A bunch of kindly people has suddenly become terribly important for a certain section of the media. They are called Close Friends of the Rushdies. The sole point of the CFR’s existence now is to furnish journalists — the cleverest of whom must be friends of the Friends — with the whole truth about why Padma Lakshmi has decided to leave Salman Rushdie. Each of the two has spoken briefly and clearly about the decision and about who has made it. But brevities and clarities are annoying in such situations, especially if one is dedicated to the truth. It is important to know everything, but even visible people have invisible lives. Hence, the CFR are crucial, provided they remain unnamed and unseen, but always available to their friends in the media for comment.

One idea doing the rounds — floated by the CFR, of course — is that Ms Lakshmi is a “trophy wife”, whom the internet defines as “an attractive, young wife married to a usually older, affluent man”. Like the trophy in a competition, he has ‘won’ her. But it is part of the story of the trophy wife that at some point in her conjugal career, she inevitably comes into her own and turns toxic. Having completed the first phase of social climbing, she kicks the old ladder away, and embarks on Phase II. But trophy-hood is addictive. So the next phase involves looking for the next ladder — possibly someone older, richer and more famous. And so on.

Visually, the Rushdies fit this story: she is so much younger, taller, sexier. And he did win her. “Any woman who has heard him speak for five minutes would just melt,” she had declared three years ago, as Desdemona had said about Othello. But even a bit of thought makes it obvious that these roles do not fit the Rushdies at all. In fact, it is possible to use their example to show just how passé and meaningless the notion of the trophy wife actually is. For, by the same logic, isn’t Mr Rushdie equally a trophy for Ms Lakshmi? Can it not be argued that every trophy wife always already has a trophy husband, given that the whole discussion hinges on the fact of his being rich and famous? So it makes much more sense, if one must work with such descriptions, to talk of trophy marriages instead, in which husband and wife are each other’s trophy. Think of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, David Furnish and Elton John, Anna Nicole Smith and J. Howard Marshall, or even Sharmila Tagore and Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi. In each case, who is the trophy, and by what sort of calculation? Weren’t these arrangements perfectly symbiotic, however sad the outcome in some?

It is best to dismiss “trophy wife” as one of those non-categories, created or dredged up by the friends of the Friends, that come with their own silly stories. The invoking of such a figure says a great deal about how modern societies continue to look at, and chatter on, about money and fame, youth and age, men and women, and the many bewildering ways in which they come together or move apart. Besides that, it merits no second thought. When it comes to husbands and wives, “atrophy” is perhaps a better idea.