My Name Is Radha

Tassels

Behind the hedges of the spacious garden adjacent to the kothi, a cat had delivered a litter of kittens, all eaten up by the tomcat. Later, behind the same hedges, a bitch gave birth to a few puppies. They had now grown quite big and yelped all the time, inside the kothi and out, plus they deposited their terrible filth everywhere. Poison took care of them. They died one by one, their mother too. No one knew where the father had disappeared. But had he been around he would surely have met his end just as expeditiously.

Many years had passed since. . The hedges of the garden adjacent to the kothi had been trimmed and pruned scores of times. Behind them, many more cats and bitches had brought forth their young ones and they had all gone down the same path to oblivion without leaving any trace of their existence. Her hens — by far the most ill-mannered ever seen — often used the same hedges for laying their eggs and she was obliged to collect them every morning and carry them into the house.

In the same garden some man had brutally murdered their maid. . her red silk drawstring with tassels on the ends, bought for eight annas from an itinerant vendor only two days before, was coiled tightly around her neck. The killer had twisted the cord with such unforgiving force that her eyes had popped out.

The gruesome sight of the maid had so affected her that she fell victim to a raging fever and lost consciousness. . and was perhaps still unconscious. But no, how could that be? Long after the murder, the hens had laid eggs, many cats had given birth to kittens, and a marriage ceremony had also taken place. . a bitch with a red dupatta wrapped around her neck, her glittering kurta. . of brocade with gold and silver threads woven into the fabric. But this bitch’s eyes weren’t bulging out of their sockets; they seemed, rather, to have sunk down into them.

A military band had performed in the garden. . Soldiers in red uniforms had marched with those colourful skins tucked under their arms, spewing out a medley of strange sounds. When the decorative tassels attached to their outfits fell off, people rushed to pick them up and tie them to the ends of their drawstrings. . but when morning came all of this had simply vanished without a trace. . they’d all been poisoned.

God knows what got into the bride’s head that she decided to give birth to a baby, just one baby, and not behind the hedges, but in her own bed. . so roly-poly, a veritable red pom-pom. . But the mother died. . father too. . both done in by the child. . no one knew where the father was. Had he been there, his death was certain. Heaven knows where those band-wallahs in their tasselled uniforms had disappeared that they never came back. Tomcats roamed around the garden and gawked at her menacingly, taking her for a basketful of animal skin, membrane and pieces of tough meat, though her basket had only oranges.

One day she pulled out her two oranges and set them in front of the mirror. She backed up a little and looked at them, but she didn’t see them. . Because they’re teeny-weeny, she reasoned. . But they started to grow even as she was looking at them. She wrapped them in a silk cloth and put them away on the mantel above the fireplace.

Now the dogs went into action, barking their heads off. . The oranges started to roll around on the floor. They bounced on every floor of the kothi, hopped into every room, and sprinted off nimbly to large, spacious gardens. . The dogs played with them, and sparred with each other.

Strangely, two dogs in the pack died from ingesting poison. Her stout, middle-aged housemaid gobbled up the rest. She had been recruited to replace the young maid whom some man had murdered by tying her tasselled drawstring in a tight noose around her neck.

She did have a mother, six or seven years older than her stout, middle-aged housemaid, but not as stout or sturdy as her. She went out for a ride in the car every morning and evening, to lay eggs behind the hedges in faraway gardens like her bad-mannered hens. Neither she nor her driver picked them up.

She would fry omelettes, which left stains on her clothes. Eventually, after the stains had dried, she would throw the clothes away behind the hedges in the garden. Buzzards would swoop down to carry them away.

A girlfriend of hers came to see her one day — Pakistan Mail, Car No. 9612 PL. It was murderously hot. Daddy was in the hills, Mother on an outing. . she was drenched in sweat. The minute she entered she took off her blouse, flung it aside and installed herself directly under the ceiling fan. Her boiling milk jugs cooled off gradually. Her own milk jugs were cold but slowly began to warm up. Finally, heaving away, both the hot jugs and the cold became lukewarm and morphed into a tart lassi.

The band played for that girlfriend, though the soldiers’ uniforms had no fluttering tassels. Instead they had brass vessels, some small, some large, that produced sound, booming and soft. . soft and booming, when pounded on.

When this girlfriend next met her, she said that she was noticing changes in herself. And in fact she had changed. Now she had two bellies: one old, one new, one riding over the top of its mate. Her boobs looked ravaged.

Then the band played for her brother. . the middle-aged, stout housemaid cried inconsolably. Her brother tried his best to comfort her. Poor thing, she had remembered her own wedding.

Her brother and his wife quarrelled all night long, she crying, he laughing. . In the morning, the stout, middle-aged servant took her brother away to comfort him. The bride was given her bath. . her red, tasselled drawstring was threaded through the waistband of her shalwar. . only heaven knows why it wasn’t strung around her neck.

Her eyes were very large. If her throat was squeezed very hard, they would have popped out like the eyes of a slaughtered goat. . and she would have come down with a high fever again. But she was still not free of that first one. . Maybe it had subsided and this was a new fever from which she had now lost consciousness.

Her mother was learning to drive. . her father had set himself up permanently in a hotel. He came now and then, visited with his son and left. The son called his wife home sometimes. Every two or three days, when an old memory revisited the stout, middle-aged servant, she broke into tears. He tried to calm her down, she tried to pat and caress him; the bride would go away.

Her sister-in-law — the bride — she. . and yes, the girlfriend — Pakistan Mail, Car No. 9612 PL — go for an outing and wander off to Ajanta, where painting is taught. They gawk at the paintings and are transformed into pictures themselves. A riot of colours — red, yellow, green, blue — all screaming. Their creator — a good-looking man with long hair who wears an overcoat in winter as well as summer, uses wooden clogs whether inside or out — calms them down. After he has muted his colours, he starts screaming himself and is pacified by the three of them, who now begin to scream themselves.

The three of them make hundreds of specimens of abstract art at Ajanta. In the paintings of one, every woman is shown with two bellies, in every imaginable colour; in those of another every woman is stout and middle-aged; and in the work of still another everything is a profusion of tassels. A jumbled mass of drawstrings.

Abstract paintings kept coming, but the boobs of all three kept drying up and shrinking. . It was really very hot, so hot that they were bathing in sweat. Shortly after entering the room, its doors fitted with khus frames, they peeled off their blouses and planted themselves directly under the ceiling fan. The fan kept whirring away, but their boobs failed to grow hot or cold.

Her mother was in the other room. The driver was wiping oil off her body.

Daddy was at his hotel, where a lady stenographer was rubbing eau-de-cologne on his forehead.

One day a band also played for her. The desolate garden sprang into sudden boisterous life. None other than the owner of Ajanta Studio decorated the flowerpots and the doors. Extremely dark lipsticks were flummoxed by the riotous colours he had let loose, and one even darker shade was so overcome that she instantly dropped down to his feet and became his student.

He had also designed her wedding dress, giving it a motley of facets. Looking directly at the front, she looked like bunches of many-coloured drawstrings; a fruit basket from the side; a floral curtain draped over the window when seen from a distance; from the back, a pile of crushed watermelons. . and a jar filled with tomato sauce from a different angle. From above, a specimen of some quaint art; from down below, the obscure poetry of Miraji.

The eyes of connoisseurs were so impressed that they burst into spontaneous praise for her. . most of all the bridegroom, who firmly resolved to become an abstract painter the day after the wedding. So he went to Ajanta with his wife. . where he found out that he was getting married and he has been shacked up at his wife-to-be’s for the past several days.

His wife-to-be was the same one who wore her lipstick much darker than the other merely dark ones. At first, for a few months, the bridegroom’s interest in her and abstract art endured. However, with the closing of Ajanta Studio and its owner’s disappearance without a trace, the bridegroom went into the salt business, which yielded great profits.

In the course of carrying on his salt business, he met a young woman whose milk jugs hadn’t run dry. He fell for them. No band played, but a wedding did come about. The first wife gathered her paintbrushes and went to live elsewhere.

The initial bitterness stemming from their differences eventually gave way to a strange sweetness. Her girlfriend who, after dumping her first husband for a new one and travelling across the whole of Europe, was now suffering from tuberculosis, portrayed this sweetness in cubic art: numberless clear and transparent cubes of sugar stacked one on top of the other amidst cacti in such a way that they gave the impression of two faces with honeybees sitting on them sucking nectar.

Her second girlfriend ended her life by swallowing poison. When she got this tragic news, she slipped into a coma. No one could tell whether this was a fresh assault of unconsciousness or the continuation of the same old one that had resulted from the initial raging fever.

Her father was in eau-de-cologne, where his hotel massaged his lady stenographer’s scalp. Her mom had handed over the entire management of the household to the stout, middle-aged servant. She could drive now, but was taken seriously ill. Still she cared a lot about the driver’s motherless pup and fed him her mobile oil.

The life of her sister-in-law and her brother was moving along on an even keel, becoming more mature and robust with the passage of time. They always met each other with great courtesy and love. Suddenly one night, when the maidservant and her brother were busy taking account of the household, her sister-in-law dropped by. She was alone, with neither a pen nor a brush in her hand, and yet she cleared the account of both in one fell swoop.

All that was seen in the morning were two blobs of coagulated gore, looking like two big pom-poms, which were then tied around the neck of her sister-in-law.

Only now did she emerge somewhat from her deep sleep. The differences with her husband, bitter at first, had been replaced by a strange sweetness. She made an attempt to daub it with a measure of bitterness. She took to alcohol. She failed because the amount imbibed was negligible. . she increased it, indeed so much that she was swirling in it. . people thought she would drown any minute, but each time she came up to the surface, wiping the residue from her lips and laughing hysterically.

When she got up in the morning she felt as if every fibre of her being had wept bitterly all night long. From the graves that could have been dug, all the babies that could have been born to her were wailing inconsolably for the milk that could have been theirs. But where was any milk to be found. . It had been sucked dry by wild tomcats.

She started drinking more to drown in the bottomless sea, but her desire remained unfulfilled. She was intelligent, educated and talked matter-of-factly, without inhibition, on sexual matters. And she did not feel there was anything wrong in establishing sexual relations with men. Yet, sometimes in the stillness of the night, she longed to go behind the hedges like one of her bad-mannered hens and lay an egg.

People began to avoid her when they saw her drunk, a mere bag of bones. . She understood everything and didn’t run after them. She lived alone in the house, chain-smoking, drinking, lost in distant thoughts. . She slept little and roamed around the kothi.

In the servant’s quarter across from the kothi, the driver’s motherless child kept up a litany of cries for the oil which had run dry in her mother. The driver had crashed the car. It was in the garage, her mother in the hospital, where one of her legs had already been amputated and the other was about to be.

Now and then when she peeked inside the quarter, she felt a vague tremor in the depths of her bosom, but that horrid tasting residue was too meagre to even wet the child’s lips.

For some time now her brother had been living in a foreign country. Finally, in a letter from Switzerland, he informed her that he was there to seek medical treatment, that the nurse was exceedingly nice, and that he was planning to marry her as soon as he got out of the hospital.

The stout, middle-aged servant disappeared after stealing a bit of jewellery, some cash, and a lot of clothes belonging to her mom. Sometime later, following unsuccessful surgery, her mother died in the hospital.

Her father did make a token appearance at the funeral, and was never seen again.

She was all alone now. She had let go of all the servants, including the driver. She found an ayah for his baby. Every burden was now off her shoulders, except her own thoughts. If anyone ever showed up to see her, she screamed from inside the house, ‘Go away. . whoever you may be. Go away! I don’t want to see anyone.’

She had found her mother’s countless priceless jewels in the safe and had quite a few of her own for which she felt no attachment. In the evening she would sit in front of the mirror naked for many hours, decorate her body with all the jewellery, drink and croon obscene songs in her off-key voice. Since there was no other house in the vicinity, she had all the freedom she could hope for.

As it is, she had already bared her body in many ways. Now she aimed to bare her soul as well. But she felt the greatest difficulty in doing so. The only way she could think of to overcome her formidable diffidence was to drink, and drink with abandon, and make use of her naked body. . but the supreme tragedy was that her body, stripped of its last shred of clothing, had actually become invisible.

She had tired of drawing pictures. . her painting paraphernalia had been lying in a small box for quite a while now. One day she took out all the colours, mixed each one with water in a large bowl, cleaned her brushes and set them to one side, and installed herself stark naked before the mirror. She started painting her body with altogether new features, strange dimensions. This was her attempt at completely baring her being.

She could only paint the front of her body. She spent the entire day in this enterprise, without eating a morsel or taking a drink of water. She stood in front of the mirror and tried out different paints, tracing crooked lines. Her brushstrokes reflected perfect confidence and surety of touch. . about midnight she drew away a little and observed herself closely, feeling satisfied. Then she proceeded to decorate her paint-smeared body with every one of her jewels and once again examined her body in the mirror. Just then she heard a sound suggestive of a presence.

She turned around abruptly. . a masked man with a drawn dagger was standing before her, poised as if to attack. As soon as she turned around, a scream shot from the attacker’s throat. The dagger fell from his hand. In utter confusion, he moved this way and that to find a way out. . Finally he found an opening and bolted.

She ran after him, screaming, calling, ‘Wait. . wait, I won’t say anything. . wait!’

But the intruder paid no attention to her. He bounded over the perimeter wall and slipped clean away. Disappointed, she retreated inside. The intruder’s dagger was lying on the threshold. She picked it up and went in. . Suddenly her eyes fell on the mirror. Over her heart she had painted a leather-coloured sheath. She placed the dagger on it and looked. The sheath was a bit too small. She threw the dagger away, took four or five swigs straight from the wine bottle and started pacing back and forth, back and forth. . She’d already been through several bottles and hadn’t eaten at all.

After prolonged pacing she returned to the mirror. She saw that she was wearing a scarf around her neck which resembled a drawstring with fairly big tassels. She had painted it with her brush.

All of a sudden she felt the scarf begin to tighten, digging deeper, and still deeper into her neck. . She stood quietly before the mirror, staring at her eyes which were popping out as the scarf was tightening. . after a while the veins in her neck began to swell. She let out a big scream and fell face down on to the floor.