by Shobhaa De
“Have you asked your parents?”
“They won’t mind, silly, he is my uncle.” I still hadn’t learned enough to be wary of all Charlie’s uncles and so I tagged along. I wonder sometimes how things would have turned out if I hadn’t gone with Charlie that day but I suppose karma is something that cannot be bucked. Charlie had to pose against an enormous plastic shuttle. She was dressed in a clinging sweater and the famous stretch pants. The photographer turned out to be a nervous young fellow from the agency who took hours to set up the lights. It was hot, monotonous and utterly boring. Charlie’s uncle looked thoroughly disreputable and his actions and speech did nothing to belie his appearance. The client was around, sweating it out in a three-piece suit. For a novice, Charlie was doing pretty well. Far from being self-conscious, she smiled and pouted with professional ease as the camera clicked away.
“Uncleji” stepped in from time to time to “adjust” her clothes or hair. The client just salivated on the sidelines. As the hours dragged past I began getting jittery. It was time to get home. I couldn’t keep pulling off the “extra tutorials” number. Just as I picked up my bags and books to leave the client said, “Just a minute.” He and Uncleji spoke for a few moments and then Uncleji said to me with a leer, “Mr. Chopra would like some photographs of you.” I looked quickly at Charlie who winked and mouthed, “Say yes!” I was totally confused. I suppose the client thought I would be flattered, but uppermost in my mind was Father’s reaction. “I haven’t asked my parents’ permission.” I stuttered. “They’ll get angry.”
“Don’t worry. We will not print these pictures without your permission. These are just trial shots for our files.Your parents will never find out,” Uncleji said.
“I don’t know . . .” I said weakly.
Charlie came up and hissed, “Don’t be stupid.Where’s the harm? They won’t eat you up—it’s nothing. Just photos. Do it, yaar.” Which is how I became a model via the perfect con. As it turned out, the client liked my photographs and they got used—without my permission and without any payment. One morning I heard Father calling out to Mother, “Isn’t this Karuna?” Mother replied nervously, “Must be some mistake . . . let us ask her.” I was summoned. Father flashed the newspaper in front of me. “When did you do this? How dare you? Do you want to disgrace us completely? This is not something girls from respectable families do. How did this photograph get here?” I just stared and stared at the ad. Actually, it looked pretty good, and I looked pretty good too. A smile must have appeared on my face, because suddenly I felt Father’s palm hitting me sharply across the face. “Disgraceful! Cheap! Filthy! No Brahmin girl has ever stooped so low. Tell me—how did this photograph get here?” I stood there glumly, too sullen and shocked to say anything. I could feel the sting of his fingers on my cheek.
Mother looking at the photograph said timidly, “She looks quite nice.”
Father looked apoplectic. I thought he was going to slap her too. “Nonsense, it is you people who have spoiled this girl. I do not want my daughters to cheapen themselves in this way. I will not tolerate this in my house.You will never do this again—do you understand?”
But the rebelliousness I had cultivated in school now surfaced with a vengeance. The ads kept appearing—again and again and again—but the slaps stopped. I don’t know why or how. Perhaps Father didn’t know how to handle a situation totally out of his ken. It’s strange to think that but perhaps that’s what it was.
I suppose it was only the act of rebellion that kept the modeling going for I didn’t enjoy it much, not the way Charlie did for sure. But it meant having money of my own and a certain quick thrill of excitement every time someone recognized me as the Terkosa Girl or whatever.
Soon a strange truce existed at home. There was a tacit understanding that I wouldn’t do any ads that would truly disgrace the family. I stayed away from all but “safe” and “classy” products. Also, there was an elaborate charade that had evolved—the old staple of “what I don’t see I don’t know.” I never left home with makeup and I always took it off before getting back. The unwritten rules also insisted that I undertook only those assignments which could be fitted into free afternoons and completed before Father got home from the office. This setup worked quite well. Until I widened the rift by acquiring a boyfriend. I still didn’t have the interest in boys that Charlie had and I suppose it was really only one more step in my rebellion (added to the fact that I did find him quite nice) that made me begin seeing Bunty. He was from another college and we met in an ad agency where he’d come to audition for a new cigarettes campaign. I thought he was cute. He smoked cheap cigarettes and wore frayed jeans. His language was laced with colorful Hindi epithets and he was what one would now describe as a laid-back person. In other words, a happy-go-lucky bum. We fell into a relationship which was uncomplicated and easy. He hadn’t read a book in his life and thought Anna Karenina was the name of a new restaurant in town. But we had loads of fun together and even convinced ourselves that we were deeply in love. I think the part we best enjoyed about being an item was people’s reactions to us as a pair. “You two look so good together,” they’d say and we’d preen some more.
My parents, expectedly, loathed Bunty or even mention of his name. It didn’t really matter since I hadn’t expected it to be otherwise. By now I was so inured to their disapproval of nearly everything about me that it was really their approval of anything that scared me. But I still played the game by their rules to the extent possible. I never brought Bunty home and I did not even speak to him over the phone when Father was around.
Over a period of time, we just worked out ways that made it possible for us to meet and go out—but we never went out nights. Once exceptionally frustrated or exceptionally daring I asked Mother, “What do you think it is that we will do in the darkness that we can’t do during the daytime?” She was too shocked to reply. The matter didn’t go further but I think I remember the occasion now because it was so symptomatic of the relationship between Bunty and me.We weren’t really doing anything much to Charlie’s horror.
“How ridiculous,” she scoffed when I explained once. “What’s the point in having a steady if you aren’t doing anything.”
“We’ll only do it after we’re married,” I said goody-goodily and Charlie laughed.
“Weird. Real weird.”
We were talking at her place and Simon and Garfunkel sang “Bridge over Troubled Waters” in the background. As Charlie retrieved a carton of tampons from her dresser, I spotted a slim packet of imported condoms—FLs. Charlie saw me staring. “These are for real men and real girls for the real thing. Not for Holy Virgins and Bunty.” I was supposed to feel crushed. But I didn’t. At the back of my mind lurked the thought—good girls didn’t.
CHAPTER 2
AS THE DAYS PASSED EVEN THE FASHION SHOW AND ANJALI WERE accepted in that strange shifting compact at home. Father pretended he didn’t know I was doing the show. Mother pretended she didn’t know where I was going three afternoons a week. And I pretended I didn’t notice them pretending not to know.
Today I wonder if I would have gone through all that if Anjali hadn’t been all that I aspired to be. Unlikely. But at that stage in my life she was very special to me as a person. Come to think of it, the reason I kept going back to the rehearsals after the first couple of occasions was not so much the chance of being in the show as the chance of being with her.The first time she invited me home I almost cried in gratitude. It was a fancy place in Malabar Hill in one of the early high-rises. It certainly doesn’t rate as a hot address today but it was different then. Soon, I was going over constantly, though getting there wasn’t easy. It involved a long walk from college to the bus stop, very often skipping lunch to get there on time. It also meant missing afternoon tutorials and additional lectures. The bus stop I had to alight at to get to Anjali’s house was at the bottom of a hill and I had to walk up a steep path in the blazing sun to reach her apartment. But, oh, the bliss once I got
there: it was cool, carpeted and more luxurious than anything I could have imagined. In retrospect, it was quite a ghastly place with cheap furniture painted over in gilt, ugly chandeliers and shabby Kashmiri wooden screens. As for her bedroom, “my boudoir” as she rather grandly called it, it resembled a bordello from some third-rate Hollywood film. It had a large canopied bed all done up in maroon velvet. One entire wall was covered in mirrors—this was Abe’s kinky little secret—the cushions were covered with inflexible shiny brocade, and the dressing table had a synthetic fur covering in plastic pink. But to my untutored eyes this was the height of good living.This was how the rich lived.This was how movie stars lived. It was perfect! It was also the first home with an actual bar that I’d seen. I thought that was terribly stylish—a bar! There was a room reserved for it. Behind the counter were all sorts of naughty stickers—the kind that originate in the touristy kiosks in London or New York. And, of course, this room too was full of mirrors. Mirrors behind the bar, mirrors on the ceiling, mirrors on the bathroom door. It was a cramped little room, really, and on one wall there was a portrait of a waiflike girl, Anjali’s only daughter, Mimi (Mumtaz, actually). When I try to recall that picture, its ordinariness points to it being the efforts of one of those slapdash Sunday painters who set up shop in Hyde Park. But maybe I’m being prejudiced for it was quite sweet and it did manage to capture the loneliness in the child’s eyes.The bar seemed an inappropriate backdrop for hanging a child’s portrait, but even that didn’t seem incongruous to me then. But as I later learned a bad portrait in a bar was the least of Mimi’s worries.What a life the poor girl led! Sleeping through the frequent fights and showdowns between her parents. And occasionally sharing her small bed with her mother, when she’d take refuge there after a particularly brutal fight with Abe. Or worse, when Anjali would be displaced from her own bedroom while Abe shared the bed with a party guest who’d decided to stay over after all.While incidents like these must have been traumatic for Mimi, they were terribly humiliating for Anjali. But she didn’t speak to me about them till nearly ten years after I first met her. “You were far too young then. You wouldn’t have understood. Besides I was afraid I would lose you by scaring you off with all these horror stories about my life. I wanted to enjoy your innocence and your admiration for as long as possible.”
I suppose I did shock easily in those days for all my forced bravado in school and college. I remember one occasion when Anjali was too far gone in her misery to camouflage the sordidness of her life from me. We’d finished rehearsing and she invited me home. She was uncharacteristically quiet on the drive back and once in the apartment she took me straight into the bedroom saying seriously, “I want to show you something.” I got my cues all wrong and felt both thrilled and privileged. Also, very adult. What could she want to show me? She went to her dressing table, pulled out the top drawer and extracted a bunch of Polaroids. “Look at these,” she said and handed them to me. They were crude, nude shots of Anjali. I was too embarrassed to say anything. How was I supposed to react? Was I meant to admire them? Did she want to shock me? Should I be blasé? I just didn’t know. I met her eyes after several beats of silence and saw she was crying. She looked very pathetic at that moment with streaks of mascara smudging the carefully applied blush-on over her cheeks. Her mouth was twisted up and her nails (those nails!) were digging into one of the brocade pillows.
“What are these?” I asked in a voice that I somehow managed to keep controlled.
“Abe took them last night. He’d come back from somewhere with this new camera. And he insisted he wanted me to pose this way. ‘You have such a beautiful body . . . I want to photograph it,’ he said. I was flattered.We’ve been going through a bad patch recently. I just felt so happy he was taking an interest in me again. I didn’t really want to do it—but I agreed. We had fun, and Abe was playful and loving. After many months, we made love. Not in that old nasty way, but lovingly, tenderly—like we used to when we got married. It was so good really. He insisted on opening champagne. We drank it in bed. He sprayed me all over with perfume.We laughed together. He kept the phone off the hook. I thought everything was OK. He left a couple of hours later, saying he had a business appointment. I went to his cupboard to put back his shirts which had come from the laundry and . . . right there . . . not even hidden or anything . . . were those other Polaroids . . . of that bloody bitch who has been chasing him for a while now. You know—that girl who models—the one who won the Miss India contest two years ago. And that isn’t all . . . I also found her panties—awful, dirty ones . . . and a scruffy bra.”
I still don’t know why she broke down that day and chose to tell me all this. Perhaps she felt I was ready to be her friend and confi dante. Perhaps she just needed to tell someone what a bastard Abe really was. Whatever her motives, I didn’t feel comfortable in my new role. I would have preferred to remain the wide-eyed fan, and mute admirer. And those Polaroids . . . I wish I hadn’t seen them either. They reminded me of dirty pictures, the sort we, as schoolgirls, would stare at and giggle over. And there is something about dirty pictures of familiars that lowers them to the level of wantons and I wanted Anjali to remain her queenly self. Besides, and I hope she won’t find this snide, Anjali didn’t have the world’s best body. In fact, seeing her stripped of all her clothes, I realized just how imperfect it was. The breasts were small (“they fit perfectly into champagne glasses”) and freckled. The hips far too wide and dimpled on the fleshly upper thighs. She was pigeon-chested and her ribcage was shaped like a conical jar. But none of this really mattered. Rather it was the battering my image of her received that shocked me. On my way home, sitting on the upper deck of the BEST bus, I also wondered whether she was trying to pass on a message. It seemed a pretty pathetic way of doing it . . . and maybe I’d got it all wrong. I preferred to give her the benefit of the doubt on this one. It wasn’t possible, I said to myself. Why would she do that with me? I mean who was I? A nobody! She didn’t have to entice me, surely. I hastily brushed away the thought. But even to this day, I often wonder.
It was around this time that I met Si. Anjali constantly brought her up in conversation and I’d formed the idea in my mind of someone even more exalted and high-society than Anjali from the evident admiration in my friend’s tone when she talked of her. Besides, Si was quite an item on the gossip hotline: rumor had it that she was a fixture at the “orgies” Abe threw, that she was the first person to wear a mini in India almost simultaneously with its appearance in Europe, the first person to openly declare that she was living with her lover . . .
At our first meeting I was impressed: she sat in one corner of the rehearsal room, smoking incessantly and wearing a Mary Quant wig, false eyelashes two inches long, a mini that revealed her stockinged legs to her upper thigh. It didn’t take me long to discover there was something very sly and witchlike about Si. Unlike Anjali, who, as the days went by, often allowed the mask to drop, Si was “on camera” constantly. Not surprising really for she was narcissistic and vain to a neurotic degree. I would watch her gazing at herself in all those conveniently placed mirrors in Anjali’s house, studying her image, adjusting her legs, pouting to herself and checking to see if those hideous eyelashes were still around. Aside from the eyelashes which, once the initial awe had disappeared, looked cheap and whorish, the things I detested the most about her were the stockings she always wore. Nylons in Bombay! The mind boggled. Her eyes were always bloodshot; perhaps it was the glue of the false eyelashes that made them so, but it just heightened the generally disreputable air Si managed to project despite all her posturing. She appeared the sort of woman who didn’t change her panties for days and left her tampons in long after she was meant to change them.
In sum, she looked a slut and certainly behaved like one. If there was a man in the same room as she was—any man—she would switch on in a flash. The crossing and uncrossing of the legs would then become a little dance and she’d make a production out of lighting her extra-long Kents
, pausing long enough to give the man a chance to jump up and do the needful. Once, she offered me a cigarette, saying, “C’mon kid, try it.” I hated the condescension in her voice. I refused with as much disdain as I dared to display. In any case, I wanted to laugh. She probably thought I’d never touched a cigarette in my life. But, when one took everything into account, I suppose I did feel gauche and rustic before Si, mainly because she took every opportunity to jerk me around especially when Anjali was present. Perhaps she thought I was competition. Once she asked tauntingly, “Do you have a boyfriend? A pretty girl like you must be having someone around.” When I didn’t reply she turned to Anjali and said with a laugh, “Hey Anj, why don’t we introduce her to Abe—he’d love her. He has this thing about Hindu virgins!”
Anjali looked at her sharply. “Leave her alone, Si. Go play with yourself if you’re bored.” On other occasions she’d breeze in asking for food saying, “Anj! I’m starving! Screwing is strenuous business.” Anjali, to her credit, disliked these mannerisms as much as I did. She’d always try and divert Si’s attention by giving her the latest foreign fashion glossy. At the time I thought Si was a bad influence on Anjali but in a while I saw that this wasn’t the case. It was all part of the learning process but greenhorn that I was it took me forever to tumble to the realities of Anjali’s world, a world where Si and Anjali were only two sides of the same expensive, if badly tarnished, coin.
Finally, it was showtime.The clothes “designed” by Anjali were pretty awful and far from original. Laboriously put together from magazines, they were neither stylish nor attractive. Thankfully, the show wasn’t a flop—all her fancy friends showed up—but neither was it a big success. I didn’t enjoy it at all, even though she insisted on my wearing her personal jewelry while the other girls used fake stuff. When I now look at those old photographs I feel amused by what was considered fashionable then. Anjali had insisted on my having my hair piled elaborately on top of my head. The hairdo, such as it was, consisted of rolls and ringlets kept firmly in place by a gluey lacquer that made my scalp itch. She also did my makeup herself. It was an era of painted lower lashes, pale lipstick and heavy mascara. I looked perfectly ghastly. She didn’t think so. “Just look at yourself,” she said. “Just look how gorgeous the effect is.” I looked and wasn’t convinced. Nobody from my family came for the show, which was just as well. After the show I was more than ever convinced that modeling was not quite my thing. I wasn’t an exhibitionist, I wasn’t confident, I felt ridiculous on the ramp and I’m sure I looked it as well. But a combination of youthful bravado and subtle manipulation by Anjali (because as I can now see without modeling there would have been no earthly reason for us to meet, something my parents would have used to separate us for good) ensured that I spent a couple of years modeling. I would consult Anjali every time an assignment came up and she would constantly keep tabs on my schedule. Then one of Anjali’s sponsors, a successful jeweler, decided the show she had staged in Bombay was good enough to take to Delhi. Naturally, Anjali considered this a major coup. “Delhi—did you hear that?” she told us at a meeting in her flat. “Now all the magazines will be after me. Maganbhai really wants us to do it in style. This time, the accent will be on his jewelry and not on the clothes. In fact, I want you girls to wear simple Grecian-style saris in pastel colors. Something like a jewelry show I saw in Zurich.The accent was all on the fabulous stuff the girls wore around their necks and arms.We’ll stick things in your hair—well—you know, like those Ajanta frescoes.This is going to be really big.” I listened to her peroration with a growing feeling of frustration. I knew I’d never be allowed to go out of town. Sneaking in a modeling assignment or two in the city itself was tough enough. But this was going to be impossible. Yet, I was dying to go. It was more than just being in another city. This trip, if it happened at all, was the first time I was going to fly and experience the five-star way of living, things I had dreamed about since high school. (“I’ve told Maganbhai, my girls are used to traveling and living in style. No train business and YWCAs for us,” Anjali had crowed at the meeting.)
