A playful little tale by Nirupama Dutt
I reached there carefully watching every jump of the meter of the auto-rickshaw. Those were the freelancing days in Delhi I was going to a party held in celebration of a prestigious award to a journalist friend who had gone a long way from the wooden benches of the Department of Journalism in Panjab University.
I had known that the function would be a grand one, but had I known just how grand it would be, I would have stayed home which was a mezzanine-floor room with a bathroom without a door.
Fun and frolic in a known familiar crowd is fine, but grand parties studded with the rich and the famous or even the unknown have always scared me.
At 14, I was on a holiday with my brother in a tea garden in Assam. Those were the days of Burra Sahibs and the Memsahibs. I tried to escape a party which was being forced upon me by my brother and mother with a view to develop my social graces for we were then members of ``impoverished aristocracy’’. I swallowed a jug full of saline water hoping that I would fall sick and would be excused from the ordeal. But I digested it all and ended up having a very good time because it was a ‘bohemian’ theme.
I though such an exercise had ended when the fight against social graces was won with studies and a rough-tough job. And even if some in the family still liked to consider them selves the proud impoverished aristocrats, I was a worker in a newspaper claiming night allowance and getting a bonus every Diwali.
But no it is not so easy to escape it all and there I was at a party once again. There was a good enough reason though. Only a few weeks before I had nearly been given up by an artist friend because I did not land up at her award celebrations. Never having received an award I could be dumb once, but not twice to the sensitivity of awardees.
Since 14 the results of the few odd parties of the kind had been always the same. While others had their fun and games, I ended up making polite conversation to some lonely old lady: And I had felt that it would have been better to stay home and talk to my mother who was both old and lonely and then I could also be impolite at times.
But there I was again and being heralded into a palatial house near the Lodhi Gardens by a Gurkha Durban, I suppressed the desire to run and take a bus back to my room. Passing the exquisitely carved Chinese screens in the lobby, I entered the hall which belonged to aristocracy that was not impoverished.
There were chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and on the floor were Persian carpets and tiger skins. I had read of Cinderella’s glass slippers, but my eyes popped seeing a three-piece sofa of cut glass and silver.
There was no going back now for this was something to tell my mother who still proudly displayed on the dinner wagon a few odd wine glasses, a decanter with a chipped top and a pair of candle-stands.
Walking from the long hall to the lush green lawn strewn with rose petals and a tall jasmine garland wall on one end, I know that what my role would be that evening. I would be playing Ellie Hendreson straight out of the chapters of Virginia Wolf’s ``Mrs. Dalloway’’. Ellie is the poor cousin, out of place in an all-wrong dress who stays on, however, to report every detail to her ailing companion, Edith.
I was even dressed up for the role. My pale blue lucknowi chicken suit and Kohlapuris bought from Janpath that day were as alien as Ellie’s poorly-cut black dress with cheap pink flowers pinned on to it. But I stayed on there in the midst of national and international celebrities, clinging chiffons and sequined silks. And to be in tune with the stream of consciousness, downed a couple of gins and drunk in details of the cut glass sofa upholstered in Jamawar. I forgot that it was rude to stare and gaze at the Indian pop-singer who had made many headlines abroad in topless sari.
There was plenty to write home about. I picked a piece of carrot from the salad and it turned out to be smoked salamon, a delicacy I had only read about. And predictably I found myself sitting near a lone Parsi lady whose son had got a similar award last year and was now in the USA I was all politeness and she extended an invitation for tea for the next day.
So I returned home with a little trophy in my bag. It was a plastic flower stolen from a massive arrangement in the bathroom. This was the only digression from Ellie who didn’t bring back keepsakes. But then there is always a scope for an innovation or two while doing a role!
