:: Kishwar Desai

Bloody love stories

Kishwar Desai

July.25 : It was while attending an evening with women publishers in Delhi that I realised a strange international phenomena that has bitten young girls around the world has sunk its teeth into the teenagers of India as well. The distributors of the books in India are chuckling all the way to the bank, as copies are flying off the shelf. It's the attack of the vampires!

Remember a time, not so long ago, when Dracula sucked out blood from human beings and his two deadly fangs would lead to a terrible death? He was cruel and frightening to look at, with his pale skin and jet black hair, his dark cape and inordinate powers. The stories that grew around the cult of Dracula were legion. He became a bat, and hung upside down. He could live forever. He slept in a coffin and so forth.

Dracula was not the kind of man you would invite home for dinner. Unless you were prepared to be the dinner. A rather unlikely figure for romance, altogether. But, move over Messrs Mills & Boon, as the makeover of the vicious vampire began a while ago in cinema is now a highly successful fictional series. It's the boyfriend to die for! Difficult to understand? Well, join the club because the recent series of vampire love-stories which have swept away teenage girls in the United States and the United Kingdom has become a publishing conundrum. Very few people can figure out what exactly in Stephenie Meyer's tales has caught the imagination of young readers who have pushed her books into the bestseller slot.

The plot is fairly thin and fantastical. I picked one of the books in Delhi to sample the blood lust for this book series. Twilight, which is now a "major motion picture", is about a young girl Isabella Swan who moves to a small town called Forks in the US. She is convinced the new school will be terribly dull - and everything is as she expects it - except that there are some vampires in her class. This is seriously written - with the additional attributes that the vampires are a group of extremely good-looking creatures who can't eat normal food and never age. They are also very well behaved, aware that their survival depends on their ability not to prey on their fellow school students, else they will get the traditional stake through their hearts. To make things even more plausible for our tiny minds, their vampire guardian is a doctor in the local hospital. They are courteous vampires, doing their best to fit into society and to contribute towards it, disguising their own peculiarities as well they can. Yes, instead of us fearing them, Ms Meyer wants us to actually pity the poor vampires who can't help the way they are.

Everyone in the town has accepted this strange lot of residents - and when Isabella falls in love with one of them, Edward Cullen, it is a normal teenage giddy-headed love story. But her love-affair is dominated by the fact that Isabella is in danger every minute of the way because while Edward tries to curb his appetite for her, he has to be careful not to let his passion overcome him: the moment he sinks his teeth into her, she is finished. She will not only die a very painful death, she will be re-born as a vampire. Therefore, he hunts in the nearby forest, drinks the blood of sundry animals and comes back to her, appetite satiated, with his gentle manners and lovely face. Isabella is not in the least bit perturbed by the dual life of her boyfriend as she is totally in love with him. He even protects her from other vampires who are equally besotted with her blood.

The whole plot is embellished by gory details of what vampires do, how they live etc - and much like the Harry Potter series, which creates a world of incipient magicians with their own rules, here the vampire world is created with its own set of idiosyncracies.

So why do young girls like it? The most accepted explanation is that its eroticism appeals ever more since it is unconsummated. The seduction lies in the fact that while the two are desperately in love, they can never be sexually fulfilled as that could be fatal to at least one of them. This dangerous frisson has a powerful pull - since forbidden fruit is always the sweetest.

However, the invention of a vampire family was also necessitated by the myriad types of relationships possible, in real-life America. There are hardly any taboos left as far as lifestyles are concerned. Almost everything is permitted in a highly liberal society, and so if you want to look for the prohibited, you have to literally invent. In such a scenario where anything goes, Ms Meyer has invented a family with a real difference.

Thanks to the peculiar nature of vampires - it is a doomed and taboo relationship from the beginning and that's what young women have found so very attractive. In a promiscuous society, what can be more romantic and tragic than a relationship that enforces chastity! When you can have everything, you love only those things you cannot have…

But I also think the vampire-romance is, in a funny way, a wonderfully positive reflection on the US. America has possibly crossed the last frontier of hating "humans". It is an open society which, apart from the loony Right, has an easy-going attitude towards all possible relationships. There is no reason not to love a black, an Asian, a homosexual, a transvestite, a Jew, a Hindu, a Muslim… all those "others" who made a rollicking good doomed romance in the past are part of the great melting pot of America. So now Ms Meyer has had to look beyond the normal boundaries of human relationships and invent someone totally alien in order to give a "forbidden" Romeo and Juliet twist to her story.

On the other hand, in India, we still carry our taboos with us. Instead of inventing vampires, we spot them everywhere. Therefore, as in Haryana recently, a romance is doomed not because the boy is an alien, but because the panchayat decides the two families are too close, by belonging to the same gotra.

The fear of breaking taboos is so strong that we are willing to sacrifice our children, rather than allow them to experiment with their own lives, choose their own much-loved "vampires". It is the same with the reluctance to repeal the dreaded Section 377. I can understand why this book has such a resonance in India. And the reason is exactly the opposite of why it is popular in the UK or the US. While there the invention of a "vampire" is essential to create an off-limits relationship - here young girls would be able to read the vampire story with a deep understanding of living in a society which sees vampires in everyone.

The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.coms