By the time the body had been bathed, dried, perfumed and wrapped in a shroud, Saddam, with the help of two of the addicts, had dug a respectably deep grave. Imam Ziauddin said the prayers and Rubina’s body was interred. Anwar Bhai, relieved and grateful, pressed five hundred rupees on Anjum. She refused to take it. Saddam refused too. But he was not one to pass up a business opportunity.
Within a week Jannat Guest House began to function as a funeral parlor. It had a proper bathhouse with an asbestos roof and a cement platform for bodies to be laid out on. There was a steady supply of gravestones, shrouds, perfumed Multani clay (which most people preferred to soap) and bucket-water. There was a resident imam on call night and day. The rules for the dead (same as for the living in the guest house) were esoteric—warm, welcoming smiles or irrational roars of rejection, depending on nobody-really-knew-what. The one clear criterion was that Jannat Funeral Services would only bury those whom the graveyards and imams of the Duniya had rejected. Sometimes days went by with no funerals and sometimes there was a glut. Their record was five in one day. Sometimes the police themselves—whose rules were as irrational as Anjum’s—brought bodies to them.
When Ustad Kulsoom Bi passed away in her sleep she was buried in grand fashion in the Hijron Ka Khanqah in Mehrauli. But Bombay Silk was buried in Anjum’s graveyard. And so were many other Hijras from all over Delhi.
(In this way, Imam Ziauddin finally received the answer to his long-ago question: “Tell me, you people, when you die, where do they bury you? Who bathes the bodies? Who says the prayers?”)
Gradually Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services became so much a part of the landscape that nobody questioned its provenance or its right to exist. It existed. And that was that. When Jahanara Begum died at the age of eighty-seven, Imam Ziauddin said the prayers. She was buried next to Mulaqat Ali. Bismillah, when she died, was buried in Anjum’s graveyard too. And so was Zainab’s goat, who could have made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for accomplishing an unheard-of feat (for a goat): dying of natural causes (colic) after surviving a record sixteen Bakr-Eids in Shahjahanabad. The credit for that of course belonged not to him, but to his fierce little mistress. Of course the Guinness Book had no such category.
—
Though Anjum and Saddam shared the same home (and graveyard), they rarely spent time together. Anjum enjoyed lazing around, but Saddam, stretched between his many enterprises (he had sold his pigeon-feed business, it being the least remunerative), had no time to spare and hated TV. On one unusual morning of enforced leisure Anjum and he sat on an old red taxi seat that they used as a sofa, drinking tea and watching TV. It was the 15th of August, Independence Day. The timid little Prime Minister who had replaced the lisping Poet–Prime Minister (the party he belonged to did not officially believe India was a Hindu Nation) was addressing the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort. It was one of those days when the insularity of the walled city had been invaded by the rest of Delhi. Massive crowds organized by the Ruling Party filled the Ramlila grounds. Five thousand schoolchildren dressed in the colors of the national flag did a flower drill. Petty influence-peddlers and smallwigs who wanted to be seen on TV seated themselves in the front rows so they could convert their visible proximity to power into business deals. A few years ago, when the lisping Poet–Prime Minister and his party of bigots were voted out of office, Anjum had rejoiced and lavished something close to adoration on the timid, blue-turbaned Sikh economist who replaced him. The fact that he had all the political charisma of a trapped rabbit only enhanced her adulation. But of late she had decided that it was true what people said—that he really was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings. His ineffectualness was strengthening the forces of darkness that had begun to mass on the horizon and slouch through the streets once again. Gujarat ka Lalla was still the Chief Minister of Gujarat. He had developed a swagger and begun to talk a lot about avenging centuries of Muslim Rule. In every public speech, he always found a way to bring in the measurement of his chest (fifty-six inches). For some odd reason it did seem to impress people. There were rumors that he was getting ready for his “March to Delhi.” On the subject of Gujarat ka Lalla, Saddam and Anjum were in perfect sync.
Anjum watched the Trapped Rabbit—who barely had a chest at all—standing in his bulletproof enclosure with the Red Fort looming behind him, reeling off dense statistics about imports and exports to a restive crowd that had no idea what he was talking about. He spoke like a marionette. Only his lower jaw moved. Nothing else did. His bushy white eyebrows looked as though they were attached to his spectacles and not his face. His expression never changed. At the end of his speech he raised his hand in a limp salute and signed off with a high, reedy Jai Hind! (Victory to India!) A soldier, who was almost seven feet tall and had a bristling mustache as broad as the wingspan of a baby albatross, unsheathed his sword from its scabbard and shouted a salute at the little Prime Minister, who seemed to shudder in fright. When he walked away, only his legs moved, nothing else did. Anjum switched off the TV in disgust.
“Let’s go up to the roof,” Saddam said hastily, sensing the approach of one of her moods, which usually spelled trouble for everybody within a half-kilometer range.
He went on ahead and put out an old rug and a few hard pillows with flowered pillowcases that smelled of rancid hair oil. There was a hint of a breeze and the Independence Day kite-flyers were already out. There were some kite-flyers in the graveyard too, not doing too badly. Anjum arrived with a saucepan of fresh, hot tea and a transistor. Saddam and she lay down, staring up (Saddam in his sunglasses) at the dirty sky dotted with bright paper kites. Lolling next to them, as though he too had decided to take a day off after a hard, working week, was Biroo (sometimes called Roobi), a dog Saddam had found wandering down the pavement of a busy road, wild-eyed and disoriented, with a mess of transparent tubes dangling out of him. Biroo was a beagle who had either escaped from or outlived his purpose in a pharmaceuticals testing lab. He looked worn and rubbed out, like a drawing someone had tried to erase. The usually rich black, white and tan beagle colors were dimmed by a smoky, greyish patina that may of course have had nothing to do with the drugs that were tested on him. When Biroo first came to live in Jannat Guest House he was troubled by frequent epileptic fits and snorting, debilitating reverse sneezes. Each time he recovered from the exhaustion of a seizure, he emerged as a different character—sometimes friendly, sometimes horny, sometimes sleepy, sometimes snarly or lazy—as unreasonable and unpredictable as his adopted mistress. Over time his fits had grown less frequent and he had stabilized into what became his more or less permanent Lazy Dog avatar. The reverse sneezes lived on.
Anjum poured a little tea into a saucer and blew into it to cool it down for him. He slurped it up noisily. He drank everything Anjum drank, ate everything that she ate—biryani, korma, samosas, halwa, falooda, phirni, zamzam, mangoes in summer, oranges in winter. It was terrible for his body, but excellent for his soul.