Word Count: 5899
for Saleem Kidwai
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 feted 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 afterwards. 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 became something else, my moon-faced Gul, when she showed her teeth to me in a way that had nothing to do with smiling. The dark spot high on one bronzed cheek, her eyes the colour of burning coal, her waist-length raven hair, her full dark lips—all this seemed to melt away in that moment, and the enchantment of her face turned fiercer, wilder. 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 used ammunition encased in paper greased with the fat of both cows and pigs. In order to load their rifles before firing, Indian soldiers would need to tear open the cartridges with their teeth. An entire regiment refused to do so and was punished mercilessly for disobeying. 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 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 long and lasciviously at Gul. 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 washed over 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 am 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, so intense I was virtually incapacitated, 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 bedsheets—usually tied in place—were 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 love-making 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.
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 up 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 under cover of 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 wildcat.’ 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 talking to in the market yesterday. They found him in an alley this morning, not a single mark on him, dead as a block of wood. Lord knows in what dark arts she dealt, to be able to do this…. She has left all of us here to rot, you included. Pull yourself together, or get out of my sight.’
I do not know how I spent the next weeks, months, year. At first I refused to perform, and they let me be. I kept vigil by her windows, by sunlight, moonlight, and candlelight. I scarcely ate or slept. I cried until the tears ran dry, and when I could no longer cry I read poetry she had written through swollen eyes. In my head I heard her sing, a monsoon dadra about dark clouds gathering, a woman tormented by the absence of her lover. I felt myself floating out of my body, and from my vantage point near the ceiling I saw the thing I had become: hollow-eyed, my hair unwashed and in knots, my lips dry. I had become the absence of Gul.
After a few months, Zeenat Bai herself started coming to feed me. She called the munshi to read me poetry, she dragged me to see the other girls rehearse for mehfils. Soon, she began pestering me to sing again, lamenting, screaming that all that education had been wasted on me, that I was not the first girl to be betrayed by a lover, that my name would forever be lost if I did not come to my senses.
I had begun to feel other sensations slowly, and this included a considerable degree of guilt, for I had contributed nothing to the household income for over six months. I began to sing again, though I still could not bring myself to dance. I sang with lowered eyes. But my voice, when it emerged again after a few days of careful riyaz, surprised me. I had been a competent enough singer before, my training substantial enough and my delight in poetry genuine, so that I could sing convincingly. This voice, though, was different—richer, deeper, unwavering, and immense, as though it was coming from somewhere else. Had I always had this ability and, obsessed with my love for Gul, never noticed it? Or had she, by leaving me—for I knew by then that she had deliberately left me—made me into the singer I had become? I do not know, except that now when I sang about longing I felt it in my bones, when I sang about the fecklessness of a lover I understood the words, and the bylanes and alleyways of the music itself, like I never had before. Betrayal had enriched my voice, and anger, when it gathered, fuelled my riyaz, so that I began to sing more and more, better and better, each raag I learned and each thumri I mastered an answer to Gul’s desertion.
And that is the voice you now know, if you know your music. The voice that took me in the decades of my life that followed to the Delhi Durbar to sing before King George, the voice by which I made a fortune for myself, setting up my own establishment at the passing of Zeenat Bai, and eventually buying property all over the city even as many of the women I had grown up surrounded by faded into obscurity. As they retreated to the shadows, pursued by lectures on morality and demonized as being unclean, I took my spot in the light. Yet, even as I prospered, my heart crumbled.
I met and married a devastatingly beautiful businessman, Irfan Ali Khan, and became Munni Begum. His family disdained me and threatened to disown him. For a time, I was forced to give up music, but through that time he loved me truly, and could not bear to see me with my face tightened in agony as I watched others, always others, perform. Much quarreling and cajoling later, his family decided that I could sing anywhere in the country, as long as I sang nowhere I could sully their good name. And so I took off to Benaras, to Rampur, to Calcutta, with Karim acting as my manager, and a handful of young pupils in tow.
It is not that I did not love again. I was very fond of my husband, I enjoyed his gentleness, his fine mind. I liked making love to him. But I never loved him like I had loved Gul, and if our partnership lacked the inconsistency and ultimate cruelty of the one I had shared with her, it also never matched its life-giving fire. Now, what set my pulse dancing was singing, and teaching the young girls whose training I had been entrusted with. To them I was everything, they called me their mother and followed me where I went. The older ones, in some years, started accompanying me on stage.
Eventually, long after my body died, they would be celebrated, honours conferred upon them by famous men. But even as their greatness would be lauded, they would always be known as pupils of the great Munni Begum. Some would write books about their years with me, and one or two would sing forever like me, never finding that precious and irreplaceable thing—the power of their own voices. The more successful ones would train many pupils of their own, and one would start a school in my name, established in my honour. For I would become what only a handful of humans become through what they leave in their wake—immortal.
But you’ve read this script. Greatness, true greatness, is only conferred upon the crone. As maiden and grown woman, whispers followed me, and even as my career arced upward like a meteor, it would be years before my considerable donations to the freedom movement would even be acknowledged. I was old when they came to love me simply for my music, for by that time my origins and my story became two different things.
In one’s sixth decade, it is difficult to stay angry. What fire I had in my belly I reserved for music, for the push and pull of the taan, for the trick and love affair of singing two exquisite lines of poetry in three different and expansive ways. I had outlived my husband by ten years already, and had immersed myself in caring for my pupils. Still, what artist with some ambition remaining can resist the lure of the capital? Younger women than I were thronging to Calcutta, playing parts on the stage at the big theatres—Star, Minerva, Classic. Some of them had been dancers, some could sing.
The capital called to me, the same pale ghosts who had so tormented us during the Mutiny were soliciting women of my talents to sing for a new contraption that had been created, for which a man called Gaisberg was meeting with gaanewalis both young and experienced.
It was called the gramophone player, a golden creature with a gaping flower for a head and a box at its tail. This is how you sang for it—you not only had to scream into the blasted cylinder that snatched at your voice, you had to hurry it up. A lingering thumri would not do—you had to squeeze the song, with all of its pathos and play, into less than one-third of the time you would otherwise have had with it. And, when you were done, you had to tell the machine your name, or they would not know who on earth you were.
We had taken some rooms in the Great Eastern Hotel, and it was there that Gaisberg had set up his little studio. Every day I spied the young girls going in and emerging. Gaisberg’s assistant, a reedy Bengali man named Sen, had approached us—but even though we were there, Karim remained sceptical.
‘I don’t know, Muniya…I have heard some strange things about this machine…. Let’s wait and see,’ he told me.
‘Like what? Don’t tell me this is like that time those men came to photograph me?’ I teased. All these years of working and living with me, and my poor Karim was still so naive! It went back to our upbringing—so differently were we brought up in the same house and by the same woman. My affection for him strengthened rather than waned because of this.
‘Muniya, I am serious. Someone from Janki Bai’s party told me that the machine…it traps bits of your soul into it every time it catches your voice. It may be best to stay away.’ I began to laugh, and he knew he had already lost the fight. After this, I decided to not push the gramophone issue too much with him; I knew I could make him come around in a few days. I could do what I pleased, but he was my oldest friend, and I did not like to frighten him.
The Bengalee had a review of a show in town, played by a tremendous new actress called Elokeshi. Zoha, my oldest pupil, had cajoled Karim to take us to the Star that evening to see her play Janabai.
The theatre that evening was absolutely packed. I had dressed in one of my favourite sarees and put my hair up carefully into a bun, but in the quiet hush of the theatre just before the show, everyone’s eyes, including my own, were turned towards the stage. I heard the soft creak of one of the doors being opened, and turned around in some irritation. I should not have paid it much mind but something kept my eyes on the figure that slid quietly inside. She was simply dressed, almost nondescript, but when she passed me, I recognized her with a start, with a pain in my heart that is impossible to capture in words.
The only person I had known my entire life who could have captured it with her song was now looking directly at me, as surely as she had looked at me when I was only nineteen: Gulbadan.
And she looked exactly as she did then—how was this possible? And how was it possible that no one else noticed her, not even Karim, seated beside me? As though she was putting on a private performance meant only for me, the woman I had known as Gulbadan transformed before my very eyes. Her limbs looked somehow more supple, her hair grew longer and more lustrous, her face suddenly—terrifyingly—sharper. Her clothes changed, became a mendicant’s, her forehead suddenly marked with a little ash. And almost as though she had always been there, she was onstage, and everyone around me broke into applause.
That evening Gul—Elokeshi—gave the best performance I had seen her give. It would be a surprise if audiences forever after did not call her Jana. There was a standing ovation at the end, and she was called back on stage by the audience’s cheers. She returned, bowed, disappeared.
My heart hammering, I turned to Karim, who had not recognized her at all. How could he? He had only been allowed to see her terrible beauty, the face of Elokeshi.
I did not say a word to him. I spent the night awake as I had once lain awake thinking about her after she had left decades before. But now I began to see how she could have been so clairvoyant. Her little tricks. Her great skills. Her overwhelming fame. Her ability to slip away at will. Her face, teeth bared, monstrous in anger.
She was not just a keeper of lore. She was part of its very fabric.
The next day I told Karim I had an evening appointment with Gaisberg and went back to the theatre. I watched her again. I was certain she knew I was there. And acting upon my certainty, I went backstage. I told an attendant to let her know Muniya was here to see her. In a matter of minutes, I was inside her dressing room.
Her hair was long, loose. Her moon-face full, not a day older than she had looked when I was so much younger. Her eyebrows arched darkly on her forehead. She smiled; her face shifted, she made herself, again, the Gul of old.
‘How are you, my love?’ She was smiling as she once had, in the way that had wrenched my heart when I first met her…a way that she knew, I could see, still worked.
‘Gul.’
‘I owe you an apology, my darling, and an explanation. But I am afraid I am only able to give you one of these things. Please accept my sincerest apologies. I should not have left you like that.’ She was calm, perfectly calm, calm in a way that frightened me even more.
‘What I saw last night… that was you? What were you doing? What…’
‘What am I? Only cloud and water, my love. I am Elokeshi on the Bengali stage. I was Mah Laqa in Hyderabad, and a long time ago, I was called Amrapali. In the coming years I will have more names and faces. The calamities are not over for our kind, my darling one. I am so glad you made a name for yourself. It will carry you far.’
‘I have so much to ask you. So much to tell. Come with me, spend some time with me.’
‘I wish I could have stayed, Muniya…’
I knew then she meant to leave me again. For the first time in many years, I felt an old resentment swell up inside me.
‘Why do you do this?’ I asked. ‘Play with a little human life?’
She turned to me then, eyes flashing. If she was capable of being hurt, I had managed to hurt her. I felt a tiny whiff of satisfaction. ‘I never played with you. Never. It gets exhausting, watching people die. It is better to go when you get too close…. My love, it was good to see you again.’
With that, she opened the dressing room door, and was almost borne away by the crowd that thronged outside. It called her name, ‘Elokeshi!’, and wanted to swallow her up. She paused, turned. Her face was different again—tinged with softness. I saw an old fire in her eyes, older than me, older than time, a fire at which I had warmed myself in the time we had had together, and without knowing it, for years after.
We looked at one another for a long moment. Then she spoke again, this time with a new urgency. ‘Listen, there is something called the gramophone now, it can copy your beautiful voice for people in another time. You must record as soon as you can.’
What was this? I could not fathom why she wanted to now focus on something so inconsequential. ‘I intend to, Karim doesn’t trust the machine, says he hears strange things about it.’
‘What, that it captures a little bit of your soul and keeps it trapped inside it forever?’ She laughed then, the same wolfish laugh that undid me as though I were still a waif of nineteen, the same fear gripping my insides as though it had never gone away. ‘It’s true, my love. It’s all true. And that is why you must do it. Do it.’ She opened the door, stepped away.
I stood there alone, blinking in the sudden light.
*
Bombay, 1995
Amol is hooked, he can’t help it. He’s at Sagar Bar every night with his buddies, after a day of running around collecting for their bosses, occasionally beating up the shopkeepers and business owners who won’t pay up. The work is exciting and the money is easy, and how better to spend it than see moon-faced Rosy every night?
Raju and Guru are in the mood to heckle him tonight. ‘What, took your girl to Apsara Theatre again yesterday? What were you doing? Watching the picture, or something else?’
Bastards. They love their dancers too. Raju is even seeing one of the girls, Meena. Besides, Rosy doesn’t let him touch her. He doesn’t much care. Being with her every evening—being the man who gets to do that—this is somehow enough. He isn’t used to this…this feeling. Is this what all the film songs are about?
Just look at her. The most famous dancer in the joint, men throw thousands and thousands of rupees at her in the course of one night. And why shouldn’t they? Look at her whirling, her skirts aglow, the silver moons embroidered on them gleaming. She is dancing to an old ghazal, something about thousands of men driven mad by her eyes. When she dances like that, when she smiles like that and looks at him, he feels like the only man in the room.
Afterwards, he is impatient to go home. She is not one to be pushed, so he waits—what else is he going to do? He watches even as Raju and Guru leave with their girlfriends. Finally, she emerges, dressed in a simple white kurta.
‘Rosy, jaan, I’ve got something for you. Come, let’s go to your rooms, na.’
She is indulgent today. The season’s first rains have begun. She had once told him the monsoon was her favourite season.
In her rooms, with the gauzy curtains and the old-fashioned lamps, he proudly pulls the disc out of a slim bag. It has the flat, round face of an old singer on it—it looks impossibly old, like it belongs to a different world. ‘Munni Begum—Classic Hits! See, huh?’ He is delighted, nervous. He doesn’t quite understand this music himself, but he knows she likes it.
The rain starts to fall gently outside, and inside they let the little needle fall on the black disc, which turns and turns. The song is about dark clouds gathering, a woman looking for her lover. Rosy closes her eyes and throws her head back. He feels a rush of love overcome him. When she opens her dark eyes he thinks he can see pinpricks of tears in them. She smiles. ‘It’s gorgeous,’ she whispers.
In the flickering light, the diamond in her nose glints, and you could be forgiven for thinking that her face changes ever so slightly.
‘Gul’ was originally published in Magical Women (Hachette India), edited by Sukanya Venkatraghavan, and most recently reprinted in A Case of Indian Marvels: Dazzling Stories from the Country’s Finest New Writers (Aleph Book Co). The author thanks editorial teams at both publishing houses, as well as friends for feedback and copyediting on the story.