A YEAR BEFORE ZAINAB was old enough to go to school, Mummy began to prepare for the event. She visited her old home and, with her brother Saqib’s permission, brought Mulaqat Ali’s collection of books to the Khwabgah. She was often seen sitting cross-legged in front of an open book (not the Holy Quran), moving her mouth as her finger traced a line across the page, or rocking back and forth with her eyes closed, thinking about what she had just read, or perhaps dredging the swamp of her memory to retrieve something that she once knew.
When Zainab turned five, Anjum took her to Ustad Hameed to begin singing lessons. It was clear from the start that music was not her calling. She fidgeted unhappily through her classes, hitting false notes so unerringly that it was almost a skill in itself. Patient, kind-hearted Ustad Hameed would shake his head as though a fly was bothering him and fill his cheeks with lukewarm tea while he held down the keys of the harmonium, which meant that he wanted his pupil to try once more. On that rare occasion when Zainab managed to arrive somewhere in the vicinity of the note, he would nod happily and say, “That’s my boy!”—a phrase he had picked up from The Tom and Jerry Show on Cartoon Network, which he loved and watched with his grandchildren (who were studying in an English Medium school). It was his highest form of praise, regardless of the gender of his student. He bestowed it on Zainab not because she deserved it, but out of regard for Anjum and his memory of how beautifully she (or he—when she was Aftab) used to sing. Anjum sat through all the classes. Her high, hole-in-the-head insect hum reappeared, this time as a discreet usher endeavoring to discipline Zainab’s wayward voice and keep it true. It was useless. The Bandicoot couldn’t sing.
Zainab’s real passion, it turned out, was animals. She was a terror on the streets of the old city. She wanted to free all the half-bald, half-dead white chickens that were pressed into filthy cages and stacked on top of each other outside the butcher shops, to converse with every cat that flashed across her path and to take home every litter of stray puppies she found wallowing in the blood and offal flowing through the open drains. She would not listen when she was told that dogs were unclean—najis—for Muslims and should not be touched. She did not shrink from the large, bristly rats that hurried along the street she had to walk down every day; she could not seem to get used to the sight of the bundles of yellow chicken claws, sawed-off goats’ trotters, the pyramids of goats’ heads with their staring, blind, blue eyes and the pearly white goats’ brains that shivered like jelly in big steel bowls.
In addition to her pet goat, who, thanks to Zainab, had survived a record three Bakr-Eids unslaughtered, Anjum got her a handsome rooster who responded to his new mistress’s welcoming embrace with a vicious peck. Zainab wept loudly, more from heartbreak than pain. The peck chastened her, but her affection for the bird remained undiminished. Whenever Rooster Love came upon her she would wrap her arms around Anjum’s legs and deliver a few smacking kisses to Mummy’s knees, turning her head to look longingly and lovingly at the rooster between kisses so that the object of her affection and the party receiving the kisses were not in any doubt about what was going on and who the kisses were really meant for. In some ways, Anjum’s addle-headedness towards Zainab was proportionately reflected in Zainab’s addle-headedness towards animals. None of her tenderness towards living creatures, however, got in the way of her voracious meat eating. At least twice a year Anjum took her to the zoo inside Purana Qila, the Old Fort, to visit the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and her favorite character, the baby gibbon from Borneo.
A few months after she was admitted into KGB (Kindergarten—Section B) in Tender Buds Nursery School in Daryaganj—Saqib and his wife were registered as her official parents—the usually robust Bandicoot went through a patch of ill health. It wasn’t serious, but it was persistent, and it wore her out, each illness making her more vulnerable to the next. Malaria followed flu followed two separate bouts of viral fever, one mild, the second worrying. Anjum fretted over her in unhelpful ways and, disregarding grumbles about her dereliction of Khwabgah duties (which were mostly administrative and managerial now), nursed the Bandicoot night and day with furtive, mounting paranoia. She became convinced that someone who envied her (Anjum’s) good fortune had put a hex on Zainab. The needle of her suspicion pointed steadfastly in the direction of Saeeda, a relatively new member of the Khwabgah. Saeeda was much younger than Anjum and was second in line for Zainab’s affections. She was a graduate and knew English. More importantly, she could speak the new language of the times—she could use the terms cis-Man and FtoM and MtoF and in interviews she referred to herself as a “transperson.” Anjum, on the other hand, mocked what she called the “trans-france” business, and stubbornly insisted on referring to herself as a Hijra.
Like many of the younger generation, Saeeda switched easily between traditional salwar kameez and Western clothes—jeans, skirts, halter-necks that showed off her long, beautifully muscled back. What she lacked in local flavor and old-world charm she more than made up for with her modern understanding, her knowledge of the law and her involvement with Gender Rights Groups (she had even spoken at two conferences). All this placed her in a different league from Anjum. Also, Saeeda had edged Anjum out of the Number One spot in the media. The foreign newspapers had dumped the old exotics in favor of the younger generation. The exotics didn’t suit the image of the New India—a nuclear power and an emerging destination for international finance. Ustad Kulsoom Bi, wily old she-wolf, was alert to these winds of change, and saw benefit accrue to the Khwabgah. So Saeeda, though she lacked seniority, was in close competition with Anjum to take over as Ustad of the Khwabgah when Ustad Kulsoom Bi decided to relinquish charge, which, like the Queen of England, she seemed in no hurry to do.