Sex, lies, & the desi woman client!

Manav Kaul in a still from the Netflix series Tribhuvan Mishra: CA Topper

I am "prank call" years old, in the history of global telecom. Which is to belong to an era, when juvenile delinquents often gathered around landline phones, without caller-IDs, with rotary or digital dials, calling up random numbers, to prank the shit outta unknown people, for ‘timepass' as pastime, in the evenings!

Our standard operating procedure was to dial any six/seven-digit number. Say, "Hello", in a hoarse/muffled voice. Upon hearing the man of the house on the other line, we'd go, "Hum ‘XYZ Gigolo Service' se bol rahe hain. Your wife hasn't cleared our bills for months. Make good on the payment, or else…"

This is when the gent, at the other end, would go berserk, "Ulloo ke patthe, phone rakh…" And we'd hang up, having caused, as per our demented judgment, considerable marital discord, in an everyday, happy household. Hah!

Honestly, none of us 15-year-olds knew if there was such a thing as a gigolo service/agency. Like the one that exists on a website in the Netflix series, Tribhuvan Mishra: CA Topper.

Shakespeare Tripathy, who works in the adult entertainment industry

Wherein the brilliant Manav Kaul, as Tribhuvan Mishra, enrols himself as ‘CA Topper', providing sex to women clients in his town.

To be generous, Puneet Krishna's CA Topper is a pretty quirky show - in itself ‘timepass' enough for casual pastime - that, chiefly for action, also comedy and romance, derives far more from movies/shows, than life itself.

And I actually enjoyed spotting movie references in it. To start with, as a local gang rounds up a couple, cheating on their spouses, in a cinema hall - the film playing in the theatre is directed by Ram Gopal Ratnam!

While Salman-SRK references abound, the repeated romantic song still is Sapne mein milti hai, from Ram Gopal Varma's Satya (1998), that continues to top the gangster genre in Bollywood. The company that's produced the series is named Rangeela, presumably after Varma's 1995 musical.

During a police-station scene, where Panchayat's ‘Prahlad' (Faisal Malik) plays a cop, you can overhear a line on Amitabh Bachchan - which is essentially the cop-station scene from Anurag Kashyap's Ugly (2013), about actors changing their names for screen, concurrently playing out in an imagined room next-door!

An authentic setting for all that's going on in CA Topper, though, can hardly be UP's Noida.

If for nothing else but the sheer number of news channels headquartered in the National Capital Region that would broadcast live - that many guns going off, so easily, simultaneously, on streets, parking lot, court, restaurant loo, wedding venue…

Maybe you could say the same for the relatively quiet, mercantile town shown as gang-land central, like Gorakhpur, as Prime Video's Mirzapur, instead - also written-directed by Krishna.

What about the intriguing CA Topper protagonist Mishra Ji, who moonlights as a male escort?

I have no other way to chat and know better than to call my go-to guy for all things ‘gigolo'. Namely, my journalistic source, Shakespeare Tripathy (name unchanged), popular adult-entertainment actor (euphemism for porn-star), who's self-admittedly been offering carnal pleasures to females, in exchange for money, for over half a decade now.

He nets clients in Mumbai, "mostly travelers, mainly in the 30-40 age group", from pings on social media (FB, Insta, etc). Besides intros at posh social soirees, where he first built his professional rep - I remember spotting him at a massive Diwali house-party on Marine Drive once - Tripathy began with a dot-com called ‘seeking arrangement', before Tinder took over.

No, I'm not outing young Tripathy. He insists on his name, in print. Anonymity in public works against him, he implies. While he hasn't watched CA Topper, here's where he differs with the show's premise.

Apart from "[sexual] satisfaction, attention, and companionship; in that order," what his clients seek, foremost, is absolute confidentiality, hence trust: "Nobody would hire a faceless, fake name [CA Topper], online!"

Training himself for the discreet sex-work, ‘CA Topper' Mishra Ji seeks help of fellow gigolo, White Stallion (if I recall right), who sermonises him on how people often think from their head and heart, but others from just below the belt; drawing a distinction between pure, momentary lust, and being sapiosexual, perhaps.

Tripathy reveals he has too many friends, who are female escorts. Key difference between his job and theirs, he says, firstly, is that his is harder. As in? "With guys as clients, it's all cut-to-cut - they do their own stuff, and leave."

With women clients, Tripathy reasons, "You've got to make the person comfortable, both before and after [the act], so to say. You have to be a good listener, allowing them the space to express themselves - emotionally connecting, chatting, foreplay, dancing, dressing up…"

The flip-side of this "subsequent friendship", of course, is they could feel possessive, "if you aren't fully focused on them". And no fury like a woman scorned, as with CA Topper and Bindi (Tillotama Shome), maybe?

That said, Tripathy's brain is his second most important organ - being a good conversationalist, evidently, is his tool of trade. He speaks Shakespearean, in fact, explaining how he got into this game: "You see, art of survival is a never-ending pursuit."

But now, he simply loves it: "Sometimes even more than when I'm with my girlfriend." Same for CA Topper, with his wife Ashoklata (Naina Sareen), you can tell.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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