My wife’s friend Sarla never really needed to join a catty – er, kitty – party, because she was a one-woman act who could out-gossip, out-drink and out-dress everyone, and still do a headstand to round it off, a given at our neighbourhood parties after everyone was a few drinks down. It was a feat she performed till she turned 50, but it was her ability to spill secrets that turned her into a terrible ingénue. “You do know your son-in-law eats beef,” she would tell a horrified vegetarian octogenarian, or “I’ve heard your daughter is secretly seeing the boy across the landing?” to conservative parents, loudly wonder whether random friends were “gay” or their wives having “scenes” behind their backs — following each up with “I hope you don’t mind, I thought everyone knew.”
What a group of kitty party women out to complain about mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law and servants could not manage to achieve over an extended lunch, Sarla managed at the snap of a finger, all rumours grist to her mill — but even though a professional slanderer with lipstick to match, she would have found herself a fish out of water in the oomphed-up avatar of the kitty club.
The kitty party has morphed into a women achievers’ club. Gaggles of women still get together to eat, drink and tittle-tattle, but they disguise the outings as purposeful. Clubs have names, and “presidents” bring-along secretaries to fill up forms and record their impressions about the quality of the wasabi (“as nasty as my sister-in-law” — I swear), the nature of the meeting (“dull, like my husband”), the venue (“girls, isn’t there any new place in town?”), and where the next gig will be.
The membership is the mid-twenties (which is the new mid-forties), their bee-stung lips collagened for pecking at each other’s botoxed cheeks that can no longer curve into a smile. Their dresses are shorter than their heels, they meet mid-week because weekends are for families, they’re “entrepreneurs, executives or ladies of leisure” as someone explained to me, which is jargon for retired models whose husbands afford them the clouds of perfume and flavoured lipstick on which they waft.
They’re accompanied by personal stylists because the club has a society photographer for them to strike red-carpet poses as they walk in (really — no kidding!), a PR executive to ensure page-three coverage, and, of course, because this is the new-age, tarted-up kitty party, they have to have an “agenda” for the meeting: it’s “make-up in five minutes instant” this week, “selecting diamonds” the next, and was “cooking for dummies and children” the week before.
Spas are the new coffee shops where they sip unmentionable vegetable juices, have facials and chocolate wraps (that’s a massage, not something to eat, dummy), sweat out the toxins from their skin and the venom from their tongues as they get down to doing what they’ve always done best, though like most things, better lifestyles have resulted in twists to their saas-bahu sagas. “Imagine,” I heard one gripe, “my husband’s sending his mother to the Amazon for her seventieth, but we’re only getting another boring break in Paris.” “Just hope the alligators get her,” cackled her friend. “Oh, they won’t,” chorused another, “her hide’s thicker than any ‘gator.” “Imagine what a lovely bag she’d make,” another piped in. “The bag hag,” they all laughed cruelly. Sarla? She was just a novice who’d never have managed even the initiation rites of the sexed-up kitty club.
