Show Business

by Shashi Tharoor

  “But how can you get him out of jail?” Abha asks.

  “Ma” (the use of the word brings tears to the actress’s eyes, not necessarily for the reasons intended in the script), “in the years that I have been a humble monkey-man I have made a number of friends who are on the wrong side of the law. We will find a way.”

  Abha looks at her newfound son, her eyes brimming with hope and pride. “Pray that they have not moved him to another jail,” she says.

  “Let’s go, Ma,” says the hero. The monkey hops excitedly about on Ashok’s shoulder as they walk on. The sound track reminds the audience that they must go on seeking.

  “You may visit the prisoner,” the jail official tells Inspector Ashok. The young man, controlling his excitement with difficulty, walks to the cell. On a rough wooden stool sits Ramkumar, head bowed, wearing a prison uniform and a thick beard. He is a well-known character actor, a euphemism for someone who can act but isn’t as good-looking as the (invariably characterless) hero.

  “Father,” breathes Ashok.

  Ramkumar looks up dubiously. “What do you want?” he asks gruffly. “Who are you?”

  Ashok grips the bars of the cell. “I am your son,” he beams.

  “I have no son,” Ramkumar replies. “Stop torturing an old man. Go away.”

  “B-but you have! Your wife, Abha, gave birth to twin sons while you were in jail!” Ashok exclaims. “My revered mother and brother died at the hands of the henchmen of Pranay Thakur, but I survived. Didn’t anyone tell you this?” He takes in the expression of growing astonishment and wonder on his father’s face and realizes that, of course, no one could have. “I’m sorry, Father.” He thrusts out his wrist. “Do you recognize this?”

  “I gave it to your mother many years ago.” His voice breaking, Ramkumar gets up from his stool and walks warily toward the bars of the cell. “And I thought she had simply decided to abandon a jailbird.” He shakes his head, grieving. “How do I know you are telling the truth, that you didn’t just pick this talisman up somewhere? Why have you come to me only now?”

  “Because I have only just found out about you and traced you to this jail,” Ashok says. He bends to touch his father’s feet through the bars. “If you don’t believe me, I’ll bring Raju-ji to you tomorrow. You remember Raju?”

  “The servant? Yes, of course I do. But” — a blur covers his eyes, and in a single point of light at its center Ramkumar sees his wife, young again, arms outstretched to him as he is dragged away in handcuffs — “it won’t be necessary.” Ramkumar looks at Ashok still bent, and slowly, as if marveling at the moment, places a hand on his visitor’s head. “Bless you,” he says, “my son.”

  “Father!” exclaims Ashok, rising. They embrace, despite the bars between them. (The filmmakers are unaware of prison regulations and they’ve never heard of the Jail Manual, but even if they were and had, they wouldn’t let realism come in the way of art. These men from Bombay belong to a purist school of aesthetics.)

  “It breaks my heart to discover a son and to know that these bars will always remain between us, while that wretched killer who has reduced me to this goes free.”

  “Father, I promise you will not have to remain in prison much longer. I will check every rule, explore every legal right you have, to get you out of here. I am a police officer. I can do it.”

  “You give me hope, my son,” says Ramkumar, pride in his voice. “But — do not tell the police I am your father. They will hold it against you, my son, that your father is a convicted criminal. It may even make it more difficult for you to intervene to secure my release. After all these years, I can afford to wait a little longer if need be, but don’t take any risks.”

  “You are right, Father,” Ashok agrees. “Very well, I shall keep our relationship a secret. But only until justice has been done and you are a free man again!”

  Outside the prison Inspector Ashok walks on air, a starry look in his eyes. He whistles; he does a quick hop, skip, and jump. Startled passersby look at him askance. A lovely girl in a cotton salwar-kameez, books in her arms, hails him.

  “Ashok!” calls Mehnaz. She is wearing outsize sunglasses, apparently to enhance the scholarly look she must sustain for the scene. “What are you doing in this uniform?”

  Ashok blinks. “Do I know you?” he asks, though he is clearly not unhappy at being recognized by this exquisite stranger.

  “Stop teasing me,” she says. “If the police catch you in this, you’ll really be in for it.”

  “But I am the police,” Ashok protests.

  “Very funny,” says Mehnaz. “But I must say, it looks good on you, Bhaiya. Is it part of the plan?”

  “If you say so,” agrees Ashok, mystified.

  “Anyway, I knew you wouldn’t let me walk alone to college,” Mehnaz says satisfiedly. “Having forced me to stay out of all your exciting plans and told me I had to finish my studies, I did think the least you could do was accompany me.”

  “You bet,” confirms Ashok, who knows a good thing when he sees it and is, in his elation, game for anything.

  “I suppose you think the uniform will frighten all the college dadas into behaving themselves,” Mehnaz goes on chattily.

  “It should, shouldn’t it?” Ashok agrees.

  “You’re talking funnily today, Ashok Bhaiya.” The girl giggles. They have reached a park that blooms conveniently on their way to the college. “You’re really speaking strangely.”

  “Would you prefer me to sing, instead?” Ashok asks. Mehnaz laughs and runs toward a tree. Ashok bursts into playback:

  Gulmohars, roses and the iris growing green,

  You are more lovely than any flower I’ve seen;

  Take off those glasses and put jasmine in your hair,

  And let me watch you just — standing there.

  Oooh, standing there.

  (Mehnaz laughs, runs around the tree, then skips lightly over the grass and puts one foot on a park bench. She slips her glasses up her forehead and holds her chin in one hand, surveying Ashok in mock disapproval.)

  Mountains, oceans, valleys around the tourist scene,

  You are a better sight than any place I’ve been;

  Turn off that frowning look and sit upon that chair,

  And let me watch you just — sitting there.

  Oooh, sitting there.

  (Mehnaz sits on the park bench while Ashok dances around it, singing. He plucks a rose and gives it to her. She inhales its scent, then stretches languorously on the bench, coyly veiling herself and the rose with her thin gauze dupatta.)

  Love-poems, sonnets and the words that I can glean,

  You are more to me than any verse could mean;

  Slip off that screen of cloth and leave your fragrance bare,

  And let me watch you just — lying there.

  Oooh, lying there.

  He brings his face amorously close to hers. Mehnaz leaps off the bench and runs to the pathway, laughing. Ashok follows, catches up with her. She is panting: “Bhaiya, what has come over you? I’ve never known you to behave like this.”

  “But you’ve never known me,” Ashok points out.

  “Don’t be silly,” Mehnaz says. “The joke’s gone far enough. Hurry up, or I’ll be late for class.”

  “Wait,” says Ashok, catching hold of her hand. She looks at his hand in hers, and the color mounts to her cheeks. “Who am I?”

  “You’re Ashok, of course,” she responds impatiently.

  “Fair enough. And how do you know me?”

  “You’re my Bhaiya, aren’t you?” She is irritated now and pulls her hand away to walk on. Ashok stands still for a moment, scratching his head in puzzlement. “Am I?” He asks himself. Then he follows her.

  “I’ll take you to college,” he says, “but there’s something really peculiar going on.”

  “I’ll say,” agrees Mehnaz with spirit. “Are you sure you haven’t been drinking or something?”

  “I’m beginning,” Ashok mutters,
“to wonder myself.”

  “And who are you?” asks the prison officer dubiously.

  “I am his wife,” replies Abha.

  “And I am his son,” adds Ashok, monkeyless for the occasion.

  The prison officer is not impressed. “He has been in this jail for twenty-two years,” he says pointedly, “and there is no record of a wife and son. In fact, it says here” — he picks up a yellowing folder held together with dangling string and leafs through dusty pages — “wife deceased. Next of kin, Pranay Thakur.” He looks up at them. “Now you go and get a letter from Pranay Thakur to confirm that you are who you say you are, and I will see what I can do. But I can’t promise anything.”

  They protest, they plead, but the iron wall of prison bureaucracy, at least as interpreted in Bombay, is not moved. “Oh, and one more thing,” the official adds. “Even if you get such a letter, please remember that visiting days are Thursdays only. This is not a hotel, that you can come in and see people when you like.”

  When the devastated pair leaves, the prison official turns to a colleague on an adjoining desk. “Strange, this sudden burst of interest in Ramkumar,” he observes. “For twenty-two years not a soul wants to see him, and now suddenly three people this week. Remember the police inspector the other day? I wonder if I shouldn’t send word to Pranay Thakur.”

  Outside, Ashok is grimly determined. “We tried it your way, Ma,” he says through gritted teeth, “and you saw how they treated us. If there was any justice my father wouldn’t be in prison at all, and now we’re not even allowed to see him! Fine, at least we know he’s there. Now you leave it to me and my friends. We’ll have him out very soon, Ma — and then we’ll turn our attention to your adopted brother.”

  “All right, my son,” Abha sighs. “But be careful.”

  It is dark, but Ashok’s face is clearly visible in the moonlight as he stands at the foot of a tree outside the prison walls, a stout length of hemp in his hands. He puts one end of the rope over his monkey’s shoulder. “Go, Thakur,” he says.

  The monkey holds the rope in his thin fingers and leaps onto the tree.

  “Shabash” says Shahji, one of the two men accompanying Ashok. Both are familiar faces from the first scene at the chawl, people whom Ashok had greeted cheerily as he walked in with his day’s pickings.

  The monkey scurries along the thin branch that overhangs the prison courtyard. He leaps down and runs to a drainpipe, which he ascends nimbly. Reaching a barred window, the monkey loops his end of the rope around a bar, then proceeds to tie it into a knot. (The audience in the front rows of the movie theater applaud, cheer, and whistle at this: the improbable is far more fun than the credible.)

  When the monkey has returned, mission accomplished, to his habitual perch on his master’s shoulder, Ashok tugs at the rope to test it. It is firm. Quickly, he ties the other end to the tree trunk. The rope looks taut and strong.

  “Let’s go, brothers,” he breathes.

  One by one, the heroes of the chawl clamber up the rope, over the prison wall, and reach the window. Ashok, the first, uses a steel file he has been holding in his teeth to saw rapidly through two of the bars. He jumps in, and the other two follow.

  Whispered words are uttered, and the men fan out. The action is swift. A sleepy guard is surprised by Shahji and his friend is knocked out, his bunch of keys taken. Another looks up from his plate to find a knife at his throat and a grinning monkey on his table. Ashok raises a menacing finger to his lips. “One word,” he whispers, “let alone a scream, and —” He mimes the act of drawing the knife across the guard’s neck. The man chokes. Ashok puts a hand over his mouth and gestures with the knife. “Ramkumar?” he asks. “Don’t tell me —just point.” The terrified guard, extending a shaking finger, leads Ashok to Ramkumar’s cell. The monkey cheerfully helps himself to the abandoned dinner.

  “Open it,” Ashok commands at the cell door. As the guard fumbles with the purloined keys Shahji gives him, Ramkumar looks up, astonished.

  “Ashok!” he exclaims.

  “You recognized me?” Ashok asks in disbelief.

  “But of course,” Ramkumar says. “Though your disguise is pretty good.”

  “Disguise?” asks Ashok.

  “I didn’t expect you to do it this way,” Ramkumar says.

  “It’s the only way,” Ashok replies as the cell door swings open.

  “Thank you,” whispers Shahji politely, administering a swift blow with his flashlight to the back of the guard’s head. Both guard and hero descend to the floor, Ashok in order to touch his newfound father’s feet. (If one were ever in doubt as to the North Indian conservatism of the makers of Hindi films, one need look no further than the number of times the characters touch each other’s feet. Some of the producers expect the same of their supplicants, and they don’t always stop at the feet, either.)

  “Come with us, Father,” says Ashok, leading him to the rope at the window. “Do you think you can do this?”

  “I have broken rocks for twenty years, my son,” Ramkumar replies in a gruff voice. “I can do it.”

  They clamber out to freedom. Once on the other side of the wall, Ashok unties the rope from the tree trunk, knots the bunch of keys to it, and flings it back in a sweeping parabola through the open window.

  “Let them figure that out by themselves,” he chuckles, the monkey applauding his efforts. “Come on, Father, let’s go. Ma is waiting for you.”

  “Ma?” Ramkumar’s bewilderment is complete. “I thought you told me she was dead.”

  “When could I have told you that, Father?” Ashok asks in surprise.

  They get into a waiting Tempo, with Shahji at the wheel, and drive off into the night. The camera catches a glimpse of Ramkumar. Hope, fear, confusion, and excitement are reflected simultaneously on the character actor’s face.

  The sounds of music and the twinkling of lights strung on trees indicate that a party is taking place, but for those in any doubt, outside the entrance there is also a red banner that announces in large, white letters: WOMEN’S COLLEGE, FANCY DRESS PARTY, IN AID OF POLICEMAN’S BENEVOLENT FUND. (Had anyone suggested to the scriptwriter that no women’s college in its right mind would be associated with such an event, and that even if it were, it would not have called the function a “fancy dress party” or misspelled “policemen’s,” the objector would have been given a lecture on the creative necessity of artistic license. The misspelling, however, would have been attributed, not to the sign writer at Himalaya Studios, but to a conscious, realistic attention to detail — for which there is always a time and place in the Hindi film.)

  Inside the college overdressed extras laugh and whirl with a gaiety rarely seen in any social event at a real women’s college in India. Mehnaz is in full evening gown, complete with sash and fake tiara: she makes a convincing beauty queen (her sash proclaims her to be “Miss Alternative Universe 1975”). As she sips a respectably nonalcoholic drink and laughs with a group of girls, a man in a kathakali mask sidles up to her.

  “Remember me?” asks Inspector Ashok, lifting his mask briefly to grin at her.

  “Ashok!” squeals Mehnaz. “But what are you doing here?”

  “This is a policemen’s ball, and I’m a policeman,” replies the man in the mask.

  “Ha-ha, big joke. I thought you were going to prison tonight.” In Hindi, one cannot distinguish between “prison” and “the prison” as one might in the language of the banner writer, so Ashok’s surprise is understandable.

  “Me? But what have I done to deserve that?” he asks.

  Mehnaz laughs. “Always teasing me, aren’t you, Ashok?”

  “Am I?” But before Ashok can pursue this line of inquiry much further, a roll of drums indicates the music will be hard to compete against. “Let’s dance,” he says, and before she can protest he has swept Miss Alternative Universe 1975 onto the floor.

  The band establishes the music director’s modernity by wielding a number of electric guitars in add
ition to more traditional, indigenous equipment. The band members also sing the first line of each verse in what they believe to be English:

  I-I-I-I-I-I luff you,

  Don’t you know that’s really true,

  That’s why I wanna hold you tight,

  Sweetielet’s dance tonight.

  I-I-I-I-I-I luff you,

  Don’t you feel that I really do,

  Can’t you see that it feels right,

  Sweetie let’s dance tonight.

  I-I-I-I-I-I luff you,

  Don’t you see it just like new,

  It’s the moment to see the light,

  Sweetie let’s dance tonight.

  Ashok and Mehnaz are proficient dancers, although dancing is an unusual skill to have acquired in a factory worker’s hutment and a chawl, respectively; the extras soon gather around them and applaud, just in case the audience itself is not so inclined.

  Outside it is dark. Ashok and Mehnaz emerge from under the banner, still masked and gowned.

  “How are you going home?” Ashok asks.

  “You’re taking me, silly,” Mehnaz replies. “Except I thought you said you’d come after the show and wait for me outside.”

  “Listen,” Ashok begins, “we’ve got something to sort out here. Look at me properly.” He reaches for his mask, but on the way his hands stop at her face, and he cannot resist cupping her chin in his hands.

  “Take your hands off my sister,” says a voice from the shadows.

  Both Ashok and Mehnaz whirl around toward the voice. The face is half hidden in the darkness so Inspector Ashok cannot see it, but Mehnaz recognizes her brother and brings a hand up to her mouth. “Ashok!” she gasps. “But then who is —?”

  There is no time to complete the question as her brother, schooled in the rough-and-ready social norms of the chawl, which neither permit a stranger to fondle your sister nor encourage you to forgo the advantage of surprise, leaps out of the shadows and administers a swift blow to the inspectors solar plexus. Police training, however, is not to be sneezed at because the cop, while still doubled over in pain, brings his knee up into the advancing assailant’s groin. A few more blows are traded, dishoom, dishoom, with the man in the kathakali mask getting somewhat the worse of the exchange (for by this point the actor playing him is a double, of course). Then Ashok, whose face has still not been fully visible to his fellow-combatant throughout the encounter, twists the inspector’s arm behind him. The kathakali cop groans with pain. Suddenly — just as the chawl pugilist, standing behind (and therefore completely outside the view of) his rival, is about to apply the final ounce of pressure that will break his twin’s arm — a shaft of moonlight falls on their vein-popping wrists, and Mehnaz sees the two identical talismans glistening in the penumbra.