Prasanti stood at the threshold of the kitchen, praying that Chitralekha would toss her plate at Manasa in fury. That would take care of two things: the stones and Manasa.
Manasa took a sip of water and placed it on the table not very gently.
“Soon, we will have . . .” Aamaa said. And then it came—the first crunch.
“A pebble?” she said to herself. “That hasn’t happened to me in a long time.” She spat out the food on the table and moved her plate to conceal the goo. “What would we old, dying people know?” she continued. “Our opinions don’t matter.”
Another crunch. This one was slightly louder than the last. Chitralekha spat it out and hid the debris with the steel glass.
“One grandson and unmarried.”
“Shut up, Aamaa,” Manasa said. “You have two grandsons, and both are here right now.”
“No worries if she doesn’t consider me one,” Ruthwa said. “I always knew I was adopted.”
“Just one,” Chitralekha said, before taking a mouthful. A second later came a loud crunching. “Did some blind person cook the rice today? How can one get three pebbles in three bites?”
“Oh, is that your way of denying that you have two grandsons?” Manasa said, more hostile than she had been up to that point.
“Who cooks food here?” Chitralekha spluttered. “Prasanti, three pebbles? Come here, you idiot.”
Prasanti forced her feet to move forward. “I think I need to see the eye doctor,” she sheepishly said.
“I know what it is.” Chitralekha got up, overturning the plate and causing it to clang to the floor, its contents splattering as far as the walls. “I know what it is. Yes, the minister—you did this with the next-door minister, too. You are angry with me because I asked you to mind your own business, you witch.”
“No, it was a mistake. It really was.”
“Shut up. I know. She was defending this Damaai. The Damaai has probably weaved some kind of black magic on this hijra. She kept supporting her. You give me half-caste great-grandchildren and dissolve this family’s name in mud and then recruit my loyal servant to win over my affection. I am surprised I even let you inside my home.”
“No, it wasn’t her,” Prasanti said. “It wasn’t her idea.”
“Shut up. You’re a servant,” Chitralekha hissed. “You’ve probably forgotten it because of the good life you have here. One more mistake, and you will be out begging in the streets. This does not work at all. Everybody takes advantage of me, even a good-for-nothing hijra. Tell me, you kukkurnee, you did it because I told you I didn’t need your opinions yesterday, didn’t you? What will you do next? Poison me? I should call the police. You’ll probably poison me.”
Police wasn’t a good word for Prasanti. It brought back memories, the same that surfaced when she had her conversations with God.
“Sorry!” she sobbed. “It was for Manasa. Manasa slapped me this morning. It was for her. Ask her. Please ask her. She ate out of that stupid bowl today. She slapped me—slapped me like I was a child. I am a woman in her thirties who gets beaten. How bad is that? I did it to teach her a lesson.”
By the time Chitralekha stormed upstairs and the others finished eating and rinsing their mouths in silence, the film of tears obscuring Prasanti’s vision cleared, and her eyes met Manasa’s, where she spotted sheer disgust. Desperate for sympathy, she turned to Bhagwati, who sat frozen in a chair, her eyes on the plate Chitralekha had thrown on the floor.
Even a dialogue with God wouldn’t solve this problem. She was an idiot to throw away all the goodwill she had built. Her mistress—the one person she had always made happy—couldn’t stand her now. Manasa knew of Prasanti’s hatred for her. Given how the dynamics in the family had changed, Manasa would easily be able to convince her grandmother to get rid of Prasanti. What was she but a servant? Easily disposable, with no onerous duties to perform, a hijra with a skill level so low that those clueless Adivasis from Doars could easily do her job with a day’s training. All these years of injecting laughter into the house had been quashed with the humiliation she’s just inflicted on Aamaa.
She understood Aamaa, and Aamaa understood her. She knew that the key to Aamaa’s heart was raunchy humor. Anything that entailed sex, sexual characteristics, excretion, and flatulence made her mistress’s day. She could titillate her mistress. She knew Aamaa as well as she knew herself.
Prasanti’s life had been different from the dancer hijra’s—all because of Aamaa. She was so far removed from her past in Bombay, when she lived in a koti, danced at people’s homes, and was expected to eventually prostitute herself. The hijras she’d lived with were lying when they promised her that, in them, she’d eventually find companionship, in their lifestyles, acceptance and society. Now she had a roof above her head, a nice, strong roof, good food to eat—the same food her mistress ate—and good clothes to wear.
Yet, she took her life here for granted.
The hijras of her past, in an effort to feel better about their sorry lives, invented naïve stories. They claimed that they were blessed by Lord Rama and were his chosen ones. In one of the many ridiculous versions of the tale they had a penchant for repeating—as though the retelling made it more truthful—the eunuchs brayed that their ability to jinx people’s fates was bequeathed to them by Rama himself. It was some silly story dating back to when Rama was sent into exile. His subjects followed him to the forest, and Rama, the benevolent prince, asked them all to return, to allow him to serve penance alone. Fourteen years later, on the way back to his kingdom of Ayodhya, he discovered that people were waiting for him outside the forest.
“Why are you still here?” Rama asked.
“Well, Lord,” one of the people said. “You asked all men and women to go back. We are neither men nor women, so we stayed.”
Moved by their devotion, the god gave them the power of the curse—anyone who crossed them would be destroyed.
That’s what the hijras believed. Prasanti, as hard as she tried, couldn’t bring herself to accept the story.
She had given up that life for this, and this was a far better life.
Her room was right below the stairs, which made the ceiling slant—it was low toward the entrance and very high at the other end. She had spoken to Aamaa about moving the door to the end with the higher ceiling, but Aamaa put it off, saying she’d promote her to an actual room—one of the grandchildren’s rooms—if she behaved. Prasanti couldn’t pace the area without hitting her head at some point. And yet, as she looked around her space, she couldn’t help wondering if she should complain about the construction quirk. She had a nice bed. She didn’t sleep on the floor. On the bed was a soft mattress, different from the rags she’d put together in the hijra house. The sheets were clean and had no holes. She had no memory of sheets from the hijra house—they had most likely been absent, like dignity and self-respect. She had so many clothes—new and hand-me-downs—that she was sometimes tempted to discard some of them.
Prasanti couldn’t cry anymore. It was as though she had exhausted her last teardrop.
The Godrej wardrobe, which she had obtained without permission from one of the rooms upstairs, rattled as she opened it. She inspected the contents of her safe-deposit box: an envelope with a thick stack of 500-rupee bills, some earned, some stolen; three pairs of gold earrings, one gifted, two stolen; a dozen gold bangles, half presented, half stolen; and a stolen necklace. Prasanti ran her hands over the crispness of each bill, as though she were examining a fine piece of cloth, and counted. She had accumulated more than Rs. 40,000.
She wasn’t a poor woman. She was worth more than all the servants she knew. Even if she were thrown out of the house, she had enough in cash and gold to be able to live. If she chose to move to a village, she’d even be considered well off. Then the cold reality of this alternative life set in: she couldn’t live outside the house. She wouldn’t get a moment’s peace beyond the compound. She would be taunted, beaten, and destroyed, all because she ha
d more of an organ than some and not enough of one as others. She had to live here. She’d have to live here. She couldn’t risk an altercation like the one that had just occurred.
Prasanti made up her mind. She would do her job. She would please everyone—even Manasa, impossible as it would be not to fight with her. She would stir up no trouble. In fact, she would start now. She would hang marigold garlands around the windows. It didn’t matter that Bhagwati had said she’d do it. It didn’t matter that Aamaa had confided in Prasanti that she wanted Bhagwati to do it with Agastaya, so Bhagwati could goad Agastaya into seeing some woman. Prasanti would do everything around the house. She wanted to show everyone she could work hard, that she was irreplaceable.
In the sitting room was the basket that contained the garlands she and Bhagwati had sewn together in the morning. Prasanti grabbed a garland and proceeded to deck the main door with it. Ruthwa asked if she needed help. Her condition had moved this brainless, heartless, selfish devil to take pity on her. She didn’t need his assistance but said nothing.
“Is everything all right?” Ruthwa said. “Are you okay?”
This display of concern—insincere as it may have been—brought back the flood of tears.
“I have work to do,” Prasanti said. “I have a lot of work to do.”
She couldn’t go back to living alone as a hijra. She couldn’t go back to living with other hijras.
She couldn’t return to her old life—any of her old lives.
FOUR
It’s just the right moment for me to intervene. Prasanti is at her susceptible best.
She keeps telling me that her story isn’t anything extraordinary, that it is an everyman story—well, an everyhijra story.
With the labor divided between Prasanti and me—and she in the mood to bleat about her past, which only quickens the pace at which she hangs the malas around the windows—it doesn’t take very long for all the windows and doors of the house (with the exception of those in Aamaa’s room) to be garlanded with marigolds.
It takes a far longer time to write the piece on Prasanti. But what a marvelous sample chapter this will be to accompany my proposal on a book about the hijras of the hills.
A Hijra Story
She had been born Prasant Acharya—the son of a Brahmin priest and his second wife.
Within six short years of his first marriage, Pundit Acharya was the burdened father of four daughters. Already nearing sixty and prone to sicknesses whose diagnosis varied from doctor to doctor, the priest was afraid he would die without a son to perform his death rites.
The thought of a stranger incinerating his fat, pudgy body bothered the priest. The stranger would be some relative—flesh and blood, yes, but flesh and blood many times removed. The pundit was certain his cremator wouldn’t abstain from salt for thirteen days after his death. The image of this man sucking on a sliver of chicken ten minutes after setting the priest’s body on fire made our learned friend despondent.
Pundit Acharya had tried again and again to impregnate his wife, but she dutifully isolated herself in the cowshed month after month to menstruate in peace. No child—male or female—arrived.
When he had married his first wife, Nirmala, slightly older than a child bride and slightly younger than a woman, those thighs had been so full of promise. And he couldn’t fault her—for she delivered, quantity-wise. But what good was quantity when not one of his four offspring could immolate him?
Nothing made his sick heart cry more than when he saw his younger brother’s twin toddlers run around naked, their tiny penises glistening in the sun. Pundit Acharya seldom saw his nephews clothed from the waist down. It was as though the little boys’ overactive bladders, which engendered a frequent change of clothes that started early in the morning, and Pundit Acharya’s brother’s acute poverty, which guaranteed that the harassed mother would run out of clothes into which to change the sons by the third urination of the day, was a mocking reminder from God about what the priest lacked.
Adopting one of the two nephews wouldn’t be the same as siring a son.
So, Pundit Chavi Raman Acharya called a meeting at which he discussed his problem with fellow priests, all of whom thought similarly, and all of whom pitied this poor man whose sicknesses received confused diagnoses and whose wife hadn’t yet borne him a son.
The Pundit had an idea.
“Would it be inappropriate for me to say that I’d like to get married to your daughter, Parajuli-jee?” he asked one of the gathered men.
Parajuli was a young priest who had married very early. Pundit Acharya was an old priest who had married very late. Parajuli had a nineteen-year-old daughter who talked to herself. A week before, she had cut her mother’s hair with a knife when the exhausted mother was asleep.
The nineteen-year-old daughter still played with seven-year-olds.
“But there’s a problem,” Pundit Acharya said.
It wasn’t that the bride-to-be was retarded.
“It’s a caste problem.”
All the priests had already started nodding in understanding.
“I am Acharya,” Acharya said.
The priests continued nodding in understanding.
It wasn’t the difference in their castes; it was the similarity. The bride-to-be and her husband-to-be belonged to the same gotra—they both were from the Kaundinya gotra, descendants of the Kaundinya Rishi. The union would be a form of consanguineous marriage—at its complicated best—even if Pundit Acharya and Pundit Parajuli would have to go back seventy-seven generations to find common DNA.
“But it’s not a problem we can’t solve,” Acharya said. “We create the rules here. I am the oldest pundit in Kalimpong. This relationship I declare nonconsanguineous.”
The others were in rapt attention. Acharya-jee was an erudite man.
The six pundits agreed. All of them had, at one point or another, received tutelage under Acharya. Pundit Acharya had married hundreds of men to hundreds of women and conducted the death rites of hundreds of dead bodies. Because everyone agreed that the priest needed to be married a second time so he could have a son who’d cremate his dead body, the very slight murmur about the nature of a wedding between an Acharya and a Parajuli was quickly hushed by experts on punditry.
The marriage was simple.
The retarded wife wore red. The groom wore daura-suruwal. The groom’s first wife wore green. The wife’s father wore a dhoti waist down and his sacred thread waist up. The groom’s brother conducted the ceremony. The groom’s four daughters wore frilly frocks. The brother’s sons, the two nephews, played in the sun, fully clothed.
At last, God had stopped laughing at Pundit-jee.
Sumitra, the new wife, had to be reprimanded a few times by her father during the ceremony. When instructed to sprinkle rice into the sacred fire around which she and her groom sat, she threw some at her soon-to-be stepdaughters’ faces and laughed. When asked to take the sacred rounds, she refused to have the loose end of her sari tied to her husband’s cloth belt. Once Round One was completed with difficulty and a few pinches from her father, Sumitra wouldn’t take Round Two.
Pundit Parajuli looked apologetically at Pundit Acharya and said a slap or two was necessary to discipline his retarded child when she was like this.
Pundit Acharya asked his first wife to take note.
Ten months later, Sumitra gave birth to a child, dangling between whose brittle legs was a penis.
Pundit Acharya could have kissed the tiny protrusion in joy.
He showed the little bundle to his four daughters and nearly slapped the second one when she tried touching her little brother.
Sumitra wailed and wailed. Her favorite toy, the biggest doll she had ever seen, was snatched away from her and handed over to the first wife for safekeeping.
Sumitra was allowed a few minutes at a time to play with the constantly crying doll when it would suckle on her.
Other times, no one was allowed to touch Prasant but the priest and
his first wife.
Prasant was a delightful baby who wore delightful clothes—shorts with frills, shirts with frills, and pants with frills, all sewn with frock pieces salvaged from his sisters’ wardrobe.
The father had grand ambitions for the child. He wanted his three-year-old to grow up to be not a teacher, a policeman, or a driver like many of his fellow priests’ sons were choosing to become, but a pundit.
Like father, like son, everyone would say.
Pundit Acharya couldn’t really tell one daughter from another. One had stopped going to school because she was stupid. Another had formed a close bond with her stepmother. He was growing old, and he often forgot the daughters’ names.
With his son, he was better. He was a proud father when the son, Prasant, was fed his first spoon of gooey rice. Prasant spat it out.
When his son’s long, lustrous hair was cut for the first time at age three, and his head shaved, Prasant looked exactly like him. Everyone who attended the Chewar commented on the similarity.
Prasant cried when he saw his shaved head in the mirror. All said he didn’t recognize himself.
The Pundit wanted to conduct Prasant’s threading ritual soon after the Chewar so that, should he die, he could die knowing that his son would set him on fire. The Bratabandha ceremony, during which Prasant would wear the sacred thread, would fully qualify the son to perform his parents’ last rites.
The Pundit didn’t notice that his oldest daughter had started making monthly trips to the cowshed. He was distracted because he was figuring out an auspicious date for his son’s coming-of-age function.
Sumitra loved fire. A few times, she set on fire things whose combustible characteristics the Pundit had serious doubts about, guavas being among them. One day, she burned her head. Had one of the daughters not seen her running around with her hair on fire, the Pundit’s retarded wife would have died. With a head devoid of hair, like her favorite crying doll’s, she was sent home, minus the crying doll.
“I just can’t deal with one more child when I have five of my own,” the Pundit said to his fellow priest, who understood.
Land Where I Flee Page 14
