Shilpa Shetty knocks the air out of an invisible obstacle with her hips, her red shalwar kameez clinging to her buttocks, as she mouths the words to a song in the hit movie Baazigar. This is in the early 1990s, while I am in the prime of my adolescence.
In an older movie, at my grandmother’s house, Anil Kapoor rolls around in the haystack with Dimple Kapadia, while his open palms simulate groping her breasts. He doesn’t actually touch them, but his pretence is dirty enough. My granny and I were eating samoosas and didn’t think much of this line-straddling soft porn at the time. It was a Hindi movie — that was just the way it was.
In restrospect, I see how I had two very different ideas of romantic affection drilled into me, with my Indian parents and Western home (I say this trying as hard as possible not to sound like another confused third-generation immigrant child).
The first was the classical western Sweet Valley High-type loving — holding hands, a sweet kiss at the prom, followed by sex in a committed relationship.
Then there was the other kind — the Bollywood kind. This was confusing to say the least. Here, there was no sex and no kissing. But the emulation of every imaginable sexual position, relayed through dance and intense drama, caused far more embarrassment than any of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield’s dates with Todd or Chad or Rafe or Jed ever could. But it was not enough to warrant an age restriction, because they weren’t actually getting naked and doing the deed after all. They were just simulating it. To a beat.
Where does this leave me 15 years later? On a dance floor gyrating inappropriately to attract men, but when they try to pull in, I turn my face away and finally duck down and escape between their legs before swinging around a club pillar pretending it’s a tree — that’s obviously not going to work. But that’s how it happens in movies, and after the song they get married — in a wedding where everybody dances to a choreographed number, in matching outfits and with a cousin from the United States being fed sweetmeats by a loving but overweight new mother-in-law.
I find myself misunderstood — what I mean to be romantic, childish playfulness, non-Indian guys miscontrue as cockteasing — whoreish behaviour but won’t put out. Jas but kak sturvy (slutty but stuck up) as Cape Coloured kitchen taal would describe it.
Kissing boys is something that white, black and coloured girls do. Indian girls swing their hips and lower their gazes — but only at weddings, because we’re not supposed to go to clubs. Those, too, are for other girls.
So we end up dressing up in high heels and short dresses to go to the movies and fooling around in public toilets — not using condoms, because we’re not having sex; that’s not allowed! And contracting diseases and unwanted pregnancies because the messing about started involving repressed fluids by accident. Sex before marriage will send me to hell, and holding hands with a boy is ougat (promiscuous). So what on earth am I supposed to do?
Indian boys, of course, are far removed from these film-induced regulations. They can’t fall pregnant and they don’t have reputations. They’re just boys, having fun before they settle down. Too often, though, these gender-based limitations and freedoms mean that the fun continues long after the vows have been sealed.
Indian people have sex. Obviously. India is the second most-populated country in the world. My second cousin has 19 aunts and uncles. But the way we’re taught about it, through film, ends up with Indian girls spending much of their post-adolescent lives thinking about sex, wanting it, but not really sure if people are actually having it, or are just pretending to have it in time to a tabla and sitaar. What a debacle.