The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star

by Vaseem Khan

  He wondered where they were headed now, and, more importantly, whether there would be any food there.

  FILM CITY SHOWDOWN

  The road blurred beneath the tyres of the Tata Venture as Chopra drove north, back towards the suburbs. It was the dead of night but the city continued as if the distinction between night and day was irrelevant. Mumbai, Chopra had long ago realised, was never still. It wasn’t so much that it didn’t sleep; it was more that sleep, confronted each evening by the frenetic pandemonium before it, simply fled from the city. Chopra had become used to the sights and sounds of the night. A vast night-time economy—straddling both sides of the law—pulsed in the darkness around him: the office cleaners and sanitation trucks, the night porters and dragomen, the barkeeps sweeping bleary drunks off rush-matted floors into the backs of waiting rickshaws, the sewage workers wading waist-deep through the great river of excrement that oozed beneath the city’s streets, the smiling pimps and drug pedlars waiting for tourists in darkened doorways… As he barrelled through the sodium haze of the Western Express Highway, another mote in the great river of cars, trucks, ricks, and motorbikes that moved through the guts of the city, he couldn’t help but feel connected to that omnipresent reservoir of humanity that marked Mumbai as the most exhilarating place on the subcontinent.

  At the gates to Film City Chopra leaned out of the truck towards the night guard. He jerked a thumb at Ganesha. “I need to drop him off to Studio 16. If the producer doesn’t find him there first thing in the morning someone will lose their job.”

  The guards, used to shooting crews moving in and out of the five-hundred-acre plot at all times of the day and night, shrugged and waved him through. Elephants and irate producers—there was nothing new in Film City about that.

  Chopra drove swiftly along the poorly lit roads that curved through the vast site.

  When he arrived at the studio he discovered a drab cinder-block building with a trellis of grey-painted columns affixed to the front like the bars of a cell. Lattice-worked windows were embedded high up, and a flight of well-worn and pitted steps led up to an arched doorway. A broad smear of off-yellow marred the building’s whitewash where the façade met the flat roof, the result of rain dripping from the guttering. Gnarled banyan trees crowded around the studio on all sides, from which the hoots and gibbers of langurs and night birds could be heard.

  Chopra parked the van in the gravel car park, let Ganesha out, then approached the eerily silent building, the little elephant drawing anxiously closer beside him. Light spilled from the doorway, but Chopra could hear no noises to suggest shooting was going on. In truth he did not expect there to be anyone in the building except the mastermind behind the kidnapping. The confession—of sorts—provided by Poonam Panipat and Robin Mistry had ended by revealing where he might find his ultimate quarry.

  And now Chopra was here.

  Inside, the studio was magnificent. Extending two floors in height, the set mimicked the interior of a sumptuous Delhi mansion, with marble flooring, expensive sofas, and a grand staircase curving up to an ornately balustraded upper floor, with a glittering chandelier overhead.

  Around the edges of the set, film equipment stood in silent slumber, patiently waiting to be reanimated. A dolly track ran from the shadows to the centre of the marble floor, the dolly lurking at one end of the track like a giant beetle. A crane loomed beside the dolly, the boom arm reaching out above the sofas, a digital motion camera fixed to the end. The set was lit by a ring of studio lights. Mounted on their tall stands, the bulb-beds surrounded by reflectors, they looked, to Chopra, like a row of mechanical flowers.

  His penetrating gaze took in the silent set, and then the darkened doorway to one side that led off into the rear of the studio, a warren of make-up and changing rooms.

  Ganesha shuffled beside him, releasing a soft snort of nervousness.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of, boy,” muttered Chopra.

  He moved towards the shadowed doorway, but was halted by the sound of feet approaching.

  And then Ali walked out onto the set.

  He saw Chopra, and his expression widened into a grimace of surprise.

  “You don’t give up, do you?” he growled.

  “It’s over,” said Chopra calmly. “I know everything. It’s time for you to return Vicky to his mother.”

  Ali’s face slackened in astonishment. His mouth worked, bouncing his red beard up and down, but nothing came out. Finally he said, “Who told you?”

  “Robin,” said Chopra. “And Poonam. I also spoke to Lal.”

  “Lal? He doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “No,” said Chopra. “But he was there thirty years ago when this story began.”

  Ali shook his head angrily. “Story? Is that what you call it? Hah! If it’s a story then it’s nothing less than a tragedy.”

  Chopra was prevented from replying by the putt-putt of a rickshaw pulling up outside. A narrow beam of light swept the entrance. There was a short exchange of voices, then the rick pulled away again.

  As silence returned, footsteps approached the doorway.

  And then the burka-clad figure of Aaliya Ghazi swept into the room, clutching the flight bags that held the ransom.

  Spotting Chopra she ground to an abrupt halt. Her veiled head swung from him to Ali. Finally, she set down the bags.

  “You can take off the burka,” said Chopra. “There’s no need for it any more.”

  Aaliya hesitated, then pulled back the veil, revealing the face Chopra had seen days earlier in the offices of Vicky Verma’s agent—the face of Greta Rodrigues.

  Aaliya walked over to stand beside Ali. “I got a call from Poonam. They said you would be here. And him, too. I thought you might be in danger.”

  “I couldn’t have found him without their help,” admitted Chopra. “But he’s in no danger from me. I simply want the truth.”

  “Truth?” said Ali bitterly. “The truth is a dirty word in our country. Haven’t you heard?”

  “Why don’t you tell me your side of the story?”

  “I thought you already knew everything.”

  “I would like to hear it from you,” said Chopra. “Or rather I would like to hear it from Vicky. The beard is distracting,” he added.

  Ali seemed about to retort, but then Aaliya placed a hand on his arm. He looked down at the girl, who merely nodded, sadly.

  Ali straightened, his shoulders suddenly taking on a new breadth. Reaching up he pulled off his skullcap, and with it the wig of short red hair underneath. Then his hands moved over his face. The beard came off. A prosthetic nose bridge went next. He reached into his mouth and out came cheek plumpers, and a dental bridge. Lastly he peeled off his red eyebrows, before running a hand through his dark hair.

  Vicky Verma faced Chopra, an expression of defiance animating his handsome features.

  “How much do you know?”

  “I know that your father abandoned Aaliya’s mother when Bijli crossed his path. I know that Aaliya’s mother vanished into obscurity with her unwanted child—your half-sister.”

  “She didn’t vanish,” said Vicky vehemently. “She was hounded out of the neighbourhood in which she had grown up. A tainted woman. Her circumstances forced her to marry a lowlife, a worthless drunk who wanted nothing to do with her child once she was born. They moved to Mira Road where Ayesha raised the girl alone—she worked as a cleaner, and later, as a seamstress. Thanks to my father she could no longer work in the industry that had beguiled her with its bright lights. A weaker person might have succumbed to bitterness, but Ayesha taught her daughter to be, first and foremost, a good person: intelligent, generous, kind.

  “The girl did well in school, and eventually became a teacher. Years passed, and then, one day her world was turned upside-down. Her mother was struck down by cancer. Days before her death, Ayesha called her daughter to her bedside. She clutched her hand, and looked at her through sunken eyes. And she told her that her life had
been a lie. The man she believed to be her father was not. Her real father was famed film producer Jignesh Verma; her half-brother was film star Vicky Verma.

  “Devastated and truly alone for the first time in her life, Aaliya considered the future. The man she had called her father her whole life—a man she had hated as long as she had known him—was a drunk who meandered through the world in an inebriated haze. Her real father was gone—Jignesh Verma had passed away, never having looked back to discover the fate of the woman and child he had forsaken. The only blood relative she had in the world was Vicky Verma—who had no knowledge of her existence.

  “She thought long and hard before acting.

  “And then, finally, she came to see me. Posing as a journalist, she secured an interview with me, where she told me, in a matter-of-fact way, the truth about my father, her mother, and herself. The sister I never knew I had.”

  Vicky paused, a shadow passing over his face. “Overnight, my world changed, and my perception of my place in it. I struggled to understand how my parents could have done this—I had placed my father on a pedestal, and to have him torn down was almost more than I could bear.

  “I am ashamed to say that I responded, at first, with anger. I demanded proof; I demanded to know what she wanted from me. Was she trying to blackmail me? But Aaliya just smiled sadly at me. ‘I just wanted you to know,’ she said.

  “It took me a month to realise I couldn’t go back to the life I had known. It took me another month to summon up the courage to go and see her. And thus I began to learn about the sister I had never had.

  “Three months later I made the decision to make amends for my father’s crime. I would set things right. A young man’s hubris, perhaps, but I knew I could not go on without attempting to reverse the harm that had been done. The simple, shameful fact was that half of everything that I and my mother took for granted—wealth, fame, respect—belonged to my half-sister.

  “But I knew that I would never get my mother to agree. Bijli would never acknowledge Aaliya, would never share my father’s wealth with his illegitimate child. And because my mother controlled that money with an iron fist I knew I would have to find another way.

  “It took me a long time to come up with a plan.

  “In the end I decided that I must turn my mother’s patent devotion to me to my advantage.”

  “And so you faked your own kidnapping,” said Chopra.

  “Yes.” Vicky grimaced. “The first step was to set up the crime. I had to think of it as a film production, and I needed a crew. I enlisted Robin Mistry and his new wife Poonam Panipat, my co-star. I knew I could trust them because I was one of just a handful of close friends that were aware of their secret marriage. Under my instruction Poonam wrote a series of threatening letters to me. They would help establish the credibility of the kidnapping—I knew my mother would be very difficult to convince. Ultimately, it was my intention that Robin be entrusted with the ransom drop. But you put paid to that part of the plan.” Vicky grimaced again. “The main hurdle was the kidnapping itself. It had to look real. That’s why it had to happen in a public place—like I said, I knew my mother would not be easy to convince—and so I decided that the concert at the Andheri Sports Stadium would provide the perfect opportunity. Coming as it did before the big shoot on Mote, all eyes would be on me. That’s when I decided to bring Aaliya in as my new PA, Greta Rodrigues. I needed a witness in the changing room, you see—none of my usual friends would have been any good; my mother would have smelled a rat.”

  “And that’s also when you decided that there would be two Alis, isn’t it?” said Chopra.

  Vicky raised an eyebrow. “I suppose Robin told you that.”

  “He confirmed the who. But I’d already worked out that there were two of you. I examined the CCTV images of Ali entering and leaving through the rear door of the stadium. It’s quite a low door, and something about the doorframe kept bothering me… and then I realised it wasn’t the doorframe. It was Ali’s height in relation to the doorframe. It was slightly different coming than going. The untrained eye might have missed it, but I’ve been a cop for thirty years. Robin is a little taller than you, isn’t he?”

  “Only by three inches,” muttered Vicky.

  “You had Robin come in disguised as Ali so he would be captured on the CCTV camera at the rear entrance while you were still up onstage. Once inside, Robin, his part of the plan complete, changed out of his get-up in a washroom, and snuck out with the crowds at the end of the concert. Then, when you came down into the room below the stage, you changed into Ali, and walked out with the costume chest, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Chopra turned to Aaliya. “One thing I don’t understand. Why did you go along with this? Vicky claims you have no material interest in him. So why?”

  Aaliya hesitated. “At first I refused. In fact, I tried to talk him out of it. You are right: I have no interest in my father’s wealth, and I didn’t want Vicky to get into trouble. I was happy simply to know that I had a brother who accepted me as his sister. I was happy to know that I was not alone in the world. But Vicky wore me down. I realised that with or without my help he was determined to carry out his plan. I thought that I could keep an eye on him, perhaps convince him to see reason and abandon his scheme before it went too far. Unfortunately, I did not succeed.”

  “But we did succeed, sister!” said Vicky defiantly. He took up the story. “On the night of the kidnapping the plan unfolded better than I could have hoped.

  “At the end of the performance, when I fell through the trapdoor as part of the ‘vanishing Vickys’ sequence, instead of coming back onstage, I changed, as you say, into the guise of Ali. I threw some of my own blood—which I’d drawn earlier—into the alcove, then hauled the chest onto a porter’s hand truck, and exited the stadium. I thought that once the police came to investigate they would discover the blood. That—added to the letters, and Aaliya’s, or I should say Greta’s, testimony about a strange porter hauling off my costume chest, combined with the CCTV footage of ‘Ali’—should have been enough to convince my mother that I had genuinely been kidnapped.”

  “And the whole Ali disguise,” said Chopra, “that was deliberate, wasn’t it? You knew that when your mother heard about the ‘bearded man in a Muslim prayer cap’ her thoughts would go instantly to the threats she had been subjected to in the past.”

  “Yes,” admitted Vicky. ‘I knew she would think that crazy idiot was making good on his promises of revenge. At the very least it would muddy the waters. Of course, I didn’t expect her to keep the police out of it, and to bring you in instead. But when Aaliya told me about you after you interviewed her as Greta I realised that the plan would still work—in fact, it was even better! Now, there was a chance of pulling the whole thing off without raising a fuss in the media. That was the one aspect of the plan I couldn’t control.

  “I knew that to begin with my reputation would work against me; that everyone would think I had simply pulled another of my vanishing acts. I had to force my mother to the point where she truly believed my life was in jeopardy. After that it would be a simple matter to arrange a ransom exchange, and then ‘Vicky’ could return.

  “Of course, I couldn’t anticipate everything. For instance, I didn’t anticipate that you would actually track me down to Aaliya’s home—how did you do that anyway?”

  “Your bracelet,” said Chopra. “You left it in the costume room below the stage.”

  Vicky nodded. “I noticed it was missing the day after my ‘kidnapping’; I suspected I had lost it that night but I wasn’t sure where. I suppose I should never have worn it, but Aaliya gave it to me and I put it on for good luck.”

  “What about the photograph you sent to your mother with the ransom note?” said Chopra. “You looked like you’d taken a fearful beating.”

  “The magic of make-up, Chopra. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been coming here. Robin got me access to a make-up room around the back. And, just so�
�s you know, the gun I pulled on you at the Madh Fort wasn’t real. It was a prop.”

  “And the ear,” said Chopra. “Let me guess: from the morgue?”

  Vicky pulled a rueful face. “The ear was one of the reasons I became Ali, hospital porter, in the first place. The ear was the finishing touch to my production, necessary to convince my mother that my life was in genuine danger. It belonged to an unidentified man whose body was scheduled for cremation.”

  “You desecrated his body,” said Chopra sternly.

  Vicky had the decency to blush. “Yes, and for that I am truly sorry.”

  “What exactly did you plan to do with the money?” asked Chopra, changing tack.

  Vicky exchanged glances with Aaliya.

  “We haven’t worked that out yet. I wanted to set Aaliya up, but she won’t hear of it. She wants me to return the money. We’ve been arguing about it.”

  Chopra was silent a moment, recalling the argument he had witnessed in the Sahar Hospital. “I don’t understand why you didn’t return as soon as you had the cash. Why did you keep up the charade? Your film is on the verge of collapse. A lot of people’s lives will be affected, some ruined. Your career, the career of your co-stars, are all on the line.”

  It was the actor’s turn to hesitate. “Yes, I thought about that. I talked the whole thing over with Poonam—she had worked so hard to get the role in Mote I felt terrible jeopardising her comeback. But she told me to do what I had to. She rose up from a very poor background; in her early career she was taken advantage of. Ayesha and Aaliya’s story struck her deeply. She and Robin insisted on helping, no matter what the fallout was. I am truly in their debt.”

  “But why not stop as soon as you had the money?” persisted Chopra. “Why risk the whole movie going up in smoke?”