Superstar India

by Shobhaa De

  Well, at least so far in India, we continue to mollycoddle our children and encourage them to stay in the family home, till such time as they're ready to marry and set up their own. Even that act (leaving home at twenty-five-plus) was considered revolutionary till as late as the '70s, when the ‘joint family’ finally began to disintegrate, owing to a combination of reasons, mainly economic. We should have anticipated what the fall-out would mean for us. But, of course, we didn't, and were soon praising the strength of the ‘nuclear family’, and declaring how it had liberated so many young people from having to compromise their goals for the sake of the elders.Young brides were jubilant at the thought of not having to share their husbands with possessive mothers-in-law. And the husbands were relieved they no longer had to hide their vodka/whisky/rum in colas, or sneak meat dishes into the privacy of their bedrooms/bathrooms, so as not to offend the more conservative members of the family.

  One wonders how middle-aged India will cope with this first-generation attitudinal shift. And, come to think of it, what happens when this lot hits sixty and seventy? Will they go back on their stated position and demand involvement from their bewildered kids?

  Widely-circulated magazines monitoring social change insist a rethink is underway. Smart young Indians have realized their folly and want to set the clock back. Extended families are back in vogue, while more and more youngsters are opting for the twenty-first century version of the Indian Arranged Marriage. It's perhaps a bit too early to predict whether this trend will snowball into something more permanent. I personally believe it will, since such a move will help careerists of both sexes, who can then pursue their dreams and have kids, in the safe knowledge they'll be well looked after by willing grandmothers. A practical arrangement that works for everyone—even the mothers-law (MILs), whose profile has undergone such a dramatic change. Today, the hated saas is educated, informed, fit and aware. She, too, knows she can't afford to offend anyone, least of all, her bahu, who frequently earns as much as the beta, if not more. Contributing to the family kitty and enhancing the lifestyle quotient commands respect for the new young woman—and she certainly knows exactly how to take advantage of her freshly-minted status.

  Does she have to endure endless lectures on ‘tradition’ because she wears jeans, drinks wine, flirts with men other than her husband, uses the f-word, travels abroad on her own, gets trashed occasionally and shows off her cleavage? But of course, traditions have to be jealously guarded, preferably by women. Men only have to pretend by wearing Rohit Bal sherwanis, not Raymond's suitings, at their weddings. Tradition is an exceedingly loaded term that weighs everybody down, even those who try so hard to keep it alive. How does anybody prop up ideas going back 5,000 years? How can anyone be convinced about rituals that may have been valid way back then but are meaningless in today's context? Who has the time or interest to delve into the ‘whys’ and ‘why nots’ of institutionalized habits that are no longer central to the way we see ourselves?

  Very often, I am caught between personal convictions and expected acts. I feel pretty confused when asked to choose between the two. I also feel guilty, like I'm copping out or denying something precious to my own children. Am I a lousy mother because I'm not entirely in sync with our great traditions? Should I be observing Karwa Chauth, because the mothers of my daughter's friends go all out to starve in style with their gal pals? For the non-initiates, Karwa Chauth is an annual fast undertaken by married women in north India for the welfare and long life of their husbands. For some unexplained reason, the ladies are expected to dress up in their bridal finery, complete with heavy jewellery, and mehendi adorning their palms. The fast is broken only after moonrise. The husband's arrival is greeted with much fanfare, as he is welcomed with an aarti, and his puffed-up-with-pride face is viewed through a sieve. (Why?!) What the origin of the festival is remains a mystery—perhaps it was a way to greet the weary warrior returning after hard-fought battles—but today, it has assumed ridiculous proportions, with rich, bored ladies making a full-blown ‘event’ out of it. Blame it on Bollywood, and next on Ekta Kapoor's soppy saas-bahu serials, if you must. But Karwa Chauth makes wives feel virtuous and worshipful towards the very men they otherwise treat like dirt and, perhaps, cheat on, during the remaining 364 days of the year.

  Not being a ritualistic person, I am uncomfortable ‘pretending’ to feel pious when all I want to do is laugh! But, for young brides smoking in a dark, trendy lounge bar, as their hip husbands fix a round of dry martinis, I suppose observing Karwa Chauth makes them feel more rooted. They tell themselves they are better wives, who believe in tradition, while their husbands proudly announce to envious colleagues, ‘Man, gotta rush home early—let's skip squash at the club this evening—Tina/Alisha/Ayesha/Natasha has been fasting for me all day… Karwa-Chauth, you know.’ How sweet. How foolish.

  The great Indian wedding

  This has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past ten years. It is no longer controlled by over-enthusiastic chaachas and chaachees. Event managers are booked well in advance for multiple functions that extend over ten days and several cities. This is not restricted to just the elite, creamy segment of Indian society. After all, not everyone is steel tycoon Laxmi Mittal, who took the cake by booking the Versailles Palace grounds for his darling daughter's wedding. Nor is everybody an ambitious, bratty, New York hotelier like Vikram Chatwal, who televised all the grand ceremonies of his high-profile wedding. One doesn't mention Liz Hurley's opulent celebration—she is a showbiz phenomenon, whose marriage is an international celeb-circus with lots of money riding on various publicity rights. But even the average Joshi and Johar today budget disproportional amounts for wedding celebrations.

  Recently, the worthy Budhmashi, who has been working in our home for the past fifteen years as a part-time staffer (‘sweeper’ sounds so politically incorrect!) had a blast of his own. When he decided to marry off two daughters in one go (double whammy), the celebrations lasted for over a week in the neighbourhood slum where he lives in a shabby jhopdi, next to an open sewer. He borrowed heavily for the functions he'd organized, one of which involved feeding 700 people from the slum—a grand feast, put together by an enterprising caterer from the same slum.

  Apart from the lavish gifts he was expected to bestow on his sons-in-law (motorbikes, refrigerators, beds and kitchen utensils, besides suit lengths and sarees for their extended families), the man also had to keep up appearances within his own community in the slums. But what of the killer-debt, I asked him worriedly, Budhmashi being the sole earner with two more children to settle. He pointed skywards and said, ‘Bhagwan will take care of everything—this is my duty. Nobody would have married my girls otherwise. They would've fallen into bad company… got pregnant, eloped with a drunk, committed suicide… these days, anything can happen. I feel better now that they're married off—they have become their husbands' problem. If something goes wrong with either, the headache is the husband's.’ Oh really?

  In under three months, Budhmashi was back, bleary-eyed and desperate. He needed to borrow some more money, since the grooms were demanding more and more of him. I asked him why. ‘Because I fed so many people at the wedding, they think I have a lot of money…’

  It's a vicious circle at all levels. This man is caught in a never-ending cycle of arrears. He is illiterate, and of poor health. If he dies, his widow will be left penniless and with a huge debt hanging over her. The man has gone crazy, working eighteen hours a day, sweeping in one flat, washing cars for someone else, cleaning toilets for a third. With no sleep and poor nutrition, he isn't going to make it. I told him so flatly, pointing out that hospital bills would further burden him. But he can't stop what he started when he made that first down payment for a gleaming motorbike to dazzle his daughters’ in-laws.

  Upper middle-class India is suffering in a similar fashion. I walked into the plush elegance of India's first Louis Vuitton store in Delhi soon after it opened. I looked at the absurd price-tags and wonde
red who'd be crazy enough to put down that kind of money for monogrammed leather. A lot of people, apparently. The LV store in Delhi has become the number one destination for trousseau-shoppers. I was told wealthy farmers from Punjab walk in carrying plastic shopping bags filled with currency notes. They place them on the counter nonchalantly and ask for the top-of-the line three-piece luggage set for a beloved beti's wedding buys. At over seventeen lakh rupees, that's a lot of money, even for a wealthy farmer.

  But these new buyers don't blink. ‘Nothing but the best—we want her to be happy in her new home.’ Apparently, the three-piece set is booked for the next few years with Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy unable to keep up with the demand. ‘No self-respecting bride leaves her maternal home without the set… it is an essential part of her trousseau,’ a smart salesman told me smugly. And that is a small part of the bigger picture, which includes serious jewellery, real estate, other long-term assets and financial instruments.

  As for the wedding itself—don't ask. Parents are compelled to keep aside a sizeable portion of their life's earnings for their children's weddings—and with zero gratitude, in return.

  The latest trend is to skip hosting a lavish seven-day tamasha in India and opt for a 100-invitees-only, exclusive affair in distant Bali/Phuket/Pattaya. It's slightly more cost-effective, and can conveniently keep out the riff-raff. Maybe Budmashi would have saved his health, had he shifted his venue out of the slum and come up with an improvised Bali plan—Juhu Beach in Mumbai is a great alternative. I say this wryly and sadly. I see no hope for Budmashi—how on earth will he pay back creditors, those dodgy men who charge over 30 per cent interest and think nothing of adopting brutal muscle power to recover their debts?

  One would've thought the extravaganzas we, in India, call ‘weddings’ would have adapted themselves to a more modern, realistic, twenty-first-century format, with less waste and more restraint. But that's not happening. Several enterprising ladies have cottoned on to the potential by launching Bridal Festivals that rake in the big bucks. Media houses have also joined the Wedding Bazaar by holding parallel two-day events which showcase the latest fashions, the coolest trends in everything from one-of-a-kind jewellery to limited edition gifts. Every detail is taken care of, including invitation cards and thank-you notelets. The wedding business has grown into a multi-crore industry and is still ballooning. ‘It's a great sign… a healthy sign,’ said a satisfied fashion-designer whose main revenue is generated during the bridal season. He talked about the trickle-down effect, which is evident when one drives past any pavement market in urban India. The colourful clothes one sees fluttering tantalizingly on hastily put-up plastic ropes lining busy avenues invariably feature cheap versions of the latest designer ensembles. Stroll into any shanty town and you'll see young people clad in polyester designs borrowed from popular Hindi movies in which the heroines have been dressed by famous designers. Manish Malhotra's pastel chiffon sarees or Aki Narula's Bunty Aur Babli shirt-salwars have made it to Lahore, London and Las Vegas, apart from swamping the local mandis of Patna, Putney or Peshawar. Seen from this perspective, the great Indian wedding has enhanced our economy and contributed to its growth. But on a more mundane level, it has become a social disease, with families unable to cope with growing expectations from everybody, to impress and outdo the neighbours.

  Wedding and funerals are two sides of the same coin. Both involve ridiculous displays, either of fake rituals or wealth. I thought of linking Budhmashi's story with our driver Choudhary's. He comes from Bihar and is extraordinarily proud of his caste, which he proclaims to the world by wearing a prominent red tika on his forehead. ‘I am a Choudhary…’ he declares, and everybody is expected to know the implication. His children are still too young for him to worry about their marriages. But his ailing father died recently. Choudhary looked suitably crestfallen when he broke the news, but I suspect he was thinking of the impending expenses ahead, and not the loss of a father. After he pretended to wipe away a few tears and I made soothing sounds of comfort (the Indian tch-tch-tch sound that's created by pressing the tip of the tongue against the back of the front teeth), we got down to business. ‘How much?’ I asked, striving to sound stern and businesslike. He looked away into the far distance, made a few calculations and said, ‘Fifty thousand… at least…’ I gulped. ‘Five months,’ he assured me, ‘and I'll give back the money…’ I'd heard that before. ‘But… why fifty thousand?’ Choudhary is technically illiterate and has never been to school. But he understands numbers, money, fractions, loan repayment schedules… and all the important stuff. He shuffled his feet and started a long story he knew I wouldn't have the patience to listen to… ‘I'll have to pay for the wood for his funeral pyre, the five priests who'll perform the final prayers and conduct the rituals, then there'll be thirteen days of mourning during which I'll have to feed all the mourners… once that's done, I'll take the ashes to the Ganga to immerse them, followed by more pujas. One has to do this… it's a part of our rivaaz…’ I knew it was crazy to argue or talk him out of it, so I tried negotiating instead. ‘Not fifty… I can spare thirty…’ He shook his head, ‘Forty…’ I shook mine… ‘thirty-five…’ He nodded. The deal was done. I kicked myself. Damn. He'd agreed a bit too swiftly. Had I pushed it, he would've settled for twenty-five. I always knew I was a lousy bargainer.

  I thought about Choudhary's father's elaborate thirteen-day funeral and the feeding of relatives. And my mind went back to my last goodbye to my own father. The end came after a ten-day battle in hospital. He was close to a 100 years when he died, a strong and inspiring lion of a man. He had countless friends and admirers, besides all of us, his children and grandchildren. But we believed he would have preferred to keep his last rites private and without any religious ceremony. Within a couple of hours of his passing away, the hearse took him to the electric crematorium close to the hospital he'd spent the past agonizing days in. There were no ceremony, no priests, no chanting of mantras, no garlands and, mainly, no extended relatives and visitors—just his children, son-in-law, daughter-in-law and five grandchildren. If was all over within two hours. Then came the question of how to dispose of the ashes. We watched as workers from the crematorium efficiently (and with characteristic indifference) gathered up the remains of a man who'd been such a powerful force in our lives—a towering figure, who'd once been a ‘briefless lawyer’ with no less a person than Baba Saheb Ambedkar, as both took the local train to the small causes court in south Mumbai, and waited for clients!

  Baba Saheb Ambedkar went on to become one of the architects of our Constitution and an inspiring neta, especially for the Dalits, who worship him. While my father moved to Delhi after serving as a district judge in rural Maharashtra. From an additional secretary in the ministry of law to a senior legal counsel at the Atomic Energy Commission, working directly with Homi Bhabha, his career was remarkable and inspiring.

  Suddenly, there he was, reduced to an aluminium bucket of still smouldering ashes, which were cooled down by pouring cold water on them (to save time!), before pouring the strange mixture through a large sieve. I watched, fascinated, as the workers poked around, sorting the bones—large ones to this side, the vertebrae to another. ‘How many matkas?’ they asked. ‘One will do,’ we replied.

  The question was relevant. Most people prefer to collect the ashes in multiple pots, so that they can immerse them in the holy rivers of India—preferably the Ganga in Varanasi, or the sangam of two rivers (mythically three) at Allahabad. There are also the truly devout who'd go to the Gangotri or to Hrishikesh close to the Himalayas. But we knew (or thought we did!) that our father would've mocked such an exercise and deemed it a ‘waste of time’… even though he was born into a Saraswat Brahmin family that till today observes all the samskaras as stipulated in the scriptures. So… what were we to do with our single matka of still red-hot ash? Immerse it in the sea, close to the spot near our home, where he used to take his evening stroll?

  It was around that time that h
is tall, ramrod-straight, familiar figure could be spotted, amongst iPod-wearing teenagers sporting Juicy Couture, and other residents from the area who frequently sought him out for his wit and wisdom. As the sun sank into the Arabian Sea, we said a silent prayer, floated a few flowers in the gently lapping waves and poured the ashes into the water. To me, it was a perfect goodbye—but traditionalists would disagree. It had been virtually the same drill when we lost our mother. If relatives found it unorthodox and inappropriate, they didn't voice it to any of us. Which is just as well… but it also underlines the impersonal, carefully calibrated communication systems that now define relationships in a society that once nurtured verbalizing anything and everything, within the family structure. All that was achieved keeping the pecking order in mind. Nobody dared to cross those invisible lines or break the rules.

  I had lost both my grandfathers before my birth. But my father's eldest brother was given the same status and perceived as the head of the family. I don't recall a single conversation I may have had with him as a child—it was unthinkable to approach a family elder without reason or formal permission. And yet, his word was law. Very little was done without his sanction. The question of disregarding his diktats did not arise. My strong-willed father would behave like a nervous schoolboy in the presence of his brother, unnerving us all by his 360° switcheroo! We didn't know this docile man!

  But we knew what that reverence towards ‘Anna’ and ‘Tatya’ (his brothers), denoted. Whatever reservations my mother harboured about these relationships were never discussed. There was a tacit understanding between my parents that excluded dissent when it came to respecting the strict hierarchies that were scrupulously adhered to, within extended families.