A Hijra Story
She had been born Prasant Acharya — the son of a Brahmin priest and his second wife.
Within six short years of his first marriage, Pundit Acharya was the burdened father of four daughters. Already nearing sixty and prone to sicknesses whose diagnosis varied from doctor to doctor, the priest was afraid he would die without a son to perform his death rites.
The thought of a stranger incinerating his fat, pudgy body bothered the priest. The stranger would be some relative — flesh and blood, yes, but flesh and blood many times removed. The pundit was certain his cremator wouldn’t abstain from salt for thirteen days after his death. The image of this man sucking on a sliver of chicken ten minutes after setting the priest’s body on fire made our learned friend despondent.
Pundit Acharya had tried again and again to impregnate his wife, but she dutifully isolated herself in the cowshed month after month to menstruate in peace. No child — male or female — arrived.
When he had married his first wife, Nirmala, slightly older than a child bride and slightly younger than a woman, those thighs had been so full of promise. And he couldn’t fault her — for she delivered, quantity-wise. But what good was quantity when not one of his four offspring could immolate him?
Nothing made his sick heart cry more than when he saw his younger brother’s twin toddlers run around naked, their tiny penises glistening in the sun. Pundit Acharya seldom saw his nephews clothed from the waist down. It was as though the little boys’ overactive bladders, which engendered a frequent change of clothes that started early in the morning, and Pundit Acharya’s brother’s acute poverty, which guaranteed that the harassed mother would run out of clothes into which to change the sons by the third urination of the day, was a mocking reminder from God about what the priest lacked.
Adopting one of the two nephews wouldn’t be the same as siring a son.
So, Pundit Chavi Raman Acharya called a meeting at which he discussed his problem with fellow priests, all of whom thought similarly, and all of whom pitied this poor man whose sicknesses received confused diagnoses and whose wife hadn’t yet borne him a son.
The Pundit had an idea.
“Would it be inappropriate for me to say that I’d like to get married to your daughter, Parajuli-jee?” he asked one of the gathered men.
Parajuli was a young priest who had married very early. Pundit Acharya was an old priest who had married very late. Parajuli had a nineteen-year-old daughter who talked to herself. A week before, she had cut her mother’s hair with a knife when the exhausted mother was asleep.
The nineteen-year-old daughter still played with seven-year-olds.
“But there’s a problem,” Pundit Acharya said.
It wasn’t that the bride-to-be was retarded.
“It’s a caste problem.”
All the priests had already started nodding in understanding.
“I am Acharya,” Acharya said.
The priests continued nodding in understanding.
It wasn’t the difference in their castes; it was the similarity. The bride-to-be and her husband-to-be belonged to the same gotra — they both were from the Kaundinya gotra, descendants of the Kaundinya Rishi. The union would be a form of consanguineous marriage — at its complicated best — even if Pundit Acharya and Pundit Parajuli would have to go back seventy-seven generations to find common DNA.
“But it’s not a problem we can’t solve,” Acharya said. “We create the rules here. I am the oldest pundit in Kalimpong. This relationship I declare nonconsanguineous.”
The others were in rapt attention. Acharya-jee was an erudite man.
The six pundits agreed. All of them had, at one point or another, received tutelage under Acharya. Pundit Acharya had married hundreds of men to hundreds of women and conducted the death rites of hundreds of dead bodies. Because everyone agreed that the priest needed to be married a second time so he could have a son who’d cremate his dead body, the very slight murmur about the nature of a wedding between an Acharya and a Parajuli was quickly hushed by experts on punditry. The marriage was simple.
The retarded wife wore red. The groom wore daura-suruwal. The groom’s first wife wore green. The wife’s father wore a dhoti waist down and his sacred thread waist up. The groom’s brother conducted the ceremony. The groom’s four daughters wore frilly frocks. The brother’s sons, the two nephews, played in the sun, fully clothed.
At last, God had stopped laughing at Pundit-jee. Sumitra, the new wife, had to be reprimanded a few times by her father during the ceremony. When instructed to sprinkle rice into the sacred fire around which she and her groom sat, she threw some at her soon-to-be stepdaughters’ faces and laughed. When asked to take the sacred rounds, she refused to have the loose end of her sari tied to her husband’s cloth belt. Once Round One was completed with difficulty and a few pinches from her father, Sumitra wouldn’t take Round Two.
Pundit Parajuli looked apologetically at Pundit Acharya and said a slap or two was necessary to discipline his retarded child when she was like this. Pundit Acharya asked his first wife to take note.
Ten months later, Sumitra gave birth to a child, dangling between whose brittle legs was a penis. Pundit Acharya could have kissed the tiny protrusion in joy. He showed the little bundle to his four daughters and nearly slapped the second one when she tried touching her little brother.
Sumitra wailed and wailed. Her favorite toy, the biggest doll she had ever seen, was snatched away from her and handed over to the first wife for safekeeping.
Sumitra was allowed a few minutes at a time to play with the constantly crying doll when it would suckle on her.
Other times, no one was allowed to touch Prasant but the priest and his first wife.
Prasant was a delightful baby who wore delightful clothes — shorts with frills, shirts with frills, and pants with frills, all sewn with frock pieces salvaged from his sisters’ wardrobe.
The father had grand ambitions for the child. He wanted his three-year-old to grow up to be not a teacher, a policeman, or a driver like many of his fellow priests’ sons were choosing to become, but a pundit.
Like father, like son, everyone would say.
Pundit Acharya couldn’t really tell one daughter from another. One had stopped going to school because she was stupid. Another had formed a close bond with her stepmother. He was growing old, and he often forgot the daughters’ names.
With his son, he was better. He was a proud father when the son, Prasant, was fed his first spoon of gooey rice. Prasant spat it out.
When his son’s long, lustrous hair was cut for the first time at age three, and his head shaved, Prasant looked exactly like him. Everyone who attended the Chewar commented on the similarity.
Prasant cried when he saw his shaved head in the mirror. All said he didn’t recognize himself.
The Pundit wanted to conduct Prasant’s threading ritual soon after the Chewar so that, should he die, he could die knowing that his son would set him on fire. The Bratabandha ceremony, during which Prasant would wear the sacred thread, would fully qualify the son to perform his parents’ last rites.
The Pundit didn’t notice that his oldest daughter had started making monthly trips to the cowshed. He was distracted because he was figuring out an auspicious date for his son’s coming-of-age function.
Sumitra loved fire. A few times, she set on fire things whose combustible characteristics the Pundit had serious doubts about, guavas being among them. One day, she burned her head. Had one of the daughters not seen her running around with her hair on fire, the Pundit’s retarded wife would have died. With a head devoid of hair, like her favorite crying doll’s, she was sent home, minus the crying doll.
“I just can’t deal with one more child when I have five of my own,” the Pundit said to his fellow priest, who understood.
While Sumitra was resettling into her natal home, her son was dancing to a radio song.
Prasant was sent to Rockvale, an English-medium school, unlike his sisters. He refused to wear shorts to school. His stepmother and he reached a compromise with pants, which he soiled with enduring regularity.
Prasant wouldn’t write a thing when asked to.
Prasant wouldn’t hop when asked to.
He wouldn’t run when asked to.
He wouldn’t jump when asked to.
He wouldn’t skip when asked to.
He wouldn’t stop dancing when asked to.
Prasant couldn’t be promoted to Lower Kindergarten because he hadn’t learned how to write a single letter of the alphabet. The priest wondered if the mother’s slow brain had somehow been passed on to the son.
Prasant refused to go back to Rockvale the following year. He went to the village school with his sisters.
At the threading ceremony, in which he was required to shave his head, Prasant wouldn’t allow shears to come near him. He spat at, pinched, scratched, and bit any hand that tried.
It was the first Bratabandha ceremony the priest had overseen whose participant was not tonsured.
The white cloth that would be girdled up around his son’s loins as a dhoti, his son quickly improvised into a baby sari. Everyone said the poor boy was so used to females in the house that his child’s mind hadn’t gathered that a sari was meant only for women.
At eight, Prasant came home from school with all his nails painted. The Sanskrit shlokas the priest tried shoving down his son’s throat Prasant converted into a song and danced to.
When he was nine, a group of older boys at school thrashed Prasant, threatening to beat him up even more if he called himself Prasant.
Very agreeably, Pundit Acharya’s son, from then onward, called himself Prasanti.
He wouldn’t answer to Prasant, happily saying that his face would be punched if he answered to Prasant, so everybody called him Prasanti.
At ten, he dressed himself in his sister’s green dress, much too short for him, and walked around the neighborhood.
Some said he was insane, like his mother. The Brahmins said it was because he was an offspring of two sagotris.
At eleven, when his uncle — the father of the naked babies who had taunted Pundit Acharya — died, Prasant disappeared from the funeral in the small town of Melli.
A year later, Pundit Acharya died in his sleep. His twin nephews cremated him. They were naked only from the waist up.
Excerpted with permission from Prajwal Parajuly’s Land Where I Flee published by Quercus books.
Prajwal Parajuly likes cooking aloo dum — not dum aloo — and wondering why he dislikes writing. Land Where I Flee is his first novel and his second book is Gurkha’s Daughter.
