When Aftab was five he began to attend the Urdu–Hindi madrassa for boys in Chooriwali Gali (the bangle-seller’s lane). Within a year he could recite a good part of the Quran in Arabic, although it wasn’t clear how much of it he understood—that was true of all the other children too. Aftab was a better than average student, but even from the time he was very young it became clear that his real gift was music. He had a sweet, true singing voice and could pick up a tune after hearing it just once. His parents decided to send him to Ustad Hameed Khan, an outstanding young musician who taught Hindustani classical music to groups of children in his cramped quarters in Chandni Mahal. Little Aftab never missed a single class. By the time he was nine he could sing a good twenty minutes of bada khayal in Raag Yaman, Durga and Bhairav and make his voice skim shyly off the flat rekhab in Raag Pooriya Dhanashree like a stone skipping over the surface of a lake. He could sing Chaiti and Thumri with the accomplishment and poise of a Lucknow courtesan. At first people were amused and even encouraging, but soon the snickering and teasing from other children began: He’s a She. He’s not a He or a She. He’s a He and a She. She-He, He-She Hee! Hee! Hee!
When the teasing became unbearable Aftab stopped going to his music classes. But Ustad Hameed, who doted on him, offered to teach him separately, on his own. So the music classes continued, but Aftab refused to go to school any more. By then Jahanara Begum’s hopes had more or less faded. There was no sign of healing anywhere on the horizon. She had managed to put off his circumcision for some years with a series of inventive excuses. But young Saqib was waiting in line for his, and she knew she had run out of time. Eventually she did what she had to. She mustered her courage and told her husband, breaking down and weeping with grief as well as relief that she finally had someone else to share her nightmare with.
Her husband, Mulaqat Ali, was a hakim, a doctor of herbal medicine, and a lover of Urdu and Persian poetry. All his life he had worked for the family of another hakim—Hakim Abdul Majid, who founded a popular brand of sherbet called Rooh Afza (Persian for “Elixir of the Soul”). Rooh Afza, made of khurfa seeds (purslane), grapes, oranges, watermelon, mint, carrots, a touch of spinach, khus khus, lotus, two kinds of lilies and a distillate of damask roses, was meant to be a tonic. But people found that two tablespoons of the sparkling ruby-colored syrup in a glass of cold milk or even just plain water not only tasted delicious, but was also an effective defense against Delhi’s scorching summers and the strange fevers that blew in on desert winds. Soon what had started out as medicine became the most popular summer drink in the region. Rooh Afza became a prosperous enterprise and a household name. For forty years it ruled the market, sending its produce from its headquarters in the old city as far south as Hyderabad and as far west as Afghanistan. Then came Partition. God’s carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred. Neighbors turned on each other as though they’d never known each other, never been to each other’s weddings, never sung each other’s songs. The walled city broke open. Old families fled (Muslim). New ones arrived (Hindu) and settled around the city walls. Rooh Afza had a serious setback, but soon recovered and opened a branch in Pakistan. A quarter of a century later, after the holocaust in East Pakistan, it opened another branch in the brand-new country of Bangladesh. But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola.
Although Mulaqat Ali was a trusted and valued employee of Hakim Abdul Majid, the salary he earned was not enough to make ends meet. So outside his working hours he saw patients at his home. Jahanara Begum supplemented the family income with what she earned from the white cotton Gandhi caps she made and supplied in bulk to Hindu shopkeepers in Chandni Chowk.
Mulaqat Ali traced his family’s lineage directly back to the Mongol Emperor Changez Khan through the emperor’s second-born son, Chagatai. He had an elaborate family tree on a piece of cracked parchment and a small tin trunk full of brittle, yellowed papers that he believed verified his claim and explained how descendants of shamans from the Gobi Desert, worshippers of the Eternal Blue Sky, once considered the enemies of Islam, became the forefathers of the Mughal dynasty that ruled India for centuries, and how Mulaqat Ali’s own family, descendants of the Mughals, who were Sunni, came to be Shia. Occasionally, perhaps once every few years, he would open his trunk and show his papers to a visiting journalist who, more often than not, neither listened carefully nor took him seriously. At most the long interview would merit an arch, amusing mention in a weekend special about Old Delhi. If it was a double spread, a small portrait of Mulaqat Ali might even be published along with some close-ups of Mughal cuisine, long shots of Muslim women in burqas on cycle rickshaws that plied the narrow filthy lanes, and of course the mandatory bird’s-eye view of thousands of Muslim men in white skullcaps, arranged in perfect formation, bowed down in prayer in the Jama Masjid. Some readers viewed pictures like these as proof of the success of India’s commitment to secularism and inter-faith tolerance. Others with a tinge of relief that Delhi’s Muslim population seemed content enough in its vibrant ghetto. Still others viewed them as proof that Muslims did not wish to “integrate” and were busy breeding and organizing themselves, and would soon become a threat to Hindu India. Those who subscribed to this view were gaining influence at an alarming pace.
Regardless of what appeared or did not appear in the newspapers, right into his dotage Mulaqat Ali always welcomed visitors into his tiny rooms with the faded grace of a nobleman. He spoke of the past with dignity but never nostalgia. He described how, in the thirteenth century, his ancestors had ruled an empire that stretched from the countries that now called themselves Vietnam and Korea all the way to Hungary and the Balkans, from Northern Siberia to the Deccan plateau in India, the largest empire the world had ever known. He often ended the interview with a recitation of an Urdu couplet by one of his favorite poets, Mir Taqi Mir:
Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka
Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka
The head which today proudly flaunts a crown
Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown
Most of his visitors, brash emissaries of a new ruling class, barely aware of their own youthful hubris, did not completely grasp the layered meaning of the couplet they had been offered, like a snack to be washed down by a thimble-sized cup of thick, sweet tea. They understood of course that it was a dirge for a fallen empire whose international borders had shrunk to a grimy ghetto circumscribed by the ruined walls of an old city. And yes, they realized that it was also a rueful comment on Mulaqat Ali’s own straitened circumstances. What escaped them was that the couplet was a sly snack, a perfidious samosa, a warning wrapped in mourning, being offered with faux humility by an erudite man who had absolute faith in his listeners’ ignorance of Urdu, a language which, like most of those who spoke it, was gradually being ghettoized.
Mulaqat Ali’s passion for poetry was not just a hobby separate from his work as a hakim. He believed that poetry could cure, or at least go a long way towards curing, almost every ailment. He would prescribe poems to his patients the way other hakims prescribed medicine. He could produce a couplet from his formidable repertoire that was eerily apt for every illness, every occasion, every mood and every delicate alteration in the political climate. This habit of his made life around him seem more profound and at the same time less distinctive than it really was. It infused everything with a subtle sense of stagnancy, a sense that everything that happened had happened before. That it had already been written, sung, commented upon and entered into history’s inventory. That nothing new was possible. This could be why young people around him often fled, giggling, when they sensed that a couplet was on its way.
When Jahanara Begum told him about Aftab, perhaps for the first time in his life Mulaqat Ali had no suitable couplet for the occasion. It took him a while to get over the initial shock. When
he did, he scolded his wife for not having told him earlier. Times had changed, he said. This was the Modern Era. He was sure that there was a simple medical solution to their son’s problem. They would find a doctor in New Delhi, far away from the whisper and gossip that went on in the mohallas of the old city. The Almighty helps those who help themselves, he told his wife a little sternly.
A week later, dressed in their best clothes, with an unhappy Aftab fitted out in a manly steel-gray Pathan suit with a black embroidered waistcoat, a skullcap and jootis with toes curled like gondolas, they set off for Nizamuddin basti in a horse-drawn tanga. The ostensible purpose of their day out was that they were going to inspect a prospective bride for their nephew Aijaz—the youngest son of Mulaqat Ali’s older brother, Qasim, who had moved to Pakistan after Partition and worked for the Karachi branch of Rooh Afza. The real reason was that they had an appointment with a Dr. Ghulam Nabi, who called himself a “sexologist.”
Dr. Nabi prided himself on being a straight-talking man of precise and scientific temper. After examining Aftab he said he was not, medically speaking, a Hijra—a female trapped in a male body—although for practical purposes that word could be used. Aftab, he said, was a rare example of a Hermaphrodite, with both male and female characteristics, though outwardly, the male characteristics appeared to be more dominant. He said he could recommend a surgeon who would seal the girl-part, sew it up. He could prescribe some pills too. But, he said, the problem was not merely superficial. While treatment would surely help, there would be “Hijra tendencies” that were unlikely to ever go away. (Fitrat was the word he used for “tendencies.”) He could not guarantee complete success. Mulaqat Ali, prepared to grasp at straws, was elated. “Tendencies?” he said. “Tendencies are no problem. Everybody has some tendency or the other…tendencies can always be managed.”
Even though the visit to Dr. Nabi did not provide an immediate solution to what Mulaqat Ali saw as Aftab’s affliction, it benefited Mulaqat Ali a great deal. It gave him coordinates to position himself, to steady his ship that was pitching perilously on an ocean of couplet-less incomprehension. He was now able to convert his anguish into a practical problem and to turn his attention and his energies to something he understood well: How to raise enough money for the surgery?
He cut down on household expenses and drew up lists of people and relatives from whom he could borrow money. Simultaneously, he embarked on the cultural project of inculcating manliness in Aftab. He passed on to him his love of poetry and discouraged the singing of Thumri and Chaiti. He stayed up late into the night, telling Aftab stories about their warrior ancestors and their valor on the battlefield. They left Aftab unmoved. But when he heard the story of how Temujin—Changez Khan—won the hand of his beautiful wife, Borte Khatun, how she was kidnapped by a rival tribe and how Temujin fought a whole army virtually single-handedly to get her back because he loved her so much, Aftab found himself wanting to be her.
While his sisters and brother went to school, Aftab spent hours on the tiny balcony of his home looking down at Chitli Qabar—the tiny shrine of the spotted goat who was said to have had supernatural powers—and the busy street that ran past it and joined the Matia Mahal Chowk. He quickly learned the cadence and rhythm of the neighborhood, which was essentially a stream of Urdu invective—I’ll fuck your mother, go fuck your sister, I swear by your mother’s cock—that was interrupted five times a day by the call to prayer from the Jama Masjid as well as the several other smaller mosques in the old city. As Aftab kept strict vigil, day after day, over nothing in particular, Guddu Bhai, the acrimonious early-morning fishmonger who parked his cart of gleaming fresh fish in the center of the chowk, would, as surely as the sun rose in the east and set in the west, elongate into Wasim, the tall, affable afternoon naan khatai–seller who would then shrink into Yunus, the small, lean, evening fruit-seller, who, late at night, would broaden and balloon into Hassan Mian, the stout vendor of the best mutton biryani in Matia Mahal, which he dished out of a huge copper pot. One spring morning Aftab saw a tall, slim-hipped woman wearing bright lipstick, gold high heels and a shiny, green satin salwar kameez buying bangles from Mir the bangle-seller who doubled up as caretaker of the Chitli Qabar. He stored his stock of bangles inside the tomb every night when he shut shrine and shop. (He had managed to ensure that the working hours coincided.) Aftab had never seen anybody like the tall woman with lipstick. He rushed down the steep stairs into the street and followed her discreetly while she bought goats’ trotters, hairclips, guavas, and had the strap of her sandals fixed.
He wanted to be her.
He followed her down the street all the way to Turkman Gate and stood for a long time outside the blue doorway she disappeared into. No ordinary woman would have been permitted to sashay down the streets of Shahjahanabad dressed like that. Ordinary women in Shahjahanabad wore burqas or at least covered their heads and every part of their body except their hands and feet. The woman Aftab followed could dress as she was dressed and walk the way she did only because she wasn’t a woman. Whatever she was, Aftab wanted to be her. He wanted to be her even more than he wanted to be Borte Khatun. Like her he wanted to shimmer past the meat shops where skinned carcasses of whole goats hung down like great walls of meat; he wanted to simper past the New Life-Style Men’s Hairdressing Salon where Iliyaas the barber cut Liaqat the lean young butcher’s hair and shined it up with Brylcreem. He wanted to put out a hand with painted nails and a wrist full of bangles and delicately lift the gill of a fish to see how fresh it was before bargaining down the price. He wanted to lift his salwar just a little as he stepped over a puddle—just enough to show off his silver anklets.
It was not Aftab’s girl-part that was just an appendage.
He began to divide his time between his music classes and hanging around outside the blue doorway of the house in Gali Dakotan where the tall woman lived. He learned that her name was Bombay Silk and that there were seven others like her, Bulbul, Razia, Heera, Baby, Nimmo, Mary and Gudiya, who lived together in the haveli with the blue doorway, and that they had an Ustad, a guru, called Kulsoom Bi, older than the rest of them, who was the head of the household. Aftab learned their haveli was called the Khwabgah—the House of Dreams.
At first he was shooed away because everybody, including the residents of the Khwabgah, knew Mulaqat Ali and did not want to get on the wrong side of him. But regardless of what admonition and punishment awaited him, Aftab would return to his post stubbornly, day after day. It was the only place in his world where he felt the air made way for him. When he arrived, it seemed to shift, to slide over, like a school friend making room for him on a classroom bench. Over a period of a few months, by running errands, carrying their bags and musical instruments when the residents went on their city rounds, by massaging their tired feet at the end of a working day, Aftab eventually managed to insinuate himself into the Khwabgah. Finally the day dawned when he was allowed in. He entered that ordinary, broken-down home as though he were walking through the gates of Paradise.
The blue door opened on to a paved, high-walled courtyard with a handpump in one corner and a Pomegranate tree in the other. There were two rooms set behind a deep verandah with fluted columns. The roof of one of the rooms had caved in and its walls had crumbled into a heap of rubble in which a family of cats had made its home. The room that hadn’t crumbled was a large one, and in fairly good condition. Its peeling, pale green walls were lined with four wooden and two Godrej almirahs covered with pictures of film stars—Madhubala, Waheeda Rehman, Nargis, Dilip Kumar (whose name was really Muhammad Yusuf Khan), Guru Dutt and the local boy Johnny Walker (Badruddin Jamaluddin Kazi), the comedian who could make the saddest person in the world smile. One of the cupboards had a dim, full-length mirror mounted on the door. In another corner there was a beaten-up old dressing table. A chipped and broken chandelier with only one working bulb and a long-stemmed, dark brown fan hung from the high ceiling. The fan had human qualities—she was coy, moody and unpredictable.
She had a name too, Usha. Usha wasn’t young any more and often needed to be cajoled and prodded with a long-handled broom and then she would go to work, gyrating like a slow pole dancer. Ustad Kulsoom Bi slept on the only bed in the haveli with her parakeet, Birbal, in his cage above her bed. Birbal would screech as though he was being slaughtered if Kulsoom Bi was not near him at night. During Birbal’s waking hours he was capable of some weapons-grade invective that was always preceded by the half-snide, half-flirtatious Ai Hai! that he had picked up from his housemates. Birbal’s choicest insult was the one most commonly heard in the Khwabgah: Saali Randi Hijra (Sister-fucking Whore Hijra). Birbal knew all the variations. He could mutter it, say it coquettishly, in jest, with affection and with genuine, bitter anger.
Everyone else slept in the verandah, their bedding rolled up in the day like giant bolsters. In winter, when the courtyard grew cold and misty, they all crowded into Kulsoom Bi’s room. The entrance to the toilet was through the ruins of the collapsed room. Everybody took turns to bathe at the handpump. An absurdly steep, narrow staircase led to the kitchen on the first floor. The kitchen window looked out on to the dome of the Holy Trinity Church.
Mary was the only Christian among the residents of the Khwabgah. She did not go to church, but she wore a little crucifix around her neck. Gudiya and Bulbul were both Hindus and did occasionally visit temples that would allow them in. The rest were Muslim. They visited the Jama Masjid and those dargahs that allowed them into the inner chambers (because unlike biological women Hijras were not considered unclean since they did not menstruate). The most masculine person in the Khwabgah, however, did menstruate. Bismillah slept upstairs on the kitchen terrace. She was a small, wiry, dark woman with a voice like a bus horn. She had converted to Islam and moved into the Khwabgah a few years ago (the two were not connected) after her husband, a bus driver for Delhi Transport Corporation, had thrown her out of their home for not bearing him a child. Of course it never occurred to him that he might have been responsible for their childlessness. Bismillah (formerly Bimla) managed the kitchen and guarded the Khwabgah against unwanted intruders with the ferocity and ruthlessness of a professional Chicago mobster. Young men were strictly forbidden to enter the Khwabgah without her express permission. Even regular customers, like Anjum’s future client—the Man Who Knew English—were kept out and had to make their own arrangements for their assignations. Bismillah’s companion on the terrace was Razia, who had lost her mind as well as her memory and no longer knew who she was or where she came from. Razia was not a Hijra. She was a man who liked to dress in women’s clothes. However, she did not want to be thought of as a woman, but as a man who wanted to be a woman. She had stopped trying to explain the difference to people (including to Hijras) long ago. Razia spent her days feeding pigeons on the roof and steering all conversations towards a secret, unutilized government scheme (dao-pech, she called it) she had discovered for Hijras and people like herself. As per the scheme, they would all live together in a housing colony and be given government pensions and would no longer need to earn their living doing what she described as badtameezi—bad behavior—any more. Razia’s other theme was government pensions for street cats. For some reason her unmemoried, unanchored mind veered unerringly towards government schemes.