The Age of Kali (24 page)

Only when the heroine moves to London and becomes a call girl does the interest begin to flag. ‘There are some wonderful seventeenth-century estates going,’ suggests another character at one point. ‘Why don’t you retire to the country?’

After trudging through 250 pages of this sort of thing, the reader feels that that would not be a bad idea.

Before she rang off, Shobha told me that she had invited a couple of her friends over for lunch in the country. They would be coming on the same launch as me, she said.

She did not indicate that ‘a couple’ meant seventy-two gushing Bombay socialites – fat-cat industrialists and their glitzy wives, actors and starlets, glamour journalists, society painters and producers. As I stepped out of my hotel I found myself ambushed by a set of characters straight out of one of Shobha’s novels.

‘Hi!’

‘Hi!’

‘Hi-ee!’

‘I
love
your Dior sunglasses.’

‘Thanks. Oh
golly –
I’m
so
hung over!’

‘I didn’t get to bed until five a.m.’

‘Are you going to Laxman’s tonight?’

‘Of course. But have you heard? Vinod hasn’t been invited!’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t you know about Vinod and Dimple?’

‘No?’

‘Bunty saw them on the beach at Juhu, and do you know what Dimple was wearing?…’

I listened fascinated. So, I thought, people really do speak like this. As the crowds of Sunday trippers gathered to gawp at the socialites, someone spotted a minor film star (‘
Ae woh dekh!
Moon Moon Sen!’) and everyone crowded around to get a picture of themselves standing beside the screen goddess. The chatterers pointedly ignored the
hoi polloi
.

‘Moon Moon! Sweety, it’s
so
good to see you! Baby, are
these
kids
really
yours?’

‘Hey, don’t you start. I’m sick of people telling me how beautiful I look. Do I look so bad in my films, huh?’

‘What a
lovely
Lanvin watch.’

Eventually the launch turned up, and with a clatter of stilettos the cocktail party moved aboard. We dropped our moorings and set off across the bay.

The incongruous half-timbered Swiss gables of the Bombay Yacht Club, the flashing white domes of the Prince of Wales Museum, the palm trees of Marine Drive all slipped away in to the distance. The shoreline widened, unveiling the mini-Manhattan of the business centre and the spider-like cranes of the dockyards. Then, slowly, the whole vision sank in to the consumptive pollution-fog that hung thinly over the bay. The boat rocked from side to side. The sun shone through the haze. The socialites swapped addresses.

Forty minutes later, the morning mist parted to reveal a white beach, a windbreak of bottle palms, and the bobbing wooden outrigger canoes of village fishermen moored to a rickety jetty. Beyond stretched an avenue of eucalyptus and casuarina, flanked on either side by banana plantations. Shobha was there to meet us.

She is tall and clear-skinned, with a mane of fabulous dark hair, and is far more attractive in person than she appears in photographs.
Her movements are graceful and languid, but she has alert alley-cat eyes which are constantly darting backwards and forwards, ready to pick up anything interesting, controversial or scandalous.

As her guests moved towards her, Shobha swooped down on them, embraced them, showered them with kisses and compliments, then ushered them through her house and out in to the garden, where the servants hovered with Bloody Marys. Soon brunch was served.

The house was decorated in very much the same spirit as Aasha Rani’s bedroom in
Starry Nights
. There were fake escutcheons on the gates, and mock-crystal chandeliers hung from the ceilings. There were soft-focus photographs of Shobha and her shipping magnate on the piano, and twirly-wirly fake-ironwork gaslights in the garden. More portraits of our host and hostess, in thick chocolate-box acrylic, hung from the walls. There may have been no pink telephones, but I still felt sure that Aasha Rani would have approved of this house.

I finally managed to corner Shobha in the lull which followed brunch. The chatterers were falling silent: they lay with their legs raised on wickerwork Bombay fornicators or stretched out on the hissing lawns.

‘You want to talk?’ she said. ‘Sure.’

Shobha flicked her hair to one side and clicked in to interview mode.

‘Maybe I’m into bondage’ she volunteered. It was by any standards an unusual entrée. ‘Without the leather and whips,’ she added.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘Writing,’ she explained. ‘I’m a typewriter-junky. I need that fix. Writing is for me a kind of bondage.’

‘But without the leather and whips.’

‘Right.’

We looked at each other. I must have seemed puzzled, as she tried another tack.

‘Do you know what the women in this town are really after?’ asked Shobha. ‘I’ll tell you. They want jewels in their bank vault, Chanel clothes in their wardrobe, a Porsche in their garage, a tiger in their bed – and an ass of a husband who pays for it all.’

Perfectly formed designer-quotes slipped out as if by magic. The whole monologue appeared to have been meticulously rehearsed. But at least no one can say that Shobha Dé has any pretensions about her
oeuvre
.

‘What do you think of your books so far?’ I asked after a while.

She smiled: ‘You want the honest answer?’

‘Yes.’

‘I write readable trash – commercial novels,’ said Shobha. ‘But I don’t think “commercial” is a dirty word. The bottom line for any product is whether it’s going to sell. There is a market out there, and I’m filling a slot. The anguished little novels my critics churn out about suffering women at the kitchen hearth, they all lie unsold and eventually get pulped. I’ve had it up to here with moaning, groaning, oppressed females.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘I am cold-bloodedly catering for
mofussil
[small-town] fantasies,’ she said. ‘I want to provide a tantalising peep in to the lifestyle of the rich and famous. I want to entertain, and most of all I want to sell. I’m not going for any literary awards.’

‘But if you want to provide fantasies, why are your characters all so unhappy?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying that all that debauchery makes everyone miserable?’

‘I don’t think the wrath of God descends on bad girls. No – I think bad girls have a ball and die having a ball.’

‘So you aren’t trying to make a moral point?’

‘No – and I hate those sort of judgements. The life my characters lead – having affairs, living from one party to the next …’

‘… and going shopping …’

‘… and going shopping – this is their idea of a ball. It’s not up to me to say, “Girls: this isn’t the sort of ball you should be having.” ’

She paused.

‘But to come back to your question – I don’t want to make it
too
perfect. No. I’m aware that if I make it all too desirable, well …’

Shobha arched her eyebrows and sipped her Bloody Mary.

‘Well … there might be a revolution …’

Two days later, the white Mercedes drove up to the Taj Mahal Hotel promptly at ten p.m. The chauffeur held the door open. Inside was Shobha – wearing a pearl choker, a gold
tikka
mark and a sari of expensive-looking gilt silk – and beside her sat Dilip, her shipping magnate. Dilip grunted a greeting. I got in. The car glided away.

It was Christmas Eve in Bombay, the poor man’s Rio, and outside, on the sidewalks of the ten-lane highway, the beggars were massing at the lights.

‘Our hostess will have been busy all day,’ said Shobha, ignoring a leper clawing at her window. ‘She always shampoos her gravel on the afternoon before her parties.’

We glided out of crumbling central Bombay. We passed the airport and headed on towards Juhu, towards Bollywood, where the beggars sleep on discarded film magazines. Along the Lido is India’s Beverly Hills.

‘Just wait until you see this house,’ said Shobha. ‘It’s like something out of James Bond.’

It was: a marble palace surrounded by giant bottle palms and facing out on to the rolling breakers of the Arabian Sea. Oceans of Veuve Clicquot bubbled in to fluted champagne glasses. Liveried servants carried lighted kebab-skewers among the guests. Courtyard after courtyard was filled with millionaires, film stars, politicians, editors, sex symbols: everyone who was anyone in Bombay.

‘No one is here yet,’ said Shobha, looking around dismissively.
‘The real heavy-duty Bombay society won’t turn up until one or two o’clock. Otherwise it will look as if they haven’t been invited to three other parties.’

Loudspeakers hidden in the palm trees were playing the Lambada. Shobha took to the floor with her shipping magnate. You could see the rocks on her fingers glinting in the lights. Nearby, the former Chief Minister of Kashmir, Farooq Abdullah – dressed in a long, thick Kashmiri coat despite the heat – was bobbing around with a woman in a voluminous sari. Both were trying to avoid stepping on her flowing silks.

I stooped down and picked up some gravel. Shobha had not been joking. It really had been shampooed.

In the first courtyard the marble was white, and glistened like a mirror. In the second, water bubbled down a rock-face, wove its way through a hanging garden and came to rest in a huge swimming pool. A suite of rooms filled with Kashmiri rugs led on to a third courtyard facing out on to the breakers. On a line of linen-covered trestles whole turkeys lay stuffed and ready for consumption; beside them were ranks of lobsters, great cauldrons full of hot curry sauces, caviar and blinis, mountains of pineapples, dates and guavas.

Fragments of different conversations wafted over the music:

‘Anyway, when Imran said he was bored in Sharjah I told him to come over …’

‘She thought she was getting a millionaire. What she
did
get was five children and two poodles …’

‘He’d love to be royalty. But he claims his grandmother turned the title down …’

‘She’s just a common
bania
’s daughter …’

‘Of course, when Imran comes here he has this queue of adoring women stretching as far as Marine Drive …’

‘He has over
one hundred
vintage cars. He drives whichever happens to match his cufflinks …’

‘Do you know what semen is in Gujarati?’

Through it all you could hear the voice of Dilip, Shobha’s tame
shipping magnate: ‘Do you know who is here tonight?’ he said. ‘The edible-oils king of India. He controls the export of thirty-seven different kinds of edible oils.’ Over the next hour Dilip pointed out the prawn king of India, the soap king of India and the washing-machine king of India: ‘Big men,’ said Dilip approvingly.

Meanwhile I was watching Shobha and the reception she was getting from the guests. Our hostess, whom Shobha had very obviously parodied as a society slut in
Socialite Evenings
, gave her a peck on both cheeks, seemingly unbothered by Shobha’s indiscretions. One of India’s leading sex symbols, Pooja Bedi – whom Shobha, with her usual subtlety, had christened ‘Boobs Bedi’ – came up and welcomed her; they sat and discussed Pooja’s recent photo-shoot for an advertising campaign by India’s new Kama Sutra condoms.

Sometime after midnight I was sitting with Shobha, our plates overloaded with turkey, when she remarked on how few people ever came and struck up conversations with her. Why did she think she attracted such hostility, I asked her.

She answered very simply: ‘A four-letter word – envy.’

‘Your columns and books can hardly have helped.’

‘None of my critics have read the books. They were just a take-off point to vent their spleen. The general reaction to the reviews was “It served the bitch right.” ’

‘But why? Why should you attract all this?’

She called for champagne: ‘Waiter!
Sahib ko champagne chahiye!’
While it was being poured, she considered. ‘As I see it, ballsy women have a hard time here,’ she said. ‘That’s just the way it is.’

There was no self-pity in the way she spoke, just resignation. She had left herself wide open to all the flak, of course, had courted it even, but still you couldn’t help feeling a certain sympathy. In a culture which has elevated sycophancy in to an art form, Shobha Dé doesn’t play the game. In what is still a rigidly conventional and conformist society, she has stood out of line, and has always been prepared to pay the price. Certainly her writing is no great shakes, but that’s not the issue. The real problem is that Shobha has guts.