The Lipstick

My grandmother didn’t wear lipstick because she didn’t like how it looked on her and because she knew that my grandfather didn’t like makeup. For him, it was a sign of frivolous femininity, prioritizing the 'superficial' over the 'substance'. My grandmother was 23 years old when Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar released. She loved Madhabi Mukherjee, I think, not just because she was a deeply captivating artist and stunningly beautiful but also because perhaps she saw a little bit of herself in her. Like Arati in the film, my grandmother would go on to be an overworked, yet inspiringly spirited housewife traversing on foot the length and breadth of the chaotic metropolis that Calcutta was, and continues to be. She’d often gleefully quote the film’s iconic dialogue, “you put red here, red here, why not here?”. I think for her just saying those lines and evoking the image of Edith putting the red lipstick on Arati was a quiet transgression; a silent rebellion that she could revel in for herself while continuing to prioritize, in Subrata’s words, “peace within the family”.

Circa 1991***

In a rare instance, here’s my grandmother wearing a hint of lipstick as a 51 year old, young grandmother proudly holding her first grandchild. I didn’t exist at this time and can’t fully know the circumstances of the photograph, but I know how proud she was of her children, her grandchildren and the lives that she had nurtured. I always appreciated my grandmother for her surprising ‘modernity’, but I think I am only now beginning to understand the tightrope that she must have had to walk. She wasn’t non-traditional and yet, she was fiercely and independently herself. She had a personality that would fill whichever room that she would walk into, but she’d also mastered the art of self-abnegation, putting everyone’s needs before her own. She had an odd, disarming way of laying claim over people she’d just met or barely knew. She would extract people’s stories and secrets and then guard them passionately.

I don’t think my grandmother ever spent more than fifteen minutes in silence. She was a traditional homemaker her whole life, but quiet demureness was a foreign concept to her. Only her transgressions were silent, otherwise, she needed to fill a room with conversation, music and laughter. I think maybe because she grew up surrounded by siblings and constant cacophony, that quietness unsettled her. She’d fall asleep to the sound of the television and start talking nineteen to the dozen the moment she woke up.

I don’t think there is much of a point to my rambling except that red lipstick has become one of the many things that make me think of Nani now. In addition to songs and clothes and places, she’s successfully seeped into even this otherwise rather innocuous entity. Now when I wonder if makeup can be empowering, I think of her quoting Edith. Does it cater to the ‘male gaze’? Sure, maybe. Is it prescribing a particular, restrictive notion of femininity? In many ways, yes. But are there ways to use makeup as subversion? I like to think yes, and not just because I think it allows people to express themselves, but also because now I can imagine my grandmother’s exhilaration, sitting in a darkened theatre watching Arati put red lipstick on.

(*** In this case, I don’t think my grandfather is upset because of the lipstick. Like me, photographs made him self-conscious, and like many others, usually this self-consciousness came across as sternness.)

February 1989