I’m a Mehfil.
Anjum says these lines in response to one of her clients saying that her name backwards could iterate to the name of a character of a popular play similar to Romeo and Juliet. Anjum jests this saying that she is all the characters in that play s well as Romeo and Juliet. She says she is a gathering of many people, a mehfil. Anjum’s statements is an expression of the conflicts she feels due to her conflicting body and soul, raging personalities as an insecure mother, a lost lover and a person who she feels is understood by no one, not even by people like her.
Was it possible to live outside language?
Jahanara Begum after having inspected her son in daylight is shocked to find that he has female genitals too. She is stunned as worried of her fate and that of his son. Since, she had managed to deliver a son after three girls, she was scared not just of the reaction of her husband who was a devout Muslim and this condition was not acceptable as normal in his world, but also of the family’s honor and name. She wonders how she will raise such a child when even the language she knew, Urdu, was gender-specific. How is supposed to denote one whose gender is not clear.
Indo-Pak is inside us.
As Aftab and Nimmo discuss why God created hijras, the transgender community in India, Nimmo says that every kind of conflict in the world: wars, inflation, fights, will eventually calm down. But, not the conflicts that is internalized in the hijras. Since, the society won’t accept them as normal human beings, but rather giving them a station where they had to earn their livelihood by either begging or extorting money for blessings, they can never have a normal life, or house, or livelihood. For them, they can never be free from the conflicts of lives, they’ll always have to live as a semi-human being.
She knew very well that she knew very well that she knew very well.
Repeating a particular phrase is a literary device frequently employed by Arundhati Roy in her works. Anjum, who has recently seen the carnage of Gujrat Riots of 2002, and has survived by pretending to be dead on the body of a dead neighbor and by forcibly blessing the rioters, is deeply traumatized. She wants to forget these details, but she knows these details as if they are etched in the memory, and that she will never be able to forget it.
It was as though the three of them were getting married.
Biplab remembers the time he attended the marriage of Tilo and Naga, and found how Tilo looked stunned and out-of-place at her own wedding without any makeup or any appropriate emotions. Naga looked insecure and nervous. It appeared as Tilo had still not recovered from Musa’s death and obsessed over him and Naga being insecure over his wife for thinking about another man obsessed over her. It was as if Musa had become part of their marital relationship.
