation ground.

  ‘Kustomer had a heart attack,’ she explained, for some reason running her finger across her throat.

  You miss him, I sympathized.

  She nodded soberly. ‘He’d promised me a gold necklace for my birthday.’

  As I paused to understand Priya, Masti’s chela Ramona came up to me, her expression demanding my full attention. Ramona was petite, pillow-lipped and brassy-haired, and had recently returned from Thailand with a set of bowl-round breasts and, following her castration, something resembling a vagina, which I was told was decorative only and could not be used for sex. Ramona’s breasts were a community treasure. She was one of only a handful of Bombay’s hijras who no longer stuffed their bras with socks or napkins and so hijras from afar came to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over her.

  Ramona greeted me but ignored my hand because she was busy lifting up her kameez, under which she wore nothing.

  ‘What do you think?’ she chirped.

  Lovely, I said, laughing with embarrassment.

  ‘Touch them!’ she encouraged, ‘Go ahead, don’t feel shy. Touch-touch, feel how firm they are!’

  That’s all right, I laughed again.

  ‘Fine, then photograph me,’ she insisted, refusing to wear her kameez until I had dug out my digital camera and photographed her topless. Every time I clicked, Ramona changed pose—she leaned forward, she pouted, she squeezed her breasts together.

  ‘There’s no point taking such fotos,’ snapped Masti, walking past. ‘You think a good magazine will print them?’

  Relieved, I put down my camera.

  Ramona jammed it back into my hand. ‘Take, take!’ She nudged her head towards Masti’s retreating back. ‘Poor thing. Her chapatti chest is giving her sleepless nights. Accha, after this, take foto of me in bikini. I use the bikini for my dance performances. I do bikini dance, pole dance, belly dance, group dance and cabaret. Want to see?’

  At about this time, when it looked like things might get out of control, they often did. Someone would bring out paper twists of hash, one of the small-time politicians with ‘hi-fi connections’ might have a couple of grams of ‘namak’, cocaine. The whisky, rum and beer had long been flowing.

  You could tell how long someone had been in the line, by their nasha. Gutka was always the first addiction. Then came beer, then quarters, and towards the end, brown sugar.

  Leela was addicted to gutka, she enjoyed her evening quarter and her motto was ‘if not now, then when I’m a mother of six?’ So on nights such as these, she would always end up drunk or stoned, and on occasion her hand would find its way inside someone’s ‘husband’s’ pants and this would trigger a no-holds-barred fight involving bottles and kitchen implements and ma-behen gaalis, ending the party with the sort of finality that made even stragglers realize they would no longer be indulged.

  When Leela spent the evening at Masti’s she would lose the twenty-four hours that followed. It always took her that much time to recover. In a moment of repentance, she might grab Priya’s hand, place it on her head and say to her, ‘Swear you’ll stop me after four drinks.’ Priya would earnestly murmur, ‘Saraswati ki kasam.’ Saraswati, favoured for her fair-skinned beauty, was both girls’ favourite goddess. But both of them knew well that unless someone imposed a similar limitation on Priya, Priya herself would get quickly drunk.

  If Leela succumbed just once a month, then her ayashi would hardly be of concern. She drank no more at Masti’s than she did at work, and it was only natural to her that like her nights at Night Lovers her nights at Masti’s would pass in a staggered blur.

  But she was drawn to Masti’s every week, partly because Masti was her mother and she loved her, and partly because there wasn’t much to do in Mira Road.

  Leela’s life was centred on making plenty of money and once she felt she’d earned enough for the week she grew restless. When she had time on her hands, she began to brood and more so than usual question where she would be in a few years. Sometimes, she said, it was like she was possessed by demons. The voices in her head would start to scream and then she had no choice, had she, but to drown these voices in a sea of alcohol?

  She wasn’t an alcoholic, insisted Leela. She would stop drinking the moment Shetty married her.

  If Masti was at work or travelling, Leela would call Priya over for a drinking competition. They would push Apsara to a corner of the bed, lay out a bottle of rum and two glasses on a tray and blast a music channel on the TV. There was no purpose to this game other than nasha. The girls drank until they threw up or were nudged off the bed by Apsara who never let a moment of weakness go unpunished.

  It was Masti who unwittingly helped Leela curtail her ayashi, during a weekend of what I imagined would involve prayer and meditation.

  Haji Malang, in the Bombay suburb of Kalyan, is the shrine of Haji Abdur Rehman Shah Malang, believed to be a twelfth-century mystic and dervish from Yemen. For ten days every year, pilgrims celebrate his Urs, or death anniversary, by laying a chadar, sacred cloth, at the dargah. Hindus and Muslims both gathered here, for the shrine was truly syncretic, with a Hindu and a Muslim priest each officiating at religious rituals. Like many shrines in recent times, most notably the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992, Haji Malang was at the centre of a menacing religious dispute. In 1986 the right-wing Shiv Sena party claimed Haji Malang as the site of a 700-year-old temple and demanded it be rebuilt. While the decline of the Shiv Sena’s omnipotence in Maharashtra stalled this demand, the presence of sainiks, the party’s foot soldiers, around the shrine asserted its continued interest. At the foot of the blue Malang Hills stood a Shiv Sena office, banners proclaiming the power of the Hindu state flapped between trees and men in saffron turbans swaggered, shouting their slogan, ‘Jai Shri Ram!’

  The shrine was of particular importance to Bombay’s hijras—they felt an affinity towards the benevolent, all-embracing Haji. Hundreds made the annual pilgrimage.

  To reach the shrine we had before us a steep climb of several hours. Steps had been carved into the hill, but many were a foot high, and as time swelled, so did my joints and they burned like an open wound. The route was as crowded as a Bombay street and to add to the confusion, everyone was walking, even bounding, at a different pace, forcing stops and detours. Mothers cradled babies, old men riddled with arthritis crawled like crabs and strapping teenagers, copycat CK briefs riding high on their bony hips, outstepped us all, keeping our spirits aloft with their playful jousts and off-colour jokes.

  Leela ran ahead, she chatted with the teenagers; at every opportunity they stopped by one of the stalls set up along the path to enjoy a snack of peanuts and papads, lassi and sugarcane juice.

  We were only halfway to our destination when the evening melted into a cloudless night. Now the route was lit by the light of mobile phones and in the hands of some experienced pilgrims, with lusty flares that sizzled blue fire.

  When the end appeared in sight, it was without warning. Our group was reinvigorated. ‘Haji Malang jayenge to bahut maza ayega!’ Masti screamed, emptying out her lungs. When we go to Haji Malang we will have great fun!

  We joined the chorus: ‘Maza ayega! Bahut, bahut maza ayega!’

  When we finally reached the pilgrim site, my senses exploded. I had never before seen so many jubilant people, collectively wired to their maximum energy. Thousands of men, women, children and hijras, dressed as though for a wedding, were singing and dancing and blowing on conches and banging on drums that hung from ropes around their neck, producing a sight and sounds so overwhelming all I could do was stare.

  The narrow road was flanked by restaurants and shops that sold religious paraphernalia, snacks and sweetmeats, flowers and incense. A man stirred a giant jalebi into shape; his wife fried a puri as wide, as fluffy as a shawl. A young boy stood tall over buckets of red roses, his brother offered chadars of emeraldcoloured silk and their parents invited Masti, Leela and me into their photo studio where we were captured in black and white, laughing wit
h the joy of little children in front of the Eiffel Tower under a giant slice of paper moon.

  The site was lined with lodges and the lodge Masti had booked us into comprised several rooms encircling a courtyard. Up a narrow staircase were three more rooms whose flimsiness was confirmed after an energetic hijra in pearls fell through the floor during sex with a little man in striped shorts.

  Procuring sex, in fact, appeared as important a goal here as the attainment of spirituality. Or perhaps they amounted to the same thing, for as the night deepened, as the aroma of hash swirled in the air and spirits raised voices, confidence and desire, groups splintered into couples, couples who had hours previously been strangers, and they felt each other up in corners. Pushing aside the goats tethered there, they arched their backs against the walls of the communal toilets. All around the shrine, up and down the hill, the chill breeze gossiped of copulation.

  Leela, Masti and I shared a room, and when we finally fell asleep it was from exhaustion.

  I was woken up at around 4 a.m. by a rustling sound and stifled laughter. ‘I’ll bite your cheeks until they fall out,’ Masti whispered hoarsely.

  ‘I’ll do kiss-kiss until you come-come,’ a man growled in reply.

  Leela woke up and when she figured out what was going on she started giggling. She giggled like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, when in fact she had warned me of just this. ‘Never go on holiday alone with Masti,’ she had said. ‘She’ll spend all day and all night having sex with every man who enters the hotil. Then she’ll order room service. It’s very bore!’