by Shobhaa De
At school, defiance took another form. I wanted to be different because I wasn’t rich. I didn’t like taking the seven-thirty fast train or a double-decker to school while the others rolled up in gleaming Buicks. And so I decided, if the other girls could flash their fancy pencil boxes and smart terrycot uniforms, I would try and attract attention by wearing my sash hipster-style, hitching the hem of my dress higher than was allowed and swaggering around the basketball court like I owned it. Imagine it if you will. A sassy kid, small for her age, oppressed at home and hungering for things she didn’t have.
No wonder Anjali seemed heaven-sent: she offered me the opportunity to be everything I ever wanted to be. But at school I had no godmothers. All I did was fret and hunger for things I didn’t have: a holiday bungalow in the hills, a personal ayah of my very own who’d call me “Baba” (not “Baby”) and carry my imported school bag, a uniformed hamaal to fetch me hot lunch (preferably chicken curry) in the dining hall and lay it all out on an embroidered table mat with knives, forks and dessert spoons, fragrant shampoos to wash my hair with (not cakes of harsh shikakai soap), ham sandwiches and a chilled Coca-Cola waiting for me at home when I returned (not cold chappatis and leftover veggies), brand-new textbooks covered with crackling brown paper (not secondhand, grubbily thumbed copies) . . . My hunger was great and it grew greater by the day for it was never fed. It didn’t comfort me much that I was not the only middle-class student in the school. I didn’t care that probably half the class consisted of other girls just like me. It was the luckier other half I wanted to belong to.
I guess quite a few of the adages that have survived down the ages have more than a measure of truth in them but whoever said that childhood was a period of innocence didn’t know young girls.Young girls are so charmingly vicious that it’s a wonder there aren’t more bloody deaths and attempted suicides in schools all over the world. How desperately I wanted to be in that charmed circle of rich girls who had everything. And how cleverly, how brutally (even if there was very little physical violence, there was brutality all right) they kept me out. My first reaction was pretending not to care. Then I tried isolating myself. That got me pretty lonely and, finally, almost in a rage, I discovered books. I read whatever I could and I’m glad I found books early considering what was to come later on in my life.
It was when I started reading that Father played a positive role in my life for the first time. And ironically he was all unknowing about it. The one commodity that was never in short supply in our house was reading material. We subscribed to several magazines including the pricey National Geographic. Plus, Father had carefully maintained his own highly prized collection of the classics. We sisters had access to Dickens and Jane Austen, Shaw and Shakespeare, Nehru and Radhakrishnan. Also, Father had a remarkable memory for literature—he could quote from Twain, Shakespeare or the Bhagavad Gita. Interestingly, and in this I’m probably unique, though I’m glad to say this lasted only till I grew to adulthood, I’m perhaps the only person who “graduated” from the classics via cult books like The Fountainhead (for a long time I was determined to marry a man like Howard Roark and I even had a tremendous crush on an architect in the neighborhood, though it’s highly unlikely he even noticed me) to outright trash.
I suppose my lust for pop psychology was of a piece with my immature ideas of rebellion. However, I quickly found a girl at school who agreed with all the ideas of rebellion I held locked within me. Charlie had a college-going brother who seemed to live to masturbate. His collection of “pondies” is what we raided and devoured in the school loo. Naturally, I couldn’t bring any of these paperbacks home. But one day I decided to smuggle in a Playboy for my innocent older sisters to look at. Which is how I came home with the bulky Xmas issue strapped to my belly under the uniform. All wrapped up in newspaper it still looked exactly what it was—a nudie magazine. We waited till my parents were asleep before flipping open the magazine to the centerspread. Smugly, I watched as my sisters gaped in wonderment at what I was sure were the biggest and the pinkest pair of knockers they had ever seen (my eldest sister claimed, though I didn’t believe her of course, that she’d once seen the dhobi’s wife bathing in the river and hers were larger). I told them confidently, “In any case all these pictures are retouched. Look at her nipples and you can tell.” We stared hard at her gigantic aureoles in absolute awe. “See the edges,” I prompted. “That’s how you can make out.” I think both of them were very impressed by me that night.
Charlie, the college guy’s sister, wasn’t really a friend-friend. But I hung around with her anyway and often got into trouble. Invariably, we were the “bad girls” who were given blue cards and kicked out of class for misconduct.
Father, expectedly, expressed his disapproval at this but I’m sure he was puzzled by it all. Poor man couldn’t figure out how or why the youngest of his three daughters was giving him, and by extension the family, such a tough time. Contrasting me with his other daughters who were passive and obedient, rarely raising their eyes to meet his, made his bewilderment complete. But even I didn’t dare rebel openly at home or when he was around. My ploy was simple on such occasions: I’d simply withdraw into myself, especially when he was berating me. “She does this deliberately,” he’d tell Mother, who’d scurry off to get extra papads. After a point, I hardly spoke to anyone in the family, not even my sisters. “You wouldn’t understand,” became the standard line and I’d trot out as I’d lie on my bed for hours together gazing at Rickie Nelson’s crew-cut in Photoplay.
Because of my intransigence I was lonely. I had always communicated with my sisters and Mother, but in this phase of my life I was almost totally cut off from them. They didn’t understand me and I didn’t want to understand them. Also none of my classmates came over as I was ashamed to invite them home. And, of course, there was no question of my being allowed to go to their homes considering that even my sisters, who were by now in college, were not allowed any form of social intercourse. “Why do you want to go to the cinema? Why can’t you stay at home and improve your mind?” Father would roar, if one of them had the nerve to suggest a weekend matinee. I loathed that phrase “improve the mind.” Now that I think of it perhaps that was why I outgrew the classics so quickly. Father hated the sight of comics. I deliberately had piles of them lying around. He hated doodles on the telephone pad. I scribbled all over it. He detested my taking books into the toilet. I always walked in with one.This was all of a piece with Father’s ideas of bringing up children. A favorite phrase which I can still remember as though he’d uttered it yesterday was, “A person must have discipline and regular habits.” This meant just one thing—regimentation. Lights off at ten p.m. Up at five thirty. No eating between meals. No “idle talk” over the telephone. And no “unnecessary laughter.” It was like being in the bloody Army. “How can he decide which laughter is necessary or unnecessary?” I asked my sisters. They didn’t answer.
He also knew how each of us would lead our lives when we grew up. “One daughter shall become a lawyer. One daughter shall qualify as a teacher. And one shall be an IAS officer.” Unfortunately, not a single daughter obliged him, but that again is in the future. At the time I’m writing of Father’s stock phrase to me was, “You’ll never amount to anything. With the kind of marks you have it is unlikely that you’ll even get into a college.” I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t care whether I did or not. That I found trigonometry disgusting and physics loathsome. That I didn’t understand the relevance of chemical formulae in my life. That I secretly longed to become a nightclub crooner and often rehearsed my repertoire in the bathroom, using the plastic mobile shower head as a mike. Get into college I did—but just about. It was really my extracurricular activities that got me in. As I said my chief worry at that point wasn’t getting into college—it was what I would wear if I did. School offered protection. Even if my uniforms were made out of rough drill—they still looked like everybody else’s. But college! How could I go in my “sensible” pl
eated skirts and “modest” blouses when all the others would be dressed in clinging sweaters and tight skirts? All the classy girls in school had spent their last term discussing little else. And as the year wound to a close they had begun work on their adult wardrobes in a frenzy and I’d die thinking of my own hand-me-downs. (“They were good enough for your sisters. They’ll be good enough for you.”) I nearly didn’t go to college because of this. I wanted to fail—I prayed that I would. “I’ll feel so ridiculous,” I confided to my second sister tearfully. She didn’t help matters by saying, “Don’t worry—nobody will notice you.” I glared at her. “But I want to be noticed.” “Well, then, you’re in trouble. Your sister and I were glad that nobody looked at us. That’s why we could concentrate on our studies.” “Fuck studies,” I said loudly and clearly before stalking out of the room. I think that was the first time my darling sister had ever heard the dreaded “F-word” (as she referred to it ever after). She didn’t tell on me, as I thought she would. But from that day onwards I had the feeling that she was distancing herself from me. Or perhaps that’s when the madness began to set in. I don’t know.
My last years in school and initially in college, until the time I met Anjali, I saw the world mainly through the prism of Charlie.We drifted apart to be sure, she was so much more determined than me to make her life crackle and pop but still I admired her lead and tried to follow her whenever I could.
Charlie was something. She scored so many firsts of the nonaca demic kind that she was the envy of every girl in class. She was the first one to start her periods, at age ten no less, and she was, consequently, the first one to sprout breasts. She would proudly pick up her school tunic to show them off to the rest of us during lunch break. How we envied her the pretty pink buds! We consoled ourselves by pointing to the acne on her face. “Pimple Face” some of the girls would jeer when they saw her but she would swagger past unfazed, her little breasts bouncing merrily.
Charlie was the first one to discover boys and soul-kissing. Given the puritanical attitude at school, it was natural that all of us were obsessed with the opposite sex but only she was adventurous enough to do something about it. The “Building Boys,” as we’d code-named our gangling schoolboy neighbors (Charlie lived across the street from me), took care of her curiosity and mine. One of them wore surma in his eyes and the other was an Anglo-Indian who played the piano. She was already notorious in the area as a “fast chick,” so it didn’t surprise any of us when she announced at age twelve that she’d kissed them both—the one with the surma and the piano-player. “Which one was better?” we asked. “Oh, definitely, the Anglo. He was eating a double-bubble gum which he passed on to me with his tongue!” Wow!
But at that stage my interest in boys was only academic, well almost. I don’t know what it was that put me off them—perhaps it was their sweaty bodies, perhaps their silly jokes, not to mention my parents, who watched my every move. But I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Charlie’s accounts of her forays into the teenage world of “Lipstick onYour Collar” and high-heeled pumps. I shared at one remove all her adventures from experimenting with her father’s razor under the arms to stuffing her bra with cotton wool to look “bigger.” Charlie, to my adoring eyes, was straight out of Archie and Veronica comics, though not half as innocent. I remember sneaking into a theater with her to see our first adult movie.We were fourteen then. It was Splendor in the Grass starring Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. I’d lied at home that I had to attend netball practice. Instead I sneaked across the street to Charlie’s home. We stole her mother’s lipstick and money for the tickets and ice cream. (Her mother never found out. She was too busy playing rummy at the club.) I recall we debated whether to take the BB’s with us or not but decided against it. “Too dangerous,” she said. “Too boring,” I said.
On occasion after occasion, Charlie took the lead in pushing us to the limits of our high school respectability. There was the school picnic, for instance, where Charlie decided we were all old enough to smoke. “I’ve had hundreds of ciggies,” she boasted. “My brother pinches dad’s fags and we both smoke in the balcony after the lights go off. I know all about it. Come on.” None of us dared walk up to a paan-bidi shop and ask for a pack so Charlie volunteered. “First, remove your school badge and sash,” Kiran, a tall, awkward girl cautioned, “or someone will report you.” She did that and went off. She was back minutes later waving a pack at us. “Cool, my favorites,” she laughed. “Look, this is the way to light them—like this. Just like in the movies.” We gawked as she expertly struck a match and lit up. “This is a filter-tipped cigarette,” she continued. “You put the filter side in your mouth.” The smoke coiled up gracefully and all of us sniffed at it with our eyes shut. “Try a puff,” she offered. I immediately took one. It was awful and tasted as though I was swallowing dirty steel wool. But I pretended I’d done it before. “I prefer nonfil ters,” I said airily, trying hard all the while not to cough, and handed the cigarette back.
“Like which brand,” asked Kiran, the girl who had cautioned Charlie earlier. I was stumped. “Oh—you know, any of the others—Charminar.”
“Go on! Liar! That one is so strong. Only drivers and servants can smoke it. Daddy doesn’t allow them to come into the house if he smells them,” Manju, another girl, added.
“Well—I like those,” I lied glibly as Charlie passed the pack around.
She was also the first girl in school to own a pair of stretch pants. They were the absolute rage at the time, but girls from “decent” families weren’t allowed to wear them because they hugged the skin so. Charlie wore her fire-engine-red pair to a school outing once and scandalized everybody. I thought she looked fantastic. She thought so too. And so did the BB’s. “I got so many whistles today,” she whispered gleefully, as the spinster-principal crooked a finger at her. “You will go home at once,” she was ordered. But it didn’t matter. She’d wanted to create a sensation and she’d succeeded.
My family detested the sound of her name. “How can a girl be called Charlie?” my sisters would squawk. “She is not a good influence on you,” Mother would mutter. “I don’t want that girl in my house,” Father would rage. And the more they disapproved, the closer we became. The day she got deflowered in the backseat of a borrowed car, she came straight to the house to tell me. She knew she wasn’t welcome, so she used the system of signals we’d worked out. I heard the two shrill whistles and ran out onto the balcony. She signaled to me to come down.
“I can’t.” I gestured. “Father’s at home.”
“Come to the landing at least—it’s important,” she urged. I peered cautiously into my parents’ bedroom to see what Father was doing. He was on his bed surrounded by a pile of government files marked “Most Immediate.” Figuring he was totally engrossed in his work, I was sneaking away when I heard him call out. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“Oh, I’ve forgotten my science workbook. I have to get some extra notes for the test tomorrow.”
“Who was that I heard you talking to just now?”
“A girl from my class.”
“Do girls whistle these days?”
“That’s her Girl Guide whistle,” I improvised.
“Be back in five minutes. I’ll be watching the clock.”
I ran out of the house. Charlie was looking even more triumphant than usual.
“I did it!” she announced.
“What?”
“Don’t be dumb—IT!!”
“You mean—THAT?”
“Yes! What else did you think?”
“How was it?”
“Not all that great.”
“Painful?”
“Not really.”
“Who?”
“The Anglo.”
“Did he know how to do it?”
“Sort of . . . but I showed him.”
“How did you know?”
“Come on . . . I’ve seen books and pictures and things.”
“Gosh! W
ill you get a baby now?”
“Let’s see . . . but I don’t think so. We didn’t do it properly.”
“Meaning?”
“You know—it was not exactly like in the books.”
“But you did do it?”
“Yes, of course, but I don’t think doing it like this can make a baby.”
“Are you going to marry the Anglo when you grow up?”
“Don’t be mad. Why should I?”
“They always do in movies.”
“Yeah—but I’m not in the movies, am I?”
“That’s true. OK. I’ve got to go.”
“Swear you won’t tell anyone. God’s promise.”
“Promise.”
“You want to do it also? I can ask the Anglo.”
“No!”
“Coward!”
“I have to go.”
College changed the equation between Charlie and me. We’d conspired to go to the same one and take the same subjects, but somehow it wasn’t the same thing anymore. Charlie got more and more involved with boys—real ones (the BB’s were promptly abandoned and forgotten) while I didn’t know quite what to do with myself. I made a few new friends, but there was no intimacy in these relationships. Charlie and I used to walk to college together and it was only during these morning sessions that we talked. She still attracted a lot of attention on the street and at college mainly because of the flashy way she dressed and comported herself. She was about the only girl in First Year who applied makeup—lots of it. And wore pointy-toed shoes with four-inch heels. I loved the way Charlie put herself together. She no longer needed cotton wool inside her bra cups—her breasts were perky and full. It was no wonder then that she soon attracted the attention of a distant uncle of hers who ran an ad agency. He asked her to model for one of his clients—a synthetic yarn manufacturer. Charlie was thrilled. “Come with me,” she urged, “I have to get my photographs taken.”
