Laurie my dear, Hear the drums roll, and what the beturbanned heralds, resplendent in burnished uniforms, are proclaiming!
Ba adab, ba mulayza hoshiyaar! Malika-e-jazbaat, malika-e-husn, dastaan-e- mohabbat ki noor, Begum Laurie tashreef la rahi hain!! (The queen of emotions, the queen of beauty, the light of the love story, Begum Laurie is arriving!)
Or, if you prefer the Sanskritised version:
Paraakh, paraakh! Srijankala ki rani, prem gatha ki pandita, Maharani Laurie padhaar rahi hain! (The queen of the creative arts, the maestro of the love story, Maharani Laurie is arriving!)
In either case, a 22 sword salute, for guns would be an anachronism, and in any case not grand or flamboyant enough for you.
Welcome back, my Prodigal Daughter! I am afraid there is no fatted calf, or even an overweight lamb, for we are strict vegetarians and even Sasha pretends to be one when he visits. But presuming that you are not a ghaas phoos eater (as they used to tease me in my very early days in the IFS, long before it became so fashionable to be a veggie that guests who were not made it a point to whisper, apologetically, that they ate only white meat and that too only 3 times a week), please evoke your tremendous powers of the imagination, and try to feel that it is there.
You are well and truly back, Laurie mine, and how good it feels to have not just 2 new chapters, but 2 chapters from the original TRS! Over the last few, I had begun to feel suffocated, after being almost buried under an avalanche of high fashion names. And there were so many of them - from Manolo Blahnik (poor Jimmy Choo is sure to sulk!), Manish Malhotra and Ritu Kumar for the girls, plus Boucheron, with and without the Cinna Pampilles (God, what a mouthful for a pair of jhumkas!), to the ubiquitous Armani, Ermenegildo Zegna and the relatively modest Etro for the men, not to speak of the shoes – New and Lingwood, Aldo and the dratted Zegna again.
Yes, and I forgot the Bleu de Chanel for men, and you forgot to tell us what Purvi, Teju and Laurie had on in terms of perfume. I strongly suspect, Laurie, that you were raking in a tidy sum for the inhouse promotion of all this high end stuff, and if so, I would be VERY proud of your for your business savvy. Only, you should then, while you were about it, not have failed to rope in three more parfumiers !!
I have never had any use for haute couture of any kind, even Indian, my tastes running exclusivlely to classical Indian weaves for my sarees, of which the diplomatic corps, wherever I happened to be posted since I was a Vice Consul in Geneva at 23, used to keep track, to see if they were repeated. It was a cat and mouse game between us, and I am pleased to report that I never got caught ! I love perfumes, but that is another tale altogether. My husband once saw an ad for Jean Patou's 1000, then advertised as the most expensive perfume in the world, and knowing nothing about the need to test perfumes on the skin first, proudly placed a large flacon of it in front of me one day, and waited expectantly for delighted thanks. Well, of course I obliged, but then I found that I did not like it at all. I could not only not say so, but I had to wear it every time till the bottle was exhausted. That cured me of experimenting with perfumes, and thenceforth I stuck to my safe Chanel No.5, with only one sally into itr from Dubai, which was a very successful one. I did not repeat it.
I am so sorry for this off topic side-track, and let us return to The Raging Storm. After barely surviving this deluge of high end fashion, it was a relief, even more than a joy, for me to see you back on terra firma, doing what you do best. Which is writing about people and their emotions. So I am far more grateful, and delighted with your two latest chapters that I am even in the normal course of things.
Laurie, the hide and seek between Arjun and Purvi during the party has come off very well, very well indeed. In and out of lifts and lobbies, in and out of their respective flats, in and out of the dance floor crowds, in and out of the terrace. Like something out of either a spy thriller or a Thomas Hardy novel. Except that unlike the latter, there is no tragic 'just missed' ending, thank the Lord. If this work of yours were ever to be filmed, this would be a highlight!
What the latest chapter reminded me of was the iridescent colours on soap bubbles. Beautiful beyond belief, ever changing, fragile and evanescent, loops and whorls that vanish before the eye can even analyse them, not to speak of holding them. The dance on the terrace is so delicately done, a bit more and it would have slipped from PG to R. I am grateful that it did not, for I do not like in your face sensuality. I am not a prude, but to me it smacks of crudeness, and what is worse, of the inability of the writer to depict passionate love without taking these shortcuts. You did not fail this test, Laurie. You also managed to retain the faraway quality of a dream, at least for Purvi, almost till the very end. It was very well done.
How is it that practically everyone of your core cast, except for Laurie, seems to be telepathic? We have not only Arjun and Purvi doing their by now usual stuff in this line, but Karan as well, when he senses that something is wrong and summons the security chaps. I would like to put in a petition of behalf of Laurie that she should also be telepathic. After all it is not just blood ties that seem to be necessary for it but deep love suffices as well, so Laurie should qualify along with Karan, it seems to me. Please do not shortchange yourself fearing accusations that you are favouring yourself as a character. It would be no such thing!
So now we have the Barbie doll as a full-fledged villainess planning an apaharan of Purvi, and hissing imprecations at her climsy and ineffective flunkey Rashmi, of all the world like the slinky bad women of the old Hollywood films noirs. She does it with all the panache of a Godmother, or perhaps of her Soham/Vishnu dada. But he would have done it himself, upfront, not thru a flunky.
And yes, Maleficent Purple sounds splendid, though I have absolutely no idea what it would look like. I shall confess at this point, rather like my above-mentioned non-veg guests, that I never paint my nails, not just now at my advanced age, but never ever. The polar antithesis of Archana and her beige talons, in effect.
This is a tad long for a review of just the four last chapters, but please note that if you were to divide it by four, it would be a more reasonable 315.25 words per chapter. With that, I shall sign off. Splendid going, Laurie!
Shyamala Aunty
PS: One teeny weeny question: from where does our modest sanskaari Purvi get "a beautiful scalloped diamond necklace and matching bangles"? From her Manav baba?
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