They did not come to clap or dance, they came to celebrate an MLA

Shabnam lost no time in demonstrating that she means business. She tabled a call attention motion on her first day as an MLA. “My constituents are the poor, illiterate tribals of Shahdol. There are no pensions for old, hapless women, no jobs for the youngsters who are forced into the world of crime. I want to know what the government is doing for them,” she asked.

That Shabnam doesn’t think much of her fellow legislators became clear the moment she came out of the Assembly to talk to the press. “Sabhi sarkari golmal me shamil hain (everyone is squandering the government’s money),” she said. “Those who didn’t have enough to eat till yesterday are rolling in wealth.”

Taking her assignment as God’s wish, Shabnam has now decided to expose this caucus. She sites the example of Shahdol’s battered roads, holding former PWD Minister Bisahu Lal Singh responsible for their condition. There is a word of caution for the media also — join her campaign againstcorrupt politicians or face the music: “Expose them, otherwise, you, too, will stand exposed.”

The outspoken legislator, however, is somewhat reticent when asked about her past. Her father Gokul Prasad Sharma retired as a DIG in Maharashtra police and she “had” four brothers and three sisters. But she wouldn’t say if they had abandoned her or she quit them on her own. “It’s all in the past. Today I don’t belong to them, they don’t belong to me,” she said.

But she does remember the past. “Especially the hurt and the humiliation I felt during my two years in a Dadar school as a child named Chandra Prakash Sharma.”

She was brought up in a eunuch dera (camp) by Haleema, a Muslim woman employed by the clan chief of the eunuchs who later took her to Chennai. From Chennai, she moved to Delhi and toured the country as a street dancer — “I learnt Kathak also!” — till she settled down in Jamania Tola locality of Anuppur town in one of Madhya Pradesh’s most backward Shahdol district 15 years ago.

But before settling down, she did return to Mumbai to do small parts in films like Amar Akbar Anthony, Don and Janata Havildar. “People showered me with money. But I had had my share of brickbats also,” she becomes pensive, showing the scars left on her body by those for whom she was a mere plaything.

As a street entertainer, Shabnam went places and learnt over a dozen Indian languages in the process. She rattles off homilies in Marathi, Gujrati and Tamil to prove the point and occasionally switches to faltering English for effect. “I may not be a scholar, but I know the world better,” she said.

Being a eunuch placed her in an ideal situation for public service, she said. “Other politicians indulge in corruption because they have heirs on whom they can bestow their ill-gotten wealth,” she said. “The eunuchs have no family of their own. The entire mankind is their family.”

Then a journalist pointed to the golden mangalsutra on her neck and asked who the husband was. “It could be you,” Shabnam Mausi said amid embarrassed laughter.