No sooner than she crossed the threshold, the ducks and chickens burst into an uproar, and flapped around the bathroom in a squall of maniacal squawks, undaunted by the flat-footed arrival of the sari-clad, distinctly matron-like figure of the great Bengali matriarch.
As Mrs Guha watched, her eyelids drooping with sleep, a pair of ducks began to race round and round the floor, one in pursuit of the other. They were of a species she had never seen before she came to Vaiku’s bathroom. They could be of Icelandic origin, for Mrs Guha had heard from her all-knowing husband that the fattest and juiciest ducks came from Iceland.
Squat, ugly creatures, almost suicidally self-absorbed, with large red warts on their necks and mangy black-and-white bodies. The huntress was massive and it soon caught up with the other and pinned it to the floor with its beak. Then after it had hoisted itself on top, it raised one leg and suddenly a bright wet pink rubbery-looking contraption appeared. It flapped its tail feathers for a moment pressing against its entrapped mate, and then tumbled off.
Mrs Guha watched spellbound: she had no conception that ducks had penises and vaginas.
Somebody who resembled a woman entered and began to laugh shrilly watching Mrs Guha standing there enthralled.
‘You were watching like it was a film … haven’t you seen ducks do that before?’ it asked Mrs Guha.
‘No!’ she said and laughed hysterically till tears flowed down her cheek.
Swallowing her vomit back, Mrs Guha ran out of the house. Inside there was darkness and death. Outside there was life, she muttered under her breath.
A large crowd had gathered in the lawn outside and she merged gratefully into its fringes. There were some hundred creatures there, packed in a tight semicircle in front of two creatures decked out in bridal gear. A marriage! Mrs Guha had stumbled upon a marriage, right in the heart of Vaiku’s pool party.
The couple was sitting on raised chairs, enthroned with their backs against the house, while creatures danced in front of them. Mrs Guha peered into the arc of light that fell like a penumbra on the bride and the groom. The groom was well dressed. He was marrying a small thin girl. The thin girl was wearing a white gown with a frill of lace and a gauzy veil. Her face had been carefully and evenly painted, so that her lips, cheeks, and ears were all exactly the same shade of iridescent pink. The flatness of the paint had created a strange effect, turning her face into an ashen, spectral mask.
A boy was dancing with a coquettish twitching. His head was bobbing up and down like a crazed toy’s.
Mrs Guha felt a premonitional fear of things to come. She breathed in the restlessness of fidgeting fingers and tapping shoes. They were hot and sweaty, drenched with the clamour of celebration. The half-forgotten longings and reawakened desires, the fingers locking in secret and hands brushing against hips in the surging crowd—all of New Delhi’s creatures thronging around the dancers, clapping and chanting intoxicated with the heightened eroticism of the wedding night.
Mrs Guha felt feverish as the insubstantial things, ghosts displaced in time, waited to be exorcized and laid to rest.
It was long past darkness now, and the faces around the bridal couple were glowing under a dome of dust that had turned green in the light of a single lamp. The drum-beat was a measured, gentle one and when Mrs Guha pushed her way into the centre of the crowd, she saw that the dancer was the most exquisite-looking woman she had ever seen in her life, dressed in a cleavage-revealing, tight cotton dress, with a long scarf tied around her waist. Both her hands were on her hips, and she was dancing with her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her, moving her hips with a slow, languid grace, backwards and forwards while the rest of her body stayed still, almost immobile except for the quick circular motion of her feet. Then gradually, almost imperceptibly, the tempo of the beat quickened and somebody called out the first line of an indecipherable chant.
The crowd pressed closer with the quickening of the beat and as the voices and the clapping grew louder the girl in response raised an arm and flexed it above her head in a graceful arc. Her body was turning now rotating slowly in the same place, her hips moving faster while the crowd around her clapped and stamped roaring their approval at the top of their voices.
Gradually the beat grew quicker blurring into a tattoo of drum-beats and in response her torso froze into stillness while her hips and her waist moved ever faster in exact counterpoint in a pattern of movement that became a perfect abstraction of eroticism a figurative geometry of lovemaking pounding back and forth at a dizzying speed until at last the final beat rang out and she escaped into the crowd, laughing.
‘Charu!’ Mrs Guha had a glimpse of her daughter. Momentarily she shook with pride at the beauty she beheld; it was a beauty that had lived in her womb for nine long months. It was hers.
But then the violence of the feeling, which she had wanted so badly to retch out in the bathroom, rose like a mist and covered her. ‘Vaiku!’ cried Mrs Guha, ‘Take me home!’ were the words that escaped her lips before she swerved and fell to the ground.
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This collection published 2012
Copyright © Sharmila Mukherjee 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Rahul Lal
ISBN: 978-0-143-06805-1
This digital edition published in 2016.
e-ISBN: 978-8-184-75759-0
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The Green Rose Page 19