I dedicated my teens to amassing an encyclopaedic knowledge of romantic fiction. During the course of my ‘scholarly research’ based on numberless novels by Barbara Cartland, Georgette Heyer and the miscellaneous authors who wrote under the imprint of Mills and Boon and Harlequin, I assembled a checklist of the essential attributes of a romantic hero. It was: wealth, broad shoulders, height, blocked tear ducts.
The wealth of a romantic hero could range from the vast riches of a shipping tycoon to the less impressive but still substantial holdings of a sheep farmer, but on the issues of tear ducts, vertical inches and shoulders, there was no compromise. For men, they were broad-shouldered, tall and dry-eyed. Above all, dry-eyed. When overcome by emotion, a Mills and Boon hero’s flinty grey eyes could narrow to slits but those flinty slits never ever leaked fluid. To cry would have been tantamount to revealing frilly underwear beneath those close-fitting jeans he favoured.
I wonder if I’d have had a different checklist if British women had not authored the romantic fiction I’d read. After all, it’s difficult to find a more uptight lot than the Brits. When I took my head out of the pages of an M&B for long enough to notice the real world, I saw that plenty of men wept quite openly in Pakistan. But the crying was not of the spontaneous variety that I frequently indulged in when feeling sorry for myself. This was genuine, but nonetheless, stage-managed crying.
Being a Shia, I have attended for as long as I can remember majlises during the month of Muharram, large religious gatherings where the martyrdom of Imam Hussein is ritually mourned for ten days at a trot. On the last day, the mourning climaxes in a short but extremely emotive gathering, during which grown men, who in their day jobs may well be hard-nosed traders or indeed professional wrestlers, wail like babies. But even when young, I recognised this crying was done in a prescribed manner, that is, at a circumscribed time and in a particular place. Because it was done in ‘time out’, so to speak, men could lower their guard without fear of ridicule or rejection. And the few times I saw grown men weep at funerals, it was again done at a time and in a place where the normal rules that govern daily interaction were suspended. Men’s public tears in my country were always socially sanctioned. And for a good reason.
It was okay for a man to cry over the death of a relative or a close friend. But that was about it. It wasn’t okay for him to cry over a sad film. It wasn’t okay for him to sob over a broken ankle, however painful. It wasn’t okay for him to weep over a lost cricket match, a failed business, even public humiliation. After all, the phrase ‘to be a man’ means to look failure, frailty and fear squarely in the face, and not blink.
But of late I’ve noticed desi men have become a bit less inhibited about crying in public. As women have entered more traditionally male-dominated areas, so middle-class men have moved in the opposite direction and started to get more in touch with their feminine side. Despite my early conditioning by Mesdames Heyer, Cartland et al, I’m cool with that. One of the most moving sights I saw earlier this year was Jesse Jackson blubbing at Obama’s inauguration. Film director Shekhar Kapur, a judge on the Indian reality show India’s Got Talent, got so emotional by some good performances that he sobbed to show his appreciation. Recently Karnataka chief minister B. S. Yediyurappa cried copiously on live television, admitting to having let down his confidant(e)s. In my view, a man who can’t acknowledge his human frailty is either emotionally constipated or deeply insecure—neither of them particularly attractive personality traits. It’s only men who fear they will be unmanned by a show of weakness who don’t ever cry in public. So let the water works be undammed, I say!
That said, I must admit I would be quite alarmed if my husband burst into tears over a missed flight. Or a stolen wallet. Or a cancelled holiday. Or an argument at work. Or a punctured tyre. Yes, by all means let grown men cry, but let them cry over weighty matters. For the smaller irritations of life, let them make like a Mills and Boon hero and narrow those flinty eyes to mere slits.
(Moni Mohsin is the Pakistan-based author of The End of Innocence and The Diary of A Social Butterfly.)
