Drop Dead Gorgeous captures the glamour world of beauty pageants in the 1990s. Dear reader, please bear with me. Let me digress for a brief moment to take you by the hand to those days of old, when our hill station’s three hotels: Savoy, Hakman’s and Whispering Windows organised lavish beauty contests. An old-timer wistfully recalls: “The Queen of hills would turn into the Hill of Queens.”
“You could call the contests anything,” my friend Nandu Jauhar, once owner of the Savoy Hotel, remembers, adding: “You could choose from Miss Mussoorie, Summer Queen, May Queen and if you ran out of names, there was always space in the busy calendar for a Jungle Queen.”
Oh yes, there was match-fixing. And how! Right till the last ball was bowled. With the judges having been tipped off in advance about the local magistrate’s wife (regardless of her pear-shaped figure), who was to be the winner.
One summer’s night, I dropped by to see the last beauty contest in town. The drumbeat reached a crescendo; the lights dimmed to reveal Luscious Lola, a cabaret artist from Calcutta, who’d seen many summers, flutter through the crowd. Barely had she thrown her skirt at a bald-headed geezer, the winner of the third prize was announced. Mrs Chawla, wife of a local dhaba-owner, by far the prettiest lady in the ballroom heard her name.
She was stunned, her husband shocked. Livid at his wife coming in third, he jumped on to the stage ahead of her and kicked the offending prize—a black-and-white TV—clean off the stage. She tried to placate him, but he wasn’t listening, he pushed her off the stage, through the hall and out through the exit.
Of course in Gauri Sinh’s novel, you are in the prelims to the finale of a national beauty contest—Miss Glamour—organised by Eye India, a mega media conglomerate. There are 21 beautiful contestants, including India’s sweetheart and reigning model, Akruti Rai. The year? 1995. Then there’s a perfect murder. The last dress rehearsal ends on a nightmarish note as the sensuous and ambitious ‘Lajjo’ meets her end on the ramp.
Everybody, including Akruti and her fellow contestants, becomes prime suspects. It gets increasingly macabre as bodies pile up—the gossipy, affable pageant hairdresser Doreen, the self-assured mean-girl Nuzhat... amid massive public outcry and searing press coverage, Akruti is convinced by fellow contestant, Parvati Samant, to help her investigate the murders. But who, really, is Parvati? And can Akruti help unearth the sinister truth, clear her own name, and also keep an eye on the prize? Generally, a good read.