Is it possible for a mother to be terrified of her own baby? Jahanara Begum was. Her first reaction was to feel her heart constrict and her bones turn to ash. Her second reaction was to take another look to make sure she was not mistaken. Her third reaction was to recoil from what she had created while her bowels convulsed and a thin stream of shit ran down her legs. Her fourth reaction was to contemplate killing herself and her child. Her fifth reaction was to pick her baby up and hold him close while she fell through a crack between the world she knew and worlds she did not know existed.
There, in the abyss, spinning through the darkness, everything she had been sure of until then, every single thing, from the smallest to the biggest, ceased to make sense to her. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. Yes of course she knew there was a word for those like him — Hijra. Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar.
But two words do not make a language. Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl. Her sixth reaction was to clean herself up and resolve to tell nobody for the moment. Not even her husband. Her seventh reaction was to lie down next to Aftab and rest.
Like the God of the Christians did, after he had made Heaven and Earth. Except that in his case he rested after making sense of the world he had created, whereas Jahanara Begum rested after what she created had scrambled her sense of the world.
Its passages were not open she checked. It was just an appendage, a baby-thing. Perhaps it would close, or heal, or go away somehow. She would pray at every shrine she knew and ask the Almighty to show her mercy. He would. She knew He would. And maybe He did, in ways she did not fully comprehend.
The first day she felt able to leave the house, Jahanara Begum took baby Aftab with her to the dargah of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed, an easy, ten-minute walk from her home. Perhaps he had called her to him. Suddenly they seemed to be the most important people in the world. Some knew parts of it, some none of it and some made up their own versions. Most knew he was a Jewish Armenian merchant who had travelled to Delhi from Persia in pursuit of the love of his life.
Few knew the love of his life was Abhay Chand, a young Hindu boy he had met in Sindh. Most knew he had renounced Judaism and embraced Islam. Few knew his spiritual search eventually led him to renounce orthodox Islam too.
Most knew he had lived on the streets of Shahjahanabad as a naked fakir before being publicly executed. Few knew the reason for his execution was not the offence caused by his public nakedness but the offence caused by his apostasy.
Aurangzeb, emperor at the time, summoned Sarmad to his court and asked him to prove he was a true Muslim by reciting the Kalima: la ilaha illallah, Mohammed-ur rasul Allah — There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Messenger. Clouds stopped drifting in the sky, birds froze in mid-flight and the air in the fort grew thick and impenetrable as he began to recite the Kalima.
But no sooner had he started than he stopped. All he said was the first phrase: la ilaha. There is no God. He could not go any further, he insisted, until he had completed his spiritual search and could embrace Allah with all his heart. Until then, he said, reciting the Kalima would only be a mockery of prayer. To suppose from this that those who went to pay their respects to Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed without knowing his story did so in ignorance, with little regard for facts and history, would be a mistake.
It celebrated but never preached the virtue of spirituality over sacrament, simplicity over opulence and stubborn, ecstatic love even when faced with the prospect of annihilation. When Jahanara Begum became a familiar figure at the dargah she heard and then retailed the story of how Sarmad was beheaded on the steps of the Jama Masjid before a veritable ocean of people who loved him and had gathered to bid him farewell.
Of how his head continued to recite his poems of love even after it had been severed from his body, and how he picked up his speaking head, as casually as a modern-day motorcyclist might pick up his helmet, and walked up the steps into the Jama Masjid, and then, equally casually, went straight to heaven. Whatever colour they paint his dargah, she insisted, in time it turns red on its own.
The street sounds grew faint and seemed to come from far away. She sat in a corner with her baby asleep on her lap, watching people, Muslim as well as Hindu, come in ones and twos, and tie red threads, red bangles and chits of paper to the grille around the tomb, beseeching Sarmad to bless them.
This is my son, Aftab, she whispered to Hazrat Sarmad. Look after him. And teach me how to love him. Hazrat Sarmad did. While she waited for his girl-part to heal, she kept him close and was fiercely protective of him. Even after her younger son, Saqib, was born she would not allow Aftab to stray very far from her on his own. It was not seen as unusual behaviour for a woman who had waited so long and so anxiously for a son.
Aftab was a better than average student, but even from the time he was very young it became clear that his real gift was music. He had a sweet, true singing voice and could pick up a tune after hearing it just once. His parents decided to send him to Ustad Hameed Khan, an outstanding young musician who taught Hindustani classical music to groups of children in his cramped quarters in Chandni Mahal.
Little Aftab never missed a single class. By the time he was nine he could sing a good twenty minutes of bada khayal in Raag Yaman, Durga and Bhairav and make his voice skim shyly off the flat rekhab in Raag Pooriya Dhanashree like a stone skipping over the surface of a lake. He could sing Chaiti and Thumri with the accomplishment and poise of a Lucknow courtesan. She-He, He-She Hee! When the teasing became unbearable Aftab stopped going to his music classes. But Ustad Hameed, who doted on him, offered to teach him separately, on his own.
So the music classes continued, but Aftab refused to go to school any more. There was no sign of healing anywhere on the horizon. She had managed to put off his circumcision for some years with a series of inventive excuses. But young Saqib was waiting in line for his, and she knew she had run out of time.
Eventually she did what she had to. She mustered her courage and told her husband, breaking down and weeping with grief as well as relief that she finally had someone else to share her nightmare with. Her husband, Mulaqat Ali, was a hakim, a doctor of herbal medicine, and a lover of Urdu and Persian poetry. Soon what had started out as medicine became the most popular summer drink in the region.
Rooh Afza became a prosperous enterprise and a household name. For forty years it ruled the market, sending its produce from its headquarters in the old city as far south as Hyderabad and as far west as Afghanistan. Then came Partition. The walled city broke open. Old families fled Muslim. New ones arrived Hindu and settled around the city walls. Rooh Afza had a serious setback, but soon recovered and opened a branch in Pakistan. A quarter of a century later, after the holocaust in East Pakistan, it opened another branch in the brand-new country of Bangladesh.
But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola. Although Mulaqat Ali was a trusted and valued employee of Hakim Abdul Majid, the salary he earned was not enough to make ends meet. So outside his working hours he saw patients at his home.
Jahanara Begum supplemented the family income with what she earned from the white cotton Gandhi caps she made and supplied in bulk to Hindu shopkeepers in Chandni Chowk.
Occasionally, perhaps once every few years, he would open his trunk and show his papers to a visiting journalist who, more often than not, neither listened carefully nor took him seriously. At most the long interview would merit an arch, amusing mention in a weekend special about Old Delhi.
Those who subscribed to this view were gaining influence at an alarming pace. Regardless of what appeared or did not appear in the newspapers, right into his dotage Mulaqat Ali always welcomed visitors into his tiny rooms with the faded grace of a nobleman.
He spoke of the past with dignity but never nostalgia. He described how, in the thirteenth century, his ancestors had ruled an empire that stretched from the countries that now called themselves Vietnam and Korea all the way to Hungary and the Balkans, from Northern Siberia to the Deccan plateau in India, the largest empire the world had ever known. He often ended the interview with a recitation of an Urdu couplet by one of his favourite poets, Mir Taqi Mir: Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka.
The head which today proudly flaunts a crown Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown. Most of his visitors, brash emissaries of a new ruling class, barely aware of their own youthful hubris, did not completely grasp the layered meaning of the couplet they had been offered, like a snack to be washed down by a thimble-sized cup of thick, sweet tea.
They understood of course that it was a dirge for a fallen empire whose international borders had shrunk to a grimy ghetto circumscribed by the ruined walls of an old city. He believed that poetry could cure, or at least go a long way towards curing, almost every ailment. He would prescribe poems to his patients the way other hakims prescribed medicine. He could produce a couplet from his formidable repertoire that was eerily apt for every illness, every occasion, every mood and every delicate alteration in the political climate.
It infused everything with a subtle sense of stagnancy, a sense that everything that happened had happened before. That nothing new was possible. This could be why young people around him often fled, giggling, when they sensed that a couplet was on its way. When Jahanara Begum told him about Aftab, perhaps for the first time in his life Mulaqat Ali had no suitable couplet for the occasion. It took him a while to get over the initial shock.
When he did, he scolded his wife for not having told him earlier. Times had changed, he said. This was the Modern Era. They would find a doctor in New Delhi, far away from the whisper and gossip that went on in the mohallas of the old city. The Almighty helps those who help themselves, he told his wife a little sternly.
A week later, dressed in their best clothes, with an unhappy Aftab fitted out in a manly steel-grey Pathan suit with a black embroidered waistcoat, a skullcap and jootis with toes curled like gondolas, they set off for Nizamuddin basti in a horse-drawn tanga. Dr Nabi prided himself on being a straight-talking man of precise and scientific temper. After examining Aftab he said he was not, medically speaking, a Hijra — a female trapped in a male body — although for practical purposes that word could be used.
Aftab, he said, was a rare example of a Hermaphrodite, with both male and female characteristics, though outwardly, the male characteristics appeared to be more dominant.
He said he could recommend a surgeon who would seal the girl-part, sew it up. He could prescribe some pills too. But, he said, the problem was not merely superficial. He could not guarantee complete success. Mulaqat Ali, prepared to grasp at straws, was elated. Everybody has some tendency or the other … tendencies can always be managed. It gave him coordinates to position himself, to steady his ship that was pitching perilously on an ocean of couplet-less incomprehension.
He cut down on household expenses and drew up lists of people and relatives from whom he could borrow money. Simultaneously, he embarked on the cultural project of inculcating manliness in Aftab. He passed on to him his love of poetry and discouraged the singing of Thumri and Chaiti.
He stayed up late into the night, telling Aftab stories about their warrior ancestors and their valour on the battlefield. They left Aftab unmoved. But when he heard the story of how Temujin — Changez Khan — won the hand of his beautiful wife, Borte Khatun, how she was kidnapped by a rival tribe and how Temujin fought a whole army virtually single-handedly to get her back because he loved her so much, Aftab found himself wanting to be her.
While his sisters and brother went to school, Aftab spent hours on the tiny balcony of his home looking down at Chitli Qabar — the tiny shrine of the spotted goat who was said to have had supernatural powers — and the busy street that ran past it and joined the Matia Mahal Chowk. As Aftab kept strict vigil, day after day, over nothing in particular, Guddu Bhai, the acrimonious early-morning fishmonger who parked his cart of gleaming fresh fish in the centre of the chowk, would, as surely as the sun rose in the east and set in the west, elongate into Wasim, the tall, affable afternoon naan khatai-seller who would then shrink into Yunus, the small, lean, evening fruit-seller, who, late at night, would broaden and balloon into Hassan Mian, the stout vendor of the best mutton biryani in Matia Mahal, which he dished out of a huge copper pot.
One spring morning Aftab saw a tall, slim-hipped woman wearing bright lipstick, gold high heels and a shiny, green satin salwar kameez buying bangles from Mir the bangle-seller who doubled up as caretaker of the Chitli Qabar. He stored his stock of bangles inside the tomb every night when he shut shrine and shop. He had managed to ensure that the working hours coincided. Aftab had never seen anybody like the tall woman with lipstick. He wanted to be her.
He followed her down the street all the way to Turkman Gate and stood for a long time outside the blue doorway she disappeared into. No ordinary woman would have been permitted to sashay down the streets of Shahjahanabad dressed like that. Whatever she was, Aftab wanted to be her. He wanted to be her even more than he wanted to be Borte Khatun. He wanted to put out a hand with painted nails and a wrist full of bangles and delicately lift the gill of a fish to see how fresh it was before bargaining down the price.
He wanted to lift his salwar just a little as he stepped over a puddle — just enough to show off his silver anklets. He began to divide his time between his music classes and hanging around outside the blue doorway of the house in Gali Dakotan where the tall woman lived. He learned that her name was Bombay Silk and that there were seven others like her, Bulbul, Razia, Heera, Baby, Nimmo, Mary and Gudiya, who lived together in the haveli with the blue doorway, and that they had an Ustad, a guru, called Kulsoom Bi, older than the rest of them, who was the head of the household.
Aftab learned their haveli was called the Khwabgah — the House of Dreams. At first he was shooed away because everybody, including the residents of the Khwabgah, knew Mulaqat Ali and did not want to get on the wrong side of him. But regardless of what admonition and punishment awaited him, Aftab would return to his post stubbornly, day after day. It was the only place in his world where he felt the air made way for him.
When he arrived, it seemed to shift, to slide over, like a school friend making room for him on a classroom bench. Over a period of a few months, by running errands, carrying their bags and musical instruments when the residents went on their city rounds, by massaging their tired feet at the end of a working day, Aftab eventually managed to insinuate himself into the Khwabgah.
Finally the day dawned when he was allowed in. He entered that ordinary, broken-down home as though he were walking through the gates of Paradise. The blue door opened on to a paved, high-walled courtyard with a handpump in one corner and a Pomegranate tree in the other.
There were two rooms set behind a deep verandah with fluted columns. The roof of one of the rooms had caved in and its walls had crumbled into a heap of rubble in which a family of cats had made its home. One of the cupboards had a dim, full-length mirror mounted on the door. In another corner there was a beaten-up old dressing table. A chipped and broken chandelier with only one working bulb and a long-stemmed, dark brown fan hung from the high ceiling.
The fan had human qualities — she was coy, moody and unpredictable. She had a name too, Usha. Ustad Kulsoom Bi slept on the only bed in the haveli with her parakeet, Birbal, in his cage above her bed. Birbal would screech as though he was being slaughtered if Kulsoom Bi was not near him at night.
Birbal knew all the variations. He could mutter it, say it coquettishly, in jest, with affection and with genuine, bitter anger. Everyone else slept in the verandah, their bedding rolled up in the day like giant bolsters.
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. Razia was not a Hijra. 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 behaviour — any more. For some reason her un-memoried, un-anchored mind veered unerringly towards government schemes.
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. 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. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.
You are all happy here! This is the Khwabgah! Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? 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. He was living proof that Nimmo Gorakhpuri was wrong, was he not? 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 plucked his bushy eyebrows into thin, asymmetrical crescents with a pair of home-made tweezers that looked more like tongs.
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. 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. 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.
Jahanara Begum, never known for her shyness, waded in to retrieve him. He refused to leave. Ustad Kulsoom Bi tried to honour 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. 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.
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 grey 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.
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 neighbours 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. She was the chosen one. 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. Those looks combined with her steadfast commitment to an exaggerated, outrageous kind of femininity made the real, biological women in the neighbourhood — 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! Only another Hijra could decode what was specifically meant by the specific clap at that specific moment.
Hijras gathered from all over the city, some came from out of town. That night she dreamed she was a new bride on her wedding night. 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 tranquillizer 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.
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 un-deepen 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. 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.
But it restricted its resonance, coarsened its timbre and gave it a peculiar, rasping quality, which sometimes sounded like two voices quarrelling 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. 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. 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? 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? 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 quarrelling 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.
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 passers-by 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 was 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. Senior and Junior Granny. The Mouse absorbed love like sand absorbs the sea. Very quickly she metamorphosed into a cheeky young lady with rowdy, distinctly bandicoot-like tendencies that could only barely be managed. Mummy, in the meanwhile, grew more addle-headed by the day. She was caught unawares by the fact that it was possible for one human being to love another so much and so completely.
At first, being new to the discipline, she was only able to express her feelings in a busy, bustling way, like a child with its first pet. She bought Zainab an unnecessary amount of toys and clothes frothy, puff-sleeved frocks and Made-in-China squeaking shoes with flashing heel-lights , she bathed, dressed and undressed her an unnecessary number of times, oiled, braided and unbraided her hair, tied and untied it with matching and un-matching ribbons that she kept rolled up in an old tin.
She overfed her, took her for walks in the neighbourhood and, when she saw that Zainab was naturally drawn to animals, got her a rabbit — who was killed by a cat on his very first night at the Khwabgah — and a he-goat with a Maulana-style beard who lived in the courtyard and every now and then, with an impassive expression on his face, sent his shiny goat pills skittering in all directions. The Khwabgah was in better condition than it had been for years. Anjum slept with Zainab on a mattress on the floor, her long body curled protectively around the little girl like a city wall.
At night she sang her to sleep softly, in a way that was more whisper than song. When Zainab was old enough to understand, Anjum began to tell her bedtime stories. At first the stories were entirely inappropriate for a young child. Far from putting Zainab to sleep, many of the stories either gave her nightmares or made her stay awake for hours, fearful and cranky. Sometimes Anjum herself wept as she told them. Zainab began to dread her bedtime and would shut her eyes tightly, simulating sleep in order not to have to listen to another tale.
Over time, however, Anjum with inputs from some of the junior Apas worked out an editorial line. The stories were successfully childproofed, and eventually Zainab even began to look forward to the night-time ritual. After the party they decided to walk for a while and take in some fresh air.
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