BIRD IN A BANYAN TREE: MY STORY
Bina Ramani
Rainlight/Rupa
311 pages; Rs 500
Copies of Bird in a Banyan Tree at terminal 1D, New Delhi's "domestic" airport, stare you in the face, but the newspapers in the adjacent rack ripe with scandal about a minister's wife in the capital and an alleged mistress in Pakistan are far racier. At nearby T3, copies of Bina Ramani's memoirs aren't in stock but the newspapers are now speculating over the mysterious death of the minister's wife, with a tiny mention of Ms Ramani's absence from the Jaipur Literature Festival. In the world of dubious celebrity, nothing changes much, only allowing for new names to replace jaded ones, fresher tittle-tattle edging out older, shop-soiled scandals.
There was a time when Ms Ramani was at the vortex of staid Delhi, her jaunty hibiscus-in-the-hair pictures a symbol of India's emerging Page 3. She ruled that space with a flair born of instinct. As a woman streetwise and ahead of her times, her private story added a tinge of romantic pathos to her public persona. Editors didn't have to go far looking for upper middle-class lifestyle stories - Bina Ramani's life had all the melodrama of an Ekta Kapoor soap. Yet, it wasn't a life of singular uniqueness. Scores of women in the eighties found themselves renouncing lives of privilege to escape violent husbands and go searching for their children "kidnapped" by these spouses - in my office alone, we had similar examples, with the husbands turning up often to taunt employers and create scenes, making it difficult for these colleagues to maintain any semblance of dignity. What Ms Ramani probably little realised was that these abused women looked up to her as a role model; in some sense, she liberated them.
Ms Ramani's book, therefore, could have come at any point in her life, but the catalyst was perhaps the film No One Killed Jessica in which Ms Ramani - in whose restaurant the model Jessica Lal was murdered in cold blood - is depicted as a whimpering socialite. Ms Ramani, as her friends will attest, is anything but weak. While she paints the picture of a talented but lonely childhood in the conservative Lalvani household in which she grew up in Bombay and London, the woman who made Delhi her home was a strong-willed one who not only took on the principal of the Lawrence School, Sanawar, where her husband, Andy Ramani, had admitted their two girls with strict instructions that she not be allowed contact, she also livened up the moribund capital with foresight and pizzazz.
Interviewing her those days, one would see the façade crumble as she recalled the violence and indignity to which she had been subjected. Because she had been born to privilege - Binatone was named for her by her adoring brothers - Ms Ramani, perhaps unfairly, drew snide asides. She was a tough negotiator with the women who came from Gujarat and Rajasthan to sell her old sarees that she turned into high-fashion garments, but she did bring a sense of glamour to Delhi. Hundreds of housewife designers followed her example and created a cottage industry out of little. The Qutab Colonnade and Hauz Khas Village, her discoveries, remain among the more fashionable addresses for fashionistas and young trendies. Alas, when celebrity morphs into notoriety, people turn cruelly judgmental.
Ms Ramani's book, unfortunately, does her feistiness little credit. Her early life and adventures could have been easily pared. Much of the information around her married life in New York appears anecdotal, good for raconteuring among friends but hardly riveting reading. My takeaways from the book are two incidents: her affair with the filmstar Shammi Kapoor that should have but did not culminate in matrimony, thanks to Raj Kapoor's disapproval of his brother's cavalier lifestyle; and her account of what happened the night Jessica Lal was shot in her Tamarind Court and its aftermath. The murder witnessed the tabloidisation of the press as a vicarious public followed the downfall of the high-living "socialite", ignoring the work she had put into making a career. Aspects of her life that it had celebrated earlier were now pilloried, instead of focusing on the murder and the hostile witnesses. It was the same press that would take up the call for justice, but much of it was at Ms Ramani's expense, who, for all that she might be blamed for the illegality of her business venture in bureaucratic Delhi, was more sinned against than sinning. Not once did she change her statements; nor once did she buckle despite the political pressure brought to bear on her, the humiliations heaped on her family, or her incarceration in jail.
Ms Ramani's book is a brave attempt to set the record straight but is too defensive - the sordid Chandraswami saga is literally brushed away - and comes too late. As the day's newspapers, loaded with spicier accounts of celebrity lives, turn yesterday's stories rancid, the robust Ms Ramani, who held Delhi in thrall but is missing from the pages of her own book, fails to wield her considerable charms on this, her own elected constituency.
