Magical Women

by Sukanya Venkatraghavan

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A weaver is initiated into the ancient art of bringing a universe into existence. A demon hunter encounters an unlikely opponent. Four goddesses engage in a cosmic brawl. A graphic designer duels with a dark secret involving a mysterious tattoo. A defiant chudail makes a shocking announcement at a kitty party. A puppet seeking adventure discovers who she really is. A young woman?s resolute choice leads her to haunt Death across millennia. . . A compelling collection of stories that speak of love, rage, rebellion, choices and chances, Magical Women brings together some of the strongest female voices in contemporary Indian writing. Combining astounding imagination with superlative craft, these tales will intrigue and delight in equal measure.

Release date: April 25, 2019

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 194

Sample

EDITOR’S NOTE

Why should Magical Women exist? Because we need stories that feel like us, sound like us, wear our skin, celebrate our features and, most significantly, flaunt the magic that is so uniquely in our blood. We need to tell these tales embedded in our culture and imagination, about the magic we have forgotten we possess, or are told we don’t, because the world is afraid of a female who knows she is powerful.

Each story in this collection is unique in its representation of what it means to be magical. For some of the characters it is a natural part of who they are, like the courtesan in Shreya Ila Anasuya’s ‘Gul’, or the goddesses in both Trisha Das’s ‘Tridevi Turbulence’ and Krishna Udayasankar’s ‘Apocalyptica’ – magic as a familiar aspect of divinity as is shown in our own mythology or folk tales. Others, like the lone survivor of an accident in Ruchika Roy’s ‘The Gatekeeper’s Intern’, discover their power and learn to trust and wield it. The protagonists in both Nikita Deshpande’s ‘The Girl Who Haunted Death’ and Shveta Thakrar’s ‘The Carnival at the Edge of the Worlds’ look to question and reshape their origin stories. Kiran Manral’s dystopian tale ‘Stone Cold’ speaks of magic both ancient and modern that will thrive under any circumstance. Are we always comfortable with our innate witchery is a question Shweta Taneja’s ‘Grandma Garam’s Kitty Party’ asks, and Samhita Arni’s ‘The Demon Hunter’s Dilemma’ is about choices in a magical world. Tashan Mehta’s ‘Rulebook for Creating a Universe’ is a fine example of how feminine sorcery has always been feared by the world and the time-hopping protagonist in Asma Kazi’s ‘Bahameen’ gives a sense of frenzied magic, one that cannot always be controlled. Magic channelled as a form of rage is evident in Sejal Mehta’s ‘Earth and Evolution Walk into a Bar...’, S.V. Sujatha’s ‘Gandaberunda’ and my own ‘The Rakshasi’s Rose Garden’.

Each story is original and stands for a collective secret power that threads the writers together. These storytellers have been inspired by our own rich tales of women who are ready to subvert their fairytales, find new stories and retell the old myths from our vast South Asian heritage. I am proud to present this diverse constellation of stories – heartbreaking, uplifting, joyful, funny and surreal all at once. You may or may not have heard of them before, but they will feel familiar, because these are narratives that have been running through our blood since the dawn of time. To create this universe of stories and have you read them is a dream come true. These are our stories. You may find your own among them.

Sukanya Venkatraghavan

GUL



SHREYA ILA ANASUYA

‘A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them.’

– Adrienne Rich

The halls of this vast house are windy. There are domed lamps and carpets woven to dizzying intricacy covering every inch of the floor. Honoured guests recline on bolsters, the scent of jasmine wafting on their expensive wrists, fragrant blossoms that are theirs for the taking. But take it from this old courtesan. There are unseen women everywhere, though you will not know them even if I tell you their true names. Step into the shadows, and there they are, filling the halls.

Women who knew how to arch an eyebrow or make a bawdy remark at just the right moment, or laugh wildly, just as they pleased. Expert musicians of their time, breathtaking poets, dancers who could put any master of yours to shame. I know these women, I knew them.

Of them, only very few survived the bloody tides of the Mutiny and its aftermath. The old order, in which they had had a place, perhaps sometimes a precarious and strange one, but a place nonetheless, collapsed entirely. Begum Hazrat Mahal’s unending war ended. Lucknow fell, and the pale ghosts who arrived to plunder this land bit down on its jugular. All our patrons and paramours scattered; many were hanged, many more exiled. That was the moment the axis of our world shifted – and precisely because it was pivotal and bloody, it is the moment they recount the most. Lucknow of 1858.

But what is far more brutal is the slow passing of time – what the pale ghosts started, the good people of this land made sure to finish. People of high standing, wearing crisp cotton woven by hand, lovers of music and culture all – people who couldn’t move a finger without walking on the backs of those who washed their fine clothes and scrubbed their inherited mansions clean. They wrung our necks; they smiled as they did it. Over the next few decades, those of us who would not, or could not afford to hide our origins were pushed, pushed, pushed – whirling away from the centre of the mehfil to the corners, where most of us lingered, where our daughters linger, where their daughters will linger until the last one perishes.

Some of us survived it. Some through marriage, some by hiding our true names, some by becoming safe embodiments of the very world that had been destroyed. I, Munni Begum, survived by doing all of this. This is how you still hear my voice, echoing at you from the years that stretch between us. This is the plain truth – I am among a handful who were lucky.

And then there was Gulbadan.

She arrived one morning at Zeenat Bai’s establishment. I was nineteen then and had been performing for a few years. She wouldn’t tell us where she came from, but that was par for the course for us. She was no girl, but time had not left its mark on her face in the way it criss-crosses most faces. It only became a kind of knowing that never left her eyes, even when her moon-face was twisted in peals of laughter.

She had exquisite, long fingers, and a perfectly straight back. She held her body with the ease and grace of a dancer. Her voice was low – honeyed when it needed to be and rumbling when the situation demanded, breaking and circling and echoing through our usual repertoire of songs that were either about love or worship, or often about both at the same time. Ghazal, thumri, qawwali – she could sing it all with ease, locking eyes with each person in the audience so that, for a moment, they felt like the only person in the world.

It was this quality that quickly made her one of the most fêted tawaifs in Chowk. It was not simply that she was considered beautiful or that she could be perfectly charming; there was something else about Gul that made people of all kinds throw themselves in her path.

I saw nawabs blush when she winked at them during a performance, sigh when she seemed to consider them lovingly for a minute and then turn away, her eyes flashing like the diamond in her nose. In a matter of three months she was adding more to Zeenat Bai’s coffers than could have been expected of any new entrant to the house.

There, I have told you the public version. It is no secret. Anyone who was alive then and knew her will tell you as much. That she was skilful. That she was magnetic. That she was a mistress of her arts.

But what nobody knows about her is that she was my Gul.

I was besotted with her. She could tilt her head at me and I would trace the arch of her eyebrows in my head for nights afterward. She made me feel impossibly tender. If we were simply lounging together early in the evening, the sound of her smoke-filled voice would have me tracing circles on my thigh.

She knew it, of course, though she feigned not knowing at first. I could not have hidden it from her for all my trying. I tried hard, embarrassed at the force of my own passion, confused by the heavy presence of her in my breath, in all my days. She had reached out and taken my heart in her fist, simply, easily, just by standing before me one morning.

I suppose I should not have been surprised that she crushed it just as easily when she fled in the suffocating days following the end of the Mutiny. This is after she had lifted my chin one evening in the middle of me reciting a foolish ghazal I had written in her honour and made my heart leap to my throat when she kissed me softly. I could not believe she loved me back, and never fully trusted that she did, although she insisted as much to me in hushed whispers when we awoke entwined some mornings, or by way of thrilling notes that she passed to me even as we hurried to change our finery in the middle of crowded performances.

Her love was lush, it is true, but it was entirely on her terms.

She chose the nights I could spend in her chambers, and this I did not mind. What I did mind was the way she dismissed our relationship in front of the other girls in the house. This was by no means the first time in Zeenat Bai’s house that two women had fallen in love. But because of Gul’s magnetism, her popularity, the way so many of the men who came to our salons were as besotted with her as I, the household’s acceptance of our relationship was hesitant. About this she did absolutely nothing; there was no sign in front of them of the ardour she displayed when we were alone together.

She remained icily silent when my eyes filled with tears if she took a lover from among our patrons. But when I tried to rebel by taking up with Samina, my age-mate and equal in the household, Gul’s retaliation was swift and unforgiving. Her anger was always reserved solely for me, and only behind the closed doors of her room. There she become something else, my moon-faced Gul, when she showed her teeth to me in a way that had nothing to do with smiling. The one dark spot high on her bronze cheek, her eyes the colour of burning coal, her waist-length raven hair, her dark lips full – all this seemed to melt away in that moment, and the enchantment of her face became of a fiercer, wilder quality. I was in love with her; I was terrified of her. Fear and love became locked in a fierce embrace, and fed each other like air feeds fire.

But then a different, more menacing fear gripped our entire household. The pale ghosts introduced a rifle that required equipment that was greased with the fat of both cows and pigs. An entire regiment refused to bite the cartridge and was punished mercilessly for not obeying orders. That is when, you can say, our troubles began, for many of the plans for the long months of rebellion that followed were hatched in our very salons.

Those months were subdued; the air itself felt oppressive. We had fewer performances, and when we did the mehfils were not as joyful as they had once naturally been. With more time on our hands, Gul and I started shopping for the household ourselves. Sometimes we took Zeenat Bai’s only son, Karim, with us to help us haul our bags home. Karim’s birth, unlike his sisters’, had not been celebrated, nor had he been as extensively educated as them, so he earned his keep by running errands for the house and making sure our books were kept in order.

On the day before I was to turn twenty, Gul insisted she wanted to make me some kheer, and we went to buy the ingredients – thick, fresh milk, fragrant saffron and raisins. Karim came along, and the three of us were in good humour after what felt like aeons. Gul was wearing a simple embroidered kurta of white, and as usual her diamond pin flashed on her face. To this day when I think of her, it is this image of this Gul that comes to me – fresh-faced, light, laughing easily.

Perhaps this was the final moment of my innocence, the final blossoming of the years in which I had spent so much time immersed in reading and writing, understanding music and dance, learning how to converse and compose. It was a light that a darkening world cannot bear, especially on the faces of women, especially on the faces of women such as I. Perhaps someone cast an evil eye upon us. Perhaps I was too happy, despite the fact that things were crumbling around us, and I had no right to be. Perhaps I loved her too much.

For at that very next moment Gul caught the eye of a Lal Kurti. The officer stopped us with a glint in his eye, which travelled to his mouth and became a smirk as he looked at Gul from head to toe. My blood curdled. I wanted to tear his eyes off her, and I was about to say something. She knew me so well that she sensed it, and put a steadying hand on me. Karim, beside me, seemed struck silent with fear. I had never felt so humiliated.

Then he spoke, in the kind of accent we had mocked hundreds of times. ‘How much for a turn with you, girl?’

I started forward, but Gul pushed me back. I whirled to look at her. In the entire year I had spent with her, I had never seen the kind of cold fury that overtook her face then.

‘What did you say to me?’ She spoke in a voice I did not know. It boomed with the power of a thousand more, echoes within echoes.

My stomach felt cold as ice. For a few seconds the market seemed to cease its jostling around us.

Then, as suddenly as it had seemed to be sucked out of the world, the clamour came back. I saw the soldier’s face tighten, but he didn’t seem to be startled, like I was. ‘Don’t waste my time, girl. I know you are one of those nautch girls. Don’t make me haul you off.’

She had arranged her face into a too-radiant smile. I knew this face well, she used it with particularly cloying patrons, who wanted to hang around too long after the mehfil was officially over. ‘Come with me, sahib, my rooms are just around the corner.’

I stared at her, but they were off already. I watched them for a few seconds before I ran after them. She glanced back and shot me a look. Stand back, it said. I know what I’m doing.

When she emerged from the alley she had led him into a mere handful of minutes later, it was by herself. She refused to say a word to me all the way home, while I cried silent tears of rage and confusion. The fear had returned in full force – though she said nothing, and scarcely even looked at me – and it was here to stay, for the next morning, she had disappeared.

We had spent the night together, but she had said she would much rather speak the next morning. I usually awoke if she did, but that night I had felt unusually laden with sleep – when we finally slept – and did not stir. When I woke up to the first rays of the sun filtering through her gauze curtains, I noticed that I was alone. The cream bed sheets lay rumpled, her satin-wrapped pillow abandoned. I thought she had gone to wash her face, and stretched while I waited for her, anxious to discuss what had passed the day before.

Some strands of her impossibly thick hair lay scattered upon her lightly embroidered pillow. They made me think of our lovemaking the night before, how forceful we both had been, different from the languorous nights I had come to expect from our time together, nights I savoured. But the night before had left a tight knot of desire in me still, I wanted more of her – and the unanswered questions from the market only made me more restless. As the light outside intensified, I grew more and more nervous, and still she did not return.

She did not return.

By midday, the household began to hum with questions. By then I had searched everywhere, every room, every balcony, every terrace. I had run out of the gates, madly, tears streaming down my face, and Zeenat Bai had to restrain me. I had punched Karim when he tried to placate me, and I had refused to stop screaming her name until they shut me in her room. They did not do it unkindly, nor was I left alone – Samina was there with me, but nothing would console me.

I was sure she was in danger. Perhaps the soldier had returned in the cover of the night and taken her. Perhaps even now she lay dead in an alley somewhere. My moon-faced Gul would never have left me on purpose, I knew. She had been taken, and had I been allowed to leave the house I would have scoured the city for her, looked in every street and corner until I found her and brought her back to me.

And then, in the afternoon, just as I had fallen into an exhausted stupor, the doors of her rooms were flung open and I came face to face with three Lal Kurtis. ‘Where is she? Gulbadan?’

Before they could stop me I ran out to the main halls, where more Lal Kurtis were stationed. Zeenat Bai was sitting on the floor, coolly, gurgling at her hookah. The man Plowden, their captain and our sometime patron, was questioning her. Strange to see him here, after so many months – he had attended many of our mujras, and his wife, Lucy, had had a special fondness for Gul. She had even asked Gul for lessons.

Zeenat Bai wore a tight smile on her face. ‘I do not know where she is, sahib, she has abandoned the hearth that fed her for a year. She is as faithless as a wild cat.’ Zeenat Bai was nothing if not astute. I knew that most of her valuables and our money had already been spirited away, just enough remained in the house that they could take. I was hopeful then, thinking she herself had stowed Gul away somewhere. But in a second, she said something that dashed my hopes. ‘And I’m well rid of her, for I will have no murderer in my house.’

I shrieked then, and she started. ‘Shut up, you foolish lovesick girl. Your precious Gul seems to have killed a soldier that she was seen talkin. . .