The Green Rose

by Sharmila Mukherjee

  11

  That night upon returning from Dhuniya’s house, Charu had a dream. She dreamt she was sitting in a mandap, with circles of jubilation around her, like a forest full of loud monkeys they were dancing to the tune of Hindi songs. Charu couldn’t see well, for her face was hidden from the world behind a blood-red sari that drooped heavily over her face. She couldn’t breathe; the smell of cheap perfume mingling with the smell of cheap zarda nauseated her. Everything was unfamiliar; it was as though she were tossed into a world altogether different from the one she was used to living in.

  ‘Esmile, Didi, esmile,’ monkey boys and monkey girls were gyrating around her and telling her. Like a circus item she was being poked by them through the veil of the heavily drooping red sari. Charu felt like slapping the screeching monkeys, each and every one of them. But she couldn’t move, as though she were a tree rooted to the very ground on which she was sitting. Somebody would have to cut her off to help her move.

  She was getting married and she did not even feel remotely marital. She wasn’t experiencing the pleasurable thrill that brides were supposed to experience on the eve of the consummation night (or so the saying went). Thin girls, with dark complexions lightened up with gaudy make-up, were singing a song peppered with sexual innuendos and Charu listened with a thickening wad of distaste forming on her tongue.

  Wrapped tightly in her sari, like a bridal gift, Charu began to think of the garlanded marital bed, where she would sit waiting for the man. They said the men get stone drunk on their wedding nights; it helped release the tension. Her neck and shoulder tightened in anticipation of the grip that would push her prone on the bed. The women were squeaking: ‘Make it hard for him, Didi, the first time make it really hard, or he will give you no peace later; fight and scratch and don’t let him touch your breasts, Didi …’

  ‘The first time is like an assault, Didi,’ Dhuniya’s voice was petering off as if she were being dragged away by an invisible force into a dark tunnel.

  ‘When you open your eyes next morning you will feel a dull ache in your lower abdomen and a painful soreness between your legs. Your clothes would be in disarray and you will reach down to discover your thighs to be crusted in blood,’ Dhuniya was still hoarsely whispering.

  The violence of it all! Dhuniya was being pounded on and the thudding noise was getting louder and louder. No, that was Deepti; she was grinding something with a pestle and clapping her hands in delight. ‘Didi, Didi, see how finely I’ve crushed the pepper balls, see, see …’

  ‘No, no, Deepti, stop, stop,’ Charu wanted to say. ‘It’s not a pepper ball, it’s Dhuniya, our poor Dhuniya! They’re making you do their dirty work …’ but Charu’s tongue had swollen like a mound of rising dough and touched the roof of her mouth. She couldn’t speak a single word.

  The more she pounded, the more gargoylish became her face. The noise of pounding got louder and louder, like ear-splitting drum beats.

  Shumati! Suddenly Shumati’s dark, craggy face shimmered in front of Charu. She had horns on both sides of her head. Her eyes flashed a kind of anger that Charu had seen only in the framed pictures of the goddess Kali that adorned the walls of almost every Bengali household that she had ever visited in her 30-odd years on this earth. That was a picture of anger which always baffled Charu. ‘Is Kali angry, Ma, or is she sticking out her tongue and laughing?’ Charu would ask her mother, not understanding the contradiction fleeting across Kali’s face: her lips snarling, cinder tongue protruding, but brows as smooth as the Taj dome and eyes as calm as a millpond.

  Divine anger, Mrs Guha had told her, was not like the anger of humans. It had contradictions that were not supposed to be resolved. By smiling with anger, Kali elevated herself above her petty enemies.

  If only she wore clothes, she would be fully dignified, like a diplomat, Mr Guha had quipped with his lips pursed.

  Shumati was smiling, yet her eyes were aflame with anger, smoke-like substance billowed from what passed as her ears and nostrils. She charged like a comic-book oxen. ‘I will kill everybody, Dhuniya is mine,’ the words popped up around Charu like millions of thought bubbles.

  A grand war was been waged, perhaps Shalini’s mythical lesbian Mahabharata had come to rule the roost in Charu’s dream.

  Charu felt wetness on her face, as if fear had dribbled over like saliva onto her chin.

  Dhuniya, what will happen to Dhuniya? In the melée the poor girl will be lost, most surely trampled over.

  ‘Dhuniya!’ a scream imploded inside Charu.

  ‘Dhuniya!!!’ A few nights later, after Charu dreamt the lurid dream of Dhuniya’s rape and Shumati’s revenge war, somebody else screamed out Dhuniya’s name as well. The groom had staggered into an empty room and an empty bed, puking and howling in anger. Human anger, expressed with the totality of his being, came out of Shubodh’s body like a big ball of fire.

  No ambiguity there.

  His mating call had gone unanswered: Aare sunn! Listen there, my beauty, my love’s a-grinding and how sweet is this spice before me … Don’t be curling yourself up like a snake, turn to me, look, he said as he shot his arms out into empty space and grasped air instead of the body of his bride.

  That night, from a shanty in New Delhi’s most sprawling slum, rose a bone-freezing scream, as if a gruesome murder had been committed. Neighbours came pouring out of their beds. God’s will, some said, while others cried murder and scandal. The courtyard that was awash with fun and frolic and the rites of fertility a few hours ago, had become, in an instant, a funereal demesne!

  Over that which light reigned, darkness had fallen.

  At first everybody thought that Dhuniya had eloped with a secret lover. Many a slum wedding had ended with the bride running away with her secret lover at the last moment.

  Eyewitness accounts said that a three-wheeler was parked outside the mandap site all evening long. By 10:30 p.m. it was gone. Many remembered a darkly shrouded figure sitting inside the vehicle; some thought it was a woman in a burkha, others believed it had been a perfumed ghost, so slender it looked, and such good foreign smell it released into the air around it. They saw another darkly shrouded figure behind the wheel; it was a rarity in New Delhi—one woman in burkha driving another woman in burkha.

  The three-wheeler took off with a man at around 10:30 p.m.

  ‘That Shumati,’ Dhuniya’s father said with a growl. ‘That bitch, she took my only daughter away.’

  Shumati and Dhuniya were gone indeed, evaporated from the face of the earth like mercury, only to return in the form of pictures in the newspapers a few days later.

  A picture of Dhuniya—in traditional female wedding garb appeared in several of New Delhi’s prominent papers. The photograph captioned ‘The runaway bride’ was followed by one that said, ‘Who is the lucky groom?’ Finally, there stood, smack in the centre of the page, a picture of the bride and the groom. It said, ‘The groom is a she!’

  The whole world saw Dhuniya in bridal gear and a big smile on her face standing arm in arm with Shumati who was her usual panted-and-shirted self. While Shumati wasn’t wearing a dhoti and a kurta, there was a distinct male swagger in her pose. ‘We are now husband and wife,’ Shumati announced to the reporters boldly. Giggly reporters asked for marks that would distinguish husband from wife. One suspects that the news hounds were there in the spirit of attending a circus or a freak show. The reality of what Shumati and Dhuniya had done hadn’t yet begun to sink in and solidify into fact. With nostrils flared up in anger, Shumati had shot back an answer: ‘We don’t copy men!’

  Fearless lesbians! Charu thought upon seeing the photograph. She was thrilled at having scripted the marvellous escapade of fearless lesbians. All evening long during Dhuniya’s wedding, she had sat cooped inside a scooter-taxi, concealed in a smelly burkha loaned by one of Deepti’s friends, waiting for the opportune moment to whisk Dhuniya away. Charu had to empty a whole bottle of poison just to alleviate the smell.

  The whole thing was
planned by Charu. Dhuniya had just wanted to fly away into Shumati’s arms the moment Charu had located the whereabouts of Dhuniya’s butch-lover. But Charu wanted to insert some delicate symbolic details into the story of the Indian lesbians that was about to be catalyzed into action. Things had to be done in style; for it wasn’t just an ordinary love story, but a memorable saga of lesbian elopement. She had wanted Dhuniya’s wedding ritual to continue uninterrupted till the time when an intervention would be needed. She wanted the moustached Delhi municipal corporation sweeper Shubodh or Shubodh, whoever he was, to feel the sharpest possible pinch in that region where they all believed was the ultimate seat of male power and male control over the female. She wanted Shubodh and the entire tribe of penis-headed monsters who fed on frail girls like Dhuniya, to climb to the acme of violent passion and then whoosh the food would be taken off the table just when the hunger was about to be satiated. Hah! If she could, then Charu would even wait till the nth second, when the drunken lout would be ready to disgorge the canon balls, in the name of the solemnity and sanctimony of marriage, and in one sweeping motion, bundle Dhuniya away from under the bile-pissing sweeper. That would have been the most delicate of touches, but Charu didn’t want to wait too long. What’s possible in reel life can’t be replicated with precision in the real.

  So Charu waited in the dark till Dhuniya dressed in a man’s garb melted into the shadows once the ceremonies were over and it was time for the bride to lie on the rack. Charu couldn’t think of the occasion as anything less torturing than the medieval rack. Her father had spoken so eloquently about the rack in Shakespeare. If she had the power, she would put Shubodh on the rack herself and tear him apart, limb from limb, but dismemberment like that was not an option. She had to settle for the more jejune form of escape.

  Dhuniya disguised herself as a man and followed Charu’s plan to the tee.

  There she was at a time, when men and women of the slum were busy looking for the groom—he was drinking away some place was the speculation.

  Perfect custom, Charu thought, to enable the execution of her plan for Dhuniya’s escape.

  ‘Didi, don’t let the man touch her; Dhuniya is pure and we will be pure towards each other till our marriage is done,’ Shumati had spoken to Charu like a gentle giant. Charu’s heart had melted in an instant like butter in a high noon sun.

  Charu felt elevated beyond her dreams. So this was how it felt like to help uplift fellow-lesbians? Shalini must have felt the same way upon ratcheting up Charu’s dormant lesbianism into a raging active volcano!

  Oh but this Shumati was like a bull in a china shop. At first Charu was staggered by the width and muscularity of Shumati’s torso and her arms. ‘Comes off thrashing heavy animal hide at the tannery,’ she said. There were tattoos on Shumati’s arms, and what pretty designs they were, marvelled Charu.

  Shalini had told Charu about the lesbianism of India’s working class. ‘Not like ours.’ She was right; there was nothing about Shumati’s physique that had the word ‘feminine’ writ on it. ‘Yet these day labourer types are our best hope; our most powerful constituency,’ Shalini had said poignantly.

  Was Shumati’s massiveness a mere palimpsest, as Dhuniya had said? Something infinitely and irrefutably womanly was under that; one just had to scratch the surface.

  It wasn’t easy for Charu to relate to such a massy woman as Shumati, but woman Shumati was, with her face softening up into a ball of cotton whenever the name of ‘Dhuniya’ fell from her lips.

  Dhuniya was inside Shumati and Dhuniya was a slight little bird in Shumati’s eyes, a bird that had to be protected within her steely arms.

  A picture in stark contrast to the rich housewives or wannabe-rich housewives of New Delhi, enjoying the security of marriage on the one hand, and fucking women, on the other. Charu christened them the Dr Mrs Jekylls and Ms Hydes of New Delhi.

  Shumati and Dhuniya—the two simple, slum-dwelling women, manifested no Jekyll and Hyde syndrome. They had between them twice the honesty that all of the high society women inside their air-conditioned homes taken together possessed.

  Charu’s admiration for Dhuniya and Shumati would prove to be prophetic, for shortly the two would become poster children for the lesbian cause in New Delhi amongst various Mahila Samitis led, as Mrs Guha would say, by fat moustachioed women who, because they despaired of ever getting married themselves, had decided to fill the vacuum in their lives by taking up cudgels on behalf of two unmarriageable destitutes from the servant class.

  Yet heroism and identity politics were the two last things on the minds of Dhuniya and Shumati when they posed to have their photographs taken. In fact they were very nervous about publicity. Reporters had come because somebody had tipped them off, and within a day or two of the ‘marriage’, newspaper folks had started to camp outside the room in the hotel in Jaipur that Charu had rented for the couple.

  ‘My wedding gift,’ Charu told them, embarrassed by Dhuniya’s bending down to touch her feet for blessings. ‘You’re our goddess, Didi.’

  The goddess had really poked a hole in patriarchy.

  Dhuniya’s elopement on the eve of her consummation night did not sit well at all with Shubodh and his family. Things may have been different had Dhuniya not ducked that rite. Charu was on the money when she chose that moment and that moment only to make a symbolical despoilation of the kingdom of prepuce.

  She had dealt a real blow to the enemy.

  For in the kingdom of prepuce, when a bride who had been assigned to you and you only, absconded from her bridal bed at a point in time when you the groom staggered into your nuptial chamber agog with expectation and arousal, then your whole being was bound to suffer a severe rupture. On the special night in his life what the babu sweeper saw instead of a ripe, garlanded virginal melon that was waiting to be bit into for the first time, was night soil. No, Charu did not have the ingenuity to have shit on Shubodh’s bed, but there was a saying among the poor of New Delhi that for a man to be left stranded with an empty bridal bed on his wedding night was as bad as to sink face down in a pool of night soil.

  Thanks to Charu, Shubodh had night soil on his face.

  But the enemy hits back, and when the enemy is cowardly, it hits back with venom.

  ‘They are really going to do something terrible to the girls, Didi,’ Deepti told Charu.

  From Deepti, Charu got the news that while the men were angry—as they were expected to be, for after all one of their tribe members had just lost his woman to another woman—it was Dhuniya’s mother who wept the most uncontrollably upon hearing that her daughter had run away with the half-human, half-oxen Shumati.

  ‘They call her a bhaisan,’ Deepti informed Charu smothering a giggle.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Deepti, Shumati is not an oxen, she’s a good woman who is physically stronger than you and I together,’ Charu softly chided her maid. ‘Much better care-taker than your husband,’ she wanted to add, but refrained for no matter how badly she was treated, Deepti always stood up in fierce defence of her husband when he was spoken badly of.

  ‘Dhuniya’s mother is very upset and they say she will fall sick and die if she doesn’t stop crying.’

  Why, Charu wondered, do these women cry over things that they should cherish? O come on, Mrs Chunaram, get real, she wanted to tell the lady in American style; grab her by her shoulder and shake her and ask her to get real because with Shumati Dhuniya was in paradise not hell.

  ‘Somebody showed her the picture of Dhuniya and Shumati’s marriage from the newspapers,’ Deepti said, smothering yet another giggle, and the old woman started wailing like death itself had entered her home. She had hurled many imprecations not only at Shumati, but also at Charu and the fattest among the entire community of sister-fuckers, Laadli, whose courtyard and latrines Dhuniya’s father cleaned every week.

  ‘Be careful for a few days, Didi, for Dhuniya’s mother’s brothers are known to punish enemies with goondas.’

  A feeling too a
lien but akin to fear ran down Charu’s spine. How did they know she helped them? Who told them about her? She cast a suspicious look at Deepti herself. True, after they tried to beat up Shumati the first time, Charu had told them to pack up and head back to New Delhi, to the place where lesbians like them sought refuge—Laadli’s house. But Charu had been careful to not leave her footprints anywhere in the affair.

  ‘Don’t tell them I sent you,’ she had told Shumati.

  ‘Why? Are you afraid?’ Shumati asked, looking at Charu as a tiger looks at a pansy, a fierce cat looks at a wimpy poodle.

  What could she say? Yes, she was afraid, not of getting raped by filthy men, but of getting completely banned from the sight of her mother. Just as Dhuniya’s mother was more upset than her father, so would Mrs Guha be red-hot angry if she got wind of the fact of Charu’s involvement in the Shumati-Dhuniya lesbo scandal.

  Shumati wouldn’t understand Charu’s fear; it was a classic bourgeoisie fear—the fear of losing things she was so used to having, like her parents’ protection, their love, her relatives’ blind belief that one day she would indeed be settled in marriage with somebody like her father, the eminent Guha babu. Shumati was free of all this; nobody had any expectations of her. She belonged to no state, in a manner of speaking, and consequently, suffered no fear of becoming stateless. The warisless of this world were tethered to nothing but their own integrity, and a conviction of the rightness of their own actions.

  Shumati was convinced that in taking Dhuniya away and marrying her, she did the right thing.

  ‘But, oh, aren’t you in for some revolution in your mental world, Shumati,’ thought Charu.

  With her marriage, Shumati’s world would change as there would be somebody to whom she would be accountable to, somebody for whose mental and physical well-being she would be responsible for.

  ‘I worry about Dhuniya,’ Shumati had said, and Charu’s lips had curled up in a smile. ‘Let them do whatever they want to me, I can fend for myself, but if they do anything to Dhuniya, I’ll go bad, angry, mad and destroy the world.’