Anjum watched the video looking shocked, the light from the mobile phone screen bouncing off her perfect white tooth. It was clear the men were shouting, but the volume on the phone was turned down so as not to wake Miss Jebeen.
“What are they shouting? It’s in Gujarati?” she asked Saddam.
“Your Mother! You look after her!” Saddam whispered.
“Ai hai! What will they do to these boys now?”
“What can they do, the poor fuckers? They can’t clean their own shit. They can’t bury their own mothers. I don’t know what they’ll do. But it’s their problem, not ours.”
“So now?” Anjum said. “You’ve deleted the video…that means that you’ve given up the idea of killing that bastard cop?” She sounded disappointed. Disapproving, almost.
“Now I don’t need to kill him. You saw the video—my people have risen up! They are fighting! What is one Sehrawat for us now? Nothing!”
“Do you make all your life’s big decisions based on mobile phone videos?”
“That’s how it is these days, yaar. The world is only videos now. But see what they’ve done! It’s real. It’s not a movie. They’re not actors. Do you want to see it again?”
“Arre, it’s not that easy, babu. They’ll beat up these boys, buy them off…that’s how they do it these days…and if they leave this work of theirs, how will they earn? What will they eat? Chalo, we’ll think about that later. Do you have a nice photograph of your father? We can hang it up in the TV room.”
Anjum was suggesting that a portrait of Saddam’s father be hung next to the portrait of Zakir Mian garlanded with crisp cash-birds that graced the TV room. It was her way of accepting Saddam as her son-in-law.
—
Saeeda was delighted, Zainab ecstatic. Preparations for the wedding began. Everybody, including Tilo Madam, was measured up for new clothes that Zainab would design. A month before the wedding Saddam announced that he was taking the family out for a special treat. A surprise. Imam Ziauddin was too frail to go and it was Ustad Hameed’s grandson’s birthday. Dr. Azad Bhartiya said the treat-destination Saddam had chosen was against his principles and in any case he couldn’t eat. So the party consisted of Anjum, Saeeda, Nimmo Gorakhpuri, Zainab, Tilo, Miss Jebeen the Second and Saddam himself. None of them could in their wildest dreams have predicted what he had in store for them.
—
Naresh Kumar, a friend of Saddam’s, was one of five chauffeurs employed by a billionaire industrialist who maintained a palatial home and a fleet of expensive cars even though he spent only three or four days a month in Delhi. Naresh Kumar arrived at the graveyard to pick up the pre-wedding party in his master’s leather-seated silver Mercedes-Benz. Zainab sat in front on Saddam’s lap and everybody else squashed in behind. Tilo could never have imagined enjoying a ride through the streets of Delhi in a Mercedes. But that, she discovered very quickly, was only due to her severely limited imagination. The passengers shrieked as the car picked up speed. Saddam would not tell them where he was taking them. As they drove through the vicinity of the old city, they looked out of the windows eagerly, hoping to be seen by friends and acquaintances. As they moved into South Delhi, the mismatch between the passengers and the vehicle they were in drew plenty of curious and sometimes angry looks. A little intimidated, they rolled the window-glasses up. They stopped at a traffic intersection at the end of a long, tree-lined avenue where a group of Hijras dressed up to the nines were begging—they were technically begging, but actually hammering on car windows demanding money. All the cars that had stopped at the lights had their windows rolled up. The people in them were doing all they could to avoid eye contact with the Hijras. When they caught sight of the silver Mercedes, all four Hijras converged on it, smelling wealth and, they hoped, a naive foreigner. They were surprised when the windows rolled down before they had even launched their strike, and Anjum, Saeeda and Nimmo Gorakhpuri smiled back at them, returning their wide-fingered Hijra clap. The encounter quickly turned into an exchange of gossip. Which Gharana did the four belong to? Who was their Ustad? And their Ustad’s Ustad? The four leaned through the Merc’s windows, their elbows resting on the ledges, their bottoms protruding provocatively into the traffic. When the light changed, the cars behind them hooted impatiently. They responded with a string of inventive obscenities. Saddam gave them one hundred rupees and his visiting card. He invited them to the wedding.
“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 wo
men, 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.
I feel I am surrounded by eunuchs. Am I?
At the time it had seemed like nothing more than a part of her regular barrage of ICU insults. But now it gave Tilo a shiver. How did she know? Once the pot of ashes had been buried and the grave filled with earth, Tilo closed her eyes and recited her mother’s favorite passage from Shakespeare to herself. And at that moment the world, already a strange place, became an even stranger one:
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
She had never understood why her mother had so particularly loved this manly, soldierly, warlike passage. But she had. When Tilo opened her eyes, she was shocked to realize that she was weeping.
—
Zainab and Saddam were married a month later. There was an eclectic gathering of guests—Hijras from all over Delhi (including the new friends they had made at the traffic lights), Zainab’s friends, most of them students of fashion design, some of Ustaniji’s students and their parents, Zakir Mian’s family, and several of Saddam Hussain’s old comrades from his varied career—sweepers, mortuary workers, municipal truck drivers, security guards. Dr. Azad Bhartiya, D. D. Gupta and Roshan Lal were there of course. Anwar Bhai and his women and his son who had outgrown his mauve Crocs came from GB Road, and Ishrat-the-Beautiful—who had played a stellar role in the rescue of Miss Jebeen the Second—came from Indore. Tilo’s and Dr. Azad Bhartiya’s little cobbler friend, who had outlined his father’s lung tumor in the dirt, dropped in briefly. Old Dr. Bhagat came too—still dressed in white, still wearing his watch on a sweatband. Dr. Mukhtar the quack was not invited. Miss Jebeen the Second was dressed as a little queen. She wore a tiara and a frothy dress and shoes that squeaked. Of all the presents the young couple were showered with, their favorite was the goat that Nimmo Gorakhpuri gave them. She had had it specially imported from Iran.
Ustad Hameed and his students sang.
Everybody danced.
Afterwards Anjum took Saddam and Zainab to Hazrat Sarmad. Tilo, Saeeda and Miss Jebeen the Second went too. They made their way past the sellers of ittars and amulets, the custodians of pilgrims’ shoes, the cripples, the beggars, and the goats being fattened for Eid.
Sixty years had gone by since Jahanara Begum had taken her son Aftab to Hazrat Sarmad and asked him to teach her how to love him. Fifteen years had passed since Anjum took the Bandicoot to him to exorcize her sifli jaadu. It was more than a year since Miss Jebeen the Second’s first visit.
Jahanara Begum’s son had become her daughter, and the Bandicoot was now a bride. But other than that, nothing much had changed. The floor was red, the walls were red and the ceiling was red. Hazrat Sarmad’s blood had not been washed away.
A wispy man with a prayer cap striped like a bee’s bottom held out his prayer beads to Sarmad beseechingly. A thin woman in a printed sari tied a red bangle to the grille and then pressed her baby’s forehead to the floor. Tilo did the same with Miss Jebeen the Second, who thought it was a good game and did it many more times than was really necessary. Zainab and Saddam tied bangles to the grille and laid a new velvet chadar trimmed with tinsel on the Hazrat’s grave.
Anjum said a prayer and asked him to bless the young couple.
And Sarmad—Hazrat of Utmost Happiness, Saint of the Unconsoled and Solace of the Indeterminate, Blasphemer among Believers and Believer a
mong Blasphemers—did.
—
Three weeks later there was a third funeral in the old graveyard.
ONE MORNING Dr. Azad Bhartiya arrived at Jannat Guest House with a letter that was addressed to him. It had been hand-delivered by a woman who would not identify herself, but said the letter was from the Bastar forest. Anjum didn’t know what or where that was. Dr. Azad explained briefly about Bastar, the Adivasi tribes that lived there, the mining companies that wanted their land and the Maoist guerrillas who were waging a war against security forces that were trying to clear the land for the companies. The letter was written in English, in tiny, cramped handwriting. There was no date on it. Dr. Azad Bhartiya said it was from Miss Jebeen the Second’s real mother.
“Tear it up!” Anjum roared. “She throws away her baby and then comes back here saying she is the real mother!” Saddam stopped her from lunging for the letter.
“Don’t worry,” Dr. Azad Bhartiya said, “she is not coming back.”
It was a long letter, written on both sides of the pages with whole passages scored out, sentences running into each other as though paper was in limited supply. Between the pages there were a few pressed flowers that had crumbled when the papers had been folded into the pellet that was delivered. Dr. Azad Bhartiya read it out, roughly translating it as best he could as he went along. His audience was Anjum, Tilo and Saddam Hussain. And Miss Jebeen the Second, who did all she could to disrupt the proceedings.
Dear Comrade Azad Bharathiya Garu,