(MONSOON: JULY 2003)
I haven’t visited for over a year and Heera Mandi has been transformed during my absence. The local government has set about turning Lahore into a tourist destination: one of the city’s bazaars has already been developed into a thriving, modern-day “food street” with open-air restaurants and quaint, upgraded facades on the traditional buildings. Something similar was intended for this part of the inner city until the guardians of morality objected, insisting that the tourists would gravitate to the brothels after satisfaction at the restaurant tables. Heera Mandi’s women are disappointed by the abandonment of the plans, but now at least parts of the mohalla near the Badshahi Masjid look more like a visitor attraction than a shabby ghetto.
Fort Road has been paved. A fountain now sparkles near where the dump once stood, and there are decorative street lamps along the pavements where the addicts used to make their camp. Boys no longer play cricket in front of the mosque, and to make sure they don’t return, two heavily moustached guards in dark sunglasses sit on a bench in the middle of the grass. The dingy facades of the buildings have been masked by layers of new paint: soft yellows and creams, dark reds, and occasionally a virulent, sense-jarring blue. The windows, balconies, and shutters have been painted in contrasting colors. At dusk Fort Road is picturesque, veiled in a flattering glow from pretty lighting, and the mosque, the Sikh palace, and the Hazoori Gardens are illuminated by hundreds of spotlights. It’s utterly charming. On the side streets nothing much has changed: the potholes and filth remain and the galis are flanked by the same drab walls. The addicts haven’t disappeared, but have simply gravitated from the perimeter of the mosque farther into Heera Mandi. A large multi-storey building near the Tarranum Cinema has collapsed and now provides the addicts and other local men with an open-air toilet to replace the one that vanished when the dump was shifted.
All the buildings around the courtyard have had a facelift, and some of the people at the windows and doors are different. The village family has said goodbye to the courtyard. All the fancy furniture has been moved out. They have gone somewhere better, to someplace where the giant bed and dressing table can be fully appreciated. The family’s fortunes have risen a very long way in a very short time. Five years ago they were in their village. Four years ago they were a hair’s breadth away from destitution, living in two rooms opposite Iqbal’s house and ridiculed by the Kanjar neighbors. And then it all changed. The girls went to Dubai, so now they can leave the bazaar in style, taking their new video player and three rickshaws full of electrical goods to a nicer home where the free-range chickens will have more room to roost on the furniture and scratch around on the carpet.
The Shia shrine in the corner of the courtyard has developed markedly during the past few years. It looks as if it has always been there. A metal fence has been added to the bathroom tiles, a gate has appeared, a couple of bushes are growing nearby and there are lots of places to stand little oil lamps. They look so pretty at night. The pimp who is the patron of the shrine must be very pleased. His religious life and his reputation in the community are coming along nicely. So is his business: there are three striking new girls in his house.
Maha’s New Regime
Behind the freshly painted doors the interior world of Heera Mandi is undisturbed. Maha has a new home in one of the dressed-up buildings. She came back—again—to Heera Mandi after the police dragged her out of her home in Karim Park and kicked her down the street, beating her with a leather belt in front of all the neighbors. The police must have been short of money and anxious to generate some revenue through a cleanup campaign. Ariba and Nisha had a whipping too. Adnan rescued them from imprisonment in the thanna by paying a large bribe. He also paid the medical bills for the repairs to Maha’s face. His money couldn’t erase the damage to Maha’s pride, though, and the family left Karim Park quietly one morning and returned to the stigma of life in the official brothel quarter.
Maha’s new residence is far grander and cleaner than any of her previous homes. It’s on the second, third, and fourth floors of a substantial building on Fort Road. A deeply devout Shia family live on the second floor of the house. The sons speak good English and have come to thank me personally for the overthrow of Sadaam Hussein, who was persecuting their Shia brothers. A less friendly family lives on the ground floor, but their door is always closed, so we rarely see them.
With three roof terraces Maha has plenty of space to spread out her possessions: her flowers, plants, and ancient furniture, the old air cooler, and the children’s tricycles. It’s a lovely collection of terraces: one is enclosed by trellises to screen the family from the eyes of the neighbors, and the topmost storey is so high it looks out over all the other houses to Iqbal’s restaurant, and the domes of the masjid. A large metal panja and a Shia flag have been erected in the corner of the roof. Below them, half a dozen oil lamps sit on a little ledge surrounded by strings of dried flowers and trails and pools of hardened candle wax.
The seven rooms of the new house are strangely empty. Only Maha and the youngest children are here. Nisha, Nena, and Ariba have gone to the Gulf to work as dancers. Nena has been on several tours and this is Ariba’s second trip. Nisha wasn’t so keen to go, but the money was too good for them to refuse, so, still with her twisted arm and bony body, she packed her suitcase and left with her sisters, all the while insisting that she wasn’t going to have relations with “old Hindus” or “black Arabs.”
The advances on the girls’ earnings are paying for the superior house, and the family’s fortunes have been revolutionized. They have money and a lot of new furniture: odd multicolored table lamps and a couple of giant beds with fancy carved frames that Nena’s enamoured ashiks have donated to the family in an attempt to win her virginity. Maha deemed the gifts insufficiently generous, so two years after her failed marriage to Sheikh Khasib, Nena remains complete.
I’ve left the beautiful room in Iqbal’s home and moved in with Maha. It makes sense because I spend so much of my time with her and the family and my room in Iqbal’s is often empty. I sleep on one of Nena’s big beds. Maha has assembled a collection of items on the bedside cabinet that she thinks I’ll need: tissues, bottled water, a large tub of hair-removing cream. No natural light enters the room. The window looks into the narrow well that runs through the center of the building, but it hasn’t been opened for decades and the shutters have seized together. A brand-new air-conditioning unit keeps the room cool. One of Ariba’s clients bought it because he was tired of the heat spoiling his visits. At night Maha insists on turning it up to maximum chill so that I wake rigid with cold under the sheet. She’s trying to be kind: she wants to make me feel at home. She thinks it always snows in London.
Maha has new treasures she keeps safely guarded: two sets of gold jewelry, rings, necklaces, earrings, a handful of gold bangles, two mobile phones, and assorted watches. They are presents from the girls’ satisfied customers, or optimistic ones who dreamed of satisfaction. It’s not a large or particularly valuable horde, but Maha handles it carefully: the jewelry is displayed in red velvet boxes and the mobile phones are wrapped in tissue. She has a bank account too and has saved up almost seventy thousand rupees ($1,180). It’s a start, Maha says, the beginning of a new life. “When the girls return,” she says, “when Nena is married, everything will be perfect.”
I’ve seen Adnan only once, hobbling in on crutches in the middle of the night. He was shot twice in the leg a few months ago during a gunfight in the bazaar and will probably never walk unaided again. Maha wasn’t pleased to see him, judging by the way she hurled the bottle of 7-Up at his head as he left.
“I’m always alone here,” she sighs. She has no customers and no husband. She spends a lot of time lying on the mattress looking agitated, fidgeting with her clothes, and smoking hashish. She’s given up Corex but can’t do without some kind of fix. Maha wants a man—a new one and a decent one—although Adnan would still do if he could just learn to treat her with some respect and affection and if his wife would stop concocting those vile spells. She says we both need a man and a new plan: she needs to lose some weight and I need to gain some. Today we’re going on a diet.
We return from the market with two shopping bags full of diet foods: vegetables, fruit, and chicken breasts. There are two—only two—warm and tempting naans, wrapped in newspaper, jutting out of the bag. Maha eyes them hungrily. Bread and ghee must be eaten in moderation or not at all. A great pot of vegetable soup is simmering on the gas ring. Maha grimaces.
Charms
There’s something about Maha that tells strangers she’s a kanjri. It might be the way her chador comes loose and she walks around bareheaded. Or it might be the direct way she looks at men, or the way she laughs, or the way she sways through the crowd looking around with her head held high. It might simply be her beauty—lessened, but never masked, by her weight. I don’t know. I’m following her through a street market on the edge of the old city. I’m about twelve feet behind her, observing the men’s looks and how they whisper and nudge their friends.
The market is full of customers buying cheap clothes, household equipment, toiletries, snacks, hashish, and a variety of drugs that look like a selection of dried, crushed plants. Other traders are selling hope. Maha wants to know about the future, so we pay three rupees (five cents) to an elderly fortune-teller to have his sweet, ragged little parrot walk along a line of envelopes and pick one out with his beak. Maha isn’t pleased with the fortune written on the paper in her envelope. I can’t make sense of mine: it must be based on some traditional stories or part of the Quran. The old man can see my confusion, and he laughs so we can see that he hasn’t a single tooth in his head.
We’re going to try some more serious dealings with the spiritual world. A jadugar, a magician, is sitting by a wall that runs along the Ravi Road. The mystical guidance is more expensive here—twenty rupees (thirty-four cents)—but it’s a more personal service. Maha has to give some details, like her name and her husband’s name. She concentrates hard and throws some tiny brass dice. The jadugar scribbles figures on a pad and starts telling Maha all the things she wants to hear: her husband loves her but there’s a problem.
“Mumtaz, his other wife,” Maha interrupts, shouting so loudly that the jadugar flinches.
“Yes,” the jadugar says. Mumtaz has being performing black magic on Adnan again. She’s been putting her menstrual blood into his drinks. For five hundred rupees ($8) the man will produce some tarviz, charms that will unravel Mumtaz’s spells, and everything will return to normal.
Maha settles on a fee of two hundred rupees ($3) and the man gives her three small bits of paper torn out of a notebook. There’s a charm written on one and on the others there are lists of numbers in rudimentary grids. Maha folds them into tiny tight parcels and puts them in her bra. She’s very pleased.
Tasneem’s Lovely Hair
Malika is sitting in the telephone shop and rushes out as I stand admiring the new look of the Tarranum Cinema. It has been painted the color of dried peas. She wants to know why I haven’t been to see her. The khusra with the harelip and the rubber legs is still in Malika’s house and there’s another man whom I don’t recognize sitting in a corner. They’re all very friendly. Tasneem is living at Malika’s nowadays too, but she isn’t in at the moment. They say she’s gone to her village because her uncle has died. I’m not so sure this is true. Malika says that things went badly for Tasneem: her marriage ended in disaster. She says her husband was cruel. He used to beat her, and in the end, he chucked her out. She came back to Malika’s because she had nowhere else to go.
She brushes my hair and asks why I’m not wearing my earrings. It’s as if I’m half dressed.
A Punjabi film is on the television. Dancers run around in a field waving scarves and forming circles around a singer. The khusras tell me that the star is the most famous woman singer and dancer in Pakistan. The film appears very old and the heroine looks bloated and surprisingly ugly.
A khusra with a handsome face and a tall, slender body arrives. They laugh about how one of the other khusras performs her dance routines and give me a mean demonstration of her level of incompetence. The handsome khusra asks me how long I have known Tasneem.
“Tasneem’s not good,” she declares. “She’s a loose person. She’s badtamiz and useless in the head.”
“She has a good heart,” I add and ask why she thinks such bad things about her.
“Because she left us. We don’t get married. We stay here with the others. Tasneem got married and went away.”
Malika is nodding and looking at me with great seriousness.”It’s not allowed,” she adds. “We can’t leave and get married. We can’t get permission. Tasneem was bad.”
Tasneem has disobeyed the rules of khusra society, the rules that tie them into a community and forbid them to leave, and she will be punished: she will be ridiculed and made to do all the jobs no one else will consider doing. She was treated badly before and now life will be even worse for her. I don’t think it was a badmash, a brutal stranger, who hacked off Tasneem’s lovely hair: it was the khusras themselves.
Jogging in Racecourse Park
Maha and I are starting an exercise regime to complement the diet. We’re going to go to Racecourse Park every day. A long way from Heera Mandi, it’s a park with ornamental gardens, children’s playgrounds, cricket pitches, fountains, a long jogging circuit, and, in the center, a polo club. We’ve made an effort to look our best because it’s a place frequented by the rich. The circular walk around the park is used by lots of fitness enthusiasts, and Maha joins them, walking against the flow of joggers and stopping often to admire the excellent displays of flowers and tropical plants.
Maha points out a hospital next to the park. “That’s where my sister died,’ she says flatly.
No one is sure why her rosy-cheeked sister collapsed last month and then died a few hours later. Not even the doctors. Maha’s mother sits alone now at her window in the courtyard chewing paan and looking miserable. I think Maha is grieving too.
Our pace slackens to a relaxed amble. Maha is complaining: “Louise, my legs, my bund, my feet.” She’s swaying through the crowds, taking shortcuts across the grass, laughing and breathing deeply, confessing now and again that she’s spotted a former client, or musing that some of the men are rich and a few of them are extremely attractive. Her dupatta is slung across her shoulders, a mist of perspiration dots her upper lip, and her hair, escaped from its clip, hangs provocatively around her face. Every man glances at her. A second later, they glance again.
Lahore Polo Club is in the center of the park. Maha points out all the expensive cars and says it’s a good place to pick up business: she’s been here before. We watch a group of children having riding lessons. Their fathers are not around: there are only a few frosty, upper-class ladies speaking English who give us disparaging looks. It’s a disappointment, so we survey the car park again and lie down on the grass to watch some youths play cricket. Maha is so happy gazing at the sky and talking about how she’s going to stick to the diet and be slim and meet nice men. Tomorrow she’ll buy some running shoes to speed up the walking and the fat loss.
It’s almost time to go home and savor some more soup, so we drag a whining Mutazar and Sofiya from the children’s playground. To soothe them we stop at the cafe for everyone to enjoy ice creams and Cokes and packs of namkeen. Maha relishes her ice cream—after all she deserves it. A handsome young man observes every mouthful and every lick of her lips with awed fascination. He moves closer and then follows us, trancelike, to the rickshaw. Maha half-shuffles and half skips in her sandals, laughing and pulling the children along behind her. For once she’s unaware of her impact, but every head has turned.
By evening Maha isn’t so happy. We’re cooking and she is low because I’m leaving soon.
“You are going,” she complains. “There are only four days left and then I’ll be alone.”
“How can you be alone when you have the children?” I laugh, trying to make light of it.
“When the children go to sleep, I’m alone. My heart is alone. Those men are frauds. They use me and go away. I’ll never meet a good man. Good men don’t want to know me. You are the only person who hasn’t given me up. Promise you won’t give me up—not until we die.”
I make a promise, and mean it.
A big ghee tin is sitting on the gas ring in the middle of the kitchen as we cook. Something is bubbling slowly inside it. It looks like volcanic mud.
“It’s good magic,” Maha explains. Her mood lifts and she laughs and pokes the tin. “It’s got to cook every day for twenty-one days.”
At the bottom of the tin, under the mud, is a little earthenware bowl. The jadugar’s charms are in this bowl interleaved with layers of sugar. On top of this is one of Adnan’s used syringes—just to make sure the magic fastens itself on the right man.
“Adnan will smell it and know someone is thinking about him,” Maha states.
“And after twenty-one days, what will happen?” I ask.
“He’ll come back and love me.”