Lopamudra BanerjeeThey were here to dance the night away, swishing and swaying over the frenzied stage…One by one, they ramped onto the stage,the ground beneath their feet shook with jarring tremors. Were they feeling the tremors too, as the audience clapped on and whistled to their tunes?
Their honeysuckle frames, gushing with their sweet-smelling aroma (or was it the musk of cheap perfumes permeating the air), enticing as the night itself, transformed into poetry of resistance. Their names were announced by faceless anchors, their identities revealed…A delectable mix of Hindu, Muslim, dalit, minority, and queer woman, they joined hands and circled around the stage, emerging anew, from the ashes of their slain selves.
“What is your name, sister?”
“Ayesha…Ayesha Khatun…” The diva with dark, brooding eyes, clad in a black salwar suit said.
“And you?” She asked in return.
“Sita…Sita Murmu…” Pat came the reply.
“Baby…Baby is my name, not given by my birth mother, but the Godmother who raised me. But don’t ask my surname and embarrass me…I know not who my father was.”
“Mine was a drug dealer, and a pimp…”
“Mine, better still, finished off by the police in a gang war.”
One by one, the dancing divas unfurled the petals of their beings, holding their arms to the wind. The relentless girls, the nonchalant divas, opened the floodgates of stories…stories that hung on the threshold of their blistering pasts. They sang to the nameless music of the mad night’s mirth; in their voices, the murmurs of mythical women, folklore women of another world echoed.
Ayesha, the invincible firebird, danced frantically on the stage. The blazing fire of her body roared on, and not a soul could gauge that the fatal sting of HIV-positive had entered her bloodstream. Not a soul could gauge the heart-rending tale of the minuscule cells of her body, dying bit by bit every passing minute as she flounced around, singing and swaying her hips to her favourite Bollywood number.
“Ding dong ding, ding dong ding dong ding dong…Ek do teen, chaar paanch chhay saat aat now, das barah, gyara tera…”
The countdown began, the frantic countdown tracking the arrival of that elusive lover guy who never arrived at all…but that couldn’t dampen her flickering fire, for in this cacophonous web of everyday lovers swooning at her doorstep, countdowns are a forever phenomenon…
Sita Murmu gyrated her body in frantic moves now…the petite, lanky girl, with the nervous energy of an emaciated waterfall. She knows not who named her Sita when, as a fresh-faced, dusky girl of nine, she had been trafficked from the dense forest area of the northeast or the borders of Bangladesh, was it? Geographies didn’t have an impact on her psyche, nor did the origin of chastity embedded in her name. She had learnt to kick them off, like dirt, along with her scars in numerous difficult places as soon as she had learnt to dance, pushing her body like a froth of revolution.
“I never knew who my father was…is it important anyway?” She asks. He might be the one who trafficked her, traversing borders.
And Baby, with no surname to camouflage the anguish brewing in her, since her bastard birth, had to abscond from a ‘Home’, an orphanage of sick, pale, emaciated baby faces where in the dead of the night, every bloody night, calloused, adult hands groped her body.
“It’s hard to believe, you know, that I am the same stupid Baby whose muffled cries broke through the silence of those nights…I just want to live, live dangerous, live sinful, live incredulous now!” She laughed and mingled with the circle of the dancing divas.
Poorni, whose mother had named her ‘Poornima’ (full moon), as much as she remembers her origin, had learnt to infuse soulful melodies with her voice too, in between her spectacular dance moves, moving to and fro like a restless deer all around the stage. Was it she who mentioned a drug dealer father, a pimp who sold her in three different states, every time hiking the price of her body by thousands?
“Ah, yes, a ‘body’ it is still, lumps of flesh and curves that the police retrieved from the Bengal-Nepal border. And don’t even ask what the police men did, all of them wanted their share of me.”
“Whatever happened to your mother then?” Baby asked, or was it Sita? They missed theirs. Or, was there anything to miss anyway?
“Don’t ask too many questions…just dance on, the stage is all yours…the mother might as well be dead meat long ago, or, slogging in some nondescript brothel in an unknown corner of the world.” Poorni lashes at them, still dancing, kicking away myths and memories with ruthless strokes of her body.
“Even the full moon has blemishes in her body, chaand ka kalank, and they make her even more beautiful.” Her mother, dead or alive now, would say.
She was all about blemishes now, the pure white of the moon skin was history now, but she hated rehashing her history, her old wounds—they maddened her.
Now, now…there were utterances of poetry in the stage heard by them all, but who recites verses amid these dancing divas? Who is this nameless, unidentified girl at the corner? Who is this bewitching diva of the folklore in whose voice, tales and myths merge?
“Between the age of nine to fourteen, they all raped me. Two of my uncles, the maternal and the paternal one, the brother-in-law, the neighbor who claimed to give me a job in a stinking rich household…and between the age of nineteen to twenty, the master too…”
Does her tale sound familiar, does it ring resonances when she bursts open in primordial truths?
She often forges her name often now, to suit varied purposes… “I am Rekha, Rekha Pal…Namita Mallik…Sima Das…” She says, emerging with various ID cards. But the gatekeepers of society haven’t really discovered who the real woman is. She manages to slip through, pushing past their barriers, with her façade of beauty, her shameless display of skill, thrift. With her homespun tales, she weaves new meanings as she leaves old countries, old storms behind those gates.
Yes, those gates…those gates, so excruciatingly hard to enter through. The gates of schools, colleges, institutions, those so-called ‘havens of propriety’ where a father’s name, a stamp of legitimacy is the first benchmark to lodge their bodies. Yes, the bodies of these unapologetic women who now mock the deep structures of society with their coordinated dance of resistance.
Once again, all the girls, the divas dance around the stage in circles, jeered, leered by the bare, thunderous night. They wanted to claim slices of their lives in the civilised human world, but that was not to happen.
In the other world, beyond those dark gates, with their dead, smothered bodies and their enlivened spirits, they danced on. The stage was all theirs.
Note: Short fiction, composed in March 2024, the International Women’s Month and also the #womenshistorymonth, reflecting on the position of marginalised women in our racist, patriarchal Indian society.
