Most of his visitors, brash emissaries of a new ruling class, barely aware of their own youthful hubris, did not completely grasp the layered meaning of the couplet they had been offered, like a snack to be washed down by a thimble-sized cup of thick, sweet tea. They understood of course that it was a dirge for a fallen empire whose international borders had shrunk to a grimy ghetto circumscribed by the ruined walls of an old city. And yes, they realized that it was also a rueful comment on Mulaqat Ali’s own straitened circumstances. What escaped them was that the couplet was a sly snack, a perfidious samosa, a warning wrapped in mourning, being offered with faux humility by an erudite man who had absolute faith in his listeners’ ignorance of Urdu, a language which, like most of those who spoke it, was gradually being ghettoized.
Mulaqat Ali’s passion for poetry was not just a hobby separate from his work as a hakim. He believed that poetry could cure, or at least go a long way towards curing, almost every ailment. He would prescribe poems to his patients the way other hakims prescribed medicine. He could produce a couplet from his formidable repertoire that was eerily apt for every illness, every occasion, every mood and every delicate alteration in the political climate. This habit of his made life around him seem more profound and at the same time less distinctive than it really was. It infused everything with a subtle sense of stagnancy, a sense that everything that happened had happened before. That it had already been written, sung, commented upon and entered into history’s inventory. That nothing new was possible. This could be why young people around him often fled, giggling, when they sensed that a couplet was on its way.
When Jahanara Begum told him about Aftab, perhaps for the first time in his life Mulaqat Ali had no suitable couplet for the occasion. It took him a while to get over the initial shock. When he did, he scolded his wife for not having told him earlier. Times had changed, he said. This was the Modern Era. He was sure that there was a simple medical solution to their son’s problem. They would find a doctor in New Delhi, far away from the whisper and gossip that went on in the mohallas of the old city. The Almighty helps those who help themselves, he told his wife a little sternly.
A week later, dressed in their best clothes, with an unhappy Aftab fitted out in a manly steel-gray Pathan suit with a black embroidered waistcoat, a skullcap and jootis with toes curled like gondolas, they set off for Nizamuddin basti in a horse-drawn tanga. The ostensible purpose of their day out was that they were going to inspect a prospective bride for their nephew Aijaz—the youngest son of Mulaqat Ali’s older brother, Qasim, who had moved to Pakistan after Partition and worked for the Karachi branch of Rooh Afza. The real reason was that they had an appointment with a Dr. Ghulam Nabi, who called himself a “sexologist.”
Dr. Nabi prided himself on being a straight-talking man of precise and scientific temper. After examining Aftab he said he was not, medically speaking, a Hijra—a female trapped in a male body—although for practical purposes that word could be used. Aftab, he said, was a rare example of a Hermaphrodite, with both male and female characteristics, though outwardly, the male characteristics appeared to be more dominant. He said he could recommend a surgeon who would seal the girl-part, sew it up. He could prescribe some pills too. But, he said, the problem was not merely superficial. While treatment would surely help, there would be “Hijra tendencies” that were unlikely to ever go away. (Fitrat was the word he used for “tendencies.”) He could not guarantee complete success. Mulaqat Ali, prepared to grasp at straws, was elated. “Tendencies?” he said. “Tendencies are no problem. Everybody has some tendency or the other…tendencies can always be managed.”
Even though the visit to Dr. Nabi did not provide an immediate solution to what Mulaqat Ali saw as Aftab’s affliction, it benefited Mulaqat Ali a great deal. It gave him coordinates to position himself, to steady his ship that was pitching perilously on an ocean of couplet-less incomprehension. He was now able to convert his anguish into a practical problem and to turn his attention and his energies to something he understood well: How to raise enough money for the surgery?
He cut down on household expenses and drew up lists of people and relatives from whom he could borrow money. Simultaneously, he embarked on the cultural project of inculcating manliness in Aftab. He passed on to him his love of poetry and discouraged the singing of Thumri and Chaiti. He stayed up late into the night, telling Aftab stories about their warrior ancestors and their valor on the battlefield. They left Aftab unmoved. But when he heard the story of how Temujin—Changez Khan—won the hand of his beautiful wife, Borte Khatun, how she was kidnapped by a rival tribe and how Temujin fought a whole army virtually single-handedly to get her back because he loved her so much, Aftab found himself wanting to be her.
While his sisters and brother went to school, Aftab spent hours on the tiny balcony of his home looking down at Chitli Qabar—the tiny shrine of the spotted goat who was said to have had supernatural powers—and the busy street that ran past it and joined the Matia Mahal Chowk. He quickly learned the cadence and rhythm of the neighborhood, which was essentially a stream of Urdu invective—I’ll fuck your mother, go fuck your sister, I swear by your mother’s cock—that was interrupted five times a day by the call to prayer from the Jama Masjid as well as the several other smaller mosques in the old city. As Aftab kept strict vigil, day after day, over nothing in particular, Guddu Bhai, the acrimonious early-morning fishmonger who parked his cart of gleaming fresh fish in the center of the chowk, would, as surely as the sun rose in the east and set in the west, elongate into Wasim, the tall, affable afternoon naan khatai–seller who would then shrink into Yunus, the small, lean, evening fruit-seller, who, late at night, would broaden and balloon into Hassan Mian, the stout vendor of the best mutton biryani in Matia Mahal, which he dished out of a huge copper pot. One spring morning Aftab saw a tall, slim-hipped woman wearing bright lipstick, gold high heels and a shiny, green satin salwar kameez buying bangles from Mir the bangle-seller who doubled up as caretaker of the Chitli Qabar. He stored his stock of bangles inside the tomb every night when he shut shrine and shop. (He had managed to ensure that the working hours coincided.) Aftab had never seen anybody like the tall woman with lipstick. He rushed down the steep stairs into the street and followed her discreetly while she bought goats’ trotters, hairclips, guavas, and had the strap of her sandals fixed.
He wanted to be her.
He followed her down the street all the way to Turkman Gate and stood for a long time outside the blue doorway she disappeared into. No ordinary woman would have been permitted to sashay down the streets of Shahjahanabad dressed like that. Ordinary women in Shahjahanabad wore burqas or at least covered their heads and every part of their body except their hands and feet. The woman Aftab followed could dress as she was dressed and walk the way she did only because she wasn’t a woman. Whatever she was, Aftab wanted to be her. He wanted to be her even more than he wanted to be Borte Khatun. Like her he wanted to shimmer past the meat shops where skinned carcasses of whole goats hung down like great walls of meat; he wanted to simper past the New Life-Style Men’s Hairdressing Salon where Iliyaas the barber cut Liaqat the lean young butcher’s hair and shined it up with Brylcreem. He wanted to put out a hand with painted nails and a wrist full of bangles and delicately lift the gill of a fish to see how fresh it was before bargaining down the price. He wanted to lift his salwar just a little as he stepped over a puddle—just enough to show off his silver anklets.
It was not Aftab’s girl-part that was just an appendage.