In KGP, I was called Baap and the person who asked me this question was one of my wingmates in C-Top West, Azad Hall. I will not name him here because of the circumstances where this conversation happened would not sit well with the exalted position in the corporate world that he has now retired from.
Just outside the IIT campus, in a place generally referred to as Prem Bazar, the Love Mart, there were a number of Santhal villages, or bustees, where the residents, almost always women, would sell Mohua -- a vodka-like clear colourless alcoholic drink. Mohua is the drinkwa franca, widely enjoyed across the entire tribal belt in India stretching from Bengal in the East through Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, to Maharashtra and beyond. Tribal communities in India -- Kohl, Bhil, Santhal et.al -- have traditionally produced the spirit Mohua, from the Mohua flower, using simple home-based distillation methods. The process involves soaking dried Mohua flowers in water, fermenting the mixture, and then distilling it to create the spirit. Every hut in the Santhal bustee in Prem Bazar would be selling this drink at Rs 3 per re-purposed beer bottle and this was served by Santhali "boudis", who were almost all full-figured, dusky maidens with long black hair ... thus setting the stage for what is to follow.
Mohua was available in two varieties; the hot one straight off the sill that was rough on the throat and the cool, smooth one that would come back a little later with the kick of a mule in heat! Along with the Mohua, boudi would serve a pinch of salt and if one would ask, a green chili. There have been legends that these boudis could or would offer much more but these legends were more about Narayanganj which was somewhere near Jakpur or Madpur, the two stations before Kharagpur. In Prem Bazar, it was strictly Mohua, but served by these dusky, lissome bar-tenders!
Coming back to the question, that started this chapter, men ( or rather boys) in IIT were starved of female company. The sex ratio of men to women or boys to girls tended towards infinity. SN Hall was an oasis in the desert but its inhabitants were like cactii! So barring the occasional 'pondy' there was little that we boys could do to cool the hormones bubbling through our bodies. So seeing a naked woman would have ranked on par with having a vision of the Divine.
"Baap, have you ever seen a naked woman?" was a perfectly valid question, especially after one has had swig or two of Mohua served by a dusky damsel.
I thought for moment and answered, quietly, "Yes I have!"
The circumstance had indeed been extraordinary and even today, I sometimes wonder if the incident was real or was it an extremely vivid dream.
Even though the summer vacations had started, I was going to Kharagpur from Calcutta, possibly to pick up some document that I would need for my summer training in TELCO, Pune and which I had forgotten to pick up from the Placement Office. I was on one of the late night locals, possibly the last one which had departed Howrah around 9 PM. I would normally never take a late train like this but there was some property related work in the city that had delayed my departure considerably. This was not really a problem because I would reach the station at around 11:30 from where I would take a cycle rickshaw and reach Azad Hall just after midnight. Since the mess was closed for summer, my mother had packed some food for me that I had finished off just after the majority of passengers had got off at Kolaghat. The next two big stations were Mecheda and Panskura and when we left Panskura, I was the only passenger left in the entire second class compartment.
It was night, it was dark, my stomach was full and I was swaying to the movement of the completely empty train with the sound of the wheels ringing in my ears. Did I or did I not fall asleep? It is possible that I did but I am quite sure that I did not.
There were still a couple of small stations to go -- Khirai, Haur, Radhamohanpur, Balichak, Shamchak, Madpur, Jakpur -- and in one of them the train slowed to its usual halt. The final jerk of the brake woke me up form my stupor and I saw an unbelievable sight.
A completely naked woman boarded the train and sat down at the window seat on the other side of the train. I was of course on a window side as well but she was diagonally across from me. And naked meant stark naked! Not a stitch of clothing did she have on her body. She would have been in her thirties or forties and from the trident that she carried in her hand, she would have been a bhairavi, a female devotee of Shiv. As the train started, her long dark hair billowed in the wind giving me a clear view of her breasts and nipples. Frankly, my brain simply froze up and my mind refused to work.
On one hand I was keen if not desperate to look at her naked body but on the other, my middle class morality and upbringing kept me from gazing at her openly. Instead, I took the cowardly way out of glancing at her from the edge of my peripheral vision. As if I had no interest in her nudity, her open sexuality even though I was longing to look at her. Perhaps it was because this was the first time that I was in the presence of a naked woman and that too with no one else around, that I did not know what to do. Had I been a little older, with some more experience in such matter, I might have walked over and sat down next to her, perhaps talk to her or seen her more closely. But no, I did nothing but stayed frozen in my seat with my head down. Or did I doze off and was I dreaming all this? I still don't think so.
The train stopped at the next station, a tiny one and totally dark. No one boarded our compartment and there was no one on the platform either. The naked Bhairavi was still sitting on the window, but then she lifted her legs and folded them on the seat, giving me a clear view of her thighs and buttocks, but nothing more. I was still giving sideward glances at the naked woman sitting a few feet away from me but of course I still did not have the courage to either speak or do anything more. Today, I cannot recollect what exactly was going through my mind, but if I were to extrapolate from my thoughts today, I would have thought of her as the Divine Feminine, Kali the Mother, and possibly the Lover, herself who had come to test my ability to deal with her explosive presence. Sadly -- like Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, who did not have the courage to walk out of the safety of the Dak Banglow, when called out to do so by a Tantrik Sadhu -- I failed that test and sat rooted to my seat.
Finally in the next station, my Goddess lost patience with me and decided to leave. As the train slowed to a halt, she got up from her seat and for the first time I got a full, frontal view of a fully naked woman -- from her eyes that seemed to flash mischief, to the thick fuzz of her pubic hair -- as she regally walked past me and stepped into the darkness of an empty platform.
We had paused our Mohua while I was telling this story and when I was done, my friend took one big swig of the acrid spirit. "You are so lucky, Baap. I am yet to see a naked woman outside a Playboy magazine.!"
"I am sure your time will come."
"But are you sure that this was real?"
So was it real? or was it a dream or hallucination? Or for that matter, what is real? what is an illusion? Who knows. Are we real?
