Unlocking the Kiss

Here it is,people,The Kiss that just happens. In an everyday sort of way. A democratic muaah. Between two willing and able adults,propelled towards each other with a just-like-that-only,let’s-see-where-we-go-with-this air. Where the guy and the girl have equal weightage. Which does not herald its arrival with a hundred shehnais,or a thunderstorm with the leads-dressed-in diaphanous-chiffons getting drenched under a tree,or,even,Poochie Pie Emraan Hashmi.

It can show up,though,in the lovely shape of Katrina Kaif,who chases after a guy she’s attracted to,in this year’s other summer spesh. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Delhi Belly,with not a speck of shit visible anywhere on its glossy exterior. Dreamboat Hrithik is Kitty Kat’s heartthrob,and we don’t blame her for a moment for wanting to get her paws on him before he drives out of her sight (we know that he’s not going to drive out of her life,this being a happy Hindi movie). We only wish that the moment had a little more passion in it,though: for two people as hot as Kat and Hrithik,there should have been a little more steam.

Still. However. It is a moment. A leading lady in mainstream Bollywood taking the lead thus is truly significant. Because it’s long been the male prerogative to be the dragger of hair into the cave,an axiom faithfully followed in films which need to cater to a mass audience. A heroine being the first to zero in on a hero’s mouth is permissible only in a comic thread,where you are encouraged to laugh at the silly thing’s temerity. But that’s mostly just a chaste peck. The real thing,mouth-to-mouth,fluid-exchanging lip suck,is initiated by Papa Bear,and Mama Bear had better grin and bare it.

So hey,Kat,you go,girl. You’ve come a long way from poor Mallika Sherawat who was made to sell a movie on the basis of the number of kisses it offered to a panting public. I saw Khwahish in a once-grand-now-filthy Delhi theatre. Regal is one of those vanishing throwbacks to the Raj days where the gentry would sit in plush boxes,and the proles below. Those enclosures had long turned into shabby holes with bad chairs and worse body odour,meant strictly for illegal activity. It was from one of those boxes that a bunch of us sat through the first day first show with the express purpose of counting Mallika’s kisses.

I’ve now forgotten the exact number. But there’s no forgetting the excited murmur amongst the mostly-young-male audience in the stalls below,which rose with every smack. Mallika turned out to be a good kisser,getting into it good and proper,knowing how and where to position her nose. That knowing what to do with your nose when your mouth is otherwise occupied goes a long way in being convincing. It’s a pity she decided to get into more ambitious acting territory and disappeared,because part of Bollywood’s new-found comfort in the mouth-lip-tongue triage has much to do with her,and the noise her movies made when she was so engaged.

That Hindi cinema has not always been kiss resistant is well-known. Pre-Independence films had several searing kisses: one such between Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani back in the ’40s,can give today’s Tashi and Menaka a run for their belly belly smelly cash. The moral police that came rolling out as the movies got older ensured that romance between good-looking men and women became an elliptical thing,without mention or display of skin. This led to filmmakers resorting to several sneaky devices,chief of which was to put the heroine in a white sari and place her for several minutes under a waterfall,which,in turn,led to everything — waist,belly-button,heaving body parts below and above — becoming available.

All except the mouth. The Kiss was still not allowed its rightful place in the pantheon,not till the last decade when suddenly something gave: slowly,but surely,it’s come to the fore. And the things that go with. A loosening up between the sexes,a loosening up of sex-on-screen. Pucker up,or perish.

shubhra.gupta @expressindia.com