by K R Meera
‘Leave now, it is getting late.’
Sushila di shook me back into reality. ‘Why did you tell me not to trust Sanju babu?’ I asked her in a circumspect tone. He probably has a wife and children back home—Ramu da’s words rang in my ears.
‘He will never marry anyone.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘Don’t you know what this place is?’
‘Avinash Kaviraj Road . . .’
Hearing someone call from the kitchen, Sushila di drew her aanchal over her head, slowly extended her knee, got up and went into the house with a weariness too early for her age. She completed the address as she went in: ‘Number 15. Aparajita Apartments.’
I didn’t understand. I followed her back through the kitchen and into the courtyard. Picking up my bag, I prepared to leave.
‘Stop!’
I spun around. Two women were coming down the staircase. One of them was the wizened old woman who had sung for me the song about the kite when I had come here the first time. The other woman was a beautiful middle-aged woman in a red silk sari. I could not tear my eyes off her face. But neither could I look long into her eyes.
‘Have we met before?’
The middle-aged woman came over and fixed me in her stare. I looked at her like a fool. Her face was familiar but I couldn’t recall where I had seen it. Her form, radiant as a goddess, the scent of blooming jasmines all around us, the sweetness of her voice and the intensity of her eyes left me scared and weak. It was she who had been singing before.
‘Why did you come here?’
‘To see Sanju babu, Di,’ Sushila di answered, from the courtyard.
‘Why?’
Her brow furrowed. I looked her intently. She had Sanjeev Kumar’s straight hair and his long, regal nose. My body tingled.
‘Didn’t you hear me? What were you doing in his room?’ Now her voice was harsh.
‘Talking,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it enough to talk in the studio? Do you have so much to talk that you must come here? What were you talking about?’
‘History . . . the history of Sanjeev Kumar Mitra . . .’
Her eyes lit up with a smile.
‘What history? Let me hear too.’
‘His ancestor was a dacoit. In the eighteenth century he was hanged to death by my ancestor Satyanatha Grddha Mullick. He was the only man who came back to tell us what death feels like.’
She looked at me disbelievingly. ‘Eesh!’ she exclaimed. A few more moments passed.
‘Come, have a cup of tea.’ She took a deep breath and invited me in.
‘No, I am in a hurry.’ I was feeling strong again.
‘Stay for a while before you leave,’ she urged me.
‘I don’t know who you are.’
‘Trailokya Devi, that’s my name.’ That’s all she said. I yearned to hear more. But she didn’t tell me anything more. ‘Why, have you heard the name before?’ She looked at me intently now.
I was amused. ‘Have you heard the story of my ancestor Ramnatha Grddha Mullick’s first visit to Sonagachi?’
‘Tell me. I love to listen to stories, especially true ones!’
We eyed each other cautiously. I felt like I wanted to be with her, always. I began to tell her the story and we went towards her room on the upper floor which was far more beautifully and tastefully decorated than Sanjeev Kumar Mitra’s. She bade me sit on the bed covered with a red silk spread. A place prized, traditionally, by Bengali housewives—they wept and laughed, played cards and shared sweets, all sitting on their beds.
After that first experience, Ramnatha was a shattered man. Whenever he remembered that night at Sonagachi and his first woman, he thirsted to return there. But the memory of the bloody incident always deterred him. He would lie hunched up on his bed, weeping and laughing in turn. The months went by. Then, one day, news appeared that there had been an attempt to murder a woman from Sonagachi. An acquaintance, another woman, had taken her to a nearby pond and tried to drown her in it. On investigation the police discovered that five other women had also been drowned there; their bodies were recovered. The police also found out that the same woman was apparently behind all five killings. The woman who had lured her victims, all of them women she knew, with false stories and stolen the gold jewellery they wore at the time, was sentenced to death on 4 September 1884. She kept protesting her innocence till all her appeals were rejected. On the eve of her execution, she finally confessed her misdeeds to the chief investigating officer Priyanath Mukhopadhyay. She confessed to conducting false marriages by setting up the girl Bidhu as a bride, and to luring women to the pond, promising to introduce them to a sannyasi who could increase any amount of gold by five times. She also told him her last wish. ‘I want to see once again the boy Ramnatha of the Grddha Mullick family.’
Priyanath Mukhopadhyay arranged for that. She held Ramnatha’s hands through the bars of the prison cell, and with love in her eyes, murmured: ‘I will never forget you. If only all men would submit to a woman like you did . . .’
He listened in silence, his heart splintering.
‘Don’t forget anything that I taught you. I have taught you everything that you need to know about a woman.’
He bowed his head, weeping at the memory of that night.
‘I have a wish. Will you fulfil it for me?’
He was still wordless.
‘You said you would marry me—will you do it?’
He looked at her, thoroughly amazed.
‘Not today, tomorrow . . . on the gallows. You must put the noose on my neck. What can be the hangman’s marriage garland if not the noose?’
Ramnatha broke down. She reached out from behind the bars to stroke his young face gently. He felt weak, worn out with sadness at the thought that they would never spend a night together again.
‘Why, why did you take those five lives? You who gave me a lifetime’s love in a single night, how could you ensnare and kill five people?’
She had stroked his head.
‘I have an adopted son. I did it so that he won’t suffer. So that he won’t spend his life on the verandas of whorehouses guarding them. I gave back to the world what it gave me. I give back to you what you gave me.’
When the jailer announced that it was time for the meeting to end, Ramnatha gripped the bars of the cell desperately and blurted out the question: ‘Your name . . . you didn’t tell me your name . . .’
‘Trailokya.’
‘Who gave it to you?’
‘I gave myself that name. There are three worlds, the world of Desire, the world of Form, and the world of the Formless. I am of all three.’
She went away without a single tear in her eyes. Ramnatha requested that he be permitted to perform the next day’s execution; Grandfather Satyanatha agreed. And thus, Ramnatha Grddha Mullick carried out his first and last execution.
‘Tonight you must sing that song in my memory,’ she told him when the noose was placed around her neck.
He promised.
Immersed in grief, he sent her to her death. The bones in her neck snapped easily, without the least struggle, like a leaf falling. The whole night after, he sang the nawab’s song, lost in her memory.
When I finished Trailokya di let out a deep sigh. So did the other woman.
‘You speak sweetly.’
‘And you sing marvellously, Trailokya di.’
She smiled easily and broadly. ‘I didn’t know my name had so many dimensions. Thank you for telling me.’
The girl I had seen earlier came in with tea and sandesh wrapped in a banana leaf. The sandesh was truly exquisite; it made me feel very happy, suddenly.
‘Trailokya di, where is your home?’
She gave me a kind look, went over to the tanpura at the head of the bed, played a note on it, came back to me, and
said cryptically: ‘For the past six generations, this has been our home. I am an Agrevali.’
She smiled effortlessly. The radiance and power on her face were such that age could not dim them. It made me feel a bit afraid.
‘Do you know what an Agrevali is?’ She got up again and walked towards the balcony. ‘The belief is that we were born in the race of apsaras.’
I listened to her keenly. It was then the meaning of that mansion with white walls, red windows and nine stairways dawned on me. For the Agrevalis, prostitution is a matter of pride, like execution is for my family.
‘The worst sinners are those who die without experiencing the true pleasure of sex. They are reborn even crueller and wickeder. The gods sent us to the earth to prevent such sinners from being born.’
I went red, but she was undeterred.
‘We came to Kolkata from Agra. We were the dancers at the Mughal court.’
I went up to the balcony and looked out. Sonagachi seethed and bubbled. Dark, besmirched, dilapidated buildings spread out everywhere, forming a labyrinth. Female bodies set up for sale since noon still waited, sweating profusely. A bunch of sneering young men chewing paan walked by, swinging their arms. A group of women who had found no clients pursued them, fighting amongst themselves. Wherever I looked, I found women with dark skin and lips painted red, like the statues of the goddesses in Kumortuli. ‘Aren’t all these women like that?’
She came near me, looked out, and closed the red window curtain. ‘No. Not all of them. We Agrevalis do not sell our bodies, we only share our souls.’
I was flummoxed.
‘No one who steps out of this place can ever hurt a woman with his body or mind,’ she said firmly.
I smiled scornfully. ‘But that’s not true, apparently, of a man who lives here!’
‘Do you mean Sanju?’ She sighed. ‘He didn’t grow up here. He grew up in his father’s place. He can never understand the culture of this place. His mind is hard—it can never be happy at the happiness of others. It is narrow. He doesn’t know how to take pleasure, and what he recognizes as pleasure is not that at all. His father was the same . . .’
Her voice fell. I had no response. She took up the tanpura and ran her fingers on its strings. We were quiet for a few minutes.
‘Trailokya di, how are you related to him?’ I wet my dry lips.
She looked at me surprised, ‘He’s my son! Why, can’t you believe that?’
‘He told me that his mother was no more.’
She burst into peals of laughter that brought tears into her eyes. Her head shook so; her fair neck and cheeks turned a pale red. The girl who had peeped into Sanjeev Kumar’s room came up and stood there silently. Trailokya Devi got up.
‘Who can tell how someone will die, Chetna? You can go now. We will meet again.’ She turned to the girl and said, ‘Tell one of the drivers to drop Chetna at her house.’
I got up, my heart weakening when I bid her goodbye. Walking down the steps with the girl, getting into the car—it all felt like a dream. As I passed through the streets of Sonagachi full of cheaply made-up women in stale garments, men stinking of betel, bidi and cigarettes, and the smell of fish and meat frying in oil, both my anger and my desire for Sanjeev Kumar frothed and raged. I wished to drain him further with the story of Sankaran, Narayana Asan’s son, who came to Kolkata in the nineteenth century when the canon fired in Fort William for the change of guard at five in the morning and nine at night.
I met him many days later, after Ramu da’s last rites. He came home. He who never bore the weight of what had passed, who was always cheery and optimistic, he walked into my room freely.
‘Did you hear, Chetna, three people were executed in the Gulf on 31 May?’
I shook the water out of my hair.
‘The video is marvellous. It would make a great programme.’
I gave him a sharp look.
‘Why don’t you say something? Are you cross again?’
When he came up to me again with those words, looking deep into my eyes, with the innocence of a carefree teenager, I wanted to make him entirely mine, so fully that he would never touch another woman in his life. I stroked my long curls which fell on my body like Manasa’s serpents.
‘Your mother is a beshya, isn’t she?’ I asked that question slowly, carefully.
He shuddered in shock. I watched keenly as his face and eyes turned a flaming red, and he began to rub them hard as though his blood pressure had shot up. He ran out of the house, then came back in with a turbulent face, and then went out again only to return once more, to pace about the narrow rooms.
‘Your mother is an Agrevali.’
‘Yes,’ he muttered after some time, as if admitting defeat.
‘All the girls born in that house will have to take up that profession? Just think, if you marry me, if we have girls . . .’
I thought he was about to hit me. Instead, he turned away sharply, eyes welling as if he had been hit. I was anguished as I saw him grip the prison bars he had erected around himself, head bent in sorrow. How I wished to reach out through those bars, stroke his face, kiss his palms gently. Ramnatha—who sang Babul mora . . . the whole night after Trailokya was hanged to death—came to my mind. He never had another woman after her. Not because of his excessive love towards her, not because he had lost the sexual urge. But because each time he tried to have sex, he felt in his body the writhing movements of the girl who had been stabbed before his eyes. He lived for a year after her death; he hanged himself at the age of seventeen. The night before he killed himself, he sat on the Ghat, singing the nawab’s song till dawn. I hummed the rest of the song.
‘Stop! That’s the song my mother sings!’ Sanjeev Kumar blurted out, agitated.
‘So?’
‘It hurts me.’
‘Then I’ll sing it all through the night!’
‘Why do you wound me so? What do you want?’
I smiled at him. My body trembled and sourness gushed up in my mind.
‘I too must fuck you at least once!’
I tried to smile, but wept instead. His face blanched, but his eyes were wet too.
I felt gratified. Like Trailokya, I gave back to the world what it gave me.
44
The big turns in this story took place on 11 and 12 July. The first was actually not so eventful. But the incidents on 12 July were connected to some things that happened the day before. I didn’t go to the Bhavishyath because it was a Sunday. The big news of the day was about the villagers of Paraspur who lost their land when the Padma changed course. They were blockading a minister in the state’s cabinet and the legislator in the West Bengal legislative assembly from Paraspur. Fifty-four houses had been swept away. But what really affected me was seeing Mano da. I heard his voice in Kaku’s salon that evening and quickly went over. Kaku was cutting his hair, squeezing himself into the little space beside the board that said ‘Hair cut: Rs 15; Style cut: Rs 30’, and so on. Meeting him unexpectedly, my heart that had been wound tight like a coil of rope became a bit loose and relaxed. When I went up to the old, battered chair where he sat covered with a dirty towel, Mano da moved his eyes and smiled naughtily at me.
‘When I see this Sukhdev’s face, I remember the story of his going off to Siliguri to hunt somebody’s head! Ooh, I am always scared when I sit here covered with a towel! Do you know—I have seen him chop off someone’s head! I leapt up instinctively and caught the sword, but do you know what he told me? Dada, don’t be afraid, there won’t be a drop of blood; in the olden days, we Grddha Mullicks used to also decapitate wrongdoers!’
Moving his scissors through Mano da’s hair, Kaku let out a deep breath. ‘Her father says I can’t even kill a fowl—and that’s true!’
Cheap shaving cream smelt funny, like spoilt milk. The smell pervaded the air of the salon. On the long, narrow stand on t
he wall was an old brown shaving brush which had lost quite a few of its bristles in encounters with innumerable men. The two mirrors on the wall behind the stand reflected the asbestos ceiling as though it were slanted. On the other side, a small, toy-like TV silently played a song sequence from an Uttam Kumar movie. Kaku had decided to start a salon after trying his hand at many other kinds of work. He had been a rickshaw driver, a shop accountant, a cotton millworker. He could not stick on anywhere. Watching his fingers move on Mano da’s white head, I thought of Wajid Ali Shah. In the room’s silence, Mano da’s white locks fell softly like rain falling on the river.
‘You don’t know, Chetu, those were strange times. Thinking back now, I don’t know if it was really us who did all that . . .’ Kaku looked at me, rolling his eyes. ‘It’s as though I can still see Jyotirmayi.’ Mano da turned and looked at Kaku.
