The Parcel (18 page)

“No problem,” gurumai said. “You're my child now.”

During this time, Madhu often thought about his parents. On the one hand, he was glad that he had run away from them. It was clear that he and they needed to be apart. But it hurt him that he had not been found. He was only a short distance away from his home, and he wondered if his family had even bothered to search for him. Was his disappearance the answer to his mother's prayers?

Thank God for Bulbul. She was the one thing in life that gave him joy. In those early days and nights, their friendship kept on blossoming, and she showered Madhu with praise about his skin, his eyes, his thighs—what a feast men would have. She said she was jealous. Madhu was jealous too of this person Bulbul was referring to, because Madhu couldn't see her. He was still a boy, still his father's son.

When Bulbul was high on ganja, she was funny. She would talk about the law, which she had a great interest in, particularly as it applied to the hijras.

“Madhu, Madhu, Madhu,” she would say—she always said Madhu's name three times after she had swallowed her golis. “Do you know that castration is a criminal act under the Indian Penal Code?” Then she'd giggle. “To become who I am, I had to break the law.” She laughed so much she fell to the floor, and lifted her sari to show Madhu how empty she was. All that remained was a small fleshy hole. Madhu laughed too—out of terror.

The day was approaching. Then the night was coming. Then it was the midnight hour. And then it was 3:00 a.m.

Madhu's pubic area was shaved. After her bath, she was asked to remain bare and to step inside the secret room. Four hijras were waiting in that room, and one of them had the key to Madhu's future: gurumai.

She was one of a dying breed, a dai-ma, a midwife who had performed more than a hundred operations. She was the gatekeeper who delivered Madhu from one life to the next, from humiliation to freedom. Only one person had died under her knife. “He did not have the will to live,” said gurumai. “He was weak.”

Madhu could not afford to be weak. There was no turning back.

Did he have second thoughts? Of course he did. He fluctuated between yes and no, went back and forth, up and down, shivered the way a tube light shivers just before coming on to full brightness. He thought he was making a mistake.

What Bulbul had said scared him—he did not want men to feast on him. Yes, by then he was well aware of what happened in the brothel, but the thought that his body was going to be tasted bothered him. He wanted love, to be acknowledged, to have someone run his fingers through his hair, or kiss his cheek. He told gurumai he could not go through with it.

“That's fine, my child,” she said. “You can go home anytime you wish.”

No one stopped him. No one tried to cajole him into staying. Even Bulbul seemed relieved. She told him he could come visit her whenever he wanted, even if he chose to remain a boy. That was enough for Madhu. At least he had made a friend. He decided to leave before they changed their minds.

He ran to the stairs, and even though he knew he would get the beating of his life from his father, he kept going. But then, something happened. Not a riot or bomb blast or gang fight—nothing of that sort. Bombay hadn't yet become its savage sister. It was bubbling and brewing toward its new avatar, but hadn't fully imploded.

What happened is that Madhu slipped.

On his way down the stairs, in his confusion and fear, he slipped. He did not even make it to the street. His ankle did not break, but it was swollen.

He waited at the bottom until Bulbul came down to go to the laundry.

Madhu could barely walk. He could not even rest his foot on the ground. Of course, Bulbul could not take him home to his parents, or she'd get into trouble. Madhu would have to stay there until his ankle healed; then he could leave. But he knew what everyone else knew: this was meant to be. He had not even made it to the street. The ice on his ankle only proved the fact that his fate was locked and frozen. There was such a thing as destiny, and it came—like an angry, forgotten ancestor it came—to remind Madhu of his future.

A week later, he found himself in the operating chamber with gurumai, Bulbul, and two other hijras. They were the same age as gurumai but looked much older. They were in that room because of their physical strength. They were the manliest hijras Madhu had ever seen.

Gurumai offered a prayer to Bahuchara Mata. She held the knife before the picture of the goddess and asked her to bless it. Madhu tried not to look at the knife, but he could not help himself, so gurumai held it behind her back.

There was a small stool in the room. Madhu took his place, with Bulbul behind him. When Bulbul had been on that stool years ago, she had been made to bite her own hair. Madhu's hair was not long enough yet, so he was given another, more effective, option. Gurumai placed the picture of Bahuchara Mata before him. In the picture, she was riding her rooster, as always, and the trident in her hand was shining.

“Hold her,” said gurumai.

Madhu waited for someone to hold him. Bulbul was behind him, but neither she nor the two old hijras moved.

“Hold the Mata,” said gurumai.

Madhu realized that gurumai was talking to him. She was not referring to the Mata as a picture. Bahuchara Mata was
here
and gurumai wanted Madhu to hold her. As soon as Madhu took Mata into his hands, two of the hijras tied a thick nylon rope around his waist and pulled hard from either side until he could barely breathe. This was done to prevent the blood from flowing to his groin.

Anaesthesia was for the weak. Madhu would have to depend on the goddess.

“Is she smiling?” gurumai asked.

Three days earlier, Madhu had been given a picture of the Mata and asked the same question. Now, if Madhu found she wasn't smiling, the operation could not proceed. It would be fatal. It was not up to gurumai to make the call. It was up to Madhu.

Madhu thought of his father as he looked at the picture. He could not see Mata's face; only his father's face appeared. His father already knew Madhu's life would amount to nothing—and perhaps he was right.

“Yes,” said Madhu. “He's smiling.”

No one questioned why Madhu had called the Mata a “he.”

Gurumai then took another string and tied Madhu's penis and testes with it. The two old hijras spread Madhu's legs from either side and held him down.

Gurumai began chanting in a low, guttural whisper, “Mata, Mata, Mata, Mata, Mata…”

The two old hijras joined in. Their voices were just as hard
as gurumai's. They were building a tempo; they were in harmony with each other. Bulbul completed the mantra. Her voice, even though it was much higher than the others, merged seamlessly. But above them all, Madhu heard another voice. It was distinctly male and it was not chanting Mata's name. It was a wail coming from the outside, from the street. Madhu thought he was hallucinating.

He started chanting, “Mata, Mata, Mata…”

He stopped looking at gurumai. He knew what she held in her hand. Madhu felt something. A bite. Something bit him. Hard.

Then he felt hot blood trickle down his legs. His first period.

The blood gushed and he wailed. But he had been trained to stay conscious. This was where Bulbul came into play.

“Look at Mata,” she reminded him. Under no circumstances was he to close his eyes or fall asleep. But Mata's picture slid from his hands. Now the fight was on—a wrestling match between Bahuchara Mata and her sister, Chamundeshwari. One sat on a rooster and the other on a lion. One sister gave life while the other terminated it—at least that's what the other midwives believed. But not gurumai. She was in complete control of the situation.

It was all about letting the right amount of blood flow out of Madhu's body. Making the correct slice was just part of it. That was why those who wanted to get castrated preferred gurumai to doctors. The doctors of Nagpada and Madanpura would perform the operation, but terrified of losing the patient, they immediately stitched the wound up. They failed to grasp the significance of the ceremony, whereas gurumai knew how much blood to drain out. She could
see
the impure blood leave the body, every trace of it, while the hijra balanced between life
and death. To ensure that all of the poisonous
male
blood was expelled, Madhu had been willing to risk death. He had tasted death more closely than any other human being alive.

“When you are no longer scared of death, only then are you liberated,” gurumai had told him. Nirvan, the ultimate liberation, was a state of mind.

When gurumai thought it was time, she stopped the flow of blood. Hot oil was poured over Madhu's absent genitals and a small stick was placed there to keep a hole open so he could urinate. He knew he would not be urinating anytime soon because he had sweat pouring down every inch of his body. The smell of antiseptic pervaded the room as the two old hijras wiped the blood from the floor.

More hijras from the household streamed in. Madhu's life was in the balance. They started clapping loudly, chanting Mata's name with a fever that made the room boil. They ensured that Madhu did not slip into a coma. Bulbul kept opening Madhu's eyes again and again. There was an army in the room.

To this day, however, Bulbul maintained there was no one else in that room besides her, the two other hijras, and gurumai. She insisted that the four of them had done all the clapping. To Madhu, it had felt like there were thousands there.

Madhu's forty-day period of healing began. His wound was not stitched closed. More sesame seed oil was applied by Bulbul. All she did in those initial days, the poor thing, was make the oil hot and apply it. Madhu was given black tea and told not to force the urine out. He was so weak a fly could have crushed him.

He lay in bed all day and night. He was forbidden from looking into a mirror. He had forty days to forget the old face. The most important dictum of all was that he was not to see a
man during his healing period. So he could not look outside his room. On the third day, or it could have been the tenth, he was given rice, which he threw up instantly.

“Good,” said Bulbul. “Whatever impurity did not leave through the blood is leaving through the mouth.”

He was bathed, but to do this, Bulbul made him sit on a stool, propped him up against the wall, and poured water over him. He could not bear the feel of water on his skin. There were days when he cried bitterly, cursing himself for being born. In addition to his own cries, he repeatedly heard the cries of another, the same wailing from outside that he had heard above the sea of chants during his operation. Now that Madhu was more lucid, he could decipher a name in that cry: Hema.

A man was shouting out a woman's name, stretching it out for kilometres, making it the longest name in the world. There was so much anguish in his call that Madhu simply had to ask Bulbul who he was.

“That's Gajja,” Bulbul said.

And that was how Madhu fell in love for the first time. He was fourteen years old and he fell in love without even looking at the man's face. It was the wanting in Gajja's voice that did it, and what he learned of Gajja's story.

Gajja had been in love with a prostitute named Hema and had been ready to marry her, to take her away from Kamathipura. He would give her respect and had promised to never bring up her past. There was just one problem: the girl had been bought by the brothel madam for a reasonable sum and had yet to pay out that amount, which was beyond Gajja's reach. But he sold his little hutment and offered the madam something close to the actual amount, promising to pay the remainder, and the madam agreed.
It was a miracle. The act of kindness would perhaps give her a seat in heaven—not a front row seat, just a tiny spot somewhere.

But fate has a cruel way of poking its nasty nose into other people's happiness.

For about a week, Hema was wracked with high fevers she could not shake. Gajja took her to a doctor at JJ, where he worked, and was told that she had dengue. She died shaking in his arms. A mosquito had ended what could have been a glorious union.

Gajja had to be pried away from Hema's body. The madam and the other prostitutes had to literally tear him from her arms. Even though Hema was dead, he lay next to her for hours, asking her to wake up. He kept asking for a garland. He would not budge until someone got him a garland.

A garland was yanked off the entrance to a nearby shop and given to him. Gajja placed it around Hema's neck. He married a dead woman. He had shown everyone that love could be found in places of horror. But afterwards, he started drinking heavily, wandering the streets and wailing Hema's name. When Madhu heard Gajja's story, he regained some of the faith in men that his father and the boys at school had made him lose.

On the fortieth day after the surgery, Madhu was ready to be renamed. Receiving a new name was part of the initiation ceremony. Normally, the guru had to take the initiate to the hijra leaders of Bombay, who would then assign a name. But when it came to the hijra code, gurumai was willing to make transgressions—she housed hijras who begged, who blessed, and who prostituted all under the same roof. She was a dai-ma and could bend the rules like a magician bending the wind. Madhu was free to choose any name he wanted from a list given by gurumai. The feminine names—Lucky, Dimple, Rani, Chandni, Lekha—
made Madhu's mouth water. But he decided to retain his original name. It was the only thing that had been with him since his birth that was not a lie. Madhu. He had hid in that name for years and it had kept him safe.

On the fortieth day, Bulbul brought him tweezers to pluck whatever hair was on his face, but he was already hairless. Castrated so young, he would surely blossom into something full and feminine—there was no doubt about it. He was bathed again and Bulbul dressed him like a bride. She bejewelled him, parted his hair in the centre, and applied mehndi on his hands and feet.