Moonrise and Eunuch Song

Moonrise and Eunuch Song


The comedy of embarrassments begins early in the evening when a barefooted man, his sacred thread hooked around an ear and a hand pressing at the crotch of his lungi, wheedles a boy into lending his slippers for a minute: the floor of the lavatory is flooded and layered in yellow slick. The boy grins with bright white teeth set in
thick yellow plaque and looks away embarrassed. He turns to his companions, boys of his age who are wearing shoes although their teeth and clothes suggest a similar life, and looks at his toes as he laughs nervously. The barefooted man's whine is impossible to suffer anymore, so a chorus of disinterested yet exhortatory calls descends upon the boy: "lend the man your chappal, it is only for a minute, when traveling together we trouble each other, it is only the decent thing to do."

There isn't even standing space in the general compartment of Mithila Express coming to Raxaul: it is ordinarily a very crowded train, especially in the general no-reservations compartment. Crowded not only with bodies, but their riotous assault on the senses: their smells of armpits, feet, hair oil, food, luggage, tobacco-steeped phlegm, alcohol, flowers in the eunuch's hair; their colors of teeth, knees in threadbare pants, skins, wife's sari bundling clothes, neck-grime and toe-muck, green cloth parrots with black beaks, turmeric and paan stains, white crescent of lime under khaini-pressing thumbnail; their comedy of girths, where a man folds neatly above the space covered by his shoes while another man pushes four neighbors out of their orbits around him when he turns to spit into the corner under the sink. This compact of peas and limes in a box reshuffles along half-inch voids between bodies when an eunuch sings her way through, pinching buttocks and caressing loins, or when a barefooted man must ewwwwvisit the lavatory.

"Badebhai," pleads the man to the boy young enough to be his son. The boy evacuates away from his slippers, explaining in a tribal language what must have been a list of his inadequacies, instinctively probing the voids around his body to bend and slip into them. The barefooted man looks down at the slippers and looks up, looks around, looks exasperated: there are large holes where his toes will sink into the
worn slippers. Everybody laughs at the high-caste, janai-strung man's predicament. At least his janai is hooked over his ear. The boy retreats into a shell of soft abuses from his friends and dismissive curses from lighter-skinned, better dressed men. Quiet returns to the space between the lavatories where some twenty travelers sit compacted, fermenting in the stew of incidental companionship.

"Kasto lagyo ta hamro India?" It's alright. Different, that's for sure. It is hard to decide if I am included in the "hamro," or if the word is there to mark me as an outsider. He is the darkest man in the compartment, with the widest nose and thickest lips, hair fused into a thick mat. He speaks Nepali, Bengali, Oriya and Hindi. Even he confesses that he speaks Nepali better than any other language now:
thirty-four years of living in Kathmandu, he says. But he treats me like a guest, telling me to sit when a space opens up against the wall, offering me food, asking in rustic Nepali if "garo ta bhakhaina?". At least in this space between the doors and the lavatories, hamro India is alternately heart-rending and heart-warming. It is cold when we silently watch a railway-policeman rob two young men of their last rupee coin for stashing a cardboard box of sohnpapadi in the passenger class. It is unusually warm when the eunuchs approach, signaling their approach with sharp, inimitable claps and a sultry song.

"In aankhon ki masti ke…" sings the siren, her brows twitching like rueful serpents separated mid-congress, the pout of her mouth pointing and drawing, pushing and pulling, her hands slapping together to ward off evil or searching the pockets of mustached men suddenly giggling like little girls. Another eunuch, not quite as sold to their professional femininity, follows her in a green shirt, sleeves rolled
to reveal the biceps, a pair of lumpy, uneven bumps over the chest suggesting stuffed bra. A scowl of displeasure is fixed on her face. She grabs a man by his collars and shakes him, screaming into his face to pay up. Her companion, the siren, moves on unfazed and winking, asking her dewarji for ten. The angry eunuch sits on her haunches and sobs. "What are you looking at?" she lunges at a young man who is
terrified just by the presence of the eunuchs. The siren glances over from the other end of hamro space, grinds her buttocks gratuitously against a Jharkhand gardener's attentive crotch and makes her way back to her sobbing companion.

The moon rises over the southern horizon. It has to set before the sun will rise. Hundreds of kilometers must pass before Raxaul. The siren sits, her knees touching her companion's knees, and raises the angry eunuch's chin to look past the passengers, through the door, at the moon hovering over mosques and mounds of wheat chaffs and piles of cow-dung dried into logs. Once more she sings the same song, her mouth and brows and tip of nose and tilt of head shadowing Rekha. She sings
beautifully, the voice full of flaws, insignificant and significant, singing to an angry eunuch in a crowd of tired men, singing past the rush of tepid air to the cool face of a low-slung moon. The angry eunuch's shoulders relax. She wipes her eyes without once taking them off of the siren's face. A man sighs here and another man sighs there, knowing that nothing but the eunuch's song exists with honesty, with
force. The moon inches up. Each man hangs his head to listen to the song, so haunting and delicate, the dull edge of manly hoarse sugared with an affected high-pitch, its lulling balm reaching everybody.

The man who borrowed slippers to go into the lavatory emerges, breaking the spell momentarily. He looks at his benefactor the tribal boy, who is nestled between the bodies of his friends: rapt, spent. The man surveys the edge of his elbows for a point on the walls on which to lean, to listen, to wait until the bodies stir back into life. He seems content to be forgotten, for the moment, by the crowd,
by the boy, by the line of men who will have to create new voids for his limbs to probe as they negotiate a way forward in this small world, this hamro India. He stands there relieved, janai still hooked over his ear, two thick, dirty, dry toes strenuously curled up and away from the floor.