The Parcel (4 page)

Now, Madhu reflected on how Padma had Shivaji's guile. It had helped Padma sustain her reputation as one of the most feared madams of Kamathipura, until the mantle had recently been taken over by another woman, Silver Chaya. Padma had no silver teeth like Silver Chaya, whose mouth shone in the dark when she spoke. Padma was simple and plain, and vocal in her disdain for men. Silver Chaya was a voracious lover, but Padma was now in her seventies and had long ago become an ascetic. She dealt in flesh but never partook of it. She was like gurumai, an overseer, an orchestrator of life and the destiny of human beings. But none of this was evident when Padma was a young girl. If anything, she had been a mere twig snapped off a branch and thrown to the side of the road for any traveller to trample upon. That was how gurumai always started Padma's story when she told it to her hijras, with the smoke from her beedi rising to the ceiling just like Padma's eventual rise to power.

After what had happened to Padma as a child, gurumai had said, she vowed to never be vulnerable again, to never leave things in the hands of a higher power. If that higher power was taking a nap, like in her case, things happened that one could never truly recover from. “But then I told myself that if God was sleeping while bad things happened to me, then I could use that same nap time to make good things happen as well,” Padma had told gurumai.

She had always been a child of Kamathipura, back when Sukhlaji Street was known as “White Lane,” on account of the British troops that came to anchor their cocks. And it was in “Safed Gulli” that her father's face started turning white too, and his lips, the coughing disease feeding on him right before her very eyes, as though it had bought her father's lungs at an auction and was now enjoying the merchandise with absolutely no regard for the twelve-year-old who sat praying in front of a small picture of Lakshmi, while her father kept assuring her between coughing fits that he would never leave her, trying to hide the blood at first, but failing so pathetically that they both knew he would soon be joining his wife, who had died giving birth to Padma.

When he did go, a neighbour took Padma in.

For one whole year, this neighbour treated Padma as her own, held her close to her chest even though her husband did not like it at all. Padma could give the cough to both their children, the husband said, and she was a sly devil, she hid the cough, she went outside and coughed, so it was gullible of the woman to think that Padma had been spared.

But Padma had been spared. She had been spared from the cough, but not from puberty. Not from becoming a woman. Nothing could stop that.

After one whole year of eating meals with her new family, she was sold. She was not even sent far away. She was sold into a brothel only a few feet away, on White Lane itself. It was a matter of convenience, and when she had been broken, several times, until she accepted who she had become, she went across the street, to the woman who had taken her in, and asked her point blank if she'd been in on it. But the woman just shook her head,
and from the single tear that rolled down her cheek, Padma knew she hadn't known, or if she had, she was powerless. Then it dawned on her that her father had failed to look after her, even though the cough wasn't his fault, and now yet another man had failed her. One good, one not so. Either way, it did not matter.

From then on, even when she was spreading her legs ten times a day, sometimes fifteen, she never lost that burning desire for power, to never be at the knees of a man again, and she quickly shrugged off any tears and self-pity and focused on rising to the top, which in her world meant owning her own brothel. Her father's illness had pulled her out of school, it had torn her like a page from a book, and the wind had carried that small page to a small bed, which became her working space seven days a week for the next five years. It was her prison, and if she used her head, it could become her liberation too.

Her lack of resistance was misconstrued by the madam of the brothel as the sign of someone who was sex-mad, and that was perfect for Padma, because no one detected the cold reasoning under her heaving breasts; no one realized that she accepted prostitution as work, just as a man accepted going knee-deep in a sewer to clean up shit for the rest of the city. The man did not choose that job; it was given to him. It was the same with Padma, except that by the time she was eighteen, her owner, the same madam who had bought her from her neighbour, declared her a free agent. From a sex slave, she was now an adhiya prostitute.

“What I paid for you, you have earned out,” said the madam. “From this day on, you will get paid. Half of what you fuck, you keep.”

“Thank you” was all Padma said.

Then, about ten minutes later, she went back to her madam.

“How much did you pay?” she asked.

“For what?”

“For me,” said Padma. “How much did you buy me for?”

“What difference?”

“I want to know how much I was worth.”

“Three hundred rupees.”

The sum made Padma reel, but she did not show it. Three hundred rupees could be considered a fair amount at the time, especially for a poor family, but it was also incredibly low. It made her realize that she had no place on this earth at all, that as a girl she had the same importance as a rubber tire, or a clock, or a pair of shoes.

“I'll make you a deal,” she told the madam. “I'll look after the books for you as well. I'll manage the place. That way you can rest.”

“What do you know about accounts?” the madam asked.

“Nothing,” said Padma. “But then again, I didn't know anything about cocks either.”

She got the job. It was not the books Padma was after. It was the police. If she had access to the books, she would know which cop to grease, which dick to moisten with her own cunt, and she dove into her dual role with the passion of a woman putting herself through a business degree. When the time came, when the madam was on her deathbed, Padma was twenty-five, a veteran of the business, and had saved enough money to call it a small fortune—but it still wasn't enough. So she went to a moneylender, took a loan, kept her breasts as collateral, made him feel as tall as any building in the city, told him that the goons that worked for her madam could be at his disposal as
well if they went into partnership together. She told him it was important for them to own the brothel, to buy it from the actual owner. The day she got ownership of the brothel was the last time she gave herself to a client. This was in the 1960s, when Madhu hadn't even been born and the opium dens on Sukhlaji Street gave everyone equal rights by sending them all to heaven. This was when Padma single-handedly caught the imagination of Kamathipura.

She hired two men—Hassan the watcher's father was one of them, a striking Pathan, and the other was a thin hero-type, with a knife tucked in his belt—and she walked across the street from her brothel to the home of the man who had sold her. She carried a steel thali in her hand, with a small bowl of sugar and a wad of cash tied with a brand new rubber band. Seeing Padma in her new incarnation made the man nervous, but she reassured him there was no need to be. Padma was there to pay her respects. She fed the man sugar with her own hands and gave him the money, thanked him for her success. If it hadn't been for him, she said, she would still be poor and helpless. She touched the feet of the woman who had looked after her for a year just like she had her own children, and then went back to her brothel.

Nothing more happened for an entire year.

And that was fine. Padma waited. She knew that once the man had tasted money, he would want more. The day he ran out, he came to her brothel. He came for a loan, he said. He was going through hard times, and she was like a daughter to him. Would she help him out?

Of course she would.

She asked him to wait while she went and fetched the money. She came back, like before, with sugar and cash. But this time,
the hero-type held the man's hands from behind. The Pathan was about to give the man a thrashing, but Padma told him not to be immature about things.

Once again, she fed the man sugar with her own hands.

“Please,” she said, “eat.”

She even brushed away some of the sugar that was on the edge of his lips. Then she instructed her men to take him outside. They thrust him to the ground, bound his feet, and tied his hands to a telephone pole, so he lay prostrate on the ground facing the sky. It was ten in the morning and passersby tried to avoid the man, not wanting to get in the way of what they assumed was gang rivalry.

But there was no gang, just a lone woman smearing sugar all over a man's face.

Padma smeared the sugar with such deference she might have been a potter moulding clay into her own creation. His face, his eyebrows, his ears, and an extra dose in the centre of the forehead with her thumb as though she was putting a final bindi on him.

Soon, all the girls from her brothel came to see what was going on. The men from nearby shops came. The postman came. The milkman came.

So did the ants.

Hundreds of them, crawling their way to the man's body. So many hundreds of black ants, so many hundreds of red ants, soldiering their way to the sugar. The man begged for forgiveness and in his terror blurted out what he had done for all to hear, and in doing so negated the possibility of any intervention, which only suited Padma.

Then, when the first bites began, the man went quiet.

A few seconds later, he sent out a scream so high it brought his wife to the scene.

When she saw that Padma had not only tied up her husband, but was coolly sipping chai and watching, she was sure Padma had lost her mind.

Padma looked at her and said, “Forgive me.”

Then she touched the woman's feet. “I hope you understand. Just remember, you will always be looked after.”

Perhaps the woman did understand, for she turned away and left her husband screaming his heart out, as if that might be the only way for him to get in touch with it.

When the blood trickled, White Lane turned red. It became “Lal Bazaar.”

In this fashion, Padma had added her own memorable hue to the place and, at the same time, sent a humble message to the prostitutes under her command, should they have any delusions of escaping or disobeying her. Her story spread through the fourteen lanes of Kamathipura faster than syphilis.

When the man's face was a gnarled caricature, a stray dog licked the sugar off it.

Hassan signalled to Madhu that Padma was ready for her.

“You know where to go?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Madhu.

“Then go. I have to keep guard.”

She passed five rooms to her left, and the doors were shut, which was a good sign for Padma. It meant business was brisk, except for the two women standing on the balcony outside their respective rooms. Both were in their late thirties. The makeup
on their faces was too light, a garish contrast to the darker skin of their necks and arms. Their lips were so red they sent off the flashing alarm of a siren, a warning not to enter, rather than a seductive invite.

Madhu peeked into one of their rooms. The women rented them from Padma at the rate of twenty rupees per client. A small child slept on the ground, huddled in a corner, its head leaning against a stainless steel trunk that contained all of its mother's belongings: her clothes and combs, her makeup, her memories—all of it had to fit in one trunk. If it didn't, the woman had too much of a personal life and needed to be cut down to size. The blue walls of the room were so dreary they made the steel trunk stand. If a client showed up, the child would be placed under the bed, and the bedsheet adjusted in such a way that it would fall over the edge like a waterfall, cutting the child off from mother and customer, until the next one came. Madhu could smell the sex in there: the sweat, the cigarette smoke, the chewed tobacco, the attar of prostitutes—water was added to the empty perfume bottle in a desperate attempt to gain more mileage—and the incense stick in a corner of the room trying in vain to counter all the other whiffs. She drew her head back. This was the collective scent of a cheap, violent fuck, the odour of enslavement.

More rooms, more closed doors.

In the corridor, a young boy was drawing something on a piece of paper. He had a small flashlight angled on the ground so that it lit the paper while he practised writing his name, but the way he made large loops on the page made Madhu think he was drawing. In another room, a prostitute was breastfeeding her child. With her mouth half open and her head against the
wall, she looked comatose, and the baby was literally hanging off her breast. It was hard to tell if she had any nourishment to provide at all. Perhaps, thought Madhu, it was the other way round. The child was resuscitating her, urging her to find the will to carry on.

Padma's room was the same as it had always been, with its old four-poster bed that had belonged to the original madam of the place. Madhu had heard from gurumai that after Padma's husband died, it was the only thing she brought back into the brothel. “Who did I think I was, aiming for a normal life?” she had told gurumai about her marriage. She had two children, gave birth like some blessed factory in consecutive years at the age of forty, and her husband, a postman, gave Padma a new life. Or so it seemed. Less than three years after they got married, the postman's liver failed. And he was a teetotaller, which made Padma realize, once again, that a whore is a whore is a whore. How dare she move out of the brothel into a regular flat, where the vegetable vendor came right to her doorstep?

Even her children felt wrong. Without their father she knew she would fail them terribly. Each time she played with them, she had a foreboding that something would happen to them too, since they were both girls, so she gave them up to a couple who could never have children of their own, on the condition that they leave the city immediately, not tell her where they were going, and never return. The more untraceable they were, the longer the distance between her and them, the safer the children were.