The Green Rose

by Sharmila Mukherjee

  To Charu, the Indian lesbian cosmology was drawn in fine shades of speckled grey, whereas Laadli’s lesbian world was one of militant black and white where men were the enemy number one of women, exploiting them sexually and keeping them under their thumb. It was a crude world where women needed to fight back against the men.

  ‘We, women, in this house and in other houses, like the Parliament and the many brothels (where live our hetero sexually most exploited sisters) that dot the length and breadth of this country, we are all born lesbians. Our natural inclination is to love fellow women. This is a god-given biological fact. But as we grow up we are made to hate our biological tendencies as aberrations, like ugly white spots that appear on the normal pink flesh of humans infected with vittilago.’

  At this juncture, Laadli pointed to someone in the audience of women. Charu turned her head to see whom Laadli was pointing her fleshly, bejewelled finger at. Her eyes fell on the fat, shaven-headed woman that Laadli had christened Mayawati, after the famous political leader who, Laadli said, was secretly cult-worshipped by real lesbians in India. In the political ascendancy of Mayawati Indian lesbians pinned a lot of hope, for the rise of women like Mayawati to the highest level of government would mean a promotion of the lesbian cause.

  Among the women in Laadli’s house were a few who bore Laadli-conferred names, proudly, like titles. There was a pair of physically mismatched lesbian lovers—one whose rotundity reminded Charu of the big dome of Bijapur, while the other was as thin as fishbone—whom Laadli had baptized ‘Jaya’ and ‘Shasikala’.

  On meeting Charu’s eyes, Mayawati flashed a coy smile at her. Instead of flashing back a smile at Mayawati, Charu squirmed and looked away, for what she saw induced a feeling of sheer optical horror in her: She saw Mayawati’s lips. They sat like a patch of blindingly radiant pink on an otherwise pitch-black face. Mayawati’s lips were like a bright pink star exploding on her face.

  ‘We treat lesbianism like we treat vittilago, a disease that afflicts many poor people in India,’ Laadli was saying. ‘We shrink back from it in horror.’ While Mayawati appeared to be a nice person—a simple soul who might have had a hard life as somebody’s wife, Charu wouldn’t for a million rupees want to be kissed by Mayawati.

  ‘And who trains little girls to treat lesbianism as vittilago? Our mothers and grandmothers, whom we trust to raise us in the right way. But they betray our trust and raise us, not in the right way, but in the way prescribed by patriarchy; according to which lesbians are neither women nor Indians, but abominations. But can you blame our mothers and grandmothers for being the handmaidens of patriarchy? No, for they too have been taught the same lesson by their mothers and grandmothers. We, here in this house, must not repeat the pattern of our mothers and grandmothers. We must be free of the vise that grips our necks. We must disobey the phallic code and follow our own code of right and wrong, normal and abnormal, beautiful and ugly. We have a tough battle on our hands, my sisters, as the ideology of patriarchy is imperishable and pervasive, over time it has entered into our blood stream. We think like patriarchy wants us to think. Have you seen any Indian film where a woman sings a song of Pyaar and Mohabbat to another woman? Will Mira Nair ever make a film on a lesbian Monsoon Wedding? Will Deepa Mehta remake Fire to show Shabana and Nandita falling in love with each other in a normal way like men and women do—in a shopping mall, at a party?’

  ‘No, no, no!’ the women shouted back in unison.

  ‘Why?’ Laadli asked.

  ‘Because we Indians, rich or poor, chamar or Brahmin, Angrezi or Dehati, are all servants of patriarchy!’ the women shot back together.

  ‘Are there any Indian stories about Indian lesbians?’ The question ricocheted in the pretty lesbian’s mind.

  ‘Yes, there is!’ involuntarily, her throat squeaked an affirmation. Truth be told, Laadli’s speeches had a soporific effect on her. Listening to Laadli, you would think that there was no fun in being a lesbian in India; that being an Indian lesbian meant a peasant-style insurgency against the nebulous organism of patriarchy. Whereas, the word Indian lesbian conjured up images of fun and play in the mind of Charu: playing flirty little games with your dainty-tempered sakhis and sanginis under the languid shades of a peepul tree on hot summer afternoons.

  Didn’t somebody in the room have a voice of her own to stanch the gibberish that flowed, like water gushing out from a burst sewage pipe, from the mouth of the portly Laadli? Didn’t somebody want to relieve the tedium of Laadli’s portentous pronouncements with a girly giggle or two?

  ‘Yes, there are stories about Indian lesbians in India. I can tell you one if you like,’ Charu had interjected, unable to resist the temptation of puncturing Laadli’s neat theory with an alternative perspective.

  The noise of the pin-drop silence that befell the room when she spoke was deafening. Everybody turned to face the pretty lesbian. Scanning the room to locate the face from which the interjection came, Laadli stood still like a grim bronze statue, arms folded on her chest. It came from Charu.

  ‘Ugh!’ grimaced Laadli inwardly; it’s that girl again. No sooner than Charu spoke, the women gathered in the room began ogling her. They ogled her all the time like dirty-minded boys, probably had wet dreams about her and made love to her in their sleep. The pretty lesbian was a very ogle-worthy object. She, in fact, was the only ogle-worthy object in the house of Laadli’s house. And that made her such a disgrace in the eyes of Laadli Chaurasia.

  But at this moment—of Charu’s interjection, Laadli was curious. ‘Tell us,’ Laadli said, gauging the mood of the audience. They too, she could tell, wanted to hear the pretty one speak. ‘Tell us the story of Indian lesbians that you’ve read.’

  At this request, which she wasn’t expecting, Charu got flustered. How to articulate ineffable impressions to an audience of so many cows? She had a nagging suspicion that the women of Laadli’s house were bovine, meaning they had thick hides through which the finer sentiments of love and romance would never penetrate.

  Truth be told, when she thought of Indian lesbians, the image that shot reflexively to the forefront of her mind was the image not of those presently congregated but of beautiful women with vital statistics that were out of this world, standing boob-locked on the panels of Khajuraho.

  Ah Khajuraho!

  How their nipples grazed each other, hardening, in the process, like the rocks of which they were made.

  ‘Go, stare at these women on a warm moonlit night,’ Charuwanted to tell the roomful of Mayawatis, Jayalalithas and Shashikalas, ‘and experience what I have experienced; if what you feel does not make you shave your facial hair, then call me a liar.’

  Staring at the statuesque women, Charu had felt currents of electric shocks in her nether region.

  Truth be told, it was a panel of medieval rock-carved statues of semi-naked women frozen in gestures of shringaaring that had initiated Charu into the labyrinthine world of lesbian desire. The interlocking of yonis of beautiful women had made her giddy with erotic same-sex yearning. The women, she understood to be sakhis and sanginis—flirtatious playmates, who were above everything else women that loved to play when they were in a mood to play and could in the wink of an eye effortlessly assimilate back into being heterosexual wives. The confluence of play and duty, in their lives was perfect, like the confluence of the rivers of India. There was no contradiction in that.

  Charu herself was as supple as the women of Khajuraho and she rejoiced in this tradition of suppleness.

  So, that day, Charu told the women of Laadli’s house, most of who couldn’t tell the difference between a Khajuraho sculpture and the faucet in Laadli’s bathroom, the story of Khajuraho. Mayawati couldn’t believe her ears (and her eyes which were riveted on Charu, triggering off an internal drooling of bodily fluid that she enjoyed immensely): Could there be such a place where women were shown to put their arms around other women and suck on each other’s boobs, for the public to see, in Madhya Pradesh? Was this the same Madhya
Pradesh from which she was forced to flee because they saw her nibbling on her sister-in-law’s breasts one afternoon, when all the men were out working in the field and the hut was empty?

  The knowledge that the Khajuri women were Madhya Pradeshis made Mayawati’s chest swell with pride. But the sweetie was telling them that the Khajuris were very pretty, like Rekha and Aishwariya. The sweetie was also telling them that the Khajuris attracted each other because they took good care of their looks; you could see them holding mirrors in their hands, applying powder and scent and making sure that there was no hair on their faces, for even in the time of the Khajuris, nobody fell in love with women who had hair on their face. The Khajuris spent a lot of time, sometimes a whole day, plucking hair from their face, strand by discrete strand, cleaning their nails, putting colour on them, painting their lips, removing wax from their ears, and they took special care to clean and scent up that part of their body which was precious to both their husbands and to their fellow Khajuri leshbin girlfriends.

  That part, Mayawati remembered with a trill of dismay passing through her heart, she had not paid attention to since she started living in Laadli’s house, for she never got to use that part for furfuri masti. In Laadli’s house pre-marital furfuri masti was banned and it was understood that till the time a suitable bride could be found for single lesbians, they were to live like widows.

  So Mayawati lived like a widow—shaving her head even—finding comfort in the memory of her sister-in-law’s feathery touch all over her body, especially on that part.

  Suddenly Mayawati’s yearning for the lazy afternoons of furfuri masti in the hut in Madhya Pradesh got stronger. It was like she wanted the furfuri masti right then, with Charu Didi, in the room where Charu Didi had just finished telling her story of the Khajuri women and Laadli memsaab was glaring at the sweetie with burning coal in her eyes.

  But why would Charu Didi want to have furfuri masti with somebody like her—a head shorn of hair sitting on top of a bloated body? In Madhya Pradesh she was pretty, that’s why her sister-in-law, who looked like the Khajuri women described by Charu Didi, preferred to have furfuri masti with her to her husband. Now she looked like a buffalo so nobody came to her; Mayawati had a distinct impression that Charu Didi laughed at her behind her back.

  In Laadli’s house everybody looked either like a water buffalo or like a fishbone, modelling herself after Laadli or her Amrikan biwi Bhinni, who was so thin that Mayawati could break her like a twig between her two fingers. But now that Charu Didi was there, living with them, they all wanted to look like her, but Charu said she was inspired to look pretty by the Khajuri women.

  Mayawati’s eyes fell on her own hands and she saw unclean fingernails with no paint on them. Charu had such beautiful colour on her nails; she must have learnt it from the Khajuris. Today, especially after listening to her story of the Khajuri women, Mayawati noticed the flaws in other parts of her body, the calluses on her finger from washing other people’s dishes for fifteen years, the big black mole on the right side of her chin, which sprouted hair like a grasshopper sprouts its antenna from atop its head, the hair on her lip (she felt its presence though she couldn’t see it), hair on her legs, her arms, and hair, hair, hair, she saw hair everywhere on herself, except her head where it should be, as though she was not a woman anymore but a big fat animal from the forest of Madhya Pradesh. If she could, she would find a gigantic razor and shave her body clean of all the hair but Laadliji forbade them to shave body and face hair because real female beauty had nothing to do with hair on the body and face, Laadliji told them.

  Despite being a fat, hairy woman herself, Laadliji had got herself a white Amrikan biwi, so they believed her when she said that real Indian leshbins don’t go for the body, they go for the mind, so shave if you have to shave, but shave the grass of ignorance and superstition from your mind instead of shaving hair from your face and your forearms!

  But today, they got a vision of the beauty of the Khajuri women from Charu, and they began to see the benefit of taking care of themselves. Something was stirring deep inside their bellies. If one were to put an ear on the women’s bellies one would hear a growl; a similar-sounding growl, a zoologist would say, comes from the stomach of a Royal Bengal tigress when she is hungry and has a scent of where to get good satisfying food from. If one had ears like a dog that day when Laadli’s peroration on the Indian lesbian’s fight against patriarchy was responded to by Charu’s story of her conversion in Khajuraho, then one would catch the noises rising from the stomachs of the women of Laadli’s house as noises of dissatisfaction.

  So, now what have we in our midst? A temple friezer! Laadli and Vinnie exclaimed laughingly over beer and smoking hot pakoras that night after listening to Charu’s story of conversion on a moonlit night surrounded by stone carvings of hourglass-shaped figurines of voluptuous women (compared to whom Scarlett O’Hara would look like she had come from a famine, quipped Vinnie).

  ‘Haven’t we had our share of these puerile, garden-variety lesbians in our lives?’ queried Vinnie and Laadli in unison, for they spoke invariably in unison when it came to opining on subjects that were of a lesbionic-orientation.

  They were potted pansies, usually pretty, with skin that looked like it might have been harvested through some blasphemous new process from the wrists of infants, were city-bred, Christian Diorized from head to toe (if their fathers could afford that kind of expensive shit), spoke English well, scorned the average, working-class lesbian masses because they spoiled a vision of lesbian life inspired mostly by reading coffee-table books on ancient Indian temple sculpture with ‘homoerotic’ themes.

  Not too long ago, the potted pansies went gaga over the depiction of beautiful, brass kalsi-figured women coiled up like snakes in each other’s arms in Mira Nair’s Kamasutra. There, there, there, see, see, they wrote in glossy women’s e-zines, a clear evidence that even before the West was born, there was lesbianism in India! The ‘homoerotic’ spotters exasperated Laadli. They trivialized the real everyday struggles of real lesbians who risk real persecution by being loyal to their biological instincts.

  ‘But do you consider this as evidence of real lesbianism?’ Laadli had once asked while doing a PowerPoint presentation of what constituted real lesbianism in modern India, at an ‘Indigenous Lesbianism in Early Modern India’ symposium organized by the University of New Delhi’s gender studies department.

  She had projected images of women in allegedly lesbian poses from the temple friezes of Khajuraho, Ajanta, Ellora and Konarak. ‘These were images of Ayashi women,’ she had powerfully contended, adding that the panels represented the wives and daughters of aristocrats frozen in postures of perhaps a mid-afternoon siesta in their boudoir. Yes, some of the women were shown touching each other’s private parts, or as we conjecture from what remains of the ruins to be private parts, but just because a woman is caught pinching another woman’s nipples, doesn’t mean that they are engaging in lesbian sex. For all you know, they may be playing a medieval aristocratic parlour game. Then the women you see kneeling in front of the crucial orifice of fellow women—we musn’t see those women from our modern interpretive lens and like children clap our hands in joy and say “See, see, cunning lingus in action in medieval India” and invent an Indian genealogy for this very central of facets in lesbian love-making. I have come to the conclusion that the women who are kneeling are servant women, who in ancient India had very little control over their bodies and were exploited for sexual pleasure both by men and by women from the aristocracy. Maybe the kneeling women are giving what us moderns say, rather crassly, “blowjobs” to the women who are standing up, but they are most likely blowjobbing under extreme duress—they have no choice, either blowjob or get fired and enter a brothel. Better to give blowjobs to clean, fragranced and pretty aristocratic mistresses than to be rimmed by fat, hairy men in public houses.

  Laadli’s exposition shook up the audience, comprised largely of practising lesbians and scholars who we
re writing books and composing queer theories, quite a bit out of their complacency. One imagines that after the brutal debunking, few would ever again see anything remotely lesbionic in Khajuraho. They would instead see exploitation, class-inequality, sexual slavery and even pornography, for Laadli suggested the temple friezes could have been constructed for male viewing pleasure as nothing would have turned on the men of ancient India more than seeing images of women doing furfuri masti with each other.

  It was silly then, in the eyes of Laadli, to tout Khajuraho-type Indian artefacts as constituting evidence of the iconography of lesbianism in ancient India, with the confidence with which one touts the Taj Mahal as comprising the iconography of romantic love in Mughal India. On any given moonlit night, one can see lovers, typically a young male and a young female, walking hand in hand at the Taj Mahal site, breathing in deeply the transcendental Persian romance that the grand mausoleum emanated, but on any given moonlit night, go to the Khajuraho temple frieze site, and you’ll see heterosexual couples in a clinch, surreptitiously kissing each other, or you’re more likely to see the lone male, look nervously over his shoulder to ensure nobody was watching, and glide his hands inside that hideous place that Laadli hated to envision, let alone name. But you wouldn’t see any lesbians in Khajuraho, neither single lesbians nor lesbian couples.

  So that day when Charu told some bullshit fairy tale of receiving lesbian grace from the statues of Khajuri women on a warm, moonlit night, Laadli felt compelled to give a counter-narrative of Khajuraho as a great masturbatory haunt for horny, sex-starved males.

  But more often than not, fairy tales have a powerful impact on the listener’s heart than tales of unmitigated reality. For the next few days following Charu’s storytelling, Laadli got, what she thought, were sullen vibes from the women. If this weren’t just a home for poor, displaced and persecuted Indian lesbians from the countryside, and were a political party headquarters, then one would hazard a guess that a conspiracy to challenge the power of the party netri was afoot among the rank and file of the followers. Mayawati, who was the most docile of all the lesbians, appeared to walk around the house with a mask of disgruntlement on her face. Even a cursory glance could tell that something was nagging the inner strings of her heart. Something potent, Laadli told Vinnie, was brewing inside Mayawati and by osmosis the brewing potion was getting transmitted to the other women in the house. The virus of rebellion, as Laadli knew all too well, was contagious.