The Parcel by Anosh Irani Page A

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 thewhite 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.
    Madhu took the stairs and was greeted by dour-faced Sona. Gurumai always teased Sona that she must have been a wrinkle in her past life, specifically a wrinkle on someone’s arse, which is why she always made that stinky face. But it was not a past life that Sona could not shake off; she was trying to forget her brothers in this life and how they had treated her when she was Suresh. She had run away from a small town in Gujarat when she was sixteen. Her brothers had followed Suresh to drag him back home, but when gurumai told them that he had already been castrated, they spat on the ground and left without even meeting with him. Suresh hadn’t been castrated. It was gurumai’s way of showing Suresh that family ties meant