What would Nimmo do?
Snigdha Poonam
One of the things to know about
Nimmo, the heroine in Thus, The Tale of
Miss Tapna, is that we have met her before. She is the poor girl orphaned
at a young age and thrust in the unwilling care of Uncle and Aunty whose purpose
in life is to avoid disappointing people. We know her from countless films made
in an earlier, unapologetic era of Hindi cinema, from Seema in 1955 to Chalbaaz
in 1989. So thankful is the heroine for the asylum, that she’ll carry out a command
even before it’s uttered, whether it is getting her cousins ready for school, making
countless cups of tea for Uncle in the morning or placing her entire salary in
the hand of Aunty.
And yet Nimmo is unique. Like the previous
versions of the character, Nimmo too goes from hiding in the background to
taking centre stage, but in her case, it’s she – not a man or dog or resurrected parents – who catalyses
the change of her fortune. What makes her victory more remarkable is that she works
her way to it in a city where things are so upside down – policemen greeting
thieves, cows roaming about as though they own the place – that its very name has
overturned to Tapna.
Tapna is the kind of city where
the faintest hint of agency shown by a woman can cause its power structure to
unravel. It can be a young woman riding a bicycle ‘who knows, she could become
fearless, fall in love, or marry whomever she pleases’. Of course, it’s not
only in Tapna that a young woman getting around on her own is seen as capable
of the worst transgressions. Few things threaten the rigid code of acceptable
behaviour in small towns more than women taking charge of their mobility. The
public dread of girls flying around
on their pretty little scooters – the ‘scooty’ being a tool of liberation like
no other – is common to small towns across the length and breadth of the
country. What’s worse than a girl riding the scooter is a girl covering her
face while riding the scooter. In a
meeting organised between the police and the concerned citizens in Indore a
couple of years ago, parents spoke of the trick their daughters were up to: the
young ladies were wrapping themselves in scarves not to protect their faces
from sun and pollution, as they claimed, but to go around meeting boys without
any fear of being caught.
Nimmo was banned from riding the
bicycle, but she could live with it. Walking three kilometres to college seemed
a smaller punishment than being thrown out of the house, even though it was a walk
that took her through all kinds of dangerous territory peppered with men and
potholes, the two colluding to make life difficult for the girls of Tapna. Nimmo
would suffer this daily misery if it kept Uncle and Aunty feeling they had the
control of her. She needed their approval to do what was for her a painless way
to get a life: become a beautician. For all the rap the beauty industry gets
for enslaving women to aesthetic standards dictated by the male gaze, it is the
smoothest path to liberation for an Indian woman. It’s number one among the
limited options available to a woman who wants to make something of herself while
avoiding the cost of an open rebellion. It explains why the beauty parlour explosion
in India is less about business and more about social change, a quiet
revolution sweeping through the hinterland and changing forever anyone who enters
its force field: young college dropouts, middle-aged ladies from joint
families, anyone fallen on hard times. Ten
thousand rupees is all it takes to train as a beautician – one doesn’t even
need to venture out of one’s street to do so anymore – and for as basic an
investment as one lakh rupees, it’s possible to open one’s own beauty parlour.
All that’s needed is a wall-length mirror, a revolving chair, a herbal massage
cream and a roll of white thread. There’s a lot Nimmo gains in life by working
at the Lopamudra Beauty Parlour – a regular salary, respect at home,
self-confidence, even a degree of independence – but she has a bigger game in
mind. She wants to open a beauty parlour of her own. But where is she going to
get the one lakh rupees?
There is a way, but it’s laden
with risk. One lakh rupees is the prize money for winning the beauty contest at
the Amigo club, the new axis around which Tapna’s upper-class society revolves.
A lot is riding on the contest for Miss Tapna. It’s meant to revive the
fortunes of some very desperate people: DB, the retired IG of police who’s
launched the club to gain back his social ranking; Mayaji of the Lopamudra
Beauty Parlour, who needs the contest to establish herself as the arbiter of
high culture in Tapna; Singhaniya, the mining millionaire turned legislator who
can throw in the money in hope of been seen as a respectable patron of the
arts. But nobody wants it to succeed more than Nimmo.
Nimmo wasn’t born a beauty queen;
before she learnt to groom herself at the beauty parlour, she looked ‘like a
schoolteacher who hadn’t been paid in three months’. But she was smart,
presentable, and, most importantly, ready to do what it takes. It wasn’t so
simple, though. The prize amount was kept so high because few girls in Tapna would
be ready to risk the disrepute of
participating in a beauty contest. The announcement of the contest caused serious
outrage among the middle class as well as the intellectual circles in Tapna.
Fiery editorials were written and debated about; placards and banners called
for the cancellation of the shameful parading of Tapna’s honour. Even a prize
of one lakh rupees wasn’t enough to lure the girls of Tapna into putting on a
swimsuit and sashaying down the ramp for the entertainment of men who awaited
the sight with fifty-paisa coins pressed into the tobacco-stained hollow of
their palms.
What was Nimmo going to do? She
had taken the plunge without much persuasion, but as the swimsuit round went
from being a distant dread to reality, leading her fellow participants to chicken
out one by one, she was in a fix. Once she went on stage wearing a swimsuit, there
would be no going back. She could never return to being the obedient niece, the
dutiful employee, the self-effacing woman. ‘In one go, she’d escape the
stifling well of familial culture. She’d be able to open her own beauty
parlour. She’d be able to marry as she chose.’
If she won the title of ‘Miss Tapna’ it would mean she was no ordinary
girl. She’d be excused from the rules that applied to ordinary girls. No one
would be shocked at anything she chose to do with her life. To win a beauty
contest in a small town is, after all, a sure escape from conformity. If you
think of ‘Miss Baroda’ or ‘Miss Kanpur’ or ‘Miss Bhopal’ as empty titles, a way
for small town girls to entertain themselves, you couldn’t be more wrong. It’s sometimes
the most empowering step they have taken in their lives. A girl in Patna could
win the top rank in an all-India medical/engineering/MBA entrance test and have
her face splashed across the city, but chances are she’d be less free to do
what she wants to than Miss Patna.
For most of the girls who came to Ranchi earlier this year to audition
for ‘Miss Jharkhand’ – some
from villages whose names I’d never heard before, some without taking
permission from their parents – the title was less a vehicle to become the next
Madhuri Dixit and more an escape from the predictable future: finish college, get
an acceptable job, get married, have children…. When asked why she was
contesting for the title, one of them, a tall, doe-eyed girl in a shimmery black dress said it was because she didn’t want
to have a boring life.
In the middle of a crazy series of
events engulfing the beauty contest at the Amigo club, Nimmo decides she
doesn’t want to have a boring life either. She’d rather be Miss Tapna, living up
to the meaning of the word ‘Tapna’ in Hindi: to leap.
*
Snigdha Poonam grew up in Ranchi and works as an independent
journalist in Delhi. Her first book, a nonfiction account of the new Indian
small-town life, will be published by Penguin Random House in 2016.
The
small-town sashay: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-focus/The-small-town-sashay/articleshow/47314385.cms
