Greedy. Lush. Volatile. Really picky. These are words you could use to describe me from time to time. I am an Arian to the core. Linda Goodman may as well have been using me as her prototype when writing Star Signs. Me, and Charlie Chaplin of course.
Action-oriented? Yes.
Short-tempered? Yes, yes.
A realist, yet a decided idealist. Absolutely.
But Linda didn’t get it all right. She also calls me impulsive: “They are 100% the genuine article, and act from self-sourced impulses.”
Never in a million years would I act on an impulse. Even the dreadful perm I convinced my father to let me get in the 90s was the result of several weeks of strategy. And an "impromptu" dinner party is at least 72 hours in the making. So, the events of Thursday have truly shaken the ground beneath my feet. Here’s what happened.
The soundtrack to my drive to work is usually Monocle Radio or a TED Talk. There are however, a few patches of Bombay where Vodafone’s 4G collapses and I turn to Hrishi K on 94.3 Radio One for the latest goings on in the city. This happened Thursday too, near the Taraporewala Aquarium on Marine Drive. I switched on the radio expecting Hrishi K’s usual radio-ready chat, but instead heard a sultry voice talking about paan, and its role in the art of seduction. Yes, the same paan that wallahs across India wrap a betel leaf around an areca nut; the juice of which sullies street corners, white walls, pretty parks and freshly dry cleaned sarees in this great country of mine.
The voice spoke of how WhatsApp has now taken over the duties of the paan. The voice spoke of how she misses the time when lovers would exchange messages through paans. Of how there was a paan for every proposition and rejection. And how the paan was “... the ultimate symbol of romance and passion in the history of seduction…”
The book has an entire chapter dedicated to “Paan and the Arts of Seduction”. I quote: “Paan, says the Kama Sutra, was the transition between foreplay and sex.”
According to Anand, when a woman offered a man a paan, it meant she was ready for sex. The chapter goes into great detail to describe the extensive erotic vocabulary inspired by and conveyed by the paan. From inviting someone for a hook up (Ankush paan) to letting them down (Chaturstra paan), there is apparently a paan for every romantic event.
This is certainly more exciting than any WhatsApp conversation I've ever had! I am now reading the chapter called ‘The Sixty-Four Skills’. Who knew an impulse purchase would open me up to such an exciting, distant world!