Show Business

by Shashi Tharoor

  Why am I sounding so negative? You know I hero-worshiped you, Ashok-bhai. How could I not have? You were such an admirable figure in my eyes: tall and handsome, good at sports, a very public personality from an early age with your theater and your speech contests and your girls on either arm. I derived so much of my identity from being your brother, it was inevitable that you could do no wrong in my eyes. All this — this criticism came much later, when, after years of being out of your shadow’s reach, I saw you again at close quarters and realized what you were. Saw also that you couldn’t help being what you are, but that didn’t make it any easier to live with.

  What a waste your political career was, Ashok-bhai. Why did you do it? Dad understood all along, of course: you stood with no other thought than that you could win. Very useful for the party: by winning in your constituency you helped them deflect the threat of Sugriva Sharma. You served a very specific purpose. But did you think for a minute that they might have another purpose in mind? Did you even think who the “they” were, what the forces were within the party, how the factions stacked up, who had it in for whom, whose interests you might have served by winning, who wanted you out of the way the moment you’d fulfilled your purpose? Did you bother to do any of your homework, make political alliances, pay homage to the mentor you needed, or even acquire an adviser? No, Ashok-bhai. You thought you could go through the political world the way you did the film world, picking up scripts designed for you, doing what came naturally and reaping the benefits. It didn’t work that way, after all, did it? And if you had only asked me, I could have told you it wouldn’t; I would have saved you all the frustration, the humiliation, the waste. And in the process I could have prevented you from destroying Dad’s political legacy and my political hopes.

  It was that Swiss bank thing that really pissed me off. Why? Why did you need it? You wandered into politics and assumed the prevailing mores, but just as you did in films, you assumed the worst of them. There are actors in Bollywood who pay their taxes, surely, and there are, even if it sounds like an oxymoron, honest politicians. But you, Ashok-bhai, with your languid eye on the main chance, you would never have sought to be either. How was it that you never learned anything from Dad?

  I’m sorry. I’ll change the topic, promise. But what can we talk about, Ashok-bhai? You’re about all we have in common. Politics? No, I’ve said too much already. Films? What do I know about films? I took Dad to see that film you made in the first flush of political enthusiasm, Mechanic. Your first real failure after Dil Ek Qila. There it was, your statement of purpose, your cinematic attempt to promote your political image with the masses. And what crap it was, Ashok-bhai! Dad squirmed in embarrassment throughout, and I, your ex-campaign manager, didn’t know which way to look.

  Of course, Dad kept objecting to all the wrong things. A real-life Pranay would never support slum demolitions, he pointed out. In fact, he argued, the slums exist because of the Pranays, who give these areas political protection by making populist speeches about squatters’ rights and who thereby assure themselves of both the votes of the grateful slum-dwellers and the financial support of the mafia dons who really run the slums and who collect extortionate rents for a few square feet of public property. Not only that, no politician would conduct himself in an election year the way your Pranay does: even if he stood to gain from slum demolition, he would surely pretend otherwise rather than lose such an enormous bloc of votes. When the slum delegation goes to him, he would at least promise to “look into it” or “see what I can do” — utter some such time-honored insincerity. But your movie has him behaving with all the overweening arrogance of the Hindi film villain.

  “But it’s only a film, Dad!” I whispered. And he would say, “But even in a film, things have got to make sense. Why aren’t there other candidates in this election, in a country with two hundred and fifty-seven registered political parties and no shortage of aspiring Independents? How is it that the field is left to a thug and an upstart?” Or again, at the ridiculous climax, “Which idiot politician would provide an unknown rival with a free platform like that?” Pranay’s strategy in a race like this would obviously be to ignore his rival rather than give him such a major buildup and have to kidnap him — I mean, really, Ashok-bhai, how ridiculous can you get. But again, there you are, Hindi films. Only in Hindi films would a politician choose such a roundabout way to eliminate an ill-equipped rival and then choose to leave him locked up with one decrepit guard at a predictable address. Where do people leave their brains when they go to see this nonsense?

  Forget the political stuff for a moment: how about the rest? Can you imagine for a second a real Indian mechanic in a romantic entanglement with a real Mehnaz Elahi? It’s impossible: all these rich girl-poor boy fantasies the Hindi films churn out fly in the face of every single class, caste, and social consideration of the real India. “Just giving the lower classes the wrong ideas,” Dad growled, not entirely in jest. After all, the dramatic rise in what the papers call Eve-teasing, which is really nothing less than the sexual harassment of women in the street, isn’t entirely unconnected with Hindi films. Where else could all these lower-class Romeos have picked up the idea that the well-dressed women they once wouldn’t have dared to look at are suddenly accessible to them?

  So, thanks to the kind of roles you play, the lout thinks he’ll get the rich girl just as you do in the movies. Except that in real life, the rich girl won’t look at him, let alone sing duets with him. In real life, there isn’t a lout who looks, talks, or for that matter smells like Ashok Banjara. These louts are a different species, dear brother, and yet you play them as if they were just like us. They aren’t just like us, even if it might suit you to make your living pretending that they are.

  There, too, I guess one can say, “It’s only a film.” But even by the standards of your films, Mechanic was a bust, and not just at the box office. If Pranay was going to take the trouble to send thugs to bash up Ashok in the garage the first time, why wouldn’t he send them back to finish the job they didn’t complete? And when Mehnaz goes off to the slum with Ashok — who could believe she doesn’t have other friends to stay with? Maybe even a boyfriend? Why is it necessary to make her an adopted daughter suddenly, toward the end? Some of the great Greek myths are about daughters who betray their fathers because of their love for the resplendent hero: you could have been the Theseus to Pranay’s Minos. But no, our audiences can swallow any amount of improbable crap in the plot, but not the idea that blood can possibly betray blood. No wonder even our Prime Ministers believe the only people in politics they can trust are their sons.

  And why, while we’re about it, did your sidekick have to have my name? A comically frightened Sancho Panza-type buffoon who gets Ashok out of trouble — is that what “Ashwin” conjures up in your mind, Ashok-bhai? Don’t tell me you didn’t write the script — you were vain enough to add yourself to the story credits. What would it have cost you to at least change the name of this sidey, for God’s sake?

  I know, I know: you didn’t mean to offend me. In fact, you might even have intended, with typical sensitivity, to be paying me a tribute of some sort. Thanks, but no thanks, brother. The only tribute I ever wanted from you was your withdrawal from the seat that was rightfully mine. Instead of which you took it from me and made it impossible for me ever to have it again.

  Will you, to whom nothing much matters, ever understand what my political life meant to me? All those years spent in the constituency, all those elections fought, petitions received, complaints heard, problems solved or sympathized with, homes visited, calculations worked out, promises made and largely kept — what were they for? I was building up a life, Ashok-bhai, I was creating a sense of what I was that had nothing to do with you, but would do everything for me. I was doing it first of all for Dad, to help him, and then I realized I was doing it to show him that I could be what he’d hoped you’d be, his true son and heir. And then, slowly, I began doing it for myself. I became not just a
son, not just a brother, but Ashwin Banjara, political worker — and almost certain inheritor of the constituency when Dad finally decided he’d had enough. I even spurned all thought of marriage because I wanted nothing to distract me from pursuing my cause and my ambition. Wedded to politics: that’s what I was. With a worm’s-eye view of the political world, crawling toward my own little morsel. Till you swooped down from the heavens and carried it away just as I was reaching out to touch it.

  Even then, Ashok-bhai, though not without difficulty, I accepted reality, learned to live with my role. I sort of told myself that being right-hand man to Ashok Banjara was probably just as good a way to matter in national politics. And in due course, with your prominence and your exalted connections, you would ensure I was well looked after — an adjoining constituency, perhaps, or a Rajya Sabha seat, or perhaps even your own when you moved on to bigger and better things. But you destroyed all that, Ashok-bhai, destroyed your career and mine, and now you’ve all but destroyed yourself.

  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be cruel. I’m dreadfully upset about your accident, you know that, don’t you? I want you to get well soon. The whole nation is praying for your recovery.

  Isn’t that incredible? After everything, when all seemed lost, just as you seemed to have embarked on a long and inevitable decline, to become again the focus of national attention through an accident? If you surv?— when you come out of this, Ashok-bhai, you’ll again be the hottest property in the history of Bollywood. There are prayer meetings at street corners, Ashok-bhai; the louts are taking time off from Eve-teasing to pray for your health; little boys are neglecting their homework to ask Heaven to intercede on your behalf. Your old films, even Dil Ek Qila, are being rereleased to bumper crowds. You’re Number One again, Ashok-bhai, not just at the box office but in India’s hearts. Maybe this is when you should have joined politics.

  It’s sort of like what happened in Madras, in 1967, when the fading screen hero MGR, swashbuckling star of a hundred Tamil films, was shot, really shot, by the established film villain — and a former mentor — M. R. Radha. He was taken to the hospital and the Tamil-speaking world stopped turning. Men and women wept openly in the streets, commerce came to a standstill as shops closed, crowds of more than half a lakh waited patiently outside the hospital for hourly bulletins as the great man fought for his life. A delegation of rick-shawallahs, who were the epitome of the common man as portrayed by MGR in his films, pulled their vehicles all the way to Madras to be by his bedside. Poor people from the streets came to pay their respects; so did VIPs from their air-conditioned homes. The only difference from what’s happening with you today is that MGR’s fans didn’t pray for his recovery, since, like all members of his anti-Brahmin DMK party, he was a declared atheist. However, some folks who found it hard to shake off their old habits prayed to portraits of MGR himself. You try and figure that one out. On second thought, in your condition, don’t.

  For six weeks the cinemagoers of Tamil Nadu held their breath. MGR survived; what is more, he conducted his campaign for the Legislative Assembly from his hospital bed. He had been given an unwinnable seat by a party chief jealous of his popularity; he went on to win by the largest majority in the electoral history of the state. What is more, he carried the state for his party as well. Photographs of the bandaged actor were splashed across the papers, with captions of him declaring: “I wanted to come to your homes to seek your votes, but I was prevented from doing so. Now I must ask for your hearts.”

  He got them, of course. And their votes as well. Then he went on to split the party, unseat his chief rival, and win a state election at the head of his own version of the DMK, organized entirely around his fan associations. He was Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for almost a decade, and such was the magic of his name that he continued to rule the state from a hospital bed, this time after a stroke, though he was so badly crippled he couldn’t even speak. When it was suggested that the people of Tamil Nadu were being ruled by a vegetable, his handlers put him up on a high stage before a massive crowd and ran a brief tape of one of his utterances through the sound system. Another notable first for India: the country that invented the playback singer had now come up with the played-back politician.

  So you can do pretty well politically out of this accident, Ashok-bhai. They say the PM is coming to see you. Who knows, perhaps the party’d be willing to rehabilitate you. After all, the massive outpouring of grief must suggest that the people have forgiven your little peccadilloes — if they ever mattered to them. The party isn’t going to treat you as an embarrassment it’s relieved to be rid of when the great Indian public obviously holds you in such regard. This accident could actually be the rebirth of your political life. Think about it! Just uttering the words makes me feel much better. It isn’t all over yet, after all, for us. For you. The moment you can speak and respond, we must start planning your comeback.

  I’m sorry about all the things I said earlier. You know how sometimes things look so bleak that one says more than one intends to. But now the political blood is tingling again in my veins. We can show them yet, Ashok-bhai. It’ll be the greatest comeback since Indira Gandhi.

  Look at the bright side. Before all this happened, let’s face it, you were heading downhill like an Indian Railways train — faster than anyone would have thought possible on the way up. People were used to you; they were tired of you. The accident, the grave risk to your survival, has been a great shock, the kind of shock that galvanizes the system. It was no longer possible to be bored by you.

  Of course, it’s been a shock to everyone, Ashok-bhai. And perhaps most of all to the public, whose property you’ve really been. The girls, your triplets, have taken it all rather well. Rather too well, perhaps: I’ve seen Sheela preening into a hand mirror before walking past the anxious throng into the hospital, Neela puts so much makeup on her dark face that she only looks human under flashbulbs, and Leela seems to emerge from every visit to your room with the air of someone walking out of a movie theater. None of this is more real to her than any other scene you’ve starred in, Ashok-bhai. And why should it be? You’re hardly real yourself: they’ve seen more of you on the screen than in the flesh. You haven’t spent much time with them at home or anywhere else. You even went on family holidays with a servant-maid in tow. You were, you are, a larger-than-life figure to millions, but to the few around you, you weren’t quite as large as life.

  Except perhaps for the little one. Little Aashish looks so sad and bewildered by it all, standing there with his short stubby thumb in his mouth and his big black eyes round in incomprehension, nibbling at his nonexistent nails, wondering why everyone is behaving like this. It’s when I see him, your son, that I feel the greatest pain.

  Sorry — hearing all this, if indeed you can, many of the things I’ve said must only make you feel worse. But you mustn’t, Ashok-bhai. Just take it as one more incentive to get well again: to win back people; to win back your political place. I’m sure it’ll gladden you to know how spontaneous the outpouring of good wishes is. People have really rallied around after the accident. You won’t believe how kind everyone’s been. Even people who’ve had their problems with you in recent years. Old Jagannath Choubey showed up with an enormous bouquet of flowers. Mohanlal came and fretted anxiously, pulling so much string off his fraying cuffs that I thought he’d unravel his entire shirt before he left. Pranay has been very solicitous, asking Maya how he could help, taking the girls out for an afternoon at the beach, commiserating with Dad and Ma. He’s not really my type, but Dad thinks Pranay’s too good a man to be associated with the Hindi film industry, and he’s a villain! Even canny Sugriva Sharma, fresh from his recapture of what used to be your seat, sent a cable. I have it here somewhere — I’ll read it to you: WISHING MOST SPEEDY RECOVERY STOP INDIA’S HEART BEATS FOR YOU STOP NATION’S SCREENS NEED YOU STOP SUGRIVA SHARMA. He released it to the press, of course, before it even got here: Parliament isn’t the place for you, but the nation’s screens are. Wi
ly bastard.

  In fact, Pranay’s really been the best of the lot. I don’t particularly like to admit it, because something about the fellow makes me uncomfortable, but he’s really taken an awful lot of trouble. He’s come every day; he must have had to cancel a shift or two to do it. And I hadn’t imagined you two were so close, though I guess you have done a lot of films together. When the doctor wanted us to talk to you like this it was Pranay who volunteered to try it first. He’s the only one who really seems to be able to console Aashish: in no time the boy climbs onto Pranay’s lap and tugs at his absurd ties and for a moment forgets his bewilderment. One day Pranay rather ostentatiously took off a florid tie and looped it around Aashish’s neck. He was delighted and wouldn’t give it back. “It’s yours, my boy,” Pranay said, “a present.” And I could have sworn I saw tears in his chronically red eyes.

  Everyone is overcome by the occasion, Ashok-bhai. Your occasion.

  Even that harridan Radha Sabnis. Look what she wrote in the latest Showbiz:

  Darlings, isn’t it terrible what has happened to our precious Hungry Young-No-Longer Man? Cheetah hasn’t always been nice about The Banjara, but we all love him, don’t we? I’m praying and waiting for his recovery so that we can celebrate it together in a glass of Pol Roger 1969, his favorite champagne. [Funny, I didn’t even know you had a favorite champagne.] In his meteoric career Ashok Banjara has come to personify the Hindi cinema as we know it — the style, the razzle-dazzle, the energy, the charisma. As they say in the ads for runaway prodigals, come back, Ashok — all is forgiven. We need you, lover-boy. Grrrrowl…

  Lover-boy? Well, she might have chosen a more appropriate epithet, but as I said to Pranay, it proves her heart is in the right place. “Who’d have thought she even had a heart?” was his rejoinder. “Perhaps Ashok was one of the very few who dug deep enough to find it.” Odd remark, that, but I suppose he was just trying to be nice about you.