Naak naak, who's there?

[So, Kindle magazine asked me to do a piece for their cover spread about women “reclaiming” their bodies, and I obliged with this series of vignettes about the Nose. (The essays in the issue are about various body parts.) Still a bit unsure about what I was trying to do exactly, and it reads like a mix of personal anecdote and po-faced social commentary from the “look-at-me-I’m-such-a-sensitive-male” catalogue. But hopefully it isn’t a complete... stinker.

Post title courtesy that adroit punster, Baradwaj Rangan]

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My favourite photograph of my wife Abhilasha is, of all things, an X-Ray - a profile of her face that shows the outline of the nose and the jaw clearly enough, but with one tiny, jarringly non-organic substance visible in the nasal region. You feel like you're looking at an embedded metallic chip from a dystopian story about people being monitored by a totalitarian government.
 

Illustration: SOUMIK LAHIRI

Learn the context though, and it becomes funnier. Two years ago Abhilasha had a nose encounter of the weird kind. She had been wearing one of those small nose-rings that looks very compact on the outside but which comes with all sorts of complicated paraphernalia that lies just out of sight: a tiny cap screw, a bolt, and for all I know a warehouse supply of ball bearings and rotating-gear wheels too. Anyway, over time the little screw somehow got embedded in the wall of the nose, with the skin closing over it – and she discovered this only when she managed to remove most of the ring and realised something was still lodged inside, where only a surgeon’s delicate tools could reach.

Hence the X-Ray. Hence a quick appointment with the local clinic, where all of us had trouble keeping a straight face. (Surgeries involving a family member are not normally things to be laughed at, but.) Hence the giggling doctor – and I tell you, a big burly Sikh surgeon teehee-ing like Tinkerbell as he exits an operating theatre is a rare sight. Eventually Abhilasha came out looking sheepish, a small bandage-gauze awkwardly attached to half her proboscis. “Aaj tumne hamaari naak kaat ke rakh di,” I told her with the sternest expression I could muster.

It seemed the obvious thing to say. After all, we are the smugly liberal ones, right? We have grown up hearing – and superciliously shaking our heads at – those melodramatic pronouncements in Hindi movies. We feel we can use them in humour, even though we know they so often assume much darker expression in the real world: as condemnations, to suppress rights and freedoms; that they can even be a matter of life or death. A few months earlier, we had read the story about Bibi Aisha, the Afghan woman whose nose was cut off by her husband and in-laws when she tried to escape them after years of abuse. Aisha did eventually gain a measure of freedom – and became a poster-child for commentary on sexual oppression when she was featured on the cover of Time magazine – but one can safely assume that thousands of other women aren’t as lucky.

However, this attempt to construct otherness – to not acknowledge the large spectrum that links our own presumably enlightened lives with the uncivilised lives of "those" people – is self-deceptive. Years earlier, Abhilasha herself had been on the receiving end of a more serious “naak” denouncement. It was during one of her first stints in journalism. An unexpected “graveyard shift” happened to arise during a week when her parents were out of town and she was staying at her maasi’s house. Destined to be stuck in office past midnight and reluctant to disturb a household that had old people living in it, she decided to stay over at a friend’s who lived nearby – after having informed her aunt, of course. It was the practical thing to do in the circumstances. But the next day, when her mother returned, hell broke loose: there was screaming, there were wails and imprecations. What were you thinking? What will they think of us? What kind of a job is this? And that damning sentence: “Naak kaat di tumne hamaari.”

Two things worth noting here: one, that her parents seemed less concerned about what she had really been up to the previous night, and more concerned about what their relatives would think; deeply upset that the situation had been such that others knew. And two: Abhilasha’s mother had once been the principal of a small school and had in her younger days written short stories that might be described as feminist laments for the ways in which women are made to live in the shadows of men. Her apparent volte-face when it came to her own grown-up daughter seems like a classic case of a victim of patriarchy becoming absorbed into the system.

Here was an urban family that hadn’t thought twice about giving their daughter the same level of education as their son, and about encouraging her professional ambitions. But that didn’t erase the Lakshmana-rekha: it was untenable to stay out this late, to fail to be the Good Girl treading a straight path from office to home.

*****

The other “lakshmana-rekha” in the Ramayana – the one that doesn’t get described as such – is the clean slash Rama’s younger brother made across Surpanakha’s face with his sword, severing her nose and setting a chain of events in motion. It’s easy to see why this ambiguous episode has lent itself to so many literary retellings and alternate psychological explanations. In a short story titled "Surpanakha", for instance, the novelist and poet Amit Chaudhuri casts Rama and Lakshmana as posturing bullies, unable to deal with the idea of a woman as a sexually autonomous being. “Teach her a lesson for being so forward,” Rama tells his brother chillingly when Surpanakha propositions him; the words echo “punishments” meted out by patriarchal societies to women who dare express sexual desire.

Lakshman came back; there was some blood on the blade. “I cut her nose off,” he said. “It,” he gestured toward the knife, “went through her nostril as if it were silk. She immediately changed back from being a paradigm of beauty into the horrible creature she really is. She’s not worth describing,” he said as he wiped his blade.

“Horrible creature...not worth describing.”

To see that Time photo of Bibi Aisha is to be reminded of why the nose is so key to our perceptions of human beauty as well as personal dignity. Try looking at the photo with your finger awkwardly blocking out the missing organ, and you get a hint of inner radiance and poise; you see the forthright, proud gaze of someone who survived an ordeal. And yet, without the nose, the illusion becomes difficult to sustain – the organ is, to put it simply, central. With a gaping hole right in the middle of the face, the resemblance to a death-head is inescapable, and we are uncomfortably reminded of what we are beneath our hubristic ideas of our own beauty.

The nose is also, of course, the breathing apparatus – directly associated with the most fundamental activity of human existence. And in the “naak kat gayi” context, it can be an uncomfortable reminder of what existence is for so many women around the world. It means being the repository of a family’s or society’s “honour”, someone whose “transgressions” – real or imagined – can shame everyone around her. It means being custodian and possession, goddess and slave, at once. It means you have no identity as an individual, only as a symbol or as an object. As Nivedita Menon points out in her fine new book Seeing Like a Feminist, the obsession with a woman’s “honour” lies at the heart of the belief that rape is “a fate worse than death”; that once a woman has been “shamed” thus, she is a blot that society must purge itself of. (Or even marry off to the rapist so that a non-consensual sexual act is retrospectively legitimised.)

Something else Menon’s book discusses at length is gender performance: how women have internalised aspects of behaviour expected of them – keeping their eyes averted, focussing inward, occupying the least possible space in public places. Interestingly, an inversion on the Pinocchio story – Pinocchio’s Sister: A Feminist Fable, written by Abraham Gothberg – features a girl whose nose grows longer when she tells the truth, a metaphor perhaps for how women are often forced into living up to an ideal rather than being true to themselves.

*****

I offered a morbid view of the nose-ring at the start of this piece, which is perhaps unfair. Nose-rings can of course serve graceful decorative purposes, enhancing a woman’s aesthetic appeal (and why not a man’s too?) and making life more colourful and attractive generally. But beauty and ugliness can go hand in hand, in much the same way that many festive rituals can be celebratory fun while also being subliminal ways of maintaining a regressive tradition. I have friends – women among them – who cluck their tongues exasperatedly when I say that the large nose-ring worn by Indian brides in certain traditions reminds me of the rope threaded through a buffalo’s nostrils, used by its master to lead it about. And apparently I’m being a wet blanket and a grouch when I spell out my feelings about customs like the “nath atarna” – the removal of the nose-ring – which is often a euphemism for the end of a woman’s virginity. Or the sight – so touching to many eyes – of an adult woman sitting on her father’s lap during a wedding ceremony (the nose-ring prominent on her face), an object waiting to be transferred from one man to the other.

Of course, in many such cases, the custom is “harmless fun”, containing a sense of irony, with young people joking about the implications of what they are doing even while they are doing it. But it is useful to be aware of how firmly embedded certain ideas are in our social framework; how they become part of our everyday lives and assumptions, and are propagated by even the most innocent-seeming aspects of our popular culture. Consider the suhaag-raat scene in Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie, with Shashi Kapoor removing Raakhee’s ornaments one by one as she sings in memory of a lost love. On the face of it, this is a tender scene from one of our most beloved romantic movies, and the film is trying hard to present Kapoor’s Vijay as a caring, sensitive man. (It’s a terrible performance, incidentally – the actor has absolutely no clue how to play this scene, and can one blame him?) But think about what is really going on here and it becomes a little icky: a woman, who is in love with another man, is about to be bedded by a husband whom she barely knows (and in the patriarchy, deflowering is of course code for “possessing” – she is now his). The last ornament he removes is the nose-ring, as the song ends and the scene fades to black; it is as obvious a symbol as all those Hindi-movie shots of bees buzzing around flowers whenever two lovers draw near each other.

Metaphors for virginity aside, the author-mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has noted the many ways in which a woman wearing a nose-ring may be perceived. “The scientist said it has no scientific basis. A rationalist mocked her for mutilating her body in the name of beauty. Another rationalist pointed out that it was an ancient acupuncture technique. A feminist said she was sporting the symbol of patriarchy. A secularist said that made her a Hindu.” And so on. At the end comes the kicker: “Everybody saw the nose-ring. No one saw her.”

In a better world we would be able to see the whole person, as opposed to a cluster of disjointed parts. Perhaps it will happen one day.

Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal: notes and a nose

Didn’t think much of Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal; in fact I can’t remember the last time I found it so hard to sit through a film (no wait, that would be this one, which was even harder). However, the film was partly redeemed by the best scene involving a human nose since Woody Allen's Sleeper.

Notes

– John Abraham’s character Sunny Bhasin, a cocky young football star, has one of the most persuasive lines in the film, though it’s a line the film itself doesn’t pay adequate attention to. “I play football, I don’t perform in a circus,” he snaps when asked to join a Southall club comprising various potbellied men who kick a ball around to prove that their sense of community, their “Hindustaniyat”, is intact despite their having left Hindustan years ago. (Now this sense of community is under threat because moneyed people want to build an entertainment park or something such on their beloved club ground. To deflect these plans, they must rapidly get their act together, hire a washed-up former player as a coach and rise up the ranks of the British football league; hence the film.)

But as it turns out, Sunny's derisive “circus” is an apt description of this motley band of buffoons (who collectively go “YAYYY!” when they discover money sent by an anonymous benefactor and realise that there is one other person who believes in them), and the problem is that it remains an apt description despite their climb towards glory in the second half of the movie. Even the soppiest underdog-has-his-day film must reach for credibility at some point, but the transformation of these dawdlers to a league-topping side is never remotely believable.

At the heart of this story are some very simple-minded conceits: that the human spirit (in this case, the Hindustani spirit) can substitute for other deficiencies like basic incompetence (and potbellies) even in a sport as physically demanding as football; that sheer will to win (as if other teams aren’t equally determined) can override all the other factors that go into a sporting victory; that only the team we’re meant to be supporting responds to the thunderous pep talks delivered by its coach (inevitably a man with demons in his closet, trying to redeem himself) while the opposition is content to play supporting role on the big stage.

Now, to an extent, all inspirational sports movies have to engage with such simplifications. Even Chak De India, a much superior film to Goal, laboured at times to convince us that its team of underprivileged, faction-ridden Indian girls could win a world championship against the war-hardened, ruthlessly efficient Australians. But where Chak De succeeded was in the attention it paid to the staging of its sports sequences and in the behind-the-scenes training given to its actors, so that they at least looked like competent hockey players, and what we saw up there on the screen looked like a professional hockey match (it helped also that the climactic decider in that film was a tie-break, which is more about skill and strategy than brute force). In Goal, on the other hand, we never get a sense of the nuances of football, of strategies or manouevres – in fact, with some of the players in the Southall club, we never get the sense that they can do anything other than trot up to a ball and kick it at some point within the 0 to 180-degree arc in front of them. The result is akin to a slapstick National Lampoon feature (I don’t remember now whether there was a movie called National Lampoon’s Football Academy, though on this evidence there should have been) rather than to a rousing Remember the Titans-type film (which is what Goal was trying to be).

– It could still have been a very funny movie (unintentionally, that is) if it weren’t so loud, shrill and prolonged, and so reprehensibly manipulative in its depiction of racism. There’s the Aston Villa skinhead, a stand-in for the average Brit player who doesn’t want a south Asian on his team: he tells star player Sunny, “Go home, Paki.” (I’m still undecided whether Sunny gets offended by this because it’s a pejorative in general or because he doesn’t care to be mistaken for a Pakistani). There’s the Evil White Woman who wants to take over the Southall ground (personally, I thought she might put it to better use than we see the footballers doing) and who will eventually be forced to extend the lease, much the same way the British in Lagaan are forced to defer taxes for three years. The perpetually scheming, contemptuous look on this woman’s face and her frequent exclamations of “Shit!” when her diabolical plans are foiled are so overdone, it would be enough to make Lagaan’s Captain Russell break out into a hearty rendition of “Jana Gana Mana”, like the gora lad in Loins of Punjab Presents.

– When the whites do unsporting things on the field (e.g. faking a tumble to earn a penalty), they exchange meaningful looks, leer and perform high-fives – our cue to feel sorry for our persecuted desi heroes. Essentially, we’re in this strange zone where an Indian team is supposed to be competing on equal footing with tough foreigners, but at the same time we’re expected to shake our heads, cluck our tongues and feel wronged every time someone from the opposition shows a bit of the tough-guy spirit. It’s like the shameless, play-to-the-gallery scene in Lagaan where the little boy sent in as a runner for one of the players is caught backing up too far by the Brit bowler, who then runs him out: tears streaming down the kid’s face, expressions of disgust and betrayal on the faces of the villagers, and suddenly we aren’t playing a hard sport anymore, we’re just nurturing our victim mentality.

– But oh, just to balance things out, there’s a superfluous beach scene featuring skimpily dressed white women, thrown in to show us that goras can be put to some good use as well.

– I laughed out loud at the scene where Shaan (Arshad Warsi) says that Sunny’s playing for a British league team amounts to spitting in the plate that he’s eaten from (“jis thali se khaata hai, usi mein thookta hai”) – that’s a rich analogy coming from an Indian who voluntarily migrated to a foreign country and who has, by most accounts, had a good life there; he might want to rethink what the “thali” is in this case. I’m not getting into Tebbit Test territory here, but given the circumstances of these people’s lives, this “thali mein thook” business reeks of self-righteousness. As does Shaan’s remark, made in a different context, that “the British had all the guns and cannons, and yet we got them out of our country without even lifting a hand”. (Right, right, and then you missed them so much that you migrated to their country a couple of decades later.)

The nose

– Thankfully, Goal does manage to be funny (unintentionally, of course) in parts, notably in an ending that extracts every possible drop of dramatic tension from the fate of – hold your breath – John Abraham’s nose. That’s right: while a match is on, a doctor checks an X-Ray and discovers that Sunny has a hairline fracture in his proboscis! The opposition team finds out and decides to cash in! (Because they’re evil racist goras!) They elbow him in the nose – once, twice! (They never get penalised, the referee is a racist gora too!) The nose gets the worst of the climactic goal too, calamity looms and there is a heart-stopping moment where we don’t know whether the felled Sunny will open his eyes again (except that he’s John Abraham, and Bipasha Basu is waiting in the wings, and this is a feel-good film, so we really do know, don’t we?).

If Goal had known it was a comedy at heart, it might have had the good sense to end with a shot of Sunny’s long-suffering nose ascending to heaven while the ghosts of football heroes past stand about in the clouds tossing marigolds at it and chanting "We dig John's nose". But no, it chooses instead to give this lame-brained subplot all the tragic resonance of Amitabh blowing himself up along with the bridge at the end of Sholay. Will the nose live to sniff another day? Of course it will, and if this film does well with NRI communities all over the world (who see in it their own lifetime struggles to preserve “Hindustaniyat”), who nose, there’ll probably be a sequel too.

P.S. John Abraham is probably the best thing about the film: the role suits him and he does the brattish grin-and-squint thing better than most other actors. (Bipasha is hardly there: the highlight of her role is a scene where she looks deep into his eyes and seductively whispers "Asshole" - much the same thing the film is doing to its audience all along.)