Bandana Tewari bumps into a childhood friend, now rich, famous and pompous and comes away with ‘crumbs of wisdom’ from a humorous encounter

I met her, unexpectedly, in the month of October, as she meandered through a crowd of people who stared unabashedly at this apparition of beauty. She is an acclaimed actress and singer. "Oh, there you are!" she squealed, as she recognised me from younger days and nudged me into a corner. "Come with me to my boudoir," she invited, with the false humility that comes from being insanely vain. As we ensconced ourselves in a lavish room with marble statuettes and baroque frames (the kind you never want to see in your own home), I began my day with a diva.

Armed with zero tolerance for pomposity of every kind except intellectual and an attention span that is as fickle as a harlot, I wasn’t sure if I was the right candidate for this ride. I watched, as from a long-stemmed, cherry-red Egyptian perfume bottle, she sprayed the air with what smelt like Jungle Gardenia. When the ‘air pocket’ in front of her turned wispy white with perfume, she took a deep breath and walked into it. "Never squirt perfume onto your skin, darling. It’s so harsh. Always walk into an envelope of scented air. Madame Estee Lauder used to do that," she revealed.

"In showbiz, keeping things unknown to the public works as the best buzz marketing tool. It allows people’s imagination to go simply wild," she said, with a snigger. Near her, lay a stack of every conceivable magazine straight off the rack while a stout man sat in a corner flicking through each one with great expertise, dividing them into two trays. One tray read ‘In It’ and the other, ‘Not In It’.

"I am in the business of making pleasure," she said, with a flourish. "I choose what makes me happy. And my real happiness comes from being able to select the things that make me miserable!" Such modesty, I commented, mockingly. She looked into my eyes, hard and deep, while I sat there pretending to be resilient to her microscopic vision. "I am modest enough to admit that I lack modesty." That shut me up nicely.

At this point, her cocker spaniel that had hitherto looked quite domesticated, as it lay there curled up like a miniature beanbag, charged at the sight of ice cream being offered to me. "My poochie-poo! Let her enjoy it. She needs it more than you do," she reprimanded, while I stared at her in horror for making one dollop of ice cream suddenly look like my life support. With a disdainful smile, I placed the bowl on the ground and, within seconds, that mean little animal wiped it clean. "Come to Mama…." she cooed as she pulled out an outrageous rhinestone dog collar from her bag. Both dog and owner squealed in delight.

She had opinions about everything. When I pulled out a cigarette she said, "A good smoke is like a hearty cry. It quenches your soul." Smug as a bug for having come up quite effortlessly with inventive one-liners, she continued to throw my time and schedule out of whack, enticing me instead, with what she called her ‘crumbs of wisdom’.

Her manservant — outfitted like a trapeze artist with such fitted clothes that I could have sworn his underarm hair was poking out of his sweater — performed a curious task. With a small stopwatch he made sure his madam’s chamomile tea was brewed for precisely one minute and thirty-two seconds. This tea had to be replenished every half-hour. "He is my Man Friday," she proclaimed proudly, as he looked on, like a Cheshire cat that had just been patted by his mistress. "They say, the best man for me must be a cross between a bull and a butler!" Thunderous laughter ensued. By this time, I had reckoned that lack of propriety was not one of her bigger concerns. She referred to her breasts as ‘puckerish pom-poms’, her fan mail as an ‘occupational hazard’ and love, she said, was comparable to measles — at its most dangerous when it comes late in life. I think she stole that from Byron.

Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity outside the door. The paparazzi were coming in for an impromptu shoot. She huffed and puffed and made a poor case of being so ‘tired of it all’ when the truth was that she basked in it. So Man Friday ushered in a battalion of poorly dressed, trigger-happy photographers, while she slid from slouch to cinematic pose with the deftness of a reptile preparing to pounce on its prey. "Madam, please one more, one more," begged a bedraggled lensman. Pat came the answer, "Arjun, you know I don’t pose. Ever! Shoot me as I am. You will get what you want." True diva style. In the course of a few minutes, I came to understand that she knew each photographer by name, loaded with anecdotal references and professional profiles. As soon as they had left the room, out came her perfume bottle and she did an Estee Lauder again.

A diva is as diva does. And what she did, was give a well-rehearsed repertoire of behaviour that moved from cunning to cute, sophisticated to shallow, in what seemed like the blink of an eye. She told me quite sanctimoniously that as a child, when she cried, she would always run to the mirror and watch herself sob. " It is so enchanting to watch my eyes well up and those big teardrops roll down…to experience an emotion from the inside and yet to be able to observe it from the outside, is such a thrill." Her love for melodrama, quite assuredly, developed from this childhood indulgence.

I learnt quite quickly that when you reach a successful stage in your career, maintaining an illusion of youth and virility becomes something of an obsession. However, without talent, a diva is but a poor braggart. Without beauty, she is only a sullen sceptic. But a diva without intelligence? She is but a daunting impostor without a motive.

After all, she agreed, "What good is this fruit if there is no temptation?" Touché.

[A self-proclaimed dilettante, whose daily routine starts with being playfully tongue-in-cheek, but ends up being dangerously foot-in-the-mouth, Bandana Tewari complains about being an underpaid writer. What she doesn’t like about writing is that she has to forfeit her right to lie, as the truth is invariably funnier. So therefore she should be paid pots of money, as compensation!]