Dignity and dominion are separately sketched. She is Pakistani, I presume. In India, we have socially-produced codes of honour and dignity which are stifling and used routinely to silence anything women might want to express, let alone their bodies. I take Zakaria's to be a mundane, matronly rebuke. Pooh-poohing at your lack of sharam or lojja or shame, and taking you to be devoid of a brain because you stripped on TV. You have been asked not to get naked as often, and not to make naked your feelings and desires in such a 'ribald' manner. But my purpose here is to talk about you, Lena Dunham. You, who made angst sexy again. Like good old Victorian poets. Like us melodramatic Bengalis. You gazed at your navel through layers of tummy fat. You brought the navel up to the mind. And then you wrote a book: Not That Kind of Girl. I don't know if it is published in India. D brought it for me when he visited last year. And we binge-watched the last season, sitting up in cold Coorg. The book is a Hannah-monologue version of the TV show, I'd say. It proceeds as a string of aphorisms. Making light of hurt. Making weight out of the trivial. Love lives, internet boyfriends, sisters, parents, haircuts, cats, weight loss, mental health are picked up, played with and thrown aside. The book would make a great podcast. But Lena would have to speak it. In her baby voice. A baby voice that emits great thoughtfulness and brutal scrutiny unto the world. A literary voice that rings in that particular faint thread of pain generated from being born in the latest leg of capital's journey. It is particularly urbane. It is not a 'White' worldview though Lena may be held guilty for introducing tokenising Blackness into the show. The pain of not knowing what is enough, what one should live for, a moral and aesthetic limbo—that is what Lena Dunham touches on. The book is no literary classic, but it provokes one to think of the condition of urban beings.

Rafia Zakaria

Lena Dunham: Angsty is Sexy

A Chequered history