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Spreading a bedsheet as white as sewali flowers, they lay down on their backs beside each other on the ground. It was the beginning of October. The fan above was spinning at a low speed, their attempt to deal with the heat of a summer reluctant to bid adieu. They lay cocooned in weariness, the sort of fatigue that follows a climax. After staring at the fan unblinkingly for a good while, Chaitali shifted, turning to her side. Now her eyes were frozen on Imon's face. Imon, still lying straight, turned to her with a smile.
"At the core of it all is the wheel." Said Imon, unprompted. "The wheel that never stops turning. This turning, this moving forward as we turn— that is what life is all about. Stagnation is another name for death."
"Buddha talked about it too, didn't He?" Chaitali added, "A wheel, a chakra with twenty four spokes!"
Imon said nothing, taking Chaitalis hand. A soft— no. The softest, smallest hand. Imon's, in comparison, looked large and long, with colours trapped under the fingernails— remnants of a painting finished a short while ago. Colours that had stayed even after a good wash. Water colours water itself had failed to carry away.
Chaitali too squeezed Imon's hand. The hand that had moments ago brought her image to life on a canvas. Caressing and fondling it, she intertwined her fingers with Imon's. Imon, to whom she had never been colleague Utpal's wife, Mrs Dorobdhora, but Chaitali from the day they had met. Utpal had always compained it was hard to hold onto her tiny hand. During their wedding, her father had put her hand in Utpal's in front of the sacred fire, performing the Hindu ritual of Kanyadaan— the giving away of the bride. Her hand had looked ridiculous in his. Almost Lilliputian, Utpal would often say. Yet it didn't seem to look that bad against a large hand now, Chaitali observed. Although, it had to be said that Imon's hand was not as coarse as Utpal's due to obvious reasons.
There had been some party at Utpal's office that night. After arranging dinner for the rest of the family members, sorting out what was needed for Utpal's tiffin the next morning and tending to a million other chores, Chaitali had noticed that the hands of the clock had managed to overtake her. She had worked faster after that, yet Utpal had had to wait for her out in the cane chair in verandah for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes that he had made sure to bring up while introducing his new bride to his colleagues later, Imon being the first of them.
"Women, you know." He had said, "We could be dead on our feet waiting for them, but they cannot part from their mirrors! Can't really complain about the end product though!"
Chaitali had been shocked. Product? Was she an object? Something to be bought and sold in the market? Despite the stupid grin on her face, she had felt tremors within. Was this the man she had spent years waiting for? Ever since their school days? All these years, she had dreamt of building a home with a man who had had no qualms about calling her a product in front of his friends!
With a glass of lemon soda, she had sat in a dark corner of the room on a sofa, observing the guests. Like little woven flowers, ice cold water droplets had covered the outside of her glass. The flowers, in threads, had travelled down the surface of the glass, barely hanging from the grooves on its base. As she had sat peering at the crowd through her drink, Chaitali had come to a realisation. Yes, this was the man she had been waiting for. During her post graduation days, she had once gone to a bar with Rini and some other friends. A bar cum restaurant. She could no longer recall whose birthday it had been, but she remembered the lime soda she had ordered there. "Lime soda my foot!", Utpal had screamed at her, accusing her of lying over the phone. Rini and the others had heard him too. The man who had screamed then, had been the very one standing before her that day. She had simply not realized it, or perhaps not wanted to. Chaitali had not cried that night at the bar. So many needless sorries she had blurted out to calm him down! Utpal himself, who would often brag about drinking cheap whiskey in plastic glasses without soda or water (sometimes taking swigs straight from the bottle) had told her to go to hell, taking her sorries with her.
Years later at the office party, the same man had stood with a glass of scotch in his hand, gushing as he talked. Chaitali had just finished gulping down her lemon soda when a woman in an ash-coloured kurta had come into view. Brushing past the fresh frangipanis in the porcelain vase bearing a hand-painted image of Radha-Krishna, She had walked up to her from a dimly lit corner of the room.
"As long as men stay men, women won't get to be treated as humans!" She had declared. A pair of dangling red earrings had caught Chaitali's attention. The woman had looked like a bouquet of poincianas— the flowers of a fire tree. One summer day, while travelling in a bus down National Highway 37, Chaitali had looked up from her window seat and seen a tall fire tree adorning the sky. Although the only splash of red on the woman that night had been her earrings, she had reminded her of those flowers. Of fire itself.
From their very first conversation, the woman had adddressed her by her name. She was younger than Chaitali, even though she had the authority to order Utpal around at work. Despite a work environment that upheld conventional classifications in the name of etiquette, the woman had thought it unnecessary to address Chaitali as Mrs. Utpal. She had, in fact, thought it best not to.
It didn't take them long to become friends. Friendship— was that really what it could be called? To tell the truth, the woman had opened up a strange new space for conversation in her life. The rice and lentils and vegetables and elephant apples and gravies and pickles and bedsheets and pillow cases encasing Chaitali's mind had been swept away by a wave, all thanks to that woman. Well, actually, she was still a girl. Only about to touch thirty despite her high-ranking post.
The more they talked, Chaitali saw the woman and herself growing younger. She began seeing herself as a girl too, despising all that came with being a woman. A human, that's all she now wanted to be. She wanted to ride on her friend Naivaidya's bike in a short summer dress to that Naga village she had heard of, where long ago, the heads of vanquished enemies were displayed with pride in the front hall. In some beach in Gokarna, she wanted to wear a sari over her jeans and stand next to her school friend Souradeep, who had stopped dropping by to see her after Utpal had started grumbling about his visits. She wanted to travel to that village by the indo-china border, Chitkul. To sit there on a rock in a kasavu cotton sari by the road and spend the day reading about Anderson's life beyond the border. Most of all, she wanted to distance herself from Utpal. All the arguments that she had settled with her apologies, never caring who was right or wrong— she wanted to let them be for a change. Let them be as they were. If someone was determined to be unhappy no matter what, how could she make them feel otherwise? That was not her responsibility, the girl had helped her realise.
Emboldened by that realisation, Chaitali had put on the knee length summer dress she had been wanting to wear for a long time, lit some candles, poured herself a glass of wine and made herself comfortable in the living room on her birthday. The bouquet of roses in Utpal's hands had come crashing that night. As she had bent down, trying to pick up the fallen rose petals, Chaitali's fingers had been pricked by thorns. She had wiped off the blood dripping down from them, cleaning up the floor until it had started shining like a mirror. Then she had, once and for all, walked out of that house.
During her first few days of living in a rented room by herself, the girl had stood by her. Utpal, who had been uncomfortable whenever she had forgotten to introduce herself to his colleagues as his "Mrs.", had somehow had nothing to say about this relationship. Maybe he didn't want to say anything. Was it because Imon was a girl? A fiery one at that? Or did it have something to do with the fact that she was his superior? Chaitali didn't know. She no longer wanted to.
At present, a painting sat in front of her. A canvas propped up on an easel ahead. Imon had created it with the same fingers she was now holding. No brush. Nothing else to mix the colours with. A hand-drawn painting of white and orange sewalis strewn across the grass. Lying amidst them was Chaitali dressed in the same colours. One side of the painting held another image within, done beforehand with brushes. A likeness of a series embroidered by Chaitali depicting vulvas in many shapes and forms. In the embroidery, which expressed pained memories of her time spent with Utpal, none of the forms exuded any contentment. Gazing at the painting, Chaitali began to speak.
"It pleases me when you touch my hand, you know. So much so that I shiver from within! Back in college, Sruti had placed her lips on mine one day in our hostel. No man had touched my lips till then. Not even Utpal. Actually, apart from him, I had never even looked at another man that way. Most likely, Sruti had come to me chasing an experience. I was pretty sure of that even then. It was the first day of my period, and my cramps were killing me. You know I like nothing about anything on my first day. Not myself at least. Not one bit! Yet, that kiss had stirrred something inside me. Made me quiver. My heart had not raced, no. Nor had it stopped beating. People lose their minds over the heart for no reason, don't they? It's just a machine that pumps blood! Sruti's touch had left me wet that day. I had never felt like that with Utpal. Everything was always so rushed with him. Do you remember I had told you one day, that with him it was almost always like exercising? You had told me it happens. That a woman's body never abides if she is not aroused. Without being pleasured, my vagina, dry and joyless, was used year after year. Utpal would come to me trying to be romantic, and in two minutes— yes, two minutes, it would all be over! He would fall asleep immediately. Nobody had told me what I was supposed to do then. Nobody was going to either. I used to get so tired too, reaching home from school after a full day of teaching. But I had tried to keep the spark alive, to scatter fragrance on our marital bed. Yet, when it was time to wrap it all up and sleep before the night even began, none of the people who had given me a thousand suggestions before our wedding, none of the friends and family who had called at odd hours annoying me with advise I had never asked for, would come to teach me how to satisfy myself!"
Chaitali fell silent for a while. Cradling her neck, Imon put her arm around her, her hand becoming a pillow for Chaitali. She turned away from the painting, looked into Imon's eyes and said, "But these are simply bedtime stories. The night will be wasted if we keep dwelling on them! A good conversation is as satisfying as the moments after a climax, isn't it? The moments that we all keep chasing. Of course it can bring pain too. It can bring poisonous memories, but happy ones with it. All it needs to be is devoid of judgement and full of meaning. Even silence ought to be meaningful, I think. When you squeeze my hand, does it only make me tremble here, in this part of my chest? People forget how important it is to feel things down there as well. How do I leave my body to someone who ignores that? A vagina is only used in our society. Nobody cares to talk of its pleasure!"
"I think it's probably because they don't have any control over themselves— all those men who cannot talk to you without calling you someone's wife. The thousand other Utpals who think that is the only way to respectfully address someone of the opposite sex. If they did, it would not be so hard for them to accept and recognise our nether parts— each a path into the world itself. They would even find it easy to share in the pain and pleasure of these paths with those of us who bear them. But, as I said, they don't know restraint, and for this reason, for only this reason, they make themselves believe that those with and without vaginas will always be divided, and cannot exist simply as humans in this world."
"Nor can they accept that just like any other phenomenon we experience as humans, the presence or absence of that path in someone's body is irrelevant when it comes to love. As it should be! "
Chaitali panted, drained by the conversation. She saw sorrow in the eyes of her image in Imon's painting. A certain restlessness. The sorrow shone as bright as the dewdrops glittering on the sewali petals. Gazing at the corner of the painting, watching all sorts of sensations, aches and emotions dancing like waves across every vulva, Imon and Chaitali found themselves rolling around on a matress of sewalis, buried under layers and layers of petals.The flowers consumed them, their fragrance melting into every strand of their hair.
Imon stretched out her hand to graze Chaitali's shoulder. A scent clung to her hand as she did so. Not the smell of springtime foxtail orchids, those eternal symbols of love, but a lingering scent of sewalis. She brought her hand up to herself and inhaled, then buried her nose at the base of Chaitali's neck. The deep, long breath that left Chaitali carried the same scent. When that scent, and the taste of the sewalis Imon's imagination had given life to, mingled in Chaitali's breath, the threads of her embroidery, enveloped by Imon's painting, began releasing the same fragrance. Marks left by Imon's fingernails grew dense upon Chaitali's bare back. Like musk deer, the two drifted and floated, drunk on their own scents. Until a raging thunderstorm arrived to wash away the sorrow of the sewali petals, they soared amidst the clouds in a sky of their own making.
Manaswinee Runumi Mahanta
Translated from original Assamese into English by Harsita Hiya
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