Making a Clean Breast of Growing up with the Forbidden Fruit

Khalid Mohamed asks, doesn’t forbidden fruit only make a heart grow fonder?

Once porn a time, it was a guilty pleasure. A harried portal editor and I exchange notes about our first encounter with the oldest sport in the world.

Instantaneously, my thought bubble wants to ooh and aah: Come on, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, D H Lawrence and countless literary giants in the lord alone knows from how many continents, gave a rise to readers across generations. Instead, I stick to basic instincts.

Do you know Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, directed by Stanley Kubrick, was banned by the Indian censors, I wish to add. Naaah, all this sounds too highbrow. So I desist. Shut up, the subject on the bare table is honest-to-goodness porn which is now, tauba tauba, taboo for the virile as well as the erectile dysfunctional.

Been There, Done That

The editor husks that his maiden brush with porn was at Howrah, raggedy paperbacks hawked under the bridge, strewn with purple prose , wrapped in chrome yellow cello-paper. My maiden, I brag, was a video cassette of Deep Throat featuring the delectably nicknamed Linda Lovelace. I’m about to elaborate on the lost art of fellatio (or so, the lore went), the Howrah pornwalla has switched off, not in the mood to be upstaged.

To each his or her own, by which I mean that everyone of us I’m convinced slides through a phase of growing up, discovering triple entendres even in classic ditties a la the birds do it, the bees, come let’s (pause) fall in  love. Before Deep Throat happened, of course, there were the TCs (travelling companions..pause…on overnight train journeys) printed with typos galore by one Olympia press. These were spiced in translations, with ethnic chutneys, in practically every Indian language. TCs were begged-borrowed from school bozos, more advanced in sexual esoterica.

And there were smuggled-in copies of Playboy and Penthouse. The father of a school buddy would send us out to fetch the mega-buxom bunnies from the circulating library. “Oye, your dad’s soooo dirty.” I’d huff, but was envious. The son had no objections, “Don’t be such a prude, ninny,” he’d shut my trap. “Doesn’t your mum mind?” I’d screech. “Wait, I’ll go and ask her,” the son of the progressive pitaji cackled. No, no, let it be.

‘Birds and Bees’ Curiosity

Maybe I’d understand this beat-the-heat syndrome someday. Like many ninnies I was confused already about why and how babies popped into the world. Believe it or burp, I know many sex ignoramuses who thought babies were born when two bicycles fell on top of each other, shukriyas to Yash Chopra’s Dhool ka Phool. Two bicycles crashed, and hey presto, Mala Sinha became an unwed mom. Mr Chopra was to edify me, eons later, that it was a symbolic conception. And it clicked. Come to think of it, now in the absence of ‘live’ models, there can be porn clips about cycles mating in slow-motion. A Cannes Palme d’Or winner for India, finally.

As it turned out Bollywood became my breeding ground, paved with sex-it-up stories ranging from the tame to the wild-‘n’-wanton. Take my friend Ram Gopal Varma, for instance, who has tweeted that the ban is ever so Talibanesque. Once, I dared him to loan me a stack of his porn DVDs. He did, but they were so pixilated that I couldn’t tell the difference between an arm and (censored!). He swore the CDs ran smoothly on his player. Player huh? Then there’s the story of an estranged Bollywife who told me about her husband who was addicted to porn in the wee hours. Normal, normal, I assured her. “Yeah like hell,” she spat. “He wears women’s lingerie while watching porn.” Whatttt? Truth is stranger than pulp friction.

A superstar suddenly looked me straight in the eye, in Paris, past the midnight hour. “You want to come with me…there?” he quizzed. “Where? A strip show?”. Looking at me as if was in a crib, he retorted, “No, somewhere better.” Never figured out the whereabouts.

‘Ban’ana Republic

On the other hand (ewwww), a trip to a children’s film festival in Corbeille Essones, a smalltown a quick  zip away (ewww…why does every word sound loaded, now?) from the Charles de Gaulle airport, was more graphic. In the august company of Gulzar saab, Amol Palekar and his then wife, Chitra, we set out to check out the delights of Moulin Rouge. A stark naked woman with a whip squatted tantalisingly in a shopping window. Gulzar and Amol saabs blushed, I kept a poker face, but Chitra whooped, “She’s so hot! Aren’t you guys turned on?” Moral of the story: males can be pretty non-commital about the..er..naked flesh.

So yeah, Bollywoodwallas or otherwise can be squeamish. Journalists too, as I deduced in Hamburg. On a junket through Germany, a quartet of us ventured into a triple xxx cinema. With the tickets we were handed mini apple liquer bottles. One journo gasped, “They’ve given us massage oils!” On returning to the hotel, the shaken and stirred journo flushed the bottles down the toilet. He didn’t want the housekeeping maid to think we were sex fiends.

That quaint era of triple xxx’es, tacky video cassettes and DVDs evaporated with internet websites. At the click of a mouse, an entire new world of categories – Asian, Oriental, mature, amateur, American, European, bondage and unmentionbles galore – opened up like Alibaba’s cave. Have the appropriately named LAPtop, will taste the forbidden fruit. No one need be hungry or lonely any more.

And now comes the ban. I dread to log in. Can’t deal with a blank page…even that might look erotic, allowing the imagination to stuff the space. That’s just not done for us in Kama Sutra land. Sorry, entry strictly prohibited.

(The writer is a film critic, filmmaker, theatre director and weekend painter)