When Charu rang Shalini’s doorbell, she got something of the Radha-Krishna vibe. Whence it came she didn’t know. She felt enveloped by an aura of predestination, as though she had come to meet a lover she had known for a while and with whose personal ecology she was familiar. It seemed that today was the day reserved for an exchange, as they said in heterosexual parlance, of bodily fluid in the way that only beautiful women could exchange such an intimate substance—with grace and subtlety.
The first thing that Charu noticed upon crossing the threshold of Shalini’s home into her living room was the neatness. The décor was sparse. It was as though the sofas were rarely sat upon, and the tables never came into contact with food plates and coffee mugs. Nothing seemed to be touched by sentience. Shalini’s house did not even look like it was lived in by humans. Yet it was pretty.
‘I have no children, you see, so there is nobody to make things messy,’ Shalini said cryptically with a bit of a wan smile on her lips. Charu pondered on the goddess’s state of childlessness. She knew of the Greater Kailashi gossip about Shalini. ‘Barren’ is what they called her, as if she were the planet Mars. ‘She’s beautiful but barren,’ the ugliest and the fattest with the biggest brood of children among the housewives of Greater Kailash said, to feel superior to this most beautiful of all women to grace the colony with her presence.
It was a common belief that the fate of a childless woman was worse than the fate of a poor woman, and that it was better to live in a house filled with children in the slums than to be living like a lonely ghost in a big rich house in the best of neighbourhoods of New Delhi. ‘But let’s not talk about me, Charulata, that’s your name, isn’t it? Shanks tells me a lot about you. She thinks you are really beautiful … and beautiful you are Charu, a very beautiful creeper!’ Shalini said in an effusion of soft laughter.
‘Shanks? Who is Shanks?’ Charu asked Shalini nervously.
‘Shankari, you know her, don’t you, she’s your mother’s best friend as well as mine, though Shanks’s love for me does not trickle down to your mother through osmosis, you see. Your mother hates me,’ Shalini observed with tranquility, as if it were only natural for Shalini to be hated by Mrs Guha. ‘Oh, the looks she gives me whenever I pass by her in Khan Market.’
So, Shankari Vaikundeshwari has told Shalini about me, Charu thought, relieved to know that a report of herself was passed on to Shalini by the trusted Vaikundeshwari.
That Vaikundeshwari would speak glowingly of Charu was a given; from a very young age Charu knew Vaiku liked her. She felt liked the instant auntie Vaiku’s finger travelled up and down her spine, resting only on the buttons of her bra, teasingly foreshadowing the possibility of undoing the same. ‘She’s grown into a very pretty girl, our little Charu, hasn’t she?’ auntie Vaiku had said to Mrs Guha while caressing Charu’s back with a wave-like movement of her hand.
‘Shanks and I think very highly of you, you know,’ Shalini said, as she went into the kitchen to make two cups of tea. ‘One for me and one for the beautiful creeper that has been able to evade her strict mother’s eyes and escape from the house to meet the big bad dragoness Shalini.’
Charu laughed. Shalini made her feel at ease.
‘Well now we know that the beautiful creeper has a beautiful ringing laughter as well,’ remarked Shalini with a coquettish lifting of her eyebrow. Blood rushed up to Charu’s face as she sipped tea from the dainty china in which Shalini had served her.
Charu and Shalini chit-chatted for a long time about small things in life, small desires and small beauties, like two pretty women would and Charu felt that all the while they conversed, sitting across one another, an electric charge flowed through the air surrounding them. The charge was enough to light up the lamps in the room. Time had passed, the afternoon was gliding into early evening and the room in which Charu and Shalini sat, sipping tea, suddenly appeared darker. The lamps had to be lighted.
‘Oh my god! My mother must be back by now!’ Charu blurted aloud, springing out of the couch like a fish that had been taken out of water. ‘I think I need to go now.’
Shalini laughed that soft laughter again. ‘Relax, Charu, your mother won’t be back anytime soon, the book club meetings run on and on, besides Shanks will keep her company.’
Shalini knew her mother was at the book club? Charu wondered a bit confusedly. Perhaps, she and Mrs Vaikundeshwari were the best of friends and so shared every detail of their daily lives with each other.
As she assured Charu to not be afraid of her mother, Shalini put her hand on Charu’s lap. The glass and the colours of the bangles adorning Shalini’s wrists blended harmoniously to create a twinkling concordance of sight and sound, and Charu’s face was again suffused with the colour of blood—from her thighs to her face the hue spread like the rapidly evolving branches of a banyan tree—as Shalini’s bangled wrists rested on Charu’s lap. Charu felt a slow massaging movement on her thigh. She sat still not knowing what to do; should she look into Shalini’s eyes? Should she extend her own hand in a gracious return of the act? Charu simply didn’t know.
The room had grown dark; Shalini hadn’t turned the lamps on yet. Charu could barely see the articles in the room. She could barely see Shalini’s face and the motility of the expressions on Shalini’s face. Had there been light in the room, Charu would have seen pity on Shalini’s face, for it was the emotion of pity that was currently playing on the face of Shalini as she caressed Charu’s thigh tenderly.
The poor pretty girl, so like me and so fated to become what I am today—undeservingly alone! Shalini must have thought.
‘It’s getting dark, come let’s go up to the terrace. I have a little nursery on my terrace,’ Shalini said, gently retracting her hand from Charu’s body.
‘O the nursery, yes, I know about it, I want to see it so badly!’ Charu said like an excited schoolgirl.
Shalini smiled, ‘Yes, of course you know about it, everybody in Greater Kailash knows about it. They call it literally my nursery, the lonely old childless maid’s very own nursery where vegetation grows instead of children.’
Like a scythe of sharp bitterness Shalini’s words cut the air in the room into two halves.
Charu wished she hadn’t made the observation about the nursery. She had perchance touched a raw nerve in Shalini.
But clouds seemed to disperse no sooner than they gathered on the horizon of Shalini’s mind. Flirtatiously she nudged Charu and said, ‘Let’s go to the terrace. I’ll show you my rose and then when it’s really dark, you’ll see the night-queen, my specialty creation that sleeps during the day and awakens at night.’
So much was speculated about Shalini’s nursery that it had been raised to the position of a local legend in Charu’s mind. She was hoping to see in the nursery things that she could only dream about, things with the power perhaps to transform her into a mermaid.
Shalini giggled at Charu’s words. ‘Yes, darling, I grow plants that can give you amazing fish tail’, she said jokingly, this time taking hold of Charu’s arm proprietarily, and pulling her close.
‘But, you’ll be disappointed, for my nursery is plain and simple and quite not what the Greater Kailashi gossip says it is,’ Shalini added in a serious tone, as she ushered Charu into the covered space atop the terrace.
What Charu saw made her jaw fall in surprise. Inside the nursery was textbook sparseness—the place was shockingly bare, barer than the Thar desert except for a few odd-looking floral entities and a shrubbery of the queen-of-the-night.
‘You see, how horticulturally challenged the famous Shalini Gardener Mahapatra is?’ Shalini asked in an amorphous tone. She could have been engaging in some form of sophisticated self-mockery or she could have been getting back caustically at a world that so grossly misprisions her.
Charu was flummoxed, not knowing what to say in response. She felt a little fearful even; she gauged that she was in the company of a very complex woman who was sexy and soulful at the same time and up to her eyebal
ls in hurt.
What if she started crying?
But Shalini didn’t shed a single drop of tear. ‘Do you like roses?’ Shalini asked Charu cheerfully. Charu nodded in assent. ‘Then you’ll like mine, I’m sure.’
Roses? Charu looked around the nursery and nowhere did she see roses.
‘Here, come, come with me,’ said Shalini, grabbing Charu’s hand like a mother would grab a toddler’s hand lest the latter got lost in a crowded place. But around Charu there was no other human except for Shalini and there certainly were no roses within a mile.
‘Come, follow me and I’ll lead you to my best friends—my roses,’ Shalini repeated once again, this time in a sing-song voice.
Perhaps she’s gone mad with loneliness, thought Charu silently and a little uneasily.
‘There they are,’ said Shalini pointing her long, willowy and incredibly sexy finger at pale green-looking monstrosities in the name of roses. They didn’t even look like flowers, Charu felt. They looked more like an agglomeration of little spiders. But upon sensing that the floral abnormalities were the objects of Shalini’s adoration, Charu didn’t express her sentiments aloud.
‘These are the pride of my nursery, the green roses. Nobody except Shanks and now you know about these.’
Green roses! What were green roses? Charu knew roses to be red or yellow or white or pink, but green was not the colour she associated with her favourite flower.
What Charu was gazing at was a floral lack, not a flower per se, for where there should be petals and stamens and pistils, there was only a cluster of green leaf-like structures. Charu bent close to the leafy enigma and sniffed.
Her head swam. A smell very unlike the conventional rose fragrance shot up through her nostrils; she imbibed instead a spicy, peppery aroma. She felt a little unstable on her feet and doddered; Shalini caught her in her arms. ‘There, there, charming creeper, it’s just a rose, it won’t bite you,’ she cooed soothingly into Charu’s ears.
‘You see, Charulata, this rose is an oddity, more like a collector’s item rather than a lover’s gift. I just love it,’ said Shalini emphatically by rolling her tongue over the ‘l’ in ‘love’.
‘Yes, it’s pretty and has a great smell,’ Charu whispered, her head still swimming under the aromatic impact of the green rose.
‘Glad you think it’s pretty. I think it’s butt-ugly, uglier than a cactus,’ Shalini countered Charu’s weak attempt at being polite.
‘Then why do you have it, Shalini?’
Shalini looked momentarily at Charu and their eyes locked. ‘Thank god it’s not “Shalini auntie” or some such demonic appellation that my friend’s children insist on giving me. I hate it. My name sounds fantastic on your tongue, Charulata!’
‘Shalini’ had shot out like an arrow from Charu’s end. She wasn’t ready to call Mrs Mahapatra by her first name, not yet. But now that she had said ‘Shalini’ she felt empowered and bolder than before.
‘Shalini is a very pretty name, and I like saying it,’ Charu told Shalini in a whisper as they stood only inches apart from each other. Shalini further bridged the minimal distance between them. Their breasts almost touching, Charu and Shalini now spoke in sotto voce. They wished to separate themselves now from the world, close the door on it, as it were.
‘Shalini, Shalini, I can’t … my mother …’ Charu was sliding into a deliciously delirious state and at the same time fearing what was set in motion; it must be the green rose, she thought. She felt Shalini lunge over her with her full thighs. ‘Beautiful creeper, the most beautiful creeper yet to be in my garden, with my queen-of-the-night and my green rose … I’ll keep you, I’ll keep you …’ Shalini whispered while holding on fiercely to Charu. Charu felt the full corporeal reality of Shalini’s body now. She had bathed, was warm and ready, like a tuned-up drum. Her earth-coloured body was ready for seed. She twisted like a snake coupling with another, writhing in the sands.
This was everything that Charu had been wanting for months. Yet why was there distress on her face?
‘You look sad,’ Shalini said, wanting to hold her feet and offer Charu her love. The next second she was falling at Charu’s feet, her breast touching her knee.
In the vehemence of her stumbling the buttons on her blouse tore open.
Shalini leaned her head on Charu’s thigh and embraced her legs. Overwhelmed with tender feelings, she felt Shalini’s hot breath. Charu’s hair rose in a thrill of tenderness and she caressed Shalini’s loosened hair.
Touching full breasts she had never touched, Charu felt faint.
As in a dream she pressed them. As the strength of her legs ebbed Shalini sat her down and held her close. Charu’s hunger, so far subconsciously brewing, suddenly raged, and she cried out like a child in distress, ‘Ma!’ Shalini leaned Charu against her breasts, fed her …
Then she took off her sari, spread it on the ground, and lay on it hugging Charu close to her, weeping, tears flowing helplessly.
When Charu woke up, her head was in Shalini’s lap; her cheek was pressed into her naked belly. Shalini’s fingers were caressing her back, her ears, her head. Charu felt disoriented as if she had become a stranger to herself. Where am I? How did I get here? Who is this woman? A series of questions erupted in her mind. Charu looked up at Shalini like a lost child. Shalini smiled down at her, gloriously. ‘Your mother will be home soon. Come, let’s go down,’ she said in a caring motherly tone. Charu got up mutely, patted down the wrinkles in her dishevelled sari, most of which had come unravelled.
‘Come I’ll fix your hair,’ Shalini said, drawing the discomposed strands of Charu’s hair together in her hand and recomposing it into order. ‘You need to wash off your make-up, take off your sari and get back into your manly garb before your mother returns. She mustn’t see you like this—all dolled up and utterly butterly sexy,’ Shalini said, prodding Charu’s ribs gently.
Charu was torn between wanting to stay and wanting to run away without looking back. It wasn’t her mother that she was afraid of; something told her that Vaiku had a pact with Shalini and would bring Mrs Guha home only when she got a signal from Shalini that the coast was clear. It was Shalini that she was afraid of. She wanted to run away because she was embarrassed to think of what stupid mistakes she might have made while making love to her. Did she grope and fumble like an inexperienced goose? Did she stick her finger in the wrong places? Such a novice she was, unexposed to either heterosexual or lesbian sex! And yet like a fool she dared to make love for the first time in her life to a woman who had probably made love to both men and women a thousand times before.
If Charu was an amateur dribbler, Shalini was a professional player, for how skilfully she played Charu’s body, sensitizing her every pore to the touch of her nimble fingertips.
Love was made in such a rush; like an avalanche they had dived headlong into an eddy of passion without much foreplay. It must have been the damned green rose that made her do it; the smell, so unlike the smell of a rose, lingered inside Charu still. Perhaps, Charu thought, the green rose was an aphrodisiac upon inhaling which Charu must have gone berserk. Oh how geeky she must now look to Shalini.
To Shalini Charu looked stricken; her breast grew tender with affection for the poor beautiful girl. Something familial tugged at her heart and she reached out to cup Charu’s face in her hand and plant a soft kiss on her forehead.
‘Don’t worry, you were fine; next time we’ll do it when the queen-of-the-night awakens,’ said Shalini, as if she were assuring her daughter that all would be okay and she would ace her exams.
But what could Shalini Mahapatra do? Over time, she had developed a protective attitude towards Charu. Many an afternoon she would step out into the sun on her rooftop terrace to dry her hair, for the idea of subjecting her hair to the torture of a hairdryer appalled Shalini. Out of the corner of her eye she would see Mrs Guha’s daughter, the one that Shanks had identified as ‘one of us’, gazing at her from the balcony of her house. Shalini would
feel privileged at being stared at so worshipfully by a gorgeous younger woman, but at the same time she would also feel a strong kinship with the girl. Like her the girl must be terrifyingly alone in her accursed existence, consumed day and night by passions that she was neither able to express nor expunge. Silent victims, they all were, of the tyranny of biological imperatives. Since that time Shalini had resolved to look out for Charu.
Recomposed, Charu sought Shalini’s permission to leave. They embraced tightly; never before had Charu felt so succulently embraced, so juicily befriended by anyone.
‘Because it’s not traditional; because it’s so sterile yet so seductive,’ shouted Shalini as Charu was on her way out of the door.
Startled by Shalini’s sudden outburst, Charu stopped in her tracks and looked at her, puzzled.
‘The green rose, Charulata; you wanted to know why I love the green rose despite its ugliness, and I gave you the reason.’
Later, when Charu had met the women of Laadli Chaurasia’s house, Shalini’s words about the green rose would resonate.
Shankari Vaikundeshwari, Shalini Mahapatra, Charulata Guha, Laadli Chaurasia, and the many other strange blooms in the city of New Delhi, the rosa monstrosas, congeries of sepals—never will they find a place in a traditional garden of red roses.
4
Thus Shalini became Charu’s first lover. This made her visit to the residence of Mrs Guha imminent. For how long could a lover resist the urge to visit her fellow lover, spectacularly smitten as she was by the beauty of the light brown mole on the right side of the latter’s finely clefted chin?
Days and nights after Charu’s visit to Shalini’s house, Shalini dreamt of the mole and the clefted chin, and her desire to behold them again burned like a furnace within. Since the evening of her departure, Charu had stopped appearing on the balcony of her house to gaze at Shalini. Shalini too had interrupted her hair-drying routine in the mid-day sun by staying indoors and listlessly turning the hairdryer on at ‘low’.
The Green Rose Page 6