by K R Meera
34
After Mayadevi died, Prajapati was mother and guide to Siddhartha Gautama. He left home at twenty-nine. Wandered in the world seeking the root of sorrow. When he returned after attaining Enlightenment, the two people who greeted him and accepted his Word were his father Suddodhana and his second wife, Prajapati. Later, many people were drawn to him and became his followers. But the Buddha did not offer spiritual advice to women. When men became his followers, many families were orphaned. Wives whose husbands left and prostitutes whose clients went away lost their livelihoods. They gathered together under Prajapati’s leadership, shaved their heads and set out in search of the Buddha’s camp. Crossing the desert and fearsome wilds, the procession of five hundred women finally reached the camp, their feet chapped and broken, heads covered with dust. They begged for mercy. Ananda, the Buddha’s disciple, was touched. He went to the Master and pleaded on their behalf: Five hundred women wish to follow your path, please permit them to leave their homes. But the Buddha did not budge. Take the very thought away from your mind, he said. Why, persisted Ananda, is it not possible for women to do this? It is, responded the Buddha, but don’t think about it. After strenuous efforts at persuasion and much begging, the Buddha conceded and accepted the women as disciples. However, he warned: With this, the life of this faith which should have stretched a thousand years has fallen by half. In our family, Annapurna, the wife of my ancestor Saubhadra Mullick, decided to follow the Buddha’s way. But the Buddha did not allow her to give up her home.
The memory of Grandmother Annapurna surfaced in my mind when I witnessed the protest by almost a thousand women led by the wife of the chief minister at SSKM Hospital, demanding justice for the young girl murdered by Jatindranath. The Buddha had permitted only men to leave their homes and walk the path of Dhamma. He was convinced that women trapped in their perishable bodies that are eventually sapped by time require no extra enlightenment. The only prominent man in the whole protest was my father, I noticed from my place at the rear. Jatindranath sat glum-faced in the back of the jeep with the policemen. I could see clearly the stubble-covered hollows of his cheeks, and his bleak, emotionless eyes. He was handcuffed to a beam inside the jeep. He looked straight into my eyes as I stood near the telephone booth with Mano da and instantly recognized me. The jeep was held up by the protestors for twenty minutes; all that while, he maintained that intent gaze. His face disappeared when the TV cameras and the press reporters pushed ahead. By then the women police had arrived and they began to remove the protestors. In the melee, I saw Sanjeev Kumar Mitra, in a green T-shirt and jeans, deep in conversation with a young girl in a black T-shirt and jeans, her hair bobbed fashionably like the film stars.
I touched Mano da’s wrist. ‘Let’s go, Dada.’
He gave me a searching look. ‘Heard that you and that reporter are going to get married. Is that true?’
I coloured. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Sukhdev told me.’
‘There was some such talk . . . ’
He considered Sanjeev Kumar Mitra again. ‘Is he trustworthy?’ he asked no one in particular.
I had no reply. We were there only because the uncle of a child who had been found murdered had come to Mano da requesting his help for a post-mortem. The murdered child was my friend Amodita’s daughter. Mano da used his influence to get it done. As we were coming out, the women shouting slogans and holding placards barred our way. The small tempo bearing the body of the six-year-old waited for the vehicle carrying the man whom the protestors wished to punish for killing a thirteen-year-old to pass. We stood by till Jatindranath’s vehicle left, then the tempo went in, and the protestors dispersed. Mano da gripped my hand and walked ahead briskly.
‘You told us you were not participating in the protest, Chetna.’ Sanjeev Kumar Mitra surfaced out of nowhere.
‘I didn’t come for that.’
He shook hands with Mano da. ‘How are you related?’ he asked.
‘She’s my daughter . . . soul-daughter,’ replied Mano da.
I smiled, eyes welling. Confusion glinted in Sanjeev Kumar’s eyes.
‘I heard of you the very first day I went to meet Phani da . . . but wasn’t been able to meet you.’
‘We’re of the old sort, child. What was this protest for?’
‘For these people—who else? If the death sentence isn’t carried out, will they get work? Remuneration?’
‘Isn’t it the other way round? If the death sentence is carried out, don’t you stand to gain more than the hangmen?’
‘Say “for us”, Mano da. Aren’t we all the same, we press people?’
‘No, we aren’t. I can’t understand you.’
‘Ah, forget it! Come, let’s leave together.’
‘No thanks, we came by bus.’
‘But does that mean you have a quarrel with cars?’
He had taken his glasses off. It seemed to me that he looked at Mano da not with respect but with sympathy.
‘Where are we going?’ Mano da asked.
‘Let’s get some tea and start an adda!’
He took Mano da’s hand. Mano da raised an eyebrow at me. Like Annapurna, I had abandoned desires and needs, memories and obligations. Sanjeev Kumar didn’t like Mano da asking me. The intolerance was evident in his voice when he said, ‘Women can’t take a decision!’
‘Sanju babu, it is your age that makes you say that. At my age, you’ll start leaving everything to the women.’
Sanjeev Kumar Mitra pretended not to hear what Mano da said. The moment she shaved her head and took to ochre robes, Annapurna was declared an enemy of the family and society. When Emperor Bimbisara’s consort, Queen Khema, became an ascetic people accepted it, saying that she had attained Enlightenment in the course of her past births. When Annapurna sought to tread the same path, however, they asked: how could a woman become so heartless as to abandon her family and children to seek happiness just for herself? A woman’s nirvana lies in her service to the husband and children, they ranted. Annapurna’s three little children cried out for their mother. The people stoned her. I felt I was the woman who had declared two thousand years ago: ‘My heart is fixed on bliss.’ A smile bloomed on my lips.
‘What’s there to smile so much about?’ Sanjeev Kumar Mitra turned around in the front seat of the taxi and asked.
I turned my gaze outside the window and continued to smile.
‘Two thousand years back, women did not have the right to leave their homes,’ I whispered.
‘So who’s giving up their home? You?’ Mano da asked, bewildered.
Sanjeev Kumar Mitra said with a smirk, ‘Don’t pay any attention, Mano da. Chetna keeps saying these mad things. She lives in the past, really. The only thing that attracts her is history. She doesn’t see the world in front of her.’
‘Sanju babu, all that’s in front of your eyes is but a repetition.’ The pain in Mano da’s voice was palpable. ‘We don’t learn anything from history . . . ’
Annapurna’s spiritual journey started when she began to smile to herself in the middle of unending domestic chores. It was her mother-in-law who first became anxious about the daughter-in-law who smiled for no reason. She beamed while doing the washing and the puja, while handing the rope to her husband when he set out for the palace.
‘What’s there to smile about?’ her husband asked, feeling vexed when he sensed that she did so even in the darkness of the bedroom.
‘I don’t know. Bliss bubbles up inside me and flows out.’
‘What has happened that you should feel so happy?’
‘That is my soul’s secret.’
Saubhadra Mullick jumped up and extended the lamp’s wick. Annapurna did not leap up or try to cover her nakedness. She faced her husband in her femininity without feeling smaller.
‘What happened?’ she asked, calmly.
‘Out with
the truth! Who do you think of that makes you smile all the time?’
‘The Tathagatha!’
She beamed again. Her husband grabbed his purse and set out for the courtesans’ street. There he slept with the most beautiful woman he could find. She was much, much more beautiful than Grandmother Annapurna, but he found no pleasure. When he tried to have intercourse, the memory of his wife’s smile pulled him down. He ordered her to stay out of sight when he set off for the gallows each morning after puja. His mother had been a widow since her youth. Tears and discontent reigned on her face permanently. My ancestor ordained that his mother should henceforth perform the Kali puja and the arti, and that she alone should hand him the rope every morning. Not just him, but the entire Mullick family felt troubled by the woman who smiled to herself. What was behind that smile, they wondered—love, lust, scorn, sadness? No one could believe that a woman could attain bliss by means other than her husband, children, clothes and jewels. The news of the woman who smiled to herself constantly reached the royal court; the emperor heard of it. He visited her incognito. The radiance of her smile worried him too.
We stopped the taxi near College Street and got off. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Raja Baidyanath Mukherjee, Justice Edward Hyde and the watch maker David Hayer had got together to establish the Hindu College during the time of Grandfather Devicharan Mullick. The college first began nearby, at the residence of Gorachand Basak on Chitpur Road. Once it shifted to College Street, innumerable bookshops sprouted around it. Young people milled around the shops that had completely taken over the footpaths, making it almost impossible to walk. There were girls everywhere—in sleeveless tops, jeans, short skirts that touched their knees, leggings. As we stepped into the Coffee House, the din of a hundred people chattering all at once left me deafened. Seeking a place to sit, we made our way forward. The conversations from each table reached all the other tables.
‘Truly, this was a move that spoiled Thakur’s name! The truth is that I didn’t feel so bad even when his Nobel medal was stolen!’
‘Do you know, most people still don’t know that the medal is lost?’
‘The government hushed it up . . . but surely, it is an insult to the whole country! Could this happen anywhere else?’
‘This is the very depth of depravity. Such a university, world famous! The vice chancellor handing out an appointment to a woman with no qualifications! Selling land illegally!’
Many were venting their rage.
‘No place to sit on the ground floor. Let’s look upstairs,’ Sanjeev Kumar suggested.
Dragging his bad leg, Mano da hopped up the stairs.
‘Hey look—that’s Sanjeev Kumar Mitra!’ A girl’s voice rose from the table behind us.
‘Who’s that female? Isn’t she the hangwoman?’
‘But she looks quite happy!’
‘Right, if it were me . . . ’
The statement remained incomplete. I wanted to laugh at that possibility: if it were me. One day, as she was serving Grandfather his food, Annapurna assumed the padmasana and entered into deep meditation. Serve the fish, Grandfather shouted. She didn’t hear him. She sat up straight, eyes shut, the smile on her lips. All the loud yells, the shakings, the water that her mother-in-law poured on her, the children’s loud wails—none of it could make her open her eyes or erase that smile. She came back from that world of bliss which she alone could enter only the morning of the next day. To the questions of others, she replied with her smile alone: I left my home and went to the Tathagatha. When this became more frequent, the rhythm of domestic chores was upset. I will buy you jewels if you stay at home, Grandfather tried to entice her. But I already have three jewels, said she—the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha. All efforts to make her submit through angry words and blows came to naught. Grandmother has left her poem in the Therigatha:
My body dries up, crumbles, and joins the five elements in the Tathagatha’s radiant presence. But my soul, it rises with great dignity and triumph into the infinite radiance of nirvana.
We climbed the spiral stairway. The asbestos roof of the ground floor was littered with used paper cups, plastic bottles and betel stains that looked like blood stains. When we sat down at a free table, an old gentleman in a dhoti and kurta came towards us, beaming. ‘Manavendra babu, what a long time! Didn’t I warn you that our bhavishyath, our future, was dire?’
Mano da’s face lit up. ‘Komal da, it is not the future that’s dire, it’s the present! What’s the news? How are you?’
‘Babu, what could be new with me? I go to Mother’s place for the dying every morning, offer whatever help I can, come back. I hang around here after that.’
When the gentleman departed, Mano da told me, ‘An old comrade of ours . . . ’
‘I’ve heard so much about you. I’ll come over to your office one day. Let’s do something on TV about—’
‘No.’
Sanjeev Kumar Mitra tried to get a word in, but Mano da didn’t let him complete his sentence.
‘Only those who want to read the Bhavishyath need to know of it.’
‘But a news item on TV can be good publicity, Dada.’
‘We don’t need publicity, Sanjeev babu. Leave Bhavishyath to its fate.’
There was a minute’s silence. Sanjeev Kumar Mitra wiped his glasses and put them on again.
‘Chetna works at the Bhavishyath now?’
‘Yes, she is our proofreader.’
‘Good. But we wish she had been prominently present at the protest today. That’d have given her greater mileage.’
‘I am not a petrol car.’ There was anger in my voice.
Sanjeev Kumar looked at me closely. But when I returned his gaze and found his eyes, blurred behind the smoky glasses, my body woke up again. The memory of our walks together came back. Aparajita and nilmani vines sprouted again inside my body, holding out their tender shoots. His face fell. The waiter brought the coffee; we drank it in silence.
‘Portugal—I predicted that Portugal would win!’
‘But you see, she is all alone in the cabinet . . . what can a woman do when she is so isolated?’
‘Look, this Grddha Mullick is very cunning. But what I can’t understand is how our chief minister can justify the death penalty!’
Snatches of conversations billowed around me.
‘Why are you smiling?’
I realized I was smiling only when Sanjeev Kumar Mitra asked.
‘I feel happy,’ I murmured.
‘What’s there to be so happy about?’
‘Maybe that you have left my life?’ I said.
Sanjeev Kumar’s face went red as if it had been slapped hard. We were silent when we came down the stairway.
A man with a grey beard and sunken cheeks and a cloth bag on his shoulder accosted us at the foot of the stairs. ‘Two rupees, just two rupees,’ he said, holding out thin volumes with yellow covers.
‘Two rupees? What is this?’ Sanjeev Kumar turned to him.
‘Poems, Babu, my latest ones.’
Sanjeev Kumar took one of the books, flipped through it and asked in mocking tones: ‘What profit do you make selling these for two rupees?’
‘The true profit is the pleasure of selling, Babu!’
‘But counting the money, you stand to lose in the end.’
‘Money is but a concept. On the same paper, if you print “five”, it is worth five rupees; if you print “five hundred”, it is worth that much.’
‘Fool!’ Sanjeev Kumar Mitra grimaced and muttered under his breath. He stepped out and hailed a taxi.
‘I need to talk to you, Chetna.’
‘Later . . . ’
‘Should I remove myself? Here, I take your leave!’ Mano da smiled and climbed into the taxi.
I followed him, but Sanjeev Kumar Mitra stopped me roughly.
‘Wait
, wait—we need to talk about our wedding.’
I stopped.
‘Let’s go to that old house. It is close by, if you walk a bit through this way . . . the house, don’t you remember?’
His voice was alluring. I closed my eyes and looked at him from within, smiling to myself.
‘I am not interested.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Weren’t you talking to a girl in front of the hospital today? Your wife ought to be someone like her. We are completely different. Like my baba says, you can’t twist a rope out of clay. Nor can you make a pot out of rope.’
‘But your father’s agreed to register the marriage as the earliest.’
‘His decisions need not be mine always.’
‘He’s given me his word that you’ll be thrown out of your house if you don’t cooperate!’
I burst out laughing.
‘Why are you laughing? Are you totally mad?’
I couldn’t stop. I was laughing to myself. What a terrible loss, I realized; it had taken me so long to understand Grandmother Annapurna who fought for the freedom to abandon the home! If only the little girls who were dragged into the bushes could laugh loudly at their attackers. If they could, the life of the world’s injustice would reduce by half. Anyway, this is the turning point you must take note of in this tale of death, suffocation and severed limbs: Henceforth, I smiled to myself, I cannot submit to the will of the father or the lover or the husband or children to come in the future.
35
Six-year-old Amolika’s eyes had been gouged out. Her limbs had been hacked off. Her neck had been pierced with an iron rod. But since I had already seen her little body the previous day, I was able to accompany it with a hardened heart. Her mother, Amodita, had been my classmate in primary school. She was married before she turned fifteen. During the final exams in the ninth standard, I remember shutting the history textbook I’d been studying and going along with Ma to Amodita’s house in the slum near the railway track to take part in the singing and feasting before her wedding. When her wedding procession and the carriage drawn by a white horse came along Strand Road, the hearses and the funeral cortèges gave way. Amodita looked like the pale crescent moon, not sufficiently nourished. In the days that followed, she waxed like the full moon; but in the next two or three years, she shrank like the waning moon. She lost two infants; her husband, a worker in a cotton mill, became asthmatic; her paralytic father-in-law needed full-time care. Soon she looked like an over-milked cow. I did not have the courage to look at Amolika’s little body. It was hard for me to even believe that it was the body of a human being. The murderer was a neighbour, an eighteen-year-old. He had promised to teach her a song. He had sung the first few lines of ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ for her but before she could sing along, he clamped his hand over her mouth and dragged her into the bushes.