On Anjum’s eighteenth birthday Kulsoom Bi threw a party for her in the Khwabgah. Hijras gathered from all over the city, some came from out of town. For the first time in her life Anjum wore a sari, a red “disco” sari, with a backless choli. That night she dreamed she was a new bride on her wedding night. She awoke distressed to find that her sexual pleasure had expressed itself into her beautiful new garment like a man’s. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but for some reason, perhaps because of the sari, the humiliation she felt had never been so intense. She sat in the courtyard and howled like a wolf, hitting herself on her head and between her legs, screaming with self-inflicted pain. Ustad Kulsoom Bi, no stranger to these histrionics, gave her a tranquilizer and took her to her room.
When Anjum calmed down Ustad Kulsoom Bi talked to her quietly in a way she had never done before. There was no reason to be ashamed of anything, Ustad Kulsoom Bi told her, because Hijras were chosen people, beloved of the Almighty. The word Hijra, she said, meant a Body in which a Holy Soul lives. In the next hour Anjum learned that the Holy Souls were a diverse lot and that the world of the Khwabgah was just as complicated, if not more so, than the Duniya. The Hindus, Bulbul and Gudiya, had both been through the formal (extremely painful) religious castration ceremony in Bombay before they came to the Khwabgah. Bombay Silk and Heera would have liked to do the same, but they were Muslim and believed that Islam forbade them from altering their God-given gender, so they managed, somehow, within those confines. Baby, like Razia, was a man who wanted to remain a man but be a woman in every other way. As for Ustad Kulsoom Bi, she said she disagreed with Bombay Silk and Heera’s interpretation of Islam. She and Nimmo Gorakhpuri—who belonged to different generations—had had surgery. She knew a Dr. Mukhtar, she said, who was reliable and close-lipped and did not spread gossip about his patients in every gali and koocha of Old Delhi. She told Anjum she should think it over and decide what she wanted to do. Anjum took three whole minutes to make up her mind.
Dr. Mukhtar was more reassuring than Dr. Nabi had been. He said he could remove her male parts and try to enhance her existing vagina. He also suggested pills that would undeepen her voice and help her develop breasts. At a discount, Kulsoom Bi insisted. At a discount, Dr. Mukhtar agreed. Kulsoom Bi paid for the surgery and the hormones; Anjum paid her back over the years, several times over.
The surgery was difficult, the recovery even more so, but in the end it came as a relief. Anjum felt as though a fog had lifted from her blood and she could finally think clearly. Dr. Mukhtar’s vagina, however, turned out to be a scam. It worked, but not in the way he said it would, not even after two corrective surgeries. He did not offer to refund the money though, neither in whole nor in part. On the contrary, he went on to make a comfortable living, selling spurious, substandard body parts to desperate people. He died a prosperous man, with two houses in Laxmi Nagar, one for each of his sons, and his daughter married to a wealthy building contractor in Rampur.
Although Anjum became a sought-after lover, a skilled giver of pleasure, the orgasm she had when she wore her red disco sari was the last one of her life. And though the “tendencies” that Dr. Nabi had cautioned her father about remained, Dr. Mukhtar’s pills did undeepen her voice. But it restricted its resonance, coarsened its timbre and gave it a peculiar, rasping quality, which sometimes sounded like two voices quarreling with each other instead of one. It frightened other people, but it did not frighten its owner in the way her God-given one had. Nor did it please her.
Anjum lived in the Khwabgah with her patched-together body and her partially realized dreams for more than thirty years.
She was forty-six years old when she announced that she wanted to leave. Mulaqat Ali was dead. Jahanara Begum was more or less bedridden and lived with Saqib and his family in one section of the old house at Chitli Qabar (the other half was rented to a strange, diffident young man who lived amidst towers of second-hand English books piled on the floor, on his bed and on every available horizontal surface). Anjum was welcome to visit occasionally, but not to stay. The Khwabgah was home to a new generation of residents; of the old ones only Ustad Kulsoom Bi, Bombay Silk, Razia, Bismillah and Mary remained.
Anjum had nowhere to go.
PERHAPS FOR THIS REASON, nobody took her seriously.
Theatrical announcements of departure and impending suicide were fairly routine responses to the wild jealousies, endless intrigue and continuously shifting loyalties that were a part of daily life in the Khwabgah. Once again, everybody suggested doctors and pills. Dr. Bhagat’s pills cure everything, they said. Everyone’s on them. “I’m not Everyone,” Anjum said, and that set off another round of whispers (For and Against) about the pitfalls of pride and what did she think of herself?
What did she think of herself? Not much, or quite a lot, depending on how you looked at it. She had ambitions, yes. And they had come full circle. Now she wanted to return to the Duniya and live like an ordinary person. She wanted to be a mother, to wake up in her own home, dress Zainab in a school uniform and send her off to school with her books and tiffin box. The question was, were ambitions such as these, on the part of someone like herself, reasonable or unreasonable?
Zainab was Anjum’s only love. Anjum had found her three years ago on one of those windy afternoons when the prayer caps of the Faithful blew off their heads and the balloon-sellers’ balloons all slanted to one side. She was alone and bawling on the steps of the Jama Masjid, a painfully thin mouse of a thing, with big, frightened eyes. Anjum guessed that she was about three years old. She wore a dull green salwar kameez and a dirty white hijab. When Anjum loomed over her and offered her a finger to hold, she glanced up briefly, grasped it and continued to cry loudly without pause. The Mouse-in-a-hijab had no idea what a storm that casual gesture of trust set off inside the owner of the finger that she held on to. Being ignored instead of dreaded by the tiny creature subdued (for a moment at least) what Nimmo Gorakhpuri had so astutely and so long ago called Indo-Pak. The warring factions inside Anjum fell silent. Her body felt like a generous host instead of a battlefield. Was it like dying, or being born? Anjum couldn’t decide. In her imagination it had the fullness, the sense of entirety, of one of the two. She bent down and picked the Mouse up and cradled her in her arms, murmuring all the while to her in both her quarreling voices. Even that did not scare or distract the child from her bawling project. For a while Anjum just stood there, smiling joyfully, while the creature in her arms cried. Then she set her down on the steps, bought her some bright pink cotton candy and tried to distract her by chatting nonchalantly about adult matters, hoping to pass the time until whoever owned the child came to get her. It turned out to be a one-way conversation, the Mouse did not seem to know much about herself, not even her name, and did not seem to want to talk. By the time she had finished with the cotton candy (or it had finished with her) she had a bright pink beard and sticky fingers. The bawling subsided into sobs and eventually into silence. Anjum stayed with her on the steps for hours, waiting for someone to come for her, asking passersby if they knew of anybody who was missing a child. As evening fell and the great wooden doors of the Jama Masjid were pulled shut, Anjum hoisted the Mouse on to her shoulders and carried her to the Khwabgah. There she was scolded and told that the right thing to do under the circumstances was to inform the Masjid Management that a lost child had been found. She did that the next morning. (Reluctantly, it has to be said, dragging her feet, hoping against hope, because by now Anjum was hopelessly in love.)