Translated from the Bangla by Chirayata Chakrabarty
[Trigger Warning: sexual violence, trauma]
Come one, come all, to the Vendo-r-r-r Va-a-an! Everything’s twenty-five, five and twenty! twenty-five, five and twenty!
Ruma opened the door, and found sparkling sunshine dripping from the leaves of the trees, landing playfully on the reds, greens and purples of the van. Her heart skipped a beat at the thought of something new.
She stepped on the threshold, and then onto the street. You’re not supposed to step on the threshold. That’s what witches and alakshmis do. That’s what ghouls do, and faes do. It’s bad luck. It’s apshagun, bad juju.
Ruma examined a knife with a plastic handle. She wondered if it was sharp enough, its thin steel blade reflecting the sun. But the pink handle bewitched her. But the fruit basket looked useful too. Or how about the rug, with the nice, blue swirls? She should have gotten that one. How many dreams can you buy with that one rolled up and skinny fifty-rupee note anyway?
All of the money from her tutoring was already tucked safely away at the end of her mother’s aanchal. Somehow, that note of fifty had remained in the knot of Ruma’s stole.
Who is Ruma? Why is she in our story? Why was her mother within, and why was she without and at the door? Because she was unwed? Or because she happened to be too big for her boots? How old is this unwed Ruma? Why is she eyeing the knife? To cut and peel greens? Or to thinly slice onions, or cut her ailing father some fruit? Or would she use it for something else?
We know nothing, except that the story starts here, at the door.
The taped voice that called out was a woman’s. It was the same from every selling van. Sometimes, from the cone of the black battery box, blared strangled, broken cries. Like the croaking of frogs. It happened when the battery was low. The voice groaned and bellowed, all’s twenty-fi-i-i-i-i-ve, all’s twenty-fi-i-i-i-i-i-i-ve…
The waves of her bellowing scattered across the neighbourhood, and women and children swarmed out. Young women, with their spawns or siblings at the hip. Huddling around the Mass Enchanter.
Now, the voice enchants no more. Nobody humours the croaking or the groaning. No one wants what it sells, unless completely necessary. There’s so much more to be had elsewhere. So many games on smart phones. Cinema, TV shows. The vendor van is the same old stock renewed. The same old baskets and rugs and pillows and buckets and tubs and knives and scissors.
But, yes, Ruma did come out, and she went close enough to the van, and examined the knives and the baskets.
Suddenly, she felt a sting, just like the taut zapping of lightning.
On the other side of the road, from within the half-darkness of a leaning tarpaulin shade, Ruma felt a pair of lewd, leering eyes impale her. A gaudy bandana on a sweaty, dark forehead. Under the eyes a bulging nose. Under a bulging nose, a row of crooked teeth.
Tarun Mohanto stared at her, unblinking, and that stare let a thousand fire-ants loose on Ruma’s skin. The Ruma that was “10-pass”, the Ruma that taught two kids and her sister mathematics, and English. The Ruma whose selfie-addiction had compelled her father not to enrol her for Year 11.
She was perusing the knife, in front of the hawker with the tattered gunji. Now she quickly put it back and ran in. She stumbled in clamorously. The first thing she did was draw the curtains. Then she bolted the door that stood on a pile of bricks, jumped onto the elevated cot and pressed her palms firmly onto her eyes.
For a few seconds, all the blood in her body had rushed into her face, and then up to the crown of her head. Anger roared in her ears. Once she had pulled herself together, she went back to the door and opened it. She parted the curtains just enough to look out of the room. She couldn’t see those snake-eyes, anymore. Then the wooden door, that stood on the bricks and was too low to climb through upright, was shut and bolted loudly. The washed-out curtain that her mother had cut out of a saree stuck between the panels like spinach in teeth.
*
Baba has decreed that Ruma won’t go to a far-away school for her 11th. Maa had protested, fruitlessly. The Higher Secondary school was quite far from home.
- She won’t study, why?
- She is wild! You don’t see? What you do at home all day? Eat rice and fat up?
- Rice gives me acid. You don’t know? Not like I eat with your money…
Maa says this in a voice thin and low with fear, tears bubbling in her throat. Then she adds, ‘she wants to, no. She is taking tuitions so she can fix her studies. That money she gets for us only.’
- Make her stop. I don’t touch her money.
- You are going to retire. We have two girls. How we manage if they don’t study?
- Then you take care of them, fix their character! You are always home, you can’t whip them into shape? What dirty things they say about our girl. Can’t even listen. She put some filthy picture somewhere or something. I don’t even know!
- Picture? What picture? In the newspaper?- Dhur, no! On phone. Fyaashbuk or something… Give me some rice… and some curry.
Maa braced her aching belly and bent down to serve him.
- Everyone does that. Everyone got a phone. You don’t even have money to get her a phone.
- She better not dare to buy a smartphone with her tuition money!
- No, she won’t. She listens to you.
- Ha! Some listening! She steals my phone to do… all that. Don’t spoil her so much. She will bring us dishonour someday, that girl. Sooner we rid of her the better.
- Toh do it. You were looking at boys for her. You said you will get her married.
- Will the boys take a bride by her face? I’ll have to give money. Do I look like I have Alladin’s treasure buried somewhere? That I’ll get her married?
Ruma’s Maa is always home, a woman wrapped in her cloth from head to toe. She worked days and nights, and ate at odd hours, her body now saggy and her stomach a condominium for acids and bile. A large stomach with commensurate legs, and arms so soft, like dough, Ruma couldn’t help but squish them.
Maa was actually a whole bundle of love and tenderness. The bundle cooked all day and said to herself, life is good in prayers, and the cold is good in layers…She handed her husband a muffler or a bath towel. She made her daughters clips with ribbons and oiled their hair in the evenings… And so, Maa was the only one who could stand up to Baba. She never got to go to school, and so, only she could do it.
- Can’t you save money? What house are you running, Ruma’s Mother? Give me some sour fish.
- If you won’t get her married, why not let them study? Get a job?
- You stop! Brain of a woman! So easy it is to get a job! They hang from trees or what? That you’ll just shake and they will fall into your hands?
He knew he was a chump who never really amounted to anything, because he never asked, never unionized, never appealed, and remained merely a store clerk without any substantial pay raises. He never got the respect he thought he deserved.
At home, though, he was full of rage and retorts, and insults lobbed generously at his wife.
Since Ruma was born, her mother drew eyebrows on her with kohl from its pot, and pressed the tips of her fingers on the two corners of Ruma’s nose with oil to pull and lengthen. Rup-taan, Pulls of Beauty. I will make sure she’s pretty, she used to avow. It didn’t take much more than a little bit of water and oil for Ruma to grow up radiant. She didn’t need cosmetics. With the sorcery of age and foulness of air, she grew even prettier.
The girl also realised that she wanted more. She wanted more than her beauty, her two sets of clothes, her one stole, and a bra. She wanted to dim the sun and take it in her hands. She wanted to go places on a pink Scooty like the college girls from the next mohalla. A Kanyashree cycle, at the least.
She dreamt about her sister and her, Ruma and Seema, on the way to school on their cycles. A class 11 uniform with green borders and green-ribboned braids.
But after her 10th, Baba made her drop out of school. Her results hadn’t come out well. A lower spot in the second division. It was no surprise, the other kids who scored well got help, had tutors. She couldn’t afford that.
Who knows what Ruma wanted, but she knew she wished to go outside. She wished she could go to college like the older girls in the neighbourhood, and then work. Maybe as a teacher at a school, or a typist at an office. Just like she saw in the city that one time.
Ruma wished, but her body and her spring-wind mind misguided her. Maybe her grades were not the only thing that had made her father pull her out of school. She began to do things that were not good for her.
She began to doll up for the most routine affairs. Then she would douse herself in an attar that every girl wanted, and bring every average joe on the street to their knees. She walked to the bazaar with an idle stride, as if she had a halo behind her head – an invisible, circling light. She knew that, as did her new cavalcade of fans and critics.
Ruma came across her fair share of rose petals wrapped in a handkerchief, misspelled love letters tied to half a brick. She couldn’t help but click a picture of her rosy lips, whenever she got her hands on a smartphone. She even knew where those pictures needed to go. There was only one decent phone at home where you could send whatever, wherever, with ease.
She could play the younger neighbourhood boys like a fiddle. And when she brought in the tide of her luscious mane, she knew that it made them fall over in swells of joy and worship. There was nothing scary about that.
Danger crept in from elsewhere.
Tarun Mohanto. He was a local rough-neck.
Tarun was a bad egg. A drifter, always between jobs. Wherever he went, he used his cocksure brain and leery eyes to get his way. So, the more people he terrorised, the more regard he amassed for himself. He was large, and twice Ruma’s age.
The fellow took Ruma to Victoria Memorial once. He bought her bhelpuri and mango gola, and then forced her to take a ride on a horse carriage with him. It was late, but at least they had other people with them. There was another guy, a friend of Tarun’s, who had wooed another girl from Ruma’s neighbourhood. This Kolkata expedition was their plan.
Lata was resting her head on Ashok’s shoulder. Ruma had been sure to be extra haughty that night. Not once did she let him touch her shoulders or her back. A girl must hold on to her worth.
Tarun was pissed. She’s pretty, he admitted, but she’s a vain cunt. ‘She can’t do that to me.’ He stared at her tight kameez as he licked the empty plate of bhelpuri. Ruma ignored him, wrapping the stole more securely around herself. On the train back home, Lata fell asleep. Ruma did not. Instead, she made her way through sticky looks from strangers, and leaned out of the door to feel the wind in her hair. Tarun and Ashok, furious, barked at her to ‘go inside and sit quietly’. When females don’t act like females – have no shame and fear – they don’t look like females.
- You mad, huh? What’s your head full of? Shit? Those are dirty people… What if they touched you?
Ruma quickly retorted: And you’re dirtier than them!
*
After that, the man began to harass Ruma in every possible way. Anonymous letters, phone calls… over and over and over again. As many times as Ruma said ‘no’. Even more than that. He told everyone in the neighbourhood that she had called him ashiq, lover, on their Kolkata trip. That she was leading him on.
When they heard about her ‘thing’ with Mohanto, all the local boys began to steer clear of her.
Now she had dropped out of school, but she wanted to keep up at home. Baba did not deny her that. He got her a female tutor. Political science was hard, but she could manage History and Geography with a little bit of rote learning. She struck herself with a ruler every time she caught herself daydreaming. She turned a pencil between her own fingers until it hurt. She began to punish herself.
Maybe if she had paid more attention to her books. Maybe if she hadn’t fooled around so much. Maybe if she had not tried so hard to be pretty or cool, this man would have never been in her life.
The same thoughts occurred to her after she had slipped away from the vendor van that day. Tarun lay waiting in the tea stall across the street. He had been for a few days now. Ruma shivered.
She had only ever seen this discomfort in women from books and cinema – the men hounding the women; the women say no at first, but then by virtue of the men never giving it a rest, never giving up on their unrequited love, the women eventually fall in love with them too.
Her red red cheeks, her black black eyes…the man’s lovelorn aria. You can’t escape my love, he then professes. Then the setting off of sweet explosions in the woman’s mind. Mann me laddoo phoota – laddoos of love. They shudder and their body grows heavy. Their eyelids quiver and their eyes roll up into their heads. What bliss!
Ruma sits on the cot and wraps her arms around her knees. She slowly shrivels into herself. She doesn’t feel good. This revulsion is so, so, so far away from the gushes of joy in the movies, she thinks. On the other end of love is hate. She imagines twisting Tarun’s hands, throwing them off of herself.
*
Ruma didn’t step out a whole lot, anymore, but sometimes it couldn’t be helped. Her tutor, Seema di, called her one day.
‘Come, I’ve got my hands on some cheap books. Political Science. Question banks. The exam may be private, but you still have to work for it. I don’t feel very good, or I would have brought them to you myself.’
Ruma was walking past an old, hollow factory, full of forgotten machinery, along a thick brick wall. A narrow alleyway. The smell of piss. Half-lit. Empty. The hand had come from behind her. Something hot melted into her back. It burnt like fire. Stunned, she turned around, and the same heat seared into her face.
Ruma couldn’t get a proper look at the thick-grey-cloaked man. She was already keeling over from the pain, and unconscious, she lay in the empty alleyway. Rivers of pain streamed down her face. Licks of fire. It began to blister. Her nose and one eye bubbled with hot boils.
Ruma’s father had set out to look for Ruma with her sister. Her mother knew that she was going to Seema’s. Her sister knew that the shortcut was through the alleyway next to the factory. When he found her, her father took her in his arms, called a toto, and took her to the health centre. Then to the hospital outside town, laid on banana leaves in a cycle-van. The flesh on her back boiled, and her bones peaked through the dissolving flesh along the trail of sulphuric acid on her face.
Three days later, with her blood full of drugs, she came to. It was a cold, dead day. Ruma found herself supine, tubes snaking out of her nose, her hand. She opened her one working eye, and with what little sight she had left in it, she saw her mother. Her sister. The aghast, nervous nurse who had come to dress her wound. She saw their faces crumble. She saw them bite their bottom lips to keep down vomit, acid, and tears.
Nurses never came near her. From fear, disgust. The story of Mukhpuri, Fry-Face, had spread through the locale. How shameful, how sickening! Not only did she go get her face fried, she also made sure her family was ruined, cast out. Baba had thumped his head against the wall, against the frame of the bed. Her sister had turned blue from crying. Didi loved her selfies, didn’t she? Didi used to take Baba’s phone and smile impishly when she took her selfies. O go, how beautiful she was!
Only Maa did not cry. She did not shed a tear. The soft, round, doughy Maa, who couldn’t raise her voice at Baba, remained silent, and did not move from her daughter’s side.
Maa used to draw eyebrows on little Ruma with kohl from its pot, and press the tips of her fingers on the two corners of Ruma’s nose with oil to pull and lengthen. She had massaged and pulled her daughter’s face, and hoped that one day it would look just like a doll’s. The same Maa plucked the gauge and the cotton from the nurse’s hands – I will do my girl’s dreesing. Give!
The doctor did three surgeries on her face. Two of the house staff came out to puke and swoon out of nerves. Even after three plastic surgeries over seven days, the stitches on her skin, stretched over the molten flesh, did not hold.
She had to get stitches again.
And then there was the dressing. Maa learnt to do it by herself. Just as she always sat down to pray, meditative, softly picked up the effigy and changed his vestments with a steady hand, sat him up from his reclination, wiped the place around his tiny bed, and cleaned the floor in front of it, Maa dressed Ruma’s wounds with the same steady hands. She wiped her every blister with the salve-soaked cotton, and laid her healing hand on every vein that was bursting with blood.
*
Did Seema di tell Tarun where Ruma was going that day? To get the question bank?
Her mind too was riddled with questions.
For over a year, Ruma was afraid to look in a mirror. The face under the bandages felt like somebody else’s. She had heard her share of stories, of all the swooning and gagging at the sight of her bare face.
Then, finally, she had forced herself to look at her own reflection, and she had felt her insides drop. She had thought about how ugly she must look now. She had tried to imagine. But that day when she finally looked, she thought herself more hideous than anything she had ever imagined.
A rage rose in her. It surged through the tips of her limbs and climbed up to the crown of her head.
Her at-home-belittling, at-work-fawning Baba had dragged himself to the police station. He had returned and never gone back again. Who will make the journey? Who has thick enough soles for the back and forth? But more importantly, who has thick enough skin? Her case had not moved an inch since it had been filed.
But the day she looked into that mirror, she decided that she won’t go into this gentle. She said, I’ll go talk to the police myself. I won’t stop until that monster goes to jail.
- He’s gone, maa. He has disappeared. Besides, your statement says that you didn’t see a face.
- Look for an N.G.O. They have people who fight cases for you.
- I’ve hired a broker…
That day, her father yielded to her.
- He said compensation is there, he will get for us. I pawned everything to pay for your treatment, maa. I did everything I could…
Baba had sobbed like a child. It was all his fault. He had not protected her. He had chastised her for her beauty, her eighteen-year-old spring-wind mind, her darting from one branch to another, her soaring. Now it had all come back to bite him. The man was broken, his spine snapped in two.
He returned from the station one day and said to his wife, ‘Never step foot in Dibya Thakur’s ashram again.’
Ruma could not get Tarun Mohanto arrested. Several years went by. ‘Compensation is there… I’ll get you a broker.’ A lawyer uncle suddenly turned up. He will fix everything, he said. He was well-known for being a drunkard in Kanti jethu’s family. His young sisters-in-law trembled at the thought of him. And so, he stepped up, eager to play the messiah. He got hold of a middle-man, fought for several years to get them four lakhs, and won.
Even then, Ruma wanted nothing but to get Tarun Mohanto arrested. All she knew was that the police wanted proof, and she did not have any. She had deleted all the SMSs between them, all the declarations of love. She cursed herself. The only reason they hadn’t been able to build a case was because of her.
The sun rose and set too many times to count, days inched into nights. It was winter now. Girls sat outside with the sun on their back, played ludo, spread Boroline over their dry skin stretched with laughter, and stuffed themselves with phuchka at the street corner.
Ruma wrapped herself up to her face in a black stole and stayed in her room. She knew what would happen if she went out, if she showed up on the radar, and in front of the sunning girls and blankets. She knew that their gossip and laughter and play would turn into a big, lifeless silence. A black air would engulf the sunny cheer. The women would bite the ends of their anchal and leave. Their eyes would darken with revulsion.
The nerve of this girl! A fried face isn’t enough? How dare she show it out here?
She had known since her unending days at the hospital–when Maa used to refuse to budge from her daughter’s side, and Baba used to bring them fresh clothes in a grocery bag knit with plastic strings–of her new place in the world. That everywhere she went, she would bring with her the frost of deep winter and the dark of the night–just like the witches from fairy tales. Once she stepped into the canteen for food, and the nurses had shooed her away like a dog. Apparently, a pregnant woman in the room had seen her bandaged face and her tilled-soil wounds, and fainted. They say her baby almost died.
‘Promise me you won’t go out again, for my sake,’ her mother had said. ‘I will bring you food.’
Eventually, Maa had to return to her housework, but she rode the bus several hours every day to bring her rice and daal in aluminium containers. Someone had to.
The local women yakked amongst themselves too: ‘That harlot took this neighbourhood down with her!’
Years rolled by, but Ruma did not step out.
Four years later, the day she walked out of her home, out of the neighbourhood, across the alleyways, and onto the bus road, was the day she found out that Tarun Mohanto was hiding in Dibya Thakur’s ashram.
*
Dibya Thakur was a popular deity in the locale. Three, four bhandaras a year, a seven-day fair in the winters, all in his name. Kirtans, bhajans. The symphony of naam-sankirtans, the shrill voice of the singer accompanied by srikhal, kartal and the dohar’s prayers, spread across the winter air those nights. A symphony that reinforced your sleep, made you want to wrap the quilt around yourself even tighter.
Bhakts, devotees, came from far and wide by train; bhakts from all over Bengal. They fattened the holy treasury and feasted on rounds of khichri bhog in return.
Tarun, the only son of the Mohanto family, had drifted from this flank to that, from one leader to another, and was on the verge of becoming a vagrant.
On the way, he had sinned a little, made a little mistake. A man can’t always keep it in his pants. He fell for a girl. Lust consumed him. This is why they say that a woman is a doorway to hell. Men must strive to overcome their spell. Tarun had not learned to do it, so when he had followed Ruma into the alley and set her ablaze with sulphuric acid, it was only to expel from himself some of that despair, some of the lust.
It was the only remedy.
Then he had to disappear.
There were no witnesses. No one would have spoken up, anyway. He had quite the sway on that crowd. Eventually, though, he had come back, for his family, and, to some extent, because of a deep-seated guilt.
He put on a saffron robe, drew a tilak on his forehead, and joined forces at the ashram as a priest. It was as if that position was made for him. People applauded this character arc. A sinner always finds his way! One who alters his mind washes away all sin. God has called him and he has answered!
Only Ruma’s family stopped going. Everybody else got in line for a taste of the cashew-raisin loaded, saal-leaf served bhogs.
Ruma’s mother never sat down to pray either. She was not herself anymore. All she did now was dress Ruma’s wounds, and when she went to bed, she dreamt of a day when Ruma would come out of surgery and look just the way she did before.
The didi from the N.G.O. wanted to talk about a government scheme she had found. Ruma made her way to the station. She always wrapped her face in a sheer stole when she stepped out. She shampooed and combed her hair carefully. The hair helped cover some of the face as well. When people avoided her like a plague, or moved away and stared at her all the same, it made her laugh. A frenzied laughter pushed against her chest so hard she could not help but let it escape. On the train, she did not sit. She leaned out of the door instead, felt the wind in her hair and listened to the guava-women calling.
The moment she set foot on the platform, she found herself toe-to-toe with him. Not knowing what to do, they froze. Their feet turned to stone.
Tarun Mohanto and his tilak. He was leaner now, his skin shiny, his flesh supple, healthy. Between the two of them, he had staggered more. And Ruma?
She felt like she had been zapped by that same lightning from years ago. Then the man’s sorry face, and moistening, downcast eyes slowly permeated her senses, just as the drug had seeped into her blood at the hospital. The initial shock climbed down her spine and dissipated. Instead, she was filled with a strange apathy. A sardonic smile creeped into one corner of her mouth.
Tarun moved away rather gingerly.
‘Sorry, it’s just that it’s been a while since I’ve seen you around here. I… I… it’s been so hard for me…’, he blubbered, then climbed into the moving train and disappeared.
‘I couldn’t lock you up’, Ruma said under her breath, ‘but the fight isn’t over yet, you piece of shit…’
People thronged around her. Students, packets of jalebi, arguments with hawkers.
Ruma climbed into the train calmly.
She began to teach again, saved up a few thousands. Then she walked into a store in the city one day, no longer ashamed or afraid, and bought herself a phone.
Light always digs its way out of swells of darkness. That’s what Pratima di at the N.G.O. used to say. She had not understood it then.
Ruma wore a pink salwar as she turned the front camera on and set it up at just the right angle.
Then she danced. She danced, and the circle of light behind her head beamed upon her lithe frame. She posted the video on Facebook.
Now, every person that had damned her, would fear her. Every spectator to that video would be afraid of her. Her spirit had shone in her eyes in the shape of an arrowhead, and it could gut Tarun, and every other gutless bastard out there, in moments.
Yashodhara Ray Chaudhuri (born 1965) is an author and a bureaucrat of the Indian Audit and Accounts Service. She has served in different parts of India extensively. She is a noted poet, hailing from Kolkata, West Bengal. Publishing her literary works since 1993, she has over 50 collections of poetry, articles, novels and short stories to her credit. She was awarded the Krittibas Puroskar in 1998, established by Sunil Gangopadhyay, and the Anita Sunilkumar Puraskar instituted by Bangla Akademy, in 2006. She is the recipient of the Barna Parichay Sharad Samman, 2011. Along with fiction, she also writes critical essays and articles, published in leading newspapers and magazines of Bengal. Yashodhara is a translator from French to Bengali. She was awarded the Diplome de Langue from Alliance Fraincaise du Calcutta in 1998, and has translated Leonardo Da Vinci by Serge Bremley in 2008, and Combat de la Vie by Dr Luc Montaignier in 2012. She is married to Trinanjan Chakrabarty, an author, translator, scholar, and a teacher of the French language.
A creative writer, translator, and multimedia artist, Chirayata Chakrabarty specializes in Bengali-to-English literary translations and interdisciplinary storytelling. She held the second prize in the Antonym’s Tagore Award for Translation from Bengali to English in 2021. She also has to her name The Chronicles of the Last Timesmith, her English translation of a speculative fiction novella by Dipen Bhattacharya, Dita’r Ghori. Her poems have appeared in the literary journal, Muse India. Under her middle name ‘Purna,’ she also makes music. Her latest album, ‘Goober’s Time,’ can be found on Spotify.