None of the municipal officers who visited her was man enough to take the matter further and run the risk of being embarrassed by her legendary abilities. Also, like everyone else, they feared being cursed by a Hijra. So they chose the path of appeasement and petty extortion. They settled on a not-inconsiderable sum of money to be paid to them, along with a non-vegetarian meal, on Diwali as well as Eid. And they agreed that if the house expanded the sum would expand proportionately.
Over time Anjum began to enclose the graves of her relatives and build rooms around them. Each room had a grave (or two) and a bed. Or two. She built a separate bathhouse and a toilet with its own septic tank. For water she used the public handpump. Imam Ziauddin, who was being unkindly treated by his son and daughter-in-law, soon became a permanent guest. He rarely went home any more. Anjum began to rent a couple of rooms to down-and-out travelers (the publicity was strictly by word of mouth). There weren’t all that many takers because obviously the setting and landscape, to say nothing of the innkeeper herself, were not to everybody’s taste. Also, it must be said, not all the takers were to the innkeeper’s taste. Anjum was whimsical and irrational about whom she admitted and whom she turned away—often with unwarranted and entirely unreasonable rudeness that bordered on abuse (Who sent you here? Go fuck yourself in the arse), and sometimes with an unearthly, savage roar.
The advantage of the guest house in the graveyard was that unlike every other neighborhood in the city, including the most exclusive ones, it suffered no power cuts. Not even in the summer. This was because Anjum stole her electricity from the mortuary, where the corpses required round-the-clock refrigeration. (The city’s paupers who lay there in air-conditioned splendor had never experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.) Anjum called her guest house Jannat. Paradise. She kept her TV on night and day. She said she needed the noise to steady her mind. She watched the news diligently and became an astute political analyst. She also watched Hindi soap operas and English film channels. She particularly enjoyed B-grade Hollywood vampire movies and watched the same ones over and over again. She couldn’t understand the dialogue of course, but she understood the vampires reasonably well.
Gradually Jannat Guest House became a hub for Hijras who, for one reason or another, had fallen out of, or been expelled from, the tightly administered grid of Hijra Gharanas. As word spread about the new guest house in the graveyard, friends from the past reappeared, most incredibly, Nimmo Gorakhpuri. When they first met, Anjum and she held each other and wept like star-crossed sweethearts reunited after a long separation. Nimmo became a regular visitor, often spending two or three days at a stretch with Anjum. She had grown into a resplendent figure, large, jeweled, perfumed and immaculately groomed. She came in her own little white Maruti 800 from Mewat, a two-hour drive from Delhi, where she owned two flats and a small farm. She had become a goat-magnate who traded in exotic goats that she sold for serious money to wealthy Muslims in Delhi and Bombay for slaughter on Bakr-Eid. She chuckled as she told her old friend the tricks of the trade and described the spurious techniques of overnight goat-fattening and the politics of goat-pricing in the pre-Eid goat-market. She said that from next year her business would go online. Anjum and she agreed that for old times’ sake they would celebrate the next Bakr-Eid together in the graveyard with the best specimen in Nimmo’s stock. She showed Anjum goat portraits on her swanky new mobile phone. She was as obsessed with goats as she had once been with Western women’s fashion. She showed Anjum how to tell a Jamnapari from a Barbari, an Etawa from a Sojat. Then she showed her an MMS of a rooster who seemed to say “Ya Allah!” each time he flapped his wings. Anjum was floored. Even a simple rooster knew! From that day onwards her faith deepened.
True to her word, Nimmo Gorakhpuri presented Anjum with a young black ram with biblical, curled horns—the same model, Nimmo said, as the one Hazrat Ibrahim had sacrificed on the mountain in place of his only begotten son, Ishaq, except that theirs was white. Anjum put the ram in a room of his own (with a grave of his own) and reared him lovingly. She tried to love him just as much as Ibrahim had loved Ishaq. Love, after all, is the ingredient that separates a sacrifice from ordinary, everyday butchery. She wove him a tinsel collar and put bells on his ankles. He loved her too, and followed her wherever she went. (She took care to take the bells off his ankles and conceal him from Zainab when she visited, because she knew what that would lead to.) By the time Eid came around that year, the old city was teeming with retired camels with faded tattoos, buffaloes and goats as big as small horses, waiting to be slaughtered. Anjum’s ram was full-grown, almost four feet tall, all lean meat and muscle and slanting yellow eyes. People came to the graveyard just to have a look at him.
Anjum booked Imran Qureishi, the rising star among the new crop of young butchers in Shahjahanabad, to perform the sacrifice. He had several prior bookings and said he would not be able to come until late afternoon. When the day of Bakr-Eid dawned, Anjum knew that unless she went to the old city and brought him herself, interlopers would snatch him away out of turn. Dressed as a man, in a clean, ironed Pathan suit, she spent the whole morning trailing Imran from house to house, street corner to street corner while he went about his business. His last appointment was with a politician, a former member of the Legislative Assembly, who had lost the previous election by an embarrassing margin of votes. To minimize his defeat and show his constituency that he was already preparing for the next election, he had decided to put on an opulent display of piety. A sleek, fat water buffalo, her skin oiled and shining, was dragged through the narrow streets that were only as wide as she was, to a crossing where there was some room for maneuver. Positioned diagonally, tethered to a lamp post with her front legs hobbled, she just about fitted into what passed off as a street crossing. Excited people, dressed in new clothes, crowded doorways, windows, little balconies and terraces to watch Imran perform the sacrifice. He arrived, making his way through the crowd, slim, quiet, unassuming. As the murmur of the crowd grew louder the buffalo’s skin twitched and her eyes began to roll. Her huge head with its horns that swept backwards in an oblong arc began to sway back and forth, as though she was in a trance at a classical music concert. With a deft judo move Imran and his helper rolled her over on to her side. In a moment he had cut open her jugular and ducked out of the way of the fountain of blood that pumped up into the air, its rhythm matching the beating of her failing heart. Blood sprayed across the downed shutters of shops, on to the faces of smiling politicians on the tattered old posters pasted on the walls. It flowed down the street past parked motorcycles, scooters, rickshaws and cycles. Little girls in jeweled slippers squealed and stepped out of its way. Little boys pretended not to mind and the more naughty ones stamped their feet softly in the red puddles and admired their bloody shoe-prints. It took a while for the buffalo to bleed to death. When she did, Imran opened her up and laid her organs out on the street—heart, spleen, stomach, liver, entrails. Since the street sloped downwards, they began to slip away like odd-shaped boats on a river of blood. Imran’s helper rescued them and put them on more even ground. The skinning and cutting-up would be done by the supporting cast. The superstar wiped his cleaver on a piece of cloth, scanned the crowd, caught Anjum’s eye and nodded imperceptibly. He slipped through the crowd and walked away. Anjum caught up with him at the next chowk. The streets were busy. Goatskins, goat horns, goat skulls, goat brains and goat offal were being collected, separated and stacked. Shit was being extruded from intestines that would then be properly cleaned and boiled down into soap and glue. Cats were making off with delectable booty. Nothing went to waste.