An Anthology Which Talks About Stories Of Women And Men

 Nautanki Saala and Other Stories  by Mohua Chinappa is an anthology that shares stories of women and men and traces the cultural-economic shift between 80s to the 2000s. An excerpt:

In being away from home, I found a closeness with a stranger. When I had to decide if I wanted  to be part of the grief of a family, not just a woman displaced and abandoned, I felt differently.

 In December 1971, India’s then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, sent her troops to help Bangladeshis fight the Pakistani army. It was a nine-month long war that left countless dead, raped, maimed. Thousands were displaced from the place they called home. I, too, was one of them. I fled the lanes of familiarity, making my way into the burgeoning metropolis of Delhi. I crouched in a train at the border, with so many others like me, leaving our forever homes behind as we made our way to the safer, unfamiliar territory that was all concrete and vacant. Leaving the wet, muddy lanes of Chittagong was like bidding farewell to a part of my soul. My deep longing for rains that make the paddy fields sway in a surreal dance remains preserved in my mind’s eye to this day.

We Bangladeshis, with a different Bengali dialect, were given a special part in the city to build our homes and secure our future. As I moved into my new two-bedroom home, I put up the torn white and blue Jamdani sari as a curtain. It reminded me of my home country. I threw open my freshly painted window every morning to feel the morning breeze of Delhi and watched the birds fly across the horizon.

One morning, I noticed another displaced family living opposite my home. Our common past, a thread of familiarity was all we had. In the soft morning light, I saw a woman with an oval face, large eyes, long wavy hair wearing a cotton sari with a white and red border, staring back at me, holding the railings of her window like she was a prisoner in a cage. Her fingernails dug into the curtain wire like she was afraid of something.

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I found her beautiful and untouched. Her large luminous eyes softened as our eyes met. She smiled at me. I smiled back. She gestured with her hands, something that I did not understand.

I waved back at her, but she continued her gesture. It was like she was asking me a question and I had no answer.

We communicated like this most mornings. She was a question with no answer, a relic from my country that I’d left behind.

As the days turned into months, I settled into Delhi. Hindi words and phrases made their way into my vocabulary except for the occasional goof-ups as I confused the gender of objects. I learnt how to cook like the locals and was beginning to enjoy making parathas and devouring them with achar and lassi on winter afternoons.

On one such winter evening, dusk had fallen earlier than usual. On the street outside the house opposite mine, I noticed the same woman from the window standing, illuminated by the streetlight. She was sobbing, holding her cotton saree tightly against her breasts and her frail shoulders wrapped in a woollen shawl. She trembled as I approached her.

I asked her, what was the matter? She stared vacantly at me and said no one wanted to give her a pinch of sindoor. It was extremely urgent. She told me she had married Aslam in Bangladesh and he was on his way to Delhi to take her back home. She said Aslam had told her she could wear sindoor even though it was not commonplace for Muslim women. I told her that I was unmarried, but I could try to help her find some sindoor in the colony even though most of the shops were shut by now.

She added that she must dress up the way Aslam loved seein her. She rambled on that he loved her wearing a white and red-bordered sari with her hair loose, sindoor smeared over her arting.

He loved messing up her hair when they were together. When he made love to her, he cupped his hands over her oval face, kissing every inch of it. I tried to hide my embarrassment at her candid confessions but secretly I felt envious of her and Aslam.

Extracted with permission from Nautanki Saala by Mohua Chinappa, Oakbridge Publishing

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