“Mysterious Gazillionaire, Barefoot, Horny Cleaning lady.”
That’s the title of the best-selling romance I need to write when I stop laughing.
I was browsing through the magazines hanging from clothespins at my local newsstand when my eyes roved through a stack of book titles and then roved right back and stayed there.
“Reprobate Lord, Runaway Lady.”
“Billionaire M.D.”
“Brooding Billionaire, Impoverished Princess.”
And, besting even that for riches and fantasy, “The Billionaire’s Housekeeper Mistress.”
I scanned the blurbs. They haven’t changed since I got turned on to piles of this pitifully throbbing genre shortly after I started menstruating. The Mills and Boon romances my friends slipped to me were validation that I had arrived into adulthood.
Since my parents never allowed me to date and even talking to boys was direly forbidden, these bodice-rippers were a window to world where there was hope for every girl and the marms eventually fared better than the tarts.
I tore through these books, some time between lunch and starting on my homework. You could go through them fast as through a Cadbury’s chocolate éclair. You started slow, skimmed through, lingered through the erotic parts (which were eagerly shared the next morning at school and tittered over) and, faith in mankind and hope for my own romance some day kindled by the last starlit kiss, settled down to tackle algebra.
In that virginal, pre-Google era, Mills and Boon books gave me the answers no one else could. I wanted to know what a woman kissed and ravaged by tall dark and handsome tycoons felt. Yup, she still gazes into his glacial blue eyes and somehow ends up melting on the silken sheets of the king size bed in his yacht/ranch/chateau. The only difference is that the heroes in my youth were English, Latin or Greek millionaires. Now, the hero is a billionaire and the book titles sound downright smutty. “The Billionaire’s Housekeeper Mistress.” You could imagine a porn film having the same desperate title.
I read loads of these books. They were all the same: wide-eyed virgin collides with highly tanned mysterious and wealthy man. Misunderstandings and sly mistresses thwart the romance. But love (and marriage) win.
Mercifully, I read lots of other books and moved up the literary food chain very quickly. I read lots of non-romantic novels, but a girl must have her romances, just as she should always have chocolate within reach. I found Barbara Cartland books vile: the heroines were infantile, the dialogue asthmatic (“I … love … you... too… she… murmured….”) and then there were the covers, with Dame Barbara with her hideous, mascara-encrusted eyes and her pearl-encrusted digits clawed around a fluffy lapdog.
I tore through Georgette Heyer, Victoria Holt, the Bronte sisters. I read “Gone With the Wind,” a book for which I suffered a stinging slap on the cheek from my mother because she was convinced it had to be dirty. After all, there on the cover was Vivien Leigh, all passed out and boobs pushed up, held by a brooding Clark Gable, with flames raging in the background. I read the book again and again.
My all-time favourite romantic book? “Pride and Prejudice.”A beautiful gem of a book that actually has the rich hero/unassuming virgin theme pulp romances untiringly replicate.
I have yet to find a great Indian love story, the kind that brings a lump to your throat that’s hard to dislodge. I don’t attribute this to the lack of love stories, but to my own ignorance. I ask around and the answers are always Devdas, Laila-Majnu, Heer-Ranjha. Unfulfilled lovers choosing death over separation. Boo hoo.
Devdas doesn’t have the gonads to acknowledge to his childhood sweetheart Paro that he loves her, or to stand up to his zamindar father and walk out on his family’s wealth. We are supposed to feel sorry for Devdas through his entire gutless life, and in the end, there he is, a wandering drunk, coughing up blood because he is dying of tuberculosis. Yet, somehow, he has not just his first love, but the most famous courtesan of his time, Chandramukhi, both pining over him. And this utterly patriarchal male fantasy is fobbed off as a great love story?
I would bet that most women would want to wash their hands off a loser like Devdas instead of wasting their lives on him. I’ll take an honest bodice-ripper any day. I’ll … even … take … Barbara … Cartland.
