SEX SURVEY
Three books encapsulate the mores of modern-day dating, through the eyes of a misogynistic pick-up artiste, a ‘liberated’ woman and a transgender person
Laid in India is Dave Besseling’s book-length profile of Sid Malhotra, who scours the streets of Bandra for women to pick up. Malhotra (not his real name) is a self-styled PUA, a pickup artiste, capable of chatting up any woman, anytime, anywhere and securing a digit-close, a kiss-close, or an F-close.
A digit-close is persuading the object of one’s desire to part with her number, a kissclose is inveigling a kiss and an F-close you can work out for yourself. Malhotra takes much of his method and his jargon from a bestselling 2005 book called The Game by erstwhile music journalist Neil Strauss. Before The Game, in 1999, Tom Cruise played Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia, a character loosely based on Ross Jeffries, who in the early ’90s offered men courses in using particular words and phrases to prime attractive women for sex.
Malhotra styles himself as the Indian answer to these American hucksters, these vendors of self-esteem and self-improvement. The women are baubles, gaudy evidence of the PUA’s newly acquired confidence, the reward for completing that defining American journey from loser to winner. If American PUAs are pathetic, attempting to elevate arrested adolescence into a considered lifestyle choice, what should the reader conclude about Malhotra, a pilgrim cast adrift, a man whose imported worldview is wholly without cultural context?
Indian cities are unforgiving places, closed to those who migrate from elsewhere, leaving family and friends behind to fend for themselves in the forbidding metropolis. Ravinder Singh, in his new novel This Love that feels Right..., articulates some of that loneliness, desire and desperation, the outsider’s hunger to belong. Singh is one of the country’s most popular writers. An
ex-manager at Microsoft, he is of the Chetan Bhagat school: uncomplicated love stories written in unselfconscious English. Singh cannot write, but it is churlish to complain about the countless solecisms that litter this manuscript, the peculiar sentence structure, the reliance on cliche. His prose cannot be otherwise if it is to reach his audience; his use of “lot many”, for example, is an authentic rendering of English as it is spoken in Delhi. Besides, Singh has no illusions about the literary quality of his novels.
Far more odd is Besseling’s prose. “Bandra’s still got that incorporative vertical,” reads a typical sentence. Ugliness aside, Besseling’s sentences are sloppy; metaphors, allusions and quotes are generally ill-chosen. A clock is “as broken as bribe-seeking cops”. What does ‘broken’ mean here in relation to venal police? “[T]he only time he’s really uncomfortable in public,” Besseling writes about Saif Ali Khan, “is waiting in airport immigration lines, but on the mean streets of Bandra, ‘It’s not like that at all,’ he says.” So Bandra is not like waiting in an airport immigration line? That’s it?
After Malhotra achieves a digit-close in a crowded bar, from a girl surrounded (improbably) by seven muscular friends and spiriting her away to a quiet corner, having (improbably) used a former Miss India as a ‘pivot’ to distract the friends, an awed Besseling is told that Malhotra has an opening routine that works on “every girl” whether she’s 18 or 40. What “unimpugnable words”, Besseling muses, “would work for Harold and Maude as much as Humbert and Lolita”? What do Harold and Humbert have to do with it? And the reference to Maude and Lolita is tautologous, a reference that is ‘clever’ at the expense of being illuminating.
“I will tell you,” Malhotra often tells Besseling, in response to a direct question, before moving the conversation in another direction. Besseling performs a similar trick in the book, deflecting and prevaricating, hoping that if he pretends for long enough that a revelation or an insight is coming, readers will quiet their growing doubts. The trouble is there is no there there. Who is the character Besseling is profiling and what does he represent? Nothing Malhotra says is corroborated. Hardly anyone is interviewed. Besseling is so incurious about his subject he doesn’t even visit the small town in which Malhotra grew up. It’s no surprise that we learn rather more about Dave than we do about Sid.
And what we learn is that Dave isn’t so much profiling Sid as engaging him in a willy-waving contest. Besseling claims he finds PUAs repellent but shows off his own PUA bona fides. Expressing faux bemusement at Malhotra and his friends’ veneration of models and actresses, he writes: “And it makes me wonder if they’ve actually been with any, because once you’ve been with a few models and actresses, the pedestals crumple rather quickly.” Ah, the voice of experience, as Besseling wants so much for the reader to know. He also suggests that PUA philosophy is essentially correct: “Sexual compatibility just happens to be what our brains have been wired to assess before anything else.” This piece of inane bro science is true because “any dude with a dick will tell you”.
Maybe most of us (men that is) are immature idiots. Maybe that is Besseling’s grand design—to write a book that replicates the hollow heart of contemporary maleness, a book that is all mouth and no trousers. If so, Laid in India is a triumph.
Speaking of ‘dudes with dicks’, Laxmi’s Red Lipstick begins with a subversive nativity scene: “When I was born, the doctor checked my genitals and pronounced me a boy.” For Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, arguably India’s most famous transgender person, it was a moment freighted with meaning. What did genitalia have to do with being a boy or a girl? “[T]o me,” she writes, “the term ‘transgender’ has always implied ‘transcending gender’.” She took solace from the words of the journalist and activist Ashok Row Kavi: “The world around us is abnormal, baby. You are normal.” It’s a defence of the individual’s capacity for self-creation, for setting her own parameters in defiance of society. Laxmi follows, as this perfunctorily written memoir, in collaboration with Pooja Pande, shows, the dictates of her heart. She can talk of men lightly, of using them for her own ends, and at the same time be so in thrall to a lover that he “has absolute control” and “acts very patriarchal at times”.
Red Lipstick allows for complication, for human perversity. Complication is what Ravinder Singh eschews. This Love that feels Right... is about a chaste affair between a gym instructor and his young, married client. It is told from the woman’s point of view. The men are ciphers, representatives of types—the absent, preoccupied husband; the sensitive, upstanding would-be lover. The real relationship in the novel is between two women—Naina, the bored, neglected wife, and her liberated friend, a glib proponent of open marriages. This, and their Socratic dialogue, could be intriguing in the hands of a better writer, but Singh sets this novel in multiplex India, that urban utopia where class and religion don’t intrude and ‘progressive’ attitudes are mere posturing. The ugly Indian male is on display in all three of these books; only in Red Lipstick though are the shibboleths of gender challenged and maleness made, intentionally, to look ridiculous.