Why is Shalini Passi so Queer-coded?
Shalini Passi has become quickly beloved as the unproblematic oddball of 'Fabulous Lives vs Bollywood Wives'. But is no one picking up the trail of queer hints she's dropping?
The first time Shalini Passi appears on the Fabulous Lives vs Bollywood Wives, she is a sight for sore eyes. She struts down the gently curved corridor of her sprawling Delhi mansion, entourage in tow, backed by an electrifying strain of Yeh Ek Zindagi. With a bejewelled, serpentine headpiece lodged firmly in her hair, two daggers in her hands, and her décolleté magnificently exposed, the first thing that comes to mind from this 45 second sequence and introduction is…‘drag queen’.
It’s not that the other women on the series dress any less extravagant. Right since the first season, the Bollywood Wives never falter in shocking viewers with obscene wealth signalling. But Shalini feels different.
For one, she looks like a work of art. Her presentation is performative, bordering on theatre. Her outfit, she explains, was inspired by Cleopatra, and she did not deliver any less. In a cascading cream gown lined in gold embroidery and teal jewels, she could only be an elusive woman for whom men would trade kingdoms, fight wars, upheave economies.
Maheep Kapoor remembers to point this out when complimenting Shalini’s finery. “[Cleopatra] had lots of men running after her,” she quips, but Shalini feels compelled to add “And women!”.
It caught me off guard.
In recent years, Bollywood has been brimming with effeminate, catty men, one being the producer and frequent guest star on this very series. But lesbians? They remain painfully hard to come by. To see a woman on a mainstream series, a Dharmatic production no less, reveal even a sliver of queer intention warranted a double take.
Seconds later in a confessional, Shalini candidly remarks on Maheep’s outfit, “I think [she] looked very hot with the Jessica Rabbit kind of look. I like women who look beautiful and hot.”
With each passing episode, this woman begs queer readings, and with each passing interview, gushing think piece and slick video edit, she gets none.
Was nobody paying attention when she told Seema Khan that she’d ‘zoomed’ into her chest to admire it? (Where is all the queer media!).
I suppose there is the issue of the husband. Had she been single perhaps people might’ve been more receptive to her hints. But since when do gay women not have husbands? Evelyn Hugo famously had seven. It should have helped that Shalini and Sanjay Passi share no discernible chemistry—less than even the hetero Bollywood Wives in their prudish, largely chaste marriages, if you can imagine it (talk about lesbian bed death).
Ultimately none of this really matters. Because regardless of her relationship with her mousy husband and the occasional lesbian-leaning comment, Shalini’s queer-coding has much less to do with her attraction (or lack thereof) to others, and far more about who she wants to be in this world.
In Episode 6, lounging on a yacht in Mauritius, Shalini tells the group she grew up wishing she was a boy. “Boys had so much more freedom,” she says.
Her rationale echoes a stirring excerpt from Sylvia Plath’s journals in which she laments that being born a woman is her “awful tragedy”. Plath writes with fervour about a “consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors, and soldiers, bar room regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording”. She deems herself “doomed” for her female anatomy that invites danger of assault and curbs her freedom.
“I want to talk to everybody I can, as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel West, to walk freely at night...” she writes.
Shalini’s admission to the confessional camera carries a similar sentiment: “If I was born a boy, I would be able to just travel the way I wanted to. Not have to call up and inform anyone. Have no people with me.”
But where Plath views her femininity as an inescapable curse, Shalini diverges. She prefaces her explanation by clarifying she no longer wants to be a boy. This was something she grew curious about— something she explored, entertained even, and eventually decided against.
Her womanhood is a conscious choice rather than a destiny thrust upon her that she complacently accepts. It is this deliberate expression of femininity that imbues her actions with the delicacy and artfulness of a trans woman. That or her painstaking HMU.
Her complete awareness of and consequent fulfilment with herself inform all other parts of her life and is ultimately what makes her so likeable. Her joie de vivre, her passion for art, the way she can dance into the ocean in the rain like an 80s heroine with no care for the Bollywood Wives snickering behind her back.
She lives life with an acute sense of purpose and intention. I imagine this is why she gets so upset when Kalyani Chawla pokes fun at her for “doing lunches”. Her typically serene stature is replaced by bitter discomfort and annoyance. The thought of someone perceiving her lifestyle as frivolous and trivial is unimaginable to her.
I thought she was strange for being so infuriated by such an inconsequential comment. But in good times and bad, that is the Shalini quality. She is strange, and weird, and peculiar.
Put that into a synonym generator. See what you get.