THERE is a time of night in the city when animals rule. Those who work late on the streets and live there have gone to sleep. That is when the dogs come to tear into the garbage bags. The cats go about their scavenging in silent disdain for the dogs’ wolfishness. The crows sleep in the trees like black fruit.

The street on which I live becomes a corner of hell. The halogen air is pungent with garbage and canine terror. My eyes meet those of a pack of dogs frozen in mid-hunt by my footsteps. I wake the ironing man on his cart and beg him to reach me home. ‘Never look into a dog’s eye,’ he tells me. ‘This is when those we can’t tame come out. Some of them are spirits. If you take Ram’s name when they come near you, they vanish.’

There are pets, and there are animals. Pets create in our lives a realm of dependence and control at their least perverse. But the world of animals and insects is ruled by fear, revulsion and cruelty. Think of snakes, rats, lizards, bats, cockroaches, wasps and ants. There is a grey zone between the fierce and the tame that haunts us with its otherness. There, the border between what is kept out and what is let in are difficult to police.

Outside my ground floor bedroom is a wall. Sometimes, late at night, a cat walks past my window along the top of this wall. With the light from next door falling on it, my mosquito net becomes a screen for the cat’s giant moving shadow. I may have managed to keep the mosquitoes out. But this leopard-shaped piece of the night has somehow got in, and prowls the borders of my sleep.

*

‘I’ve passed!’ my friend, let’s call him Saleem, announced on the phone. He lives in a village in Bengal’s South 24 Parganas, and was referring to his secondary board exams. His schizophrenic father, daab-selling mother and school-going younger brother were all thrilled with his results. But there was an edge in Saleem’s voice: he knew he was possessed by a spirit.

 

The day before his results, he had gone to his aunt’s house, where he coaches ten boys and girls in English, history, geography and maths. He was sweeping the floor before sitting down on it to teach, when he accidentally swished his own leg with the broom. That was when the spirit got into him. He immediately got a fever and became delirious. He kept saying that he was going to flee home, that his aunt’s daughter would die soon. As his mother carried him home, he passed out after hurling himself against a tree near which there had been a murder. It was the murdered woman’s spirit that had possessed Saleem. His mother dragged him to a maulana, who gave him an amulet for 400 rupees.

When I visited them a week later, Saleem was still withdrawn. He took me to his school, where he had to collect forms for junior college. The school was like the one Apu went to in Ray’s Aparajito – alive with a mischief that was not of this age. Saleem was the star there. I met his English teacher, who told me that even though he, the teacher, was Hindu, he had great faith in the maulana who was treating Saleem. The other students giggled.

Once, I had walked along the railway line with Saleem and his best friend to an ancient Shiv mandir. It was surrounded by paddy fields, and had a courtyard ringed with trees. Here, the boys sang for me the Behula-Lakhindar pala they perform at the end of Chaitra every year. They took turns to play the hero and heroine, but we had to get up when the mosquitoes came out. Before we walked home through the fields in the moonless night, Saleem took me to a well and made me wash away the aftershave that he could smell on me. It might attract spirits and snakes, he whispered.

Saleem’s hut rests on stilts above stagnant water covered with water hyacinths. There is a large bed on which everybody sleeps, with his father tied to one side of it. Lying down on it under a tattered mosquito net feels like being in a hut within a hut. (Sitting on this bed on an unbearably sultry summer’s day the previous year, I had struggled to explain to Saleem a poem that was part of his English syllabus: Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’.) After we got back from the mandir that evening and went to bed, Saleem told me how he had gone out to relieve himself into the water below his hut one night and found himself peeing on a floating human corpse. He was delirious for days after that, and still dreams of that thing in the water. He said that he would never spend a night in a hospital, for they were full of ghosts that come out of the stains and odours in the bedlinen.

 

I once met a gang of suburban children who had run away from their homes to live in the railway station in Malda. One year, they all started getting chicken-pox. But when they were put in hospital, they would slip out and return to the station before nightfall. They spoke of a headless ghost that haunted the hospital wards after dark. Many of the children were used by the police to carry corpses from the railway tracks to the morgue after accidents and suicides. I wanted to tell Saleem about these children. But he had set an alarm on his mobile phone and fallen asleep. He had to get up early next morning for maths tuitions.

*

Late on a chilly, moonlit night in Saleem’s village just after Kali Puja, I found myself in a large room full of men dressing up as women. It occurs to me as I write this now that none of these men had heard, or is likely to hear, of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. They were just as clueless about the drama being played out in the Delhi court around this terrible old law, and oblivious of the battle being fought against it in other pockets of urban India. The keywords of that battle – les-bian, gay, bisexual and transgendered, safe and unsafe sex, queer rights, Constitution, democracy – would probably never figure in the consciousness of these men.

 

Yet, that night, the atmosphere in the room was electric with erotic possibilities, although there were no women around. The men in it were dressing up for the night-long gajon – a medley of playing, dancing and singing – that was going to start soon in the middle of the bazaar, fantastically lit up and already packed with people, just outside the room. Because I am a man, I had been allowed inside what was being called the ‘ladies-der ghar’. Here, two men in their early twenties, and two veteran male actors in their thirties and forties (the oldest being the gajonlakshmi, the diva of the local gajon and jatra-pala circuit) were briskly getting ready for their opening appearances on stage as women. I could hear continual announcements outside, heralding the younger actors as the ‘hot heroines’ of the Adi Joy Ma Kali Company. I had already realized that they were household names in the village, where men, women and children were all eager to share with me their awe of the actors’ cross-dressing skills: ‘Dada-go, ki shundor meye-chhele shaje ora tomay bolte parbo ni!’ [Bhaiya, can’t tell you how prettily they dress up as girls! (In rural, colloquial Bengali, meye-chhele means ‘girl’, although it literally translates as ‘girl-boy’.)]

In the dressing room, the men had sat down in a circle on the mud floor in the glare of a naked bulb, each with his little box of make-up (the sort of aluminium box in which children take their books to school). After taking a drag from their bidis and a quick thakur pranam, they started making up their faces and necks with astonishing deftness, while a young wardrobe boy ran around handing them things and combed out their flowing black wigs. It was obvious that they didn’t want to be disturbed. So I disappeared into the shadows with my camera, which they had allowed me to use, although they showed nothing but indifference to it.

 

Suddenly, from where I was crouching, I realized that the room was surrounded by boys and men peering in through the holes and rents in the plastic sheets that formed its walls. Some of them had even started moving into the room through the door. From now on, at every new stage of the actors’ spectacular transformation into women, there was a stepping up of the tension in the room. It reached a peak when the wardrobe boy started handing out the bras and falsies. The children were quickly shooed out, and the adults came in and shut the door, their eyes shining as they lurked in the shadows. In the hushed silence, I could hear the unmistakable gulping sound made by throats parched with arousal. Somehow, it felt improper to keep taking photographs.

Then, all of a sudden in that hush, someone jeered, ‘O bhai Brihannala!’ – invoking Arjun’s cross-dressed alter ego in the Mahabharat. The gajon-lakshmi, now almost fully transformed into a resplendent Durga, looked sharply up at this man, held him in a long and icy stare, and, with studied casualness, ordered the wardrobe boy to throw everyone out of the room. Out I went too.

For the Adi Joy Ma Kali meye-chheles, the night’s performances were a rollercoaster ride from the peaks of love to the pits of bawdry, with every kind of melodrama, abjection and slapstick thrown in-between. There were adulteries, murders, rapes, miscarriages, bed tricks and someone called Balloon baba going around threatening to jab every well endowed woman in the audience with a very sharp pin. I learnt later that there were objections from most villagers, and within the company, to women being employed as actors – but not for moralistic reasons. Most people felt that with the entry of women, the performances would have to be chastened: the male actors would not feel free enough to let themselves go in the ribald scenes involving real women. So, men playing women remained the better option for both actors and audience.

 

After the night’s revels were over, and the marketplace was almost empty, I saw two young actors standing against the green room door at dawn. They had changed into men’s clothes, but had kept their wigs and make-up on. Around them was a gathering of shifty eyed men who seemed unable to tear themselves away from their favourite heroines. After a while, most of these men cleared off, casting furtive little backward glances as they walked away. The two who remained went up to the actors, spoke to them briefly, and they all disappeared into the bamboo grove behind the green room. Later, when I got to know the gajonlakshmi a little more, he told me how they would have sex – unprotected sex – with the men from the audience. But this happened only while the actors were still made-up, he added with a touch of virtue in his voice, and never, he emphasized, after they had changed back into men again.