I am sitting.
Under the mango tree on a low-height wooden stool, in the courtyard of my ancestral home. My mother steps forward, takes a handful of turmeric paste from the two silver bowls placed on the brick-plastered floor in front of me. She raises her hand and applies the haldi on hesitant me, first on my cheeks, then arms and hands, and then the legs. She slides the remaining paste over my feet in the end, as a tear wells up in her eye.
‘Now my girl would no more be mine’.
She lets out a muffled cry. Her cry from the hollows of her heart, though faint, breaks open the gates of the dams of the many other pairs of eyes looking at me endearingly in that courtyard this morning . Daarji, Veer ji, Bua ji, Jeet Mama, all join in, with their moist eyes. I never knew I had mattered so much to each one of them. Even after whatever had happened. The tide of tears around me gradually rises up and is about to drown me in itself . Right at that moment a flash on my phone screen pulls my gaze .
“Bombay calling…”
I, all smeared with the yellow paste by now, plead to Simar, my childhood friend sitting next to me for the ceremony , to hold the phone against my right ear. She does so with a sullen look. I know her tears are fake. At least not meant for me. She is not crying over missing me after I am gone. She is sore because I was dashing off to the city of my dreams and the next month she was doomed to marry in a town where the only popular , profitable and possible occupation was weaving quilts all the year round. Even during sultry summer months.
‘Hello, Jazz? Hello… All good? Are you crying? Hey, I won’t bury you alive, I promise’. He was his usual self. I could hear him munching on potato chips. If only his jokes could also crack like the wafers crumbling under his teeth right now.
‘Haha. Vey funny. It’s nothing; just people getting way too emotional on me getting married.’
‘Oh, okay. So, you are not the one crying?’ He asked.
‘Nooo! Why would I? Rather, I’m so excited.’ Suddenly the phone against my ear slipped down. Simar, while trying to overhear our conversation had lost the grip on my phone. I shot a stare at her. It worked.
‘By the way, I am still waiting for the picture of our future home in Bombay. What is taking you so long? And do not give me that - I wanted to surprise you - crap’. I was in wait for long.
Binty Maasi had meanwhile rubbed the turmeric paste too close to my left eye. ‘Sorry, sorry’, she pleaded and cleaned it up with the same tenderness that had attracted me to her since my childhood. Likewise, she always mirrored her youth, her dreams in me. I knew she was seeing herself sitting in place of me right now. Some dreams never find life. But an occasional breath in to them, does great good.
‘No, not at all. I was just worried that you would get disappointed and embarrassed in front of your folks. It’s too small an apartment, not your Chandigarh bungalow types’. My folks and their flamboyant lifestyle always overwhelmed him. Poor him. He was still to know of many humble and embarrassing stories, some hidden and others buried behind these towering walls.
‘You know very well that I am ready to live even in a chawl next to her place. It just has to be Bombay.’
‘Madam, it is Mumbai now not Bombay!’
‘Not for me. I love the sound of it. There is something about it which…’
My body shivered in a rush. I looked up at the sky, my sky, with a yellowish tint. The silent sobs around meanwhile had already been swept over by giggles and haldi ceremony songs by now.
Except for my mother.
‘O Beeji, please stop crying. I cannot hear your Jawai’s voice properly on my phone’. I shouted at her as she sat holding my hand. With the other hand she was wiping her tears with her phulkari dupatta. The one that had been handed over across generations from every mother to her daughter. The one with the warmth of the tears across generations. But I could not have let anything come between me and Bombay. Not even her tears.
When I was at school, every Sunday, a Hindi movie was regularly televised by Doordarshan . Our big joint family would sit together on the floor and watch it while munching on pakodas and sipping milk tea. Immediately after, without a word, the TV would be switched off and people in the front two rows would slide back to create space. Time for my performance. My show. My movie. Every Sunday, after working on the storyline over the past week, I would narrate, enact, dance, sing, do everything that was there in my movie. Single-handedly. Everything by myself. If it did not get concluded on that day, which was often, because of the power cuts at 10PM, it would be resumed the next Sunday. Simar often teased me that it was just a means of keeping the youngest one in good humor fearing her brattish tantrums. But the artist inside me knew her audience. Throughout the week, almost every day, people would keep bumping into me to ask what my next story line was, what my heroine would do next to keep the goon at bay, , whether my hero would leave his family for love, or an innocent request for a happy ending on the coming Sunday. Gradually, neighbors, friends, doodhwallah, dhobi and others started joining my audience. Meanwhile, Daadi began the trend of calling me ‘Raj Kapoor’. I would spit back if someone called me Nargis. I wanted to create new worlds out of what floated in my mind and not follow others’ instructions.
Then came her.
That day I could not perform after the movie was over. I stood there blank. The two front rows who had slid back to make space for me sat back wide eyed in wait.
‘Have you forgotton all kudiye?’
Beeji jeered in impatience. I stayed frozen . The truth was that I did not want to recall those forgotten lines, as my mind was already on a roll, continuously replaying in a loop what it had never thought of; what it had just witnessed.
‘Beeji, what an amazing job this man has done.’ That is what I could utter.
‘Which man? Oh silly, that is a girl, a very talented and a courageous girl, like you’. Beeji beamed in pride on her knowledge about films and me.
‘But this movie had so much action, bombs, army, killings. How did she do it?’
‘Why cannot she?’ Beeji exclaimed and got up with a wave of her hand to light the tandoor as the rest of my audience wearily walked away, missing their roll of much-awaited weekend entertainment.
How did she do it? How did she manage to do it despite being a girl? That question stayed with me. The answer was her name on the screen. I begged Veer ji to help me. He got me a pirated CD of the movie, with the promise of a blockbuster performance by me next Sunday. ‘Everyone is missing their little Raj Kapoor,’ he exclaimed while placing it in my hand. They were about to miss more. For many days, or weeks, my eyes were not ready to see anything beyond her, beyond what she had created. I neither could, nor did perform, over the coming Sunday, the next sunday and many more Sundays after that. I was not bowled over by the movie per se, but by the possibilities it threw at me - Yes, I could create something like that. I could make that Sunday performance play on the silver screen instead. Even if it involved a man’s world. Dream, plan and execute. That’s it. Why I did not think of it earlier, I wondered.
For days together, whenever anyone asked me anything the only answer he got was – ‘I want to be Farah Khan’. Now my dream had an alibi. It was ready to die at the hands of reality for me. But I gradually realized that the people around me, my audience, had been happy with my Sunday movies only, only till the time I had no plans of actually making them happen. Now when I had the roadmap ready, the eyebrows had moved from their position in awe to ridicule and gradually to scorn.
When I voiced myself - there was no question of going to Bombay or even learning film making in the local and shady art school - I was told. Good girls do not go into doing films. But here I was not planning to act. Their unfounded fears of getting exploited or spoiling their name by doing shameless things did not even arise in my case. I was to be the Director, in the same track pants I wore every day at home. Every night I devised different plans to try clarifying my sincerity without fail knowing well the well- practiced snub in wait. For them, the youngest laadli of the house had turned into a problem, an irritant, and thus ready to be married off.
I did not take it silently lying down. I did try to go to Bombay, a world my parents hated. A world where my icon lived. A world which was the only way to reach her, assist with her, learn from her and then finally, to be her. To be those fingers who could twirl anyone around them.
I tried running away by train to Bombay but was dragged back . Courtesy Simar. And also, knowing well the destination, it was much easy to catch me every such time. Once Daarji allowed me a stay for a month there with his ‘door ki bua’, but much before I reached, she had already readied a well instructed prison for me there, in my dream city. Now her anakh (pride), was at stake. I was not allowed to leave home after five, in a city which livened up in the evening and that also after finishing all the household chores. Suddenly her three sets of maids decided to rush off to their respective villages, for a marriage or a mourning, just a day before I had landed.
I came back. I tried online classes, I messaged my role model, tweeted her, but then I was just a number in the list of millions of her followers. And that Karan Johar kept her busy all the time, either at parties or Instagram reels. My days and nights were spent with my headphones on, listening to her and everything around her. May be, some divine power may spot me, help me reach Mumbai. The rest I could handle. I was confident.
Then something happened which sucked the breath out of my industry and everything just lost its meaning. Everything was shut.
It was in this darkness that Baba ji blessed me with his arrival. He was Daarji ‘s door ki Bua , with whom I had stayed …errr…suffered in Mumbai, her neighbor’s nephew. He was to undergo a training for a month in the industrial area of Solan, Himachal Pradesh, about two hours away from my place. Because of the pandemic, he was hesitant to stay in a Paying Guest accommodation. Therefore, on door ki Bua’s request and also to compensate for the suffering I had made her go through, he was allowed to step in. It was unimaginable in a house with a girl aplomb with bubbling youth, ridiculous ambition and sheer lack of shame, in the city of Chandigarh.
I still remember our first meeting on the breakfast table almost after a week he had moved in. I was least interested in talking to him. I kept yawning and occasionally scratching my scalp to the though lively narration of his train journey, his accomplishments and his future plans. Nothing could dare interest me. Not even his compliments.
‘Oh wait! What did he just say? Bombay? A job in Bombay. A house in Bombay’. My mind immediately got down to work. My hair smoothened back in place and a smile jumped up on my face. I got up in a jiffy and landed a parantha with an extra dollop of my favourite white makhan on his plate.
Everything began moving as per the plan, I don’t deny that in the process I did find him nice and not bad for a partner. Jackpot indeed. Everything began to fall in place, gradually. My family was also tired of me by now and jumped at the opportunity to get rid of this trouble monger, who was now smiling at least.
‘Do whatever shameful things you want to do , but only after you go to your home, not ours. Get off our backs!’ These words had lost their repetitive value in the alleys of my ancestral home now. ‘We are so lucky to have such a hardworking and loving son-in-law for our laadli'- took their place.
And that is exactly the thought that ran down in those tears , in front of me, all across the courtyard today. I hate them. Those selfish, as-per-their-own convenience tears, who just want me to leave , unbelong, from them, their names. ‘Oh sorry! Where were we? I was just telling my folks to go a bit slow with the haldi smearing.’ I came back to him. ‘Yeah. Now I can hear you properly. By the way, where is the picture of my new house, our house? You promised. Now send it to me, or I won’t step out for the pheras…I swear’. I eked out a mock laugh.
‘No no I can’t dare afford that.’ He jumped up in a laugh. Unopened packets of chips fell down on the floor. ‘But I was thinking if I should get you a better house. I mean, you deserve a sea-facing one, a four bedroom at least.’ He waited for my response. The packets held their breath on the floor. My gut began getting uncomfortable. ‘Jazz you very well know it won’t be possible financially , for another few years to get one in Mumbai so I thought why not live in Pune in a far more decent apartment, for the time being. We can shift later when we can afford one.’ He almost whispered the last part.
‘What? Say that again? Pune, you mentioned?’ I treaded carefully.
‘Yeah, you heard it right’. He came back in a slightly stronger whisper.
‘But the deal …. I mean the plan was to be in Mumbai, right?’
‘Yeah, but I got a much better opportunity for us last week in Pune. Could not have said ‘no’.’
How could he change the plan at the last moment? And dare announce it to me on the wedding day. Simar slipped the phone again. This time she was genuinely sorry and put it back. She held my hand and told everyone to go quiet for a while. ‘Opportunity it is. But not for us. Only for you. And you are telling me now, on the day of the wedding.’ It was time to confront him. I am a Director. I can see things the way no one can. Stark naked. That is how I weave meanders around them, to turn them into stories to be unraveled by the audience, layer by layer. It is my job, not his.
‘Baby it is so much money in the Pune job, you never know I may be able to produce a movie for you in the next few years, a short one…one of those artsy ones and then we can go to Cannes and…’ He paused, a forced pause, a fumbled pause, I don’t know what to say pause, a please say yes pause. ‘Plus, I did not know how would you react if I told you days before the wedding .You are my love, my lady luck. I did not want to lose you.’ He pleaded. The crumbling was back again.
‘Is that the only reason?’ I interrupted his overdramatic cajoling.
‘I don’t deny that it is my dream come true. I could not have said a ‘no’ but it would be foolish to say no?’ He smacked his lips. The packet of chips was finished. I could hear him crushing it.
‘And what about mine?’ I pushed out the final question and looked up at the marigold garlanded towering walls.
‘Of course, I have kept that in mind. I will…we will find a way out, I promise. Things can be managed from Pune. It is just three hours away. You just enjoy ’ His cajoling continued.
‘I repeat…what about me… my dreams, my Bombay ?’ I shouted as the bhangra dhol began warming up its pitch. He had been instructed .
‘Please believe me. Something would work out. It’s my responsibility. And we have love… why do we need any thing else?’
He threw the packet in the bin. Loud and clear.
Before I realized Daadi pulled me up and raised our hands in the air to dance to the dhol beat. I looked at Simar.
‘You love me. Right?’ landed the words from the phone crackling high up in the air.
Really brilliant loved it, i kind of like how you leave endings to imagination
Really nice minute descriptions