I can see the streets through windows, the red-hued streets I haven’t stepped out on in ten years, maybe fifteen, maybe more. I can see the streets through windows, the red-hued streets I haven’t stepped out on in ten years, maybe fifteen, maybe more.
I lose count of time here.
They say the wives of this family pass the marble lions of the main gate only twice. They enter as pre-pubescent girls – tiny, shy new brides, eyes red and swollen from crying, drowned by the shower of flowers and music and wedding chants. They leave in the dusk of their lives, through the hushed fragrance of sandalwood and white tuberoses, the name of God sung again, pale-dead bodies bundled on fragrant wood, on the way to the burning ghats where their mortal bodies meet fire, to rise in smoke to the heavens, to be scattered as ashes on the holy Ganga.
Fierce marble lions guard the entrance to this palace, the stucco pillars, the turrets and the wings. They say it looks like the palace of the Queen of England. I wouldn’t know it so well, I never get a chance to see the façade from outside, not since that full moon evening in July when I entered this house as the third wife of my husband, God bless him, with music and ululation and a shower of sweets.
Inside, it is something of a dream, something of a nightmare – the high-arched hall in the corner, threshold of beaten gold, with the eight-metal alloy idol of the tiger-riding resident Goddess of the house. She has blessed the family through generations, looked over their fortunes, the movements of stars and planets in their zodiacs, their love, wars, and prosperity – a family I was fortunate to be married into.
The idol is covered in gold jewellery, and diamonds and rubies. The priest is a Brahmin of the highest caste, learned in the Sanskrit hymns and prayers.
The entrance hall is paved with marble, cool and shiny in the summer heat. The wide stairs are of veined marble, walls covered in rich tapestry. Huge oil paintings of the landlords, in Queen Victoria’s court, on the decks of the ships sailing the seas. Done by English portrait painters. And the stuffed hide of the ten-feet Royal Bengal tiger shot in the tropical forests near the Bay of Bengal. It growls at you in silence.
Jardinieres in the hall corners, sculpted vases and statuettes, nudes holding lamps. Crystal chandeliers with a hundred candles inside, swaying in the breeze and the rhythm of music, the dancing girls. Persian rugs, carved mahogany and shegun-wood, Burma-teak furniture. Thick soft bolsters and pillows scattered on the rugs. Console tables, wall brackets, huge Venetian mirrors. But the house is silent, very silent. It is so big that it scarcely seems occupied. People are lost in the maze of the rooms, dark corridors, hidden away, appearing now and then, like droning bees pouring out of their shady, sweet hives.
Inside, through windows, we see the streets ghostlit with ornate, drooping gas lamps and the neighbourhoods swim in the luminous lives of the titled and the wealthy, the lords of the land…the fine silken dhotis, the horse-drawn carriages and the troops of liveried servants; the pigeons and the bulbuls the aristocrats fly for leisure, the singing courtesans trained in the old classical traditions of Hindustani music, the rosewater and the liquor and high-class prostitutes.
Our courtyard is much older than all that; much, much older than all our mothers-in-law, older than my husband’s grandmother who tells us all the stories, stories that seem only half-real, even when they are true. Does it go back to the days before the British took over our land, our country, before the last Muslim ruler of Bengal lost his throne at the battle of Plassey? Who knows?
It is the inner courtyard of the mansion, surrounded by the various wings of the house, a colossal rectangle of marbled floor under the open sky – the only patch of sky we get to see. The outside world lives in our memories, getting fainter and fainter by each day, each year, the brisk winds of gossip brought in by maidservants deepening the aura of the unreal around all that outside the lion gates of the mansion, a beautiful fairy tale, not of the present, not of the future.
In the morning, we sit there in scattered circles and chop vegetables – huge heaps of them, for the colossal lunches cooked everyday, for over two hundred members of the family and the countless dependents, and waifs, and vagabonds who always seem to hover around this family. Dozens of maids scurry around, pushing a pot our way, carrying heaps of vegetable skin and seeds and shells away, daring to join in the giggle and gossip. This is also the ripe hour to catch up with the buzzing grapevine, in the house, in the neighbourhood, as this is the only time of the day when all the women of the house get together. From the north and the south wing, from the branch of the elder cousin with land in the Hooghly district, from the branch of the younger cousin with jute mills along the river.
The men of the house or the menservants rarely come this way, and outsiders are never allowed so much as a glimpse of our faces. We are high-born ladies.
Much of our time of the day is spent tending to our men – preparing and serving betel leaves to them, massaging their feet, demanding more jewellery. But this is a time when we are left to ourselves, to gossip and giggle and curse and cry on each other’s shoulders. One’s husband isn’t paying her as much attention as he should have been, and she suspects that he has a favourite whore in the singing women’s district of the city. One is still childless after three years of marriage. One has to grit her teeth everyday, against the poison-tongue of her in-laws for having brought a poor dowry from her father’s home. The widow of the Mitra family, those who owned most of the land along the north-eastern stretch of the city, seems to be having an affair with her estate manager – Radhu, the dairymaid who served our house and theirs, is certain, from the way things looked at the Mitra Mansion. And you know what, Debi, the fourteen-year old, newest bride of the family said after her first night with mejothakur, her fifty-year old husband? None of the wives in this house have ever said something so delightfully scandalous, not in a hundred years!
The open courtyard is a home within a home, our real home of laughter and tears and anger within the huge mansion of endless wings, endless halls, rooms and passages suck us in for most of our lives, in the dark tangles of our menfolk, their love and lust, and whims, serving them meals and readying a comforting bed for them at night, the pain of childbearing, the happy thralldom of nursing the babies. We have to move around the halls and rooms and passages softly, silently, drawing the ends of our saris to cover our faces, stifling the jingle of our anklets, lowering our eyes before our husbands, brothers-in-law, fathers-in-law, taking care not to spill a drop of forbidden, impure knowledge of the female body before anybody – menses and labour and unhappiness with our husbands in bed, nursing our children. Even the frilly lightness of jewellery, the applying of alta, the beautiful design of dried red dye on one’s feet, debates over the superior quality of saris from Benaras over those from Bishnupur, of cumin seeds over grated onions in fish curry. Here is our stretch of daylight, of the midday summer sun, of the star-scattered cobalt of cloudless evenings, even the turmoil of the tropical Kalboishakhi storms of early summer. We can run up and down the courtyard, jingling the ankle bells, giggling and screaming, quarrel at the top of our voices. The silence and the murkiness of the bedrooms and the passages and the halls, the rest of the mansion vanishes here, all of a sudden, in the cozy sunshine, the fresh air and the smell of chopped vegetables, freshly washed saris let out to dry and the fragrance of red alta being applied on ankles, the aroma of fragrant oil on flowing tresses of black hair.