Mumbai Noir (22 page)

The man dives forward again, this time in front of an oncoming taxi.

“See?” he says again, having avoided the taxi by a millimeter.

I nod.

“Now, are you still going to pray that no one should die?” the man asks.

I shake my head.

“Good.” He smiles. “You should never believe what those babas say.”

The other residents break into spontaneous applause. But of course. A working-class superstitious watchman has been taught a lesson in high-class skepticism. I clap as well.

I follow the residents back to the gate. They disperse. Some return to their homes; some go out for a stroll.

Pandey is standing in the guard position. I go and stand beside him. My cheek is still stinging from the slap.

A few minutes later Pandey says, “Sorry, yaar.”

We salute as a Tata Sumo exits the gate. No, no,
I
am sorry. I should have kept my mouth shut. The problem, I now realize, is in the telling.

A poor-looking man wants to visit flat 802. Pandey buzzes the flat on the intercom. The visitor is known and permission is granted. The man signs the register and enters the building.

The residents of Sea View Apartments are luminaries in their own right. There is a millionaire who owns the entire top floor. There is an actress on the sixth floor. And throughout the building is a sprinkling of very wealthy businessmen. Security was lax till a decade ago. But the country was poorer back then. And the residents of Sea View were like their countrymen. As the country grew wealthier, so did these residents. Now their lives are impossible without people like Pandey and me protecting them from people like Pandey and me.

Could I be wrong? Is it possible that someone will
not
die today?

The way the windows of floors three to six are aglow with a bright red, seeing how the sparrows are chirping and flying around like crazy, and sensing the relief of another sunset, I estimate the time to be about six-thirty.

Our duty ends at seven. I have just half an hour left to be proved right. But what if …

No, I cannot be wrong. Someone is going to die today. But what if …

How can I be wrong! There has to be a reason—some reason for me to remember so many idiotic, inconsequential details: A red rose in the vegetable lady’s hair! A pigeon roosted on a lamppost!

Someone had better die in the next half hour. I see no motive to continue otherwise. If my memory and mind reveal themselves to be worthless, I might as well drink and drug myself to death.

No, if I can think, and if I can remember random sequences of events from weeks and months ago, there has to be a reason, some reason. Within the next half hour someone will die; and when it happens, I will remain calm. I will not celebrate. I will not grin knowingly at Pandey. I will keep quiet and go home, content with the knowledge that existence has its own plan, and that, watching-watching day in and out, I have somehow cracked that plan’s blueprint.

The telephone in the security cabin rings.

Pandey goes in to answer it.

After a few seconds he shouts, “Mishra, take, it’s DG-saab!”

DG is the Shiv Security supervisor for this part of the city.

Pandey emerges from the cabin. I go in and pick up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Haan, Mishra, DG here. Are you tired?”

“What, saab?” I say.

“Boss, are you tired?”

“Uh, as usual, saab. I’ve been here since morning.”

“Could you, maybe …” DG says, “somehow stretch it till tomorrow morning?”

“Why!”

“Relax, brother, I’m asking for a favor. Rajkumar cannot come for duty. He has guests from village. If you can’t do it, I’ll have to fill in for him. Can you do the night shift with Sohrab?”

“But—”

“Ya, what?” DG snaps.

“Why didn’t you ask Pandey?”

“Come on! Pandey just got married a month ago. It’s too early for his wife to sleep alone. You know how women are in the beginning.”

“Pandey told you this?”

DG laughs. “Don’t be a nut. We have to understand such things.”

“Tomorrow I will have to do the day shift as well?”

DG says he doesn’t know yet, but most probably no. Either way, my overtime pay is assured.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll stay.”

What else? Do I have a choice? It is almost seven p.m. If I refuse to oblige, DG will have to do the night shift. But I don’t care about that. It’s almost seven, and if I refuse to oblige, I will have to go home a broken, hopeless man. I will have to admit that my memory and my mind have no purpose, and that all the events I see and remember amount to zilch.

This morning, after I saw what I saw, I was certain someone was going to die today.

Now “today” has become longer. The half-hour deadline has postponed itself. I thought I had grabbed existence by its horns, but the willful thing has managed to break loose again, leaving me hanging for another twelve hours.

Pandey is very sorry to hear of my double shift. He tells me to go eat something, to shit, piss, stack up on tobacco and white lime and whatever else will keep me awake through the night. “Go, go fast,” he says. “I’ll wait till you return.”

I walk out the gate and cross the road.

Before entering the neighborhood eatery, I look back for a glimpse of Sea View Apartments. Against the backdrop of a dark blue sky, with the streetlights and flat-lights glittering, and the traffic zooming up and down the road, the setting seems poised for something momentous, something horrendous.

I exhale. It’s going to be a long, long night.

LUCKY 501

B
Y
S
ONIA
F
ALEIRO
Sanjay Gandhi National Park

I

T
he Vihar Lake is an ink spot in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park. It is cool, dense, and dark green, shapeless yet distinct. It is infested with crocodiles and encircled by forest with spotted deer and owlets, minivets and magpies.

The dai lived somewhere on the banks of this lake. She lived on castration and so great was her skill she had transformed five hundred without suffering a fatality. Those desiring her services would make an appointment months in advance. They did so at her reed mat and bolster outside the Kanheri Caves, in the park, but quite far from where she slept. She could not write, but had a strategy that compensated. If a man was dark, she would mark his name with a circle painted black. A bulbous nose would find expression in a square. This way she remembered and, more so, was humoured.

Like the dai, the ones who came to her were neither men nor women. They were tragic, some thought, but mainly fascinating. They wore saris, applied lipstick, urinated standing up. Among them some were more beautiful than others. Their beards had subsided.

If they liked you enough, they would invite you home and tell you their stories. These stories were always the same. They were of a boy who dressed as a girl and was thrown out of home for doing so. Then the hijras recognized him and said, “But you are one of us! You share our soul.” So the boy was alone no more. He knelt before the gurus and learned the laws. He knew the hijra anthem: One palm crack, “Hello!” Two, “Goodbye.” More, “Beware.” The years passed and the boy became a man who wanted to be womanly. So he surrendered his body to the dai nirvan. Like the one of whom it will now be told, the boy desired femininity he believed a doctor’s touch could not realize. Soft skin, breasts. But when it was done, the castrated one was neither man nor woman. He was a third sex.

The one of whom it will be told, he called himself Shabnam. This is how it was for him.

The evening before the castration, Shabnam was asked what he would like to eat. A baby goat he didn’t skin was roasted on a fire he didn’t help prepare. There were breads and a fulsome daal. He concentrated on his food. He was asked: Which songs shall we sing? What stories would you like to hear? Questions made to one who should not die with regrets. He answered truthfully.

At night Shabnam’s snores mingled with the gossip of the greylag geese. He slept well, perhaps because the day after was unimaginable.

At five a.m. he was shaken awake. It was stifling in the park, he realized, and in the muddy light his sleepy eyes saw a grove of trees beckon, their branches claw-sharp. He peered forward, but was unable to see clearly. The trees continued their rustling. A cold wind nibbled at his flesh.

The dai was squatting by his side, chewing sugar biscuits dipped in tea. She was ugly, concluded Shabnam. Wrinkles scrambled across her face. A coil of silver hair rotted down to her empty blouse. On as close inspection as he dared, he realized she could be of any sex but appeared of none.

This will not be me,
he swore to himself.
I have chosen well. I am tearing out the root of my manhood before it is too late.

II

Shabnam, then Sharad, had lived near the park all of his life. Its tranquillity was one of fits and starts, for there were slums within the park and without, and all along the borders of the main road that led straight to Aarey Milk Colony just outside of which he had lived. Cars sped past pots bubbling on twig fires. Women wrenched each other’s plaits out in arguments over the communal tap.

Sharad wasn’t as poor. He went to school, he had new clothes once a year, and although his room was not his own, it had a window and on this window a sill from which he could enjoy the pleasures of the park. His particular pleasure was bird-watching and some days his entire conversation might comprise sentences such as: “Another white-tailed stonechat!”

Sharad’s parents were the Sharmas, and the Sharmas split the rent of their two-room, toilet, kitchen with a Muslim couple. The man and woman kept to themselves; they recited Rumi to each other. Their poetry, their detachment from all but each other, was romantic, and sexual, and his parents despised and feared them for it. His father would snarl, “What can you expect of people who pet their goats at breakfast and slaughter them for dinner?”

The Muslims were kind in the ways children appreciate. They spoke to Sharad directly, not through his parents. They lent him their precious Rumi. In time he could recite: “
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along.”
He would echo the couple’s murmurings from the room he shared with his parents. “
When I am with you, we stay up all night, when you are not here, I cannot get to sleep.”

And they introduced him to the hijras.

It happened thus. It was Friday, he was fifteen and waiting outside Ajantha Cinema. That night, as on most Friday nights, a stranger paused before him, and having appraised his reddened lips, the cinch of belt around his small waist, invited him in for a film.

Later, as Sharad raised his head from its accustomed position, he saw one of the Muslims, the woman, staring at him. Sharad was not embarrassed. This was how boys like him got by.

Then one evening, several weeks later, when his parents were at a wedding, the Muslims invited Sharad to the cinema. He wasn’t interested in them in that way, he said. He liked them, just not in that way.

Yes, the woman said. Of course not, agreed the man. It was just the cinema.

Outside the theater, clearly waiting for them, stood two hijras dressed in nylon saris. One of them sucked on a joint as she fussed with her pleats. Another had wandering eyes and a lisp.
Thona re!
she mouthed to the knock-kneed black marketeer standing close, counting his wad of tickets with moist black fingers,
O mere thona re!

The Muslims introduced Sharad. “These are our friends,” the man said.

“They can help you,” said the woman.

“You like boys?” the hash smoker cut to the chase. Sharad nodded. “Want to come with us?” she asked. Sharad shook his head. He had seen these hijras around. They begged. They stank. They were slum dwellers. And Sharad was no slum dweller, even if he did like boys.

The next Friday, as he neared Ajantha, he spied the hijras from a distance. He was about to turn back when the hash smoker beckoned to him with a paan-stained pout. The hijras bought the tickets, they watched the movie, no demands were made of Sharad.

Over weekends like these evolved something like friendship.

Sharad would look back at this courtship with a smile. If the hash smoker was to be believed, all hijras ever did was dance at weddings. All they ever spent their money on was the cinema. Then there was the casual introduction to their guru at a party. Had it even been someone’s birthday?

His parents were told or found out.

No beatings.

His father was a civil man.

Sharad was locked in their bedroom.

Once he spied a sarus crane gliding above the trees. A park watchman had spoken of last seeing one two years earlier. His spirits soared. Then he remembered what he was.

The hijras came for him. Their thundering songs as they strode past Sharad’s cowering mother recalled the determination of a pariah kite swooping down on a rodent.

As he stuffed some clothes into a bag, Sharad knew it had been a matter of time. The hijras of the slums understood him in a way his parents never could.

If his family wished upon him heterosexuality, the hijra guru he went on to share with the hash smoker wanted him to eradicate every sign of it.

Hira Bai had a square beefy face, a purple mouth, bittendown nails varnished red. She knew everything, and one of the things she knew was this: “A real hijra has no chili.” When this statement prompted no reaction, she petted Shabnam into submission. “You are
my
diamond,” she growled over and over again. “And I want you to be flawless.”

In time Shabnam accepted the logic of castration. Once a nirvan, his hair would grow and his voice would soften. A nirvan is no better than an akwa, uncut; but he would no longer have to tuck it in.

So on Hira Bai’s fortieth birthday, and at barely seventeen, Shabnam took his guru aside. Patting away her outstretched palm—he had, after all, said he had a present for her—he asked that she call the dai nirvan.

III

Stray images of years past now flitted through Shabnam’s mind. Fearing agitation, he calmed himself as he knew best.