One can very well imagine the fear and the out-of-body goosebumps that the possibility of being a container of boy-like propensities in matters pertaining to Kama can produce in a young girl who cared particularly about being feminine and proper in every kind of way.
Were some sagacious person to tell Charu that the lord Kama (even perhaps the lord Jesus himself) had diverse lives and a Janus face then she wouldn’t feel so improper and abnormal at so young an age. But where in the city of New Delhi, with its lowbrow commercialism and its hetero porno-influenced ways of judging sex and the relationship between the genders, would one find such an endearing truth-teller?
In these cold earthly realms where Charu was doomed to live, such transcendental plurality was unthinkable—here in the concrete and prosaic urban sprawl of the city of New Delhi, where plush palaces of the noveau riche grew up insensately with the snarly dishevelled hovels of the old poor, life was regimented into watertight compartments of rich and poor, Brahmin and Shudra, servant and master, English and vernacular, trousers and sari. Here only men, being the stark opposite of women, could be attracted to women.
Naturally, that day, the heavens above had sympathy for Charu Guha, as they saw the droplets of doubts coalesce in her mind into dark nimbus clouds of confusion and pain. They witnessed a rift in her girly composure, a window through which they could glimpse the shades of maleness that her floral-printed pink frock and the ribbon tied in snaky knots above her hair obscured.
Any girl, they whispered inaudibly into Charu’s ears, might be a boy. The fact of this epiphany may have clanged through the soft chambers of her nubile brain. She may have discerned in the secrecy of her mind that everything she understood and had taken for granted as fundamentally immutable—the curve of the earth, the heat of the sun, the reliability of the eyes—was getting squeezed out of her little body. She fantasized about pretty little girls and asked the gods above identity-laced questions like ‘Who are we?’ ‘Are we girls or boys?’ ‘Do little girls help each other get in and out of their dresses?’ ‘How many of us were out there that were not what they seemed?’ ‘Were girls who liked other little girls, imposters?’ Could the women she had seen in the parties that she went to with her parents all over New Delhi—the slinky, curvaceous creatures in silk, purple and pink—be men in disguises?
Over time, Charu watched her queries vanish into thin air, as they couldn’t be addressed to anybody in flesh and blood, they couldn’t receive any answers; perhaps, she thought, the disguises were so convincing that others seemed not to notice. For the next ten years, Charu Guha wondered if she had imagined the entire encounter with the Mother Superior.
Charu, continued to live and grow, like other normal girls lived and grew—like potted perennials in their mothers’ secure weatherproof nurseries. But inwardly she carried a big landfill of frozen desires. Once in a while she would catch her reflection in the mirror, and see a silhouette fleeting across the surface of the glass. Occasionally, she would notice her parents, facing one another across the dinner table. Once the solid embodiments of man and woman, they would appear translucent, and Charu imagined the pretty accoutrements that decorated their living room to pass through them.
2
Charu liked women. It is not that she hated men, but she could not think of men as objects of romantic love. She felt that she could fall in love only with women and marry one of her own sex, while with men she could be friends.
With a man she could be a daughter, sister or niece, but never a lover.
She never told anybody about her preference for girls. How could she? Neither her friends nor her family—in fact, not a soul in the city of New Delhi—would understand. She was especially fearful of how her parents would react if they knew of her secret lesbian impulses. To them even dreaming of such things was abhorrent. Charu would be punished where it hurt her most. Her father would cut off what he called a privileged access to the air conditioner that buzzed day and night in Charu’s bedroom. It was the air conditioner that helped Charu dream her lesbionic dreams during the hottest of the hot summer nights.
Lulled into beautiful deep sleep by the cold soothing artificial air of her bedroom, Charu, the pretty Indian lesbian, dreamt of Lesbos.
Charu named the landscape into which she floated Lesbos; for it resembled the Greek island she had read about in stories of Greek myth. She had read about this place in ancient Greece where a woman named Sappho lived and composed poems to celebrate the beauty and love of women. Her father, who true to the tendency of educated Bengali gentlemen to keep rows and rows of books stacked inside book cases, had told her that Lesbos was just one of the many Grecian islands and that Sappho was simply a poet who stood out because she was one of the rare female poets in a male-dominated world.
But Charu thought differently about Sappho and Lesbos. Just as Vrindavan was a sacred place for Krishna-devotees, so Lesbos, the Lesbos of Charu’s imagination, was more than just an island—it was a special place, her very own lesbionic Vrindavan, where gorgeous women lived, danced and sang and composed poetic sweet little nothings in praise of other gorgeous women.
Wafted by the A/C jet stream, Charu travelled to Lesbos where there were no men to be seen. Only pretty-faced women dotted the landscape of the island like figurines from an erotic temple panel. Charu would lock eyes with girls whose long eyelashes fluttered like butterflies. She would brush against their smooth olive skins, full lips, and firm buttocks. Through the folds of the saris she would see the soft contours of their bodies. Gasping with delight she would want more. Siren-like the creatures would entice her, pulling her into their midst. She would glide and glide, her heart beating louder and faster with each step.
The dream would inevitably end at the height of a climax.
The first gush of harsh New Delhi daylight would wake Charu up; it signalled the end of her delicious, night-long tryst with lesbians and the beginning of yet another day of pretending to be who she wasn’t.
She would soon have to cast eyes on the city where she was doomed to live the life of what Americans described as a ‘closet’ lesbian, someone whose genuine self remained locked up within the four walls of a cupboard for a good part of her waking hours, while what walked around interacting with the world was a counterfeit Charu. Thus, it wasn’t the real Charu but her ghost that flirted with handsome, successful men and hung out with them in expensive restaurants and malls in the satellite city of Gurgaon. When Charu’s ghost returned home, she sat down with her mother to discuss the prospective bridegrooms whose families had made contact with the Guhas expressing a keen desire to forge matrimonial alliances with their beautiful daughter.
The ghost genuflected mindlessly before the altar of heterosexual marriage as if in that institution lay her truest salvation. The Charu that hid in the closet could only come out at night and stay within the confines of her dream. Needless to say, Charu Guha, daughter of one of India’s highest-ranking government officials, led a pretentious life as a heterosexual woman. And she felt terrible about it. Every time she let a man plant slobbering kisses on her neck during a courtship, she felt dirty and guilty; she felt like she had committed an act of treason.
It’s, thus, no wonder that Charu cherished dearly her dreamlike trips to the island of Lesbos; in Lesbos Charu could be her truest self. Tragically, however, the sojourns left her more depressed than elated; they were wonderful but brief (how she prayed for the prospective bridegroom visitations to be brief, but they always turned out to be excruciatingly long).
What sexually arousing scenarios her moments in dreamlike Lesbos accorded her! Yet, poof! It went no sooner than it came. So unfair, she thought bitterly, this whetting of her appetite and then whisking away the table full of sumptuous food!
Waking up aroused on a hot day, and then slapped with a realization that what had titillated every inch of your senses was but a dream, is the cruellest of things to befall someone!
Just as the blaze of the morning sun pierced through the
lace curtain-lined windows of Charu’s bedroom and diluted the soothing twilight-cool of the air inside, the thought of retreating into a ghost pierced Charu’s heart and benumbed it to the noise and bustle to which the city of New Delhi had just woken up.
Despite the soul-sucking heat, there was excitement in the air—not just about the money but also the love and romance that fed into the pulse of the modern, global city. The more money people were making, the more intent they were on finding and making love. And it wasn’t just the same old Indian traditional love leading straightforwardly to marriage like water through a drainpipe into the river; the newly rich of New Delhi demanded romance of a Western style. They wanted the dating and the hating and the mating, and whatever else they saw through the lens of global entertainment media chains the Westerners do in their rituals of romance.
The business of dating was booming in New Delhi. Single men and women made a beeline to become couples. They competed by creating fantastic profiles on the Internet. ‘Single, sexy, twenty-something Delhi girl equally at home in the East and the West, wanting to meet a like-minded man with drive, sensitivity, humour’ went the ads.
Charu too wanted to post an ad on the Internet, but she floundered. There was no room on these sites for women who desired women. The maximum she could do was to pretend to be a man and put an ad looking for a woman. But that wouldn’t take her very far beyond virtual space.
So putting a stone on her real desires, Charu advertised herself as a smart, cosmopolitan woman, with a master’s degree in a hot field from a hot university who was looking for a good-looking man, working preferably in an American multinational company, who knew his wine well and could speak English without a heavy Indian accent.
This was an act, not of hypocrisy or insincerity, but of great despair on Charu’s part. For, the longer she waited for her dream to come true—for the republic of India to turn into a republic of lesbians, and the city of New Delhi to become like the city of San Francisco, where women kissed women openly in public places—the lonelier she got. The day, she believed, would never come.
Charu feared she would slowly but surely grow into a spinster, revered on her face for her chastity but laughed at behind her back as a frigid old maid who rejected men because she was afraid of ‘real’ sex. The furiously spinning Ferris wheel of life will have passed her by if she kept waiting for the deeply heterosexual world of New Delhi to change.
Besides, the women of New Delhi, she thought, were a little unreliable. They were mostly interested in shopping and enjoying life in a secure world, provided for by their moneyed husbands. Few intended to live authentic lives.
Charu had gazed deeply into the eyes of many a woman (to their great discomfort) and was sure that somewhere inside them was hidden a lesbian that was dying to surface. But there was also fear in those very same eyes where some lesbionic flame flickered; a fear of social ostracism and of being punished for flouting heterosexual norms.
From time to time, Charu too was swayed by fear—of breaking the rules and standing out as a social deviant. Best to be one of the majority; to blend in. The Jews had done that and so had the blacks in white-majority societies. Closer to home, Muslims would forego circumcision and cut off their traditional beard to pass off as a Hindu. It was the turn for the lesbians of India to act straight.
Charu weighed the pros and cons of acting straight. She often came up heavily weighted in favour of pros.
First there was the force of sheer numbers. For wherever Charu looked, in shopping malls, inside air-conditioned cars, in upscale restaurants, and fashionable clubs, she saw only heterosexual mating. Men and women appeared joined frantically at the hip, linked together indissolubly. Men and women walked hand in hand, fingers intertwined so firmly that it would’ve taken a body builder’s strength to untwine them.
Charu wanted an indissoluble bond with that special someone, and since it could be neither with a woman nor a man that was unadulterated in his heterosexual, Indian-maleness, the best alternative was to seek out a man who in many essential ways resembled a woman.
Charu’s mind often wandered to Akash; he was masculine in his bearing, yet possessed the soft sensitivity of a classy woman.
Akash Gupta was her father’s colleague’s son. He had everything Charu technically wanted in a life-partner except the right gender: a good breeding, an interest in the finer things of life, an American MBA and consequently a high-paying job with grand perks with an American multinational company in Gurgaon.
Akash was a textbook definition of an eligible bachelor; yet he was strangely unattached. Charu saw him frequently at her father’s official gatherings and at various social parties, but he hardly ever arrived at these occasions with a pretty girl dangling from his arms. He did have strong arms; Charu could tell he had glossy, hairless skin and a body he took good care of. Once in a while she saw him in female company but Akash had seemed inattentive to and disinterested in the escort’s presence. It was as though she was there by his side because that’s what he was supposed to have by his side in social settings like these. A woman accompanying Akash was like a tie around a reluctant tie-wearer’s neck—a necessary evil.
She had often puzzled over what she thought was Akash’s lack of urgent interest in women and marriage. Everybody said how suitable he was for their daughters’ hands and could have the best alliance for the asking. Yet, Akash, it was rumoured, rejected proposal after proposal in the same vein that Charu did. What constraints was he under? Charu pondered. She had heard that Akash was ‘anti-woman’. The story was that he had developed an indifference towards women after he came back from America. Something must have happened to him there!
At a particular gathering, Charu had bumped into Akash, who was nursing a glass of water and looking very bored and lost. He smiled at Charu and they struck up an amiable conversation during the course of which Charu felt no sexual vibes emerging from Akash’s end towards her. It was like she was talking to her girlfriend, not to a man. Charu’s experience with males of New Delhi had been typical: they would talk to her and sneak in flirtatious messages with an eye to getting inside her dress or her pair of tight Levis. She could smell their rising sexual appetite at ‘hello’.
But with Akash, her social interactions were—and she had many subsequent to the initial one—sexually non-threatening. Talking to him, Charu never felt like she was being covertly undressed by the onlooker’s eyes and pressured to do things she didn’t want to do. Akash and Charu shared stories like sisters.
The long and short of the matter was that Charu had begun to like Akash. She wasn’t attracted to him sexually because Charu could never feel sexual attraction towards anyone but a woman. Charu liked Akash in a sisterly kind of way and in Akash she saw the qualities of a woman—he was soft-spoken, sober and wondrously humble. Unlike other accomplished men with a very high price in the stock market of marriage, Akash did not take women’s adoration for granted; in fact, he did not even seem to want female adoration.
Charu had joked with Akash about his un-Indian attitude towards pretty women, and Akash had laughed awkwardly.
‘Not all Indian men are supposed to be the same,’ Akash had said over coffee at Barista one day. The conversation was about how Charu preferred to wait for as long as it takes to find the right man to marry and Akash had surprisingly chimed in with a similar sentiment.
‘But what if we get old just waiting?’ asked Charu, with the frightful image of the old withering maid always dangling before her eyes.
‘Isn’t it best to stay single, instead of marrying for the sake of alleviating loneliness?’ Despite being a heterosexual dude of New Delhi, Akash was sounding eerily like Charu, and the similarity of thoughts sent a ripple of bonding through Charu’s body.
Was she falling in love with Akash? Can she, a lesbian, fall in love with a man on the basis of his principles and yet not be sexually attracted to him?
‘But, I understand what you’re saying, Charu, it’s hard for singl
e beautiful women like you to live alone in the city of New Delhi. There are men scouring the landscape wolfishly and attractive females like you could fall prey. Marriage gives you a badge of security.’ Akash had voiced Charu’s opinion.
‘It’s not easy for men either; some of us have to pretend to be who we are, not just to show the world we are normal. It’s hard to be different here. We unleash a never-ending cycle of self-sacrifice, pleasing the parents and pleasing everybody except oneself …’ Akash’s voice petered off into the descending darkness of the warm evening.
Charu felt like holding Akash’s hands, so vulnerable he sounded. But she refrained as one thing might lead to another and the warm and fuzzy feeling of camaraderie that had grown between them in the last few months would fizzle away and something monstrous would come in its place.
Akash had turned misty-eyed that evening, Charu had noticed. Was he, like Charu, remembering a dream and feeling wistfully nostalgic? Charu had not dared to ask Akash the question then; she reserved it for later.
A brilliant idea had flashed through Charu’s mind: Why not ask Akash to marry her? He would be the perfect groom for her. He didn’t see women as sexual objects or as vehicles of procreation; he and Charu had got along famously as friends, and for the first time in her life, Charu had managed to make a friend out of a man. Also, something told Charu that Akash would treat her like a sister, rather than as somebody to warm his bed at night. Above everything else, Akash would be a coup of a husband for Charu and would be her great retort to a world that would not leave her alone until she got married and ‘settled’ down.
Being an incurable worshipper of female beauty, Charu would have preferred to marry a woman, a beautiful woman, somewhat of an amalgamation of the sedate, thoughtful Shabana and the young vivacious Nandita, the actresses who dared to have sex with each other on-screen in the film Fire. But as such an outcome was impossible in her lifetime, Akash would be the second best choice as spouse.
The Green Rose Page 2