The Parcel (16 page)

“She can't read,” said Salma. “You're wasting your time.”

“We can teach you,” said Aruna. “There was a time when I couldn't read either. Now I can.”

“That's great,” said Salma. “Now go suck a cock.”

Madhu, Salma, and the girl started walking at a brisk pace, but the former madam followed. She sensed that this girl was still young and vulnerable.

“Why do you want to stay in this line?” asked Aruna. “We can help you find good work. I used to be in this line but then I came out of it.”

Salma turned to the young woman and said, “When your cunt is as old and shrivelled as hers, you can also leave this line.”

Aruna was trying her best to stay calm and focused. “I work at the centre now. I work for Prem Nagar. We are rehabilitating sex workers.”

“There's nothing wrong with us,” said Salma. “We don't need your help.”

“Look,” said Aruna. “We have our meetings in a room that is just across—see?”

“Leave us alone,” said Salma.

“Maybe she doesn't want to go with you.”

“Why don't you ask the girl?”

“What's your name?” Aruna asked the girl.

“Yes,” said Salma. “Even I would like to know that.”

“Ekta,” said the young woman.

“Ekta,” said Salma, “do you want to come with me and work, or do you want to go sing bhajans with this woman?”

“We don't sing bhajans. We are Christians. We have prayer meetings.”

“Do you serve popcorn also?”

“I'm done talking to you. Let the girl speak.”

Madhu watched with a mixture of amusement and sadness. Part of her wanted to rush back to the parcel; if anything happened to her, Padma would skin Madhu alive. On the other hand, this battle between Salma and Aruna was too delicious to abandon. The two women fighting over Ekta—one for her flesh and the other for her spirit—was a reflection of the parcel's current state, the way she hung in the balance. Except that Madhu was in charge of flesh
and
spirit. Because it was impossible to salvage both, she was trying to relinquish one in the hope of preserving even a whit of the other. She wished her task was as clear-cut as Salma's or Aruna's.

Salma squeezed Ekta's hand. “Say what you want. Speak the truth.”

“Leave her hand,” said Aruna.

“Look, Ekta,” said Salma. “You can pray in the brothel also. You can do sex work and, if you like, pray during your free time. But prayers don't fill your stomach.”

“We will empower her!” said Aruna. “We will teach her how to stitch, how to—”

Salma cut her off. “You want to be a tailor?” she asked Ekta.

Somehow this helped Ekta make up her mind. “I'll go with her,” she said, gesturing at Salma. Pleased with the victory, bristling with energy, Salma decided to properly introduce herself to Ekta.

“My name is Salma,” she said. “I'm glad I found you.”

Aruna accepted defeat but tried a parting shot: “If you ever need me, I'm—”

“She won't. But if
you
ever decide to start whoring again, I have an empty bed next to mine. In the meantime, say hello to Jesus for me.”

Aruna gave Salma a look of disgust. As Aruna retreated to her prayer meeting, held in a small room sandwiched between a cigarette shop and a milk bar, Madhu's attention was caught by a man who was talking to the cigarette shop owner. He had been slyly sipping chai as he watched the prostitutes' drama outside the brothel. It was Umesh, the real estate agent who had recently paid gurumai a visit.

“As if I need
her
to talk to Jesus,” barked Salma, pointing at Aruna's back. “As if without
her
, Jesus doesn't love me. If he wants to love me, then love me. I've never lied about who I am.” Then she pointed to a new building on Bellasis Road. “It's buildings like this one that are making us suffer. You think the people who will come to live here, you think they are any less sinful than us? The women who sleep in these buildings, they are also whores. How many of them actually love their husbands? How many of them actually
want
to sleep with their men? We both do the same thing. Only I do it better,” said Salma.

Madhu followed Salma's outstretched, accusatory hand. In the red-light area, these new buildings were called “The Towers.” Many of them were as yet uninhabited, and the dark grey cement walls gave them a ruthlessness that made Madhu queasy. They
seemed to grow in the dark, in illogical spurts, seeming so far away from completion one moment and then suddenly gaining height overnight. And the towers were not just in the east; they were coming up from behind Madhu as well, surrounding Kamathipura on all sides, giant sentries advancing, blocks of cement thousands of metres tall with rectangular holes in them for the windows to come. To Madhu, they looked like the teeth of smiling sentries.

Her eyes left the buildings and moved on to something closer, to a notice that was pasted on a wall right in front of her:

Suddenly, Madhu started laughing. Right before her eyes, at least ten women had been rendered homeless, tricked into an even darker future, when as tenants, they had had every right to be treated fairly; right before her eyes, a young prostitute had been enticed into a futureless future; and here was some chooth ka dhakkan, some complete cunt-lid, offering a workshop to save birds.

Birds!

Why not her? What had Madhu done to be overlooked so completely?

Were birds worth saving because they could not tell their stories, tell of the cruelty and injustice they had encountered over the years? Or was it because it was possible to fix them, bandage a wing or two, and then make them fly away, out of one's life forever?

“What's so funny?” asked Salma. “Why are you laughing?”

We cannot be fixed, thought Madhu. And we will never fly away.

M
adhu handed gurumai's will to Padma, then headed back to the cage. Salma had allowed the parcel to play with her son for a bit, but had then put her back in lock-up. All Salma had wanted was a playmate for her son, and once he had been returned to the NGO, the parcel was no longer needed. This worked beautifully for Madhu: the parcel had been allowed to breathe, then a chokehold had been put on her all over again. When Madhu shone the flashlight on the parcel, she noticed that the soles of her feet were swollen. She must have been kicking the cage bars. But she was calm now, defeated and totally receptive.

“There was a girl like you once, a long time ago,” said Madhu. “After just one week, she could not remember her mother's face. Do you remember your mother's face?”

“Yes…”

“Touch the bars,” said Madhu. “Put your hands on the bars.”

The parcel was hesitant. Madhu could see she thought she
was going to be beaten, but of course Madhu would do no such thing. Beatings were primitive, such a waste of time.

“I will not hurt you. Hold the bars with both hands.”

The parcel did as she was told. She gripped the bars tightly, her small fingers encircling them. The parallel lines of the bars in front of her face as she peered through them were much like the two lives she would have from now on—her past and the present—and the two would never meet.

“Each time you think of your mother, I want you to hold these bars and ask yourself one question: What feels more real, your mother or these bars?”

Madhu could see that the question was making the parcel sink. It was travelling down through her body faster than anything she had ever imagined. How far away her old life must seem.

“I asked that girl, ‘Why can't you see your mother's face?' ” Madhu continued. “She said it was because she was scared. But that wasn't true. Her mother could not show her face to her daughter because
she
was ashamed. Even I would be. Even I would not show my face if I had sold my own daughter.”

It was essential for Madhu to let the parcel think about this. She had added another ingredient to the mix, another herb or poison, depending on the way one looked at it. Madhu knew there was no difference between the two. In the right dose, a poison could be used to one's advantage. It was a secret that gurumai had shared with the young Madhu. She used to put drops of a substance in Madhu's eyes to make her pupils dilate, and it had made her eyes widen like legs and flutter like butterflies.

She let this new piece of information simmer inside the parcel for a few hours. And all that time, Madhu sat there in the
loft, saying little, allowing the parcel to ask questions, but never answering them. The minute the parcel shrieked or showed signs of hysteria, Madhu asked if she would like a visitor, and the thought of the slithery thing in the cage silenced the girl. At times, she tried to stand up, but the cage did not allow her to do so fully. It ensured that her back was bent, another element of the design that was intentional. If in the water tank she turned to fish, here she was a bent plant, being cut down to size.

Finally, the parcel managed to go to sleep with her arms around her knees, and Madhu was pleased. The parcel had learned a valuable lesson: she was the only person who could provide comfort to herself. Madhu knew there would be times when the parcel's heart would beat madly inside her breast, and she would have to let it go to town. It was best if she understood that anxiety or panic or any cry for help would be met with deafening silence, which in the end would only accentuate the cry, make it all the more ear-splitting and useless.

Madhu could now see the parcel without the flashlight. She enjoyed being cooped up with the girl, and her eyes were gaining the accuracy of a sniper's. She could clearly see the goodness in doing this work. If she hadn't been here, the parcel would be bloodied and bruised by now, with the smell of pimps on her. In Madhu's hands, the lie was being taken out of her—the thought that she would be free anytime soon. That was the true poison. Through the bars, Madhu tried to pet the parcel—not by touch, but with a gentle gaze over the contours of her body. In sleep or in wakefulness, the parcel had someone to share the terror with at least.

Around three in the morning, the parcel woke with a jolt. Madhu had dozed off too, on the ground near the foot of the ladder, and the sudden rustle above her head startled her awake. She rose immediately; there was work to do.

After the two of them had a quick chai on the floor below, it was time to go shopping in Barah Gulli. Every Friday, from 3:00 a.m. to noon, Lane Twelve transformed into a bargaining paradise. There were many names for it: Midnight Market, Sab Kuch Market and Chor Bazaar Ka Bhai, or “Brother of the Market of Thieves,” which alluded to its more famous sibling, Chor Bazaar, on Mutton Street. Madhu would buy clothes for the parcel at Sab Kuch Market, but for footwear, she would go to another midnight market, the one on Dedh Gulli, which had become a shoe lover's utopia. Madhu smiled when she thought of the Nike Air shoes that Bulbul had bought a year ago—shoes that might have been stolen by professional shoe stealers from outside a mosque or temple in the city and eventually sold to a vendor. The Nikes forced Bulbul to walk faster—she felt she
had
to—and she looked like a demented jogger in a sari, traipsing on the moon.

At the entrance to Lane Eleven, Madhu recognized an old woman who was looking after two children. She was affiliated with one of the brothels, and her job was to keep the children entertained if the clients had no one else to leave them with. There was a younger woman beside her, wearing black tights and a pink top—the last showpiece left.

Madhu turned right to Barah Gulli, walking alongside coolies carrying large TVs in cane baskets on their heads. They dropped them off at a repair shop that had so many TVs stacked on top of each other that Madhu wondered how the owner managed to work on even a single one. At the entrance
to the playground, two men lay on a handcart and shared a beedi. Their knees touched, and they both stared at the sky, blowing rings of smoke that disappeared before they could fully form. Here, even smoke had a miscarriage.

As soon as they entered the playground, Madhu could sense that the parcel was taken aback by the commotion. Normally, the place was lit up by halogen lights until dawn, but tonight the lights were not on; perhaps they were not working. All Madhu saw were the beams of flashlights moving horizontally and vertically, directing her to the dozens of vendors displaying their wares. The parcel should have been accustomed to the darkness by now, but clearly she was dazed: she almost walked into a roller on the ground. By noon, once the vendors had left, the roller would be used to flatten out the dusty earth again, leaving no trace of what was happening right now.

Madhu loosened her grip on the parcel to test whether she would let go of her hand. She didn't. So they carried on, walking by the man selling washing machines and old computer screens, past empty glass bottles, the majority of which had once held Chivas Regal and Red Label whisky, and past ceiling fans that lay flat on their backs on the ground. It seemed more and more brothels were taking Padma's cue and removing the most common means of suicide. When the lights shone on the fans, they resembled deformed metal insects that had once been alive. Next came the typewriters, reading glasses, binoculars, world maps, pens, refills, remote controls, gumboots, mirrors—so many mirrors, some with minor cracks, and others just empty frames—harmoniums, and stethoscopes. But the most popular vendor here was the one who sold crutches. He sold them cheaply, but they were sturdier than any house in the area. In a
place where beatings and injuries were more common than a sneeze, the support his crutches offered was beyond measure.

Gajja was here too, but Madhu did not go near him. This was business time for him. He took medicine from the hospital whenever he could, especially cough drops and some high-voltage painkillers, and sold them. His clients were mainly prostitutes who were addicted to the cough drops or used them to lull their children to sleep while they worked. Gajja guided them on the proper dosage and what to feed children before they took them. Sometimes the mothers took the cough drops too, and their children would crawl around the edge of the bed, trying to wake them up.

The parcel stopped at exactly the spot where Madhu normally did: the record seller's stall. Even after all these years, Amitabh Bachchan was still the centrepiece. The vendor was a huge fan. His son had worked as an extra in some of Bachchan's films. The vendor had his own flashlight, which he shone on the album covers:
Sholay, Deewaar, Zanjeer, Silsila…Sholay, Dewaar, Zanjeer
…He went back and forth, cover to cover, directing Madhu's vision. Even though he was talking to another man, and not paying much attention, the light fell directly on Bachchan's face.

Madhu was starting to feel displaced by the beam of the flashlight. The record seller was merely using it to light his merchandise, but the brashness of the glare, the nakedness of it, the way it shone like the headlight of something approaching, forced Madhu to turn inward, toward her past. She locked eyes with Bachchan's and thought of her father's radio churning out the tunes of Mohammed Rafi and Mukesh—the real voices behind some of Bachchan's lip-synching—woeful melodies filled with loss, or something much deeper than loss: an emptiness so vast that Madhu felt she carried acres and acres of nothing inside her.
With each note, she had imagined being lowered into a coal mine, where the air became closer and only the sound of her breathing remained. She had wanted to cry, scream, anything to get rid of the nothingness, to give it form, but Rafi and Mukesh stole her voice and only made her more barren.

It was only when the
women
sang that the tears had come. It was only when the women ached for their men that Madhu had ached too. How she had revelled in that ache. How it had lifted her. The despair was so beautiful, it was the most freeing experience she had ever had. It was a glorious stream of tears, from eyes to bridge of nose, until her tears had fallen into another world, where they were appreciated.

Even now, Madhu still played one song from her father's collection in her mind again and again. She sometimes hummed it to herself and only realized she was singing when she was halfway through it. She had seen the entire movie that featured the song only once, but she knew exactly how the hero, Amitabh Bachchan, held the green-eyed heroine, Rakhee, in his arms in a land full of snow. Amitabh told his love, “Sometimes I have this thought that you have been made for me. Sometimes I feel my heart has this thought that you are my destiny.” When Madhu had heard those lines, she realized for the first time that a
heart
could have thoughts. That was when she'd had her first longing, not for sex, not for anything dirty, but just to be held by a man. And any man whose heart could think would be the one for her.

In the movie, Rakhee is married off to the character played by Shashi Kapoor instead of Amitabh, and Rakhee sings that same song again on her wedding night, but she is still singing it to Amitabh. Shashi Kapoor does not know this, of course. He is madly in love with her, and she is in love with someone else—
which all made sense to Madhu, because love is about
not
having. The moment she had seen that movie, she had become Rakhee, and she imagined herself in pink lipstick, nose ring, and flawless skin, the red vermilion a mad streak of passion running through her forehead, trying to split her head into two because she could not have her man. Even though her husband was holding her, delicately removing her ornaments one by one, she only longed for her lover, and she sang to Amitabh, who was far away, and said to him, “Sometimes my heart has this thought that you were made for me.”

Years later, when Madhu looked back on this moment, it occurred to her that even in her dreams, she did not get her man. Even in her dreams, she did not get love. Out of the hundreds of songs that the radio had sent her way, this was the song that had entered her blood and changed it from B positive to O positive. She had become a universal donor, had given herself to all, because she understood that she belonged to none.

Madhu was brought abruptly back to the darkness of Barah Gulli by the sound of a police siren. No—it was a toy jeep a little boy was playing with. The parcel was staring at the boy, who was tugging at his father's shirt, asking him to buy the jeep. His other choice was a toy ambulance. Perhaps it was fitting, Madhu reflected, that they sold police jeeps and ambulances here. One had failed to protect, and the other had failed to rescue.

Suddenly she didn't feel well. Familiar bile rose in her stomach and up her throat. All at once, she felt there was so much acid inside her that if she were to spit it out, she would disfigure the loveliest of faces. She had to get out of there, away from Amitabh and Rakhee, but she hadn't completed her task and bought any clothes for the parcel yet. She simply did not have the strength to shop.

On most days, she managed to keep the piercing reminders of the past at bay by wrestling with them, by crushing them to the ground until they stopped thrashing about and behaved. Tonight, however, the parcel was watching her, and it made Madhu feel uneasy—what if the parcel saw Madhu weaken? It would send the wrong signal. No, Madhu could not allow that. Both master and slave could not be frightened. The parcel needed to be placed back in captivity until Madhu regained her balance.

Madhu turned and was heading back to the brothel with the parcel when she saw Salma talking to a vendor and handing him a huge carton of condoms. This was one of Salma's regular gigs: she would convince the Marys to give her free condoms for the safety of her co-workers, and then she sold them in Barah Gulli. Of course, no one in Kamathipura cared for the condoms, so men from outside the district bought them for a pittance for personal use.