The Parcel (17 page)

Madhu asked Salma if she would buy clothes for the parcel. Salma shrugged her shoulders and took the girl's hand.

The minute Madhu stepped off the playground, the halogen lights snapped on. She started running.

It seemed to Madhu as if she had been running ever since she was a child. Trapped in the wrong body, she had felt the panic take over time and again; it still did, insistent as ever, rumbling through her like a tabla,
dhakadhakadhaka
. Would it never stop? Was it possible that things were getting worse, that the ruptures in her sense of the present were much larger somehow? The gaps had to be bigger, she thought, for the past to permeate her with such velocity.

Running would not solve anything. Neither would time. Time did not heal. Time was not money, either. It used to be. Now time was wrinkles. Time was wobbly knees. A spasm in the back. Muscles freezing out of shame. Time made Madhu remember more. For forty years she had lived inside this body. No matter how much she accepted who she was, she was still afraid. She was still angry. She still wanted answers.

She ran past the diabetic ghosts who swayed to and fro outside Geeta Bhavan. She could see them clearly, even if they were ghosts, because they were just as scared and angry as she was. They were angry at the gulab jamuns they ate, and they were scared because they no longer had any effect on the living. Just like Madhu. She had no effect on the living. She had no effect on her own family.

She waited on the bridge, past the banana seller, on the forty-seventh step.

Her brother finally arrived, the pathetic little goat. She imagined him with a jutting chin, just like her father's. There he was, sending out cigarette smoke as though it were a coded message to the elite in the city.

Barah Gulli had put Madhu's body on alert. She was hyperventilating. If she'd had a stethoscope to put against her breast, it would melt, such was the heat inside her. She was so heavy right now that even the crutches in Barah Gulli, the ones that supported lives more miserable than hers, would not be able to bear her weight this morning. She knew it was not Amitabh and Rakhee who had put her in this mood.

It was the sight of the bloody flashlights.

After she had become a regular in Hijra Gulli, after Bulbul and she had become closer than sisters even, Madhu's father took him to a holy man. This man, Madhu was told, was a great seer. He would be able to provide a cure. No matter how many times his father slapped him when he walked on his toes or giggled with a limp wrist, he could not be corrected. Once, when Madhu had come out of his bath, he had worn his towel around his chest, covering his breast, instead of around his waist. He did it out of modesty, but he also liked the way it made more of his thighs visible. The gesture was innocent, natural, and yet it had earned him a slap. Afterwards, his father decided to take Madhu to the holy man.

When Baba saw Madhu, he held his hand, closed his eyes, and said to Madhu's father, “This boy needs your love. Great misfortune may befall him if you do not look after him.” Madhu's mouth fell open. His father asked Baba if he could give Madhu a sacred thread to help him mend his ways. “Change will only come through your acceptance,” said Baba. No thread was given.

Madhu and his father walked to the bus stop in silence. Madhu's father did not utter a single word on the bus either. For a few hours, Madhu thought that something would melt in the man and he would treat Madhu like a human being. That night when his father ate, he sat next to Madhu. When Madhu's mother put the first chapati on her husband's plate, as she always did, he broke it in half and gave one piece to Madhu. “Eat while it's hot,” he said. His voice was still stern, but Madhu could make out a tremor in it.

As usual, his father was the first to finish the meal, and he rose from the table, put on his spectacles, sat by the window, and stared at the road. This was his silent thinking time, when
he'd ruminate about history, his meagre salary, his mediocre students, their lack of discipline, and the politics at the college, which he would then complain about to his wife before bedtime. But that night he spoke: “Madhu, come here.” So Madhu joined him by the window. But then his father was silent, lost in thought again. Maybe he just wanted to stare at the traffic with his son, or perhaps he wanted Madhu to go to Geeta Bhavan and get some sweets, even though it was the end of the month, when he was always short of money. Madhu's mother piped up and asked Madhu what Baba had said. And Madhu lied: he replied that Baba could understand the father not accepting the son, but what about the mother? Madhu had never had the guts to tell her how he felt, that after his brother's birth, whatever love had once come his way was gone, directed toward his brother. Whenever he tried to put his head in her lap, she was always holding her other, normal, son.

That night, his mother did something unusual. She put Vijju down and held Madhu close. She told him that he was the first born, and first-borns are precious, and Madhu should never forget that. “Don't take your father's words to heart,” she said. “Understand his position. They make fun of him at the college.”

“Why?” asked Madhu. He knew why, but he hoped his mother would lie.

She told him the truth. “Because they have seen you. You behave like a girl. We may be poor, but as a teacher he commands respect…and you are taking away the one thing that he has. Can you not find it in your heart to listen to him?”

She said this
while
holding Madhu, while mother's and son's bodies were pressed together. In that hug, Madhu was trying to convey all the emotions he felt, and as she spoke, he realized she
did not understand him at all and never would. Just then, his father called out to him again.

“Madhu…,” he said. “I think…” He was finding it hard to speak. “Madhu, I…I want you to know that I…”

Madhu got up and went to the window. He was willing to wait for his father's words. For the first time in his life, his father was talking to him, man to man. He waited with a patience that could calm any fear.

That was when the lights went out.

His father's face turned dark. It was a power shortage; there had been one a month before too. Madhu's mother got a flashlight and shone it around their tiny flat. It lit the calendar on the wall, one with a precious pink baby on it. Madhu's father, distracted by the power cut, turned away from his son, mumbling about the papers he had to correct.

Fifteen minutes into the blackout, there was a knock on the door. Madhu's mother assumed it was one of the neighbours—the same woman who had come over during the previous blackout to make sure everything was okay. She was a recent widow who just needed an excuse to visit. Without looking through the peephole, Madhu's mother opened the door. The next second, the flashlight fell to the floor and she moved a few steps back. Madhu and his father ran over, and Madhu picked up the flashlight and shone it in the direction of the door.

The beam lit gurumai's face.

“May I come in?” she asked.

Madhu shook so violently, he feared he might cause cracks in the floor.

“Who are you?” his father asked. Madhu could detect the tremor still in his voice, but now there was a new note of hardness.

Gurumai refused to answer.

“May I come in, please?” she asked again.

She was cordial, gentle, and confident. She was so centred, Madhu felt as if a towering presence was standing at the threshold. It was his mother who confronted gurumai first.

“You have the wrong house,” she said. “There is no newborn here.”

Gurumai looked straight into Madhu. Even though it was dark, even though the flashlight in Madhu's hand was only lighting parts of gurumai's sari, his mother's face, and his father's hands, he knew gurumai had homed in on him.

“I'm here for
him
,” said gurumai. “I'm here for Madhu.”

Just then, their widow neighbour opened her door, and Madhu's father hurried gurumai in. His need to keep face tricked him into letting a hijra into his home.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“How do you know him?” asked Madhu's mother.

Then gurumai uttered the line that would seal Madhu's fate.

“I know him because he is one of us,” she said.

In the short pause between these words and her next ones, Madhu's childhood disappeared. In that short space, a vacuum opened up and swallowed his future. Then he remembered what gurumai had told him almost a year ago at the chai stall:
I will take care of things
.

“You need not worry,” she told Madhu's mother. “I am not here to claim him. It is against our code to do that.”

“If you ever touch my son…,” said Madhu's father, his hand trembling, his face fuming.

But gurumai did not move. She became even calmer.

“That is not your son,” she said. “That is your daughter.”

Then she turned away and went out the door ever so gently. Madu saw her walk back through the corridor and turn right, toward the stairs, but he heard no footsteps.

Vijju had slept through it all. For a child who shrieked all day, who was a hyena in the wind, he was too silent, too content, Madhu thought.

That night, Madhu's father drank his cheap liquor in silence while Madhu shivered. When the power came back on, Madhu's mother turned off the lights. The truth was too bright to behold. No questions were asked of Madhu. His mother lit incense sticks and circled the picture of Shiva, clockwise and anticlockwise. The incense sticks were the only source of light, a dotty red glow, but even they were too bright for his father, who got a headache and swallowed his pills. Madhu pretended to go to sleep, afraid that the questions might begin at any minute.

He had been right. As soon as he feigned sleep, the questions did begin. He could hear his parents whispering, not out of concern for him, but because what they were discussing was so private and shameful, they were worried that the wind might carry it to their neighbours.

“I don't know what to do,” said his father. “We can't even afford to send him to boarding school.”

“It's okay,” his mother replied. “It's okay. God will help us. He will change.”

“Forget him. What will happen when our younger one is older? No one will marry him. They will see Madhu and decide that both brothers are effeminate.”

“I will pray harder.”

The next morning, the neighbours came with their questions and concerns. They came as though someone had died. Where
was the watchman? How does the hijra know where we live? This is a decent building. We may live next to the red-light area, but
our
lights are white.

These were not questions, but veiled condolences for a failed son, and thin threats. With their clean eyes, they scanned the flat and made Madhu's father feel even smaller. He never let anyone enter his home, and now they had not only entered the flat but had taken a peek into the worst moment of his life.

Madhu was in his school uniform already, so he left. But he did not go to school. That was the day he went to Hijra Gulli, to the narrow lane that would liberate him and make him reborn.

Gurumai took him in and told him that there were two conditions a person had to fulfill to become a true hijra. One, he had to be accepted as a chela by a hijra guru. That condition would be easy to meet since gurumai was more than happy to accept Madhu as her disciple. Two, Madhu would have to be sculpted. Only a hijra who was emasculated was truly liberated, and she enjoyed a higher status in the hijra hierarchy than one who was not.

“A hijra is one because of the
soul
,” gurumai told Madhu.

If the soul truly wanted to be a woman, wouldn't it naturally reject the penis? It was a natural progression, the falling of the penis and testes, like leaves when seasons changed, except that this change was permanent. Gurumai had known hijras who lost their minds because the operation had not been done. They went mad, literally, and became obsessive about objects. One hijra, she told Madhu, had started stealing hair from the slums of Dharavi, where they hung hair to dry in the sun so they could export it to foreign shores to be used as wigs and hair extensions. This hijra stole the hair and brought it all to her small hut, where she chewed
on the strands and tied them around her waist and neck. Until the poisonous blood was removed from her through the operation, she had continued to behave in this manner.

Even now, it was hard for Madhu to think about her operation. As she stood on the bridge, she could smell the disinfectant that had been applied. One hijra performed the operation, while another hijra was assigned to take care of Madhu's every need afterwards. That was Bulbul. She had been through it herself. But in Bulbul's case, even after the operation, she continued to behave irrationally, and gurumai said that perhaps all the poisonous blood had not seeped out of her.

What Madhu recalled about her operation was culled from her own hazy memory and from Bulbul and gurumai. It was important for her to take these bits and pieces and weave a tapestry for herself, because this had been the moment of her transformation. Her own memories about the event came in sudden convulsions, much like the physical convulsions she continued to experience long after the operation, when she'd suddenly wake up and her body would remember a thing or two.

About a month before the operation, Madhu was asked to stop wearing male underwear. He was given two pairs of panties instead. Bulbul made him tuck his penis between his legs and wear both panties at once so that he would get used to not having anything down there.

He was told not to look in the mirror anymore.

“You must forget the old face,” Bulbul said.

A week before the surgery, he could have no spicy foods, no booze, and no drugs. Bulbul would have ganja once in a while because she was just as nervous as Madhu was. He was put on a healthy diet and all expenses were taken care of by gurumai.