Show Business

by Shashi Tharoor

  Ashok … my son … I can’t go on.

  ASHWIN

  I have a message for you, Ashok-bhai. The Guruji rang. You remember him, from the election? He’s here now, a sort of resident seer to the stars. I had no idea you had maintained contact with him, but then I have no idea about lots of things involving you. I told him there was no indication you’d be able to hear or understand what anyone had to say. He said, “He’ll understand.” So I’ll read you his message.

  It’s in Sanskrit, a verse from the Valmiki Ramayana:

  dharmadarthaha prabhavati

  dharmath prabhavate sukham,

  dharmen labhate saw am,

  dharma saarabinda jagat.

  Hope I’ve said it right. The Guruji also supplied a translation: “From dharma comes success, from dharma comes happiness, everything emerges from dharma, dharma is the essence of the world.”

  Is that all? I asked him. Is that the message? And he said, “Tell him that dharma is what life is all about, the upholding of the natural order. Tell him that whatever he did was in fulfillment of his dharma. Tell him to have no regrets.”

  I’m passing it on, Ashok-bhai, but for what it’s worth, I think it’s too easy. One has to have regrets. I have regrets. A life without regrets is a life lived without introspection, without inquiry. That’s not a life worth living.

  MAYA

  It’s too late, Ashok. There was so much to say, so much I wanted to tell you, so much you never had time to listen to. Now I see you lying there, and I have no words for you anymore. You wrote me out of your script, Ashok. You left me nothing to say.

  Interior: Night / Day

  I can’t believe I’m doing this.

  Me, Ashok Banjara, best-educated actor in the Hindi film world, former member of Parliament, man of action who gave both “man” and “action” new definitions, Bollywood’s first megastar and most articulate of interviewees, lying in a hospital bed festooned in tubes and drips and bandages, listening to the hate and frustration and regret of a motley cast of characters from my life. But it is me, it’s my ears that are taking in this drivel, it’s my lips that refuse to move in response to my command, it’s my tongue that does not so much as flicker when I painfully demand of it the shout that will deliver me from these voices. What is the matter with me? The doctors of Bombay’s best hospital do not know. What is going to happen to me? Who tampered with the script?

  The voices echo and resonate in my mind, the only part of me that Kalki’s act of destruction has left untouched. My mind, grown large enough to occupy the useless rest of me, is huge, cavernous, full of shadows and empty spaces, airless and vast, a prison for pain. My mind sees shades of light and degrees of darkness, feels the warming lick of a million tongues of flame, hears the hollow percussion of a lifetime’s listening. My mind does not sleep.

  The voices fill it, merge, rise, withdraw, return; they do not leave me alone. They are the sum of all the voices I have ever heard, from the harsh Hindi of the ayah of my infancy to the Tamil lilt of my secretary, Subramanyam, and they swell to fill the spaces between my ears, between my ears and my heart, between my heart and my head. Through them I try to interpose my own clamorous, insistent, screaming, voice. But they do not hear me.

  I hear them. Through the encroaching mists of pain that now shroud my senses, I hear them. They sit on that chair facing me, they look intently at the mask of my face for any sign of recognition or reaction, they avert their gaze or bury their face in their hands or blow their nose or weep, and it is as if I am a screen at which they are looking, something to which they respond but that cannot change what has already been said. They sit there, and sometimes they get up and walk about the room, and then they leave my line of vision. But I can always hear them.

  The doctors are the worst. They come in, they consult their clipboards and they talk to the nurses as if I didn’t exist, didn’t need to be lied to. They cluck and frown and mutter phrases like “no progress” or “wery disturbing” without heed to the effect they are having on my morale. They think I can’t hear! One of them even sat here and said, “If you can hear me, cough.” As if I could raise a cough in my present state. Another tried “Blink.” Blink! If they only knew how hard it is for me to open my eyes once they are closed; it is easier for me to keep my eyes always shut or always open than to shut and open them to blink for their satisfaction. But I confront my pain and try. My eyes close. And they refuse to open again! I try, but the strength ebbs away from my lids, and they remain resolutely shut. “He blinked,” says a nurse, without conviction. “He closed his eyes,” retorts the doctor. And they label the experiment “inconclusive.”

  Like my life. I don’t know what they can do to give that back to me; I feel it slipping away, like the wet sari of a dancing actress. For the moment that I hold her sari in my hands, I can feel its texture and its wetness and sense the shape of the body to which it is attached, but I know that with each twist of her hips, each choreographed shake of her bust, she is taking the sari out of my outstretched grasp. And that in the end the rain will still keep coming down, the music will continue playing, but I will be left holding nothing but my own emptiness.

  I don’t want to die. I’m too young; I was having a good time; I’m not prepared for this. And yet the longer I lie here, stabbed by pain, the less I want to cling to life. The things I have heard — the things they all think of me! My God, is this what I have really been all these years?

  But what about the others? The masses, the great public whom no one would let into this hospital? They came from everywhere and nowhere to see me, from the six thousand cinemas of our land they walked and trudged and took trains and rode to see me, from huts and hovels and dhabas and hotels they traveled to see me, and no one let them in. Instead access to me has been restricted to an intimate handful who care much less for me than those waiting outside. They are my true intimates, I want to shout to the doctors. It is in their lives, their hearts, that my legacy lies. Allow them in, they will numb my pain, they will revive me.

  For doctor, there is much I have given them, huddled as they are in a world of little work and low wages, cramped space and closed prospects, social tyranny and perpetual struggle. I embodied their alternative, their other life. To invent something that is beyond reality, to incarnate escape and by so doing to make it true, as true as anything else they have ever known and infinitely more pleasurable: that is what I have done and done better than anybody else. I bestrode the cinema screen and I reified the dreams of millions, saying to them, Look, in me, Ashok Banjara, you can see your dreams come alive while you are awake, you can take my fate in your hands and we can triumph together. I have kept India awake by telling the nation it can dream with its eyes open. I have given each Indian the chance to reinvent his life, to thrill to the adventurous chase, to chase the unattainable girl, to attain the most glorious victory, to glory in the sheer joy of living. I have brought dignity to innumerable lives, doctor; more, I have brought hope.

  The same hope that they are now holding out for me in their vigils outside this hospital. Let them touch me with it, doctor. Allow them to heal me with the truth of their devotion, as I have lifted them with my own truth. Yes, truth. For what I have done is take a part, a situation, a line of dialogue, an expression, a gesture and make it more than that: I have carved a space with each, made a shape, broken a shackle, freed a bird that has soared in countless imaginations. In my acting as in my life, I rode the stallion of time with the free rein of opportunity; and in so doing, I gave the ordinary people, the ones in the twenty-five-paisa seats, a truth more valuable than the tattered truths of their tawdry lives.

  The pain is becoming unbearable. What is the truth of my life, doctor? Does it lie in the words of these mealymouthed intimates you have dragged in to see me, spouting their fears and their wishes and their self-justifications in the hope of eliciting the relief of a reaction? Is it hidden in the words my dharampatni, my wife of fifteen years, cannot bring herself to sa
y? Is it visible in the innocence of round-eyed little Aashish, whose short stubby fingernails betray a parentage I know isn’t mine? Or can it be found, doctor, in the movement of the original of those fingernails, as Pranay turns knobs and dials he isn’t supposed to touch — Pranay, whom everyone thinks of as kind, smiling, decent, pulling tubes and wires and switches while I lie here helplessly and scream silently into the void?

  He did it, doctor, and you don’t even notice! Through my pain I demand of you: how intensive is your care? Your nurses come in and take readings off machines that are no longer connected. Another nurse adjusts a drip hours later and does not try to find out how long it has been askew. I feel the pain and the desperation in equal measure, the dying and the rage at the cause of the dying, undetected in the bright lights of your hospital. The villain has done it — he has killed the hero. And you, the production crew, don’t even notice.

  I feel reality leaving me. I feel it all flow out of me through the deep ravine of my mind, the reality I have known and held dissolving in the flames that envelop my being. In my pain Abha’s augmented bust bounces away from my grasp, Subramanyam’s soft syllables hiss in dissonance, Cyrus Sponerwalla’s three chins wobble precariously around my face, Gangoolie’s “so to say” echoes cavernously in my ears, Tool’s beard catches fire and the flames curl up between Mehnaz Elahi’s parted thighs, for I am the flame and I am in her. You are all coming in now because that infernal machine is beeping and I can see the golden outlines of your faces, Ma don’t weep I have never seen you weeping, Maya stony-eyed after fifteen years how could you be, Dad so pale and gasping I know I shall see you soon again somewhere else, Ashwin really shattered for at heart you always loved me and I knew you did, Pranay the bastard whose face I do not want to see. Dear doctor, please take him away, please take my pain away.

  You are not real. None of you is real. This is not real. Only the pain is real. And me, I am not real either, and I will never be real again.

  I am seeing you all now in flash forward, and you are out of focus, the print is overexposed, the celluloid has caught fire, for God’s sake do something, do something about this pain. Your shadows interweave with the flames in my mind, your silhouettes shift on the walls in a spectral dance, the flames flicker in your eyes and garlands of fire encircle my brain, I am falling now endlessly through the flames, in their illumination I see you all again, a funeral procession of fluttering shadows, the pain is gone now, in its place there is the limpid clarity of darkness and glowing and shadow and fire, always the fire, the final fire that will shoot me to the sky.

  But not yet. Someone will find out how to stop the pain, someone will find out who did it, someone will arrest the villain for the crime, someone will find the lyrics to the theme song, someone will gather the crowds for a joyous celebration, and then, only then, as the flames flicker and the shadows dance and the people in the twenty-five-paisa seats applaud and whistle and the stories merge and melt and dissolve in the heat, only then will it be, only then can it be,

  THE END.

  Glossary

  While the meanings of most of the Indian words used in the text should be apparent from their context, a glossary may be of interest to some readers. The words defined below are, unless otherwise specified, from Hindi, the language of the Bollywood films featured in the novel.

  abhineta—actor

  adharma—unrighteousness; opposite of dharma

  advaita—a system of Hindu philosophy

  arreé[slang] “hey!”

  bachcha—child

  bahu—bride, daughter-in-law

  beedis—small Indian leaf cigarettes

  bété—son

  beti—daughter

  bhai, bhaiya—brother

  bhajan—devotional song

  bharata natyam—a popular system of South Indian classical dance

  Bong—[Indian-English slang] Bengali

  chakkar—[Hindi slang usage] business

  chamcha—sycophant, hanger-on

  chappals—slippers

  chaprassi—peon, gofer

  chawal—rice

  chawl—slum settlement

  chowkidar—gatekeeper

  churidar—tight pajamas

  churidar-kameez—outfit of tight pajamas and loose shirt

  daal—lentils (an Indian staple). Daal-chawal is the Indian equivalent of bread and butter.

  dada—[slang] tough guy

  desi—domestic (in the national sense), indigenous

  dhaba—roadside tea-and-snack stall

  dharampati [formal usage] husband

  dharampatni [formal usage] wife

  Diwali—the Indian festival of lights

  dry day—[Indian-English usage] a day when the sale and public consumption of liquor is forbidden

  dupatta—a long scarf worn by women with the salwar-kameez and similar outfits

  ganwaari—village girl

  ghagra—Indian skirt

  gherao—a form of protest picketing that imprisons the target, who is surrounded by demonstrators

  godown—warehouse

  gunas—good qualities

  gurudwara—Sikh temple

  jamaatkhana—place of meeting and worship for some Muslim sects

  jee-huzoor—“yes, sir”

  jhamela—mix-up

  judai—a bond, a twinning

  Kalki—Indian mythological figure, the tenth avatar of Vishnu, who will be incarnated on earth at the end of Kaliyug to destroy the world

  kameenay—[an insult] third-rate fellow; scoundrel

  kameez—loose shirt

  kanjoos—miserly

  karma-yoga—the yoga of action; one of the principal ethics derived from the Bhagavad Gita

  khadi—homespun (worn by Indian politicians as a symbol of nationalist simplicity)

  lakh—100,000

  lathis—staves, usually of bamboo, used by Indian police in crowd control

  maal—[slang] goods

  maha—big, great

  Mahabharata—ancient Indian verse epic

  masala—spice

  mastaan—hood, thug

  mela—fair

  moomphali-wallah—peanut seller

  muhavrein—idiomatic expressions, proverbs

  musafir—traveler

  naraka—hell

  neem—margosa tree, whose twigs are used to clean teeth

  neta—leader

  paan—Indian digestive of leaf and spices, chewed usually after meals

  paglee—madwoman

  pahelwans—wrestlers, tough guys

  paisa—the smallest Indian coin (100 paise = i rupee, about 4 U.S. cents today)

  pallav—the loose end of the sari, draped over the wearer’s shoulder

  Patthar aur Phool—[imaginary film title] “The Stone and the Flower”

  pau-bhaji—Indian snack

  payal—anklet

  Puranas—ancient Sanskrit texts

  salwar-kameez—outfit of loose pajamas and loose shirt

  seedhi-saadhi—[slang] straightforward, innocent

  shabash—“congratulations,” “well done”

  shastras—ancient religious texts

  slokas—ancient religious verses in Sanskrit

  Valmiki Ramayana—sacred Indian epic of the god Rama, as told by Valmiki

  yaar—[slang] pal, friend

  Ya Khuda—“Oh, God!”

  zamindari—a feudal system of land tenure in which tenants tilled land for a zamindar, or big landowner

  zindabad—“long live”

  Acknowledgments

  My research into the Bombay film world was made possible in great measure by Mr. P. K. Ravindranath, Press Adviser to the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, to whom I am most grateful. My thanks, too, to the able and cooperative officials of Film City, Bombay, who gave me detailed access to their sets, studios, and locales, and to the film crews who allowed me to intrude upon their work. My research would not have been possible without the help and hospitality of the
Parameshwars of Bombay: thank you, Valiachan and Valiamma, Viju and Anita. I should also like to acknowledge the filmi magazines of India for providing much grist for my fictional mill and to pay particular tribute to Malavika Rajbans Sanghvi for her witty and perceptive feature articles on Bollywood in the nonfilmi media. Of course, I remain solely responsible for what I have made of the material.

  “Ashok Banjara” was invented in 1972 by a subeditor at JS magazine in Calcutta, Narayan Ojha, who thought my too-frank campus journalism warranted a pseudonym. Tragically, Narayan did not live to see his creation acquire new life in these pages, but the name of my protagonist is a small tribute to this fine journalist and greathearted human being.

  My thanks, too, to Jeannette Seaver, David Davidar, Ann Rittenberg, and Nandita Agarwal for valuable editorial advice and invaluable positive reinforcement; to Deborah Rogers, for her faith and support; and to Professor P. Lal, for a verse from the Valmiki Ramayana.

  My parents, Chandran and Lily Tharoor, were, as always, a precious source of inspiration and encouragement: to them I shall always be grateful. My wife, Minu, read the manuscript with her usual care and insight; I cannot thank her enough for her patience and understanding. As I wrote the book my sons, Ishan and Kanishk, were constantly in my thoughts, but not in my vicinity; otherwise, as the old saw goes, this book would have been finished in twice the time.