“Whatever you imagine, it will pale in comparison to what actually happens to these girls.”
I am sitting with a social worker in a Mumbai coffee shop. For a second, I’m relieved. And then, I’m horrified.
I’ve been working for years on The Parcel, a novel about a retired transgender sex worker named Madhu who is told to prepare a “parcel” – a young girl who has been trafficked into the red-light district – for the life that awaits her. And a social worker has just told me that I needn’t worry about authenticity; whatever fictional cruelty my characters inflict on the girl will be totally plausible.
It’s a grim reality that has taken decades to sink in. One of my earliest memories is a single snapshot: a brothel and a woman standing outside it. In my mind’s eye, the scene is glimpsed from a height because my mother was carrying me as we walked through Kamathipura, one of the most notorious red-light districts in the world.
I was born in Bombay – it was Bombay back then – in a compound on the edge of Kamathipura called the Retreat. It was an idyllic sanctuary, offering me a childhood full of kites, marbles, and cricket – and a view of the convent school opposite, where sex workers lined up every evening with thick black paste smeared on their lips. As a child, I thought of the people that I saw beyond the gates of the compound in which I grew up as “different”. And when someone is different or “other”, their pain conveniently escapes your radar.
These days, Kamathipura is a mix of brothels, small factory units that repair cellphones, lumber mills, cats covered in sawdust, and the obligatory police station. The dark shadows of newly constructed buildings loom over the mishmash of the district’s 14 small by-lanes – the result of a recent boom in real estate that has seen landlords throw sex workers out on the street.
The memory of the woman standing outside the brothel is still distinct, but I cannot recall my first contact with a hijra – a person who considers themselves neither man nor woman. Perhaps that’s because since time immemorial, they have always been there, like the wind or sunlight. And yet, in India they are ignored, made invisible.
The word comes from the Urdu phrase “hijrat karna,” which means “to migrate”. And hijras are indeed migratory, constantly trying to find home not just within their own bodies, but within society as well. Still mired in superstition, believed to possess the ability to bless or curse, they beg at traffic lights, sing and dance at weddings, bless newborns, and do sex work. Centuries ago, some of them held prominent positions during the Mughal rule as war generals or confidants to queens, but the hijras of today are forced to seek relief in small victories. In 2014, the Supreme Court of India passed a landmark judgment recognizing hijra as the official third gender. The invisibles were made visible – but only partially. They might have found a place on paper, but not necessarily in society.
The Kochi metro employed 23 hijras in June this year, but some of the new employees couldn’t find anywhere to live within the city. Very few people were willing to rent property to hijras because of the social stigma and the fear that they might use the dwellings for sex work. For the mainstream, the hijra is the perpetual outsider. The almost-human.
The inner life of someone who doesn’t feel quite human was my way to explore the red light district in fiction. When I was growing up, kids would say to each other, “stop being such a hijra”, meaning: “Man up, will you?” But as I delved into their lives, customs, and the sheer force with which they have been shunted into the cold, it became clear they are anything but cowardly. Only a hijra could look at a trafficked girl, I supposed, and explain to her that she has been sold into a lifetime of slavery, betrayed by the ones she loves and trusts. For no one knows betrayal better than them. Perhaps, in Kamathipura, it is only in that space that hijras have found between male and female, where there is hope, where one can become fully human.
- Anosh Irani’s The Parcel is published by Scribe UK, priced £12.99. It is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £11.04, including free UK p&p.