Sexuality is a funny thing for an Indian lesbian.
When all the crows of New Delhi retire to their nests, the dream of Lesbos comes to her. She is on an island where there are no men. Pretty-faced women dot the landscape like figurines from an erotic temple panel. Eyes that dance like butterflies, olive skins, full lips, firm buttocks make poetry of seamlessly sutured parts in their busty frames. Through the folds of the sari she sees the soft contours of bodies. Gasping with delight she peers into the gloaming for more. Siren-like the creatures entice her, pull her into their midst. She glides and glides; her heart beats louder and faster.
Then it happens. When she is close, too close and about to touch them with her fingertips, they turn sour, their eyes darkly imperiling.
'Betrayer,' 'Coward,' 'Hypocrite,' 'Worshipper of Semen,' 'Hetero Bitch,' they scream. Cusses come at her like arrows, scales fall from fish like bodies. Women turned into monstrous fish, hiss dreadful animosities. They want to tear her frail bodice, expose her. She runs and runs away from them till she reaches the rim of the island. Doddering precariously on the thin ledge separating earth from water, she wakes up alone in bed, in a room, encircled in darkness.
At age 25 Ms. Charu K. Guha, beautiful smart daughter in a status holding family of New Delhi, decides to come out and pursue romance full-frontally. She is tired of living a closeted life, hiding inside cavernous dreams,
The modern global city pulses with romance of an American style. The business of dating is booming. Single men and women make a beeline to become couples. They compete by creating fantastic profiles on the Internet. "Sleepless in New Delhi, a Preeti Zeinta look-alike but with more soul. Single, sexy twenty something Dehlite equally at home in East and West, wanting to meet a like-minded man with drive, sensitivity and a eye for both cash and culture…." So go the zestier ads. Charu wants to post an ad on the Internet, but she flounders on the shore of descriptors. She doesn't know what kind of a woman she is and what kind of man she wants. All she wants is not to be left stranded like single like a pale ghost while the Ferris wheel of life spins furiously.
Wherever she looks, in shopping malls, inside air-conditioned cars, in upscale restaurants, and fashionable clubs, the winsome Charu Guha sees a mad rush of couples. Men and women appear joined frantically at the hips, linked together indissolubly. The woman's right hand typically passes through the man's left and like jaws locked in rigor mortis, her fingers are grasped firmly by his, as though afraid that they might come loose if let go of.
The indissoluble bond, that is what Charu wants with that special someone, man or woman.
Then there are the rings branding the bond as precious and permanent. Set in gold and silver bands the rings glow on every finger like glistening pellets.
In a perfect world Charu would have preferred the ring to come from a woman, a beautiful woman, somewhat of an amalgamation of the sedate, thoughtful Shabana and the young vivacious Nandita, the nubile actresses who dared to have sex with each other onscreen in the film Fire. Charu watches it on a boot leg DVD in solitude, hunching close to the light flickering on the television set in the sooty stillness of her bedroom. The nights of watching raw contraband sex have aroused her immeasurably to the possibility of something similar happening in the real world to her; the coming out into the light of day something that she has always wanted but could never dare to ask for. The fear of being caught red-handed by her parents has been there, but desire for the unmentionable has been heightened by the fear.
Charu's father and mother, both very modern individuals holding progressive thoughts about the world and the women therein, refuse to see the film. "Women," they opine in unison with the cities other parents of daughters and daughters-in-law, "should be smart, educated, financially independent, but they certainly should not have sex with one another."
"In bed, a woman should lie next to a man and a man only."
While the sex between Shabana and Nandita secretly exhilarates Charu it nauseates the rest of the city.
The denizens of the robust masculine city dub Fire the 'lesbian flick'. They burn cinemas where the film runs. They threaten to burn anybody who said they enjoyed the film. Fighting fire with fire was how Charu thought of the carnage. It chilled her heart to see men and women uniting so venomously against what they label the common enemy of moral corruption. They said that like syphilis and godlessness this concept of women sexing women with no shame came from the West. 'Down with globalization' shrieks the placards bobbing up and down in the million Hindu protest marches that run from the theatres to the house of Parliament. The effigies of Shabana and Nandita are spat upon and torched and sacred hymns in praise of Hanuman god are chanted with the spraying of vermillion water from gigantic looking bazooka guns.
For days Charu dreams of getting burned by a battalion of fiercely screeching saffron-clad monkeys. They catch her in bed with a bare breasted female. They scoop her out and drag her by the hair through the city shouting obscenities like "American whore virus." In the market square they burn her and burn her.
Charu wakes up in beads of sweaty trepidation and thinks it is safest to procure a ring from a man.
In her mother's time there was no ring giving and taking between boy and girl. Just a simple homey ceremony with parents, relatives and neighbors witnessing and blessing and the conch shell blowing hard and loud to announce to the gods the arrival into the pantheon of the newly wed a fresh pair. But now with globalization and all, the youth of India, not wanting to be left behind in anything, are doing exactly what the youth in America are doing. They are announcing betrothals on websites and newspapers. They are bartering rings amidst partying, eating, and gyrating to loud foot tapping music.
At times when contemplating her well-manicured yet ring-bereft fingers, she is overcome by a sense of loss. Flushes of regret creep up the translucent skin on her neck and spread to her cheeks. A fool she is perhaps to be seduced by a persistent voice inside her stomach that says to her 'not for men you are meant, not for men, but for women.'
A sucker from a young age for dreams, visions and ephemeral voices, this most soul- beautiful to behold of daughters, on warm sultry nights, alone in bed in her father's amply endowed house, allows her mind to veer like a wind guided winged fruit to a scenic Isle. There she finds herself surrounded by bevies of the most beautiful and stylish of the city's women, looking seductively askance at her and beckoning her with their slender, bejewelled fingers, to enter their moist cavernous mouths where churned the blood-red of sweet betel juice.
While the single unmarried daughters in the city's posh enclaves fall into dreams of securing rings from America-branded MBA sons of high status families, Charu lies tossing and turning under satin sheets fantasizing about hibernating in the folds of the supple sari clad bodies of women.
In the morning when clarity of reason makes the diffuseness of dreams look like a formless pre-prandial sliver of a passing shadow, she blushes deep crimson at the previous night's mental transgression. "What a waste of a weekend evening," she thinks, gazing into the imaginary crystal ball of an imaginary future and seeing only fingers, ringless, forlorn, withering, terrifyingly alone. She feels a wave of panic rise in her bosom. Stupid of her to be missing night after night of opportunity to sit in upscale restaurants in the company of the cities thick walleted young corporate men, to bask in the glow of their adulating gaze, to bandy slick Americanisms, to engage in sanitized, calculated chit chat about culture, money, personal achievement and the motherland as emerging economic superpower.
In her 26th year Charu wants a ring to be conferred on her ceremoniously by a man, for the whole world to witness.
Men, Charu rationalized, held the keys to capital in the city. Globalization had made them rich and undiscerning. They had begun to think increasingly with their prepuces, those awful organs that knew naught but to crawl inexorably like bloated covetous worms on a hundred little slimy feet toward female orifices. MBAs and IT workers were drawing opulent salaries, living inside flamboyant homes with separate servant quarters. They were zipping around in latest model, air-conditioned Marutis, shopping inside glass palace-like showrooms for brand names, wining and dining women in restaurants where maîtres d' would accost them deferentially after hearing of their fathers' names. They were getting richer and duller by the hour.
It would be so, so easy to fool them.
It helped immensely that she did not quite look like a lesbian. Standing daily before the looking glass in her bedroom, applying Dior make up lushly on her face, checking anxiously for any obvious marks of a woman-lover on her body, she heaves a sigh of relief everyday at discovering none. She thanks god for that.
Die hard lesbians, mannish looking, with no clitoris, hair cut shorter than a man's, flaunting raucously their lesbionic convictions in shrill unfeminine voices, sporting unabashedly a moustache here and a beard there, warring perpetually against the bastion of patriarchy, have nothing in common with the kind of woman she is: smooth honey dewy-complexioned, smart, kamasutra-beautiful with savvy English accent, long- flowing silken hair washed regularly at the finest salons, in short, possessing a heterosex appeal that jumped out at men like a figure from a Khajuraho temple bas relief.
Charu's parents keep pressuring her for marriage. Suitable alliance after suitable alliance appear at her door step, but Charu is turning all down, sometimes by saying that one is odoriferous and smells too much of hydrogen sulphite, or this one looks like he cleans chamber pots for a living. Flimsy excuses for not marrying, the real reason being Charu doesn't experience any chemistry with any of the men. Juices don't course through her veins when she is with men.
When she sees her svelte co-worker Anjuli things happen. Flames leap up without the stoking; tectonic plates move inside of her whenever she brushes shoulders with the girl in her office.
It's congenital. Charu tries to draw her mother into the theme of congenitality, but her mother will have nothing of anything that has something to do with the genitalia. She is suspecting already that there is something seriously unnatural with her daughter's genitals and she will stay a spinster all her life.
At night she is weeping helplessly in the solacing arms of Mr. Guha. Charu hears her mother's sobbing and her father's crackpot consolation. Mr. Guha, the powerful worldly man who knew his Greek, says sometime that like Penelope his daughter is rejecting suitors because she is waiting for the right man to reveal himself. Other times he is saying that their daughter is a centaur, the horse half coming from him and the woman half from the mother. At his guffawing the sobs from Charu's mother reaches a higher decibel. She squeaks forth like a quail her tear-inflected chagrin at Charu's Americanization. Disease, unnatural, unhealthy are words strung together with L-word, satellite TV, dirty. The new girl with whom Charu is seen hanging out these days is condemned as a glorified prostitute.
Next morning at breakfast came the following sanctions from the swollen eye-lidded mother: "no more going shopping and late night bar hopping at the expense of your father's prestige and wallet with that spoilt brat of a woman. No more to be spending disproportionately long time with women, and time to spend more time with suitable men, like normal girls do." To never again allow the face of Fire and L-word to enter into the household. And no more silly prattle about biology and chemistry. "Women are not supposed to prance around with women and play doll's house love. Love is not a tinderbox and matchstick affair but a proper enduring social engagement between fair maidens and handsome princes."
The ending is a terrifying maternal caveat: "Who will look after you when we are gone, a woman? Pshaw! You will be an outcast!"
Her father explains to her how the Sapphic lore is mythical and Western, absurdly out of place in New Delhi. "Besides", he says, in a well-considered moment of erudite poise, "Sappho was married. She only loved men, both at home and in exile. There is a rumor that she jumped off the Leucadian cliffs for the love of Phaeon, a ferryman, in an effort to assert her heterosexuality." His face, she notices, has reddened to a beetroot hue as he utters the last word. Charu's heart melts. Such sincere, sweet attempt on the part of her dear stiff-necked father, a man of few words and many imperatives, to break into a colorful cloudburst of candor over morning coffee. She is moved to a tender tragicomic sensation. With eye shimmering, she reflects on the so-much her parents have given her. Everything she ever asked for, love, money. How they have jump started the very engine of her well-being. And selfish she is returning so much giving with the blind pursuit of cranky private dreams. The irregular dreams of an ungrateful daughter. Thoughtless she! Charu turns beetroot red with shame remembering her dishonorable reveries. Hallowed by the beetroot spreading redness of the moment, father and mother extract a solemn promise from daughter. Charu will give it a good shot so all that beauty she possesses does not go waste. If she finds not a man to like and wed then she will live in unconditional love for parents. Either unite with a man in matrimonial propriety or remain virgin-daughter in the father's hearth. But no dilly-dallying with women.
