Pictures by Anindya Shankar Ray

From fondling a Brazilian model’s breasts (at her insistence!) to a touching account of creating Braille-embroidered clothing for his Visionaire collection, the Calcutta launch of Wendell Rodricks’s The Green Room at Oxford Bookstore on Saturday touched upon everything from shocking to downright hilarious.

The launch was followed by a book-reading and interactive session steered by event management professional Oindrilla Dutt. That he doesn’t shy away from bitter truths was evident when Wendell was quizzed about his almost obsessive compulsive need for cleanliness. “Well, my parents were young lovers from Goa. And when we moved to Bombay, we lived in a glorified chawl with a public toilet. And there was no water,” revealed the designer. After having to “crap on other people’s crap”, he decided that when he got out of the situation it would never happen to him again. “Now people ask me, ‘What will you do with bathroom floors that are so clean? Will you eat off it?’,” he laughed.

The world of insecurity behind the glitz and glamour was also dwelled on. For instance, the girl who took out two ribs to have a slimmer waist and how she had to be careful not to have anything hit her solar plexus (because her lungs would collapse if she so much as hit a table while sitting down). Or the one who asked him to “feel” her breasts, which were more life-like because of silicon injections under the muscle layer. All this and more — from the book that Wendell ritually penned 2,000 words a day for — had the audience fascinated.

Another incident revealed how Wendell never takes his backstage presence lightly. This happened when he showed his third collection, he read out. He sat in front of the catwalk, relatively relaxed and happy with the way the show had started when he was surprised to see one of the models assigned palazzos and a kurta walk with strange “geisha-like” steps. “The dimwit” had put in two legs in one of the palazzo and not knowing what to do with the other leg draped it around her hand.

This drew the most belly laughs from the audience on Saturday. Wendell maintained he still “wasn’t amused”. But we certainly were!

Malini Banerjee
What’s the most revealing autobiography you have read? Tell t2@abp.in