by Shobhaa De
Soon he discovered a major hitch—I couldn’t tango. He turned to me seriously and said, “You, my dear, have to look for just three things in your search for the perfect man. He must tango. He must fence and he must drive a burgundy-colored Lamborghini.” And those were his last words to me. He died shortly after resettling in Coonoor. I think he must have died of boredom.
CHAPTER 6
BOREDOM. ONE DAY ANJALI TOLD ME THAT SHE HAD LOST INTEREST in diamonds and I knew she was dead. “Are you ill,” I asked her agitatedly. “How can you say no to diamonds?” She answered in a small voice, “What’s a solitaire without a man?” I knew this had to be serious. “Let’s talk about it,” I suggested.
And so we met three days later at the Willingdon Club.The place was like a lush green morgue, and the few old Parsee dowagers collapsed in the cavernous chairs on the balcony looked like corpses with blue-tinted hair. Anjali’s divorce would be final in a month or two. Mimi, her daughter, had come to terms with it in her own way. She was sucking her thumb (“but only at night”), apart from that there weren’t visible signs of a breakdown. “What are you planning to do with her?” I asked Anjali.
“I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll send her to California.”
“Why California?”
“Oh, I don’t know. She could do some courses or something there. The weather’s nice and the boys are well-built. Poor thing, maybe she’ll feel funny for a bit—you know, our Mimi doesn’t have any boobs. But I can always get her father to fix that. Let him at least pay for a new pair of tits for his darling daughter.”
“And what about you?”
“What’s wrong with my tits?” she snapped indignantly.
“I wasn’t thinking of them at all. I was talking about the rest of your life . . . or isn’t it as important?”
She didn’t get the sarcasm—or pretended not to. “Oh, my life? It’s OK.”
“You mean you’ve found a man?” I said, thinking to myself that this was amazing—in the three days between the time she had talked to me and now she’d found someone! Her voice brought me back to her. “Yes, there is a man. But I don’t think he’s the right one.”
“You mean, he isn’t marriage material?” I said.
“Something like that.”
“Married?”
“Yes. But that’s no big deal.”
“Kids?”
“Yes. But that’s irrelevant.”
“Then what?”
“He’s a government biggie.”
Heavens! I couldn’t imagine Anjali being a government official’s wife. “What on earth are you doing with a salaried man, Anjali? You probably spend in one afternoon what the poor man takes three months to earn!You’re right—he definitely isn’t husband material—not for you.”
“But I love him,” she sulked.
“So what. You’ve ‘loved’ so many before him. What makes this one so special?”
“He makes me feel special. He loves my nails.”
God! “So do I, but that doesn’t mean I want to marry you. Besides flipping for your nails—do you have anything else going for the two of you?”
“He appreciates my qualities. He values my opinions. He listens when I talk. He doesn’t laugh at me.”
All that sounded fine. But the picture still remained fuzzy. “Where did you meet this fellow? Have you slept with him?”
“You’re awful.You don’t have any romance in you.You just want to spoil everything by asking crude questions . . . But to answer your nosiness—yes, I have slept with him. It was wonderful. I felt the earth move. Just like in those books. For the first time, I felt something.”
“Oh?” I said cattily. “Has the ‘Big O’ finally happened?”
“You know, you have become quite a bitch. And I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. He’s different. He’s not like all the others.”
“But that’s what you say every time. I’ve heard it on at least twenty previous occasions. The new twist this time is that bit about the nails.”
“You wouldn’t understand something as beautiful and simple as that.You see, he has never seen polished, manicured, long fingernails before. I mean—he may have seen them on actresses in movies, but not on a real woman. He’s never touched painted nails before. He is like a child when he holds my hands. He gets so fascinated by them. He can’t stop touching them.”
“How sweet,” I commented. “And where do you go for these fingering sessions?”
She glared at me. “Listen. I don’t need any of this. Why are you being so bloody hostile? Jealous?”
“Of what?Your nails or your government clerk?” I asked archly.
“He is not a clerk. He is a high income tax official. In fact, that’s how we met. Abe had him over to the house to settle some problems. Nothing happened for months. And then we met again at Guddi’s party. I don’t know what it was—maybe the sea air, you know she has this lovely house on the beach at Juhu. We spent the evening together . . . just chatting. And then he said, ‘Excuse me, but may I touch your nails? I have never seen such beautiful nails before.’”
“Where was his wife?” I asked immediately. “Oh—somewhere fiddling with her sari, I suppose.” And then she was off again. “He has never known someone like me. He thinks I’m so exotic and unreachable. He took me to tea once. We went to Malabar Hill—you know the Naaz Café there? Stop grinning, idiot. I know what you’re thinking—imagine lah-di-dah Anjali eating oily pakoras in that joint. But that didn’t matter. He was so thrilled to be seen with someone like me. He kept saying, ‘Everybody is staring at you.’”
I shut off my smile and told Anjali exactly how I felt the whole thing would end.
“Money isn’t everything,” she said without much conviction in her voice. “It hasn’t brought me any happiness.”
“But it sure has cushioned your sorrow,” I reminded her. I told her to forget the income tax officer and look for someone else.
“But who? There’s no one on the scene.”
“Someone rich and available.”
“You’re crazy darling. Do you think I wouldn’t have grabbed him if he existed?” She had a point. I promised to keep my eyes peeled for such a person. And if I found him to deliver him to her at once.
“Why would you do that for me, darling? Wouldn’t you want to keep him for yourself?” she asked disinterestedly.
“Not really. It’s unlikely that I’d find a man who could tango, fence and own a Lamborghini.” She looked at me as if I was crazy and turned away.
After the Willingdon Club meeting I didn’t see her for a few weeks, though we had a few phone conversations. Truth to tell, her husband-hunting was getting on my nerves. All our talks revolved around her mate stalking. Once on the phone half jokingly I suggested a diversion to her. “Why don’t you learn French?” I said. “After all, you do love Paris, you go there often, you’ve said French is a beautiful language—and the whole thing might be fun.” I was amazed when she took this seriously. Next thing I knew she’d enrolled herself at the Alliance Française. She called excitedly, “I’ve joined the beginner’s course. You were right, it’s great fun. Of course, all the others are kids, but that hardly matters. At least I know what I’ll be doing three times a week.” As an afterthought she said dismissively, “It’s all over with the income-taxwallah.” “Why, what happened?” I said, mentally preparing myself for a half-hour running down of the poor sod. Shows how well I knew her, for that’s what happened. “He was getting too possessive,” she began. “Imagine telling me how to dress! I mean it’s a bit silly at my age to be told by this man not to wear sexy cholis! I’ve always worn knotted-up cholis and always worn chiffon saris. In any case, I don’t have great big knockers pouring out of them—so what’s his problem? He kept saying, ‘Men stare at you.’ Of course they do. I’d die if they didn’t. Initially I found this jealousy business sweet and touching but then it started to crawl up my nerves. Stare at me, indeed! Once he actually instructed me to pull the pall
av over my shoulder. What nonsense! I refused to do it and asked him if he nagged his wife in the same way. Immediately he said, ‘I don’t have to tell her about such things. My wife is a decent woman who dresses decently. She is not one of you society ladies to show her body to the world.’ That did it. I told him to go right back to his decent wife and behave like a decent husband himself. And guess what. He promptly went and knocked her up. I hear she’s pregnant! Good for them.” That closed another little chapter in Anjali’s life.
The new one began a month after she had begun taking French lessons. “You’ve got to meet Pierre—he is très terrific.” I felt weary just listening. I was positive this new number was one of the teachers at the Alliance—but I had to hear it all from her—the unabridged version. I could almost see her flushing over the phone. Pierre, apparently, was the heartthrob of all the teen elements in the classes. He was young, dashing and debonair. Or so she insisted. She thought he was cute but not her type. Then, one day as she was waiting for her car to drive up after a class, she had found him next to her. “A coffee, madame?” he had asked. She had thought quickly: it was a toss-up between the charming Pierre’s invitation and an appointment with her manicurist. This was one round her precious nails lost. On the spur of the moment, she’d agreed. And off they went to the Trattoria, the Italian coffee shop at the President Hotel. As soon as they walked in, the manager had come rushing up to her. “Good afternoon ma’am. Seeing you here after a long time. How have you been? Good to have you back with us.” The standard treatment she was so accustomed to. Pierre had looked more amused than impressed.
Barely had they settled down, than he had looked at her, placed his fingers lightly over her hand and said, “I want to make love to you.”
Recalling the moment, she said, “I was so taken aback. I thought I hadn’t heard right. So, I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’”
Slowly and seriously he had repeated it again.
“You must be crazy. I don’t even know you,” she’d said.
“I know. But I had to tell you. I think it is more honest that way.”
A long silence apparently ensued after which she asked him whether he knew she was a married woman, much older and really not one of those sleep-around types.
“Yes, yes, yes. I know everything. But I don’t want to go on seeing you, wanting you, inviting you to coffee and pretending there’s nothing more. If you are not interested in making love, then tell me so right now, and we’ll never meet again.” So she had said she wasn’t interested.
“You are saying you don’t want to make love to me?” Pierre had asked.
“No. I don’t want to,” she’d replied. “OK, let’s go then. No point sitting here sipping coffee and making small talk.” If that was a carefully thought-out strategy on his part it had worked wonderfully. They had got up in a huff and left the restaurant. “Tell your driver to follow us. I’ll reach you to your home,” Pierre had insisted. And so they had driven back in his Peugeot in a cold, sullen silence. She had sat clutching her bejeweled hands in her lap and staring at the road through enormous Dior sunglasses while he had concentrated on driving.When they arrived in the driveway of her apartment, he had reached out tenderly and stroked her face with one light touch. “It doesn’t matter. I still want to see you.” Then he’d taken her clenched hands in his, kissed both of them and said, “Your polish has chipped. You need a manicure!”
Which was how Anjali discovered love—French style. “This is the experience I’ve been waiting for,” she’d trill throatily. “This is what romance is all about. Pierre is the most romantic man I’ve ever met. I’ve found a new life, a new world with him. It is so beautiful to be in love, perhaps for the first time.” I’d bring her down to earth by asking—“Marriage?” “Oh must you spoil everything with your ‘practical’ questions. What’s marriage? I’ve discovered something far more important—love,” she would say. God! Now where had I heard that one before. For months after she met her Frenchie I had to endure her mooning on about love. One afternoon I reluctantly agreed to have tea with her at the Sea Lounge. Soon after the waiter had taken our orders, she plunged right in. “I’ve started writing poems,” she said.
“In French?” I asked bitchily.
“If you’re going to be nasty, I won’t tell you anything,” she pouted.
“Don’t,” I hastily told her. “I’m beginning to feel pretty sick.” The rest of that evening she criticized me for being judgmental and harsh and not treating her great love with the respect she thought it deserved. Perhaps. Though after I met Pierre, I must say, I changed my attitude. He wasn’t the European rake I’d expected him to be. And he seemed sincerely involved with Anjali. In fact, if there was a conversion process going on, it was he who was fast becoming Indianized. Anjali had decided to unveil India for him. And I found this side of her very sweet. She was like a mother hen, a sexy one, and Pierre was firmly under her wing. Apart from the kurta pajamas he began wearing while going out with her to various Indian music concerts and Gujarati (Yes!) plays, he’d adapted on a deeper level. She too had changed, softened, and Pierre suited her. “He makes me feel worthy,” she once said. “I don’t feel like a fool. He listens to my comments and he truly appreciates me.” That was pretty evident and I felt happy for her. She seemed less self-obsessed and more giving. Maybe he had managed to tap something within her that even she had never known existed.
“He touches my soul,” she declared dramatically once, after a short, experimental vacation she took with him.
“How did everybody react to you?” I asked her. “Didn’t you feel self-conscious traveling with a foreigner?”
“I’m beyond caring, darling. People stared and gawked.They may have thought I’d picked up some gigolo-hippie from the roadside. But it didn’t matter. I learned so much from him on the trip. It’s one thing meeting in a Bombay flat on the sly and another when you share a room and wake up together.”
Perhaps this was for real, but knowing Anjali (as I’m sure she herself did) this was a doomed affair. Pierre was a divorcé so there weren’t major complications in his life. But Anjali was not prepared for a long-term commitment to him. And, as always, the decision was based on material considerations. By now, she was too set in her ways. Slumming was fun so long as it was an adventure. And the thing began to fall apart from the time she took a trip with him to Agra. He was unwilling to let her foot the bill at the five-star hotel there. He wanted to do it his way on his money and she went along. It turned out to be a far from exciting experience.They finally ended up in some seedy place without air-conditioning. This in the middle of May! The bathroom was at some distance from their poky little room, and the toilet was an Indian-style sandaas. “I took tablets to constipate myself,” Anjali recalled. “It was so traumatic seeing that horrible thing. I refused to even pee into it.”
“What about Pierre?”
“Oh, my dear, he has become such a dehati, he didn’t mind it at all.”The food had proved inedible and bat-sized mosquitoes had kept them awake all night. “I’d spray the room with L’Air du Temps five times a day—but still the smell of urine would remain. I felt sick with the heat. Sick with the smell. Sick with the awful food. Imagine asking for tea in the morning and the damn thing arriving on a filthy, battered aluminum tray, with the sugar in a chipped saucer garnished with a dead fly.” Poor Anjali. Romance, however feverish, was clearly not compensation enough. “I was so conscious of the noise and dirt that I didn’t even feel like sex,” she continued. “Even the thought of it was sickening. Where would I wash later? There were no hand towels, no Kleenex tissues, not even toilet paper.The bathroom was one mile off and the bedsheets were full of old semen stains. Ugh! I thought I’d pick up some bug and die there.” Immediately, I remembered her finickiness. And recalled the first bidet I’d ever seen in my life, in her bathroom. I’d come out after a wash and asked her, “What’s that in the corner? Is it a wash-basin for Mimi?” She’d stared incredulously at me. “You mean you�
�ve never seen a bidet before?” After explaining its function to me, she’d giggled coyly, “And I use it after sex . . . you know to wash up and feel clean. I hate that sticky, drippy feeling.” And here was this fussy woman in Agra, with nothing more than her Swiss lace hankies to wipe herself with. It was almost funny.
But I was more than glad she’d gone with Pierre on the trip because it had given her a vivid idea of what life with him would be all about if they were to get married. Pierre didn’t pretend to be anything other than a lowly teacher. He was not a man with a special mission—he was just plain lazy and unambitious. Money was not important to him. The little he had was spent on books. Kokil’s, the rare books place, was where he’d hang around for hours on a free Saturday, looking through musty volumes, digging for a bargain. Books and music were his passions. Besides cooking.
I suppose the high point at this stage in her life was the time she had, as she put it, the first “color-coordinated meal” in her life. She had to tell me about it, “Pierre decided to cook a ‘green lunch’—everything was green, starting with the tablecloth and napkins. We had fish with green sauce, followed by green (mint) dessert and crème de menthe on crushed ice later.”
“Didn’t you puke?”
“No darling. I’d done my green number, too. I’d worn a green sari with my favorite emeralds!”
Before I draw the inevitable veil over this hiccup in Anjali’s love-life I must say that the one thing she was uncharacteristically reticent about was her sex life with Pierre. Once I took her up on this—“Is your Frenchie all that the great French lover is cracked up to be? Does he do it differently?”