What if they burnt her? Sometimes Charu would wake up in the middle of the night thinking of the charred bodies and fearing punishment raining down on her like missiles from the sky. The pressure to conform was huge; she could marry a man, ‘any man’, her mother had said swallowing her pride, hurting at the prospect of having to beg her daughter to negotiate such basic things.
‘You’re beautiful, Charu; any man would be pleased to have you. Have you and keep you on a pedestal.’
She wouldn’t need the man to feed her; he wouldn’t even touch her if she didn’t want him to; she needn’t worry as her parents would ensure that she had a good life. The man she married would simply have to have enough culture in him, for Bengalis couldn’t do without culture. Charu would have to meet just the very minimal requirements of a heterosexual householder; her parents were willing to cut a sweet deal for her. She could even get her lesbionic needs fulfilled on the sly; nobody would know, ever …
‘Compromise! Compromise! Give your consent,’ sirenic voices chimed inside her head. Should she give up the fight and make peace with the hetero-world?
But no! She couldn’t. She couldn’t; not for the world, if that were to be offered to her on a platter, would she do such a thing and lose Shalini’s respect in the process. Shalini would hate for Charu to become another Shalini in middle-life, saddled with a ‘sweet-sister’ husband.
Though she said lovely things about Biju and his sisterly affection for her, Charu knew that Shalini saw Biju as a residue of the hetero world that she despised and shunned; but because he was truly inoffensive she couldn’t take her anger out on Biju. So what Shalini did was to make him disappear into a sexual cipher—a naapoongshuk, as they said in Hindi.
Shalini would turn her face away in disgust from Charu, were Charu to make a compromise marriage with a naapoongshuk. Dummy lesbians, she would say, shedding tears of crushing disappointment, were more harmful to the cause than lesbian-abominating heterosexuals.
Charu had a dread of earning Shalini’s disrespect. She would stay on course and do anything to win the woman’s admiration and betrothal, anything …
Besides, Charu was too much in the know now to go back to being her old, blissfully ignorant superficial self. Too much of the society in which she had a good place owing to her father’s status and power, stood exposed to her as a discriminatory apparatus (as Shalini described it) to be accepted blindly.
Under Shalini’s tutelage Charu’s political acumen had got sharper; she would mercilessly parse down society with a mental knife into levels of oppressive power-structures.
Charu’s ‘uncivil disobedience’ was indeed hurting Mrs Guha till she could no more contain her pain. Near-livid with anger, Mrs Guha accused Charu of sullen perversity, and blamed it on ‘that Oriya woman’, who was stealing Charu from them because she didn’t have any child of her own. It was a time when Charu was cutting down via cold logic everything her mother held sacred.
‘That’s awful, Ma, what you said about Shalini is awful, it’s not true …’ Charu shouted back, incensed by Mrs Guha’s accusation. In her excitement, she almost blurted out, ‘Lover, Shalini is my lover, not my mother!’ but good fortune intervened to make her hold back the one secret that was wrapping itself around her heart like a great vampire squid, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into her arteries and veins.
‘One day I will say it out aloud to the world, regardless of the consequences; else my heart will be crushed into a pulp with all of the life-juices squeezed out,’ Charu thought to herself.
Expectantly she looked up at Shalini; but Shalini was as always unaware of what was going through Charu’s mind. She was getting high off pontificating on gala weddings.
‘The rich louts of New Delhi, how they spend money on having copycat Monsoon Weddings! With song, dance and marigold and lots of people eating and drinking mindlessly under a shamiana; freak shows these Monsoon Weddings,’ Shalini said disgustedly.
The ‘straight’ were wimps in her eyes, and resorted to loud expensive weddings because they are not strong enough to say ‘I do’ for real, in private; they have to have a lot of noise, a lot of public declaration and affirmation—all empty hulla goolla signifying nothing.
Vinnie and Laadli didn’t do any ‘straight’ type hulla goolla; quietly they travelled by train—the Rajdhani Express—to Kolkata. She could have afforded twenty plane rides to and from Kolkata, and all of them first-class, but Vinnie was humble and a classic romantic; she wanted to do the old-fashioned India-romance thing, for which the train was cut out, as flying according to her was a ‘Western import’.
Shalini’s narrative of Laadli and Vinnie’s marriage, made Charu fall half in love with the American lesbian.
The blessings of Maa Kaali, that’s all that lesbians need—the blessings of Maa Kaali. ‘Imagine Maa Kaali as the resident goddess of the lesbians!’
‘I love Maa Kaali, because she is the ace squelcher of patriarchy!’ Shalini squealed in delight, clapping her hands in joy like a little girl, sharing with Charu the epiphany of Kali running amok, cutting away phalluses with a pair of gigantic shears.
Laadli and Vinnie bribed a priest and arranged for a late-night temple wedding attended only by stray dogs and little girl-prostitutes. She had ordered boxes and boxes of Nahoum plum cakes—Kolkata’s best—and had paid local thugs to keep the pimps away for the night, not only because they were men trained to see women as sexual meat, but also because they were the most soul-ugly of men.
She and Laadli wanted to enjoy the most significant moment of their life in the company of the despised and the marginalized of society.
The poor girls and the stray dogs were fed to the teeth. There were wedding photographs back home. You would see them displayed proudly all over the house. Both Vinnie and Laadli posed like husband and wife and had big smiles on their faces. Their necks were thickly garlanded and there were these huge vermilion tikkas on their foreheads. The tikka looked particularly resplendent on Vinnie’s pale skin, Shalini said, with a glint of approval in her eyes. ‘If that is not right and proper marriage, then I don’t know what is.’
‘Could we not get married in Kalighat too, Shalini,’ Charu wanted to spring the question on her lover.
But marriage between her and Shalini would never happen, not in this world, Charu knew for sure.
Instead she told Shalini in a complaining tone, ‘We don’t even make love to each other anymore.’
‘Does it matter, Charu? Aren’t we lucky that at least we get to sit with each other and touch each other freely in the safety of our homes? There are so many like us who don’t even have the luxury of saying ‘I love you’ except in sign language so others don’t hear. You read about the two women in the papers the other day, didn’t you?’
And Shalini would go on and on thus, ‘justifying her hypocrisy and lack of loyalty to me’ is what Charu would think to herself. ‘I’ll just have to get used to the idea of being her friend, and nothing more.’
Indeed their relationship had settled into a friendship—a cozy kind of camaraderie. Starting off as fiery lovers, making the dry earth of New Delhi crackle with the sparks flying from the friction of their bodies, Shalini Mahapatra and Charulata Guha had tapered off into being ardent girlfriends in the space of a year.
Shalini had begun to look at Charu not as a lover, but as a member of a big family. Sometimes, when Charu would want to have sex, Shalini would squeeze her cheek and say, ‘You’re so naughty, like the little sister I never had.’
At other times, when they would lie down together, pleasantly exhausted after a hard afternoon’s labour of pruning and watering the green roses, and Charu would be unable to resist the urge to hump Shalini, Shalini would call her out in a fashion, the way in which mothers call out to their babies, and then roll over closer to Charu to wrap her arms around her, holding her tightly to her bosom. Though such actions, Charu knew, were authentic expressions of the older woman’s maternal feelings for her, they only re
vved up the sex engine inside Charu, for child or sister of Shalini she could not make herself feel to be. Every physical contact with Shalini led to pulsing, throbbing movements inside Charu’s veins.
Sometimes Charu feared that her veins would get blue with the pressure of unspent desire.
The rendezvous on Shalini’s rooftop by the bush of green roses, that Charu so looked forward to, took place no longer. Charu missed them, itch as she did, to lie naked beside Shalini, and probe every little detail of her body with her fervent lips. But what could she do? Lately, Shalini had got too coy; she still smelled superbly and looked stunning, but it was regarding the activity of sex that she had started to display an attitude of aloofness. A ‘perspective’ is what she called it. ‘I have developed a perspective.’
‘How brittle are those relationships,’ Shalini said with a sigh heavy enough to make little rain clouds in the air around Charu, ‘that hinge on sex.’
Maybe her paradigm of the ideal relationship was the one she was having with her husband Biju, Charu thought.
Like a shy slug Shalini retracted whenever a move was made on Charu’s part to initiate sexual intimacy. Just like she hedged sex, she also hedged the topic of her marriage to Biju.
Every time Charu tried to have a serious discussion about Biju—for after all Biju was technically her rival in love—and his role in her life, Shalini would subtly steer the conversation away into other areas, convincing Charu that she had no intention of un-marrying Biju. To dissolve a marriage with a man, that too with a man as peaceful and harmless as Biju, would be a foolish undertaking in itself, and to dissolve it for the sake of a woman-lover would be like trading gold for feather, solidity for vacuum. Such transactions were unheard of in India.
‘Be practical,’ Shalini would tell Charu.
Yet, Charu knew, that in America, women left their rich husbands for their poorer lesbian lovers all the time. She had watched a show on NBC, where two absolutely, bedazzlingly sexy blonde women had told their story of ‘coming out’ to their husbands, and though telling them they were lesbians, who couldn’t lead the lives of faux-straight women anymore, was a gut-wrenchingly painful experience, ultimately the truth had set them free. How cute and grounded the two women looked on television—like a pair of perfect heterosexual householders, who even had children to complete the family picture, for though both women had discarded their husbands, they had the presence of mind to bring along their children with them.
Charu was fascinated by the idea of two women raising children between themselves, one acting like a father and the other acting like a mother. Men seemed so redundant in such a scenario.
She wished Shalini had a child; that would have been one gain from the stultifying arrangement she had with Biju in the name of marriage, and Charu then would have a total family of a woman, woman and child.
The NBC blondes sat with their arms around each other’s shoulders, and Charu’s heart leapt to her eyes with longing. Badly, she wanted the scene to be repeated in real life. One day she and Shalini would sit like that in front of a camera—moving or still—and tell their story to the world.
8
Charu was disappointed in Shalini. She had strong nesting instincts and dreamt of setting up a lesbian household with the woman of her choice.
‘Don’t believe what you see on TV, even if it’s NBC,’ Shalini had told Charu wryly, upon hearing of Charu’s ‘television-inspired’ dreams.
Once Charu had seen a T-shirt in Janpath with the following logo smeared in blinding white across a pitch-black background: Almost all the men I like are either dead, married or gay. Charu loved the T-shirt as it spoke to her of a lonely, questing, un-conjugated-with-another-she-heart, lost in the wilderness. It must have been part of a whole contingent of T-shirts printed in New Delhi and shipped to New York or San Francisco that somehow got separated and left behind. She immiserated with the nameless she-heart, it was her weeping straight-sister; she wanted to take it home and print a new logo on top of the old one: All the women I like are either living, but married or in hiding—(signed) An Indian lesbian.
But Charu couldn’t take the T-shirt with her for fear of offending her mother with the ‘smutty’ word ‘gay’. She left the stalls of Janpath, letting the garment resign to its fate, shuddering at the thought of it hanging limply on the knobbly back of a Delhi Municipal Corporation sweeper.
She had taken the cue however. For a while Charu juggled between the categories in which she could place Shalini; should it be ‘married’ or ‘in hiding’, or a new third portmanteau one—‘hiding in marriage’.
Shalini, Charu wanted to tell her in an email, composed half in anger and half in hurt, you are an insincere Indian lesbian. You don’t want to upset the apple-cart, for the apple-cart serves both you and your husband well: you get what you want and he gets what he wants: Biju gets to stay as a husband in a heterosexual marriage, so he can hold his head high in the ministry of health; you, Shalini, you get to be a man’s wife—a thumping affirmation of your Indian womanhood and normality in the eyes of the world. Only poor Charu gets to be left out in the cold. She gets nothing because she is sincere. She only gets to rejoice in the sweetness of her lesbianism with nobody to share it with in New Delhi. She has, as you wanted her to, embraced her inner green rose, while you are red still with spots of green here and there. It looks horrible, you see, this presence of green spots in a dominantly red zone. It looks half-and-half, a colour that’s fake, incomplete. To be sure, I was a fake colour myself, in hiding so long; with your poetic assurances you lured me out of my miserable den of dreaming and secret salivating after beautiful women. You told me how important it was for me to be ‘myself’. I was a tepid ingenue, waffling between identities. But being with you has changed all that. Now I’m a new country with new, well-defined borders. I can’t go back to being the old country I was. I feel like I am formed now, ready to take on the world.
But, inserting a strategic and voluble pause here, Charu ended her composition with a tragic note of finality, I’m alone. As you won’t be with me.
Till date the email lay supine in her ‘draft’ folder. For Charu never sent it to Shalini. What would have been the point in telling Shalini about her double standards—one that she lectured to Charu and the other she followed in her own life?
Shalini would never divorce Biju.
The maximum that came from Charu in the way of protest against Shalini’s hypocrisy were mutterings to herself.
While nursing a glass of Bordeaux on evenings of particular unhappiness in Shalini’s living room, her head swimming in the aroma of the rosa monstrosa, her body loosening up and craving the other woman’s—within inches of her reach, Charu would mutter self-piteously.
Poor Charu! Poor Charu! Always a loser, losing one sexy woman after another to lousy-looking ordinary men; first there was Tanusree, lost to a bespectacled, moustachioed, pedantic NRI, and now Shalini, lost to a sweaty Oriya Biju. The thought ricocheted inside her cranium so loudly that she felt somebody was thumping her head like a bongo. Just as a Bollywood film heroine would do, she held her head in her two hands and fled from the room saying ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’ leaving behind an aghast-in-mock-surprise Shalini.
Shalini would laugh and call her a paagli buri.
‘Chased by Biju’s ghost again are you?’ Shalini liked to compare Charu, well-read that she was, to a female Hamlet, chased by ‘ghosts’ of her own making.
‘Don’t worry,’ Shalini would say, ‘Biju is far away, in Luxemburg and won’t be back before he’s made good of every paisa allotted to him by the Ministry of Health and Human Affairs!’
Shalini had a way with turning gravity into levity.
It was her genius, Charu thought, to make a lover into a sister and a husband into a brother. (For in an unguarded moment of inebriety Shalini had called Biju the older brother she ‘never had’).
So, about sex, Charu did not insist. Its’ okay, she reasoned. She would be whatever Shalini wanted, a sist
er, a child, because without Shalini she would be frightfully lonely in the city of New Delhi. Who else would be so versatile and chameleon-like? Mother figure, older sister, friendly lover or loverly friend, one without a bone of jealousy or possessiveness in her body? To who else could Charu tell about her crushes and heart-breaks, experienced silently from a distance and not be laughed at in return? The day when she heard (relayed with an I-told-you-so attitude by Mrs Guha, who had, in turn, heard it from Mrs Bagchi) that Tanusree had got affianced to Ajoy Mukherjee, Charu was stricken by a heavy-heartedness under whose weight she felt like she would wilt. All day long she cried on Shalini’s shoulders.
Though chemistry bound Shalini and Charu together, the chemistry rarely culminated in a body-rubbing, mucilage dripping kind of sex. It culminated in something that eluded labelling. Some would call it sisterhood, but if Shalini and Charu’s bonding was a type of sisterhood, then it was a very singular type of sisterhood indeed. On warm evenings the two of them would sit serenely like a pair of terracotta figurines, under a canopy of green roses; Shalini’s home was now full of her favourite flora. From the rooftop garden, like wild fire, they had spread into every nook and cranny of her house; there wasn’t a shelf or a table where a vase of green roses couldn’t be found. In the four corners of her living room there sprouted shrubberies of green roses from large wicker pots, and it was under such botanical extravagance that Charu and Shalini would sit, staring into each other’s eyes till they grew limpid with listening to mellow ghazals, and sipping fine libation, stuff that Shalini’s husband Biju bought for his wife on his frequent trips abroad.
Choosing a different room in Shalini’s house every day, Shalini and Charu would sit together thus by the green roses and gulp down juicy kebabs with Amaretto. They would talk and kiss and slide their hands up and down one another’s spine; this is how they would cement their sisterhood.
The Green Rose Page 11
