by Shobhaa De
For two days of pure agony I grappled with how I was going to get my parents’ permission. Finally, I decided to tackle Mother when she was alone in the kitchen. “I’ve got this chance to go to Delhi for two days,” I started off.
“It’s not possible to go to Delhi for two days. It takes that much time in the train,” she said without looking up from the puris she was frying.
“I’ll be flying.”
“Who is taking you—that woman?”
“Yes. They want us to take the show we did to Delhi.”
“Who is they?”
“Some jeweler.”
“Father will not hear of it.”
“Please Ma, why don’t you tell him to let me go. I’m not a kid anymore. All the other girls in my class are allowed to go wherever they want. Why can’t both of you trust me?”
“What about your college?”
“I have midterm holidays at that time.”
“I will see Father’s mood and then decide.” I hugged her with joy and went off to the room I shared with my sisters. “I heard you talking to Mother,” the older one said.
“So what?”
“So, now you want to go to Delhi and God knows where else with that woman. Do you know what people think of model-girls? They are no better than prostitutes.”
“So?”
“Everybody will think you are a prostitute.”
“So?”
“Don’t you feel ashamed?”
“No.”
“You’ll ruin your whole life . . . your future. No decent man will marry you.”
“I don’t want to marry a decent man. He’ll probably bore me to death.”
“In any case, Baba won’t let you go.”
“We’ll see.” Several years later she would display a maturity and grace that I would be grateful for but for now I hated her.
Mother brought up the topic after dinner. Father was listening to a speech on the Five Year Plan on Vividh Bharati.
“Ssh! Don’t disturb me. It’s an important topic,” he said sharply as Mother began. She shut up promptly. An hour later I was called to their room. (We sisters only went there if we were summoned, never on our own.) I stood at the foot of their bed. He said crossly, “What is this I hear about Delhi? Our girls don’t go to other cities with strangers. Anything can happen. We don’t know these people. Who are they? What if they are racketeers? Do you know their background? Who are the other girls? Are they from good families? Are they Hindus? Brahmins? No—I am sure not. It is not done in our community. This profession is not for us. It is for others—loose charactered people.” I looked down at the floor, sullenly.
“Well, what have you to say? Speak up.”
“I’m not doing this as a profession. It is only a hobby.”
“What sort of a hobby is this? I’ve not come across such a hobby before. In our time girls learned how to cook, knit, crochet, embroider, make rangoli. We called such activities hobbies.Yes, a few girls these days collect stamps or learn drawing. But what you are doing is not a hobby.”
“I enjoy it and I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“That is what you think. Once parents allow girls to slip out of their control then everything goes wrong. We don’t want that to happen to you.”
“I won’t do anything to disgrace you,” I said meekly though inwardly I raged.
Abruptly he seemed to arrive at a decision. “I will let you know my decision tomorrow, it will be better if you don’t go.Your mother and I feel ashamed of all this.”
Once again I repeated tonelessly, “I will behave myself. It’s only for two days.”
I still don’t know what made him agree to my going. Perhaps it was just a sense of weary resignation. Mother conveyed his decision to me over breakfast. Before she could finish her sentence, I was on the phone to Anjali. “I can come! Father said yes.” She seemed delighted too. “I’ll make your reservations,” she said and rang off.
All the way to the airport in Anjali’s car I mentally scanned the events I hoped would occur in the next few days. Totally preoccupied, even the vast gulf in appearance between Anjali and me didn’t depress me. She was dressed in her smart “travel outfit” and even at that early hour everything was perfectly in place—hair, makeup, nails, scarf, sunglasses.There may have been bags under her eyes, but I didn’t notice them.The other girls looked like scruffy strays picked up from the street. They were all uniformly dressed in sloppy jeans and T-shirts. Some of them looked like they hadn’t brushed their teeth or run a comb through their hair. “All professional models look like this during their off hours,” Anjali said when I commented on their appearance. I was wearing my best salwar kameez. I’d barely slept the previous night. Neither had my sisters. We’d set the alarm, booked a wake-up call and told the milkman to deliver our bottles earlier than usual. “Don’t leave the house without tea,” Mother had warned. I’d packed a brand-new bag that I’d bought for myself from Crawford Market. It was less awful than the ones we had at home, but it was far from good. As it happened, it fell apart on the flight itself, and when we were waiting to collect our luggage at Delhi airport, mine arrived in bits and pieces, with all my stuff hanging out of the broken bag.
That was, surprisingly, the only awful experience that first trip held for me and it did no end of good for my ego. But as with most matters of the psyche it was an illusory high as I discovered when, soon after we had returned to Bombay, Anjali visited my home for the first time. She arrived without warning and I was mortified the moment she walked in. “I wondered if you would be free to go shopping,” she announced as she trailed in after my second sister who had let her in, but I just gaped at her in shame and anguish for I knew what she was looking at, things I had lived with and been ashamed of most of my life: the rexine sofas, the distempered walls, the files lying all over the house, the cheap plastic tray and tea cups, the little brass Buddha and the disproportionately large Qutub Minar on the mantelpiece, the embroidered tablecloth and the curtains without pelmets. And that wasn’t all: I was, sadly, ashamed of my family and finally ashamed of myself—“caught” in a shabby “house frock” with oil in my hair and chipped polish on my toes. Worse, none of my family wanted to meet her, even my second sister slipping away after announcing her. Anjali sat on one of the rexine sofas, looking slightly uncomfortable but in no hurry to leave. I wanted to push her out, tell her not to humiliate me like this. Instead, I started to mimic Si—not deliberately, but out of nervousness. My voice changed and became high-pitched, and I pretended to be very casual and light. “Have a drink,” I rashly offered when I knew perfectly well we didn’t keep anything more than Rex orange squash in the house. “What about some fresh lime soda?” I said, again knowing there was no soda around. Fortunately Anjali spared me further embarrassment by saying she’d just had a lassi and wasn’t thirsty. Even as she quietly surveyed her surroundings in a curiously masochistic way I hoped she would be disgusted with my middle classness and decide to stop seeing me. It was a ridiculous relationship to begin with.While I had wondered what Si and she had in common, I should have first asked myself what on earth we had in common. At that moment I would have been genuinely relieved if the relationship had ended. Nothing of the kind happened for while I hesitated Anjali took charge of the proceedings. “Why don’t you change. We’ve got to go right now if we are to get to the shop before it shuts.”
I ran in to tell Mother I was going out. I saw disapproval written all over her face. “She’s not beautiful at all . . . and she’s wearing a horrible sari,” she hissed. My sisters were standing on the balcony staring at her car. “Is that really hers?You mean she takes you around in that?”
While changing I asked them, “Did you see her? Isn’t she lovely? Mother thinks she’s awful.”
“Mother would,” said my second sister, and I loved her for it.
The first time was the worst. Anjali visited intermittently in the years that followed and each subsequent visit dulled the embarrassment
I felt. And then I discovered, though this was much later, that Anjali’s background wasn’t all that different from my own. After that the gulf between us decreased rapidly and I became more equal in the relationship.
Anjali’s father was a doctor—a general practitioner. She had grown up modestly in a small apartment located in one of the less posh localities of Bombay—central enough and in the heart of town, but far from plush. Laburnum Road in those days was a tree-lined, quiet avenue full of Gujarati professionals. The houses there had “character” but were certainly not opulent. Anjali had gone to the nearby New Era School, which was not a convent, or even an English medium school. This was why her accent was so strange and this explained also her occasional grammatical lapses when she spoke English. I suppose I would have cottoned on to her background much earlier if only I hadn’t been so dazzled by her manner. I must say here I’m not trying to denigrate Anjali; on the contrary I can only give her the most fulsome praise for achieving what ninety percent of India’s middle class spend two-thirds of their lives trying to achieve—the step up to the glories of the rich and famous. It is interesting, this business of being part of the Indian middle class and the pulls and strains it inevitably sets up. I doubt I’d have done the things I felt compelled to do if we hadn’t been so middle class. Luxury, for instance, was a dirty word in our house, while Education, with a capital E, of course, was one of the great gods. Like in clichéd Hindi films, the world of the rich and privileged was synonymous with the Evil Empire (oh, the hypocrisy of it all).We were trained to regard everything that wasn’t “basic” and “essential” as frivolous and wasteful.The key word was austerity. Discipline and denial were the highest prized virtues. Children didn’t drink tea, coffee or aerated waters. (Unfortunately, at our place, “children” we remained till the day we married or left home—whichever was sooner. My aversion for milk was understandable—milk was tyranny.)
My parents were not overly religious, but festivals were considered sacred. We couldn’t skip any of the rituals—not even in the middle of our exams. Diwali remained the high point of our young lives. But other “minor” religious occasions were important too. How I hated the month of Shravan. It meant bland, “fasting food” on all Mondays, and vegetarian food for the rest of the week. This was torture. Not that we ate meat and fish every day, but Sundays were associated with a spicy mutton curry rich in coconut gravy. To be denied even this pleasure was too much. I cheated. Obliging non-Hindu friends at school cheerfully let me raid their lunch boxes. Only Mother knew but she pretended she didn’t.
Our “outings” were strictly en famille. Father decided and we followed. If he was feeling particularly outgoing, we’d make it to the beach, where we children would sit in a huddle, close to our parents, sipping coconut water and staring (slyly) at the boys. Cinemas were out and so was film music.We woke up to the sounds of AIR bhajans. Mother was allowed to tune in to her favorite Lok Geet program of songs from popular “dramas,” but that was only during the hours Father was away at work. I longed to listen to the Binaca Hit Parade broadcast by Radio Ceylon but I had to satisfy myself by hoping the neighbors would turn their set up or that Father would choose that time to go for his bath. “Love me tender, love me sweet, never let me go,” Elvis Presley would croon and I would go weak in the knees and kiss the World War Two radio over the bookcase.
It was quite a while before the family acquired a transistor. The little box with no wires was like a mini-miracle. The servant was sternly told not to touch it. “Don’t even dust it,” instructed Mother. “I will do it myself.” It became Father’s exclusive toy with limited access granted to Mother. Her biggest thrill was when she triumphantly took it with her into the bathroom and locked herself in.The transistor lost its glamor when we acquired a record changer. It was installed in one corner of the living room with a laminated box of its very own. The small record collection was handled possessively by Mother who kept the keys to the cabinet with her other “important” bunch. The time for listening to music was also strictly rationed and entirely at our parents’ whim. But, for us, the great achievement lay in the fact of the instrument’s ownership. It existed. And because of it, in more ways than one, so did we. And of course like the great majority of the middle class in “service” we had “quarters.” I forget which class ours were. It was quite complicated to figure that one out each time we moved to bigger premises (with or without servants’ quarters) for, to me, all the flats looked depressingly the same. Blue whitewashed walls in the drawing room and bilious green for every other room. The furniture, too, remained virtually identical: numbered government furniture on monthly hire. Our first refrigerator, toaster, geyser, automatic iron, car and television—all these firsts were events that generated tremendous excitement. Especially the car. We spent the first week worshipping it. Literally. Priests were hired, garlands bought, coconuts broken and incense burned, as we propiated the Gods to bless our gray Landmaster. When we finally sat in it, I thought I was Princess Margaret at marriage to Lord Snowdon.
It was this background that made me understand Anjali’s basic insecurity and allowed me to put up with her “excesses” once I got to know her better. I remember one of my early trips with her to Bhavnagar to shoot some fashion photographs. We stayed with a friend of Anjali’s, a Gujarati heiress who went under the peculiar nickname of Jinx. Bhavnagar was an unlikely setting for Jinx.
She spoke better French than her native Gujarati (having been brought up by a succession of English nannies and then finished in an exclusive Swiss school), was a Cordon Bleu cook (stuck with a shudh vegetarian kitchen), an accomplished horsewoman and frustrated writer. But what she did best was devour men for whom she had an insatiable appetite. Most of the Indian men she went after were terrified of her for she was far too sophisticated and liberated for them to handle. Jinx came on strong and she liked to call the shots. Even sexually, she was the aggressor. Besides, the local men found her ugly (which she wasn’t). She had feral looks—catlike, amber eyes, a full mouth and dusky skin. She didn’t have a great figure, but she used to giggle so that her “juicy ass” really turned the European guys on. Jinx had one other kink, which I discovered on our first night at the farm. She liked to dress in drag. “Let’s all dress up,” she announced; “let’s make an occasion out of it.” I’m not sure for whose benefit she was staging all this. Maybe she had set her cap on the photographer—a scrawny Belgian with bad breath whom Anjali had dug up from somewhere. (What Jinx didn’t know was that the Belgie had already been bagged mentally by Anjali.)
Anyhow, when dinner time came around, there was Jinx all rigged out in a dj. She stood dramatically at the door of the vast dining room, holding a fat Havana aloft, and asked how she looked.
“Like someone in drag,” said Anjali cattily.Then we noticed Jinx’s spats and cane. “Come on, Jinx—what’s all this?” Anjali asked.
“It’s for you, my darling,” said Jinx airily and went off to open the champagne. The Belgie looked bewildered. He’d come to India in search of the exotic. He’d expected veiled women with lotus eyes and small feet. Not spats and cigars. Undeterred by his reaction, both the women put on quite a show for him. It was a terrifically entertaining evening for me as I watched the crosscurrents and stayed out of the firing line. Jinx suggested Dumb Charades—which she was wonderful at. An attempt was made—a miserable one and promptly abandoned after Anjali stumbled over the spelling of Hercules. Dinner turned out to be an elaborate affair. “Traditional Bhavnagari hospitality, darlings,” said Jinx as gleaming silver thalis laden with rich food were produced by a small army of servants. Oil diyas lit the room instead of candles and in place of a formal flower arrangement on the table there were fragrant rose petals floating in brass containers. Everybody was high. That is, everybody but me. I was still being the good girl.