He was married, had four children, was a model husband, an exemplary father. Turn up whatever corner of his life you wish, you wouldn’t find anything even vaguely dubious or dark. That’s all fine, but this idea—it never failed to rattle my brain.
I swear, I cursed myself several times for harbouring doubts about the man. ‘You’re rotten. Why do you needlessly mistrust a man whom the whole world considers good, and about whom you yourself don’t have any complaint? What’s wrong if he never tires of looking at his well-proportioned body? You’d likely do the same if you had a body like his.’
Still, I could never bring myself to look at him with the eyes of others. This often drove me to argue with him during our conversations. If something he said didn’t sit right with me, I went all out against him. But after every such altercation, I would see only a smile on his lips and feel an indescribably bitter taste sloshing around in my throat, which pissed me off even more.
Without a doubt, his life wasn’t stained by any scandal. He had no relations, innocent or otherwise, with any woman except his wife. I also admit that he called every female actor his sister, and they, in turn, called him brother. But my heart always questioned my mind: Why establish this relationship in the first place? A sister–brother relationship is one thing, but calling a woman your sister, that too so demonstratively, like putting up a sign that says ‘Road Closed’ or ‘No Pissing Allowed’, is quite another.
If you’re not intending to establish a sexual relationship with a woman, why announce it in public? If even the thought of a woman besides your wife can’t enter your heart, why bother to advertise the fact? Since I couldn’t resolve this, and other similar issues, a strange perplexity gripped me.
Anyway—
The shooting of Ban ki Sundri was progressing. The studio was bustling with activity. A slew of extras, both men and women, showed up every day and we had a nice time indulging in light-hearted banter with them.
One day, the make-up master, whom we called Ustad, walked into the villain Niaz Muhammad’s room with the news that the new girl who had been signed up for the role of the vamp had arrived, so filming was expected to start very soon.
We were having a round of tea at the time. We warmed up at once, partly from the tea and partly from the news. The arrival of a new girl in the studio was always a pleasant event, so we all quickly exited the room to have a look at this new creature.
We finally saw her when Hurmuzji Framji came out of his office, took two paans out of drummer Isa’s silver box, stuffed them inside his humongous cheeks, and headed for the billiard room.
All I could see of her was her dark, brownish complexion as she quickly shook hands with the seth and rode away in the studio car. A bit later Niaz Muhammad told me that she had rather puffy lips. Perhaps he was only able to see her lips. Ustad, who hadn’t glimpsed even that much, remarked, shaking his head with an air of disapproval, ‘Onh, kandum!’ No good! The girl didn’t come to the studio for the next four or five days. On the fifth day—or was it the sixth?—as I was coming out of Gulab’s restaurant after taking my tea, I suddenly bumped into her.
I tend to look at a woman surreptitiously. If she appears in front of me suddenly, I’m unable to see anything of her. Since this girl had materialized so unexpectedly, I couldn’t get a good enough look at her to form an opinion of her appearance, although I did see her feet; they were squeezed into a pair of new-style sandals.
The path from the lab to the studio was topped with gravel that had numerous pretty round stones sticking out. This made walking in her open sandals rather difficult for her, as they kept slipping on the round stones again and again.
After this encounter Miss Neelam and I gradually became friends. The studio personnel didn’t know it, but our relations were quite informal. Her real name was Radha. Once I asked her why she had changed her beautiful name and she replied, ‘Oh, no particular reason,’ then added a minute later, ‘it’s too beautiful to be used in films.’
You might think that Radha was a religious kind of woman. Not at all. She couldn’t care less about religion and its trappings. But just as I inscribe ‘786’, the numerical value of ‘bismillah’, on top of the first sheet of paper before writing a new story, she also just happened to love the name Radha dearly. Since it was her wish that we not call her Radha, henceforth I will only call her Neelam.
Neelam was the offspring of a Benares prostitute. And it was with a Banarasi accent and cadence that she spoke. It sounded very sweet to the ear. She always called me Sadiq, though my name is Saadat. ‘Neelam,’ I once said to her, ‘you can just as easily call me Saadat. I know you can. So why don’t you? For the life of me, I can’t understand it.’
A faint smile appeared on her dark, thin lips. ‘Once I’ve made a mistake, I stick to it.’
I think very few people were aware that the person everyone in the studio considered just an ordinary actress happened to possess a unique personality. She didn’t have the shallowness, the baseness of other run-of-the-mill actresses. Her gravitas, which everyone at work saw through his own lens and misinterpreted, was her loveliest attribute, entirely endearing.
This gravitas, this charming sturdiness served as the most becoming make-up on the clear, smooth surface of her darkish complexion, though it cannot be denied that it had packed the corners of her thin lips with the unnamed bitterness of sorrow—a quality, let’s accept it, that set her apart from other women.
I have never ceased to wonder, then or now, why they picked her for the role of the vamp in Ban ki Sundri. She wasn’t even nominally foxy or sharp. When she appeared on the set wearing a skimpy choli to play her part for the first time, I was terribly shocked. She could immediately guess people’s reactions, so the minute she saw my expression she explained, ‘Director Sahib ordered me to appear in this outfit because I’m not playing the part of a respectable woman. You know what I told him, “If this is an outfit, I’m willing to walk with you naked.”’
‘So what did Director Sahib say?’
Again a faint smile appeared on her thin lips. ‘He immediately started imagining me naked . . . How silly can these people get! What need was there to tax his poor imagination once he had seen me in this wispy outfit.’
This should suffice by way of Neelam’s introduction for an intelligent reader. Let me now proceed with the events which I must record to finish this story.
In Bombay the monsoon starts in June and continues till the middle of September. The first couple of months the rain comes down so hard that it’s impossible to work in the studio. The shooting of Ban ki Sundri had started towards the end of April. We were just about finishing the third set when the first rains broke on us. Only one small scene that had no dialogues remained, so we kept shooting. Once that ended, we were at a loose end for months.
This provided many opportunities for people to spend time together. I spent nearly the whole time sitting in Gulab’s restaurant, sipping cup after cup of tea. Whoever walked in was dripping wet, or almost. All the flies outside had swarmed in. The atmosphere became unbearably filthy. A cleaning rag lying on one chair, an onion-chopping knife on another. Gulab Sahib standing nearby, churning out his Bombay Urdu with his disease-rotted teeth: ‘Tum udhar jaane ko nahin sakta’ (You can’t go there), ‘Ham udhar se ja ke aata’ (I’ll go there and come back), ‘Bohat lafra hoga . . . han . . . bara vanda ho ja’ienga’ (It will create a big mess . . . yes . . . it will result in a big loss).
Everyone came to this restaurant, with its corrugated tin roof, everyone except Seth Hurmuzji Framji, his brother-in-law Edalji, and all the heroines. Niaz Muhammad was obliged to come here twice because of his pets Chunni and Munni. Raj Kishore showed up once a day. The minute he crossed the threshold with his tall, athletic body, everyone’s eyes suddenly lit up, but not mine. The young male extras immediately got up to offer Raj Bhai their seats. Once he sat down, everyone crowded around him like so many moths. After that, you heard only two types of things: the extras praising
Raj Bhai’s marvellous acting in old films, or Raj Bhai regurgitating the ancient history of how he dropped out of school and, later, out of college to join the film world. Since I had memorized all of this by now, I would greet him when he entered and get out of the place.
One day, after the rains had stopped, Niaz Muhammad’s cats scared the daylights out of Hurmuzji Framji’s German shepherd, who ran to Gulab’s tea joint with his tail tucked between his legs. As he was running in, I saw Neelam and Raj Kishore talking on the round platform under the maulsiri tree. Raj Kishore was standing and, as usual, nodding his head, which meant that as far as he was concerned he was making interesting conversation. I don’t remember now when or how he’d been introduced to Neelam, but she’d known him well even before she joined films. And if I remember correctly, she had casually praised his good-looking, well-proportioned body once or twice.
I came out of Gulab’s restaurant and had just made it to the eves of the recording studio when I saw Raj Kishore take down his khadi bag from his broad shoulder with a jerk and pull out a fat notebook. I immediately knew that it was his diary.
After finishing the day’s work and receiving his stepmother’s blessings, he was in the habit of writing in his diary before he went to bed. Even though he loved Punjabi dearly, he wrote the diary in an English that was vaguely reminiscent of the delicate style of Tagore in some places, and Gandhi’s political manner in others. It also reflected a significant influence of Shakespearean drama. But I never did see any sincerity in anything he wrote. Should you ever come across this diary, you’ll know all there is to know about ten, maybe fifteen years of his life. How much money he donated, how many poor he fed, the meetings he participated in, which outfits he wore and which he discarded . . . and if my guess is right, you’ll also spot my name on some page beside the figure 35, the amount I once borrowed from him and haven’t returned to this day since I figured he’d never note that it had been returned.
Anyway, he was reading some pages of his diary out loud for Neelam’s benefit. Even though I was quite some distance from them, I surmised from the way his lips moved that he was praising the Lord in the style of Shakespeare.
Neelam sat quietly on the round cement platform under the maulsiri. From her elegantly serious face, it was apparent that Raj Kishore’s words were making no impression on her. She was looking, rather, at his protruding chest. His shirt was open and his dark black hair looked ravishing on his fair chest.
Everything looked washed and immaculately clean in the studio, even Niaz Muhammad’s cats, who normally looked revoltingly filthy. Both of them were lying on the bench opposite me, cleaning their faces with their soft velvety paws. Neelam wore a spotless white georgette sari with a matching blouse of white linen, creating a subdued and pleasant contrast against the darkish skin of her slender arms.
For a moment I wondered, ‘Why is she looking so different?’
Suddenly our eyes collided and I found the answer in her distracted glance. She’d fallen in love.
She gestured to me to come over. For a while we talked about this and that. After Raj Kishore left, she asked me, ‘Will you come along with me today?’
We arrived at her house at six in the evening. She tossed her bag on the sofa as soon as we entered and said without looking at me, ‘It’s not what you’re thinking.’
I understood her meaning. So I asked, ‘How do you know what I was thinking?’
The same muted but mysterious smile appeared on her lips again.
‘Because we had both thought the same thing . . . Maybe you didn’t think about it later, but after much deliberation I’ve concluded that we were both wrong.’
‘What if I say we were both right?’
‘Then we are both stupid,’ she said, plopping down on the sofa.
In no time at all the sombre look on her face deepened. ‘How can that be, Sadiq? I’m not a naive young girl who doesn’t know what’s inside her heart. How old do you think I am?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Absolutely right. But what you don’t know is that I already knew what love was when I was only ten years old. Forget knowing what love is, I was actually in love. By God I was. I was seized by a murderous love clear up to the age of sixteen. How can I ever love anyone now? Not a chance.’
She looked at my frozen expression and said nervously. ‘I know you’ll never accept it, no you won’t, not even if I bare my heart to you. Don’t I know you well enough? But by God, may I die if I lie to you . . . my heart is incapable of loving anyone any more. However, I can at least say this much . . .’ She hesitated.
I kept quiet as she had already drifted into deep thought. Perhaps she was trying to articulate what that ‘this much’ was.
Soon the same fleeting smile that had a way of adding a touch of knowing mischief crossed her lips again. She sprang up from the sofa and began saying, ‘But at least I can say that it’s not love. I’m positive. Whether it is some other affliction . . . I can’t say. Sadiq, I want to believe it.’
‘You mean you want to make yourself believe it?’
That blew her fuse. ‘You’re very mean . . . One must never abandon good form when saying something . . . Why do I have to make you believe me anyway . . . It’s me I’m trying to convince. The trouble is, I’m finding that hard to do. Can’t you help me?’
She sat down beside me, toying with her little finger, and asked, ‘What’s your opinion of Raj Kishore? I mean, what is it in him that you think I have a thing for.’ She let go of the finger and started playing with her fingers one by one, distractedly. ‘I don’t like the things he says, I don’t like his acting, I don’t like his diary . . . God knows what nonsense he was spewing out.’
Cranky, she got up from the sofa. ‘Don’t know what’s happening to me. I just want a big commotion . . . a big noise, like cats going at one another . . . clouds of smoke spilling forth . . . I’d be drenched in sweat . . .’ Then she suddenly turned towards me and asked, ‘Sadiq, what do you think, what kind of woman am I?’
I smiled and answered, ‘I’ve never understood either cats or women.’
‘Why is that?’
I thought for a moment and said, ‘A cat used to live in our house. Once a year she was seized by bouts of terrible whining . . . and then a tomcat would suddenly appear out of nowhere and the two would go at it with more ferocity than you ever saw, leaving both of them bruised, battered and bleeding. But soon after, our auntie cat would become the mother of four kittens.’
She looked as though some disagreeable taste had flooded her mouth. ‘Sheesh, what a dirty mind you have!’ Then, after chewing a cardamom to improve the taste in her mouth, she said, ‘I hate kids. Anyway, let’s just drop it.’
She opened her paan box and started preparing one for me with her slim, delicate fingers. With tiny spoons she dug into small, narrow cups containing lime and catechu pastes and, with finesse, applied them to a paan leaf already stripped of its central vein. She folded the leaf into a cone and offered it to me. ‘Sadiq, what do you think?’ she asked absent-mindedly.
‘About what?’
Chopping a piece of roasted betel nut into smaller bits with her sarota, she replied, ‘About this silliness that has started for no sane reason at all. If it’s not silliness, what else could it be? I mean I’m totally confused. Tearing at myself, mending myself. God only knows what lies ahead if this stupidity is allowed to continue. You don’t know, I’m a formidable woman.’
‘Formidable—whatever do you mean?’
The same mysterious, almost imperceptible smile flitted across her face. ‘You’re awfully shameless. You know everything, yet you insist on poking me with these soft needles to make me blurt it out myself.’
The whites of her eyes turned a shade of pink.
‘I’m a very hot-tempered woman—is that so difficult to understand?’
She suddenly sprang to her feet. ‘Go now. I want to take a bath.’
I left.
For quite a while a
fter that she didn’t mention Raj Kishore to me. Still, we somehow knew one another’s thoughts. I knew what was going through her mind and she, mine. This silent exchange went on for a few days.
One day Kirpalani, who was directing Ban ki Sundri, was watching the heroine rehearse her song. All of us had piled into the music room. Neelam was ensconced in a chair and was slowly tapping her feet, keeping time to the music. It was a pedestrian song, but the melody was quite good. When the rehearsal ended, in walked Raj Kishore with his khadi shoulder bag. One by one he greeted director Kirpalani, music director Ghosh, and sound recordist P.N. Mogha in English. He joined his hands and said namaskar to Miss Eidan Bai and then informed her, ‘Sister Eidan, yesterday I saw you in Crawford Market. I was buying oranges for aap ki bhabhi.* when I spotted your car . . .’ As he turned his head, his eyes fell on Neelam who sat buried in a low chair by the piano. His hands rose spontaneously to say namaskar to her, but the moment she saw him she catapulted out of her chair and warned him, ‘Raj Sahib, please don’t call me “sister”.’
She said it with such measured gravity that everyone in the music room was dazed for a moment. An embarrassed Raj Kishore could only mutter a feeble ‘Why?’
She didn’t answer and stomped out.
Three days later when I went to Shamlal’s paan shop at about three in the afternoon, people were still gossiping about this incident. ‘Saali, her own intentions must be dirty,’ Shamlal was asserting proudly. ‘Why else would a woman mind Raj Bhai calling her sister? But mark my words—she won’t get what she’s after. Raj Bhai doesn’t go easy on his zipper.’
This Raj Bhai’s zipper was getting on my nerves. I didn’t say anything to Shamlal. I just sat down and quietly listened to his and his customers’ chatter, laced with exaggeration and next to nothing of substance.
My Name Is Radha Page 4