The Sisterhood

by Roma Circar
It was that time of year again, 24 years ago, when the sisterhood of planters' wives across the neck of the woods called the Dooars, was requisitioned to prepare for the Dooars Ladies Games Union (DLGU) AGM.  The date had been announced, and so had the venue (Central Dooars Club [CDC]), although official letters had not been despatched to the participating clubs. The mandatory inter-club competition for the year was decreed to be a short skit.

 Oyez, oyez, oyez! The news percolated down to the sancta sanctorum of all the bungalows along the length of the Dooars. This was the era of the three Ts – the Telephone, Telegram and Tea. No prizes for guessing the swiftest medium of communication amongst them – it’s certainly not rocket science! Even as the official letters from DLGU, bearing details, were possibly undergoing a manual spell-check, club-minded covens were sailing into their respective conventions on a fleet of broomsticks to seize the advantage of an early start to a ‘spell’-binding conclusion!

At our club, Nagrakata, in the prettiest district of the Dooars, there was a great deal of scratching of heads. What was our skit to be? To arrive at a consensus, Mrs. Kanak Saksena, the seniormost amongst us, called a meeting at her place one cornflower blue June morning. Saksena with a ‘K’- that was the spelling of her name, not to be confused with Saxena with an ‘X’.  I remember her waving an incorrectly addressed envelope in the air one evening at the club. “We aren’t the ‘Saxy’ types!” she had declared, tongue firmly in cheek, sending us into peals of laughter.

There were not too many lady members at our club, but what we lacked in numbers we compensated for with abundant enthusiasm. After several rounds of the most delicious elevenses over discussions that seemed to boomerang back and forth, we finally froze on the subject of our skit – politics. Mrs. Saksena believed it would give us an ‘intellectual’ edge over the other clubs!

Sudha Levin and yours truly were co-opted to script the skit, but what did we know about politics? Those were appalling times in the political firmament – one political goon had tossed his consort into the oven, another’s grandson had a rape and run accusation on his head, and yet another with dairy DNA had turned Bihar into his personal byre, milking away for all he was worth. There was enough fodder to write a scathing screenplay, and fortunately our combined brains found themselves equal to the task. We devoured reams of contemporary political newsfeeds, at once disgusted by our leaders and delighted at the prolific content we were amassing. Once our libretto was complete, we put it to the others at one of our umpteen meetings and it underwent an audio edit on the spot! Many more anecdotes and commentaries were added, some deleted, among much mirth. The combined fine-tuning honed it to acidic acuity, and the Nagrakata team declared its script ready! 

Casting was a much shorter process, because we discovered that all our ladies possessed the histrionic gene in no small measure. Reena Chaturvedi was a natural Lalu, and the cow we designed for her to milk on stage was an ‘udder’ masterpiece! Sangeeta Krishan played the creepy Sushil Sharma, accused in the Naina Sahni Tandoor murder case, to perfection. Tina Sisodia brought Beant Singh to life with her accent, head gear and hirsute jowls. Indu Bhagat was the diminutive Jyoti Basu, almost a clone of the original, and Keka Banerjee was the archetypal Narasimha Rao, although she often alternated between the Bengali and South Indian accents during rehearsals just to get a rise out of us!

Our rehearsals, at each bungalow in turn, were an amalgam of blood, sweat and laughter, delicious victuals – once even a Himsagar mango sandesh handcrafted by Tina– and scintillating discussions wherein the script went under the scalpel several times over, to excellent effect. Our closing song, that was to have all of us up on stage to take a bow, was a rehash of an old patriotic refrain that expressed our bitter opinion of poor political leadership. It ran into many verses, and began something like this:

‘Netao ke dagar mein

Baccho dikhao chalke

Yeh desh hai humara

Kha jao isko tal ke!’

Sadly, it was our beleaguered destiny to see our ‘intellectual’ skit bite the dust at the prize giving, upstaged by others like the ‘Kitty Party’, staged by the host club, and ‘An Emporium for Husbands’,  a Dalgaon Club offering deliciously pregnant with irony! There was no time to defend our reputations as the intelligentsia of the Dooars, because the loaded dialogues issuing from the makeshift stage hit our funny bones head-on and held us in their thrall! And then there was the sumptuous lunch to follow, meticulously arranged by the ladies of CDC and finally, of course, the heated AGM.

The DLGU AGM has, since time immemorial, been an impassioned affair. In a sense, it is a microcosm of the Indian Parliament, with clenched fists doing duty as mallets, horse-trading sans Swiss bank accounts, personal vendettas being aired for public consumption and a helpless moderator! It’s hard to fathom why the sisterhood of the Dooars metamorphoses into sister-‘hoods’ during an AGM. Where does that spirit of togetherness and esprit de corps vanish the moment the AGM begins? Club members who’ve worked tirelessly and merrily together for two full months to co-produce a magnum opus are suddenly seen shaking their fists at each other across the well of the house!

No matter! That’s part of the playing field too! Long may the DLGU AGM continue, and so too the accompanying schizophrenia. It gives the ladies the opportunity to let their hair down in the prelude to autumn each year, at a time their men are romancing the second flush hot off the drier mouths. The diverse competitions give free reign to their creativity, and the mind-pooling of ideas leads to some stupendous productions. They enjoy months of energetic rehearsals that culminate with cheers for each performance on stage and, in a fitting finale to all that diabetes- inducing sugar and saccharine, slide on their knuckle dusters and spice up the arena with brilliant volleys of brisk repartee!

Meet the writer: Roma Circar

Says Roma, "At a fairly tender age, in 1979, I traipsed into the magical wonderland of Camellia Sinensis and shade trees.It was in this exquisite space that I began to give vent to my feelings, albeit in miniscule doses. A number of my short stories found their way into Eve's Weekly, the Telegraph,and The Statesman.

My experience with work in the organized sector, once we moved to Kolkata after three decades out in the sticks, was with e-learning in the corporate sphere. However, the long hours of slavery were not exactly my cup of tea. I now work from home. In addition to books, I am now turning more and more to reading what is churned out in this blog. It transports me to a slice of life that is already on its way to becoming an anachronism. Let us endeavour to record it for posterity."

 Click here to read all Roma's stories on this blog

Is this your first visit here? Welcome to Indian Chai Stories! 
Do you have a chai story of your own to share? Send it to me here, please : indianchaistories@gmail.com. 
My name is Gowri Mohanakrishnan and I'm a tea planter's wife. I started this blog because one of the things that I wouldn't want us to lose in a fast changing world is the tea story - a story always told with great seriousness, no matter how funny - always true (always), maybe a tall tale, long, or short, impossible, scary, funny or exciting but never dull.
 
Happy reading! Cheers to the spirit of Indian Tea!
ADD THIS LINK TO YOUR FAVOURITES : https://teastorytellers.blogspot.com/Indian Chai Stories