The Green Rose

by Sharmila Mukherjee

  Charu was still a snob, for it was impossible to de-snobberize herself overnight; such things take time and brushes with relevant experience. But regarding Dhuniya, Charu was able to transcend her class-hauteur easily—she didn’t even have to try. Upon reading about Dhuniya and Shumati and upon hearing of Dhuniya’s plight from Deepti, who knew Dhuniya very well, she was with a great deal of facileness able to look beyond Dhuniya’s servant-class stature; a voice inside her head went off involuntarily: ‘Charu, Dhuniya is a lesbian, someone in your league; she’s in need of help. She’s a cause for you, the way you were a cause for Shalini.’

  So there was Charu, in an unfamiliar land, uninstructed in the ways of managing the baggy clothing in which her sexy body was at present housed, standing awkwardly before the daughter of a sweeper that swept, among other homes, New Delhi’s most famous lesbian hostel, not knowing how to start the conversation.

  ‘Please come in, Didi,’ Dhuniya said softly. Charu was being asked to step inside Dhuniya’s modest home and Charu was hesitant.

  ‘Isn’t it better to go some place else, like a restaurant?’ Charu asked, feeling instantly sheepish about the incongruity of the suggestion.

  ‘That would be wonderful, Didi, for once a month Shumati treats me at a fancy ice-cream place, we can go there but today it will be better to sit here and talk, because Deepti Didi told me you know my story and you can help. Baba and Ammi won’t be back till late evening and my brothers are out of town too, on construction business. We have a safe house now to speak.’

  Charu, who had come prepared to say the ordered, logical things to Dhuniya, was abashed at how collected and ordered Dhuniya’s words were.

  Did Dhuniya address her as ‘Didi’ in the way Deepti addressed her as ‘Didi’, or did Dhuniya check into the sisterhood gear? For a few seconds, Charu’s thoughts were scattered, scattered by the tone of deference and reason with which Dhuniya spoke to her.

  Should Charu have seen Shalini as a ‘Didi’ figure as well?

  ‘Didi?’ Dhuniya’s mellow voice brought Charu back to the present.

  ‘Yes, of course, Dhuniya, we can sit here and chat,’ she stammered.

  No sooner than Charu was offered a rickety cane chair—a Greater Kailash resident’s garbage—Dhuniya vanished into a space on the other side of a clothesline that also acted as a makeshift wall. ‘Please let me get you some tea and biscuit,’ Dhuniya whispered almost to Charu.

  There was nothing to say except give Dhuniya’s proposal a nod of assent.

  What am I here for, asked Charu to herself … Okay, I’m here to ask Dhuniya about how I can help her escape the marriage that her parents are forcing on her …

  Dhuniya sat close to Charu, on another rickety chair; so submerged was Dhuniya’s chair under clothing and rags that Charu couldn’t see what material the chair was made of … she wanted to know, for some odd reason, what material the chair was made of on which Dhuniya sat and absent-mindedly dipped a Marie biscuit into her cup of tea.

  Charu’s cup missed a handle, but Dhuniya wasn’t embarrassed in the least. She had bigger priorities, like how to escape from the marriage with a Delhi municipal corporation sweeper, who had a big ‘moustache’ that scared the hell out of Dhuniya, for it made him look like a rapist.

  Charu was certain, he was a rapist. Charu was certain that on the night of the wedding, he would rape Dhuniya into oblivion. Rape is what happens to Indian lesbians when they get married off to men.

  Tremors of abomination shot through Charu’s body when she thought of the moustached man raping the shy, fragile lesbian.

  ‘Didi?’ Dhuniya asked worried that Charu would faint in these uncomely surroundings. Deepti must have told her about Charu’s uppityness.

  She looked at Dhuniya and said, ‘Dhuniya, tell me your story and then I’ll give you a concrete plan of action.’

  Charu was composed now, holding the tea cup in the cusp of her hands and sipping the lukewarm milky substance, but politely refusing the biscuit. She was ready for Dhuniya’s story. The story of another life was on the verge of getting intertwined with hers, again, after Shalini.

  ‘My father wants me to marry Shubodh; I’m of that age, you know. But I don’t want to marry any Shubodh, Shubodh, I am madly in love with Shumati. Ammi and Baba hate Shumati and the boys here tease me more when they see me with Shumati.’

  Deepti had told Charu that the men of the slum are angry that Dhuniya ‘loiters’ all the time with Shumati.

  How ironic, thought Charu. If Dhuniya had ‘loitered’ with a man, the max she would have to endure was a pressure on her to marry the man. But her ‘loitering’ with a woman was making her a target of illicit sexual taunts from men! Is this live slum-lesbian porno or what?

  ‘My family hates Shumati. But you know, Didi, I blame Shumati a little for that; she gets very sullen and angry when people ask her simple questions like what’s her caste.’

  When Dhuniya’s parents asked Shumati what caste she belonged to Shumati said ‘self-made’.

  Charu, who wasn’t a big Bollywood fan, thought of Shumati’s answer in Hindi, Aare apun khud ka banaya hai re, and she giggled, for that was the tall-as-a-palm-tree superstar speaking from way back in the 80s—Lawaaris. That’s what Shumati believed she was, she was a working-class girl, poor and a lesbian to boot. She was pure and simple without waaris. In a way Charu, the lesbian Charu, was a lawaaris, as was the lesbian Shalini and the lesbian Vaiku. All the parents of lesbian daughters would, in a New Delhi minute, disown them were they to express their lesbianism formally to the world.

  How apt Shumati’s self-description was.

  ‘You are laughing, Didi, but they got angry with her because she said “self-made”.’ Dhuniya believed her parents asked Shumati a legitimate question.

  ‘I told Shumati that this is our chance, please tell them your real caste, which I think is at the same level with ours, and they’ll turn to our side.’

  How naïve was this Dhuniya; with up to class 6 education Dhuniya could read and write, but the evil intricacies of the heterosexual world were invisible to her.

  When they cornered Thelamma, one of the lesbian girls from the ‘suicide-pact couple’, she confessed her caste. They sent a man from a caste lower than hers to ‘remedy’ her ‘sexual malfunction’. Shumati knew what the caste question meant; Charu’s admiration for Shumati increased. She had the toughness, the tiger’s tooth. Kill or be killed, was the saying.

  ‘Shumati doesn’t like anybody to ask about her caste; you know, Didi, she has no parents; they died and till their last breath they regretted not having a boy. It really hurt her—so she tells me she is a man.’ Dhuniya paused, blushed like a new bride as she spoke of Shumati’s ‘manliness’ with a twitter.

  ‘Wait, Didi, I’ll show you a picture of her.’ Dhuniya rushed into another of those spaces behind another row of clothes hung up to dry on a clothesline, and came back within a few minutes with what she proudly said was a ‘colour’ picture of her and Shumati standing side by side outside a mall.

  Charu put the photograph on her lap. What she saw she couldn’t place; whether it was a man or a woman who had masculinity writ large on her entire being, she couldn’t tell. Charu had only an eye for the feminine, the lavender, lilac-spring kind of femininity spelled ‘woman’ to her. Of alternative forms of femininity she didn’t know though Shalini had told her about them.

  ‘There she is,’ Dhuniya said enthusiastically, pointing a cheaply bejewelled finger at Shumati’s image.

  ‘She makes good money, Didi, and she spends so much on me; she bought these rings for me,’ said Dhuniya jutting out her fingers one by one at Charu.

  But Charu was still studying Shumati’s bearing. She was wearing loose trousers and a loose half-sleeved shirt. She was smiling back at the camera, putting out a steely grin for the world to see. Her hair was tied in a red bandana.

  ‘Many say she looks like Phoolan Devi,’ Dhuniya laughingly pointed out as she noticed Charu’s eyes r
iveted on the bandana. ‘“Like a goondi,” says my father, and he is so afraid of her. But it’s a good thing na, Didi?’

  ‘What’s a good thing, Dhuniya?’

  ‘It’s a good thing for women who have nobody to protect them, to be feared. Men fear her, I can tell from the way they look at Shumati. It’s such a relief to be a manly woman, Didi; especially in the slums and in the villages. It’s different for you, Didi, you’re beautiful and men like you for that, but if a girl is too pretty here, men lust after you and it’s good not to be too pretty when you’re poor.’ Charu heard Dhuniya’s mini-treatise on poverty and beauty.

  Charu agreed. Even if you’re not poor but too pretty to be true, then also you’re in trouble, Charu wanted to tell Dhuniya.

  At first, when her father saw Shumati, he thought she was a man and they almost had his consent for marriage, Dhuniya said, amused at the misrecognition.

  ‘I gave Shumi an idea; I told her to go dressed as a man and she wouldn’t have to work too hard. Just a little darkening of her moustache and flattening of her chest; she walks like a mastaan already, hee hee.’ Again, Dhuniya laughed at an imagined scenario where her father and mother, labouring under the belief that Shumati was a man, blessed them as daughter and son-in-law.

  But apparently Shumati was adamant. She wouldn’t pretend to be who she wasn’t. ‘That’s one of her faults, Didi; everything is good with her. She earns money, she buys me gifts, she takes me to the pictures, she loves me with all her heart, but she is too obstinate and cannot lie, even if it’s for our good.’

  Wow, thought Charu. She was beginning to envisage the new lesbian goddess already; the tanning factory-working Shumati, a manly woman of courage.

  ‘What do you mean by a little darkening of her moustache, Dhuniya?’ Charu asked, though it wasn’t the most pivotal of details in Dhuniya’s narrative.

  ‘Oh that, Didi, hee hee, Didi, Shumi doesn’t like to shave her lip hair because she says it’s natural, god intended hair to grow on her lips, you know? Initially I used to tell her to do something about it, but now I don’t even see it, these little things don’t matter to me. I just love her.’

  Dhuniya’s cloyingly pluralistic take on love and beauty was starting to choke Charu with a feeling of guilt. Shumati clearly looked like a man, and she had lip hair which she wouldn’t shave, and still Dhuniya said all was forgiven and forgotten because she loved Shumati and was equally loved back by her!

  How on earth, Charu wondered, did they make love, with all that hair on her lips, in the armpits, on the legs, on the … Charu had to shut her eyes to the spectre of thickets that the topic of hair evoked in her.

  Perhaps, Charu was an altogether fake lesbian herself, just as prejudicial about feminine beauty as were the men. That made her a sexist.

  ‘God, god, am I a sexist? Do I not know the true way to love a woman? Can I not see beyond the physical, the outside? Am I as patriarchically oriented as the heteros are? Should I bow down to this wisp of a girl with class 8 education from a municipal school and her hairy, masculine girlfriend as lesbian ideals, and ask them to teach me the lesson of real lesbian love?’ The series of questions passed through Charu’s mind like several jolts of electricity. But soon she shook with laughter internally; her melodrama, her heightened response to Dhuniya and Shumati’s love-tale was risible to herself. What was she talking about? They needed help, not adulation; she needed to help Dhuniya and Shumati get married. First Dhuniya had to be safely extricated from the marriage with the moustached man Shubodh, then she had to be deposited in the arms of the moustached woman Shumati. Sometimes lesbians like Dhuniya—because they were poor and pretty—had to choose between the lesser of two evils; better a moustached woman than a moustached man.

  First task was to get a hold of Shumati, track her down. For, upon hearing of the news of Dhuniya’s marriage, Shumati had left. With the weight of what deep sorrow, Charu thought, Shumati must have left the city! If only Charu had the luxury she would leave Delhi as well, for day after day of getting crushed under the ponderous writing on the wall that Shalini was more Biju’s than hers was unhinging Charu. But where would she go? She envied Shumati’s freedom.

  Charu began to form a favourable view of Shumati; she was a lesbian who wore her identity proudly as a badge of honour. Maybe women like Shumati had more courage than the uppity, chaal yaar-speaking women of New Delhi. For the uppity women to be a lesbian was like an adventurous escape from the dreary every day of their lives. ‘Chaal yaar I too have a girlfriend naa,’ they would say, sucking up to a lifestyle of which they had a half-baked understanding, and to which they genuflected because they believed it was oh so chic and American. For the Shumatis and Dhuniyas of the world, to be in love with a woman was life itself, total brick-and-mortar life, not an indulgence to be enjoyed at pool-side parties.

  Charu was getting a clear picture; a picture was cooking with clarity in her mind, slowly like rotisserie chicken.

  Dhuniya’s clear expression of desire and fear made more of a deeper impression on Charu’s mind than did Shalini’s kilograms of ‘philosophy’. All of Shalini’s principles, and ideologies and politics evanesced into nothing in comparison with Dhuniya’s and Shumati’s genuine attachment to each other.

  Suddenly, Charu blushed in shame. Here she was, hanging on to Shalini, a married woman whose big redeeming feature was that she was beautiful, as beautiful as the Khajuraho women. Charu had always wanted one of those figurines to materialize into life, and oh how she had fantasized of making love to them on moonlit nights! But there was nothing beautiful about the fact that Charu had dwindled into a lesbian mistress of a married woman.

  So, Charu blushed in shame. What would Dhuniya, the tiny Dhuniya with a big lesbian heart, say if she knew the truth of Charu’s liaison with Shalini? And all that Dhuniya herself wanted was Shumati, the strong, moustached, bandana-wearing, butch, Shumati. Charu remembered how, with her eyes welling up, Dhuniya had told her her heart’s desire. ‘It’s so simple, Didi, so simple that I am afraid there won’t be any room in the world for it, because there is only room for big things in this world …’

  Charu extended a slender finger and wiped the tears off Dhuniya’s cheeks. They felt coarse in comparison to Shalini’s, but there they were, placeholders for real tears shed by a real woman for another real woman. Charu couldn’t recall a moment where she had seen Shalini shed tears, tears for the lost possibility, for a ‘What if?’ moment. Never had she heard Shalini murmur, even absent-mindedly of how she regreted not having met Charu or a Charu-like entity when she was younger, before she was married. ‘Things are only as they could have been, Charu. What’s the point in wishing them to be otherwise? Let’s just make do with the reality on hand.’ This had been Shalini’s ongoing mantra: an appeal to Charu to be reasonable, modern and practical, to carve out possibilities from reality while Charu wanted to undo reality and release possibility into unbounded space. All of Shalini’s stories of asking the genie to rebirth the world into one that was lesbian, were stories, just stories. Charu was certain that were the genie to truly appear in front of Shalini, she would say, ‘Oh please, genie, give me a sister-husband like Biju, please, genie, please, and also give me a girl like Charu on the side.’

  ‘Didi, my desire is simple,’ Dhuniya was saying, just as the thought of kissing her wet cheeks crossed Charu’s mind. But she refrained; yet so much in need of protection Dhuniya seemed at that moment!

  ‘If a pari appeared to me and asked me what I wanted most, I would say, please Pari didi, please, just give me Shumati; on my wedding night, just make Shumati take the place of the sweeper’s son.’ Charu’s heart skipped a beat; Dhuniya’s wedding day was approaching fast and Shumati was still absconding. She had asked Deepti to make a thorough inquiry using her network of maidservants of New Delhi.

  Would they understand the solid simplicity of what Dhuniya wanted? Not money nor house nor car, nor even an elevation of caste status, but just Shumati! But even Dhuniya, t
he sweeper’s daughter who never saw the face of an English book in her life, knew that what she was asking for was nothing less than the miraculous—a radical revamping of everything that was deemed normal and right by the sweepers, the chamars, the babu class, in fact the whole world—that women could wed only men.

  Were Dhuniya to muster courage and ask for the improbable, she would probably be cut up into small, small pieces and fed to street dogs. Then they would hunt down Shumati and do the same to her.

  Best course of action, Dhuniya said in despair, was to go mute-mouthed into the wedding and live the rest of her life offering up her body to a male stranger and preserving her best self—her dreamy mind—for Shumati.

  ‘No!’ Charu said with a male resound in her voice that was so pronounced that it even surprised Charu herself.

  ‘No, Dhuniya, I won’t let that happen; we will find Shumati, we will help the two of you go some place else and turn the direction of destiny, by our very own hand,’ Charu said, as she held Dhuniya’s bony body close to her chest that was heaving with anger.

  If all else failed, there was always Laadli’s house and its great resources to fall back on. But first Charu wanted to do something autonomously. Too long had she been following orders, her mother’s orders, her father’s more gentility-inflected orders, Shalini’s orders, Shalini’s and Vaiku’s awfully pedantic lesbian pedagogies; she was tired of following and following. Here was a chance for her to prove that she too could be a leader and turn the big hands on the face of destiny’s clocks in whichever direction she deemed fit. Her own destiny was chained in life-imprisonment, but she would liberate Dhuniya’s and Shumati’s from maximum-sentence prison.