Every day Anjum, new to the news, watched TV reports about bomb blasts and terrorist attacks that suddenly proliferated like malaria. The Urdu papers carried stories of young Muslim boys being killed in what the police called “encounters,” or being caught red-handed in the act of planning terrorist strikes and arrested. A new law was passed which allowed suspects to be detained without trial for months. In no time at all the prisons were full of young Muslim men. Anjum thanked the Almighty that Zainab was a girl. It was so much safer.
As winter set in, the Bandicoot developed a deep, chesty cough. Anjum gave her teaspoons of warm milk with turmeric and kept awake at night listening to her asthmatic wheeze, feeling utterly helpless. She visited the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya and spoke to one of the less mercenary Khadims whom she knew well about Zainab’s illness and asked him how she could neutralize Saeeda’s sifli jaadu. Matters had got out of control, she explained, and now that it concerned much more than the fate of one little girl, she, Anjum, who was the only one who knew what the problem was, had a responsibility. She was prepared to go to any lengths to do what needed to be done. She was prepared to pay any price, she said, even if it meant going to the gallows. Saeeda had to be stopped. She needed the Khadim’s blessings. She became theatrical and emotional, people began to stare and the Khadim had to calm her down. He asked her whether she had visited the dargah of Hazrat Gharib Nawaz in Ajmer since Zainab had come into her life. When she said that for one reason or another she hadn’t been able to, he told her that that was the problem, not anybody’s sifli jaadu. He was a little stern with her about allowing herself to believe in witchcraft and voodoo when Hazrat Gharib Nawaz was there to protect her. Anjum was not wholly convinced, but agreed that not visiting Ajmer Sharif for three years had been a serious lapse on her part.
It was late February by the time Zainab recovered enough for Anjum to feel that she could leave her for a few days. Zakir Mian, the Proprietor and Managing Director of A-1 Flower, agreed to travel with Anjum. Zakir Mian was a friend of Mulaqat Ali’s and had known Anjum since she was born. He was in his mid-seventies now, too old to be embarrassed about being seen traveling with a Hijra. His shop, A-1 Flower, was basically a hip-high cement platform, a meter square, located under the balcony of Anjum’s old home, at the corner where Chitli Qabar opened into the Matia Mahal Chowk. Zakir Mian had rented it from Mulaqat Ali—and now from Saqib—and had run A-1 Flower from there for more than fifty years. He sat on a piece of burlap all day, making garlands out of red roses and (separately) out of brand-new currency notes that he folded into tiny fans or little birds, for bridegrooms to wear on the day of their nikah. His main challenge was and had always been to keep the roses fresh and damp and the currency notes crisp and dry within the small space of his shop. Zakir Mian said he needed to go to Ajmer and then on to Ahmedabad in Gujarat where he had some business with his wife’s family. Anjum was prepared to travel with him to Ahmedabad rather than risk the harassment and humiliation (of being seen as well as of being unseen) that she would have to endure if she traveled back on her own from Ajmer. Zakir Mian, for his part, was frail now, and happy to have someone to help him with his luggage. He suggested that while they were in Ahmedabad they could visit the shrine of Wali Dakhani, the seventeenth-century Urdu poet, known as the Poet of Love, whom Mulaqat Ali had been immensely fond of, and seek his blessings too. They sealed their travel plans by laughingly reciting a couplet by him—one of Mulaqat Ali’s favorites:
Jisey ishq ka tiir kaari lage
Usey zindagi kyuun na bhari lage
For one struck down by Cupid’s bow
Life becomes burdensome, isn’t that so?
A few days later they set off by train. They spent two days in Ajmer Sharif. Anjum pushed her way through the press of devotees and bought a green-and-gold chadar for one thousand rupees as an offering to Hazrat Gharib Nawaz in Zainab’s name. She called the Khwabgah from public payphones on both days. On the third day, anxious about Zainab, she called again from the Ajmer railway station platform just before she boarded the Gharib Nawaz Express to Ahmedabad. After that there was no news either from her or from Zakir Mian. His son called his mother’s family home in Ahmedabad. The phone was dead.
THOUGH THEY HAD NO NEWS from Anjum, the news from Gujarat was horrible. A railway coach had been set on fire by what the newspapers first called “miscreants.” Sixty Hindu pilgrims were burned alive. They were on their way home from a trip to Ayodhya where they had carried ceremonial bricks to lay in the foundations of a grand Hindu temple they wanted to construct at the site where an old mosque once stood. The mosque, the Babri Masjid, had been brought down ten years earlier by a screaming mob. A senior cabinet member (who was in the Opposition then, and had watched as the screaming mob tore down the mosque) said the burning of the train definitely looked like the work of Pakistani terrorists. The police arrested hundreds of Muslims—all auxiliary Pakistanis from their point of view—from the area around the railway station under the new terrorism law and threw them into prison. The Chief Minister of Gujarat, a loyal member of the Organization (as were the Home Minister and the Prime Minister), was, at the time, up for re-election. He appeared on TV in a saffron kurta with a slash of vermilion on his forehead, and with cold, dead eyes ordered that the burnt bodies of the Hindu pilgrims be brought to Ahmedabad, the capital of the state, where they were to be put on display for the general public to pay their respects. A weaselly “unofficial spokesperson” announced unofficially that every action would be met with an equal and opposite reaction. He didn’t acknowledge Newton of course, because, in the prevailing climate, the officially sanctioned position was that ancient Hindus had invented all science.
The “reaction,” if indeed that is what it was, was neither equal nor opposite. The killing went on for weeks and was not confined to cities alone. The mobs were armed with swords and tridents and wore saffron headbands. They had cadastral lists of Muslim homes, businesses and shops. They had stockpiles of gas cylinders (which seemed to explain the gas shortage of the previous few weeks). When people who had been injured were taken to hospital, mobs attacked the hospitals. The police would not register murder cases. They said, quite reasonably, that they needed to see the corpses. The catch was that the police were often part of the mobs, and once the mobs had finished their business, the corpses no longer resembled corpses.
Nobody disagreed when Saeeda (who loved Anjum and was entirely unaware of Anjum’s suspicions about her) suggested that the soap operas on TV be switched off and the news be switched on and left on in case, by some small chance, they could pick up a clue about what might have happened to Anjum and Zakir Mian. When flushed, animated TV news reporters shouted out their Pieces-to-Camera from the refugee camps where tens of thousands of Gujarat’s Muslims now lived, in the Khwabgah they switched off the sound and scanned the background hoping to catch a glimpse of Anjum and Zakir Mian lining up for food or blankets, or huddled in a tent. They learned in passing that Wali Dakhani’s shrine had been razed to the ground and a tarred road built over it, erasing every sign that it had ever existed. (Neither the police nor the mobs nor the Chief Minister could do anything about the people who continued to leave flowers in the middle of the new tarred road where the shrine used to be. When the flowers were crushed to paste under the wheels of fast cars, new flowers would appear. And what can anybody do about the connection between flower-paste and poetry?) Saeeda called every journalist and NGO worker she knew and begged him or her to help. Nobody came up with anything. Weeks went by with no news. Zainab recovered from her bout of illnesses and went back to school, but outside school hours she was querulous and clung to Saeeda night and day.
TWO MONTHS LATER, when the murdering had grown sporadic and was more or less tailing off, Zakir Mian’s eldest son, Mansoor, went on his third trip to Ahmedabad to look for his father. As a precaution he shaved off his beard and wore red puja threads on his wrist, hoping to pass off as Hindu. He never found his father, although he did
learn what had happened to him. His inquiries led him to a small refugee camp inside a mosque on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, where he found Anjum in the men’s section, and brought her back to the Khwabgah.
She had had a haircut. What was left of her hair now sat on her head like a helmet with ear muffs. She was dressed like a junior bureaucrat in a pair of dark brown men’s terry cotton trousers and a checked, short-sleeved safari shirt. She had lost a good deal of weight.
Zainab, though momentarily a little frightened by Anjum’s new, manly appearance, got over her fear and propelled herself into her arms shrieking her delight. Anjum held her close, but responded to the tears and questions and welcoming embraces of the others impassively, as though their greetings were an ordeal that she had no choice but to put up with. They were hurt and a little frightened by her coldness, but uncharacteristically gracious in their empathy and concern.
As soon as she could, Anjum went up to her room. She emerged hours later, in her normal clothes, with lipstick and make-up and a few pretty clips in her hair. It soon became obvious that she did not want to talk about what had happened. She would not answer questions about Zakir Mian. “It was God’s will,” was all she would say.
During Anjum’s absence Zainab had begun to sleep downstairs with Saeeda. She returned to sleeping with Anjum, but Anjum noticed that she had started calling Saeeda “Mummy” too.
“If she’s Mummy, then who am I?” Anjum asked Zainab a few days later. “Nobody has two Mummies.”
“Badi Mummy,” Zainab said. Big Mummy.
Ustad Kulsoom Bi gave instructions that Anjum was to be left in peace to do whatever she wanted, for as long as she wanted.
What Anjum wanted was to be left alone.
She was quiet, disconcertingly so, and spent most of her time with her books. Over the course of a week she taught Zainab to chant something that nobody in the Khwabgah could understand. Anjum said it was a Sanskrit chant, the Gayatri Mantra. She had learned it while she was in the camp in Gujarat. People there said it was good to know so that in mob situations they could recite it to try to pass off as Hindu. Though neither she nor Anjum had any idea what it meant, Zainab picked it up quickly and chanted it happily at least twenty times a day, while she dressed for school, while she packed her books, while she fed her goat:
Om bhur bhuvah svaha
Tat savitur varenyam
Bhargo devasya dhimahi
Dhiyo yo nah pracodayat
One morning Anjum left the house, taking Zainab with her. She returned with a completely transformed Bandicoot. Her hair was cropped short and she was dressed in boy’s clothes; a baby Pathan suit, an embroidered jacket, jootis with toes curled upward like gondolas.
“It’s safer like this,” Anjum said by way of explanation. “Gujarat could come to Delhi any day. We’ll call him Mahdi.”
Zainab’s wailing could be heard all the way down the street—by the chickens in their cages and the puppies in their drains.
—
An emergency meeting was called. It was scheduled during the two hours of regular power cut so that there would be no complaints from anybody about having to miss the serials on TV. Zainab was sent to spend the evening with Hassan Mian’s grandchildren. Her rooster was in his customary snoozing place on a shelf beside the TV. Ustad Kulsoom Bi addressed the meeting propped up on her bed, her back supported by a rolled-up razai. Everyone else sat on the ground. Anjum skulked sullenly in the doorway. In the hissing blue light of the Petromax lantern Kulsoom Bi’s face looked like a dried riverbed, her thinning white hair the receding glacier from which the river once rose. She had put in her uncomfortable set of new dentures for the occasion. She spoke with authority and a great sense of theater. Her words appeared to be directed at the new initiates who had just joined the Khwabgah, but her tone was directed at Anjum.
“This house, this household, has an unbroken history that is as old as this broken city,” she said. “These peeling walls, this leaking roof, this sunny courtyard—all this was once beautiful. These floors were covered with carpets that came straight from Isfahan, the ceilings were decorated with mirrors. When Shahenshah Shah Jahan built the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid, when he built this walled city, he built our little haveli too. For us. Always remember—we are not just any Hijras from any place. We are the Hijras of Shahjahanabad. Our Rulers trusted us enough to put their wives and mothers in our care. Once we roamed freely in their private quarters, the zenana, of the Red Fort. They’re all gone now, those mighty emperors and their queens. But we are still here. Think about that and ask yourselves why that should be.”
The Red Fort had always played a major part in Ustad Kulsoom Bi’s recounting of the history of the Khwabgah. In the old days, when she was able-bodied, a trip to the fort to watch the Sound and Light show was a mandatory part of the initiation rites for new arrivals. They would go in a group, dressed in their best clothes, with flowers in their hair, holding hands, risking life and limb as they plunged through the Chandni Chowk traffic—a confusion of cars, buses, rickshaws and tangas driven by people who somehow managed to be reckless even at an excruciatingly slow speed.
The fort loomed over the old city, a massive sandstone plateau, so vast a part of the skyline that local people had ceased to notice it. Had Ustad Kulsoom Bi not insisted, perhaps nobody from the Khwabgah would ever have worked up the nerve to go in, not even Anjum, who had been born and raised in its shadow. Once they crossed the moat—full of garbage and mosquitoes—and walked through the great gateway, the city ceased to exist. Monkeys with small, mad eyes paraded up and down the towering sandstone ramparts that were built on a scale and with a grace the modern mind could not conceive of. Inside the fort it was a different world, a different time, a different air (that smelled distinctly of marijuana) and a different sky—not a narrow, street-wide strip that was barely visible through a tangle of electric wires, but a boundless one in which kites wheeled, high and quiet, up in the thermals.
The Sound and Light show was an old-government-approved version (the new government had not got its hands on it yet) of the history of the Red Fort and the emperors who had ruled from it for more than two hundred years—from Shah Jahan, who built it, to Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal, who was sent into exile by the British after the failed uprising of 1857. It was the only formal history Ustad Kulsoom Bi knew, though her reading of it may have been more unorthodox than its authors intended. During their visits, she and her little crew would take their place with the rest of the audience, mostly tourists and schoolchildren, on the rows of wooden benches under which dense clouds of mosquitoes lived. To avoid being bitten the audience had to assume a posture of enforced nonchalance and swing their legs through every coronation, war, massacre, victory and defeat.
Ustad Kulsoom Bi’s special area of interest was the mid-eighteenth century, the reign of Emperor Mohammed Shah Rangeela, legendary lover of pleasure, of music and painting—the merriest Mughal of them all. She primed her acolytes to pay particular attention to the year 1739. It began with the thunder of horses’ hooves that came from behind the audience and moved through the fort, faint at first and then louderLouderLOUDER. That was Nadir Shah’s cavalry riding all the way from Persia, galloping through Ghazni, Kabul, Kandahar, Peshawar, Lahore and Sirhind, plundering city after city as it galloped towards Delhi. Emperor Mohammad Shah’s generals warn him of the approaching cataclysm. Unperturbed, he orders the music to play on. At this point in the show the lights in the Diwan-e-Khas, the Hall of Special Audience, would turn lurid. Purple, red, green. The zenana would light up in pink (of course) and echo with the sound of women’s laughter, the rustling of silk, the chhann-chhann-chhann of anklets. Then, suddenly, amidst those soft, happy, lady-sounds would come the clearly audible, deep, distinct, rasping, coquettish giggle of a court eunuch.
“There!” Ustad Kulsoom Bi would say, like a triumphant lepidopterist who has just netted a rare moth. “Did you hear that? That is us. That is our ancestry, our history, our sto
ry. We were never commoners, you see, we were members of the staff of the Royal Palace.”
The moment passed in a heartbeat. But it did not matter. What mattered was that it existed. To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.
Ustad Kulsoom Bi would be furious with anyone who missed the chuckle after all the effort she had put into pointing it out. So furious, in fact, that in order to avoid what could turn into a public spectacle, the newbies were advised by the older ones to pretend they had heard it even if they hadn’t.
Once Gudiya tried to tell her that Hijras had a special place of love and respect in Hindu mythology. She told Kulsoom Bi the story of how, when Lord Ram and his wife, Sita, and his younger brother Laxman were banished for fourteen years from their kingdom, the citizenry, who loved their king, had followed them, vowing to go wherever their king went. When they reached the outskirts of Ayodhya where the forest began, Ram turned to his people and said, “I want all you men and women to go home and wait for me until I return.” Unable to disobey their king, the men and women returned home. Only the Hijras waited faithfully for him at the edge of the forest for the whole fourteen years, because he had forgotten to mention them.