Mumbai Noir (23 page)

Favorites. The color blue. Kingfisher, quail, parrot finch, bee-eater. Swallow. Oh yes, robin chat.

He was offered no food, no water. He swallowed some opium and followed the dai and her two helpers to a pond thick with water chestnuts. Here, many years past, they had built a temple to the goddess.

As Shabnam prayed with the rest, the dai waited for the call. It could be a cock’s crow. It could be a silence impenetrable. It could offer itself in minutes or be measured in the gathering of a cloud field. But once revealed, there was no going back.

A helper scratched his groin, a scraping sound like a cat pawing a shut door. The other, encouraged, quickly cleared his throat. Shabnam had been sweating in the sauna heat of the park and was heavy with drowsiness. A pintail duck quacked. Shabnam startled, said something. The helpers ignored him. The dai ignored them all.

They were all the same, she thought. Some barely eighteen. They believed the younger you were, the greater the feminizing effects of castration. Their gurus encouraged them, of course. The pretty ones were sought after as prostitutes. The more they earned, the richer their gurus became. So of course the gurus wanted nirvan for all.

They didn’t encourage doctors either. A boy who went to Bangkok would work hard to save for the operation, but he might skimp in his offerings to his guru.

And there was such a thing as being too womanly, acknowledged the dai. It was one thing to chop off your chili. Another to get a vagina. What for to be so beautiful? A beautiful one wasn’t a hijra, she was a woman. Next thing you knew, she ran off to get married and there was one less in the community.

The ways of boys were none of the dai’s business. But she had reason to suffer discontent. She had recently turned sixty-five and she felt each day of her years. Her hands were spotted, lumpy; her limbs carried the weight of her age. And every slicing now turned her off food, her life’s single greatest pleasure.

Yet each time she brought up the subject of retirement, the chief gurus would recoil. “But you’re unbeaten at five hundred! Better than Tendulkar!”

For all their interest, what did they really know about her? Not one of the hijras she had sliced had asked whether she sterilized her knife. She did; boiling it over and over again in the water of neem leaves. They weren’t curious about whether she herself was a nirvan. She was, although in her time there wasn’t all this pampering and feasting. She was sliced with a thin piece of glass, nails were jammed into her urethra, three months later she returned to work, and if she peed while fucking, her customers, for what they paid, didn’t complain.

Her guru had been a dai nirvan. Who knew that? When her guru died, she inherited the position.

The dai saw the sign.

She sighed.

Sure, a dai nirvan earned well and was respected in the community, she admitted, prodding the boy along. She was in a social class apart and on festivals received new utensils. Boys died and no one ever thought to blame the dai. It wasn’t death, after all, that was an accident in this matter, but life. She was paid her full fee, irrespective. It was a good deal, she knew, and five hundred was a record unbeaten so far.

And yet.

Shabnam followed the dai and perhaps the opium had hit him, for he staggered and stopped repeatedly, as though performing a dance.

His testicles were knotted with twine.

In the slums of the park brewed the morning’s hustle and bustle. Feet slapped the dirt road, bicycles pedalled on it, hands reached out to one another, vendors cried—
tea, vegetables, toys
! Children found plenty to laugh at as they ran about naked, feet kicking up pools of dust.

Shabnam heard all of this but softly, softly. He was so far away from them.

The poor continue submitting
, he sneered.

What he meant, of course, was that not one of them cared for him.

Fear turned his bowels into water,
drip, drip, drip
.

Color? Flying? Flightless? Too easy.

First bird seen after running away to Hira Bai.

He paused, confused. A red-necked falcon? A black drongo? “Wait,” he said. “Wait.” The dai closed her eyes. Shabnam looked at her helplessly. “A water cock? A painted snipe?”

In the creamy blue sky sailed a kite and its colorful tail wagged this way and that.
Goodbye! Good luck!
it said to Shabnam drifting away to a happier place.

“A common teal?” begged Shabnam. “A kestrel?”

His knees gave way.

He felt water in his mouth, a steady stream that splashed his torso, rolling down to his feet. Now he cried, as they demanded, “Mata! Mata! Mata!” He cried, and the dai held up her newly sharpened knife.

How she enjoyed a good meal.

A hot-hot double rot. Methi ki daal. What she called vihar dai ki raita—curd sprinkled with chopped onions, tomato, coriander, and a handful of crisp boondi. In the summer she would spend days chopping and spicing vegetables for pickles. On her window stood an army of glass bottles and as the pickles ripened, friends would find excuses to visit her at meal times. Nothing beat homemade carrot pickle with hot roti and a fat glass of lassi.

These were small pleasures, she told herself. Not too much to ask.

Phallus, scrotum, testes.

He crumpled.

The blood was rubbed across his body; hot oil was drizzled on it.

A helper placed the severed parts in a plastic bag. Some liked to take them home to preserve in alcohol.

Shabnam awoke a few hours later and called out weakly to the dai. She hurried to his side. Picking him up like he was weightless, she carried him to the grindstone and thrust his naked body into a sitting position. She hugged him so tight.

Blood trickled down his legs. Menstruation.

IV

When Sharad returned home after running away with the hijras that first time, his mother had cried into his shirt. They had walked up and down the colony, she told him, accosting every hijra they saw, demanding to know his whereabouts. “We went to the shamshan ghat,” she wept. His father didn’t speak to him. The neighbors had heard, and were pleased. For all their book learning, their protestations that they didn’t share a kitchen with the Muslims, the Sharmas were no better than them.

The second time, he stayed away for weeks, dancing at weddings, travelling to Kalyan with Hira Bai to attend the urs of Haji Malang, a patron of the city’s hijras.

This time when he returned, his mother’s grasp had an unmistakable foreignness to it. It wasn’t her fault. She was as full of longing as the first time she had held him in her arms.

V

After news of his castration spread, Shabnam became as popular as a cinema star. Hijras he had never met, and a few he had, visited him daily.

One would be so bold, having once lain on that same bed, to push aside the covers that swaddled Shabnam’s shoulders down to feet. Here was a lemony yellow rib cage and a stomach uneven as upma. But above the womanly hips and before the small feet, their oval toenails a clear pink, was the reason why they had come to pay homage. A hairless mound of raw flesh. And crawling on it, a fresh puckered scar.

All the while he was being examined, Shabnam drifted between dreams.

On the fortieth day, the one who survived was celebrated with jalsa. He would be scrubbed with turmeric and dressed in the red sari of a Hindu bride. There would be flowers everywhere. The guests would jostle in high pitch. A few would be envious, he imagined, with a small shiver of pleasure. No doubt their masculinity would weigh heavier than usual and they would whisper that he thought too much of himself.

Hira Bai would be ecstatic.

And his parents? Would they come?

He giggled sleepily, imagining his father’s reaction to his chili curled up in a jar.

And so the days passed, days that seemed like nights, nights of weeks that were a miasma of dreams, of bedside visits, of hot poultices.

Then broke a dawn destined to be his last.

When Shabnam awoke he did not know this and daydreamed again, perhaps aloud, as the dai fed him a broth of vegetables and chicken liver.

She said nothing.

Sometime between lunch and dinner, as she waited patiently outside the hut, Shabnam died.

Only a few minutes later, the dai entered and kneeled down to check his pulse. His flesh was cool. She straightened up briskly and walked toward the windows. Drawing back the curtains of sari cloth, she threw open the rotting shutters. December had arrived in the park. The sky crackled with the flap and caw of hundreds of migratory birds.

“How peaceful it is,” murmured the dai.

The room would air out quickly, she thought, pleased.

Gossip churned like pepper in a mill.

What was it? Neither akwa nor nirvan but in-between.

“He wasn’t fit to be one of us and so Mata took him,” Hira Bai shrugged.

“He fucked women,” the hash smoker lied.

His parents had forgotten him, the hijras said, and if they had not, who would be the first to tell them?

The dai’s reaction was swift. She performed a puja of selfcleansing, then announced she would never again castrate. They begged her to reconsider. She was helpless, she said. Guilt had stilled her lucky left hand.

Death’s rituals need no indulgence. Penis and testicles to the dogs. The helpers, faces disguised in shawls, feet anxious to leave the scene, disposed of Shabnam.

VI

In the Vihar Lake, a body watches a child slipping on his mother’s bangles. He watches a teenager trying to escape something he’s anchored to. He watches himself, his head on Hira Bai’s lap, sighing as she runs a fragrant oiled comb through his hair. He spots a great eagle, a bristled grass warbler. He turns to share the sighting with his parents, only to find them standing behind him. His mother is crying, but it his father who surprises him. “Come back,” he sighs heavily, so heavily. Now his womanly self wishes to be heard. She bends forward with a secret. Her chest is heavy with rolled-up socks. He leans in, pleased. Her face collapses into a swarm of wrinkles. The dai smiles at him with curious satisfaction.

THE EGG

BY
N
AMITA
D
EVIDAYAL
Walkeshwar

O
n the fourth floor of Tirupati Towers, an all-vegetarian building near Teenbatti, Anita Mitesh Shah heard the doorbell ring and instantly burrowed deeper into the comforter, her billowing pink cave. This is where she took refuge when she wanted to distance herself from the household’s daily ablutions. Although her bedroom was at the end of the corridor, she could never keep out the gurgles and grunts of the servants, Tarini’s whines, and the daily stream of terrorists disguised as broom vendors and fruit-sellers who came to her door. Everyone was trying to unhinge her in a sly, subtle way. She knew their game.

Some days, Anita felt threatened even by Rajkiran, the muscular sweeper, because she was convinced that he had stockpiled pictures of her in his head. Uncensored ones, accentuated with frozen nipples and blue toenails. As she lay there, she saw a flash of something being hit by a car in the building’s driveway. She deleted the thought before it could completely unspool its menacing visuals. They didn’t leave her alone.

Anita swung her legs over the bed and went through the ritual of double-clicking her feet, first the left one, then the right one, on the red line that ran through the carpet, over the gentle creeper that had been woven in by some kind Kashmiri to give her solace. She went into the bathroom, shut the door, delved into the corner of the cabinet behind the mirror, and took out the little pillbox with a green cap. Two capsules ensconced in her palm, she wrapped her gown tightly around herself and stepped out.

Suman, the maid with a slight hunch, was dusting, carefully working her way through the crevices of a crystal Ganesh.

“Get me water!” Anita barked. “Who rang the bell just now?”

“It was the maharaj, bhabhi. He had come to collect his clothes. He wanted to meet you, he came yester—”

“I don’t want to meet him. Did you give him his clothes?”

“Yes, of course, bhabhi.”

Anita was convinced the girl was being sarcastic. She glowered at her, hating even more how she always walked around with the bottoms of her salwar rolled up to just below her knees, revealing skinny white legs streaked with faint black hair, because she was endlessly washing clothes.

Fifteen minutes after Anita took her pills, the thoughts slowed down. She went into the bathroom and smoked a cigarette, blowing smoke out of the window and waving her hand in front of her face each time she did, so that the smell would go away. But the smoke merely curled its way back and seeped into her thick hair, lingering there like a halo of discontent.

The first time she had smoked was ten years ago, on her wedding night in Udaipur, where her family lived. She was in Hotel Marigold with the man who had suddenly transformed from stranger to husband after some well-meaning relative had fatalistically circled a
Times of India
matrimonial. He had handed her his lit cigarette with a grin. She’d felt flattered and strangely excited at the prospect of doing something so new and naughty. She had coughed and coughed, then vomited a week’s worth of rich wedding food over the balcony, and finally lain flat on her back on the bed, and fallen into deep abiding sleep amidst the scent of stale tuberoses. In the morning, as they both sat on the balcony overlooking the lake, surrounded by low hills dotted with temples and mosques, he offered her another drag of his cigarette and she had breathed it in without any hesitation, like a pro. Then they made love. And she held onto that moment—the orgasmic skies and the temple chimes and the distant clanging of a Rajasthani brass band that applauded their union.

Ten years can change so much.

She vaguely knew that Mitesh had left very early in the morning. She had stirred, but not woken when she heard the shower go on and off. She had smelled the sweet incense that he lit in front of the little Laxmi photo in the corner of their room, a ritual he followed just before he left every morning, and she knew he was gone. The doorbell woke her up to that familiar paralysis of loneliness.