Dalim Masi

In Bengali, dalim is a fruit, round and glowing with a beautiful blush like the colour of a rose. But my Dalim Masi was nothing like those rosy-cheeked figures. Bengali fairy tales have their Prince Dalim but this Dalim was neither boy nor girl.

I wondered why she was dressed in a sharee. She could have worn a shirt and pant and become like Prince Dalim.Why, then, did she choose to wear sharee as a Princess? She had the chance to rise from third class to first class, and she went and blew it.

People say Hijra have no household of their own, no partner, no children. Ahare,poor things. Perhaps that is why, somewhere deep in my childhood mind, I began to call her “Masi”,Auntie, It sounded close to Ma, close enough to mother.

She had no household of her own, yet she was always somewhere around everyone else’s. Whenever a  baby was born in the neighbourhood, Dalim Masi would appear, dancing and singing with the child, clapping her hand. She would receive two or four hundred taka, sometimes a thousand, or perhaps some rice. That was enough to carry Masi through a few days.

Once a newborn had passed its twenty-first day, Masi would place her hand gently on its head and bless the child. May the child never have a fate like hers. The power of Masi’s blessing was said to be immense. No one in the whole neighbourhood was like her:all successfully avoid to inherit her situation.

At weddings she would arrive quietly, receive a sharee or a little money, and perhaps sit unnoticed in a corner of the house, eating a decent meal after many days. Then Masi, who had never had a household of her own, would bless the newlyweds for the new household they were about to begin.

 I saw her walking alone along the village roads,a cloth bag hanging from her shoulder. Wherever and whenever I saw her, my mind would instinctively whisper and I would call out, “Dalim Masi!”

When Dalim Masi came to our house, my grandmother would bring out chira and muri.If there was grated coconut, she would give her some of that too.Mother would give her some dal-bhat,bread and butter ; my boroma, eldest aunt, would give her a handful of rice into her palm. I would climb a tree, pluck a couple of guavas and bring them down for her. Masi would bless us lavishly before she left.

Her hair was cut short, thin in little patches, almost bald in places. She was tall and spare, all length and angles. Her hands, feet and face carried the unmistakable shape of a boy’s. Yet on her wrists she always wore two beautiful bangles; a large nose-ring rested on her nose, earrings hung from her ears, and around her neck, beside a silver chain, hung an amulet.But Dalim Masi’s greatest adornment was her smile. It came from a mouth darkened by years of chewing paan; revealing teeth white and blackened in places, worn away by decay.

The lively, quick-witted Dalim Masi who could once set a wedding gathering alight—I saw her one day sitting quietly on a stool. Our veranda had not yet been fitted with a grill. She was eating rice with a painfully dry face.

:Masi, why have you come out when you are so unwell?”

:Ah, bacha,child! My wandering nature doesn’t let me stay indoors..

But I knew what Dalim Masi had left unspoken: beneath her physical weakness lay the heavier weight of poverty.

She is the only one in the whole neighbourhood—or so everyone seemed to believe, as though it were an implicit truth. There were not many dalim trees in the neighbourhood, and dalim fruit did not grow all year round.The only Dalim, my aunty, remained here throughout the year, and still, somehow, she was always an outsider.She came from house to house, walked along the roads, an unwanted, unnecessary disturbance, like an unwelcome stranger.

What kind of outsider was she. Except during weddings and celebrations for newborns, Masi wandered through the neighbourhood as though she were invisible. As though nobody needed her.As though she were simply walking from one end of the village to the other just because she herself needed to.As though her walking meant nothing. As though, without that little blessing she carried from house to house, her existence itself meant nothing. As though she had only herself to keep alive with the burden of her own existence, weaving the meaning of her life, thread by thread, upon society’s blank page—understanding that meaning solely by herself:a meaning the rest of the world could ignore, if it wished. And yet Dalim Masi could never stop coming.

The last time I saw Dalim Masi, I told her I would visit her home. But where was her home?

A short story by Tanusree Das