Lady Chatterjee's Lover

CHAPTER TWO

Things Fall Apart

"OURS is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or to scramble over obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

Things fall apart, but not as quickly as people do

At 16, with the growth of her body ushering newer, hungrier stares, Lady Chatterjee (then only Chitra Chatterjee) had become the talk of the upper and upper middle class, a body that was as voluptuous as it was structured. Her hair was the black of darkness, straight as cornsilk, rare for the weather and humidity of Calcutta. Her usual cotton suits still looked as they had when she'd worn them at 14 and 15, but the commodification of her body made her family usher shame into the way she saw herself. Like there was something wrong with her, in her body growing the way it was. She stopped eating the rasgullas she had loved since she was 9, stopped skipping rope with her friends when she was 14, noticing the older married men not smiling at her playfulness but wanting to drink it in with their eyes like liquor. She stopped letting her hair down or drying it in her balcony like she'd loved, where she'd felt like a princess. She tried to tone down everything about herself that was beautiful, which surprisingly helped her make more girl friends, it's a sickness, Chitra thought, how women were always in competition with one another, even when they loved it each other. She herself was no different, it hurt her whenever she wasn't given the same attention in a room because someone else was prettier. If pretty is all you were, it was a title only waiting to be taken by someone who could sweep the room with her looks.

Chitra's shyness did not discourage the men from their sickening glares which made it obvious--whatever they were imagining, Chitra had understood blood red lust before she had known what the word lust even meant. She'd stopped going to the garden to paint, because the male house help was shameless in their stares. At 15, Chitra had learned she was grateful for her family, as quick as they were to blame her for it, the protection of her father was the ultimate safety she treasured. Dependency is a sin for women, but she discovered that later on, after she had become an old sinner.

But this is all before she became Lady Chatterjee, in 19th century Calcutta.

Things had been changing in India for quite some time now, especially in Bengal. But political unrest, like almost every single thing, only affects people if they're in the heart of it. Otherwise it's as easy to ignore as the rainstorm when you're toasty warm inside. Especially if you've got the money for it, because the rich don't get into the ruble of it all unless it comes banging on their door, and Chitra was both beautiful and rich. But beauty is currency in all places of the world, and she had come to know of that in her teens, in a more innocent naive way. Contrary to her attempts at dulling her beauty, Chitra had a knack for amping up a glow around her if she wanted to. There was a conviction there, that was much deeper than her beauty in looks. She knew how to wield it, and that in itself made her sharper than a fresh knife. There was only one person she met, one who was a bright exception among other dull ones who she wasn't really fazed by. This was Ravi. The only man she hadn't been able to entrance, not because of she couldn't... but because Ravi saw her a little bit more than she wanted anyone to. It was a vulnerability that felt like a rush she'd never felt before, almost bordering on the edge of anxiety... knowing he had somehow come to read her, unnerve her enough for her to show him the snarky tight meanness and the cruelty she had inside of her, buried under layers and layers of her past.

She was 17 when she met him, on the campus of the University of Calcutta. She had moulded herself to fit a group of friends, but Chitra was deeply aware she didn't belong with them... Not that they were wrong people, it was just that she knew there were more people out there, more people who would probably be there for her, the kind of friends she needed, not the kind of friends she could afford in the moment.

It was in that moment of doubt and fear, that she met the pillar of a person that Ravi was. One poetry class later, their first together, the poem Ravi read out pierced through so many layers of her she felt like an onion cut in half. They had started talking then, bonding over the inherent loneliness in their souls. Chitra discovered what it meant to be so honest with another human being, with Ravi, and Ravi made it easier, doing the one thing a man can do to double the attraction a woman might feel towards them--he listened.

The fact that Chitra was beautiful helped, but that's the thing about wanting only beauty, people who only want beauty can never stay still, can never be satisfied because there will always be someone prettier somewhere, and the novelty of it wears off as soon as the act of "having" is established, no matter how objectifying it sounds. That wanting never really lets go of you, it's the regime of doom, a ribbon tying so deeply into the loneliness inside of you. If you choose to depend on wanting. It makes you do desperate things, like Lord Daniel did when he met Chitra, but that's later in the story.

Chitra knew her beauty did not guarantee her kindness, only lewd looks of cruelty and animalistic tendencies. It was with Ravi, for the first time, it felt different. There was an electricity in the air when they were together, even when they were sitting a few feet apart, reading poems in the campus grounds, the sunlight touching them both through through the pillars of the verandas.

Chitra didn't know exactly when it started, somewhere around passing notes to each others, to them becoming poems. Oh, but she remembered the feelings she burst with at each and every step as it had happened. First love is like a woman's womb, it stretches, and bleeds and makes room for more. It changes things in irreversible ways, enough that sometimes Chitra doesn't remember who she was before she experienced this singularity of a love.

But Ravi was wrong for her, according to her father anyway, and fighting her father was a battle that was as fierce as it sounded, for Chitra. This is where are story sows its seeds of the passion, hurt and desperation of first love. One that you never really forget... One that reflects doom like a mirror.