Superstar India

by Shobhaa De

  Hi-speed elevators, touch buttons for everything, curtains operated by a feather-light switchboard, central air-conditioning, piped music—it sounds far better than it actually is, when you start living in these still, fetid air boxes, telling yourself ‘Wow! I could be in Manhattan…’

  The only useful change that has directly impacted urban living is the frenzied construction of flyovers and underpasses. We are fifty years too late in this enterprise, but we'll get there eventually. As for the ‘tube’ or subway system—well, Kolkatans and Delhi-ites swear by their pride-and-joy—the underground transit systems. Mumbai is still five years away from experiencing that particular delight. But, then, we have our trains (above ground)—on which women get raped, stoned, molested, robbed from time to time. And compartments get burnt or bombed. But we love our trains, almost as much as we love our BEST buses, and yellow-blacks. Mumbai is on an erratic and insane growth curve. Our Municipal ‘Fathers’ (more like ‘Thugs’) have perhaps failed to notice the savagery of a typical Mumbai monsoon. Year after year, our dirty metropolis gets dirtier, with devastating flooding of key arteries, building collapses, choked gutters, overflowing sewers and outbreaks of waterborne diseases. Everybody screams blue murder. Nothing happens. Meanwhile, our CM begs a visiting Chinese prime minister to help convert Mumbai into another Shanghai! Extraordinary? You bet. But such is the level of our shamelessness.

  I don't know when this Shanghai nonsense started or even who the culprit is. But the joke is that Mumbai needs a good, hard scrub more than a ‘Shanghai tan’. It's no use pointing out to our beloved leaders that Mumbai can never ever make the Shanghai cut, mainly because Mumbai is still part of a democracy. As a young Indian businessman commented in a press interview recently, ‘I wanted to put up a factory in Shanghai. I was shown a plot which was crammed with buildings. “This is the place for your factory,” a Chinese official told me. “But it has so many buildings on it—where will my factory come up?” I asked. The official smirked, “Don't worry about those buildings. Once you decide, and sign the contract, we'll pull them all down and give you the plot for the factory.”’ This won't—can't— happen in India. Try telling that to our chief minister.

  Meanwhile, the city continues to reel under one civic crisis after another. The last municipal elections fielded several candidates who'd never seen the inside of a school, and were vegetable vendors, black marketeers, racketeers, gangsters, ex-cons, fishmongers among other job descriptions.These are our city's ‘mamas and papas’. What's the bet the smelliest, largest, most putrid garbage can in the whole world, which goes by the name of ‘Mumbai’, is going to get smellier and dirtier with each passing year? But, why worry? We have Bollywood!

  Indians are Sex Machines

  Oh please—let's just dump that Kamasutra fixation and be honest with ourselves. Indians copulate. So does the rest of the world. Period. Are we great, even good lovers? I seriously doubt that. Do we copulate more than our global counterparts? Possibly. But that's also because we have fewer diversions or, at any rate, that was the case till satellite TV ‘happened’ to us. Sex vs entertainment? That's a no-brainer. Indian are having their most torrid love affair ever— with their TV sets. Nothing is as big a turn-on for us as that flickering image, and of course, the throbbing organ in our hands—the remote control. We can't get enough from over 100-plus TV channels.

  Regardless of what's on the small screen, we stay glued. We are hooked to the background sound of soap stars squabbling, TV commentators arguing and prime-time anchors pontificating. And of course, we wake up to film music, go to bed watching music videos and won't mind dying to the insistent beat of any popular Bollywood hit. Where the hell is the time for sex? If it's a toss-up between watching Bipasha Basu doing an item number about a beedi to a furtive coupling on an uncomfortable bed, with the risk of interruptions by curious neighbours, brawling kids and intrusive in-laws, a micro-second away from a satisfying climax, hey—anyone with any sense would take Bipasha's beedi break any day! Indians have sex. Whether it qualifies as ‘good sex’ or ‘bad sex’ is hard to say, since we continue to be so squeamish about the subject. The surveys so far are hardly representative, with a pathetically modest database. Even so, each time a mass-circulated magazine announces the dramatic results of the latest sex survey, that issue is instantly sold out. We want to know whether other Indians are having more or less sex than we ourselves are—and that's about it.

  What is apparent, however, is the radical shift in attitude, especially with the twenty-somethings. I half suspect this is more for the benefit of market researchers than a reflection of reality. Giggly teenagers these days have taken to being uber ‘cool’ while discussing hitherto forbidden topics like virginity, oral sex, condom use. Are they really as casual and comfortable about experimenting with multiple partners in their lives as they claim? Hard to confirm, but they're certainly talking a lot on the subject. The biggest change has come from women, who've suddenly discovered they have a say in this regard. Traditionally, Indian women were nothing more than receptacles for sperm. They were told (if they were told anything at all!) that men were ‘like that only’. Men needed a ‘release’, or ‘Men are men… put up with it… you'll get used to it… it isn't all that bad… do it, or he'll look for it somewhere else… there are any number of women he could sleep with… you do want children, don't you? Well, then…?’ Nearly every woman I've ever discussed it with says sex is an entirely overrated exercise.

  Are they really as casual and comfortable about experimenting withmultiple partners in their lives as they claim?

  But women also see it in the right perspective. Sex is one of the things in a woman's life, along with food, jewellery, nice sarees and goodness know what else. It is not something they see in isolation—a huge sign on Broadway, up in lights, a gigantic magnet that makes mush of better options—like a good book, music, SLEEP for God's sake! For men, it is often the end-all and be-all of their existence. At least at that precise moment when they ‘want it’. And they always seem to want it—and want it bad!

  And yet, the world has been fooled for centuries—if you ask me, we should keep up the joke, especially all that nonsense contained in the biggest literary con job out of India—Vatsayana's Kamasutra. I remember a rather bizarre conversation I had with the future king of England (that is, if Jug Ears ever makes it to the throne). This was at his Highgrove residence, just a little after Camilla had been officially ‘outed’ but not yet accepted by the palace. It was one of those high-falutin Indian charities Charles is the patron of. I got the feeling he wouldn't have known what exactly he was supposed to be supporting that evening, nor cared less. He walked into the reception area with his standard quizzical expression and did the rounds politely. Assorted Indians, grandly dressed for the royal darshan, attempted strange curtseys and dips, clad in ornate sarees and all-too-tight churidars. I was introduced to him as a ‘famous writer from India’. He looked vaguely interested as he asked (on auto pilot), ‘So… what do you write?’ I answered, somewhat cheekily, ‘Risqué novels… bodice-rippers…’ The jug ears flapped (I swear they did), his eyebrows shot up, a wicked gleam lit up those tired eyes and he stopped long enough to engage in a proper conversation.

  Soon, there was a stir as an unexpected guest decided to join the party. It was Camilla herself. This threw the organizers totally since the seating at the head table had to be redone. While the overdressed ladies rushed around, Camilla joined us and I decided to bring the Kamasutra into the conversation. It was a sly trick and far from subtle. But I gambled it would amuse the man who'd once expressed his deepest desire to be reborn as his lady-love's tampon! With intimacy levels that, errr… deep and intense, the reference to the love treatise was perfect. Sure enough, the two of them exchanged meaningful looks as I suggested the absurdity of some asanas. ‘People should attempt those at their own risk—one could break one's neck… also, even the simplest positions are very hard on the knees.’ Oh God! I'd obviously touched on something
important! The two of them eye-locked and then burst into knowing, prolonged laughter. For me, it was an unforgettable ‘royal moment’. I had visions of them romping around in a gigantic four-poster bed, Camilla wearing frilled knickers (or less), and Charles in just woollen socks, trying out Kamasutra poses and pulling a few middle-aged muscles in the bargain. I wish I had been less honest about those recommended contortions and encouraged them to realize their full sexual potential by going the whole hog! Yet another way of the Empire striking back.

  Sex does not exist

  Unlike the Brits, who discuss sexual matters with such wry humour in regular dinner-table conversation, Indians never allude to sex, even by mistake. In fact, we pretend sex does not exist. Or, if it does, it is for ‘procreational purposes’ only. Never recreational! Sex isn't considered ‘fun’. Someone who's experimental in his/her approach in instantly branded ‘bad’ and dubbed ‘weird’. We insist on a chaste, prudish approach to all matters that are considered sensual and do not encourage casual contact for fear it will trigger off base instincts. And yet, it isn't uncommon to see Indian men walking around un-self-consciously with their arms around each other's waists or shoulders, or their fingers interlocked. Outsiders often believe that sight is an example of how liberal and accepting Indians are about homosexual love! What it actually is, is a displacement or an expression of frustration. Human beings want to touch and be touched. I'm sure most of those men would rather be fondling/embracing females—but they can't… they won't. Not even their wives!

  As a child growing up in Delhi, I would be fascinated by the casual workers who lived in jhuggies next to a construction site near our sprawling government colony. I would be especially interested in trying to figure out how and when these dozens of babies were made, given that there was no space and zero privacy to make them in. At the time, I was ten years old and pretty precocious. I'd try and peek behind the tattered ‘curtains’ guarding the entrance of those improvised dwellings, while the workers took their afternoon siestas during the searing summers. I did manage to catch them ‘at it’, on two or three occasions, but was disappointed when all I could see were the hairy, bared buttocks of the man. The woman's anatomy was completely submerged under yards of ghagra. The act was over in under five minutes, and didn't look pleasurable at all.

  The image has stayed with me, and it came back vividly recently, as my twenty-one-year-old daughter and I drove past a particularly shabby stretch of Mumbai lining the old docks. The homes were made out of corrugated aluminium sheets and discarded packing cases. The total area was no larger than 5 ft x 5 ft. Most of life was being lived on the filthy road outside these hovels. And there, beside the rickety charpoys, one could see entire families carrying on with their routines—kids bathing in gutter water, women cooking on wood fires in dented aluminium vessels, men in torn lungis, smoking beedies and staring listlessly around them. Right next to this scene of urban decay were garishly painted sex-workers, also operating from the very same boxes, made out of crates and sheets. A lot of them were clearly men in drag, wearing mermaid skirts and brief cholis, stuffed with cotton wool. They sat on the edge of the pavement with their skirts pulled up to their knees, legs parted, cigarettes dangling from their wide-boned wrists. Their clientele were inter-state truck drivers, who'd stop briefly, duck into the box and emerge minutes later, after, perhaps, a hasty but efficient blow job. I looked at Arundhati to see her expression. It was sad and pained. She'd averted her eyes and switched off. Later, she asked me how and where those charpoy couples made love… and made all those babies. I didn't want to tell her, ‘exactly in the same time the sex-worker satisfied the trucker’. It was such an ugly truth to reveal to one so young.

  The same night, driving back from an event, we passed Mumbai's notorious pavement residents—rows upon rows of men and women who occupy designated spots along the pavement and sleep soundly through everything. Here, they don't even have packing-case hovel, to protect their privacy. And yet, they manage to have sex and produce children. When? How? Why?

  *

  There is a general belief that India is in the throes of a sexual revolution. And that young Indians are experimenting like never before. I wonder how much of that is really true. One thing, however, that cannot be disputed is that women have finally discovered autonomy over their own bodies. Especially young urban women, who seem to be very active sexually. Far more so than my generation, and far more openly so than the in-between generation. Talking to liberal, articulate girls into their second decades, it's easy to believe that they are totally relaxed about their sexuality. But are they really? Or is it just a Delhi/Mumbai niche phenomenon that one uses to make a bigger statement about the country's attitude?

  When I was at college in Mumbai (St Xavier's) in the '70s, it was the West that was in the throes of a sexual revolution. We were foolish enough back then to mimic our daring counterparts in Europe, England and America, by staging flower-power ‘Love Fests’, but when it came to pushing the sexual envelope, not many people were that bold. Or else, we wouldn't have raised our eyebrows at the ‘shocking’ behaviour of a Parveen Babi or a Protima Bedi (the voluptuous Odissi dancer and ‘official’ flower-child who staged a ‘streaking’ photo op) when they boasted openly about their bohemian/hippie lifestyles and exhibited their latest lovers without the slightest self-consciousness. Multiple partners? Oh… only bad girls had those. And they ended up badly, too. Good girls ‘fooled around’, but just a little. They bagged ‘good’ husbands who valued their chastity, and lived happily ever after.

  How much have things really changed? Even a casual viewing of popular soap operas reveals the desired attributes of ‘traditional’ Indian women. Matrimonial ads continue to specify the virginal requirements of brides. And even an iconic movie star like Amitabh Bachchan is not embarrassed to state he approves of actress Aishwarya Rai (his daughter-in-law) because she is ‘homely and domesticated’ (read: not a sexual adventuress). While young Indian men have relaxed the double standards a little, when it comes to choosing a partner they still reserve their respect for the ‘well-brought-up’ girl (read: conservative and untouched). Words like ‘slut’, ‘whore’, ‘pimpette’, ‘bitch’ continue to be hurled at any woman who society believes sleeps around or indulges in sexual escapades. Men? Oh, they have an entirely separate set of rules. ‘Mard toh mard hai,’ everybody agrees.

  And yet, with the ghastly, gruesome Nithari murders of 2007, involving a public school-educated businessman, his psychotic servant and their victims (sexually abused, brutally murdered children), India is reluctantly waking up to a certain sickness, its hypocrisies, its submerged violence. The discovery of discarded skulls and bones of defenceless kids, lured into this House of Maniacs, has forced Indians to confront horrible realities.

  The question that arises is: were we always like this? Or is this something new—a ghastly imported virus that is infecting our society? We'd like to believe this kind of aberrant behaviour is not inherent to us, because we are so peace-loving and puritanical. An absurd assumption, given the convoluted stories evident in our mythology and folk tales. The thing is, Indians deep down believe sex is ‘dirty’. It is referred to as ‘gandi baat’. Nobody wants to discuss the subject in an open, natural way. There is far too much guilt involved. And too much revulsion, too. Bodily fluids are considered distasteful—which could explain why kissing itself is thought of by many as being ‘un-Indian’. Adults plant chummas on children. And there it ends. No wonder kissing on screen is still seen as a big issue, worthy of extensive media attention. Small-time actor Emran Hashmi's sole claim to fame is his feat of filming a record number of kisses! No reference to Hashmi is complete without a nod to his kissing expertise. Not so long ago, a couple in Chennai caught kissing on camera at a popular night-club found themselves in a great deal of trouble after making national headlines for their ‘boldness’. It was after this silly exposé that the local authorities clamped down on couples cuddling in public places.

 
We're the best

  But since India is at present in the ‘We're the best’, ‘We're the greatest’ mood, everyone is including the Great Indian Lover in the ‘Best’ of the world category. How absurd. Maybe, several centuries ago, perhaps during the Golden Ages of the Guptas, Mauryas and other exalted dynasties, people in the Indo-Gangetic plain were really and truly sexually evolved. Sculpture, frescoes, paintings, erotic poems… everything that is pre-Mughal, pre-British, indicates a society that enjoyed life, enjoyed food, wine and love-making. But that was ages ago. The story is pretty depressing now, and don't believe a word of what those insanely over-the-top women's mags tell you. In fact, the crazy thing about the so-called Sexual Revolution raging in the country (more inside our stupid heads!) is the total disconnect between everyday realities and what the tabloids suggest in their weekly ‘Test Your Love Quotient’ quizzes.

  Yes, there are more lingerie stores in the malls than shoe boutiques, but I wonder which Indian woman goes to bed wearing a blood-red thong with dyed chicken feathers over her pubis? There are provocative ads with teaser lines (‘going down was never better’), and cheesy male models in tight underwear with lipstick marks all over their chests, but all this seems ludicrous when compared to the daily urban grind that leaves no time for such nonsense. ‘Making out in the bathroom is the new sex mantra,’ a breathless teen mag tells its nubile readers. Oh yeah? How does anyone make out in those slippery, wet, unattractive hellholes that leak and smell? How many Indian bathrooms come with shower stalls and jacuzzis? Mainstream magazines feature semi-naked models romping around on luxe satin sheets, proclaiming their sexual charge via explicit advice (‘Tongue-in-the-navel—ooh… and behind the knees… aaah’). What sort of person is having this kind of sex? Working women come home looking grim and/or fierce. It needs a really motivated/horny fellow to want to tackle this creature. Working men, after hours of commute time, get home with smelly armpits and a breath as foul as their mood. Foreplay? Sex? You must be kidding. Dal-chawal, hot parathas, a bit of Nach Baliye and a familiar bed to snore in, is closer to the truth. But we dare not admit it.