Sleeping with Movie Stars - Part 4

By Gitanjali Kolanad

Living outside of Kalakshetra gave me a chance to see other dancers. I saw Yamini Krishnamurthi. In one dance, she sat on the floor, soles of the feet together, knees apart, and enticed Krishna, her lover, in one way after the other. She called him sweetly, coyly, suggestively, pretending to be angry, getting really angry, laughingly, with sandalwood paste, with paan. If he stayed away, surely it was only to have her call him more. At the end, she looked at him directly to call him, and then remembered suddenly what she was calling him for – to make love to her after all – and transparent desire flitted across her face as if she was all alone with her lover instead of in front of an audience of thousands.

I loved that look. Sometimes, I went with the American girl to the bar of the Connemara, ordered rum and coke, pulled out a Charminar and practised that look on the middle-aged businessmen who frequented the place. It was easy enough to get them to buy our drinks, light our cigarettes. I thought it was ‘the look’, but it was pretty dark in there. If one offered, we let him drive us home, fueling his erotic fantasies. On the road to Besant Nagar, we said, "Here, this is where we live," at the gates of the Theosophical Society, where the guard knew our trick. When the car turned around and drove away, we walked the rest of the way home along the lonely road in the moonlight, talking about how repulsive he was with his jowly face, his movie villain moustache, his yellow teeth, his pot belly, his too-tight shirt with the wet patches at the armpits and how ridiculous he was to think that he had any other purpose in our lives but to serve our needs.

But one evening the man who lit my cigarette was not middle-aged. He was young and about as good-looking as any man had the right to be. We let him drive us all the way home. The next day his car came to pick me up, and I changed out of my dance sari and went where the driver took me without asking any questions.

He had a house in Sterling Gardens, a colonial mansion with columns at the entrance, a garden of mature trees, and cool tiled floors. The high-ceilinged rooms with barred and shuttered windows had very little furniture, which made the place seem at once elegant and bohemian. On the stereo, someone sang, "…in the summer time, when the weather’s fine, you got women, you got women on your mind…."

We went out for dinner with a few of his friends, all men. He hardly talked to me, but he and his friends engaged in a kind of sophisticated banter, switching fluently between Hindi and English, whichever better suited what it was they wanted to say. It made me feel very grown up just to sit there and listen. They made jokes and compliments at my expense in about equal measure, but I didn’t understand most of the conversation.

We went back to his place. He took me into his large, elegantly proportioned bedroom, sparsely furnished like the rest of the house with just a tall rosewood cupboard in the corner and a mattress on the floor. He closed the double doors, and then began to take off his clothes, looking at me all the while with his dark poet’s eyes. Now, I wonder whether it was a technique on his part, something that had worked for him in the past, or if it was something he recognized in me, that if he led the horse to water, she would drink.

His look said, "Who are you?" and that was what I wondered myself. I didn’t know what I would do. I stood there for a moment, and discovered that I was the kind of girl, who, when alone in a room with a man, unbuttons her blouse as if she’s done it a hundred times before.

In the morning, cool green light streamed in through the barred windows. On the mattress, the sheets were flung everywhere. Our legs were entwined; mine were the colour of strong coffee, his a perfect crème caramel, cream made golden with egg yolks and burnt sugar. I was a hungry young animal. Nothing could have been more delicious.

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