Charu’s hopes had been raised; she was feeling a lot lighter and was thinking of giving her friends in Lesbos the news. They wouldn’t mind the advent of Akash in Charu’s life, for in demeanour and nature, Akash was more of a woman than a man.
Perhaps, Charu thought mischievously, she could even induce Akash to visit Lesbos with her!
Charu was getting ready to pop the question to Akash, when things went poof for her again.
After their meeting at Barista, at first a few days, then a few weeks, and then finally a couple of months passed without any phone call or email from Akash. Charu had a bad feeling. Had she unintentionally given herself away to Akash? Did he feel like she was springing a marital trap on him? Did he run away from her just as he had run away from so many other women before?
Then she heard that Akash had gone back to America. The company he was working for had relocated him to its corporate headquarters. But Nisha, who had an eye on Akash, and was as disappointed as Charu was with the news of Akash’s departure, said it wasn’t on account of work that Akash left New Delhi for America. He hated living in New Delhi, especially under the constant pressure of marriage. His parents had lined up an infinite number of girls for him to check out and Akash finally got too fed up with the situation to persevere in the city. Nisha suspected that Akash had a girlfriend in America and he couldn’t tell his parents about her because she was white.
That was Nisha’s explanation of Akash’s abrupt exit. But Charu had come to know Akash pretty well as a person. She was convinced that Akash had deeper reasons than the ‘white girlfriend’ one. The Nishas of the world were shallow themselves and reduced complex human motives to one big heap of clichés.
Even if Akash had a lover in America, why couldn’t he confide his secret love life in Charu? They had after all discussed everything about life and love in a chummily forthright fashion in the few months they had known each other. Did he think she would tell on him? Or did she think she would be jealous?
To Charu, Akash didn’t look like he was in love and pining away for somebody far away. When he spoke of the ‘pressures’ of living in New Delhi he was trying to convey something else, far vaster in its implication and tangled than mere love for a blonde, white American woman.
The longer the span of Akash’s absence grew, the more despondent Charu became. She felt abandoned by a friend in whom she had confided her most private thoughts; Akash had become the kind of friend she had always longed for—one with whom she could be just her unpretentious, full-fledged self. Being ‘different’ herself, Charu believed she had acquired a comrade-in-arms in the battle against homogeneity.
But now, she was alone again, back to finding refuge in her solitary musings.
When Delhiites—men and women—are heart-broken, their usual recourse is alcohol; Charu’s anodyne was unique—it was the movie Fire. When she was excruciatingly sad she would retreat into her room and watch the film like a patriot would listen to her country’s national anthem when defeat was imminent.
There was one special scene that Charu liked to stay glued to: it was the love-scene between the two women. She liked to see one woman atop the other on a bed under a silken mosquito net. For days she would re-play the scene in slow motion in her head: she would mentally trace the motion of Shabana’s hand gliding up and down the smooth contours of Nandita’s torso, raising and soothing its agitated nerve endings here, there, everywhere, all at the same time.
Charu would then gradually graft herself onto the scene and feel the mercury rise in the nether region of her body.
Charu’s mother hated Fire. So she sympathized with the Hindu extremists who, in the name of upholding ‘real’ Indian values, attacked the movie theatres where the movie was playing.
‘It deserves to be burnt,’ Mrs Guha had said, dismissing the film as a ‘heap of immoral rubbish’.
The idea of women having sex with women was not only improbable to her, but it was also obnoxious.
But neither one of Charu’s parents was bigoted. Both were very modern individuals holding progressive thoughts about the world and the status of women therein. However their modernity had limits. Daughters could be all that they wanted to be, but certain things were an absolute no-no: they couldn’t marry Muslims and/or profess a preference for alternative sexualities.
As far as the Guhas were concerned there was only one kind of sexuality in this world: heterosexuality. Consequently, in bed, a woman’s place was next to a man’s not to another woman’s.
So while the sex scenes between Shabana and Nandita in Fire had secretly exhilarated Charu, it had nauseated the Guhas and, Charu suspected, the rest of the city of New Delhi.
Only men like Akash didn’t seem to mind it. A rare man was this Akash who actually took the relationship between the two women in the film to be a real relationship that was as solid as a relationship between a man and a woman.
Charu sighed. She missed him again. Late one night, sitting at her computer, she clicked on the dating site where a profile of hers was secretly stashed away under an alias. Her chosen name was ‘Sita’, after the name of Nandita Das’s character in Fire (but this Sita was a ‘woman’ looking for a ‘man’, not her ‘Radha’, Sita’s lover in the film). Charu dragged the cursor to the description box in the ‘man’ section and made some changes. It pained her less to think of Akash when she did this; in the list of criteria of the ideal man, she added one more—she was looking to know somebody of a ‘non-patriarchal’ type.
It had occurred to Charu that there was this one word, although an archaic one that Hindu extremists cringed at the sound of, that summed up Akash as a person: non-patriarchal.
Upon being pressured for marriage for the umpteenth time by her parents, Charu said that she would consider a prospective bridegroom only under one condition—that he be non-patriarchal. At the mention of this word, Mr Guha guffawed and said that if she was looking to marry a non-patriarchal man in India, then she was day-dreaming. They’d better migrate Charu to Iceland then.
Charu’s mother didn’t enjoy her husband’s jokes, especially when a situation as serious as their daughter’s marriage was concerned. Not in her wildest dream did she imagine that a matter as simple as this—a parent’s desire to see her daughter settled into a good marriage—would become so fractious.
Why had Charu turned into such a male-hater? Mrs Guha wondered.
‘Not all men are as bad as you think. Look at your father; do you see any male-chauvinism in him?’ Mrs Guha asked. Charu had an answer to that, but she chose not to think her thoughts out aloud. Of course, her dad was a good man, a wonderful provider; she loved and respected her father deeply, but she couldn’t deny the fact that even in this day and age he believed that women with short hair were half-males.
But Mr Guha had made a valid point: Charu would be hard-pressed to find a non-patriarchal man in India.
Suitable alliance after suitable alliance appeared at the Guhas’ door step. Mr Guha was a powerful man in New Delhi and Charu was known among the city’s elite class as a beauty with an enormous brain. So proposals flowed in easily and most of them were fabulous.
If only Namrata’s parents were to get even one per cent of the proposals that Charu got without even lifting a finger, the poor girl would be married by now.
Namrata was one of Charu’s friends from college. She was desperate to get married, but she had less-than-average looks and her father didn’t have as much of a social standing as Charu’s father did. The few boys that came to see Namrata usually went back disappointed and never made that second call. The girl worked hard to please her visitors, and did everything that a would-be bride in the marriage-market was supposed to do. She sang, danced, entertained, and even became a veritable bilingual. To the parents of the boys she spoke in chaste Hindi, while to the boys, many of whom lived in America and were doing a quick marital tour of New Delhi, she tried to speak in American-accented English (and for this she sought the help of Charu).
&
nbsp; But nothing worked. Charu felt sorry for Namrata; she, who was a lesbian, was getting flooded with offers, yet Namrata, who was as straight as daylight and instinctively in love with everything patriarchal, was facing a famine in that area! What a twist of fate!
Were it in Charu’s power to do so, she would definitely turn the tide of proposals towards Namrata’s house. But she was too scared to make that suggestion to her mother. So, Charu adopted a tactic: during the course of a chit-chat with one of the boys visiting her, she would casually drop Namrata’s name and give a few words in praise of her virtues and her immense suitability as a potential wife (and daughter-in-law).
Unbeknownst to Mrs Guha then, Charu’s rejects, like hand-me-down clothes, were passed on to Namrata.
Meanwhile Charu cracked down on the proposals more mercilessly than ever before. Her excuses got increasingly whimsical; or so her mother alleged. She said it was very superficial of Charu to reject men on the grounds of chemistry. ‘Chemistry can come later, over time; who thinks of chemistry first when the boy is from MIT and earns a six-figure salary with unlimited stock-options?’
Charu’s mother had irrefutable logic on her side. But chemistry was important to Charu. First there had to be chemistry, and then the rest might follow. And Charu didn’t experience any chemistry whatsoever with men. She got the courage to tell her mother that no chemistry meant that certain seminal juices never coursed through her veins when she thought of men.
Yet Charu was not without those seminal juices. The key was to find the right person to get them flowing, and the right person could never be a man. When she saw her svelte co-worker Anjuli the juices flowed crazily and naturally. Flames leapt up without the stoking, tectonic plates moved inside of her whenever she brushed shoulders with the girl in her office.
But it would be futile, even incendiary, to mention Anjuli and the whole phenomenon of the mating between the Anjulis and the Charus to her mother. At best Mrs Guha would accuse Charu of having lost the power to discern the difference between men and women. ‘Anjuli is a girl!’ she would tell Charu with an expression of genuine perplexity on her face. At worst, she would be shock-stricken.
Charu tried approaching the topic in a subtler way: ‘It’s congenital.’ But her mother would have nothing of anything that had something to do with the genitalia. She had already begun to suspect that Charu was averse to marriage because there was something seriously unnatural about her body.
And so the battle between mother and daughter raged within the premises of the Guha household, with no prospect of reconciliation in sight. The only way for Charu to restore amicability in the house was to sacrifice her real romantic aspirations and for the sake of her mother, agree to marry a bridegroom handpicked by her.
But before waving the white flag of truce, Charu wanted to score at least a symbolical victory of sorts. She wanted to tell her parents the truth about herself; that way she would have peace of mind at least.
So, she did, in the most delicate way possible. She told them she was a lesbian.
‘Well, well,’ said Mr Guha from time to time, in the manner of a gentleman-stoic. Mrs Guha simply fell silent. She went about her domestic chores, directing and supervising servants and going to the market to get her brand of imported food at astronomical prices. Mr Guha liked Western cuisine over Indian ones.
Charu was assured by her mother’s calmness; her mother was a practical woman, so as long as Charu got married she would be fine. That was Charu’s conclusion, till the series of nocturnal wailing began to emerge from behind the closed door of the Guhas’ master bedroom.
Charu’s dreams of Lesbos were continually disrupted by the wailing and she hated her mother for it. She was doing this deliberately—subverting her right to live out her lesbian existence even in her dreams.
Mrs Guha had taken to weeping nightly. Standing outside their room, Charu heard her mother’s sobbing and her father’s consolations. He, as was his custom, tried to joke the whole crisis away.
Mr Guha, the powerful worldly man who knew his Greek, compared his daughter with Penelope. Mrs Guha, he said, should take pride in the fact that, like Penelope, his daughter was rejecting suitors because she was waiting for the right man to reveal himself to her. At other times he offered more nonsensical explanations.
The more Mr Guha tried to joke away his worries, the louder grew his wife’s sobs. She squeaked forth like a sick bird, her tear-inflected chagrin at Charu’s Americanization. ‘Disease’, ‘unnatural’, ‘unhealthy’ were words strung together with L Word, satellite TV, dirty.
That shameless cleavage-displaying girl Anjuli, with whom Charu had been seen frequently, was condemned as a glorified prostitute.
Mrs Guha’s wailing continued for weeks. Then one night no wailing came from the Guhas’ master bedroom. For days neither Mr nor Mrs Guha spoke much to Charu. An uneasy peace had settled into the house.
Several mornings later, Charu’s mother broke her silence. The Guhas had sat down for breakfast. The atmosphere was solemn as if food was being had under a cloud of a tragic happening. Mrs Guha looked at Charu through swollen eyes. Charu realized that her mother had indeed been crying all this time but under a strict order by Mr Guha to weep quietly.
Mrs Guha spoke; what Charu heard was a series of sanctions in what Charu could and could not do for as long as she was living under their respectable roof. Charu could go shopping (it was one of her favourite preoccupations), but she could not go shopping or anywhere else with Anjuli (who wasn’t named but was referred to as ‘that spoilt brat of a woman’). She was in effect banned from spending a disproportionately long time with women, period. Charu was to hang out more, albeit in a respectable way, with suitable men, like normal girls did. Her collection of DVDs of Fire and L Word were to be confiscated by her parents and kept away from her sight till the time she got married. Mrs Guha also prohibited Charu from scuttling marriage offers on the basis of ‘biology’ or ‘chemistry’. Women, Charu was told, were not supposed to prance around with women and play doll-house-love. Love was not a tinderbox-and-matchstick affair but a proper enduring social engagement between decent women and handsome men with a promising career and good breeding.
The breakfast ended with a terrifying maternal caveat: ‘Who will look after you when we are gone, a woman? Pshaw! You will be cast out of society!’
Mr Guha explained to Charu how the Sapphic lore was mythical and Western, absurdly out of place in New Delhi. Charu noticed that his face had reddened to a beetroot hue as he told Charu the ‘real’ story of Lesbos. Her heart melted by her dear stiff-necked father’s sincere, sweet attempt to be reasonable with his daughter. It strained him, for he was a man of few words, for whom it was hard to be candid about the subject matter of his only child’s sexuality.
So Charu was moved to a tender tragicomic sensation. As she reflected on how much love and creature comfort her parents had given her, she felt choked by filial emotion. They had jump-started the very engine of her wellbeing, by showering her with everything a modern daughter could want. Was she being selfish by returning their abundant love with a blind pursuit of her private dreams? Should she have kept her sexual identity a secret from her parents? Was it thoughtless of her to tell them she was a lesbian?
Charu turned crimson with shame upon recasting all that she had said in the new light of her new thoughts. She must not hurt the feelings of her parents anymore. She should be a proper daughter from now on and give heterosexuality a try. If she fails to find a man of her type whom she could marry, she would live celibate, in unconditional love with her parents. She promised herself that she wouldn’t indulge in her lesbionic reveries, nor would she contemplate dilly-dallying with Anjuli.
She made an attempt to abide by the rules of the mating game as it was practised in New Delhi.
At 27, Charu Guha found herself basking in the light of a young man’s attention. He was rich. He had flair. Yet the old world-values intruded. The way his eyes settled on her breasts
filled her with disgust. The former Charu would have punched him in the face for being disrespectful to her. But the new Charu tried hard to smile back encouragingly.
The young man was well-liked by her parents. The fat cat son of a fat cat father. A rising star on the corporate horizon of New Delhi. From day one, upon setting eyes on her at a party, he had wanted her.
They were engaged to be married.
How ecstatic Charu’s mother was upon hearing of the alliance! No sooner than she was convinced that her daughter’s lesbian fad had passed and that she had reverted to normalcy, she rolled out plans for a big engagement party. She feared that if she didn’t strike when the iron was hot, Charu might relapse anytime.
Charu’s engagement party was an affair to remember. Powerful guests from all over the city attended it. Everybody blessed the couple with permanent happiness and children. It could be said that the air of New Delhi resonated with the blowing of conch shells at this grand occasion of Charu Guha’s pre-marital bliss.
And what a whirlwind of courtship Charu fell into! She was wined and dined in upscale restaurants. Showered with expensive gifts and, like a gorgeous peacock, she was fed with gems instead of seeds by her super-rich patron.
The affair was easy to handle till a certain point. The young man hadn’t yet asked for the inevitable.
But Charu was taking precautions. When she wasn’t strutting around in the best restaurants and concert halls of New Delhi like a plumed bird, she was devising plots to make her avoidance of sex, when the dreaded moment arrived, appear normal—part of the personal culture of demureness that all Indian women were expected to display before they got married.
Thus kisses were shied away from as he tried to kiss her here and there, sticking his tongue out salaciously. She was always in motion, swaying, sliding, gliding, ducking, and coyly pleading for postponement. When he wanted her lips she turned her neck to him, bobbing her head up and down in the manner of a spring chicken on the run. He was always missing the mark and she was experiencing waves of intense relief upon feeling his salivating mouth fall on the safe, non-sexual parts of her body.
The Green Rose Page 3