Vespa

Ché had come to them, the first one ever to possess a last name, a passport with a valid home address, and an anatomy that was unequivocally male. Vespa cataloged the dissimilarities. Entire nations were constructed along the idea of distinction. She wanted to record the before-Ché picture of her kholi, because she knew the after-Ché picture would be quite different. Their kholi was their whole world, the only sea-facing room this side of the Dharavi slums, home to Vespa and Steffi, two card-carrying eunuchs , neither of them with a police record.

Ché brought with him a backpack from which he produced a camera, the lens as long as Vespa’s arm, a pair of slippers so sturdy they could kill the fat wall lizard, and the smells of airports and cafés, places they’d never been to and would likely never go. He planted his things in the center of the room, making the kholi look small, the curtains frail, the walls dirty, like the room were a choppy sea around the rooted island of his things.

He’d come because in one of her interviews with a magazine, back when the media found her sort sexy, she’d called her life a living hell. Ché wanted to see what hell looked like. He offered to pay. Ten thousand rupees if she let him stay four days.

At first Steffi had objected, but when she heard about the cash she’d relented. The money could go a long way. It would mean better service at Madam Chang’s Hair Salon, less trips on the local, more hours of rest.

Already Ché was aiming his camera at the room. Vespa couldn’t understand his fascination. What beauty or brazenness could be found in paper flowers? In their rusted toiletries? Their bras and blouses, their mud-splattered saris hanging on pegs?

“Tell me please, who is everyone?” His narrow shoulders shone from a black tank top, as though in mock-apology.

Vespa trailed her eyes around the room.

Sprawled to her left was Champa, the Jasmine, playing with her flip-phone. Reader of French novels, collector of old perfumes, maker of her own business cards that simply said: “de bonne heure.” She pointed at Champa with her toe. “All she wants out of life is a snappy ringtone and good bandwidth.” Champa stared at her, as though to say, “What’s wrong with that?”

Two more eunuchs sat to her left: Saffron and Izzat, whose descriptions wouldn’t matter because their bodies, like their hair and makeup, changed every day. Today they were Madonna, dark lipstick and cross pendants, tomorrow jumpsuited Zeenat in Don, the day after wet glittering sari-ed Sridevi in Mr. India.

Ché cataloged their names, their dresses, likely also their sins and hopes in a little skyblue diary that said “Cervantes” in a slanting font.

Finally Vespa pointed to the indivisible Steffi. Left foot placed beside right knee, back arched, a perfect Cleopatra. Taking in all of her was an ordeal. Arms bent, cradling a round head topped with a 70-s bouffant, sari bulging over beer-belly that wasn’t a beer-belly but her very own oddity below the waist, the oddity that made Steffi Steffi.

Still, after all the stunning visual stimuli, all Ché could ask was “Why ‘Steffi’?”

“What is there to know? When she was little she wanted to be Steffi Graf.”

Ché looked stunned, disappointed. His hand hovered over the notebook as if contemplating whether to even bother documenting Steffi or moving on to the next girl. What had he expected? A crazy initiation story that revealed the essence of all eunuchs?

“What?” said Steffi. “You are not the only one with a childhood.”

“Mmmm,” chimed Vespa. “We could ask you the same question.”

Ché tapped his pen, swung his cap forward such that his eyes disappeared. “How would you shorten Chediyappa? They christened me Ché at Dartmouth. In America.”

Looking at him—distressed jeans rolled up to reveal thin, vulnerable ankles (susceptible to twists)—she wouldn’t have thought he had reasons to hide. He seemed so…wholesome. Complete.

His eyes, less intrusive than his camera, darted around the room and finally came to settle on her bosom. “And what about you?”

She told him. Vespa was her original name. Original pet name. Her mother’s idea, who’d trained as an architect in Miami, navigating the city on her beloved yellow, Italian scooter.  She was the only one with her original name intact. Strange from the beginning. She’d seen no reason to change it. What she didn’t tell him—her name proved she had a mother once. The old woman was alive, still lived in the same city. They hadn’t talked since Vespa had turned three and grown, alongside all the woman parts, a man part as well.

*

Ché

He followed them down Nesbit Road through the Byculla traffic. Starting from the Exhibition Center, they batted fake lashes at the temples, pausing at the Bahuchara Mata shrine to give away all the money they had. They made three more stops: the flower shop, the cemetery, the cosmetics store. From there they made their way to the Eastern Freeway.

He kept up. At the tea stall he had a cup of hot, frothy tea. His stomach growled, but he didn’t make a fuss. It was important to be unintrusive, to observe all the small details. From any one of those details he could launch a story. He was toying with a possible beginning: “They call them the ironies of God. Women intended as men, intention reverted.”

At the Byculla traffic circle, he readied his camera for a wide-angle shot—the eunuchs during the collecting hour.

There had been no warning. Vespa hadn’t prepared him. Steffi left them at the signal and stepped into the oncoming traffic.

She raked through the cars, shuffled past the autos, the front of her sari hitched all the way up, past her privates. Installing her legs inside a shallow manhole, she turned right, turned left, revealing her truth below the waist. The scooters, like lizards slid forward, stopped, slid forward. The violent put-put puff of their exhausts exploded like little bombs, causing Steffi to cover her mouth with the free end of her sari. Still, she persevered, holding her ground, revealing her truth. This is what El Jefe, their boss, had told him. They went to the Eastern Expressway for the tourists. They came to India to see the oddities, didn’t they, and we are the city’s pimples, her sores and boils. Steffi, like a confetti of pimples, a thrill-provider, a guilt-inducer, a god-reminder turned to each passing auto beseeching, bragging, threatening them with her biology in exchange for a rupee or two.

A current ran through Ché’s body. Every nerve chimed Present! like a classroom full of students. His camera at the ready, his impulses told him to click! And yet, the way Vespa looked away, her head tucked, sari covering mouth from fumes, eyes belying ambivalence and disdain, like an ordinary housewife waiting for the signal to change. It was just another day at work, just like his father getting into the Nissan and driving off to sit at his desk each morning. Insignificant. He ought to give a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T. His confusion in properly labeling the moment—significant? insignificant?—left his body mute. He stood stiffly at the signal, his limbs frozen, mouth agape, watching Steffi.

His camera dangled, the strap digging ridges into his neck.

It looked like Steffi was taking a public piss for all of Mumbai to watch. Her arms were outstretched like branches, coins glittering in both hands. There was something delicate about her sturdiness. The fingernails were painted, a different pattern on each finger, rainbow stripes on the index, a rising sun in the middle, polka dots for the ring, starburst for the little one. Sideburns were carefully twirled into curls, free end of sari flapping madly, a flag of daffodils, filling hearts with morbid joy. 

She might be built like Mohammad Ali, but each time the drivers shoved her, told her to get lost, told her to just go and die, Ché wanted to rush forward. But his body was in shock. This was an out of body experience. It was almost as though he’d pulled his own pants down, exposed himself. His legs felt stuck, his arms too, his sins came flooding forward like a diseased yellow moon that wouldn’t shift. How odd. How embarrassing. How utterly thrilling. Death-defying. A religious experience.

A minute later, Vespa broke the spell.

“How much?” she asked, and Steffi held up two small bills.

“Is that all?”

Religiously, Ché took this down in the notebook.

*

Steffi

She had spent thirty rupees on the flower shop. She couldn’t help it. They had purple orchids. Not purple. Ink color. The blue of Chelpark ink, and all she could think of was blue ink blots on white school shirts. The flowers were the color of childhood. The shopkeeper even printed a label of her name and stuck it on the plastic: STEFFI.

The flowers were for their kholi.

Vespa took the flowers, cradling them on her arm like a newborn. Behind her, the boy from America. He wanted to see them at work. But it was Vespa she was worried about. Vespa, who always feared the collecting hour. The first time she’d frozen on the spot, hands glued to her sides. Asking for money was not part of her makeup. Coming from a good family and all. But good family or no, their biology made them both freaks, and as freaks they had a duty to perform, songs to sing, palms to open flat, people’s charity to implore. She ought to get off her high horse. “She will learn in time,” she’d told El Jefe. But Vespa never learned. Steffi had to do it on her own.

“You think you can make both our quotas?” Vespa had asked.

“Why not? I’m strange enough for both of us,” she’d replied.

She didn’t mind. It was second nature to her now. She told herself she was standing on a precipice, staring into the eye of the Arabian Sea, at some distant vessel, its siren coming at her full and strong, and also its distant light. And if she squinted hard enough, all the headlights melted into one.

Bombay was a bitch. Bombay was an aggressive ex. The traffic moved so slow. It wasn’t her fault. She swayed, scrunched, collapsed, twisted, bent to make way for every fucker in every vehicle while still holding a bag, a funny knife (hidden in her blouse), her sari pleats, and a gesture to stop. This is the way I was born. Not born, no, but grew into. Feel pity or disgust or whatever it is you need to feel and cough up a rupee. The traffic complained. Cursed. A thousand-headed monster, its hundred eyes torching hers. Metal spokes and rubber wheels. Monster! someone screamed and she said, My thoughts exactly! First you, never I. School jingles best jingles. People urged God to intervene. As though she didn’t have access to him. As though she couldn’t ask him to intervene on her behalf. She bared her teeth. Let it be known, she told the Bombay traffic, she prayed every day. To the Devi on the hill. She shouted the Devi’s name as she stood naked from waist down, Bombay traffic oozing from her sides like she were birthing the city scooter by ugly scooter. She sang praises to the Devi, the Devi who’d given her a matka for genitals, a matka the size of a football. This was the goddess’s glory. She was made in glory, image source unknown. No replica to be found for miles around. No one in their city had genitalia like hers. This is what she was telling Bombay traffic at the top of her lungs.

“Excuse me,” said a voice behind her.

The man in the auto wore a white kurta and pajama. His wild hair nearly covered his kohl-rimmed eyes. A poet, no doubt. He’d seen her essence. He wanted to immortalize her in a tasteful nazm.

“Can you…?” A rude horn swallowed his words.

“Yes?” She leaned inside his auto.

“Can you tell me what’s holding up the traffic?”

She pulled him by the collar. “Do I look like I have a bloody telescope?”

They cleaved her off him. Beat her with their Hawai rubber chappals, soles scuffed from dragging their feet along footpaths. She was a truth universally acknowledged: a hijra on the streets with lipstick on her teeth and genitals the size of Greenland must be in want of a husband. Your husband.

*

Ché

Back in the kholi he consulted Wendy Doniger, wrote furiously in his “Cervantes” notebook to make up for his earlier panic: the ironies of god, they are hated and worshipped, revered and mocked. Ancient history holds sway. Still considered a symbol of fertility, their presence is requested at weddings and baby showers. Tricked out in glittering saris, loud makeup, fake jewelry, these blessed half-and-halfs burst into simple gatherings and turn them into raucous affairs … their main concern is not the expectant mother or the happy bride and groom, but outdoing each other in timbre and glow…

“What are you writing?” Vespa asked.

How should he explain it? It was more movement than essay. Meditation rather than story, revelation rather than description. He saw the concern in her eyes, the attempt at comprehension. Likely she did not read English. How far had she studied? Likely not at all. Her education must have happened in beauty parlors and music recitals.

“It isn’t intended for Mumbai Mirror or Midday,” he said, trying to soothe her. “You aren’t going to find yourself on page six.” He was going to change her name, maybe not even give her a name.

“Which magazine?”

 “It’s American. Read only in America. It’s online.”

“But if it is online, anyone can read it anywhere, anytime? What is it called?”

“Avenues and Empires. It isn’t very popular in India.”

He pulled out his laptop, pulled up the site, showed her the pictures. Photos of Sudanese refugees in Vermont, goat slaughterers in Islamabad. The big, beautiful images reflected in her big, beautiful eyes. Beside the photos, the choicest words in Helvetica, written by some of the best indie journalists he’d met online. Now, a photo of Obama drinking beer and eating noodles with Bourdain at Bún chả Hương Liên in Vietnam.

Could she see that he intended to do the same to her? By writing about her he wanted to elevate her life from hell to not-that-much-of-a-hell. Create her anew, and that too in English. For an audience that spoke the language of human rights. An audience that had words to describe her experience. LGBTIQ. Pride.

She turned her eyes away, tucked an inky orchid into her hair. “Make me look pretty, yes?”

*

Vespa

He was slumped on her bed, reading from a fat book titled The Hindus, telling them their history. The eunuchs had been worshipped since times immemorial. In the Elephanta caves, less than an hour away by boat, the half-man-half-woman form of Shiva attracted tourists from all over the world. Wendy Doniger, the author, had compiled all their great accomplishments.

Vespa didn’t ask, but wondered: how could all that help them now? Could history help get them better clients who dined them at Mahesh Lunch Home before following them into their rooms? Could history make their parents come crawling back, begging for her forgiveness?

“Once an old raja had only eunuchs for tax collectors,” read Ché. “To shame his public into paying taxes and--”

“This Wendy person,” interrupted Steffi. “Has she been to India? She gives talks?”

“No talks,” said Ché. “She would be attacked if she gave a talk in India. Forget India, she can’t even read in New Jersey. One time, she had a chair thrown at her.”

The photo on the back cover revealed a woman wearing big shaded glasses and a straw hat. How could such a woman, afraid even of a little sun exposure, take such risks as to have furniture thrown at her?

At most Vespa had shoes tossed at her. Dirty water. Paint and eggs on Holi. But everyone got egged on Holi. A chair was too much.

“She must feel so exposed,” she wondered out loud.

“But it isn’t herself she is exposing,” said Steffi. “It is us.”

“Yes, but, why?”

India was not Wendy’s problem. So why make it her problem?

“Just like us,” Vespa said, “she is taking on the pain of others, and getting beaten.”

“Stupid,” said Steffi. “Brave.”

“If you meet her,” Vespa told Ché, “tell her we think she is very brave.”

Ché’s eyes lit up. Two fireflies in the semi-dark.

*

Steffi

The lights had gone. She lay on her bed, listening to Vespa. Ché had spread his own bedding on the floor, a shiny stretch of wool with zippers, sturdier than anything they owned. Vespa was telling him how they got kicked out of Juhu and came upon the Byculla traffic as their regular spot. Juhu had been a good location. The crowds outside Pratiksha, awaiting a glimpse of Big B had always indulged them. But the police didn’t like it, accused them of disrupting peace. They couldn’t have freaks hanging outside the mansion of the greatest movie star in India. Big B may have played a eunuch in one of his most famous songs, now how did it go, jiski biwi moti uska bhi bara naam hai, if you got a fat wife you’re blessed, lay her on the bed, no need for a mattress, but he was a respectable man with grandchildren. And so Juhu was lost.

“Big B is worshipped like a God in India,” chimed Ché, showing off what-all he knew about his parents’ country of birth, and Vespa laughed encouragingly.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked, and Vespa’s bangled arm flagged Steffi. “She does.”

“What do you think He is like?” he asked her. “Cruel? Kind?”

She had her theory. God was a householder. All God wanted was to settle down with a good woman and raise babies. To sip tea in his banyaan on the balcony, read The Telegraph on weekdays, The Times on the weekends. He wanted to go to work on the local, come home in time for more tea, for balcony-in-banyaan time. He shouted at his wife, but not too much because then the neighbors would complain. He didn’t want to solve the problem of poverty, didn’t want to fight crime or drugs. Problems of caste and class were foreign to him because he did not create them. What was his business that farmers were committing suicide or the tribals were turning Maoist? God was a modest householder, sipping tea on his balcony, scratching a mole on his shoulder. The world wasn’t perfect, but that wasn’t his problem because he never intended any harm.

“You don’t believe he is all-powerful, all-knowing, the creator of all, the giver of pain?” Ché persisted.

“She thinks he has no power,” replied Vespa. “She thinks God sees all but doesn’t have the power or the will to do anything.”

Steffi raised an eyebrow. “You can worship Bahuchara Mata all you want. When have I stopped you from believing whatever you want?”

Vespa sat up. “It’s not just you. I see what you mean. If God was so great, how come he made pain? How come he made us?”

Steffi didn’t have an answer. “Go to sleep. It’s getting late.”

Why did God create us? She tried various sentences in her head. So he could laugh. So there is a thing called punishment. God has a sense of humor. 

But what did it matter? Ultimately the fight was over the means of production and the minute the eunuchs gained control of the surplus they produced, they wouldn’t be marginalized. Haha. Even she knew this wasn’t true. Someone ought to write the eunuch version of Capital.

Vespa’s heavy snores and Ché’s soft ones filled the kholi. Steffi lay awake. What did a eunuch with an MA in economics know about God? Steffi, the eunuch, they said. Not, Steffi, the MA in economics. She’d studied like everyone else, appeared for all the exams dressed like a Dharavi girl with arm socks and face wrapped in a dupatta like a cauliflower in a newspaper. Still there were questions she couldn’t answer. Vespa had laid bare all the little rooms inside Steffi’s head, rooms she’d so carefully filled with images, descriptions, explanations.

And that too in front of this boy. Why had Vespa let him into their lives? What was he after? What had he captured inside his enormous camera, inside his notebook?

She opened Ché’s laptop. There were photos he’d taken earlier that day.

In one photo, spreadeagled before Bombay traffic like the Rio Jesus, a thousand headlights coming to impale her, she stood, cardboard stiff. Like Moses, the traffic parted. In another, she bargained at the flower shop, embarrassing the owner into give her a good rate. In another, she was a speck in the crowds of Flora Fountain. How common she looked, and different, her beak nose, her overpainted lips. Then in a series of photos, she and Vespa looked through a tear in the curtain, past the window grills. Like they were jailed. How grotesque she looked.

Why did Vespa wish to  lock herself into the rigidity of Ché’s photos?

The photos imposed an idea of their bodies. Female eyes over female lips over male jaws on male shoulders over female chests over female tummies (no chance of babies), over femalemale-female genitalia. Like God followed a prototype then forgot and followed another. God on steroids. Her body was her body, and it didn’t need to be represented. Or described. Or celebrated. Just left alone. To its fate. Her fate was her fate. Hell or heaven or something in between. 

But Ché wouldn’t understand the nihilism of believing in fate. Steffi  minimized the images on his laptop.

The website he was showing Vespa earlier popped up. What had he called it? Avenues and Empires. A travel-blog. Traveling. Didn’t it sound exotic? Like levitating or flying or hydroplaning. You were lifted off the ground, carried with speed from location to unfamiliar location, without purpose, without need, without the inconvenient huddle of relatives or friends. Just stories. Ché was the traveler and Steffi and Vespa, an encounter.

On the website people ate, drank, celebrated Ramadan, hugged, raised glasses, raised hands in prayer, cowered from guns. The photos captured people in all their grainy details, so clear, she felt she was inside their skin. Even in fascist countries trying to overthrow dictators, these travelwriters found bootleg bars, drank their way to freedom.

She, Steffi, was going to live on that site. Like the sole woman surfer of Togo. Or the gay couple of Islamabad, or the Somalian refugee singer in Spain, or the last sati of India. The funeral pyre was as tall as the four-foot-two child-bride, dressed in red, face barely visible from under a mountain of garlands. Even in these photos there was a scrumptiousness, the landscape of people’s skins, the sharp inclines of the Togo woman’s cheeks, the rude helplessness of the sati girl’s buck teeth. The textures conveyed so brightly, unsparingly on Ché’s laptop screen. She stared long at each photo, tapping the arrow keys with her rainbow nail.

She would be part of the site, that was what Ché had come to do. To immortalize her and Vespa. To immolate them. He’d put up the photo of her in the traffic circle. Her profile would be tastefully blurred, only her imploring arms left in painful, shameful relief, as though fighting with all the headlights. He’d make it  look like she was begging for a miracle to release her from the curse of her anatomy.

So this was it. This is how she would be forever remembered. A hijra. Persian meaning: separation. Separated. Separate. From the normal. From all the normal people eating noodles, drinking beer, earning an MA in economics.

It was nearly dawn. Vespa would be up soon, and Ché would follow them for another afternoon at the traffic circle. She hopped out of bed,scribbled a note for Vespa: Don’t look for me.

*

Vespa

Vespa woke up with a start, staring at the scrap of paper beside her pillow.

Steffi’s friendship meant everything.

Once on their way home, a man had wanted to see what Steffi had been parading that afternoon for free. He tugged at her sari, and when she didn’t yield, the man boxed her breasts like they could detach from her body. Like she was carrying lemons in her blouse, not real breasts. Vespa had punched him in the face and kept punching until he bled.

And still Steffi had left. She ought not to have let Ché in with his camera, his essay, his Wendy book on the eunuchs, his laptop, his website. But maybe there was still time.  She knew where Steffi would be. She hired an auto and gave the address.

Behind the Bahuchara Mata shrine, inside the dark room dedicated to the ritual, the hakim knelt by Steffi. Her legs were parted, sari up, her bouffant squashed into submission, red smeared all over her face. The hakim launched a tirade of curses at Steffi’s genitals, as though bad words alone could cause the unwanted organ to fall off in shame. The gathering of worshippers sang praises, as though to undo the sting of his words. The two opposing messages fit into each other like two concentric circles. They rotated in opposite directions. The shouting, so loud, was the only anesthesia, because now, the ritual knife was brought forward, dipped into the flame growing from a small pile of wood. Steffi looked achingly alert. She closed her eyes as if to succumb to the hallucination of the words, but not for long.

Tomorrow Steffi would compare her castration to a painting by Goya, Goya and Picasso the only two painters she spoke of. She would say that there was a lot of darkness, a lot of shouting, a lot of shadows, and dance. This was the way she saw everything--magical. Vespa knew this. 

The swiftness of the hakim’s movement resembled a dance. The knife swung this way and that, as though to snip off a few noses while he was at it. So much swinging, like a Maa Kali vanquishing demons, such that the exact moment of Steffi’s liberation was hard to pinpoint. But come it did, and greater than Steffi’s cry were the ululations of the hakim and the worshippers.

What had just happened? For several minutes, Vespa was not sure. But Steffi had fainted, and along with her, a handful of worshippers.

Vespa did not know if the hakim would allow her to get close to the piece of flesh that had been so recently a portion of Steffi’s body. The “football” paraded for all of Bombay traffic to see, paid their rent, and during the months when there were no baby showers and bachelor parties to go to, their food and their ice-creams on Juhu beach. How did it look, that unwanted sack, a mass of skin and flesh? A mere patch of brown-black. It looked meaningless, absurd like a collapsed lung, unidentifiable as any organ outside the body. No longer a gift from the goddess.

Steffi’s body was wiped clean, like the floor of a temple after a puja, like the Muslim lane after a sacrifice. Spots of red , shone on the scrubbed floor, but more likely this was vermilion. She waited for Steffi, but the hakim was attending to her. It might be hours before she was released.

Vespa turned to leave, toward their kholi with its new norms, its sea-facing aspect. What would they eat? How would they pay rent? What would El Jefe say? All questions for a later day.

As she walked home, she realized. Steffi was one step closer to God than all of them. She could see more, standing in the traffic stream. Unfiltered, unadulterated, she whetted the traffic for Vespa. Angered by Steffi, when they passed her, they appreciated Vespa’s less freaky features, her unextended unbegging arm. Chalo, a eunuch with some dignity for a change, they thought. She doesn’t want anything. How quiet she looks, almost harmless. A cat getting wet in the rain. Let’s give her a rupee for good behavior.

As Vespa neared her room she saw Ché sitting inside, pointing his camera at various objections inside her home. She turned, a swift movement of her feet. On the other side of the avenue she saw Steffi, her walk jaunty, delirious from the pain. All that was missing were violins and temple music to indicate her return. Vespa ran lifting her skirts, the traffic on the road on the verge of midday fatigue. Steffi would need her arm to lead her back home.