Bhairavi Read online

  ‘I won’t go.’ Chandan resisted her husband’s exciting proposal.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Amma will get angry.’

  ‘Wah-Wah!’ Vikram had laughed loudly and then grabbing Chandan’s pointed chin bent over her milky face, ‘Seriously, sometimes even I wonder, like Bhabhi had, whether you have lost your milk teeth yet. Why would your Amma get angry? Have I eloped with her daughter?’

  ‘You will see.’ Again, he tried to coax her like one would a child, ‘Do we get any time alone together till the night? And the damned night goes away in a wink. In the day, wherever you look, there are guests! It has been ten days since the wedding but none of them seem to want to leave. Ok, we’ll go wherever we feel like going. Just pick up our bags and leave, get down at whichever station we feel like and get on whichever train we want to.’

  And so the couple spent their honeymoon roaming around for a month, getting on and off trains on their whim. At every station one Chandan would get down and then taking her husband’s hand a different Chandan would leave. With great care, Vikram made his ever-changing unmatched companion leap from the steps of adolescence to the throne of youth. Sometimes, they would laze under the neem tree in some unknown village, having hung their bag on the walking stick and placed their shoes against the tree. Vikram would sing like a village boy with his innocent village belle of a bride hugging his chest. ‘Chhi! Chhi! What are you doing, what if someone sees us?’ Chandan would push her husband away and then come closer.

  ‘So what! I want people to see us—you have to be lucky to see a couple like us, Chandan!’ Sometimes, he would pull her into the fields, ‘It is in such fields that the ornaments of village women are taken and they are killed and buried, Chandan.’ He would scare her as if he meant to rob his beautiful wife and bury her there. He would then kiss his scared, shivering, artless bride’s closed eyes in reassurance. Some nights were spent in front of old temples, some in dharamshalas.

  When they got back home, Sonia embraced her, ‘You have made her more beautiful, Dadda! Look at her Mummy, she has got such a tan!’ Sumita had gone abroad again. Darshan had probably gone to Kashmir with her mother to forget her woes. Their presence used to scare Chandan, so now, she didn’t find her marital home as scary. Though the strange décor of her marital home could still scare her sometimes. What kind of a decoration was this! An ashtray made of a real human skull! Sonia had told her that her mother had bought it for a hundred rupees from sweepers who were going to cremate an unknown corpse. A foreigner friend was offering five hundred rupees for the skull but Mummy didn’t agree. On the walls were hung parts of broken idols. Somewhere a broken bust, somewhere separated from the rest of the body was a broken head and on the door with great artistry was hung a thigh with the call bell on it. Every time the doorbell rang and Chandan opened the door, she would blush.

  ‘I don’t know why Mummy has such morbid tastes?’ Sonia would often say but Rukmini would smile with pride. She really had very morbid interests. There were ten-feet-long pictures of naked chudails on the walls and strands of hair from different parts of their bodies covered the roofs of their house in frescos. In the drawing room, there was a lopped off tree trunk, and in another room, a huge elephant trunk. The lady of the beautiful house had bought it off a king in Tehri but Rukmini had redecorated it to look like the painted face of an Adivasi. Some walls had red stripes or a thick squiggly black spot as if a beaker of coal tar had been upturned there. On top of that, Rukmini would paint pictures on her easel that made little sense.

  But the besotted Chandan fell in love with every brick of her marital home in a month and a half. If she ever missed her mother, her loving husband would immediately sense it. ‘Let’s show you the Qutub today, Chandan.’ He would sweep his new bride away in his car to show her entirely different planets and she would forget her maiden home. Darshan had returned from Kashmir by now, and had stung Chandan once by saying, ‘Ay ji, doll-bride! Have you managed to get rid of your husband’s drinking habit? I’ll respect you if you can manage that. That rascal has started drinking too much at this young age.’

  ‘What have you been drinking?’ The innocent Chandan asked looking at her husband sitting next to her. Her straightforward question and genuine look of concern pierced Vikram’s heart. He felt like slapping Darshan’s painted face.

  ‘Alcohol! Did you think I was talking about drinking tea or milk?’ Darshan bared her teeth without restraint.

  That night Vikram swore on his knees that he would stop drinking to put Darshan in her place and to demonstrate the power of his wife’s beauty.

  ‘Vikram!’ When his holidays neared an end, Rukmini proposed at the table, ‘Chandan is a child right now. How will she be able to look after your household? Why don’t you leave her here? She’ll join the college here and meet you in her vacations.’

  Chandan was sad as soon as she heard her motherin-law’s proposal. At night, she embraced her husband and became restless like a child. She wouldn’t stay here alone. Sumita and Darshan were her biggest fears. And then she had never been particularly interested in studies. She would go wherever Vikram went. Catching hold of her thin wrists, her husband enveloped her in his loving assurance. He wouldn’t leave her, ‘Who will teach you what I am teaching you, Chandan? What better education can there be?’ To prove his point, he brought his face closer to hers.

  Saying, ‘go away’, she pushed him. Then laughing, the beautiful student lost herself in her generous teacher’s arms. She was ready to leave for Calcutta without having met her mother. That made Rukmini happy. Chandan had indeed been able to tame her spoilt son in a short time. Leave alone drinking, he didn’t even smoke anymore. The foreign friends had been banished. Vikram would not appear even when Darshan came to visit and she would leave in a huff soon after.

  The father-in-law was also very fond of this childlike daughter-in-law. She would don a short veil in front of him and he would give her a gift every day. Which is why when he heard that his son was taking his bride along with him to Calcutta, he said, ‘Bahu is leaving to manage her own household; get the priest to find an auspicious day for their departure.’

  His own father-in-law had been a barrister! The latter had given his daughter to him on Amavasya night. That new moon night had not left him all his life. His father-in-law had probably wanted to axe his sanskari son-in-law’s superstitious nature but the stubborn knot of the latter’s sanskars had not come undone. He still kept some of them safely hidden under his stiff collar.

  ‘Why are you saying these stupid things?! He has to join on the fifteenth and today is the twelfth. Why do you want to confuse him by bringing in astrological charts? What if the stupid priest tells him that the auspicious date falls on the sixteenth, will he leave his job for the date?’

  Chandan had not been able to sleep well for a few nights in the excitement of being able to spend private time with her husband again. Her mother-inlaw had given her a lot of things that would smoothen her work in establishing her household.

  Vikram had a Nepali friend in Calcutta. He had asked the newlyweds to meet him in Bombay. He would book an air ticket for them from Bombay because he was a senior officer in Indian Airlines. The first day of the journey went in fun and games and then started the first phase of their Kaalraatri. They were lying next to each other on the berth after finishing their meal. The train stopped at a small station and three to four army officers got in to ruin their isolation. Chandan was reassured on seeing them enter without any luggage. It looked like they were travelling to the next station and would disembark after two or three hours. Had they planned to spend the night in the train, wouldn’t they have carried their bedding for protection from the cold?

  Little did she know then that the beginning of the soldiers’ journey would be the end of theirs. The train was speeding when they opened their bags and took out the bottles. Then, without any shame, they opened the bottles and saying something in Bangla, looked at Chandan and started drinking. Scared,
Chandan glanced at her husband as if to say, ‘I am scared!’ Vikram’s face had turned red with anger. Chandan never forgot the heat of her husband’s face at that moment.

  ‘Chandan, come to me.’ He said with great pride.

  ‘No Chandan, come to me here.’ One of the men who was short and had villain-like thick moustaches spread his arms in front of her, laughing. The other went to the switchboard and suddenly the entire compartment was bathed in darkness.

  Even as Chandan hugged her husband tightly, the man yanked her from him. The other three started beating Vikram who tried in vain to protect his wife. They tied him to the berth with a sheet. The train kept picking up speed like a traitor.

  ‘Oh, bald man,’ the scary short man said to his friend in Bangla, ‘she is an absolute lioness.’

  But could the one who had turned into a dangerous lioness on being attacked by four strong men, defeat them?

  She could hear her helpless, restrained husband groaning—had they gagged him too?

  Will they take his life? Even if they don’t take his life, will she ever be able to show her besmirched face to him.

  The other human lion had just started pulling her towards himself when she leapt like thunder. If nothing else, she could try and find the door of the train in the dark. She didn’t delay a second when she found the door of the speeding train. She deceived the eight hands trying to grab her and jumped.

  Death and only death could now erase her blemish.

  But even death had escaped her. It had been a year and she was still living her cursed life.

  SEVEN

  A whole year has passed by so quickly; every moment of her previous life kept trying to pull her back to it but she couldn’t run away from the ashram.

  Why?

  She didn’t have an answer to this ‘why’.

  ‘Mayadi is an enlightened ascetic.’ Charan had once said to her in the isolation of the temple, ‘She can’t let go of the person she likes. She keeps them tied to her with the power of her mantras. She really likes you a lot. Just see, you won’t be able to leave even if you try.’

  ‘But she gets irritated with you, then why does she not chase you away?’ Chandan had asked, a little annoyed. But the next minute, she had got angry with herself. This wasn’t a question to ask of anyone!

  She had never been asked any questions—who was she, where had she come from, why had she jumped off a moving train? Why doesn’t she go back home?

  That was the joy of living in a hermitage. Nobody had any curiosity or worries! Had the intoxication of charas and ganja subdued the feminine curiosity of these two women?

  ‘Yes, what you are saying is right, Mayadi can’t stand me. She thinks I will rob her of her guru; not with the power of my beauty, but on the strength of this rotten body. If I could snatch him, I swear I would have done it a long time ago, Bhairavi.’

  Charan brought her dark face close to Chandan’s. Chandan saw her ganja-high bloodshot eyes and realized that intoxication had made her bolder.

  ‘The guru is just like a stone.’ She said in an annoyed tone, ‘I have gone to the graveyard in the middle of night so many times to hand over a chillum to that stone effigy; I have stood there for hours. How can I snatch away the one who doesn’t even look up to see me? That Yogmaya knows this. Which is why neither does she run away nor does she let anyone else run. But I have also tied a thread at Paribaba’s mazaar. I’ll see how I don’t run away.’

  And then one day, Charan cut her cord that the supreme yogini Mayadi had tried to keep intact and pulled on often. Even Chandan had started shivering on seeing her ferocious countenance. Hair loose, intoxicated red eyes that seemed to be touching her forehead, and in her hand a bare trident! Inebriated, Maya Didi had started dancing.

  ‘Tell me the truth, Bhairavi, do you really not know where she is? I raised that girl at my bosom. Vishnupriyadi was right. She is the kind to bite the hand that feeds her.’

  ‘From the way she had started countering everything, I know where she could have gone. That funeral pyre burning Chandal must have eloped with her.’

  ‘When I think about it, I realize that it’s a good thing that she ran away. Priyadi used to say, “Had that darling Charan dasi stayed here, she would’ve brought death with her.”’

  Mayadi’s guess was right; Charan had run away with the madman. Charan was no longer there so Chandan had to go to the temple to burn incense. Mayadi’s knees troubled her, so she couldn’t walk the long distance. On the way to the temple, Chandan saw that the tin gate of Shamshan Vihar was shut and there was a big lock on it. She understood that Charan had indeed run away with the madman. On the fourth day, she noticed that the lock had been opened.

  Chandan used to feel scared of the madman when she would bump into him alone so she quickened her pace; just then Charan jumped from a hilltop like the wind and blocked her way, laughing.

  ‘Why, new Bhairavi, you were trying to fool us and run away? Maya Didi has incited you as well? Come inside, I’ll treat you to my husband’s special hot tea, then we’ll talk.’

  Today, Charan dasi’s appearance was different. A thick line of a quarter of a kilo of vermillion sat in her parting, On her dark feet were two toe-wide anklets; she was wearing a bright red sari and her hands were full of bangles with a shakha and nowa in the middle. The madman also looked unlike himself, smiling in his red-checked bush shirt and black, fitted pants. Having been brushed by love, their dark faces were glowing.

  ‘Sit,’ Charan took Bhairavi’s hand and made her sit on a wooden stool and asked her, laughing, ‘How is Maya Didi? God knows what kind of abuses she must be hurling at me—my food gets stuck in my throat every day as I eat.’

  Chandan kept sipping her tea quietly. It tasted like nectar. She hadn’t drunk any tea since Charan had left. Maya Didi did not drink tea and didn’t let anyone else drink it either.

  ‘I have become a householder after all, Bhairavi,’ Charan started saying, ‘We have come today to wrap up things here. His work as a Chandal is over. Even today, we turned away two parties. I have refused to let my husband work here. The hand that put vermillion in my parting, will that hand give tea to people burning pyres? Am I not right, Bhairavi?’ Then laughing a triumphant laugh, she started swinging her legs on the tin chair.

  ‘He has a Chacha in Calcutta.’ Earlier, she used to refer to the madman as ‘tu’; now she had placed him on a pedestal by referring to him as ‘aap’. ‘His company tours the entire country but they are in Calcutta these days. The manager of their circus company is a “Madrasi”. His Chacha cooks for him. He says he will find me a job too. It is a lot of fun, Bhairavi! The lioness’s eyes are just like our Maya Didi’s. Eat and drink whatever you want. Watch three shows without a ticket and then pull the curtains of your tent, sleep till noon. They have shows running all night, so you can sleep till whatever time you want. Nobody like Maya Didi there to wake you at four in the morning with the sound of her tongs. Cheetahs, bears, lions, huge elephants, pythons in iron cages this big! Then there are jokers with their painted faces and girls with thighs as thick as banana trees. I swear on you, Bhairavi, they jump so high in their silk panties and blouses that I close my eyes in fear and start saying, “Jai Guru jai Guru”. Eight servants stand with a big net spread under them. It is not like Manager Babu has everything set. These are the things his Chacha has told us. When I start jumping like that after my training, I will be paid a full hundred and fifty rupees a month. Jumping isn’t such a difficult task. His Chacha was telling us that when Tara and Mada joined the troupe, they were youngsters with runny noses; now they can jump right through burning rings.’

  Charan took the empty teacup from Chandan, kept it down and then started chirping again, ‘Chacha is teaching my husband to ride a bike in the “well of death”. He says that his nephew is very smart, he isn’t scared of the well of death at all. So, I said, “how can he be scared, khudshoshur, your nephew has spent half his youth in the well of death.” Chacha laughed a lot.�
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  ‘Ai Bhairavi!’ Charan took Chandan’s hand in hers, and spoke as if to appeal to her, ‘Come with us, Manager Sahib will admit you as soon as he sees your face.’

  Chandan got up without saying a word. She had forgotten about Maya Didi in the middle of the conversation. The latter had asked her to return quickly. The memory of her instruction returned to whip her. Charan’s request had not touched her even a little.

  ‘I have to leave, Charan, Maya Didi’s knees are aching a lot today.’

  Charan did not say anything when Chandan got up to leave. Perhaps she understood the futility of her presumptuous request. That day, Chandan took a different route on her way back to the ashram.

  The next day, when she went to clean the temple, she found Shamshan Vihar abandoned. Charan was gone. Maya Didi had still not forgiven the ungrateful girl. She looked upon her departure as a defeat that had made her go silent. Where had her mantras gone wrong? Had her illnesses sucked away her tantric powers? Who would light her chillum now? The girl might have had many faults but who could beat her at massaging feet, making rotis, getting the chillum to the guru at odd hours? And where would Maya Didi, who was so used to showering abuses on her, find her amusement?

  She could not scold Chandan in the same way. And that black girl whom she could love or abuse at will like a dog had left her.

  ‘She will suffer, that wretch!’ Maya Didi would get up in the night to grumble and Chandan would wonder if she was going mad. She had probably fallen in love with her mischievous ward in spite of scolding and beating her day and night. Which is why Charan’s thoughtlessness hurt her even more.

  ‘She could have informed me before leaving. Would I have stopped her, Bhairavi? Will you also leave me in the same way?’ She would wake her up in the middle of the night and pulling Chandan to her bosom, start sobbing.

  But Bhairavi did not run away, the one who left was Yogmaya!

  Chandan had started taking the chillum to the guru after Charan left. At first, she too had been afraid, but what Charan had said was right! Was she handing over the chillum to a puppet made of bones and skin? He took it from her as if he were a stone idol.