The most fantastic mothers

This is a story I have always wanted to write. It is disturbing, and I have been up nights in a row thinking about Zeenath Pasha.

Here is the link to the song they played at the Kamathipura brothel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVhOKaRXHc

And here is the link to a Granta story I read many months ago.

http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Monas-Story

Chinki Sinha
Kamathipura, Bombay

Like stars hung from a black sky, the chandelier earrings touched her shoulders almost. Her face, black and beautiful, and dark eyes lined with kohl, Zeenath Pasha sat on an old bed, an inheritance at the Ramabai Chawl in Kamathipura. Evening light, mostly the sickly beams from the street lamps, trickled in from the window against her back.
Like a beam of moonlight on the folds of black clouds Saleha lay on Zeenath's lap. Her black saree, on which she had stitched up a border of fake diamonds, fell in folds around her.
A young woman, thin and pale, but full of smiles, sat on the edge of the bed. She is Saleha's mother. The woman who had the womb, and the eunuch who only wanted to be a mother, who was neither a man nor a woman.
The woman calls her Shonali. The half-woman, who holds the milk bottle in her hand, calls her Sallu.
The eunuch, who cut off her genitals to become a woman, knows she would be an incomplete woman always. Castration at best rids you of the burden of maleness, Zeenath says.
“We are like sisters. We went on the dhandha together. We slept with the same men. She wanted to abort Saleha. She has two daughters already. I counselled her, told her I wanted a child, and paid for everything from her vitamins to her operation. The baby is not HIV positive,” Zeenath said.
Saleha means pious. In the little brothel, the little child is being brought up by Zeenath, the Maalak of the household, who entered into a contract with the mother, a poor sex worker from Bengal, and rented out the womb. The delivery of the child happened in Zeenath's name and one evening when Saleha was just a few days old, she came to live with the 10 odd eunuchs in the three-story chawl with its bunker beds where the eunuchs traded sex for a few rupees.
Zeenath runs the brothel. Almost 20 years ago, she had run away from Hyderabad and her friends brought her to Sushila Ma, the stern proprietor who offered refuge to battered souls like her. For days, Zeenath sat under the tree outside the brothel, and cried. She was young, and broken. So broken that she entered the flesh trade without much resistance. Sometimes you just let destiny take over. You can't go on daring fate over and over again, she said.
She couldn't have gone back to her abusive husband. Ahmed, the man she loved, abused her. They had got married against the collective will of their respective families.
“A man can't get married to a man,” the grandmother announced.
The couple consumed poison, and spent their days in the hospital recuperating. Zeenath, born as Mehraj, was consumed by the idea of love. She uncovered her feet, and there they were – tiny scars. Cigarette burns. She stubbed so many of them on her feet in an act of rebellion.
Finally, they were married. Zeenath's family disowned her. They arranged for the wedding, gave her some jewelry, and a bed, and some utensils, and even celebrated with a feast. But that was it. Beyond that, Zeenath would have to forget she had a family, and brothers and a sister.
The first seven months were good. They went for movies, made love, and talked about a future together. But the future also had its bearings in the past. Zeenath couldn't give birth. In fact, she wasn't even castrated then. They would taunt her, and she would cry. At the time, she didn't know she was transgender. She only knew she loved Ahmed.
One night, as they were returning from the theatre after watching the film Chandni, they heard a child's muffled cries. Near a kabristan in the Charminar area of Hyderabad where they lived, they stumbled upon a newborn girl. An abandoned child. Zeenath carried her home.
In the morning she announced she would bring her up.
As she goes back in time, her eyes are restless. But she tries. It isn't easy recalling the hurt.
Replay, revisit. The forbidden land. You step carefully. You travel but in a vaporous land. And you know you can't reclaim things, people and moments that lie wrapped in cotton balls. Preserved, and yet tinted with so much more. Memory is never pure. It is a complex set of images that are tied to the state of being. Anything can trigger a set of images - smells, sounds, sights, cities.
“He beat me up, and when my money was finished, they would just hurt me so much,” Zeenath said.
She looked away. Tears fell. She wiped the corners of her eyes, but continued. After all, she owns her memories.
“I begged for my child. I couldn't go back to my family,” she goes on in a crackled voice. “Then one night, as he beat me up, and I fought back, my two-year-old Saleha died. We killed her.”
She had named the baby she found that night Saleha – pure, pious, upright.
Zeenath was arrested. They took her to the police station and blamed for killing her child.
One night, she escaped. Her friends got her to Bombay. Straight to the streets of Kamathipura, the red light area of the city. In the room, where she now lives with her children, and offers refuge to others running away from grim pasts, is where she first met Sushila Ma, the hijra guru who was in charge.
She was initiated into the sex trade. She hated it. But she was grateful for the lodgings. In the nights, when they tore through her body, and ravaged it, she cried silently. For Ahmed, and for Saleha.
She never called Ahmed. She doesn't know if he is alive. Or if he married again. Sometimes, it is best to close the doors.
When Sushila Ma died, the members of the brothel broke their bangles as per the rituals of the community and over the dead body, they unanimously chose Zeenath as their leader. Zeenath took an oath to pay off the debts of Sushila Ma. In her will, Sushila Ma, who had two adopted sons, made Zeenath the Maalak. The two sons, who live in another part of the city, inherited part of the property but the control of the brothel was bequeathed to Zeenath Pasha, the eunuch who once sought refuge here.

Green, and grimy staircase. Narrow and full of last night's leftover smells. Stale, cheap perfume, the bits that couldn't escape through the apertures, hung in the dark corridors. It mixed with the smell of cooking, and of sweat, and made the air heavy. Smell of defeat.
Pitiful eyes, pits of darkness, and holding within them tales of abuse, and losses, looked up from the bunkers. This is where they serviced the clients – on cheap blue tarpaulin sheets, and only a tattered piece of clothing gave them some privacy. But in these stacked berths, privacy wasn't even needed.
These are the infamous pinjras, the ones where the eight eunuchs spent their nights whoring their bodies, which were like cages holding the soul of women. During the day, they slept on the same plastic sheets resting their bodies that hurt like that of any prostitute. Swollen, abused, and filthy. Evenings, they would shower, and get ready for the night.
Sometimes, Saleha would be wrapped in their arms in these cages as they stole their own moments of motherhood. Nisha, Kajal and Kashish adore the little girl. She runs around, crosses the threshold of the room, and is held back by Zeenath. Not that side of the world for her.
“She will study, and she will get out of these streets,” she says.
Her seven-year-old son Asif, whose mother, a sex worker died of HIV AIDS soon after he was born, leaves the brothel at around 4:30 pm for what they refer to as a night school run by an NGO in the locality for the children of the sex workers. He returns at around 8 am to a rearranged house. Before he comes, Zeenath sweeps the corridors, and the staircase, and removes the used condoms, the cigarette butts, and the alcohol bottles.
“Perhaps he knows. He doesn't ask,” she said. “It is just difficult bringing up children in a brothel. They are young now. But they will grow up one day.”
Saleha smiles. She is a quiet child. Her mother takes her away. There is a birthday party and DJs are playing music on the roof. New Bollywood songs. Zeenath, resplendent in her black chiffon, climbs upstairs, and surveys the men who have perched themselves on the roofs to witness the party. She hangs tattered curtains to block the view. But this is Kamathipura. You can't hide anything. Everything is on display here, and is for consumption.
For more than 20 years, she has lived in the building. This is where she fell in love the second time. Salim, who worked in a hotel, would stand in the doorway and tease them as they went in and out of the building. He would throw letters, flowers, at them. He once gave her a watch. She would always be late for their meetings.
“This way you'd be able to keep time, he told me,” she said.
Vortex of pain, the labyrinths of betrayals that she had lost herself into, and the waves of pain that swelled up and flowed freely from her weary eyes, formed the narrative of her life. Broken by the losses she had borne, by the million mutinies exploding inside her, she sings songs from yesteryears to express what she can't in her own words.
“Nighaen mila kar badal jane wale, mujhe tujhse koi shikayat nahi hai. Yeh duniya bari sangdil hai, yahan par kisi ko kisi se mohabbat nahin hai ... Main ashkon mein sare jahan ko bahan doon, magar mujhko rone ki aadat nahi hai.”
Gauri Sawant, a transgender who came to visit her, played the Pakistani singer Noor Jehan's famous song from the 1962 film on her mobile.
Zeenath sat next to her. She sang along. Both of them sang along. Perhaps the song said it all. A song of betrayal, and a song of acceptance, and of forgiveness, and of strength, of picking up the pieces and moving on.
Tucked into the cramped lanes of this red light area are many sad lives, and in the lit windows of its chawls, where the women sit, their lips flaming and eyes dark and inviting.
She was born a son to her parents. Her father was in the police, and mother a lecturer. She was brought up by her grandmother just outside Hyderabad. Almost blind, and very ashamed of her eunuch grandchild, the grandmother kept mostly aloof. They wouldn't take her to the neighborhood celebrations, or even to family functions, and she happily led a secluded life, cooking, and cleaning and loving her pets.
“I had a dog, and nani had goats and cows, and I loved them,” she says.
One day, her friends adorned her hair with gajras, and pumped her eyelashes with mascara and shaped her eyebrows. They tied the chocolate brown lace saree that belonged to her mother, and painted her lips. They were playing their usual games when her brothers walked in. They gasped and called her names. Her uncle was a hijra, and the family couldn't bear the thought of another son yearning to be a woman.
Zeenath continued to sweep the backyard in her saree through the flurry of abuses. She stood her ground. She was sent to live with her grandmother.
Ahmed lived across the street. Dusky and broad, he was taller than others. Zeenath fell for him at an early age. They used to meet at the paan shop, and exchanged letters.
When she refused to be reformed, she was sent to Dubai to work as a domestic help. Her aunt lived in dubai and she arranged for her nephew's new job.
As soon as the daughter's of the household finished with their bath, Zeenath would wear their salwars and come out. The family gave up on her and she was kicked out. In the meantime, she had written letters to Ahmed and had called him to Dubai. They spent eight months there, and then returned to Hyderabad. The families tried hard to keep them from marrying each other.
“Even the police was fed up of us. Each time, we would be taken to the thana, they would be 'oh, again' and they'd just rfuse to register anything,” she said.
But Ahmed betrayed her trust.
“If it wasn't for him, and if my family would have accepted me the way I was, I would not have to wait to die every day,” she adds.
Another song. A happy song.
“Pankh hote toh ud aati main ...”
And Zeenath spreads her arms. She flaps them just like a bird, and Gauri joins in. Two lonely birds, beating their wings in a cage.
For a while, they play songs. They alternate between sad numbers and happy numbers. The night ends with Sufi songs. The mortals are incapable of love. Only the God deserves this devotion. For him, this eternal thirst is justified. He can't hurt them. He will eventually redeem them. That's the hope.
There’s no moonlight anywhere. And there's no sky anywhere. It is a small room in a brothel with the photos of the last four eunuch leaders that ran the Ramabai Chawl.
This is their world. The world of the dispossessed.
Inferno, and now purgatorio, and then you go to paradiso, as per Dante’s framework.
Namdeo Dhasal, the lumpen poet, who wrote Golpitha, which was published in 1972, sums it all up.
“Here queue up they who want to taste
 Poison’s sweet or salt flavour
Death gathers here, as do words,
In just a minute, it will start pouring here”
And death lurks in the shadows. A will has been prepared. Her inheritance and her earnings have been divided into three. Nisha, the hijra who she has chosen over others to be the next Maalak, will get the control of the brothel. Her son will get a room in another part of the town. For Saleha, she has kept away jewelry, cash and a some part of the brothel is also in her name.
Although, in a couple of years, the brothel will be demolished and in its place, a high rise will come up. They would get an apartment there, Zeenath said. But those are the promises. And from her life, she has learned that promises are never kept.
“I always wanted to be a mother. I always wanted a girl after the baby died. I have always blamed myself. Saleha is the reason I want to live. For her, I can die,” she says. “Look how innocent she is. She completes me.”
Many years ago, a eunuch had walked the streets of Ajmer, and had fasted and prayed in the court of Khwaja Garib Nawaz Moinuddin Chishti. He wanted motherhood. On the mountain, as the legend goes, the eunuch delivered a son. Zeenath won't take the name. It is forbidden. But she has been there, and has eaten the little berries that grow on a tree at his shrine. They refer to it as the Maji. It is said if you pay homage to the shrine, a eunuch will be blessed with a child.
“I have prayed at many shrines. Saleha is my reward,” she said.
And she recounts other stories from the Hindu mythology. About the ardhnareshwar avatar of Lord Shiva, and how Lord Rama, when he was going into the 14-year-long exile, he was followed by men and women and the eunuchs.
He sent the men and the women home when he entered the forest. But the eunuchs he asked to wait. They waited for years. When he returned, he asked them why they were still there. And they said they were waiting to hear from him. He blessed them with motherhood.
But these are stories. They repeat it to themselves to elevate their situation. But the truth is that they have suffered for having been born in the wrong gender, and then claiming it at the cost of so much.
Saleha calls her “ma”. The child is fair unlike Zeenath, who is dark as the night.
Underneath the bed, Saleha's toys are scattered. A red deer, a green horse. On the dressing table, there bangles, and pencil liners and lipsticks. For a eunuch, it is always a competition.
“We should look better than the women. We, the incomplete, women try to be the most fantastic. We decorate ourselves,” Zeenath said.
On the side, her wig and her flowers are arranged neatly. For another time. On Friday, after prayers, and her hair tied in a piece of cloth, she squats on the floor with Saleha.
“Sallu, you make too many demands on your poor mother,” she says.
A few old clippings and magazines stand testimony to her glorious past as Bombay's first hijra to have worked with an NGO Asha Mahila in a saree. It was in 1993.
On the cover of a Tamil Post, a magazine, from almost a decade ago, there is a photo of Zeenath. Juxtaposed with it is a picture of a popular Tamil actress Priyanka.
“Ek hijra khoobsurat hai ya ek heroine, this is what it says,” she said.
And in her albums, she has her engagement pictures. She fell in love once again. Same fanatic sort of love. Salim, who worked in a restaurant, and claimed to love her is her husband. His family lives in Uttar Pradesh and they gave her the name Zeenath, which means beautiful. They married eight years ago. The family didn't know much about her gender. She was castrated and she wore her sarees. When they adopted Asif, they thought Zeenath had produced the baby. But Zeenath had always wanted her Saleha back. She adopted again.
The waves made a crashing noise. They hit the rocks and rolled back, disappointed, angry, and then they hit back. Silver drops flew in the air, and again they retreated. Yet again, they struck.
The qawals clapped their hands and sang songs of devotion. On this island, under a tree that was wrapped in red threads the faithful, and the hopeful had tied for the saint to remember their wishes and grant them, and would one day return to untie them when they would have been fulfilled, Jeenath Pasha sat, facing the shrine. The dargah contains the tomb of Sayed Peer Haji Ali Shah Bukhari, the way to whom is a narrow street through the brackish sea water. Across the waters, there's yet another shrine. Of the saint's mother.
“You visit her first and then come here,” Zeenath said.
In her arms, she held Saleha. The pigeons flew, and the song reverberated across the courtyard. song of faith, of love, and of yearning, and of eternal hope. She never could hold on to love. It eluded her. The cigarette burns on her feet are testimony to the truth that she loved, and she lost.
She looked up again at the shrine.
"Salim hurt me. He is an alcoholic now. He was nice in the first few months. He needed money. They all think that we make a lot of money. My family claims their share, and they come to collect money. I give. I don't want curses. My life is too cursed. Salim doesn't come home too often," Zeenath Pasha said. “First, I lost to a misplaced gender, and second time, I lost to alcohol. I am used to losing now.”
That evening, sitting in the courtyard, with her feet with all the scars of lost love dangling, she said she was HIV Positive.
Six years ago, the doctors had given up. They had said she wouldn't survive beyond two weeks. She miraculously made it. But the fear of death remains. For the last eight months, she has not been able to do much. Jeenath Pasha, the hijra who is so full of love and life, is slowly fading away. She is now fighting tuberculosis, and knows she won't live for too long, not till Saleha is grown young woman and out in the world making her own choices where she is free to be whoever she want to be. Unlike her, who couldn't be male, female, other or neither but an in-between.
"I did dhandha. Who would have fed me otherwise? I was young and I didn't know anything. Bombay scared me. It was an ugly city. To me Bombay was Kamathipura,” she said.
She wiped away a tear.
"I look at her and I cry through the nights. What is going to be her fate? I fought mine and I have given up," she said. "She is so fragile.”
And then she hums the song. The song they sang the other night. The song that sums up her life.
“Yeh duniya bari sangdil hai yahan par kisi ko kisi se mohabbat nahi hai ... karoon jo main fariyad apni jubaan se, gire toot kar bijliyan aasman se ...”
“Bahut takleef uthae hai,” she says, as she disappears into the staircase of the subway. The shrine to her right, and Saleha to her left.

Gauri Sawant, the other mother

She alternates between a mother and the role of a grandmother, who tells her adopted daughter that she shouldn't clap like the hijras, and the one who shows Mandwa, a young transgender, how to sing, and dance, and clap. She is on the threshold. On one side, there is the world she has always craved for, and on the other, a universe of misplaced sexual identities, of suffering, and of letting go.

With Gayatri, she is gentle. She scoops her hair, ties them in a pony tail, feeds her food, morsels carefully wrapped and slowly pushed into the girl's mouth. Mandwa, who wears her hair short, is a young transgender who has chosen Gauri to be lead her through her new life, transformation from male to female.

Gauri Sawant, a 30-year-old transgender, and the director of Sakhi Char Chowghi Trust in Malvani in Mumbai, adopted Gayatri four years ago. She was a six year old. Her mother, a sex worker, who had green eyes and a fair complexion, died of HIV AIDS. Gauri and her had been friends. In the network of sex workers, most of them know each other.

“I became a mother by accident,” Gauri said, as she inched closer to Gayatri.

She brought the child home, cut her nails, and fed her food. Gayatri attended school in the neighborhood, and spent most afternoons after school in the little room in Malvani with her mother and a group of hijra community members, who played with her and pampered her.

It hasn't been easy bringing her up in this environment. At the shelter, which offers refuge to those that are fighting abuses, or are trying to mostly survive in a world where their gender identity is still an unacceptable, uncomfortable truth, Gayatri is an innocent 10-year-old who is trying hard to differentiate between “uncles” and “aunties”.

Those who have grown their hair, and wear salwars and sarees, the girl refers to as aunty. But Mandwa, who has short hair, and has the voice of a man, is an uncle. They don't mind. For in the child's conformist world, the spectrum of gender has not been confronted. Of course, she picks up some of the ways of the other world she inhabits.

Once, Gayatri got into a fight with other girls from school. Within minutes, she had started clapping, and abusing.

“That's when I knew I had to get her to a boarding school,” Gauri said.

Now, Gayatri is studying in Pune. She comes home for holidays, wraps herself around her new mother in the nights, and sleeps soundly. When she had first come to live with Gauri, she was a withdrawn child, still dealing with the loss of her mother. Now, she calls Gauri her mother.

Gauri was born in Pune. Her father was in the police, and she had an elder sister. Her mother died when she was around nine years old. They lived with their grandmother, and one day she was found sleeping wearing a bra underneath her shirt.

She was made to urinate with the door open so her uncles could ensure she wasn't squatting like a woman and relieving herself. All those things were such tortures, she said.

Her father, the assistant police commissioner, carefully chose her clothes – pants, and shirts. He forced her to keep a moustache, and she hated it.

She lived a closet existence. She fell for a boy in school. Tall and dusky, and she would stand outside his class waiting for him to emerge from the doors. She would write him letters, and made little hearts on paper. She cut her hands, and with the ink of blood, wrote to Sachin, who she imagined to be her lover.

One day, she was having dinner with her father, and her tears fell into the dal. She cried. She was inconsolable. Sachin hadn't come to school and she was shaken. She had seen him at the bus stop with another girl and she was jealous.

She moved on to others. A boy who slid his hands under her trousers, asked her to undress, and they discovered, and explored each other. She knew she wasn't attracted to women. She had taken a divergent path.

One night, her father held the door open for her, and asked her to leave. She had nowhere to go. Finally, she came to Ashok Row Kavi, the gay rights activist, and he gave her shelter. She worked with him, and went through sex reassignment surgeries to transition from male to female.

“Cutting off your genitals is not easy. It is a part of you that you are letting go of. The truth is, we will always be incomplete women. Not here, not there,” she said.

She left her family, and moved in with te hijra community. Once, outside the Borivli station, she saw her father. He looked worn, and weary.

She wanted to call out his name. But she didn't.

“Kya paaya, kya khoya,” she said, and looks away.

Now, she has a partner, and they live near Malvani.

Gayatri is a thin, wiry girl.
“Mummy tells me many stories. About queens and kings and princes and palaces,” she said.

Ever since Gayatri came into her life, Gauri's life has changed. She wears traditional clothes because that's what Gayatri likes, and cooks for her. Together, they go to the beaches or to movies.

Some of the childhood that she missed out on, Gauri is now reclaiming through her. They play with dolls, and pretend to cook food in miniature vessels. Here, there is a role reversal. Gauri plays the daughter, and Gayatri plays the mother, who cooks food for her daughter and send her to college.

Simple plots, and uncomplicated narratives in a child's play. They laugh easily, the mother and the daughter.

“I didn't want to be a mother. But I wanted to do something for her. She is so innocent. The community has been very helpful,” she said.

Brining up a girl child is like holding a glass doll, she said.

“You must be very careful,” she said. “We are in an environment where we have all sorts of people coming in.”

In the narrow lanes of Malavani, a poor neighborhood, there are many hijras. Like Chandani, a haji, who has adopted two children. They live in the village, and Chandni won't talk about them. She is afraid of the stereotypes that others associate with such adoptions.

In Delhi, another transgender talks about her daughter, whose mother is a sex worker from Kamathipura. She doesn't visit her daughter because she is afraid of forming attachment. There are too many stories of children who have been brought up by the eunuchs who have walked out on them. For instance, the famous eunuch Tikku Hijra who lived at the Mahim Dargah, and was shunned by the girl she brought up, or another, an elderly woman, whose adopted daughter abandoned her. But she provides for her.

Shahnaz Nani, a hijra Guru, married off one of the adopted daughters recently. The neighborhood in Malvani is full of stories about the lavish wedding feast Shahnaz threw. The daughter lives across the street and is married to a man who drives an auto rickshaw.

Gauri has ensured Gayatri recieves a good education and gets a good career.

“She says she wants to be one of those that give injections. Nurse or doctor, we still have to decide,” she chuckled.

Gauri, who lives in a residential area, and works for an NGO, is a respectable member of the community.
But it is difficult truth to explain why the hijras would want to be mothers.

“My eyes are always hungry. They look at your face and move down, and we long for that complete body. We are a sandwich. We are just buried between the two genders,” she said. “It is a strong urge to be a woman, and to look better than any woman. We want to be mothers, too. That is an inherent part of being a woman. All our lives, we have only wanted to be a woman.”

It is not for the fulfillment of the ambition of womanhood that she should do this, Gauri's guru had warned her.

“Take on the responsibility only if you can do it, she had told me,” Gauri said.

Gauri is forever switching. To Gayatri, she is the doting mother who buys her white fairy-like frocks and throws parties for her.

For Mandwa, she is the hijra nani, the one who will ensure the 19-year-old transitions smoothly and adopts the hijra ways.

So Mandwa accompanied her to Kamathipura. And Gayatri stayed home.

The streets were full of women, and men haggling over prices. Men stumbled out of dark staircases, spat out, and seldom looked back. In the tiny rooms, the women must have smoothened their saris, fixed their makeup, and were already waiting for the next customer. Business has gone down ever since the deaths because of HIV AIDS. There's a fear. But there's also the need. So, they continue.

Gauri tells Mandwa, who is a trained Lavni dancer, all of this.

“This isn't your future,” she says.

She teases Mandwa. And Zeenath joins in.

“Parde mein rehne do, parda na uthao. Parda jo oth gaya toh bhed khul jayega,” they sing.

“We sing this to tease others,” she says. “Mandwa isn't castrated yet. She is on her apprenticeship.”

The other life, the other daughter. She teaches Mandwa the nakhras, and Mandwa imitates her.

As they walk downstairs, they see a young eunuch standing in the doorway. They call after her. She comes.

“So you decided to choose this,” Gauri says to her.

The young hijra only smiles.

“Mandwa, jab tak phool mein color rahega, tab tak noch ke khayenge,” she says. “Yeh Bombay hai. Yahan sab kuch milta hai. You don't fall for this.”

The young hijra is just 18-years-old and they had thought of getting her a job at some NGO. But she ran away and is now into the sex trade.

“It is just a dangerous life she has chosen. But we can only do so much. There are not many alternatives for her,” Gauri says.

The streets of Kamathipura were bustling at night time. And in that diffused light, this world had a certain charm, a certain temptation. Eunuchs and women were on display. They looked beautiful. But if you looked closely, their eyes had a hunted look.