by Anupama Krishnakumar
Priyanka didn’t quite remember when she began being called Pinki. She wasn’t particularly fond of pink. Yet, Priyanka, the name, somehow underwent a series of transitions to eventually settle on Pinki without any real reason. Initially, it was her friends who called her that way and her parents too kind of found it ‘very modern’ and absorbed the name into their routine. Priyanka protested in the beginning. “Why not Priya at least?” she asked but when people didn’t really care, she ended up conditioning herself to respond to Pinki.
As a child, Priyanka never asked for expensive gifts from her father who worked as a peon in a nationalised bank in one of the small towns in Maharashtra. She never asked for pricey toys, clothes or fashion accessories. She never asked to be taken out to all those posh-looking restaurants that lined up the streets she walked through on her way back home from school, despite the tempting smell of a whole variety of food that tickled her nostrils. But Priyanka loved movies. She loved them like nothing else in the world.
She asked her father, a man crazy about movies himself, for just one thing. ‘Take me for a movie every fortnight.’ A request that met with serious displeasure and scorn from her mother. “The girl will be a spoilt child by the time she is twenty,” the distraught lady declared emphatically. But nothing could break the father’s resolve to take his only daughter who had unmistakably inherited his love for cinema, to watch films.
Since the age of five or so, Priyanka grew up with movies and consumed them like it was food. At twelve, she was in awe of the king of hearts, Shahrukh Khan. She didn’t miss a single movie of his. Rather, her father ensured that his meagre income didn’t come in the way of his daughter’s biggest desire in life. When Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge released, Priyanka was 13. Suddenly, the awe for her matinee idol turned into something more, something inexplicable. She felt she could do away with everything in life and spend every second looking deeply into the nasheeli eyes of this man, this magician. She scourged newspapers looking for pictures of him and stuck the ones she found all over her cupboard. She hid some secretly inside the pages of her school books and stole a quick glance by flipping the pages during classes.
Sometimes as she sat helping her mother in the kitchen, she would stare and keep smiling even as she absent-mindedly went about the work her mother had assigned to her. Once she cut her finger when she was slicing onions and her utterly dismayed mother yelled, “Pinki, you stupid girl! Stop dreaming!” Another time, she added sugar to the dal instead of salt, as her horror-struck mother burst out wailing, “Look what this mindless man that I have married done to my only daughter! Now who will marry this mad girl?”
But seriously, Priyanka never cared nor did her father. At 18, when she finished her PU and her parents decided that they couldn’t afford to pay for her college and so made her stay home, Priyanka began wondering how she could start looking better than the female actors who played the love interest of her beloved. Every time she walked by the “Sultan Mirrors” shop, she would check herself out in the many mirrors that were placed outside the shop. She would tuck a curl behind her ear, quickly examine the colour of her lips or just flutter her eyelids and chuckle shyly. And almost every time she stared at her ordinary self in the mirror, she would find Charan, the young man who worked in the shop, look at her with fondness in his eyes. She imagined that Charan looked at her that way because something had changed about her. She never really evinced interest in him or his romantic advances. She merely saw his reaction to her as a sign of her growing beauty, the glow she imagined she was gaining.
She longed for the world that the movies showed to her. She created an imaginary universe which revolved around her. She spent hours listening to film music, lost in thought, creating tales spun with the threads of her dreams. Soon she demanded money from her father – to buy expensive, fancy-looking clothes, accessories and ‘make-up’ material, leaving the ageing man wonder for the first time ever, if he had been instrumental in taking things too far and beyond his hands. For, his beloved Pinki didn’t listen to him anymore and went about watching movies, more than one sometimes, in a week.
She spent hours watching movies after movies on TV, stayed away from her friends and came up with strange demands. Once she declared that she wanted to go to Bombay to visit King Khan. “I know where he lives,” she announced proudly, “I have found it out. Come father, let’s go.” Her parents were left speechless. Her mother told her to shut up, to no avail. Her father, still brimming with love for his daughter, told her politely that the thought of going to the big city terrified him and that it was impossible for simpletons like them to get to meet a superstar. But so firm was Priyanka in her belief that she could meet the actor, that she packed her and her father’s stuff into a suitcase and dragged her protesting father out of their modest home one morning, until the man pretended to have a fainting fit in a bid to end the ordeal, at least temporarily.
Priyanka was so annoyed with her father that she never spoke to him for months together. She ignored her mother and of course, the brown-eyed boy at the mirror shop who continued to throw fond glances at her. Once he even spoken to Priyanka’s parents asking for her hand in marriage. They, who were more than willing to get her married to someone, didn’t even mind the fact that he belonged to a different caste. “Pinki,” her father told her one evening, “get married to Charan. He is a good boy.” In return, she had laughed and said, “he isn’t the one for me. If you speak a word more, I will run off to Bombay.”
Months later, she watched a film on TV in which the female lead, all beautiful and full of attitude, was called Priyanka. And everyone called her Pri in the movie.
How nice, Priyanka thought, “Pri sounds so good. Pinki sounds like a dull head’s name and I have lived with it like a fool for so many years!”
That evening she spoke to her parents for the first time in months. “Don’t call me Pinki anymore,” she said caustically. “Call me Pri from now on. I am Pri.”
Her parents looked on helplessly.
Another day. Another demand. The story of Pinki turned Pri took yet another turn.
