Over the next week announcements were made from several mosques several times a day. No one came forward to claim the Mouse. Weeks went by, still no one came looking. And so, by default, Zainab—the name Anjum chose for her—stayed on in the Khwabgah where she was lavished with more love by more mothers (and, in a manner of speaking, fathers) than any child could hope for. She did not take very long to settle into her new life, which suggested that she had not been unduly attached to her old one. Anjum came to believe that she had been abandoned and not lost.
In a few weeks she began to call Anjum “Mummy” (because that’s what Anjum had begun to call herself). The other residents (under Anjum’s tutelage) were all called “Apa” (Auntie, in Urdu), and Mary, because she was Christian, was Mary Auntie. Ustad Kulsoom Bi and Bismillah became “Badi Nani” and “Chhoti Nani.” Senior and Junior Granny. The Mouse absorbed love like sand absorbs the sea. Very quickly she metamorphosed into a cheeky young lady with rowdy, distinctly bandicoot-like tendencies (that could only barely be managed).
Mummy, in the meanwhile, grew more addle-headed by the day. She was caught unawares by the fact that it was possible for one human being to love another so much and so completely. At first, being new to the discipline, she was only able to express her feelings in a busy, bustling way, like a child with its first pet. She bought Zainab an unnecessary amount of toys and clothes (frothy, puff-sleeved frocks and Made-in-China squeaking shoes with flashing heel-lights), she bathed, dressed and undressed her an unnecessary number of times, oiled, braided and unbraided her hair, tied and untied it with matching and unmatching ribbons that she kept rolled up in an old tin. She overfed her, took her for walks in the neighborhood and, when she saw that Zainab was naturally drawn to animals, got her a rabbit—who was killed by a cat on his very first night at the Khwabgah—and a he-goat with a Maulana-style beard who lived in the courtyard and every now and then, with an impassive expression on his face, sent his shiny goat pills skittering in all directions.
The Khwabgah was in better condition than it had been for years. The broken room had been renovated and a new room built on top of it on the first floor, which Anjum and Mary now shared. Anjum slept with Zainab on a mattress on the floor, her long body curled protectively around the little girl like a city wall. At night she sang her to sleep softly, in a way that was more whisper than song. When Zainab was old enough to understand, Anjum began to tell her bedtime stories. At first the stories were entirely inappropriate for a young child. They were Anjum’s somewhat maladroit attempt to make up for lost time, to transfuse herself into Zainab’s memory and consciousness, to reveal herself without artifice, so that they could belong to each other completely. As a result she used Zainab as a sort of dock where she unloaded her cargo—her joys and tragedies, her life’s cathartic turning points. Far from putting Zainab to sleep, many of the stories either gave her nightmares or made her stay awake for hours, fearful and cranky. Sometimes Anjum herself wept as she told them. Zainab began to dread her bedtime and would shut her eyes tightly, simulating sleep in order not to have to listen to another tale. Over time, however, Anjum (with inputs from some of the junior Apas) worked out an editorial line. The stories were successfully childproofed, and eventually Zainab even began to look forward to the night-time ritual.
Her top favorite was the Flyover Story—Anjum’s account of how she and her friends walked home late one night from Defense Colony in South Delhi all the way back to Turkman Gate. There were five or six of them, dressed up, looking stunning after a night of revelry at a wealthy Seth’s house in D-Block. After the party they decided to walk for a while and take in some fresh air. In those days there was such a thing as fresh air in the city, Anjum told Zainab. When they were halfway across the Defense Colony flyover—the city’s only flyover at the time—it began to rain. And what can anyone possibly do when it rains on a flyover?
“They have to keep walking,” Zainab would say, in a reasonable, adult tone.
“Exactly right. So we kept walking,” Anjum would say. “And then what happened?”
“Then you wanted to soo!”
“Then I wanted to soo!”
“But you couldn’t stop!”
“I couldn’t stop.”
“You had to keep walking!”
“I had to keep walking.”
“So we soo-ed in our ghagra!” Zainab would shout, because she was at the age when anything to do with shitting, pissing and farting was the high point, or perhaps the whole point, of all stories.
“That’s right, and it was the best feeling in the world,” Anjum would say, “being drenched in the rain on that big, empty flyover, walking under a huge advertisement of a wet woman drying herself with a Bombay Dyeing towel.”
“And the towel was as big as a carpet!”
“As big as a carpet, yes.”
“And then you asked that woman if you could borrow her towel to dry yourself.”
“And what did the woman say?”
“She said, Nahin! Nahin! Nahin!”
“She said, Nahin! Nahin! Nahin! So we got drenched, and we kept walking…”
“With garam-garam (warm) soo running down your thanda-thanda (cold) legs!”
Inevitably at this point Zainab would fall asleep, smiling. Every hint of adversity and unhappiness was required to be excised from Anjum’s stories. She loved it when Anjum transformed herself into a young sex-siren who had led a shimmering life of music and dance, dressed in gorgeous clothes with varnished nails and a throng of admirers.
And so, in these ways, in order to please Zainab, Anjum began to rewrite a simpler, happier life for herself. The rewriting in turn began to make Anjum a simpler, happier person.
Edited out of the Flyover Story, for example, was the fact that the incident had happened in 1976, at the height of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi that lasted twenty-one months. Her spoiled younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, was the head of the Youth Congress (the youth wing of the ruling party), and was more or less running the country, treating it as though it was his personal plaything. Civil Rights had been suspended, newspapers were censored and, in the name of population control, thousands of men (mostly Muslim) were herded into camps and forcibly sterilized. A new law—the Maintenance of Internal Security Act—allowed the government to arrest anybody on a whim. The prisons were full, and a small coterie of Sanjay Gandhi’s acolytes had been unleashed on the general population to carry out his fiat.
On the night of the Flyover Story, the gathering—a wedding party—that Anjum and her colleagues had descended on was broken up by the police. The host and three of his guests were arrested and driven away in police vans. Nobody knew why. Arif, the driver of the van that brought Anjum & Co. to the venue, tried to bundle his passengers into his van and make a getaway. For this impertinence he had the knuckles of his left hand and his right kneecap smashed. His passengers were dragged out of the Matador, kicked on their backsides as though they were circus clowns and instructed to scram, to run all the way home if they did not want to be arrested for prostitution and obscenity. They ran in blind terror, like ghouls, through the darkness and the driving rain, their make-up running a lot faster than their legs could, their drenched diaphanous clothes limiting their strides and impeding their speed. True, it was only a routine bit of humiliation for Hijras, nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing at all compared to the tribulations others endured during those horrible months.
It was nothing, but still, it was something.
Notwithstanding Anjum’s editing, the Flyover Story retained some elements of truth. For instance, it really did rain that night. And Anjum really did piss while she ran. There really was an advertisement for Bombay Dyeing towels on the Defense Colony flyover. And the woman in the advertisement really did flat out refuse to share her towel.