Food for drama

Shobhaa De's book oscillates between the sombre and serious and is delightful in its description of everything Bengali

Insatiable: My Hunger for Life

Author: Shobhaa Dé

Publisher:  HarperCollins

Pages: 283

Price: Rs 699
 

It was to be expected that Shobhaa Dé would usher in her 75th birthday with a book. Ten years ago, over a coffee meeting at what used to be the All American Diner, a popular breakfast spot now called Habitat Hub at India Habitat Centre in Delhi, she’d said, “I am always writing a book or (am) mid-book or thinking of the next book. My day is really defined by almost constant writing  — if only I could write in my sleep.”
 

That was a year when Ms Dé had returned to writing novels after over a decade. What was to be a simple conversation over coffee turned into an adventure from the get-go, thanks to the Diner’s two identical entrances, both with a green canopy, both facing a lawn and both with “The All American Diner” written on them. It was after some ridiculous spinning through those doors that she and I managed to find each other.
 

Where there is Dé, there is drama. There’s also excitement, exuberance, unapologetic, in-your-face opinion and tonnes of stories. Why, then, should her book, Insatiable: My Hunger for Life, be any different?
 

At that coffee meeting, Ms Dé had said she does not write about real people since that would be boring. Well, this book is about real people and they’re far from boring. It’s about the unknown ones, such as the staff at her home or her neighbours or those she meets at the beauty parlour to which she’s been going for years (with the exception of Covid years). And it’s about the celebrities — the designers, writers, film stars, Nobel laureates and artists, you name it — with whom she hobnobs, wines and dines. But more than anything, it’s about food, a delicious theme that runs through her relationships, passions, encounters, and even her insecurities.
 

The flavours and aromas leap out of the pages, whether she’s having a chatpatti chat with foodie-economist Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee at the Jaipur Literature Festival, or whether she and her husband are over for dinner at Aamir Khan’s Pali Hill home, where the actor, now a single parent, continues to live surrounded by family despite two separations. Mr Khan serves them his mother’s biryani, mushy potato slow-cooked in ghee and kebabs, while ex-wife Kiran Rao keeps reminding him that the film crew is waiting for him.
 

Ms Dé is clearly insatiable when it comes to food, friendships and feelings. The book could be described as a travelogue through a year in her life, January to December 2022, at times with a mishmash of flavours for company (think digestive biscuits crumbled over spicy idli and mixed with green chutney; why, she can even have green chutney with cake!).
 

It is a ride, yes, but it has its sombre moments. The opening itself is kind of sad, with her searching for “Anuradha” (yet again) in the Jaipur Lit Fest crowd. Anuradha is the name she was given at birth by her Saraswat Brahmin family, since she was born under the “Anuradha nakshatra”, but a domineering uncle promptly shortened it to Shobha. Ms Dé writes that when she got to know about this at age five, she wailed for the “classy and classical” Anuradha who’d lost out to the “pleb-sounding” Shobha.
 

Insatiable is in many ways her quest for Anuradha. It lets the reader into her life, her home and family — husband (always Mr Dé), children (The Brood), their spouses and their parents, grandchildren. It’s packed with anecdotes, many of which are hilarious, such as her reaction when the general manager of a hotel in Madurai, where she and her husband have gone to renew their marriage vows before the tutelary deity Meenakshi, tells them while showing them their room, “Our Prime Minister Narendra Modi slept on this very bed during his recent visit.”
 

A Maharashtrian married to a Bengali, she’s also delightful in her description of everything Bengali: “Bongs are born drama queens. The men in particular. They all want to be Uttam Kumar and go into emotional overdrive with melodramatic dialogues like, ‘Aami morey jaabo ’, at the drop of a hat.”
 

Back to sombre: You find her questioning the fallout of a time when the political has become personal. What does ideology have to do with love, friendship, marriage, she asks. A lot, actually. “Food, sex, politics have a lot in common — it’s about what’s considered palatable/acceptable to both partners,” she writes.
 

Ms Dé is not known to be subtle. She’s caustic and candid, serious and sarcastic, funny and fiendish. She moves around in some hoity-toity circles but comes across as an outsider looking in critically, sometimes with amusement, at times with contempt.
 

There are those who question her literary skills. Author Reginald Massey once said she writes “soft pornography which titillates”. To such criticism, Ms De’s response has been consistent: Ignore them, don’t look for snipers.  Insatiable shows the merit in that advice.