How my brothel visits set me free
I call it: "When your loss seems unbearable." This was what I came across while reading Alice Munro late night. I guess that's what it is. That's what led me to the brothels.
That evening, Zeenath Pasha was dressed in a black chiffon sari with a silver border, and chandelier earrings. She held her adopted daughter, and in that little room in the inherited Ramabai Chawl in Gulli No 1 in Kamathipura, she looked magnificent. So resplendent that it camouflaged the bitterness she had carried for many years. She was born a man, and then tried to become a woman. But she was stuck in between.
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We had climbed the roof. A narrow iron ladder opened up to a terrace from where you could see the crumbling edifices, and in the windows women stood looking out, and perhaps they were contemplating their fate. But this is what I thought standing there, and watching the windows juxtaposed with the kites that were struggling against the chaos of the winds. It could rain anytime. A DJ was setting up his equipment. It was Zeenath's birthday, and she said if I stayed that night, I would be able to see them dance. She twirled, and moved with abandon. I watched her thinking if I would return.
And then, she brought me downstairs, and played a song by Noor Jehan on her mobile.
"Ye Duniya Badi Sangdil Hey Yahan Par
Kisi Ko Kisi Se Muhabbat Nahin Hey ..."
The song implies how the world was pitted against love, and to love, one needed to not complain.
They sat around, and spoke about their lives. Beyond the scribbling in the notebook, and the barriers between a storyteller and a subject, there was more. I was seeking answers. It seemed they would lead me to these. They asked me about my story, and in the days to come, we would lie down on that bed, below the fan, watching the fish swim in the little aquarium, and speak of love and loss.
With these fabulous eunuchs, I learned that we are mostly at the mercy of those that tell us their stories. And in order to take those, we must let them in, and tell them our stories. It was therapeutic. The brothel had seemed the unlikeliest place to speak of love, but it was in these little rooms where the prostitutes spoke of love with the wisdom of those that had seen it all. They loved fiercely, and they weren't afraid of losing. So that someone might win, someone had to concede defeat. Admitting loss, and giving up was an act of courage. This, I realised over many months of being with them. To fight one's inheritance of loss was a given. The struggle was constant. Without respite, without break, and with no finite end.
I think it was long ago. I must have been very young then. I was on my way to school when I saw a eunuch lift her skirt, and there was this absence. Like a void. I wasn't shocked. I knew better to not ask about this at home. But I wanted to know more about the void, and what it meant to live with one.
In autumn 2005 I met Frances, a transgendered woman, in Carousel Mall in Syracuse. I was a student then, and the university asked me to take up a beat for news reporting. Scanning through newspapers, I stumbled upon a news item that mentioned a transgendered woman suing the state of New York for discrimination. I was intrigued and I looked her up in the phone directory and called her landline. She picked up, and in a deep voice she said she would meet me. It is tough for us reporters. We pry too much. We want peoples' lives to be spectacles. We hang around until we have a story, and details that would make us writers. I was actually ashamed to even ask her to let me hang around. But I guess Frances knew. She said she would talk to me.
That was the first encounter. In terms of exploring the complexities of identity, we take much for granted. I was curious. I wanted to understand how the question of not belonging to the binaries of male and female take over someone's life so completely that they would lose their jobs, and they would be forced to file for unemployment benefits, and queue up at soup kitchens.
Together we went to underground get-togethers of cross dressers, and to churches. I met others. They carried their vanity cases, and dresses, and stood in front of the mirror of this basement of a church that was aiming at reformation somehow, and then emerged as beautiful, exaggerated women, and we drank soft drinks, and munched on chips, and cookies. They didn't like me at first. But I guess they got used to me being there. But it was Frances who intrigued me.
For a year I followed her. On and off. One time, she kept touching the cross that hung in a chain around her neck. She had done her PhD in religion, and used to be a choir singer. She told me she was evil. I hadn't known what to say. Once, she had asked me to wear the wrong shoe in the right feet. I tried. In my apartment. I couldn't walk, and it hurt. That's what she said it felt like to be in the wrong gender.
I moved cities, and then countries. I took jobs, and left jobs. I fought for stories. I let go. I wrote a few, and many stories about such outcastes languish in the pages of my notebooks, or in memory.
Once, a professor at the journalism school said the process of writing means you shut off, keep the notebook aside, and let the memory filter out what's not worth telling. For years, the stories that made me feel closer to the world were stories of those that had been left behind, and had fallen through the cracks. I only remembered their stories. Like Zeenath, who fell for a lover who would stub cigarettes on her hands and feet. Once, at the shrine of Haji Ali, she asked me would I know how it feels to know if one's dying. Aren't we all dying, I had said.
Yes, she said, but to know that death is galloping towards you makes you shiver sometimes. It is like sitting in a cold, cold room with windows with broken glass, she explained. She said she had HIV/AIDs. She had lost many friends in the red light district to this disease, and she worried about her adopted daughter's future.
There is a small poem by Gulzar.
It is titled "Prostitute".
- Trampled in the midst of a lush field
- The corpse of a pagdandi ...
- If my womb had not been trampled by these
- wayfarers
- My sons might have grown up
- And my daughter too ready for marriage
- by now.
I'm often asked, what kind of people go to hijra brothels? I tell them, men go there. They ask why. I say it is cheaper, and perhaps more thrilling. There are truths that are uncomfortable to speak of. Brothels are places of fetishes. They are the receptacles of the filth of the world. They are not just places of sex. That's just an overrated notion. They are places where men shed inhibitions. They won't be judged for asking to beat the women up, and stub cigarette butts on their palms, feet, breasts, and elsewhere. For money. That's how the economy works.
They ask me why I go to brothels. I guess to find answers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said once that morality too is a question of time. It is.
Only rarely Zeenath Pasha talks about what could be if the body were not such a complicated mess of social imagination, and polarised notions.
Even their prayers are for others. Because there's not much that can redeem them in this life, Zeenath told me once when we had met at Ajmer for Urs. The eunuchs camp at the shrine for days to pray to the saint.
It is like staring into an abyss. But how does one look away, she had said.
“You can't. It's real,” Zeenath said. “The abyss of my body.”
Green, and grimy staircase. Narrow and full of last night's leftover smells. Stale, cheap perfume, the bits that couldn't escape through the apertures, hung in the dark corridors. It, mixed with the smell of cooking, and of sweat, made the air heavy. This is the smell of defeat.
Pitiful eyes, pits of darkness, and holding within them tales of abuse, and losses, looked up from the bunkers. This is where they serviced the clients – on cheap blue tarpaulin sheets, and only a tattered piece of clothing gave them some privacy. But in these stacked berths, privacy wasn't even needed.
These are the infamous pinjras, the ones where the eight eunuchs spent their nights whoring their bodies, which were like cages holding the soul of women. During the day, they slept on the same plastic sheets, resting their bodies that hurt like that of any prostitute. Swollen, abused, and filthy. Evenings, they would shower, and get ready for the night.
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Vortex of pain, the labyrinths of betrayals that Zeenath had lost herself into, and the waves of pain that swelled up and flowed freely from her weary eyes, formed the narrative of her life. Broken by the losses she had borne, by the million mutinies exploding inside her, she sang the song of loss, and what could have been. Sometimes when we had nothing to say to each other.
“Nighaen mila kar badal jane wale, mujhe tujhse koi shikayat nahi hai. Yeh duniya bari sangdil hai, yahan par kisi ko kisi se mohabbat nahin hai ... Main ashkon mein sare jahan ko bahan doon, magar mujhko rone ki aadat nahi hai.”
The same song. The one she had played when I first met her. The one sung by Pakistani singer Noor Jehan's famous song from the 1962 film on her mobile.
This was a song of betrayal, and a song of acceptance, and of forgiveness, and of strength, of picking up the pieces and moving on.
Tucked into the cramped lanes of this red light area are many sad lives, and in the lit windows of its chawls, where the women sit, their lips flaming and eyes dark and inviting.
Their stories helped me deal with loss; to accept it gracefully. It made me write with responsibility, and each sentence I wrote liberated me. We can never know all. But beyond the breaking news, and trends, there are stories that help us understand the world, and ourselves. This isn't self-indulgence. This is breaking the barriers between us and the unknown. Isn't that what journalists were always supposed to do - to make a world a little more familiar, a little more tolerable.
Only if we listened to the stories of others.