The Parcel (9 page)

Madhu quickly moved in to take Roomali's place. Madhu, once the jewel of the brothel, was now a mere beggar. The day her gurumai relegated her to the streets, five years ago, to compete with legless men, widows, and pickpockets, she knew she had reached a low point. Hijra gurus also made pojeetives do begging work. It was an unsaid rule: when hijras were too sick and ugly to fuck, too weak to sing and dance, begging was their only recourse. By demoting her to the streets, gurumai had made Madhu feel like a pojeetive even though she wasn't one.

Gurumai wasn't surprised when Madhu handed her the initial payment from Padma. It was far, far more than what the others had collected.

“Where's
that
from?” asked Bulbul.

“Kutti, tera kaam kar,” said gurumai. “Stick to your task.”

From each bundle of cash, gurumai kept half. The rest she handed over to the respective earners. That was how the tradition worked. Fifty per cent of the disciples' earnings went to the guru. It seemed steep to some chelas when they first entered the clan, but the payment included food and rent, and spiritual guidance from gurumai. More than anything, it was the semblance of a family they were paying for, and the comfort that
when they fell ill and were old and infirm, they would never be alone. “And don't forget the police,” gurumai always reminded her hijras when they—especially Tarana and Anjali—bitched about giving up half their money. “Who will protect you from them? Only I can oil them, line their pockets with hash and cash, so that they will leave you to your work.”

Madhu went to the dressing table that she shared with Bulbul and put her money in there. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Roomali stuffing a meagre amount into her English textbook. Madhu took a couple hundred rupees from her share and slid them into Roomali's hand while no one was looking. She winked at Roomali, whose tiny eyes widened in eternal thanks. Roomali did not know what to say, but even if she did, Madhu would not have heard her. She had already sped out the door to feed the parcel.

Downstairs, the morning's rhythms gave Madhu a sense of calm. The laundryman was hanging white shirts to dry, the scavengers were on a smoke break after scrounging through the night's garbage, and temple bells were sounding, their shrill rings jolting Madhu into walking faster. She had told the priest she would come meet him, so the bells were like the ring of a mobile phone, a where-are-you call. She entered the temple and collected a cloth bag from one of the devotees. The knot was secured tight, and the form of the thing inside the bag was long and coiled and it thrashed about from time to time to show its displeasure.

Her next stop was a toddy shop. She paid the man, removed the marigold that adorned the mouth of the bottle, and gulped the white ferment down. Breakfast done, she hurried past the
Khubsurat Beauty Parlour, remembering that she needed to get her eyebrows done. The parlour had a new sign up: “Beauty Class (only for ladies).” Outside Padma's brothel, a new DVD store had opened. Inside, boys were watching an action movie on the computer screen. Distracted by a car explosion, she stepped on a discarded blue shirt with blood stains on it before she rushed up the stairs.

This time when Madhu went through the trap door, the parcel was awake. Good. Madhu doubted whether the parcel had slept even a wink since she'd last seen her. That was the purpose of the statement Madhu had left her with: “Now think about what you've done.” It disoriented the parcels completely, made them think they were here because they had done something wrong. They would recount the last few days that they had spent with their mothers and fathers and look for signs of anger or disappointment from either parent that would help them identify why they were being punished to such an extreme. But they had done nothing, and when they could not find a reason, it drove them crazy, and they could not hold down the smallest morsel of food because their bellies were so full of guilt.

The parcel was holding the cage bars, shaking them, and for a second she looked like a possessed little thing. Human beings were all the same, reflected Madhu, no matter where they came from. Under duress, all were animals, trying to flee with the same clumsiness. The begging and pleading had begun. Madhu did not look at the parcel's face; she didn't have one as far as Madhu was concerned. As the parcel's voice rose, Madhu stayed completely still. But in staying still, in trying to block out the parcel in front of her, the only place available to Madhu was the past.
She remembered her first parcel, and the second, and how they had come to her, and why she agreed, rather
chose
, to do this work.

She thought of it as an act of compassion.

In her heyday, when she was put on display in Hijra Gulli on the veranda of the brothel, lit up like a bird in a cage, her skin smoother than anything in the vicinity, she'd had a young cop as a client. He was a junior constable who paid her on time, was respectful, and had a wife. Madhu took a liking to him because he never fucked her in anger. He did not treat her arsehole as a complaint box for his furies and failures, as most men did. But then one night he blew her apart, which was fine—once was okay—and she was getting paid, so who was she to talk about quality control? It was what he did after the sex that got to her. He sobbed.

He had been asked by his superior to conduct a raid on Padma's brothel. And so he had, swift and silent as a knife in the night. His superior told him he was not to harass Padma; the raid was simply a formality, for there was “pressure from above.” But what he found there made him faint in rage: a girl, about nine years old, talking to herself, locked up in a cupboard. He took her back to his station, and his superior said, “Good work. I will handle it.” So the girl was fed and the young cop was told to go home. The next day, he found the girl in the lock-up. She was in a cell by herself so no one could harm her. But why were they not trying to find out who she was?

The answer came in the form of Padma, who walked into the station as though she was the girl's grandmother and took her back to the brothel. No reports were filed, nothing. The young cop received his share of the bribe, which he had to take if he wanted to keep his job. “This girl, she has gone mad,” said
the young cop to Madhu. “They even know her name: Nilu. She used to be able to read and write. Now she has lost that. The whole time in the lock-up, she kept scratching the wall. I have a daughter. She is only one year old, but I wish she had never been born.”

For the first time, Madhu did something without gurumai's permission. She went up to Padma and introduced herself. She looked like she was on fire and her reasoning was just as searing. “We are all women,” said Madhu. This made Padma sneer, but that was okay. “Each time a man rapes a girl, she is raping you, she is raping me,” said Madhu. The facts were simple: Almost every brothel madam had been raped in the past. That is why they were able to do this work. It had happened to them, they had survived, so there was no reason the girls would not. Rape was like the common cold. You had to catch it at some point.

“What do you want?” Padma asked.

“I want to take the power away from the men.”

“Without men, this game doesn't work,” Padma replied.

“They are destroying the girls.”

“Why do you care?”

“I used to be a boy once,” said Madhu. “But in my heart, I was always a girl. And it is men who fuck us up. It is men who make us who we are. But you are not interested in my life.”

“That's right,” said Padma.

“Then I will say this: it is bad business. That girl, Nilu, has lost her mind.”

The mention of Nilu's name made Padma take notice. She sat up a bit straighter. “How do you know her name?”

“It doesn't matter, Padma Madam,” said Madhu, offering respect because it would be unwise to get too much of an edge.
“All I'm saying is that the girl will be of no use to you now. No man wants a crazy, even if she is underage.”

“I'm listening,” said Padma.

“Madam, I will keep men in this game, but I will use them differently. I will use them in such a way that the girls won't lose their minds.”

“Does your gurumai know you are here?” asked Padma.

“No, but I'm hoping you will speak with her,” said Madhu. “And whatever I make from parcel work will go to gurumai.”

Madhu knew that money would keep gurumai happy. The fact that Madhu was wanted by Padma might make gurumai appreciate Madhu even more.

“Fine,” said Padma. “The next time a choti batti comes, I will send for you.”

A girl was not called a “parcel” then. The code name was “choti batti.” Madhu did not know who had coined the term, but “little light” did not sit well with her. It meant that the light in these girls was being snuffed out, and Madhu's aim was to somehow keep even a tiny spark alive. Not a spark of hope, not at all, because that was the deadliest of sparks, but something, a small, good-for-nothing spark that would prevent them from going completely mad. So she had replied to Padma, “Yes, call me when the next parcel arrives.” It just came to her, that word, and perhaps there was a better one out there, but it was her first contribution to the game.

Madhu knew she needed to have a game plan, one that made business sense to Padma. The brothel pimps—not the clients—were the ones who inflicted the most damage, so Madhu had to keep them at bay. To train the girls, the pimps burned their soles with hot irons. Madhu explained to Padma that dainty
parcel feet were a delicacy for men. They should be left untouched. When vaginas were burned with cigarette butts, marks were left there as well, and while drunken men did not care about aesthetics, the girls developed infections that would render them unfit for consumption. Thus, step by step, Madhu appealed to the common sense in Padma, and even though Padma knew what Madhu was doing, something within her thawed, and just an ant-sized piece of her allowed Madhu in.

“As long as the girls listen, I don't care what you do,” Padma said.

Obedience was paramount. The pimps prepared the parcels for whoredom by plundering them beyond belief, turning them into vegetables. But if they were meat, meat they would remain, thought Madhu. She wanted their minds, not their bodies. It was only through their minds that she would be able to access them at a later point. If the mind was yours, the body could be made to withstand any indignity, she figured. Hope was taken away through the body, but it could be reinstalled through the mind at a later point, if required. But how to discipline them without raping them? How to scare them without thrashing them?

The pimps did not realize that because they tortured the parcels so much, the parcels began to prefer their cages. The only time they were let outside was when they had sex with a client, so the cage was home, the dark sanctuary where the parcels found relief. They adjusted themselves to their new domain quickly, the way tiny animals did, sensing the danger outside, realizing that the cage was their friend. The bars were trying to keep them in and safe, just like the arms of their own mothers and fathers who had tried to protect them but could not. At least, that is what some parcels believed.

When Madhu finally got the call from Padma that a new parcel would arrive in a day, she still had no answer as to how she would train them without physical violence. Yes, she could disturb them psychologically, but not too much because the mind was the very thing she was trying to save. She lay in the dark that night, listening to gurumai's snoring and thinking how much it reminded her of her father, that deep, disgruntled growl voicing itself against the world, even during sleep. When he was a boy, the young Madhu had imagined that his sleeping father was not human. His skin was so smooth and oily, completely hairless. By day he was a harmless, well-mannered history teacher, but by night he was a bald snake hissing away at the injustice in his own life, and just before he plunged into the deepest sleep, he let out a final hiss, the way a wick was extinguished, water over dreams. As Madhu lay awake beside gurumai's bed, her father's memory made her shiver. Then it made her shiver again, this time with excitement. Her father had shown her how to train the parcels without laying a finger on them.

When the parcel finally stopped howling, the silence brought Madhu back to the present. But as soon as the parcel saw that she had Madhu's attention, the countless questions began all over again, begging questions, cries for help that fell upon Madhu's skin one after another: “Who are you? Why am I here? There is a mistake. Where am I? Please, please, please.” Most of these pleas slid off Madhu's sari on their own. The few that remained she brushed off with a flick of the wrist.

“There is no use screaming for help. No one will help you.”

“Please…,” said the parcel. “Please…let me go…I want…to go home…”

“This is home,” said Madhu. “If you want to be happy, you will listen to me. To listen to me, you have to be silent. Do you understand?”

But the parcel did not. She had a new burst of energy, fresh grief and fear, and she let out even sharper howls and sudden sobs that echoed in the loft.

Madhu took the cloth bag that she had picked up from the temple on her way to Padma's. What lay inside was still, but it was breathing. She did not want to alarm it: if it started thrashing about in the bag, it would be hard to contain. She needed to be calm. Madhu shone the flashlight on the cloth bag. The moment the parcel saw the bulge in it, like a long, slender stomach pressing against the cloth, she became quiet.

“I want you to remember this,” said Madhu. “Remember this, because from now on, each time you scream, each time you disobey me, I will make you go through this again and again.”

The parcel was fixated on the mouth of the bag. As Madhu opened it, she placed it between the cage bars and let its contents slide out, as though she was pouring oil into the cage. What slid out wasn't oil, but it was just as slippery, and when the parcel heard its voice, she let out a wild shriek and begged for mercy, as her skin was covered in something truly living. It was trying to tell her something; it was speaking into her ear, telling her to be quiet, but the parcel failed to understand, and she continued to scream. So it left her ear alone and slithered down her neck and back, and it touched so many parts of her that she thought there were three or four nightmares in the cage when all along there was but one.