The Green Rose

by Sharmila Mukherjee

  ‘We are like two old maids now,’ Shalini said one day. ‘Before you met me, you were a young maiden full of prospect, and I was an old maid with no prospect. Now, selfishly I have dragged you into old maidhood. See what bad things happen to the young when they come in contact with the old?’

  Such self-evasive humour charmed Charu. She would lean over to remove the dark ringlets of hair that formed an Olympic logo on Shalini’s forehead, to clear some space for a tender kiss.

  Shalini would smile. Having imbibed enough liquor, she would then unroll her favourite Persian rug, lie down on it, and ask Charu to sit by her and give her a whole-body massage. Charu would happily oblige, for under no circumstances would she forego an opportunity to experience that shimmering sensation that the touch and feel of Shalini’s body induced in her veins.

  ‘Could you sing me to sleep?’ Shalini would occasionally ask Charu, intending, in the spirit of unalloyed sisterhood, to yank the girl’s chain, because Shalini had over time got to know all of Charu’s secrets, including the one where her Rabindrasangeet master had told her the story of the two ‘bellows’, one that produced sweet music of the spheres through the harmonium, bringing the sky and earth together, and the other that rent the spheres into pieces with its discordance. Charu was the latter kind of bellow.

  Both women would erupt into laughter at the thought of Charu singing and lulling Shalini to sleep.

  Those were evenings of magic for Charu, for truth be told, Shalini had everything that Charu wanted in a woman. Yes, she was her mother’s age, but Charu liked older women because they had that sexy wisdom that could only come with age.

  But there were moments of dark doubts as well.

  Was she still living in a doll’s house? Else, what was she doing, spending her days in the empty house of a fifty-something-year-old married woman, serving her needs in a way that only mistresses serve the needs of those who keep them. Was she a lesbian lover or a lesbian mistress? But how could that be? How could women be mistresses of other women?

  As far as Charu’s knowledge went, the practice of mistress-keeping was a wholly heterosexual one. Couldn’t only a ‘mister’ keep a ‘mistress’?

  Uncertainty over the direction her life was taking in entangling itself with the life of Shalini crept into Charu’s mind like a slowly extending shadow.

  To her ‘lovers’ represented the acme of human relationship. Two lesbians as utterly beautiful as she and Shalini could only relate as lovers; to relate as friends would be such a waste of their beauty and pent-up sexual energy.

  But Shalini begged to differ. She believed that the more a relationship transcended the merely physical, the greater were its chances of survival and sedimentation into something rock solid.

  9

  ‘Is she beautiful?’ Charu asked Shalini one day. ‘Is Vinnie about whom you talk so glowingly beautiful?’

  She had begun to think a lot about Vinnie of late. Once or twice Vinnie had even appeared in her dreams. She had confessed that to Shalini.

  ‘How can that be, Chars, you haven’t seen her yet,’ Shalini said laughingly. True, Charu hadn’t seen Vinnie yet; in the malls she had seen Laadli, waddling alone through the crowd like an inflated duck see-sawing laterally under the weight of the shopping bags that she carried in her arms.

  Charu thought Laadli was ugly; too ugly to be deemed a lesbian.

  She hadn’t seen Vinnie yet, but had heard Shalini affirm the ‘authenticity’ of her lesbianism so much that in Charu’s mind she had been transfigured into a beautiful thing. It’s as a thing of beauty that Vinnie, the American lesbian, had begun to appear in Charu’s dreams lately.

  Whenever Charu thought of lesbians she thought of beauty. As a lesbian she could not conceive of making love to anything but a beautiful woman, one that was a garden of the choicest feminine attributes like long hair, manicured nails, a body shaped like a curvy brass vessel and with absolutely no hair in the wrong places. Charu also liked a woman to smell good, of lilac-scented foreign perfumes. On occasions when Charu got out of her car and walked the pavements of New Delhi, she passed women with the smell of cumin and turmeric on them. ‘Ugh,’ she thought to herself; who would want to make love to women like these?

  But for all the charming-smelling, beautiful women of New Delhi, Charu unequivocally had the hots. And she wanted all of them to love her back ardently. It was a reflex action over which Charu had little control. Upon hearing about Laadli’s American spouse, Charu got a vision of great beauty; a lesbian who is American and white was bound to be twice as beautiful and sophisticated as a standard Indian lesbian. (Some of the episodes of the L Word Charu had seen, and she had thought the lesbian women to be truly beautiful though not all of them had long hair.)

  Truth be told, most of Charu’s syllogisms were flawed yet unique; they followed an idiosyncratic pattern of their own. Shalini had got used to them and because she had true affection for Charu, like a mother cow had affection for her suckling calf, she never subjected her to any serious upbraiding.

  She played along.

  ‘Silly girl, what a little man you are, always thinking of sexing up pretty women! But about Vinnie—she is a real lesbian, not the dolled-up Barbie lesbians in the upper circles of New Delhi that you have the hots for, Charu. The lesbians of America are real; they are the real McCoys who don’t care as much about appearance as we here in India do; they have pretty radical ideas of female beauty,’ Shalini laughingly said, while landing a friendly, almost sisterly slap on Charu’s bottom.

  Charu was already thinking ahead of time, of transferring her love, her powerful, powerful love, to another vessel. For the love of women for women was too precious a love to go waste, to evanesce into thin air. Charu was determined to give her lesbian love a secure home, moor it to a solid terrain, to settle it inside something more durable than Shalini’s wishy-washy philosophy.

  Vinnie had power; Vaiku told her so indirectly. ‘Once you step inside Laadli’s house, you’ll see for yourself what power I’m talking about,’ Vaiku said. ‘The house is crammed with lesbians, mostly poor, village-oriented ones, and it’s said that Vinnie can send them abroad for a better life. Imagine that, Chars!’

  Sure Charu could imagine Vinnie, running around like a white Kali, collecting the unfortunate and transporting them as stowaways to America and Canada. But if the legend was true then Vinnie was more powerful than Kali; if she was really capable of sending the lesbian daughters of the poor and the oppressed to America and Canada, then she was an Almighty.

  The desire to know Vinnie grew exponentially in Charu’s heart.

  But first Charu had to get to know Laadli, the ‘stallion herself’, the ‘keeper of the grass that grew in its stable,’ said Shalini trying to translate a Bengali proverb into English, and making mincemeat out of it in the process.

  Charu understood. Her mother too had propounded the parable of the grass and the stallion many a time: Somebody was passing by a field of lush green grass one day. A mighty stallion stood feeding on the grass (sometimes, Mrs Guha said, it was a mighty cow, because horses she knew fed on hay, not grass). The passerby was entranced by the beauty of the lush green grass and wanted to sink into it badly. But the horse came in the way. So the passerby decided to jump over the stallion and dive headlong into the cushiony bed of grass. Disaster ensued. The stallion, slighted by the passing-over, kicked the hell out of the passerby and wounded him mortally.

  ‘That’s my grass!’ the horse cried, as he thrashed the passerby into oblivion.

  Never cross the horse to eat the grass. And never try to steal a fellow lesbian’s girlfriend from right under her nose.

  Charu knew of Laadli’s girth, and rumours of her phenomenal strength were afoot. The Punjabin had an American diet it was said, and got her strength from it.

  Charu didn’t want to get on Laadli’s bad side. She would first get to know Laadli and then she would gradually approach Vinnie.

  ‘Be smart,’ Shalini advised Charu
. A smart way to get into Laadli’s good books was to take an active interest in the gay-lesbian politics of New Delhi because both Vinnie and Laadli were big on political activism. That’s how they met: Vinnie was in New Delhi interviewing people, collecting data on the state of lesbianism in India, and she met Laadli at a women’s conference. Laadli was giving a fiery speech on how the state used its power to harass and threaten gays and lesbians in rural India. She was citing instances of women who were forced to make suicide pacts because the families and the local police colluded to make their lives miserable. ‘Why? Because they happened to love one another; because they happened to refuse to get married to men and have sex with men,’ thundered Laadli’s voice from across the podium and seeped into the souls perhaps of the audience in the dimly lit lecture hall of the University of New Delhi.

  The story was that Vinnie fell in love with Laadli’s fire.

  A perfect couple they were with one complementing the other.

  Laadli was lucky, Charu thought, to have found a perfect match for herself. It was so hard for an Indian lesbian to find a suitable mate in India. They were all so concealed, masked and closeted.

  Had it not been for the miraculous advent of Vinnie into the city of New Delhi, Laadli would have, like the rest of them, remained companionless, alone.

  Everything was happenstance; Charu had come to believe in the power of happenstance to enable events, encounters, even causes.

  10

  ‘Didi I know you do causes,’ of all people it was Deepti who said this to Charu. Then, embarrassed by what Charu might perceive as a maid’s sauciness, Deepti blushed salmon-pink and apologized. ‘Sorry, Didi, I-I didn’t mean to but …’ ‘Oh, it must be Shalini. You must have heard Shalini discuss causes, politics, waving jhandas and staging morchas. She’s something naa, that Shalini Didi of yours?’ Maybe Deepti knew. ‘Didi, she is so pretty and so kind,’ Deepti wanted to offer a consolation, Charu thought. But as long as she didn’t report anything to headquarters, Charu was fine. Deepti could be trusted; there was something deeply trustworthy about Deepti.

  ‘She is so kind and so helpful and she helps girls I know.’

  ‘Girls? What girls, Deepti?’ Charu was curious to know.

  ‘Oh girls whose parents marry them forcefully, then girls who get beat by husbands, you know the girls who have nobody to help them.’

  Charu looked at Deepti with the full force of her lucid gaze; it was a gaze that many thought was like the penetrating rays of the sun—radiant and razor-like, energy-giving and at the same time energy-sapping. Deepti shuffled on her feet uncomfortably under Charu’s gaze. Charu noticed some swellings on Deepti’s arms, a bruise here and a bruise there.

  ‘Is Balram up to his nasty tricks again, Deep? Do you need help?’

  ‘No, no, Didi I’m fine, everything is fine,’ Deepti said as she reached instinctively for the bumps on her arm, caressing them slowly, as she spoke.

  ‘It’s this girl Dhuniya, my daughter’s friend; my daughter Hima you know, she always wants to help other girls in trouble and gets so much scolding from her father for that. But I encourage her to help other girls.’

  ‘Dhuniya?’ Charu liked the name; the ‘h’ seemed redundant.

  ‘Yes, Dhuniya is in the same class with her, she is good in her studies, but for the last few months she hasn’t gone back to school. She’s missing studies.’

  Not a new story, Charu sighed.

  ‘She is in trouble.’

  ‘Who? This girl Dhuniya?’ Charu asked springing into alertness.

  ‘Yes, big trouble,’ Deepti said, and strangely she flushed pink as she mentioned Dhuniya’s ‘trouble’. ‘And I think you or Shalini Didi can help Dhuniya.’

  Deepti paused diffidently and said, ‘Maybe you can help better; Dhuniya might open up to you more easily.’

  Charu smiled; Deepti must find Shalini intimidating, with all that heavy talk she does.

  ‘Why us, Deepti? Why do you think we can help this girl? Is she pregnant?’ For that was the first thing that came to Charu’s mind when she thought of young slum-girls in ‘trouble’.

  ‘N-no Didi, chi chi, no, Dhuniya is a very good girl; she never loiters with boys and has a very good reputation. It’s her marriage. Her parents have arranged a marriage for her and Dhuniya is against the marriage.’

  ‘You can help Dhuniya, Didi, I am positive. She doesn’t like grooms.’

  ‘What is there in grooms to like, Deepti?’ Charu asked wryly, thinking of her own instinctive dislike of grooms. ‘If the girl is being forced to marry against her will, then I can ask Shalini madam to take her to a women’s organization; they will help her.’

  ‘No, Didi, she isn’t being forced to marry; if she wants, her parents can find another groom, but Dhuniya doesn’t like grooms. She told Hima she doesn’t like any groom.’

  Suddenly a bulb lit up in Charu’s mind. This girl Deepti was talking about didn’t like any groom; all things groomish she found to be revolting. Her mind was bathed in brilliant light.

  ‘Dhuniya isn’t against marriage, Didi—that is what she told Hima, but she doesn’t want to marry grooms.’

  ‘Oh, she wants to marry a bride, Deepti!’ Charu said laughingly, as Deepti’s face reddened.

  ‘Y-yes, Didi, something like that, but she is a sweet girl, quiet and sweet, nothing bad in her.’

  ‘That’s okay, Deepti, quiet, sweet girls can also like brides over grooms.’ Maybe Deepti thought that only feisty women like Charu and Shalini liked brides. But Dhuniya was just another girl, like her own Hima, and she was surprised that a girl like her daughter liked brides, not grooms.

  ‘Didi, Deepti wants only one bride, not any bride. She wants to marry this lady named Shumati.’ Deepti finally mustered enough voice power to say it out aloud as a thin crimson shadow flitted across her face.

  A ream of narrative fell from Deepti’s lips. And what a tale of Indian lesbians flowed from the lips of Deepti that day! About Dhuniya and Shumati she told Charu, and Charu listened with fascination, not believing at first that right in her own backyard lived two such women who were so madly besotted with each other that they were willing to sacrifice life, family and the existing paradigm of what it meant to be Indian—all for lesbian love.

  Most of the Indian women who wanted to be lesbians had husbands and when they fell out of love with their husbands, they began to harbour lesbian ambitions in their heart. First came the men, and then came the women. Husband-love was original; lesbian love was derivative.

  But Dhuniya and Shumati’s love was man-free from its inception.

  Dhuniya, a sweeper’s daughter and Shumati, a factory worker, were virginal women who had preserved themselves for each other and each other only. If history were to be rewritten (by the radically unpatriarchal), Dhuniya and Shumati would find a place in the legendary love-lores of India; the ‘Dhuniya-Shumati’ pair would be mentioned in the same breath as those of Heer and Ranjha, Laila and Majnu.

  But the trials of Heer and Ranjha, Laila and Majnu fade into insignificance when compared to the trials of Shumati and Dhuniya.

  Imagine the difference between walking with a sore on your foot and trying to walk footless.

  This was how Dhuniya described her ill-fated love-affair to Charu.

  She was getting to be 20 when Charu met her, and Charu felt seduced by the felicity of Dhuniya’s metaphor.

  In trying to find Dhuniya’s address, Charu got lost in a maze; it seemed as though the city of New Delhi were a circle and Dhuniya lived somewhere, in some entirely fickle place that touched the circle tangentially. Charu was about to give up on the journey when Deepti said she would hand-lead her to Dhuniya’s block. But ‘Didi’ had to wear a salwaar, that too a baggy, nondescript one, and not one of her cute but foreign shirt and pants.

  Having no baggy nondescript salwaars of her own, Charu borrowed a pair from Deepti. She laughed at her own action; what pass had a pursuit of the lesbian cause brought her to? Here she was, in
her maid’s clothing, gliding behind Deepti, much like her shadow, through a landscape that was as alien to her as would’ve been Mars’. Deepti had chosen a time when Dhuniya’s parents would be away cleaning homes in South Delhi.

  So, at a safe time, Charu arrived at Dhuniya’s door and knocked. Charu stood momentarily and surveyed the scene around her. It wasn’t as bad as she had thought it would be; just plain old poor and unclean. The sweepers who lived in the slum wouldn’t clean the place for free, Charu surmised, using her father’s grim, governmental sense of humour. But what surprised her was the vicinity of the place to Hauz Khas; just three blocks separated the deluxe from the detestable.

  For the first time Charu had physically entered the world of the poor of New Delhi. The absolute disjunction between her world and this world perplexed her—same city, a few blocks and this kind of separation! It was like she was a hetero standing in homoland and experiencing total perplexity at what she perceived to be an alternative reality.

  Dhuniya appeared at the door in a sari; from Deepti she knew Charu was coming, so she had put powder on her face, combed her hair and tied it in a neat bun. Her eyes were cheap-kohl rimmed and she had a red dot, plum in the middle of her slender forehead. All of the details stood sharply limned before Charu, and she was aware that she wasn’t just looking at another woman, but was peeping out at her through the shutter of a lesbian eye. She couldn’t help feeling that they were a pair of sexual eyes, gauging the coy young girl standing in front of her, as if there was beauty to be scoured in that thin yet nubile sari-clad body.

  Did Dhuniya know Charu was a lesbian? If Dhuniya knew then Deepti also knew. At times Charu believed that these women—women like Deepti, who looked passive and unknowing, actually knew everything; they had built-in everything-knowing radars. Else what could explain Deepti’s gesture—of offering to accompany Charu to Dhuniya’s home? It was as though Deepti knew that Charu was wanting to help a fellow-being, and Deepti knew that the fellow-beingness that Charu felt for Dhuniya was located in something special, not just in their both being women. Why would Charu suddenly help somebody of Dhuniya’s rank simply because she was a woman? Deepti had seen Charu literally grow up, and though she loved Charu, she knew Charu to be a snob. Everybody knew Charu to be a snob.