Why was Mrs Vaikundeshwari organizing a pool party, asked Mrs Guha with genuine wonderment in her voice. Weren’t they too old for that kind of thing?
Mrs Vaikundeshwari laughed and said that the party was intended for Alia’s friends but since she knew that no force on earth could persuade Mrs Guha to allow Charu to go to the pool party alone, Mrs Guha was very welcome to join in the fun, said Vaiku, with a wink aimed, thought Mrs Guha, at Charu.
Some of the body language that Vaiku used even when she was sober appeared anomalous to Mrs Guha; it seemed so out of place, coming as it did from the body of a mother with a daughter the age of Charu. The winking induced a slight jolt in Mrs Guha’s composure, as did the very jugular shrugging of the shoulder with which Vaiku said, ‘Oh and don’t drag Guha Babu to the party—it’s not for him. There won’t be too many men from the cadre, just Alia’s college friends.’
At times, Mrs Guha couldn’t tell what age bracket Vaiku belonged to. She had the reputation of being very popular with Alia’s college friends and was to be found in cafes and clubs in the company of young women. She was a bundle of contradictions to Mrs Guha—the quintessential auntie who cupped Charu’s face within her hands or caressed Charu’s hair, running her long artistic fingers through her thick, curly tresses, in a gesture of maternal love—while also being the carefree femme fatale, swooping down to buckle her shoe straps and in the process letting her sari pallu slip off her blouse to expose her inner bodice.
To Mrs Guha, the salvation was that the falling of the sari pallu more often than not took place in the presence of women.
So it was fixed that Charu would go to Mrs Vaikundeshwari’s pool party along with Mrs Guha, though Mrs Guha had a hunch that she was invited only by default, that somehow the party wasn’t like the kind of party that Mrs Vaikundeshwari usually organized.
6
That day Charu primped in front of the mirror. Mrs Guha hadn’t seen Charu spend so much time and labour in beautifying herself like this before. She wished Charu would put the same effort before appearing in front of a roomful of potential grooms and their parents.
It was not that Charu was averse to primping in general, but there was something special, Mrs Guha thought, about the seriousness, care and enthusiasm with which her daughter was putting on her Christian Dior make-up that day. Charu was even humming a Bollywood tune as she rushed back and forth between the bathroom, vanity room and bedroom. Had Mrs Guha sufficient linguistic capital at her disposal, she would describe Charu’s rushing back and forth as ‘flitting’.
Her daughter was flitting all over the house like a twinkle-footed little kitty.
The name ‘Radha’ came to Mrs Guha’s mind, as she keenly observed her daughter. Radha, Mrs Guha had read in books, had flitted around like a ballerina the whole day inside her husband’s house, putting on make-up, taking it off, putting it back, unrolling her sari off her butter-textured body, putting it back along with a more matching piece of choli and petticoat, tying her hair this way and that. Radha laboured on those special days, days at the end of which the call of Krishna’s flute would come from the darkness outside her house. Waiting for the call impatiently, Radha would become irritable and frisky. While her excitement would be aroused by the thought of what the evening was going to bring—a feast of out of the world lovemaking with Krishna in the lush mangroves—she would bristle with irritation at the inevitability of coming back home to the limpid bed of her limpid husband.
While Mrs Guha never approved of Radha’s adulterous escapades into the woods to make love to one who, strictly speaking, wasn’t even her husband, she appreciated the spirit of Radha. There is merit in the laborious preparation that Radha undertook just so she could deliver her very best when the special occasion arrived.
Mrs Guha herself would get into the Radha-like preparatory spirit whenever there was the occasion for a dinner party that the Guhas would arrange for the career-upliftment of Mr Guha. So many of the promotions that Mr Guha had received in the last few years should have been attributed to the superior Radha-like preparations of his wife instead of to just Mr Guha’s luck and talent.
Mrs Guha tried to instill in Charu Radha’s spirit of preparation when prospective grade-A grooms would come to see Charu. She would try and coax her daughter into putting herself in the mindset of Radha and prepare for the visit with a diligence that would ensure the clinching of the deal.
But Charu could not be coaxed. Far from preparing herself for the auspicious moment, she would threaten Mrs Guha with the prospect of alighting spontaneously on the boy, meaning thereby that she would not put on extra make-up just to please him.
If a boy wanted a girl as his wife then he should be willing to see her in her natural state, not in a made-up-for-the occasion state; that is deception, Charu would say feigning feminist outrage.
Giving up on the hope of expecting anything from Charu in this area, Mrs Guha, true to herself, would compensate for her daughter’s laggardness by doing whatever preparation she was required to do as a prospective giver-away of her daughter’s hand, in order to make an event like this successful: she would get busy creating delicious dishes for the arriving party, and would begin to make suitable alterations in the home decor in case the arriving party wanted to take a tour of the house, as it was customary in the city of New Delhi for a prospecting groom’s family to take a tour of the house to which they came to see a prospective daughter-in-law.
Mrs Guha would begin her preparation at least two to three days in advance of the appointed day. She would flit and flit around the big house, like a frenzied butterfly, cooking, cleaning, polishing and instructing her maids.
That day, which would culminate at Mrs Vaiku’s pool party, Charu was flitting around the house in the Radha-like spirit that her mother had never before seen her don.
Mrs Guha couldn’t help feeling resentful. If only her daughter had put the same amount of care in the putting together and the decoration of herself when the Mukherjees had come to the Guha residence with Ajoy, their Harvard-trained economist son! Things would have turned out to be so different then.
When the Mukherjees had arrived, Charu had come down in a pair of loose-fitting garments that were clearly bought from some cheap store in Janpath. The coarse flannel shirt with the sleeves scandalously rolled up revealed the delicate blue veins on her forearm in a most vulgarly mannish kind of way; the posterior of her unwashed blue jeans hung alarmingly low as if it wanted to drape, not the wearer’s buttocks, but the ground on which Charu stood.
All in all Charu resembled a teenage boy that day. Had the Mukherjees not known that Charu was the Guha’s only born, they would have easily mistaken the person they saw before them to be a son of the Guha household. Ajoy then would have said ‘Hello Rahul, I’m Ajoy and I’m here to meet your sister.’ They would have become mutually back-slapping, hearty brothers-in-law, united in their common yet divergent love for Charu.
But upon seeing Charu, a feeling that was quite the reverse of amity was sparked off in the mind of Ajoy. The disappointment on his face was so palpable that one would think he was looking, not at a beautiful young woman dressed in flagrantly male costume, but at a lorry driver in a lungi and a smelly undershirt with holes in it, wolfing rice from a tapori and strutting the shop floors with the smell of garlic on his breath.
Ajoy hated women in loose pants and shirts; the very image turned him off sexually. Many an otherwise attractive woman had accosted him in America, but he had not wanted to touch their flesh because it was housed inside manly attire.
Indian women looked particularly awful in pants and shirts; in his mind pants and shirts clashed violently with the idea of Indian femininity, an idea that had been instilled in him by his Ma Didimas. While pants and shirts could sit all right on the bodies of Western women (who, in the eyes of men like Ajoy, were a bit masculine to begin with), they would look thoroughly foreign on an Indian woman, as incongruous as a palm tree in Alaska, and spoil whatever innate beau
ty she possessed.
He could never forget the sight of this Indian woman crossing the streets of Cambridge, while he was in his car. In the spirit of courtesy accorded by Bengali gentlemen to women, Ajoy had stopped to let her cross. In the process he had a close look at the woman. What he saw was an Indian woman with long hair and a face that could have sat well on a sari-clad body, but appeared disjointed atop a man’s shirt and a pair of baggy pants. But from her torso downwards she looked like a shapeless twig of neem in ill-fitting garb.
The word ‘centaur’ had passed through Ajoy’s mind. He regretted having wasted his chivalry on this ridiculous figure.
Charu had revived that image momentarily in Ajoy’s head. It was so distasteful, so unnatural, that he shook his head to rid himself of it. He had heard much about the beauty of Mr and Mrs Guha’s daughter. He had seen the photograph of Charu in a sari and so violently had she invaded his dreams that he had urgently wanted to see her in flesh and blood. For Ajoy the excitement of meeting Charu was akin to meeting a delicate red rose, with its face framed in the pallu of a body-clinging chiffon sari with a spoondrift of the pallu end bubbling at her throat.
The photograph had caught more than his eyes: that he might speak with her, walk out with her—he had wanted her that badly. But to see the very same girl, for whom he had flown from Boston to New Delhi by paying an arm and a leg for a peak-season ticket, dressed in a chequered flannel shirt and baggy jeans, was like imagining himself to be in love with a lorry driver, or with one of those ungainly Indian women in American clothing; for Ajoy, even to shortlist Charu as a finalist for the position of a marriage-probable, would be to act like a man who’d gone sweet on an ape.
Mrs Guha had noticed an expression of angry betrayal on Ajoy’s face and knew the enterprise to be doomed no sooner than it had begun. The pain of seeing a topnotch groom slip through her fingers for no good reason other than her daughter’s obstinate nonchalance towards her own marital prospect was in itself a topnotch pain for Mrs Guha.
She seethed silently in discontent as she heard Charu chirpily proclaim her enmity against Indian-Americans like Ajoy. Like the other pseudo-Americans she had the misfortune to meet in the city of New Delhi, Ajoy was a swollen-with-pride hypocritical windbag, mouthing big liberal jargons without understanding their meaning.
You know, Ma, why they come here and say big things?
No, I don’t know, Charu, you tell me.
Because they are hiding something that’s an intrinsic part of them and of which they are not particularly proud.
Oh, and what is that, Charu, their bank balance, maybe?
No, silly, I know you’re being sarcastic out of anger. It’s their inner pig.
Inner pig? asked Mrs Guha genuinely surprised at this new coinage issued by Charu.
Yes, said Charu, their inner chauvinistic pig can’t oink freely in America, so when they come to India to hunt for brides, the pigs go Oink! Oink! Oink! And what’s worse, their annual little bride-hunting junkets to New Delhi are ego trips; they come here to feed their inner pig.
Despite her mounting exasperation, Mrs Guha couldn’t help but laugh at Charu’s image of the Bengali-American male-chauvinistic pig. Hopping on one leg, jutting out her lips to make them look like a snout, making grunting noises, saying, Here, Ma, watch me, I’m a Harvard-educated pig, hungry for the praises heaped on me and the admiring looks thrown my way every time I set foot on the soil of New Delhi, Charu made a heart-warming impersonation of a creature of her imagination.
But the laughter inside Mrs Guha’s mind ended as the sombre truth of the just-concluded matter sank in. Mrs Guha was certain that she would not hear back from the Mukherjees. The Guhas had just lost a boy who could have been a great match for Charu: son of well-placed parents of New Delhi, Bengali with the right blend of the East and West, educated, scholarly, with good English-speaking skills, and most importantly, a Brahmin. This was no joke in the eyes of Mrs Guha. This was a serious mistake …
But wait … paused Mrs Guha to ponder on something momentarily, for in pockets, like pools of standing water collected in the midst of the furiously paced eddies of thoughts, a plan was struggling to solidify. The results could be easily reversed in the Guhas’ favour if only Charu could be roped in as an accomplice.
Clearing her throat, Mrs Guha prepared to share her plan with Charu. Ajoy was in New Delhi for three more weeks—till the beginning of his next semester at Harvard, and he was yet to see the other girls. From Mrs Bagchi, Mrs Guha knew that the Mukherjees had selected Maitreyi, Archana, Tanusree, and Madhumita, amongst others of whom Mrs Guha didn’t know as they lay outside the pale of New Delhi’s elite IAS circle. Of these four daughters of prominently situated IAS officer cadre fathers, she knew, through the active gazeteering of Mrs Bagchi.
‘Had I a daughter, I would invite the Mukherjees over too,’ Mrs Bagchi had said. Ajoy was a great catch and Mrs Guha was confident that Charu, if she would just be a little more normal like the rest of the marriage-prospecting girls of New Delhi, would beat the competition hands down. Charu’s beauty far surpassed that of Maitreyi’s, Archana’s, Tanusree’s and Madhumita’s taken together. Yet because of some mysterious, idiosyncratic principle that she felt she couldn’t compromise on, Charu was about to be booted out of Ajoy’s shortlist of bride-to-be finalists.
This one you can’t just let slip from your hands, Charu, Mrs Guha told Charu in a voice of appeal. Why not call him while he’s in New Delhi?
Charu cut Mrs Guha short. No, Ma, I will not call him and ask him out to have ice cream with me at Nirula’s. I won’t do that though I would love to have ice cream at Nirula’s on any given day! said Charu with fierce determination.
The fierceness of Charu’s protestation took Mrs Guha aback. She, who was used to the verbal duels they fought in the wake of every failed groom-seeing event organized by Mr and Mrs Guha for Charu, felt pierced by her daughter’s latest imperiousness.
For the first time she took the other side and jumped to Ajoy’s defence.
Ajoy was right to be angry! Mrs Guha said. For who would like to see a woman dressed like that, like a taxi driver with no makeup over and above everything else? After all, he had come to see you as a bride, had he wanted a taxi driver he would have gone to the dhaba, no? Poor boy, the insult he must have felt!
Upon hearing her mother compare her to a taxi driver, Charu smiled, for she knew no matter how much she veered away from putting make-up and from dolling herself up in the customarily coy and feminine way when meeting prospective grooms, she could never look like a man, let alone a cabbie.
Besides, she had nothing against wearing a sari and beautifying herself on special occasions. If only standing in front of her that day was Tanusree and not Ajoy or Manish or the hordes of the Rams, the Shyams, the Jodus and the Modhus—people she generally categorized as woman-hungry men—then she would have shringaared herself to the hilt and her mother would not even have recognized her to be the same Charulata.
She heard the name of Tanusree; her mother was saying something that linked together Ajoy and Tanusree.
Tanusree? Tanu? Did her mother mention Tanu as being part of the Mukherjees’ list of brides-to-be for their lousy son?
How distasteful! Simply to contemplate Ajoy and Tanusree as a jori made Charu’s stomach turn. She cared little for Ajoy; he could jorify himself with anybody—an apple, a tree, Deepti, the Guha’s housemaid-in-chief, or with Dhuniya, the sweeper Chunaram’s daughter … and even with Chunaram himself. But a jorification with Tanusree would cut into the core of Charu’s being.
Your friend Tanusree, you know, Mrs Dasgupta’s daughter … Well, Mrs Bagchi told me that Ajoy’s parents have selected her for him to go and see. I’m sure Tanusree won’t be as stupid as you and not seize upon this opportunity to net a good quality America-settled Bengali Brahmin boy!
Tanu’s name fell like a droplet of cool aromatic attar on Charu’s skin, seeped in and aroused in her mind a shimmering hologram of a
woman, slender and long limbed, with a complexion that was exactly the tint of translucent nimbu pani in the height of summer. She had huge dark eyes and her face was long and perfect in its symmetry; she was by far the most beautiful creature she had ever beheld, of a loveliness beyond imagining.
Charu cleared her throat, which was suddenly swollen and dry.
Whispering in inaudible syllables Charu said, ‘Tanu!’
Tanu, her mother said, was to be seen by Ajoy. The Mukherjees would go to the Dasgupta house shortly to facilitate a match-making between the Dasguptas’ daughter and the Mukherjees’ son.
It’s a shame, Mrs Guha muttered to herself. Such a shame that somebody like Tanusree, who was far less beautiful than Charu, would get to clinch Ajoy as a husband. She imagined the worst-case scenario to be an invitation to the marriage of Ajoy and Tanusree, an invitation they would be unable to turn down because such an action would be calamitous for Mr Guha’s career.
Will not the Dasguptas secretly gloat over their victory?
Imagine attending the wedding of the boy who could easily have been our son-in-law, Mrs Guha said with a sadness emanating from the thought of the imminent wedding ceremony of Ajoy Mukherjee and Tanusree Dasgupta.
And her Charu would be permanently single, like that fat cow of a woman who keeps the strange house in the neighbourhood. This she said aloud for Charu’s ears, hoping that the spectre of living the rest of her life as a husbandless fat cow would raise the hackles in her daughter.
Holding a point of view that was the Manichean opposite of her mother’s, Charu liked Chaurasia Bibi, the woman who allegedly ‘ran’ the house known as Laadli’s house. She had turned down one wedding proposal after another till the time she grew so fat that proposals stopped coming her way.
Charu hadn’t met her yet but from what she heard of Laadli Chaurasia, she construed the picture of a large yet independent-minded, self-assured woman. Perhaps her largeness of mind had by osmosis trickled down to constitute a largeness of physical frame.
The Green Rose Page 9