The reluctant lotus-eater

Shobhaa De ensures the reader is hooked to this tale of an adventurous woman whose life is a jumble of strange cities, unreliable men and unfulfilled desires.

Courage is beginning a book with a 12-year-old’s sexual fantasy around a painting of a mounted British soldier, italics and all. Courage is that description of Srilaa pleasuring herself segueing into a warning to the ‘virgin’ to stay away from sindoor-khela and onto a graphic version of a young girl’s first experience of menstruation. Writers can’t do that, can they? If it is the fearless Shobhaa Dé, she can and damn well will, setting the tone for raw peccadillo-strewn antics only the seasoned may stomach.

As protagonist Srilaa says: “I was just a woman with an appetite. A curious and adventurous woman. Unapologetic about expressing my desires. I loved cheese omlettes. I loved sex. Simple. Sex gave me enormous pleasure — I was my best self while having sex.”

Writing women’s biography entirely on the basis of their sexual identity or orgasmic frequency is neither novel nor recent. Among the classics stand Moll Flanders, Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley’s Lover; although it is the high art of their writers that has catapulted these books into must-read lists.

Desi (pun unintended) and abashedly 2020, Ms Dé’s signature style leaves its imprint all over the book too. Which other Indian writer could use kutti (bitch in Hindi) and haraami (bastard) as terms of endearment? As the reigning empress of popular writing in India from decades, Ms Dé knows exactly what serves as tonic for the hesitant Indian reader. As long as hypersonic action is interspersed with titillation, her constituency is a satisfied lot. Along with flowered chiffons and caviar, there are the Cartiers, Piguets and Patek Phillippes to wow the mob. Years accordion to the author’s deft touch, only pausing when Srilaa must bed a lover, otherwise losing the calendar.

The community of Indian Writing in English often faces the question of how to translate the muddle of class, caste, privilege, language, district and a million minute differences of our deeply splintered society. That is sorted here in the choice of a specific community as backdrop. All the clichés swarm: kanjoos-makkhichoos, 10-carat diamonds and extra-stingy husbands ducking from sparing money for household expenses. Thankfully, the heroine as an outsider looking in with considerable rage, underlines that she and her extensive sexual foibles are all individual and not representative of her community.

Opacity of reason

Throughout the book, numerous epithets attach to Srilaa: idiot saali, paagal, spoilt bloody maal or randi. As she whirls around playing musical chairs on wimpy men’s privates, most of these terms resonate.

For she seems to labour under the misapprehension that it is an act of courage to sleep with a whole battalion of louts, or to recount her exploits in the bedroom or bathroom floor of a luxury hotel in Delhi. Wish there was more to her than the opacity of reason and the desire to regurgitate everything about her tame-to-the-point-of-tears sexploits. That said, Srilaa does have her moments.

Where Ms Dé excels, is the unique writing style, zingy and unerringly truthful, which goes down smoother than martinis with three olives. The storytelling is spiked with exactly the right amount of casual conversation-styled chatter. Between everyday fact and shock, the reader is hooked to the tale as it unravels through cities, unreliable male lust and a life crammed with unfinished projects. In the process, a kind of atlas of our society emerges; each character is someone we may have met. There are moments the reader must pause and marvel. “I used shells and pebbles to create the family tree. The prettiest shell was Ma. And the least attractive pebble was me.”

Yet, there are some gaps. Despite the book’s erotic theme, the actual act is surprisingly sterile and mostly suggested, left to the reader’s imagination. It leads the horse to a water source, only to discover a dry sandpit instead of full-blown erotica. The Jamshedpur thread too peters out rather abruptly; although that is something a competent editor should have flagged.

If breezy Sex in the City style tell-all books serve as your palate cleanser of choice, this is essential reading. Between being stunned and captive to the ever-unfolding saga of Srilaa’s life, the reader rediscovers an all too common but overlooked tale of a woman marooned in the ocean of a life to which she could never reconcile.