The Parcel (5 page)

The bed from the brothel was the only remnant of her old life. Even though she had shared it with her husband and children, it had remained her throne, the source of her power. She
had felt a surge of accomplishment the first time she'd slept on it as the owner of the brothel. But taking it into her flat with her husband had been a grave mistake, and letting her children sleep on it an even graver one, and so it was returned to its original place.

Madhu looked for a moment at the legendary bed, which gave off an aura of power even in its owner's absence. Padma was not in her room. It meant she was in her office.

It had been years since Madhu was inside the brothel, and the passage of time made her lost and dizzy. Although she was on the second floor, she felt she was in the belly of this building, about to meet its architect, while the air got tighter and the light scarcer.

She knocked on Padma's office door and waited.

When there was no response, she pushed the door slowly, until she saw Padma seated at a small desk, a ledger in front of her, pencil in hand, her steel-rimmed glasses sitting low on the ridge of her nose.

“I have a job for you,” said Padma.

Straight to the point. Time was electricity to Padma. She tried not to waste it.

She was thinner than Madhu remembered, more wiry. The skin on her forearms was scaly. Even though she was indoors, and alone, and in her own domain, she wore her white sari over her head like a hood. The embroidered lining on her sari was the only bit of fizz allowed in the room. There were no jingling bangles on her wrists, like she used to have. The hood of her sari slid down but she did not bother to pull it back up. Her hair was scant and silver, stiff and alert, not an ounce of life flowing through it.

“A parcel has come,” she said.

Parcel
. Madhu tensed. If tongues kept the shapes of the words they had used, she would carve out that word from anyone who had ever spoken it.

“I need you to look after it,” said Padma.

“Me?”

The tip of Padma's tongue touched the corner of her lips. “Yes, you.”

“But…but I no longer do this work.”

“You like living on a beggar's salary?”

“No, it's…”

“A new cop has come. He's young and wants to prove himself. Maybe his sister was a whore and she died, who knows. But he doesn't believe in Gandhi. This is one case even the Father of the Nation cannot solve. So I need someone experienced.”

In most situations, a bundle of five-hundred-rupee notes made the law bend and break. The Mahatma's face on the currency made the exchange all the more shameful, and hilarious, as he passed through the hands of the corrupt and ruthless. Whenever they counted money, their fingers grazed his cheeks, made them go red hot in embarrassment.

“Madam, I'm out of touch,” said Madhu. “I'm not—”

Padma suddenly stood up and slapped the ledger shut, displaying a sprightliness that Madhu could only hope for if she lived to be Padma's age.

“You will come out of retirement,” she said. She opened a drawer and threw a bundle of notes at Madhu. “Advance. Your gurumai will be proud of you. Now follow me.”

Madhu froze. She was not prepared to meet the parcel. It was too soon. It had been too long since she had last dealt with one.
But if she showed any more hesitation about taking the job, Padma wouldn't take kindly to it, and neither would gurumai.

“From now on, you will use only this,” said Padma, placing a mobile phone in Madhu's hand. It was an old instrument, no larger than the sweet biscuit Madhu dipped in her chai each morning, and judging from its dents, must have had its share of falls.

“The SIM card is new. No one else has this number. After the job is done, you will return the phone to me.”

“Yes, madam.”

“Do not make any calls from this phone, except to me.”

“Yes, madam.”

“Now come,” she said. “You've been away for a while.”

Nothing had changed. At least, nothing that mattered.

Unlike before, there was no guard on floor three. But the same padlocked grille that was found on floors one and two was here as well, just as Madhu remembered, and it slid so smoothly when Padma pushed it aside, it felt ominous.

The room behind the grille was full of ceiling fans, most with cracked wings. There were steel trunks covered with cobwebs, mounted on top of each other, some piles higher than Madhu herself, the topmost trunks perilously balanced and ready to fall upon the slightest provocation. The windows were closed, barricaded with wooden panels hammered one on top of another. Music crept in from the outside, from the taxis and video game parlours below, muffled drumbeats and tinny female voices that sounded far, far away.

“Don't clean anything, don't move anything, don't dust anything,” said Padma.

As her eyes adjusted, Madhu could make out an old bicycle leaning against the wall, its torn rubber tires glued to the metal rim in bits and pieces like wet tar, and behind the cycle, a familiar small wooden ladder. Padma stood near the cycle and looked above it, up at the ceiling. Madhu's gaze followed, and she too stared at the ceiling. Madhu could detect a heavy silence emanating from that corner. Her ears picked up a single rustle, the movement of someone's leg, a toe scraping the edge of something. Padma took a key that was tied around her neck with a black shoelace and gave it to Madhu.

“Her name's Kinjal. She got here this evening,” she said, and left.

The minute Padma mentioned the parcel's name, Madhu knew the process had begun. Starting now, the parcel would have to be emptied of her past, and it did not matter what it was. Kinjal was a fine name, but so was Ritu or Lekha or Aarti—a parcel's name had no power, because no matter what, all names added up to one thing: zero.

Whoever Kinjal was, wherever she was from, Madhu prayed that she had a natural tendency toward stillness, for it would make her life easier. One had to be still; one had to forget movement. The mind had to be taught how
not
to travel, because if the parcel decided to catch some ticket to the past or to a station called Hope, her skin would peel. First, it was the skin, then the deeper layers of flesh dissolved in fear, then the bones crumbled as though they were never sturdy to begin with but made of some sad powder, until the soul was finally visible, so it could be wiped clean and a counterfeit could take its place, fresh from Padma's mint.

Madhu readied herself for the parcel's face, because she knew that in it she would observe the same cycle of confusion
and fear and prayer that moved round and round, just like the giant wheel in Lane Fourteen opposite Suleiman's Restaurant. The children would laugh and urge the man in charge to turn it faster, failing to realize that the man wasn't turning the wheel at all—he wasn't even touching it. It was the wheel of fate, or the wheel of destiny—you could call it anything you wanted, call it the laugh-a-minute wheel of life, who cared, it ran on its own, powered by some invisible source. If that felt like a lie, you took the first left from Alexandra Cinema and then turned right, and there it was, for all to see, a pathetic giant wheel, moving on its own, the children screaming in delight as it kept them gobbled up in its seats, all safe and barred, while the operator chewed paan and for the sake of appearances kept it spinning, knowing full-well that he was doing this just to earn his bread, because even if he decided not to play along and stopped putting his weight on the wheel, it would continue to turn, and the last thing it required was his damn consent.

I
n the arena of sex trafficking, the players were always the same: a member or trusted aide of the parcel's family; the agent who dealt in parcels, commonly known as the “dalal”; and finally the brothel owner. These were the constants, the trio that worked in perfect harmony like stars aligned in the heavens, constellations producing the same effect: a brilliant explosion of pain.

For the parcel, that pain was now just a bud, a promise of days to come, and no one knew this better than Madhu. She placed the ladder against the wall. The ceiling wasn't that high; five rungs were all that was required to get her there. She pushed the wooden panel up with her palm and slid it across. She had definitely gained some weight since she'd last been here. Her waist barely fit through the opening now, and a couple of rough edges scraped her belly.

She had entered the hollow space that would become her operating chamber for the next while. It was still dark in here,
but she could already detect the parcel's movements—those hurried, useless movements. As always, there was a small flashlight near the right-hand corner of the loft. She groped for it but did not switch it on.

Madhu knew that the moment she pushed that switch, she would be in charge of the face she saw. Those eyes would be hers, that brain hers, even the smallest flitter of fear that darted across the parcel's face like a bird in the sky.

But it wasn't time yet. First, Madhu ran her hands along the cage bars. The ring that she wore rattled against them slowly:
rat…tat…tat
…The gaps in time were deliberate, so slow as to make the parcel wonder if they were even real. The dust in the loft made Madhu sniffle, but she did not sound like a person taking in breaths; it was more a reptilian crackle, like the way light bulbs sometimes hissed when hot. Her grip on the flashlight grew harder. For a brief moment, she closed her eyes, almost in prayer, because she knew that the next time she opened them, she would be using light, that most beautiful of things, to destroy.

Most of the young girls Madhu had seen were from Nepal, and a majority of them had not even heard of Bombay. There was one girl, years ago, who had not known what India was. Her village had been so tiny, so remote, she had no clue that there was anything beyond it. She lost her mind in only a few days.

When it came to the opening of a parcel, Madhu did not believe in the conventional approach wherein the madam and a couple of prostitutes pinned the parcel down to a bed while the customer broke her in. The parcels momentarily turned into eels, the terror electric, until their muscles went limp. There was
no doubt that this was the quickest method, and it required minimal effort on the brothel owner's part, but Madhu surmised that in the long run it was counterproductive. The sudden breaking in dislodged the parcels so badly that they teetered on the edge of madness for years, and some clients had a problem with sleeping with what they thought were mental patients.

Madhu's approach was subtle. She knew that the instilling of fear in a parcel was a moot point, since the girl had been catapulted thousands of kilometres away from family and landed in a cage. Fear was essential, but it had to be built upon. It had to be layered, over time, like wet cement, until it solidified and ended up as the very foundation of the parcel's being. Then Madhu would be the only one who could help ease it. The conventional method was not only barbaric, it also damaged the goods to the point where mending was impossible.

Madhu took a breath, then blasted the parcel with light. The parcel huddled, her back against the cage bars, trying to find space where there was none. She was exerting pressure against the cage bars, but Madhu knew that the more you pushed, the more things closed in on you—and this was one of the rules the parcel would have to understand, one of several rules that the cages taught its newborns.

The girl seemed to be about ten years old.

Her hair, parted in the centre, ponytailed on either side, was pressed to her head with a healthy dose of oil. Tiny earrings dotted each lobe. Her eyebrows were long, but her lashes normal. Healthy cheeks, typical of Nepali girls, but not too puffy. Skin the colour of brown rice. Madhu could not discern the tint of her eyes because her gaze was fixed to the floor. Her nostrils flared; the tightness in her lungs would be doing that.

The parcel, Madhu decided, was at that stage where she could grow into anything.

Her looks were ordinary enough not to promise any celestial blooming, but at the same time, she was…not pretty, but calm. No, perhaps calm wasn't it.

She was clean. Yes, clean. Not in a soap-scrubbed way, but her skin, her shins. No scars left by childhood games or boils, no chicken pox marks on her face. The place under her eyes was sunken, but that was to be expected. One hour in this cage was enough to do that. There were no signs of beating on her. The way she sat, crouched, suggested that there were no internal wounds either. No bruised ribs or swollen kidneys. Madhu was no doctor, but this much she could tell. Internal damage had a way of pouring out: suddenly the eyes would flinch or the feet would twitch. This one sat reasonably still. Not too still, though, because that part hadn't come yet.

Madhu had always resented these virgin girls. These yet-to-flower kalis were the reason eunuchs had been sculpted in the first place—that and God gifting hermaphrodites to mothers. The Almighty, caught in the throes of some divine nasha, occasionally did the job only half right by giving a boy child a penis the size of a seed or, in a moment of misplaced generosity, bestowing both a penis and vagina. Who knows what he smoked up there; if that formula could somehow be obtained, Kamathipura's opium dens would rise from the ashes again.

In being asked to be this parcel's caretaker, Madhu felt the weight of history repeating itself. Throughout the ages, eunuchs had served as protectors of harems, rakhwalas of precious vaginas that meant the world to the men in power. If other men had been left in charge when kings went to war, by the time they
came back, chooth-walls would have been ruptured beyond repair by guards, cooks, gardeners, court jesters. So the eunuch had a place. Some even rose to the position of high-ranking government officials, or served as confidantes to members of royalty. The severing of their penises meant that they were severed from their families as well, rendered unfit for society, which made them subservient to just one master—as Madhu was to gurumai—loyal to a fault, out of helplessness. However, that same loyalty afforded them a level of prestige. Eunuch slaves were status symbols, exchanged as gifts between noblemen, or demanded as part of the war-spoils when a kingdom was lost. To this day, hijras were exchanged between hijra leaders. When Madhu was at her sexual zenith, such was her demand that she had almost been bartered away to another guru, but she had begged and pleaded with gurumai not to trade her. Gurumai would have made a fat profit from the trade, but she gave in to her star hijra's histrionics. It was an act of generosity gurumai never allowed Madhu to forget.

But now, Madhu reflected, history had been perverted. In this cramped loft, there were no kings, only the kingdom of Kamathipura, and this parcel might be worth protecting, but Madhu's function was to protect her and keep her safe until it was time to
not
protect her—history made topsy-turvy.

Moreover, the moment at which Madhu would have to let go of this parcel was not in her hands. Unlike a fruit that tasted hard and bitter if eaten before it was ready, a parcel's ripeness depended not on the state of the parcel, but on the one who tasted her.

Madhu knew that Padma already had a buyer for this parcel, someone who was eager to pay a bomb for a virgin child—which made this parcel different from the others who arrived in
Kamathipura. This parcel had been commissioned. Padma had been very clear that this one was true maal, a real virgin. Normally, when clients were told that a girl was seal-pack, it wasn't the case. The girl had already been broken, but because she had not yet been sold on the market, she was still considered virginal and was presented as such to clients. In reality, she had been raped repeatedly by the agent during transport, on the train itself. How fitting, thought Madhu, that this was done in the cargo compartment, because the word
maal
literally meant “cargo” or “commodity.” The girl had been bought for a price and was no longer human. She was being converted into cheez—a thing to be consumed.

A parcel that had been opened on the way was sold at a higher price because it had already been tamed. The brothel madam would not have to go through the trouble of disciplining it, of having it opened. That was a headache.

This parcel's case was different. She would not be taken in the brothel itself; something more rare would occur. She would be transported to someone's home or to a hotel room nearby. That was why Madhu was being employed. She would act as the carrier. The parcel needed to be packaged in such a way that it looked like it belonged in Kamathipura. And who better than a hijra to undertake the task of transformation?

The parcel raised her head toward Madhu and then looked down again. Madhu turned the flashlight off, but she was not ready to make herself visible. Not yet. The parcel was murmuring something, mumbling away, her jaws hardly able to open. Words had no weight; they were as weightless as the motes of dust that stood in silvery columns under dangling light bulbs. Madhu's aim in this first meeting between herself and the parcel
was simple: to share the same physical space. There was no need for talk. When two bodies met, raw truth was exchanged.

And the truth was that a ten-year-old girl had been sold into slavery.

Madhu took one last look at the parcel and went down the trap door. That was enough for now. As she placed the ladder back next to the bicycle, she pondered the meaning of magic. Magic wasn't about making things appear out of nowhere. Any amateur could do that. Magic was to make what was real disappear. To wipe out from existence. To turn against God.

He creates, thought Madhu. I erase.

Madhu walked through the lanes of Kamathipura: Lane Fourteen, Lane Thirteen, Lane Twelve…She descended deeper and deeper into the core of her settlement. The streets were rough cement, eaten and dug out, but the foundation of their hardness had been laid years ago, in the 1800s, when the first prostitutes wafted through them, danced and spun around, and eventually collapsed, only to be replaced by other bodies. Next, the criminals came. Once the working girls had made the place unacceptable to society, it became the perfect hideout for thieves, goons, small-time smugglers, and young men with moons in their eyes looking to make their mark in the criminal underworld. While they hid in the shadows, there was always the fold of a woman's underwear to play with. If a thief's hand got too restless, itched for a lock to break, he could slide it up a thigh or two during his hiatus. Slowly, the respectable families started moving out of the area and only the prostitutes and “kamathis” remained, the artisans and labourers from
whom the place got its name. The families that had respect but no means to move out had to stuff handkerchiefs in their mouths whenever someone asked where they lived, because the assumption was that if you lived in Kamathipura, you were cheap, you were easy, you had flies coming out of your mouth when you yawned.

But gurumai had taught Madhu that this place did have one saving grace. What Kamathipura offered its babies, no other locale in the city could. To any new entrant, gurumai always gave a brief history of the place, and then the moral: “A child of Foras Road does not have ambitions. It does not seek love. It does not want. It does not beg for happiness like normal human beings do. That is our strength.”

When Madhu was a young hijra, thread by thread gurumai had woven a tapestry so fine that Madhu was mesmerized by her gall, the sheer glory of a reject rejecting the rest of the city. But Madhu had not realized that gurumai was talking about the children of female prostitutes; she was not referring to hijras. Hijras were never born in Kamathipura. They were always from somewhere else. They were immigrants, and, as such, they were morons with dreams. And although hijras may have been adopted by Kamathipura, they were confined to a two-storey building known as the House of the Hijra. It was the unofficial womb for members of the third gender, and it was Madhu's home. For bodies like Madhu's that were neither here nor there, Hijra House offered a fixed address for the soul.

Before India's independence, a lot of white memsahibs who stayed in the area employed hijras to do the daily cooking and cleaning. Over time, the hijras became more than just servants—they were confidantes, trusted aides, not just to the
white women, but to the rich Indian women as well. When India finally broke free of the British and the white women went back to England—and some of the Indian women moved elsewhere—they gifted their homes to the hijras. That was how Ramabai Chawl and the area surrounding it had become a hijra haven. All this Madhu had been fed by gurumai—stories sequestered into the very fabric of her being to keep her proud and loyal, and fearful.

By now, Madhu had reached her asylum. The moment she turned right from the laundry, the darkness took on a different scent. There were no street lights in this lane; it lived in the dark. At the beginning of the lane, the carrom players, mainly steelworkers from the adjoining mill, sat on wooden stools, making shots at impossible angles, while their cigarette smoke created a hazy cloud that climbed the walls of the public urinal and disappeared toward the roof, where Devyani, six foot three inches of human draped in black, straggly hair falling to the waist, stood in a sari. Every single night, Devyani smoked ganja and planted herself on the roof of the public urinal. Unlike a lighthouse, which emits a blinking signal, Devyani merged into the sky, appearing only when there was trouble. Then her teeth would flash as she descended onto the ground with alarming speed to prevent some macho lund from ill-treating Roomali—Roomali, who at this moment was leaning against the wall of the public urinal, wooing her next client. With its layers of makeup, her face was a sudden shot of white in the dark, and the red lips made her look clownish until she began to sweet talk. Then there was no mistaking her wiles. She wore shorts, which was a violation of the hijra code, but as long as she brought in some coin it didn't matter to gurumai.