Sleeping with Movie Stars - Part 5

By Gitanjali Kolanad

At Kalakshetra, we were learning Alaripu, which is the perfect expression of the principles that the adavus set out, unfolding with a pure conceptual clarity that is as pleasing as (insert here a mathematical proof). I was having trouble with the rhythm. In the simple alaripu that we were learning, the underlying rhythm is of three beats, like waltz time. But at times the persistent foundation of threes is overlaid by patterns of fours. I couldn’t seem to hold both rhythms in my head at the same time. The other students got it right away and the teacher mocked me.

I didn’t care. I discovered a truth about art - that ineptitude doesn’t in any way lessen the pleasure, and I enjoyed the dance just as much as the girls who could do it well. They flew like birds; I flew like Icarus.

I hadn’t figured out yet why people had sex. Given the additional worry of pregnancy, it seemed like a step backwards rather than forwards in the pursuit of pleasure. In Canada, the prevailing wisdom among my peers was that we should be fucking by our age. I had approached it the spirit of a collector – a short one, a tall one, a white one, a black one; I was already seventeen in years, but only five in lovers. I slept with them once; then they were out of my life, but on my list.

Until now. When the car came for me I went to Sterling Gardens. We had very little in the way of conversation. He wasn’t interested in my dance and I certainly wasn’t interested in his work for some advertising agency. Nor did we ever discuss our relationship such as it was. But I had begun to feel something worth pursuing. I breathed heavily and moaned as I had been taught to by the movies, and at the same time I tried to pay attention to what I was really feeling; that heat, first at the surface and then deep inside. When the car came for me, I went.

He invited me to a party in honour of a friend of his, an up-and-coming movie star from Bombay. I had seen only one Hindi movie, with Rajesh Khanna and an elephant, and a few Tamil movies, in which the girls who had sex always ended up dead. All the things that I loved in the Kalakshetra dance dramas – the action interrupted by song and dance, the extreme stylized depiction of emotion, the archetypal heroes and villains, the plot conventions in which fate and separations at birth and deus ex machina are constantly invoked – I found laughable on the big screen. The aggressive jiggling of the hero and heroine in the too-tight costumes seemed more obscene to me, and more embarrassing to watch, than the scenes of sex with Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, where she plays a housewife with a secret life as a prostitute.

I went to the party wearing a very short white dress. There were advantageously cantilevered bosoms, and fleshy expanses of midriff and back, but I was the only one showing thigh. The movie star also stood out: every other man was in pants and a shirt, but he was elegant in a pale silk kurta and pyjama. I was introduced to him. He pretended to speak no English, and so my lover translated, but I knew that the things they were saying and what they told me they were saying were quite different.

The movie star and I danced. I whispered in his ear, "It’s too bad you don’t speak English. I want to tell you what I would do to you if we were alone in your room right now." His instant mastery of that language was gratifying. I told him. Then I went and danced with other men.

The next day my lover took me to his suites at the Connemara. They ordered room service. The movie star’s brother and my lover played chess. The movie star and I watched them, and flirted. I wanted to sleep with a movie star, and even though he wasn’t a really big movie star, like Rajesh Khanna, he might be the only one I ever met. I told him all these things, so when we could we made our exit.

He promised to be quick, but he wasn’t, and by the time we got back, my lover had gone. The movie star and his brother drove me home, and we laughed and joked all the way. I told them about how I had almost slept with the brother of Country Joe, of the band Country Joe and the Fish, and though they’d never heard of Country Joe and the Fish, it was a good story and they laughed. He said that this had never happened to him before, and I said, "Don’t worry. It will." It was funny to see the way his eyes lit up at that, the thought of the women in his future, and we laughed about that too.

I got up the next morning and went to Sterling Gardens. It was early. He was still in bed. I tried to get in next to him but he turned away, saying in a hard whisper, "I’m not your pimp." I ran outside and climbed into a ficus tree in his compound and sat there on the smooth round branch in the green, swinging my legs. The sensation his words had evoked was so new to me that I didn’t know what it was. I needed to be alone so that I could get used to the sudden heaviness in my chest. He didn’t come out and I finally went home.

Even now I remember his words, though the hurt is only the memory of a hurt. But that was my first heartache, and I tested all the rest against that: this is not as bad, this is nearly as bad; until eventually there was one that was worse. I heard that he got involved with the beautiful model who showered ecstatically under a waterfall with green soap in the posters of the time. The movie star became very famous, but I couldn’t tell anyone in Kalakshetra, and back in Canada, nobody had heard of him.

© Gitanjali Kolanad 2006

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