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FRIDAY FUNDAS Matrix of Fantasies What is it single men really do? India Today Senior Editor Ravi Shankar does some loud thinking. This really nice looking woman, with a smile that lit up one corner of the party, had slightly tired eyes. It was the night and the thirties going south. She was alone but she didn't look single. I have always been curious, she said, toying with the rim of her wine glass. Cabernet Sauvignon tilted like the horizon of a rolling ship, threw a star on her face. The other woman giggled and looked at me with a dark, sooty glance. Oh, I forgot to mention there was another woman with her, who was theatre and had the eyes to prove it. She had the neatest mouth I had ever seen in my life, like parts of an orange, and the neatest way I have ever seen a woman smoke a cigarette. She had nice white teeth, and the smoke matched her teeth perfectly. The curious one was in black, with a purple thingummy around her neck and the thespian was in orange. Vasant Vihar was night outside, and the tree which showed itself through the open balcony door looked as if it had the pale leaves of ash. Ritu Beri was trying to look French and haut monde but succeeded in only looking like Ritu Beri. She has a slightly equine neck and is rather wide-hipped, her smile faintly unwashed: and she has the worst dress sense I have ever seen in a designer, except for Rohit Bal who looks positively unhygeinic. The Pakistani ambassador was sipping red wine and looking worried. About what? I asked. What is it that single men do? the woman in black with the purple thingummy around her neck asked me. I mean, what is it that they really DO? I could have raised my eyebrows, and feigned perplexed amusement. Or I could have done an Anne Rice mysterious stranger act, as if I was Lestrade who had taken a fancy to Pandara Road, and had decided to make Delhi his haunting ground. But the fact was that I really had no answers. The whole world is a matrix of interlocking fantasies: reality would be unbearable if you couldn+t give your imagination a Formula One ride about things you can only guess about. Unless you project fantasies, speculations, mysteries into stereotypes which seem socially strange, you cannot bar the tedium of everyday life. The purpose of imagination is to whet curiosity, embellish the monotonous and project wish-fantasies. In fact, it is the beginning where myth is perpetuated as ritual. What is it that single women do? Have orgies with strange men? Play doctor with lesbians? Waltz in the nude to Pavarotti? Masturbate reading Danielle Steel? Ha! What is it that bosses do to secretaries? Use the office table to be on top? Ha ha! What do sailors do on foreign ports? What do air hostesses do when they deplane in America and Europe? Ha! There are more. Many more. Questions, speculations, fantasies I have heard and listened to without offering answers over the past decades. The presupposition that all white women are loose, and are looking for a black or brown intervention. That you get raises only by giving the boss a blow job, or pimping your partner. That small towns are hotbeds of wife-swapping and incest. That Chinese drink jasmine tea to make great lovers. So, what is it that single men do? REALLY DO? Most stay single out of choice. Most were married once, and have no desire to enter the farce again. Most find it comfortable to wear furry slippers and curl up on the sofa with a glassful of Lagavulin, reading Jonathan Kellerman or J.M. Coetze as the case may be, while the dogs are sleeping on the rug. Most keep clean beds, are sexually disciplined, emotionally self-sufficient and use shampoo once every other day. Many go out during weekends, partying till late at night, and do drive back alone, quite satisfied. Some cook for fun, or to please a casual girlfriend who likes Laura Esquieval. Many do feel lonely when they listen to Frank Sinatra or jazz, and I know many married men and women who feel lonely a lot of the time. Many like watching Casablanca on the DVD because they can weep about this unmale thing called loss and not explain. Nothing, I said. (Ravi Shankar
is Senior Editor, INDIA TODAY and author of The Scream of the Dragonflies.
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