“You must come!”
They smiled and waved goodbye, sashaying their leisurely way through the annoyed traffic. As their car sped away, Saeeda said that because sexual-reassignment surgery was becoming cheaper, better, and more accessible to people, Hijras would soon disappear. “Nobody will need to go through what we’ve been through any more.”
“You mean no more Indo-Pak?” Nimmo Gorakhpuri said.
“It wasn’t all bad,” Anjum said. “I think it would be a shame if we became extinct.”
“It was all bad,” Nimmo Gorakhpuri said. “You’ve forgotten that quack Dr. Mukhtar? How much money did he make off you?”
—
The car floated like a steel bubble through streets wide and narrow, smooth and potholed, for more than two hours. They glided through dense forests of apartment buildings, past gigantic concrete amusement parks, bizarrely designed wedding halls and towering cement statues as high as skyscrapers, of Shiva in a cement leopard-skin loincloth with a cement cobra around his neck and a colossal Hanuman looming over a metro track. They drove over an impossible-to-pee-on flyover as wide as a wheat field, with twenty lanes of cars whizzing over it and towers of steel and glass growing on either side of it. But when they took an exit road off it, they saw that the world underneath the flyover was an entirely different one—an unpaved, unlaned, unlit, unregulated, wild and dangerous one, in which buses, trucks, bullocks, rickshaws, cycles, handcarts and pedestrians jostled for survival. One kind of world flew over another kind of world without troubling to stop and ask the time of day.
The steel bubble floated on, past shanty towns and industrial swamps where the air was a pale mauve haze, past railway tracks packed thick with trash and lined with slums. Finally they arrived at their destination. The Edge. Where the countryside was trying, quickly, clumsily and tragically, to turn itself into the city.
A mall.
The passengers in the Merc fell dead silent as it turned into the underground parking lot, lifted its bonnet and its boot like a girl lifting her skirts, for a quick bomb-check and then drifted down into a basement full of cars.
When they entered the bright shopping arcade, Saddam and Zainab looked happy and excited, completely at ease in the new surroundings. The others, including Ustaniji, looked as though they had stepped through a portal into another cosmos. The visit began with a hitch—a little trouble on the escalator. Anjum refused to get on. It took a good fifteen minutes of coaxing and encouragement. Finally, while Tilo carried Miss Jebeen the Second, Saddam stood next to Anjum on the step with his arm around her shoulders, and Zainab stood on the step above her, facing her, holding both her hands. Thus reinforced, Anjum went up wobbling and roaring Ai Hai! as though she was risking her life in a dangerous adventure sport. As they wandered around awestruck, trying to tell the difference between the shoppers and the mannequins in shop windows, Nimmo Gorakhpuri was the first to regain her composure. She looked approvingly at the young women in shorts and miniskirts, with huge shopping bags and sunglasses pushed up into their lush, blow-dried hair.
“See, this is what I wanted to look like when I was young. I had a real fashion sense. But nobody understood. I was too far ahead of our times.”
After an hour’s window-shopping and absolutely no buying, they ate lunch in an outlet called Nando’s. Mainly, huge helpings of deep-fried chicken. Zainab was assigned to supervise Nimmo Gorakhpuri, and Saddam took care of Anjum, because neither of them had been to a restaurant before. Anjum stared in frank amazement at the family of four at the next table—an older couple and a younger one. The women, clearly mother and daughter, were both dressed alike in sleeveless printed tops and trousers, their faces caked with make-up. The young man, presumably the girl’s fiancé, had his elbows on the table and frequently gazed down admiringly at his own (huge) biceps that bulged out of his blue, short-sleeved T-shirt. Only the older man did not appear to be enjoying himself. He peered furtively out from around the imaginary pillar he was hiding behind. Every few minutes the family suspended all conversation, immobilized their smiles and took selfies—with the menu, with the waiter, with the food and with each other. After each selfie they passed their phones around for the others to see. They did not pay any attention to anyone else in the restaurant.
Anjum was far more interested in them than in the food on her plate, which she had not been in the least impressed by. After he paid the bill, Saddam looked around the table with a sense of ceremony:
“You all must be wondering why I brought you all the way here.”
“To show us the Duniya?” Anjum said, as though it were a quiz question on a TV show.
“No. To introduce all of you to my father. This is where he died. Right here. Where this building now stands. Before it came up there were villages here, surrounded by wheat fields. There was a police station…a road…”
Saddam then told them the story of what happened to his father. He told them about his vow to kill Sehrawat, the Station House Officer of the Dulina police station, and why he had given up the idea. They all took turns to pass his mobile phone around the table and watch the video of the dead cows being flung into the District Collector’s bungalow.
“My father’s spirit must be wandering here, trapped inside this place.”
Everybody tried to imagine him—a village skinner, lost in the bright lights, trying to find his way out of the mall.
“This is his mazar,” Anjum said.
“Hindus aren’t buried. They don’t have mazars, badi Mummy,” Zainab said.
Maybe it’s the whole world’s mazar, Tilo thought, but didn’t say. Maybe the mannequin-shoppers are ghosts trying to buy what no longer exists.
“It isn’t right,” Anjum said. “The matter can’t be left like this. Your father should have a proper funeral.”
“He did have a proper funeral,” Saddam said. “He was cremated in our village. I lit his funeral pyre.”
Anjum was not convinced. She wanted to do something more for Saddam’s father, to lay his spirit to rest. After a great deal of discussion, they decided they would buy a shirt in his name from one of the shops (like people bought chadars in dargahs) and bury it in the old graveyard so that Saddam and Zainab’s children would feel the presence of their grandfather around them as they grew up.
“I know a Hindu prayer!” Zainab said suddenly. “Shall I recite it here in memory of Abbajaan?”
Everybody leaned in to listen. And then, sitting at a table in a fast-food restaurant, as a missive of love to her late as well as future father-in-law, Zainab recited the Gayatri Mantra that Anjum had taught her when she was a little girl (because she believed it would help her in a mob-situation).
Om bhur bhuvah svaha
Tat savitur varenyam
Bhargo devasya dhimahi
Dhiyo yo nah pracodayat*
ON THE MORNING of Saddam Hussain’s father’s second funeral, Tilo put something else on the table. Literally. She brought out the little pot that contained her mother’s ashes and said she would like her mother to be buried in the old graveyard too. It was decided that there would be a double funeral that day. If the cremation in the electric crematorium in Cochin counted, it would be Maryam Ipe’s second funeral too. Saddam Hussain dug the graves. A stylish, Madras-checked shirt was interred in one. A pot of ashes in the other. Imam Ziauddin demurred a little at the unorthodoxy of the proceedings, but eventually agreed to say the prayers. Anjum asked Tilo if she wanted to say a Christian prayer for her mother. Tilo explained that the church had refused to bury her mother, so any prayers would do. As she stood beside her mother’s grave, a line that Maryam Ipe had repeated more than once during her hallucinations in the ICU came back to her.