When Socialite Evenings sas-hayed into the world, the brisk sales of India's first English language bestseller were fuelled by the hope that the cast mirrored people in real life. Just as Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy sparked off parlour games in Calcutta as people matched fictional character to real-life counterpart, Socialite Evenings had Bombay playing endless rounds of `You Know Who That Is, Don't You?'
Selective Memory has sparked off the same reaction in a lot of circles -- media, the film and modelling world, and in that rarefied strata occupied by the rich and famous. Like a lot of autobiographies that come out in the West, and unlike most autobiographies that come out here, De is an expert at the gentle art of celebrity pugilism. She names names in some cases -- Sunil Gavaskar, Parveen Babi, Kiran Bedi, Zeenat Aman, Pico Iyer, Vikram Seth, Kabir Bedi and Nari Hira among others -- and drops a light, and usefully transparent, veil over the rest.
The anecdotes are everything that you might have wanted. They drip with the kind of juice that was scattered so liberally across her books, they have a zinger in the tail just like those old Stardust columns, and they're told with the kind of grace that has always been the author's personal prerogative. There's the classic story of Vikram Seth looking on in paralysed horror as De's dog (since every dog has his De, why shouldn't the reverse be true?) spits up on his previously immaculate pants; there's a posturing Kishori Amonkar breathing fumes of righteous rage at De; there are both Shatrughan Sinha and Kabir Bedi proving that most of their muscles were to be found between their ears; and that's just for starters.
But luscious as the anecdotes are, it would be a mistake to read this book just for their sake. "I have chosen to carve up my life into those segments I have no reservations about revealing and serving up to readers," writes De, and that is true -- up to a certain point. Who's going to miss the candid suhaag raat confessions when there's so much more to read about?
Like De's attitude to being a writer, which should be required reading for all aspirants. She's blunt about the fact that she never planned on being an Author (just as she never apparently planned on being any of the other things she was), and equally blunt about how she dealt with the publicity treadmill once she had written her first book. Or like her stories of modelling and media then and now, which go beyond being entertaining to being instructive as well.
Perhaps the most touching and most candid section is the one on being a parent. De on her kids is nothing like the De-Arundhati (as in her child, not as in Roy) jugalbandi in her columns. She's at her best when she speaks directly of the highs and lows of parenting, the unexpected sense of vulnerability, the strong ties of affection. Not too many have been privileged to see this side to De, and it should come as a fairly pleasant revelation. (Not least to her children, who like Erma Bombeck's offspring, have stoically put up with reflected fame.)
Looking through De's eyes at her life, it's remarkable how little she appears to regret. There are no breastbeatings or lengthy explanations, Elia Kazan style, over decisions made or unmade. Beyond a certain point, the lack of depth does get irritating, though that may be due at least partially to the fact that Penguin had to jettison 200 pages of De on De to bring the book down to manageable size.
This is not a very literary autobiography either -- you wouldn't put it on the same shelf as Proust or Premchand, for instance. It is the next best thing, however: one of the few celebrity bios in India that offers more than a tinsel, heavily glossed over life or gossipy anecdotes. Right at the end of the book, De muses on the schmaltzy Sinatra anthem, My Way: "Thus sang the man disparagingly described by the commentator as a lounge-bar crooner. Yet, it took a lounge-bar crooner to touch the lives of countless people...."
It's a far more perfect analogy for her writing than anything SOAS (which has De's books on their syllabus) has come up with yet. As for Selective Memory, it's a far, far better thing that De has done than she ever did before.
