It was always night in Kamathipura. Days were a mutation of night. When dusk came, the hijras appeared like stars and stood in clusters, lit up. Roomali looked extra white tonight, while Devyani stood erect on the public toilet roof and peered into the distance like a sentry from a different era, on a fort tower, alert for an enemy onslaught. Devyani’s error was that she was looking for the enemy outside the boundaries of Kamathipura, when the real-estate vultures were already inside. Among the hijras, only Madhu noticed the small bulldozer parked on the other side of the public toilet. It hadn’t been there when she returned home the night before. That a bulldozer had come in so stealthily in the middle of the night, without so much as a sound, meant something.
Madhu tried to tell herself she was just being paranoid. Gurumai would never sell. The bulldozer must be for the structures surrounding Hijra House. Just as the hijras were a thorn in the face of society, the building they lived in would serve as a reminder that they could not be disseminated easily. They were scar tissue, and they would somehow endure.
Madhu knew that the gathering of the hijra leaders was in one day, and that fact was weighing on her. Even though the gathering was not in Kamathipura, gurumai was having the brothel cleaned in case one of the leaders wished to visit. But Madhu knew that would never happen. The hijra leaders looked down on sex work. It brought shame to the hijra community. No leader would ever enter Kamathipura. Still, gurumai insisted on employing some retired female prostitutes to clean the brothel anyway, and they were busy scrubbing the walls and floors so hard that neither prostitutes nor brothel would have any skin left.
Madhu kept her mind on the task at hand. The parcel needed her attention. She needed to be made ready. As Madhu walked toward Padma’s brothel, it occurred to her that nothing could destroy Kamathipura. Its structures could be demolished, but it could not be destroyed. She was experiencing the same thing with the parcel. The parcel would die and then re-emerge in an altered form.
When Madhu arrived at Padma’s brothel, Salma told her that the parcel was in her room. The girl had been running a fever, so Salma had given her a Crocin.
“We need to do something,” said Madhu. “Have you forgotten?”
“No,” said Salma. “I’ll fetch the parcel.”
When they came down to join Madhu in the street, the three of them were greeted with a surge of unholy noise. The pimps of Kamathipura had suddenly turned pious. It was their monthly cleansing too, and they were singing bhajans in praise of Sai Baba of Ajmer. They had paid money to the owner of Café Faredoon and requested that he feed the poor on their behalf. A long line of the destitute had formed outside the restaurant, where they waited to be fed mutton biryani paid for with rape money. One pimp had cymbals in his hands and was striking away with such fervour, he was convinced he had been forgiven.
Salma and Madhu parted ways, Salma muttering about needing to go to Bachuseth Ki Wadi. This was a kebab place known all over the city, and next to it was a string of tailors. After the government had shut down dance bars, many of the bar girls had moved to the suburbs and resorted to prostitution, or had gone back to their townships. Tonight, the tailors of Bachuseth Ki Wadi were having a sale of second-hand outfits, ones that the bar girls had sold back to them for a pittance. Some of the bar girls were still around, working in a dance bar or two that managed to operate clandestinely. Madhu sometimes watched them arrive at the dance bar in taxis; they’d slip through the back entrance like pretty robbers.
Tonight the street lights were brighter than usual. Madhu smirked when she read the street name: Nimkar Marg. The name change was a pathetic attempt at giving the area an air of respectability. Someone must have felt that Nimkar Marg was less dirty than Foras Road or Kamathipura. As if by changing a name, the area would be different, thought Madhu scornfully. Name it anything—the area would always have the screams of whores whizzing around, looking for someone to listen. Screams could not be fooled. Screams did not pay attention to street names.
A lone white bull stood below the flashing neon sign of a mobile repair shop. Madhu felt the parcel slow down as they passed; she stared at the whip marks on its skin. Bloody lines ran deep across the beast’s back and belly. Madhu imagined the same arm coming down in the same arc each time the bull slowed down. The parcel ran her fingers along the bull’s skin, tenderly avoiding the lines.
Madhu had never seen the parcel this way. Perhaps the bull reminded her of something, or someone, and she was trying to speak to it. She flicked a couple of flies off a wound. Then she looked at Madhu, wanting to stay there for a bit. Madhu paused and let her tend to the bull. The parcel drove the flies away again and then blew on the bull’s wounds, determined to provide some relief. When Madhu looked at the parcel’s eyes, she saw that they were watery. Madhu sighed. It was perhaps the last act of kindness the parcel would perform. Once she was opened, the kindness would leave, just like the flies she was driving away.
As Madhu went to lead the parcel away from the bull, a police van passed by. It stopped a few feet away from them, outside a newly erected police booth. Madhu guessed it had sprouted there to make the normal citizens of the area feel secure. On the police van, painted in white against dark blue, was “Crimes Against Women Children and Senior Citizens Call 103.”
Madhu read the words again, just for fun. Here she was, right in front of the van, with a parcel that was going to be opened up as though she were a birthday present. The bull was now moving its head in the parcel’s direction in appreciation for the girl’s efforts to drive the flies away. It had stopped twitching. But now Madhu was getting wary. Two cops got out of the van and went to a chai stall. A third cop came out of the police booth and started talking to the other two. He looked in Madhu’s direction. Madhu smiled at him, then reached out to place her hand on the parcel’s shoulder. The girl had moved toward the bull’s mouth and was mumbling something to it.
Luckily, the busyness of the street kept things normal. A prostitute was holding an old man by the hand and helping him cross the road. She was being abused by another prostitute, who accused her of stealing her client. A goat followed the old man across the street. A motorcycle veered to the side to avoid the goat and slid instead into an empty cot placed outside a barber’s shop. People rushed to the rider’s aid.
The parcel looked up at Madhu. Then, she made a run for it.
She shot away, a terrified bullet in the direction of the cops. She shouted for help and one of the cops turned, and for a moment, Madhu’s heart beat faster. But then the cop was distracted by his colleague who was trying to move the crowd away from the fallen rider. The parcel was only a few feet away from the police van.
Suddenly Salma stood in the parcel’s path, blocking her like a dam. She swooped her away into a side street, and Madhu followed. The two of them stood silently in front of the parcel. Madhu saw the colour fading from the parcel’s face—hope was leaving the way the sun left an evening. The outing had simply been a test to see if the parcel would try to escape. Salma had been stationed there all along. Madhu had wanted to check if the parcel could be trusted, if enough fear had been instilled in her. But the poor thing had done what most girls did: she had seen the cops and tried her luck.
And like the parcels of the past, she had failed. Like all parcels, this one had to be punished.
On the way back to Padma’s, Madhu did not admonish the parcel in any way. In fact, she stopped at a bhel-puri vendor and treated the parcel to her fullest meal yet. The parcel could hardly eat a morsel. Madhu sensed that she was terrified. Each time Madhu looked at her, she flinched the way one flinches in anticipation of a tight slap across the face. But Madhu did nothing of the sort. When they reached the loft, the parcel got into the cage like a well-trained animal petrified of its owner’s whip. She was about to say something to Madhu, but Madhu just smiled at her as she closed the cage door, which rattled the parcel even more, pushing her back into silence.
Madhu was playing things cool on purpose; her nonchalance was certainly going to make the cage smaller that night. Sleep would come to the parcel in fits, and each time the parcel woke up, her dread would grow. She’d have time to reflect on the futility of her escape attempt. The night would also give Madhu enough time to think about a method of punishment. Physical punishment was out of the question because that would damage the parcel. Madhu had to keep her fresh. But there were ways—there were always ways.
Gajja unknowingly provided Madhu with one when he called her the next morning and asked if she would go with him for an afternoon show at New Roshan Talkies. Madhu was so taken with the idea that popped into her head, she did not bother to ask which show. She hadn’t been to Pila Haus in a while, but she hoped the tattoo woman was still outside New Roshan Talkies.
That afternoon, she collected the parcel on her way.
“I live here,” said Madhu, pointing to Hijra House as they passed by it. “All my sisters live in that building.”
Next to the public toilet, Bulbul was playing carrom with a young chap, a budding gangster. She kept giggling after every shot she made, holding her mouth, mocking herself for how inept she was at the game.
They passed the blue mosque and then reached Two Tanks, where the sound of steel clashing into steel reminded Madhu of the time she used to work in Gaandu Bageecha—the Anal Gardens. When she saw the gardens a few minutes later—an abandoned ground just opposite the scrap houses, an arid place with cement blocks lying around—she held the parcel’s hand tight; a reflex when remembering the unpleasant. After Madhu had defied her gurumai and stopped sex work, after lifting her sari and flashing the bride’s mother, after begging work made her slip into an even deeper depression, she had slid even lower and come to Gaandu Bageecha to regain some of her lost glory. Her beauty no longer visible, her false sense of power gone, she would smoke a chillum near the small statue of Ganesh outside the gardens. Then, sufficiently numb, she would wander through the gardens in search of clients.
In the mornings, the ground was used for minor political gatherings. Activists practised speeches on people who would never vote. Starting at about five, the gamblers arrived to play cards until dusk. After that, it was Madhu’s turn. She would stand against the far wall of the gardens in the devil dark with a small flashlight and snap it on and off three times in quick succession. That was her signal. She then clapped three times, the shrill hijra clap, to warn people. She did not want them coming to her thinking she was a woman.
Only the junkies came. Sometimes Madhu did not even get paid. Sometimes she got roughed up by young men who called her a freak. But on other nights, she’d get a man who was honest enough to pay for his relief. She no longer brought pleasure to anyone—not for a moment did she fool herself. She brought the men some relief, that was all. She was slightly better than a bowel movement.
She did not use condoms because the men did not want to. If she insisted on condoms, they would go to someone else. Sometimes the junkies were so clouded that she would have to go through their pockets at the end of the session to collect her payment. She never cheated them. If anything, she felt pity for them and gave them a discount while they were sleeping. She was so lonely by then that she’d lay down next to them after her lovemaking—she liked to call it that—while they were unconscious and hold their bodies close to hers.
This was when Gajja had yanked himself out of her life for a while because Madhu had pushed him away. She felt she was no longer worth looking at. So after spending the day begging at Bombay Central, she’d go to the gardens and hug anything male, anything with a beating heart. Some of the men were gentle in their sleep. They were like children. Some cried in their slumber, making random sounds of ache and home that ricocheted against her breast. When the men made those sounds, Madhu sat up against the wall, placed their heads in her lap, stroked their hair, and studied their faces in the stingy glow that spilled from an old street light. Some had so many lines in their faces; others had a few teeth missing. She started connecting with them as they slept. Awake, they were of no use to her, but asleep, they were allowing her to mother them. It gave her the strength to go begging the next day.
She’d never had any ambitions to be a mother and adopt children the way some hijras had. But now she discovered that she had quietly harboured this hope, keeping it buried inside her because it was one more thing that would be laughed at. She believed that sometimes life gave you a lesser version of a dream, and it was up to you to take it. So she took it in her arms, and she cradled those junkies as if they were her own flesh and blood. Even though some of them had abused her while they were inside her, once they passed out, all that remained was her caress and their breathing.
She spoke to them while they slept, told them things she had only told Bulbul, about how her father used to hide her from the neighbours. Whenever someone from the building would stop to chat and Madhu would answer in his feminine voice, his father would finish Madhu’s sentence and send him away. When Madhu was a boy, he’d had a girl’s voice, but now that she was a hijra, she had the voice of a man. She just didn’t get the joke—or maybe she did, and so did her junkie children. But unlike her father, they never passed judgment; they never wanted her to become invisible. Gaandu Bageecha may have been arid, more desert than garden, but it gave her some shade, cooled her down when the hot sulphur of failure was eating her bones. It was during those nights, when she kept her palm on the foreheads of her little junkies, that she felt for the first time in her life that she had the power to bless. She had dropped her beauty, renounced it the way a snake lets go of its skin, and now in the role of mother, the force of Bahuchara Mata was flowing through her.
She did not do any hocus-pocus or chant mantras. She simply thought about the story of the young Mata traversing a jungle in Gujarat and being pounced upon by a band of thieves. To protect her dignity, the Mata had sliced off her breast and placed it as an offering before the thieves. This act of mutilation had resonated with the hijras over the centuries. By mutilating herself, she was honouring herself. The Mata had sacrificed her womanhood in order to preserve it, just as the hijras let go of the male in them to become channels for the Mata. But what had the Mata been trying to say in that forest? What was the young Mata discovering for herself? That she was a woman, even without her breasts. As long as her soul was intact, her body could be massacred ten times over. So Madhu, against a wall in Gaandu Bageecha, with a sweet junkie in her lap, moved beyond self-mutilation into compassion. The force of the Mata was gentle and eternal and made no distinction between junkie, truckie, servant, or labourer. Birth had not made Madhu who she was now. The lack of touch had. So she would give to her little junkies what had been denied her, and when she placed her hand on their heads, she felt something swell inside her. It was not love, because love was something slippery—it could be caught but then it slid away. What she felt, and imparted, could not be caught to begin with. Each night, after a quick fuck, she would put her children to sleep and walk back home to Hijra Gulli. She was one of the rare few who had discovered why the arid ground in Gaandu Bageecha was called a garden.
Now, as she walked alongside the parcel in the daylight, Madhu found it strange to be staring at the same ground. It was occupied only by a small boy trying to fly a kite. He had no string, but he was holding the kite by its ears and trying to send it up. Seeing the kite go limp, he picked it up, and ran with it. Then he stopped abruptly and looked around, not knowing what to do with so much space.
By the time Madhu and the parcel got to Pila Haus, they were both thirsty. Madhu ordered a watermelon juice for both of them outside Pestonji Building. The parcel would need strength for what was about to happen.
Madhu surveyed the area. Pila Haus, like Kamathipura, had become a version of its former self. Originally called “Play House” because of the high society plays that had once been performed here, it was now a hub for B-grade films and two Chinese dentists, Dr. Wang and Dr. Tang. There was an Afghan dentist as well, with a fish tank in his window that contained three fish named after his three wives; and Dr. Sharma, who was new and had a miniature Indian flag embedded into a denture as a window display. It was Dr. Sharma who had refused to treat Madhu. Dr. Wang had taken a look at her teeth instead and told her that in China, during his great grandfather’s time, eunuchs were respected and worked with the royal family.
Today, Madhu was not here for her teeth. She found the woman she was looking for. Deeba was seated cross-legged in her sari, looking more like a fisherwoman than a tattoo artist. Laid out before her were designs sketched out on white chart paper covered in transparent plastic: demons, rats, Krishna, a light bulb, and a black butterfly. For years these were the images she’d engrave on the arms and necks of her customers. She took requests, depending on her mood, but she would never copy a design from somewhere else.
“Trying to run away last night was wrong,” said Madhu to the parcel. “Do you understand?”
The parcel nodded her head and looked away from Madhu, licking the line of watermelon juice from her lips.
“If you do wrong things, there are always consequences.”
This time, the parcel did not nod. She looked straight at Madhu, but there was no insolence in her look at all. She seemed to be making some sort of plea. Madhu’s mention of consequences had made her realize that retribution was on the way, and it made even the smallest dash of bravery ooze out of her.
“If you make any sounds, if you do any drama, if you attract any attention, you will really suffer. That man who attacked you, I will not protect you from him again. So make sure you go through this well, and if it pains you, remember that the pain has come because you tried to escape.”
The parcel looked around nervously, unsure of what her punishment might be.
Madhu led her to Deeba. “How are you?” she asked.
“It’s slow today,” said Deeba. “How is Bulbul? Did her man come back?”
Madhu smiled. Of course he did not come back. He never would. Bulbul had his name inscribed on her back, thinking it would draw him back. She just looked like a package that had been rubber-stamped. Fate sealed.
“I have a customer for you,” said Madhu, indicating the parcel.
“Want a butterfly for her?” asked Deeba.
“No.” Madhu did like the butterfly. One wing was longer than the other, as though it had realized something and was reaching for it.
“Why do you have rats?” asked Madhu. “Who would want a rat tattoo?”
Deeba showed Madhu the outside of her ankle. A snarling black rat with spiky teeth was tattooed there.
“When I first came to Bombay, I used to sleep on the road. A rat bit me so badly, I almost died. To cover the mark, I made a rat. Customers like the story when I tell them, and then they want it too.”
“Tell Deeba your name,” Madhu said to the parcel.
“Jhanvi,” the parcel replied. Madhu nodded. This time she had not made a mistake.
“That’s what I want. Write her name on her forearm, so she never forgets it.”
Deeba patted the ground next to her. The parcel looked at Madhu with new understanding, her eyes even more pleading. If that look could work, Madhu would have been jelly ages ago. Deeba inserted brand new batteries into her clunky apparatus; it had a dull needle at one end.
“I sterilize it each morning on the chaiwala’s stove,” she said to the parcel. “So don’t worry.”
The needle whirred like an angry mosquito. Whirring and buzzing, it spiralled its way into the parcel’s skin, reminding her never to run, that even if she ran, she would never manage to escape because her name was now stamped on her arm for her and all the world to see. It was the only passport she would ever get. This name might not have that much power now, but in time it would gather so much weight, her right arm would be heavier than the left.
Madhu held the arm down and steadied the parcel. The whirring continued, the blood dripped, and no one cared. Only the DVD seller glanced their way, through the curtain of horror films that dangled on strings from the roof of his shop. By the time the tattoo was done, the parcel’s skin was red and raw. Madhu was reminded of the white bull the parcel had tried to soothe.
Now the parcel had whip marks of her own.
The two of them waited for Gajja outside Roshan Talkies. The cinema was showing an Ajay Devgan movie called Gundaraj. A man was standing in the lobby with a switch in his hand, which he pressed every few seconds. The resultant ring of the bell reminded everyone that it was show time.
“Balcony! Balcony! Balcony!” he announced.
Madhu bought the parcel boiled eggs from the vendor outside the theatre and hoped that the munching would distract her from the pain. Her mobile rang: Gajja was already in the lobby and wanted her to hurry up. When they arrived, Madhu could see that Gajja was surprised.
“This is Jhanvi,” Madhu said. “Jhanvi, this is my friend Gajja. Nice name, no? If you add an n in the middle, it gets even better,” she said with a wink.
Jhanvi stared at Gajja’s face but said nothing. Neither did Gajja.
By the time they got to their seats, the theatre was full. For a weekday afternoon, Ajay Devgan had pulled in an impressive crowd. Large fans blew air in Madhu’s face. She opened herself to the fans and closed her eyes.
“I wanted to talk to you alone,” said Gajja.
“So talk,” said Madhu.
Moments went by and she heard nothing except the squeaking of Gajja’s chair as he adjusted himself. She opened her eyes.
“Tell me…,” she said.
“I have to go back to my village,” he said. “The Parsi doctor I work for is retiring. The new one hates me. He wants to get his own people in.”
“So get another job…”
“I’m done with Bombay.”
We are not done with Bombay until Bombay is done with us, thought Madhu.
“I want to watch the movie,” she said instead.
She did not want to think about Gajja leaving. He was not her lover anymore, but he was the only man in her life. Gajja and gurumai were her two gods. One was kind; the other was confusing in her kindness.
“I want you to come with me,” he said.
Gajja had been her first. She had been a virgin until he made Madhu his, and Madhu could not have asked for a better man. That much gurumai had allowed her. She could pick the man who would make her a woman. For two years after her castration, gurumai had nurtured her, fed her. Madhu did not have to do a thing. Every month she was stripped and made to stand in front of a mirror. She and gurumai felt utter glee when her hips grew, and her breasts showed themselves, and her hairless body glowed with youthful pride. She could urinate properly and there were hardly any signs of scarring. Gurumai was the perfect midwife.
If only Madhu’s mother could see her. Madhu had made herself into a beautiful girl and could not be mistaken for a boy. A reversal had taken place, and she fantasized that she would be accepted by her parents now. That’s how stupid she had been. Whenever she mentioned this to Bulbul, Bulbul would nod her head in encouragement, but she was the most transparent person in the world and Madhu could see her doubt. One day, Madhu told Bulbul that she wanted to go home to see her mother. Would Bulbul accompany her?
“Why do you want to go home?” Bulbul asked.
“I…What if they came looking for me but couldn’t find me? I’m their child. They must be worried about me. It’s been two years.”
“Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“You don’t understand. Maybe they went to the police and reported me missing but the police did nothing.”
“We may be hard to find, but…”
“I’m a girl now. I’m…Just look at me…You said I’m pretty. Am I not pretty? Were you lying to me? Tell me the truth.”
“You’re pretty, Madhu. You’re very pretty.”
“Then come with me. I just want them to know I’m alive.”
“They know.”
With quivering lip, Bulbul told Madhu that her mother had already spoken to gurumai. She had tracked Madhu down. She had not rested day or night; she had scoured the streets for gurumai with venom even snakes would die from. She had gone to the police and reported her son missing, but the cops were looking for a boy in a school uniform, not a girl in a sari. Madhu’s family was not rich—they had no donations to make—so even though Madhu was on the missing list, and the police could have found him if they really wanted to, his case was treated like a missing shoe or key.
Eventually her mother had come to Hijra Gulli. Gurumai had not denied that Madhu was here. “You can call the police,” gurumai said. “But it has already been done.”
“What has been done?”
“She is one of us now.”
Bulbul said that when Madhu’s mother heard that, she went into a trance. She sat in front of gurumai in total silence. Neither one spoke. Each took in the other’s presence.
Over the years, Madhu had made herself believe that information had been exchanged during that silence, about her, from one mother to the next. My son likes sugar on his chapatis. My son is an Amitabh Bachchan fan. My son likes to be held tight and told that he is not useless. Sometimes my son stares at traffic for hours.
While her mother would have given gurumai the past, gurumai would have offered the future:
Your daughter is fulfilling her destiny. She has a sister named Bulbul. She has a new mother now, one who cares for her.
That’s why silences were heavy. The words accumulated like the dead, body upon body, until there was a stinking heap of corpses and the smell in the room was too bold for anyone to bear. So of course, Madhu’s mother had to leave.
Where was Madhu during this time?
She was in the operating chamber, locked up, recovering.
In the years since, her mother had never come back. Not once. Yes, Madhu had lost her genitals. But wasn’t Madhu the same person inside, the same soul who to this day had not found solace? It is said that a mother’s love is pure, that when a mother prays for her child, the universe listens. Madhu had discovered that mothers were just as debauched as the rest. In her opinion, the halo needed to be taken off their heads and placed in the gutter, where all halos belonged.
When Madhu learned about her mother’s visit, she begged gurumai to let her go home. For the second time, she asked for permission to leave.
“You can go,” gurumai said, “as soon as you have repaid the loan.”
“What loan?”
Gurumai spat her tobacco into her spittoon and asked Bulbul to fetch her account ledger. She opened it to a page labelled “MADHU” in bold. Underneath her name, there was a list:
- Saris
- Bangles
- Jewellery
- Food
- Hand mirrors
- Makeup
- Nail polish
- Rent
- Chappals
- Salwar kameez
- Table fan
- Bulbul’s gift
Gurumai had even charged Madhu for the new table fan she had bought. Madhu had complained about the heat, and the fan had been purchased for her comfort. But Madhu could never get a single breeze from that fan. No hair of hers had moved because of it.
Madhu had no clue what “Bulbul’s gift” had been, but she knew why Bulbul had to be given one. When a new hijra was inducted into the fold through the Nirvan ceremony, the hijra attending to the inductee had to be given a gift. Without Madhu’s knowledge, Bulbul had been given two new salwars, new chappals, and a gold bangle.
Gurumai said she had not even listed the fee she would have to pay to the hijra elders on Madhu’s behalf, as she did for every new member. The conclusion was clear: Madhu was no better than a slave who would have to crawl her way out of debt. When Madhu asked Bulbul why she was not wearing the gold bangle she’d been given, she looked at Madhu as though she was stupidity multiplied by eternity. The bangle was locked in gurumai’s treasury for safekeeping. This was business. This was Bombay. It had not become the financial capital of the country by twiddling its thumbs.
Madhu’s mother had given birth to her. Gurumai owned her.
So at sixteen, Madhu started repaying the loan. She chose Gajja, a drunken man ten years her senior who had a shattered heart and barely remembered who he slept with. She chose love. Love opened her legs. It was manufactured love, no doubt. It was imagined; it was hoped for. It was, in reality, just a smelly tongue down her throat and a hard one up her behind, but Madhu made it something else. To this day, it had lasted.
But now she had to tell Gajja that she could not leave Bombay with him.
She had been in the wild too long. The normal was terrifying. The normal was being a man’s something, as opposed to a nothing. She had been invisible so long. Any form of respectability would give her shape, start putting her back together. But what if the parts didn’t fit? What if, in her new avatar, she turned out to be even more peculiar?
She was fine. She was content with what life had given her. That was the lie she held on to in the cinema hall.
The parcel had fallen asleep against her shoulder. The pain must have knocked her out. Madhu looked at the girl’s face. It was so still in the light that glanced off the movie screen, it almost made her want to stroke the parcel’s cheek. On her other side sat the man she cared for. In this darkened hall, she felt slightly human. Perhaps it had to do with the name of the theatre: Roshan. It had brought a little light into her life. Choti batti—that’s what the parcels used to be called anyway.
The parcel breathed against Madhu’s arm. Thin streams of air from those tender nostrils tickled Madhu’s skin: touch without being touched. Even Gajja had fallen asleep. His snore was disturbing the couple in the row ahead. The woman turned her head and looked at Madhu, hoping that she would nudge Gajja to stop.
Madhu would do nothing of the sort.
Instead, she smiled at her. It was not an apology, but a form of ownership. This man was hers. Let him rest, he had earned it. This child too.
The woman smiled back.
She had mistaken Madhu for a woman. For ages, Madhu had tried to embrace womanhood, but her desperation made her stumble and she had become a pathetic parody. In this moment, Gajja and the parcel had made her complete.
She smiled; she truly believed that a woman did not need a man and a child to be complete, or without whom she was vapour. Yet she suddenly felt proud. She was giggling inside, skipping, jumping, doing all the things she had been too ashamed to do as a boy on the school playground.
She was with her family.
She pressed her nose against Gajja’s stubble and took in the scent of booze and hospitals. It was the warmest smell she knew. She had to be careful not to wake them up. The minute they woke up, this feeling would stop. They would become real.
Some relationships lasted a lifetime; hers would last for the remainder of this movie. Sometimes life offered you a lesser version of a dream. She chose to take it.