by Suketu Mehta
Since then, Vinod has made only two films, 1942: A Love Story and Kareeb, for a total of five feature films in his entire career of two decades. Why does it take him such a long time, when other Bollywood directors are turning out one or two every year?
“Primarily because of the writing. I’m not a writer.” He resents having to make movies with hackneyed plots for what he calls the ulloo audience. “I’m constantly saddled with a viewer who’s cinema illiterate. It’s like trying to talk Shakespeare with Khem Bahadur”—Vinod’s Nepalese cook. “My fear is that through constant simplification and trying to talk Shakespeare with Khem Bahadur, I’ve lost the ability to discuss Shakespeare with people who know Shakespeare.”
This is something I gradually find out about Bollywood: The people working in it are far smarter than the product they turn out. “We are dwarfing our intellectual selves in order to make films for a Hindi film audience. You’re writing this great novel in the English language. Try doing it in Hindi; then you’ll know my tragedy. You’ll get fucked. You’ll have no fucking money to pay your children’s school fees.”
He allows himself to think, sometimes, of how it would be if his earlier art films had been a success, of if he had chosen to live in the United States after his Oscar nomination. He is sometimes burdened by the sense of a life not lived, the feeling that he took the wrong fork in the road a while back. “I want to make international films for the world market. I want to grow. Where will I go from here? I can sit here in my wooden study with my Jacuzzi and stagnate for the rest of my life.”
There are two Vinods fighting “eyeball to eyeball,” as he is fond of saying about Khan and Altaaf, our lead characters. One is the avant-garde filmmaker from the Film Institute at Pune, student of Ghatak and Mani Kaul, worshiper of Kurosawa. The other is the big-budget Bombay producer, with something to prove to his commercially successful stepbrother, who cannot afford subtlety in his films lest it go over the heads of the ulloo audience. If he pledged his troth to either of these two personas—became wholly Vinod the committed art filmmaker or Vinod the Bollywood hack—he would be less tortured. As it is, the conflict is apparent in his films; it keeps him from winning an Oscar or having a megahit at the box office.
Vinod is attached to his home but not to the city. “Bombay’s never thrilled me. If I could take all my friends from here and live in Florida, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. Bombay has become like a goon city since the Sena and Bal Thackeray have taken over. There’s just one man who’s fucked up Bombay, and that’s Thackeray.” He was told by a government bureaucrat that if he wanted tax exemption for Kareeb, he would have to go to Thackeray. The most effective method of government control over popular cinema isn’t the censor’s office, it’s the tax office. Granting tax exemption to a film lowers the price of a ticket by half and could mean the difference between life or death for a film. But Vinod will not kowtow in front of Thackeray. If the Supremo causes trouble for him, he says, he will move out of the country.
Vinod tells me about the New Quit India Movement. It is a group of some fifty Bombay luminaries: dancers, actors, diplomats, and so on, loosely coordinated by a Parsi hairdresser who is in charge of some of the city’s most famous heads, and she has invited Vinod and Anu to join the exodus. They have resolved to emigrate en masse to Canada: to Vancouver. To this end, they have meetings, where they bring in experts to conduct lectures on how to get abroad and how to live there. They are all rich and can afford the $200,000 it costs to get Canadian papers. It is a uniquely Bombay dream of exile: You want to get out of Bombay, but you want to take your Bombay with you. The New Quit India Movement dreams of traveling in a social bubble halfway across the world, where it can re-create Malabar Hill and Pali Hill in a more salubrious environment.
YEARS FROM NOW they will be asking me, “And what did he look like? And how did he walk?”
We are in Amitabh Bacchan’s bungalow, and I am shaking his hand. Not his waxwork in Madame Tussaud’s, the real thing. I have grown up with this man—or, rather, with his image. Now, for the second time, I am seeing him live. The first time was in 1979, at the old Deluxe Cinema in Woodside, Queens, where he’d come to launch Kala Patthar. He gave a speech onstage; I worshiped from afar. Bacchan was, then, the biggest star in Hindi films; the man who, when he was injured in the filming of a movie stunt, had the entire country praying for his recovery and tens of thousands of people lining up outside Breach Candy Hospital to give him blood.
The man himself is surprisingly bigger than his screen persona. He wears a loose white silk Pathan suit. When he shakes my hand, a smile comes on; I have never seen so many teeth in my life. It is not a smile of pleasure, or even of greeting. It is as if a switch has been flicked; there is a flash of light. A moment later, the switch is flicked off and the face resumes its stillness, sinks back into its slight daze.
Outside his bungalow, at all hours, groups of people wait to get his darshan, an auspicious viewing. Inside, he reigns in his office, which is just this side of showy, all beige leather and black wood. A large figurative painting of an old bioscope-wallah with a cluster of kids peering into it dominates one wall. On his desk are stacks of videocassettes and a couple of books, one of his father’s poems and, on top of it, Paul Reiser’s Couplehood.
Vinod asks me later, “Do you think he weaves his hair? It looked strange, in the front.” From the back, too, it looks strange, unnaturally elongated over his neck. It is not just his hair that he has lost. Bacchan is desperate; his last few movies have flopped badly and the future of his production company, ABCL Ltd., is in doubt. When Bacchan first called Vinod from Mauritius, the director was so revved up about Vikram’s plot for a film about Kashmir that he started swearing. “Motherfucker. It’s a fucking brilliant idea.” Bacchan listened politely and agreed that it was brilliant. Later that night, Vinod felt bad that he had been so coarse around Bacchan, who is senior to him. But that was also a subtle indication of the new position of the star—that a director could swear like a sailor around him and he would have to take it, to hang on the line from Mauritius. After the failure of his last couple of films, it was Bacchan who now had to call about roles.
Unlike many Hindi directors, Vinod shoots from a written and bound script, but no such product is necessary—or sufficient—to sign up the talent for the film. We have to go physically and “narrate” the script to the stars. This is the reason we are in Bacchan’s bungalow. We are going to tell him a story.
Bacchan tells us what effect our film should have on the audience. “You need to catch them by the crotch and shake them up.” He wants to make a truly breakthrough film, one in a different paradigm. As examples, he cites Bombay and Bandit Queen. And he has a keen sense of the primacy of his role as hero, the only hero. He wants something in the plot by which Khan can show his “smartness—supreme smartness.”
After we narrate the story to him, the superstar has a suggestion. “Can we make the system the villain?” asks Bacchan. “The common man is disinformed,” he begins. He saw Oliver Stone’s JFK, and it changed the way he looked at the world. In India, although the common man is intelligent, he has been lied to by the politicians and by the movies. But now the common man is waking up and realizing that the system is responsible for his travails. So now the common man will not accept a cliché ending in which the hero wins and everybody can go home.
Bacchan wants us to make a movie with an ending that will awaken the common man to what the system is doing to him. He wants the two protagonists, the cop and the militant, as they clasp in embrace at the end, to be shot dead by a single bullet. “Let’s really give the audience something to think about,” the star proposes. “They’ll sit in the theater for fifteen minutes after the lights have come on, thinking about who could have shot them. Then they’ll say, ‘Shit . . . it’s the system!’”
“What about the censors?” I ask, remembering Vinod’s concerns about making a controversial film.
“Don’t worry about the censors,” Bac
chan swats them away in the air, like houseflies. He relates what happened at the National Defense Academy, where his latest film, Major Saab, is set, in which he plays the academy commander. When he showed the film to some army officers, they had complained that certain scenes were not true to life and implied that they could make trouble with the censors. “Ban it, I said to them, and I’ll make a film about what really goes on in the army: the gunrunning in the forward posts, the senior officers sleeping with the junior officers’ wives.” The officers backed down and said, Let’s talk about this over some drinks. Amitabh Bacchan had won a true hero’s victory; he took on the army single-handed, and the army gave in. I feel a glow within.
Vinod paces about his terrace after the meeting with Bacchan. He asks me what I think of Bacchan’s suggestions. I tell him I’m not sure the public will accept a movie in which both leads die. The basic difference between an art film and a commercial film is that in an art film the hero dies at the end. Vinod wants the militant to be reunited with his girlfriend and with his father at the conclusion of the film. So he rehearses the appeal he will make to Bacchan: “Sir, the system may be screwing the common man. But if I kill both my stars at the end of the picture, the system will surely screw me.”
What accounts for the star’s paranoia? Bacchan’s foray into politics came to a humiliating end; he was forced to resign his parliamentary seat in 1988, after his name was linked to the Bofors arms scandals. His entertainment conglomerate, ABCL, is on the front pages of the newspapers; his bank wants to sell his house to recover money loaned to the company. His movies are failing left and right. The whole country had loved him; the whole country had been ready to give its blood for him. It couldn’t be the people who had withdrawn their love. It couldn’t be that they were faithless. No, it had to be something else. It had to be the system.
WE GO BACK to Bacchan’s house late one night with the latest draft of the script. Jaya Bacchan, his wife, is there, along with his actor son, Abhishek, and the family accountant. Jaya is a dignified, gracious lady. I can still see the actress that delighted me in Guddi and Mili. Some snacks are offered to us in the living room. We talk about the Starr report, which is just out. The recent bombings of American embassies in East Africa, Bacchan now sees, were a plot to distract attention from Clinton’s troubles with Miss Lewinsky. I sense the dread hand of the system again.
We are discussing all this at three in the morning. Then we say good night to Jaya and go upstairs with the star to his study. Bacchan watches the location shots Vinod has taken in Kashmir. They show a gorgeous, peaceful country, with old bungalows and cascading fountains in well-laid-out gardens. He makes approving noises about the revised script; I sense he is dog-tired and just wants to get the meeting over with. When we come down, it is about 4 a.m. Jaya is still there, at the foot of the stairs, in the low lights, gliding silently over the carpeted floor. Abhishek and the accountant also appear out of the shadows. We tell Jaya we thought she was turning in. “I’m always up till at least four-thirty,” she responds.
“We’re a family of insomniacs,” Abhishek explains, with no little pride.
Bacchan sits down again in front of the ever-present salted snacks, this time complemented by a dish of Rajasthani sweets. They all seem quite prepared to talk for another hour. We take our leave. The ghosts stay on.
SHAHRUKH KHAN, OUR FIRST CHOICE to play Altaaf the militant, comes to Vinod’s house one day to talk about the script. He is not good-looking in the conventional way but is bright, focused, and energetic. He comes wearing a black shirt with all the buttons undone down his hairless chest, blue jeans of which the too-long cuffs are not folded but ripped at the seams, and sneakers. I’ve met Shahrukh before; the first time was on the set of Dil To Pagal Hai. A shot was being filmed when the hero is meeting the heroine. She is shopping for vegetables, haggling over the price of a watermelon. Shahrukh comes to her aid; he puts his arm around the vegetable seller, a dark fellow with a huge mustache, and talks to him in a low voice. The vegetable seller looks chastened and puts the watermelon into a plastic bag. In the films I grew up with, heroes saved heroines from brigands; now they negotiate better prices on vegetables.
As Shahrukh enters Vinod’s living room, we are talking to Ajay, who has dropped in for lunch. The star is highly deferential toward the cop; Ajay once saved him from the gangs when he was targeted for extortion. Vinod’s servant, Khem, is not in the kitchen, and Anu says she will make tea. Shahrukh sees that we are not finished talking to Ajay. He gets up—“I’ll make tea; I make very good tea”—and disappears into the kitchen.
Then the servant comes up the stairs. “If Khem goes into the kitchen he’ll have a heart attack,” notes Vinod. Khem goes in and sees somebody pounding cardamom for tea. He is irritated, we find out later, that some interloper, maybe another servant, is doing his job. It is not until Shahrukh comes out with the tea on a tray and Khem notices our attitude to him that he realizes who the man in his kitchen was. Stardom is not intrinsic; stars acquire their light through reflection, on the faces of their fans. At the moment, Shahrukh is the biggest star, in the country and in the region. Two Pakistani boys were recently caught by Indian soldiers as they illegally crossed the border in Kashmir. It turned out that they hadn’t crossed to join the jihad; they had braved death at the border in order to see their idol in the flesh. They had planned to travel to Bombay to see Shahrukh Khan.
Next on the list of Vinod’s decisions is the choice of the heroine. But it’s not very important. In an action film, the heroine is only slightly more important than the scenery. Vinod has already spoken to Tabu, who is a fine actress but, as a distributor advises him, “you should go for the glamour.” Preity Zinta, the actress I had met in Madanpura for Tanuja’s shoot, has a bubbly smile. Plus she’s from Himachal Pradesh. She is a pahari, a mountain girl. She gets the role of Sufi, the love interest.
Vinod chooses an old friend of his, Jackie Shroff, for the role of the villain. I knew about him and his friends when I came back for visits to Bombay. They hung around Wonderworld, the video-game parlor on Nepean Sea Road, and got the girls. Jackie, unlike most other Hindi film stars, makes eye contact with you when he talks. He is a big man, running to fat; when he eats Vinod’s biscuits, his assistant reprimands him. Vinod and Jackie—Jaggu to his friends—have an easy, affectionate, joking relationship. They’ve been through some times together. At one point, Vinod says, Jackie owed him five lakhs. He gave him twenty-two checks. All of them bounced.
Unlike the Hindi movies I grew up watching, in our film there is no vamp playing opposite the villain. Why aren’t there any vamps in Bollywood anymore? I ask Tanuja. “The heroine became the vamp,” she explains. In the glory days of Bindu and Helen, the vamps were the only screen women who were allowed to wear shocking costumes, gyrate erotically, drink whiskey. All that can now be done by the heroine; at least one song number where the woman who is later the dutiful wife seduces the hero by flashing her thighs is obligatory in today’s movies. Another role to be swallowed up by the lead is the comedy routine: Asrani, Paintal, Johnny Walker, the sidekick or fool who used to throw in a few accidental punches in the climactic fight sequence. Bacchan destroyed the comedy roles; he incorporated them into his own. He was the only actor with enough stature to be able to do that and still look heroic.
THE PROPORTION of popular movies that deal with political issues, with terrorists, has been steadily growing. I can hardly recall any when I lived here as a child. India now deals with threats to its integrity through the movies. Many of the Hindi films of recent days are about a vast international conspiracy against the country, headed by a villain of vague ethnic outlines. There are scenes of bombings, terrorists, usually in league with Gandhi cap—wearing politicians. It is a simple explanation for the million mutinies: It’s all coming from outside, what governments since independence have called the Foreign Hand. If we could only get to the one man who wants to destroy our country, everything would be all right. Somewhere in P
akistan, in Switzerland, sits Mogambo in his fabulous mansion, plotting with his minions ways to break up Hindustan.
I feel distanced from many of the scenes in Mission Kashmir. In writing them, I am a lawyer, putting words I do not believe in the mouths of my characters. Politically, I am at left angles to the film. I argue that we need to insert something about the social and economic conditions that go into the making of a terrorist, especially in Kashmir. I talk about visiting Kashmir in 1987 and seeing perhaps the most corrupt state government in India; about the wishes of most of the locals I had spoken to not to be part of the Indian Union; about the double standard in India’s keeping Muslim-majority Kashmir on the grounds that the maharajah had acceded to us at independence, and refusing to let the Muslim princes of Hyderabad and Junagadh accede to Pakistan because they ruled over Hindu-majority states. But I don’t push the point. I do not have the necessary weight on the script-writing team.
Vinod wants the film to reinforce in the popular imagination the syncretic idea of Kashmiryat, the age-old ideology that allows Muslims at the Hazratbal mosque and Hindus at the Shankaracharya temple to worship in the same country. He is not blind to the recent history of his troubled homeland. At one point, he says, “The Indians have fucked Kashmir. I’m a Kashmiri, I know. They’ve been fucking Kashmir for fifty years.” The script presents a full panoply of the political views of the country’s Muslims, represented by Khan, the pro—Indian state Muslim, to Altaaf the duped Muslim terrorist, to Hilal the troublemaking fanatic from Afghanistan. At one point, a Hindu bureaucrat questions Khan’s loyalty. Khan responds angrily. “Mr. Deshpande, it is not the misfortune only of the Muslims but that of the entire country that a soldier who has braved bullets for twenty-one years must prove his loyalty repeatedly because his name is not Deshpande but Inayat Khan. . . . My love for this country needs no certificates from a bureaucrat.”