Menoka has hanged herself

by Sharmistha Gooptu

  Just thinking about it outraged him. The injustice of it all. Maybe…maybe…she’d secretly prayed for him to die. That’s why she cried. To hide it, that she had wanted him dead. So easy then to put those flowers on his picture, light that foul incense, and be done with it. She had gotten hold of everything after him, zamindari estate, the houses…everything. Maybe Ramola too had wanted the boss dead. So she could have it all. Be boss of Bharat Talkies. Surely she didn’t take it kindly that the boss had bullied his way around the place, a woman like her. But, did she really think it would all be so easy now, for her? He smiled, it was going to be fun seeing how she did things…her way…

  What do you long for, Ramola Devi? He pondered trying to choose a jacket for the evening. Was he good for anything at all, that clumsy bully of an ox you just got off your back? Or, do you still have it all waiting, to be done to you…all of those things you only dreamt of, like they had all wanted it done to them. That’s what keeps you all on your toes, doesn’t it now? Keeps you from getting too big for your little slippers and high heeled shoes…

  II

  ‘Saala, shuar, son of a pig. Didn’t I say not more than two?’ Raju spat at Jhantu from the bed.

  Jhantu was wiping the mess on the floor, sulking. ‘How do I know…that they had a third one in there?’ he nodded towards the bathroom.

  ‘How do I know?’ Raju mimicked him, gritting her teeth. She grabbed the wooden ashtray from its resting place by the bed and raised her arm, then thought better of it. ‘Now make sure they don’t go shooting their mouths off on this, or else…you’ll have it, I’ll put one up your backside.’

  Jhantu pulled a glass shard from under his toes and made a face, ‘At least you got the money. They gave more, that’s something, na?’

  ‘Gave? That’s something, na? Who got it out of them? You, you son of a donkey, you pig? Ja bhag.’ Raju spat again.

  Jhantu pulled up his hunched body and ran to Raju, throwing his arms around her. Raju pushed him away, ‘Ja, get away.’

  ‘Maap didi, I’ll wash your feet with gangajal and drink, don’t be angry. I swear on Ma Kali.’

  ‘Na, leave me, move…saaala,’ she didn’t push quite so hard this time.

  Jhantu knew the signs of mellowing. He hugged her around the knees laying his head on her legs. ‘You’ll give me a share, na? Of the extra?’ he asked eagerly. She pinched his arm, making him wince. ‘Hmmm…but you be careful, any rubbish bhundal you do again and I’ll skin you alive,’ she laughed.

  Jhantu heaved relief, what a night! The ‘party’ had a room at Lula Lodge, next to Mangoe Lane. Two of them, jamai and shala babu, brothers-in-law, they’d said. Jhantu had stayed at the door, as always, dusting the floor and settling down to nod. He’d jumped at the crash inside, then a thud, and a yell. Only it wasn’t Raju. Someone on the other side had pulled open the door and he had flown inside to find a third one there, clearly belonging to the party of two. Another brother, did they say? This one was holding his head where Raju had hit him. The crash had been a half drunk glass of some foreign stuff aimed at the party. Raju was frothing at the mouth, and about to go again for number three. She seemed to have forgotten One and Two. Two, then closest to the door had thrown it open, possibly imagining he could fly. But not with him there, na babu, Jhantu thought back grimly…they had had to pay for three. It wasn’t easy, holding Raju at bay and getting that extra out of them. The party had exited but not before they’d issued some gaalis and threats which got Three the other ashtray in his back.

  He’d have to go see One in a day or two, with commiserations. Perhaps Raju would agree to another outing with the party (assuredly One and Two this time) after things had cooled. Tempers, they were not good for their business. He had been in the line long enough now, the likes of them just couldn’t afford to make enemies. Only, Raju didn’t seem to care. And it worried him.

  Jhantu went by the screen name Kusumkumar. He was nearing thirty but looked ten years younger and played boyish heroes, and beautiful celestial beings like yakshas and gandharvas. He had a pencil thin line for a moustache, smooth arms and legs, and his hair was always well-oiled and neatly combed. Having a widowed mother and two brothers to provide for, he had put his sweet good looks to other uses. He had discovered that some among the sahibs preferred the company of men like him to their own memsahibs. And had quickly become a favourite at some men’s haunts, but after a couple of unpleasant incidents, in one escaping three drunken sahibs abducting him in their motor car, he had become wary.

  In the studio para, though, Jhantu still offered his services. Disparaged by some as ‘nyaka’, unmanly, he was still good enough to handle new girls in their line. He would be gentle, coaxing them with his persuasions. Some others might lose control in a weak moment, thereby risking the job at hand, but never Jhantu. He would go about it steadily, to almost a pattern, of which he was secretly rather pleased. Until he tried it on Raju.

  In those early days, before Raju had entered Unique studio, Kamala had set herself the task of finding Raju a paramour, someone she could set up to induce the girl into the ways of men. To teach her what to do and what not with the babus, before Kamala could put her properly in the line. Raju had had her monthlies almost a year, so she was old enough, and if married she would be on her way to becoming a mother, Kamala had reasoned. It was time that she got her bearings or she would come to no good. But Raju had made Jhantu jittery. The girl seemed an imbecile of sorts, a nitwit. As it was, she had a ready smile that made him want to shake her, and the only times she had opened her mouth had been to intake the chops, cutlets and other treats he had bought her. He had not gotten a word out of her and every time he tried to come close she had pulled away, still the smile on her face. Determining Jhantu to exert his full charms.

  He’d taken her in a tram to the maidan, and though recovering from a spell of indigestion had patiently waited, as Raju had savoured the roadside vendor’s spicy ghugni and aludam. She ate silently as always, scraping up every drop, then raising the plate to her lips and licking it clean, before they had walked again, towards a thick clump of trees. He would do it like in the American films, he had thought. And after he’d made sure they were hidden from the road, seated on the raised ledge around a giant banyan, he had unbuttoned his shirt to reveal his bare chest, while starting to whisper the sweet nothings. He was deciding whether to fall on his knees or put his arms around her when he had felt the first rumblings. Not paying heed, he had dropped down on his knees and placed his head on her lap, face nestling against her stomach. Even as the rumbling had built into a roar. Abandoning stratagem, Jhantu had leaped up frantically looking about, even as Raju had looked on unperturbed. He had tugged off his shirt and trousers leaving them as he had retreated further into the thicket, plonking himself in the midst of some undergrowth.

  He was furious. Just as he was making headway. He hoped his predicament wouldn’t affect his success. He had snatched at some large leaves hanging overhead and quickly mopped up, but on emerging from the thicket found Raju missing. Gone also were his shirt and trousers. In their place, to his bewilderment was neatly folded the sari Raju had worn, red and yellow stripes.

  He’d retreated into the thicket, then emerged again in the hope that Raju too had surfaced. But almost an hour had gone by and he had lost hope. He should have known, the girl was crazed. Bajjat, rotten idiot, he bit back the curses that he wanted to hurl at her. He would extract each and every penny that he had spent from Kamala, that rotting old magi, for thrusting her on him. Emerging in his worn out jangias he had tied the sari around himself like a musalman’s lungi, cursing, then crept his way back to the tram stop at the maidan’s edge, only to find Raju on the spot, robed in his shirt and trousers, wearing her smile.

  He had seethed all the way in the tram while Raju had giggled on, unaffected by the looks of other travelers. Two men had thrown them coins, even as they had looked Raju up and down. As he lay that night, reliving the day’s disaster, it had dawned on
Jhantu that the girl was no imbecile, rather she had something unbeatable about her. And knowing the ways of men, he had remembered the char annas thrown at her. Months later, he’d smiled, perched on a broken seat in a musty cinema hall watching Raju Darling as she whirled in gay abandon thrusting her breasts on the one-eyed villain, eyes flashing, her lips smiling. He had known a winner. He also knew why men found Raju so very alluring. Them that liked to have their own women under their thumbs also dreamt of the one that didn’t care for them or the world. The one that could hold them by the reins. Be master to them. Play games. When she danced she ruled the hearts of those that watched her, their mouths open and hearts pounding. As they had devoured her every part, she consumed and spent them. Raju was worth her weight in gold. She was the queen the likes of him dreamt of…the one they were always searching for. The one that would get whatever she set her sights on.

  But that buri magi, that hag Kamala, she was with her always. Raju would greet him with a teasing ‘Ki go, Jhantu Da, how goes?’ when they chanced to meet in the studio para, but Kamala had given him the cold shoulder. Still, the studio para had its alliances and dalliances. Jhantu fielded an envoy, the one and only nyaka Natabar, the thin bespectacled dance master who had as much a way with words as he did with his swaying arms, tilted hips, heaving chest and poses and postures. Natabar could be in and out of the studios, even the ones where he had no work, and nobody had ever stopped him. He would step into dance rehearsals and put up impromptu performances, at times he had crafted the steps to a new song. Natabar sometimes slept on the steps of this studio or that, in the cold they even laid out a blanket or two, in case he did come by. When Rukhsar, the Bowbazar girl who was ‘second wife’ to a certain studio boss died and her body was thrown into a nulla in the studio para, everybody had known what was what. Only Natabar had danced non-stop in the sun from morning till late noon right before the very same studio’s gates, even threatening to tread glass shards, bringing the said studio to a standstill, and the wad of notes to arrange a burial. When Natabar had started to stop by Unique studio nobody had thought much of it. ‘It’s an art, didi,’ Natabar had told Raju, ‘to keep men under your thumb and also get their money out of them. You are made for it, my rani didi…not everyone’s job that. It’s our dal-bhat, the likes of us, our bread and butter, but these bioscope girls…they fall in love. It does them in, didi…’

  Raju knew it well. Her mother Puti Dasi had pined away for her father, one Ramesh Babu, who had brought her to a small rented room on the ground floor of a tenement in north Calcutta, from where the only view was the mossy walls of another crumbling house. Puti had been a theatre girl at one of the city’s old playhouses. He was a widower, and came to her after work and on Sunday afternoons. In a year and a half Raju was born and Puti saw the last of her babu. The landlord let her stay on, but she became a bonded servant to him and his wife, who lived on the floor above. She drew buckets of water, washed, scrubbed floors and cooked and by the time Raju was five or six, she was with her mother, running up and down the stairs, fetching this and that and trying to make herself useful, as if trying to earn the two square meals that she and her mother would get. Puti aged before her time, and living in the dingy dampness of the ground floor room she often had fever and a cough that made her breathless. The only person who ever came to see them was Kamala Masi, peeping in through the window of their room with her ‘Ki go?’ Kamala was employed by one of the theatre companies on Cornwallis Street, and her day job was to go from house to house with the handbills for the evening shows. In the evenings, she could be serving tea, helping with the costumes, or ushering the respectable ladies to their seats on the upper tier. Raju remembered her first coming by their window in the afternoons when she was six or seven and pushing through the printed handbills. Kamala had tried to coax Puti to return to the theatre, but Puti had not agreed. She clung to the roof over her head, and Raju knew very early in her life that her mother feared everything that lay beyond their little dingy room.

  It hadn’t kept Raju though. Once she had gotten over the amazement of it all. Nidhu Babu the landlord, who had hair greying at the temples, would watch her from behind as she squatted in her half-wet sari at the slippery kol-tola, washing a heap of dirty utensils and filling water to be used in the kitchen. He would drop one or two annas in her utensils as he accosted her in the dark alleyway between the kol-tola and kitchen, hastily running his hands over her chest or back, or rubbing himself against her as she steadied herself to stop the wet utensils crashing to the floor. She hadn’t thought of being afraid, after all, she knew ‘Nidhu Jethu’ for as long as she remembered. Only she wondered at first why he would want to put his hand in there, that dirty place from where she let out the turds. Him being so fussy about his puja things being spotless, sprinkling gangajal all over the place.

  But she hadn’t worried too much. She’d seen funnier things, like the time she had peeked into one of the upstairs rooms where Nidhu Jethu housed his boarders, the three office-going babus. She had crept up the stairs that Sunday afternoon to see if she could reach the roof unnoticed, where jethima, the landlady, sunned her pickles. A groan and soft ‘Baba go, my god’ had made her look in, and there they were, all three of them babus, on the one takhtposh bed, two of them with their gamchas around their waists, and babu number three pinned down, in nothing at all, hands tied behind his back, rope around his neck, while the other two rode on him, like he was a horse. Raju had watched in bewilderment as babu number one had pulled the rope around babu three’s neck bringing the tears rolling down his face, though babu two had soon abandoned his riding position and had stood himself up on three’s bottom, laughing as he had struggled to balance himself. Raju too had laughed from her hiding place, she had forgotten the pickles in the fun of it all.

  Then there was the attorney Ukil Babu’s boy, on the next roof. He had climbed across in the evenings and she had let him put her on his knees and kiss her on the mouth. He had gotten her things. The chops and singaras that his mother sent up to him on the roof, where he studied to prepare for his examinations. He was going to be a barrister, he said, like his father. And then he would marry her. One day he had gotten a friend. And sat Raju on that other boy’s knees and had him kiss her like he did. ‘My wife, re’ he had said laughingly. His wife, when she came later that summer, was draped in red, her face hidden, a girl not much older than her. Raju had gorged on the sweets they had sent out in the para. She had waited for when he would leave for his sashurbari with his new wife. That evening she had climbed across to the next roof, and emptied the two ink bottles he had had on his desk, red and blue, on the pages of notes that he had so painstakingly written out in his neat hand. For good measure she had soaked the ink sodden sheaf in a water bucket.

  Jhantu Da, he was different. There just wasn’t that glint in his eyes, nor ever did his hands shake, even a little bit, like Nidhu Jethu’s did when he would lay them on her. And then, Molina and Saraswati, those two studio girls from the day that they took her first naked pictures, them with their hate-filled glinting eyes, and twisting pan-stained mouths…leering as she had twirled around, the sari starting to come off where Molina had knotted it loosely for her at the waist. The sari, tangled and messy, lying in a heap at her feet. She had swirled and swayed her naked body, posed and postured until she had felt herself grow giddy, the food in her stomach pushing upwards, towards her mouth again.

  Kamala Masi, her eyes too had glinted when she had gone on and on about some golden-hearted rich boy that wanted to see her, marry her and take her home to his mother. What for? To wash his mother’s feet, and dance attendance on her, like that Ukil boy’s goat of a new wife.

  Natabar Da…he had danced round and round her like she was a queen.

  ‘We have no roop, didi, no beauty, but you…you have everything…something more than roop…something that makes them want you. Use it, didi, while you have it…it won’t be forever.’ His anger was like her own, and those like them that w
ere dirt and dust. When she took them she played with them, every time she would turn the game around, leaving them just as they thought they had gotten what they wanted. It was fun, that bewilderment in their eyes, so much hunger. When she came to them she made sure they remembered.

  III

  Seth Makhandas Khemka wiped another tear off his round face, shook his head despairingly, then gulped down the rest of his tea. His ordinarily rosy visage looked about to burst from its increased ruddiness and he was perspiring from the strain of his exertions. Sethji had been one of Shankar Chattopadhyay’s first backers, land magnate who had made his fortunes in the last war when he became a supplier to the sahibs. Ordinarily, Sethji would not drink water even at a meat-fish eating place, but he simply couldn’t say no to Ramola Beti, not at this time. He had rushed to see her as soon as he had heard, he’d gone to his des, his village, for Devi Maa’s yearly puja. Never in his life could he have imagined so tragic a ghatna, and poor Shankar Babu, always so hasmukh, always laughing.

  ‘All mata’s will, beti’ he had wept as Ramola sat quietly, wondering if it did really help, to cry it out like that. Sethji had never seen a bioscope picture, he had a repugnance mixed with fear of it, though in fact he had put his money into films when even the most forward looking among his bhais would not have done it. Shankar had won him over, a Bengali boy who knew business like a bania, and ‘so educated, brainy, what buddhi…’ he reminisced through his tears. Makhandas Khemka had prided himself on backing such a highly educated, America-returned man of the future. Though why Shankar Babu had allowed Ramola Beti into films, he never quite understood. Such a beautiful pure girl, her face would remind him of his Devi Maa. These Bengali boys sometimes did go too far in their craze for being modern. Still, it was alright while he was there. ‘But, no more, beti,’ he had implored. ‘Bioscope is no place for any widhwa…you know it, don’t you beti…a widow has her honor to guard, na beti?’ He had shaken his head, ‘Not the place for a good girl like you.’