Kishore Singh: The age of the 'Sweeties'

It was mere coincidence that I happened to be home when my wife was having a group of “Sweeties” over for lunch, and I was quickly drafted into mixing their cocktails while minding my own business and keeping quiet. As an observer, I quickly discovered that women in their fifties – referred to as “Sweeties” among each other, which is useful when you can’t tell a Kamini from a Kamya behind the botox mask – after first demurring about daytime drinking, knocked back their Cosmopolitans faster than most men I know; they delighted in dirty talking; and innuendo was invented by them as idle entertainment.

 

I shut my ears to most things I couldn’t help overhearing, accompanied by their increasingly raucous laughter, but it served to shed light on the private lives of women in the limelight. Such as a designer friend who I’d thought I knew well, but who, the Sweeties chitchatted, seemed to be in the business of spinning men around one pretty finger to get things done her way. Such as when she appeared in “inappropriate clothing” at the golf course, accompanied by three “hunks” to teach her golf, to whom she let it be known that, alas, she’d lost her mobile phone the previous evening. “By the time she got home,” laughed the purveyor of this tittle-tattle, “there were three new phones awaiting her pleasure.”

For some while now, working women have been escaping from offices to attend “guest management” events – lunches, high-teas, day cocktails – put together by socialites whose only credential is the ability to pull off a mailing list of interesting or powerful women. New restaurants, stores or launches are heralded by these celebrities sending out a “Join me Sweetie” message. The Sweeties then arrive in a shimmer of chiffons and crystal, air-kissing surgically dimpled cheeks, shedding their views on everything from caviar to cabochons, getting high on champagne, sharpening their talons on insults and slander, and leaving with promises to meet up at “Amina’s next” or “Sapna’s spa” — spas being high on the desirability quotient: What’s not to like about a caprioska and a deep tissue massage, especially when sandwiched in between office meetings? Salmon on toast instead of a soggy samosa in office, tuna sashimi instead of pantry noodles — and ridding oneself of workday stress in the bargain? But catch a man with a glass of beer on a Tuesday afternoon and you can be sure it’ll find mention in his annual appraisal.

Having feasted on such hedonism, women seem bent on taking it to its full conclusion. At a dinner my wife and I attended recently, a full range of such services had been provided for the guests — provided they were female. While the men gathered around the bar and gawped at a cricket match on television, the women swaned it up in the living room where a hairdresser, especially flown in for the evening, undid carefully coiffed heads to give the ladies instant new hairstyles. A designer showed them interesting ways to wear their own clothes, accompanied by tipsy giggles. Attendants were on their knees coaxing the ladies out of their stilettos and into indulgent foot massages. Men wanting a look-in were impatiently shooed away. It was reminiscent of the zenana culture prevalent in my grandparents’ homes where the women, in purdah, would watch the men entertain themselves from behind screens. That male-female divide now appears to be back, with one crucial difference — it is the men who are in purdah while the Sweeties are having all the fun.