At 27 Charu Guha is basking in the light of Suhail Narangi's attention. He is rich. He has flair. She eyes the capital. He is a means to the end. If only she could get to the capital without the via media of the dreadful prepuce-worshipping, life would be a whole lot easier for her. The way his eyes settle on her breasts fills her with unease. Ogled at relentlessly, they squirm under a taut white Gap T-shirt, like a pair of projectiles ready to shoot off into ether at the slightest provocation.
Suhail is well-liked by her parents. The fat cat son of a fat cat father. A rising star on the corporate horizon of New Delhi. From day one, upon setting eyes on her at a party he wants her. She and Suhail are engaged to get married.
How ecstatic her mother is upon hearing of the alliance. Powerful guests from all over the city heavily attend a big engagement party. Everybody blesses the couple with happiness and children. Air of New Delhi resonates with the blaring of conch shells.
What a fabulous courtship! He wines and dines her in upscale restaurants. Expensive gifts rain on her. Like a prosperous patron feeding his pet peacock with gems instead of seeds, he is showering expensive foreign gifts on her.
Charu is receiving and receiving, desperately separating object from giver and experiencing afflatus from glimmer and goldgettishness. Yet in solitude, she is dreading the coming of the moment when he would ask for the return gift. She bravely papers over anxiety with a smile as she would paper over a minor blip in an otherwise well-scripted reel story.
She devices plot after fabulous plot to make her avoidance of sex with him look normal, part of the demureness that all Indian women are expected to display in the company of men. Even a kiss is shied away from as he tries to kiss her here and there, sticking out his tongue salaciously. She is in motion always, swaying, sliding, gliding, ducking, coyly pleading for deferral. When he wants her lips she turns her neck to him, bobbing her head up and down in the manner of a spring chicken on the run. He is always missing the mark and she heaves a sigh of relief when she feels his salivating mouth fall on the back of her neck, her arms, safe non-sexual zones.
When he is not looking, she scrubs the parts touched by him with a perfumed hanky.
Because the whole business is unsavory, her reveries are coming back like roaring tempests.
She has promised her lips, one in the nether region and one smack above her gorgeously clefted chin, to a woman. A beautiful woman of her dreams...the woman teases her at night when she is in bed unable to seal lid to eye. When the haunting is too much to bear, her fingers twitch and travel inexorably to nooks and crannies. Under the covers, behind a tightly locked door, she squeals in delight, sounding like a freshly lit flame before petering off into deep sleep.
Suhail's eyes never cease to glint with lust. He is impatient. In the guesthouse by the river, hidden behind lush vegetation, away from the prying eyes of civilization, he takes her to ease her out of the tension he knows she suffers from because she is the virgin bride to be. He understands, he tells her in sotto voce, though nobody would have heard him had he shouted it out to the skies. He is creating an ambience, or as they say in New Delhi parlance, the perfect Kohinoor moment, in dewy soft focus. The imported wine, the lamb shish kebab.
The wine makes her giddy with delight.
The tension is ebbing away fast like a muddy rivulet in retreat.
She can handle it. Charu is safe. For the occasion, she is wearing a chastity belt. It fits snugly like ball in a socket.
Men can't see the thing, as it doesn't glow in the dark. It's only when they come up against it they wail in sorrow then rail in anger.
Charu's hole is securely plugged with chastity stuffing.
In her grandmothers time women took counter-invasive measures with homespun articles of clothing. 'Chastity stuffing' is what it sounds like when the crinkled-skinned old woman's pearl of ancient wisdom is transliterated into English.
In New Delhi there must be at least a countless number of beautiful classy women, who nightly go through the motion of the much abhorred act of sex with men with ingenuously created shock absorbers plugged into their orifices. They aren't all lesbians. They just don't like sex with men. What is there to like about the writhing, the wriggling, the bestial grunting, the clumsy spiraling into tumescence and more tumescence, the blank thud of pestle grinding on mortar and then the freakish spilling of the abominable fluid across boundaries?
Makes sex with men a wholly tasteless activity in the eyes of women like Charu. She doesn't want it and she doesn't want it.
Charu enjoys the foreplay. The finery of the courtship is ego-boosting. Suhail fits the bill of a good fore player. He is quite a looker. His skin is the smooth, non-hirsute ideal she seeks in the world (but doesn't find). She dislikes hair sprouting like weeds. His skin is like a rich man's well-manicured lawn. Eminently touchable, it begs stroking. From head to toe he is Hugo Bossed for the encounter-promising evening.
He is the doll that Charu can snuggle up to, hold, be held, receive benefaction from.
The doll wriggles frightfully. The more Charu tries to think about muslin-textured articles of clothing to wrap up the doll in, the more rigid, hard, gravelly, crude brown earth stony it tumesces into.
It tumesces and it tumesces.
The soothing, wine inflected diffuseness of Charu's mind is lifting like a fog.
Bastard! Don't you have mothers and sisters in your family? She screams.
In heaven as on earth: When an Indian woman yells, then descends on her male counterpart total darkness. His will is paralyzed as though spray painted into stillness by terror. He is compelled to submit like a grass-grazing cow.
Shiva, the uber man, is lying ashen, the legendary tuber draining off blood, deflating like a punctured balloon, while over his prostrate body, trampling on the soft flesh of his distended belly, her tongue lolling, panting, longish, stands she, reeling slightly under the impact of the deafening roar of expletives she has just released into the cosmos.
"Bastard do you want to eat my face or what?"
She is believing that he will veritably lick the skin off her face away and devour bones and muscles if she lets him carry on this way, unchecked. She is envisioning him as a monkey, pushing her legs apart, knocking her over, squatting on her breast and stinking.
She smells stink. The stink is preceding him as he is pushing towards her. Covering her face with one arm across her breast she yells fearlessly "rotten bastard get off me!"
The grapevine of New Delhi gets into Tarzan-like lightening speed mode, teleporting news from creeper to creeper, changing fact to fiction to salacious gossip. Air is rife with speculation on the crestfallenness of the Guha's. The glee over their impending shame can barely be contained.
Truth to be told Mr. Guha, the chief secretary of the chief's chief's chief, had many enemies in the city. They all prayed for his tumbling and hated his impeccable English. But he stood stern like a statue, irremovable. Nothing would have got to him as this one has. Imagine raising a daughter who turns out to be a man-hater! Imagine filling the head of a daughter with Western ideals, teaching her to have a premium focus on speaking aromatic English, treating English as a priceless pearl, and giving her the audacity to look down on the Hindi-inflected broken English speakers of New Delhi! Imagine wanting to name the daughter Miranda when she was just born and having ego fight with his wife before adopting the native name of Charulata!
The city socialites had long ago predicted something to be awry in the daughter so strangely-made. Not a tendon here and a cartilage there misplaced, but something bigly odd about her.
All were waiting for the prediction to come true. All were waiting for Mr. Guha's vein to break.
When news of the break up of Suhail and Charu's engagement reach the ears of Mr. And Mrs. Guha, Charu's mother threatens to overdose on Benadryl if she doesn't fix what she has just broken—her golden egg hatching prospects. Where will they find another like Suhail Narangi for her? Getting to be 28, soon to be 30, Charu will not have luxury liners such as him docking at her port for too much longer. And on top the obstinate lesbian thesbian thing will make even leaky, mastless, broken-plank boats run away from her. Treat her like leprosy, reject her like they reject dark skinned tribal faced girls.
Charu takes mental note of genteel ships and tatterdemalion boats passing her by, leaving her shipwrecked, in a lush thicket of mangroves with the ground beneath her feet all soft and downy. The possibility of being surrounded by tribal girls their hips swaying in the wind, humming sweet mother-earth tunes, drawing nectar from flora, electrifies her.
The electricity is perambulating in slow motion through her arteries like a bank-grazing snaky river.
"I love you Ma," is what she tells her mother.
Mr. Guha sinks into a somber mood and scrutinizes the Greek mythology volume for clues. Thoughts run disarrayed through his mind: Can daughters of good Bengali gentlemen with a nose for daffodils, an ear for Schubert and a stomach for Greek, be lesbians or whatever name they gave these women with warped chromosomes? He has never consumed beef or alcohol in his life, the sacred thread of initiation has always adorned his body like a coat of Brahminical arms, he has never cast even the germ of a lascivious glace at a woman, not even at his wife whom to his satisfaction he has treated with so much respect over the years, as one would treat a mother or a sister. Just once, only once, he had profaned the lady in order to have Charu, the sweet fruit of their combined effort. And to such a sinless man is born a lesbian daughter!
A sacrilegious non-sequitor has been appendaged cruelly to his otherwise coherent life at an age, when like Duke Prospero he should be retiring into the sanctuary of good books.
How can lesbian daughters be born to observing Brahminical men? Is it his ill luck, or the curse of an evil aunt, or is he paying the price for not keeping the name of Miranda for his daughter?
A trill of shock passes through his body as he contemplates the possibility of the real flesh and blood presence of a lesbian in his house, a daughter of his has effloresced right under his nose, into a strange thing!
Lesbian! The word resonates yet catches on to nothing from anything in the past. A fairy word to his ears, insubstantial, not real. Nobody in his fourteen generations or in the fourteen generations of his familiars ever harbored a lesbian daughter in their nest. The damn word didn't even have a solid etymological root. Mr. Guha rummages through several Greek and Latin primers to seek out its origins. All he gets is a vague intimation of geography: Lesbians: pertaining to Lesbos, the old Greek island in North East Aegean. Like Athenians are to Athens, Spartans are to Sparta, so Lesbians are to Lesbos, inhabitants simply of one lakh sultry-climed islands that float on the sea like swarming honeybees. Men lived there along with women. The women dreamt about fellow women, they wrote poetry about them and painted each other. They make men disappear from their dreams, their art work, and their imagination. But in real life they eat, drink and make merry copulation with men, bearing them children.
The idea of the lesbian he cannot grasp. What is she? Like a child looking into a kaleidoscope and discovering various patterns, some in arabesque, some in cuneiform script, he sees faces of women with Groucho Marx moustaches eating dirt and jellyfish, women burping and farting unrestrainedly, engaging in unfeminine activities, purple gargoyle faces, with clusters of ovaries peeling off of them like old skin. Some are chasing away men with industrial strength rolling pins. He is aghast at the sight of the prancing deviants.
Like the parched desert-weary Bedouin Mr. Guha conjures up the infant cherubic Miranda, her phantom-face shimmering in the distance through the haze of heat and dust. There is light, there is exhilaration; he sees the bright formation of a lakh resplendent glowworms spiral upwards into a fountain. The light bedazzles and darkness falls over his eyes.
At the age of 28 Charu is rendered an orphan. A calamitous event by any standard is this descent into a state of motherlessness and fatherlessness of the one and only beautiful, single, coveted-by-men, lesbian-daughter of high-status parents.
"His heart was stretched across his chest like a rubber band unto infinity," the young doctor says as he examines the body of Mr. Guha, the chief secretary of the chief's chief's big chief, the big man of New Delhi, slumped humbly in his high-backed patent leather armchair, head lolling on chest as though it had come unhinged from his neck. "It is like two fat people had played tug of war with his heart. First time I am seeing this type of dying in New Delhi, where so much pulling in opposite directions has snapped the heart in twain," he says, consecrating his rapid verbal autopsy with a dollop of Middle English.
On an ordinary day Charu, the father-emulating daughter that she was, loving to roam in the labyrinth of literary referents, would have meditated amusedly on the manifold oddities of the word 'twain' as it rolled out of the tongue of the Punjabi Doctor. But today she is petrified, turned into stone, standing zombie-like in the midst of the quiet carnage of a father dead of heartbreak and a mother overdosed on Benadryl.
Prolonged wailing is coming from the insides of the Guhas' house. The maidservants are emoting like comic book gorillas, beating their breasts histrionically, lamenting the passing away of a true Indian wife, a husband-devotee, in the tradition of the venerable sati. Two whole bottles of Benadryl she had to consume to follow her husband to heaven! Noble she! They shriek.
Toward Charu they cast coal-black eyes of accusation. It is as if her shameful, dirty woman-lovingness had killed her parents.
All that Charu wanted was to be with a beautiful woman. In lieu of a woman, she would be satisfied with a good man, one who would safeguard her chastity with his life, not despoil it. It would be nice to have a gentle man who did not cast lustful glances at her.
The consummate mate in Charu's eyes: meetings with him over lemonade, dal puri and the latest Bollywood DVD, would be consistently transcendental. They won't converse much. Turning off the lights, they sit next to each other, as he struggles to follow her instructions to link arm into arm and not let go.
Sometimes he will lie down next to her and go off to sleep like a baby, while her mind will drift into the warm islands of Lesbos.
Not a hackle of trepidation will he raise inside her while they sleep together like a couple in a fairy tale.
Looking out the window of his room one night she will perchance see a dank sky with an endlessly thickening carpet of clouds. She will be fearful that her life will go out of her for good were she to step out into that grim numbed down world. He will intuit her fear and administer his hospitality in sheepish smiles to help soothe her anxieties. This would be the way to win her heart and make her determined to not leave his room, his house, come what may.
On their wedding night the consummate mate would offer the left side of his bed, because the right side has a hollow into which he fits smugly. Shyly he would confess that he liked sleeping in the hold of the hollow. The two would sleep with serenity, he in his hollow and she in the belly-warmth of security.
The next morning they would wake up, surprised to find themselves aligned next to each other on his bed like Hansel and Gretel.
"You're a man!" he would cry.
"You're a woman!" she would cry back in return..
They would be in ecstasy at this discovery of one another.
On the day of Mr. And Mrs. Guha's funeral, many come, top brass men and women of New Delhi, socialites mostly. They praise Mrs. Guha sky high; commiserating with Charu's loss of two big umbrellas, they click their tongues in pity. She knows they pity her mateless condition. In the absence of her parental umbrella, they insinuate, she is meat for the elements. Wolves will come at her, peck at her flesh. She will be baited as a bear.
No man will ever marry her. She will find no woman either.
Sharmila Mukherjee lives in Brooklyn. She teaches at New York University and spends the rest of her time reading, writing and loving a most amazing partner. She was born and raised in the 'city of joy' Calcutta, India. The landscape of her fiction is Bengal and she writes about Bengalis struggling to retain their identities in an increasingly globalizing India. She has stories published in South Asian Review amongst other literary journals. Currently she is working on an epistolary novel tentatively entitled The Imperial Mother.
Comments (closed)
Brian Bloomberg
2008-05-07 06:04:21
Who reads such nonsense? Everyone trying to be a Rushdie or a Jhumpa here? Get a life and a real job.
Jonathan
2008-05-07 19:17:08
"Brian Bloomberg," IP address 202.54.107.194, originating in Milton, Queensland, Australia.
dave quinn
2008-05-14 15:02:07
I liked the story. It's pretty original and I detected parody here. As for Mr. "Brian Bloomberg" from Queensland, Australia, I'm not surprised with his rude dismissal of the story. Most Australians are philistines anyways.
debraj
2009-11-10 11:38:00
Great writing!!!Bongs are sensitive....easy to write about them i suppose...