Beautiful Thing Read online

  From Grant Road station in South Bombay, they took a taxi to neighbouring Kamatipura, Priya riding shotgun so she could control the rear-view mirror to focus entirely on her.

  To ensure ‘max-joy’ they began to fortify themselves with marijuana they had bought in fifty-rupee paper twists from Priya’s shared boyfriend, Raj.

  Raj was ‘shared’ because he was still seeing Barbie. (That Priya went with another man, the customer she had introduced me to, was irrelevant. That was her right because it was her livelihood.) Raj acknowledged the state of Priya’s wrists, but he was impressed with Barbie’s ‘Chop Suey’ breast as he described it. No woman had loved him so much.

  Raj was a sturdy, confident fellow with thick, wavy hair dyed to match his light brown eyes. He wore tight pants with flared bottoms and satin shirts in bright colours. He worked in the branch office of a well-known insurance company, but as a peon, he confided. He served tea, carried files, modulated the air conditioning and when the boss’s wife visited, carried her handbag and Pomeranian in a bag, to and from the boss’s silver Lexus. Raj was aware that in the world outside the dance bar he was no catch. ‘In this line though,’ he explained to me, ‘while a woman’s booty is considered her wealth, a man’s booty is the simple fact of him being employed.’

  It was possible that Raj was waiting to see if Priya would go further in her demonstrations of love. But Priya said she wouldn’t. ‘What kind of man isn’t satisfied with one woman chopping up her breast for him?’ she wondered. That she didn’t know kept Priya intrigued—she thought it suggested hidden depths. She decided it was worth sharing Raj for the purpose of plumbing these depths.

  Kamatipura was named for the Kamati tribe of artisans and labourers who migrated to Bombay from Andhra Pradesh in the late 1800s, seeking refuge from famine. While their men laboured with concrete, Kamati women made bidis that took the entire day to stuff and roll and for which they were paid ten annas—six less than a rupee—for a thousand. By the 1900s, the state’s apathy towards Kamatipura was visible in the absence of public lighting and a police force. The area was overcrowded and its migrant families suffered poor sanitation. They were ravaged with diseases, particularly venereal. In 1917, Bombay’s police commissioner, the Englishman Stephen Edwardes, described these families as being of a ‘low state of evolution’. Kamatipura’s marginalization encouraged all manner of illegal activities including gambling and the sale of intoxicants, and in time the area came to be known as Bombay’s red light district.

  Not much appears to have changed. Kamatipura remains a warren of brothels teeming with sex workers and madams, pimps and children, with their dogs and cats and goats and with raucous parrots whose language is as vivid as their plumage. Side streets of sweatshops are crammed with squatting men working furiously on sewing machines and with women threading sequins through saris in the flickering light of kerosene lamps.

  That evening, however, life appeared less strained. Perhaps because it was the weekend, perhaps because more people than usual were celebrating birthdays, weddings, participating in religious festivities. I passed several tents pegged between streets and inside each one was a lavish shrine filled with gods and goddesses garlanded with flowers and ropes of twinkling lights. Giant speakers belted out dance songs, and the sex workers who could had gathered their children in prayer. Others went on as before. They unfurled their hair, powdered their faces and outlined their reddened lips with black eye pencil so their mouths popped suggestively and were visible from afar. Leaning out of their brothel windows in sari blouses scooped low and petticoats that clung, they called repeatedly and with unflagging enthusiasm, ‘Ai, hero! Want some company?’

  The red light district was divided into numbered gullies and by unspoken agreement each belonged to a single community. Female sex workers had their territory. Hijras theirs. Men had their territory, too. Like a pack of dogs, each group knew better than to stray, for the punishment for forgetting could be severe. Even if all you were doing was trailing around a corner daydreaming—of falling in love, of having the right one waiting at home for you patiently, monogamously—but say you were doing this dreaming-sheaming looking what they called ‘heroine-like’, making yourself attractive to customers who were, by rights, not yours, and say the ones who worked the street spotted you, then it would be within their rights to teach you humility. And they would, and then your gums would run like water and you would never again stray.

  Having parted ways with Leela and Priya in order to explore Kamatipura, I now sought to rejoin them. As I entered gully no. 1, I heard Leela before I saw her.

  ‘I’m going to skin your flesh,’ she was screaming, ‘and throw it to the dogs!’

  Leela was standing outside Gazala’s brothel and the person she was threatening was a constable gripping hard at his lathi. Surrounding him like bullies at the school water cooler were a dozen hijras dressed for the party in saris, bangles and breasts. ‘I’ll piss in your mouth!’ one of them warned. ‘Your children will be hijras!’ hexed another. ‘You’ll die a hijra!’ screamed Leela with delight. She gleefully pinched a hijra standing beside her.

  Leela was always up for confrontation. She thought it synonymous with passion. If a fight occurred in her presence, it didn’t matter who was involved, or over what, she would launch herself in with gusto.

  Leela took the side of the hijras, but Priya would have none of it. With her back pressed against the brothel wall and her silken hair billowing about like an unpinned dupatta, she played with her rhinestone-encrusted clamshell phone with an expression of boredom. A joint dangled out of the corner of her mouth.

  Spying me, she waved me over without a smile. ‘You wanted to know us better, Sonia,’ she said, sardonically. ‘Come, come. Have your fun. Take foto,’ she taunted.

  What’s happening? I asked.

  I had no intention of clicking photographs. A camera in a red light area is like a gun in a classroom. Something unfortunate will happen. The stage was already set for more drama than I was comfortable with and I didn’t want anyone to think I was alone.

  What’s happening? I repeated, rubbing shoulders with Priya.

  Priya resigned herself to being intruded upon. Using his lathi as encouragement, she recounted in a bored voice, that ugly motherfucker—she pointed a talon at the policeman—had demanded hafta from Gazala’s hijras. While elsewhere he might have made his request bashfully, amongst sex workers and hijras the expectation of politeness was a fantastic one. Angered by his belligerence and edgy after a long day of preparation and prayers in honour of Gazala’s birthday, the hijras had refused.

  It was an unusual response, Priya said thoughtfully. Paying hafta should have come as naturally to them as squatting on the latrine in Gazala’s brothel. Even the hijras were surprised by their response, and hooting, they made a run for it. Then brazened by the confidence of their head start, one of them turned to taunt: ‘Hey, cocksucker, hurry up!’

  The constable embraced the challenge. He caught up with the hijras as I reached the brothel. I memorized him, to be safe. He was short, skinny, pockmarked and aggrieved. His uniform was crumpled. A pair of sunglasses was falling out of his pocket.

  Appearance notwithstanding, the constable seemed to know that he was better than the hijras and that it was his right to demand hafta from them. Even as they railed—‘Money? I’ll show you money! Look under my sari!’—the constable went on the offensive. If anything happened to him, he knew, as did his friends, where the hijras lived.

  He pointed to a pretty young thing called Maya. ‘Want to spend the night in lock-up?’ he demanded.

  ‘To meet my future in-laws?’ Maya said cheekily.

  ‘Take out a hundred, I said!’

  ‘Ohho, a bribe?’

  ‘Bitch!’

  ‘Cocksucker!’

  ‘You whore!’

  ‘Maybe so! But even a whore like me wouldn’t fuck a cunt like you!’

  The constable rammed his hand into Maya’s broad flat nos
e; his anger split open her lip, it split open her blouse freeing fistfuls of paper napkins like doves from a cage. As they settled gently on the ground I read what they said—everyone saw that they said—‘Gokul Lunch Home’.

  Maya’s hand went up to her mouth. To be humiliated in public was one thing. It was a hijra’s life. And it was the police most of all who loved to taunt their kind with catcalls of ‘original or duplicate?’ and ‘what have you stuffed your blouse with today?’ But to be stripped of her womanhood in front of her peers who would cry with her now and then laugh hysterically behind her back—intoxicated with the relief that it was she and not them, this time at least. On such a day. At her doorstep.

  The constable stepped back a pace, and then two—but there was no way he could retreat far enough. His face turned translucent with regret. Or was it fear?

  He had overstepped, he knew—not because of what he had done, but because he had done it on his own, without the buffer of his friends, to one among a dozen hijras. Now they would get their revenge, because he was alone, because he stank of fear, and fear was a stench the hijras picked up on immediately because often they stank of it too.

  They crowded in, their breath hot, their voices harsh. Wasn’t it enough they paid this sister-fucker a daily bribe of fifty rupees? Did he need his cock sucked as well?

  ‘O son of a Kanjar,’ screeched an elderly hijra with watery eyes. ‘If you have shit in your arse speak up, speak up now and apologize!’

  Just when it appeared the mob would have its way, we were startled by a shriek.

  Now what?

  I knew it, I sighed. This was Kamatipura. I mentally scanned the contents of my handbag—a pen, a bottle of water, a sandwich, my wallet. No possible weapons.

  Then a hijra cried, ‘Dekho!’ and pointed to a shower of green and white sparks illuminating the clouds over Kamatipura. Then came a terrifying wail and cascade after cascade of golden stars poured like heaven’s tears. More fireworks thundered past and now we saw no stars, no sky, but colour, all colour, dazzling colours everywhere we looked.

  Ratatatatat went the fireworks, quietly went the constable.

  We watched him lope down the street.

  ‘Just as well,’ shrugged Maya, turning her face to the sky. ‘If we had given it to him, we would have ended up in lock-up. If not today then tomorrow.’

  ‘One way or the other,’ said Maya, transfixed, ‘we suck his dick.’

  Spying me, Leela companionably linked her arm in mine.

  ‘See how they bully us?’ she grinned, pulling me away. ‘But how we made his hawa tight? Ha! And did you hear what I said? “I’ll skin you like a stray dog, make a parcel of your brains and courier it to your mother.” Ha! Cunt ran faster than a cheetah!’

  Flicking the joint to the ground, Priya shook her head at Leela. ‘Happy?’ she asked.

  Leela nodded vigorously. ‘So happy!’

  I had never been to a brothel and had no idea what to expect. Gazala’s was straight out of a film. Her brothel was a baggy, blousy monster with four storeys and two small windows that glared down like glaucomic blue eyes. The interior exceeded my first impression. Drafts spun like tops. The stairs were uneven. The banister trembled like a bad knee. We walked into cobwebs, past rooms scooped clean of furniture.

  Batting about were the hijra sex workers and they too appeared as though in a film. Maya’s lehenga-choli, she told me, was from Chor Bazaar, a flea market nearby. The pearls she wore around her neck were a gift from a customer. She had tucked a peacock feather behind her ear, and on her arms she had, just that morning, tattooed the name of her father dead of alcoholism, of her mother lost to HIV and of the sister who had run away from it all. Maya said these things to me in the same tone I would have used to describe where I had bought the clothes I was wearing. She didn’t want me to commiserate. I asked her, she told me.

  So instead I said, you look beautiful.

  She beamed, ‘And you, you are top-looking!’

  Stopping briefly to wash her face and reapply her make-up, Maya led Leela, Priya and me to an attic-size room on the fourth floor. It was clear from her expression of pride as she twirled around that she, and all of Gazala’s hijras, had given it their fondest, most earnest attention. In the light of a single grimy bulb I saw streamers and on a stool a luscious cake fat with cherries. Placed neatly on the floor in order of height were paper plates, packets of savouries, bottles of Pepsi cola and Kingfisher beer and an Eiffel Tower of plastic glasses.

  There were a dozen of us to start with and as Priya got busy with a beer, Leela was pleased to make the introductions. ‘This is my friend,’ she said of me importantly, emphasizing ‘my’ and ‘friend’. Then pointing to an acquaintance, she would say in all seriousness, ‘And this randi is called . . .’

  Someone switched on Gazala’s twin deck and the sound of tapping feet immediately filled the air. Leela whooped her way to the middle of the room and with a gorgeous smile began to thrust her breasts in and out. She jumped up and down, she twirled around and she was so full of joy, the other guests yielded to her. Leela leaned back, her t-shirt rode up, from her dark-chocolate stomach dangled a silver heart pendant that said LOVE. She stuck her thumbs into her waistband, she whooped louder and louder, and now she could have been a teenager anywhere, pleased with herself and with the attention she was getting.

  The hijras looked on admiringly, but they didn’t care to be upstaged on their own turf. They waited long enough to seem polite and then, catching one another’s eye, agreed to make a play for the floor. Three of them, including Maya, spread themselves out and without seeming to edged Leela off the centre of the room and up against a wall.

  ‘Arre arre!’ pouted Leela. But before she could start a fight, Priya walked over and reined her in. ‘Competing with hij’s?’ she scolded. ‘Behave yourself!’

  Gazala strode in.

  I had never seen anyone like her. She was over six feet tall and covered in gold jewellery. When we wished her a happy birthday, she curtsied like we were royalty and boomed her thanks in the voice of a middle-aged man. As she turned to greet new guests I saw that the back of her sari blouse was stapled with streamers that fluttered, tentacle-like, all the way down to her ankles. Any other party and I would have wondered whether the theme was fancy dress. In her brothel though, it must be said, Gazala fitted like wallpaper.

  Leela whispered that Gazala wanted only gifts of cash on her birthday. Other than the daily fee she charged her hijras for rent and food—breakfast wasn’t included and lunch was a boiled egg—they had also paid for the party. That explained the hijras I’d seen idling at the corner of the street. One of them had said to me, not unkindly, ‘Pyari, the money for Gazala’s gift didn’t pop out of my arsehole!’

  In these hours, however, no one begrudged Gazala her joy. Leela’s ‘mother’ Masti, who had entered with Gazala, started singing Happy Birthday. She had a voice like a trombone. We joined in, jostling each other and clapping all the way to ‘many boyfriends to you’ and ‘you were born in a zoo!’ Bursting with pride, Gazala blew out all forty-eight candles. She plunged a knife into the cream cake and we exploded with whoops and cheers.

  As we sat on the floor eating cake with bendy spoons and sharing bottles of beer, I felt like I was among old friends. Of course, even my oldest friends have never displayed the transfixing curiosity hijras are known for. When they are comfortable with a woman, they sit real close and stroke her hair. They peek into her blouse to inspect the foreignness inside. In any other circumstance I would have left. That night, the pinching and prodding by Maya and her friends made me feel on the in. In time, I came also to recognize this communal trait as a compliment. Hijras may call themselves the ‘third sex’ but they want nothing more than to be womanly. Their curiosity about the female form is an example of this naked urge and expressed most unabashedly with people they like, and wish to be like.

  Apropos of nothing, Maya, who was sitting to the left of me, murmured, ‘Hijron mein
himmat hai.’ Hijras have courage.

  I agreed. It was as much part of their identity as long hair and saris.

  ‘I was born in Kamatipura,’ she said, placing her arm companionably around me. ‘Why should I lie? I was born next door, in gully no. 4. My mother fucked men. Perhaps they were low-quality men? Who knew? But we hardly ate. I had to look out for myself. Who knows if I smelt? Bad people always found me. My teacher raped me. Then I was raped again. When I was ten years old, old enough to make my own decisions, I decided that if this was going to keep happening to me then at least I should profit from it, I should eat from it. So I stood outside the theatre, that one’—she gestured towards the window—‘and I waited for men. That’s when the hijras came for me. They said, “Tum admi ko gaand marte ho, hamare saath kyun nahin aate?”’ You fuck men. Why don’t you join us?

  I had become accustomed to such confidences. My friendship with Leela convinced her friends to warm to me and, with their familiarity, they also honoured me with trust. Since so many of their friends had suffered similarly it wasn’t often that they found a listener. So they were delighted to be heard and never reticent about sharing deeply intimate, even self-incriminatory details. Although I was shaken by their stories, I tried never to be discouraging. Sometimes it felt that simply by listening I was helping out.

  Maya took my hand in hers. ‘I cut my chilli,’ she said, gesturing below her waist with a slicing motion. ‘I was sixteen. It cost me thirty thousand rupees and robbed me of forty days of my life. For forty days, a dai applied hot oil bandages on my wound.’