The Green Rose

by Sharmila Mukherjee

  15

  Meanwhile Charu’s fan base was swelling in Laadli’s house.

  The women congregated around her like ants congregate around a succulent piece of gulab jamun. For the first time since their arrival here they were getting to see another face of leshbin beauty, one that was refreshingly whiskerless, and without side-burns or obtruding moles. Guided by the sweetie they went to posh parts of New Delhi, sat in open-air cafes or inside air-conditioned juice bars, to ogle the girls walking the streets. How sexy they looked in sleeveless, tight, belly button-showing vests and low-rise pelvis-hugging jeans! The pretty girls were like eye-candy, flush with a promise of melting in their mouths no sooner than they took them there. Mayawati wanted to eat them right then and there. Such a distant drab dream now seemed the shapeless moustachioed women with tightly braided oily hair she saw daily in Laadli’s house!

  They loved Laadliji, but Laadliji didn’t like the global-shobal parts of New Delhi. The glitter, she said, was false because it was spread by people who were spoilt by the lure of the pursuit of meaningless carnal pleasure and meaningless consumption. Laadli took the women on trips to the slums of New Delhi instead and to areas in Old Delhi that were still pristine—untouched, that is, by Starbucks culture. ‘This is where real Indians like you and me live,’ Laadli would tell them, ‘and that is where the spoilt people live,’ she added turning in the direction of the glassy malls like a wind-wane. ‘If you don’t know what it means to be a real Indian, then you will never know what it means to be a real Indian lesbian,’ Laadli’s dictum resounded with a tone of finality in the halls of Laadli’s house.

  So, though they loved Laadliji, because she fed them and housed them and provided them protection from police and family, they began to love Charu more. She was so much more fun than Laadliji. One day the sweetie showed them a tube from which could be squeezed a paste-like substance in it. Toothpaste, they wondered. What fun can leshbins have with toothpaste? ‘KY Jelly,’ the sweetie said, drawing a ‘Ka’ and a ‘Ya’ on a piece of paper. Amrikan leshbins use it regularly to enhance the mastiness of the furfuri masti. But KY Jelly wasn’t cheap because Indians didn’t make it. It came from Amrika. So much magic in the jelly that a single tube cost the same as a sack of 20 kilograms of rice! Lop-sided were the priorities of the rich! But, explained the sweetie, the price you were paying was not just for the jelly, but also for the incredible masti you’d dive into when you put it on. Like the kind of masti the Khajuri women would have with each other after applying deer oil on significant points of entry into hidden recesses in their bodies.

  Mayawati was enthralled by this concept of using jelly to enhance furfuri masti. If only they could afford such stuff in the villages of Madhya Pradesh, then, Mayawati was certain that between the two of them—she and her pretty sister-in-law—they would have produced a baby a long time ago! The passion of their afternoon mastis was as hot as burning coal just the way it was. Imagine using the jelly on top of that!

  ‘When you oil the keyhole of any lock or door, the key goes in smoothly as if it were wading unobstructed through a stream of silky molten butter,’ Charu said and they all agreed. ‘And chi ching phaank, the locks unlock and even rusty doors fly open with ease! KY Jelly is just like that oil,’ Charu observed triumphantly. She was truly smitten by a perverse desire to corrupt the fatsos of Laadli’s house (to get back, one assumes, at Laadli Chaurasia for having the gall to say that if one looked closely, one would find the sculptures of Khajuraho to abound in streaks of dry semen). So when Shasikala said, in her annoying nasal voice, Aare dikhao naa kaise, she seized the chance to do what she called her Khajuri trance enactment.

  Today, in the underground lesbian scene of New Delhi (the Indian lesbian scene’s permanent home, as some say tauntingly and others say regretfully, is under the ground, do gaaz zameen ke niche), the Khajuri trance is a celebrated act, performed with such élan by pretty lesbians night after night in dens where large crowds gather under the blanket of darkness and anonymity. The art sections of the city newspapers don’t write about the performance because so raw is its enactment of the travails and triumphs of the yoni that it can’t be written about (not especially in the language of respectability; it can only be witnessed in person. ‘It’s no mimesis, it’s the real thing,’ avid intellectual lesbian undergrounders can be overheard saying. Today, in cities like New Delhi and Bangalore, this is what the consensus is about the Khajuri trance drama.

  But that day, in Laadli’s house, Charu did the enactment for the first and only time, step by delicate step, in public. Before that day, she had done the enactment only in the privacy of her room, armed with a tube of the fanta-fabulous KY (she called it her own private kama yoni jelly).

  Han, han sweetie zara dikhao naa kaise, the chorus of the fatsos ascended like a swarm of bees.

  To get into the Khajuri trance, Charu closed her eyes. In seconds she was transported to a gorgeous landscape, the site being replete with visual drama—the jungle, the mountain, the ruins, the stream of clear cold water. Inexplicable perturbations were sweeping through the jungle. Flocks of birds rose, screaming from the surrounding trees and went boomeranging through the skies, only to settle back in the same spots from which they had risen. To Charu the disturbances were the augury of the Khajuri woman’s arrival. In a moment the Khajuri woman would be seen standing on the far side of the stream, half-naked yet half-obscured by a tangle of greenery. She was dressed in nothing but a wide bejewelled belt tied around her slender waist to hold in place a long skirt. She was sitting atop a rock downstream. Charu could tell from the practised way in which she seated herself—swinging her feet up and then pivoting around to plunge them into the water—that she came there often to be alone. As the Khajuri woman’s feet slid under the water, her fingers picked at the hem of her skirt and pulled it back. The water rose past her ankles, to her knees, and with it also rose her skirt, slowly climbing the long line of her thigh. The curve of her thigh made a gentle ellipsis. Charu was powerless to stop herself and began walking down the path, moving with the slow deliberation of a sleepwalker towards the Khajuri woman.

  She walked straight into the pool across the spot from where the woman sat. The water rose to Charu’s knees, then to her groin, her hips, almost to her chest. The current began to pull at her clothes and her sandals filled with sand and grit. She slowed to keep her footing and then she saw the Khajuri woman’s feet, hanging in the water, rippling in the current. When her hands made contact with her legs, the pretty lesbian felt a sharp breath rising from her lungs. It was the water that made this possible, she was sure; it was the stream that had washed away the barriers of fear and hesitation that would inevitably chain her hands. She began to move her fingers up the curve of the Khajuri woman’s ankle, along the fine edge of her shinbone. Then her hands began to move on their own, pulling her behind them, between the Khajuri’s parted knees, until suddenly the pretty lesbian’s face was level with the Khajuri’s thighs. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to follow her hands with her mouth, to move her lips along the elliptical line of the Khajuri woman’s thigh, all the way along its length until the line parted. There she came to a stop her face buried in her, her arms raised to shoulder height, holding the Khajuri woman around her waist.

  The women gasped, and one couldn’t tell if they gasped out of sheer groin delight at witnessing Charu’s spectacular solo performance, or out of sheer startlement caused by the unexpected falling across the room of the shadow of what at first glance looked like a massive pagoda. But the originator of the shadow was neither a pagoda nor a dome nor the voluminously feathered lord Garuda. It was the shadow of Laadli Chaurasia herself. Laadli and Vinnie, everybody knew was in Gurgaon attending a conference entitled ‘Rural lesbianism in global India: An anachronism?’ Yet lo and behold, there was Laadli, with Vinnie lurking behind her like her diminutive white sidekick, standing, arms akimbo, looking menacing.

  At the advent of Laadli, they all jumped, as if they w
ere a pack of mice that had fallen precariously in the shadow of a mega-sized hawk. Charu jumped along with the others, and as she jumped—almost out of her skin—out jumped her hand, shimmering with the jelly, from the place into which she had planted it like one plants a tuber of potato deep into the soil, and out of her hand jumped the tube of KY Jelly. It fell to the floor with what was to Charu the noise of an eardrum-exploding implosion.

  She got up from the stool on which she was sitting when her spirit had transcended her body and entered the body of the Khajuri woman thus effecting a kind of inter-body communion, making her do the things that the Khajuri wanted her to do. She got up from the stool—the rock downstream of her imagination—and faced Laadli Chaurasia, like one faces a nemesis. Laadli faced her with a silent ferocity, for the pretty lesbian was her nemesis as well.

  In reality, her silence was a momentary condition of stupefaction induced by the sight that she beheld in front of her, the sight she had never beheld before in her house, and a sight she had never expected to behold ever in Laadli’s house—the sight of a half-naked female in flesh and blood, naked as daylight from her pelvic downward. It was like seeing a pile of night soil or worse still, a mound of tampon rags, in the sanctum sanctorum of a temple. Desecration on the premises of Laadli’s house was a cardinal sin that called for capital punishment. So, while Laadli didn’t say anything, she stooped and picked up the tube of fallen jelly and after studying it for a brief few seconds, she inserted it in her pocket carefully, as if she were a homicide detective carefully collecting crime-scene evidence to be reproduced in court. Then as suddenly as she had appeared, Laadli took an about turn and walked away.

  Charu pulled up her pants, buttoned them up and sat down with her face between her hands. Throughout the night she cried and her body shook with the tremor of her sobs, while Mayawati sat with her, comforting her with words despite her general inarticulacy. Many years later, were Charu to chew over those words of Mayawati, it would be: ‘We promise, Didi, we will remember to take care of ourselves.’

  16

  Mrs Guha didn’t particularly want to attend Vaiku’s pool party. The day had been hot and moisture hung heavy in the air, creating that effect that Bengalis famously call ‘patch patche’. ‘God what a patch patche day to make a party!’

  But as always, Mrs Guha found it hard to turn down Vaiku’s request. ‘Please come, Sushila, please, and please let Charu come a little early because we need helping hands to organize the party.’

  So, it was decided that Charu would go early and Mrs Guha would follow later during the evening.

  One side of her mind fervently wished that the rain would come and come in torrents so the pool party would be washed out. But then again, she feared the relentless enthusiasm of those New Delhi women; women like Vaiku, so full of annoying energy, never sleeping in the afternoons, always going shopping during the day, throwing this party and that party every other day of the week. What energy these ladies had! Mrs Guha knew that if it rained, Vaiku would take the whole party, pool and all, inside and have an indoor pool party.

  Resigned to the inevitability of Vaiku’s pool party, she began to prepare mentally for the evening long tedium that was about to kick off at Vaiku’s place. She snuck in a bottle of headache medicines into her purse.

  Charu, as usual, had spent the entire day fussing over her make-up, the clothes she was to wear, and every little aspect of her appearance. Mrs Guha didn’t see much of her daughter the whole day. She didn’t see much of her daughter for months now. She flitted in and out of the house busily doing god knows what the whole day and sometimes well into the evenings.

  One day when Charu was out, Mrs Guha had gone into her daughter’s room. She was going into her daughter’s room after a long time. Nothing had changed she saw, except that the awful plants that the Oriya woman had brought into their home several months ago, were all over the room now. Mrs Guha stepped back in alarm; the thing Charu called the beautiful green rose had now become a resident of Charu’s room. There were bunches of the roses on her bed; she was sleeping with the roses. Oh and the smell that induced a kind of grogginess—it stunned Mrs Guha at first—there it was again, thrusting itself out offensively at her like the pincers of a crab. It was as though it were telling Mrs Guha to keep out of the room because she didn’t belong there. ‘This is our room, mine and my gorgeous Charus’s, not yours,’ the smell seemed to scream out at the poor lady. The green roses said, ‘You have lost Charu; go home, go back to where you came from. Charu is with us now.’

  With tears in her eyes, Mrs Guha had stepped back. Around Charu’s room she had espied an inviolable cordon sanitaire. She would be denied entry to her daughter’s world from now on.

  The day she got wind of the fact that Charu was visiting that fat Punjabin’s house, Mrs Guha had gone hot with coke oven anger. First that Oriya pretender and now the gross woman with the American always dangling by her massive side like a dried-up dandelion stick!

  Angry and distressed, Mrs Guha had stopped speaking to Charu. Her daughter, her dear sweet little Charulata, was changing under her very eyes. She now had that wild look of the rebellious in her eyes. Mrs Guha feared for the future.

  So, all day long Charu bathed and perfumed, perfumed and bathed as if she were to attend one of Gayatri Devi’s balls. Tired of listening to the sound of the shower streaming down in full force, Mrs Guha dozed off.

  ‘Bye, Ma, see you later this evening at Vaiku auntie’s,’ said Charu as she breezed out of the door leaving behind a trail of sweet smell; a groggy Mrs Guha barely managed to wish her daughter goodbye. Why was she feeling so dopey, she wondered.

  Lately Charu had become like the whirlwind, and whenever she rushed past Mrs Guha cyclonically, Mrs Guha was convulsed with a strangely dazed feeling, like she had inhaled air that was heavy in ozone.

  Must be the green rose, she had thought.

  Mrs Guha heard the whirring of a car engine; that must be Shalini, the Oriya child-pilferer, picking up Charu.

  ‘Nomoshkaar, Sushila, nomoshkaar!’ Vaiku came running towards her with her hands folded in greeting. Why this sudden Bengali greeting from Vaiku, wondered Mrs Guha. The smell hit her no sooner than she entered the house.

  ‘I will soon get a headache from this smell,’ Mrs Guha thought, as she said ‘nomoshkaar’ back to Vaiku.

  The party was in full flow. The men were conspicuous by their absence; but she had been forewarned. The party would be a celebration of womanhood, or some such nonsense, Vaiku had said. Ninety per cent of what Vaiku said was nonsensical. These ageing beauties of New Delhi were existing in a realm of pure nonsense, was Mrs Guha’s opinion. None of them were grounded in solid reality. They didn’t cook, they didn’t do normal household chores, and they didn’t look after their husband’s needs. They simply fed off their husband’s money and positions and revelled like spoilt girls: kochi khukis. Mrs Guha had snapped like a pair of scissors wanting to cut into the kochi khukis of New Delhi.

  Stupid revellers!

  It was so dark, yet there were pockets of ghostly light shining here and there, lighting up some places while flinging others into deep gloom.

  Why wasn’t she able to focus and why was her head feeling so light?

  Oh that smell! The smell was hanging heavily in the air, by the swimming pool where had gathered all sorts of women, mostly fat, and some extravagantly thin. They were revellers wearing masks. The smell was particularly thick around the swimming pool. Squeals of laughter like bells were ringing all around Mrs Guha.

  Somebody came close to her, too close for her comfort, squealed out what sounded like laughter, and threw something bushy round her neck. Mrs Guha stumbled a bit in the half light and half darkness. She felt it with her hands; the smell was sharp, acrid, and awful. Someone had thrown a garland of that awful plant around her neck.

  Mrs Guha wanted to throw up, so choked was she by the smell.

  She reached for the garland and pulled it out forcefully.

/>   The whole place was festooned with green roses.

  Hoping to trap a breath of fresh air Mrs Guha stepped inside Vaiku’s house. Many a time she had been inside the house; she knew her way in there. The inside looked empty, free of the obnoxious people outside.

  The deeper into the house Mrs Guha went, the fainter the noise and the music and the odious gurgles of meaningless laughter grew.

  Good, she thought, I am getting away from them.

  Feeling her way through the semi-darkness—an eerie greenness glowed around her—Mrs Guha searched for the bathroom. Vaiku had three bathrooms on the ground floor, Mrs Guha remembered.

  The house suddenly sounded empty; it was as though all of life was outside; inside there was death.

  Mrs Guha wanted to vomit; a feeling of discomposure was creeping into her. She desperately needed a bathroom.

  She heard cackling noises, like ducks. Maybe that’s where the bathroom lay, where the cackling of the ducks was coming from.

  Following the cackle Mrs Guha came to a door, ajar. A pallid green light came from the other side of the door.

  Stumbling and shuffling her way through the next few steps, Mrs Guha pushed open the door and stood at the threshold of what appeared to be a bathroom. Yet it was a weird bathroom, for there were bird-like creatures in there. Perhaps they were Vaiku’s new pets. Large-sized ducks and chickens and oh how naked and voluptuous they looked. How terribly shorn! Was Vaiku fattening them for slaughter?