Sleeping with Movie Stars - Part 1

By Gitanjali Kolanad

Two boys on a motorcycle rode past the bus stop one way, then the other way, then back again as I waited for the 23A to take me to Kalakshetra. Finally they pulled up at the tea shop, as if to buy cigarettes. But I was the one who made the decisive move: in Madras, circa 1970, I’d already learned, if they were nice guys, then they didn’t have a clue.

I went over and bummed a smoke. It ended up that the boy with the wild Bob Dylan hair stayed there while I rode back to the hostel behind the boy with the long long eyelashes.

I was seventeen. My parents had sent me from Canada all the way back to India to get me away from the corrupting influences of the West. At Kalakshetra, the rules for dress and behaviour were very strict. Not two braids - "it looks like a girl standing baaah" and the teacher demonstrated, standing with her legs apart, like John Wayne - but one chaste legs-together braid. Not bangles on one wrist, but equal numbers of bangles on each wrist, because "you don’t have both eyes on one side of your face, do you?" When I dressed in a sari, with my long wavy hair in a thick plait with jasmine flowers, little gold earrings and bangles on each wrist, I looked like a good South Indian girl. You couldn’t tell that I was ‘spoiled’, the word my grandmother, who knew the truth, used for me, as in, "Who will marry her now that she has been spoiled?"

In the hostel, I shared a room with two other dance students. I had a shelf to put my things, a bed, and a suitcase with clothes pushed under it. There was a corridor with a fretted wall, through which the sea breeze blew, for we were near the sea. Down the hall was the bathroom where I learned to bathe with water poured from a bucket, and the toilets, where I learned to squat, and wash myself instead of using toilet paper.

When, late at night under our mosquito nets, my roommates and I talked of boys and what it might feel like to lie with them, I thought it best to keep my knowledge of those matters to myself.

At Kalakshetra, we were not supposed to even talk to the boys. In the hostel dining room, we sat cross-legged on the floor, girls on one side of the long hall, boys on the opposite side, kept apart as if we were magnets and iron filings. Nevertheless, hot glances were regularly exchanged. My roommate, in love with one of the senior boys, would not eat until he sat down with his stainless steel plate and their eyes met. Sometimes, if he was with his friends, joking and pushing and laughing, he wouldn’t look; my friend would get up and walk away, leaving her food untouched.

And yet, I had sexual encounters, of a kind. The Kama Sutra, in the list of eight kinds of embrace, states that the first four occur between couples who do not know each other. I participated, unwillingly, in some of these. On the one Sunday of the month when I was allowed out of the hostel to go to my guardian’s place, and took the bus, the bus conductor rubbed his forearm across my breast as he passed coins to the person beside me - Spristakam. A fellow passenger pressed his crotch up against my shoulder as I sat in the aisle seat - Udhgristakam. It was rare that the walk from the bus stop to the Kalakshetra gate did not yield at least one glimpse of male genitalia, given the ease of whipping open the lungi, that perfect flasher’s garment; but I could find no Sanskrit name for that.

The drummer at Kalakshetra, who we addressed as ‘sir’, as we did all the male teachers, was very good-looking - his black hair worn long and slicked back, his lips always red with paan. He was a brilliant drummer, inventive, playful and insouciant, as if he hardly noticed what his hands were doing as the complex patterns of rhythm unfurled from the mridangam. He looked out over the audience, his lip curled to hold the paan, with the sexy self-confindence of a rock star. He whispered to me behind the bouganvillea, "I’ll talk to you later," touching my breasts with only the merest pretence of accident. He didn’t speak English very well. "I will help you," he whispered, but I didn’t know what he meant. "Sir! Don’t do that!" I said, but I wasn’t really angry. "What? What I shouldn’t do?"

I tried to figure out what it felt like to touch my breast, from the man’s side of the bargain; not what the breast felt, but what the forearm felt on contact with the breast, and not a bare breast, mind you, but the breast felt through bra, choli blouse and the numerous folds of the sari draped over it. I could achieve no frisson.

The boys on the motorcycle came one day to the Kalakshetra office and claimed to be my cousins. I was allowed to walk with them around the grounds, on the sandy paths between the simple thatched huts where the dance and music classes were held, while everyone else was resting in the afternoon heat. Trees spilled papery yellow flowers on the red earth. We shared a cigarette when no one was looking. They told me they were from the Madras College of Architecture. Did I go to discos? "Yes." Did I go to the cinema? "Movies, you mean? Yes." What was my favourite ‘filim’? "2001: A Space Odyssey." That hadn’t been shown in India as yet. We shared our tastes in music, and here we were in perfect agreement: The Cream, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors.

• << TEX Home
• Page 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next >>