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.
“So we are remembered as the forgotten ones?” Ustad Kulsoom Bi said. “Wah! Wah!”
Anjum remembered her first visit to the Red Fort vividly for reasons of her own. It was her first outing after she had recovered from Dr. Mukhtar’s surgery. While they queued for tickets most people gawked at the foreign tourists, who had a separate queue and more expensive tickets. The foreign tourists in turn gawked at the Hijras—at Anjum in particular. A young man, a hippy with a piercing gaze and a wispy Jesus beard, looked at her admiringly. She looked back at him. In her imagination he became Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed. She pictured him standing proud and naked, a slim, slight figure, before the jury of malevolent bearded Qazis, not flinching even when they sentenced him to death. She was a little taken aback when the tourist walked up to her.
“You are fery beautiful,” he said. “A photo? May I?”
It was the first time anybody had ever wanted to photograph her. Flattered, she threw her red-ribboned braid over her shoulder coyly and looked at Ustad Kulsoom Bi for permission. It was granted. So she posed for the photograph, leaning awkwardly against the sandstone ramparts, her shoulders thrown back and her chin tilted up, brazen and timorous all at once.
“Sankyou,” the young man said. “Sankyou very much.”
She never saw it, but it was the beginning of something, that photograph.
Where was it now? God only knew.
—
Anjum’s drifting mind returned to the meeting in Ustad Kulsoom Bi’s room.
It was the decadence and indiscipline of our Rulers that brought ruin on the Mughal Empire, Ustad Kulsoom Bi was saying. Princes frolicking with slave women, emperors running around naked, living lives of opulence while their people starved—how could an empire like that have hoped to survive? Why should it have survived? (Nobody who had heard her playing Prince Salim in Mughal-e-Azam would have guessed that she disapproved of him so thoroughly. Nor would anybody have suspected that, notwithstanding her pride about the Khwabgah’s vintage and its proximity to royalty, she harbored a socialist’s anger about the Mughal Rulers’ profligacy and their people’s penury.) She then went on to make a case for principled living and iron discipline, the two things that according to her were the hallmark of the Khwabgah—its strength and the reason it had survived through the ages, while stronger, grander things had perished.
Ordinary people in the Duniya—what did they know about what it takes to live the life of a Hijra? What did they know about the rules, the discipline and the sacrifices? Who today knew that there had been times when all of them, including she, Ustad Kulsoom Bi herself, had been driven to begging for alms at traffic lights? That they had built themselves up, bit by bit, humiliation by humiliation, from there? The Khwabgah was called Khwabgah, Ustad Kulsoom Bi said, because it was where special people, blessed people, came with their dreams that could not be realized in the Duniya. In the Khwabgah, Holy Souls trapped in the wrong bodies were liberated. (The question of what would happen if the Holy Soul were a man trapped in a woman’s body was not addressed.)
However, Ustad Kulsoom Bi said, however—and the pause that followed was one that was worthy of the lisping Poet–Prime Minister—the central edict of the Khwabgah was manzoori. Consent. People in the Duniya spread wicked rumors about Hijras kidnapping little boys and castrating them. She did not know and could not say whether these things happened elsewhere, but in the Khwabgah, as the Almighty was witness, nothing happened without manzoori.
She then turned to the specific subject at hand. The Almighty has sent our Anjum back to us, she said. She won’t tell us what happened to her and Zakir Mian in Gujarat and we cannot force her to. All we can do is surmise. And sympathize. But in our sympathy we cannot allow our principles to be compromised. Forcing a little girl to live as a boy against her wishes, even for the sake of her own safety, is to incarcerate her, not liberate her. There is no question of that happening in our Khwabgah. No question at all.
“She’s my child,” Anjum said. “I will decide. I can leave this place and go away with her if I want to.”
Far from being perturbed by this declaration, everybody was actually relieved to see a sign that the old drama queen in Anjum was alive and well. They had no reason to worry because she had absolutely nowhere to go.
“You can do as you like, but the child will stay here,” Ustad Kulsoom Bi said.
“All this time you spoke about manzoori, now you want to decide on her behalf?” Anjum said. “We’ll ask her. Zainab will want to come with me.”
Talking back to Ustad Kulsoom Bi in this way was considered unacceptable. Even for someone who had survived a massacre. Everybody waited for the reaction.
Ustad Kulsoom Bi closed her eyes and asked for the rolled-up razai to be removed from behind her. Suddenly tired, she turned to the wall and curled up, using the crook of her arm as a pillow. With her eyes still shut and her voice sounding as though it was coming from far away, she instructed Anjum to see Dr. Bhagat and to make sure that she took the medicines he prescribed.
The meeting ended. The members dispersed. The Petromax lantern was carried out of the room hissing like an annoyed cat.
ANJUM HADN’T MEANT what she said, but having said it, the idea of leaving took hold and coiled around her like a python.
She refused to go to Dr. Bhagat, so a little delegation headed by Saeeda went on her behalf. Dr. Bhagat was a small man with a clipped military mustache who smelled overwhelmingly of Pond’s Dreamflower talcum powder. He had a quick, birdy manner and a way of interrupting his patients as well as himself every few minutes with a dry, nervous sniff accompanied by three staccato taps of his pen on the tabletop. His forearms were covered with thick black hair but his head was more or less hairless. He had shaved a broad strip of hair off his left wrist, over which he wore a tennis player’s toweling sweatband, over which he wore his heavy gold watch so that he had a clear, unobscured view of the time. That morning he was dressed the way he dressed every day—in a spotless white terry cotton safari suit and shiny white sandals. A clean white towel hung over the back of his chair. His clinic was in a shithole locality, but he was a very clean man. And a good one too.
The delegation trooped in and sat down on what chairs were available, some perched on the arms of the others’ chairs. Dr. Bhagat was used to seeing his patients from the Khwabgah in twos and threes (they never came alone). He was a little taken aback at the multitude that descended on him that morning.
“Which one of you is the patient?”
“None of us, Doctor Sahib.”