NAMITA GOKHALE
Priya
PENGUIN BOOKS
CONTENTS
The Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi, 1982
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Praise For The Book
‘A gripping tale of status, sex and power’—DNA
‘A rare occurrence in fiction’—Tehelka
‘The author’s observations of the p3ps who colour Priya’s life are acutely felt and painfully familiar to everyone who has tried to feel the pulse of Delhi’—Outlook
‘A satire that takes potshots at today’s politicians and well-heeled society’—Indian Express
‘The hidden story is that of two Indias that are at odds with each other . . . one which is thriving and one which isn’t’—The Hindu
Also by the Same Author
FICTION
Gods, Graves and Grandmother
A Himalayan Love Story
The Book of Shadows
Shakuntala: The Play of Memory
The Habit of Love
Things to Leave Behind
NON-FICTION
Mountain Echoes: Reminiscences of Kumaoni Women
The Book of Shiva
The Puffin Mahabharata
In Search of Sita (co-edited with Malashri Lal)
Travelling In, Travelling Out (edited)
Himalaya: Adventures, Meditations, Life (co-edited with Ruskin Bond)
To JE for challenging me to return to the territory of my first novel.
And to Paro, for remaining so triumphantly alive after all these years.
The Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi, 1982
So there we were, the five of us, quite companionable again, at the Café Chinois one evening, Suresh sipping his coffee like a bellows, Bucky and Paro devouring large cognacs, and Lenin spooning in mouthfuls of cassata ice-cream in between large gulps of whisky. Lenin had been baiting Bucky all evening, but Bucky had consistently refused to respond to any provocation.
Lenin was being elegantly withering, in a very erudite fashion, about the re-emergence of the feudal classes in modern India. ‘The trouble with India, as I am sure you will agree,’ he stammered condescendingly, ‘is that as a breed you are all half-Anglicized, and half-denationalized. And completely irrelevant, if not treacherous, to any advanced society we may dream about or plan for. In fact, I think all of you should be shot dead!’
‘I say, old boy, isn’t that carrying it a little too far?’ Bucky Bhandpur replied abstractedly, as one might to a pesky schoolboy. This infuriated Lenin even more, and he began addressing Bucky as ‘Your Excellency’, or ‘Your Royal Highness’, or ‘Maharajkumar Sahib’. On his way to the toilet he even executed a low curtsy to Bhandpur, and reserved an even more elaborate ‘Farshi Salaam’ for Paro. She seemed tickled as a teenager at the idea of playing them off against each other, and tried subtly to push Bhandpur into a more aggressive stance. But he was far too seasoned a player to rise to such obvious bait.
THE PARTY HAD SPILLED ON TO THE TERRACE OF THE OBEROI HOTEL. Outside, a plump yellow moon roosted on the hump of an old tomb lining the greens of the Delhi Golf Club. I remembered how we used to come here, to the Café Chinois, with Paro and her posh friends, all those years ago.
Today’s do was in the Mountbatten suite. It was to not celebrate but austerely ‘announce’ a new SEZ, a Special Economic Zone, for Food Processing and Allied Industries in Haryana. Three thousand acres of subsidized farmland sounds a bit excessive to set up a few canneries and French fries factories, but apparently it’s just what Indian agriculture needs. Senior bureaucrats, junior politicians, assorted businessmen, flashy networkers, all got their power fix for the day as they gorged on kebabs and canapés and busily bowed and scraped and snubbed each other.
Everybody in Delhi knows everybody—everybody who matters, that is. As a jumped-up middle-class girl from Mumbai I still can’t figure out these equations. Seek out the current lot of ‘useful’ people, scorn the hangers-on and despise those who might need you. That’s the formula for Delhi social networking. It’s in the air, this greed to be somebody, along with the benzene and the diesel fumes and the suspended particulate matter, and the dust from Rajasthan.
An attractive man wearing an insincere smile and a badly constructed toupee strutted across the terrace towards me. He sported a red tie, and a red silk handkerchief fanned out from the pocket of his double-breasted jacket. His flushed forehead was beaded with sweat. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘I’m Jimmy Batata, the Tomato Ketchup King of India.’
‘Why not the Tomato Ketchup Emperor of India?’ I enquired, my eyebrows arching up in amusement.
He found that funny. ‘Well said, well said!’ he exclaimed enthusiastically. ‘Beauty and brains . . . indeed you are the mistress of both, Madame!’ Saccharin or aspartame? Artificially sweetened chamchagiri, I thought to myself. But I would have been a little offended if he hadn’t bowed and scraped in some manner. And I would have shown it, with a little disdain.
I’m somebody now. My husband Suresh Kaushal is the Minister of State for Food Processing, Animal Husbandry, Fisheries and Canneries. Maybe it’s not an ATM ministry, like telecom or power, but agriculture is important to modern India, and Food Processing is crucial to agriculture. That’s what Suresh says.
I began life as B.R.’s secretary. It’s hard for a middle-class girl to suddenly find herself top of the heap. But I’m coping. Like the rest.
Suresh appeared and put his arm around me. ‘Mr Batata’s company plans to introduce genetically modified tomatoes to India,’ he explained. ‘They will have built-in multivitamins. It will
change the life of India’s farmers.’
For better or for worse, I wondered cynically, but not aloud. I am a politician’s wife—I must act the part, and be supportive. Carefully readjusting the folds of my sari pallav, I bestowed upon Jimmy Batata a haughty smile. It’s a curve of upper lip I practise sometimes, in the morning when I brush my teeth. A minister’s- wife smile, modulated to establish who I am, where I stand. There is a trick to it—an easy trick. The smile must never reach your eyes, just hold itself in a tilt of lip.
Batata persisted with his conversation. ‘Did you realize,’ he said messianically—‘do you know, Madame, that only Batata Red Sun tomato sauce is used in Hindi films instead of blood? It is a Bollywood special-effects tradition. Hero is dying, or villain or policeman or terrorist, farmer, moneylender—it is our ketchup only!’ He clutched his red handkerchief in convincing demonstration.
Blood ketchup. The thought made me sick.
Mrs Jimmy Batata joined us. She was very large, her skin shone as brightly as the gold-dust fabric of her sari, and she was carrying a cheerful cherry coloured Dior bag. ‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘tomato ketchup makes an excellent hair conditioner?’
I looked up at the dark sky and the jaundiced moon. A mischievous monsoon breeze was ruffling the potted bougainvillea. Snatches of conversation floated around me. A mobile trilled out a Bollywood tune. Distant fireworks announced a wedding procession.
‘Let’s face it—cricket is the new cash crop. Of course he denies being part of the IPL bidding consortium . . .’
‘The EU Free Trade agreement . . .’
‘Yes, tariff figures can be misleading, and commodity nomenclature is plain problematic . . .’
‘In five years time, by 2010, India will be the largest arms importer in the world. And there are people who say this isn’t progress!’
‘Did you figure the Chief Minister of Karnataka has had an official makeover? He’s moved from safari suits to Italian designer gear! Wants to change his son-of-the-soil image . . .’
‘My son is graduating this summer from Wharton . . .’
‘Our son is with Gold
man Sachs in NY.’
‘I must say, you can never know the meaning of hunger until you’ve been on a macrobiotic diet.’
‘My new handbag . . .’
‘I told him—“You must remember, India is the paradox of paradoxes . . .”’
A waiter rushed to light a heavyweight’s cigar. A paper napkin rose with the breeze, and sailed into a bimbette’s face, making her scream.
A pretty woman with a lined forehead was standing by the railing, looking out at the dimly-lit golf course below her. Suddenly she burst into quiet sobs. I saw her wipe her tears with the pallav of her cotton ganga-jamuna sari. I wanted to console her but didn’t know what to say.
The waiters began circulating the soup—almond, not tomato— and the buffet dinner was laid out punctually by ten.
‘Very classy,’ Suresh commented approvingly as we left. ‘The future is in SEZs.’
I had a flashback moment. I was twelve years old, in that other India of the late sixties, of socialist austerity and a ration economy. My mother was cooking dinner. The pressure cooker was hissing on the kerosene stove. (We had applied for a gas connection, but it took the intervention of a well-connected uncle and two years of waiting to finally get it.) One of our neighbours, whose balcony adjoined ours, had bought a new transistor radio. Mukesh drowned out the hiss of the cooker. ‘Mera joota hai Japaani, yeh patloon Inglistani . . .’
I was day-dreaming, imagining Raj Kapoor’s blue eyes looking into mine, when my mother’s sister waddled in, importantly, swinging her imported handbag. Her son, who worked in the navy, had sent a bottle of Kraft cheese for us. I had never eaten processed cheese before. Paneer yes, but never cheese. Mother thought it a waste of money.
I knew of children in school who ate chips and cheese and drank Campa-Cola, but they were out of my league. My friends ate parathas or vada–pao and knew their place in life.
‘We have brought for you imported cheese,’ my aunt announced. We, not I, even though she had come alone. ‘Didi, I want some bread. We will show you how to eat imported cheese.’
‘No bread–shead in this house,’ my mother declared unabashedly. The sisters warmed some stale chapatis and smeared them with Kraft cheese. One each for me, my mother, my aunt. Two for my brother, when he returned; he was a boy, the man of the house.
‘This is how they eat in phoren countries,’ my aunt explained knowingly.
‘And also beef . . .’ my mother added spitefully. ‘That navy son of yours. I’m sure he’s eating beef along with this Kraft cheese!’
That India. Those days.
It’s a symptom of growing older when the past keeps replaying itself in your head, like a spool in a tape recorder when recorders still had spools.
It was Paro who showed me how the other side lived. Paro and BR, my boss, the sewing-machine magnate. Paro was BR’s wife. She was an Amazon, an addiction. She was also selfish, cruel and consistently unkind. But something in Paro—her self-possession, her sheer gall, sparked a matching resistance in me. She taught me that life’s rules can be bent by those who dare.
Paro—sexy, beautiful, destructive. All that I am not, then and now. Me—I’m just an ordinary housewife. A woman who has climbed up the ladder, step by determined step, with her husband’s unexpected luck helping things along. I was Priya Sharma when Paro first met me, BR’s lovelorn secretary; awkward, hungry for experience, eager for love.
Twenty-five years, now, since Paro died. Unbelievable, as I look back, how we have all changed. This new India, half dream, half nightmare, from which we might collectively awake. Paro would never have believed that our lives might continue after her, but they have. Loukas Leoros, that ‘lonely stalker of reality’, mourned her death by directing a darkly funny film on heterosexual marriage, winning him an Oscar nomination. He tied the knot with his assistant Tony soon after, and they appear happy together, happier by all accounts than he and Paro were. How nice it must be to switch one’s partner’s sex and find contentment.
The men in her life! Bucky Bhandpur, cricketer and philanderer, in his second innings now, always in the news with a ravishing celeb wrapped around him. He didn’t need her then, he doesn’t miss her now.
We who survived Paro. Lenin, devoted admirer, had later agitated for the landless in Madhya Pradesh. I haven’t seen him in years. And BR—her first husband, my first boss. Dare I spell it out? Should I scribble over these lines? BR—my first lover. Wherever is he? I think of him often, dream of him sometimes. If only . . . I think to myself sometimes. If only.
IT’S THE 15TH OF AUGUST, INDEPENDENCE DAY. THE INDIAN FLAG flutters against the rusty sandstone ramparts of the Red Fort, the bands of orange, white and green dancing in the monsoon breeze. My sari pallav is billowing too, like a yacht in sail, and my hair, pulled back in a discreet ponytail, escapes the rubber band only to get stuck around my eyes, the Gucci shades no help at all.
‘Saffron for sacrifice in need.’ We sang that during morning assembly in school. The white had been for ‘purity in every thought and deed’. And green? What did green stand for? I try, but can’t remember, distracted by the Prime Minister’s sometimes inaudible speech.
My husband leans across his chair and reaches for my hand. I observe him dispassionately. He is short and solemn, and the carefully styled silver in his hair makes him appear almost distinguished. Time has been kind to Suresh. It is difficult to imagine that he’s the same plump, owlish lawyer ‘of sober and decent habits’ whose photograph my mother had brandished like a war-trophy when at last she received an offer of marriage for me, her only daughter, via her sister in Meerut.
Maybe Suresh is right—everything in our lives is fated by Saturn and Jupiter, sometimes Venus. Only the whims of destiny can explain how my stolid lawyer husband has risen to such dizzying heights of power. And Food Processing is only the first step. Perhaps in the next cabinet reshuffle, kismet could get even kinder.
Shahnawaz Sheikh, the doddering Minister for Minority Affairs, has fallen asleep in the seat beside me. His famously wide mouth, a caricaturist’s delight, is open, as he snores to an unpredictable rhythm. A fly enters his mouth and heads for his throat. He chokes, begins to turn purple. I thump him on the back but this seems to make things worse. Rita Ray turns back from the seat in front and punches and pummels and throttles him until the fly escapes and returns to freedom.
The PM’s speech is drawing to a close. He has been droning on, from his podium behind the bullet proof glass, about a new vision of a caring India. ‘Our strength lies in the people,’ he declares, ‘in their unity in diversity. In the words of Pandit Nehru, spoken from these ramparts five score and ten years ago . . .’ The men and women and schoolchildren herded and corralled below the ramparts are listening patiently. It has begun raining but that doesn’t seem to bother them.
‘Jai Hind!’ the PM concludes at last. The notes of the national anthem swell and fill up the moisture-soaked morning. The people stand to attention. They unfurl their umbrellas, mostly black, some multicoloured, and prepare to leave the historic grounds and return to their daily lives.
We stand up too, in the VIP enclosure. There is a lump in my throat as the anthem soars towards the high notes at the end: Jaya He! Jaya He! Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya He!!! We wait for the PM to leave. Everyone looks bored and impatient. The weather is hot and humid and sultry, and now that the annual chore is behind them, everybody is in a rush to return to the sanity of their air- conditioned lives and the reception in Rashtrapati Bhavan in the evening.
The Home Minister smooths his hair with a vain flick of his hand. It’s an obsessive signature gesture. He’s rumoured to have over five hundred pairs of shoes and as many colour coordinated safari suits. He blow-dries his tinted hair before every press encounter and changes outfits four times a day, sometimes five. Some say deciding which to wear is the only decision he takes in a day. As usual, only Rita Ray seems sprightly. She oozes the sophisticated self-confidence of a pedigreed third-generation politician with the right
leftist family credentials. A large red bindi blazes like the Japanese flag upon her smooth pale forehead. Rita has just been appointed Minister of State for Power and Alternative Energy. The private power distribution companies are trembling with fear at the havoc she will surely wreak on their sweetheart deals and mega projections. It’s been a month of horrific power cuts under her dispensation, though not of course in Lutyens’ Delhi. ‘All power corrupts,’ Rita Ray exclaims with a wink, ‘and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The light has gone out of our lives, and now the air-conditioning too!’ It’s not so funny really, but she can never resist taking a dig at Nehru, treating it as a duty, and the way she does it, it sounds somehow hilarious.
We get into the car, Suresh and I. It’s the standard white Ambassador, with a whirring red bulb on top, and ‘Power Brake’ lettered on what the driver refers to as its ‘backside’. Suresh insists on sticking to the antiquated Ambassador, resisting the other sleeker models available from the ministers’ pool. The bodyguard on duty leaps into the front seat, hand on holster. There is silence as we drive home; Suresh meditates on the ways of destiny, as he often does, and I contemplate the past and the present.
‘Western ascendancy is over,’ he says, suddenly giving vent to some silent train of thought passaging his mind. ‘After the recession, the future belongs to us. To India. And China. The green light on liberalization has brought us where we are today!’ I try to focus on India that is Bharat, unfurling its potential economic glory before an astonished world. I fail. My mind is not on the green light on liberalization, but on the wedding we have to attend tomorrow.
Paro’s son Aniruddha is getting married. Born of her rebellious affair with Bucky Bhandpur, Ani is the second-handsomest cricket hero in India. The reigning heart-throb of the game is of course stocky Gaurav Negi, the small-town boy from Haldwani with streaked shoulder-length hair. Ani’s fiancée, supermodel Sujata Sethia (Suzi to the press) is the daughter of arms dealer Manoviraj Sethia. Bhandpur Junior’s marriage to pouty Suzi is to be the shaadi of the season, an alliance between an arms dealer and a cricket dynast. Suzi dated Gaurav Negi before she settled for Ani’s breeding and old money. Gaurav Negi has outgrown his ‘humble’ background, but his brother still runs a tea-stall somewhere, and his mother dyes her hair with henna and speaks no English. At the end of the day the elite stick together, they resist outsiders until they are so rich or important as to become irresistible. I know, I’ve watched.
Priya Page 1
