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The Sunday Times: Was Asha the unsung heroine of his novel?
Fury, the latest novel from Salman Rushdie, has been described as a barely disguised treatment of the author's own marriage break-up, his flight to New York and his subsequent relationship with the arrestingly beautiful actress Padma Lakshmi. But this may not be the first time that Rushdie has drawn on a real- life muse in the creation of his fiction. His previous novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, centers around the life of a fictional Indian rock star, Vina Apsara, and how she found fame in the West. Apsara' s character is remarkable for her self-possession, arrogance and total self-belief; she is worshipped and immensely susceptible to adoration.
 When the book was published, there was much gossip about how Rushdie had tried to obtain a favorable comment on the novel from Madonna. But Madonna reportedly ordered her copy of The Ground Beneath Her Feet to be shredded, much to the delight of the critics. She obviously didn't think the book reflected anything about her life, or at least that is the kind interpretation. But rather than asking Madonna, Rushdie should have asked the Asian singer Asha Puthli, who was a prolific artist in the early 1970s but is now almost forgotten. She released several albums which sold worldwide. In an interview with The Sunday Times in 1974 she said: I'm a great manipulator. I'm as fake as real can be and as real as fake can be. Legends are made like that. Talking is my drug, singing is my sex.
The words and sentiment are uncanny: they could so easily have been uttered by Rushdie's ambitious and vainglorious heroine. The similarities do not end there. Both Puthli and the fictional Apsara come from a well-to-do Bombay suburb called Bandra, and both in the course of their careers went on to transcend all frontiers: of race, skin, religion, language, history, nation, class, as Rushdie puts it. As a child, Asha was brought up by her aunt Sulochana Shetty the fictional Apsara's real name in the novel is Nissa Shetty. Like Apsara, Puthli wanted attention at a very early age and would sing loudly through an open window. She became well versed in Indian and then western classical music she learnt "Che Faro Senza Euridice" from her classical teacher Hyacinth Brown. Apsara sings this song in the book. For Puthli two radio stations helped her to expand her popularity into the West: Radio Ceylon and Voice of America. I wanted to synthesize two cultures: America was the youngest and India was the oldest. I wanted to make a new form of music, she recalls.
Like Rushdie's Apsara, she attains the full circle of achievement through the two radio stations: From Voice of America I learnt jazz and from Radio Ceylon I learnt pop, and within a year of my coming to the West they were playing my music. Puthli would teach birth control to women in the villages — Apsara, too, goes on a birth control crusade when she is fatuous. Like Apsara, Puthli's exotic, glamour immediately captured the imagination of the New York jet- set in the 1970s. She had little money and would create her own designs — an embroidered Indian pillowcase became a dress, a long piece of cloth became a sari without a blouse. That is how she struck up a friendship with Salvador Dali. He saw me and came running down the street and said, ‘Please join me for tea at the St Regis,' she laughs. Puthli was a favorite of Warhol and recalls her first meeting with the artist: He loved taking Polaroid's and went around pointing a microphone at people. I said, "Don't stick that near my mouth.In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Apsara also becomes part of this set, hanging out with a Warholesque New York bohemian artist that Rushdie names Amos Voight. Apsara's relation to divinity is a strong theme in the book: Vina means lute, while Apsara means angel., The final chapter of the book, an epilogue to Apsara' s life, is entitled Vina Divina.
Similarly, the image Puthli projected of herself, on album covers and in promotional material, was I that of an angel. She dyed the hair on her temples white to resemble wings and used to say she lived in the clouds. When the model Penelope Tree interviewed Puthli ‘for Warhol's Interview magazine, she asked her: Aren't you royalty? Puthli replied: How about, divinity. Asha Puthli eventually retired from singing to bring up her only child, but has recently returned to the spotlight as a guest singer with the band the Dum Dums. It was' not until this year that she became aware of her starring role in The Ground Beneath Her Feet - the American consulate- general in Bombay told her she should read it. He told Puthli that he had read about her career in the Seventies when he was posted in Calcutta and thought how close Vina Apsara' s life seemed to her own. Many other people have been asking the same she says, They think that Rushdie must have been obsessed by me.
Rushdie, while he acknowledges he was aware of Puthli, is adamant that she was not-his model. I do remember Asha Puthli as a singer, but am unaware of any details of her biography, and I did not use her as a model for Vina Apsara, he said last week. Whatever similarities there may be are coincidental. Puthli, however, feels very differently about her the book. Reading it I felt really eerie. My first instinct was that he must have a scrapbook of my life; it was like someone had stalked me. Novelists tend to be like vultures that borrow from reality and shift life. I feel uncomfortable because they live vicariously. I feel like prey.
She does not recall ever meeting Rushdie: If I had met him in the exuberance of youth, I don't remember. I was altogether arrogant and dismissive of people because I was too impatient to live, but if I am to be a muse, then I may as well be a muse to a good writer. Such impatience, and appetite for fast living, is a mark of Apsara's character, too. Puthli went on to a career that twisted and turned through Europe and America. Thanks to the author Ved Mehta, who featured her in his seminal book Portrait of India, she was signed up by John Hammond, who discovered Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan. She was chased by high-flyers, partied with rock icons and glided through different genres - jazz, rhythm and blues, disco and rock. She didn't believe in the ethnic ghetto, so when she arrived in the West she didn't sing in Hindi and she dyed her hair red for one of her album covers. The fictional Apsara, too, does all of these things.
Puthli gargled with champagne and was never afraid to speak her mind. She caught the imagination of many other artists in later years, earning the spoken admiration of both David Bowie and Donna Summer. Tantalizingly, when Vina Apsara passes away in the novel, her death is marked by the manufacture of dolls. Puthli means doll - could this have been Rushdie's clue, his nod to the similarity between the two lives?
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