Show Business

by Shashi Tharoor

  They sent a car for me, I remember, and that was my first disappointment. I’d expected a swank foreign car like the ones the stars drive around in Malabar Hill, but it wasn’t even an Impala, let alone a Cadillac convertible. Just a scratched, black, rattling Ambassador with holes in the upholstery and rusty springs poking through. We drove into a ramshackle shed in some grimy suburb, which turned out to be the studio. I got out, still expecting air-conditioning and gloss. What I got was a bunch of stinky studio sidekicks pushing me this way and that, change this, wear that, wiping their brows and their noses and shouting at each other and at me, with an occasional “ji” thrown in as an afterthought. This went on for hours and hours and then I found myself stumbling into a dingy room. “Makeup, madam,” they said, and a thin, slimy man with the hands of a skeleton plastered all sorts of evil-smelling white and pink muck on my face, neck and, most enthusiastically, my cleavage. His nails were black and chipped; a cockroach ran out of his powder case. After all this they wanted me to stand before the shining spotlights and smile seductively.

  “Ya Khuda,” I groaned to the director, “this is supposed to be glamorous?”

  “No, madam,” he replied, pawing me with his eyes. “You are.”

  And you know what? I was. Because none of that mattered.

  What matters to you, Ashokji? Anything? Me? No, I’d only be fooling myself. Your wife? I don’t think so. As a woman I can say that if she mattered to you, you couldn’t treat her the way you do. Or treat me the way you did. Your children? You hardly talk about them. I think that what matters to you is your image. The way you see yourself is the way others see you. It doesn’t matter what kind of husband or father you are, the important thing is that you’re seen as a husband and father. You are all those roles you play on the screen, aren’t you, Ashokji? Because there’s nothing else, is there, nothing else underneath — no other character competing with the character of the role. Maybe that’s what makes you so good: you are the role each time, or maybe the role is you. But what that “you” is nobody knows. I wonder sometimes about those scriptwriters who write roles “for” you — what “you” do they base it on? The screen “you,” or course; they write a part that is as much as possible like the other parts they’ve seen you play. And so you are what you’ve been on the screen, and the screen continues to let you be you, and no one knows the difference, if there is one.

  Have I ever told you how alike you are to everyone? Because you are, you know. With everyone you behave in the same sort of way, the relaxed, confident pose, the smooth voice, the effortless charm. It always works best the first time, or when the other person is alone with you. But when they meet you again, and they see you’re exactly like that once more, or worse still, when they meet you in a larger group or with other people, and they see you treat all the others the same way, they feel terribly distanced from you, Ashokji. The same people whom you’ve won over the first time feel cheated, because they feel they are no different to you from anyone you might meet the next day or the next year. And indeed they aren’t, are they, Ashokji? No one makes the slightest difference to you — all that matters is how you relate to them. In the process you offer them this perfect exterior, but people are terribly inconvenient, Ashokji, they don’t stick to the script, they don’t confine themselves to their quota of dialogue, their interactions don’t cease when the hero has no further use for them in the plot, their feelings aren’t switched off when the director says “Cut!” And so they walk away from you, and they find other friends, and you’re left without friends in the world. Even those who’d normally be happy to be a supporting actor to a hero, because this hero makes it plain, without ever saying a word, that he doesn’t need their support and won’t notice it when it is taken away.

  OK, OK, I know what you’re going to say, or what you would say if you could. You’d say, “Don’t be silly, paglee, am I the same with you as I am with Cyrus Sponerwalla? You see a different me than other people see, or most other people, anyway.” I suppose that’s true, you are different, but only just. With women you’re different not because you want to reveal any more of yourself to them but because you want them to reveal themselves to you. Physically, of course. I don’t think you’ve ever cared very much what goes on inside our heads. So with women you switch on an extra bulb in those eyes of yours, Ashokji, but it doesn’t cast any light on you. And if you do treat a woman who attracts you differently from the way in which you treat a man, you treat most women alike as well, whether they’re sleeping with you, costarring with you, or merely writing gossip columns about you. Except when we’re actually in bed together, for instance, is there much difference between the way you behave toward me and the way you behave toward Radha Sabnis? The casual observer would find it difficult to tell from your conduct which woman is actually your lover and which is the bitchy columnist you’re trying desperately to avoid, without showing it, of course. Though actually, the thought of anyone being Radha Sabnis’s lover is hysterical — I bet you’d never do it for all the black money in Bombay.

  Hai, what a fate, to be able to talk like this to you at last, for the first time sitting down and fully dressed, and not even to know whether you’ve heard a word I said! Whenever I tried to talk to you before, you know, after we — don’t make me shy — afterward, I knew you weren’t listening. Don’t try and protest your innocence, I knew. All along I knew. Well, almost. I became suspicious at first because you would seem so attentive as I talked, lying there with my head on your shoulder, and you’d grunt every time I paused, which would only encourage me to go on. But whenever I asked a question you answered with a kiss, and the kiss led on to other things, and then my questions never got answered. This was fun for a while until I began to think it odd that your affection for me always rose whenever I wanted an answer from you. So I started putting in odd things, outrageous things, into the middle of what I was saying but without any change of tone at all, and you never reacted to any of them. I’d talk about a sari I’d seen, or about this aunt of mine whose husband used to beat her, or about the latest things Salma said, and I’d casually add a phrase like “this was the time I was selling myself for a hundred rupees an hour” or “you know the aunt I mean, the one who was sleeping with your father,” and you wouldn’t bat one of your droopy eyelids, you’d just continue grunting at all the right places.

  So then I realized that your mind was somewhere else entirely, once your body had spent itself in me, and that you weren’t listening to a word I was saying. All those precious, intimate little secrets and thoughts and anxieties and family events that mattered so intensely to me and that I wanted to pour out of myself to share with you, the things that I wanted to give you to make myself truly and completely yours, the private doors I was opening to let you into my world and not just into my body, none of these things had made the slightest dent in your consciousness. And you know something, Ashokji? It didn’t matter. I was so happy lying there with the hairs on your chest tickling my cheek and your arms around me caressing the hollow of my hip, that I chattered cheerfully on, knowing you weren’t listening and yet feeling the joy of saying all these things to you that were a more precious gift from me than the ones you valued. I thought, it doesn’t matter that he isn’t listening, maybe he too is enveloped by the soft intimacy of my voice, maybe the actual words don’t matter as much as the fact of my saying them, maybe the sound of my words is enough to tie me to him more securely than the fleeting union of our pelvises. Maybe — and maybe he just can’t be bothered. But I don’t want to know. I love him.

  Can any woman have loved you more unselfishly, Ashokji? And yet, when you’d had enough, when you’d tried every position you wanted to try and got bored with the familiarity of me beside you, you just spurned me, Ashokji, you garlanded me at your temple and you let me go, you pretended not only that I didn’t exist but that I had never existed. And now I cannot even get you to say, for once, for the first and last time, that you loved me.

  Oh, As
hokji, I so wanted to be cheerful, but how can I? See, I’m wiping a tear with the corner of my sari pallav — how you used to hate me doing that! But I can’t bear it just to look at you lying there. In a way it’s just like old times, isn’t it, with you lying there and me talking away into the void. Except that you don’t even grunt now.

  You know what I think, I think you really got angry with me over that business of the Swiss money. Really, how was I to know it would be such a jhamela? You said, “Listen, Mehnaz, this brother of yours in the Gulf, can he help?” and I said, “If I ask him to, I’m sure he will.” And then you met him and the two of you worked it all out, why blame me? The whole thing was your idea anyway. I remember how it happened; see, even if you remember nothing that I ever said to you, I always remember every word that you spoke to me, even how you said it and what you were wearing, if anything, when you said it. On this occasion you were wearing only a wrist-watch, and it wasn’t Swiss — see, I made a joke — and you said how unhelpful Cyrus Sponerwalla had been about helping you stash away your black money. You did a perfect imitation of him squealing in horror, “Like, man, that’s illegal!” You did it so well I could practically imagine Sponerwalla’s chins quivering and eyes popping, even though I hadn’t met the man yet. And so I said, not even half seriously, “He should meet my smuggler brother from Dubai, Nadeem’ll really give him an education.” And you suddenly sat up, practically spraining my neck, and said, with that look in your eyes that means you really want something, “Are you serious? Can I meet Nadeem? What does he do? When is he next coming to India?” I sort of rubbed the side of my neck a bit and sat up too and said, “Of course I was half joking. He’s not really a smuggler — can you imagine? — but he does know about these things, he’s a businessman,” and you were so interested you didn’t even ask me how my neck was feeling. I told you, I remember everything.

  So one thing led to another and when my brother came down to India you sat with him and asked earnest questions about Swiss bank accounts. At least so he told me, I wasn’t even there, but I don’t see why he would lie. So Nadeem said, “Sure I have a Swiss bank account, many of us in the trading business have to, and I can help you open one.” And he took a lot of trouble too, explaining how it could be in any name or number, and you thought of using your birth date as the number and Nadeem explained how easily that could be traced back to you, and finally you settled on Gypsy as a translation of Banjara. Remember how you forced poor Choubey to switch a whole sequence from Kashmir to Switzerland in that film, Himalay ke Peeche, so that you could tie this up in Geneva yourself?

  I didn’t mind, because it meant boating on the Lake of Geneva with you, the Alps rising white and majestic behind like the cover on a box of chocolates, and letting the spray from the Jet d’Eau blow onto our new parkas as we laughed at the absurdity of the Swiss manufacturing a tourist attraction in the midst of all this natural splendor. And how you chased me into St. Pierre’s Cathedral, saying you wanted to make love to me in a confessional, and the look on your face when you discovered it was a Protestant church and they either didn’t sin or wouldn’t confess to it! And your shock on discovering that the casino wouldn’t permit bets above ten francs and that a box of chocolates cost twice that much. And the Piaget watch you bought me, even though I told you I never wanted to know the time, never wanted to see it passing when I was with you. And how I dragged you off to the hotel where Professor Calculus had stayed in my favourite Tintin adventure, and you said stuffily, “Is that all you read, comic books?” but you still photographed me near that life-size cutout of Tintin they had in the hotel lobby. Are you amazed at how much I remember? But what I remember most of all about that visit to Geneva was how disbelieving you were that you could walk anywhere without being instantly mobbed and asked for autographs — and the tone of regret in which you said, “It must be this parka, I could be any cold tourist.” Oh, Ashokji, how much I loved you then, and how much I love you now.

  My Guru says I must stop looking back. The past is always there with me anyway, he says; what I am is the result of the past as it shapes itself into the future, which in turn immediately becomes the past. The present, he says, is an illusion: each moment has either already happened or has not yet happened, it is either past or future. The problem with Westerners, he says, is their obsession with the present, which means they are living for something that does not exist. Does that make any sense to you? It didn’t entirely to me, but the Guru is obviously a great man and I cannot always expect to understand everything he says.

  I’ll tell you something that he should have said to you when you were getting mixed up in all those Swiss bank accounts. It’s something he said to me when he was explaining why I should renounce my worldly goods to his ashram. “In our legends and our shastras,” he explained, “there has always been a conflict between Lakshmi and Sarasvati, that is, between the goddess of wealth and the goddess of the arts. In other words, my dear, wealth and art are not compatible: one constantly destroys the other. It is better, in the natural order of things, for the wealthy to have no taste, and for the artistic to have no wealth.” If you had only realized that, Ashokji, you wouldn’t have got into that whole mess.

  But you didn’t really do too badly, did you? I mean, considering. After all, you’re not in jail or anything. How you got it so screwed up I don’t know. It was a simple enough arrangement. Whenever my brother and his associates needed money here, they got it from you, and Swiss francs went into your account — for your family holidays abroad and Maya’s selfish little shopping trips to Harrod’s. No one asked any questions and no one need have, if you hadn’t gone and got mixed up in politics. Now who asked you to do that? That dried-up little minx of yours wanted to be a minister’s wife, I bet. I mean, what else could she be after Dil Ek Qila, hanh? I wouldn’t have been able to show my face to a producer after that disaster, let alone to a camera. But she gave you more guilt by “sacrificing” her career again, as if she had any career left to sacrifice. Great comeback that was. More a go-away than a come-back, if you ask me.

  I was very angry with you then, Ashokji, and with the way you just stopped seeing me. But Guruji counseled me again, quoting Manu this time — you know, the ancient lawgiver. From time immemorial women have had different roles at different times. The same woman who is treated as a chattel in domestic matters is an essential and equal partner in rituals, religious sacrifices, the offering of homage to ancestors. An Indian woman’s consolation, the Guru said, is that she knows where she is irreplaceable, in what she is indispensable, and when she is irrelevant. And that applies not just to me, but to that minx Maya as well.

  Who’s that? What… ?

  Oh, it’s you. Hello. What do you mean what am I doing here? I’m visiting our husband.

  OK, baba, don’t scream, I’m going now. All right, all right, there’s no need to make a fuss. I was going anyway. Oh, and I suppose you should know, for the doctor, that I didn’t get a peep out of him. But then I couldn’t see the part of him that usually responds to my presence.

  Have a nice day, Mrs. Banjara.

  Interior: Day

  I can’t believe I’m doing this.

  Me, Ashok Banjara, product of the finest public school in independent India, winner of its English Elocution Prize, best-dressed undergraduate at St. Francis’ College, drinker of eighteen-year-old Macallan, standing up on a rickety platform in churidar and kurta, declaiming the virtues of the Prime Minister’s party in chaste Hindi to a rural throng that look like they couldn’t even afford the proverbial twenty-five paise for their cinema seats. But it is me, it’s my mouth that’s moving in political recitation, it’s my arms that are gesticulating under the shawl that’s draped toga-style over my khadi kurta, it’s my voice calling for social justice, rural development, and votes. Me, Ashok Banjara, political campaigner and aspiring member of Parliament. Now there’s an unlikely turnabout. I carefully enunciate the idiomatic muhavrein that a Bollywood lyricist has scripted for me
, I fling my right hand skyward and pause for acclaim; and as the acclaim comes, I tell myself, you can’t be serious, old son — or can you?

  It’s all happened so suddenly. OK, I can’t pretend the thought hadn’t entirely occurred to me. After all, it’s in my genes. I am my father’s son, even if I’ve tried to deny it all my life. And I’ve never really been able to shake off the underlying desire (again, repeatedly denied) to win his approval. I couldn’t at school, in my choice of job, in my plunge into films; I could, and did, when I picked a wife. Somewhere at the back of my mind lay the thought that I might one day do something that would make him truly proud of me. And politics was the only possibility: it was his world, he’d always wanted me to join him, I’d refused — and now I confronted the wonderful paradox that my nonpolitical fame had actually improved my prospects of being able to enter his world successfully.

  But I never really tried to do anything about it. Even when Cyrus, as nonpolitical an adman as ever violated Bombay’s prohibition laws, mentioned it once. “Have you ever thought, man,” he fantasized over his third whiskey one hot, “dry day” evening, “of entering politics?” I looked at him as if he had suggested I put on a loincloth and a tin helmet and do a mythological film. “Really, Cyrus,” my look said.

  He reacted instantly to my disdain. “Hey, it’s not such a bad scene, man,” he protested. “Opportunity-wise. I mean, look at these Southie guys, MGR, NTR, you know. Big-time Tamil, Telugu movie stars, and when they entered politics they were, like, unstoppable everywhere their movies played. Now you, man, your movies play everywhere. You’re not a regional actor, like. Only real handicap’s your initials. Kinda inconsiderate of your parents to be so kanjoos at the naming ceremony when they coulda, like, spread themselves around. AB lacks something, ya know? Kinda like a kid trying to remember the alphabet. Call yourself ABR and you could be bloody Prime Minister one day, big guy.”