The Green Rose

by Sharmila Mukherjee

  Shumati had phoned from the hotel in Jaipur, confessing her fear to Charu.

  A few days following the phone call, there was a fire in their hotel room.

  Warding off the smell of kerosene permeating the air in their room, huddling together atop their bed, the terrified duo saw islets of flame coming at them in large concentric circles. With the end of her sari a flickering orange, Dhuniya managed to run out of the hotel with Shumati throwing her arms around her wife to safeguard her skin from getting singed by the heat of the growing fire. When they were shooting blindly out of the room, they caught a strange act out of the corner of their eyes. A hotel boy was fiddling with the door lock thinking the women to be fast asleep inside.

  The plan, as was disclosed the day after in the papers, was to lock the women in their room and set it on fire. ‘Women put their tormented souls to rest after realizing the enormity of their shameful deed,’ would’ve hogged headlines in the papers the next day. The local police acting in cahoots with the hotel authorities, who, in turn were acting in cahoots with some local fanatics, crusaders against lesbianism in India, would’ve demonstrated to the press how after nights of depravity in their room, the lesbians had felt the weight of their vileness sit heavily on their conscience. Their inner Sitas and Savitris had suddenly leapt out and demanded of them a thorough expiation.

  What really hogged the headlines the next day instead was the story of Shumati’s and Dhuniya’s miraculous escape.

  12

  It was a pair of sooty, tired, terror-stricken women, holding each other up as best as they could that Laadli Chaurasia encountered when she opened the door of her house. They looked like they had jumped through rings of fire like the tigers in the Great Oriental Circus. Their bodies emitted the odour of ash. Ah, Chaurasia must have thought, this is where the reel drama of Radha and Sita ends and the real-life drama of Dhuniya Begum and Shumati Raja begins.

  Deepti informed Charu of the entry of Shumati and Dhuniya into Madame Chaurasia’s house. ‘They are living upstairs in a separate bathroom and bedroom like a jori,’ Deepti said with shrill wonderment in her voice. For a fleeting moment Charu thought Deepti was yearning to be in Dhuniya’s place, to be ensconced sumptuously in the second storey of Laadli’s house.

  ‘Why, Deepti,’ she asked winking mischievously at her trusted handmaiden of many years, ‘you also have a secret lover or what? A Shri Shumati that you’re hiding from us?’

  Deepti blushed and furiously disavowed even an iota of loyalty to any kind of jorification other than that between her and her husband.

  ‘Chee, chee, Didi, what are you saying, I wouldn’t think of anything like that in even one of the seven births,’ Deepti protested against her young mistress’s insinuations.

  Oh come on, don’t pretend, Deepti, Charu thought to herself, haven’t I seen you make those rasgoolla eyes at Malli whenever the two of you are alone in the kitchen?

  According to Charu, every woman, including her mother Mrs Guha, makes rasgoolla eyes at least at one woman during their lifetime. It’s instinctual.

  Then again, who knows, perhaps Deepti was simply envious of the special treatment that was being meted out to Shumati and Dhuniya in Laadli’s house. They were being fed and accorded a level of comfort that they could never imagine enjoying as women of the servant class in New Delhi.

  Nightly, Deepti slept next to her marad, who, when he was not snoring loudly after a hard day’s plying of his three-wheeler on the streets of New Delhi for a living, was leaping on her tired body to do the needful. There was a custom, especially amongst the poor, that the wife should reflexively open her legs whenever the husband cried, ‘Open sesame!’

  Imagine the difference between sleeping like that, beside a mindless sack of semen, on a bed with a mattress as hard as concrete, under an odoriferous, grimy mosquito net, where roaches and flies nested on hot, humid nights, and sleeping in a big bedroom—with cool air wafting in through the low-humming air conditioner, mellow lighting emanating from ornate lamps like you see in glossy magazines—on a bed that had a soft mattress suitable for princesses, and a bed mate who didn’t have that obnoxious carrot-stick that Deepti’s mard was so proud of having.

  Then imagine taking a long hot bath in the separate bathroom after a long, hard day of labouring inside the houses of rich memsaabs, and splashing cold water on your face in the fine glassy sink that had enough room for holding three buckets of water at a time. Perhaps Deepti fancied Dhuniya to avail of these luxuries at Chaurasia memsaab’s house just by virtue of being, what they were called in the papers, leshbins. So if she were to become a leshbin, run away from her mard with Malli, survived being burned to death, then probably she too could live in a big house in New Delhi with American-style bedroom and bathroom.

  But oh, thought Charu, I must stop this habit of mine, of pretending to know what other people think!

  ‘I am happy for Dhuniya, Didi,’ Deepti said. ‘She loved the woman so much, she deserves what she has got today; I am so happy she got Shumati and they are safely living together now.’

  Secretly, Charu felt a swelling of delight in her breast, for she had a large part to play in ensuring Shumati’s and Dhuniya’s safe passage from Jaipur to Laadli’s house in Greater Kailash.

  Bravo Shumati!

  It was time Charu paid a visit in person to Laadli’s house. For so long she had been postponing the visit, and the reasons had been varied, from fear of her mother finding out that she had been to the lecherous den, to fear of being seen on the premises of the lesbian house (this one fear Charu was embarrassed to experience). What if they saw her entering Laadli’s house and thought improper things about her?

  But now things were different. She felt by catapulting Dhuniya and Shumati’s love story into the realm of possibility, she had become more of a real flesh-and-blood lesbian than she was ever before.

  She felt achievement throb in her breast.

  ‘Shabash, beta!’ Vaiku had congratulated Charu on the accomplishment. Shalini had flashed, what seemed to Charu, a tantalizingly erotic smile. Perhaps Shalini felt the triumph vicariously.

  There was chance yet with Shalini, Charu thought.

  The more lesbians she rescued from the morasses of poverty and oppression, the more kudos she was likely to receive from her mentor-lover.

  It was true that in Laadli’s house Dhuniya and Shumati were being treated, if not like royalty, then like expensive china—carefully, lest they fall and break. Charu saw it with her own eyes.

  ‘Once you get there, you wouldn’t want to tear yourself away,’ Shalini had told Charu some time ago.

  ‘We all belong there. When you get there, you won’t remember the place you left to enter into the world of Laadli. The city of New Delhi, the parents, the husbands, the brothers, the sisters, the relatives, the entire apparatus of heterosexuality that ruled the world like a Roman empire would seem like enemy territory to you.’ Shalini had been trying to encourage Charu to visit the house and take an interest in the lesbian lives that were growing under Laadli’s nurturing care.

  ‘Welcome to our house, Ms Guha,’ the address startled Charu. Yet there was sonority in that voice. A thrill ran through Charu naturally. If a voice can send a mouse-like scooting through your body, one can imagine the mega-wonder the bearer of that voice can do.

  Charu turned around to see.

  ‘Hello, good to see you at last, Ms Guha, I’m Vinnie Brown,’ the woman with the sonorous voice extended a blue-veined, stringy hand to shake Charu’s.

  The mouse’s jaw must have fallen. Just the way it had scooted in at the smell of a piece of cheese, so it scooted out, disappointed that the cheese wasn’t as fabulous as it was conjured up to be.

  Okay, so Vinnie didn’t quite look like half-eaten domestic cheese, but Charu was expecting somebody like Shalini in Caucasian skin.

  ‘She looks so emaciated!’ was the first thought that came to Charu’s mind upon seeing Vinnie. ‘Pale as hell and stringy as a bean pole
, were there two Vinnies standing the length of a cricket pitch away from one another, a clothesline could be hung between them and nobody would know to what the two ends of the clothesline were tied to.’ Charu’s mischievous thoughts drew a picture whose central subject matter remained totally incognizant that she had become the subject matter of a picture of snap judgement.

  The thinness of her torso accentuated by the tank top, Vinnie stood smiling at Charu, hoping to catch a hold of her hand and shake it warmly.

  ‘A cross between the lamb Dhuniya and the butch Shumati,’ thought Charu’s appraising mind, as she near-absentmindedly shook Vinnie’s hand. She felt the power of the American lesbian’s clasp. Big powerful hands she had.

  ‘So sorry, should’ve come earlier,’ Charu mumbled, looking around her, hoping to see Dhuniya.

  From Vinnie, she heard that the pair was asleep. ‘For the past few days, they had been catching up on their lost sleep, is my guess. Poor things! They arrived like a couple of unfeathered chicken, about to be butchered or something.’

  It was good that Vinnie and Charu had Dhuniya and Shumati to talk about. The meeting had come too suddenly and Charu didn’t know what to say.

  They discussed the lesbian pair at length.

  From Vinnie Charu learnt that Shumati and Dhuniya had come to Laadli’s house in a very fragile state of mind.

  ‘I could hear their bones rattling inside their bodies.’ Vinnie’s face looked like it had been inflected by Dhuniya’s and Shumati’s bone-rattling experience. Charu could tell the woman cared.

  ‘At first the two young women began to have doubts about this business of living the life of what they called leshbins. But Laad’s patient counselling paid off, I suppose; you know better if Laad spoke to them instead of me.’

  Apparently Dhuniya and Shumati wanted to abandon their dreams of setting up house together; Dhuniya cried and wanted to go back to her parents.

  Laadli boosted their morale by saying that they were brave sepahis of lesbianism. Other foot soldiers would look up to them as heroes, for Dhuniya and Shumati were not the only leshbins in India, there were others who were in hiding while Dhuniya and Shumati were amongst the rare few leshbins who were bravely living like real leshbins. If there was a bahaduri award for leshbin courage then Dhuniya and Shumati would be the first to get it.

  Charu now knew where Shalini’s war metaphors came from.

  The lesbians were fighting what was no less than a war.

  ‘It’s an international thing, you see,’ Vinnie assured Charu upon seeing a flicker of consternation on the pretty girl’s face.

  ‘You’re pretty, really pretty. I hear you have an awesome name, got from Tagore himself?’

  Charu’s heart leapt up in delight; Vinnie knew the source of her name?

  ‘I read a lot of Indian literature, particularly Indian lit with a feminist slant—your very own Tagore, what a feminist he was and in that era too. Brave guy; wish more like him were around today, instead of those piss-ass monkey-fanatics, setting fire to whatever didn’t fit their piss-ass ideology!’ Vinnie’s face got red hot with indignation as she spoke about New Delhi’s homophobic simian brigade.

  ‘They may be a bit broken today, but believe me, they are a force to reckon with,’ Vinnie was fired up by the idea of threatening the power of patriarchy the world over.

  She had fired up Dhuniya and Shumati all right.

  Both gushed with revolutionary spirit the next time Charu saw them at Laadli’s house, and with pink flushes on their cheeks (Shumati, Charu noticed, had a tattoo of a rainbow on her forearm, to add to the tattoos of an angry oxen and the ten-headed Ravana, with all of them guffawing triumphantly) they said the ‘Amrikan’ had been like a godsend to them.

  ‘Didi, Vinnie Didi told us in Amrika leshbins had more power than in India and the men couldn’t do much about that, but show anger.’

  ‘Impotent anger,’ Vinnie had told Charu; impotent anger was destructive in the long run than potent anger; it simmers till it explodes, is the impression Charu got from Vinnie. While in America, they weren’t burning down cinema houses and effigies, they were cutting in through the laws and referendums.

  Shumati really liked Vinnie. Both butches, one thick and one thin, one white and one brown; but both belonged to the same genus, Charu observed with perspicacity.

  One day Charu caught Vinnie and Shumati exchanging symbols. While Chaurasia Didi’s Amrikan wife showed the tannery-butch her hair, styled like a thick jungle of porcupine-quill projections on the top of her head. ‘Cut your hair like this and you will be recognized as a leshbin from a distance,’ said the American.

  Instead of falling down to the waist, like Dhuniya’s did, Vinnie’s rose from her head majestically upwards. ‘She is a peacock-head,’ Charu told Shalini. Over dinner one evening, they laughed about Vinnie’s hair. That’s the way they did things there. They bound their breasts and pickled their hair in brine.

  Charu and Shalini were dead drunk by the time they finished paring Vinnie down to her essential butchiness.

  The next time Charu saw Shumati, the oxen had her hair up and stiff. She had streaked it blue.

  One day, Laadli broke in on Charu, Shalini, Shumati, Dhuniya and Vinnie; they were sitting on the terrace of Laadli’s house, gulping down strong tea made by Shumati. Shumati bragged about the strength of her tea; they joked about its aphrodisiacal quality. Dhuniya blushed. What a gala gathering this was! And Charu wished the world could witness this beautiful congregation of women from across the spectrum. They laughed, ate, drank, made lesbian jokes about heterosexual prissiness.

  It is upon this sunny scene that Laadli broke in.

  ‘See, sisters, see this news that came out in today’s Delhi Times!’ Laadli gasped for air, as was her custom whenever she had to run up the stairs or, plunging out of her car, run up the driveway to share something consequential with her lesbian sisters. Charu had got used to Laadli’s huffing and puffing—literally, as these days she had become a fixture at Laadli’s house.

  Laadli laid out before them the newspaper. Two beautiful, modern women clad in expensive silk saris appeared to have been photographed in a party kind of atmosphere. Each was holding a glass of wine in her hand, poised gracefully like a pair of fine terracotta statues you see in temple sculptures. They wore their saris stylishly, not sloppily like servant girls. Both had shimmering black hair that was cut around the napes of their necks in a very shapely way.

  To Shumati and Dhuniya they resembled the angrezi-Indian women who worked in the tall glass buildings of New Delhi. ‘See,’ said Laadli, with a triumphant smile on her face, her fat finger pointing to the picture. They saw the women were standing side by side. They were Indian lesbians, who recently announced to the world that they had been living together like husband and wife for ten years now.

  ‘This is a picture of the big wedding party they threw and it gave me an idea,’ Chaurasia clapped her hands like a child who was happy because she had found a really cool toy to play with. ‘Why not throw a wedding party for Dhuniya and Shumati? Why should only the rich have the privilege of marrying with fanfare?’

  Priyanka Thadani and Shaheen Rizvi, one Hindu and one Muslim, were both rich business women in the famous city of Bangalore. Ministers, business owners, film stars and cricket players came to Priyanka and Shaheen’s marriage party. It wasn’t officially called a wedding, but everybody knew it to be one. So, big people came and nobody mocked the couple and asked the kinds of jeering questions that were asked of Dhuniya and Shumati. Guests brought gifts, ate, drank, and danced the night away.

  Laadli was a grassroots kind of person. While Priyanka and Shaheen’s wedding was encouraging news for the lesbian movement in India, still its impact would be restricted to the rich.

  The rich of India can get away with anything. A hijra would be deemed normal if he was an Ambani hijra, and an Ambani hijra could marry his hijra lover without guilt or fear. But if the hijra hailed from the slums, stones would be thr
own at him, urchins would treat him like a freak and were he to attempt to express his birthright to love somebody of his ilk, he would be locked up in jail. So, it didn’t matter if the rich of India were ‘liberated’ or not. They were liberated by their wealth anyway. It’s the action of grassroots lesbians that mattered, not what the rich, spoilt ones did in the rarefied atmosphere in which they lived.

  Both Laadli and Vinnie agreed that Dhuniya and Shumati would serve as fantastic grassroots material for the lesbian cause!

  Laadli knew the secret of Priyanka and Shaheen. They all went to the same school and college in New Delhi. The men of the city lusted after Shaheen and Priyanka, for like normal women they possessed unambiguous heterosexual appeal. But they also had steamy lesbian affairs that were conducted in a secretive, subterranean kind of way. And why wouldn’t they? Even before the controversy of Fire, women of New Delhi were very cognizant of the forbidden pleasures of the clitoris. There had always been cosmetic lesbians like Priyanka and Shaheen experimenting sexually with women, to spice up, Laadli suspected, their primary heterosexual lives. The lesbian flings for them were subsidiary, a means to alleviate boredom even.

  It angered Laadli to see that what was recreational for some, like Priyanka and Shaheen, was a necessity for others like herself. Unlike the Priyankas and the Shaheens of the world, Laadli was a confirmed, true-blue lover of women, who never slept with a man, was not even neck-pecked, let alone kissed, by a male. So it was no wonder that Laadli saw in Dhuniya and Shumati two kindred souls. She could tell they had not experienced any other life apart from the one that they were being persecuted for. It was as if Shumati and Dhuniya were born lesbians.

  Most women who came to Laadli’s house for help were late converts to lesbianism, and wanted a reprieve from the tyranny of male domination they were subjected to. The city-bred ones had taken a leaf out of the film Fire, where Shabana and Nandita found, in each other’s arms, a well-deserved break from their husbands. But to Laadli, Shabana and Nandita served more as whistle-blowers of patriarchy—exposing its built-in hypocrisies and double standards—than innate lesbians. Dhuniya and Shumati were innately lesbionic, so unaffected were they in their attachment to one another; so oblivious were they of the concept of identity politics.