Indian Eunuch (True) The final blow.

A story cut from The Metropolitan Newspaper about an Indian getting 
Castrated against his will.

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The final blow to my manhood 


My name is Shabnam and I am a eunuch. I was not born so...well, 
this story is about how a young man called Aslam was turned into 
Shabnam overnight...through a barbaric operation. The deep gash of 
a knife that you see on my face is a recent one. I got it a few 
days back in a scuffle at the Old Delhi Railway. 
One customer, a very tall young man, tried to run away by not 
paying me after we had sex behind the public urinals. I was soon 
overpowered by him, though I myself am quite strong. Luckily, a 
cop, who is also my “admirer”, came to my rescue. As I stood before 
the mirror at home that night, attending to the bleeding cut in my 
left cheek with an anti-septic cream, I was suddenly filled with a 
twinge of pity for myself. Where has Fate brought me? I almost wept 
as I looked at my pathetic, painted face, kohl-lined eyelashes, 
balls of wool in my kameez and a woman’s dress with a red dupatta, 
hanging about me as if on a dressmaker’s mannequin. 

Contrast this with my image of only three years ago, to which the 
mirror hanging in my old Seelampuri one-room flat has been witness. 
I was a handsome young man of 27, clean-shaven and always dressed 
simply in a white shirt and black trousers ( my favourite), in 
which I would sit for hours at the sewing-machine. I was a tailor 
in Moradabad. Since it was an old, shabby quarter where I had my 
little shop perched atop a hair-dresser’s, with whom I shared a 
common stairway, all sorts of customers frequented my shop. Among 
them were a group of hijras who came almost every night, since I 
was soon hooked on grass and other drugs of which they always had a 
good supply. As time went by, I didn’t mind even being paid in 
drugs for the clothes I (or, rather my assistant) sewed for them. 
And, they in turn, used my shop, after closing time, as a 
convenient joint for their drunken get-togethers. 

Little did I suspect how cunningly the clap-trap had laid for me. 
And I, the fool I was, myself walked into it. On a pretext, they 
took me one evening to the outskirts of the city, for a “drinking 
session”, persuaded by one elderly hijra ( addressed by others as 
guru of their dham), where they kept me confined in an old, 
deserted house, feeding me on opium and milk for three days (a 
ritual they judiciously follow before the main ceremony). 

Then came the night that ruined my life. Under a full moon, dozens 
of colourfully dressed hijras had gathered with dhol-beaters. In a 
state of drunken stupor, I was brought to a raised mound of earth, 
and even though I was half-conscious the terror alerted me and I 
vividly remember the pounding of the drums and the mad, frenzy of 
the dancing hijras, as they celebrated another addition (myself) to 
their grotesque world. A quack had been hired (for Rs 5,000, I 
found later on) to deal the final blow on my manhood with a 
doctor’s blade. It all happened in a flash of a knife. As per the 
ritual, I was left to bleed through the night, with some elderly 
hijras having applied a paste of katha and some herbs as antiseptic 
on my wounds. 

Well, the rest is imaginable. There are certain injunctions we must 
follow. We must shave every day, make up our faces heavily to hide 
any trace of stubble, practice obscene pelvic thrusts, learn the 
lewd, rhythmic dialect of the hijras and obscene parodies of 
popular film songs and be ready to tear a throat or lift a 
child...for ransom.” (The conversation was interrupted on the 
roadside, near the Old Delhi Railway Station, as a car glided to a 
halt, and the man inside beckoned to Shabnam to hop in. And that 
was the last this writer saw of Shabnam, a victim of such strange 
twist of fate!) 

(As told to Pankaj Tuli)