Namita Gokhales 1984 debut novel ‘Paro is sassy sexy and

Paro is a lust story. Between Paro and Priya. Paro and BR. BR and Priya. And, Paro, Priya and BR. No, it is a love story. There are the tender first sights, the ravenous first kisses, the inevitable fallouts, and the imminent reconciliation. Like planets orbiting the sun – bound and servile – so too a galaxy of lesser mortals revolve around the callous and charismatic Paro. No one really knows where she has come from, but she is destined for greatness – great drama, great notoriety, and great tragedy. Paro is a fever dream and nightmare, and no one who drifts into her forcefield will wake up unscathed.

It takes two to tango

Priya, the narrator, is on a mission. She started as the top boss’s secretary at a home appliance company and with minor cunning and a rightly-timed arranged marriage proposal has climbed up the social ladder in Delhi and Mumbai by buzzing around the right people at the right time. Priya’s husband, Suresh Kaushal, begins as a modest lawyer of terrifying appetite and, through sheer resilience and a kink for humiliation sticks it out with maharajahs, netas, bureaucrats and a temperamental Paro to get what he desires – to be the top choice of rich brats everywhere for when they get in trouble with the law.

Paro and Priya first met under insidious circumstances. Priya was madly in love with BR (and had got into bed with him too), but it is Paro, a socialite of uncertain origins, who bagged him as her husband. While Paro mistakes Priya for her “best friend”, Priya admits to Paro being her “obsession” – a deadly tango fuelled by pure despise and even homoerotic undertones.

The shadow that looms menacingly over the two suffering ladies is that of BR. Paro is aware of his philandering ways and Priya knows that Suresh’s nouveau riche suavity will simply never outshine BR’s refined breeding. While Priya (halfheartedly) plays the role of a dutiful housewife, Paro goes from strength to strength ensnaring princes, ministers and their sons, and even a foreign filmmaker with her killer charm. Priya is a witness to it all – amply jealous and forever frustrated. Everything, especially men, seems to come easily to Paro and Priya, scheming and sly as she is, is eternally overshadowed by her frenemy’s conquests. BR and Paro – the “twin divinities in [her] private mythology – entrap and suffocate her in debilitating humiliation and torment.

‘Paro’ through the years.

Paro, bountiful and beautiful as she is, is catty and cruel in a way that most bountiful and beautiful people are. She shows a real knack for bedroom powerplay, toying with corporate and state politics, and men hover around her like devoted bees. Paro’s excessiveness is vulgar and gluttonous – while she boasted of ethereal beauty in her youth, her middle age is marked by extra flab and a flair for theatrics. And still, through it all, she remains very much the femme fatale who leaves a trail of destruction in her wake.

Priya’s world, although not tended to with much care, is in tatters each time Paro forces herself into it after the latest spate of drama. For Paro, all the world is fair game – from rich, young men dreaming lustily of a communist revolution to Priya’s husband Suresh, who somehow is more loyal to and understanding of her than his own wife. The two women take sips from this explosive cocktail of neglect and attention, each torturing the other with false spectacles of camaraderie and naked displays of competitiveness.

A cruel devotion

In her most tortured, private moments, Priya imagines taking Paro. Paro, not given to being modest, has candidly exposed herself in times of duress and excitement. Priya’s fantasies are coloured by Paro’s bare flesh – the only other person to share this feeling is their joint objet de désir, BR. An almost wet, sticky arrangement that poisons the two women against each other. “A madonna of the garbage heaps”, Priya thinks of Paro, and their entanglement is decidedly unfeminist. And yet, they are united in their agony, each throbbing with such and pain and desire that, under normal circumstances, it would have been the most solid foundation of a lifelong friendship.

Even Priya’s decision to write Paro’s story in her novel is a testament to a most staunch and chaste devotion – desiring the beloved only from afar, lavishing them with ornate words and phrases with no obligations to possess or consume. 40 years later, Paro tickles a radical imagination – is this novel, set in the early decades after independence, really about two women in love?

The queer reading delights and electrifies, and there’s something to be said about the crackling sexual energy of the book – certainly quite brave of a young woman writer to attempt in her debut novel. Paro digs its talons into the reader – it is impossible to take a breather from this racy story and yet, it is Namita Gokhale’s whip-smart, zesty writing that’s the star of the show. She writes with the ruthlessness of a gossip columnist and the intuition of an anthropologist – achieving the perfect balance that makes the reader desire, despise, and pity the rich.

Dear reader (wink wink), I inhaled Paro.

And now I’ve discovered there’s a sequel – Priya! – and my fingers are already itching to get hold of it.