B-side of Sugar Town

I discovered love in the summer of 1980.

I was 14 years old and as unidimensional physically as a playing card. Worse, I wore soda bottle glasses, rode a navy blue BSA SLR bicycle, had a miniature pomeranian called Julie, read books and was in the top three of the class. I was the class nerd everybody left alone. That didn’t mean I didn’t have a deeply satisfying inner life: I had nurtured a huge crush for almost two years for a senior at school who didn’t even know I existed, I obsessed about the actors Rajinikanth, Pratap Pothen, and the singer Cliff Richard, who also didn’t know I existed. However I saved my love for love.

I fell in love with the voice of an announcer on AIR Chennai. I fell in love with Rhett Butler. I fell in love with large bikes with a thump that could be heard a mile away. I fell in love with a face on a billboard. I fell in love indiscriminately and randomly.

By 1981, I had moved on to the next phase of teendom. I had discovered how to reinvent myself in my head. Depending on which time of the day it was, I was someone from a book. Mostly I was Ginnie from Herman Raucher’s There Should Have Been Castles . She made it seem alright to be skinny, leggy and sassy. Though just before I fell into bed, I allowed myself to be Scarlett O’ Hara sweeping down a white staircase in a green velvet dress into the arms of a shadowy man who waited at the foot.

I also had Lobo singing ‘I’d Love You to Want Me’ playing in my head. It helped to have a particular classmate with whom I had long conversations about nothing specific. He on his bike; me on mine. Then in the March of that year, just a week before my board exams, I fell ill with chickenpox. I now sought a tragic heroine amidst the books I read.

But something truly fell out of the bottom of my world that summer when my grandmother died. All through April and May, I had watched her deteriorate from a woman who was like a cruise liner into a catamaran. She had cancer and I am not sure if the disease eventually killed her or if it was the radiation treatment. When you lose a grandparent, you have your first intimation of mortality. Tomorrow was not forever and I had to emerge from my burrow.

And so there was a brief infatuation with a classmate. We played table tennis and exchanged love notes, I wrote him poetry and he gave me quotes from the Song of Solomon . He was a brilliant hockey player and gorgeous looking and a devout Christian. The love story ended in a few weeks when we were told off by a priggish teacher. My Romeo was lacking in spine. So once again I retreated into books and made Eric Carmen’s ‘All by Myself’ my anthem. Who needed love when there was cricket and tennis. Besides I was saving myself for the bad boys of Harold Robbins.

In the Summer of 1982 I was still skinny and sassy and I had short hair. But I wore silver bangles from elbow to wrists, sleeveless smocks and an attitude which was largely a defence mechanism. I was also in love with the word Bohemian. And so I argued about everything — our way of life, freedom of expression and all that my parents represented — middle-class middle India. I had meanwhile discovered a few Russian, some European and many American writers. I also had Meat Loaf to bolster me along. Two out of three ain’t bad. And I was ready to engage with life.

And I did. At Shoranur in my grandparents’ home, I met a young man nine years older than I was. He called my Julie the Hound of Baskervilles (my father‘s name is Bhaskaran). He read Updike and Kerouac, talked about Sylvia Plath and Ginsberg, had long hair, used multi-syllable words, didn’t have a job and fitted my template of the Bohemian love interest.

When I went back to school, I parked Bohemia and settled for being the class eccentric. I would wake up each morning thinking what new thing am I going to learn today! The rest of the class looked at me in disgust when I mentioned it. I fed a goat every day my lunch of roti and omelette. I had also begun discovering the joy of travel for travel’s sake — I rode the bus to the terminus and back. In fact, I wasn’t being rebellious as much as adventurous when I went on bike rides on the Bullet of the boy who was regarded as the bad boy of Avadi. And I was drawn to the glint of light on the metal frame of a batchmate. That and his jawline. I also had begun writing and everything else receded into the background as I filled pages of a book with poetry with a yearning for I don’t know whom or what.

The mid-Eighties passed in a haze as I tried to make sense of my feelings, my body, my life… I was in a relationship with the young man I had met in 1982; I had dropped out of college; I was trying to become a journalist on the misguided notion that talent was enough; I was oblivious to what was happening in the world as I retreated deeper into my reading and music. There was something constant about what words and song did for me while everything else was flux.

In the summer of 1986, I married the young man and a few days later, Julie died. With that my childhood came to an end and I reinvented myself to young wife. I was all the young wives of literature. I was the clueless Dora of David Copperfield aiming to be Rose Red Browne of What Katy Did Next by Susan Coolidge. I was the intimidated Rebecca of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and the briskly efficient O-lan of Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth . The truth was I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be.

I had a husband, a home and bookshelves for my books and his. And a Binatone stereo for our cassettes. I baked and sewed. But in the span of three months, I had moved three jobs. The longest I lasted was for three months in a real estate company. The real estate boom was just beginning in India but I was still paid fairly well. It helped me support my habit — old furniture. Half of my first salary was spent on a hat stand from a yard.

We had little money, but I wasn’t unhappy. But I wasn’t happy either. I was stricken by a sense of ennui. Those were years when nothing much happened in Chennai or my life. MGR died in December 1987. We acquired a Dyanora colour TV. In summer, the heat beat down on us but we poured water on the floor, ran the fan on at its maximum speed and sweated it out. During the monsoons, we let the leaks of our flat in the Belly Area in Chennai drip into plastic buckets. My music lessons had come to a standstill and the books I read no longer excited me. Meanwhile I dreamt of writing and just writing. Penguin India had set up offices in Delhi and one heard of a mysterious creature called a publisher. This one was called David Davidar.

But there was life to be lived. My husband climbed the corporate ladder. I continued to jump jobs. By the summer of 1988, I was into my fifth job. We had custard and fruit for breakfast and ate sandwiches for lunch and ate out at Rangis five days a week. Even the menu never varied: egg fried rice, prawn, lamb or chicken in ginger-garlic sauce and two fresh lime sodas sweet and salt. It was a little bit like being trapped in Groundhog Day except they hadn’t made the film yet.

Sometime in the summer of 1989, I went with my husband and a couple of his colleagues for a concert at the University Auditorium. A French jazz band was playing. After a while a few of us began dancing in the aisles. The man I was dancing with was an upcoming filmmaker. Now he is a top-of-the-game stalwart but then we were located in our twenties. If the music moved you, you danced. You didn’t think beyond that.

However a policeman lurking there asked my husband’s colleague who I was with. He had seen me come with one man and there I was dancing with another. The colleague pointed out my husband to him. That’s her husband, he said. So how can she dance with another man? The policeman demanded in an incredulous voice, our friend said.

We laughed about it.

But I realised then that it was time to break the ennui. Or I would become the person the world expected me to be. The Good Wife. The decade was coming to an end. Somewhere in my head Belinda Carlisle was singing ‘Heaven is Place on Earth.’ I was almost 24. It was time to reinvent myself. Once again.

Anita Nair is the author of novels like The Better ManIdris. Her books have been translated into over 30 languages. Her new novel, Chain of Custody, will be published soon

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