The Green Rose

by Sharmila Mukherjee

  Jhansi Ki Raani of the lesbians, the boys in the colony of Greater Kailash jeeringly referred to her.

  But to Charu a real Jhansi Ki Raani she was, giving protection in her house to an ‘endangered species’, she was quoted to have said to the newspapers, ‘biding time for the centuries-old storm to pass before they could safely venture into society again.’

  By the storm she had meant article 177 of the Indian Constitution. Charu had Googled it up. The very diabolicity of the article, juxtaposed as it were with progressive and modern elements in the Constitution, had shocked her. The discovery only increased her respect for Laadli. For years, Laadli Chaurasia had risked her own personal reputation and safety to actively campaign for the removal of the brutish article from the Indian Constitution.

  Charu had never been inside Laadli’s house but knew it to be a good house for socially marginalized women. She knew that only women lived there and only women visited the place. There was a rumour that men were debarred from entering it.

  Perhaps one day she and Tanu could live happily ever after in that house.

  Mrs Guha shuddered at yet another hastily imagined future scenario: In that scenario some unforeseen disaster befell the Guhas and Charu was left alone, without the protecting umbrella of her parents. Unable to fend for herself, she ended up in ‘that’ house where lived the female scum of New Delhi—unmarried and unmarriageable women gathered from various parts of the country.

  The mention of Laadli’s house inevitably conjured up visions of her widowed Pishi’s abode in Varanasi for Mrs Guha.

  The life of a widow! That’s the life that her grand-aunt Santu Pishi lived in that horrible charnel house in Varanasi.

  Chee, Chee I shouldn’t think such inauspicious thoughts! Charu’s mother shrieked internally in horror, making wild circular motions around Charu like an exorcist driving out evil spirit.

  As a child Charu had a few sightings of Santu Pishi in the house of her maternal grandparents. She had wanted to hail her by name but Santu Pishi was always scurrying from one room to another like a ghost as though afraid that she would melt away were she to come in contact with flesh-and-blood humans. She consciously avoided any direct encounter with Charu whom she knew to be the Bilet-educated government officer’s daughter. They had told her that the officer would be very angry if she were to speak with the little girl-child, stuffing old ideas into her young head. Upon spying Charu from yards away, the grand-aunt would bend her head low and walk away in the opposite direction.

  Santu Pishi’s head was an object of great fascination for Charu, for in her universe nobody else had a head that was so shorn of the minutest of hair follicles. It was as though she were proscribed from displaying any sign of life on her head.

  When Charu asked her mother about the state of extreme barrenness in which the grand-aunt’s head lived, Mrs Guha said that where Santu Pishi lived women were prone to have lice in their hair, so it was to prevent lice from growing on her head that Santu Pishi shaved her hair off.

  Charu believed then that Santu Pishi truly lived in a charnel house.

  It amused Charu to note that her mother saw little difference between an atavistic charnel house of impoverished widows and a modern meaningful social institution like Laadli’s place.

  Laadli’s house was not a lice-den, Charu told her mother. Lesbians were women who also had, like normal women, heads full of lush hair.

  And Laadli certainly wasn’t living the life of the Santu Pishis of this world!

  7

  Laadli Chaurasia had an American spouse named Vinnie Brown. Vinnie Brown spent half the year in her house and the other half in her hometown in California.

  Vinnie was a political activist, a self-proclaimed crusader against all the homo-haters, whether they were in India or in America.

  ‘I don’t like women who fight,’ said Charu, gathering from Shalini that Vinnie was a combative lesbian.

  ‘It’s not unwomanly to be a fighter, Charu. We should be grateful to American lesbians like her; they give visibility to our struggles whereas we, Indian lesbians, we prefer to remain invisible. We just sit here and hide our true faces from the world and don’t do anything to change things … Laadli is lucky to have a spouse like Vinnie!’

  ‘Spouse? You mean to say they are lovers right? As in girlfriend-to-girlfriend lovers, spurning men, making love to one another … you know, the way you and I were in the beginning?’

  Charu wanted to be sure, for Shalini often used words loosely. She navigated between categories sweepingly, as if they were all one and the same.

  Lovers: yes, it was possible to imagine Laadli and Vinnie as lovers; for lately, a lot of women in the English-speaking circles of New Delhi were starting to adopt girlfriends. ‘Meet Ravina, my girlfriend,’ a married woman, mother of three to four teens, would say to her circle with a flicker of mischief in her eyes. And they would understand. Why? Wasn’t Charu herself, boldly, in the face of her mother’s silent yet terrifying indictment, walking into malls, restaurants and movie theatres with Shalini by her side? Couldn’t everybody tell by their body language that Shalini was Charu’s ‘girlfriend’?

  But marriage between two women? That would be ideal but well-nigh impossible; how many women in the city of New Delhi would dare to contemplate marriage with another woman, even if the other woman was an American? Charu shivered at the thought of what the consequences of a holy matrimony between two lesbians would be. Not only will the Hanuman brigade of New Delhi burn the mandap down, but they will also castrate both ‘husband’ and ‘wife’.

  ‘Laadli and Vinnie are husband and wife, just like Biju and me,’ Shalini said, entwining one index finger with the other to demonstrate the tightness of Laadli and Vinnie’s sacred matrimonial bonding.

  ‘Married in the right proper way?’ Charu asked, her pupils dilating and her eyebrows arching in surprise. She was a sceptic.

  ‘Yes, married in the right proper Hindu way in Kalighat.’

  ‘In Kalighat?’ Charu was astounded. That’s where girls eloped to, to marry boys their parents didn’t approve of. Charu couldn’t envision an exchange of marriage vows between two girls taking place inside the Kalighat temple. It’s possible on celluloid, like Shabana and Nandita who did the marital embrace on the courtyard of a Sufi temple, but in real life?

  Lesbians getting married in Kalighat! The thought opened a whole new chapter in the book of Charu’s understanding of these matters; Kalighat rose dramatically in Charu’s esteem with this knowledge. Her mother had spoken of the place always in a sombre tone of genuflection, as if nothing but the right and the proper could happen on its premises. Imagine what she would say to the idea of lesbians getting married in Kalighat! She would without doubt shriekingly equate it with admitting stray dogs and cats into the temple.

  The thought of despoiling sanctities thrilled Charu. If only she could somehow come out of her timid shell and despoil just one big sanctity then Shalini would be hers—in the total, complete, body-and-soul sense in which Charu wanted Shalini.

  Oh how fervently Charu wished Shalini were hers, just hers and not anybody else’s!

  But over time Shalini had become strangely detached from Charu—she loved her still and fed her gourmet wine and cheese, and the two of them still pruned Shalini’s green rose bushes with great care and diligence, and they still held each other when the mutual holding was needed, and they still felt popcorns of desire burst between their thighs (at least Charu felt thus) when fingers ran through thick tresses and limbs got intertwined like trellis work, but at the end of it all Charu felt Shalini was detached; detached from Charu enough to go home and prepare for Biju’s return from Dubai or Muscat or wherever the shit Biju travelled to, to convene meetings with foreign medical dignitaries.

  There were times when Charu had doubts—about Shalini’s lesbian credentials. Here she was—Charu, the beautiful Charu, whom men would give an arm and a leg just to kiss—freely offering herself to Shalini, yet Shalini wouldn�
�t take her in the way she wanted to be taken. Something was gravely wrong in the picture. It was Shalini: Shalini, Charu at times believed, was really a heterosexual who was a recreational lesbian on the side.

  Every time Charu raised the issue of the authenticity of Shalini’s homosexuality, the older woman flared up in protest.

  She would insist that there were many ways to be a lesbian, not just one. If it was okay for Charu to pursue her lesbian dreams in her own way, why was it wrong for Shalini to pursue hers in the uniquely ‘Shalini’ way.

  ‘There’s nothing to explain or analyze, Charu; this is me and that is you and we are both lesbians and we stick together to forward our cause. My being Biju’s wife doesn’t spoil anything, doesn’t make me any less lesbionic than you.’

  Then she would remind Charu of her own complicity with heterosexuality. Didn’t she herself still toy with the idea of marrying a boy of her parents’ choosing, just in case, just in case …?

  ‘Alone,’ Charu filled in Shalini’s unfinished thoughts with the terrifying bombshell of a word: ‘Alone!’ Just in case she never found a woman to mate with, just in case she fell alone, with parents long dead, growing old meaninglessly, like a smote of dust in the universe, floating around, adhering herself to nobody and getting kicked out if by chance she fell into a seemly eye or two. To be left alone, a spinster, in the city of New Delhi, would be like living in total darkness, dehumanizing.

  Yes, of course, once upon a time, Charu had her very own Biju—Akash Mehra—whom she had sent that one SOS-type email after her father’s death and her mother’s sudden sickness. She remembered how she had desperately sought his marital protection, assuring him that she would just need to be his wife in name only, not in reality, because she was a lesbian and couldn’t fulfil heterosexual wifely duties.

  At this Akash had offered his condolences (hearing about Mr Guha’s death) and had expressed solidarity with Charu’s ‘alternative’ sexuality. He had said he understood a fellow homosexual’s plight in India. He could not marry her but she could always count on him as her most trusted gay brother-in-arms.

  ‘Didn’t you think Akash would be a safe husband to you?’ Shalini had asked Charu.

  Yes, Akash would have made the perfect husband for Charu, but unlike Biju, Akash was very principled, and wouldn’t marry just for the heck of satisfying a social expectation. He had fled to America instead to live a true gay life.

  Charu thought of Biju; poor Biju, he didn’t have the courage to be anything beyond a pliant tool of society. Charu didn’t envy Biju his so-called ‘good luck’ of having Shalini as his ‘wife’. On the contrary, Charu felt sorry for the man; how much more happier he could’ve been had he a suitable man to share his life with! And how much more sensible it would have been for Shalini to live with Charu instead of Biju.

  Oh but hadn’t Charu read her history books well? Didn’t she know how for survival’s sake, Jews—the world’s most persecuted ethnicity—hid their Jewish identity and intermarried with non-Jews? Did that make them bad Jews? So by marrying a man was Shalini being any less of a lesbian than Charu?

  This was no insolvable paradox: Shalini, the lesbian, could also be Shalini, the good wife to a gay man like Biju.

  ‘I may not be in a homosexual union, but I am passionate about the cause of Indian lesbians and can teach younger lesbians to live out their identities uncompromisingly; show them how not to make the choices that I made,’ Shalini said.

  ‘You need both teachers and doers, believers in the principle and enactors of those very same principles.’

  When Shalini spoke thus in an abstract, lecturing tone, Charu couldn’t help but want to smack her on the head in annoyance.

  It had become habitual on the part of Shalini to identify Charu as the ‘practical’ Indian lesbian, one who just was a lesbian, and herself as the believer in the cause of lesbianism.

  The ‘cause’! Ah yes, the cause—that was Shalini’s pet project in life. The cause was to war against homophobes (which to Charu meant the whole of Indian society), to draw lesbians like Charu out of their foxholes, to make them see that full-throttle lesbian passion was not just a dream but also a possibility.

  ‘Did I not help you realize that, Charu? And aren’t you supposed to help others realize that?’

  Charu liked romance, the romance of burning up with passionate desire for the flesh and the body; she hated politics. All the politics of organizing morchas and meetings, of mobilizing the forces to fight for the cause, to bring the cause into the light of day, to scream out for demands and legislative amendments, to go to court in the company of fat moustachioed women with thick glasses and body odour, took the wind out of Charu’s sail.

  At these times of Shalini’s grim lectures on the cause, Charu didn’t want to be a lesbian anymore, at least not officially.

  How she missed those days of dreaming of and wanting simply to touch Shalini, the sexy, temple-goddess-like Shalini, stepping on to the balcony all ablaze in deityful splendour, drying her long dark hair in the natural warmth of the hot New Delhi sun, allowing the droplets of water to evanesce, little by little, not hurrying anything along.

  The sex and the familiarity had been good, but the wanting, just the mad-crazy wanting had been better.

  Charu had got out of one foxhole, which they call the ‘closet’ in the West, and now she was in another, called love. Hopelessly, irrationally, Charu had fallen in love with Shalini.

  Maybe it would work if she joined the cause and did something for the cause, Shalini would begin to admire her just the way she admired Vinnie and Laadli. Charu had begun to suspect that Shalini saw her as a child still, a child-lesbian who needed to be apprenticed in the ways of responsible and adult lesbianhood.

  ‘It’s a whole way of being, radically different from the heterosexual way of being,’ Shalini had told Charu. ‘You know, Chars, you can’t be a lesbian only by coming in sexual contact with women, then go home and eat and breathe heterosexism in all other aspects of life. No! You have to wholly be It!’ Shalini’s emphasis on ‘It’ both mystified and jolted Charu.

  ‘It’ is what? Charu wondered, for the mere physical aggression that would go into Shalini’s enunciation of this most nondescript of pronouns would convert ‘it’ into something highly charged with meaning.

  Was Shalini wholly ‘It’? Or was she shamefully half and half?

  Sexuality was surely a funny thing for an Indian lesbian.

  ‘It is the idea, Charu, and the complete mental acceptance of the idea and the living of life entirely in tune with the idea! I believe in the idea of living life free of heterosexual strictures. Yes, I’m married to a man, but a man like Biju is hardly a man with that awfully constricted world view that most Indian men have. He’s a sweet sister to me … just a teeny phallus dangling between his legs, which he would gladly dispense with if I ask him to. He doesn’t even mind my relationship with you and has a completely non-prejudicial approach to lesbians, why he even cried when that awful man set his wife on fire because she had sex with another woman …’

  The idea! Charu felt helplessly inadequate at times, coping with the complexity of Shalini’s idea of lesbianism. ‘It’ wasn’t simply a case of wanting another woman with every ounce of sexual energy in one’s body; it was more.

  Perhaps Charu was supposed to live the principles of the political manifesto, the green rose manifesto. Perhaps it was more a matter of changing utterly the status quo and of radically dismantling everything taken to be fundamentally sacred.

  Secretly Charu was struggling to come to terms with the mazy nature of what Shalini really wanted—a major structural change in the way we do the business of life, a real change-inducing upheaval.

  Shalini wanted nothing short of raising a lesbian Mahabharata on earth-India.

  In the restructured earth-India lesbians and non-lesbians would be equal citizens; whatever was possible in the Indian heterosexual world would also be possible in the Indian lesbian world, includi
ng marriage, family and other rituals that people took for granted in the universe of the ‘straight’ people.

  One day Shalini told Charu the following:

  ‘If the genie were to emerge from the lamp, I would unhesitatingly state my three top wishes as lesbianize the world, lesbianize the world and lesbianize the world. And please, please, genie bhayiya, create social conditions to make it easy for women to marry other women. Then all will be good and proper, the way the noble forces upstairs intended the world to be.’

  Shalini would tell such things to Charu wistfully, and Charu, melting under the radiance of the beautiful older woman’s unadorned confessions, would laugh softly, her fingers diving instinctively into the dense jungle of her long, dark hair. Stroking Shalini’s silken-textured hair and feeling a thrill run down her spine, Charu would concur with Shalini: she too had the same three wishes for the genie.

  ‘Invade the wall of Indian sanctity and you’ll see how loosely constructed the walls are. Poke the foundation a little and it crumbles,’ Shalini said time and again, giving Charu the distinct impression that Shalini hated the sanctities and would love for the wall to be breached in one way or the other.

  Indian sanctities were stacked against lesbians and all that was deemed right and proper was the shameless patriarchal affirmation of heterosexual values, nothing else. We are living an Orwellian nightmare of our own—the big hetero brothers and sisters are watching us … Charu remembered the words from the pamphlet Shalini had slipped into the green rose bouquet she had made for Charu. They must have been hand-scripted by Shalini.

  They are watching us … the words had lingered with an eerie impact in Charu’s memory. The other day she saw the horrific images of the charred bodies of two simple village women; in one of those tiny pockets reserved in the newspapers for accidental deaths of the small and the anonymous, the image was tucked. They wrote of how the bodies were found hugging one another. Unable to put up with the fiery eyes around them and the looks that bore into them like sharp objects of torture, they burnt themselves to death, conjoining themselves—one with the other eternally—daring the flames to lick them apart.