The Parcel
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'There is a term for me in almost every Indian language. I am reviled and revered, deemed to have been blessed, and cursed, with sacred powers.' In the swollen and crumbling red-light district of Kamathipura, at the heart of Bombay, Madhu is given a difficult and potentially lucrative task by her housemother -- to prepare a newly arrived 'parcel' for its opening. The parcel is a ten-year-old girl from the provinces, sold into the sex trade by her aunt. Madhu's home is Hijra House, one of the last bastions in the land war slowly consuming the area, as property developers vie for land. It is here that 'hijras' -- eunuchs, people of the third sex, 'neither here nor there' -- ply their trade. Now forty and with her looks and spirit waning, Madhu struggles with the task she has been given, confronted by memories of her past, of how she was rejected by her family -- and by how she longs, secretly, to go back to them. Everything is dissolving within and around her. Then, as the land war comes to a head, and with her housemother coming under pressure by the hijra elders to sell their home, Madhu realises she must do something to save herself. The Parcelis the masterful new novel from acclaimed author Anosh Irani, and is a savage and beautifully rendered story about community, belonging, and the cheapness of human life.
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What else can I say besides the fact that this book was sad. There was just so much sadness that even the ending, which was I guess the silver lining, did not cheer me up even a little bit. Madhu's whole life is just a huge mess. I feel terrible for her, and I knew that one of the things this book was going to do was to try to redeem her at the end. I could not think of her as redeemed however, as I had just read 200 pages of how she psychologically breaks children into submission to prepare them for prostitution. The epilogue really shows how just a short period of time with her had messed up the girl in ways that will probably never be fixed.
I liked at least that they show just how messed up Madhu's thoughts about it are. She believes that she is doing them a favour. It becomes less of an explanation and more of her trying to convince herself that what she is doing is a gift.
I found it to be a bit slow, and going off on a lot of different tangents that were not really imperative to the story.
I think I would still recommend it, as long as you can handle a whole description of the process of her being castrated. That was quite hard to get through.