Which teenage girl among us hasn’t loved and longed for Shah Rukh Khan?
I certainly wasn’t immune. Though I never subscribed fully to Bollywoodmania, I too had my share of longing for that floppy head of hair, disarming smile, and bratty charisma moulded into so many saviour-minstrel archetypes in blockbuster films.
Ahh, but then.
Then I saw Malaika Arora undulate on a train snaking through the mountain ranges of Tamil Nadu, and that. was. it.
Shah Rukh Who?
Along with my first sightings of Xena: Warrior Princess, Malaika became part of the incipient stirrings of — not my queerness, which began when I was born — but my awareness of it. I didn’t have the language to describe my desires, my identity as parallel to them, but I knew the things I felt. And knew they were dangerous.
When Arora, Khan and the troupe of dancers filmed the “Chaiyya Chaiyya” video in the late nineties (young Queervanee would have been on the cusp of teenagedom, a precocious and punchy 12-year-old), they didn’t use special effects. No green screen, no filling it in in post, nothing. That’s really Arora, dancing her heart out on top of a train, hurtling through tunnels and back out into bright South Indian sunshine.
What you don’t see is the rope around her waist. The line of blood it left on her belly.
Arora sounds almost sanguine about this in interviews — she was a fresh talent, ‘discovered’ through Dil Se. Starstruck by Khan, she sounds like she was happy just to be in the room, even if — in my 12-year-old heart — the room revolved around her.
Maybe I’m sentimental. But I can’t look at “Chaiyya Chaiyya” without seeing a bloodline through her ghaghra. And I can’t think of that scene without feeling the high cost of beauty: what we ask of women to be desirable, on a train top or lying across its tracks. Was I part of that, having desired her? Am I part of it, even now?
What do we see of our own desire? I don’t mean the regard we have for others. I mean what we see as desirable about ourselves, facing a mirror. Do this with me, now.
Find a mirror. Place yourself before it, and ask:
What have I done, with the rope tied around my waist? How can I begin to unknot it?
When you have an answer, write it down. Begin with one word, then write another.
I’ve written: only be kind, Shivanee. As tender in your pain with yourself as you are to others.
Tell me, if you would, of what hurts on your body. And how you manage, despite all of that ache, to undulate in the sunlight. How you leap, and soar, and dance.
I’ll be writing more about Malaika Arora, the dance scene on the train, and Xena: Warrior Princess in Unkillable.
I will never look at "Chaiyya Chaiyya" the same way again.
The cost of desire can often be our coporeal selves.
Fyah again!!!