She was always leaving, leaving. Only she’d never left. To leave is to start all new. But she had left so many times, she did not know what it meant to cut loose forever.
Her stop had arrived. She would be on Hope Street in a few seconds. But how was she to make her way to the exit? She asked the conductor to wait for a moment before he rang his hurried bell. Three heavy bags stared at her, full of books and papers, packed so tight that they could explode any moment.
The conductor rang his bell anyway. ‘Yedi,’ he muttered, extracting some loose change from his leather bag. And just in case Ahalya had not understood, he obliged by translating for her, circling his finger around his temple: ‘Mhanje Cracked.’ Why insult someone in one language when you can do it in two? Agitated by the conductor’s audacity, she fell, all of a heap, her leg trapped in the handle of one of her bags. Platts’ Urdu, Classical Hindi and English Dictionary, sky-blue and cloud-eared, was peeping out of Ahalya’s gym bag with the loose zip-claw.
How many times have I told you not to mix your metaphors, dear girl? There’s no such word as ‘cloud-eared’.
But there can be, Miss.
Whether the dictionary was cloud-eared or gut-cold, ember or amber, agar or agate, surma or Burma teak, tulsi or trampoline, was immaterial. It weighed a ton. That was material. When it popped out of her bag and bust her toes, it was excruciating.
Ahalya hobbled back to her seat. As the bus entered Navy Nagar, she tried to alight in as orderly a fashion as possible. This time she thought she would descend without incident. No such luck. A man, who let his large blubbery belly do all his talking and pushing, prodded her. Ahalya looked back to let fly at him. He flashed his razor-sharp, tobacco-stained teeth at her. There were rows upon rows of teeth in his mouth, thousands of them, jagged like prehistoric tools meant to rip through carcass and tree bark. She couldn’t have stepped aside even if she had wanted to. He bit off a large chunk of her shoulder. ‘Shark!’ she shouted out, so loud her larynx burned.
*
Darindar and Goshtkhor were standing by her bedside, flashing their ivories at her and singing:
Ash, rash
Ark, krak,
Karak
Krr, krr, krr
Ahalya couldn’t bear the horrible grinding sound made by the monster twins. It felt as if Miss D’Souza’s chalk was screeching all over the blackboard once again. It made her shudder.
The monster twins had made a habit of hijacking her stories. Barely had she finished one when they devoured it: legs, arms, head, breasts, vagina, hyoid bone and eyes. She had nothing to show for herself because they gnawed relentlessly through everything she wrote.
Darindar and Goshtkhor ate widely and without discrimination. They ate, period. They were subject-agnostic. Whether the stories were spiritually inclined or atheist, vampiric or humorous, adventurous or tragic. Each night, they would put Ahalya’s stories through the mincer and crank away gleefully, as a cascade of shredded ribbons streamed into their plates. Goshtkhor smacked his lips as he tucked into the keema-scented stories. The rascal put his paw on Darindar’s hairy shoulder, ‘Betcha a whiff of meat would substantially improve Bukbuki’s stories.’
They called her ‘Bukbuki’, a name brimming with affection for a plump child in Konkani. The kind that was much sought after by Indian aunties who swore that anything anointed with ghee was healthy.
Ahalya was slim; some might say gaunt. She had her mother’s regal face, a high forehead and a Roman nose relieved by a pair of hazel-brown eyes shot through with flecks of gold. Nobody would mistake her for bukbuki. Perhaps it was her plump arms, a vestige of stubborn baby fat that refused to leave her even as an adult. Darindar and Goshtkhor were creatures of appetite, thinking with their mouths rather than their little grey cells. Although it must be said that Darindar was smarter than his twin. Having gobbled thousands of Ahalya’s words over the years, he had begun to play with language. As he sang in his hoarse, meaty voice, he threaded together a garland of morsels.
buk ghasu
bukdu gorosh
kutukdu nivala
myound
The twins wore the garland of small bites in Gujarati, Kashmiri, Urdu, Bengali and Konkani around their necks and danced ecstatically. It was their rudraksh and their tasbih. As they clapped their hands and flung their hairy arms in the air, their eyes radiated golden flames. Licking off a few words stuck to their tusks, they barrelled into each other. Sparks flew from their warring antlers. Dangling from each of their turquoise skirts was an all-too-human penis. Who were these strange creatures, with their spotted rust-orange bodies and large elephant ears winnowing the air?
Ahalya tried to ignore the commotion Darindar and Goshtkhor were creating in the kitchen, as she lay beside Gautam. He snored rhythmically, his lips opening ever so slightly to suck in the air. She kissed his eyes out of habit and played with his charcoal grey curls. In his dreams, he was a crack shot waiting to shoot the tiger between the eyes. There were wars to be fought and rivers of blood to wade through. He was always on the move, a mercenary tearing through the pages of history, unafraid to cut off a tongue or hand, to disembowel or castrate. All for a bag of gold.
But in his waking hours, the mercenary showed no trace of violence. His general disposition was one of aloofness. He kept a stiff upper lip at all times. Nevertheless, he burned like the glass-curtained buildings that he built. Who in their right senses would build glass façades in Bombay? Enough suckers whose heads were stuck in NYC or Nantes, while their bodies sweated it out under the tropical sun. Gautam was no sucker in a world full of lollipops. Instead, he would repeat his father’s favourite adage with a chuckle: ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ ‘But hey hold on, didn’t that come from Barnum of Barnum and Bailey fame?’ laughed Ahalya.
Gautam’s body temperature had always been higher than normal. Hugging him in summer was like embracing an oven. Ahalya had realised early on that you can’t play with fire. Fire controls you, you can’t control it. What was Gautam shovelling into his soul every day? And where did those red-hot embers disappear? Could a fire-swallower’s cheeks remain pale and cool like sweet-scented jasmine?
It seems like yesterday that Ahalya and Gautam were on their honeymoon in Chikmagalur. The night was heavy with the intoxicating smell of coffee blossoms mixed with French polish. It grew heavier with Gautam’s erratic breathing and palpitations. After some clumsy foreplay, he made a choking sound.
Ahalya did not know what held them together. Some relationships were never meant to have a name. If you examine them too closely, they might unravel. Their brokenness was the glue that held the patchwork of two souls together. She was about to enter the kingdom of sleep when she saw Gautam sleep-walk to his cupboard and fumble inside its locker. He professed to remember nothing the morning after.
When Ahalya walked into the kitchen, the sun’s rays were playing on Gautam’s kurta, picking out its olive-green highlights. He waited for a few seconds before pushing the plunger into the French press. The splash of coffee in the transparent amber cups, which belonged to Ahalya’s grandmother, spread a golden glow on the table. She joined Gautam and their friend Narad for a round of coffee and upma strewn with broken cashews. Narad looked dapper in fawn corduroys and a white t-shirt. He was being his usual capricious self, weaving in and out of stories, spreading rumours and stepping on people’s toes, all the while creating stiletto-deep wounds. With his spectacles balanced precariously on the tip of his nose, he scowled all the time.
And then just like that, in the middle of all his embroidering, Narad said with a straight face, ‘I think I am a lesbian woman trapped in a gay man’s body.’
‘One thing at a time, old boy,’ said Gautam without batting an eyelid. The shutters had been downed. As far as Gautam was concerned, there was no need for dialogue. Neither disclosure nor closure were necessary. Have you ever seen tears in a fire-swallower’s eyes? Ahalya cast a warm glance at Narad for the first time in years. He deserved a hug for having the courage to name the various entangled parts of his self. Not that a misogynist like Narad could comprehend an exchange of affection.
*
A creature of habit, Ahalya wished her students as they walked past her in the college quadrangle. Bewitched by their phones, they hardly ever looked up. As she walked past the library to take a detour to Room 102, she winced. She could feel Vichitra’s whiplash on her back.
Vichitra would assemble all the books in neat rows on the large reading table. And then whack the hell out of them with his weapon of choice – the trusted jharoo with its thin sticks extracted from fallen palm fronds. Marx, Gramsci, Dadabhoy Naoroji, M G Ranade, Alexandra Kollontai, Ambedkar, Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Nehru, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya – they had all survived Vichitra’s assassination attempts. Nobody knew where Vichitra had come from. He had just appeared one day in the college quad, with his shabby white beard and cruel eyes that threw death spells at books and people alike, and taken charge.
In the examination hall, Ahalya’s fingers were rotating something in a silk pouch. Not unlike women who turn prayer beads in their purses on Bombay locals. The hot afternoon breeze made her drowsy. Tired of scouring the anxious faces of the students, she shifted her gaze to their feet. Another portrait emerged from the hems of dirt-laced fraying jeans: pedicured toes painted Goth black, green or tangerine; ankles adorned with a single thread of silver or beads and a few coffee-brown feet with cracked, bare soles.
*
Gautam had found Ahalya’s wine-red silk pouch on the bed. He began to loosen its drawstring. Pushing his hand into the pouch, he blind-touched its contents. His fingers curled around toys. Were they toys? Their smooth surfaces felt a bit chalky and porous like clay. Gautam knew his materials well. Pleased with himself, he remarked, ‘Plaster of Paris, I say.’ Was the bearded gent a sage or a mage? Karl Marx? After all, Marx-baba had been sucker-punched by history. ‘That explains the broken nose.’ But those stylised fish-shaped eyes and full lips felt too smooth. They did not fit with the job description of the grizzly prophet of the proletarian revolution. Gautam moved on to the next toy and enjoyed running his fingers down a long arm that seemed to be bangled all the way. A sensation that reminded him of the Rabari women who lived in the slums of Cuffe Parade. Every day at his school bus stop, he saw them pass by in threes and fours, in their backless cholis embroidered with mirrors and cowries, their arms decked in ivory bangles from shoulder to wrist. He could smell fish. They smelt of the sea.
The nose of this bangled figure seemed to be unbroken, its lips fleshy. Its tiny breasts gave way to a slit shaped like a full stop in Devanagari – purna viraama. Gautam flinched and withdrew his fingers. He had gathered the evidence he needed. This figure must be a dancer or a guardian figure. With one of its arms gracefully poised at her hip and its right leg bent ever so slightly at the knee. Both toys were broken – the sage had an arm missing and the dancer had lost her feet.
Ahalya grabbed the silk pouch from Gautam’s lap and put it away in the drawer of her nightstand. He looked sheepish but kept marvelling at the touch of the toys – hard, yet flesh-like. Normally they talked each other to sleep. Gautam was an excellent mimic. He kept Ahalya in splits. Most nights she would drift into sleep giggling and guffawing. She wasn’t in the mood today though.
Neither sleep nor tears came. Ahalya felt choked up. In the early hours of the morning, she had a shooting pain in her eyes that travelled all the way down to the sockets. As she tried to soothe her lids, a swan flew into her face. She shooed it away. It landed on the reading table of the college library. Vichitra of the dirty white beard brandished his jharoo. The swan hissed and pecked his eyes out. There was blood everywhere. Ahalya tried to exit the scene but she had to attend to some unfinished business. Crossing the librarian’s table, she reached a dark alcove and yanked open the door of the teak cupboard that stored the teaching aids. This dusty cavern hadn’t displayed anybody’s fingerprints except Ahalya’s in years. She gently removed the figurines from her pouch and placed them on the shelf. There they lay, side by side – the Priest-King and the Dancing Girl. Relics of the Indus Valley civilisation whose denizens had baked new bricks like hot bread every day, to build a city of public baths and right-angled streets.
But then, during Partition, a long and bloody line was drawn through the country by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, between bouts of diarrhoea and plain white spite against the coolies. The Priest-King was recruited into the Lahore Museum and the Dancing Girl was commandeered by the National Museum in Delhi. It is unlikely they will ever come together again.
*
Ahalya woke up parched and drained. The sunlight filtering in from the kitchen window was flecked with red spots. She splashed some water on her eyes to wash away the night’s debris. Gautam must have left early for his site visit. The grilled chutney sandwich tasted like sawdust on her tongue. She bent down to clear away the crumbs when she noticed bits of paper on the floor. The trail led her to the old vacuum cleaner under the table, where she found a heap of torn words. As she ran her fingers through them, they got stuck on her sweaty palms like insects attracted to grains of sugar. They all repeated a single word – ‘eyes’. The paper bits had a serrated edge. She could make out Darindar and Goshtkhor’s signature. The pair of toothy rascals had been at work on her stories again. But why had they left out the eye-word? ‘Are they scared of sympathetic magic?’ she chuckled. As if the ingestion of the eye-word would cover their body in eye-sores.
A few days later, when she woke up in the early hours of the morning to go to the loo, she heard their hoarse voices. They thought they were whispering. Darindar chided Goshtkhor for being inattentive and picked the eye-word from his beard.
‘One word can’t do much harm, can it? You’re worried about the Mahabharata for no reason, Darindar.’
‘And you are in the wrong epic, fat-mouth!’
*
A few days later, Ahalya woke up to the cries of the monster twins. They were screeching their lungs out. It wasn’t morning yet but it wasn’t night either. There they stood: creatures of the twi-dark, twi-bright, covered with strange protrusions on their bodies. From a distance, she could not make out whether those were wobbly lips or eye-sores. On a closer look, their bodies seemed to be covered with scores of vaginas. Vaginas in all shades: rose madder, reddish brown, pink and black. In all shapes: ovoid, spheroid and cylindrical. Oozing, dry, frilly lipped, tight-lipped and sagging. At the feet of the monster twins lay Ahalya’s latest story in shreds, with the eye-word redacted. Ahalya smiled at her handiwork. Their greed had got the better of them this time. They had not realised that the word substituted, overwritten, erased, is still a word swollen with memories, myth and magic. It does not disappear or die because you want it to.
They knew that the story had done them in. Or more precisely the eye-word.
The Lord of the Thunderbolt seemed to be pleased with himself that morning. He let the sky rip and it poured. The monster twins tried to shake off the eye-word, but the vaginas stuck to their skin. They had been cursed. But curses could be reversed. Or so they hoped, as they put out their hairy paws to soak in the fat raindrops.
*
Darindar and Goshtkhor landed at Rokdanandan’s court on the first day of spring. His cohorts referred to him as HH or His Highness in public and HC or Hard Cash in private. There were marigolds everywhere, adorning Corinthian columns, threaded into torans and garlands along with mango leaves. Their velveteen flower petals brought a spot of sunshine into the harried lives of the monster twins. HC, a broad-chested man, sat on a throne made of bleached bones. Playing with a peacock on a short leash, he went puck-puck-puck-puck each time he tossed a few grains into its mouth. Occasionally, he threw fistfuls of grains in the direction of Payal and Chital, who stood guard, flanking him in purple Banarasi saris. They could have been centaurs. Instead, they rocked to and fro where they stood, saddle-strapped to mechanical horses.
Payal and Chital were the only women in a court full of yes-men.
Lately, as the monster twins battled the infestation of vaginas, neither was sure if his penis counted for anything. They greeted HC with a baroque namaskar. But when their eyes met his, they began to tremble all over. Never before, and mind you they were at least a few centuries old, had they seen such cold eyes. They waited for the words, ‘khal-laas gunshots’ in court parlance, to fall from his lips.
Their plea had been noted by HC’s secretary, who proposed a ready solution, ‘The curse will be undone, the moment His Highness turns Ahalya into a stone.’
Still holding hands and cringing from HC’s gaze, Darindar and Goshtkhor sought clarification, ‘And when will Ahalya’s curse be reversed?’
Sparks flew from HC’s bloodshot grey eyes.
They whispered to each other, ‘We can’t let this happen to Bukbuki.’ For, even while they had torn greedily through Ahalya’s stories, they had become addicted to them. They had begun to identify and imitate the voices in her tellings, voices that HC had silenced across the country, voices that whispered, yodelled, murmured, ululated, challenged listeners with deep roars.
‘When did the creatures of appetite become creatures of taste?’, HC’s secretary hissed in their ears. ‘Why should it matter to you if this woman lives or dies? Whether she is breast or stone?’ He looked at the vagina-shaped sores on their bodies and winced. ‘She has infected you with dangerous ideas. But never forget this. You story-killers can never become story-savers. A dastaan-khoi can never become a dastaan-goi.’
They stamped their feet in anger, ‘But we can if we wish.’
As they raised their heads, their eyes met HC’s. In that moment, they saw his fear. And he saw that they had seen it.
HC clapped his hands. The monster twins were frog-marched out of the court. ‘Off you go,’ said the secretary, handing them over to the guards, who took them by the scruff and dumped them in a jeep painted in camouflage colours. They did not know where they were being taken. As night fell, they were shoved out of the jeep and found themselves at the door of a museum with no windows.
They were pushed in, and the door closed behind them. In the foyer, harsh klieg lights illuminated a colossal statue of the many-armed Mother India. The tame lion accompanying her could have been imported from Disneyland. The globe she stood on could have been a giant exercise ball. Darindar was not fooled by this patriotic mashup. The trident was sharp enough to draw blood. Goshtkhor was insanely hungry. If only he could chew on a few petals of the lotus poised between Mother India’s slender fingers or the ear of corn she held in another of her hands. Darindar had to restrain him physically from breaking his teeth on a granite flower.
In the distance, they could see a tunnel of fluorescent rocks and minerals that emitted a gem-like reddish orange and green light. They did not want to venture too far out, so they wandered along an elliptical vitrine. There was pale amethyst from Norway, a lump of native gold from Australia, sail-shaped lapis lazuli from Pakistan soaking in all the light, and a translucent violet kunzite from Afghanistan. Everywhere there were mineral stones breaking out into spiculae or icicles. The throbbing, swirling ovoid patterns on a Mexican agate reminded Goshtkhor forcefully of the vaginas on his chest. He jumped back, banging his head on the glass. Darindar tried to console him with a granular, pristine white mineral stone labelled ‘Designed by God’, in the hope that it would remind him of a sabudana crisp. But neither thought of food nor God could stop Goshtkhor’s paws from shaking. The elliptical vitrine was an endless loop of trauma and ridicule. Every stone had eyes. He flopped down on the cement floor.
Darindar picked him up and carried him piggyback. This time he distracted Goshtkhor with a stone that had naturally taken on the contours of the map of India. Its crystalline white grains reminded Goshtkhor of snow. Drained of colour and borders, this map gave the impression of a clean slate on which anything was possible. They stood still. They were mesmerised by the frozen snowflakes. Goshtkhor piped up, ‘A miracle indeed. It is snowing all over India.’
Darindar chimed in, ‘Betcha Kashmir has taken over India!’
For a few moments they had forgotten hunger. And fear. They seemed to be at peace.
*
Spring was over. It was the bewitching twi-dark, twi-bright hour. Ahalya had hardly slept. Rather than waste time on the proverbial what-ifs, she hit the keyboard to finish some writing. She had barely typed a few words when her fingers froze. It felt as if someone had placed a rock on her heart. She swallowed hard. What was this sour taste? Was it something she had eaten? Or was it the aftertaste of a forgotten curse? She had hoped to camouflage this toxic sensation with a glass of rose milk but it persisted.
She lay down on the day bed, pulling her legs up to her chest. The morning glare forced her eyes open. She drank a glass of water, then another. While making breakfast, her eyes, still blurry with sleep, fell on the meat mincer. It floated in front of her like an evil genie. Approaching the counter, she was surprised to find a pile of ashes. As she sifted through it, her fingers curled around pieces of bones, chips of tusks, shredded letters. A cry escaped her body. More a primeval call than a cry. Then nothing. She kept moving her lips, making sounds that had not yet found their proper shape in words.
Gautam found her sitting at the counter in a trance. He looked at her. He looked at the ashes. He gathered Ahalya in his arms but she tore herself away.
She was leaving again. This time she left home with the cloud-eared dictionary and little else. She got down at Hope Street and walked to the library garden. There she scattered the ashes at the roots of the hundred-year-old banyan and opened the dictionary. As its pages began to fade, she began to say a prayer, and it was a garland of words plucked from many languages.
*
Nancy Adajania is a Bombay-based cultural theorist and curator. She has curated a number of major research-based exhibitions including the Nelly Sethna retrospective (Chatterjee & Lal with Cymroza Art Gallery, Bombay, 2021); 'Zigzag Afterlives: Film Experiments from the 1960s and 1970s in India' (Camden Art Centre, London, 2020); the Sudhir Patwardhan retrospective (NGMA, Bombay with The Guild Art Gallery, 2019); 'Counter-Canon, Counter-Culture: Alternative Histories of Indian Art' (Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2019) and the Navjot Altaf retrospective (NGMA, Bombay with The Guild, 2018-2019).
Adajania was the juror for the Video/Film/New Media fellowship cycle of the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015-2017). During 2013/2014, Adajania taught the curatorial practice course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts. In 2012, she was joint artistic director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale.
In 2021, she conceptualised and led an online curatorial workshop, ‘Once Upon a Cultural Famine: A Curatorial Thought Experiment’, for the Kochi Biennale Foundation. Her book The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf, The Guild, 2016, expanded the scope of the art-historical monograph in several directions, retrieving previously under-regarded political and cultural histories while weaving together the intersecting intellectual biographies of the artist and the author.