My parents have bought me Mills and Boons when I was growing up; they are both very cool dudes like that. Plus they knew reverse psychology all too well with me. During the course of that phase, I read several dozen of them. A while ago, I wrote them a tribute. Last week, it got published in Talk magazine here. My friend Sajai there at the magazine is one of the very few copy editors I know who I feel safe giving my stories to. But like a mother's blind love for her baby, I cannot resist posting the original here too.
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Reader, I married him.
By the time Jane Eyre tells you, the reader, this, you are rooting for
her and Mr Rochester, rooting for the strings of happiness Jane is trying to
hold on to, rooting for love and companionship and all that. More than that
all, through the lives of the unlikely couple, you root for the love story that
we each secretly hope to be ours, even if not in the manner of Bollywood
excesses.
And that is the clever sales pitch that always works, be it in a rom-com
starring American sweethearts or in chick-lit or in the ultimate temples of
romance, Mills and Boons.
I have no qualms whatsoever in admitting I read Mills and Boons
(M&B) through my teens and through the idyllic conquer-the-world early 20s.
On my Kindle device, I still keep a few handy, for long commutes and the lunch
hour. After a long day at work, after a fight with mother, after a heavy book,
there is no better feel-good than an M&B. Or even Silhouette. Or Harlequin.
Or their other offspring. It is perhaps like what ice-cream is to most people,
you don’t need a reason to have it; and it always makes you happy.
Apart from being the ice cream on a rainy day, to me, the M&B books
have helped hone my writing skills as well, something I realized, like the
proverbial bulb above my head, the other day when some of us were discussing
the new phenomenon ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ (which I don’t think I will ever
finish). The subject veered to romance novels in general and listening to each
of us talk of how we discovered and came to be hooked to them, I realized my
association went a wee bit deeper.
It was my school principal who, unwittingly of course, introduced me to
M&B when I was in class 7. During a routine PTA meeting, mother complained
to the principal that I read more novels and less of my textbooks, often
staying up into the night. Madam principal asked me what I read and I told her;
I don’t remember what my answer was. She then turned to my mother and said as
long as I was not reading Mills and Boons, it was all right, given that I was
not slacking in the academics anyway.
In the 1990s, we school girls were still of the kind that did not know
of nor had access to such books. My interest was obviously piqued; there is no
greater reason to do something than to be told not to do it. As if the universe
was conspiring, I found a worn M&B in a sack of second hand books dad had
bought for me from a distant land. Never having bothered with the name of the
publishers on the cover before, The Stars on Fire or some such like
was thus my very first M&B. I still remember the story of a young actress
who comes as a replacement for another and the director, while thinking the
worse of her for supposedly manipulating her way in, cannot help but fall in
love with her. There is drama and heartbreak and fights before the mandatory
happily-ever-after. In hindsight, I nearly giggle when I remember that it was
quite a racy book to be reading at the age of 12!
I remember narrating the story to a friend whose parents were stricter
about what she could read. Mine, bless them, having seen the folly of the
principal and knowing the theory of reverse psychology all too well with me,
let me be. From then on, I must have read several dozens of them; most of them
one summer in high school that I spent in the city house of an aunt with access
to a whole library dedicated to M&Bs!
As I began writing in several forms and at several places, the value of
these soapy, theatrical novels came to the fore. A sunset in these novels is
never just a sunset, it is always a golden caramel yellow light that bursts
upon from behind the island, yet pales before the glow of the heroine’s face. A
face that isn’t just beautiful but is likened to the moon and the sun and the
sunset and to the flowers in the meadows. Over the top, yes of course. But no
one is telling you it is literature.
In those initial years of reading them, what I perhaps skipped were
parts that talked of history of an island (not always fictitious, mind you), of
food and little phrases from the local dialects and of culture. Much later,
while revisiting some old ones and picking up new titles, I used to be struck
by what I could only think of as travel writing in those passages between the
heroine’s blush and the hero’s show of all-maleness. I would not claim to have
found inspiring sentences and quotable phrases in any of them; now that would
be too farfetched. But in the two-three hours that it takes to read one of
them, if you pay attention, there is a little bit of history, some intro to
food and clothes and language and culture of turquoise beaches and emerald
islands to be found in those pages.
There are Indian versions as well, which were launched with a much
publicized competition where winners got their stories published by M&B
India. I read one of the first few that came out, and stopped at that. We have
our Bollywood for our unbelievables. In romance fiction, I find the
unrelatable-ness of foreign characters with blond hair and the French accent
better to ‘get’ than the dusky dude in a sherwani wooing his fair, lithe bride
in a ghoonghat. But that is just me.
This thought process started with the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon
for me. I have an e-book version that I thought I would read, just to see what
the fuss was all about. But a few pages down, I gave up after the girl began
blushing in every seventh sentence. It is supposed to have revived erotica, but
if that book is erotica, it is snowing in Bangalore
today. I stopped at a point when the heroine says of her blush, that she was
the colour of the Communist Manifesto! That made me laugh, doubly so because I
don’t think that was the writer’s intended reaction from her readers. But then I
read somewhere that she is making one million pounds every week (!!) from the
book now. That robs me of the amusement.
Apparently, M&B has come out with fan fiction for Fifty Shades… as
well. I am not sure I want to read them. I like my clichés in my romance
fiction. I like the emeralds and TDH men and the perfect stories. I might still
skip over the sightseeing bits of the book, but like your vanilla ice-cream,
plain and simple, there is nothing like a good, straightforward love story when
real life gets bit of a bore. Plus I get to learn another way to describe
sunset on a beach.
Ends/
