Flashback. Circular wipe.
It’s the year Michael Jackson played Bombay. Mumbai. Bombay. On the TV news men in pink and saffron turbans are at the airport, jigging frantically to the music of dhols. A large fabric sign hanging in the arrivals hall crying out NAMASTE MICHAEL NAMASTE FROM AIRPORTS AUTHORITY OF INDIA. And MJ in black hat and red blazer with gold buttons applauding the dancers. You are my special love, India, he says. May God always bless you. The boy D twelve years old in his bedroom, watching the news, teaching himself to moonwalk, mouthing the words of the famous songs, he has all the lyrics down, one hundred percent. Great day! And then the next morning sitting in the car with the driver on his way to school. They come down off the hill onto Marine Drive and there’s a traffic jam by Chowpatty Beach. And suddenly there he is, MJ himself, walking among the stationary cars! Omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod. But no, of course it’s not Michael Jackson. It’s a hijra. A hijra like a giant Michael wearing Michael’s black hat and red coat with gold buttons. Cheap imitations of. How dare you. Take those off. Those don’t belong to you. The hijra with right hand touching hat brim doing pencil turns amid the jammed traffic, clutching at his her its groin. The hijra has a battered boombox, it’s playing “Bad,” the hijra with white face-paint and red lipstick mouthing along. It’s disgusting. It’s irresistible. It’s terrifying. How can it be allowed. The hijra is right up against his car window now, the young milord on his way to Cathedral School, dance with me, young master, dance with me. Shouting against the rolled-up window, pressing red lips against the glass. Hato, hato, the driver shouts, waving an arm, get away, and the hijra laughs, a high contemptuous falsetto laugh, and walks away into the sun.
Circular wipe.
When you showed me the statue of Ardhanarishvara I blurted out, from Elephanta Island, and then I shut my mouth. But yes, I know him-her from long ago. It is the coming together of Shiva and Shakti, the Being and Doing forces of the Hindu godhead, the fire and the heat, in the body of this single double-gendered deity. Ardha, half, nari, woman, ishvara, god. Male one side, female the other. I have been thinking about her-him since boyhood. But after I saw the hijra I was afraid. Everybody was a little afraid of hijras, a little revolted, and so I was too. I was fascinated as well, that is true, but I was also afraid of the fact that I was fascinated. What did they have to do with me, these women-men? Whatever I heard about them made me shudder. Especially Operation. They call it that, Operation, in English. They take alcohol or opium but no anesthetic. The deed is done by other hijras, not a doctor, a string tied around the genitals to get a clean cut, and then a long curved knife slashing down. The raw area allowed to bleed, then cauterized with hot oil. In the days afterwards, as the wound heals, the urethra is kept open by repeated probing. In the end, a puckered scar, resembling, and usable as, a vagina. What did that have to do with me, nothing, I had no fondness for my genitals but this, this, ugh.
What did you say just then, she interrupted. No fondness for your genitals.
I didn’t say that. That is not a thing I said.
Cut.
Riya is sitting on the floor, reading from a book. “According to the poet-saints of Shaivism, Shiva is Ammai-Appar, Mother and Father combined. It is said of Brahma that he created humankind by converting himself into two persons: the first male, Manu Svayambhuva, and the first female, Satarupa. India has always understood androgyny, the man in the woman’s body, the woman in the man’s.”
D is in a state of high agitation, walking from white wall to white wall, slapping at the wall when he reaches it, turning around to walk the other way, reaching the wall, slapping, turning, walking, reaching, slapping.
I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me. That job at the Museum is fucking with your head. This is who I am. I’m not some other individual. This is me.
Riya doesn’t look up, goes on reading aloud. “Few hijras settle in their places of origin. Family rejection and disapproval probably accounts for the uprooting. Having re-created themselves as beings whom their original families often reject, hijras usually take those new identities to new places, where new families form around them and take them in.”
Stop, he shouts. I’m not prepared to hear this. You want to drag me into the gutter? I am the youngest son of Nero Golden. Did you hear me? The youngest son. I’m not ready.
“?‘As a child I followed girlish ways and was laughed at and scolded for my girlishness.’ ‘I often thought I should live like a boy and I tried hard but I couldn’t do it.’ ‘We also are part of creation.’?” She looks up from the book, snaps it shut, gets to her feet and goes to stand right in front of him, their faces very close together, his angry, hers absolutely expressionless and neutral.
You know what? she says. Many of them don’t have Operation. They never have it. It’s not necessary. What’s important is who they know they are.
Is that a book you found on a park bench? he asks. Really?
She shakes her head, slowly, sadly, No, of course not.
I’m leaving, he says.
He leaves. Outside in the hot afternoon street, it’s noisy, garish, crowded. It’s Chinatown.
A gigantic insect. A monstrous vermin. A verminous bug. Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from troubled dreams to discover that he had been transformed in his own bed into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer. People disagreed on the best translation. The exact nature of the creature is not precisely specified in the Kafka story. Maybe a giant cockroach. The cleaning woman says he’s a dung beetle. He himself doesn’t seem too sure. Something horrible, anyway, with an armored back and little waving legs. “Into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer.” Not a thing anyone would want to be. A thing from which everyone finally turned away in horror, his employer, his family, even his beloved and formerly loving sister. A dead thing, in the end, to be taken out with the trash and disposed of by the cleaner. This was what he was becoming, D told himself, a monstrosity, even to himself.