The Parcel (3 page)

So Gajja looked this way and that, up and down, sideways, diagonally—he used every camera angle possible to look for the moon. Then he waited for Madhu to say her line, one she used to say with so much longing that Gajja would swear that the ghost of Ghalib had temporarily slid into her.

“It is a moonless night.” She played along. “It is a moonless night.”

When Madhu finally said those words, she knew that her flute was hollow and that her words had no music in them. But
Gajja still clutched his heart. Three pegs down, he lay on the ground and looked up at her, helpless, lost, a man who had found the very surrender that Ghalib's ghazals had so drunkenly spoken of.

“There she is…,” said Gajja, pointing to Madhu. “There's my moon.”

Madhu blessed her man. She asked her heart to scrounge together any goodness it could, and she directed it toward him because he was making a broken object feel human. He turned her rough to smooth, he turned the water inside her belly to sherbet; he was still the man she loved, except that love and touch were strangers now, travellers following different maps.

She tore the string of jasmines that were tied in her hair and slowly showered them on Gajja. He revelled in these drops of white, let them fall on his face, soft kisses from the love he once had. Then she left him on the floor. “I have to go,” she said.

And just like that, the moon disappeared.

Outside, the red lights had come on.

Some were red, some were blue, and others green. It depended on the brothel owner's taste. When Madhu was young, it felt as though the whole area pulsated on its own, had a hunger to outlive and outshine anything or anyone. But now she saw the district as a collection of dead people that suddenly sprang to life only when the lights came on. It was resuscitated every night with an extra dose of doom, and it responded brilliantly, as though kissed by something holy. And indeed, something holy stood at its entrance, in the form of a small shrine, that of Sai Baba of Shirdi.

At the corner of Bellasis Road, just round the bend from the Alexandra Cinema, was a white-tiled wall with a hutch in the middle. There rested Sai, the bearded saint, guide, and solace-giver to both Hindus and Muslims. Madhu closed her eyes and passed her hand over the flame of the oil lamp that lay at Sai's feet, the only warmth most residents could hope to find on any given night. This was the unmarked beginning of the red-light district. It was here that taxi drivers dropped off the hungry, at a stand where pimps hovered over passengers, barely giving them time to exit the vehicles, showering upon them rates and body shapes, and the promise of orgasms so monstrous, they would make the high-rises looming against Mumbai's new skyline seem puny.

Opposite Sai, the convent school receded in the background, the white statue of Jesus perched high above, his arms outspread, looking down at the whores who stood by the school walls dressed in red and silver, shiny little ladies, as though they had swallowed all the firecrackers during Diwali and were now setting them off internally, in bits and sparks, night by night, for the rest of the year. Madhu knew most of them, some by name, almost all by face. It was best to keep track of faces, not names. Names stayed the same, but faces could change overnight. Sculpted by beatings in the dark, they assumed new forms. The loss of a tooth, or the rage of being raped by three, showed itself on the cheek like a hot flash. Yes, it was best to keep track of faces.

It was dhandha time, and one of the women on sale, a silver thing, was bargaining with a potential customer. This was Salma, a mainstay at Padma's brothel. She was out in the street snatching clients as birds do fish from water, right at the edge of the district.

“No, no, not two hundred,” Salma said. “Three hundred is fixed rate, yaar. What a miserly prick you have. Kanjoos lauda!”

Salma was one of more than sixty women who worked for Padma, and even when she did not wear silver, she sparkled. Her skin was dark and there were small pimples on her cheeks, but she knew how to talk to a man. The bodies of the women were all more or less of equal mileage, but what set a woman apart, and Madhu knew this better than anyone else, was her ability to mind-fuck, to leave an invitation to bajao in the man's mind, so that if he hesitated about it for even a second more, the offer would expire and he would miss the earthquake of the century. Madhu had been a champion at this. Tonight she moved on, leaving Salma to her trade, ignoring a small surge of pride. It still came, on occasion, when she recalled the sense of power she had once felt. But it left her feeling stupid. Now she was a mere lemon peel lying on the road.

She walked past the numbered brothels:
Welcome 52, 63, 420
. The numbers had made sense in a government survey a long time ago, but now seemed completely random. She turned the corner, past Café Andaaz and the police booth, and entered a side alley toward the lair of Padma, one of the most powerful madams in the area. At one point, Padma had more cash flowing through her brothel than sewage through a gutter drain, but it was the power that came with the cash that was the greatest kutti of them all—the bitch could leave without warning and, when it did, deposit inside of you a stadium of emptiness.

Things had changed, reflected Madhu, since she had started living in this area years ago. The place had become more professional. Pimps now had business cards to provide an air of decency and professionalism to the rundown brothels. Nirmal,
one of the pimps for Padma's brothel, was cajoling a couple of tourists—one could always spot the tourists; they smelled different, afraid but inquisitive—to try out the goods. He handed them his card, crumpled at the edges and damp from his own sweat, which announced with great pride that the brothel had A/C. The card had a sketch of a sandy beach on it, which had made Madhu laugh when she'd first seen it. There was even a phone number, for return buyers.

“Do you want to in-joy?” Nirmal asked. “Should I make your prog-raam?”

Nirmal was young, not more than twenty-five, with straight hair that fell just below his eyebrows, and unlike some of the other pimps in the area, who were tough and dirty and stank, Nirmal kept himself fresh and non-threatening so that tourists weren't intimidated and fell for his bait. Pimps with stubble and heavy, cold hands were allocated to the locals.

“You don't have to sex them,” Nirmal said in English to the tourists. “If you want oral only, that also I give.” Then he corrected himself quickly: “Not me, not me, I don't give oral.”

The tourists smiled, charmed by his talk.

“Nepali, South Indian, all types I have. Christian also. Just come see,” he said. “If you want, we show oreejnal report.”

The report business was a sham. There was a new report each month, from some quack with a medical degree who had a deal with all the brothel owners in the area. Sick or not, the prostitutes got a clean bill of health, as spotless as the marble floor of a five-star hotel. Real tests were a waste of time, money, and blood. Even if the report was genuine in the morning, by the end of the day, five truck drivers had entered the woman. The “pojeetives,” as they were called, were in the thousands.
They looked fine until they became sick and weak and fell like flies, only to be swept off the next morning with the lazy swish of a broom.

Madhu looked up at the three-storey building that was Padma's brothel.

Built during British rule, the structure was over a century old, and at one point had housed just as many women. Now the number was a mere fraction of the twenty thousand women who worked the district, but when the sex was on, the building rumbled. The dirty glass windows were a patchwork of purple and green, and some of the panes were broken, exposing the rusted iron grilles, while others were shuttered with wooden boards. Wires looped precariously from one window to the next, like garlands, then ran in a vertical mesh all the way down to the street level, ready to electrify those who touched them. But it wasn't the wires that made the place sizzle. It was the burning of skin, and Madhu could feel the moans of the customers just by standing underneath this tower of flesh.

A couple of fat, defeated women stood on the balcony, staring blankly into the space below, inhaling petrol fumes, their ears no longer sensitive to the car horns, the buzzing of scooters and motorcycles, or the sudden jamming of brakes, noise they had perhaps accepted years ago, the sound of their own lives coming to an abrupt halt. Their bodies, once butter, were now layered; these were women whose girth would certainly be noticed on any street corner outside the district, but inside this frenzied menagerie they were insects, insignificant yet capable of transmitting disease. Way above these women, on the rooftop, three men lay sprawled like panthers on a tree branch, scanning the labyrinth of streets below. These were the “watchers,”
the eyes of the brothel, who noticed the movement of the flora and fauna beneath. Even a slight deviation from any of their prostitutes, a single attempt to move beyond their allocated boundaries, and they were beaten with wooden sticks the way mattresses are thrashed until the dust comes out, then slowly settles back again.

There were scores of brothels such as this one, some smaller, some larger, and even though the district spread out over fourteen lanes, the majority of the brothels conglomerated between Lanes Fourteen to Ten, stuck together in desperation, conspiring to form one of Asia's largest red-light areas. When Madhu had been in school, when she'd worn a boy's uniform, she had learned about a triangle somewhere far away, and how people got sucked through it into another world. The red-light district was exactly like that. Most of the prostitutes had been tricked into landing here, some came on purpose, but everyone got lost in its black hole of existence. It slowly stripped away the past until you were reduced to a nameless, past-less creature unable to find a way out.

The world saw the prostitutes standing on display behind huge windows with bars and called these rooms “The Cages,” but Madhu knew there was only one cage. It started at Alexandra Cinema and went all the way down to Underwear Tree. This was a cage without bars, and it had a name, and if Madhu were to come back to earth in another life, she would do so as a Mumbai tourist guide, and her mother-father would know this from the start because the minute she slid down the clouds and into her mother's womb and out again, she would begin speaking, and her first words would point to this open-air cage, to this wound in the city, and as more and more nurses and doctors
and ward boys gathered around, she would announce with the pomp and splendour of a lion tamer, “Welcome to the Cage. Welcome to Kamathipura.”

As Madhu climbed the stairs to Padma's brothel, her slipper got stuck in a nail. Perhaps it was a sign for her to stop and turn back. But no, that was not possible. It was thanks to Padma that gurumai was able to own her current abode. Here, in the district, favours stretched on for decades and had more value than currency. Padma had known that by helping gurumai, she would have access to all her hijras as well, and they would have no choice but to do her bidding, which was why Madhu was climbing her stairs now.

It was a long, steep walk to the first floor, thirty stairs in all, through passages sprayed with paan and urine, until Madhu reached the reception area. The first floor was where the more expensive, cleaner women were housed. A bearded guard sat on a stool, but did not flinch when he saw Madhu. A hijra was hardly a matter of concern or importance. The guard was more interested in making sure that the tourists Nirmal had brought up were feeling at home. They were seated on a sunken sofa in the “showroom,” cold beers in their hands.

She moved on to the second floor, the clash of light and darkness jarring. It made no sense to a visitor, the way the showroom was bursting with light but the corridors and stairs were uneven, shadowy crevasses where one had to watch each step, eyes adjusting like an animal's. This set-up was for the police, in case of the obligatory raid. The wiring of the building was in such disarray that there wasn't a central fuse for the
guards to snap shut. So it was prudent to keep the stairs in darkness so the insides of the brothel could go dead and quiet when needed, and just as quickly come back to rude life.

The second floor was where the second- and third-hand goods were stored. It was the haunt of truck drivers, labourers, servants, laundrymen, and watchmen. Too broke to visit the first floor, they fed on the cheapest women, who were paid as little as a hundred rupees. What these women lacked in looks, they made up for by tolerating beatings, the pulling of hair, and the burning of thighs and vaginas with matches. This was also the floor where Padma lived, so it was no surprise to Madhu that it was guarded by Hassan, loyal and robust, more concrete than man. Padma believed in battling it out in the trenches with her troops. After all, she had got her start as one of them.

“Wait here,” Hassan said to Madhu.

She could see that he had been expecting her. He got up from his stool and pointed at it for her to sit on, but Madhu knew it wasn't out of courtesy. He wanted her to be the eyes for a moment, to take his place at the tower. Hassan was a feverish being, so used to not sleeping at night that his eyes had forgotten how to close. He drank as he neared the end of his shift, at 4:00 a.m., to knock himself out, the booze tranquilizing him into baby sleep, where he was no longer responsible for sensing danger.

As instructed, Madhu sat on the stool and lit a Shivaji. The climb had made her pant, and she was getting anxious. She needed some of the warrior's guts to soothe her. He, too, had instructed his Marathas to keep an eye out from the Pratapgad Fort for the invading Mughals under Afzal Khan. Long ago, Madhu had loved hearing from her father tales of Maratha bravery, of how Shivaji duped the Mughals, outsmarting them
with guerrilla warfare. These had been the only times her father treated her like a son, so she never tired of listening to the stories. And she loved how Afzal Khan's head was buried under a tower after Shivaji's victory. There was no documented evidence for this, her father had told her, but he shared this story with his students at Maharashtra College anyway.