October 19, 1998
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BOOKS Honest De's Work Shobha says it from the heart -- but says very little. By Mallika Sarabhai SELECTIVE MEMORY: STORIES FROM MY
LIFE
"After a while perhaps, but you see, I'm under no illusion about the great literary quality of my book. You know people are essentially hypocrites. They love to lecture about morality, but they love to read about immorality. An attractive young woman can write a story about a heroine whose clothes keep coming off and describe the resultant consequences in detail. People are shocked but people love to be shocked. If you will notice the best sellers and analyse them carefully, you'll find most of the sex books written by attractive women whose photographs look very seductive on the dust jackets are the stories that sell in the big figures. Women love to read about sex from the viewpoint of a woman. And men like to look at the dish pictured on the cover and wonder just how a nice girl like her knows so much about the things described in the book. It makes for speculation ... and sales." An extract from an interview with Shobha De? Nope. It's from a Perry Mason novel circa 1961. And by De's own admission in Selective Memory, bang on. Discreet. Open. Honest. Vulnerable but far removed. These are some of the words that floated through my mind as I read De's partial autobiography. Here was someone putting some of her life in the public domain and doing it honestly, sometimes movingly. And yet something eluded me. Is there perhaps not enough of the slip showing? The book is very long. A good quarter of it is De talking of her Stardust days and the peccadilloes of film stars and their hangers-on. This might be the section that most people want to read but it left me saying, "Yes, but what about you?" There are witty descriptions of De's meetings with other worthies, the most interesting being her encounters with Rukshana Ahmed and Haji Mastan. The chronology of her personal life, or the lack of it, is somewhat confusing. Her being Mrs Kilachand just sort of slips in and one is left wondering when that could have happened. Another passing reference to her babies makes one realise the marriage has progressed. And then she is Mrs De. It is only towards the end of the book that the reader gets a clearer picture of the two marriages. De is at her best when she speaks of her family. The account of her mother's death and her own guilt about it made me want to reach out and squeeze her hand. And her absolute love for her six children (two hers from her first marriage, two his from his first marriage, and two theirs) is heartwarming. De has mellowed. Many things that used to make her react harshly or vituperatively no longer seem to matter as much. Nor does she pretend she doesn't like the money, the adulation, the celebrity lifestyle that she works so hard to achieve and maintain. And she is comfortable in her skin. Beautiful, talented and famous, should it matter to her that to the world of her readers she is one of the society women of her books, as far removed from ordinary mortals as Brooke in The Bold and the Beautiful? Probably not.
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"And of course you'll be writing other
books."
