The Green Rose

by Sharmila Mukherjee

  Something paradigm-shifting had to happen.

  One weekday afternoon, when the streets of New Delhi were scorching hot, so hot you could fry fish on them, the doorbell of the Guha residence rang like a siren. Though the Guha’s bell emitted only the soft chimes of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, that afternoon it rang with a piercing shrillness giving an impression that the presser of the bell was suffering from a high degree of emotional commotion and was subsequently not quite in control of what she was doing. As was her custom on hot weekday afternoons, Mrs Guha was lying belly up on her bed, lulled into sleep by the cool of her air-conditioned room, while Charu was cocooned in her own air-conditioned oasis, doing what, nobody could tell because she had locked the door of her room from the inside and stuffed the keyhole with cotton wool. The servants were asleep in the servants’ quarters in the back of the house, away from the ear-piercing sound of the doorbell that particular afternoon.

  No visitors were expected at the Guha residence that day.

  In Greater Kailash, the reigning code of etiquette was singularly Western: visitors, whether they be your mother, father, sister or brother, or the very bestest of your childhood friends, couldn’t alight upon you unannounced. They had to phone you or email you well in advance to set up an appointment to visit. The visiting code had been enforced with special strictness by Mr Guha. After him, Mrs Guha followed suit.

  So the doorbell, ringing that day with such high-pitched persistence, produced an all-round startlement in the house. Who could it be at this ghostly hour of the afternoon? And how impertinent of whoever it was to come thus without advance notice! Mrs Guha had jumped out of her skin. Clutching the extreme end of her sari pallu, lest it come unravelled, Mrs Guha bundled out of her bed, slipped into her indoor sandals, quickly did her face and hair in front of the mirror (for on principle, Mrs Guha never appeared in front of outsiders dishevelled), and started to walk down the stairs. From the staircase she witnessed what she construed as a motile object, hurtling across space with supersonic speed towards the door. It was Charu, dressed as usual in a pair of baggy trousers and a chequered half-sleeved shirt. That afternoon Charu could well have been a young man in the half-soporific eyes of Mrs Guha.

  By virtue of an old habit she was about to stop Charu in her tracks and ask her to first change into something decent before answering the door. But something in Charu’s frenetic dashing made her desist from that action. Charu was flying at the door with a sense of urgency that comes from knowing who it was on the other side.

  Upon seeing her mother come down the stairs, Charu shrieked, ‘It’s okay, Ma, I’ll get the door, you go back to sleep!’ She held up her hands to Mrs Guha in the manner of a traffic policeman holding up a stop sign at a busy intersection. But Mrs Guha didn’t stall. She pretended not to hear Charu and glided down the stairs, matching her daughter’s speed with her own accelerated pace. She had smelled something funny and was determined to reach the door ahead of Charu to see who was ringing the doorbell with such muscular energy.

  Enlivened with a spirit that enters only mothers like Mrs Guha to help them protect their daughters from unnameable yet potentially threatening forces, Mrs Guha got to the door before Charu, though in a last-minute bid Charu too made a lunge for the doorknob.

  No sooner had Mrs Guha opened the door, like a Garuda-sized bird rushing in, flapping its gigantic wings, was a gust of wind so strong that Mrs Guha’s sari pallu flew out of her control and she shrieked involuntarily in Bengali: Ore baba eta ke re, Charu! Charu didn’t know what to say, as she stood transfixed behind Mrs Guha, looking helplessly at the figure of Shalini Mahapatra that stormed past Mrs Guha in Medea-like fury, shaking a bouquet of what Mrs Guha perceived to be overgrown coriander leaves at Charu.

  Were Baba to witness this spectacle he would have said excitedly, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,’ Charu thought. Indeed, nothing excited Mr Guha more than the flesh-and-blood incarnation of a Western literary idiom. But the sight of Shalini charging at her like a raging bull inspired only a fear in Charu’s breast, a fear of exposure in front of her mother. For any moment, Shalini might blurt something so compromising as to shock and anger Mrs Guha into a more draconian moral policing of Charu’s life.

  Please, please, Shalini, don’t say a thing, please control your anger, please, was what revolved like a ticker in Charu’s head.

  But Shalini simply wailed melodramatically, I waited for you! All morning and all afternoon I waited for you and you never came! You stood me up! Charu saw that tears were forming in the corner of Shalini’s eyes making them mistier than usual. Shalini’s misty eyes held great sexual appeal for Charu, thus the sight of them growing mistier aroused Charu. Had it not been for her mother, Charu would have rushed over to Shalini, grabbed her by the waist and stopped her mouth with a passionate kiss.

  Shalini was looking enticingly wan, wearing her blacksnake hair coiled in a knot and adorned with flowers of the ember-champak and the heady fragrant screw pine. The bush of green rose seemed to spring organically from her hands, as if Shalini herself had birthed them especially for Charu.

  Stupid me, thought Charu in self-reproachment, to waste an opportunity to avail of such beauty offered so freely on a silver platter! How silly of me to give in to paltry fears of what my mother would think!

  At that moment her mother, not Shalini, seemed to Charu to be the intruder, an intolerable incongruity in this tableau vivant of a same-sex loverly tiff. She wished with all her heart for Mrs Guha to vanish into another realm far, far away from where Charu was at that moment, wanting to act like a normal lover and pacify Shalini’s cute tempest in a tea cup.

  A mother, the enemy of her daughter’s happiness and freedom! The thought resounded with unnaturalness and cruelty in Charu’s mind, making her feel guilty and ashamed.

  With eyes downcast, Charu offered tepid apologies both to Mrs Guha and Shalini. Suddenly Shalini became cognizant of Mrs Guha’s presence and turned a deep shade of pink. Blushing profusely, Shalini quietened down and mumbled, ‘Namaste auntieji. Sorry to disturb you but Charu promised to help me in my nursery. With my green roses.’

  Charu heaved a sigh of relief. The situation had been managed; dust had been thrown into Mrs Guha’s razor-sharp, dissecting eyes.

  But not a mote of dust stuck in Mrs Guha’s eyes. Not a droplet of dew fogged up her vision. Her mind may have been thrown temporarily into a tizzy of confusion, caused by the sudden transpiring of unexpected activities, but optically she was as incisive as a lizard on the prowl for prey.

  What she saw clearly was an act of grave violation of codes of etiquette on the part of her next-door Oriya neighbour. What audacity the woman possessed to ring the Guhas’ doorbell so ferociously, acting like it was her own mamarbari! Even greater audacity to rush in through the door like a bhutni with her tail on fire. Not only did she not pay her respects to Mrs Guha, but she also fouled up the air with that awful smelling bunch of hideously mutated dhaniya leaves. How spidery they looked; how bad they smelled!

  Gritting her teeth in anger, Mrs Guha had a good mind to place two thunderous slaps on the Oriya woman’s rouged cheeks.

  There is a saying in Bengali that if you want to get to the grass that stands green and tempting on the other side of a mighty stallion, it’s best to seek the horse’s permission before you proceed. Figuratively speaking, Shalini made the mistake of jumping over the stallion to get to the grass, thereby inciting a stampede of angry emotions in the beast’s breast.

  ‘Auntieji!’ Mrs Guha shouted at Shalini. ‘The impudence you have of calling me auntieji when you barge into my house uninvited in the middle of the afternoon, ignore my presence just because somebody has not helped you tend to your pots of bad-smelling dhaniya leaves!’

  What truly upset Mrs Guha was hard to guess: was it the fact of Shalini addressing her as ‘auntieji’, or was it the fact of not being paid respects to by an Oriya?

  Wasn’t it illogical for Shalini, a woman in her mid-forties (bu
t looking like she was in her twenties), to address Mrs Guha, a woman barely in her mid-fifties, as ‘auntieji?’ Again, was not Mrs Guha justified in turning bellicose upon being addressed as ‘auntieji’ by an Oriya woman?

  Mrs Guha hated that word, as much as she hated words like ‘daddyji’, ‘mommyji’, and ‘babyji’, because they ‘ji’-fied, in the crassest of Punjabi ways, the sacrosanct nature of kinship.

  Being a true-blue Bengali for whom the city of New Delhi was not a habitation of choice (if only the British didn’t move the central government from Calcutta to Delhi things would have been different for her, Mrs Guha said often, affecting a mood of historical lamentation in her tone), Mrs Guha hated the Punjabi culture that surrounded her continually like Saturn’s rings. Everything Punjabi grated on her nerves. How sweet, like sondesh, the Bengali ‘mashima’ sounded compared to the Punjabi ‘auntieji.’ What a horrible half-English, half-Hindi word was ‘auntieji’, connoting neither warmth nor respect! But that’s how, Mrs Guha reasoned, the Punjabis of New Delhi spoke—without warmth or respect, but with a lot of bhangra-brashness. Bad as words like ‘auntieji’ sounded when they rolled off the tongues of Punjabis, they sounded worse when emanating from the mouth of an Oriya.

  On the other side, Shalini’s anger also grew exponentially.

  To insult her green roses was to drive a sharp-stemmed screw through the core of Shalini’s very being. So while Charu prepared to assuage Mrs Guha’s anger, Shalini exploded into hers. A small-scale pandemonium ensued.

  For long Shalini had tolerated with patience and politeness the baleful looks that Mrs Guha had thrown her way whenever they crossed paths in New Delhi. Laadli too had a similar experience with Mrs Guha, only Shanks had managed to extract friendship from the woman, probably because Shanks was an expert in the art of camouflaging.

  ‘That woman, I tell you, has an internal radar that picks up subterranean signals to which others are oblivious; if this were the US I would call her a pathological homophobe,’ Laadli had told Shalini once.

  But Shalini wasn’t bothered by Mrs Guha’s homophobic vibes; what did it matter what a round-faced Bengali woman with thin arms and a belly that jutted out like a corpulent balloon thought about her sexuality? Her atrocious English, her social faux pas and her fixation about the sanctity of her daughter’s reputation made Mrs Guha herself a laughing stock in the IAS circles of New Delhi. Some called her a buffoon even, a complete mismatch for her elegant husband.

  But today it was different. Mrs Guha had crossed boundaries today. Imagine insulting Shalini’s green roses! How dare she refer to them as gutter-smelling fake dhaniya leaves?

  ‘Mrs Guha, I am offended,’ said a vexed Shalini; she looked around the living room purposefully till her eyes settled on a Japanese flower vase.

  ‘Very pretty, will go perfectly with my roses,’ Shalini murmured under her breath; trotting over to the vase she picked it up in her hands and examined it microscopically.

  Clouds of anxiety rumbled inside Charu; was Shalini intending to drop the vase from her hands? It was one of her mother’s most cherished possessions. But nothing like that happened; satisfied with the inspection, she stuck the rose bunch in it and walked over to the dinner table.

  Situating the vase with the green rose carefully in the centre of the table, she turned round to face Mrs Guha. ‘Put some water in the vase when I’m gone, Charu,’ she instructed Charu in a tone of authority. ‘Mrs Guha, your vase goes well with my rose; they complement each other.’ Mrs Guha stood still, probably seething inwardly with emotions that were best not explicated in words.

  ‘Mrs Guha, these roses that you see, they are fine quality roses, of very aristocratic origin; very rare, to be found only in the homes of people who are discerning floral collectors. Thus you will not find them in the homes of anybody in Greater Kailash.’ In many words, Shalini conveyed to Mrs Guha that she was a woman of good taste.

  The woman has some nerves, Mrs Guha thought, to come into my house without prior notice in the middle of the day, to break my sleep, to ignore me and address my daughter, to manhandle my best vase, and then to lecture me about some ugly, odoriferous leafy structures that she calls roses! And she does all this with so much righteousness of attitude!

  Mrs Guha didn’t particularly like being lectured about cultivating roses by somebody like Mrs Mahapatra, who she believed was a horticultural pretender, not a real gardener. Mrs Guha was the real gardener, growing real roses in a real garden in the back of her house. Not only had her roses been praised by dignitaries from all over the world, but they also almost made it to the Ideal Home and Garden magazine.

  Mrs Guha however, her anger notwithstanding, was losing the war to Shalini.

  The war that was afoot between Mrs Mahapatra and Mrs Guha on an intolerably humid July afternoon was a war of words, a contest of eloquence. Eloquence wasn’t Mrs Guha’s forte. She could only burst out in anger or joy or sadness, not engage in elocutionary jousting.

  Shalini, on the other hand, was eloquence personified. On their first meeting Charu discovered Shalini’s way with words; she was a witty, well-spoken, thoughtful and sensuous woman. As Shalini spoke spiritedly in defence of the green rose, the needle on Charu’s personal admiration metre rose sharply. Coming from her, the green rose no longer seemed like a floral entity; it was the very insignia, the soul-made flesh, of Shalini’s philosophy of life.

  As much as Charu rooted for Shalini, she also felt sorry for her mother, who just couldn’t bring herself to speak. Chagrin had sealed her lips. But Charu knew that the lips would unseal after Shalini left.

  As Charu saw Shalini off at the door, Shalini slipped a chit of paper into Charu’s hand and Charu, in turn slipped something back—a little round object—into Shalini’s. The mini-transaction escaped Mrs Guha’s notice because she was preoccupied with plans of how to rescue her Japanese vase from the unsightly bush that Shalini had planted in it.

  ‘Get that out of my way, Charu,’ Mrs Guha ordered her daughter, pointing in the direction of the green rose cluster. Quietly Charu obeyed her mother, thinking it better to obey her harmless wish than to cross her and make her angrier still.

  ‘The smell is so bad it gives me a headache,’ Mrs Guha mumbled to herself. ‘Loneliness must have driven the woman crazy, naa re, Charu?’ Mrs Guha asked in a surprisingly subdued voice.

  ‘Poor thing, why don’t you drop by her place now and then? Maybe help her out with her gardening, teach her a thing or two … but don’t get into all that green rose foze nonsense, one mustn’t make mockery of one’s roses.’

  The words that Mrs Guha said came as a revelation to Charu. Was she hearing right? Instead of banning Charu from having further social intercourse with Shalini, her mother was actually encouraging her to strike up a friendship with Shalini next door! To allay Shalini’s loneliness! What had overcome her mother today? Was the green rose essence working its charm on her as well?

  Striving hard to contain the delight that bubbled up in her mind, Charu sombrely said, ‘Yes, Ma, I will try to be a good friend to Mrs Mahapatra.’

  ‘Oh, and if you want you can put the dhaniya leaves in your room, in that glass vessel we got from Janpath last month,’ said Mrs Guha before she retired for the afternoon to her bed.

  An enormous burden was lifted from Charu’s mind. She would be able to keep the roses, albeit in a cheap twenty rupees glass vase. Holding the green rose bunch in one hand, she softly caressed the roses with the other.

  ‘A lesbian mascot, from one Indian lesbian to another,’ was written on the top of the piece of paper that Shalini had passed on to Charu. The vapours arising from the rose had a declogging effect on her nerves, allowing her to imbibe a wide array of perfumes, an eclectic mixture that comforted her, transported her to the doughy spot on Shalini’s lap, where Charu had had her best sleep yet.

  In her room, away from the prying eyes of the world, Charu read Shalini’s note:

  A lesbian mascot, from one Indian lesbian to an
other

  You are my little green rose

  With time I imagine you growing into a lovely creeper of green roses

  I’ll be your wall around which you remain entwined

  Please take care of the bunch I gave you

  Their life is in your hands, for they don’t propagate

  They are seedless. If you don’t nurture the one you have, it’ll die. There won’t be any after this

  For they don’t have seeds

  They’re different

  We are different

  Today’s garden is filled with red roses. They all look alike. They all smell alike.

  In today’s garden there is no place for the green roses

  They are called monsters, so they have to make a place of their own, separate, outside the main garden

  But they will persist

  One day not only will they gain their rightful place in the garden of the red roses, but will also spread the green hue in the heart of red

  Yours in love,

  Shalini

  Something was moving inside Charu, as if a map was being redrawn, borders were being reconstituted, countries were shrinking into provinces and provinces were expanding into countries. The contours of a new globe were being minted as she read Shalini’s letter.

  The letter exceeded a love letter by a single individual. She felt like she was being written to by members of a fully formed political apparatus that had a working philosophy and a mission of its own. The political apparatus wanted to assure her that she was not alone, that there were many like her, floating in the great metropolis, invisibly, insularly, in an identity-less vacuum, waiting and dreaming, dreaming and conversing with ghosts, despairing of a time when they would be able to live real material lives—of householders, lovers, parents, children—on terms of their own identity. For the first time Charu felt sure that she could love a woman and the woman would love her back and their love would not be dispersed like a hollow whisper in the wind. Their love would find traction in the solid world of material reality.