“Who’s happy here? It’s all sham and fakery,” Nimmo said laconically, not bothering to look up from the magazine. “No one’s happy here. It’s not possible. Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? I don’t mean you, but grown-ups like you—what makes them unhappy? Price-rise, children’s school-admissions, husbands’ beatings, wives’ cheatings, Hindu-Muslim riots, Indo-Pak war—outside things that settle down eventually. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.”
Aftab desperately wanted to contradict her, to tell her she was dead wrong, because he was happy, happier than he had ever been before. He was living proof that Nimmo Gorakhpuri was wrong, was he not? But he said nothing, because it would have involved revealing himself as not being a “normal people,” which he was not yet prepared to do.
It was only when he turned fourteen, by which time Nimmo had run away from the Khwabgah with a State Transport bus driver (who soon abandoned her and returned to his family), that Aftab fully understood what she meant. His body had suddenly begun to wage war on him. He grew tall and muscular. And hairy. In a panic he tried to remove the hair on his face and body with Burnol—burn ointment that made dark patches on his skin. He then tried Anne French crème hair remover that he purloined from his sisters (he was soon found out because it smelled like an open sewer). He plucked his bushy eyebrows into thin, asymmetrical crescents with a pair of home-made tweezers that looked more like tongs. He developed an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down. He longed to tear it out of his throat. Next came the unkindest betrayal of all—the thing that he could do nothing about. His voice broke. A deep, powerful man’s voice appeared in place of his sweet, high voice. He was repelled by it and scared himself each time he spoke. He grew quiet, and would speak only as a last resort, after he had run out of other options. He stopped singing. When he listened to music, anyone who paid attention would hear a high, barely audible, insect-like hum that seemed to emerge through a pinhole at the top of his head. No amount of persuasion, not even from Ustad Hameed himself, could coax a song out of Aftab. He never sang again, except to mockingly caricature Hindi film songs at ribald Hijra gatherings or when (in their professional capacity) they descended on ordinary people’s celebrations—weddings, births, house-warming ceremonies—dancing, singing in their wild, grating voices, offering their blessings and threatening to embarrass the hosts (by exposing their mutilated privates) and ruin the occasion with curses and a display of unthinkable obscenity unless they were paid a fee. (This is what Razia meant when she said badtameezi, and what Nimmo Gorakhpuri referred to when she said, “We’re jackals who feed off other people’s happiness, we’re Happiness Hunters.” Khushi-khor was the phrase she used.)
Once music forsook Aftab he was left with no reason to continue living in what most ordinary people thought of as the real world—and Hijras called Duniya, the World. One night he stole some money and his sisters’ nicer clothes and moved into the Khwabgah. Jahanara Begum, never known for her shyness, waded in to retrieve him. He refused to leave. She finally left after making Ustad Kulsoom Bi promise that on weekends, at least, Aftab would be made to wear normal boys’ clothes and be sent home. Ustad Kulsoom Bi tried to honor her promise, but the arrangement lasted only for a few months.
And so, at the age of fifteen, only a few hundred yards from where his family had lived for centuries, Aftab stepped through an ordinary doorway into another universe. On his first night as a permanent resident of the Khwabgah, he danced in the courtyard to everybody’s favorite song from everybody’s favorite film—“Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya” from Mughal-e-Azam. The next night at a small ceremony he was presented with a green Khwabgah dupatta and initiated into the rules and rituals that formally made him a member of the Hijra community. Aftab became Anjum, disciple of Ustad Kulsoom Bi of the Delhi Gharana, one of the seven regional Hijra Gharanas in the country, each headed by a Nayak, a Chief, all of them headed by a Supreme Chief.
Though she never visited him there again, for years Jahanara Begum continued to send a hot meal to the Khwabgah every day. The only place where she and Anjum met was at the dargah of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed. There they would sit together for a while, Anjum nearly six feet tall, her head demurely covered in a spangled dupatta, and tiny Jahanara Begum, whose hair had begun to gray under her black burqa. Sometimes, they held hands surreptitiously. Mulaqat Ali for his part was less able to accept the situation. His broken heart never mended. While he continued to give his interviews, he never spoke either privately or publicly of the misfortune that had befallen the dynasty of Changez Khan. He chose to sever all ties with his son. He never met Anjum or spoke to her again. Occasionally they would pass each other on the street and would exchange glances, but never greetings. Never.
Over the years Anjum became Delhi’s most famous Hijra. Film-makers fought over her, NGOs hoarded her, foreign correspondents gifted her phone number to one another as a professional favor, along with numbers of the Bird Hospital, Phoolan Devi, the surrendered dacoit known as “Bandit Queen,” and a contact for the Begum of Oudh who lived in an old ruin in the Ridge Forest with her servants and her chandeliers while she staked her claim to a nonexistent kingdom. In interviews Anjum would be encouraged to talk about the abuse and cruelty that her interlocutors assumed she had been subjected to by her conventional Muslim parents, siblings and neighbors before she left home. They were invariably disappointed when she told them how much her mother and father had loved her and how she had been the cruel one. “Others have horrible stories, the kind you people like to write about,” she would say. “Why not talk to them?” But of course newspapers didn’t work that way. She was the chosen one. It had to be her, even if her story was slightly altered to suit readers’ appetites and expectations.
Once she became a permanent resident of the Khwabgah, Anjum was finally able to dress in the clothes she longed to wear—the sequined, gossamer kurtas and pleated Patiala salwars, shararas, ghararas, silver anklets, glass bangles and dangling earrings. She had her nose pierced and wore an elaborate, stone-studded nose-pin, outlined her eyes with kohl and blue eye shadow and gave herself a luscious, bow-shaped Madhubala mouth of glossy-red lipstick. Her hair would not grow very long, but it was long enough to pull back and weave into a plait of false hair. She had a strong, chiseled face and an impressive, hooked nose like her father’s. She wasn’t beautiful in the way Bombay Silk was, but she was sexier, more intriguing, handsome in the way some women can be. Those looks combined with her steadfast commitment to an exaggerated, outrageous kind of femininity made the real, biological women in the neighborhood—even those who did not wear full burqas—look cloudy and dispersed. She learned to exaggerate the swing in her hips when she walked and to communicate with the signature spread-fingered Hijra clap that went off like a gunshot and could mean anything—Yes, No, Maybe, Wah! Behen ka Lauda (Your sister’s cock), Bhonsadi ke (You arsehole born). Only another Hijra could decode what was specifically meant by the specific clap at that specific moment.