The Green Rose

by Sharmila Mukherjee

  SHARMILA MUKHERJEE

  The Green Rose

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE GREEN ROSE

  Sharmila Mukherjee was born and raised in Kolkata, India. She migrated to the United States in her twenties and, after much internal migration within the country, she has settled in yet another prototype of Kolkata—New York City. She teaches undergraduate writing and literature.

  This book is dedicated to the women of India who are courageous enough to live the lives they want to and not the lives society expects of them. It is also dedicated to women who suffer indignities because they belong to a sexual minority.

  1

  At a glance, she appeared normal like the other beautiful, marriageable girls of New Delhi. Like a typical Delhi girl, she was slim and petite and carried herself well. She wore the choicest (read Branded) of clothes selected from the most expensive of malls and colour-coordinated them well with the right accessories from Dubai and Singapore—so it was an accepted fact that there was nothing ‘wrong’ with the girl. Her life, apparently, was like the other girls’ from ‘good’ families.

  She was guided by her mother the same way her mother had been guided by hers—to be the wife of a qualified and, as a common Delhiite would put it, a well-settled man. So when Charu hit twenty-five, her parents launched a serious search for a suitable bridegroom for their ‘very eligible’ daughter. Marriage, after all, was a destination towards which all parents like Charu’s parents and all daughters like Charu journeyed inevitably. And just like the heroine’s parents in Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenge, her parents had a dream for her marriage as soon as she was born.

  No matter how high, how low or how middling the stature of the social orbit into which they are born, the fact of her marriage, taking place ideally by the age of twenty-five, becomes registered on the subconscious of both parent and child as an imminence—something that’s a priority and as universal as the biological fact of the human body.

  So, even though the Guhas were a liberated lot—sparing no opportunity to scoff at traditional Hindu customs that looked and sounded redundant—the thought of disembarking from the bandwagon of marriage never crossed their mind.

  In Charu’s case, however, the journey got derailed no sooner than it had begun; severe crinkles appeared on her roadmap to marriage thereafter. And as far as the Guhas were concerned, on the head of no other girl and on the heads of no other parents of girls known to them had such a calamity fallen. The Guhas suffered silently.

  With other families it was a routine thing. America-residing young men with expensive degrees and highly paid jobs came to New Delhi for the customary fifteen days. They would check out the girls their mothers and fathers had reserved for their sighting and assessment; engagement parties duly took place to announce the joining of families in matrimonial accord. Wedding bonds were forged with style and glitter. It was as if an entire Bollywood film had come alive—the glittering designer clothes, the low-cut blouses, the dresses, decorations etc.

  For the Guhas, on the other hand, the whole business of marriage for Charu became a struggle. It wasn’t as if men with an all-round impressive status and khandaans didn’t visit the Guhas’ house in Greater Kailash 1. But the fact that at some point of time they all seemed to come out disappointed or utterly displeased and quite a few, barring the very brave, wanted to return for a second or a third visit. Whatever transpired within the four walls of the Guha home, nobody came to know, not even the fat aunties taking an evening walk in their faux crêpe suits and Nike shoes. Whatever was happening inside, it was surprising to all of them that not one proposal that came their daughter’s way materialized into an engagement announcement.

  ‘Wonder why this new proposal from America was turned down?’ was the question foremost in the neighbours’ minds, though none spoke up.

  Rejections after rejections hung in the air of the Guha residence like heavy forebodings.

  In New Delhi, there were young women who were, in principle, against the idea of marriage. They saw marriage as a mere tool of patriarchy used to domesticate and subordinate women to their husbands and their in-laws. They were working and independent, had their own places and circles of friends and could not therefore understand why they had to be married to feel complete.

  But Charu was not one among them. She was educated, with a Masters degree to boot, and she loved the whole idea of marriage and quite artlessly worshipped the institution in her mind. With her own eyes she had witnessed the marital bliss that her parents shared. Her mother, though a housewife, was forever content and smiling and nothing made her happier than to be a perfect housewife to a decent status-conscious man like Mr Guha.

  Charu felt that society would come to naught were the institution of marriage made a free choice instead of a necessity. In her mind, she pitied the feminists in Delhi. She conjectured that their lives were or would be empty and companionless when they turned old.

  She didn’t see what was wrong with patriarchy if by patriarchy one meant the rule of decent men. By definition, her father was a grand patriarch but he was also a wonderful provider for her and her mother. In his regime nobody suffered from any material want whatsoever. Being a highly placed government official, Mr Guha had all the accoutrements of a good life—the travels abroad, the servants, the access to the corridors of power, the house and the prepaid energy bills—lavished at the feet of his wife and his daughter. It was on account of him that Charu and her mother were able to avail of the American-style quality of life right in the very heart of South Delhi.

  Her exquisitely pedicured, sandalled feet rarely had to touch the concrete pavements of the city for there was always that government-furnished car with a government-furnished chauffeur—a telling symbol of her status in South Delhi—to drive her around—to college, to malls, to upscale restaurants. In exchange for the plenty he gave her, her father merely expected Charu to be a good daughter, for in Mr Guha’s eyes daughters and wives bore that special responsibility of not compromising the izzat of a family in any way. The family’s good name mattered to him very much.

  And Charu was an obedient, izzat-conscious daughter. Despite her flaming beauty, which aroused wicked desires in men, and despite all the temptations to transgress the boundaries of izzat in a newly globalizing and resplendent New Delhi, she barely dated men and never wore clothes that showed cleavage (though she possessed a sumptuous amount of the same). She never mingled with the ‘crass’ and the ‘down market’, a nom de plume given by Mr Guha to those who didn’t value the finer aspects of life, like respect for women, etiquette, table manners, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, proper English, and a belief that everybody has his or her own assigned place in the social hierarchy.

  He abhorred feminism and Dalit politics.

  All those years of growing up in the strict moral ambience of the Guha household had transformed Charu into an ultra-desirable bride-to-be. So wherein lay the problem, relatives and friends knowing the Guhas (but not necessarily intimate with their secrets) began to ask behind their backs as time flew by and Charu still stayed unmarried.

  The Guhas, in all their modern Bengali wisdom, a wisdom that was suavely attuned to meet the needs of the
se complex and challenging global times, were flummoxed by this phenomenon. They didn’t know what earthly, secular turn of the screw could un-jinx their exceptionally pretty daughter’s marital prospects, so they turned to the time-tested anodyne of deity worship.

  It was as though the goddess Mahalaxmi had decided to single out Charu and her parents for unfair punishment in this crucial aspect of their rite of passage through life. The goddess must have perversely twisted and turned things around for the poor Guhas just for sport. So she had to be appeased.

  At the age of twenty-five, ripe and ready to be offered to the care-taking of the most eligible of men in the exclusive social pale within which the Guhas circle, Charu discovered that as her mother’s carefully curated artefact, she looked forward to a married, settled life. There was no doubt in her mind that marriage was the most natural thing to happen to her. To live a life alone would be living alone and bereft.

  Fearing such an outcome for herself, Charu was in single-minded pursuit of the right partner. But here she was different. As she cast her longing eyes on several potential candidates, she saw Tanusree. Tanusree was the most beautiful of all of Charu’s classmates at the college she had just graduated from. She came into Charu’s dreams often, swirling her svelte shapely hips like a Bollywood actress, dressed in a chiffon sari, her rich black waist-length hair falling in cascades over her slender shoulder. In Charu’s mind a gentle, fragrant wind always seemed to blow wherever Tanusree went.

  Charu knew that in Tanusree’s case she faced brute competition—men wanted her as their wife. While she bristled at the thought of the unfair advantage men had over her in the business of wooing women like Tanu, somehow she believed that she would prevail—for she would know how to win women like Tanusree’s heart, colonize their dreams. One day Charu hoped to beat the competition by alluring Tanu with the prospect of marriage and a sweet, settled way of a cultured feminine life.

  It’s true that the world deemed men to be the natural companions of women; but Charu begged to differ on this.

  She had seen—in the houses of her relatives and friends—how women who were beautiful creatures once upon a time had been reduced to fat, kitty-party going, beauty parlour-visiting cackles of hens. She had hoped to see domestic bliss herself but there was something about housewives that made her tremble inwardly—the fear for her own fate. What if she were to be married to a man and become one of the innumerable women who lost a sense of their being? What if she became one who got into the grind of looking after her family and husband, sleeping nightly like old, spent firearms by the side of their husbands?

  To her own confusion, she had seen her mother’s body bloat into a slumped sack-like entity, as though parts and parcels of her anatomy were held together in place by a thread that had come utterly loose. Yet her mother was not that old at all and she seemed altogether a very happy housewife.

  She remembered the girl from college. She was a thing to behold and cherish, so smooth was her skin, so taut her waistline. There was much talk of her marriage on campus. She was under pressure to marry and settle down. Then one day, Charu learnt that the girl’s marriage had been fixed. While the other girls discussed her marriage with envy and admiration—most wanted to be in the bride-to-be’s shoes—Charu was concerned about the little details—how would the poor girl fare on the night of her wedding and the nights and days following?

  For days, following the marriage, the girl stopped coming to college. When she reappeared again on its premises she appeared vastly changed—from the sprightly girl to one who could not stop blushing at the mention of her husband. Charu couldn’t understand what made her so happy.

  The beauty of beautiful women had always magically transported Charulata Guha into ether every time she saw them. Their laughter would ring in her ears for days and nights. So anything that knifed into that vision of beauty would automatically enter her bad books as things to be despised and destroyed.

  Then there was Mrs Vaikundeshwari, her mother’s best friend and a wife and mother of a daughter of Charu’s age. To Charu, Mrs V was the ultimate sexy mother goddess; she threw funny ostentatious parties to enhance her husband’s career prospects and with what amazing ease she would swivel from conversing with men on the subject of the United Nations’ failure to prevent the American intervention in the Gulf to helping the women in the kitchen fry crisp guileless fat-free nimkis!

  One such evening in a shimmering sari draped over her stunning figure and groomed good looks, Mrs V put the young and the so-called young women gathered together in her living room to shame by sermonizing on what to her a woman meant. There was no immediate context to why she said all this except that she had in her delightfully manicured hand, painted with the much in vogue black nail-polish and bejewelled with the choicest diamonds, her third glass of ‘Sex and the City’. She revealed how being a woman was about remembering one’s female soul, carrying the jewel of one’s femininity.

  ‘It’s about holding the dewdrops and subtlety of your femininity and being a warrior woman. It’s about the rebirthing of the female psyche. It’s about being in tune with yourself, loving, nurturing and marrying yourself. Because you are complete. You don’t need to be validated by anything or anyone.’ Putting the traditionally romantic dialogue of ‘You complete me’ to shame, she seemingly pointed her elegant finger at Charu and Charu only!

  Mrs V was stone drunk. But to be drunk on Sex and the City and to discuss the glorious immanence of womanhood was to be indisputably sexy in Charu’s eyes. Had Charu stood close to Mrs V, she could very well have overheard the gurgling noise emanating from the older woman’s chest every time she breathed in, echoing her heart bouncing back and forth from one side of her rib cage to another. Charu found Vaikundeshwari to be fiercely attractive; she resolved in that instant that she could spend a lifetime hiding her face within the rich folds of the fat-laden glistening underbelly of the gorgeous Mrs Vaikundeshwari.

  The desire unleashed a physiological chain reaction: slow, playful, frightening peristalsis-like movements gripped Charu’s pelvic region. She was in ether, when Vaikundeshwari accosted her, her hand grazing Charu’s softly, like muslin slipping off of a bare shoulder. The grasp tightened. Charu felt the uncertainty mixed with the lust and confidence of liquor filling the air between them. She pulled Charu in, their eyes locked for a second, and then they were devouring each other. Tongue slipped beneath tongue, lips clung to lips as time zoomed by. Charu was kissing a woman for the first time and for all the world to see.

  For Charulata Guha, it had all begun when she had accidentally brushed against the skinny body of her sixth-grade best friend Surekha. What was evoked was nothing short of being sensational—nothing that could be explained in words. But Charu’s experience remained like a movie viewed claustrophobically in an underground cavern by an audience of one. The finely honed, miniature doses of strange, viscerally felt sensations of delight: the tautening of an obscure muscle and the footfalls of thousands of baby squirrels scampering up and down the veins and arteries of her inner thighs.

  Then it happened in the classroom, on the playground, the cafeteria and most blasphemously in the prayer hall—the same excitement, the same sensations, the same feelings—all that Charu wanted but couldn’t explain.

  One day the Mother Superior of the very Catholic and expensive private school that Charu attended saw Surekha and Charu walking with their arms encircling each other’s waists. Their black, shiny little shoes clicked where they fell in rhythmic pitter-patter. They were like little swans moving with a mixture of haste and defiance. They’d teased their hair into nearly identical braids. Earrings flashed in the sun, brilliant as prisms. Each of them wore floral-patterned frocks—one was purple, the other pink—that accentuated their budding breasts which shone through the fabric. The closer they came, the shallower the Mother Superior’s breathing got. A type of conundrum came to her mind as she watched the girls walking towards her. ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ she though
t. The drawing of a dining room looked normal at first glance; on closer inspection, a chair was missing its leg and the man who sat atop it wore half a pair of glasses.

  These were two little girls, linked along the spectrum of the same sex. Like an incredulous intruder, the Mother Superior stalled them in their path. When Charu and Surekha saw her staring, they shifted gear and linked their arms with ever more adamantine grit. There was something conspiratorial and sisterly about their sudden closeness. Though their mouths didn’t move, they might have been communicating without moving their lips, so telepathic did they seem as they joined arms and pressed together, synchronizing their light steps.

  For reasons unfathomable, the observer’s face turned purple with anger. On the premises of a vernacular school that families like the Guhas sneered at for their non-Western, non-elitist allegiances, one can surmise that this scene of two sakhis walking hand in hand would have been quotidian, causing no consternation whatsoever even amongst the school chaprasis.

  But that day on the premises of one of the most prestigious convent schools in New Delhi, the girls were deeply misread. The wispy braided-haired duo was summoned by the Mother Superior and given a stern reprimand on propriety and etiquette.

  A jet stream of censuring words gushed through the Mother Superior’s mouth that day. Translated, they would have sounded thus: Jesus, nay, humanity at large, would be grimacing in disgust were Charu to have boy-like propensities, for only boys walked with their arms around little girls in the hallways of hallowed institutions.

  Charu, by nature, was a great receptacle that had the virtue of receiving conflicting messages with grace. Upon hearing the Mother Superior’s chastisement some convictions began to coagulate in her impressionable mind: Only boys, she began to believe, had the privilege of licking the soft pink bugsy ears of eternally cute girls like Surekha.