I stood there on the Sacrarium Steps, the site of a thousand years of coronations, as a brown woman in the twenty-first century, a happenstance of empire. And I did so in a soft chiffon sari in a deep red, with a brocade border of black and gold. The colours and ciphers of Shakti, the divine feminine principle, herself.
When I wear a sari, it is never just culturally quaint. It is with awareness and aliveness. It is a powerful garment and, like all power, one must wield it with grace or not at all.
The memory of the things I left behind when I moved to India haunted me for several years. I had not been wealthy, but I had great taste and, more than that, great luck. In Tamil there is a word, kairaasi, that captures it. It means that I could source amazing deals with the talent of a water diviner. Most of what I owned cost no more than ten ringgit each, but all of it was beautiful. All of it I wore. I thrived in that beautiful wardrobe of mine. There was one semester in college when I was told that a small group of girls would wait by the gate to check out my outfit for the day. I was wild, vivacious, sensual – I was cowboy hats and jacquard jackets and thigh-high leopard-print boots. I was bohemian paisley and chunky necklaces and cascades of filigree, tassels and fishtail hems.
And then, for a long time, I couldn’t be.
In my first few years in the city, I maintained a collection of clothing that I joked were for ‘eventual migration’. I would buy things that I knew I could never safely wear in Chennai – not just because they were pretty things, but because my body longed for them, even if there was a paucity of safe spaces or reasons to wear them. What happens between a woman and a dress can be sheer choreography. We dismiss that desire too easily as vanity. Vanity that is a cardinal sin, linked to narcissism, superficiality, the inability to connect to others. But who’s to say that it’s all about attention or other people? Who’s to say it isn’t about, in fact, intangible things: the fabric of life, literal and otherwise? It’s the necklace one buys for oneself on the day of an old love’s wedding. It’s the satin slip one sleeps in alone. It’s what happens behind my transwoman friend’s locked door when only the mirror is her audience, her admirer, her witness.
So I would buy these beautiful things, and simply keep them safe. For the first time in my life, I wore pants every single day. Even a long skirt would register femininity, a dangerous thing. I wore ill-fitting kurtas half on purpose and half out of shame, that emotion that was the sum effect of both lascivious gazes and moral reprimanding. I didn’t have a choice: I didn’t know the city, didn’t understand its codes, belonged to no cliques. So, each day, as I caught auto-rickshaws and walked down busy streets and conversed with strangers and colleagues and attempted to make friends, I donned this shamed and shabby skin with all the effort of a person learning a new dialect. Not coincidentally perhaps, I was also doing this literally – trying to scrape the sweet native patois from my tongue in exchange for the Madras bashai that would allow me to negotiate the city with a little less difficulty. I closeted my true self, with all her many accoutrements, in order to be safer. Until – strangely – I became safe.
Fashion is about far more than vanity, or morality for that matter. It is about identity, memory and emotion. It is a background score to every interaction, conveying ambience, setting the scene, foreshadowing, foregrounding. Every mood-lifting ensemble is a victory. Every garment touched longingly and placed wistfully back on the shelf is a compromise – resignation that sometimes means ‘not yet’ and sometimes means ‘never’.
I don’t know how else to put it, but at some point, either the city became safe enough or I became strong enough. I stopped thinking twice about whether a sleeveless tunic would be read as a comment on my sexual availability. I paired saris with spaghetti-strap blouses and tube tops to formal events. I wore a miniskirt to a poetry reading once and posed cheekily in front of a jackfruit tree in the courtyard and learned to enjoy – and not be shamed by – some people’s reactions.
Half Karaikal Ammaiyar, half cynosure.
In astrology, there is the concept of the rising sign (known in the Vedic system as the lagna), the zodiac sign in which one’s ascendant – the division between the recondite twelfth house and the public first house of one’s chart – falls. The ascendant is thus liminal, the point at which the inner self is presented to the outer world. In simplest terms, the ascendant is one’s appearance – the first thing another person encounters as they form their impression of you. There’s no way around it, not even in metaphysical terms – one’s visage is one’s calling card, one’s conduit, one’s key.
The truth is that even if I retrieved the wardrobe I left behind, I would no longer be able to fit into most of it. The body changes. Only one’s nature is a constant, through vagaries of influence, catalogues of choices, seasons of taste.
The wardrobe, you understand, was only ever a metaphor.
CAST AWAY
TISCA CHOPRA
‘Life is a play that does not allow testing. So sing, cry, dance, laugh and live intensely, before the curtain closes and the piece ends with no applause.’ – Charlie Chaplin
I landed my first acting role at the age of two. By default. At the boarding school where my parents taught, they had no one that young to play the baby Lord Krishna. So I was cast. All I had to do was walk across the stage looking cute in a loose white chaddi-baniyaan. I walked to the centre of the stage, stopped at the footlights, gazed happily at the audience and refused to budge. The girl playing Yashodhara had to be sent to fetch me. I was carried off the stage, literally kicking and screaming.
My parents should have known then.
The first reason I became an actor was that my mother didn’t give me a sibling in time. We lived in Kabul, Afghanistan, and on snowy winter evenings my parents would go out for Embassy parties. I was left to my own devices. Second-hand fairytale books from the American thrift shop, with stunning illustrations on glossy pages, and All India Radio ki Urdu Service became my dearest friends. I would read and act out the songs on the radio to our Afghan maids. They loved Hindi films more than any Indian ever could. Dressed in my mother’s curlers and brand new Fab India bedcovers, I would do my own interpretation of ‘Bhool gaya sab kuch’ on the kitchen table. If I fussed about eating my supper, the maids would give me a pinch of naswar, a version of marijuana popular in the mountains. That made the food go down a lot faster – and then we could all get down to the real business of song and story. We were a happy lot indeed.
My brother came along when I was six. By that time, I was addicted to acting out stories with music. He was a ready audience – and also a very malleable one. I would act out half a story and, for what came post-interval, he had to cover my notebooks for me. Or clean my study table. In one morbid phase, I remember telling him the saddest tales of separation and pain. Weeping copiously, he would follow me around, sobbing for the second half. I discovered that in this state I could get him to do pretty much anything that I wanted. When my parents caught on, I was forbidden from telling him any more stories. I don’t know who was more upset – my brother or me.
The second reason I became an actor was my deep loathing for mathematics.
I was a school principal’s daughter. My father, also my maths teacher, was famous not just in his school but across campuses for his adherence to discipline. There was huge pressure on me to succeed academically. In fact it was just ‘not okay’ to not stand first. What possible reason could there be for that? The rest of the subjects were well under my control, but maths gave me a high fever that went away the second the maths exam was over. My fever became a regular feature, yet I had to find a way to shine and be worthy of being ‘principal sir’s daughter’.
Extracurricular activities were encouraged, but only by way of building a ‘well-rounded personality’ that should naturally progress to having a well-rounded C.V., allowing one to get a straight-laced job. For me, however, school plays, debates, poetry-reading sessions and the like were always the main thing, while the school stud
y curriculum was a necessary evil. Happily, my English teacher had insight into my situation and was able to articulate it: ‘Maths and physics are not her scene. Clearly. Then again, that is understandable. She is very culturally inclined. Maybe she is an artist.’
I was in every school play and won every debate. By the time I was fourteen, I was hosting music shows on All India Radio (AIR) and writing for a local magazine, and I stole away whenever I could to watch the latest hit Hindi films. Their impact was explosive. I came home and shut my room and did all the scenes one by one – love scenes, crying scenes and even dying scenes. I played queens, vagabonds and spies, dressed in costumes made from shiny nylon fabric sourced from the roadside Thursday flea bazaar. My parents, who could hear me faintly, had no real idea what went on behind those closed doors. They put it down to teenage insanity.
Since I was topping my class, no one really cared. I spread my wings, and co-wrote and acted in a play for our college fest which was probably the most sorry piece of writing ever, but the fact that we could actually write and put something up for people to see was a huge high. Once I had tasted that little lick of fame, I was never the same.
But life really turned around when a friend’s mum asked me to model her Angora sweaters. She paid me 5000 rupees (equivalent to roughly US$100 at the time). My parents were aghast. They thought I would go crazy with the cash. They promptly opened a bank account for me so that I, like all good Indians, could start ‘saving’. They started to think this might be an excellent way of funding my education abroad – the cherished dream of every middle-class Indian. For this reason, and this reason alone, my parents allowed me to continue modelling. But when I left home every morning for college, my face had to be scrubbed clean as a baby’s bottom. If any traces of perfume were detected on me, I was made to change. Kajal (kohl) was allowed on the college Annual Day only. My professional beauty kit consisted of two lipsticks and a blush bought by K-Mart-loving aunts travelling through North America.
As I started getting more and more serious about being an actor, dreams of moving to Mumbai, the Mecca of entertainment in India, started to form in my young head. Given my family background, Harvard and Yale were closer than Film City, Mumbai. There was no love of film in my family. We saw one film every six months, as a family outing. These were kosher films like Gandhi, Hatari and Star Wars. According to Dad, Hindi films were a ‘bad influence’. It was very ‘chee-chee’. He wanted me to become a war reporter along the lines of Christiane Amanpour, to somehow change the world. Or at least be there to report the change. Dad could not understand why I would want to do something as ‘silly’ as acting, when I could just as easily get through the best B-schools or the I.F.S./I.A.S. (Indian Foreign/Administrative Service). But when a few film offers started coming in from Mumbai as a result of the modelling work in Delhi, Mum and I were allowed to visit Mumbai, just to confirm how scandalous the world of films really was and how completely unsuited I was to it.
As soon as we got back from Mumbai, we got some devastating news. My dad had refused the son of the local M.L.A. (Member of the Legislative Assembly) admission to his school. The boy had scored zero in the entrance exam. So Mr M.L.A. sent goons with hockey sticks and rifles to my father’s office. My father had been beaten within an inch of his life. He had twenty-four multiple compound fractures.
To see my hero, my dad, in multiple traction, all limbs in casts, killed something within me forever. I realised then that I would have to look after myself in this world, because no one was infallible. And that there is a huge price to pay for being principled. I decided then that I would stick with my principles, but always be tactful, and not unbending in attitude.
Our home was sealed because it was on the school premises. We never went back to that house again. Not even to take our things. All schools in Delhi were closed for two days in protest. I started to hate Delhi; in my mind, I was already living in Mumbai. A special security force was sent to get my books from our now sealed home as I was supposed to sit my final-year exams in ten days. I took my final-year exams with two bodyguards waiting outside my examination hall.
Then came further bad news: I had done exceedingly well in my final year. The principal of my college called Dad in for a meeting. A principal-to-principal chat ensued. Dad was advised that I must pursue ‘further education’, do my Master’s in English and finally come back and teach at my alma mater. Upon hearing this, I indulged in detailed fantasies of running away. I could see myself living the life of the impoverished artist, surviving on a single meal a day, in a ramshackle but aesthetic loft. Only the idea of seeing a picture of myself in the missing people’s column kept me at home. The turmoil inside me was reflected outside. The danger from the M.L.A. was apparently not over. We lived in various places – friends’ homes and guesthouses – but never long enough for anyone to find out. Dad was certainly not returning to that school or that office. So we didn’t have a home, and college was over.
At this opportune moment, a random application that a couple of friends and I had sent to St Xavier’s College in Mumbai, for a diploma in Advertising and Marketing, got through. I finally left Delhi. Though I was home almost every weekend and I really missed my parents, I knew I had flown the nest. Mumbai was waiting for me.
As chance would have it, I landed at the doorstep of Mrs Kohli of Church View Apartments, Bandra, who was looking for a ‘decent’ paying guest. She was a hard-of-hearing, rajma-chawal-loving1, good Panju-Sikh landlady, whose son had taken all her money and moved to Pune after her husband passed away. So Kohli aunty had to take a Paying Guest and the P.G. had to take the burden of her son’s betrayal. She didn’t want an actress or model to be her P.G. under any circumstances. Her last P.G. had had bit parts in films and when the roles ran out, she had become a semi-escort. When Kohli aunty went out of town, the young lady had used her home to meet her men friends. The building society found out and aunty was put in a very embarrassing situation. ‘Badi kharaab kudiyan hondiyan ne. Raati late andiyaan ne. Aadmiyan naal hans hans ke galla kardiyan ne …’ (‘They are bad, bad girls, who come home late at night and laugh when they talk to men.’) I understood why she felt this way, but this did not make my life easy.
I had to have lunch with Mrs Kohli every Sunday and watch TV with her every evening from 7 pm to 9 pm. It wouldn’t have been so bad except she had very bad taste in television viewing. And she was partially deaf, so everything was watched at a very high volume. She was okay if I had to stay back for extra class at college. But, if I stayed back to have a snack or beer with my classmates and came back a second later than 9.45 pm, I wouldn’t hear the last of it. Padhai-likhai (pursuit of higher learning), all Indians get. I think she had the train timetable for the Churchgate-Bandra local trains pasted on the inside of her toiletries cabinet.
Mumbai never lets anyone go to bed hungry, goes the saying. I must admit, Mumbai opened its arms very wide for me: I was working almost from the day I landed. Television commercials, print advertisements and live events were aplenty. I was meeting more and more people, being invited to film previews and getting a chance to meet people I had only seen on screen. Then there was Kohli aunty with a watch in one hand and the door chain in the other. With a 9.45 pm deadline. Things reached a head the day she locked me out and I spent the night on the stairs. I had been twenty minutes late.
Even so, all was well until she realised I wanted to act in films and that the advertising course at Xavier’s was just a decoy for my parents. The neighbours came out when they heard her screaming, ‘To filmach kam karna chaandi hen? Maay nahi rakhna tennu.’(‘You want to work in the movies? I will not allow you to stay a minute longer!’)
But somehow she figured at some point that I was not going to murder her, or take possession of her flat and turn it into a dance bar. In her own suspicious way, Mrs Kohli had become fond of me. She tried to convince me how bad the world of films was.
Absurdly enough, she was quite proud of my advertising work. ‘Company d
e loki cahnge honde ne’ (‘People who work in corporates are decent’) was her logic. Kaka, her Pune-based fraudster son, got to hear, ‘Ohh kudi jedi Maggi di ad vich andi hai, ohh itthe raindi ey. Main unnu dasya Maggi changi company ey.’ (‘That girl who you see in the Maggi commercial on TV, she stays here. I told her to do the commercial, I told her Maggi is a decent company to work for.’)
But the very mention of films got her screaming. She wanted me to be her permanent paying guest. And I wanted to be a film star. Problem. No film star stays as a P.G. They have villas with swimming pools.
Then suddenly a huge fight erupted between her and Kaka’s wife, her daughter-in-law. Overnight, aunty developed huge blood pressure issues and had to be hospitalised. I had to rush between college and an ad film shoot to sit with her. Her son didn’t come to meet her. I called him several times. Mrs Kohli was convinced she was going to die. The doctors were sure she would live to a hundred. At least. She looked at me for the truth. I told her. I told her to enjoy her life, meet her friends at the Gurudwara, walk in the park or see a film on her video-cassette player.
After that episode she stopped bullying me. I could come and go as I pleased and she never locked me out again. Finally, I signed my first film in her home and with her blessings. The producers had to come home, meet her and promise I would not shoot after 9 pm. They got her a Punjabi salwar kurta set (a long shirt with a loose trouser worn by Punjabi women) and a box of laddoos2 and I was on my way. The day-to-day goings-on of my film set were at the top of the gossip charts at the Khar Gurudwara for weeks.
Kohli aunty was my lucky break, but those were more innocent times. Most building societies now will not allow the lease or sale of flats to singles. Especially to singles in the film and television business. Many actors and directors who are big names in the business have spent nights at VT station3 and in youth hostels, sometimes six or eight to a room. Only three are allowed at a maximum and it’s illegal to have more, but who cares. This is Mumbai, meri jaan.
Walking Towards Ourselves Page 19