Archives for category: Culture

LOVE AND DEATH

April 9, 2015 //
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Reflections On Japan’s Preoccupation With Death

Haresh Shah

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Ray Falk and Kayo Hayashi are scratching their heads to come up with something to do with Shah-san that evening. But I put their dilemma to rest. It’s my second night being back in Tokyo and we all have had an exhausting day – especially me, being grilled by the Japanese editors about them not getting the rights to Norman Mailer’s Gary Gilmore piece. Kayo drops me off at the hotel around half past five. I spend some time browsing the Imperial Hotel’s little bookstore  and buy a copy of the 1968 Nobel Prize winner in literature, Yasunari Kawabata’s novel, Beauty and Sadness. My intention is to read a bit of it after I have had a light dinner in one of the hotel’s restaurants or just take it easy and order a sandwich and a beer from the room service. I don’t get around to doing either. Soon as I enter the room, I stretch out and close my eyes to relax for a while. The next thing I know, it’s past one in the morning.

I force myself out of the bed, undress and crawl under the covers. It’s now three in the morning, but I just can’t fall asleep. Resigned, I get out of the bed, fix myself a cup of coffee and call Chicago and brief my boss Lee Hall on the meetings of the day. It’s two in the afternoon in Chicago, no wonder I can’t just lie down and fall asleep. I pick up Beauty and Sadness.

Oki Toshio – the protagonist of the book is on his way to Kyoto traveling on Kyoto Express. Upon his arrival, he grabs a cab at the station and checks in at Miyako Hotel. The story flows like a gentle creek. Not too complicated a love triangle among the middle aged Oki Toshio – the novelist of some renown, his long time mistress Ueno Otoko, a painter and Otoko’s young protégée, Sakami Keiko. Already a tricky tangle. Made further complicated by the involvement of Oki’s son, Taichiro. How do you untangle the four gnarly branches so intricately entwined and manage one or more of them not to crack?

Inspired probably by the book, I decide to take a side trip to Kyoto that weekend. I board the Kyoto bound Tōkaidō Shinkansen, and upon arriving take a cab from the station to the hotel, which quite by coincidence turns out to be Miyako – booked by Ray Falk’s office. As the bullet train slithers south west of Tokyo at more than 200 km/h, I take in the blur of the scenery outside the windows while still absorbed in Beauty and Sadness.

I arrive in Kyoto around afternoon. I only have the rest of the day and that night to make the best of that ancient – once the dreamy capital of the country. First I take the guided tour that gives me a bird’s eye view of the city. There are modern areas and buildings that are no different than one would see anywhere else in the world, but what sticks out above and below them are what you would imagine Samurai and Imperial Japan to be. Multi roofed and multi colored pagoda like buildings dotting the lower skyline of the entire city. The vermilion Torris gates to the Shinto shrines and the Buddhist temples, delicately groomed Japanese gardens, narrow and the crowded streets and yet narrower stone tiled labyrinth like alleys lined with clusters of small boutiques, bars and restaurants.

My destination that night is the famous Geisha district of Gion and the surrounding Higashi-oji street and Shirakawa river. I walk the alleys, rubbing shoulders with the locals and the tourists under the multiple-low grey roofed buildings and let myself be amazed at the huge and colorful lanterns hanging outside a variety of establishments, bearing their names. Doused in  predominantly yellow and red, the warm hues illuminate the streets that lead and guide your way through the neighborhood, making you feel as if you were moon walking on clouds.

And then suddenly you see the beautifully and artfully painted white faces of the illusive and alluring Geishas, tiptoeing their petite steps on the stone squares of the street. Then you see a pair and before you realize, clusters of them scurrying this way and that, going about their chores,  chatting, crossing the small wooden bridges over the creeks, twirling their red oriental umbrellas, their faces peeking out of the automobile windows. Looking more like a movie set, you suddenly become aware that those Geishas are for real. That they live and breathe there in Gion. That they are bred and brought up in a house not too far from where I am walking. That they work in the restaurants, tea houses. They sing and dance and entertain like the famed Tawaifs above the store fronts and in the bazars of Lucknow. And like their sisters on the Indian continent, many of them are mistresses to some of the richest and the most powerful men in Japan.

Overwhelmed, I take a break and as recommended, walk into the restaurant Ashiya. Like in France, it’s Lyon and not Paris, in Japan, Kyoto cuisine shines over that of Tokyo’s. And the must of the must is to have a Kobe beef at Ashiya in Kyoto. So I do. The place is totally mobbed. But they find a place for me at the bar. It’s crowded and it’s loud and it sizzles with the delicious fragrance of the meat searing on the hot metal plates. Even though I am shocked at the price tag of US$ 30.- for a tinny tiny peace of a Filet Mignon – back in 1979 when the hefty T-bone steak in the US cost about $6.-, I would not let pass perhaps once in a life chance of tasting a Kobe steak at Ashiya in Kyoto. So tender it slithers down my throat like a fresh chilled oyster. I love it.

Back to strolling the alleys, I can’t help but think of Beauty and Sadness. And of  Otoko and Keiko. As if they were real people and not the characters in Kawbata’s novel. I expect them any moment to emerge out of one of those hundreds of Geishas going about their business through those narrow pedestrian streets. I find something about their real existence mysterious. And then it occurs to me, even if Otoko and Keiko did exist and the novel was based on the real Geishas, what were the chances that they would still be around? And if they are, Otoko certainly would be very very old, but Keiko could still be in circulation. They could even be dead!

The thought nudges me into a nostalgic state of mind. Up until then, the little that I know of this mysterious land, I can’t help but see lingering behind the reticence of the Japanese character a certain shade of melancholy. Not just a mask, but something deeper, something inherent in their being.

As much life and the noise and the hubbub that swirl around me, there is something about the narrowness of the streets, smallness of the shops on the either side and their grey-brown tiled roofs all seem to give me an eerie feeling – the melancholic slippery sweetness of the dark wildflower honey. Other than the slight sliver of the sky up above, the solid stone tiles on the ground and the shops so close across from each other give me a feeling of a cocoon closing in – wrapped inside is a sleeping dead body and the soul, still inhabiting the earth, luxuriating in the ultimate slumber. What a morbid image? Why am I thinking of death?

Perhaps the answer lay in the ending of Beauty and Sadness, which I finish reading the next day on my train ride back to Tokyo. How does Kawabata deal with his four characters all curled up in one single web of loving? Simple! What if one of them were to have an accident and die?

The more I read and get to know of Japan, the more I get a feeling that the Japanese are preoccupied with death – like most Indians are, especially when it comes to the matters of the heart. I fail to see any glory in death. As inevitable as it is, it should be as natural as the birth. I can’t see inducing an end to life. Of the two Japanese authors I have read so far, both committed suicide. In November of 1970, Yukio Mishima committed the ritual Seppuku of carving out his own abdomen with a sharp knife and letting his disemboweled entrails hang out like blood soaked slithery snakes.

The public suicide of Mishima was all announced and choreographed. At the time I was working for Time and Life magazines. I still remember how us in Chicago production waited for the layouts, the photos and the text to arrive from the editorial offices in New York. I don’t remember exactly how we felt about awaiting for him to be done with and for us to put the magazines to bed and then go home. I don’t remember us having discussions about it either. Strange! Now that I think of it, it feels spooky, but then it must have felt a normal occurrence. Those were the days when Vietnam was well and alive and was covered extensively and in all its gory details in the Life magazine, week after week. The photos and the reports of the continuous death stream was hardly shocking anymore.

Mishima lost the Nobel Prize to his fellow writer and the close friend, Yasunari Kawabata, who too committed suicide by  gassing himself to death in April 1972. Unlike Mishima, tried to give a rousing speech amidst the boos of the crowd before proceeding to slice his stomach, Kawabata didn’t even leave a small suicide note, leaving his loved ones and the fans wondering forever. There are many theories about his taking his own life, among them, him being haunted by hundreds of nightmares following the death of Yukio Mishima.

The protagonist of Mishima’s Sailor Who Fell From The Grace With The Sea is murdered by a bunch of teenagers. I would go onto read Kawabata’s Snow Country, and realize that in both of his novels the “intruding” characters die of accidents, thus clearing the path of the survivors.

While I found Mishima difficult to read, I find Kawabata’s style and the narratives soothing, simple and nostalgically romantic. Both of the books have made a deep impact on me and yet even decades later, I can’t help but wish that instead of resorting to killing his characters, he could have given his stories delicate twists and left them alone. But the the endings do tell you something about the way the Japanese feel about life – or more precisely about death.

Committing Seppuku is the ultimate glory and so is the Kamikaze pilots taking off on suicide missions in their single engine, non-landing, one-man Nakajima Ki-115 Tsurugi planes and going down with the blazing bright and glorious flames.  And Madama Butterfly choosing the path of con onor muore (to die with honor), blindfolds her child, goes behind the screen and plunges the knife into her heart. Applause, applause!

Fast forward to the one of my most favorite Japanese authors of today. At the time of Mishima and Kawabata’s deaths, Kyoto born Haruki Murakami was only in his very early twenties and had yet to publish his first book, which came out in 1979. But it wasn’t up until 1987 did he burst onto the international literary scene with his mega seller, Norwegian Wood, named after the Beatles song of the era. A bitter sweet love story of the young college students set in Tokyo – the generation grooving and grown up to the essence of the music that defined the Sixties, it’s the suicide of one of the lovers that moves the story forward pulling at the heart strings not only that of the Japanese but that of the readers across the globe.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

More Japanese Stories

SEX EDUCATION À LA JAPONAISE

BOYS’ NIGHT OUT WITH PLAYMATES

A NIGHT OUT IN TOKYO

THE NAIL THAT STUCK OUT…

JINGLE BELLS IN TOKYO

TABLE OF CONTENTS

On Friday, April 24, 2015

THE TUNNEL OF LOVE

Over the years of globe trotting for Playboy, I have stayed in some of the most luxurious hotels of the world. Nothing to frown at the comfort and opulence they afford, but there are times when you just want a simple place of your own. Especially in the cities I would need to frequent a lot and for longer stays. So I rent a wonderful bachelor’s pad in Mexico City. Equally as luxurious or even more so than the rooms at Camino Real, not to mention how unique.

Playboy Stories Goes Biweekly

Having already told 92 of them, I guess I just want to stretch them out as long as I can. Also, to be honest, up until now, the stories just poured out on their own, I couldn’t write them fast enough. There are still stories I want to tell, equally as good or perhaps even better, but these are the ones that require a bit more pondering and more time to write. Like Love and Death, many of them would contain more retrospections and the deeper observations. A bit slower pace will also give me time to work on some other stuff which I hope to share with you in the future. HS  

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Categories Culture, Japan, Memoire, Playboy, Travel

JINGLE BELLS IN TOKYO

December 11, 2014 //
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A Fleeting Glimpse At The Land Of The Rising Sun

Haresh Shah

gingerpagoda
I have landed in Tokyo during the day on the Christmas Eve of 1977. I am enroute to Bombay with a non-business related stopover in Japan. Even so, Playboy has arranged for me  to be met at the airport by one of our Tokyo rep’s people. This is my very first trip to the land of the Rising Sun, and I am excited to be here, even for a short stay of 48 hours.

Arriving and negotiating through Haneda International Airport feels like a free fall into a total disaster area. Even considering that the Japanese like and thrive on things small, neat and functional, their international airport is ridiculously small, overcrowded and chaotic. And yet they somehow manage to maintain order within what would seem daunting to anyone else. As I claim my baggage from the carousel and look around, I see a huge easel, wrapped across it is a wide band of paper sign saying: Mr. Shah – next to which it is repeated in katakana using the Japanese characters for my name. When I present myself by the sign, a uniformed hostess walks up to me with Welcome to Japan and pins to my lapel a name tag and informs me that someone is waiting for me outside at the MEETING PLACE.  Keiko Shirokawa is there to pick me up and take me to the hotel Dai Ichi in the famous Ginza district – that bustles with restaurants, bars, night clubs, department stores and boutiques.

I am on my own, so they have booked me in a modest place. As small as the room is, it lacks for nothing that a weary traveler may need or want. In-room amenities include a happi coat, a short kimono like garment to relax in – very attractive in bright blue and black. I am almost tempted to honestly steal it. Also provided are a pair of vinyl slippers and a green tea center with a small electric water heater and tea bags. The bedside drawer contains Teachings of Buddha, in English as well as in its Japanese versions. Just like in a five star hotels in Europe, the toilet paper is folded at the end in a triangle every time the room is cleaned. It is not only equipped with the bedside telephone, but there is also a toilet-side phone in the bathroom! A glass for drinking water is placed over a matching glass coaster. There is also a mini-pack containing of the Japanese one sided toothpicks. I have never seen them before. In that the flat ended top looks like a crown atop the thin lines grooved around its diameter. This is so that you can snap off the top and rest your toothpick on it for later use.   And the bedside lamp has twin fixtures. One lights up to allow the reading and another one with a mini bulb provides very faint shadow illumination. And everything in the room is computerized. The billing of course, but what is now common place, I encounter it for the first time – being able to punch in the time for the wake up call through the key pad on the telephone. When it rings in the morning, you hear a gentle opening of a flower like jingle – the kind which can come from a slight touch of a single sitar string. And the vending machines in the lobby are stocked not only with soft drinks, but also with beer and whiskey, and little chilled bottles of sake. As well as conveniences such as shaving and tooth brushing kits, hair grooming products and the ice cubes. What else could one have wanted even in a luxurious and expensive hotel?

The thing that impresses me the most about the Japanese is how inquisitive they are. I am amazed at the questions they ask me during our short introductory meeting I had with some of the editors. Pounded into them must have been, there is no such thing as a stupid question. This seems to answer, why they are so detailed oriented and how they go about not stealing, but learning by heart the secrets of the most complicated of the machinery.

Unlike any other city around the world I have been to, nothing comes even close to the list of things I have made about what I see and experience in Tokyo within those two Christmas days.

What is most astonishing to me is, even though only less than 1% of Japan’s population of 112,000,000 people are Christians, nowhere else have I noticed a city so commercialized with Christmas as is Tokyo. The department stores such as Sogo, Mitsukoshi and Matsuya decorated in things Christmas would put to shame even the Christmas decorations of Marshall Fields/Macy’s of Chicago’s State Street. It’s winter time in Japan also. No snow on the streets, but the air is crisp and cold and there is enough cotton glittering with tinsel is spread out into the store windows to make up for the lack of the real thing. Wafting in the air in continuous loops are Jingle bell, jingle bell, Santa Clause is coming to town and I am dreaming of a white Christmas and other holiday tunes permeate the Tokyo streets, give you a feeling of having landed in the Christmas themed Fujiland. There are more blinking neon signs arched at the street fronts wishing you MERRY CHRISTMAS in this land of Buddha than I have seen anywhere else in the world. The stores are open through all Christmas holidays and crowds emerging from them are bulging with bags and bags of Christmas, nay, Winter gifts.

Over a period of time I would learn that the Japanese love to give gifts. It’s a tradition you have to respect and accept. So much so that even Playboy with its strict corporate policy of its employees not allowed to accept any gifts had to bend the rule in order not to commit the embarrassing social faux pas and risking the congenial relationship with our Japanese partners by letting me bring those gifts home – even allowing me to keep them. And the gifts wouldn’t be perfunctory. I still have their top of the line Canon Sure Shot – came in handy just in time, because I was getting tired of lugging around my heavy camera bag stuffed with Pentax Spotmatic, a set of lenses and filters and other accessories – now made obsolete by the digital cameras. And a set of beautiful Seiko watches, his and hers – the ones both Carolyn and I still wear.

Though I can’t help but wonder, who can afford anything at those prices? Okay, the ones given to me were from the corporate PR budget. But what about the personal gifts that I witness people carrying out of the stores? One of the things that totally flabbergasts me during this first visit to Japan is, how expensive everything is!! The first night Keiko takes me out for dinner at a small unpretentious neighborhood Chinese restaurant costs US$ 30.-. That is just the food. At the time, something you could do back in California for $10.-.  As expensive as the food is, in the most cases you get to see it “live” even before you enter the restaurants. The standard dishes are on display in the glass showcases fronting each place, little hand made signs indicating the names of the dishes both in Japanese and English and the price of the respective dish. I still haven’t been able to figure out whether the food on display looking so appetizing is so beautifully frozen or is made of very natural looking plastic. Even basics like a cup of coffee, a glass of beer, a single tomato in the department store, sight seeing tour, day-to-day clothing, all cost three or four times as much as they do back in the United States. You would think the small luxuries that are made in Japan, like cameras, transistors, Walkman, calculators and such should at least be cheaper, Nope! They are cheaper to buy across the Pacific. Curiously enough, other than the electronics and some things obviously Japanese, such as Kimono and Kabuki masks, the stores are filled with the products foreign – mainly European high fashion and American. American jeans and the movies, the magazines, the McGregor spices and DelMonte tomato ketchup in the grocery store.

When I first arrive in Tokyo, I feel more squeezed and boxed-in like nowhere else. There are ocean waves of people, wherever you set your sight. As I walk the streets, one thing you can’t escape is how loud the people are. And how crowded and noisy are the streets. And the cacophony of the deafening noise made mainly by millions of wind pipes blowing at their highest decibel level seems unreal. There must be something psychological about them being out and a part of the crowd. Because in the meeting rooms and during the social encounters, they are meek as lambs facing hoards of lions. And their multiple bowing at every stage of the life including the petite females with their doll like slit eyes bowing and un-bowing, whispering domo arigato gozaimasu every time you get on or off an elevator. Not only to the attendants, but there is absolutely no tradition of tips even in restaurants and bars.  There are other  things I marvel at: The reverence with which business cards are exchanged. Held delicately by the fingers of both hands and offered with a gesture that of a religious tribute – the way Indian worshipers do when making an offering of flowers in a temple. The cards themselves are simple, a little larger than the standard size, stark white, devoid of the fancy corporate logo, printed on each side in black and white type face with the name, the designation and the contact details of the bearer. In English on one side and katakana on the other. And you are expected to receive them equally as reverently, look at it, bow your head slightly and then tuck into your pocket as delicately.

The passenger doors of the cabs swing open automatically as they slow down to pick you up. And then close at a touch of a button soon as you get in. Drivers all wear thin white gloves the kind English butlers do. That there is no such thing as an exact address in Japan. The first time I had gotten into a cab with Keiko, it took her almost a minute to communicate the directions to the driver indicating the exact location by listing the landmarks such as crossroads, the most prominent building around there, the neighborhood, just like we do in Bombay. Just like Bombay, Tokyo was never planned to be an easy city, hence the house numbers and streets have almost no or a very little meaning to them. And they drive on the left side of the streets. Something so obvious in Britain and its past colonies such as Australia and India. But Japan?

Also the thing you can’t ignore is the fact that many of the people walk the streets with their mouths and noses covered in white masks. Something Jains in India do in order not to inadvertently inhale the living insects. I am not sure whether the Japanese wear them because of the pollution of Tokyo or it could have something to do with the Buddhism. Majority of Japanese all dress in conservative western clothes. Unlike India and other traditional countries where you could see both, it would be a rare sight in Japan to see the men dressed in anything other than the western suits and casual shirt and pants and women mostly in two piece suites or the skirts and a blouses.

Outwardly they’re totally westernized and yet, not withstanding some of the obvious social etiquette and the public behavior, you can’t help but wonder whether behind the  appearances, they have somehow managed to mask their real identity, leaving us guessing what their internal world really is like.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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SEX EDUCATION À LA JAPONAISE

BOYS’ NIGHT OUT WITH PLAYMATES

A NIGHT OUT IN TOKYO

THE NAIL THAT STUCK OUT…

Next Friday, December 19, 2014

THE ARABIAN NIGHT

As announced last week

Of the multitude of PR events sponsored by Playboy across the globe, Playboy Germany’s 20th anniversary BIG BANG party sticks out the most in my memory. And then there was a low key event just a year before.

 

 

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Categories Christmas, Culture, Japan, Memoire, Travel

THE NAIL THAT STUCK OUT…

November 20, 2014 //
1

Haresh Shah

Daring To Be Different

geishabrau
When our Japanese partners were reported what Shah-san was up to all through the week, flabbergasted, the executives and the editorial team are in awe of the fact that an executive of Playboy Enterprises was in their country expressly for meeting with them and yet they would not see him for an entire week. They were equally astonished when heard from Ray Falk’s office that Mr. Shah, nay Shah-san, accompanied by Sasaki-san, was crisscrossing  their country and visiting places in an attempt to glean first hand some understanding of the land  and its culture, its people in general and the young existing and potential readers of the Japanese edition of Playboy in particular.

Even though they didn’t know what to make of this Shah-san, they were positively impressed and intrigued, not to mention amazed. And then approved of my itinerary as was set up by Ray’s office. The places I would visit and the people I would be exposed to should give me a fair idea of some of what they had hoped to communicate to me when Lee (Hall)  had originally conveyed to them what my mission would be working with the new team.  That my role would go beyond giving them pep-talk,, turn around and then catch a plane back home. That I would roll up my sleeves and work hand-in-hand with them, not only in making and re-defining the magazine itself, but also talk about and make possible ancillary publishing activities as an extension to the regular issues.

I have returned to Tokyo that Friday night from our six day long exploratory trip through the country. On Saturday morning, I am met by Yuko Kato of Shueisha. American educated, Yuko is not a part of the creative editorial staff. She is more of an “it” girl who is assigned to expose me to the bustling with colors and the neon lights in the high decibel city of Tokyo. Yuko is in her mid-to late twenties, moon faced – sort of an attractive girl who is brimming with energy and enthusiasm to add and to finish up what Yastaka Sasaki had started out. It’s a rainy and a crowded day. Not that Tokyo is ever without crowd, but it’s Saturday and the people are out in troves, further cramming the space with their colliding umbrellas. Yuko and I huddled under a large umbrella loaned by the hotel, we negotiate the streets and alleys of the city. Duck in and out of the various places that I would visualize years later when I began to read works by Haruki Murakami. Neighborhoods clustered with cafes and jazz clubs and the cozy little bars and down home compact and crowded mom and pop eating places. The dark and narrow alleys, dingy little public establishments, the smallness of everything that would eventually define Tokyo and Japan for me.

After having stuck to the typical Japanese eating places through the week, Yuko takes me to the Italian Toscana and French Ile de France.  At night we end up at the Tokyo branch of the discotheque  Maharaja. We spend most of the Sunday roaming about the all alluring neon signs bedecked Ginza. That night I have a date with uncle Jaman’s publishing associate Frank Watanabe accompanied by Mrs. Watanabe and his son Nori. They take me to Zakuro, an exclusive and expensive Shabu-Shabu restaurant. Sort of like Swiss fondue, cooking your own food in the boiling water in a larger pot, instead of in smaller fondue pot sizzling with oil. We are seated on the floor and are served by traditional Geishas. They prepare the spread for us, making sure that the water is properly heated and spiced and then bowing, reverently walking backwards, leave us to prepare and enjoy our meal. Popping in now and then to make sure our Sake cups are filled and if we’re in need of anything else.

Submerged in all things Japanese for an entire week, now I feel ready to face the Shueisha crowd and hopefully be able to ask and answer and defend a group of them sitting across the long conference table, with me alone on the other side, albeit Sasaki or Kayo Hayashi interpreting by my side.

Even though I have already forgotten about the hot water I had found myself in five years earlier over Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song,  however faint the memory, it still plays out in the front of my eyes.

As I face about ten of them, sitting across the table from me, the showdown about to erupt, conjures up the image of a hundred Kauravas to my lone Arjuna with Krishna as my chariot driver on the battle field of Mahabharata. Me having to fend off my hundred step-brothers, the bows tensed and the arrows ready and pointed at me like in a modern firing squad, over something I had presumed settled between them and the rights manager Jean Freehill in my office. The Japanese language rights to the excerpt  of the Mailer book. That was 1979 and to the best of my memory the beginning of splitting of the rights to the text that was bought by Playboy. Up until then, the rights to the text would normally be available to all of our editions around the world. But not in the case of The Executioner’s Song. The foreign rights were sold separately. Playboy wasn’t even given an option to bid on them.

I no longer remember exactly, but to add an insult to the injury, the Japanese rights were sold to Shueisha’s arch rivals, Kodansha. I knew our rights department had fought and negotiated hard for our international editions, but to no avail. I remember some clever literary agent summing it up for me. There is no such thing as exclusive rights any more, that the rights now could be infinitesimally divisible. Whew!!

Soon the pattern followed when Playboy bought a bunch of short stories by Gabriel García Márquez, our internal table of contents started showing up with NO FOREIGN RIGHTS stamps in the bold type face. In my naiveté, I show up at García Márquez’ agent Carmen Balcell’s office in Barcelona.  I offer her $10,000.00 for foreign rights. She all but laughs me out of her office. But considering that after all I was a señor de Playboy, gives me as a gift, the original first edition of the master’s El Amor en los Tiempos de Cólera. The book I still cherish and from which read a paragraph now and then and be in awe of how fluid his original words in Spanish are.

Even though this phenomena of  NO FOREIGN RIGHTS  by now is more of a norm than an exception, I am still prepared to face the “squad” with whatever grill worthy issues they may have to confront me with.

But wonder of all wonders, this time around, not only they don’t have any bones to pick with Chicago, there are absolutely no group meetings planned. My whole week of already being in Japan and not wanting to see them so that I would have a better feeling of things Japanese, have thrown them off balance. Instead they have decided to meet with me individually or in pairs to discuss with me section-by-section of how they envision the future editorial direction of the magazine and are eager for my input. And even more astonishing is: other than a perfunctory quick visit to the editorial department, they have arranged to meet with me informally at cafes and bars. In restaurants and talk over lunches. Absolutely un-Japanese thing to do.

I guess I have earned my stripes over the five years since my last visit to Tokyo by collaborating closely with them and having facilitated several mutually profitable special projects. My week long trip through their country expressly designed to get know them better has added to the PR rhetoric from Lee and Ray. It has become clear to Shueisha, that Shah-san is not there to lecture them. That honest to God, as communicated to them, I am indeed there to roll up my sleeves and become a part of their team  in Tokyo and their solid ally when back in Chicago. They are appreciative and welcoming in the way I would have never imagined the Japanese would ever do.

I am overwhelmed by the biggest honor bestowed upon me one evening by the top Shueisha executive Mr. Tadashi Wakkana by hosting a dinner for me at the garden restaurant Happoen. Invited are about twenty of the company’s top executives and the editorial staff of Playboy.

It’s a traditional Japanese affair in which we are all seated on the floor in a large circle and are being entertained by a group of Geishas. What I remember fondly of that evening and with a smirk on my face is: as we settle down, an aging and experienced Geisha kneels down in front of me. She is holding a platter full of little ceramic Sake cups surrounding the tokkuri (carafe), ready to be filled . The polite most and the traditional thing for me to do would have  been to motion her to fill the cup and then wait for all the glasses being served and for Mr. Wakkana to propose a toast.

As much as I love Japanese food, raw fish as in sushi and sashimi and all, I just haven’t acquired taste for the two of their most traditional beverages. Green tea and Sake. And what I really feel like having is and normally drink with the Japanese food is one of their great beers – fresh and chilled.  Either Kirin or Sapporo. But at the time, I am in my newly acquired taste for the crisp and cold Asahi Dry phase. I almost accept the cup of Sake, and then thinking to myself, that would mean an evening full of drowning the potent liquor that I didn’t care for in the first place, why not be honest and have a beer instead? After all, I am the guest of honor! I also know that by then I have accumulated fair amount of capital in the goodwill, perhaps I can risk just a little bit of it and dare order a glass of the thirst quenching beer instead.

So I ask the Geisha, whether they had any beer? For a moment, just for a split second, there is a palpable hush in the room. I have knowingly committed a faux pas. But then, without missing a beat, from the opposite side of the circle, Mr. Wakkana commands: ‘I’ll have a beer too!’ And guess what? Everybody in the room orders biru. Very Japanese thing to do. Deru kui wa utareru. Literally: Nail that sticks out, gets hammered  down!

It turns into a lovely evening. Along with the exquisite food, first the beer and than the Sake also flows. Rest of my stay goes well. The discussions, the agreements, the concrete plans and the time table for their execution of editorial changes and the promotion to follow.

But there still had to be a group meeting. Not the kind I remember from my earlier visit, cooped up in a windowless corporate meeting  room, sitting around with a group of editors at a long conference table with me alone on the opposite side with Kayo or Sasaki sitting next to me to interpret.

This time around, they have another surprise waiting for me. On Thursday afternoon, Sasaki and I board yet another bullet train and head for the resort town Hakone, known for its hot springs and picturesque Mount Fuji, about sixty miles (96 km) south of Tokyo. After having checked into yet another Ryokan, Sasaki escorts me to the inn’s spa featuring its own private hot tub. Sitting around are all the editors I have worked with through the week, naked as jaybirds and sipping on their Kirin beers, the bottles resting by them over the rim. The splashing in the tub and drowning of beer and an elaborate dinner that follows makes for a wonderful farewell. Mission accomplished, I am touched at finally being admitted to their inner circle.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, November 28, 2014

UNDERNEATH HER CLOTHES

You might think that the glamour photographers who shoot the nudes would be devoid of any such male fantasies. After all, what would remain to fantasize about when you see the most beautiful women in their most seductive attributes through your lens and watch them prancing around the studio in the nude, day in and day out?

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Categories Corporate Matters, Culture, Food & Wine, Japan, Social Customs, Travel

UNLOVED IN THE LANDS OF L’AMORE L’AMOUR

November 13, 2014 //
0

Haresh Shah

My Not So Intimate Encounters With Italy And France

bestfoodwinewomen

The first time I landed in the land of Ciao Bella and O sole mio, they dumped our baggage on the tarmac next to the aircraft, barely said sorry and told us we would have to carry it to the terminal ourselves – that the ground personnel had just decided to go on a strike. A bit different story when I first arrived at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. I am met at the airport by Gerrit Huig and the editorial assistant Ann Scharffenberger. They talk me into and I unwittingly agree to drive us through the city in our rented little Citroën. Though I had taken lessons in driving a car with manual transmission, this is my first time trying it out without an instructor sitting next to me. I haven’t yet gotten the knack of synchronizing the gears with the accelerator and the breaks. The car would shudder, stall and come to an abrupt stop in the middle of swirling rush hour traffic. Happens several times on the Arc de Triumph round-about. I get furious faces, obscene yelling  that I don’t understand, French version of the finger and then silly mocking giggles from my two passengers. But I somehow manage to survive both welcomes. Not exactly j’taime.  

Now years later, I wonder whether my first flights into Milan and Paris were symbolic of my not so close relationships with the romance lands. I can’t even remember how I was welcomed when I first flew into Rome years later. Quite in contrast to the recent Lufthansa ad proclaiming: Seduced by Paris. Inspired by Rome. And I can see why. What is there not to love about the countries with the history so rich, the languages so sweet and sexy, so languid and full of l’amore and l’amour. And yet, no matter how many trips I would end up taking to the either over the next two decades, they never warmed up to me. Likewise, as natural as I am with learning languages, as hard and long as I have tried to learn the Italian and the French, they both have eluded me.

And so have the people. Beyond the business, people just went home. Of course there were some  dinners and a bit of socializing now and then, but by and far when I think of the huge amount of time I spent in Milan, Paris and Rome, what I remember the most are the evenings when I often found myself sitting in elegant restaurants all by myself, slowly savoring their delicious Euro-Mediterranean cuisine, sipping on their exquisite wines and contemplating life. In Paris, when I finally managed to get Annick Geile, the editor-in-chief of the French edition out to lunch, while we have hardly set down at our outdoor table, she turns her wrist to look at her watch, and as if talking to herself, whispers: my days are divided in segments of twenty minutes. The message was as clear as can be. Though I wondered how many segments I was allotted, I totally ignored her utterance as if I didn’t even hear it.

While I still lived in Munich, I couldn’t wait to return back to my home town every weekend, catching that around eight o’clock flight back. How could you be in one of the three most alluring cities in the world and not want to spend weekends there? Especially if you have to be back first thing Monday morning, and you’re staying in some of the most exclusive hotels and every penny you spend is paid for?

Because, after you have seen all of the historical monuments; passed through Duomo umpteen times, admired the glamour of the Scala, climbed up and down the Spanish Steps, sprawled St. Peter’s Square in Vatican, have been in awe of the Coliseum and have crossed the river Tiber in Rome and paid your tribute to the Notre-Dame, smirked back at Mona Lisa in Louvre, looked down at the breathtaking view of the city of light from the top of the Eiffel Tower and gawked and wished at the shop windows along Champs Elysees and have sat in enough cafes and restaurants all by yourself, you are done with them. For who I am, I can barely begin to relate to the places without meaningful connection to their people.

Not that I didn’t try to connect, but then you learn that like love and friendship, people either click or they don’t. And the sad truth remains, we just didn’t.

Ironically, my most memorable weekend in Italy remains to be the rain drenched and bone cold long Easter weekend I spend with Rainer and Renate (Wörtmann)in their newly acquired Mill House in Tuscany’s Pontremoli. Not Rome, nor Milan.

My memories of Paris are not that dismal. Walking around by yourself in Paris is a different kind of experience. Even with no other human being walking next to you, the city itself accompanies you wherever you choose to walk, especially the left banks of Seine and along the cafes of Boulevard Saint Germain, conjuring up the lives of some of my favorite authors. Françoise Sagan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. And then Earnest Hemingway, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller.  Just thinking of them you could while away a snifter or two of excellent French Cognac or the cooling tall glasses of Pastis. They all come alive at every step in Paris. But in Rome and Milan? Nah! The only one I could think of is Alberto Moravia and his The Woman of Rome. Probably also because I have had a pleasure of shaking hands with him after a speech by him in the courthouse gardens of the University of Bombay.

In the backdrop of my non-relational acquaintance with Milan and Rome, the two cities I least looked forward returning to, it was then quite amazing for me to hear the following story almost twenty years after my last trip to Italy.

It was two years ago when Jan (Heemskerk) came on a visit to Chicago, we got together with some Playboy old-timers to reminisce the shared déjà vu.  Among them, Arthur Kretchmer, the recently retired editorial director of the US Playboy. As much as I respected the man the super editor, Arthur and I at the very best had mostly perfunctory professional relationship. But Jan and him got along really well and so we meet Arthur at his favorite restaurant The Indian Garden on Chicago’s Devon Avenue – a stretch of which is also named Gandhi Marg. With Arthur, it’s mostly him talking and you listening. And so it was during the lunch. Just his very presence intimidated me, creating an atmosphere of speak only when spoken to. So it were Jan and Arthur conversing with me pushed in the background. But somewhere along the line, I got to interject and now having acquired distance of time, I confessed, I was always intimidated by you.

‘You should have been.’ He answered and even though I would have liked to know precisely why, I left it at that. But then Arthur decides to smooth things over and asks me: Do you remember Mario in Rome?

Of course I do. In Italy, Playboy’s  trajectory included three different publishers. We started out with Rizzoli in Milano. Some years later, the magazine was moved to another legendary Italian publishing family, Mondadori. Or more precisely, to the independent Georgio Mondadori, who had split from his family to go solo. When that relationship didn’t quite work out, the magazine was licensed to Edizioni Lancio SPA, in Rome. Also family owned – albeit much smaller. Lancio specialized in photo novellas that were and probably still are extremely popular all over the world. Curiously, in India, those novellas were distributed by my uncle Jaisukh’s Wilco Publishing Company, which is where I had first started learning the ropes of the publishing, when a teenager.

Lancio proclaimed the re-launch to be Nuova Edizione Italiana. The new Playboy in Italy had a semblance of small editorial team under the mild mannered aging journalist, Alvaro Zerboni, but it was the company’s president Michele Mercurio who wielded the total control over the pages of the magazine. From the very first meeting it became clear to me that Lancio was not the right kind of publishers for our beloved bambino. The years that I was subjected to work with them, we constantly collided over what direction the edition should take. As diplomatic as I would try to be, we never came around to see eye to eye, thus creating a constant tension between Rome and Chicago. Being able to develop any sort of personal rapport never even came into the play.

Even so, I was accorded a certain protocol like status. Always being picked up from the airport and brought back in the company Mercedes Benz sedan by Mario. Picked up from the hotel and whenever needed brought back also in the Benz. Mario barely spoke any English, but I was trying hard to learn the Italian. So other than the editor in chief Alvaro Zerboni, my real human face of Rome was Mario, a very pleasant, ever smiling of the angular round face, very white of the skin and of a stocky built, he played the role that of the executive chauffer, a messenger and a sort of unofficial PR person for his employers. Mario for one, had high curiosity level and the fact that he spoke no English and I spoke only rudimentary Italian never inhibited him from asking me questions and manage somehow to wrangle out answers from me in my odd mélange of Italian, Spanish and English. He was interested in me. He was interested in the mystic of India. He was charming and sweet in the way Italians can be and somehow felt close to me. I liked him and he liked me. But that was the extent of it. The rule was that his schedule was determined by Michele’s executive secretary Christina Schlogel and had to have her command for him to ferry me around, he often took it upon himself to pick me up or bring me to the airport even over the weekends. For which he did get into the trouble with Christina for a couple of times. But he sloughed it off with a hearty laugh.

‘Of course I know Mario,’ I answered Arthur.

‘You know, he really liked you?’

‘Yah, probably he was the only one, other than of course poor Alvaro.’

To that Arthur begins to tell the following story. Which he would repeat a year and a half later in an email before answering my queries for the blog entry Perfectly Unbound.

But even before that, I have a little ‘playboy story’ for you. The 2nd or 3rd time that Patricia and I were in Italy in the early ’90’s — so ’93 (probably 1994) would be my guess — I met Don and Louisa Stuart as well as the Mercurio’s. For a reason I no longer remember, I ended up being driven somewhere in the Lancio Mercedes 300E by their driver.

I spoke a small amount of Italian. He spoke no English. As we rode along, he asked me some questions that I stumbled through. When he figured out that I was with Playboy, the next question he asked was if I knew Haresh Shah.

I said yes. He rattled off a bunch of Italian that I didn’t get, but ended on a partial sentence that I understood to the effect that Haresh Shah was a wonderful man.

I did my best to acknowledge your wonderfulness in Italian when he said, in hesitant English, “When Haresh come… the best food, the best wine, the best girls.” He waved his hand in the air, and didn’t say another word.

Good old Mario. He really did like me:). Who am I to argue with his perception of me? Thanks Mario. True or false, it even impressed Arthur and he remembered to tell it to me almost twenty years later.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Net Friday, November 21, 2014

THE NAIL THAT STUCK OUT

Deru kui wa utareru, literally means: The nail that sticks out, gets hammered down! This aptly defines the psychology of the group in the Japanese society. To be different is to be hammered down. In the society where individuality has no place, I knowingly decided to commit the ultimate social faux pas, at the risk of alienating my Japanese hosts.

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Categories Culture, Food & Wine, France, Italy, Loneliness, Memoire, Playboy, Profile, Women

THE STRANDED BRIDE

March 27, 2014 //
1

Lost In The Labyrinth

Haresh Shah

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I am at Rome’s Fiumicino International Airport, temporarily delayed because of the cancellation of Alitalia to Frankfurt, which is where I was to connect with Lufthansa’s overnight Frankfurt-Johannesburg flight. They have re-routed me on British Airways to London and then connecting there to onward journey to South Africa. Suddenly I have a couple of hours to kill. I avail myself of the first class lounge, leave my belongings there and venture outside to check out the renovated expanse of the airport. As I am walking down the glass walled passage bridging two wings of the terminal, I hear a timid female voice trailing me.

‘Uncle, uncle. Please! Please!’

I turn around and see that striding behind me hurriedly is a skinny young Indian woman – sort of pretty and petite, probably weighing no more than 90 pounds (41 kg.). In her early twenties, she is dressed in the traditional sari. She is almost limping, trying to keep balance between what seems like a heavy carry on bag on one shoulder and her purse dangling down from the other. Both of them are precariously close to slipping off her shoulders and thump on the ground. She is wearing a pair of red chappals – the light weight Indian sandals. I notice the orange-red outlining the bottom of her feet and intricate mehandi motif applied to the top of them. Her hands too are mehandi covered on both sides. Climbing up her hands almost up to her elbow are clanging multi-colored glass bangles intermingled with thin gold bracelets. Her forehead is daubed with overlapping multiple vermilion tikas, to which a few grains of rice still adhere.

I stop and respond ‘Yes?’

‘Help me uncle, please!’ she looks scared and disoriented, giving me a confused look. Sensing the question what? on my face, she somehow manages to put down her carry on and fishes out of her purse a crumpled little booklet of the old fashioned hand written on flimsy sheets of the paper flight ticket and hands it to me.

‘See, please see!!’ It becomes apparent to me that she doesn’t speak much of English, so I switch to Hindi. She seems to understand it a bit better, but not quite. From her darker skin and the features, I place her somewhere in the country in Maharashtra, outside of Mumbai. She is from Pune. I switch to my limited fluency of Marathi to which she responds with a sigh of relief. I glean from her itinerary that she boarded the Air India flight from Bombay bound for Rome, and from here she is to continue on to Montreal. I look at the departure time on the ticket and realize that her scheduled flight has long left. I quickly glance at the flipping departure board, it’s already close to five in the afternoon and there are no more north America bound flights scheduled that day. Actually, there aren’t many flights scheduled to go anywhere for a while. Other than a lone passenger walking past here and there, it’s just the two of us standing in the middle of the wide passage.

‘You know that your flight has already left?’

‘Has it? No, it can’t be.’ And then I see the expressions on her face change from disbelief to dismay to I don’t know what to do helplessness.

‘Uncle, uncle, please help me.’ She urges. Her face contorted on the verge of breaking down in a cry. She obviously has no clue as how to negotiate her situation and/or what to do next.

‘It’s alright. Don’t worry. We’ll figure something out.’ I try to comfort her. I still don’t know what though! But as we stand there for a couple of undecided and uncomfortable minutes, the whole scenario unfolds in the front of my eyes.

She is newly married. Probably plucked hastily from a bevy of eligible suitable young candidates by a newly graduated and a year or so in his well paying job as an engineer in one of the western countries. The usual routine would be: a brilliant young man graduates from prestigious school in India, enrolls and is admitted for the post-graduate studies abroad, most probably in America. Alternately in England, Germany or Canada. Earns his Master’s degree, probably with honors and is offered a job. It takes him a year or two to feel settled, acquire his Green Card or an equivalent thereof from the respective country, and has saved up enough money to take a month long trip back home in quest of finding a mate. His family has lined up several prospective brides from other compatible families for him to see and to consider.

I imagine him making rounds of their homes in company of a close friend and couple of his own family members. I imagine one of them being the home of the young woman, standing in front of me, whose name I know from her ticket is Kajal. Sitting in her parent’s living room is the man she may or may not marry, depending on how they like each other, and if from a conservative family, whether or not their astrological charts concur.

Even though it’s a hundred degrees outside, he is dressed up in his suit and a tie. His brother and his friend accompanying him not so. Only slight comfort from the heat comes from the ceiling fan whirring up above. They are surrounded by the male members of the girl’s family, involved in animated chit-chat about the way of living between the east and the west. The young man, let’s call him Manoj, is, if not exactly nervous, is a bit fidgety. After all, this is one of the most important moments of his life that would define the rest of it.

Waiting in the inner room and in the kitchen are the females of her family. Kajal is dolled up in her best sari and the glittery jewelry like a Bollywood starlet. When an appropriate amount of time has passed, as if on a stage managed prompt, she walks slowly towards the living room with other women following. Her hands slightly shake as she tries to balance a snack tray with cups of tea already poured in, and little dishes and bowls filled with Monaco crackers, Glucose biscuits, home made chivda and sev, penda and other sweetmeats bought from the best Punjabi halwai.

Anxious, her heart is filled with the fear of unknown and yet she feels incredibly excited as she walks across the hall and places the tray on a low table next to the man who could become her husband. Her head is partially covered by the end of her sari. Her eyes are lowered. She raises them as discreetly as she could to get a closer look at the young man she has already seen photos of and glanced at from the slight opening of the door from the inner room. He is allowed to be a bit more obvious in raising his eyes and taking her face in and whatever else he is able to discern of the rest of her torso covered by her sari.

Whatever the outcome, this has got to be one of the most thrilling moments of their lives. They may choose to meet once again and sit face-to-face in a café for small talk, mostly accompanied by a friend or two, who may discreetly excuse themselves for a short while, giving the two some private moments.

Let’s suppose that everything goes well and both families pop a rock of sugar in their mouths to celebrate forging of this new lifelong union. Now there are only a couple of weeks left for Manoj to hurry through the rest. First of all, to get married. As importantly, to apply for the papers for now his wife to come and join him in Canada. Both of the families switch to the whirlwind gears. The wedding is arranged, hundreds of friends and relatives have blessed the couple. The days filled with lots of laughters and happiness. And then they see him off Mumbai’s Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport. His face smeared with vermilion, flower garlands hanging around his neck and a coconut in his hands, which he must discard before landing at his destination. Go back to his job and wait for the immigration formalities to clear and wait for his bride to join him.

‘Come with me and let’s see what we can do.’ I say and pick up her shoulder bag and return to the lounge with Kajal in tow. The receptionist is hesitant to allow her in but seeing that I am Lufthansa’s gold status Senator, she reluctantly allows me to bring her in as my guest. Settling her on a couch and getting her some chips, nuts and Coke, I let her tell her story.

I have guessed it right. She is indeed a newly married bride on her way to join her husband in Montreal where he works for a large multinational corporation as one of its engineers. She has landed in Rome several hours earlier and has managed to get lost in that vast labyrinth of an international airport. It is because of her limited knowledge of English and sheer timidity – afraid to ask anybody and confused about the time difference and finding herself in an environment totally alien to her, she is totally disoriented. Scared, she looks helpless like a wounded bird fallen to the ground, its wings fluttering, but disabled, not able to rise even an inch off from where it has fallen. Soon as she sees me walk past, a face familiar to her and someone recognizably from her country, does she dare open her mouth. In the meanwhile, not realizing how much time has elapsed and that the plane that would take her to her husband has already left without her.

When I explain all this to the receptionist, she softens and even tries to see if there is any way she could help her get on her way.

‘I’m afraid nothing today. The best option for her is to spend overnight in Rome and catch the same Air Canada flight tomorrow afternoon.’ Easier said then done. Whereas she has failed to even make it on her own from one gate to another within the confines of an airport, how would this woman ever manage to go outside, find a hotel, stay there by herself and come back tomorrow? To further complicate the matter, even if it were manageable with some help, that’s not an option for her. She has no Italian visa to even venture out of the airport.

It takes me back to that chilly late August early morning when I was on my way to London to begin my studies, when the Swiss immigration officer yanks me off the train in Basel. Basel is uniquely complicated tri-border town where Switzerland, France and Germany meet. I have arrived on a German train that slides along the German platform. I will connect to London train from the platform that is in France. To get there, I must walk through the Swiss platform, for which I do not have a visa. But that’s yet another story. Only the receptionist notices my momentarily frozen face.

Her gaze pointed at me, she continues: ‘I don’t know if they would let her stay here overnight. They probably shut down the airport after the arrival and the departure of the last flights.’ I tell Kajal all of that. She is beside herself and understandably so, because where is she going to go? In the meanwhile the time is ticking and soon I should be walking to the gate to make my flight to London.

‘Don’t leave me here by myself uncle. Please, please.’ Her pleas are heart breaking and as torn as I am I really don’t know what else to do.

‘I doubt it, but perhaps someone from Air India or Air Canada is still around the terminal. After all, she is their passenger!’ I hear receptionist say. When she notices the hopelessness on my face, she taps on her computer. ‘You still have thirty five minutes.’

So I take Kajal practically by the hand. ‘Let’s go see if we can find someone.’ The banks of the service counters that are within the international departure areas are all absolutely empty and deserted. No one in sight. Won’t hurt to try the other wing. So I walk with her through the passage where she had first stopped me. We cross the passage, and I notice a lone young man, curly black hair, chiseled dark face. An Indian!! He is going some place, his gait is harried and swift.

‘Excuse me!’ I scream. I have managed to stop him in his tracks. He turns around to look at us. His breast tag identifies him as an Air India personnel. He rushes towards us.

‘Here you’re. Kajal Kamat. We’ve been looking for you for hours now!’ I don’t even wonder how he recognizes her right away. Who else could she be? When he looks at me, I give him a quick rundown on how she happened to be with me.

‘They waited for her and even delayed the flight for about fifteen minutes calling her several times on the PA system.’ But then he realizes that she couldn’t have understood a word of it. As lost and distracted as she is; she couldn’t have recognized even the sound of her own name. Seeing that I am looking at my watch; ‘You go ahead sir. We don’t want you to miss your flight as well. Thanks for helping her. I’ll take her from here.’ Before darting out, I put my hands over Kajal’s shoulders and wish her luck. She doesn’t say thank you, instead she brings her palms together and bows her head.

‘Bless me please, uncle.’

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, April 4, 2014

QUICK CASH

During my hiatus in Santa Barbara, I meet up with Playboy Germany’s first editor-in-chief Raimund Le Viseur in Los Angeles. He is there following the promotional trail of then the First Lady, Betty Ford and wants to get together one evening. He is accompanied by the photographers from the news agencies Sygma and UPI. We together go out looking for the Stars.

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Categories Culture, India, Love Story, Marriage, Memoire, Travel, Women

AN INDIAN AMONGST THE INDIANS

March 20, 2014 //
0

Still A Damn Indian? Call Me At The Bank

Haresh Shah

pequot

Even though there is an alternative theory about how and why the native Americans came to be called Indians – which is: Christopher Columbus  having observed how ritualistic and religious the natives were of the new land he had stumbled upon, he defined them as the people of In Dios – In God, smoothly transitioned into Indians. But I still like the popular theory of Columbus believing that they had landed in India and therefore… Whatever! Can’t help but feel a certain amount of affinity, precisely because both of us being called Indians.

The night Jan (Heemskerk) and I spent at Fetzer Valley Oaks Food and Wine Guesthouse, we walk across the street to check out  Pomo Indian owned and operated  – Shodakai Coyote Valley Casino. It looked like an old shack. It wasn’t all that big and it mainly offered slot machines and some black jack tables. The hall was dimly lit and the trolleys serving free  soft drinks passed by the customers every so often.  No alcohol served on the premises.  The on site guard-PR-spokesperson Philip told us that alcoholism was  rampant among the Indians on the reservations. Philip talked to us about their Pomo tribe and the future plans for the  expansion.  The glow and the wonderment on his face was undeniable, probably at the thought of what good fortune their lot had been bestowed upon. Jan immediately assigns me to do a story for the Dutch edition of Playboy of what was then the recent phenomena of popping up of the casinos large and small across the American continent on what used to be the Indian reservations.

●●●

‘You know, this used to be a one horse town in the middle of nowhere.’  Talking to me is Terri, a Pai Gow Poker dealer at Foxwood Resorts and Casino, perched atop  Mashantucket, the “much-wooded land” in Ledyard, Connecticut.  From the looks of  Terri’s face, she seems to have traveled back in time, perhaps picturing how desolate the landscape looked just a few years earlier.  Even though Terri’s table is temporarily abandoned for it having become too “hot,” as I look around, rest of the place is bustling. Hundreds of gaming tables across the huge expanse are all occupied.  I feel the din of the noise and the hush of the silence and suspense, all at the same time.  I observe the stern faces of the dealers and the flurry of activities of the pit supervisors in the background. I watch  the gamblers pondering, getting excited, and plain concentrating on their next moves so much so that most of them don’t even seem to notice the coming and going of the provocatively dressed cocktail waitresses in their buckskin short dresses bunched together at their waists by wide belts, and looking like wild treats with their Indian headbands and feathers in their hair.

When you approach the sign RESERVATION, on Rural route 2, what suddenly materializes in front of your eyes are the shining pagoda-like bottle-green rooftops dotted like centuries old castles along the European highways.  In not too distant a past, Mashantucket was deserted  of all human habitat and if not for two elderly half-sisters, Elizabeth George Plouffe and Martha Langevin Ellal having stayed put,  the state would have seized the land to build a park.

The same fate would have been awaited the bucolic corn fields of Wisconsin and Minnesota instead of the now imposing presence of their Mille Lacs, Hinckley and Ho-Chunk casinos. Once desolate country roads surrounding the Indian reservations, now bring to their huge parking lots of the glittery casinos, a constant stream of cars and busses unloading from just a few to hundreds of people in front of the Hole in the Wall Casino Hotel in Danbury, Wisconsin and Shodakai Coyote Valley Casino in Mendocino County in California, to forty five-thousand people per day in front of Foxwood Resort Casino in Connecticut.

They all come to try their hands at the loud clattering of the slot machines, whisper at the black jack tables, experience suspense of the roulette wheels, feel the exhilaration of the rolling dice on the Craps Tables and watch the unfolding of the numbers on the bingo boards.  Many come just to rest and relax, eat some of the best food and be a spectator of the grand shows featuring great names such as Frank Sinatra, Luciano Pavarotti, Tom Jones, Crystal Gayle, Loretta Lynn and Willy Nelson.

Though the nighttime brings out some men dressed in their evening best and women in their shiniest, tight fitting, low-cut sequined dresses showing off their perfumed cleavages, the most everyone is dressed in his or her street clothes.  While one may still notice intrigue and suspense on the faces of the gamblers occupying the game tables, the real excitement reigns supreme in the slot machines parlor.  It is in one of them that I witness a curly white haired grandma hitting a jackpot and suddenly the bells going off with the loud piercing wails, the crown light begin to twirl its rainbow and with the thunderous sound, the quarters gushing out of the mouth of the machine like torrential rain.  The grandma dressed in her bright red double-knit pantsuit, getting up from her stool, with her mouth wide open in astonishment, her granddaughter clinging to her and both of them jumping up and down in exhilaration is the sight to behold.  For a few precious moments, the entire parlor freezes to a standstill. The grandma has just proven that winning a jackpot is not just a dream.

What has changed the landscape of the American rural country life is the 1988 passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, commonly  referred to as IGRA.  It allows the native American tribes to offer versions of gambling that are not specifically prohibited in other parts of the state. Through IGRA, the United States Supreme Court recognizes Indian reservations as sovereign nations in that the Indian tribes have the right to make their own laws and be governed by them.

The astounding success of the Indian casinos has not only benefitted the native Americans, but the community at large. For a little over 300 Pequot tribe members that collectively own the Foxwood, it employs 10,000 people.  Of 2,400 jobs at Mille Lacs, 80% are held by non-Indians, majority of them by the “white man.”

‘Most of us are so thankful for the casino.  I had just lost my job and there was no other place to go.  I came here with no experience.  They sent me to school to become a dealer and paid for my education. Two months later I started at $ 30,000 (a year). Where else can you make that kind of money with no experience?  The casino also pays for all  medical expenses, including free medication, which they even home deliver if I am unable to go to the pharmacy’, continues Terri, the Pai Gow Poker dealer – a white woman.

The next day, I broach the subject with Richard Tesler, the casino manager, ‘They have a tribal thinking in which their employees become a part of the Indian family.’

Back at my hotel Norwich Inn & Spa, I am talking to Dawn, a waitress. ‘My sister is not happy about more traffic and crowding in  schools because of the casino, but most of us are thankful that they (Indians) are here.  If not for the casino, we wouldn’t still be here.  This hotel was under bankruptcy and would have closed.’

With that kind of success comes dissent. Even though the Nevada gaming industry supported the passage of IGRA, the phenomenal success of the Indian gaming business has prompted others to protest the deregulation of casinos that favor the American Indians.  Among the protesters is Donald Trump, the owner of three casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, who could face  stiff competition from a New Jersey tribe in the process of planning a casino in the region.

Though IGRA opened up a window of opportunity for the native American tribes, the ultimate success of their enterprises has come from the vision, business acumen and sheer hard work of everyone involved.  Even so, the success has come so sudden, it is as though they have hit a jackpot.  Within a few short years, Joey Carter, the PR director at Foxwood, has gone from cutting wood for five dollars an hour to being one of the owners of the largest grossing casino in the nation.

About a month later, I find myself sitting around the committee members of Ho-Chunk Casinos in Wisconsin. At the end of the day, what does this all mean to the native Americans? I ask.

‘For me personally, our success has gotten us the attention  we were deprived of.  It has given us the tool that white folks understand, namely, money and greed. Now we can capitalize on the same greed that we have learned from them,’ answers Ron Decoralt, of the Ho-Chunk nation’s Planning and Economic Development Committee.

Do you ever get a feeling that now you can afford to strike back at the white man for all the horrible things he has done to the native Americans? I shoot a pointed question.

‘For me, this is not a vendetta.’ Responds another committee member, Lorenzo Funmaker, chairman of the committee and a professional carpenter. ‘We owned all this land around here.  A lot of atrocities and thieving were committed in taking away what is rightfully ours.’

‘The money gives us means to bring back our religion, language and culture. Way back, the white man stopped us from speaking our language. Out went our history and civilization which was preserved and rooted in the oral tradition. White people are hardly civilized. We Indians are very highly assimilated. No matter what, I am still a damn Indian,’ says Amos Kingsley – a construction worker.

While most of the fifteen or so committee members are trying to restrain their resentment to the white man, a twenty-one year old Shawnee Hunt is blunt in his assessment in what this new found success can do for them. ‘The casino money empowers us in other ways.  It helps us get education.  As I am growing up, I realize that first and foremost I am a native American living in the white man’s world. I live in the white community and go to the white man’s school and listen to the older kids always berating how dumb the Indians are.’

Like Shawnee in Wisconsin, several hundred miles east of them, their brothers in Connecticut are as blunt.  ‘Success of the tribe as a whole allows the tribe to be re-born.  The tribe was broken up by the Dutch and the English in 1634.  Over the next centuries, it was assumed that the Pequots no longer existed.  To bring back whatever remained of the tribe, an economic base had to be formed. Thanks to the vision and efforts of our tribal chairman Skip (Richard) Hayward, we have been able to do just that.  It has allowed us to raise our heads a little bit.’  Talking to me is John Holder, director of project development for the ever expanding Foxwood.

‘You know, I don’t feel exactly like we are striking back.  But suddenly, people don’t look at me as the person I once was.  Now they look at me as the same person with money.  One of my close friends, a white man, continuously asks me, How much money do you make? And the good friends that we were, I would tell him. Over a period of time, he began to resent the amount of money I make.  Suddenly you don’t know who your friends are.’

‘You bet they resent us dark folks making all that money,’ Joey Carter tells it as it is, ‘behind our backs, they still call us all sorts of names.  But my attitude is, you can call me what you want, but call me at the bank.’

‘I make it a point to always work on Columbus day,’ continues Joey as a slight smile  crosses his lips.  As much as I feel that he does this in defiance to the white man as symbolized by Columbus, I feel that there is deeper significance to his non-acknowledgement of the very existence of Columbus, whose arrival on the American continent must mean to him and the native Americans as the beginning of them being pushed out of their way of life.

Whatever the case, they have learned well from their experience with the white man.  The French were the first ones to scalp.  The Indians imitated and perfected the art of scalping.  Likewise, the Ho-Chunks were first introduced to gambling, also by the French as early as 1634, in what was then known as the three beans game. And see now what they have done with that knowledge!

There are still people who are upset by this sudden resurgence of the damn Indians.  Most of them however, are happily clanging away at their slot machines, and the ones who are not, are quite happy for them.  ‘Good for them!  After hundreds of years of oppression from us, they deserve it,’ says my friend Beth (Jones). The owner at the local Midas muffler shop, Joe Simchak, sums it up pragmatically, ‘We had it a long time coming.’

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, March 28, 2014

THE STRANDED BRIDE

Just married in India. On her way to the west to meet up with her husband and start her new life. Miss her connecting flight in Rome. Totally lost. Run into me.

Tags , ,
Categories American Indians, Culture, Gaming, Memoire

THE EARTHY AZTEC BEAUTY

February 20, 2014 //
0

The Domestic Arrangements South Of The Border

Haresh Shah

aztecqueen

I met Pepe Morales during a Playmate promotional jaunt in Acapulco. Our publishers have hired Pepe to cover the event – a young Mexican photographer and socialite of some renown . He seems to know everyone we run into and is greeted with the warmest abrazoz and pats on the back, while he bumbles around following the Playmates and documenting the weekend, with me taking additional photos whenever I am able to sneak some shots without neglecting my duties that of the Playboy executive on site.

Pepe and I hit it off right away. When back in Mexico City, we meet one evening for dinner. We have fat juicy steak dinners at Barbas Negras during which we drown three bottles of Los Reyes. Feeling absolutely no pain, Pepe asks:

‘What would you like to do now?’

‘I don’t know. This is your town. Maybe go cunt chasing?’

‘Why not? Let’s just get out of here and together we’ll paint the town red,’ he proclaims.

So we get into his fire red Mach 1 and end up at the cozy Las Nueves. Unfortunately for us, since Pepe’s last visit there, it has now turned into a trendy gay hangout. We have a drink or two there and then make our exit.

‘I know where we can go. To your casa amarilla.’ So we end up at the lobby bar of Camino Real. This gives us time to simmer. As in Acapulco, Pepe seems to know everyone and everyone seems to know him. People would stop by, couples, men, women – especially women and they go through their Mexican tango of hugging, patting the back and then parting with promises to meet up soon again. At the end of which, two of his female acquaintances walk up with exuberant Hola Pepito. He invites them to join us. Introduces me and builds me up as el hombre de Playboy. Curiously, it’s a pair of a blonde and a brunette. Both good looking. Gives me a feeling of being society girls about town. Quite friendly. But they speak only perfunctory English. We have a couple of drinks with them and then Pepe proposes.

‘How if we go to my place and party?’

The girls try a bit hard to get, but then after some prodding from Pepe, seconded by me, we all pile into his compact sports car, somehow managing to squeeze ourselves in. Pepe and Lucia in the front and me and Tere  in the back.

●●●

On that Saturday, Pepe has invited me to his place for breakfast. He feels it’s unpardonable that as long as I have been coming to Mexico, nobody has yet gotten around to take me to the Pyramids. Why don’t you come over to my place on Saturday, we’ll have a nice breakfast and then drive out to the Pyramids?

Pepe’s is a spacious penthouse apartment near the Chapultepec Park in the center of Mexico City. Cascades of light pours in through the skylights illuminating dozens of artworks and the blown up photographs that adore the walls. Some of the photographs with blurred images of the billowing skirts of the folk dancers remind me of Holi festival in India. He’s not only a photographer but also a serious artist and all that hangs on the walls is his own work. The place looks larger than I remember it from a couple of nights ago. I think it contains three, if not four bedrooms. Large kitchen and the dining room. Even though some of the furnishings has that colorful feeling of Mexico, most of it is the modern functional. It feels warm and comfortable.

When I arrive, I am greeted by a tall, angular faced, as if lifted from a cubist art, long necked and sharp penetrating dark eyed woman standing on the other side of the threshold. She doesn’t say anything, but silently welcomes me with a toss of her head. Her long and curly hair following the motion of her neck.

‘Hola Haresh. Bien venido mi amigo a tu casa en Mexico.’  Pepe rushes towards me, suddenly throwing the woman in the background with a fuerte abrazo, and the pat on the back he takes me by the arm and leads me to the table. Such exuberance! But this is Mexico and I am getting used to it.

The table is laid out just so. The plates glowing with vibrant colors are nestled into the larger shiny copper plates that serve as placemats. The clothes napkins are bright burgundy. A jar sweating of freshly squeezed orange juice awaits. The pungent aroma of strong Mexican coffee permeates the air. Engulfed in Pepe’s exuberance and displayed hospitality, for a moment I even forget about the pretty young woman.

I am treated to a sumptuous Mexican breakfast consisting of fresh papayas and mangoes, huevos rancheros with home made red and green salsas, frijoles, chorizzo, piping hot tortillas and even chiles toreados – the pan fried hot jalapeño peppers with fresh scallions. The relish my Latin Valentine Patricia had introduced me to and Pepe remembered me telling him how very much I loved it. And of course the strong café Mexicano served so attentively and gracefully by his maid Clarissa. For every gracias I utter, she rewards me with de nada and with the sweetest little smile and a sparkle in her eyes. At every compliment, I feel that extra hump in her short walk between the kitchen and the dining room as I watch her long curly hair tossing up above small of her back and caressing her shoulders. She looks very young, like in her late teens the most. But even in her innocence, I sense a certain worldliness on her face and in her eyes. Would certainly qualify to be a Playmate. Even in her homely dress covered with an overall, her figure and her beauty excel.

Seeing that I am eying her, should we take her along? Asks Pepe.

‘Sure. Why not?’

‘Let’s do it. It would do her good to get out of the house. Why don’t you ask her?’

‘Me?’

“Si. Then she wouldn’t feel pressured!’

‘No quires ir con nosotros?’ I ask

‘A donde?’        

‘A los Pirámides.’

‘Puess…,’ she says and then hesitates a bit and turns her face to Pepe.

‘Puedes, si quires, Venn!’ She turns around to face me.

‘Entonces si. Me gustaria mucho. Gracias.’

When we’re done and she has cleared the table, Pepe tells her to leave the dishes alone and go and change.

Transformed, a gorgeous young woman emerges from the back room. She is dressed in a simple long white cotton dress. It’s trimmed with wide bands of light grey lace around the neck and the waist and the hem, practically touching the floor, a wide white sash tied in a bow at her back billowing in the air. A simple silver hoop choker with a dangling little ball adores her neck. Her sculpted face with high cheek bones and the shoulders pointed proudly upwards, she stands tall on her plain white platform shoes. Her slightly slanted eyes enhanced with the kohl outline, she wears only a light touch of red lipstick on her pert lips quivering under her dainty little nose.

It seems Pepe too is in awe of her sudden transformation from a simple maid serving us humbly a while ago into a femme fatal. Something he probably haven’t yet had a chance to see. And when placed in front of the Pyramids, neither Pepe, nor I could ignore her. Between us two, we turn Clarissa into the most sought after photo model. She doesn’t say much, except swirl and move as we request, flash shy smiles as if to herself and in her face I see her savoring what must have been a unique moment of her young life. To be appreciated for her own natural beauty and in an environment which undoubtedly is hers. She doesn’t look Spanish and or Indian or a mulatta, the mixture of the two. Her face wears the looks and the pride of an Aztec Princess reincarnate, standing comfortably in front of the Pyramids and the ruins of the ancient Aztec built city of Tenochtitlan, as if she owns them.

●●●

On our way back, Pepe drops off Clarissa before taking me back to my hotel. We are in contemplative mood. We avoid the bustles of the lobby bar and settle ourselves over beers in their by now subdued cantina.

‘She is pretty!’ I say reflexively.

‘Who, Clarissa?’

‘Who else?’

‘You’re right. She is prettier than I ever thought she was.’ And then we are quiet. I see a certain smile cross his face, as if trying to contain a private joke.

‘What?’

‘I guess, I picked her right.’

‘Did you interview many of them?’

‘No, that’s not how we do things around here in Mexico. One weekend, I just drove out to the country bazar, she was standing there up above on cliff under the tree with others, and I picked her.’

‘You mean like from a line up?’

‘Not exactly. But sort of. They are offered for the domestic work, mostly by their parents.’

‘You mean like slaves?’

‘Noooooo mi amigo. Just that they are poor in the backlands and one way for them to make some money is to work in the city. You negotiate with their parents and agree upon the monthly salary and other conditions. But she is free to leave whenever she wants to.’

Having grown up in India in a relatively affluent family, domestic help is not that unusual to me. But all our servants came from little villages to Bombay on their own, looking for jobs. They may have known someone else from their village in the city and then its just a word of mouth. What Pepe tells me is a bit different. Seeing me lost in my unspoken thoughts, he continues.

‘I pay all her expenses. She has every Sunday off and has her own living quarters in the back of my apartment.’

‘How does that work? A young pretty woman living under the same roof?’

‘You’re right. There is always that possibility. And the temptation. As you see, she is very pretty, you know?’ I give him a sideway look.

‘Okay. I could take advantage of her if I wanted to, and get away with it without even risking losing her. But your friend here is a romantic type. I had to pursue her, and pursue her long.’

I don’t interrupt.

‘She always resisted my advances. And I respected her for that. And then one evening, without any warning, she just opened up to me, like a flower. Like an orchid!!’ I can see on Pepe’s face what he must be seeing, something I could just imagine.

‘Doesn’t that put a damper on your social life with other women?’

‘Not at all. At the end of the day, she realizes, and I make sure she knows that the first and the foremost she is my maid.’

‘Yes, but we’re now talking matters of the heart. How does she feel about when we showed up in the middle of the night with the two women a couple of days go? Or was she off that night?’

‘No she was very much there, and she didn’t like it. In fact she is quite crossed with me. Thanks for being so kind to her and making her feel special. I think she is now softened a bit and I’m sure we’ll make up.’

Just a few hours drive from Santa Barbara and you’re in Mexico. What a different world? I think.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, February 28, 2014

UNDETERMINED

Both you and I will have to wait and see which entry in works makes its way up to the top. Whichever it turns out to be, promises to be good. Stay tuned.

 

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories Artist, Culture, Friendship, Mexico, Profile

LOVE, LIES AND THE LATIN LOVERS

January 30, 2014 //
1

Haresh Shah 

How Can You Not Fall In Love With Them?

parachute

‘And now ladies and gentlemen, we are approaching the home of one of the most colorful characters of our country: Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, the adventurer and the author of the Republic of Venice and the autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (Story of  My Life), which is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century. But as many of you certainly know, he is mostly known as the great lover of women. Yes, the great lover and the great liar.’ We are on a gondola site seeing tour navigating through the narrow canals of Venice. On our right is a long curving three story flaming rust colored brick building with elaborate balconies protruding out of the walls and huge windows overlooking the the canals down below.

I am crisscrossing Europe with my friend Ranjan from Bombay, and of the cities in Europe we have seen so far, Venice certainly takes us to a dreamland like no other. I notice a self-congratulating chuckle on the face of the gondolier for having said something so clever as to pair the great lovers with the great liars. Perhaps more true of the Latin lovers than the others. The reputation they must have earned from the speed with which they move forward, totally infatuated in pursuit of the objects of their desire.

My friend Irene in Chicago is head over heels in love with Bruno – a  handsome singer guitarist playing at a Lincoln Park venue around the corner from her apartment.  He is good looking for sure, soft spoken, charming and a smooth operator. Irene believes in whatever lies he tells and the promises he makes. And before any of us realizes, Bruno has moved in with her. We actually like Bruno and are even charmed by him. But we are protective of Irene. She is particularly vulnerable and we don’t want her once again to be hurt. We suspect all along and tell Irene that he is probably happily married with kids back in Mexico. But something as trivial as that never stopped Irene from her amorous escapades. And then he is gone. As we had suspected, before departing, Bruno confesses to Irene that he indeed has a family in Mexico and is in Chicago to  make a few fast bucks. Whether Irene expected him to leave his family and stay with her, I don’t know. But she is devastated nevertheless. Like others before Bruno, Irene manages to move on with time. Though I know, he was for her more than just a fling.

Fortunately, in most cases, it’s just that. A fling. Short and sweet. Just like one of the two American Playmates I had invited to come to Mexico some years earlier to help us promote the local edition. We are in Acapulco and have an afternoon off.  We linger at the beach front bar restaurant long after lunch. While one of them decides to waddle through the sand with a juicy paperback in her hands and stretches out on her stomach, baking under the sun, the other decides to be adventurous and signs up for parachute jumping. So off she goes with an instructor. Young, svelte, gleaming bronze tan and of the body toned like an iron statue – Roberto is certainly handsome. He speaks reasonably good English and is probably tickle pinked that he gets to help this American beauty – a Playmate, no less. He is vivacious and charming as he buckles her up and snaps in the parachute. Gives a little push on the small of her back, she taps her feet on the sandy ground and struts towards the approaching waves. The parachute unfurls and she is airborne. Roberto shades his eyes and watches her pulled up and away.

By the time she comes back down on the earth, she is exhilarated and giggly. Roberto unsnaps her and helps her undo her gear. Free of constraints, he gives her a congratulatory hug and like a true galan, escorts her back to us. All of these couldn’t have taken more than total of ten minutes. But for a true Latin lover, that’s more than enough time to hook his prey. I can just imagine his squeezing in hola guapa, que bonita eres and don’t you want to have a drink with me? along with other phrases of endearments that Latin languages are so rich with and come natural to them. How can you even begin to compete with te amo and eres mi corazon, or ma chérie amour and j’taime in French or ciao bella and bellissima in Italian?  In comparison, you’re beautiful, i love you and ich liebe dich sound absolutely hollow.

The next morning, we meet again at the same table and are waiting for the Playmate to join us for breakfast. As punctual as she normally is, it seems a bit strange that she isn’t there already. She is about half an hour late when we see her making her way towards us, swinging on the arm of, who else? Roberto. They part with a quick peck on cheeks and as she approaches us and as if in answer to the big question mark on our faces, she is all smiles. No need for her to elaborate. Her smile and how radiant she looks tells us all. We all smile back the knowing smiles. Thinking: Good for her. Knowing well that it’s just a passing fling and there is nothing for us to worry about. And so it was. Some months later she is married to a good American boy back home.

So when during the Mexico World Cup shoot in Puerto Vallarta, Jan (Heemskerk) and Michaela (Probst) are stood up by Alfonso, because he was busy with our Pat (Tomlinson), none of us actually gives it a second thought and we immediately write it off as a vacation fling south of the border. This was the first week of March. We all return home towards the end of the week. Pat and some others may have stayed over the weekend before coming back. But little did we know, from there on, things must have progressed at the speed of a bullet train.

Barely three weeks later, Pat stops me in the corridor and hesitantly but happily tells me that she was getting married that weekend, on the Easter Saturday on the 29th. The groom to be? Alfonso! I don’t know whether it’s the shock that I feel, but it certainly jolts me a bit. It makes me feel quite uneasy. Alfonso was brought in by our Mexican publisher to help us with logistics of our photo production but was not a part of the regular staff. I didn’t know much about him, if anything. Handsome, tall, dark hair, tanned skin and a fast talker. I didn’t really think much of him, also because as charming and affirmative as he was with his always positive si como no! attitude, things that he would promise or said he would take care of, he didn’t or didn’t quite.

The speed and urgency with which it’s planned feels like a shot gun wedding. It’s not going to be in a church or anything. It is to take place at her sister’s home in the north western suburb of Barrington. I am not sure whether it would be her sister or someone else would perform the ceremony. And then there would be small toast to the newly weds followed by dinner at home.

Even though Pat has worked with me on several projects over a period of years, we are not exactly close enough for her to invite me to her wedding. ‘I know what you might be thinking. But it all happened so fast. I never thought I could fall in love at first sight, you know! We’re both very happy.’ She pauses and continues, ‘It’s just my immediate family. I would love it if you and Carolyn could come. To have someone who was there when I met Alfonso.  It would mean a lot to me for you to be a part of it.’

When Carolyn and I arrive at her sister’s home the night of the wedding, there is a distinct cloud of doom covering everyone’s face. I say perfunctory hola to Alfonso, who looks petrified and distressed. The place itself looks helter-skelter as if a bunch of rambunctious kids having turned it upside down hunting for the hidden Easter eggs. Everyone frantically looking for the missing wedding band Alfonso has brought along to slip on his bride’s ring finger during the ceremony. He swears to have carefully tucked it away into a small pocket of his carry on duffle bag. Could it have fallen down and rolled away somewhere in the house as he unpacked? It was also likely that it fell off when the customs officer opened it to inspect its contents? The room is filled with the cacophony of multiple possibilities on the fate of the dainty little wheel of the precious jewelry meant to bind them for life for the better and the worst. Pat is besides herself and is on the verge of breaking down with a cry. Before things get any gloomier, someone suggests that we should just go ahead with the wedding ceremony anyways, the ring’s got to be somewhere around, and must show up sooner or later. Rest of the evening is blurred in my memory.

Fast forward to me running into Pat once again in the corridor of our offices. That marriage didn’t last too long and as it turns out, Alfonso was already married in Mexico and there was never a ring.

Something to be said about the wisdom of the Venetian gondolier having described the great lover Casanova to be also a great liar.

The good news is: Whatever suffering Pat may have endured, she flashes a pragmatic smile and tells me that since then she has found herself a true soul mate and is now happily married.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, February 7, 2014

PORK, DUMPLINGS AND CABBAGE

I was one of the early ones to enter the countries of the former Eastern European countries almost as soon as the Iron Curtain was lifted and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first three editions to be launched in the region were Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. In the early years, my predicament always remained, what to eat?

Tags , , , , , , ,
Categories Culture, Mexico, Playmates, Romance

WHO’S EVER SEEN GOD?

January 23, 2014 //
1

Body And Soul Union

Haresh Shah

cuernavaca

Actually our destination this Sunday is Las Mañanitas, more in line with an all day weekend outing for Playboy executives to spend a leisurely afternoon in the lush gardens of one of the most beautiful hotels and restaurants in the world. Enjoy sumptuous Mexican delicacies washed down with Tequila Sunrises and Daiquiris. Only a short half an hour drive from Mexico City, the town of Cuernavaca is heralded the City of Eternal Spring by the geographer, naturalist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, is a perfect escape from the dense clouds of pollution, swarms of crowds and the constant dint of noise of Mexico City. It is the pride and joy not only of the town of Cuernavaca, but of the entire country. We sit under the open sky and under the cooling shades of the trees and sip on our psychedelic tropical drinks. We are surrounded by  the tall royal birds among them the proud peacocks gracefully prancing up and down with their iridescent tails spread out into magnificent round throne like fans. Prancing along are other long necked beautiful birds swaying and strolling while jumping monkeys frolic up and down the tree branches. It feels like being in paradise, the garden of Eden as one would picture it. The only other time I would come upon such an exotic place would be several years later on my first visit to Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

Feeling euphoric, soon as we are settled, a waiter comes by, carrying a huge blackboard and sets it down on the ground. On it the menu of the day is listed in colorful and curlicued script. We order and then continue with our drinks. In no hurry to go anywhere, just letting ourselves loosen up and enjoy  the moment. Time slips by and then we are invited to the table all set up for us on the terrace shaded with bright and vibrant umbrellas. The food! The food!!! This is my very first trip to Mexico, which was originally meant to be just a short orientation thing, but as has been with my life, it stretches into almost three weeks. Work! What else? I am required to dive right into the thick of it, as I had to several years earlier in Germany. And so I do.

The people I am working with are wonderful partners and the hosts. This is the rewards part of the hard work. Our taste buds are treated to the fat succulent camarones con ajos, and fresh red snappers and carne asada replete with Mexican flavors of chili and cilantro and lime. No hard taco shell anywhere in sight, like back in the USA. I didn’t know anything about the TexMex and the CalMex part of what I had come to think of as the authentic Mexican food. Soft shell flautas at McGill’s in Isla Vista washed down with XXX beer is as far as I had come to know of the Mexican cuisine. So it turns out to be the most deliciously pleasant surprise.

I am brought here by Carlos Civita, the partner of our Mexican publishers, Ampudia family of Editorial Caballero.  Carlos, of the famed Civita family originally from Italy, but known for their publishing empire Editorial Abril in Argentina. During the political upheaval there, the family just decided to cash in and leave. His father, Cesar Civita is now living in New York City while Carlos has taken up residence in Mexico City. The delightful bunch, some of the most wonderful people I have ever been fortunate enough to know. Carlos basically takes me under his wing and the very first weekend that I am in Mexico City, he just hands me the keys to his little Renault, so I get to explore the city on my own. Now when I think back, it could well have been a disaster. Because driving in Mexico City is not exactly like driving in Chicago or even New York. Its more like Bombay and Saigon where the chaos and survival of the fittest reigns supreme. Not to mention extra attention I needed to pay to the car’s manual transmission. I remember, how the little Renault shuddered and came to a stand still right in the middle of a square with hundreds of cars zapping by and not paying any attention to stranded me. Not even the cops nearby directing traffic budge an inch. Somehow I survive and get the thing going again. I won’t even mention how many times I got lost during that weekend.

But the weekend after, he wants to show me around and picks Cuernavaca and Las Mañanitas as our destinations, accompanied by his visiting parents, and makes it in to a family outing. They pick me up from my hotel around ten. Early for Mexico, because the lunch is never served before two at the earliest. But before we settle down and splurge at Las Mañanitas, he wants us to attend that morning’s mass at Cuernavaca’s  Catedral de la Asunción de María. That seems a bit odd because Carlos and his family are not exactly what I would call religious folks. Plus, they are born Jewish, though Carlos’ wife Marta is Catholic. But he has heard so much about the uniqueness of the mass performed by the Bishop of Cuernavaca cathedral, and how uplifting his sermons are and how they are devoid of religious dogmas.

The Bishop is more like a secular philosopher and a teacher than a Catholic priest. Apparently very popular among his followers, majority of them very young. He seems to have a rock star status within his congregation whom I end up naming the Pop Priest. His manner of conducting the mass is nothing like I have ever experienced. Flamboyant and colorful, his words that I don’t understand, sound so uplifting and optimistic. And he has built himself a reputation that surpasses that of the historic cathedral – a proud landmark of Cuernavaca that rivals even Las Mañanitas. Thus making them the perfect twins in balancing the material world with the spiritual life, symbolized so appropriately by its revered Bishop.

Probably in his late Fifties or the early Sixties, he wears an easy smile Wrapped over his white cassock  is a green shawl. And his choir is made up of a six piece rock band, containing of three guitarists, two violinist and a drummer. They all wore long frizzy hair and are dressed in their blue jeans, t-shirts and such – tops normally worn by teenagers. His voice is gentle and natural. His congregation is dressed not in their Sunday best, but in their ordinary street clothes. At this point, my Spanish is non-existent, but I like the soothing and even tone of his voice vibrating in the air.

Post mass, he stands outside the front gate greeting the exiting crowd, making small talk. He breaks up in a smile when he sees me emerge from inside and folds his hands together in traditional Indian gesture of namaste.

‘How did you like the mass?’

And we converse for a while. He asks me about India and refers to Buddhism and Hinduism and tells me how the message remains the same; be it Jesus or Buddha or Krishna. Devoid of any theatrics, what strikes me the most is that unlike other services I have attended, he certainly does not talk or constantly repeat the name of Jesus in vain. He doesn’t make you feel that unless you believed in Jesus you were doomed to be engulfed by the long and thorny tentacles of the wild hell fire. Likewise, I don’t once get a feeling, the one I normally got in the past from the priests whose message was loud and clear: Jesus is the way and the only way. I see in him an image of Gandhi – who though extremely religious, and very much into his Hindu beliefs and rituals, never lost the sight of the fact that there were other beliefs and they had to be revered and respected. Like my own dad.

My dad remains the most religious person I have ever known. He followed his Vaishnava  faith to the T. An entire room of our home was and is still devoted to his in-house temple designated as Thakorji no room. His daily rituals lasted an average of four hours. Longer on the religious holidays. Of us eight siblings, the rest could be said to be more or less religious to the extent that they all follow bits and pieces of my parent’s total devotion, but as for me, it would be fair to say that even for a long while I identified myself as an agnostic, finally I have come to realization that that was a cope out on my part, because what I really am is: an atheist. After holding out hopes for me up until I was in my early thirties, my dad astonished me one night. I had just returned from paying my tribute at the shrine by our house – something I did out of sheer respect for my dad and expressly to please him.

‘You don’t have to go to the temple just to please me. You’re just crowding it and taking a place away from a true believer.’

What he didn’t verbalize was what I read in the look on his face. I know you’re a good kid and that’s all that matters.

Not withstanding occasional and almost always politically provoked sectarian violence in India, especially in it’s most metropolitan city Bombay, is where you also grow up respecting every religion, every culture and every custom. No one ever walks past without bowing his head, be it a temple, a mosque, a church, a derasar, a gurudwara or a Parsi fire temple. As religious and as devoted as my father was in his belief of Nirvana and reincarnation in his worship of Bal Krishna (infant-playful Krishna), he never had anything denigrating to say about other religions. The person with that kind of tolerance and accepting of the other faiths is in my eyes a true Vaishnava.

Just as the Spanish inscription carved in the most modern typeface on the large marble plaque on the wall behind us says:

 NADIE HA VISTO NUNCA A DIOS

PERO

SI NOS AMAMOS UNOS A OTROS

DIOS PERMANECE ENTRE NOSOTROS

***

NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN GOD

BUT

IF WE LOVE EACH OTHER

GOD RESIDES WITHIN US (AND SO DOES HIS LOVE)

Atheist or not, I certainly can say Amen to that.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, January 31, 2014

LET IT BE A SURPRISE

Not sure which one of the ones I am working on will be ready to go over the weekend. Just let’s wait and see, because I am afraid that’s how inspiration works! I promise whatever comes out on the top will be GOOD:-)

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Categories Culture, Food & Wine, Mexico

THE TERROR OF THE TWO Cs

January 2, 2014 //
1

Haresh Shah

The People, The Pride, The Passion And The Philosophy Of Making California Wines

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His desk is huge and cluttered and we’re face-to-face with an unkempt and eccentric looking vintner wearing the wine stained sweatshirt bearing the logo of one of his creations, Le Sophiste.  With shoulder length long black hair, he looks like a cross between Tom Jones and Abbe Hoffman.  Bonny Doon‘s President for Life and the founder, Randall Graham is known in the industry as the Rhône Ranger as in the Lone Ranger, a.k.a Crazy Randall, because of his refusing to succumb to what he calls the terror of Cabernets and Chardonnays. Instead, he devotes his energy and resources to growing  exclusively the Rhône varietals such as Grenache, Mourvedre, Marsanne, Rousanne, Viognier, Cinsault and Syrah. His response to the industry’s perception of himself: when your foes believe that you are insane, you have a great technical advantage.

Life is too short to keep drinking the same wines, Graham philosophizes, I have a soft spot for ugly duckling grape verities, he adds with a wry smile. Randall studied philosophy at the University of California in Davis, prior to getting into the making of wines in 1983.  Realizing hat he wasn’t a good philosopher, he decided to blend his love of philosophy with that of wines he would make.

He believes wines need certain raison d’etre, and he has made Bonny Doon’s mission to make wines that complement California’s emerging fusion cuisine, which is closer to the Mediterranean and south of the border than it is to the American meat and potatoes.

His is a loft office in what once must have been a barn. I see a cat scurrying in the background and also a couple of young women busily hurrying back and forth across the hall carrying stack of papers. The cackle of the wood burning fire place makes you fell warm and cozy on this cold, gray and rainy day

The looks and the ambience of the place reminds me of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young classic of the early Seventies.

            Our house is a very very very fine house

            With two cats in the yard

            Life used to be so hard

            Now everything’s easy ‘cause of you.

Randall’s eccentricity and the courage of his conviction shows in his demeanor and the pride in his going “solo” against the wind in the wines he chooses to make. Bonny Doon wines are hand crafted and produced with tender loving care. The philosophy and the character of those wines is  apparent in their creative labels illustrated with unusual, if not controversial images of Alcatraz prison, a flying saucer beaming up above a Chateauneuf-du-Pape vineyard, a portrait of Marcell Proust, and in the contents of those bottles described by the RG himself, sounding scholarly with a tongue in cheek humorous twist. Here is how he describes Le Sophiste: Sophism: from Gk. sophistes sage (def): A spacious argument for displaying ingenuity in reasoning or for deceiving someone. And then throws in some Italian just for the fun of it. Like on the label of Moscato del Solo; stampatore o’dell.  incisore c. casa. DOONOMINAZIONE DI ORGINE CONTROLLATA 1993. DA SERVIRE FRESCO.

●●●

My first awareness of California came when I met Ann (Stevens) at Positano restaurant in Munich. I became instant friends with Ann and her husband Mark. It was because of them that three years later I ended up moving to Santa Barbara, California.  And it was them who first introduced me to California wines and what has now become known as California cuisine.

Mark introduced me to the Fetzer Zinfandel, which was so good, but a bottle cost $3.50. A hefty sum in the early Seventies. We decide to buy a case instead, for $36.00. Certainly the first of many we would continue to acquire and consume.  Little did I know, twenty years later I would  be sitting in Hopland in Mendocino County with Ken Boek – the Master Gardener at Fetzer Valley Oaks Food & Wine Center, who would introduce us to the basics of making of the wines. True to its creed of from earth to the table, Fetzer has committed itself to the organic farming. As Jimmy Fetzer, the oldest of the eight Fetzer children and the winemaker tells it: the first step in making wine is growing grapes.

Fetzer is the largest mainstream winery in Mendocino County. The business no longer belongs to the family – though they still till the land and make their wines. Personally heart breaking for me is that under the corporate umbrella of Brown Foreman, Fetzer family too has succumbed to the terror of the two Cs, and they no longer make the Zin that introduced me to good American wines. Apparently Zinfandel is an extremely low yielding grape. Another reason Cabernet Sauvignon claims competitive advantage. Small comfort that there is still a strand that bind us. Jimmy Fetzer, is married to one of our own: September 1974 Playmate Kristine Hanson. At the time of publication, a student of communications at California State University in Sacramento and working part time as a black jack dealer at Harrah’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. We run into jeans clad Jimmy at Boonville’s Pinot Noir tasting. He is soft spoken, tall and handsome, a proud wine maker who is equally as proud of his beautiful centerfold wife; she looks sexier now than when she appeared in Playboy more than twenty years earlier.

●●●

As we crisscross the wine country, I realize that eventual corporate buy outs or not, the business of making wines is basically tied to the soil and the farming, which at the end of the day is a family affair. Dry Creek is the father/daughter team of which David Stare is the owner wine maker and his daughter Kim takes care of the marketing. Kim’s husband Don Walker too is enlisted and is now in the process of learning the ropes.

Business should never get too big for its britches,

David Stare tells us as we are having a lunch at Bistro Ralph in downtown Healdsburg. Here is the man with degree in civil engineering from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and MBA from Northwestern University. Academically oriented, he looks the role of his preppy self, dressed in his khakis and crew neck sweater – a tedious nerd.  But as he puts it, from early on he was becoming a cork dork. This leads him to add yet another degree in enology from University of California at Davis. An article in  The Wall Street Journal talking about the bright future of the wine industry in the U.S. prompts him to combine his business acumen with his “cork dork” passion and take a plunge by buying 55 acres of land in Sonoma County in 1972.  Twenty three years later, Dry Creek wines are considered to be some of the best values for the everyday wine consumers.

He believes, Wine should not be an investment.  It’s something you buy because you enjoy it at the time. So do 90% of Americans who consume their purchases the same evening on which it was bought.

The morning, we cross the Golden Gate Bridge to visit Dry Creek, I feel a certain affinity for their wines. I couldn’t help but think of the evening almost fifteen years earlier, my colleague Donald Stewart and I had killed two bottles of their Fumé Blanc over a dinner – which helped us resolve some work related conflicts the two of us were experiencing. Just what good wines are supposed to do.

In the early days, Dry Creek produced predominantly white wines, among them Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc and Fumé Blanc. So did most of the California wineries.  It all changed almost overnight when in 1992, the sales of red wines sky rocketed in the aftermath of the highly watched CBS program 60 Minutes aired a segment called The French Paradox, crediting red wines for the longevity and good health the French citizens enjoyed.

●●●

Later that afternoon we meet with Bob Levy, the winemaker and one of the partners of Merryvale Vineyards.  Bob had joined University of California in Davis to study medicine, instead he got interested and switched to enology. We spend fair amount of time in Merryvale’s barrel room, tasting and talking wines.  Lightly bearded and balding Bob is a serious man, even looking a bit sad and melancholic at times. He gives you a feeling of being more of a doctor or a professor than the man in such intimacy with his wines. He shares with us some of his best along with his deep passion and philosophy of wine being the beverage most conducive to romance.

I see wine as romance, like raw oysters.  Blend  good wine with good food and think of intimate things that can happen.

His thoughts are centered around romance even when he speaks of the technical aspects of wine making.

Timing for picking grapes is extremely important. Harvesting is the most exciting time.  We work 18 hours a day, seven days a week.  It’s a multiple orgasmic feeling. 

In that barrel room filled with the pungent aroma of the wines aging, listening to Bob Levy talk about them makes Omar Khayyam come alive:

             A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

            A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou

●●●

How could one even begin to talk about California wines without talking about the Mondavi family and the invaluable contribution made by the patriarch Robert Mondavi for putting American wines on the world map? He not only makes some of the best California wines but he is also the ambassador at large for the entire wine industry of the United States. Robert Mondavi will also go down in the history as having forged the joint-venture with Baron Philippe de Rothschild of Mouton-Rothschild and establish Opus One winery right across the street from his own.  In the true family tradition, working with him are his wife Margrit Biever, his sons Michael and Timothy and his daughter Marcia.

His striking mission style winery complex leads you in through an imposing archway flanked by the wine tasting room, a souvenir shop and the administrative offices. Inge Heinemann of public relations gives us a quick tour of the winery before we settle down for leisurely tasting of their wines paired with some exquisite dishes created specially for us by Margrit’s daughter, Annie Roberts, who is the chef at their elegant, airy and spacious Vineyard Room.

During the course of the meal, we are joined by the younger Mondavi son. Lanky, debonair, tall, brooding, gaunt and bearded with full head of black hair, Timothy is the family winemaker – though he prefers to be called the wine grower.  He differs slightly with his father’s philosophy of making good wine is a skill, fine wine an art, to making good wine is a skill, growing good wine is an art   Because; the three most important things that give its personality and noblesse to an artistic wine are; soil, climate and philosophy of the people involved.  One needs to grow grapes in synchronization and harmony with nature. As he talks to us about wine and good life, he turns his head in a circle and looks around the room; this room is about celebration of good life.  Wines are civilizing aspects of being a part of a meal and therefore of  good life. And then he continues: artistic wine’s purpose is to express its personality in a pristine way. After all, life is too short to drink bad wines”. Timothy Mondavi somehow seems to echo the sentiments of the wine country’s madman, the Rhône Ranger, Randall Graham.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2014

UNEMPLOYMENT BLUES

It wasn’t until after more than a  year later that I show up at the unemployment office to apply for the benefits I was entitled to. This in itself was enough for David M. to wonder about during our initial interview. There were other things about my application that he couldn’t quite put in the standard slots. What followed was enough to drive him up the wall.

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Categories California Wines, Culture, Food & Wine, Playmates, Romance

SEX EDUCATION À LA JAPONAISE

April 18, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

Lessons In Interactive “’Bout The Birds And The Bees”

japanlove6

My brain is still busy processing what I had just seen, when I see flailing hands of the several young men in the front row. Yastaka Sasaki explains to me that they are playing rock, paper, scissors. The winner would then get to climb up the stage and get to fuck the girl who has just concluded the “second act” of her striptease routine and is now waiting in front of the sparse post-lunch time crowd of young “salarymen”. Completely naked, she is squatted there on the stage floor on her knees, legs spread wide apart, the spotlight still focused on the exposed glistening inner layers of her vulva peeking through her dense and dark, artfully manicured patch of pubic hair. Her face wears a contemptuous frown with a forced smile on her lips. Staring intensely at the faces of the men in front of her, as if daring the one who would take her as a prize right there on the stage with everyone in the audience watching.  Having eliminated the rest, about six of them, the winner eagerly climbs up the stage, and honest to God, there they are, just a few feet away from our eyes – her lying down on her back, opening her legs wider, her knees pointing upward like a dead duck on a kitchen table waiting to be stuffed. Her hands resting on sides, as if preparing to lift her slight frame into a bridge position for a gym routine.

The man, having hastily removed his clothes wedges himself between her open legs, tugging at his penis, possibly to give it an extra  bit of hardness, slips on a condom and then plunges it into the girls’ already waiting and well lubricated vagina and begins to pump. He doesn’t last long. A minute, two at the most, before falling by her side. What I remember still the most is the cryptic smile crossing the girl’s thin lips. Her little fish eyes fluttering, her getting up, picking up her discarded clothes  from the stage and walking away.

I am in Japan on behalf of Playboy. One of the enticements my boss Lee Hall had dangled in front of me to tear me away from the sunny Santa Barbara, California to the cold and cloudy Chicago, was an assignment in Japan.

Lee made good on his promise and sent me on a short exploratory trip to Tokyo within the first months of my moving back to Chicago in 1979. But it wasn’t until the mid 1985 that he actually  assigned me in earnest to the project. In his opinion, though the Japanese had started out wonderfully well ten years earlier, now the sales had began to go south and something needed to be done. On their part, our partners Shueisha had brought in a whole new editorial team and Lee felt that I could form a part of that team, and help them lead in a fresh editorial direction, thus helping them  gain back some of their lost readers and hopefully find some new ones.

Flattered as I was, technically I was still the division’s Production Director. Perhaps because I had proven my editorial impulse, working with Playboy in the Netherlands, two years earlier, he must have felt that I could do the same with the Japanese. But Japan was not little Netherlands. Plus I had lived and worked in Holland for several months and had some idea of what the country and its people were like.  But Japan seemed like a completely different planet. The two times that I had been there for short visits, I couldn’t say with any certainty that I even had a least  sense of what the Japanese were all about.  Even those two short trips had made me realize that the Japanese were like no other people I had ever known. I needed to know more about the country, the people and its culture before I would take on the challenge.  Lee didn’t only understand but totally concurred with me

He  recommended that I read Edwin Reischauer’s The Japanese – in his opinion, one of the most defining books ever written about the country and its people.  My first sense of Japan came from reading Ek Zalak Japan Ni (A Glimpse at Japan)  by the most prolific Indian artist and writer, Aabid Surti, who has since become a close friend. I had also read the Japanese novelists that included Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. I added to them, Behind the Mask by Ian Buruma and Pictures from the Water Trade by John David Morley. Several months later, I felt prepared enough to board the Northwestern flight to Tokyo.  But I still wasn’t ready to be face-to-face with the Japanese editors and the executives of the giant Shueisha Inc., who held the license to publish the magazine. What I wanted to do first of all was to get to know and experience Japan on my own.

●●●

I arrived in Tokyo on Monday night. Checked into the Imperial Hotel. Got a good night’s sleep, dumped my baggage in the hotel’s storage.  A duffle bag slung over my shoulder, I ventured out accompanied by our Tokyo rep Ray Falk’s assistant Yastaka Sasaki. We boarded the outbound Hakusana #1 – Japan’s famed  Shinkansen – the bullet train, that would take us  from Tokyo’s Ueno to Kanazawa.

There we checked into an old world charming inn, Miyabo Ryokan.  And for a week crisscrossed  the country, visiting campus in Kanazawa, hanging out at student cafes and bars, eat at all night Japanese restaurants, browse bookstores, interview students in their club, go discoing in a place called – of all things, Maharaja.  Visited Meiji Mura – the open air architectural museum and also spent some time watching middle aged housewives amidst the deafening clanging of Pachinko Parlors, their gazes fixed on the pinball machines and their hands frantically pulling the handles as if on auto pilot.  Absolutely amazing! Staying always at Ryokans, the  traditional Japanese Inns with tatami mattresses on the floor, with the center of the tiny room serving as the spot where you lounged, slept and dined. Eating dried fish, sticky rice and green tea for breakfast which tasted awful, but still! On the trains we ate box lunches and in towns stuck to eating at down home sushi, yakatori and tepanyaki restaurants.

The idea was to observe, experience and absorb as much as one humanly can of  the country, its people and their lives within six short  days.  Also to see places and people where our readers are most likely to be. Perhaps even glean some insight into them. Basically, experience first hand the smells, the sounds and the sights of the land of the Rising Sun.

‘There is something else that you must know and see about the Japanese young men,’ Sasaki said, if a bit hesitating.

‘Sure.’

So here we are in Toyota city of  Nagoya, sitting in a small dingy and dim lit place called Tsurumai Theatre Live Strip Show.  Its  no bigger than a large living room with a small round stage at the other end, in front of which are several rows of randomly placed individual chairs with vending machines on the wall behind the audience. Machines are stocked with Coke and other soft drinks as well as an assortment of Japanese beers. Unlike what one would expect in a place like this, the beverages are prized the same as they would in a company cafeteria. There is no bar, neither the girls coming out in the audience to hustle.  I remember, the entrance fee being an  equivalent of US$ 12.- which even by the standards of 1985 was cheap, very cheap by the Japanese standards.

Not much different from the striptease joints in Soho district of London, except the audience and no hassle ambience. Most every one here is plus or minus twenty five years of age, compared to  me at forty five and Sasaki a bit younger, we would be considered dirty old men. If not quite the middle aged geezers of London. Other than a bit of  commotion at the end of the performance, with the men in the front row playing scissors, paper and rock, audience is extremely well behaved, almost reverential. They are all dressed in their young “salarymen” uniform of dark western suites and mostly white shirts with appropriately somber ties.

But what is different is the show itself. No holds barred to say the least. The dance routine as mechanical. The girls would strip in the standard, one piece of clothing at a time till she is completely naked.  Normally, this is where the show must end. But no, it serves just a warming up for more routines to follow.

The spotlight is focused on the center of the girl’s wide open legs, she inches forward to the edge of the stage where the heads of the scissors, paper, rock crowd is bopping up and down to get a closer look at the innermost anatomy of the other sex. She puts her index finger and the thumb on either side of the skin surrounding outer lips and stretches them open even farther, looking over the heads of half a dozen or so men now hovering over her crotch. And then she moves her hand and extends it to take one of the men’s outstretched hand in hers. Has him fold rest of his fingers and let the index finger stick out. A pack of condom appears in her hand, which she tears open with her teeth and slowly sheaths the man’s finger with it, holds and guides it slowly inside her vaginal canal, guiding him to vacillate it in and out motion and then lets him do it on his own. It is no longer erotic for me. If I did feel aroused earlier in the act, now I could feel my arousal deflecting. And yet,  as outrageous as it is, its absolutely fascinating. The girl guiding the man’s finger in and then allowing him to explore on his own, as if handing your little kid the house key and teaching him how to open the door

The music changes and another girl saunters on the stage. This one is dressed like a nurse in starched white uniform, head piece and all, carrying a small emergency kit, a white box with the red cross  painted on the lid. The same routine. Removing of the clothing from the head piece down to the shoes and eventually the skimpy pair of panties. But even while the dance is in progress, I notice something in the background, which I presumed to be just a mesh screen to cover the wall.  Nope! Now the back of it is lit up and one could sense something else going  on behind the screen.  It now looks like back-lit silver threads, hanging from the ceiling down to the top of the stage and behind that is the silhouette of a couple frolicking in the nude. I give Sasaki a sideway glance.

‘One of the losers of the scissors, paper, rock can buy her services by paying extra.’

Set up in the background is a rudimentary bedroom with a full size mattress on the floor. The young man is lying on it on his back, the girl is leaning down and massaging his cock and when she has brought it up to its full glory, she pulls out a pack of condom from her little purse  lying by the side of the mattress, tears the foil open and slips it over his penis in what seemed like a ritual manner. She ties her hair in a pony and then plunges down her open mouth to engorge him and begins to oscillate, as if also to the rhythm of the music being played for the stripper in the  foreground. A smile breaks out on my face as I once again look sideways at Sasaki, amazed and shaking my head. What I am thinking is: So these are our readers!! And this is in the country where they hire kids to blotch out pubic hair in imported magazines?  

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, April 26, 2013

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

Playboy once ran a pictorial, Father Knows Best (February 1979), in which they ask: Would you let your daughter pose nude for  Playboy? How about mothers? Would you?

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Categories Culture