The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Read online

  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.

  And so, at the age of fifteen, only a few hundred yards from where his family had lived for centuries, Aftab stepped through an ordinary doorway into another universe. On his first night as a permanent resident of the Khwabgah, he danced in the courtyard to everybody’s favorite song from everybody’s favorite film—“Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya” from Mughal-e-Azam. The next night at a small ceremony he was presented with a green Khwabgah dupatta and initiated into the rules and rituals that formally made him a member of the Hijra community. Aftab became Anjum, disciple of Ustad Kulsoom Bi of the Delhi Gharana, one of the seven regional Hijra Gharanas in the country, each headed by a Nayak, a Chief, all of them headed by a Supreme Chief.

  Though she never visited him there again, for years Jahanara Begum continued to send a hot meal to the Khwabgah every day. The only place where she and Anjum met was at the dargah of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed. There they would sit together for a while, Anjum nearly six feet tall, her head demurely covered in a spangled dupatta, and tiny Jahanara Begum, whose hair had begun to gray under her black burqa. Sometimes, they held hands surreptitiously. Mulaqat Ali for his part was less able to accept the situation. His broken heart never mended. While he continued to give his interviews, he never spoke either privately or publicly of the misfortune that had befallen the dynasty of Changez Khan. He chose to sever all ties with his son. He never met Anjum or spoke to her again. Occasionally they would pass each other on the street and would exchange glances, but never greetings. Never.

  Over the years Anjum became Delhi’s most famous Hijra. Film-makers fought over her, NGOs hoarded her, foreign correspondents gifted her phone number to one another as a professional favor, along with numbers of the Bird Hospital, Phoolan Devi, the surrendered dacoit known as “Bandit Queen,” and a contact for the Begum of Oudh who lived in an old ruin in the Ridge Forest with her servants and her chandeliers while she staked her claim to a nonexistent kingdom. In interviews Anjum would be encouraged to talk about the abuse and cruelty that her interlocutors assumed she had been subjected to by her conventional Muslim parents, siblings and neighbors before she left home. They were invariably disappointed when she told them how much her mother and father had loved her and how she had been the cruel one. “Others have horrible stories, the kind you people like to write about,” she would say. “Why not talk to them?” But of course newspapers didn’t work that way. She was the chosen one. It had to be her, even if her story was slightly altered to suit readers’ appetites and expectations.

  Once she became a permanent resident of the Khwabgah, Anjum was finally able to dress in the clothes she longed to wear—the sequined, gossamer kurtas and pleated Patiala salwars, shararas, ghararas, silver anklets, glass bangles and dangling earrings. She had her nose pierced and wore an elaborate, stone-studded nose-pin, outlined her eyes with kohl and blue eye shadow and gave herself a luscious, bow-shaped Madhubala mouth of glossy-red lipstick. Her hair would not grow very long, but it was long enough to pull back and weave into a plait of false hair. She had a strong, chiseled face and an impressive, hooked
nose like her father’s. She wasn’t beautiful in the way Bombay Silk was, but she was sexier, more intriguing, handsome in the way some women can be. Those looks combined with her steadfast commitment to an exaggerated, outrageous kind of femininity made the real, biological women in the neighborhood—even those who did not wear full burqas—look cloudy and dispersed. She learned to exaggerate the swing in her hips when she walked and to communicate with the signature spread-fingered Hijra clap that went off like a gunshot and could mean anything—Yes, No, Maybe, Wah! Behen ka Lauda (Your sister’s cock), Bhonsadi ke (You arsehole born). Only another Hijra could decode what was specifically meant by the specific clap at that specific moment.

  On Anjum’s eighteenth birthday Kulsoom Bi threw a party for her in the Khwabgah. Hijras gathered from all over the city, some came from out of town. For the first time in her life Anjum wore a sari, a red “disco” sari, with a backless choli. That night she dreamed she was a new bride on her wedding night. She awoke distressed to find that her sexual pleasure had expressed itself into her beautiful new garment like a man’s. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but for some reason, perhaps because of the sari, the humiliation she felt had never been so intense. She sat in the courtyard and howled like a wolf, hitting herself on her head and between her legs, screaming with self-inflicted pain. Ustad Kulsoom Bi, no stranger to these histrionics, gave her a tranquilizer and took her to her room.

  When Anjum calmed down Ustad Kulsoom Bi talked to her quietly in a way she had never done before. There was no reason to be ashamed of anything, Ustad Kulsoom Bi told her, because Hijras were chosen people, beloved of the Almighty. The word Hijra, she said, meant a Body in which a Holy Soul lives. In the next hour Anjum learned that the Holy Souls were a diverse lot and that the world of the Khwabgah was just as complicated, if not more so, than the Duniya. The Hindus, Bulbul and Gudiya, had both been through the formal (extremely painful) religious castration ceremony in Bombay before they came to the Khwabgah. Bombay Silk and Heera would have liked to do the same, but they were Muslim and believed that Islam forbade them from altering their God-given gender, so they managed, somehow, within those confines. Baby, like Razia, was a man who wanted to remain a man but be a woman in every other way. As for Ustad Kulsoom Bi, she said she disagreed with Bombay Silk and Heera’s interpretation of Islam. She and Nimmo Gorakhpuri—who belonged to different generations—had had surgery. She knew a Dr. Mukhtar, she said, who was reliable and close-lipped and did not spread gossip about his patients in every gali and koocha of Old Delhi. She told Anjum she should think it over and decide what she wanted to do. Anjum took three whole minutes to make up her mind.

  Dr. Mukhtar was more reassuring than Dr. Nabi had been. He said he could remove her male parts and try to enhance her existing vagina. He also suggested pills that would undeepen her voice and help her develop breasts. At a discount, Kulsoom Bi insisted. At a discount, Dr. Mukhtar agreed. Kulsoom Bi paid for the surgery and the hormones; Anjum paid her back over the years, several times over.

  The surgery was difficult, the recovery even more so, but in the end it came as a relief. Anjum felt as though a fog had lifted from her blood and she could finally think clearly. Dr. Mukhtar’s vagina, however, turned out to be a scam. It worked, but not in the way he said it would, not even after two corrective surgeries. He did not offer to refund the money though, neither in whole nor in part. On the contrary, he went on to make a comfortable living, selling spurious, substandard body parts to desperate people. He died a prosperous man, with two houses in Laxmi Nagar, one for each of his sons, and his daughter married to a wealthy building contractor in Rampur.

  Although Anjum became a sought-after lover, a skilled giver of pleasure, the orgasm she had when she wore her red disco sari was the last one of her life. And though the “tendencies” that Dr. Nabi had cautioned her father about remained, Dr. Mukhtar’s pills did undeepen her voice. But it restricted its resonance, coarsened its timbre and gave it a peculiar, rasping quality, which sometimes sounded like two voices quarreling with each other instead of one. It frightened other people, but it did not frighten its owner in the way her God-given one had. Nor did it please her.

  Anjum lived in the Khwabgah with her patched-together body and her partially realized dreams for more than thirty years.

  She was forty-six years old when she announced that she wanted to leave. Mulaqat Ali was dead. Jahanara Begum was more or less bedridden and lived with Saqib and his family in one section of the old house at Chitli Qabar (the other half was rented to a strange, diffident young man who lived amidst towers of second-hand English books piled on the floor, on his bed and on every available horizontal surface). Anjum was welcome to visit occasionally, but not to stay. The Khwabgah was home to a new generation of residents; of the old ones only Ustad Kulsoom Bi, Bombay Silk, Razia, Bismillah and Mary remained.

  Anjum had nowhere to go.

  PERHAPS FOR THIS REASON, nobody took her seriously.

  Theatrical announcements of departure and impending suicide were fairly routine responses to the wild jealousies, endless intrigue and continuously shifting loyalties that were a part of daily life in the Khwabgah. Once again, everybody suggested doctors and pills. Dr. Bhagat’s pills cure everything, they said. Everyone’s on them. “I’m not Everyone,” Anjum said, and that set off another round of whispers (For and Against) about the pitfalls of pride and what did she think of herself?

  What did she think of herself? Not much, or quite a lot, depending on how you looked at it. She had ambitions, yes. And they had come full circle. Now she wanted to return to the Duniya and live like an ordinary person. She wanted to be a mother, to wake up in her own home, dress Zainab in a school uniform and send her off to school with her books and tiffin box. The question was, were ambitions such as these, on the part of someone like herself, reasonable or unreasonable?

  Zainab was Anjum’s only love. Anjum had found her three years ago on one of those windy afternoons when the prayer caps of the Faithful blew off their heads and the balloon-sellers’ balloons all slanted to one side. She was alone and bawling on the steps of the Jama Masjid, a painfully thin mouse of a thing, with big, frightened eyes. Anjum guessed that she was about three years old. She wore a dull green salwar kameez and a dirty white hijab. When Anjum loomed over her and offered her a finger to hold, she glanced up briefly, grasped it and continued to cry loudly without pause. The Mouse-in-a-hijab had no idea what a storm that casual gesture of trust set off inside the owner of the finger that she held on to. Being ignored instead of dreaded by the tiny creature subdued (for a moment at least) what Nimmo Gorakhpuri had so astutely and so long ago called Indo-Pak. The warring factions inside Anjum fell silent. Her body felt like a generous host instead of a battlefield. Was it like dying, or being born? Anjum couldn’t decide. In her imagination it had the fullness, the sense of entirety, of one of the two. She bent down and picked the Mouse up and cradled her in her arms, murmuring all the while to her in both her quarreling voices. Even that did not scare or distract the child from her bawling project. For a while Anjum just stood there, smiling joyfully, while the creature in her arms cried. Then she set her down on the steps, bought her some bright pink cotton candy and tried to distract her by chatting nonchalantly about adult matters, hoping to pass the time until whoever owned the child came to get her. It turned out to be a one-way conversation, the Mouse did not seem to know much about herself, not even her name, and did not seem to want to talk. By the time she had finished with the cotton candy (or it had finished with her) she had a bright pink beard and sticky fingers. The bawling subsided into sobs and eventually into silence. Anjum stayed with her on the steps for hours, waiting for someone to come for her, asking passersby if they knew of anybody who was missing a child. As evening fell and the great wooden doors of the Jama Masjid were pulled shut, Anjum hoisted the Mouse on to her shoulders and carried her to the Khwabgah. There she was scolded and told that the right thing to do under the circumstances wa
s to inform the Masjid Management that a lost child had been found. She did that the next morning. (Reluctantly, it has to be said, dragging her feet, hoping against hope, because by now Anjum was hopelessly in love.)

  Over the next week announcements were made from several mosques several times a day. No one came forward to claim the Mouse. Weeks went by, still no one came looking. And so, by default, Zainab—the name Anjum chose for her—stayed on in the Khwabgah where she was lavished with more love by more mothers (and, in a manner of speaking, fathers) than any child could hope for. She did not take very long to settle into her new life, which suggested that she had not been unduly attached to her old one. Anjum came to believe that she had been abandoned and not lost.