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Abbas Sahab was good at every thing he wrote (Though he had his
share of critics who didn’t like his thoughts and ideas on
various issues, his love for Jawaharlal Nehru and his ideas and
his sincere concern for the upliftment of the downtrodden and his
thorough dislike for hypocrites and politicians who said “we
care” during the elections and then said “who cares”
after they found a seat in Parliament, a bungalow in New Delhi and
any number of other facilities which were just some years ago enjoyed
by Rajas and Maharajas. Take one of his stories he told me one evening
as an example.
Lamb-doll? That’s not a bad description of me, Marilyn, she
thought half drowsily. Strange, it never occurred to any one else.
All those cruel words that they stuck on people like department
store labels. They had called her “Baby Doll”. They had
called her sex kitten. They had called her “the body”.
The body, the body. That’s what she was to them just a body!
A body without a soul like a cold stiff corpse on the dissector’s
table in a medical college. Everybody in the world was some body
because everybody was more than a body, was a soul, a personality,
a thinking mind, a feeling heart, everybody was a son, a daughter,
a wife, a husband, a father, a mother. Everybody was some body,
all except her for she was just “the body”. The next moment
she stood nude before the tall full-length mirror. “ Hello
Body”, she greeted the one in the mirror with unspoken sarcasm.
Hello Body, you who are me, you who are not me, you my lifelong
companion, you my bread-giver, you my friend, you my brilliant enemy,
you my sensuous destroyer, you who took me to the pinnacle of success
and fame, you who condemned me to the loneliest hell that my body
has ever condemned me, I greet you, I salute you, I thank you, I
envy you, I love you, I hate you. You have killed me and by God,
I shall kill you. Yes, the body that was the enemy, the one over
there in the glass frame, the one who was her, and not her.
And in that moment of literally naked self-realisation, the reflection
seemed to speak to her out of the mirror. The enemy, that’s
what you call me now? You choose to forget what I have done for
you. Remember your life as a child in the filthy slums you lived
in, the shabby clothes you wore, the half famished state you were
always in. Remember the heart breaks you suffered because of the
neighbourhood boys ignoring you, passing you for the more fleshy
and well-dressed girls. Your poverty was a mill-stone round your
neck. You would have ended as a slatternly house wife of the slums,
prematurely aged with lifeless eyes and a permanent fatigue in your
bones.
Even at the age of fifteen you wanted to be independent, to earn
your own living. But did you have a chance? You had no education,
you had no particular talent, you had nothing to sell, no brains
and no skills.
At best you could have been a waitress in some small restaurant,
your future dependent on the fancy of the Boss and that in turn
dependent to “please” him, to offer him the only thing
you had to offer- the body, that’s me. When people followed
you with their eyes, it was me they were after. But you had your
puritanical scruples even when you were forced to submit, you and
your little girl craving for love and a fairy-tale prince charming.
At the age of sixteen you even lived with him in a dingy hole. But
from the beginning you knew that there was no union of souls, no
conjunction of two hearts. And he believed in all he desired in
you were me. You felt cheated, degraded, hopelessly frustrated.
You even tried to kill yourself. Then you left him. You decided
to sell your body and your body sold like nothing in the market
sold.
You manage to console yourself that you were not selling your body
but only the image of it. You traded it for all the comforts you
could buy. All you had to do was satisfy the vicarious pleasures
of sex-starved men.
My body had the power to be associated with the greatest of writers,
actors and actresses, millionaires and billionaires, parliamentarians
and even the president. It was an hectic clash. It was a dark life
within illuminated with the brightest artificial lights of the world
outside. Marilyn Monroe one of the greatest lights of the world.
The only time she lived a real life, loved her life, when she married
Arthur Miller but it didn’t last for long. She fled in fear
of the light. She had a million dollars in the bank and a bottle
of sleeping pills in her hand. In the morning the world waited for
Marilyn Monroe but there was no Marilyn Monroe. The only difference
was now no one called her “the body”. The police came
in and said : “don’t touch the corpse”.
Ali Peter John
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