Show Business

by Shashi Tharoor

  Anil, indeed. The witch couldn’t even get my name right.

  But here I am, anyway, Cheetah’s grrowls notwithstanding.

  And in the teeth, I might add, of familial opposition, indeed disbelief. My father’s jaw actually dropped when I told him; even at home I couldn’t escape the theatrical. My younger brother, Ashwin, who had grown up attached to my shirttails like a surplus shadow, should have been pleased that he would now have a filmi hero to worship instead of a mere Brother Who Could Do No Wrong. None of it: he just looked at me, large eyes limpid in disappointment, as if I’d been fooling around with his girlfriend (which, in point of fact, I had, though he didn’t know it). “Films, Ashok-bhai?” he asked incredulously. “Bombay? You?” And he shook his head slowly, as if wanting to believe I knew what I was doing, but failing in the attempt to convince himself. Only my mother, as usual, was nonjudgmental. But all she could bring herself to say to me were the standard words of blessing, “jeete raho” (“may you go on living” ), which hardly qualified as active encouragement. Pity Tool Dwivedi wasn’t around to buck me up and cheer me on, but then he was contemplating his navel and his dirty toenails somewhere on the banks of the Ganges, beyond the reach of the Franciscan old boy network. In my great adventure I was, it seemed, completely alone.

  But alone or not, I’m in the middle of a film set now and there’s no time for existential self-indulgence. The playback song starts again, I lip-synch my melodic vow of eternal pursuit, the rain falls through holed buckets, my feet move as they have been taught, but I am terrified they will trip over each other. I am acutely aware of the ridiculousness of what I am doing, even more aware of the incompetence with which I am doing it. Double embarrassment here, to be doing the ridiculous incompetently. I am so petrified with fear of failure that I do not sense the tickle in my nose until I reach for Abha in midcavort, my back impossibly bent in choreographical adulation, one hand behind my rump like a bureaucrat seeking a discreet bribe, the other stretching up to her chin, lips moving to the playback lyric. I am hardly aware of it as I look into her eyes, my nostrils flaring in desire, and sneeze.

  “Cut!”

  “Oh, Christ,” I mutter under my breath, reaching for my handkerchief. I am not Christian, but fourteen years of a Catholic education have taught me a fine line in blasphemy.

  All hell breaks loose. As I sneeze again, I see Gopi Master, beside himself, launching into a paroxysmal frenzy that could easily be set to music in his next film. I see Abha throwing up her hands and stalking off toward her dressing room. There is the crash of a door: I seem to have this effect on women. I see angry faces, laughing faces, exasperated faces, black and brown and red faces, all animated and contorted in their urgent need for self-expression. I sneeze again, hearing voices raised, announcing how many takes have been taken, recording how many hours have been lost, recalling how overdue the next meal break is. Mohanlal nears me, reproach written in every furrowed line on his brow. His anxiety is eight on the Scale, and climbing.

  “Sorry, Mohanlalji,” I sniff. “Couldn’t help it. Must be all this rain. I’m very wet. Achoo.” I dab at my offending proboscis, and my handkerchief turns an alarming color. It’s even more serious than I’d thought! No, I’ve just taken some makeup off.

  Mohanlal looks decidedly unsympathetic. “Abhaji is being wet, too,” he says. “So also half the technicians, with perspiration if not with this water. How is it that you are only one who is catching cold?”

  I am completely taken aback by this evidence of directorial heartlessness. “It’s hardly my fault, is it, if I — achoo!”

  Mohanlal is spared the task of apportioning relative blame for the uncommon cold by the arrival of one of Abha’s chamchas. He is a lower grade of hanger-on in that he doesn’t travel with her, but shows up at the studio to run odd errands and generally gratify her sense of self-importance. Mohanlal turns to him, his anxiousness clearly heading from eight to nine. When Abha sends her sidekick to him, there are obvious grounds for fearing the worst.

  “Memsahib not coming,” the chamcha announces importantly, confirming Mohanlal’s apprehensions. “Too tired.”

  “Wh-a-at?” The director is up to nine now. “What do you mean?”

  The sidekick switches to Hindi. “Abhaji says she is not coming back today for any more shooting. She is very tired after all those takes.” He looks meaningfully at me.

  “But she can’t do this to me!” Mohanlal begins, quite literally, to tear out his hair, his long fingers running through the thinning strands like refugees fleeing in despair, taking with them what they can. “We’re behind schedule as it is.”

  “That,” said the chamcha pointedly, “is not her fault.”

  Mohanlal turns to me, murder in his ineffectual eyes. “This is your doing,” he breathes in a furious bleat, switching back to Hinglish for my benefit. “You are not being able to dance, you are not being able to move, you are not being able to do one song picturization right. No wonder Abhaji has had enough.” He reaches out for the chamcha, who is sidling away from this sordid domestic scene. “Where is she?” He returns to Hindi. “I’ll go and talk to her.”

  “It won’t do any good,” the sidekick replies, with a knowing shake of the head. “And it might just have the opposite effect.” Mohanlal nods wearily. Abha’s rages are legendary: she is efficient and professional and even occasionally pleasant, but once her temper is aroused, flames leap from her tongue, singeing wigs at sixty paces.

  “OK.” Mohanlal’s favorite two syllables emerge reluctantly, like air from a deflating radial. “We’ll take a break now,” he tells the technicians, who have begun to throng around us in the manner of the traditional Hindi movie crowd scene. He says this with a groan, a man at the end of his tether.

  “Look,” I suggest helpfully in conciliatory Hindi, “while you all take a break, why don’t I try and have an extra rehearsal with Gopi Master?”

  “Because he’d kill you, that’s all,” Mohanlal says with a sudden passion. “Which mightn’t be such a bad idea. Where is he?” He looks around, and spots the dance master in a corner, face buried in his hands in a mournful sulk of great intensity.

  “Just trying to be helpful, that’s all,” I say, backing off. “You’re right, I don’t think we should disturb him. Maybe I could use a rest after all.”

  “Rest?” Mohanlal is almost screaming. “If I were the producer, I’d give you permanent rest.” He must be upset; he has never spoken to me like this before. I will have to redraw the Scale. By the standards of everything that has gone before, this is practically an eleven.

  But high anxiety has suddenly metamorphosed in my director into aggression. “You are not going to rest, Mr. Hero,” Mohanlal adds, jabbing his forefinger into my chest to punctuate his return to English. “I am telling you what you are going to do. You are going to get Abhaji back here. Is your fault she is not here, isn’t it, is your fault this picture is not having shooting now, is all your fault. So you get it going again. You were wanting to be filmi hero?” he demands rhetorically, taking me by the upper arm and propelling me toward Abha’s dressing room. “I am giving you your big chance. Enter the tigress’s den and bring her out. I am not caring if you are in her jaws and bleeding when she comes out, but you get her here.”

  He might have put it a little less colorfully, I think, as I shuffle to the door. My diffident knock elicits no response. I try again.

  “What is it?”

  “Abhaji, it’s me. Ashok.”

  “What do you want? I’m changing.”

  “Just to talk, Abhaji. When you’ve changed.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m going home.”

  “I know, Abhaji. But I must talk to you. I need your advice.”

  “Advice?” She laughs, but the tone seems to soften. “I can think of other words for what you need.”

  “Please?”

  There is a pause behind the closed door. Then the famously girlish voice, still undulled by age, respond
s, “All right, give me a minute while I get dry.”

  “Take your time,” I agree, looking back at Mohanlal to make sure my progress thus far has been noted. He catches my glance, snorts, and looks away. Around him reigns the amiable anarchy of a studio set during a break: a confusion of wires, a diffusion of lights, a profusion of grips moving reflectors, stools, and power boxes. Not to mention a steady infusion of teacups, lubricating both activity and idleness. In a corner, oblivious to the clatter and the clutter, sits Gopi Master, palms on temples, red-eyed in mourning. Red- and black-eyed, actually, because emotion has smudged his kohl. I turn hastily back to Abha’s dressing room and knock again.

  The door opens and a mousy little face peers out. It is Celestine, Abha’s dresser, a girl who contrives to be even smaller than her famously petite mistress. She has undoubtedly been chosen for that, as well as for her bridgeless snub nose, frightened black eyes, and downy lip, all of which give the star nothing to worry about in her mirror while being dressed. What the hell, we all need reassurance; there’s nothing better than being able to employ it.

  “Memsahib says you can come in now,” Celestine whispers, respectfully or conspiratorially, I am not sure. I step in, and she closes the door behind me. Abha is seated at the dressing table, her head tilted as she tries to insert a gold teardrop into a perfect earlobe. She has changed out of the wet sari she was acting in into a splendid churidar-kameez in blue silk. She is looking pleased with the result, as well she might. My eyes linger on her exquisite face, seen so many times larger than life on so many movie screens in my childhood, on the sweep of black hair that flows to one side with the tilt of her head, on the creamy feet half slipped into tiny high-heeled black sandals. And inevitably — for in Agra you can’t help noticing the Taj — at the most famous bust in India, iconically displayed on so many cinema posters across the country, rising taut and firm against the silk of her kameez. For years her breasts had been Abha’s trademark, like Monroe’s legs or Bardot’s derriere, though, unlike these actresses, she was never called upon to reveal as much of her assets. Indian screenplays did not require it, and even if they did, our Indian censors would not permit it. Nudity is a commonplace in our countryside, of course, where many women cannot afford much to wear, but it is banned on our screens; whereas fisticuffs and homicide, which are illegal, are energetically portrayed. I must get someone to explain it to me sometime.

  No time for idle musings on the senses of our censors, though, as I take my eyes off Abha’s peaks to contend with Abha’s pique. She has finished with the earring and is returning my gaze, her expression an unspoken question.

  “You’re beautiful,” I find myself saying.

  She is now less angry than amused. “You haven’t come here to flatter me,” she replies, but it is obvious she is pleased.

  “No, I mean it,” I protest sincerely, my eyes straying to the bottle of hair dye she has left inadvertently on the table. “No one would believe you’re thirty-five “

  “Thirty-six,” she corrects me. Even if she joined the movies straight after school, she must be at least forty-two.

  “I don’t believe it,” I retort, striving to keep ambiguity out of my tone. “It seems just yesterday I saw you in Patthar aur Phool.” In a television rerun, I am tempted to add, but don’t.

  “So what do you want?” she asks, half smiling, waiting.

  “There’s much drama going on there,” I laugh, with a gesture beyond the door. “I’ve never seen Mohanlal so upset. Anger made him really articulate.”

  “Did he send you to me?” she asks, pleasantly enough.

  “Yes,” I respond in all innocence. “He —”

  “You can tell that cowardly son of a chaprassi he should have the balls to face me himself,” she blazes. “Go on, go and tell him that.”

  “I will, in just a minute,” I concur hastily, cursing my tactical clumsiness. “But I didn’t come here only for Mohanlal. I need to talk to you, Abhaji.”

  “What about?” The situation is still retrievable. She is slowly decelerating from her tigress mode.

  I haven’t a clue what to say next, so I shift from one foot to the other, looking uncomfortable. My glance lingers on Celestine, who is standing dubiously against the wall like a mouse evaluating a cheese of uncertain provenance. Abha thinks she understands the reason for my silence. She gestures with a tilt of her head, and the dresser scurries noiselessly away.

  “Don’t come back till I call you,” Abha orders, and the door clicks behind me. We are alone: the first time I have been with Abha without an audience, an entire crew looking on.

  “Thank you,” I say. She nods, slightly impatient. I must think of something to say. I speak without thinking: “Abhaji, I know I’m making a mess of things out there. I’m truly sorry.”

  Her face lightens visibly. “Sorry? In all my years in Hindi films, I’ve never heard an actor use that word. Even when it was in the script.” She pats the bed, the only other piece of furniture in the dressing room. “I knew you were a decent boy. Come and sit here.” Wordlessly, I obey.

  She looks at me, smiling. “I accept your apology.”

  “You must be sick and tired of my incompetence,” I say. “I don’t blame you for walking off like that.”

  There is a bright light in her eyes, and it doesn’t come from a reflector. “Oh, I didn’t walk off just because of you,” she says. “I’d had enough of that pair of idiots. When it’s obvious you can’t do something, when something isn’t working, do they try and change it? No, Gopi Master has to have his precious steps just the way he wants them, which is just the way he can do them, and that spineless Mohanlal, all he can do is to ask you to try it again. So we do take after take, I wear myself out, you get more and more worried and more and more self-conscious, and that mollusk, that invertebrate, just says ‘one more take, we’ll get it right now, won’t we?’ Calls himself a director! He couldn’t direct air out of a balloon.”

  I cannot believe my ears. So it isn’t just my fault after all! Abha’s words are lifting an incredible weight off my padded shoulders. I feel almost exhilarated. “Abhaji, so what should I do? You know this is my first film. I really want it to work. But the way Mohanlal makes me feel, I wonder why he allowed me to be cast in the first place.”

  Abha gives me a sidelong look. “Now you disappoint me. I thought you were going to speak honestly with me. None of this false innocent talk. As if you don’t know the reason.”

  I am genuinely taken aback by her words. “What do you mean?” I ask. “I know I hung around the producer’s house so much he finally had to sign me. But he wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t think I really fitted the role. He told me so himself.”

  Abha sighs. She stands up and walks the two paces to where I sit on the bed. “You really are an innocent, aren’t you?” she asks. The question seems to need no reply. “You mean you really don’t know.” This time it is a statement, not a question. I look up at her, shake my head.

  “Who is your father?”

  “I thought you were going to say that,” I respond hotly. “OK, so he’s a minister. But he hasn’t lifted a finger to help me. Never has, never will. Hates me being in films. You’ve got it wrong, I tell you. He didn’t get me the role, wouldn’t get me the role. And in any case, no one signs you just because you’re a minister’s son. My father isn’t even that important a minister. Who’d risk an entire film just to please him?”

  “I’ll tell you.” She stands over me, hand on hip. “Who is the producer?”

  This is silly, but I am looking up at her, seeing her face, her bright eyes, through the fabulous twin cones above my forehead, and I feel compelled to respond. “Jagannath Choubey,” I reply.

  “And who is Jagannath Choubey?”

  “A rich man. A producer.” She impatiently shakes her head at my replies. “An industrialist.”

  “Right. What industry?”

  “I don’t know. Factories of some sort.”

  “What s
ort?”

  “Clothing, I think.”

  “Another word for clothing?”

  My eyes widen. “Textiles?”

  “Got it. And what does a textile magnate need when he wants to make more money out of textiles?” I do not answer. I am too busy looking into the abyss. “Licenses for expansion. Who approves licenses? The minister holding the relevant portfolio. In this case, minor textiles. Last question: who is the Minister for Minor Textiles?”

  I groan.

  “You really hadn’t realized, had you?” Her voice is soft, speculative. Her hand touches my head, rumples my hair. “Poor boy.”

  I am devastated. I feel an emptiness widening inside me, pushing out all confidence, all pride. I don’t know what to say.

  Suddenly, she is sitting beside me. She puts a hand to my face, turns it toward her. “Don’t be too depressed. Everybody has to get their start somehow. Your way is better than most. You don’t know what some people have to do to get their first big roles. You’re lucky — you haven’t had to do anything.”

  I push her hand away and get up. I am that emptiness now; nothing else matters.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Mohanlal, to quit. I can’t do this anymore.”

  She stands up too. “Don’t be silly.”

  “Look, the only thing that kept me going from one disastrous take to another was the belief that at least the producer had thought me good enough for this role, really suited to it. We’ve been shooting for weeks, Mohanlal is obviously not happy, nothing is going right, the film is way behind schedule, and now you have just removed the one remaining prop that commits me to this madness. Malini was right: films just aren’t my scene. I’ve got to get out” I make for the door.