'Of course you do,' said Sanks irascibly. 'It's that guy you like, the one'- he made his voice all squeaky and produced what he fondly assumed was an imitation of my voice - '"with the cute butt."'
Oh, that guy.
Well, he did have a point, the new skipper looked pretty good when he leapt about fielding, all lithe and leonine, which is a huge thing to pull off if you're wearing those awful light-blue track pants.... And I could shop for pretty saris in Dhaka. Also, there was no way I couldn't do what Sankar Menon wanted and survive. The man is a butcher, an absolute kasai. Sanks was still talking. 'Besides, didn't you once have lunch with the whole team in Bombay, Zoya? You know these guys.'
'Breakfast,' I corrected him automatically. 'Right before some big match. But that doesn't really count. You sent me there to get some No Objection Certificate signed and they just let me sit at their table for, like, fifteen minutes. No one talked to me or anything.'
'See?' said Sanks, happily ignoring what I'd just said. 'You know them! You're going. It's just a two-day thing. And might I remind you that a lot of people would give an arm and a leg for an opportunity to observe world-class cricket up-close.'
Ya-ya, people who lived, ate and dreamed cricket. I wouldn't cut off any body part for the dumb game, except maybe the extra two inches of subcutaneous fat on my cheeks.
'Okay, Sanks,' I shrugged, bowing to the inevitable. 'I'll go.'
I hung up and gloomily retraced my steps to Shah Rukh's make-up van. I tried the handle Monita style (i.e., authoritatively), but it didn't budge. Then one of the spot-boys loitering outside the van dug out this little strand of dried snot from his nose, rolled it between forefinger and thumb and flicked it in the direction in which Shah Rukh had (presumably) gone. I looked that way and managed to spot him in the distance, atop a giant Zing! Cola truck parked in the middle of the square, practising dance steps with the choreographer.
A crowd of about a thousand extras milled below him.
I sighed.
So much for Veer-Zoya.
***
2
The next day I caught an insane flight back to Delhi and hired a kali-peeli to take me home, rattling up to the gates of Tera Numbar around midnight. The cabbie and I bickered amicably over the fare and parted friends. I swung open the rusty iron-sheeted front gate, lugged my bag through the garden and up the veranda and peered through the fly-screen door into the drawing room.
The room was dark but the TV was on, and Eppa, our severe, fifty-plus maid, who's looked after me and my brother since we were born, was catching some late-night television with Meeku, my mother's aging-but-feisty, one-eyed hairball. Eppa rules our house and has been with the family since '79 when my dad was posted in Cochin Cantt and my harassed Ma took her on to help cope with my horrible older brother, Zoravar. 'Hoo's dyuere?' she called.
'Bhooooot,' I said in my best spooky voice.
Eppa snorted as she unlatched the door. 'Zoyaaa!' she said. 'Why yu are skaring me, notty gul?' I gave her a hug as Meeku yipped eagerly around my heels and then collapsed right in front of the AC again, his duty done. 'Kaisa tha Shah Rukh Khan?'
'He was hot, Eppa!' I told her. 'I saw him shirtless, can you imagine?'
She leaned forward excitedly. 'Photu liya?' she asked, and I had to sheepishly confess that I hadn't managed any photographs. She sniffed in disgust; she'd really been looking forward to showing off a photo of me in a clinch with SRK to her entire social circle.
I collapsed on the sofa and scratched Meeku behind the ears. 'What are you watching, Eppa?' I asked her placatingly.
'Paap Ka Ant,' she said, a little sulkily.
The End of Sin. 'Cool! What's it about?'
I really like watching TV with Eppa because it's something she does only late at night, after her work for the day is done - the dishes washed, the kitchen swept, the copper gas burners meticulously cleaned with a skinny number 18 knitting needle and the glass lid firmly closed over them for the night. It's the only time she relaxes, squats before the TV, combs out her wiry grey hair and giggles girlishly over WWF wrestling matches, high-level politics in the Viraani and Aggarwal dynasties and the occasional sex-and-violence movie. Now she spoke in her gentle late-night voice, so different from her shrill quarrelsome day voice: 'The hero, no, he is loving rich girl, and her family is not happy, so her vicked brother, what he doos, he takes the hero sister and spoils her. Now she will have to kill herself...'
I choked on the glass of water she'd handed me. 'Excuse me? What d'you mean, Eppa, if he spoi - uh - rapes her, why should she kill herself?'
'She have to! That is the only way.... Spoilt girls have to kill themselves. Or become nun. They can take badla on him first if they want.'
'Revenge?' I asked. 'You mean they should kill him or something? Why can't she file a case, win it, then meet some nice man and marry him?'
Eppa shook her head vigorously. 'That is not the way, Zoya Moya! She havtu die!' She looked at my appalled expression and added charitably, 'And go to heaven, of course.'
I woke up around eight and came out to have my tea in the garden. Our house is on this very busy main road that links Delhi to the industrial town of Rohtak. Huge, smoke-belching trucks, illegally overloaded with mysterious merchandise, trundle up and down it daily. But my grandfather's house has a huge wall all around it and masses of bougainvillea and bamboo thickets that muffle the sound and create this really cool secret-garden feel.
I watched Eppa watering the flowerbeds, humming to herself. 'Good morning, sex bomb!' I said cheerily and flashed a benign smile as Meeku hurtled into the lawn and started digging vigorously in the purple masses of verbena blossoms. 'Where's Dad?'
Eppa sniffed, 'Dyuere!' and I turned and saw my father walking up, the sun gleaming on his smooth bald head, his moustache bristling. He was still in his pajamas and looked really worked up about something. 'It's that damn Gajju again,' he grumbled, without looking at me. 'He keeps parking in my spot all the time.'
Eppa made soothing noises and poured out the tea.
My grandfather built this house in the early thirties and I've often wondered why he bothered because all he does is hide in his village and avoid it like the plague. Of course, according to my grandmother, Karol Bagh was a happening address back then. 'It was all the Punjabis coming in post-Partition,' she'd told me once with a disdainful sniff, 'who ruined the neighbourhood.'
I don't really see her point. I love the Punjabi-ness of Karol Bagh. It's chock-full of colourful fabric markets and sinful, ghee-drenched sweet stalls and peopled with rocking Punju auntiejis with flashing eyes and massive shelf-like uniboob bosoms. My theory is that my grandmother, who's a little - uh - girlish in the chest department, found them hugely intimidating. That's why she beat a prudent retreat to the haveli in the village some twenty years ago, hauling my granddad off with her.
When he left, my granddad divided the house among his four sons. My father, Vijayendra Singh Solanki, is the eldest, followed closely by my trio of Chachas: Mohindra, Gajendra and Yogendra. 13, New Rohtak Road or Tera Numbar, as we call it, is an ungainly white two-storeyed bungalow with pillared verandas and overgrown lawns in the back and front, and we all live in different bits of it. We cousins love it, because the division created some really eccentric architecture, like a kitchen in a garage, a dining room you enter through a loo, a perfectly circular drawing room or gol kamra, various secret passages, and a bathroom window through which members of all four families can talk and lend and borrow stuff.
Dad moved in here when he retired from the army because he felt that motherless kids like Zoravar and me needed all the family we could get. His relationship with his brothers was tempestuous, to say the least. Like, these days Gajju was totally pissing off my dad by parking his crappy old car in Dad's parking spot in the drive. 'He's just doing it because I bought a new car,' Dad grumbled. 'I've a good mind to go upstairs and pull his nose.'
I used to stress about this internecine warring among the brothers whe
n I was younger, till Eppa explained that my dad and his brothers were actually quite fond of each other. 'Your mummy alvayz said they shows their loves by fighting, Zoya,' she told me once after Yogu Chacha had torn into our house like a guided missile and ripped the shirt off my dad's back, claiming it was his and that we'd flicked it off his washing line. 'Actually, they verrri close family. See how they all sees the cricket matches together!'
She had a point.
The ICC World Cup is a huge family event in our house. Everybody huddles around one TV and cheers like crazy. They curse and kiss and chest-bang and stuff. All is forgiven. Total bonding happens. In fact, my dad and three Chachas were all thrown out of the maternity ward of the Military Hospital by the irate Mallu nurses the day I was born because they were cheering the Indian team so loudly. It was the Prudential World Cup final that day and their lusty yelling had put all the delivering mommies on the floor off their breathe-in breathe-out rhythm.
Apparently, I only very narrowly escaped being named Kapila Devi Solanki.
Sometimes I can't help thinking that the fact that the last World Cup had been such a washout as far as India was concerned, was one big reason why our family bonding had taken such a nosedive.
Dad sipped his tea moodily, finally spotted me and did a double take. 'Arrey, Zoya! When did you come?'
I told him about the change in plan at work and he beamed happily. 'That's more like it!' he said. 'Flying to Dhaka to see some top-class cricket! Much better than shooting with hero-sheros.'
***
I was in office by eleven. I signed the register, greeted Totaram, our amiable security guard and drifted in only to suffer everybody going, 'Zoya? Why aren't you at the shoot? What happened?' It was full jale pe namak.
AWB is the biggest ad agency in the country. Its Delhi office churns out TV, print, radio and outdoor ads for a huge number of multinational clients, one of the biggest of which is the cola company Zing! Co. An agency basically has three departments: Servicing (that's me), whose job it is to suck up to the clients and help them work out what kind of strategy they need; Creative (that's Mon), whose job it is to actually create the campaign based on that strategy; and Media, whose job it is to decide where the campaign should appear (as in TV channels, radio channels, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, and street hoardings) so that the maximum number of people of the type the client wants to target end up seeing it. It's a fascinating, unabashedly shallow world, and I fell madly in love with it when I came here as a summer trainee two years ago.
I snuck into Sanks's cabin and hung around waiting for him to look at me. But he was leaning back in his armchair, both eyes closed, listening to a script that Neelo Basu (a lean, mean cadaverous machine, in a SICK MY DUCK tee shirt who lives to smoke joints and download south Indian sleaze off the Net) was narrating with full feeling. I had no option but to hang around near the cabin door and hear it too.
'Film opens on this sexy fucking highway, okay? There's this biker dude riding the Terminator, and as he cruises by, these massive fucking gates open for him, all by themselves, like magically. The dude grins a crooked grin and rides through and then he comes up to this high mountain pass in fucking Ladakh, okay? And these massive boulders roll aside magically too. He grins, again, like this happens every day for him, you know? And then he passes this green meadow where these babes are doing yoga, okay? They're all really hot, stacked types. Solid mutton-shutton happening, in skin-tight leotards, okay. And as he approaches them, they do this fucking mandook aasan, the frog position, okay, basically all hundred of them go up on their hands, raise their butts in the air and spread their legs out, like fully, man. Then this Hollywood-trailer type voice-over says: "THE WORLD OPENS WIDE FOR THE NERO-TASHA TERMINATOR."'
Neelo dropped the dramatic pose he'd frozen in, looked eagerly at Sanks and asked, 'What d'yu think?'
Sanks, eyes still closed, said mildly, 'Comments, gentlemen?'
One brave little servicing guy spoke up. 'I like it,' he said stoutly. 'It's different. It'll get us noticed.'
Neelo beamed at him, but Sanks said, eyes still closed, 'Why don't you come naked to work tomorrow, fucker? You'll be different and you'll get noticed.' The servicing guy shrank backward as Sanks opened dangerously glittering eyes and glared at Neelo. 'It's the Nero-Tasha Terminator, you fuck,' he spat out balefully. 'Not the Nero-Tasha Fornicator. When are you going to get your mind out of the gutter?'
But Neelo stood his ground. 'Don't be so one-track-minded, Sankar,' he said loftily. 'I'm showing how much respect this bike commands. Gates and shit open for it. Ladakhi boulders! And I did research, man! I went on the Net and found out the names of yoga aasans and all. This is a real aasan, by the way, in case you think I've made it up. Actually, if you think about it, it's quite a subtle script...'
Sanks got to his feet. 'Subtle, my ass,' he said rudely and then, spotting me, said, 'Aah, Zoya, take Subtle Bihari Vajpayee here and hit the airport. Your flight leaves at one.'
So then Neelo took me home in his rattling car to pick up my things for the trip. On the way he went on about how cool his script was and how he was a creative giant reporting to pygmies-in-suits and how the only way to sell bikes was to tell the consumer he would get laid big time if he bought the Nero-Tasha bike.
'In fact,' said Neelo, fully warming to his theme, 'that's the only way to sell anything, man! Bikes, televisions, insurance, cold drinks.... Buy this, get laid! Buy that, get laid! Buy fucking anything, get laid! Hey, maybe I can sell my script to Zing! whatdyuthink, Zoya? "The World Opens Wide For The Zing! Drinker". Cool, huh?'
***
3
Dhaka isn't that popular a destination but that day the lines snaking in front of the Biman Air counters were the longest in the terminal. Malayalis, Manipuris, Sardars, old, young, pierced or vibhooti-smeared, they were all in the queue.
That's cricket fever for you.
It's the Great Indian Disease, I tell you. Worse than dengue or polio or tuberculosis. They should vaccinate us against it when we're born, I thought gloomily as I queued up behind the long line of Dhaka-bound cricket freaks. One shot at birth, a couple of boosters over the years and you're immune to cricket for life. No heartache, no ulcers, no plunge in productivity during the cricket season and no stupid bets that make you lose money and lead you to commit suicide.
The queue was over forty people long, but luckily we spotted the still photographer on the project, Vishaal Sequiera, more than halfway up the line. He waved to us and we strutted up to join him, moving up some twenty places in the process.
Vishaal was all excited about the trip. His artily untidy hair (in which orange gulmohar petals were scattered like confetti) stood up like it was electrically charged and his eyes had the manic gleam of a cameraman-with-a-plan. 'Kaafi intense type ke shots lenge,' he told Neelo, puffing on a Navy Cut. 'You know, Reebok, Nike types...sweaty, focused, looking right into camera. Attitude, you know? Besides, we'll get to see some matches, it'll be cool.'
As cool as clandestine glimpses of Shah Rukh Khan's chest? I don't think so. But that reminded me.... 'What's the captain's name again, Neelo?'
'Nikhil Khoda,' Neelo said, rolling his eyes. 'Really, Zoya, you're pathetic. Please do read up on all these guys or you will fully cut off our noses in Dhaka.'
Vishaal said, 'How can you not know Khoda? He's a God, dude, he's a King!'
'Plays that well, huh?' I asked as we all moved up a place in the line.
Vishaal shook his head impatiently. 'Never mind that! Do you know who he's dating?'
'Some Bollywood heroine?' I hazarded, not very interested.
'No, no.' Vishaal shook his head again. 'Nothing so mundane! He's dating' - he clasped his hands together, lowered his voice and breathed reverentially - 'the girl in the yeh toh bada toinnngg hai ad!'
Both Neelo and he let out a long low moan.
Oh, please.
The ad in question is an extremely raunchy spot for men's underpants. It features this ripe-'n'
-tight village babe in a choli-sari who sashays really proudly down to the river panghat to wash her husband's chaddis. All the village women gather around to watch as she soaks, scrubs and rinses the garment in the sudsy river water, getting more and more turned on in the process. There's a one-line song-track that sighs steamily, 'Yeh toh bada toinnngg hai' right through the ad, seeking to inform us that the wearer of the underpants, which the proud village babe is washing so slavishly, is very toinnngg, whatever toinnngg may mean. It is seriously the most sexist piece of advertising I've seen in my life. But no one can deny that the babe is a scorcher....
'Big deal,' I muttered. 'What does toinnngg mean anyway?'
Neelo cleared his throat. 'I think it means' - he held up his hand with his index finger hanging downwards limply and then slowly raised it till it stood fully erect - 'TOINNNGG, you know?'
I choked, but was saved from having to answer because we'd finally reached the check-in counter. I hitched my bag higher on my shoulder, handed our tickets over and resigned myself to a really educational trip.
The Zoya Factor Page 2
