Yes, a thousand times Yes
8
It’s Complicated
I have sat down to write this chapter seventeen times.
I look at old photographs, read through my diaries and letters, watch my wedding video. I look at Kunal’s boyishly beautiful face as he sits across the room from me, scrolling through his Facebook newsfeed. He has such a defined jawline. And his forearms are so sinewy that when he moves his fingers to type something into his phone I can see his muscles flex.
And then, just when I’m feeling it, a blossoming of passion inside me that radiates to my very fingertips as they prepare to fly across the keyboard, spilling our story of love, he does something that makes me want to get up and punch him in the face.
Like now. We agreed to spend the first half of the day writing in the study and so here I am, poised at my computer. Kunal has been glued to his phone for over an hour. I look at the clock. It’s 11.15 a.m. It’s not healthy to be at a screen for so long, so early in the morning. Every so often there is a staccato burst of noise from the phone—a video someone has posted of their dog howling ‘I love you’, the latest remix song from a recent film, a new dialogue promo. It’s hard to concentrate on writing.
I can see his newest meticulously researched purchase, a pair of high-tech headphones, in the tray just by his outstretched legs. Maybe if I look at him meaningfully he’ll take the hint and put them on.
Except he hasn’t looked up even once in the last thirty-five minutes. And now he has found an instruction video on how to tune your guitar. If he reaches for his guitar I will have to throw something at him.
Thankfully a solution presents itself to me just as my hand closes over the oxidizing apple core left over from breakfast. I put on the noise-cancelling headphones he has not thought to wear and am immediately and blissfully cut off from all ambient sound.
Where was I? Love. Light brown eyes that crinkle up with laughter and a full mouth with the power to hypnotize. I sneak another look at the love of my life . . . who is now scribbling something in my daily planner, which I have told him only a million times not to do. The least he can do is write on the dates that have passed and not on those yet to come! I swallow an internal surge of exasperation, take off the headphones and join him on the couch where we proceed to watch three episodes of ‘Line of Duty’ on Netflix.
Love.
I remember Mrs Narula, my literature teacher in Year 6 of the British School, telling us to read a Mills and Boon novel. We were going to study ‘romantic love’—everything from Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ to Byron’s epic satire Don Juan to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—and the Mills and Boon would be the perfect primer to break us in. If you are a girl then surely you’ve read at least one Mills and Boon novel? They continue to be the most popular publishers of romantic fiction escapist fantasy books. So popular in fact that during the Second World War when paper was rationed, Mills and Boon books were allowed to be printed to boost the morale of women! The love stories are a tad formulaic—girl meets boy, girl finds boy arrogant and unfeeling, boy seduces girl somewhat against her will (disturbingly bordering on rape), a burning desire for boy is ignited inside girl, who (blinded by a heady cocktail of serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin) sees boy in new light as kind and misunderstood, boy admits his love for girl in an ego-swallowing feat that almost kills him, girl and boy embrace and ride off into a perfect sunset. I had read one or two already, notably Stranded, Seduced, Pregnant (real title) and Bootie and the Beast (okay, this is borrowed) with a particularly steamy cover that I concealed in a jacket made out of old newspaper. I couldn’t believe these guilty pleasures were now part of my official academic syllabus!
As a young girl picking her way through the minefield that is adolescence, these books must have cast their impression on my putty-like brain. Adonis-like chiselled heroes who were wealthy, powerful brutes; helpless heroines who were young, feisty and painfully bountiful . . . er . . . beautiful. Simmering sexual tension which would inevitably explode into the most perfect and tender love that always ended happily, if not in marriage then in a firm commitment to be together. Putting aside a feminist critique of the desirability of these gender stereotypes, a brief glance at the boys in my literature class would have demonstrated that these characters were in fact far from real and the world within the pages a fantasy. Not every girl wants to be rescued and not every boy is the ideal blend of demanding and commanding.
Mrs Narula, with all her experience and wisdom, broke it down for us—if we harboured expectations about love as portrayed in these and other romantic novels, we would be setting ourselves up for disappointment and regret. ‘Perfection,’ she said in her very matter-of-fact way, ‘simply does not exist.’
It may seem an obvious statement, nothing really staggering there, but I do feel that when we read a romance novel or watch a romantic comedy we tend to look over at our partners and wonder when the last time was that they bought us flowers or chocolates or professed their love for us through some grand gesture. Chances are, if your partner is like mine, that his proposal of marriage to you will leap to mind. And then you will remember all the time that has passed since, multiple anniversaries even, and nothing of romantic import will strike you. And then you will bring up the fact that he still hasn’t written on the card for your cousin’s wedding, to which he will say he hardly knows your cousin and that you haven’t left much room for him on the card anyway so you might as well sign his name, and before you know it you will be arguing about how he doesn’t pull his weight around the house and a perfectly good evening will be ruined.
Love is certainly the most precious and cherished thing but it is not all lingering looks and amorous embraces. It is not the ability to know what the other person needs without them actually having to tell you. It is not the absence of irritation, conflict or disappointment. It is hard work and there is always room for improvement. Mrs Narula was not the only person to give the teenage me a lesson in realism.
When I left for university at seventeen, Amman sat me down and said, ‘You will need to learn about a lot of things—how to use a washing machine, how to cook, how to operate a bank account, sex, how to take public transport . . .’ Whoa! That was the first time she had ever mentioned the word ‘sex’ to me, benignly sandwiched as it was between mundane chores. She looked at me intently and said something which at the time I found a little shocking coming from a parent, but in hindsight it was some of the best advice a mother can give her daughter.
‘Just because you have sex with someone, doesn’t mean you have to marry them. Sex can muddy the brain and make you feel things like trust and empathy. You may think you’re in love but you may not be.’ Those three sentences seemed to take the wind out of her and I thought for a second she was going to cry but she got up, straightened the bedcover and said, ‘You’re also going to have to learn to make your own bed.’
End of talk.
At the time I had had a grand total of two boyfriends—both from my class, both well known to my parents, and both really just friends who were boys you could count on to ask you to slow dance to ‘With or Without You’ by U2. But my first memory of finding a boy attractive was way back in school when I was seven. Daniel was blonde and blue-eyed and I was always really giggly in his company. When it was announced that the class play was Sleeping Beauty and Daniel would play the role of the Prince, I prayed fervently to be cast as Princess Aurora. It was not to be though and I watched bitterly from the wings as my classmate Savitri got kissed on the cheek by him. It didn’t require much acting for me to play my part—a grouchy goblin goon.
Daniel’s family moved away from Delhi shortly after and I was inconsolable for two whole days. However, the resilience of youth saw me bounce back from this, my first experience of unrequited love. Thankfully the pursuant years were consumed by forceful feelings of the opposite sex being gross and yucky, wretched specimens who pulled your hair and rubbed their snot on your dresses.
/> My second bout of unrequited love would be many years later, at fifteen. Let’s not give this person a name because I never told him I liked him and I would like to keep it that way. He was a boy in my sister Saba’s class, so two years my senior, and he was ‘bad news’. He had long hair and dressed scruffily, bunked class, had been caught smoking in the bicycle shed and held the record for most suspensions from school. And I was drawn to him like a moth to a flame. Or more accurately a moth afflicted by paralysis because I never actually got close enough to get burnt. Instead I stalked him happily from a distance, content to stare at him from across the basketball court or, if I was lucky, to pass him in the corridor and mumble a strangled ‘Hey’. You couldn’t convince me it wasn’t love, a love that lasted for eight whole months until said person graduated and went off to college in America. This time I nursed my broken heart for a full week before the distraction of our class trip to Mount Abu and Udaipur. By the time I came back from that I had forgotten all about what’s-his-name.
So I can safely say that in matters of the heart, when I left for university, at the threshold of adulthood, I was well-armed with good advice from Amman and Mrs Narula but poorly equipped in experience. Since then I have been to two colleges where I got my BA and MSc degrees, I have attended too many ABBA-themed retro parties, travelled, discovered make-up and hair removal, met boys whom I actually had conversations with—some were interesting, some dull—I have broken a few hearts, had my heart broken, worked in different industries, made new friends and lost touch with old ones . . . in short I have lived my life. There were perhaps two relationships in this time that stand out. It would be crude and unfair to the other people involved to divulge the specifics but I would like to share some of what I learnt, as tactfully and graciously as possible.
JC was my best friend at Oxford. I met him in my first year, in the second month of the first term, and we were together until well after we graduated, when the cruel fingers of long-distance tore us apart—aka the relationship became mutually inconvenient and we met other people. He was . . . unconventional.
The first time we met was when he knocked on my door one evening, asking to borrow some blue eyeshadow, preferably glitter-based, for a party he was on his way to. He was wearing fishnet stockings, a tank top and a miniskirt. As I applied the eyeshadow for him, I inquired innocently if the party he was going to had a fancy-dress theme. ‘No,’ he said, and bounded out the door leaving me with my mouth agape. I think it was curiosity that made me seek him out over the next few days. He was not gay. He was expressive and enjoyed making what he called ‘postmodern artistic statements’. He made me laugh; in fact he was an amateur stand-up comic so he made lots of people laugh. He played the mandolin, wrote songs and was a left-arm spinner on the cricket team. He was also a devout born-again Christian (to be ‘born-again’ means you have experienced a spiritual rebirth as separate from your physical birth and now have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ). He introduced me to Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Smashing Pumpkins. Our negatively reinforced maturity levels would result in wholesome activities like playing badminton across the quad with a blueberry muffin and ten-pin bowling down aisles of the local supermarket with an onion and some tubes of toothpaste. He didn’t care a hoot for what people thought about him—whether they booed him on stage during a comedy gig or whether they mocked him for his religious beliefs or his unusual sense of fashion. He was who he was and he taught me that it was okay to be who I was. If I wasn’t a big drinker I didn’t have to drink to have fun, if I was shy and took time to open up to people that was fine too (although it probably wasn’t okay to have a giant Twix and a Diet Coke for lunch every day). JC helped me come out of my shell in a foreign land and when we parted three years later at the end of college we said we would stay in touch. I moved back to Delhi and got a job at the Ford Foundation, an international NGO headquartered in New York, with the global mission of advancing human welfare—economic empowerment, education, human rights and democracy.
The first sign of concern for me was when I called JC to tell him I had secured this amazing job and his response to me was that it was like ‘polishing the brass on the Titanic’. When I pressed him to explain, he said these people we were helping were sinking ships and what they needed was for someone to save their souls, not give them a sandwich. It was what he truly believed and I knew then that even though we were best friends who had the most fun together, we were not going to be together. And then the sign-off on his emails changed, from ‘Love, JC’ to ‘Your brother in Christ, JC’. It wasn’t that I was losing a potential life partner; I was only twenty-one and I knew I had my whole life ahead of me, but I was losing my best friend.
Cut to, as we film folk like to say, 2002, the bar at the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi. I was back from the London School of Economics and Political Science, having done my MSc in International Relations (not International Relationships as the media here so often misquotes, a degree they have not instituted as yet but one focused on honing, I would imagine, a wholly different skill set!). I had secured a job as an associate banker at Citigroup Private Bank in London and it was to begin with a year’s training at the bank’s Mumbai office. I had a fortnight to kill before I was due to leave Delhi and was spending most nights out with friends. I was standing by the doors that led out on to the garden, discussing where we could go next with my gang of girls, when he entered the room. Tall, dark and handsome. Textbook good looks.
I tried to drag my eyes away from him as he walked over to join his friends two tables away from us. My friend Meher was saying something to me but I couldn’t concentrate on her words, I was only aware, acutely, of the presence of this man and the blood rushing in my ears. Perhaps I willed it but he looked over at me then and held my unwavering gaze. I could feel my face turning red but he offered up an easy open smile and I smiled shyly back. The rest of the evening passed in a daze of distraction but, as we were gathering up our things to leave, I saw him approach us from the corner of my eye. I can’t remember exactly what was said but I do remember the euphoria and the relief washing over me when he took my number and asked if he could call me sometime.
The next few days were a blur of phone calls, coffee dates, dinner engagements and parties. DJ seemed more mature than the other boys I knew—he drove a car, had a job, a beard even. I was used to being friends with someone and that friendship slowly developing into something more; this was the opposite and it was new and thrilling. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, my two weeks were up and it was time for me to pack my bags and move to Mumbai. It was DJ’s optimism, his unshakeable resolve that fuelled my belief that we could make it work. He even bought me a ring as proof of his commitment but my mother made me return it, saying it was too early to accept presents of such value and significance. And it did work, for a while. I spent the better part of my paltry savings flying back to Delhi every other weekend, we made plans for the future, he looked at job opportunities in London.
It’s difficult to pinpoint when things started to lose their steam. I think when you are in a long-distance relationship there are challenges that at first seem surmountable with good communication and some sacrifices but then those sacrifices start to pinch—you feel like you are missing out on going out or making friends, especially when you are in a new and unfamiliar city, because you have to be home for the nightly 10 p.m. Skype call. When that call and those once eagerly anticipated visits start to feel obligatory you know it’s a red flag.
But when you are in a long-distance relationship, it can take all that much longer to realize you are with the wrong person. You spend so little time together and that time is fraught with an almost desperate desire to maximize fun and minimize conflict that much is let go of, swept under the carpet. When I went back to Delhi for ten days during Diwali, I knew that the relationship had lost its sheen. It wasn’t just that we had different interests and general attitudes to life or even that we had different priorities—some of my c
losest friends are happily married to people who are poles apart from them in taste and temperament—it was that we were unable or unwilling to negotiate our differences.
You know you are with the right person when they are able to tolerate inevitable differences between you, and when you in turn can do the same. Unfortunately this realization only hit me when DJ called to tell me he had landed a job with an investment bank in London and could move in a couple of months, around the same time as my internal transfer at Citibank would come through. By then I didn’t want the job and I knew then that I didn’t want the boy. Upshot? DJ moved to London and I stayed on in Mumbai but left Citibank to embark on a career in films. And no, it didn’t end because of my career plans as an actor—we were just not right for each other and when we broke that down, we broke up.
Now, I’m not going to take you through every relationship I’ve had because I’ve already covered the ones of note and it really would not serve any purpose other than annoying my husband. Safe to say that when I joined films I had taken to heart my mother’s advice not to get involved with an actor, and certainly never to marry one. ‘It will complicate your life,’ she said to me. ‘Actors need a lot of care and attention, they are temperamental, they harbour insecurities, they will either be working too hard or then not at all and both are problematic.’ It was good advice—it was true of me and so I knew it was likely to be true of others. So I turned a blind eye to romance. I worked on different films with different people and forged friendships, some temporary—for the duration of the film, such is the nature of the job—but a few that have endured over the years. I was in no hurry to get married or to ‘settle down’. The very turn of phrase upset me—there was a reason it was called settle down and not settle up! I was never one of those women who dreamed of her wedding day from when she was six years old. I had no firm opinions about venue, menu, decor or dress, and as for the groom, I confess there was a mental list, based on experience, not of what I wanted but of what I knew I didn’t want.
The Perils of Being Moderately Famous Page 10