The Age of Kali (23 page)

Everything in Bombay at the moment sounds so upbeat and so hopeful that it is sometimes difficult to remember quite how fragile the current boom could be. This came home to me very forcefully on the morning after the concert, when I chatted to Baba as he drove from dancing practice for his forthcoming Bollywood musical to a meeting at Magnasound.

He described his childhood in Lucknow, his period at college in the Himalayan hill station of Nainital, and his time as an assistant engineer with Delhi Electricity. We chatted on, and he told me about his strong religious beliefs, which he says underpin everything he does.

‘So why did you shave off your beard then?’ I asked. Religious Sikhs normally look on razors with about the same enthusiasm as Iranian ayatollahs or Greek Orthodox monks.

‘It was in 1984,’ replied Baba, ‘during the anti-Sikh riots that followed Mrs Gandhi’s assassination. I was terrified for my parents in Lucknow, so I tried to get a train down there so that I could look after them. On the station the train I meant to board didn’t stop; as it passed slowly through the station I saw a mob on board dragging down a Sikh, cutting his beard off, beating him up, then throwing him off the train. So I stayed in Nainital and put myself under house arrest. Every day I would get threatening phone calls: “Sardarji: tomorrow at nine I am going to come and kill you” – that sort of thing. I had premonitions that I would be killed, but it never happened. Eventually one of my Hindu friends took me to the foothills below Nainital. There he made me go to a barber’s shop. I came back a
mona –
a shaved Sikh. Before, I was proud of my thick growth and my turban. Later all the other Sikhs called me a coward.’

‘Not the sort of thing Western rock stars often have to go through,’ I said.

‘No,’ agreed Baba. ‘It’s still a little different in India.’

BOMBAY
,
1992

Question: How do you outrage nine hundred million Indians without leaving your desk?

Answer: Write two filthy-dirty semi-autobiographical airport-slush novelettes, and set the action in Bombay.

This is the story of Shobha Dé, a clever Indian lady who looks good, lives well and writes dirty. For these unforgivable crimes her books have been panned by the reviewers and her lifestyle vilified in a couple of hundred different Indian papers. The headline writers (who are fond of alliteration) have described her as the Maharani of Malice, the Empress of Erotica and the Princess of Pulp. She gets sackfuls of hate mail; she has even received death threats.

Sticks and stones may break her bones, but bad publicity has left her laughing all the way to the bank. Shobha Dé has garnered some of the most spectacularly bad reviews ever written in India – ‘the language smacks of the gutter in its putrid contents’; ‘Amoral … she betrays her own sex’; ‘distasteful’; ‘downright
muck
’ – but at the end of it she has become by many leagues the country’s best-selling writer, moving more books than any Indian writer since Independence (she’s also a top seller in Romania, to the delighted bafflement of her Delhi publishers). And her books are avidly read. On the plane to Bombay, both my neighbours had devoured her complete
oeuvre
.

‘This is very dirty lady,’ said Mr Sanjay Aggarwal, the nice fertiliser executive sitting on my left. ‘Her books are full of wicked and filthy thoughts.’

‘I am reading everything she is writing,’ said Mr Satish Lal, who makes carbuncle grinders in Bangalore. ‘In one book I am counting
seventy-three copulations. I am shocked only. Really – her head is full of perversions.’

Shobha takes her vocation seriously. Turning herself in to the Jackie Collins of India has not been easy: her notoriety is the product of hard work. Born Anuradha Rajadhyaksha, daughter of a Brahmin district judge from small-town middle India, she has spent forty-three years becoming Shobha Dé, the rich and fashionably unfashionable pulp novelist from metropolitan Bombay.

She kicked off as an exceptionally beautiful model, at a time when joining a modelling agency in India was considered about as respectable as joining a brothel. Then, at the height of her modelling success, she suddenly threw the whole thing in and became a glamour journalist. When Nari Hira launched
Stardust
, India’s first film-gossip magazine, in the early 1970s, he made Shobha the editor. She was just twenty-three. Under her direction, the venture was an incredible success. In a matter of months
Stardust
had six million readers and was India’s third-biggest magazine. Within a year it was the largest-selling film magazine in the world.

The reason for the success of
Stardust
was simple: it had a gossip column that became essential reading for India’s numberless filmgoers. ‘Nita’s Natter’ – as the column was called – was written by Shobha, and it did what no one had ever dared to do before: gave uncensored accounts of the affairs and debauches of Bollywood, the Bombay film world. Its style was almost a parody of Glenda Slagg in
Private Eye
, full of three-word sentences punctuated by an equal number of exclamation marks: ‘Rekha left Pram’s party in a hurry!! Was she missing someone???’ ‘Ajit Singh was seen playing in the surf at Juhu with an ultra-mod model in the wee hours of the morning! Afterwards rumour has it that they went back to a wayside inn for kebabs and … some red hot pickle!!!’

For all its sledgehammer subtlety, ‘Nita’s Natter’ made Shobha the hottest journalistic property in Bombay. ‘It was the bitchiest column I’ve ever read,’ remembers Nari Hira. ‘It was wonderful. She ran down everyone she met, literally
everyone
: she made fun of socialites, mocked film stars, broke up marriages. That sort of
thing had never been done here before. It is still not done.’

The column may have made Shobha’s name, but it won her few friends. The success of her novelettes did not improve things. The books were full of easily identifiable Bombay society characters, and those portrayed in them were furious; those left out even more so. Yet her enemies could only sit and watch while Shobha’s Glenda Slag prose was moulded in to a series of massive bestsellers.

At the same time, in a country where divorce and extra-marital relations are frowned upon, in quick succession Shobha ditched her first husband, publicly took a French lover, then left him and married another man – who just happened to be a shipping magnate. To go with her millionaire husband she has diligently collected all the other trappings of the super-rich pulp-novelist: the white Mercedes and the vintage Jaguar; the penthouse suite and the hideaway retreat; the private launch and the attentive, liveried servants. You name it, if Jackie Collins has it, Shoba Dé has two.

Part fantasy lifted from a second-rate American soap opera, part marketing exercise by a clever publisher, part the deliberate creation of a very ambitious woman, Shobha Dé is a calculated construct living on the very boundary of plausibility. Spend a week with her, meet her friends, ride in her cars and go to her parties – at the end of it you are still left with a lurking suspicion that you have stumbled on to some sort of film set peopled with actors speaking lines from a Jilly Cooper script. Back in your hotel room you look through your notes and ask yourself yet again:
Is this woman for real
?

‘Put it this way,’ she says knowingly: ‘I seem to be stuck with an image, and the smart thing to do is to
flog it
 …’

The voice on the phone is difficult to place, a silky-smooth mid-Atlantic
drawl with only the faintest hint of Indian intonation.

‘Anyway, I’ll send the boat to pick you up,’ she continues nonchalantly. ‘Just walk out of the Taj Mahal hotel and down the steps to the jetty.’

Shobha Dé is not only difficult to place, she requires a leap of the imagination to believe. To be ferried across the waters of a tropical bay to interview the glamorous lady-writer in her country estate:
Haven’t I read this somewhere before?
, you wonder.

Millions of Indians certainly think so, and they don’t like it. For India, once the land of the Kama Sutra, is now one of the world’s most buttoned-up and prudish places. Despite a dazzling variety of Sanskrit terms for every shade of sexual arousal, no modern Indian language has a word for orgasm. Although the possibilities of sex have never been so exhaustively catalogued as in the Hindu
shastras
(where every conceivable type and variety of conjunction is described and analysed – upside down, as a team sport, conjoined with every animal in the bestiary), India has for thirty years resisted the onslaught of the sexual revolution which swept much of the rest of the world in the sixties.

In the 1990s the subcontinent is the last bastion of the chaperoned virgin, the double-locked bedroom and the arranged marriage. A sex scene in a traditional Indian film consists of the camera panning away from a converging couple and coming to rest on a bee pollinating a flower, or a violently shaking bush. The result is sexual repression on a massive scale, with hundreds of millions of Indians having no outlet for their erotic tensions. As the writer Khushwant Singh has noted, ‘Nine tenths of the violence and unhappiness in this country derives from sexual repression.’

While all this may be very frustrating for hundreds of millions of young Indians, it provides Ms Dé with considerable opportunities. She has built her fortune on the stress lines of the frustrated Indian libido. It’s not just that her books are cheaper than imported romances, and easier to find than banned foreign pornography. Dé realised early on that it did not take much effort to outrage an Indian audience; even the vague hint of a falling sari can register
a high reading on the Richter scale of subcontinental titillation. Before her first book,
Socialite Evenings
, had even hit the streets in 1989 it had caused a major scandal; advance orders poured in.

But it is her second book,
Starry Nights
(1991), that is by far her most successful bash at the sex and shopping novel. There are endless sequences in which the characters buy, wear or talk about Gucci shoes, Dior sunglasses or Lanvin watches, but most of the book is focused single-mindedly on sex.

The story follows the mango-breasted heroine, Aasha Rani, as she sleeps her way to stardom – and then makes her fatal mistake: she falls in love with India’s number-one hunk, a steely-eyed, smooth-skinned, cast-iron lump of machismo called Akshay Arora. There is no hanging about in Shobha’s novels: Aasha Rani’s clothes have been removed by page 3, and by page 5 we have encountered the f-word for the first time (but not the last). On page 6 we have a deflowering, on page 9 a wet sari scene (Indian cinema’s traditional alternative to nudity), and on page 17 an innovatory passage involving an elderly Bombay film star, a nubile starlet and some ceremonial oil from a Hindu temple. There are six more major copulations (on page 28, page 54, page 60, page 79, page 122 and page 181) and a galaxy of minor conjunctions, including one notable encounter in the lavatory of an Air India Boeing – which the author admits lifting from
Emmanuelle
.

One of the (apparently unintentional) pleasures of the book is the background of high kitsch against which the action takes place. Aasha Rani has a fetish for furry toys – ‘pink kittens, blue rabbits, silky black leopards with yellow eyes, polka-dotted pandas, even a four-foot giraffe …’ – which she piles high in her magnificent pink boudoir: ‘all gauzy pink drapes, quilted bedcovers and pink heart-shaped cushions trimmed with lace’. It is a truly wonderful bedroom – full, as another description has it, of ‘velvet bedspreads, Rexine love seats, pink telephones, gilt-edged mirrors and a fountain’. The reader can only agree with Aasha Rani, who ‘thought it was the most gorgeous room she’d ever seen’.

It is here, in this sequinned pink lovenest, that the temple oil
gets rubbed, the heroine debauched and the most memorable bits of dialogue spoken: ‘All through my bad days one thought has kept me going,’ says Akshay Arora in a rare moment of eloquence: ‘I knew I had to see you. I couldn’t leave this world without saying goodbye …’ It is also in this room that one producer ‘hammers away … grunting like a wild pig’, and that another lays his masculinity out on the tabletop, where Aasha Rani mistakes it for a Havana cigar.