BACKLASH SHERO STORIES

DR. SHOMA A CHATTERJI

Copyright © Dr. Shoma A Chatterji All Rights Reserved. This book has been published with all efforts taken to make the material error-free after the consent of the author. However, the author and the publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause. While every effort has been made to avoid any mistake or omission, this publication is being sold on the condition and understanding that neither the author nor the publishers or printers would be liable in any manner to any person by reason of any mistake or omission in this publication or for any action taken or omitted to be taken or advice rendered or accepted on the basis of this work. For any defect in printing or binding the publishers will be liable only to replace the defective copy by another copy of this work then available.

This book is dedicated to the hundreds of ‘invisible’ women who touched my life at one time or another not really sharing their stories but unwittingly unfolding them, layer by layer, through their lifestyle, their relationships within and without the family, their conversations with the writer and a whole lot of things that enriches our lives in ways we never imagined.

Contents Foreword

vii

1. Backlash

1

2. A Proxy Love Story

16

3. Candy Floss

27

4. Cinderella

34

5. My Mother’s Transistor

49

6. Chitrangada

58

7. Meeting In A Waiting Room

72

8. Hair

81

9. Alice In Wonderland - 2022

87

10. Don’t Ask Me Her Name, Sir

98

11. Whose Choice Is It Anyway?

107

12. The Omelette Story

118

13. Shock

128

14. Identity / Identification

136

15. That One Secret

147

16. The Girl Who Wanted To Become A Tree

156

17. Somlata

164

18. Kunda

173

19. Nothingness

181

20. Hide-and-seek

190

21. Between The Image And The Real

202

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Foreword Short fiction, we have been told is the most challenging and the most difficult form of fictional writing. But I love it because my entire induction began with the short stories of Rabindranath Tagore in Bengali followed by short stories by internationally renowned authors beginning with O’ Henry, Thomas Hardy, Guy de Maupassant and so on. Some of the stories in this book, written over a period of ten years in fits and starts, were inspired from slices of real-life experiences of people I have known in different degrees of closeness, space limitations and time also. They have been peer reviewed at different points of time. A couple of the stories here are included in two edited compilations of short stories while one, BACKLASH, from which I picked the title for this collection, won the top award at an online short story competition for women writers. This story has recently been picked by a filmmaker to turn into a short film but the work is yet to begin. Having worked as a journalist, a film scholar and an author of non-fiction on gender, or cinema or both, it has been an uphill task to get a good publisher to look at my stories and decide to publish or not to publish a collection because they identify me with my special area of nonfiction. So, I need to wait for years and years to get my short fiction collections published. My short stories are a strange blend of magic realism, some surrealism, with an intriguing element woven in, each one written from beginning to end continuously and then adding flourishes, characters and incidents that may or may not be real, living or dead or within dreams or even memories. ● vii ●

FOREWORD

The two best authors for short stories I have been strongly inspired by are Shashi Deshpande who began with short stories before moving on to novels and Jayant Kaikini the masterful creator of short stories in the country who writes in his mother tongue which are later translated. I am a film journalist and some inspiration from cinema also might have seeped in without my being aware of it. But they add more colour to plain Black-and-White writing so I did not clip them away. Finally, after a long struggle, when there were no computers or the world wide web, I got the late Prof P. Lal to agree to publish my first collection of short stories entitled YES AND OTHER STORIES under the Writers Workshop imprint which is renowned for having launched writers who became internationally renowned names later on such as Shashi Deshpande and Ved Mehta among others. My second collection, KAMINI AND OTHER STORIES was published by Har-Anand, Delhi under the guidance and approval of Narendra Kumar, erstwhile of Vikas Publishing House way back in the 1990s when it was launched at the Kolkata Book Fair by actor-director Aparna Sen. The third collection - A BAKER'S DOZEN was published under the Rupa Books imprint in 2002-2003 and got positive reviews which, however, were few and far between other books reviewed. BACKLASH is my fourth collection of short stories published with the help of NOTION PRESS.

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I BACKLASH I saw my mother in my dreams yesterday. I hardly see her in my dreams. In fact, I am a very sound sleeper and do not generally dream at all. In the rare instances that I do, it is usually about fantasies and fairies and winged angels like I dreamt when I was a child. I cannot put a finger on why my childhood dreams have carried over to my adulthood. In this dream, I saw a hazy image of a very young mother, smiling away at me and ruffling up my hair. Even in my dream, I was surprised because she was never inclined to demonstrate her affections or love or whatever you call it, physically. I was about to take her hand away when the dream broke and I woke up, surprised at myself more than at the dream. She was wearing a pink cotton sari, rumpled as usual as it used to be, stained with turmeric and oil, what with her working away in the kitchen, putting things in order, instructing the maid to do this or not to do that and so on. But mother hardly appeared in my dreams. Father still does. I was closer to my mother than to him because he was a loner, used to keeping to himself when he was not reading ●1●

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the newspaper to the last letter on the last page, including the advertisements and the classified pages, or, browsing all the English news channels on television. He did not talk much and this had cut down on my needless jabbering that happened when mother was with us. Father is not with me anymore. He died of a sudden heart attack in his sleep six months ago. I am surprised that I am talking about him in the past tense though it is still difficult for me to accept that he is no longer around. My relationship with my father grew close only after my mother was no longer around. He was a reticent man, not given to any kind of demonstration of his feelings. He had retired from a well-paid corporate job but his perspective was so professional that he kept his home and his work place completely compartmentalised. We grew close and when I served him breakfast, he would look at me from behind his newspaper, flash a happy smile and seat himself on the dining table. We would chat on what story I worked on the previous day, and I saw him watching me closely as I buttered his toast, poured out the juice from the glass jug, and served him his favourite masala omelette. I spoke of the next explosive story of the mysterious suicide of a rising hero in the film industry I was to cover over the week and he added his inputs with a smile tinged with a bit of parental pride. This became a point of strong motivation for me. This grew by leaps and bounds everyday bringing us closer to each other than we had ever been except when I was a toddler and he would drop me off to nursery school for three years. We also took dinner together when I came back in the evenings from work, which, given my specialisation in culture and entertainment, was not very often. But Sundays I had allotted me-time exclusively for my father. I even ●2●

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refused to meet by then-boyfriend on Sundays and though he was peeved, he did not object as he knew I was too stubborn and determined to change my routine. I have recovered from the shock and the grief of his sudden passing away and am back at work, chalking out the reporting programme for my juniors, fixing interview dates with film stars and celebrities from the cultural world to make the cultural week-end supplement that I edit, or, planning the page layout with the creative art director, or, checking the latest happenings in the entertainment world that might spread out to become a big story like a tadpole turning into a butterfly, its wings spread, ready to fly. I am a journalist. This is a career I had dreamt of since I was in high school and I saw it take on a life of its own. But today, it hangs around my neck like an albatross, filling me with a gigantic guilt complex. As a full-fledged journalist of ten years standing, I have not taken any step at all to find out where my mother was, with whom, how she was doing and why she left us so suddenly without a by-your-leave or even a melodramatic last letter. I remember her all the time as I happened to be her only friend caged as she was, within the invisible bars otherwise called “housework”, which covered an Encyclopaedic range of chores she appeared to be content with. “Appeared to be?” Yes, because I have no clue whether she was happy or not because had she really been content, she would not have disappeared from our life just like that! She never wore her inner feelings on her face, or body language or in her work on her face. Nor did she talk about them even to me. My mother went missing five years ago and I could do nothing about it because my father had strictly ordered me and some others to keep away from finding out what happened to her. I was 28 then and she was around 48, ●3●

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while father was just touching 50. Nothing would make my father budge from his resolve not to find out what had become of my mother. “She is my wife and it is entirely my prerogative not to question or find out why she went away, where to and whether she will come back or not,” he said, warding off questions from his family and my mother’s parental family of which just a sister and a brother with their families were around. But they live in Delhi and Kolkata. Though initially, they were worried crazy, they did not dare cross my father’s strict orders not to carry out any searches on their own. I tried a bit on search engines on the NET but did not dare confide in friends or use their help firstly because it was a social embarrassment if not a scandal, and secondly because their help would somehow find its way back to my father. I did not wish to hurt him any more than he already was. But I was shocked that he did not care even to file a “Missing” complaint at the local police station. Was this a suggestion of his indifference? Or, his hurt and shock that the woman he was married to just upped and left, without giving any sign that she would be walking away from a life that she seemed to be content in. How can a husband turn away so completely from a wife who he shared his life with for more than two decades? His taboo extended to not touching the things she had left behind - her clothes, her handbags and purses, her footwear, her jewellery, the cosmetics she sparsely used neatly arranged on her dressing table, covered with a thin layer of dust that grew thicker by the day. I often glanced across her room to wonder why the tanpura was always covered and never used while she was with us. Nor did anyone touch the harmonium, now covered with dust. Did she sing? I had no clue and I began to feel guilty about not having known much about my own mother. I was also ●4●

DR. SHOMA A CHATTERJI

angry with her for having held back from me and my father about herself and then vanished into thin air as if we did not exist! My feelings towards her were a blend of anger, disgust, betrayal, love, nostalgia, intrigue that made for a strange mishmash of feelings you are not used to. I did not enquire after her bank books and my father did not tell me either. It seems she had left with the clothes on her back. Did she know she was not going to come back? Was she kidnapped on her way to wherever she was going and could not come back because no one bothered to organize a search for her? Did my father actually want her to go away? Or was he turning his back on his bank of memories because his male ego was hurt? Did he feel relieved that she was not around anymore to peck him about being a social recluse and forcing her to become one as well? Or, to point out the wrong decision of having quit his job ten years before he was supposed to retire just like that though it meant bringing down our standard of living? They never fought, which, on hindsight, I feel was not very normal for couples, married or not. She poked him from time to time but he avoided all this by hiding behind the large pages of his newspaper. He did not care to answer or fight back. It seems more abnormal now that I have a boyfriend and we are arguing most of the time or fighting or breaking up and making up every now and then. And all this was part of the game of being a couple, dating, living together, or being married to each other. My father’s taboo on any search for my mother came to an end with his death. Neighbours, friends and extended members of the family asked me whether I would begin the search now. There was a scandal of course but with complete silence from our side, the gossip slowly faded and got sucked into its own silence. I had decided to look out ●5●

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for my mother. She was not a woman to walk out of a family she had nurtured for more than 25 years, a family that was hers and my father’s and there was nothing that should have unsettled her in any way. My father was quiet and did not believe in socialising so there were no parties to hassle her work routine or make her put in extra work in cooking and in being hospitable. He neither smoked nor drank, considered virtues in a man. But now I ask myself –are these ‘virtues’ or, are these negative traits? Or, did my mother also like being a social recluse like my father? Or, was she forced to become one, subtly because it meant that her college friends were not very comfortable in our house, what with father flashing a bland smile and walking away from the living room to his study? They slept in different rooms since I was ten and it never occurred to me to question why. I felt it was common for all couples everywhere. I had not seen other couples sleep together when the children grew. But I would never know, would I, since I never lived with anyone else but with my parents? My parents would not even imagine sending their only child for a sleepover even with my first cousins when we all lived in Mumbai. Neither was I asked to go over for sleepovers nor did I ask my friends on my own. So, small things like father and mother sleeping in different rooms even when they were quite young did not ring any alarm bell in my head. Six months after my father passed away, I got a note in my e-mail from one of the investigating agencies about a woman who they suspected, might be my mother. I had given them copies of photographs of my mother over different stages of her growing from a young woman till the time she went missing. Thankfully, it was not difficult because my disciplined father had very precisely ●6●

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maintained solid albums of the three of us. As I ruffled through her papers and documents, I chanced upon certificates of appreciation in her name, of prizes won at different competitions in vocal music through her college years. And I knew nothing of all this. She had trained in Hindustani classical music at the Prayag Sangeet Samiti, Allahabad, where she grew up, for three years under a famous classical Ustad. Her diploma said it all and yet, I never had a clue! Why had she never told me? Why did she never belt out a single musical note even in the bathroom like most of us do? Why did father not push her to continue with her music? These answered my silent questions about the forgotten tanpura and the harmonium. But why did I never ask her when she was around? Why did she not confide in me to tell me that she was once passionate about music but was sucked into the patriarchal vortex of silent adjustment within marriage? I could actually see my mother revealing herself slowly, layer by layer, like an onion with the layers slowly turning from pink to white. This was a mother I did not know and yet I lived with her for 25 years. This is the mother who conceived me, carried me for nine months, nurtured me and brought me up to help me realize my dreams. And I did not know her at all! The voice at the other end of the line, the woman at the investigative agency sounded very happy for having been able to solve a puzzle of a missing person no one had bothered to find the whereabouts of. The visit to the investigative agency turned out to be fruitless because the pictures they had of a uniformed, middle-aged nurse in a private hospital were not my mother’s. The image of the dead body found five years ago during my father’s only secret attempt to locate her discovered from cold police files ●7●