35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

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EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
be able to understand it fully, but the problems posed to any average
reader are no greater than, say, the Puerto Rican slang of a novel like
Edwin Torres’ Carlito’s Way.
David Davidar had been circumspect about Shobha Dé’s rocketship
rise to superstardom during the summer of 1992, but that was
probably because he had A Suitable Boy up his sleeve and took
Vikram Seth more seriously than Ms. Dé – because Seth had made
it in the West. Rahul Singh was more forthright: Dé was a victim of
her past. He arranged a meeting with the ‘third most famous woman
in India’ – the competition was Mother Teresa and Sonia Gandhi: an
Albanian nun and an Italian widow.
The thing about Shobha Dé, I realised, sprawled on her sofa in a
room festooned with Indian artifacts and art, classical and modern,
whose picture window overlooked the steaming grey Arabian Sea,
the real thing about her was her beauty. Forty-five years old, with
six children, she looked about twenty-five and acted like a wise
teenager. Renaissance painters would have murdered each other to
get her for a model.
She agreed with Rahul. Her years as ‘the wicked bitch from the
East,’ casting a cold eye on life in Bollywood, had made her few
friends. But even she was surprised by the extremity of outrage her
novels elicited, and Time’s ‘Indian Jackie Collins’ label merely
irritated her. She was now the ‘Princess of Porn’ or the ‘Sultana of
Smut’ to Indian hacks. It bothered her. Davidar’s campaign had
been a two-edged sword: the books sold in unprecedented numbers,
but for the wrong reasons.
When I suggested she was a moralist and satirist at heart she
seemed pleased in a diffident way. Like Scott Fitzgerald, she was in
the world she wrote about but not of it. I could see quite clearly
where her heroines came from: Ms. Dé was as uncontrived, as
complex yet straightforward, as innocent and as experienced, as they
were. And as confused about the raving new world built on the back
of an introspective and ancient one as any of her peers were – if they
admitted it. The old India had poverty, not wealth, as its underlying
reality, and austerity, not decadence, among its chief traditional values.
In these new realities Shobha Dé finds her subject matter, writing
fast and intuitively because her grasp of the material and her sense