THOSE PRICEY THAKUR GIRLS

by Anuja Chauhan

  So it was with a fair amount of expectation that I sat down to watch the news on the old black-and-white office TV on Friday.

  Well.

  I’ll give you the good news first. There’s a nice new piece of theme music – produced by Louis Banks no less. It’s a huge improvement on the earlier track, which another reviewer had compared to a galloping donkey with a broken back. The graphics have got better. Jazzy little umbrellas and smiling suns pop up on the India map during the weather reports. There is a new revolving globe logo that’s rather spiffy. And there is a toothsome piece of fresh maal reading the news alongside the irritatingly plummy-voiced Amitabh Bore. Slightly frozen and clearly overwhelmed at the importance of the job she has been entrusted with, but overall quite sweet really. I almost expected her to thank her mummy and daddy and the I&B minister for giving her this golden opportunity. She read with a perfect Brit accent (rather reminiscent of C3PO from Star Wars) and didn’t blink even once as far as I could tell, but that’s forgivable. What’s unforgivable is the news she read out. It was the same old I&B ministry approved, establishment appeasing pap. The Prime Minister has stated that he prefers his boiled eggs runny, the President has decided to name his bull dog Sunny… and so on.

  This, at a time when all the nation wants to know is who took how much money as kickbacks in the Defence Guns deal.

  This is no re-invention, DD. This is no ‘credible offering’. This is yet another gross insult to the intelligence of the viewer. Do you really think our need for genuine news reportage can be assuaged by a makeover as amateurishly fake as the mole on young Dolly Thakur’s chin?

  ‘Dhillon meri jaan? Where’s the column? All done?’

  Dylan Singh Shekhawat, sprawled in his office chair, hammering away at the typewriter with his back to the sublime view of Ballard Estate bathed in sunshine below, doesn’t bother to look up.

  ‘Patience, bastard,’ he says, his voice a deep, pleasant drawl. ‘Hira’s bitchy tone is a little hard for me to manage. But I really don’t get this – you own the bloody paper. Why can’t you get him to write his own damn column?’

  Varun Ohri, fat, fair and five feet tall, rests one fleshy buttock against the edge of a conveniently placed desk, and addresses his investigative editor with sweaty candour.

  ‘I’m a third generation rich kid, baby. My manliness has been leached by a lifetime of luxurious living. I can’t yell at editors-in-chief – especially ones who went to school with the Prime Minister of India, like our man Hiranandani. I can only plead with his minions. So give me the damn article, pronto.’

  ‘Okay.’ Dylan frowns down at the sheet. ‘But hang on a sec, I’m forty words short. Let me think.’

  ‘C’mon, c’mon, just wrap it up,’ Varun urges. ‘I’ll get you VIP passes to all the horny movies at the International Film Festival, pukka.’

  Dylan looks up and grins briefly. Lean dimples flash on either side of his firm mouth, softening the impact of his slightly hawk-like nose. ‘Deal. Here, want to see what I’ve done?’

  Ohri waddles over and scans the typewritten sheet. ‘What the fuck! DD bashing? Hira will freak when he sees this. You know he’s up to his nose advising the PM on this Operation Credibility.’

  ‘Don’t be idiotic, VO,’ Dylan replies in a bored voice. ‘Hira isn’t an old woman. He likes people to have their own point of view. Just because he’s tight with the PM doesn’t mean he’s his ass-wipe.’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’ Varun snorts. ‘You’re being extremely naïve.’

  ‘In that case he should’ve hung around and written his column himself,’ Dylan replies. ‘Instead of telling me do it. Well, I’ve done it. He said I could write whatever I liked as long as it was show-bizzy – and this is.’

  ‘He meant write something safe. About the rise of the star sons Sunny Deol and that new Kapoor kid, or the parallel cinema scene, or about blooming Buniyaad or something.’

  ‘Who’s Buniyaad?’ Dylan asks, genuinely clueless.

  Varun Ohri looks at him in frustration. Bloody Shekhawat. Just because he’s got some cosy St Stephen’s bonding going on with his boss, in this town teeming with journos from St Xavier’s Bombay, he thinks he can get away with anything. ‘Bastard, winning Bade-papaji’s award for Excellence in Journalism has gone to your head,’ he grunts. ‘I’m telling you, Hira will flip over this.’

  ‘He won’t,’ Dylan insists. ‘He’s from College, you know. He’ll think it’s a damn good joke – even if it’s on him – and next time, he’ll think twice before getting me to write his columns for him.’

  This is entirely possible. Dylan Shekhawat is quite the establishment’s darling. Even Bade-papaji Purshottam Ohri, Varun’s grandfather and founder of the India Post, famously known as the Fat Old Man of Indian Publishing, has a soft spot for him. He says Shekhawat reminds him of himself in his prime. As Bade-papaji now resembles a squat, gnarled and chubby hairball, this seems unlikely. But as his ‘prime’ was so very long ago, in a Lahori village so very far away, there is no photographic evidence to disprove his claim.

  ‘Look, take it or leave it,’ Dylan shrugs. ‘Or wait for Hira to rewrite it. I’ve got a train to catch. It’s not like I’ll even get a byline for this shit.’

  Ohri nods quickly. ‘I’ll take it. If you’re cool about the bawling out he’ll hundred per cent give you, why should I care? Anyway, I agree with what you’ve written. But at least add forty words more, fucker.’

  Dylan nods, drumming his fingers on the arms of his chair, frowning at the typewritten sheet, his dark hair dishevelled. Then he leans forward and hammers out a short burst of words.

  One last piece of advice to Miss Dolly-Dotted-Chin. Flutter those lashes. You’ll look a little less plastic. At the moment, the combination of your scraped-back hair and that unwinking, basilisk gaze is frankly scary. Or maybe that’s just because my grandmother told me never to trust a person who doesn’t blink.

  ‘Done!’ Dylan gets up and stretches lazily, towering over Varun. His white cotton shirt partially comes untucked from his pants, revealing a sliver of lean brown belly below. He tucks it back in and reaches for a bulging rucksack lying behind the desk.

  ‘Pull it out and stash the carbon, will you? I’m in a hurry.’

  ‘Hot Friday night date, huh, Dhillon baby?’ Varun asks leeringly.

  Dylan glances up, suddenly serious. ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘Oh?’ Varun looks interested.

  ‘Have you ever eaten all kinds of oily shit late in the night, VO? And then rolled over in the morning and seen the congealed remains on the plate – the chewed up bones or that orange rim of grease around the mutton curry – and shuddered?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. I own that feeling.’ Varun nods emphatically. ‘But with me it’s usually Bikaner ka bhurji straight from the packet, or sometimes Milkmaid right out of the can.’

  ‘Well, that’s exactly how I feel nowadays whenever I roll over to find my “hot” Friday night date in my bed on Saturday morning.’

  Varun looks at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Girls aren’t food, fucker. What kind of pervert are you?

  Dylan flinches. Then he straightens up. ‘Never mind,’ he says shortly. ‘I’d better hustle or I’ll miss the train. I’m going to Delhi.’

  ‘In this weather? You’ll broil your balls off.’

  Dylan shrugs. ‘Hira wants me to work on some stuff out of Delhi. Besides, I’ll get to eat some decent home-cooked food. I’ve had it with this ragda patties shit.’

  Varun eyes him speculatively. ‘More anti-Sikh-riot sob stories? I wish you’d let that go. It’s been more than two years now. Move on.’

  ‘I have,’ Dylan assures him, scratching the dark stubble on his jaw. ‘But the findings of the Special Investigation Commission will be made public any time now. I’m going to the Trans-Yamuna areas in Delhi to cover people’s expectations from it. And once the findings are out, I’ll record their reactions.’

  With that he slaps palms with Ohri, shoulders his bag and he
ads out, striding quickly through the India Post offices – past the receptionist’s station, past Bade-papaji’s legendary 1920s typewriter gleaming brassily in the showcase, past the great glass doors emblazoned with the words Truth. Balance. Courage.

  Walking down the dingy, paan-stained corridor, he encounters Mitali Dutta, a tall athletic girl with lashings of kajal, dressed in a block-printed kurta and jeans. She is tugging at the grill of the elevator and trying to light a cigarette at the same time.

  ‘Dyl!’ Her sexy mouth, rendered sexier by the silver nose ring that hovers above it, parts in a warm smile. ‘Long time. Not running any more?’

  ‘I run in the morning now,’ Dylan says, hitting the ground floor button. ‘The evenings have become too hot. You look exhausted, Mits.’

  ‘God, yes,’ she says, pulling off her scrunchie and shaking out her hair. ‘The tapes need to go out by the end of the week, so naturally, it’s nuts in there.’

  ‘How’s Viewstrack doing? Circulation rising?’

  ‘Like the sun,’ she replies. ‘It’s climbing every month. You should get the hell out of print. Seriously. TV is where the action is.’

  Dylan nods, not very interestedly. Viewstrack is a video news magazine, a recent phenomenon that has taken the country by storm and is giving DeshDarpan its first taste of serious competition. Video cassettes with visual news stories recorded on them can be rented just like movies from video-lending libraries for ten rupees a day – they cover issues ranging from separatism, corruption and environmental damage to astrological forecasts and the extra-marital affairs of Hindi film stars.

  ‘What’s your lead story next month? Can one ask?’

  Mitali smiles. ‘One can ask but one can’t tell,’ she says archly. ‘All I can say is that it’s close to your heart.’

  ‘Ah.’ He smiles as they emerge on the ground floor. ‘You’re covering the SIC’s findings on the anti-Sikh riots. Top-billing my favourite MP, Hardik Motla.’

  She laughs. ‘No comments, but if you take me to the Bombay Gym, who knows what I might, er, reveal two drinks down?’

  Dylan gives her a quick smile. ‘That sounds tempting. But I have a date with the Lobster.’

  When petite Juliet Lobo met dashing Second Lieutenant Saahas Singh Shekhawat on his Mangalore posting in 1958 and married him almost immediately, both families were appalled. But Juliet and Saahas didn’t care – they were happy in their little billeted home and soon they produced Dylan, the 14th Rajputana Rifle’s favourite child, practically a mascot.

  ‘You’ve done the impossible, Shekhawat,’ Saahas’s Commanding Officer would often marvel, dandling the large-eyed, hawk-nosed, muscular infant. ‘You’ve created a Christian Rajput. What the hell is a Christian Rajput? Either you’re meek and mild, or blood-thirsty and wild. You can’t be both! Poor confused child – give him a Coca Cola, someone!’

  Undeterred, Saahas and Juliet proceeded to create two more Christian Rajputs – Jason Singh Shekhawat and, after a long gap, Ethan Singh Shekhawat. All three boys grew to be tall and handsome like their father, musical and devout like their mother, and extremely creative in their ways of doing mischief – a trait that was their very own and inherited from no one on either side of the family.

  With three such energetic creatures hammering away at their defences, the families thawed eventually and the boys ended up spending most of their holidays at their Grandma Lobo’s home in Mangalore. They ran about under the banana tree canopies in nothing but baggy shorts, strings of rosary beads bouncing on their sun-browned chests, playing football in the waves, their aquiline Rajput noses (‘just like the spouts of those big aluminium kettles, ba!’) peeling in the hot summer sun. For more lively entertainment, they tied a thin string to the bell inside the convent and jerked it from their home across the street at midnight, leading the nuns to believe that the chapel was haunted. They phoned the Vaz Bakery and ordered cakes iced Happy Birthday Suzannah or Get Well Soon, Marietta and derived much merriment from watching them languish unclaimed in the shop window for days on end.

  Because Juliet Bai had told them her own love story a million times, making it sound more and more lyrical with each retelling, the boys grew up to be almost naïvely romantic. She also impressed upon them – especially on Dylan, the eldest – that girls were pure, delicate creatures who needed to be cherished, respected and protected. With the result that when Dylan, after seventeen years of living in an all-boys home and studying in an all-boys school, burst upon the co-educational world of St Stephen’s College, he was starry-eyed, hopeful and looking for his one true love. This attitude, coupled with his undeniable hotness, skilled guitar playing and prowess at football, naturally caused all the girls to throw themselves at him. He fell violently in love and confessed his feelings in his straightforward style. She led him a merry dance and after three tumultuous months, dumped him for being ‘too boring’ and took up with a senior who treated her badly. After that he learnt the art of keeping girls guessing. That worked much better. Ten years on, he is a master player, an accomplished flirt, wary of commitment, and the only kind of ‘protecting’ he is into comes from the chemist and costs ten rupees for a pack of three.

  Naturally his mother is worried. She has just quit her job at St Columba’s School, where she reigned for twenty years, loved and feared in equal measure by legions of sweaty, spotty and sporty boys (who dubbed her the Lobster and acquired, in spite of themselves, an appreciation for art in her painting and sculpture class). And now that she is finally free to design a tasteful wedding card, plan an artistic church wedding and welcome a beautiful, accomplished daughter-in-law into her all-boys home, her wretched malgado isn’t willing to oblige. She frets constantly, to her brushes and bartans, to Mamta Thakur, to fellow passengers on IPC buses.

  ‘When he was little he used to say, Mamma, I’ll find a nice girl quickly, okay? And then I’ll love her and love her and love her till we have fifteen children! But now, just see, ba, almost thirty years old and thenga to show for it! I tell you, I’ll be dead and buried in that Nicholson Cemetery before I see a grandchild!’

  A new source of worry, far worse than his multiple girlfriends, is his recent obsession with the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of the late Prime Minister by her Sikh bodyguards. He had been at the Delhi office of the IP when a freshly shorn and grievously wounded young Sikh lad stumbled in, babbling about revenge killings, burnings, rape and MP Hardik Motla. Dylan and a colleague from another paper drove down to the trans-Yamuna colony immediately. What he saw there is something he doesn’t talk to his mother about. But it has changed him somehow, she realizes. Won him some big journalism awards perhaps, but taken him away from his family like no girl could.

  I wish he would just settle down, she thinks. If he were a married man with responsibilities, he wouldn’t go about muttering ‘Truth. Balance. Courage.’ and seeking justice for dead Sikh women and testifying before Special Investigation Commissions against the Delhi Police.

  Still, at least he is coming home for a month. She worries about his health: he’s too thin and always forgets to put cream after his bath. Girls don’t like scaly boys. He doesn’t oil his hair either – suppose he goes bald? And he never cuts his toenails properly; they may get ingrown, and then how will he play soccer and frisbee and go running on the beach? Let alone walk down the aisle with a pretty, kind-hearted, fertile girl.

  Juliet Lobo wanders around the house rearranging things, keeping up a little hum of worry. Suppose Jason has missed Dylan at the station? And why isn’t Ethan home yet? Doesn’t he want to meet his big brother? And Saahas? Where is he? She pops her head into their bedroom and finds the Brigadier polishing his shoes, his moustache imprisoned in a moustache-bund that ties around at the back of his head, pulling up his nostrils and making him look unusually fierce.

  ‘Where are you going, Bobby?’ she asks. ‘You know you can’t drive till your glasses get fixed.’

  ‘To Hailey Road, Bobby,’ he replies indisti
nctly. ‘Balkishen Bau is picking me up…’ His voice trails away guiltily. ‘For kot-piece.’

  A reproachful silence follows.

  The Brigadier looks as shamefaced as one can with a strip of cloth tied tightly around one’s upper lip.

  ‘They will never be home before seven,’ he offers finally. ‘That train is always late.’

  Juliet Bai tosses her head.

  ‘Go, then,’ she sniffs. ‘And eat there only. More mutton chops for the boys that way. Will Balkishen Bau drop you back, or are you planning to stay the night at LN’s?’

  The Brigadier, greatly relieved, ignores this piece of sarcasm and leans in to kiss her gratefully. ‘Don’t give those pups my mutton chops, Bobby. And tell Dylan to come pick me up. He should be home by then.’

  The Brigadier has timed things nicely, because the boys arrive a full hour and a half after he leaves. They stagger in, flushed and excited, Dylan lugging his rucksack, Jason weighed down by a massive brown cardboard box, his face almost purple with the effort.

  Ethan bounces up from the couch, electrified. ‘You didn’t! How could you? How much did it cost! Actually, don’t tell – the Lobster will flip.’

  ‘I won’t.’ Dylan grins. ‘But if I eat only breadcrumbs for the next three years I should be able to pay it off. Mamma! There you are!’

  ‘Hai, why should you eat only breadcrumbs, sonna?’ Juliet Bai demands, as her malgado scoops her up and swings her around the room like an ecstatic hero in a romantic movie. ‘Put me down, stupid boy, what have you bought?’

  The two younger boys are almost knee-deep in cardboard and bubble wrap. They sit back finally, sighing, looking reverentially at a large, squat, rectangular, grey blob that looks (to Juliet Bai) like an ugly electric oven.