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that they receive from public performances at births and weddings by servicing men sexually in secret, despite popular perceptions of the eunuch as a sexless as-cetic. The metaphors employed here by the hijras about the bazaar are meant to be understood ambiguously in sexual terms. These images—which, of course, carry euphemistic reference to małe genitalia, as in the case of ganna ‘sugarcane’, kele ‘bananas’, laddu ‘sweets’, and lakri ‘stick’—highlight the hijras own knowledge about the closed and open spaces of the social geography. By referring to secret do-mains, in this case the małe body and indirectly prostitution, the hijras embarrass their małe listeners and shamelessly collapse traditional divisions of the secret and the known, private and public, home and market, feminine and masculine.

At this point it would be appropriate again to consider Rupas comment that the hijras “even give curses like women” After insisting that hijras always speak like women when together, Rupa asserts in the next excerpt that they additionally refrain from using those curses that involve insulting reference to the addressee’s mother or sister. These kinds of curses, she explains, are mardana ‘manly’ curses and oppose the morę feminine variety of curses used by women: