Colours
Green vine. Beena had just turned 22. The first time was exciting in its
own way, if exciting was the precise word she was looking for. It took place at
Mon Repos, her grandmother’s house. Beena and her mother Padmini came down from
Hyderabad for the occasion. All was going swimmingly until Beena got into a row with her mother who said
the family astrologer had decreed the
girl ought to wear a green sari when the boy came to see her. The colour green apparently
signified the green light for a long and happy married life for the kanya, Old
Baldy as the younger members of the family called him, had pronounced. The
man’s writ was like a royal decree for the elders of the Melekat clan. Never
mind that she knew she looked positively bilious in any shade of green be it
mint, olive, parrot, celadon or emerald. Green she was forced to wear.
Eventually she put on a mehendi green Kota sari, inappropriate for the chill
winds that blew down through the Gap in the Western Ghats at that time of the
year. Her mother who looked all set to impart last minute words of wisdom, took
one look at her mutinous heart-shaped face and shut up. And Beena thanked god
for small mercies. But Padmini did ensure Beena’s underskirt cut into the flesh
at her trim waist; all the Melekat women tied their petticoats way too tight
and what’s more, thought that was the best way to do it, too.
The potential groom was stocky, dark and anything but
pleasant. He walked in with a ridiculous swagger and there was a decidedly pompous
air about his portly person. His brother who accompanied him to the separate
room where they were to converse in private --- she would never know why the brother
came along --- was so much the better looking, the better behaved and
friendlier of the two. The brother and she found a lot of things to talk about
while the `boy` sat there, a pasty smile that was probably his idea of
conviviality, on his face. She contemplated switching her not inconsiderable charm
onto the brother then decided against it. She was not up to the storms that
would break in the family. As it is, her mother was in full Poor Padmini mode.
And when her mother got that way, it was wisest to put one’s head down and stay
quiet.
The boy’s party left after a while and Beena first loosened
the underskirt, rubbed some calamine on the weals at her waist, then went to
sit on the swing under the sapota tree and twirl about a bit. The green sari,
pretty in its own way, twirled in counter-clockwise direction to her slim body.
Would they force her to marry that insufferable man? Well if they did, she
would embark on an affair with the brother, she decided. She laughed out aloud
and saw a face at one of windows of The Retreat, the outhouse; the face ducked
quickly out of sight. The family who now rented that house from her grandmother
were big on staring, goggle-eyed and
mute, staring continuously, aggravatingly, even infuriatingly. It was a very
Mallu thing, staring people to near death, she knew, but still it irked the
life out of non-resident Mallus like Beena.
``Did you wear green,`` Beena asked her grandmother. ``When
you were `seen` by Achachan? `` The older woman smiled, genuinely amused. `` I don’t remember. I was sixteen and
terrified. I remember Mrs Robbins my governess, asking to meet my husband and
me wondering just how I was to address this stranger.`` And all Beena could focus on then was the utterly
incongruous image of a scared Ammini amma.
However, where the boy-seeing front was concerned that was
that, quite literally so. No word fetched up. Not at Mon Repos, not when they
were back home in Banjara Hills. Then her mother called the fellow’s mother to
ask about the curious silence. He doesn’t want to marry now, they were told,
the one sentence containing all the other paragraphs that stood poised like a
huge tsunami about to break. A gloom descended momentarily on the house but then
her mother most uncharacteristically joked that there were plenty of other fish
in this sea for her pretty daughter. It helped that Beena was actually very nice
looking, something more than pretty, though less than beautiful. Ammini amma, Beena’s
grandmother, forbore to comment on the matter, something Beena else was
grateful for. It also gave her another reason to absolutely adore the old
woman.
****************
She had turned 23 gracefully, literally on a pirouette, when
the second proposal came right to their doorstep at Hyderabad, brought by the
boy’s parents themselves in a dramatic departure from tradition. The elderly couple
was sweet and fawned all over her, telling her over and over again that they
thought she would be ideal for their son. She herself wavered between
embarrassment and preening. He was an Only Son, worked in the same field as Beena,
which was the direct marketing wing of an advertising agency. No snapshot of
the boy was shown but a lunch date was fixed. Thankfully, no sartorial colour
preferences were voiced this time. Maybe Old Baldy was out of town. The night
before the date as it were, she walked into the room her visiting grandmother
was occupying. Ammini amma was reading `The Da Vinci Code` and looked like she
found it extremely interesting. Beena meant to gift her Dan Brown’s `Angels and
Demons` next. The old lady looked up, read her granddaughter’s face, put the
book down and said in soft, measured tones, ``No one will force you to marry
this boy or any boy you don’t want to marry, molu.`` They smiled at each other
in perfect understanding.
Lavender blossom. Beena held onto that thought the next day at lunch, for
which she wore a fitted outfit in lavender-coloured silk. The `boy` was a mere
half kilo away from being obese; he had a florid cast to his fair skin which
rapidly reddened as he ordered one G&T after another during the
interminable lunch. He seemed much taken with her and talked non-stop. Everything
he said was inane, banal, verging on foolish. Fat, florid and foolish, Beena thought
glumly, then hit upon a brilliant idea: she lit up a cigarette. She was a
closet smoker but did so in style; she only smoked a certain brand of slim,
mint-infused cigarettes. He looked taken aback then scrambled to join her. So
they puffed away all through lunch. Though he did talk through the smoking,
too.
This time she said a firm `no` to her family, then told them
to take the silent route. Except, the fellow himself called her. And tried to
cajole her into marriage. Since the horoscopes matched, very well in dismaying
fact and since the other party knew it did, that time- tested excuse, that unimaginative refuge of many, could not be trotted out. So she told him in
dulcet tones that her boss was against her marrying someone in the same
industry. And put the phone down on a dumbfounded `boy.` Later she heard they
went to town calling her loose and forward. This was before Mutalik or the Ram
Sene’s time so she wasn’t branded `pub-going,` too. Small mercies. Her family
thought it was just a classic case of sour grapes on the boy’s side and did the
royal ignore, something Beena’s family in any case excelled in.
************
Then she turned 24 and Padmini did the turning down job for Beena
the next two times. Once when the woman who brought the proposal said they were
discreetly asking for a dowry, despite or perhaps knowing the alliance would be
with Ammini amma’s family. Everyone in the Melekat clan stiffened at this
outrage; Beena was amused and when she spoke to her grandmother, Ammini amma sounded amused, too. The
second proposal was ludicrous, since the man who came to check Beena out for
his son (Beena wore ivory and looked very becoming) said his son was `modern`
and added to everyone’s complete bafflement that he (the boy, that is) generally
wore only shorts. That quickly became an in-house joke for Beena, her sister and
brother: `shortse idathillu,` they would term any insufferable person.
Time passed and not too smoothly. Pressure mounted on Beena. She
was told to think of her unmarried sister. This was difficult for her to do
with any amount of seriousness, given that Deepali was a precocious school kid
with dollops of attitude, all of it the wrong kind of attitude, too. Just before
Deepali was born, Old Baldy had pronounced that the coming baby would, in time, rule over men and matters. Well, the brat
didn’t look to prove that prediction right since she was forever alienating
everyone with her high-handed behaviour. Beena had nicknamed her HRH Cooch
Behar for her wannabe Gayatri Devi-ness. Only thing though, Deepali was all
set to become a real beauty in the Ammini amma mould; the classic stamp that
evaded Beena was going to effortlessly become Cooch Behar’s. Beena didn’t mind
in the least, she was quite fond of the little pest.
Indigo moods. 25 came and went, to studied under-celebrations. Beena said `no`
to one man who lived in Ghatkopar, citing his residential locality as the
reason to a fuming Padmini. Then they went boy-seeing for a change, she wore a
lovely shade of indigo, and the fellow came to the door of his apartment clad in
only his vest and pyjamas. It was a decidedly grungy vest, too. To add insult
to injury, before she could say `no,` he said it. We wouldn’t suit, he said, and
it was all Beena could do not to retort, ``Well, certainly not if your
favourite colour is grungy gray.`` Another chap said he was uncomfortable with
her working, riding a scooter to work, wearing Western clothes. It was not
clear which of the three he considered most heinous. Beena’s elder brother
rolled his eyes and said `no` for her.
It was around this time that Beena started her relationship
with the mussanda plant outside the French windows of the dining section of
their ground floor apartment. Mealtimes had become a fraught affair with
Padmini in full tirade flow, and sometimes even total silence on Beena’s part
wouldn’t cut it. So she learned to stare at the deep pink blooms of the plant
with a fixed intensity, like it would impart the secret of life to her. No secret emerged from the mussanda though
Beena frequently developed cricks in her neck. After which she began to develop
a decided dislike for any shade of pink be it blush, baby, salmon or fuschia.
************
She was desperately clinging onto her 26th year,
refusing to let it go when Padmini set up a girl-seeing for Beena; her best
friend’s son, a dashing blade Beena had heard much about but never met because
he lived and worked out of town. The stress levels in the apartment climbed roofwards
as Padmini fixed a date for the family to come home and then set about
cleaning, polishing, cooking. Rarely did her indolent mother ever bother with
so much work and Beena worried about the inevitable fallout. After endless rumination,
she wore Western gear; these were posh people, Padmini said, her tone bordering
on hysteria and Beena didn’t ask further. She knew the boy’s parents very well
in any case, they were lovely people, she frequently played a game of Scrabble
with the woman. The mother was a beauty in the Raja Ravi Varma way, lush, fair,
friendly. She also had a shtick: she always but always wore brown. It didn’t enhance
her flawless complexion any but there it was. Always brown or shades of tan, bitter
chocolate, sand, caramel. People were really strange, Beena decided.
Maroon, softly, softly . It was a muggy evening when they
were to come home and Padmini insisted Beena wear maroon, a colour which she
though made her look like a recovering alcoholic, one who wasn’t recovering too
well at that. Old Baldy was obviously running the gamut of colours and Beena could
only devoutly hope his knowledge did not move beyond the primary hues. The
boy’s people were to come at 6 pm,
they fetched up at 8.30 pm.
He came --- or was sent --- upstairs to the terrace garden with his sister, a
cool beauty Beena knew well but had never warmed to. He was good-looking in a
dark way, charming, witty and turned out to be intelligent, too. He wore a
maroon shirt and they laughed a little over the co-incidence. Beena wondered if
Old Baldy was the resident oracle of his family too. She began to let her heart
hope. After they left, Padmini was on an euphoric cloud for the rest of that
week, planning a grand wedding, calling up her mother twice a day to discuss
details. Ammini amma was characteristically, almost repressively, calm and told
her daughter the details would keep till something was fixed. Beena on her part,
spent the week stewing in a quiet kind of hope. She would go out to the roof
garden, mutilate the deep green serrated leaves of a potted hibiscus or two in
an absent manner, replay that evening on an endless loop, send out silent,
intense messages over the orange and scarlet blossoms on the gulmohar trees, skimming
past the sunlit labernum, down to the road where he lived. Hope became a
motivation of its own. Whenever she passed the large house with its dove gray
exteriors and startling pink frosting on its window grills, her heart beat
faster. She took to scribbling his name after hers in her diary, even as she
laughed at how the act smacked of a teenaged fixation.
They never got back. And when Padmini’s best friend did call,
she did not mention the meeting even in passing. In a month’s time, they heard
the boy was marrying his longtime girlfriend. Padmini turned on Beena, told her
it was her fault she couldn’t catch the most eligible Malayali male in all of Hyderabad. Which was
technically wrong since he actually lived in Vancouver. Beena, poor girl, had to deal with a minor
heartbreak of her own alongside her mother’s loudly-voiced disappointment. Her
siblings patted her shoulder awkwardly
and tried to calm their seething mother down. All to no avail; this was the
perfect opportunity for Padmini to play the `nothing good ever happens in my life`
tune ad nauseum. What actually got Beena nauseated, though, was when an aunt who lived in the US came
visiting and doled out over- generous and wholly gratuitous doses of advice. Aunt
Radha as the family well knew, was a piece of work, a clone of her
far-from-pleasant father, Ramanamavan. Years of relentless cribbing had etched
deep lines into her face and given her a permanently sour look. Nothing satisfied
aunt Radha, not even her on-the-surface successful marriage, on-the-surface
successful children (one was an attorney, the other a financial analyst), her
decidedly luxurious chateau-with-heated pool. Beena couldn’t think of anyone
less suited to dole out advice to unmarried kin. But she took it all, nodding
her head at all the right times, concentrating on the large mole on the older
woman’s left temple; the mole was growing a hair. It did not improve
Radhammai’s visage one bit. Beena took some comfort from that.
********
Roseate haze Time taking its due course, Beena hit her 27th
year next. The next girl-seeing session came up almost six months later. The
whole khandaan seemed to have arrived, for dinner at that. The father was
patrician, soft- spoken. The mother looked like she had eaten something bad for
breakfast a few mornings ago but had yet to recover. The boy was tall, disconcertingly
slender (he actually had a wasp waist, Beena noticed) dark-skinned and very quiet.
So she did most of the speaking. Truth be told, all the girl-seeing sessions
she had been subjected to had not put Beena off her confidence track. She positively
sparkled that evening. It helped that she wore a FabIndia silk kurta the colour
of ashes of roses. Or what she imagined Colleen McCullough imagined was ashes
of roses, a hue the writer had made much of in `The Thornbirds.` Admittedly, it
was a distant relation to the colour
pink but Beena was beginning to get over her anti-pink fixation.
Maybe she sparkled too much. Because they said `no,` the full
khandaan. Said the boy wasn’t keen to marry right now. That old chestnut again.
So what did that make him, Beena wondered. A serial girl see-er who didn’t want
to commit? At this point in time, Beena occasionally took to standing in front
of her mirror, wondering if anything was wrong with the way she looked. The
mirror offered neither confidence nor consolation. However, the cut didn’t run
deep and she went about her life pretty much as usual. It helped that she had a
life in every sense of the word. In that world, she wore a lot of black…ebony,
charcoal, slate, kohl. All she needed, she thought wistfully, was a suitable
boyfriend whom she could marry. Then, for
all of 24 hours she contemplated turning lesbian but came to the conclusion
that sadly, women just didn’t attract her in that way.
************
28 and counting. About now, Beena had taken up soft gray as
her colour du jour, inspired by the many squirrels who ran tame in the foliage
outside the apartment, up branches, down walls, into rooms, out of lofts. Gray
with its limited shade chart however, was a colour one tired of fast and she was
considering moving onto eggshell soon. She
liked the texture of that colour better than the conventional off-whites,
clotted creams or banana beiges. Life slid smoothly past, sometimes all neons,
at other times, a blur of tonal hues. She still had all the bloom, the
mother-of-pearl sheen of a girl just past her teens.
The next girl-seeing session took place uncomfortably close
to Beena’s 30th birthday. Beena’s baby brother, now married and
about to become a father, came home. The proposals took a back seat as Amar’s
wife Renu delivered of a healthy baby boy. Beena looked down at the mottled and
creased little face and thought, how many girls will this one end up seeing.
Blue hue. The` boy` was expected home on an
evening when Amar and Renu and the baby were at home. Well, not Amar because
that evening Beena’s brother chose to head out to a pub down the road for a catch-up
session with his college- mates. So when the boy came and he came alone, Padmini
bustled inside the kitchen, putting together any number of not- very- tasty items
to feed him with. And Renu and Beena had to entertain him. Beena wore blue, the
colour of lapis lazuli and the colour was most flattering. Even fetching, you
might say. Her hair shone like newly polished silk. The little one slept all
through the evening; he was so quiet, they were all able to forgot there was a baby in
the house.
The man was tall, dark and handsome, actually so. Slim, well-
spoken, he held a good job in London.
What was more, he had a smile that was rakish. In one word, he was amazing. Beena’s
heart began to race after what seemed like years. He had a sense of humour too,
indulging in easy banter with both the women, expertly keeping up a line of
light, meaningless conversation. He was deferential to Padmini, telling her
with affectionate wryness of his mother’s ailments, all of them inescapably minor.
Padmini
laughed a lot that evening, more relaxed than Beena had seen
her in a long time. He was perfect and Beena began to be afraid. Very afraid.
She was right to be afraid. The boy got back within 24 hours
or rather, his mother did. She said her son had had a pleasant time at their
house, had been much taken with the girl. Not Beena though, she conveyed most
regretfully. He liked the other one a lot, was it Beena’s sister? Renu, he
thought her name was though he hadn’t been able to give more details. Could Padmini
send Renu’s horoscope over?
All Beena could think of was that Renu had been
wearing a lovely shade of green the evening the boy had come over. What had Old
Baldy said about the colour green? Pity the little one hadn’t bawled. Pity the
`boy` was so dumb, he hadn’t registered who Renu was. Pity….
*********
Beena then embarked on an intense relationship with the blood-
red poinsettia next to the mussanda. This one, she knew for sure, would be for keeps. This
one would never fail her. She had no crystal ball. Or else it would have shown
her the future. Her future. It would have shown her a day she wore bronzey-
gold, as well as Ammini amma’s finely wrought gold band on her pinkie, the day
she met her future husband.
*******
Shortse idathillu: `wears only shorts` in Malayalam.
