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 story. 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.