Demimonde
The Tarakeswar Affair is a well known story in West Bengal. But this time Shreya Ila Anasuya brings 16 year old Elokeshi back from the dead to her own tale.
The people in my village said that after he had killed me, my husband ran all the way to the police station. Apparently, he held up his wrists and announced, “Hang me quick. This world is a wilderness to me. I am impatient to join my wife in the next.” As though he had not dispatched me from this one by his own hand quite recently.
Before I was married, my stepmother gave me the ornaments that had been collected, piece by piece, for the day I would be married. She counted them out to show them to me, and not just because I was to wear them. She showed them to me so that I could count them too, for their guardianship would finally pass to me, and from me they would require the same watchfulness they had asked of her.
Each bedazzled offering had a twin — my stepmother’s admonitions.
The infinite loop of a pair of gold bangles, each as thick as her ring finger.
“Elokeshi, you must always listen to your husband and his family.”Six pairs of earrings, small and medium and large.
“Do not complain even if he vexes you.”Tinkling anklets.
“Do not show your face in public.”Little toe rings.
“Make your father proud.”A nose ring.
“Make me proud.”A kiss, and a gentle finger on my cheek to wipe away my tears.
It was not the warnings that made me cry — I was used to existing in the narrow room between point and counterpoint, knowing that every pleasure I was ever warmed by must be tempered by a glint of guilt, a sense of sin. No. It was that I was finally becoming her, leaving the sun patch of girlhood for the shadows of a stranger’s home.
In age, my stepmother and I were closer than my father and she; in experience, still far apart.
Maa had come into her new marital home nervous, hesitant — and even now was prone to cowering before my father when he was enraged. But she had looked at her life and taken what she could from it: with her chin set, she had taken control of our home and my upbringing while my father absent-mindedly stumbled through his days.
I now know the cards she was dealt, for soon they became mine.
I had one course of action — to listen. And so I listened.
Until the moment my life as Elokeshi, Nobinchandra Banerjee’s wife, ended, I obeyed Maa to the last letter. I listened always to my husband, went to him when he called me to his bed, stifled my cries even when he hurt me. When there was no child and I was already sixteen, I listened to his parents and mine when they decided I had better return home. There, I listened to the furrow of worry on my stepmother’s brow and the frown on my father’s lip when they took me to the priest of the Tarakeshwar temple. When the priest asked me to drink the noxious potion he had made for me, I listened. When I awoke in a torpor, my clothes a mess, and he didn’t want me to cry, I listened. When there were no more potions, for that was a pretence they finally dropped, my father wanted me to keep going back to the priest, I listened. When my husband returned and called me names that racked my body with sobs, I listened.
And then, in the final moment of my life, the moment between when my husband’s bloodshot eyes bored into me and blade pierced flesh, I knew that all the listening in the world had come to nothing, for the story of my life and death had become the story of my sacrilege and my husband’s salvation.
Meanwhile, for three days and three nights, my little ginger cat Pnuti prowled the spot where my husband had stabbed me with a fish knife. The stains on the ground grew lighter each day, until they mixed with the mud and earth, and disappeared.
In the starless night, far away from home, I awoke.
I was drenched in sweat, lying on a soft bed, in a dimly lit room. There was a young woman sitting by my bedside, in a saree the colour of collyrium, writing calmly in a diary she balanced on her lap. I watched her as she wrote unhurriedly for another moment, put her pen down, and raised her head to look at me. “Elokeshi,” the stranger said in a gentle, almost hushed voice. Her eyes were huge in her small face; they held mine steadily. “Do you want to drink some water?”
I shook my head. I could have gulped down the contents of a well, but I did not trust the words to leave my mouth, I did not trust anything but the steady drum of my heart, so loud I was certain the stranger could hear it too. I… shook my head? In an instant, the memories struck my mind, like a punishing hand — his red-rimmed eyes, his guttural yell, the cold hint of steel on my skin. The unmentionable, unnatural, undignified pain. The certainty of my life ebbing away, pooling around me in arterial blood.
I raised a trembling hand to my neck, to the impossible place. To the place I had carried the gilded necklace my stepmother had given to me to wear as I became a bride.
To the place where he had dealt the killing blow. My fingers landed on clammy, smooth skin. There was no wound. That’s when I sat up.
Every hair on my arms stood to attention. I touched my neck as I sat on that mahogany cot, with its four posters, but found nothing. Only one word in my head, wound wound wound wound wound, looping endlessly and obliterating every other thought. But it was nothing I found. No wound, not even a trace of blood. I raised my eyes to the stranger; she was watching me still, totally unfazed by the violent shaking of my legs. Presently she laid a steadying arm upon my shoulder.
“Stop, Elokeshi. You are not hurt any longer,” she murmured.
Not hurt? If I hadn’t been so confused, I would have laughed. My head was grasping at stray possibilities, and found that there were really only two. Either I had survived my husband’s murderous intent, and still lived. Or I was dead, and I was wherever souls go when it is their time. Perhaps this stranger was to ferry me across the last river. Perhaps she was to be my final earthly connection, someone to help me make sense of the brevity and the details of my life.
I wanted to ask her which was true. I swear to you that this was my intent. But as I looked up at her and tried to talk to her, language itself eddied around my mind and the words scattered, and I found that I could not gather them to form a full sentence.
“I…” One word, one entirely inadequate word, and no more would come.
There was not a shred of impatience in that young woman. Not a single crease on her wide forehead, nothing but a strange kind of watchfulness in her eyes.
I tried again. “Who…”
“Who am I?” she supplied.
I nodded, slowly.
“My name is Binodini. You are in my home, where I live with my companions. You are safe here. Don’t try to speak now, Elokeshi. Listen, listen to me. You are absolutely safe here. No one will hurt you. But you must not strain yourself right now. You need to get your strength back.”
In her home, with her companions? Perhaps it was the strangeness of it, or the fact that she did not pressure me to speak, but I found myself saying without effort. “Am I …alive?”
A ponderous knock at the door. And another. Again I began to tremble. If I was still alive, how had I ended up here? Surely my husband was looking for me? And if he was, I certainly wasn’t safe.
But she was already working at the brass latch, and I gaped helplessly at the gentle waves of her hair that fell loosely down her back, mingling with the black of her clothes. Someone stepped in.
I saw the alta on the woman’s feet before I saw the rest of her, red, red as the saree of rough cotton she wore, red as the huge bindi rising like the sun on her forehead. Red, red as dried hibiscus, red as a child’s painting of an apple. Her hair was gathered at the nape of her neck in an enormous bun. Her face was kind; the corners of her mouth turned up at me in a slight, quiet smile.
Behind her, in strode the most striking person I had ever seen. The angles of her nose could cut through stone, her silver hair illuminated her finely lined face like moonlight. In it she wore a single, enormous rose, white like the saree she was in. She hurriedly closed the door behind her, and latched it decisively. “How is the child?” she asked Binodini, for she had not looked around the room to see me. I had shrunk into the covers, cowering, not daring to try to speak any longer.
She whirled around then, to see me, tut-tutted, and reached towards me. Instinct should have told me to shrink away, but it didn’t. To my own surprise, I stared back at her without flinching. Her black eyes, touched with crow’s feet on either edge, looked into mine for an instant. And then the world went dark.
Binodini had snuffed out the lamp. In a flicker, the flame returned.
We were no longer in the room, but in a cavernous, dark space filled with a heady scent. No one except me seemed surprised by this.
The three women were huddled together, talking in urgent whispers, not in the least bothered by the fact that we were here. The woman in red disengaged herself, and came towards me. “My name is Sukumari. You can call me Golap,” she said. “I can see that you’re scared. Don’t worry about anything. We brought you here so we can keep you safe. Now, you must stay calm, all right? We will go back home very soon. Okay?”
There was something about her that reminded me of home, in those quiet sunlit afternoons during which I shared food with Maa. She was older than Maa, by at least ten years, but she was comforting in a way I could not really explain. I felt myself loosen my vice-grip on my muscles, felt the breath flow back into my lungs. As Binodini and the silver-haired woman joined Golap and me, I saw with a heightening wonder the mouth of the cave we were in. The night outside was still and moonless, but filled with stars pulsating against the pitch-black endlessness of the sky.
I stood at the threshold and gazed outside. Beyond me I could see a hushed wilderness, with three muddy paths that diverged like streams from a river, in three directions. The one that stretched out in front of us was completely deserted, but as I gazed out to the one on our right, my jaw fell open. In the distance, I could see a slight figure lying on the mud, a small animal scrabbling in the soil beside it. As I looked at it my heart grew tight, and I was overcome with the desire to run to the person, whoever it was. But another, stronger feeling in my gut said I couldn’t go there, shouldn’t try to go there. With effort, I made myself look away, and my eyes wandered to the bushes that lined the path to the left. It seemed deserted too, but the night wasn’t moonless as I had thought. I saw the faintest sliver of a crescent moon, with the evening star glittering next to it. The bushes were laden with the night-blooming jasmine flowers that filled the air with their fragrance, that overpowering, obscene sweetness that is like no other sweetness.
Binodini was calling me back in. As I turned around I thought I could hear the air reverberate with what sounded like distant clapping. It was coming from the place I’d just been staring at. But it was gone just as soon as I turned my attention to it, and the night fell still once more.
I sat with them on the ground, and Binodini passed a steaming cup around. As Golap handed it to me, and I held it, warm, between my palms, she started to hum. Binodini lit another lantern, while the silver-haired woman regarded me gravely. “Drink up, child,” she said. “And believe what you see. Pay heed to what you hear. And trust what you know.”
I drank deeply from the cup, a spicy, honeyed tea, and I felt the burning and the richness on my tongue, sliding down my throat, warming my entire body. I passed the cup to Binodini, and felt my head start to swim even as Golap’s humming turned into a full-throated song. We drank and the lantern flickered and Golap sang her wordless melody.
Listen to what you hear.
I looked up and saw the spectre of my former life come apart before my eyes. The father who had sent me, willingly, first to husband and then to priest. The stepmother who was powerless to stop this. The priest who had touched me because he could. The husband who fervently believed he was a good man. The mask dropped, and what I saw was not the devil. No. He was an ordinary coward.
Believe what you see.
And all of a sudden it became clear to me that my life had ended. I was dead, and I was safe. But I was also not dead, because I was here. As my head spun like a darvesh, an eye inside of me opened. Disconnected visions appeared to me, swirling and shifting before I could fully grasp them — the silver-haired woman putting rouge on her cheeks, fastening a golden choker around her neck, followed by a longer necklace. Golap in a room overlooking the river, talking animatedly with a man while a group of seated people watched intently. Binodini, standing behind a dark curtain, before stepping into a spotlight.
Actresses. They were actresses.
Trust what you know.
When I opened my eyes, I found myself on the floor, cool hands on my cheek. Golap’s. Binodini brought me water. The silver-haired woman was towering over me and when I met her eyes she saw the certainty in them. She grinned, and shifted. A small ginger cat with an unmistakable ringed tail trotted into the cave with a trumpeting meow. “Pnuti!” My voice was faint as a whisper. My little cat had found me.
The sound of purring filled my ears, and as I looked up, I saw there was a full moon in the sky. I stared at it in disbelief, and my eyes widened when I saw that the watery-looking crescent moon I had glimpsed earlier was still there too.
The silver-haired woman leaned towards me again, the two moons eclipsed by her now grinning face.
“Welcome, child. My name is Khetramoni.”
The rules were clear: go nowhere near my village, or the courthouse, or to my husband’s house in the city. My realm was Binodini’s house, the house by the river where the troupe rehearsed, the theatre, and when I was free, the streets and markets of the great city.
Was life sweet in the halls of the theatre?
Yes, to be sure, I loved everything about this demimonde.
I watched rehearsals, saw heated arguments, witnessed their drawn-out resolutions, fetched water and tea, helped with hair and makeup, ran around in all directions for set-up before and then pack-up after. I made myself so useful they retained me as part of their company for thirteen rupees a month, money that was my own to do with as I pleased. This I kept carefully tucked away in a box in the room I had woken up in, the room that was now my own.
I met the other people who made up the cast of characters in the women’s lives — Binodini’s mother, Golap’s son, Khetramoni’s lovers — and also Girish babu, the man with whom they closely worked.
So upset were some of the same men who advocated for widows to be remarried over the fact that women they considered base would be part of the city’s cultural life, they quit the theatre in disgust. Among them was Vidhyasagar, or “that old dolt” as Khetramoni called him. (“Good riddance!” when news of his quitting reached her ears.)
Girish babu, like the other men who worked with the women at the Bengal Theatre, treated the women with a kind of patronising affection, giving them directions, talking with them for hours about acting. He was a towering, officious man with a great big laugh. They called him the Garrick of the Bengali stage.
Binodini herself was called Signora, Golap was known for the range and control of her singing, Khetramoni for her tremendous stamina and stage presence — not a week passed where their shows were not praised in the papers. A story about Khetramoni’s extraordinary turn as Durga, painted and laden with jewellery (even costume jewellery gets heavy quickly if you pile on enough), standing stock-still for over half an hour on stage, collapsing only after the sound of the last clap had died down. Binodini changed costumes in a furious hurry, playing both Ayesha and Tilottama, daring the audience to think the two characters were played by the same person. Golap could convincingly play an ingénue, a beguiling wife, a tired mistress, a mystic.
The hectic days we gave to rehearsals that would give way to shows; the quiet nights were all ours. I cannot tell you of the arcane practices in those rooms without betraying the confidence of the three women I love most in the world — I can only tell you what is mine, and hope that you will guess at least some of the rest. I am permitted to tell you one delicious thing, though — Girish babu may have thought it was a section of the self-important bhadralok who decided that women could play parts in the theatre, but that, too, was part of the women’s design.
It was in those quiet nights that my sentences, at first halting, hatched.
In the domestic torpor of those evenings, I was safe, and for the first time in my life, to be completely myself. Around Golap knitting or practising on her tanpura, around Khetramoni reading or lounging or petting Pnuti, her great black eyes narrowed in repose, around Binodini, my friend and my instructor, for she insisted on returning me to a habit of reading and writing that I had left behind before I was wed. Around them I could be irritable, or chirpy, or too tired for chores. This should have been delicious freedom, and it often was, but you know as well as I do that life doesn’t work like that.
“You have some mourning to do first,” said Khetramoni, on the evening of the sixth consecutive day that I had tried to run lines with Binodini and failed. The words caught in my throat — it’s not that I couldn’t speak them, for now they came fast and easy in conversation within the sanctuary I had with these women, but it was a different story in public. At rehearsals, they would not come to me. My body would flood with dread, and though I knew each line as if I myself had written it, I did not speak them.
Once upon a time I had not wanted my own words — I had kept them on a tight leash because doing otherwise would put me in harm’s way — a sharp word or a slap in my father’s house, and my husband’s, or a look of contempt that would flatten me. But now I was in a house of words; the women spoke constantly to each other, of new plans, the cycles of the planets, of lunations and seasons, of new plays and poetry and how to tackle such-and-such problem — an ex-lover of Golap’s who had returned, angry that she would not quit the stage to be with him, promises that were broken, payments that were late, or shows that didn’t sell fast enough.
And I spoke with them of the two things that plagued me when my mind was not completely taken over by the theatre. I couldn’t tell you which was more uncomfortable — the dreams, or the rage. I had never been used to my body being my own.
In my new life, inhabiting it was difficult — but in my dreams, I returned to the original violation. I replayed over and over again hands on my body that I did not want, hands that only knew how to grasp or to harm, that filled my memories with breathless discomfort. I saw the hate and contempt that filled the bastard that was my husband, felt the unspeakable horror of his final attack, the way he thought my body and my life were his to do with as he saw fit.
The thoughts came to me unbidden, in clammy afternoon naps, the same hands and eyes over and over and over again, and sometimes they belonged to the priest and sometimes my husband.
I awoke, restless, feeling them still, wanting my aching body to be held differently, in a way that did not grasp or harm, but held, held still. I shivered in sweat from the dreams and then the rage started building up, the rage at everything I had lost, and everything that had never been mine in the first place. I had given and they had taken, and they had taken and the price I paid was the loss of my life.
Sometimes the rage took me when I was right in the middle of the theatre, while I was watching a scene or scurrying in the greenroom helping with costume changes. It caught me unawares, winded me. Khetramoni had taught me to swear and I found myself muttering under my breath. Goat-fucker, asshole, pig. Balled up fists, nails digging into my own palms, that was me, full of rage, crystalline, brilliant rage, full of memories that bruised me as surely as if I was still in the village standing in front of my recently returned, murderous husband.
I would have liked to tell you it was simple — that while the memories hurt me, the rage purified my mind and clarified my purpose. What a story that would be — girl has something taken away, girl has something given back to her. But you know as well as I do how life works, that rage too cracks you open in ways that hurt you still, that rage finds new and incredible ways to hurt you, that rage poisons so much what used to be good, until it feels like this good life, too, was part of the litany of precious things that were taken away.
But fortunately, if you know this, you also know that this is not where it stops. You have made of your own life what you could, even while you hurt and even while you rage at all that was taken from you. You forge forward, in your way. I did, in mine. What I could not speak in public I spoke in private. What I could not speak to even with Binodini, or Golap, or Khetramoni, I spoke to myself. What I could not sit with myself, I started, at least, scribbling in great sheets of loose paper I had bought with my salary. I summoned the words, and slowly but surely, they came.Alchemy.
The story of my life and death had not died down. The buzzing that had reached the bylanes and alleyways of Calcutta became a ringing that nobody could have kept from me even had they tried.
“Ei shunecho, Nobinchandra Banerjee’s trial starts today.”
I was passing the market in Binodini’s phaeton, by myself, and the shock of hearing the name made me breathless. Over the next few weeks, every time I was out, I heard of nothing else.
By this time, the story of my husband’s histrionic surrender had become well known. It was the work of a man who knew he was absolved, because he had already absolved himself and knew that everyone else was bound to do the same.
In village gossip, his apparent contrition was held up as a shining example of his great passion for an unworthy wife. Village gossip spread like an epidemic and reached the street corners of the city. There, the words escaped into the air and were trapped in fresh ink. News of my demise and the court cases that followed, against my husband and against the priest, was printed in the English papers and the Bengali ones. Both men had wronged me, but only one was despised — not for his violation of me, but because people felt he had wronged them.
Playwrights and songwriters made a fortune turning gossip into entertainment. The people of Calcutta reached the courtroom and the playhouses, in person and through their reading glasses, peering at the story of my fate and pronouncing their opinions.
Mostly, their opinion was the same. Mercy for my husband, for doing the only right thing a good husband could have done under the circumstances. Contempt for the priest. Contempt for my father, for taking me to him. But most of all, downright disgust for my stepmother, who, like me, had done nothing but listen all her life. I saw proof of it myself, in a play about an old man crazed with lust for his young wife, in which she was shown as a harridan who had ensnared this man — a fool who, unable to meet her sexual demands, contrived to buy her jewellery by pawning his daughter off to the highest bidder. In the court of public opinion, my stepmother and I were the first offenders. The priest was the second. My father was the third. My husband, the hero.
And so, in their righteous fury, they stood by my husband. A ten thousand-strong crowd signed a petition asking for him to be pardoned. They cried for clemency for him, and more punishment for the priest. They howled when he and the priest were both sentenced to prison — they wanted more time for the priest, none at all for my husband.
As for me, perhaps you will only understand if I show you what the painters in Kalighat made of what happened to me. These images of me were printed in the dozens in Battala — to adorn homes all over the city. In the most popular of them, I am shown being beheaded by my husband, the quarts of blood that he shed missing from the pristine parchment, which was streaked only with the contours of two painted bodies.
There were more paintings — of myself, sometimes with a rose in hand, sometimes with luxuriant, loose hair, always with a full bosom and full hips. In some, I was shown looking at the priest, eyes smudged with desire and intent. In all these paintings, I was a mature woman. This woman looked like someone I might have turned into had I been allowed to live, to be with a man I had chosen for myself. In the paintings I was never bloodied, never cowering, never scrawny, never small, never frail, never terrified. In the paintings I was never sixteen — never, never a girl, never just a girl.
Perhaps now you will understand when I tell you that the mercury boiled in my veins, that every word and every piece of news, of which there were hundreds, set me aflame. The angrier I got, the quieter I became. I made a room inside myself, and disappeared into it regularly, locked the door behind me.
I lost sleep; I burned.
People sell anything they can possibly sell. They sold my death.
It was not just plays and paintings they sold. Sarees began to appear in the market, my name embroidered on them. You could buy oil for headaches that was said to have been made by the priest, a product of hard prison labour. You could buy a betel-leaf box with my name upon it, and, even more cruelly, a fish knife.
I myself bought a saree, mustard with a malachite border. It said Elokeshi in a ridiculously ornate style. I wore it with a green ruffled blouse that Golap had bought me. In the mirror, I looked like a waif with quiet eyes. My body was nothing like the imagination of the patachitra painters. I started to ruminate again on the images they had painted, so many of them depicting the priest and their fantasy Elokeshi alone.
Compared to that robust, wilful Elokeshi, I felt spectral.
I began to walk the markets where they were talking about me.
“Poor child, she was only sixteen, after all,” I heard one woman say about me while on one of my excursions.
Her friend, with whom she was waiting to buy fish, snorted. “She knew very well what she was doing. Of course he killed her, would anyone spare such a girl? Anyway, I am not even sure that he did it.”
“Of course not, mashima. Girls are dropping dead of their own accord, aren’t they?” I had not meant to speak, but the words had slipped out of my mouth.
A man who had so far been silent through this exchange snapped at me. “Don’t be ridiculous. No true wife behaves in the way she did. It’s because of this that we have been arguing for so long — don’t let these girls read and get strange ideas in their head. Why was she even allowed to go back to her father’s house after she was married?”
I looked down at my saree, proof of so many things about where I came from and who I had to be, and I started to laugh. I could not stop. The man who had addressed me looked as though he had encountered an apparition, and shuffled quickly away.
What does a girl do with her burning? She speaks it.
That night I stood before the three women who were now my family and I said, “I have something to show you.”
Wordlessly I handed them the manuscript — the pages I had written and rewritten and revised, not wanting to let them go, changing a word here and a phrase there until I drove myself into a frenzy with how badly I wanted it to be just right.
I watched their faces as they read, first Khetramoni squinting at the page, then handing it to Binodini, who then handed it to Golap. As I watched them go over it, page by page by page, I held my own hands to stop them from trembling, felt my lower lip quiver as I saw from their quiet entrancement that I had written a thing that was true.
When Golap looked up from the last page, the other two quietly waiting, and looked at me, her eyes swimming in tears, my own finally overflowed.
Binodini clutched at the papers and shook her head, beaming. And Khetramoni? She pulled my tightly coiled palms towards her, shook them loose, so that I looked down and saw in sudden, giddy awareness at the object that had fallen out of them.
It was a set of handsome brass keys, one for every room in the house that was me.
Epilogue
A year and a day after Nobinchandra Banerjee murdered his 16-year-old wife, Ami Elokeshi opened at the Bengal Theatre on Beadon Street.
The play was announced just as the company’s otherwise sold-out shows suddenly started failing. The patriarch of the theatre, Girishchandra Ghosh, was on the verge of selling to a wealthy businessman when, it was whispered in the theatre circles, the quiet girl who served the tea at rehearsals came to him with a script and one extraordinary condition.
“She said she wanted to star in it… and she claims her name is actually Elokeshi, can you believe it?” Indubala, who hoped very much to join Bengal Theatre herself one day, said in an excited whisper to her companion as they waited for the show to begin. The man, entranced by Indu, not quite believing his luck, smiled at the way her eyes sparkled.
In the dressing room a girl called Elokeshi looked in the mirror, staring at her own reflection, anxiously checking to see that her costume was all in order. Her lips were painted coral, her eyes kohled, and she adjusted a pair of gold bangles — infinite loops around both her wrists.
With one last look at herself, Elokeshi went to the wings and waited for her cue.
And when she heard it, she stepped on to the stage, her heart leaping with a nervous ecstasy inside the cage of her chest.
The lights were bright on her powdered face. She could not see the two-hundred strong crowd in front of her, but she felt its electric anticipation, its watchful regard.
She took a sharp inward breath, and began.
Note:
This is a piece of short fiction based on the real-life Tarakeshwar Affair.
The year that Elokeshi was murdered — 1873 — was the same year cis women first appeared in the public theatre in Calcutta.
This story owes a debt to the work of scholars on Elokeshi, and on Binodini Dasi, and the Bengali public theatre. The quote from Nobinchandra Banerjee, Elokeshi’s murderer, is taken from Tanika Sarkar’s 1997 paper, ‘Talking about Scandals: Religion, Law and Love in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal’.
Shreya Ila Anasuya is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, an independent journalist, and the managing editor of Skin Stories, our publication on disability, sexuality and gender.
