The Parcel Read Online Free PDF

laundrymen, and watchmen. Too broke to visit the first floor, they fed on the cheapest women, who were paid as little as a hundred rupees. What these women lacked in looks, they made up for by tolerating beatings, the pulling of hair, and the burning of thighs and vaginas with matches. This was also the floor where Padma lived, so it was no surprise to Madhu that it was guarded by Hassan, loyal and robust, more concrete than man. Padma believed in battling it out in the trenches with her troops. After all, she had got her start as one of them.
    “Wait here,” Hassan said to Madhu.
    She could see that he had been expecting her. He got up from his stool and pointed at it for her to sit on, but Madhu knew it wasn’t out of courtesy. He wanted her to be the eyes for a moment, to take his place at the tower. Hassan was a feverish being, so used to not sleeping at night that his eyes had forgotten how to close. He drank as he neared the end of his shift, at 4:00 a.m., to knock himself out, the booze tranquilizing him into baby sleep, where he was no longer responsible for sensing danger.
    As instructed, Madhu sat on the stool and lit a Shivaji. The climb had made her pant, and she was getting anxious. She needed some of the warrior’s guts to soothe her. He, too, had instructed his Marathas to keep an eye out from the Pratapgad Fort for the invading Mughals under Afzal Khan. Long ago, Madhu had loved hearing from her father tales of Maratha bravery, of how Shivaji duped the Mughals, outsmarting themwith guerrilla warfare. These had been the only times her father treated her like a son, so she never tired of listening to the stories. And she loved how Afzal Khan’s head was buried under a tower after Shivaji’s victory. There was no documented evidence for this, her father had told her, but he shared this story with his students at Maharashtra College anyway.
    Now, Madhu reflected on how Padma had Shivaji’s guile. It had helped Padma sustain her reputation as one of the most feared madams of Kamathipura, until the mantle had recently been taken over by another woman, Silver Chaya. Padma had no silver teeth like Silver Chaya, whose mouth shone in the dark when she spoke. Padma was simple and plain, and vocal in her disdain for men. Silver Chaya was a voracious lover, but Padma was now in her seventies and had long ago become an ascetic. She dealt in flesh but never partook of it. She was like gurumai, an overseer, an orchestrator of life and the destiny of human beings. But none of this was evident when Padma was a young girl. If anything, she had been a mere twig snapped off a branch and thrown to the side of the road for any traveller to trample upon. That was how gurumai always started Padma’s story when she told it to her hijras, with the smoke from her beedi rising to the ceiling just like Padma’s eventual rise to power.
    After what had happened to Padma as a child, gurumai had said, she vowed to never be vulnerable again, to never leave things in the hands of a higher power. If that higher power was taking a nap, like in her case, things happened that one could never truly recover from. “But then I told myself that if God was sleeping while bad things happened to me, then I could use that same nap time to make good things happen as well,” Padma had told gurumai.
    She had always been a child of Kamathipura, back when Sukhlaji Street was known as “White Lane,” on account of the British troops that came to anchor their cocks. And it was in “Safed Gulli” that her father’s face started turning white too, and his lips, the coughing disease feeding on him right before her very eyes, as though it had bought her father’s lungs at an auction and was now enjoying the merchandise with absolutely no regard for the twelve-year-old who sat praying in front of a small picture of Lakshmi, while her father kept assuring her between coughing fits that he would never leave her, trying to hide the blood at first, but