http://www.firstpost.com/ideas/thumbelina-on-speed-the-story-of-aditi-12377.html
Thumbelina on speed: The story of Aditi
GK I has a middle class air about it... GK II.. is the more fashionable part. In GK II the pet dogs are so exotic they hardly look like dogs (extra furry rugs is more like it)... Image by G.S.Srinivas
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Editor’s Note: The following is an exclusive excerpt from Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s highly anticipated new book The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolour Youth. Billed as ”a no hold’s barred journey through the call centres, technological business parks and the nightclubs of a nation on the meteoric rise,” it maps the lives of a new generation of urban Indians in Mehrotra’s signature electric prose. The book is due to be released in June.
I can’t remember how I met Aditi. I think we had some friends in common even though we didn’t hang out in the same circles. We kept bumping into each other and then, I suppose, something changed.
After I left Khosla’s Hobbit house in Defence Colony, I moved to Greater Kailash Part I. GK I has a middle class air about it, especially R block, the block I live in. GK II, on the other side of the overbridge, is the more fashionable part. In GK II the pet dogs are so exotic they hardly look like dogs (extra furry rugs is more like it), and the houses resemble Hollywood mansions.
The room I moved into in GK I was exotic in its own way. The walls were plastered with a mixture of mud, glue and cement, giving the place a faux rural air. Three steps lead down to the small basement-like room, a perfect writer’s garret. The rent was reasonable and, surprisingly for Delhi, so was the landlord.
I was to share the house with a Russian woman hooked to Second Life, a half Burmese girl who had a wheeling-dealing live-in Australian boyfriend, and an intense Spanish girl with a permanently furrowed brow who was learning to play the tabla. The front room of the apartment doubled as a salsa studio on weekends, the tenants being free to use it at other times.
The Spanish girl, Sara, lived in the room next to mine. She was new to the city and didn’t know too many people. Aditi was her friend and would come to visit her sometimes. Sara stayed in all day, and most evenings, practicing. Later, once I got to know Aditi better, I realized Sara had also hired her as a Hindi tutor. I spent more than a year in that room. I would wake up everyday to the same sound I had dozed off to sleep the previous night—Sara on the tabla.
***
The book maps the lives of a new generation of urban Indians in Mehrotra's signature electric prose. Image by Daniel Etter/The New York Times
Aditi is a dancer. Not formally trained, she says she often dances spontaneously, on the spur of the moment. She’s just finished college and plans to leave for New York in a year’s time where she will pursue a course in music therapy.
She grew up in Ludhiana, went to the local convent school. Her accent has an American twang because her mum’s American. She was a waitress when she met her future husband, Aditi’s father, and moved to India. Aditi has three siblings: two brothers, both of whom are in the States, and a sister in Ludhiana who loves the city to death and will never leave it.
Aditi finds Ludhiana claustrophobic. Delhi has provided her with space to do her own thing: perform on the stage, experiment with boyfriends, live independently without parental restrictions.
We spend many hours in my mud-plastered room, smoking pot, making love, chatting about our pasts. She tells me about her father, a conservative Punjabi patriarch who brought up his kids with an iron hand. Even now, when she goes back home, she has to be up by a certain hour. Once when I write about her performance in my column in Rolling Stone, she tells me she can’t show it to her father even though it says nice things about her. He’d kill her if he ever found out she was a dancer.
When she was growing up her militaristic father would line up all the kids in the garden and hose them down with cold water first thing in the morning. It’s so hot in Delhi this summer that I sometimes wish her father would barge into my mud house and hose both of us down. Most times we lie naked under the wall- mounted fans, sharing confidences and laughing at the world.
The room cannot take an air conditioner—the windows aren’t big enough. But it comes with a unique architectural feature to beat the heat. A vent cut into a wall is connected to a giant desert cooler downstairs. When the landlord is in a good mood, he puts it on. The desert cooler causes a mini storm in his dining room but some of the air, a cool gentle stream, manages to find its way into my room through the rectangular vent. When this happens, Aditi and I flip around on the bed and stick our noses in the small rectangle; we lie like that for hours, side by side, taking in the breeze as well as the various aromas that waft up from my landlord’s dining table: chicken curry, coffee, incense, marijuana.
***
Sometimes, I go over to Aditi’s place. She lives in Gautam Nagar, a lal dora. Lal dora in Delhi refers to neighbourhoods which, in the eyes of the city municipality, are technically villages. The roads are not paved, rents are dirt-cheap and the electricity—illegally tapped from overhanging wires—is often free. There are quite a few lal doras in south Delhi, each boasting its own character. Khirki, for example, overflows with young designers, electronica bands and girls with trendy haircuts who work in publishing. Ber Sarai, being close to the Indian Institute of Technology and Jawaharlal Nehru University, attracts a lot of students. Gautam Nagar, where Aditi lives, is choc-a-block with call centre workers.
Sometimes, I go over to Aditi’s place. She lives in Gautam Nagar, a lal dora. Lal dora in Delhi refers to neighbourhoods which, in the eyes of the city municipality, are technically villages. The roads are not paved, rents are dirt-cheap and the electricity—illegally tapped from overhanging wires—is often free. There are quite a few lal doras in south Delhi, each boasting its own character. Khirki, for example, overflows with young designers, electronica bands and girls with trendy haircuts who work in publishing. Ber Sarai, being close to the Indian Institute of Technology and Jawaharlal Nehru University, attracts a lot of students. Gautam Nagar, where Aditi lives, is choc-a-block with call centre workers.
At night, the lanes of Gautam Nagar crawl with packed Toyota Qualises, ferrying call centre workers to their offices in distant Gurgaon and elsewhere. On nights when she’s feeling particularly rebellious, Aditi stands to the side of the road and heckles passing vehicles, “Go, go to your call centres, you morons.”
Aditi’s flat mates are from the North East. One of them works in a call centre and the other is studying to be a journalist. Fiona, the call centre worker, loves her job so much that she is hardly ever home. The apartment is spacious with a big hall in the middle and two smaller windowless rooms tucked away on either side. The walls are covered with Aditi’s artwork. When she isn’t dancing, she passes her time sketching and scribbling on the walls of her house with an HB pencil. A closer look reveals an odd jumble of faces, deformed bodies, trees, leaves and the occasional happy penis with a smiling head, sprouting like a surprised mushroom from the dense undergrowth.
Aditi wants a job. She can’t get one with her qualifications. I don’t think she’s that dying to get one—her heart is in music and dancing. Still, she tries. Perhaps she can do what her mother did. We are eating hamburgers at the American Diner in Habitat Centre and the idea strikes her that she should give waitressing a try. She asks the manager but they don’t have a vacancy. She walks into a school on a whim. They grant her an interview but she has no experience and that one doesn’t work out either. A call centre is looking for language trainers. She answers the ad, immediately feels uncomfortable among the earnest applicants. During the interview they give her a pen and ask her to sell it to them. She’s confused. She tells them she didn’t apply for a job in sales and walks out.
Palash K. Mehrotra's new book: "The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India's Technicolour Youth" is being hailed as no hold's barred book.
Aditi has a friend Bill. Bill is a musician. He used to dub porn films in Berlin before he moved to Delhi. He plays keyboards in a band and organizes a show that blends Broadway musical and farce, with tropes from the cabaret tradition. The Medicine Show consists of skits, bits of acting interspersed with music and dance, stand-up comedy. Aditi is one of the stars of the show. Sometimes she dances by herself, at other times she has a partner. Today she’s dancing with a partner to Peggy Lee’s ‘Do Right’. The audience watches spellbound as pint-sized Aditi effortlessly pirouettes, twirls, shakes, wriggles and writhes on the stage. When she finishes and takes a bow there is thunderous applause.
Aditi hangs out with Bill often. Sometimes they do some MDMA or a 2CB tab. Aditi floats like a butterfly on the love drug. She calls up a friend of mine, a photographer called Prateek Sen, and tells him she wants to fuck him. He goes over to Bill’s place to see what’s going on. He finds her sitting naked on Bill’s sitar. He calls me, “Aditi is sitting naked on Bill’s sitar and she’s saying she wants to fuck me”. I tell him I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.
That weekend there’s a lot of MDMA floating around at house parties. Aditi and I do some together with a bunch of friends. There are people over at my place. I kiss a girl a friend fancies. He’s annoyed; she doesn’t mind. It begins to rain and Aditi wants to get wet, to dance. She strips down to her red underwear and goes downstairs on to the road. It’s late, very late. There’s no one around. She dances in the rain. Another tripper from our party joins her downstairs. She wants to piggy ride on his back. He hoists her up on his shoulders, and they set off into the dark wet night.
***
Aditi is fiercely independent. She’s grown up in North India and knows how to deal with North Indian men. In Gautam Nagar the man who sells her cigarettes acts fresh with her at times. She avoids his shop and starts buying her Goldflakes from elsewhere. But there are times when she also holds her ground.
Aditi likes to wear short dresses and boots with bangles to match. I’m with her one day when a man gets off a bus, starts walking away. The moment he sees her he changes direction. Now he’s walking straight at her. She continues to follow her original trajectory. I’m dreading a head-on collision right here on the footpath between bus sleaze ball and feisty babe. At the last minute the man swerves, he does nothing, doesn’t even leer. His eyes are glued to the ground when he passes her.
Aditi can be warm and affectionate and passionate but she doesn’t believe in falling in love. I think she feels that love and possession would hamper her independence. Her lover might start making demands on her and she’d hate that.
At times, we find it difficult, especially when I’m with someone else and she misses me or the other way round. We don’t lay any claims on each other; still, deep inside, you feel a pang. A wisp of an ache. There is little you can do in such situations but learn to let go.
***
August is coming to an end. Aditi plans to leave in another two months. We don’t see each other as much as we used to over the summer. I still try and catch her performances when she’s dancing on stage. We still meet once in a while and make love.
August is coming to an end. Aditi plans to leave in another two months. We don’t see each other as much as we used to over the summer. I still try and catch her performances when she’s dancing on stage. We still meet once in a while and make love.
She’s been spending more and more time with another guy, a cosmetic dentist who makes a bomb decorating the teeth of wealthy white women.
I know Gaurav. We’ve dropped acid together. He lives in a clinic-apartment in a posh part of town. The dentist’s chair occupies pride of place in a glassed-in cabin, with doors leading into bedrooms on either side. In the mornings and afternoons he works here; at night the clinic doubles as a hangout joint. When the clinic was first inaugurated, Gaurav got a bunch of models with diamond-studded teeth to sashay down a makeshift ramp in the basement.
Gaurav’s father has decided to stand for state elections and wants him to help with the campaigning. Like Aditi, Gaurav too comes from a conservative background and has never enjoyed a comfortable relationship with his father. Indian families often resist the idea that kids grow up into independent individuals with life plans of their own. Both Gaurav and Aditi say that their mothers are more understanding.
Gaurav’s family owns hundreds of acres of land back in the village in Haryana. It’s not a world Gaurav feels comfortable in. His father’s been doing some old-fashioned emotional arm-twisting to get his son to help him. It’s an opportunity for them to build bridges. Gaurav’s been spending time in the villages, touring and campaigning for dad. It’s a struggle. The father wants to use as many SUVs as he can. It makes an impression on the rural folk. They expect a man of standing to do things in style, shock and awe his constituency, decimate his rivals. Gaurav isn’t comfortable with the casual corruption that is part of Indian electioneering. He convinces his father to move around in a convoy of four SUVs instead of six.
Gaurav is fish out of water here. The city is where he’s comfortable. The city is where he can do things his own way. The city is where he can curl up on his dentist’s chair with his favourite book, Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, and look at his own past not with disdain but cold objectivity.
***
Soon it’ll be time for Aditi to pack her bags and leave. She’s been practicing hard for her last performance. During rehearsals she’s been falling a lot and bruising herself all over.
Soon it’ll be time for Aditi to pack her bags and leave. She’s been practicing hard for her last performance. During rehearsals she’s been falling a lot and bruising herself all over.
She’s been shuttling between Gaurav’s place and mine. Sometimes, when it’s late, Gaurav drops her at my apartment in his car.
On the day of her last performance Aditi is nowhere to be seen. I’m told she’s been getting painted inside the green room for the last several hours and is now waiting for the paint to dry. Her dance has been slotted in the second half, after the interval.
I watch the other performances standing at the bar. The show opens with an absurd boxing-style balloon fight between two women. Sanjay Rajoura, a Jat standup comic, is up next. He rips into Indians and Americans with equal relish. When Aditi comes on, a hush decends on the audience. Every inch of her skin has been painted a shimmering green. In her right hand she holds a sharp gleaming knife. She looks menacing and tender by turns as she whips around on her toes, bends forward, then throws her hair back and stares at the audience with round black eyes. She looks straight out of a Hans Christian Anderson fairytale—Thumbelina on speed, cocking a snook at the world.
When the performance is over she comes outside where we are smoking cigarettes. She plants a green kiss on my cheek. She’s had paint on for almost six hours now and wants to have a shower. My place is close by so we decide to head there.
In the autorickshaw, she tells me she’ll miss me in New York. I’ll miss her too. I put my arms around her. There is silence before she turns to me again.
“What?”
“Will you invite me to your wedding?”
I sit on the question for a few seconds, then say, “Yeah, sure. Of course!” We both laugh nervously.
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