The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  ‘Anyway, I’ll send the boat to pick you up,’ she continues nonchalantly. ‘Just walk out of the Taj Mahal hotel and down the steps to the jetty.’

  Shobha Dé is not only difficult to place, she requires a leap of the imagination to believe. To be ferried across the waters of a tropical bay to interview the glamorous lady-writer in her country estate: Haven’t I read this somewhere before?, you wonder.

  Millions of Indians certainly think so, and they don’t like it. For India, once the land of the Kama Sutra, is now one of the world’s most buttoned-up and prudish places. Despite a dazzling variety of Sanskrit terms for every shade of sexual arousal, no modern Indian language has a word for orgasm. Although the possibilities of sex have never been so exhaustively catalogued as in the Hindu shastras (where every conceivable type and variety of conjunction is described and analysed – upside down, as a team sport, conjoined with every animal in the bestiary), India has for thirty years resisted the onslaught of the sexual revolution which swept much of the rest of the world in the sixties.

  In the 1990s the subcontinent is the last bastion of the chaperoned virgin, the double-locked bedroom and the arranged marriage. A sex scene in a traditional Indian film consists of the camera panning away from a converging couple and coming to rest on a bee pollinating a flower, or a violently shaking bush. The result is sexual repression on a massive scale, with hundreds of millions of Indians having no outlet for their erotic tensions. As the writer Khushwant Singh has noted, ‘Nine tenths of the violence and unhappiness in this country derives from sexual repression.’

  While all this may be very frustrating for hundreds of millions of young Indians, it provides Ms Dé with considerable opportunities. She has built her fortune on the stress lines of the frustrated Indian libido. It’s not just that her books are cheaper than imported romances, and easier to find than banned foreign pornography. Dé realised early on that it did not take much effort to outrage an Indian audience; even the vague hint of a falling sari can register a high reading on the Richter scale of subcontinental titillation. Before her first book, Socialite Evenings, had even hit the streets in 1989 it had caused a major scandal; advance orders poured in.

  But it is her second book, Starry Nights (1991), that is by far her most successful bash at the sex and shopping novel. There are endless sequences in which the characters buy, wear or talk about Gucci shoes, Dior sunglasses or Lanvin watches, but most of the book is focused single-mindedly on sex.

  The story follows the mango-breasted heroine, Aasha Rani, as she sleeps her way to stardom – and then makes her fatal mistake: she falls in love with India’s number-one hunk, a steely-eyed, smooth-skinned, cast-iron lump of machismo called Akshay Arora. There is no hanging about in Shobha’s novels: Aasha Rani’s clothes have been removed by page 3, and by page 5 we have encountered the f-word for the first time (but not the last). On page 6 we have a deflowering, on page 9 a wet sari scene (Indian cinema’s traditional alternative to nudity), and on page 17 an innovatory passage involving an elderly Bombay film star, a nubile starlet and some ceremonial oil from a Hindu temple. There are six more major copulations (on page 28, page 54, page 60, page 79, page 122 and page 181) and a galaxy of minor conjunctions, including one notable encounter in the lavatory of an Air India Boeing – which the author admits lifting from Emmanuelle.

  One of the (apparently unintentional) pleasures of the book is the background of high kitsch against which the action takes place. Aasha Rani has a fetish for furry toys – ‘pink kittens, blue rabbits, silky black leopards with yellow eyes, polka-dotted pandas, even a four-foot giraffe …’ – which she piles high in her magnificent pink boudoir: ‘all gauzy pink drapes, quilted bedcovers and pink heart-shaped cushions trimmed with lace’. It is a truly wonderful bedroom – full, as another description has it, of ‘velvet bedspreads, Rexine love seats, pink telephones, gilt-edged mirrors and a fountain’. The reader can only agree with Aasha Rani, who ‘thought it was the most gorgeous room she’d ever seen’.

  It is here, in this sequinned pink lovenest, that the temple oil gets rubbed, the heroine debauched and the most memorable bits of dialogue spoken: ‘All through my bad days one thought has kept me going,’ says Akshay Arora in a rare moment of eloquence: ‘I knew I had to see you. I couldn’t leave this world without saying goodbye …’ It is also in this room that one producer ‘hammers away … grunting like a wild pig’, and that another lays his masculinity out on the tabletop, where Aasha Rani mistakes it for a Havana cigar.

  Only when the heroine moves to London and becomes a call girl does the interest begin to flag. ‘There are some wonderful seventeenth-century estates going,’ suggests another character at one point. ‘Why don’t you retire to the country?’

  After trudging through 250 pages of this sort of thing, the reader feels that that would not be a bad idea.

  Before she rang off, Shobha told me that she had invited a couple of her friends over for lunch in the country. They would be coming on the same launch as me, she said.

  She did not indicate that ‘a couple’ meant seventy-two gushing Bombay socialites – fat-cat industrialists and their glitzy wives, actors and starlets, glamour journalists, society painters and producers. As I stepped out of my hotel I found myself ambushed by a set of characters straight out of one of Shobha’s novels.

  ‘Hi!’

  ‘Hi!’

  ‘Hi-ee!’

  ‘I love your Dior sunglasses.’

  ‘Thanks. Oh golly – I’m so hung over!’

  ‘I didn’t get to bed until five a.m.’

  ‘Are you going to Laxman’s tonight?’

  ‘Of course. But have you heard? Vinod hasn’t been invited!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t you know about Vinod and Dimple?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Bunty saw them on the beach at Juhu, and do you know what Dimple was wearing?…’

  I listened fascinated. So, I thought, people really do speak like this. As the crowds of Sunday trippers gathered to gawp at the socialites, someone spotted a minor film star (‘Ae woh dekh! Moon Moon Sen!’) and everyone crowded around to get a picture of themselves standing beside the screen goddess. The chatterers pointedly ignored the hoi polloi.

  ‘Moon Moon! Sweety, it’s so good to see you! Baby, are these kids really yours?’

  ‘Hey, don’t you start. I’m sick of people telling me how beautiful I look. Do I look so bad in my films, huh?’

  ‘What a lovely Lanvin watch.’

  Eventually the launch turned up, and with a clatter of stilettos the cocktail party moved aboard. We dropped our moorings and set off across the bay.

  The incongruous half-timbered Swiss gables of the Bombay Yacht Club, the flashing white domes of the Prince of Wales Museum, the palm trees of Marine Drive all slipped away in to the distance. The shoreline widened, unveiling the mini-Manhattan of the business centre and the spider-like cranes of the dockyards. Then, slowly, the whole vision sank in to the consumptive pollution-fog that hung thinly over the bay. The boat rocked from side to side. The sun shone through the haze. The socialites swapped addresses.

  Forty minutes later, the morning mist parted to reveal a white beach, a windbreak of bottle palms, and the bobbing wooden outrigger canoes of village fishermen moored to a rickety jetty. Beyond stretched an avenue of eucalyptus and casuarina, flanked on either side by banana plantations. Shobha was there to meet us.

  She is tall and clear-skinned, with a mane of fabulous dark hair, and is far more attractive in person than she appears in photographs. Her movements are graceful and languid, but she has alert alley-cat eyes which are constantly darting backwards and forwards, ready to pick up anything interesting, controversial or scandalous.

  As her guests moved towards her, Shobha swooped down on them, embraced them, showered them with kisses and compliments, then ushered them through her house and out in to the garden, where the servants hovered with Bloody Marys. Soon brunch was served.

&nb
sp; The house was decorated in very much the same spirit as Aasha Rani’s bedroom in Starry Nights. There were fake escutcheons on the gates, and mock-crystal chandeliers hung from the ceilings. There were soft-focus photographs of Shobha and her shipping magnate on the piano, and twirly-wirly fake-ironwork gaslights in the garden. More portraits of our host and hostess, in thick chocolate-box acrylic, hung from the walls. There may have been no pink telephones, but I still felt sure that Aasha Rani would have approved of this house.

  I finally managed to corner Shobha in the lull which followed brunch. The chatterers were falling silent: they lay with their legs raised on wickerwork Bombay fornicators or stretched out on the hissing lawns.

  ‘You want to talk?’ she said. ‘Sure.’

  Shobha flicked her hair to one side and clicked in to interview mode.

  ‘Maybe I’m into bondage’ she volunteered. It was by any standards an unusual entrée. ‘Without the leather and whips,’ she added.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘Writing,’ she explained. ‘I’m a typewriter-junky. I need that fix. Writing is for me a kind of bondage.’

  ‘But without the leather and whips.’

  ‘Right.’

  We looked at each other. I must have seemed puzzled, as she tried another tack.

  ‘Do you know what the women in this town are really after?’ asked Shobha. ‘I’ll tell you. They want jewels in their bank vault, Chanel clothes in their wardrobe, a Porsche in their garage, a tiger in their bed – and an ass of a husband who pays for it all.’

  Perfectly formed designer-quotes slipped out as if by magic. The whole monologue appeared to have been meticulously rehearsed. But at least no one can say that Shobha Dé has any pretensions about her oeuvre.

  ‘What do you think of your books so far?’ I asked after a while.

  She smiled: ‘You want the honest answer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I write readable trash – commercial novels,’ said Shobha. ‘But I don’t think “commercial” is a dirty word. The bottom line for any product is whether it’s going to sell. There is a market out there, and I’m filling a slot. The anguished little novels my critics churn out about suffering women at the kitchen hearth, they all lie unsold and eventually get pulped. I’ve had it up to here with moaning, groaning, oppressed females.’

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘I am cold-bloodedly catering for mofussil [small-town] fantasies,’ she said. ‘I want to provide a tantalising peep in to the lifestyle of the rich and famous. I want to entertain, and most of all I want to sell. I’m not going for any literary awards.’

  ‘But if you want to provide fantasies, why are your characters all so unhappy?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying that all that debauchery makes everyone miserable?’

  ‘I don’t think the wrath of God descends on bad girls. No – I think bad girls have a ball and die having a ball.’

  ‘So you aren’t trying to make a moral point?’

  ‘No – and I hate those sort of judgements. The life my characters lead – having affairs, living from one party to the next …’

  ‘… and going shopping …’

  ‘… and going shopping – this is their idea of a ball. It’s not up to me to say, “Girls: this isn’t the sort of ball you should be having.” ’

  She paused.

  ‘But to come back to your question – I don’t want to make it too perfect. No. I’m aware that if I make it all too desirable, well …’

  Shobha arched her eyebrows and sipped her Bloody Mary.

  ‘Well … there might be a revolution …’

  Two days later, the white Mercedes drove up to the Taj Mahal Hotel promptly at ten p.m. The chauffeur held the door open. Inside was Shobha – wearing a pearl choker, a gold tikka mark and a sari of expensive-looking gilt silk – and beside her sat Dilip, her shipping magnate. Dilip grunted a greeting. I got in. The car glided away.

  It was Christmas Eve in Bombay, the poor man’s Rio, and outside, on the sidewalks of the ten-lane highway, the beggars were massing at the lights.

  ‘Our hostess will have been busy all day,’ said Shobha, ignoring a leper clawing at her window. ‘She always shampoos her gravel on the afternoon before her parties.’

  We glided out of crumbling central Bombay. We passed the airport and headed on towards Juhu, towards Bollywood, where the beggars sleep on discarded film magazines. Along the Lido is India’s Beverly Hills.

  ‘Just wait until you see this house,’ said Shobha. ‘It’s like something out of James Bond.’

  It was: a marble palace surrounded by giant bottle palms and facing out on to the rolling breakers of the Arabian Sea. Oceans of Veuve Clicquot bubbled in to fluted champagne glasses. Liveried servants carried lighted kebab-skewers among the guests. Courtyard after courtyard was filled with millionaires, film stars, politicians, editors, sex symbols: everyone who was anyone in Bombay.

  ‘No one is here yet,’ said Shobha, looking around dismissively. ‘The real heavy-duty Bombay society won’t turn up until one or two o’clock. Otherwise it will look as if they haven’t been invited to three other parties.’

  Loudspeakers hidden in the palm trees were playing the Lambada. Shobha took to the floor with her shipping magnate. You could see the rocks on her fingers glinting in the lights. Nearby, the former Chief Minister of Kashmir, Farooq Abdullah – dressed in a long, thick Kashmiri coat despite the heat – was bobbing around with a woman in a voluminous sari. Both were trying to avoid stepping on her flowing silks.

  I stooped down and picked up some gravel. Shobha had not been joking. It really had been shampooed.

  In the first courtyard the marble was white, and glistened like a mirror. In the second, water bubbled down a rock-face, wove its way through a hanging garden and came to rest in a huge swimming pool. A suite of rooms filled with Kashmiri rugs led on to a third courtyard facing out on to the breakers. On a line of linen-covered trestles whole turkeys lay stuffed and ready for consumption; beside them were ranks of lobsters, great cauldrons full of hot curry sauces, caviar and blinis, mountains of pineapples, dates and guavas.

  Fragments of different conversations wafted over the music:

  ‘Anyway, when Imran said he was bored in Sharjah I told him to come over …’

  ‘She thought she was getting a millionaire. What she did get was five children and two poodles …’

  ‘He’d love to be royalty. But he claims his grandmother turned the title down …’

  ‘She’s just a common bania’s daughter …’

  ‘Of course, when Imran comes here he has this queue of adoring women stretching as far as Marine Drive …’

  ‘He has over one hundred vintage cars. He drives whichever happens to match his cufflinks …’

  ‘Do you know what semen is in Gujarati?’

  Through it all you could hear the voice of Dilip, Shobha’s tame shipping magnate: ‘Do you know who is here tonight?’ he said. ‘The edible-oils king of India. He controls the export of thirty-seven different kinds of edible oils.’ Over the next hour Dilip pointed out the prawn king of India, the soap king of India and the washing-machine king of India: ‘Big men,’ said Dilip approvingly.

  Meanwhile I was watching Shobha and the reception she was getting from the guests. Our hostess, whom Shobha had very obviously parodied as a society slut in Socialite Evenings, gave her a peck on both cheeks, seemingly unbothered by Shobha’s indiscretions. One of India’s leading sex symbols, Pooja Bedi – whom Shobha, with her usual subtlety, had christened ‘Boobs Bedi’ – came up and welcomed her; they sat and discussed Pooja’s recent photo-shoot for an advertising campaign by India’s new Kama Sutra condoms.

  Sometime after midnight I was sitting with Shobha, our plates overloaded with turkey, when she remarked on how few people ever came and struck up conversations with her. Why did she think she attracted such hostility, I asked her.

  She answered very simply: ‘A four-letter word – envy.
’

  ‘Your columns and books can hardly have helped.’

  ‘None of my critics have read the books. They were just a take-off point to vent their spleen. The general reaction to the reviews was “It served the bitch right.” ’

  ‘But why? Why should you attract all this?’

  She called for champagne: ‘Waiter! Sahib ko champagne chahiye!’ While it was being poured, she considered. ‘As I see it, ballsy women have a hard time here,’ she said. ‘That’s just the way it is.’

  There was no self-pity in the way she spoke, just resignation. She had left herself wide open to all the flak, of course, had courted it even, but still you couldn’t help feeling a certain sympathy. In a culture which has elevated sycophancy in to an art form, Shobha Dé doesn’t play the game. In what is still a rigidly conventional and conformist society, she has stood out of line, and has always been prepared to pay the price. Certainly her writing is no great shakes, but that’s not the issue. The real problem is that Shobha has guts.

  ‘I detest subterfuge and hypocrisy,’ she said. ‘I live my life openly, and in my writing I describe what really happens in this town – I tell it how it is. My attitude exacts a price.’

  ‘Is it just Bombay that’s the problem?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I love this town. At least here I can live on my own terms. I wouldn’t be able to function anywhere else.’

  She shrugged her shoulders: ‘I don’t think Shobha Dé would be allowed to exist anywhere else in India. Another city,’ she said, ‘would have crushed me.’

  Finger-Lickin’ Bad:

  Bangalore and the

  Fast-Food Invaders

  BANGALORE, 1997

  It was ten a.m., and customers were tucking in to Colonel Sanders’ Bargain Bucket Breakfast Burgers in the gleaming new Kentucky Fried Chicken in Bangalore, when ten burly farmers walked in, prised the ice-cream freezer up from the floor, and hurled it through the plate-glass front window.

  As customers and staff looked on in astonishment, hundreds of rustics dressed in Gandhian homespun poured through the breach in to Colonel Sanders’ Indian flagship and began hurling furniture around. Others used chairs to shatter the strip-lights and air-conditioning units. Heavily built village wrestlers ripped the fans from the ceiling and the tables from the floor, while a couple of cowherds attacked the Pepsi machines and chip-friers. The cash till was smashed and the contents sprayed with tomato ketchup. Buckets full of Finger-Lickin’ Chicken Nugget Combo Meals were scattered over the road and trampled in to the dust by some elderly village patriarchs who had taken up station outside. Wading through the sticky quagmire of Pepsi, batter and shattered glass, the farmers announced that they were marking the anniversary of the assassination of the Mahatma by launching a ‘second freedom struggle’ against ‘the invasion of India by multinationals’. Then they shouted a few slogans denouncing the ‘non-veg poison’ served by the Colonel and praising the virtues of ‘good masala dosas’, before vanishing in to the crowds outside.