TILO PUT THE FILES and the sachet of photographs back into the carton and left it on the table. They were legal papers and contained nothing incriminating.
She packed Musa’s “recoveries”—the gun, the knife, the phones, the passports, boarding passes and everything else—into airtight plastic food containers and stacked them in her freezer. Inside one of the containers she put Saddam Hussain’s visiting card, so that Musa would know where to come. Her refrigerator was an old one—the kind that iced up if it wasn’t regularly defrosted. She knew that if she turned the temperature down before she left, the incriminating evidence would turn into a block of ice. Her reasoning was that Recoveries that had survived a devastating flood surely had special powers. They would survive a mini-blizzard too.
She packed a small bag. Clothes, books, baby things, computer, toothbrush. The pot with her mother’s ashes.
The only decision that remained to be made was what to do with the cake and the balloons.
—
She lay in her bed, fully dressed and ready to leave.
It was 3 a.m.
Still no sign (nor scent) of Saddam Hussain.
Reading the Otter papers was a mistake. A bad one. She felt as though she had been sealed into a barrel of tar, with him and all the people he had killed. She could smell him. And see his cold, flat eyes as he sat across from her on the boat and stared at her. She could feel his hand on her scalp.
The bed she lay on wasn’t really a bed, just a mattress on the red cement floor. Ants hurried around with cake crumbs. The heat seeped through the mattress and the sheet felt coarse against her skin. A baby gecko walked unsteadily across the floor. It stopped a few feet away, lifted its big head and regarded her with bright, oversized eyes. She watched it back.
“Hide!” she whispered. “The vegetarians are coming.”
She offered it a dead mosquito from the pile of dead mosquitoes she had collected on a sheet of blank paper. She put the mosquito carcass down, halfway between herself and the gecko. The gecko ignored it at first, and then ate it in a flash, while she looked away.
What I should have been, she thought, is a gecko-feeder.
—
Harsh neon light masquerading as the moon streamed through the window. A few weeks ago, walking across a steep, over-lit flyover at night, she eavesdropped on a conversation between two men wheeling their bicycles: “Is sheher mein ab raat ka sahaara bhi nahin milta.” In this city we’ve even lost the shelter of the night.
She lay very still, like a corpse in a morgue.
Her hair was growing.
Her toenails too.
The hair on her head was dead white.
The triangle of hair between her legs was jet black.
What did that mean?
Was she old or still young?
Was she dead or still alive?
And then, even without turning her head, she knew they had come. The bulls. Massive heads with perfect horns silhouetted sickle-shaped against the light. Two of them. The color of night. The stolen color of what-used-to-be-night. Rough curls embossed into their damp foreheads like damask headscarves. Their moist, velvet noses glistened, and they pursed their purple lips. They made no sound. They never harmed her, only stared. The whites of their eyes as they looked around the room were crescent moons. They didn’t seem curious or particularly grave. They were like doctors looking in on a patient, trying to agree on a diagnosis.
Did you forget to bring your stethoscopes again?
Time had a different quality in their presence. She couldn’t tell for how long they watched her. She never looked back at them. She knew they were gone only when the light they had blocked returned to illuminate the room.
When she was sure they were gone, she went to the window and saw them shrink to street level and walk away. City-slickers. A pair of thugs. One of them lifted its leg like a dog and pissed on the window of a car. A very tall dog. She put on the light and looked up the word insouciant. The dictionary said: Cheerfully unconcerned or unworried about something. She kept dictionaries near her bed, piled up into a tower.
She picked a sheet of paper from a ream, and a pencil from a coffee mug full of sharpened blue pencils, and began to write:
Dear Doctor,
I am witness to a curious scientific phenomenon. Two bulls live in the service lane outside my flat. In the daytime they appear quite normal, but at night they grow tall—I think the word might be “elevate”—and stare at me through my second-floor window. When they piss, they lift their legs like dogs. Last night (at about 8 p.m.), when I was returning from the market, one growled at me. This I’m sure of. My question is: Is there any chance that they could be genetically modified bulls, with dog-growth or wolf-growth genes implanted in them, that might have escaped from a lab? If so, are they bulls or dogs? Or wolves?
I have not heard of any such experiments being done on cattle, have you? I am aware of human growth genes being used on trout, making them gigantic. The people who breed these giant trout say they’re doing it to feed people in poor countries. My question is who will feed the giant trout? Human growth genes have also been used in pigs. I’ve seen the result of that experiment. It’s a cross-eyed mutant that is so heavy that it cannot stand up or bear its own weight. It needs to be propped up on a board. It’s pretty disgusting.
These days one is never really sure whether a bull is a dog, or an ear of corn is actually a leg of pork or a beef steak. But perhaps this is the path to genuine modernity? Why, after all, shouldn’t a glass be a hedgehog, a hedge an etiquette manual, and so on?
Yours truly,
Tilottama
P.S. I have learned that scientists working in the poultry industry are trying to excise the mothering instinct in hens in order to mitigate or entirely remove their desire to brood. Their goal, apparently, is to stop chickens wasting time on unnecessary things and thereby to increase the efficiency of egg production. Even though I am personally and in principle completely against efficiency, I wonder whether conducting this sort of intervention (by which I mean excising the mothering instinct) on the Maaji—The Mothers of the Disappeared in Kashmir—would help. Right now they are inefficient, unproductive units, living on a mandatory diet of hopeless hope, pottering about in their kitchen gardens, wondering what to grow and what to cook, in case their sons return. I’m sure you agree this is a bad business model. Could you propose a better one? A doable, realistic (although I’m against realism too) formula to arrive at an efficient Quantum of Hope? The three variables in their case are Death, Disappearance and Familial Love. All other forms of love, assuming that they do indeed exist, do not qualify and should be disregarded. Barring of course the Love of God. (That goes without saying.)
P.P.S. I’m moving. I don’t know where I’m going. This fills me with hope.
When she finished her letter she folded it carefully and put it into her bag. She cut the cake, packed it into a box file and put it into the fridge. She untied the balloons one by one and locked them in the cupboard. She switched on the TV with the volume off. A man was selling his eyebrows. He had turned down the initial offer of five hundred dollars. Eventually, for one thousand four hundred dollars he agreed to have them shaved off with an electric shaver. He had a funny, sheepish smile on his face. He looked like Elmer Fudd in The Wacky Wabbit.
—
Predawn.
Still no Saddam Hussain.
The kidnapper looked down from her window a little impatiently.
A text message on her phone:
Let’s unite on International Yoga Day for poolside candlelight yoga and meditation by Guru Hanumant Bhardwaj
She tapped out a reply:
Please let’s not.
Right beside the school gate on which a painted nurse was giving a painted baby a painted polio vaccination, a circle of sleepy women, migrant workers from roadworks nearby, stood around a tiny boy as he squatted like a comma on the edge of an open manhole. The women leaned on their shovels and
pickaxes as they waited for their star to perform. The comma had his eyes fixed on one of the women. His mother. The spirit moved him. He made a pool. A yellow leaf. His mother put down her ax and washed his bottom with muddy water from an old Bisleri bottle. With the leftover water she washed her hands, and washed the yellow leaf into the manhole. Nothing in the city belonged to the women. Not a tiny plot of land, not a hovel in a slum, not a tin sheet over their heads. Not even the sewage system. But now they had made a direct, unorthodox deposit, an express delivery straight into the system. Maybe it marked the beginning of a foothold in the city. The comma’s mother gathered him in her arms, slung her ax across her shoulder, and the little contingent left.
The street was empty.
And then, as though he had been waiting for the women to leave before making his entry, Saddam Hussain appeared. In the following order:
Sound
Sight
Smell (stench).
The yellow municipal truck turned into the little service lane and parked a few houses away. Saddam Hussain swung out of the passenger seat (with the same flamboyance with which he usually swung off his horse), his gaze already scanning the second-floor window of Tilo’s building. Tilo put her head out and signaled that the gate was open and that he should come up.
She met him at the door with a packed suitcase, a baby and a box file full of strawberry cake. Comrade Laali greeted Saddam on the landing as though she was being reunited with a lost lover. She held her head steady and wagged the rest of her body from side to side, her ears flattened, her eyes slanting coquettishly.
“Is she yours?” Saddam asked Tilo after they had introduced themselves to each other. “We can take her, there’s plenty of room where we are going.”
“She has puppies.”
“Arre, where’s the problem…?”
He gently pushed the puppies off the sack they lay on, opened it and dropped them in—a bunch of squealing, squirming brinjals. Tilo locked her door and the little procession trooped down the stairs and into the street.
Saddam with a packed suitcase and a sack full of puppies.
Tilo with a baby and a box file.
And Comrade Laali trailing her newfound love with unashamed devotion.
—
The driver’s cabin was as big as a small hotel room. Neeraj Kumar the driver and Saddam Hussain were old friends. Saddam (master of forethought and attention to detail) placed a wooden fruit crate near the door of the truck. A makeshift step. Comrade Laali jumped in, followed by Tilo and Miss Jebeen the Second. They sat at the back, on a red Rexine bunk bed that truck drivers slept on during long-haul drives when they were tired and the stand-in driver took the wheel. (Municipal garbage trucks never went on long-haul drives, but they had the bunk beds anyway.) Saddam sat in front, on the passenger seat. He placed the puppy sack between his feet, opened it up for air, put on his sunglasses, rapped the passenger door twice, like a bus conductor, and they were off.
The yellow truck blazed a trail through the city, leaving the stench of burst cow in its wake. This time, unlike the last journey Saddam had made with similar cargo, he was in a municipal truck in the capital of the country. Gujarat ka Lalla was still a year away from taking the throne, the saffron parakeets were still biding their time, waiting in the wings. So temporarily, it was safe.
The truck rattled past the row of car-repair shops, the men and dogs covered in grease, still asleep outside.
Past a market, a Sikh Gurdwara, another market. Past a hospital with patients and their families camped on the road outside. Past jostling crowds at the 24x7 chemists. Over a flyover, the street lights still on.
Past the Garden City with lush, landscaped roundabouts.
As it drove on, the gardens disappeared, the roads grew bumpy and potholed, the pavements grew crowded with sleeping bodies. Dogs, goats, cows, humans. Parked cycle rickshaws stacked one behind the other like the vertebrae in a serpent’s skeleton.
The truck stank its way under crumbling stone arches and past the ramparts of the Red Fort. It skirted the old city and arrived at Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services.
—
Anjum was waiting for them—an ecstatic smile shining out from among the tombstones.
She was splendidly dressed, in the sequins and satin of her glory days. She wore make-up and lipstick, she had dyed her hair and pinned on a thick, long, black plait with a red ribbon woven into it. She enveloped both Tilo and Miss Jebeen in a bear hug, kissing both of them several times.
She had organized a Welcome Home party. Jannat Guest House was decorated with balloons and streamers.
The guests, all splendidly dressed, were: Zainab, a plump eighteen-year-old now, studying fashion design at a local polytechnic, Saeeda (soberly dressed in a sari, in addition to being Ustad of the Khwabgah, she headed an NGO that worked on transgender rights), Nimmo Gorakhpuri (who had driven in from Mewat with three kilos of fresh mutton for the party), Ishrat-the-Beautiful (who had extended her visit), Roshan Lal (who remained poker-faced), Imam Ziauddin (who tickled Miss Jebeen with his beard, and then blessed her and said a prayer). Ustad Hameed played the harmonium and welcomed her in Raag Tilak Kamod:
Ae ri sakhi mora piya ghar aaye
Bagh laga iss aangan ko
O my companions, my love has come home
This bare yard has blossomed into a garden
Saddam and Anjum showed Tilo to the room they had readied for her on the ground floor. She would share it with Comrade Laali and family, Miss Jebeen and Ahlam Baji’s grave. Payal-the-mare was tethered outside the window. The room was festooned with streamers and balloons. Unsure of what arrangements to make for a woman, a real woman, from the Duniya—and not just the Duniya but the South Delhi Duniya—they had opted for a hairdressing-salon type of décor—a dressing table from a second-hand furniture market fitted out with a large mirror. A metal trolley on which there was a range of bottles of different shades of Lakmé nail polish and lipstick, a comb, a hairbrush, rollers, a hairdryer and a bottle of shampoo. Nimmo Gorakhpuri had brought her lifetime’s collection of fashion magazines from her home in Mewat and arranged them in tall piles on a large coffee table. Next to the bed was a baby cot with a big teddy bear propped up on the pillow. (The controversial subject of where Miss Jebeen the Second would sleep and who would be called Mummy—not “badi Mummy” or “chhoti Mummy,” but Mummy—would be raised later. It would be easily resolved because Tilo conceded to Anjum’s demands quite happily.) Anjum introduced Tilo to Ahlam Baji as though Ahlam Baji were still alive. She recounted her accomplishments and achievements and listed the names of some of Shahjahanabad’s luminaries that she had helped bring into the world—Akbar Mian the baker, maker of the best sheermal in the walled city, Jabbar Bhai the tailor, Sabiha Alvi, whose daughter had just started a Benarasi Sari Emporium in the first-floor room of their house. Anjum spoke as though it was a world that Tilo was familiar with, a world that everybody ought to be familiar with; in fact, the only world worth being familiar with.
For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accommodate all its organs.
The first ever hotel that had come up in the small town she grew up in was called Hotel Anjali. The street hoardings that advertised this exciting new development said Come to Anjali for the Rest of Your Life. The pun had been unintentional, but as a child she had always imagined that Hotel Anjali was full of the corpses of its unsuspecting guests who had been murdered in their sleep and would remain there for the rest of their (dead) lives. In the case of Jannat Guest House, Tilo felt that that tagline would have been not just appropriate, but comforting. Instinct told her that she may finally have found a home for the Rest of Her Life.
Dawn had just broken when the feasting began. Anjum had shopped all day (for meat and toys and furniture) and cooked all night.
On the menu was:
Mutton Korma
Mutton Biryani
Brain Curry
Kashmiri Rogan Jos
h
Fried Liver
Shami Kebab
Nan
Tandoori Roti
Sheermal
Phirni
Watermelon with black salt.
The addicts and homeless people from the periphery of the graveyard gathered in the yard to partake of the feast and merriment. Payal snuffled up a substantial serving of phirni. Dr. Azad Bhartiya arrived a little late, but to great applause and affection for having coordinated the escape and homecoming. His indefinite fast had entered its eleventh year, third month and twenty-fifth day. He would not eat, but settled for a deworming pill and a glass of water.
A few kebabs and some biryani were kept aside for the municipal officers who would surely come by later in the day.
“Those fellows are just like us Hijras,” Anjum said and laughed affectionately. “Somehow they smell a celebration and arrive to demand their share.”
Biroo and Comrade Laali feasted on bones and leftovers. As a matter of abundant caution, Zainab sequestered the pups in a place that was inaccessible to Biroo and spent hours delighting in them and flirting outrageously with Saddam Hussain.