Barker Nicola
The Cauliflower
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Nicola Barker
The Cauliflower
~ ~ ~
This small book is humbly and lovingly offered — like a freshly picked wild rose — at the feet of Shafilea Ahmed, Uzma Arshad, Mashael Albasman, Banaz Mahmod, and the five thousand other women worldwide who are killed, each year, for the sake of “honor.”
The Cauliflower
Not one, not two, not three or four,
but through eighty-four hundred thousand vaginas have I come.
I have come
through unlikely worlds,
guzzled on
pleasure and pain.
Whatever be
all previous lives,
show me mercy
this one day,
O lord
white as jasmine.
Catch us the foxes,
The little foxes that spoil the
vines,
For our vines have tender
grapes.
~ ~ ~
1849, approximately
The beautiful Rani Rashmoni is perpetually trapped inside the celluloid version of her own amazing and dramatic life. Of course, every life has its mundane elements — even the Rani, beautiful as she is, powerful as she is, must use the bathroom and clean her teeth, snag her new sari with a slightly torn thumbnail, belch graciously with indigestion after politely consuming an over-fried rice ball prepared by a resentful cook at the house of her oldest yet most tedious friend — but Rani Rashmoni is, nevertheless, the star (the heroine) of her own movie.
How will it all end, we wonder? Temporarily disable that impatient index finger. We must strenuously resist the urge to fast-forward. Because everything we truly need to know about the Rani is already here, right in front of us, helpfully contained (deliciously condensed, like a sweet, biographical mango compote) within the nine modest words engraved in the official seal of her vast and sumptuous Bengali estate: “Sri Rashmoni Das, longing for the Feet of Kali.”
Hmmm.
Her husband, the late Rajchandra Das — a wealthy businessman, landowner, and philanthropist, twice widowed — first saw her as an exquisitely lovely but poor and low-caste village girl bathing in the confluence of three rivers thirty miles north of Calcutta. He instantly fell in love. She was nine years old.
That was then. But now? Where do we find the Rani today, at the very start of this story which longs to be a film, and eventually (in 1955) will be? We find her utterly abandoned and alone in her giant palace (the guards, servants, and family have all fled, at the Rani’s firm insistence). Her poor heart is pounding wildly, her sword is unsheathed, and she is bravely standing guard outside the family shrine room as a local garrison of vengeful British soldiers ransacks her home.
In one version of this story we find the Rani confronting these soldiers. In other versions her palace is so huge and labyrinthine (with more than three hundred rooms) that although the soldiers riot and pillage for many hours, they never actually happen across the Rani (and her sword) as she boldly stands, arm raised, fierce and defiant, just like that extraordinary Goddess Kali whose lotus feet she so highly venerates.
The Rani, like the Goddess, has many arms. Although the Rani’s limbs are chiefly metaphorical. And the two arms that she does possess — ending in a pair of soft, graceful, yet surprisingly competent hands — aren’t colored a deep Kali-black, but have the seductive, milky hue of