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Nothing is simple for a person like me, not even one hour on the train. My chest is a man’s chest, and my breasts are made of rags. So what? Find me another woman in this whole city as truly woman as me.
“I have been performing all my life,” I was saying to him. I was performing on trains, on roads. I was performing happiness and cheer. I was performing divine connection. “Now,” I was telling him, “just let me practice for the camera.”
“On Facebook I made many friends, including this friend in a foreign country. At least, that is what he told me,” I explain to Gobind. “This friend asked me about my life, and my feelings. I sent him emojis sometimes, to say hello. Now they tell me he was a known terrorist recruiter. Known to whom? I didn’t know any of this.” Gobind looks at me. A woman like me is never believed.
Days later, in a newspaper, I will see an artist’s drawing of me appearing in court that morning. The sketch shows a woman with her hair in a braid. Her hands are cuffed but raised as in prayer or plea. This is a mistake, I think. I was not in cuffs. Was I? The rest of her body is hastily penciled, decaying already.
The guard’s mouth fell open. Here she was, the mother of the terrorist. “Not now,” he said finally. “No visiting in the lockup.” The guard, on order to let nobody meet with the terrorist, refused to let her mother in.
Then, after the class ten board exams, she left school. He never knew why. He understood it to be a matter of school fees. But she offered him no explanation, never acknowledged how he had gone out of his way to support her. A small thing, but he found it rude. Well, was it a small thing? When he thinks about it, an old anger flickers to life. He had begun to dream of her as a mentee, but she had not considered him a mentor. She had considered him perhaps no more than a source of occasional free food. She had fooled him.
Behind me is one-eyed Kalkidi, half of her face burned, laughing hard when I turn to look, the gaps in her teeth showing. Her husband threw acid on her but, somehow, she is the one in jail. These things happen when you are a woman.
Now I watch TV, openmouthed like the others. More than the show, it is the world I watch. A traffic light, an umbrella, rain on a windowsill. The simple freedom of crossing a street.
And I was moving up. So what if I lived in only a half-brick house? From an eater of cabbage, I was becoming an eater of chicken. I had a smartphone with a big screen, bought with my own salary. It was a basic smartphone, bought on an installment plan, with a screen which jumped and credit which I filled when I could. But now I was connected to a world bigger than this neighborhood.
In his ear, PT Sir’s wife says, “Fine, then. Can you bring a half kilo of tomatoes? There is that market just outside your station.” A spouse always has ideas about how you should spend your time. Couldn’t he have enjoyed thirty minutes to himself, to drink a cup of tea and sit on the platform?
“Speech sheech,” she says. “She is pandering to all these unemployed men. This is why our country is not going anywhere.” “They are feeding a lot of people with discounted rice,” he says. “And they are going to connect two hundred villages, two hundred, to the electricity grid in two years—” “You,” says his wife, “believe everything.”
He understands how his wife feels. If you only watch the news on TV, it is easy to be skeptical. But what is so wrong about the common people caring about their jobs, their wages, their land? And what, after all, is so wrong about him doing something different from his schoolteacher’s job? Today he did something patriotic, meaningful, bigger than the disciplining of cavalier schoolgirls—and it was, he knows as he lies in bed, no sleep in his humming mind, exciting.
“You have the right?” she says, kicking a leg under the fabric to order the pleats. Under a smile, she buries all else she meant to say.
This is why, I think, we are all here. Take Americandi. She pushed a man who was trying to snatch her necklace on the street. The man fell, and struck his head on the pavement. He went into a coma. The court charged Americandi, and here she is, a decade or more into confinement that never ends. If she had received a chance to tell her story, how might her life have been?
The man behind the counter is grumbling. He is unhappy that he is having to serve me, I know. Finally I am getting one small roshogolla, ten rupees. The man is giving it to me in a small bowl woven with dried leaves. I am lifting the bowl to my forehead. I am giving thanks. It is no small thing to buy a sweet, and that is enough today. That is how my life is going forward—some insult in my face, some sweet in my mouth. Someday, when I am a movie star, that mother will be regretting that she washed me off her hands.
Then we hear that Sonali Khan is being kept under house arrest, which means that she lives, as before, in her own house. Even the meaning of “prison” is different for rich people. Can you blame me for wanting, so much, to be—not even rich, just middle class?
Soon our houses were exposed to the sun, all lime walls and cracked corners. They looked like we had never lived in them at all. The sight of our houses, so easily broken, startled me. I knew it would happen, but like this? Kitchens in which we had eaten before a flickering kerosene lamp, rooms in which we had combed each other’s hair, all roofless, soon to be crushed into a heap of brick.
But we had no real weapons. We had our bodies and our voices, our saved waste long gone.
“Leave our houses alone,” she screamed. “Where will we live?” Until then I had naively believed another home would materialize, but in my mother’s transformation I saw the truth: We had nowhere to go.
The policemen, finally calm, bamboo limp by their sides, looked frightened. Maybe the houses looked too much like their own. In the end, one policeman pleaded with us, “Orders came from above, sister, what will I do?”
But he eats. While he eats, he tells her the story of Bimala Pal’s visit. How the Jana Kalyan Party’s second-in-command came to his school to see his ceremony. “You are so easily flattered!” his wife says. “She was coming to see where the terrorist went to school. What else did you think?”
I grew angry—why wasn’t my father telling the doctor the police did it? Catch the police! Put them in jail for hurting him like that! How would he drive the rickshaw again with such pain? Now I understand his silence. Now I know his reluctance.
“Do you know how to read?” the doctor demanded. “My daughter knows,” said my father. Even in his pain, he looked at me and smiled with pride.
In this life, everybody is knowing how to give me shame. So I am learning how to reflect shame back on them also.
When I am getting tired of dancing, and sweat is starting to pour down my back, I am bending and taking the bride’s chin in my hands, saying, “God keep this beautiful girl in rice and gold.”
Later, in the quiet of the kitchen after we had eaten, she said to me, “The system doesn’t always work for us. But you see that, now and then, you can make good things happen for yourself.” And I thought, only now and then? I thought I would have a better life than that.
IN THE MONTHS FOLLOWING, when Bimala Pal’s assistant calls PT Sir and gives him a case, he prepares by purchasing a tube of antiperspirant and applying the white gel in his armpits. He carries a bottle of water and sips from it. He goes to sleep early the night before. Perhaps it is these measures, but PT Sir finds, by his fourth time at the courthouse, that there is little that agitates him.
For the first time, as he wanders down the familiar corridor, past the law library and to the canteen, PT Sir wonders if the guard is paid by the party too. For that matter, how about the courtroom clerks, and the judges, and the lawyers? Not one of them has ever said: “This man is really something! Everywhere there is a robbery, a domestic problem, a fight between neighbors, this man happens to be walking by! Is he Batman or what?”
THIS IS HOW BIMALA PAL explained it to him, and this is how he explains it to his wife. All these cases are instances in which the police are one hundred and ten percent sure that the accused is guilty. They don’t have that much evidence, is all. But the accused are known in their neighborhoods. They have reputations. Should these dangerous men return to the streets on a technicality? Much better to fill the gap with a witness and make sure the guilty party lands in jail. PT Sir cannot disagree. It is true that there is a lot about life that the law misses. And it doesn’t hurt that each
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“If you want to be a C-level actor you can use all those cheap things!” he is saying. “Real actors cry from the heart. Real actors are reaching into their own selves, and not imagining a false sad moment, but returning to a true sad moment in their own life. That is how you are crying real tears in a made-up scene.”
LOVELY IS MY HIJRA NAME, which I was selecting at my eighteenth birthday ceremony. That was the ceremony where I was becoming a real woman. Arjuni Ma was taking me into her own bedroom and standing me in front of a tall mirror. She was giving me a golden blouse and a black petticoat to wear, and then she was wrapping a red sari around my hips. Her old knuckles and wrinkled skin were touching me with so much love. I was looking at myself in the mirror, making myself to be thinking of some jokes so that I was not crying. Finally I was knowing what it was feeling like, to be all the women I was
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My love for Azad, I am telling myself, is existing in some other world, where there is no society, no god. In this life we were never getting to know that other world, but I am sure it is existing. There, our love story is being written.
“Why you are marking me B already?” I am demanding. “I didn’t even perform.” “Calm down, madam,” the man is complaining. “Why are you looking at what I am writing? It’s just lingo, nothing personal about you.” But he is not telling me what it is meaning. I am learning later, on my own. B-class. An actor who is not having the pretty face or light skin color for A-class roles. B-class actor is someone who is only playing a servant, a rickshaw puller, a thief. The audience is wanting to see B-class actors punched and slapped and defeated by the hero.
“Lovely is here,” he says, standing up when he sees me, “you are right. The message has been delivered.” “I know,” I tell him. “My mother found her, when you couldn’t!” “She has promised she will testify,” he says, as if he can’t hear me. “A win for us!” A few days later, in the papers, I see stories which claim Gobind did extensive on-the-ground investigation, endless nights of detective work, to track down the elusive hijra, Lovely.
I wondered sometimes if he paid attention to me because he felt like an outsider too. He was a father, I imagined, and all the other teachers were mothers. When the principal spoke about morals at the morning assembly, and the microphone began to screech, the ladies looked around for PT Sir. Such was his place in the school, a little apart from everybody else.
I saw my mother then as a woman. I felt her humiliation. And where I had always felt shame, I now felt white-hot anger. Anger crept into my jaws and I had to gnash my teeth to be calm. Why was this our life? What kind of life was it, where my mother was forced to buy cheap vegetables in the middle of the night, and got robbed and attacked for it? What kind of life did we have, where my father’s pain was not taken seriously by a doctor until it was too late? So I made a decision. Whether it was a good decision or a bad decision, I no longer know.
Maybe that was a poor decision. But whom did I have to teach me how to build a better life?
ALL I AM GUILTY OF, Purnendu, listen—all I am guilty of is being a coward.
On the fourth day, a reporter, or maybe just a passerby, spits on my face outside the courthouse. My lawyer finds a canteen napkin with which I wipe my face, but there is no time to find a bathroom and wash. I sit with that stranger’s hatred on my face all day.
But one day the government announces, no more this ugly refugee camp! You all get five lakh rupees, now go somewhere else and live. Shoo. Immediately, who comes? Vultures.
So this is the riot economy. In this economy, I am a broker, nothing more.
When I am thinking about it, I am truly feeling that Jivan and I are both no more than insects. We are no more than grasshoppers whose wings are being plucked. We are no more than lizards whose tails are being pulled. Is anybody believing that she was innocent? Is anybody believing that I can be having some talent?
They are also wanting as many blessings as possible, so they are always wearing five holy threads on their wrist and seven holy threads on their upper arm and who knows what else. These poor people are afraid of many things, and top of the list is bad luck from god. This I can understand, however, because me, I am the most cursed person.
BUT THEY CANNOT KILL me before they kill me.
“You are starting to look like a politician!” she says. “Is that so?” he says. This pleases PT Sir, though it is a meager reward. For what has he spent his days falsifying the truth in court? For what has he taken on the ghost of the beef-eater, that man who begs for mercy in the moments before sleep? That ghost who weeps in his mind when he is alone, who pleads with him when he waits for the schoolgirls to come to the field?
I COULD HAVE BEEN an ordinary person in the world. Ma, I could have gone to college, the city college where girls my age sit under trees, studying from their books, arguing, joking with boys. This is what I have seen in the movies. Then I too would have given scraps of my meal to the stray dogs. I too would have had nostalgic corners of campus, corridor romances. I might have studied literature, and I might have spoken English so well that if you had met me on the street, Ma, you would not have known me! Ma, you would have thought I was a rich girl.
MOTHER, DO YOU GRIEVE? Know that I will return to you. I will be a flutter in the leaves above where you sit, cooking ruti on the stove. I will be the stray cloud which shields you from days of sun. I will be the thunder that wakes you before rain floods the room. When you walk to market, I will return to you as footprint on the soil. At night, when you close your eyes, I will appear as impress on the bed.
PT Sir knows who she is. Isn’t she the ghost who begs him for mercy? Isn’t she the ghost who searches the gaze of her teacher, hoping that he might offer rescue? Maybe that is why they had the white curtain up at the court—not so that Jivan could not influence his testimony, but so that he would not have to face her.
