04 September 2003

Hajiras

I woke this morning to find the apartment filled with Pakistani eunuchs. They are called Hajiras. The BBC was running a feature on them. So it wasn't my fault, it was a function of a slow news day and a certain fascination with the outré and bizarre. I am prepared to confront my business day with a portfolio of the bizarre. Not that there is anything wrong with being a Pakistani Eunuch, since we are mired in cultural relativity, anyway. In point of fact, I went through the looking glass this morning. It was a world in which the Muslims were the bastion of tolerance and the Christians of the West were the narrow-minded bigots.

How I wound up with the eunuchs this morning is something I will on blame Vicki Barker. She announced the feature in her dulcet tones at the top of the hour as a teaser for the closeof the show. My eyes had just come open in the darkness before five. The claxon of the alarm was subdued by force of a ham-like hand. I turned the coffee on and listened to the gurgle in the darkness while the classical music till dawn trailed off. It was a fraud. The dawn was still an hour or more away. I like to have the coffee done and be ready for the first jolt when the crisp British voice tells me it is nine hundred hours in London.

The usual nonsense is going on overseas and I should have known this would be one of those weird mornings when I saw that Los Angeles was founded on this day in 1781. The first American combat casualties happened in France on this day in 1917, just as my Doughboy Grandfather was arriving to support the beleaguered French and British. Then I saw that Ford Motor Company had introduced the Edsel on this day in 1957, the most colossal miscalculation in the history of the auto industry. They rolled out the appallingly ugly car with the sideways oval grill on the same day that Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to block nine black school children from attending Central High School in Little Rock. It looked like there might be a renewed Civil War, since Dwight Eisenhower decided to federalize the Guard and take it away from the Governor.

It is a powerful thing to be the governor of a state, even a little-bitty-backward one like Arkansas. A decade later, in 1967, Michigan Gov. George Romney was running for President. He said during a TV interview that he had undergone a ''brainwashing'' by U.S. officials during a 1965 visit to Vietnam. A coincidence? I think not.

I last saw the Governor in 1994, and he looked great, though his wife Lenore was looking frail and nearly translucent. They were making a campaign appearance at an American Motors rally in Pennsylvania where my Dad was a featured speaker. The people there were not interested in politics, they just wanted to talk about their Ramblers with the people who had designed them so long ago. I am not sure that being President would have agreed with the Mr. Romney. He was a man of action, and Washington is not a place where action, particularly of the decisive persuasion, is welcomed. The problem with decisions is that they effectively end debate and study, which are the two leading industries here. And then you have to implement the decision, take action, which makes you accountable.

Accountability seems to be at the root- jeeze, I blush when I use that word- of the BBC story on the eunuchs. We went round the world through the hour and I heard nothing that shocked or astonished me. Until the end of the program, that is. The the digital clock was flashing toward six and the realization that I was going to have to do something decisive on the keyboard or give up and just go to work. Then came the bizarre feature Vicki had told me to wait for. Eunuchs. The term makes you squirm. We use it as a metaphor here in the West, since that sort of mutilation conjures the image of harem guards and 1,001 Nights. And makes any red-blooded male quiver with the very idea. Think about when we have the dog neutered. It is the right thing to do, of course, to prevent unwanted canine reproduction, but I suspect, without documentation, that the man of the house is a little uncomfortable with that trip to the Vet.

I listened to the radio commentary with eyes wide open. In the subcontinent, eunuchs are a newly awakened and vocal minority. The are called Hajiris We should be more aware of the issue here, since they are not the cartoon castrati of the Arabian Nights. They are very much real people and akin to what our activists term "the transgendered community." They were common and tolerated under the Mogul emperors. That is the queer part, if I may be permitted the use of the term. During Muslim rule of India hijras were harem guards and court entertainers and many enjoyed privileged status. They had a useful role in the Muslim scheme of society, and it makes one realize that there was a time when tolerance was the province of the people we think of as Kalishnakov-waving crazies. The British- or at least the third and fourth generation colonists- viewed them as freaks. They were shunned, along with the other aspects of Indian society that they thought should be expunged. I'll tell you about the crusade to eliminate the Thugees sometime, a wild adventure of one hard-headed young Englishman across the deserts of southern Pakistan. But the key is that the attitude of scorn applied to the hajiras remains among westernized urban Indians. They are ridiculed and avoided in the cities but reportedly there is much greater tolerance of the lifestyle in the villages, where they work as entertainers and are considered to be god luck to have perform at weddings and celebrations.

Cecil Adams is an internet author. He writes The Straight Dope, which can be found at http://www.straightdope.com. He says there is much more to being a hijra than flaming for the yokels. While they support themselves to an extent by begging, their major source of income apparently is prostitution, for which purpose they are in much demand. Hijras are invariably the passive partner, you can imagine how, and not all who call themselves hijras are eunuchs. There is a hierarchy, of course, within the subculture. Many hijras say you cannot be a true hijra until you have been castrated. The anthropologist Serena Nanda has written of the the highly ritualized operation. This is strong stuff and not to be considered before breakfast. The operation is done without anesthetic. Two quick cuts are made, severing both testicles and penis. A stick is inserted to keep the urethra open for purposes of urination. No attempt is made to stanch the bleeding or stitch the wound, which is treated with hot sesame oil to prevent infection. Despite all this, one veteran castrator claims that out of 1,000 patients he lost only one.

Ouch.

But all this explains why there would be an activist movement to distribute condoms to the eunuch community. There are press accounts of the annual hijra festival that said fifty thousand people showed up, of whom 10,000 were hijras. It was the 40,000 non-hijras (and the non-emasculated faux hijras) who needed the condoms. Sex among the hijras isn't completely inexplicable, but it's still pretty weird.

So that filled out my requirement to believe two impossible things before breakfast. Islam is tolerant. Eunuchs need condoms. But there was a third thing that almost defied the imagination. When I saw it, I sat up and knew I could deal with my day. On this day, only a year ago, singer Kelly Clarkson was voted the first ''American Idol'' on the Fox TV series.

It seems like she has been with us forever.