My closest school friend turned 24 yesterday (happy b’day, deevan!). I am not scheduled to do so for another five months, but her birthday has always seemed like the onset of mine, splitting the year into neat halves: until June 30 I am 23-and-a-bit; on July 1, I am almost-24. For most of my life this was eagerly anticipated: it put me closer to the adulthood I was so eager to acquire so I could live wildly and do all the exciting things I had in store for myself. Ever since I have been able to actually do those things (and chosen the indubitably wastrel life of living in front of a laptop) it has seemed far more menacing, cancer and wrinkles looming at the distant horizon. I envision losing my taut skin, my non-existent figure (I look like a tall potato) and my hair; my terrible eyesight weakening further, my voice assuming a wavering quiver, and my typing fingers swollen with arthritis (in more vainglorious moments, I picture the blind Milton composing extempore at his benighted daughters, replaced in my imagination by dictaphones ).
This is, you will understand, the best time to be watching television about women twice your age with hot bodies and hotter men, and it is why I have always loved Samantha on Sex and the City (hereinafter, Sex). I don’t identify with her- how do you identify with an alien superwoman? The closest I come to these New York women is Miranda in the early cynical years when she’s still something of a klutz. Samantha is my ultimate fantasy for myself (with a less.. tiring selection process and more alone-time) as alluring as she is impossible for the chronically shy. Charlotte I dismiss, while Carrie has always been the show’s central mystery. In some things we are similar: irrepressible diary-keeping; unfortunate dress-sense (well, at least she has some); a suspicion of Society (hers is far less pronounced than mine); good luck in friendship. In others- sociability, interests, cultural taste- we are impossibly dissimilar. In season one I was utterly taken with her: she was my adolescent idea of a zany thirty-something. Big I viewed as a pleasant aberration: I too hoped to have a tycoon in my stable one day. After that magical first airing on HBO India, sans all sex and watched sneakily late at night, Big has annoyed the crap out of me every time I try watching the first season (he gives her a glittery duck-purse!); the surest testament, in my experience, to the injury of hindsight.
