Mrs. Meera Patel asks. At some point. Her kohl bleeding. Her plain, nylon sari running out of her. Like riverine tributaries. Dense, desolate, desirous. Mrs. Meera Patel, the ‘hero’ of my novel, Sita’s Curse. An explosive saga tracing the sexual destiny of a 30-plus, married Gujarati housewife trapped in a lifeless and abusive marriage. Barren after a decade and more of marriage. A resident of a squalid chawl in the midst of the bustling bylanes of Mumbai. In a place called Byculla.
As possibly the country’s first feminist erotica, in recent times, Sita’s Curse has already attracted its fair share of wistfulness and wrath. But, it’s not why I am here. Which is also why I’ll come to the good stuff later. Taking you instead to the beginning. The first time I saw her. A woman of flesh and fantasy. Of the most perfectly rounded breasts and the most delicious circular navel… leading me on to a secret hiding spot, as I stared at her, from a ramshackled taxi.
The way it was for close to a year and a half. The Meera of my imagination looking out, her hands in mid-air, tracing strange shapes. Her lips parted…‘We love her. The sex works. Just that she needs to be more aspirational. A city bred, urban, working woman. Not married… or Gujarati… we don’t want people to think this is another Savitha bhabhi…’ I still remember the words. The first offer the manuscript ever bagged from a leading international publisher.
Based in India. Someone clearly threatened by the sheer realism of Meera’s character, the ordinariness of a woman’s life, the smallness of her daily struggles —the things we must never talk about. Especially, if she happens to be bethroed. We live in a strange world… of lopsided rules.
And ironical hypocrisies. Where we stand on two sides of the same battle. Separated at times by a thin sliver of vermillion. Others by towns and temples. By men and mother-in-laws. By children and caricatures. By society and sarcasm.
So, we scream hoarse when a woman is brutally raped in the heart of a burgeoning national capital, we direct plays and write rousing status updates about her. While maintaining a stealthy silence when the issue of marital rape comes up. At the same time. The Supreme Court alsopreferring to take its time to make up its mind. As if there is a difference? As if the cuts hadn’t already run deeper?
‘I was… nineteen… he, he was around sixty. He…he asked me to remove my pallu… said there was a grave dosha in my natal chart… his fingers probing…’ she bit her lip forcibly. A small patch of blood oozing out, the arid winter air stinging my eyes. ‘Did you never think of complaining to your husband? I mean… did you actually get into this with your family Guruji consenually?’ I tried not getting judgmental. Or sounding it, at least. For now.
There was a lengthy pause. As I sat facing a woman who I was meeting for the first time.
Someone who had inboxed me on Facebook, insisting that my excerpts from Sita’s Curse, that I was then writing, felt too close to her own truth as a young bride. Married to a sterile man. A mother of a three-year-old now. A daughter. She called Pari. In passing. ‘Woh bahar khadehote the… hamesha …’ she broke down for the first time.
Is erotica too close to reality then? I found myself asking myself many a time. The bitter pill about the barbaric and often tacit repression of the female gender… centuries of a cleverly guarded purdah about women by women, their roles best relegated to home and hearth, progeny and procreation… a power invested in these details, as if. Promoted. Pressurised. Made public. And yet, private. Needing desperately to be treated as equals. Crying hoarse when sexually propositioned at work. In an elevator by her own boss. A man she then has to defend in her victim’s statement, insisting she always looked at him like her own father. As if the working woman’s version is any easier to believe? More professional than a house-wife’s sordid case of sexual exploitation?
To write about? Market? In blogs, books and Bollywood? And what if the same thing transpired in the stealth of her bedroom or a dimly lit kutir for that matter? As she tasted the salt of her own tears. The shame. The screeches. The things we must discuss. Freely.
The way a poet did. The way only a poet can. Kalidasa whose highly sensuous descriptions of Shakuntalam were rife with erogenous detailing or Jayadeva, whose Geet Govinda was a haunting treatise celebrating the divine love-making ritual between Radha and Krishna. Or is it just easier? When erotica in India is relegated to the past… to carved walls of temples preserved as national treasure. Konark, Khajurao? That we blatantly flaunt as instances of our nation’s so-called sexual and cultural openness… luring blue-eyed tourists, doling out the same mumbo jumbo about the Kamasutra to them? Every single year? Is it a more convenient hiding place?
Fearless feminist crusaders like Kamala Das and Ismat Chugtai mere shadowy reference points today… dust laden historical banter, stuff that pops up easily in random Google searches. Remaining so distant. It hurts.
‘So whose coming for your launch? Sunny Leone? Mallika Sherawat?’ laughs the vice-president of a multi-national bank. A woman sporting a chic crew cut. In a halter blouse. With a mermaid tattoo on her back. That she covers. Every time her pallu slides off her well worked out shoulders. Then. Before I can reply.
‘Erotica is not for the corporates. You know ever since these sexual harassment cases started cropping up, MNCs are playing safe with all this — why risk a scandal? The talk… the equality you claim must be every woman’s… in, in your novel,’ she purses her lips. Tightly. To my proposal to conduct a simple reading for the employees of her Book Club. To talk about our desires. To be the Meera. In us.
What’s changed then? I pry deeper. Women in a work force. Women having children from a sperm bank. Women climbing a mountain. Dirty Picture. The first woman CEO. Headlines. Heroes. Hearsay.
‘You whore, you won’t ever get married. How dare you write all this dirty stuff about a married housewife? You have a disease,’ I shuddered at the last word. The pain familiar. Similar to when I was 10 or something and on a holiday to Rajasthan. When I hadn’t started wearing a bra. Or having my periods. ‘Tits,’ I still remember that word. ‘Fat girl tits,’ he lecherously leered. Twisting my nipples. In between his stubby fingers. His eyes drunken with lust. The kinds that I had never seen before. As I stood shivering outside the an empty train toilet. Past midnight. Alone. Feeling his manhood through his trousers.
It was all I felt. For many years. Choosing to never speak up. To not even tell my mother what had happened. Why I always sulked at the very mention of our next summer holiday. By train. Till today.
We’ve all read 50 Shades of Grey. Publishers are calling it a phenomenon. The Indian ones hungry now for a desi version. The next best-seller, perhaps. Making writing erotica suddenly cool. Anything saleable, like an aspiration. Like a condom brand or something. That must be endorsed by someone with a license to be sexually promiscuous. Like a Bollywood A-lister sucking on a ripened mango or slithering suggestively on a purple satin mattress, moaning suggestively. Before you decide sitting in a boardroom somewhere that a female contraceptive will be better off being marketed by an older, married heroine persay. A mother. Someone with a more ‘family viewing,’ certificate.
Clearly off the shelf, right? What if there were no rules. I ask. What if you met your soul-mate on a porn-site? Or watched the summer rains? Alone? Touching yourself? What if you looked back into the eyes of the stranger? Or crossed the Lakshmanrekha? What if it lasted? That sense of being free? What if it meant returning to who you already were? ‘What if… being a woman is enough? Womanhood a state. Not a condition.’What if…
