Before dawn came, Madhu was gone from the bridge. She had to leave. Once light arrived, it made the sight of her parents’ home unbearable, and her hungry gaze felt all the more shameful.
Madhu hoped Salma had bought the right clothes for the parcel and not dressed her up like a prostitute. Why waste time? Why delay the inevitable? That was Salma’s way of thinking. But to Madhu, the right clothes had a purpose: they were meant to highlight the parcel’s innocence and purity for that first client, the way white fabric gave an aura of calm and cleanliness to the wearer.
On Sukhlaji Street, she noticed the van that operated as a mobile Ayurvedic clinic for the residents of Kamathipura. An old man sat inside the van and promised cures for arthritis and incontinence, but at this time of morning he attracted only pojeetives.
Madhu was anxious to return to the parcel in the loft; she needed the motherly darkness. She made sure it was always night in the loft; the hot air always stank, but the light was in her control. She was in charge of its emission, what it exposed, what it concealed. To Madhu, there was nothing natural about sunlight. It lit up things too savagely, without the slightest regard for her sensibilities, especially when she stood on the bridge. She did not want to see her parents’ faces, or her brother’s for that matter. She hadn’t seen them in decades. Silhouettes were all she could handle.
She observed the parcel for a few moments as the girl slept. Then Madhu leaned back and rattled the cage bars with her legs.
“Get up!” she shouted. “Up!”
The parcel leapt up, almost hitting her head on the roof of the cage.
“What’s your name?” Madhu asked. “Tell me your name!”
“Kinjal,” said the parcel.
Madhu reached through the bars and gripped her neck.
The parcel realized she’d made a mistake. “Jhanvi,” she corrected herself.
“How old are you?” Madhu was ferocious. She had spent the last two days drilling facts into the parcel, and still the girl had answered the very first question wrong.
“Twelve.”
“What village are you from?”
Madhu could tell that the name of the parcel’s village was on the tip of her tongue, but she knew she was not supposed to speak it.
“I was born here. I’m not from any village.”
“Don’t lie to me. I will take you to the police station right now. Then you’ll tell me the truth.”
“It’s the truth…My mother was from Nepal, but she died. I was born here.”
“Do you go to school?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t…I help here…I clean the place.”
“That’s good,” said Madhu.
She suddenly changed roles and was no longer the interrogator. Of course, when a cop questioned you, the truth came out like watery shit in a matter of seconds, but the parcel had done okay. There was one thing left to do. She opened the cage and let the parcel out.
“Now hide,” said Madhu. “You have a ten second start. If I can see even your shadow, you’ll be sorry.”
No sooner had the parcel slipped down the ladder than Madhu went after her. She could see the parcel getting inside the water tank. Once she was in, Madhu peered over the top. The parcel was still. Just as Madhu had taught her, she held her dress to the side of her body so that it didn’t bloat. Madhu was satisfied. The girl could not be seen.
Sometimes raids lasted for a couple of hours. The parcel needed to get used to staying in there for that long. Madhu set herself down and prepared to wait for dawn. Her thoughts returned to her pitiful addiction. What if Bulbul or gurumai or even Gajja found out about Madhu’s habit of voyeurism on the bridge? Deep down, did she somehow hope she would find her way back into her family’s life? That was as laughable a venture as parcel work. Earlier, the parcel had been moving in her sleep, jerking an arm and then a leg, like dogs do when they lie on their sides, close their eyes, and dream they are running. The parcel was running too—running back to her village at night, wherever it was. It was hard to watch, which is why Madhu had woken her up with such cruel voltage.
Madhu’s father had had a chance to change Madhu’s future, and history, by accepting his son—but he could not. He studied history, but he dared not make it. Madhu prided herself on doing the opposite. By wiping out the parcels’ past, she was wiping out history. So who was more powerful now: Madhu’s father or Madhu?
When she came into contact with the parcels, Madhu felt that God had a purpose for her. She connected with them. She could feel their terror better than anyone else. She knew that if she made their world smaller by sledgehammering their dreams of being rescued, she’d help them. It made her sick, how they turned to God in their cages. She thought back to her early days in Hijra Gulli: the sooner the truth had hit Madhu in those early days—that her family had not bothered to look for her after she ran away—the faster her world had started to shrink. And the more confined her world got, the less she had needed her parents or her brother. That is, until a few years ago.
That was when a single new bridge had weakened her—the JJ Bridge, connecting Byculla to VT station. Even though no pedestrians were allowed on it, she had walked on that bridge one night after a few pegs with Gajja. She’d just drifted there, the way dust drifted. As she climbed up, she saw the Mahanagar Blood Bank to her left and reflected that she was not even allowed to donate blood. To do so, you were required to tick a box for male or female on the medical form. If neither was ticked, the doctor could refuse to take your blood, even if you were giving it for free. This had happened to Madhu. Gajja had called her to give blood to an accident victim, an acquaintance of his, but when Madhu showed up, the doctor sent her away. All her life, her father had made her feel like an aberration, a nonentity, and now a doctor had supported that view.
But the harder parent, Madhu now realized, had been her mother. She had been the most difficult to fight because she was in no one’s corner. Too cowardly to oppose her husband, she had secretly given Madhu bits of comfort, like scraps of food slipped under the table as though Madhu was a deformed child hidden away from sight.
Madhu’s new hijra family had seemed to offer her the acceptance she needed and deserved, and she had not minded paying the price, allowing truck drivers to enter her with the same recklessness with which they drove on highways. She once told Bulbul that so many truck drivers had entered her she should have “Horn OK Please” tattooed on her arse.
Now she realized that she had left home only to fall into the illusion of freedom. The veil had lifted. She saw that she had chosen to live with a group of people who were as unwelcome in society as lice in hair. Her father’s scorn had been replaced by society’s.
The screech of a taxi snapped Madhu out of her thoughts. It was the voice of reason telling her to wake up and accept her life once and for all. The harsh sound was pushing her to accept the harsh truth. The parcel would have her sounds too, thought Madhu: the footsteps of Padma Madam walking with a client toward the cage; the squeaks of the cage door opening; the hurried breath of the client, his hungry anticipation wetting the stale air in the loft; the vocabulary of the trapped and eternally hunted. But before these entered the parcel’s life, Madhu needed to introduce a different sound. She picked up a stick that lay on the floor and tapped it against the water tank a couple of times. This is what the cops sometimes did to check if the tank held water or was being used as a hiding place. Madhu tapped and waited. The parcel did not respond. Madhu was pleased. The tap was a simple, unassuming sound, but it was one that the parcel would recall many years from now, as an old woman.
It was always the simple things that hurt. Wounds could be subtle, silken beings.
Madhu went back in her memory to that night a few years ago when she had met up with her one steady love, Gajja, and drank too much with him at the hospital. Later, instead of returning to Kamathipura, she had gone in the other direction, toward JJ Bridge. Regret had made her go there. Her beauty was fading faster than the dye on cheap fabric, and her hijra family was no longer fulfilling her. The sisters she had bonded with had been traded to another guru like cattle. Of course, Bulbul was always there for her, but even she was getting gloomy. Gajja was a constant in her life, but the need for intimacy was leaving her fast, and she knew it was hurting him. She was desperate to stand on that bridge—she didn’t know why, she simply knew it was necessary.
That night, she had looked down over the side of the bridge at the Suleiman Usman Bakery. A little farther ahead, she saw a building named “Fancy Mahal.” It was so close to where she stood, she could almost touch it if she leaned across the gap. The traffic below, on Mohammed Ali Road, was abuzz with motorcycles beaming rude shafts of light at the minarets and meat shops. No, jumping was not an option. One needed energy for suicide. She was beyond that; she was already dead.
That was when she had confessed a dark secret to herself. She had faced up to a thought that had been growing underneath the regret: Even though her father had been hard on her, hadn’t he become more calm after their visit to the holy Baba that day long ago? Hadn’t Madhu’s father invited Madhu to join him at the window that night to stare at the traffic below? He might have been humiliated by Madhu’s presence in the family, but his struggle with that feeling was human.
Madhu stared at the grey cement of Fancy Mahal and wondered what would have happened if gurumai had not shown up at her home. For the first time, standing on that bridge, Madhu saw clearly who her father was: a struggling history “sir,” teaching uninterested students about the British, or Akbar, or whatever the syllabus told him to teach. With his short, thin frame, he would have been blown away by the wind to the Department of Failures were it not for that heavy briefcase he carried around to ground him in importance.
What if Madhu’s father was not an insensitive man? What if Madhu’s mother was not a coward? What if Madhu had read them wrong? Had his mother not shed a tear or two? Had she not on occasion stepped in and taken a blow that was meant for Madhu? Why hadn’t Madhu thought of that before?
That night on the bridge, she had concluded there were no answers…Just as there was no answer now as to why the parcel was a shivering wet mass of fear in the water tank. Why was the disease. Madhu had convinced herself of this time and again, drilled it into her skull with the same urgency that construction workers were drilling holes into the pavement of Kamathipura. Why, why, why…If you said it long enough, or loud enough, thought Madhu, you could see the ridiculousness of the question. There was no answer.
And yet, it turned out there was an answer.
When Madhu was in her thirties, she had stopped doing sex work. She was sick of it. But gurumai had not given her permission; the businesswoman in gurumai would not let her do so. Madhu refused anyway, so a barber was called and her head was shaved to humiliate her. It was a huge blow for a hijra to have her long tresses lopped off. She was also asked to pay a fine of ten thousand rupees, which she could barely afford. Yes, she had been allowed to retain half her earnings, but Madhu had always been too lenient with cash. She fed dogs, she gave prostitutes train fare to go back to their villages, and she had once even given a client his money back and something extra because he wanted to buy a cycle for his son. She bought the parcels dolls and books and colouring pencils, and she had bought Bulbul an entire collection of Kishore Kumar hits, which she regretted because Bulbul played them all day long. Madhu could afford to be this generous because her arsehole was functioning beautifully. It was nothing short of a lugubrious wonder. Even when the Mumbai stock market crashed, her gand-hole was raking it in.
She had been the toast of Kamathipura, a rare bird in a cage. Literally. Gurumai had asked a laundryman around the corner from the brothel, a man whose father used to work in the theatre as a lighting assistant, to affix some lights to the bottom of the brothel window to illuminate Madhu above. She had felt like a work of art. Actress that she was, she used the light well, letting it warm her legs and stream its hot glow right up her thighs, revealing just enough, but never more. There had once been over five hundred hijra sex workers in that one lane in Kamathipura, and Madhu could easily say, with utmost humility, that she was among the most beautiful. In the prime of her life, she had been so voluptuous and fiery she could burn a man with a single stare. One of her clients had been a doctor, a respectable ENT specialist, who drove to Madhu in his wife’s old Fiat. The car would always stall three minutes away from the brothel. “It’s my wife’s way of saying, ‘Don’t go,’ ” he told Madhu.
“So why do you come?”
“Because you are unlike anything I’ve tasted.”
He showered money on her. He’d stand up while she slept naked on the bed, take a handful of ten-rupee notes and let them fall over her like rose petals—except currency did not die and had a scent more fragrant than that of any rose.
Hers was a simple game. First, she would demean her clients: “You are not big enough or hard enough. Take your prick and go home to your wife. You can never satisfy me.” That was all it took to inflame a man’s ego. The most fragile thing in the world, the ego of the male species, was so easy to belittle. In response, the men took her with the force of a gale, and she did her precious drama: “Oooh…aah…I have never been…Oh my god…stop…Don’t stop…No, please stop.” Sometimes the choothiyas were so drunk they thought they were fucking her in the arse, but all she did was put cream between her thighs and make them come in seconds.
Then something had changed. The first sign she was aging came when she started hemorrhaging internally. She had used up all her reserves, and when her body was more honest, more in touch with its mortality, it started remembering things. After all, she was a Sherpa of the flesh. The mind could not be relied upon. It had the ability to make up stories, good or bad, and warp memories to suit a purpose, but only the body told you what had truly happened. The body could make up nothing. It stood witness to all the things she had done and every sensation she had felt. She decided to cross-examine herself. She told her mind to shut up and put her body in the witness box.
Six months after her head had been shaved in front of the hijra leaders, gurumai had asked Madhu if she would start prostituting again. Madhu said no, but it was a softer no, the no of a child begging its mother for something. Gurumai, against her better judgment, granted Madhu her wish. Madhu became a badhai hijra, one who sang and danced at weddings, and soon she accompanied Bulbul and Sona to her first “blessing.”
The blessing was held in a middle-class home. On the day of a wedding, even a dungeon like that house shone. Sona played the drums and Bulbul sang. They had taken a portable tape recorder with them to play the cheapest item songs, which was gurumai’s idea. The world was changing; tradition had to take a back seat to hip gyrations.
Madhu was not a dancer. She simply put her arms to her sides and started swaying. The whore in her made the men notice. She did not want them to. In fact, she was scared and self-conscious about having to dance.
As well, the happiness surrounding her was getting to her. She was in the presence of “normal” people on a day of tremendous joy. She was standing in someone’s middle-class living room after years and years of banishment. It felt like another planet. She could not bear the smell in that home because it did not smell of sex and urine. It was so clean, she thought she might gag on the cleanliness, and on all those fake smiles tolerating her presence.
Bulbul’s singing made her feel even worse. The words Bulbul sang were all her own:
Oh look at this rickety face
Look where it is placed
On the body of a woman
Who once was a man
But is now neither, neither, neither.
Madhu had never seen Bulbul at work and she marvelled at her skill. She was using her hands so subtly, to highlight her face. Even a mediocre painting could pass for a masterpiece for a second or two if offset by a frame, and that is exactly what Bulbul’s fingers were doing: providing a second or two of authentic femininity, a mere drop of acceptance in the ocean of time.
But the women who were gathered to watch thought Bulbul was mocking herself. They were giggling like a bunch of ten-year-olds at someone who had just got her first period. When Madhu looked at the bride’s face and saw that she knew nothing of a hijra’s pain, it irked her that just by being born in the right body, this young woman had avoided all that Madhu had gone through. Madhu realized that she had stopped swaying and that her gaze was locked on the bride’s smile.
“Don’t stare at her,” the bride’s mother told her. “Don’t look at her face. You should know better. It’s not good.”
Madhu was so startled, she started swaying again, but she could not digest the mother’s words. Madhu knew that if she opened her mouth, she was asking for trouble, but her own mother’s words came searing through her memory: “Why can’t you just listen to him?” That was it.
“What’s not good?” Madhu asked the bride’s mother.
“Hah?”
“Why can’t I look at her face? What’s the problem?”
Sona suddenly stopped drumming and Bulbul tapered off into silence.
“You should know,” said the mother. “It’s unlucky. She will be unable to bear children, just like you.”
How warped the human soul was. This woman had allowed Madhu into her home on her daughter’s wedding day because she was superstitious. And so, in her mind, the hijras were extorting money from her, preying on her fears. Instead of being part of a historic tradition, the hijras had been pushed to the fringes and were left sitting on the margins the way flies sat on the rim of a plate, unwanted, circling the perimeter to find a way back in, but never succeeding. Money was not given to them as a reward for their skilled performance. Money was given to drive the hijras away.
“Do you know why I cannot have children?” Madhu asked her.
The woman had by then realized the folly of her assault. She had simmered down, but Madhu had awoken.
“I cannot have children because I have nothing,” she said.
Then Madhu lifted her sari and started to remove her panties. Bulbul placed her arm around her, but Madhu shook it off; she could not stop. She put her own arm on Bulbul’s shoulder instead, used her as support, and tugged her panties down her legs. Then she lifted her red sari, which spanned the room like a flower, opening its petals for all to see—except that there was nothing. The flesh was so barren, it showed no signs of life except for a cigarette burn made by a truck driver long ago.
She stood there with her sari hoisted for what seemed like an eternity. In lifting her sari, Madhu was also using it as a shield to cover her face. Then the silence was shattered by the bride’s cries, and the men of the house drove the hijras out. Madhu had ruined the happiest day of the bride’s life. She was told to go die.
When gurumai heard of this, she told her three hijras to keep quiet. This incident could not reach the ears of the hijra leaders. She felt sorry for Madhu, and also was resigned to the fact that Madhu had changed. Madhu herself could not understand why she had acted as she did that day. She was thus relegated to begging, and Bombay Central became her adda. From a dhandhewali to a badhai hijra, and now a mangti, one who begged, she had experienced all three roles that a hijra could play. Her income crashed, her stomach lost its tautness, and lines started to appear beneath her eyes—hot, sorrowful bags that swelled with madness. Her body was no longer ravaged by men—and let alone, it talked even more.
Madhu was sure that the parcel’s body was talking to her this very instant. She carefully slid open the lid of the water tank just a sliver and shouted, “If anyone’s in there, come out!” She listened for a response but heard nothing. Once her eyes adjusted to the light inside the water tank, she saw the parcel’s quivering silhouette. That quiver was the second question the body asked, after Why?—What if? That was the second sign of internal bleeding: the slow, ruinous feeling that in some way perhaps she was responsible for her fate.
Around the time Madhu was reduced to begging, when her body was no longer worshipped by men and had all the time to speak, it made her ask: What if she had not run away from home? If she had not run away, perhaps her father would have accepted her. The acceptance would not have been wholehearted; it would have been a quiet resignation, the way one accepted falling hair. Father would have inched toward son. Each time he smelled the girl trapped inside Madhu, it would have rattled him, but his own worst fear, of public gossip, had already come true. In time, acceptance would have set him free.
The more Madhu had stared at the walls of Fancy Mahal that night on the bridge, the more she had believed this to be true. Cars passed by but no one stopped; she camouflaged herself well into any darkness. Even her sari clung to her, assisting her in avoiding detection.
She allowed herself an awful thought: Gurumai had laid a trap for her. Gurumai was not her benefactor, her guardian, as Madhu had thought. Her own disastrous need had prevented her from seeing gurumai’s true face. And Madhu had chosen her current life because of her own stubbornness. She had become more and more uneasy as crows cawed and dawn arrived, and the only thing moving was a small Pakistani flag attached to the minaret of a mosque. The satellite dishes on the tops of buildings yawned, bored at her pain.
It was then that she had looked directly into the apartment across from her. As lights came on, she had seen a family waking up. Together. The father gently leaned down to wake his boy. The boy wiped his eyes and begged for more time. The mother carried her little girl in her arms to the toilet. It was all so simple.
A great calm came over Madhu. Then, an even greater sickness.
She had become visible. The father, a man with a long beard, had spotted her. He came to the balcony, where he was joined by his wife. Madhu and this couple were only feet away from each other. Both man and woman looked at Madhu. They said nothing. They knew what Madhu was. They did not shoo her away. They allowed her into their family, to stand in the shared calm of people who loved and respected one another, and for that Madhu was grateful.
Instead of going back to Kamathipura that morning, she had gone to step forty-seven on the bridge closest to her family’s home. That was the first time. And that’s how bridges had become her nasha. No wonder her brother now stood on his balcony so often in the middle of the night. No wonder he couldn’t sleep. That shadow, that feeling on her brother’s skin that something was watching him, judging him, that was Madhu. It had taken her years to get to this point.
Dawn came and Madhu felt strong. She told the parcel to come out of the water tank. The girl had endured the process well. As Madhu dried her off, she saw that the water had pruned her hands into those of an old woman’s. The water was doing its job. It had hidden many parcels. Now Madhu was certain that this parcel would be her last. Unlike water, which took the form of the vessel that contained it, Madhu would no longer allow herself to be shaped by others. It was time to reclaim what she had lost, what had been taken from her.
Once Madhu was done delivering the parcel, she would put on her finest outfit, a salwar kameez with a gold border, she would take meaningful strides toward Geeta Bhavan, where the diabetic ghosts would egg her on, she would climb up the stairs to her former home, and she would knock on the door. In the dark, just like gurumai had. For a second time, a hijra would visit her home. But this time, her brother would open the door.