Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Everyone else slept in the verandah, their bedding rolled up in the day like giant bolsters. In winter, when the courtyard grew cold and misty, they all crowded into Kulsoom Bi’s room. The entrance to the toilet was through the ruins of the collapsed room. Everybody took turns to bathe at the handpump. An absurdly steep, narrow staircase led to the kitchen on the first floor. The kitchen window looked out on to the dome of the Holy Trinity Church.

Mary was the only Christian among the residents of the Khwabgah. She did not go to church, but she wore a little crucifix around her neck. Gudiya and Bulbul were both Hindus and did occasionally visit temples that would allow them in. The rest were Muslim. They visited the Jama Masjid and those dargahs that allowed them into the inner chambers (because unlike biological women Hijras were not considered unclean since they did not menstruate). The most masculine person in the Khwabgah, however, did menstruate. Bismillah slept upstairs on the kitchen terrace. She was a small, wiry, dark woman with a voice like a bus horn. She had converted to Islam and moved into the Khwabgah a few years ago (the two were not connected) after her husband, a bus driver for Delhi Transport Corporation, had thrown her out of their home for not bearing him a child. Of course it never occurred to him that he might have been responsible for their childlessness. Bismillah (formerly Bimla) managed the kitchen and guarded the Khwabgah against unwanted intruders with the ferocity and ruthlessness of a professional Chicago mobster. Young men were strictly forbidden to enter the Khwabgah without her express permission. Even regular customers, like Anjum’s future client — the Man Who Knew English — were kept out and had to make their own arrangements for their assignations. Bismillah’s companion on the terrace was Razia, who had lost her mind as well as her memory and no longer knew who she was or where she came from. Razia was not a Hijra. She was a man who liked to dress in women’s clothes. However, she did not want to be thought of as a woman, but as a man who wanted to be a woman. She had stopped trying to explain the difference to people (including to Hijras) long ago. Razia spent her days feeding pigeons on the roof and steering all conversations towards a secret, unutilized government scheme ( dao-pech , she called it) she had discovered for Hijras and people like herself. As per the scheme, they would all live together in a housing colony and be given government pensions and would no longer need to earn their living doing what she described as badtameezi —bad behavior — any more. Razia’s other theme was government pensions for street cats. For some reason her unmemoried, unanchored mind veered unerringly towards government schemes.

Aftab’s first real friend in the Khwabgah was Nimmo Gorakhpuri, the youngest of them all and the only one who had completed high school. Nimmo had run away from her home in Gorakhpur where her father worked as a senior-division clerk in the Main Post Office. Though she affected the airs of being a great deal older, Nimmo was really only six or seven years older than Aftab. She was short and chubby with thick, curly hair, stunning eyebrows curved like a pair of scimitars, and exceptionally thick eyelashes. She would have been beautiful but for her fast-growing facial hair that made the skin on her cheeks look blue under her make-up, even when she had shaved. Nimmo was obsessed with Western women’s fashion and was fiercely possessive of her collection of fashion magazines sourced from the second-hand Sunday book bazaar on the pavement in Daryaganj, a five-minute walk from the Khwabgah. One of the booksellers, Naushad, who bought his supply of magazines from the garbage collectors who serviced the foreign embassies in Shantipath, kept them aside, and sold them to Nimmo at a hefty discount.

“D’you know why God made Hijras?” she asked Aftab one afternoon while she flipped through a dog-eared 1967 issue of Vogue , lingering over the blonde ladies with bare legs who so enthralled her.

“No, why?”

“It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.”

Her words hit Aftab with the force of a physical blow. “How can you say that? You are all happy here! This is the Khwabgah!” he said, with rising panic.

“Who’s happy here? It’s all sham and fakery,” Nimmo said laconically, not bothering to look up from the magazine. “No one’s happy here. It’s not possible. Arre yaar , think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? I don’t mean you , but grown-ups like you — what makes them unhappy? Price-rise, children’s school-admissions, husbands’ beatings, wives’ cheatings, Hindu-Muslim riots, Indo-Pak war— outside things that settle down eventually. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t .”

Aftab desperately wanted to contradict her, to tell her she was dead wrong, because he was happy, happier than he had ever been before. He was living proof that Nimmo Gorakhpuri was wrong, was he not? But he said nothing, because it would have involved revealing himself as not being a “normal people,” which he was not yet prepared to do.

It was only when he turned fourteen, by which time Nimmo had run away from the Khwabgah with a State Transport bus driver (who soon abandoned her and returned to his family), that Aftab fully understood what she meant. His body had suddenly begun to wage war on him. He grew tall and muscular. And hairy. In a panic he tried to remove the hair on his face and body with Burnol — burn ointment that made dark patches on his skin. He then tried Anne French crème hair remover that he purloined from his sisters (he was soon found out because it smelled like an open sewer). He plucked his bushy eyebrows into thin, asymmetrical crescents with a pair of home-made tweezers that looked more like tongs. He developed an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down. He longed to tear it out of his throat. Next came the unkindest betrayal of all — the thing that he could do nothing about. His voice broke. A deep, powerful man’s voice appeared in place of his sweet, high voice. He was repelled by it and scared himself each time he spoke. He grew quiet, and would speak only as a last resort, after he had run out of other options. He stopped singing. When he listened to music, anyone who paid attention would hear a high, barely audible, insect-like hum that seemed to emerge through a pinhole at the top of his head. No amount of persuasion, not even from Ustad Hameed himself, could coax a song out of Aftab. He never sang again, except to mockingly caricature Hindi film songs at ribald Hijra gatherings or when (in their professional capacity) they descended on ordinary people’s celebrations — weddings, births, house-warming ceremonies — dancing, singing in their wild, grating voices, offering their blessings and threatening to embarrass the hosts (by exposing their mutilated privates) and ruin the occasion with curses and a display of unthinkable obscenity unless they were paid a fee. (This is what Razia meant when she said badtameezi , and what Nimmo Gorakhpuri referred to when she said, “We’re jackals who feed off other people’s happiness, we’re Happiness Hunters.” Khushi-khor was the phrase she used.)

Once music forsook Aftab he was left with no reason to continue living in what most ordinary people thought of as the real world — and Hijras called Duniya , the World. One night he stole some money and his sisters’ nicer clothes and moved into the Khwabgah. Jahanara Begum, never known for her shyness, waded in to retrieve him. He refused to leave. She finally left after making Ustad Kulsoom Bi promise that on weekends, at least, Aftab would be made to wear normal boys’ clothes and be sent home. Ustad Kulsoom Bi tried to honor her promise, but the arrangement lasted only for a few months.