The Green Rose

by Sharmila Mukherjee

  Charu was light hearted to an extreme. Grasping the bouquet of green roses close to her breast, inhaling the vapour it emitted with the utmost power of her lungs, she put on her favourite music—and began slow dancing movements. As she moved her body rhythmically, a tune began to form effortlessly on her lips. Charu, who failed miserably at her mother’s favourite Rabindrasangeet, sang in her own way, repeating one line and one line only, ‘I am an Indian lesbian, I am an Indian lesbian.’

  Her mother was snoring away quietly in another room in the house, not knowing about anything that took place that afternoon in her daughter Charulata’s mind.

  5

  Mrs Guha never liked going to Mrs Vaikundeshwari’s parties. But for some odd reason she could never turn down Mrs Vaiku’s invitations. Some irrational part of Mrs Guha—a part that she didn’t want to subject to any serious scrutiny—really liked Vaikundeshwari. Often Mrs Guha would tell Charu, O amaar choto boner moton, she’s like the younger sister I never had, though chronologically speaking not more than a couple of years separated her from Vaikundeshwari.

  Charu also liked Mrs Vaikundeshwari a lot; she was one person on whom both mother and daughter doted.

  That Vaikundeshwari was very likeable was proven by the fact that Mrs Guha, who was by nature hard to please, completely adopted her as her best girlfriend. Uncannily, Vaiku, it seemed to Charu, had filled the vacuum left by her dear departed father in her mother’s life.

  Mrs Guha’s face, Charu noticed, would light up like an electric bulb whenever Vaiku phoned and she was distinctly elated—an emotion that she tried very hard to conceal—when Vaiku came to her house.

  And after the passing away of Mr Guha, Vaiku came to visit Mrs Guha more often than ever before. Charu saw that her mother and Vaiku chatted about so many things that she never witnessed her father and mother chat about. In fact, the camaraderie between the two women flew more easily and volubly than what she had grown up seeing within the household.

  Her father and mother, it occurred to Charu, had a very formal relationship; they rarely spoke about the little things of life.

  Vaiku and Mrs Guha spoke with such candour about the minutest concerns, concerns that Mr Guha would, were he still alive, relegate to the category of the ‘useless chatter of women’.

  Charu herself was a constant presence as subject matter of the women’s ‘useless chatter’. They discussed the challenges of raising a daughter as beautiful and desirable—in the eyes of lascivious men—in a world gone morally corrupt and dangerous. It was on these occasions of expressing mutual concern for the moral life of Indian daughters that Vaiku and Mrs Guha struck a special chord of amity.

  After the tête-à-tête, the two women would go shopping together at the fish market where imported fish was sold to the elite housewives of New Delhi.

  At parties, however, Mrs Vaikundeshwari became a different person altogether. At these soirees that Mrs Guha forced herself to attend, Mrs Vaikundeshwari drank a lot, flirted unabashedly with men and—to the intense confusion of Mrs Guha—with the women as well. At these soirees Mrs Guha saw a different Mrs Vaikundeshwari, one who was a little wild and undomesticated.

  But Mrs Guha didn’t judge Mrs Vaikundeshwari harshly. She had grown up on stories where gods and goddesses swung without compunction between starkly opposed personalities. But at the end of the day, they were one and the same person. If the sweet, demure Parvati—who sat side by side with her husband Shiva, uncomplainingly garbed in the kind of Shaivic tatterdemalion that her husband demanded that she be garbed in if she were to be a real wife to him—if that same demure Parvati could change into the terrifying man-slaying, divine-decree-defying Kali, then so could Mrs Vaikundeshwari change from being a thick-at-the-waist, undoubtedly attractive yet maternal person to a thick-at-the-waist drunk ranter at those parties, rationalized Mrs Guha.

  But something about Vaiku’s behaviour at the parties did rankle Mrs Guha. It was the fact of her total abdication of normal womanly comportment under the influence of alcohol.

  ‘It’s all that drinking that’s going on in those parties that makes Vaiku what she isn’t,’ Mrs Guha had once complained to her husband, in an effort to evade yet another invitation that had been sent out to them by the Vaikundeshwaris.

  But Mr Guha, the rational man who felt extreme discomfort in discussing a colleague’s wife in what he deemed to be near-sexual light, because Mrs Guha in her state of chagrin referred to Mrs Vaikundeshwari’s exposed ‘breasts’ and ‘buttocks’, simply said that let those who want to drink, drink, as long as he and Mrs Guha behaved properly, paid the visit and came home by the decent hour of 10 p.m. it was just fine.

  Secretly fuming at her husband’s perennial slithering away from discussions with serious moral stakes Mrs Guha determined to do what was in her power to do: not take Charu to any of Mrs Vaikundeshwari’s gatherings.

  Mrs Guha didn’t want Charu to see the drinking and the free intermingling between husbands and other people’s wives, between wives and other people’s husbands, and last but not the least, between the wives themselves. The free intermingling of fellow wives in a manner that wasn’t sisterly was specially upsetting for Mrs Guha and at Vaikundeshwari’s parties that was a common occurrence.

  Mrs Guha didn’t like the wives sitting too close to each other. Barely an inch or two separated the women’s thighs. The thighs themselves appeared to have been wrapped so tightly in the saris the women would be wearing, that Mrs Guha felt like she was witnessing a spectacle more abhorring than that of nakedness. Each time she would see this kind of nakedness Mrs Guha would be freshly scandalized.

  Going to Mrs Vaikundeshwari’s party was a tribulation for Mrs Guha. She would equate it with the experience of entering a museum where what was on display was an array of fat thighs and big breasts and butts quite visible despite the saris that embraced them.

  Women, she lamented, had unlearned the art of wearing the sari with modesty. To her the sari—because it was generously endowed with the luxury of the length and breadth that was denied to articles of Western clothing—had the functionality of a closet; in it the female body was meant to be neatly stashed and hidden away from public view, and the doors of the closet were to be opened and the body was to glide out ever so elegantly only in a moment of extreme intimacy, the kind that can only be enjoyed between a husband and wife.

  But whenever she went to her friend Vaiku’s parties and other parties that were photocopies of Vaiku’s parties, she saw the saris worn like wraps—transparent and clingy, making the bodies look like sensuously packaged meat.

  Meat they were, believed Mrs Guha, presented for male devouring.

  She was particularly distressed when the evening ended—and it ended typically thus—with Mrs Vaikundeshwari, tottering on her high-heeled feet, descanting on the woman’s right to be who she was—as free and beautiful as the breeze that blew in whichever direction it wanted—while her sari came unravelling from her torso little by tantalizingly little. She would be holding, in the most despicable of ways, the stem of a goblet or a flute or of any one of those innumerable specialized glassware that Mrs Guha wanted to smash into smithereens whenever she was accosted with the task of correctly naming or identifying them. Her husband had always insisted that the capacity to name Western ware of such classy sort was indicative of one’s inner sophistication. Mrs Guha, on the other hand, was convinced that the ability to name liquor ware—especially on the part of women—was a mark of grave looseness of one’s character.

  Her father and mother raised her as a nice Bengali girl whom boys would revere as a Didi and not as girlfriend material. She was raised to cast stern, forbidding glances at boys ever since she was a young schoolgirl, because, as her mother and her grandmother told her, the boys would come like flies to shit to devour her, if she didn’t take control of how she was perceived. Part of the mechanism to control and direct male perception of herself as the stern, forbidding Didi, was the taking for granted of liquor as the d
evil’s drink.

  Women who, like Mrs Vaikundeshwari and her other female cohorts, held a glass of liquor with ease, as though these were a natural extension of their bodies, were to Mrs Guha coarse women deserving to be swilled by men.

  Mrs Guha deplored the fact that the women in Vaiku’s parties partook freely of liquor in the name of gender-equality and the modern woman’s right to soul-expressivity. A woman’s soul, which was to Mrs Guha a thing utterly beautiful and sacred, should be expressed through ethereal instruments like the Rabindrasangeet, rather than through the imbibing of coloured water with high alcohol content.

  In the thoroughly Bengali household where she grew up, women won the respect of men by singing Tagore’s songs, many of which spoke of love and flirtation, not in the loose and tawdry way of the modern elite women of New Delhi, but through soft symbolism, associating the moon with the marigold and so on and so forth.

  The idea was to entice, from a respectable distance, the male mind, gradually and studiously through carefully crafted love-metaphors, not to instantly inflame a man by making him see you clearly as loose all round, shamelessly sipping foreign alcohol and swaying your hips with the express purpose of half-exposing them.

  ‘Loose, loose, loose,’ the words would scream in Mrs Guha’s mind, as she saw Vaiku swaying and imbibing, imbibing and swaying, the crinkles of her beautiful chiffon sari threatening to uncrinkle themselves and tumble out of the petticoat, exposing her awful belly button to those gathered around her. So often had Mrs Guha got a full frontal view of Mrs Vaikundeshwari’s awful belly button that one day she decided to name her Mrs Naikundeshwari instead of Mrs Vaikundeshwari.

  ‘The loose Mrs Naikundeshwari,’ Mrs Guha would repeat to herself and get rigid about her decision to protect Charu from such bold exhibits. She wanted Charu to be modern and all but didn’t want her to be loose. The central tenet of the principles behind raising Charu had been consistent for Mrs Guha: daughters of the global New Delhi could be modern and global without being loose. Charu’s character, vowed Mrs Guha, should be as tight as hers and her mother’s and her grandmother’s had been. So tight their characters were that she imagined a slight pinprick to the tightly stretched tympanum that covered their characters would make the tympanum burst at the seams and out would tumble the character, not belly buttons and nipples, like gizzards from the belly of a fish out of water.

  With the intention of making Charu’s character and not her belly button tumble out in case she wanted to serenade men when she grew up, Mrs Guha employed a song master to teach Charu how to sing Rabindrasangeet. This was when Charu was about 10 or 12. But Charu’s voice, when she sang, turned out to possess the musicality of an ox. When she was made to sit behind the harmonium and sing the song along with the teacher who had just taught her a lesson in scale and beat in Tagore’s songs, Charu would break out into tears mingled with sweat instead of a song.

  At the age of 12 Charu’s singing lessons had abruptly come to an end. The teacher said that as a pupil that was to be moulded into becoming a vessel of Tagore’s songs, Charu was unteachable and unmouldable. It was ascertained that her voice just didn’t have the kind of sweet feminine ring to sing the Rabindrasangeet with.

  She would make a better air force pilot than a songstress, the master had told Mrs Guha jestingly.

  Mrs Guha suffered a crushing disappointment at learning that her Charu was not good at singing Rabindrasangeet. For a Bengali mother to learn that her daughter would have to grow up not singing the tunes of Tagore was like discovering that the daughter would have to grow up without ovaries or something. It was similar to learning that her daughter would have to live the life of a son.

  While it was one thing—a delightful thing, that would have undoubtedly elated the Guhas—to be blessed by the goddess Mahalaxmi with a son instead of a daughter, it was quite another, to give birth to a daughter and find out that a vital aspect of what made her gender what it is—incontrovertibly feminine—was missing.

  This fact of Charu’s lacuna bothered Mrs Guha day and night.

  In an effort to compensate for Charu’s failure to get indoctrinated in the art of soul-expressivity through Rabindrasangeet, Mrs Guha decided to go ahead full force with plan B, which in a nutshell was not to expose Charu to anything that wasn’t expressive of the sublime. So the word ‘sex’ and its many-faced denotations and connotations were banned from the vocabulary of the Guha household.

  Upon asking where she emanated from, Charu received the following answer from her mother: ‘belly!’ She learnt that she had sprung spontaneously in her mother’s belly wherein for nine long months she had lived, gorging on the food eaten by Mrs Guha, and had grown till she couldn’t be contained anymore within the limited space afforded by her mother’s belly. She had been ejected unceremoniously with an accompanying noise like that of an exploding firecracker.

  Such was the story of Charu’s birth as narrated by Mrs Guha to Charu.

  During afternoons crackling with the New Delhi heat and dryness, when Mrs Guha would be taking her mid-day nap, Charu would tiptoe up to her and gaze at her belly button with wonder, trying to make sense of how through that narrow, irregularly shaped hole she had popped out, and how having landed on firm ground her limbs had unfurled like a flag.

  From a very young age, the belly button—which to Mrs Guha was a generally disgusting anomaly on a woman’s stomach best hidden behind articles of clothing—fascinated Charu, especially when it appeared like magic on a slightly thick-at-the-waist middle-aged Indian woman’s body.

  There is an old saying in Bengali: If you don’t want to encounter the tiger ever because you are fearful of it, then you should by all means avoid visiting the sites on which tigers are likely to appear.

  There was this one occasion when Mrs Vaikundeshwari was insistent that the Guhas bring Charu with them. It was too much of an insistence, Mrs Guha thought, on the part of Vaiku, to ignore. She personally came to the Guhas’ home to make this special request. ‘It’s for Alia,’ Vaiku said. ‘Alia will not feel too alone if Charu is there,’ said she of her daughter. At this Mrs Guha’s heart softened. Mrs Guha’s heart would soften for anybody who showed maternal interest in her beloved Charu.

  Mrs Vaikundeshwari, Mrs Guha noticed, did indeed show a special interest in Charu. She praised Charu’s good looks and her American-English accent. This pleased Mrs Guha and she noticed that it pleased Charu as well. But then, Mrs Guha also noticed that Mrs Vaikundeshwari didn’t have to praise Charu in order to incite an emotion of pleasure inside her. Her mere presence was enough to spread ripples of reddish incandescence across Charu’s face, till her face acquired the luminosity of the sun on the verge of dipping into the Ganges.

  That day, when the doorbell rang unexpectedly, Charu tore down the stairs squealing in what Mrs Guha said was an undignified way.

  ‘Auntie Vaiku is here!’

  How did she know it was Vaiku? wondered Mrs Guha, yet again stupefied by Charu’s accurate divination of the identity of the visitor from the doorbell chime.

  Many a time had Mrs Guha asked Charu to dispel the mystery, and each time Charu said simply, ‘It’s the verve.’ Mrs Guha, who had studied in a Bengali-medium school and was consequently not so finely attuned to the pulsing motion of the many veins and arteries inside the central nervous system of the English language, felt like Charu was being falsely biting in her effort to hide something real, a special something that was shared, like a secret, between Mrs Vaikundeshwari and Charu, to which she, Charu’s mother, wasn’t privy.

  The suspicion hurt Mrs Guha, but like a true, honourable mother, she squelched the suspicion no sooner than it was aroused because it was too improbable to be considered for even a flickering moment.

  Mrs Guha believed that Charu’s face lightened up variously like a full moon or a setting sun upon seeing Vaiku because Vaiku to her was a maternal figure to be esteemed like one’s own mother. Like daughters worldwide Charu naturally saw her mother’s friends as she w
ould see her own mother.

  Yet if one were to step outside the boundaries of the universal truth and trust what they really, objectively, see, one would hesitate to classify the countenance that Charu sported, whenever Mrs Vaikundeshwari was around her, as strictly mother-doting.

  But then, Mrs Guha never consciously stepped outside the boundaries of the universal truth. She felt safe inside its ironclad perimeter.

  That day Charu was smitten by Vaiku.

  Mrs Vaikundeshwari’s caramel-tinted skin looked particularly translucent and silky under the gorgeous off-white chiffon sari she wore. She looked like she had arrived from the continent of glorious motherhood just so she could invite Charu, whom she saw as her own daughter to a special party she would be throwing that weekend at her place.

  When Charu opened the door and saw her and Mrs Vaikundeshwari in turn saw Charu back, Mrs Guha saw them both exchanging gestures of courtesy with each other; no unnameable ‘verve’ passed between them. All that Mrs Guha heard was the routine issuance of ‘Namaste auntie’ duly requited by ‘How are you, beta?’

  Nothing was released into the air to torture Mrs Guha’s soul for days.

  On the other hand, there was a promise made by her that she would certainly bring Charu along to Mrs Vaikundeshwari’s weekend pool party. Mrs Guha herself had never been to a pool party or any informal party because she disliked informal parties; informal parties in her opinion didn’t have structures and inevitably dwindled into rowdy, immoral affairs with upstart sons and daughters of upstart families drinking and generally exposing the otherwise well-concealed looseness of their characters. There was too much Bollywood-type noise in pool parties, Mrs Guha knew.