The Green Rose

by Sharmila Mukherjee

  When he was not looking, she scrubbed the parts touched by him with a perfumed hanky. She thought of buying a whole tissue box.

  But because her days were spent in this unsavoury business of evading her fiancé’s sexual advances, at night she slipped back into her lesbian reveries.

  During one of her many visits to Lesbos, Charu promised her lips, one in the nether region and one smack above her gorgeously clefted chin, to a woman. A beautiful woman of her dreams—the woman who teased her at night when she was in bed unable to sleep. When the haunting was too much to bear, her fingers twitched and travelled inexorably to the nooks and crannies on the woman’s body. Under the covers, behind a tightly locked door, she squealed in delight.

  Her heterosexual life, on the other hand, continued to be the same as before—impossibly one-sided, with most of the ‘action’ initiated by her fiancé. His eyes never ceased to glint with lust which she could never reciprocate, even if she wanted to. Finally the fiancé’s nerves showed signs of being frayed by the constant tussle of wills; he became impatient. He made a proposal to Charu: Why don’t they go somewhere else, more idyllic? He had a guesthouse by the river, hidden behind lush vegetation, away from the prying eyes of civilization. Charu understood—it was a typical male-heterosexual gesture—to try and ease a woman, if she refused sex at first, out of what he perceived as fear of losing her virginity before marriage. Charu was furious, but she didn’t show it.

  The imported wine, the lamb shish kebab made her giddy with delight. The tension was ebbing fast.

  Charu trembled inwardly, but still believed she was safe. ‘I can handle this situation,’ she told herself.

  Even though she never wanted it.

  But that evening she enjoyed the foreplay with her fiancé. The finery of the courtship was ego-boosting for her. The young man fitted the bill of a good foreplayer. Physically, he resembled Akash quite a bit. He had smooth, unblemished skin. She disliked men on whose chest hair sprouted like weed. Her fiancé’s skin was like a rich man’s well-manicured lawn. Eminently touchable, it begged stroking. From head to toe he was Hugo Boss-ed for the evening.

  The soothing, wine-induced diffuseness of Charu’s mind lifted at the thought of Akash.

  Then in a flash, the atmosphere crumpled from soothing to dangerous. The outcome was like the picture of the angry goddess Kali standing menacingly on the prostrate body of her lord and husband Shiva, whose legendary tuber, drained off blood, hung limply like a punctured balloon.

  ‘Bastard do you want to eat my face or what?’ Charu heard herself scream.

  Things had come to such a pass that she feared that with his licking and probing the man would scrape the expensive cosmetics off her face. Monkey-like he came at her, pushing her legs apart, knocking her over, squatting on her breast.

  His breath stank. Covering her face with one arm across her breast she yelled, ‘Get off me!’

  Then she remembered little but her flight from the guesthouse. The man unleashed a string of misogynistic expletives. And with an expression of shock on his face he put her in his car and asked his driver to drive her back home.

  Charu felt the car door being slammed on her face.

  The event had exposed Charu to the world in a way she didn’t want to be. She was unprepared for this.

  In the wake of such scandalous revelations, the grapevine of New Delhi got into lightning speed mode and teleported the news as salacious gossip.

  The air of upscale New Delhi was rife with speculation on the Guhas’ shattered condition. The glee over their impending shame could barely be contained.

  On account of his superior position, Mr Guha had many enemies in the city. They all prayed for his tumbling and hated his lofty British demeanour. But he stood stern like a statue, immovable. Nothing could have got to him as the exposure of his daughter’s lesbian identity had.

  Mr Guha was partially blamed for Charu’s strange ways. After all it was he who had filled his daughter’s head with corrupt Western ideals, teaching her to focus on speaking good English and to treat English as a priceless pearl, and giving her the audacity to disrespect folks who spoke Hindi-inflected English. Superficial fathers can only beget spoilt children like Charu, was the general opinion.

  The city’s socialites had long ago predicted that something was awry in Charu. Stories of her man-hating had been sprung and a whispering, underground campaign was launched against her lesbionic tendencies.

  When news of the breakup of Charu’s engagement reached the Guhas, Mrs Guha threatened to overdose on benadryl if Charu didn’t fix what she had just broken. Where would they find another groom like him? Getting to be 28, soon to be 30, Charu would not have luxury liners like him docking at her port for long.

  ‘I love you, Ma,’ is what she told her mother remorsefully.

  Mr Guha sunk into a sombre mood and scrutinized the Greek mythology volume for clues. Thoughts ran disarrayed through his mind: His daughter, whom once upon a time he had cradled in his arms and was tempted to name Miranda, so cherubic was she, is a bona fide lesbian! Could daughters of good Bengali gentlemen with a nose for daffodils, an ear for Schubert and a stomach for Greek be lesbians or whatever name they gave these women with warped chromosomes? He had never consumed beef or alcohol in his life, the sacred thread of initiation had always adorned his body like a coat of Brahminical arms. He had never cast even the germ of a lascivious glance at a woman, not even at his wife whom to his satisfaction he had treated with so much respect over the years, as one would treat a mother or a sister. Just once, only once, he had profaned the lady in order to have Charu, the sweet fruit of their combined effort. And to such a sinless man was born a lesbian daughter!

  A sacrilegious non-sequitor had been appendaged cruelly to his otherwise coherent life at an age when like Duke Prospero he should be retiring into the sanctuary of good books.

  How could lesbian daughters be born to observant Brahminical men? Was it his ill luck, or the curse of an evil aunt?

  Lesbian! The word resonated yet caught on to nothing from anything in the past. A fairy word to his ears, insubstantial, not real. Nobody in the fourteen generations of his family or familiars had ever harboured a lesbian daughter in their nest. The damned word didn’t even have a solid etymological root.

  The idea of the lesbian he couldn’t grasp. What was she?

  The light bedazzled and darkness fell over his eyes.

  At an age when daughters themselves became wives and mothers, Charu was rendered an orphan. A calamitous event by any standard, the descent into orphanhood of this most beautiful of daughters of high-status parents was made more calamitous by her childless and husbandless state.

  There might after all have been some base to Mrs Guha’s suspicions that the goddess Mahalaxmi was displeased with Charu; or else what could explain her decision to not only not give Charu anything—a husband’s home, or the flesh of her flesh—but also to take away from her everything that she had.

  His heart was stretched across his chest like a rubber band into infinity, the young doctor said as he examined the body of Mr Guha, slumped in his high-backed patent leather armchair, his head lolling on his chest as though it had come unhinged from his neck.

  That day Charu was petrified, turned into stone, as she stood zombie-like in the midst of the quiet carnage of a dead father and a mother bent over in pain.

  Towards Charu everybody cast coal-black eyes of accusation. It was as if her shameful, dirty woman-loving ways had killed her parents.

  On the day of Mr Guha’s funeral, many came, top-brass men and women of New Delhi, socialites mostly. They praised Mr Guha sky high; commiserating with Charu’s loss of an umbrella-like shelter, they clicked their tongues in pity.

  No man would ever marry her. She would find no woman either. Standing in the middle of the room flooded with visitors, Charu felt incredibly lonely. Her heart flew out to seek Akash’s. Where was he when she most needed him?

  If Charu could be friends w
ith a man, it had to be a gay man like Akash. That night, she turned her computer on and began to compose an email to Akash.

  3

  Shalini was Charu’s first lesbian lover; yet the woman, who was quite a bit older than Charu, was also married to a man.

  Being an unadulterated lesbian herself, Charu was initially hesitant to get romantically involved with a married woman. She, after all, had some principles to adhere to.

  However, all the doubt, the resistance, had melted no sooner had Shalini made love to her for the first time. Shalini’s hands had glided expertly on the right parts of Charu’s thirsty body. If prior to Shalini’s touch, Charu’s body could be compared to a shapeless lump of clay, then the touches had transformed it into a beautifully shaped vessel. She was so fulfilled inside out!

  Shalini had laughed at Charu’s metaphor of the perfect potter; ‘You feel ecstatic because I’m the first woman-potter who has touched you this way. Gradually, as more and more women-potters work on you, I’ll probably fade into second or third best.’

  Experience! Of course! Thus far, Charu had been a lesbian in name and dream only. She was lucky she found Shalini. If she didn’t meet more lesbians, women in whose company she would experience the agonies and ecstasies of lesbian love, she would just remain a pretty but empty vessel, patted occasionally by married women like Shalini, who moonlighted as women-lovers but were really entrenched in their heterosexual existences.

  But where was she to find lesbians in a city like New Delhi? Wherever she looked, she saw heterosexuals; all of the women who struck her as beautiful and worth having were already taken or wanting to be taken by men. She felt terribly lonely as a black man would in a village in the Swiss Alps, where not only was everybody white, but among whom a black would be a curiosity item, an object to fear, not make love to.

  ‘Don’t be,’ Shalini told Charu one day. She had meant for Charu to not feel so dejected and alone, for even in a city like New Delhi, there were plenty of Indian lesbians like her. One had to know where to find them.

  ‘Where?’ Charu had asked. The only place lesbians could be found lolling openly in one another’s arms, without shame and fear of persecution, would be the underground. Would Charu have to descend into some illicit club lurking somewhere in a cavern in New Delhi?

  Shalini smiled; she was amused by Charu’s childlike naivety as far as the lives of lesbians in India was concerned.

  ‘India is full of lesbians; you need to have the eyes to spot them. But, Charu, I bet you won’t even recognize them when you see them, because you think that all Indian lesbians look like Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das. No, my dear, the real lesbians of India are not so pretty and not all of them speak English; so many of them don’t even belong to the privileged class that you hail from. They’re poor, in need of protection and help and they need to stick it out together.’

  Charu was surprised by what Shalini said. How did she know, being as she was just a part-time lesbian?

  It was Shalini who introduced Charu to the lesbians in the house of Laadli Chaurasia.

  Big things were going on in this small-sized house. The house was mostly shunned by the respectable upper-middle-class residents of Greater Kailash. They spoke of the house in hush-hush tones as if they were speaking about a brothel. Yet nobody could precisely explain why they spoke of the house in such hush-hush tones.

  Women of Greater Kailash asked their daughters to avoid it. The men seemed to be more ambiguous. The house was known to be filled with women and the male residents of Greater Kailash would pass by Chaurasia’s abode harbouring a secret desire to invade the place. They would look at it and get inflamed with imagining the house as a gigantic hive, twinkling with lights and forbidden delights. But they would avoid it nonetheless. Charu had always been curious to know more about Laadli and her business but it was on account of her mother that she couldn’t cross the threshold of this house.

  Now that Mr Guha was no more, Charu’s mother was especially watchful of Charu’s social intercourse with women. Mrs Guha lived her days as though she were haunted by the spectre of Charu’s lesbianism; she dreaded the L-word and all its evil connotations. Ironically, when most mothers were worried about their unmarried daughters’ reputation being besmirched were they to be seen in the company of men, Mrs Guha was fearful of Charu getting corrupted by women. So while Charu was allowed to go out with men, she wasn’t allowed to visit places like Laadli’s house. There were just too many women there, and not a single man to be seen on the premises.

  Mrs Guha was right. In the ten or so years that the house had stood there, defiant in its singularity, no man had dared to enter it. The only male to be seen going in and out of Laadli Chaurasia’s abode was the sweeper Chunaram, carrying piles of tampon trash with his nose puckered up in silent disgust.

  Inside and out Laadli was big. A boisterous New Delhi-born-and-bred Punjabi to the core, she ate and drank and smoked her way through life, much to the chagrin of her propriety-conscious neighbours. A loose flowing man’s shirt always draped her and she wore pants that she said were her brother’s cast-offs. Others were like frail piglets in her presence, newly self-aware and fresh to this cause that Laadli had carried in her breast for years.

  ‘For so long I have been this way that you will laugh when I tell you that I have turned down almost 200 marriage proposals since the time I was 16,’ Laadli would say, puffing out a funnel of smoke that she inhaled regularly from humungous sticks of cigar.

  One might have seen the well-to-do fathers of New Delhi smoke those cigars.

  Rumour had it that Laadli was the surrogate father and mother to many of the women who gathered in her house.

  To Laadli they would tell their secrets and not be punished for them.

  ‘Once upon a time I was as pretty and girly as Shilpa Shirodhkar,’ she said referring to an old-time heroine.

  Marriage proposals had started pouring in. Her mother had started nagging her and her father had started making oppressive demands of her consent.

  ‘It was when he threatened to take me out of the English-medium school and put me into a Hindi one, because I refused to marry Jasbeer’s son, that was when I decided enough is enough and began to grow fatter and fatter. I threw away my make-up kit and straggled around in the house in my brother’s clothes looking to drive prospective suitors away,’ Laadli would say with a large guffaw at the cunningness of her revolt.

  The marriage proposals dwindled and finally stopped coming. Both of her parents sunk into a state of heart-brokenness, appalled by the sight of their once beautiful daughter waddling like a water buffalo in men’s clothes. A boy and a girl they had birthed, and now they found two big boys in their house. The father’s business fell and he died, as he didn’t want to live in shame. The mother took to bed, afflicted by something unnameable; she cut off her connection with Laadli. Already in frail health, she breathed her last when news of Laadli’s betrothal to an American lady reached her ears.

  Laadli made the girls in her house laugh, the tragedy of her loss enveloped by the folksy, matronly warmth with which she rendered the story.

  Charu took an instant liking to Laadli Chaurasia.

  When Mrs Guha came to know of her daughter’s familiarity with the ‘fat cow’ that lived five blocks away from the Guha residence, she exploded in anger. She reserved special animus for the house owned by the fat cow, not just because she was fat and wore male clothing, but mainly because she was said to operate a most mysterious business with a horde of women who lived in the house. Mrs Guha didn’t mention the word ‘brothel’ but that’s what she suspected the fat cow of running—‘a brothel!’ she screamed at Charu for having sunk so low, low enough to start visiting brothels.

  ‘Oh, how I wish I had a son, instead of a daughter,’ she lamented frequently.

  Charu did not bother to rectify her mother’s misunderstanding; what could she tell her mother? That it wasn’t a brothel but a safe house for Indian lesbians to live in, protected from
the harassment of the society and the law? Would the difference matter to her mother to whom a lesbian ‘hostel’ was as despicable a place as was a brothel?

  So, Charu kept mum and let her mother express her animosity towards Laadli Chaurasia.

  Incidentally, about everything that she didn’t quite understand and consequently didn’t like, she spoke with animosity, as if the best way to ward off the threat of things unfamiliar was to rage against them.

  Mrs Guha had raged against their next-door neighbour, Shalini, especially after Charu and Shalini became bosom friends. But Mrs Guha disliked Shalini even before she and Charu got to be girlfriends. She was angered by what she construed as Mrs Shalini Mahapatra’s out-of-place attitude. Being the wife of an officer of the Orissa IAS cadre, where, Mrs Guha wondered, Shalini got the hauteur from to not pay a visit to one such as herself—the wife of a highly anointed member of the All India IAS cadre—she couldn’t fathom.

  At first Mrs Guha attributed Shalini Mahapatra’s flouting of protocols to cultural diffidence. She was after all an Oriya and being a Bengali, Mrs Guha was acclimatized to a cultural cosmology in which if the Bengali was a major planet then the Oriya was a minor satellite of that planet. It wasn’t entirely Mrs Guha’s fault. The ubiquity of Oriya cooks and plumbers in her beloved hometown of Kolkata had planted the seeds for such cosmologies in her head at a very young age.

  So, Mrs Guha at first thought that being an Oriya, Shalini was shy of coming to Mrs Guha’s house right away. Let her get used to the fact that in a global era it was okay for Oriyas to live side by side with the genteel Bengalis, and her shyness would melt away by and by, was how Mrs Guha mentally accounted for the doctor’s wife’s delayed paying of respects.

  Charu didn’t quite understand her mother’s cultural hierarchy. To her it didn’t matter if Shalini was an Oriya or a Santhal. What mattered to Charu was her amazing beauty. Shalini Mahapatra was the most gorgeous woman Charu had seen in New Delhi.