An M&B expose

There are denouements and there are denouements. This week, one of modern, urban female India's longest-held myths (25 years?) got busted....

There are denouements and there are denouements. This week, one of modern, urban female India’s longest-held myths (25 years?) got busted. This particular myth was incredibly widespread. It crossed the snows to Srinagar and traversed the Vindhyas to the southern bastions. It was whispered between demure young misses with flowers in their hair and straight As on their report cards, during the tani avartanam (mridangist’s solo) in Carnatic music concerts even in that holiest of Indian cultural holies, the Madras Music Academy. The belles of Bandra in Bombay knew it, the smart young gals in army cantts and naval or air bases knew it, my friend’s friend Bilqis, who wore a burqa, knew it.

And this was it: Anne Mather, writer of some of the hottest, steamiest Mills & Boons that we’ve ever been privileged to read, was not a woman! Mather (whose book Leopard in the Snow was chosen in the ’80s for the singular honour of the first M&B to be filmed) was really a man! This myth was born in the 1970s. By the ’90s, there was a more or less pan-Indian consensus that Mather was not just male, but gay and Colombian.

The Anne Mather mystery was and will be, unless word of this article spreads a sort of hidden password to instant female bonding: a Sign, like the fish of the early Christian martyrs and the ear-ring of the kaanphata sect of sadhus. The closest unisex parallel I can think of is the myth of the red Volkswagen that every generation for the past four decades has sworn to have spotted in the chariot race scene in Ben Hur. (Has anyone really seen it? Puh-leese show me and I’ll buy you a drink or a triple sundae, depending on what the law allows you.)

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If you tally things between East and West, the good bits balance out quite well with the bad bits. They took our gold, land, jewels, art treasures. They brought us scurvy, small pox and plague on their dirty ships and three kinds of body lice from Versailles when le roi soleil was at his le roi-est as Louis the 14th, the Sun King. Besides our wealth, we gave them Asian flu or was that from China? And way back then, we gave them smart ideas from which, centuries later, they made useful things that (mostly) work for all of us: print, planes, movies, fans, coolers, acs, cars, electronics, movies, just name it.

And as most of modern, urban, female India might amicably agree, they gave us Mills & Boons, whose incalculable value as a soporific, a placebo, a tiramisu, a stress-buster and a handkerchief (I mean figuratively, as a tear-dryer) cannot be overestimated in the lives of the aforesaid. Ask Benazir Bhutto. William Dalrymple snooped in her bedroom in Pakistan and sniggered about the M&Bs he found there. But I know heaps of highly qualified, hardworking Indian women, holding very senior and responsible posts, who just adore to flop mentally, between all that heavy stuff, with a nice, relaxing romance. Achla Moulik, IAS, former director of the Archaeological Survey of India, has actually written a romance.

Which is why I was intrigued this week to hear that my sister in New York strayed with a friend into a terrifyingly smart place on the Upper East Side called Elaine’s (Woody Allen plays the clarinet there, it’s that kind of place). A man got chatting with them. He turned out to be the new owner of Mills & Boon, having already got imprints like Harlequin. My sister absolutely had to ask him about Anne Mather. Well, Anne’s not male, gay and Colombian. She’s an 80-year-old Englishwoman! The man at Elaine’s even said he’d met her. As they say, the truth at last. But gosh, wasn’t the myth more fun?