Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  The script also keeps making halfhearted attempts to balance the view of the Indian state with that of the Kashmiris. But it is always tempered, always compromised. In one of the scenes, a terrorist explains his reasons for joining the movement. “First they shamed my mother. I picked up a gun and came here.” This brave statement is quickly balanced by his next sentence, which he says while holding a letter from home. “Now across the border they have done the same with my sister.” In all things, equivalence. Equivalence can freeze the censor’s scissor in mid snip. Equivalence can stop the terrorist’s bullet half an inch from your chest.

  All along, drafts of the script are shown to police officers and army officers, to check the fictional world against the real one. In Kashmir, Vinod shows the script to a top Intelligence Bureau officer. The officer wonders about the scene where Khan shoots two of the militants right away, during an interrogation. “You’ve just blown him away!” he points out to the filmmakers. “With me, I won’t cut a finger off, because it’s that much less of the body for me to work with. If I cut an arm off, that’s even more lost; if I kill the person, I can’t work with anything.” To the IB officer, the body is a precious resource, to be conserved for its value as a source of pain; every organ, every digit, is valuable.

  WITHOUT MUCH WARNING, Amitabh Bacchan backs out of the film. He sends Vinod a fax. Since they have not discussed “many aspects” of the project, the star concludes, “regretfully, I’ll have to give this one a miss.” Vinod scrutinizes the handwritten fax with distaste. “Is this ‘money aspects’ or ‘many aspects’?” He goes to Bacchan’s house with a hundred white roses to persuade the star to sign for his film. The star says he is committed to another movie with himself and Shahrukh in it. We now have to think of the Kashmir film without Bacchan. But there is a dearth of dignified older actors. Indian male movie stars don’t age gracefully. They grow fat and lose their hair but they still insist on acting opposite heroines in their twenties—as their lovers, not their fathers.

  One day Vinod tells me that Shahrukh, too, will not do the Kashmir project. His fees are too high. Vinod is now considering spending the rest of the year making advertising films. The real money is in TV spots. Shahrukh was initially offered thirty lakhs for appearing in Vinod’s film, for which he would have had to travel and work for months. For three days’ work in a Pepsi ad, he’ll get ten times that money. But without the films, Shahrukh’s face in commercials would be unrecognizable. The advertising industry subsidizes the movies by funding the lifestyles of the stars. In return, the movies move product. Product placement in films reaches territories unknown in Hollywood; an entire song might be paid for by Coke, for example, and the hero and heroine dance around giant Coke cans for five to seven minutes of screen time. Nobody minds; there is no division between the sacred and the profane in Indian films.

  I finally get a chance to see one of Vinod’s films, Kareeb, in a theater in the hill resort of Lonavla.

  An Indian cinema hall is never the chamber of mass unconsciousness it is in the West. For one thing, you can never tell anyone to shut up. Everyone talks at will, often keeping up a running dialogue with the characters. If a god appears onscreen, people might throw coins or prostrate themselves in the aisles. Babies howl; during a song, a quarter of the audience might get up and procure refreshment in the lobby. Complex dialogue doesn’t work, because most of the time the audience doesn’t hear it. The sound is so bad in most Indian theaters that, as in a play, there can be no whispering in a Hindi film and the score always has to be played at top volume. It wasn’t always so. To ask directions to the theater in Lonavla, you ask where the “talkies” are.

  The audience is indifferent to Kareeb. They are jeering at the screen, hooting when the heroine shows any signs of getting close to the hero. I go out to get an ice cream during a tender scene between the heroine and her mother. “They’re being really disgusting,” Sunita tells me when I come back. “Making comments about mother-daughter intimacy.” But the audience doesn’t like the parody to be on the screen. In a scene where the mother is kidding the daughter about having a lost twin sister—which is meant to be comic, to play with the conventions of the formula—the audience is absolutely silent. Dangerously silent.

  Kareeb is not a good film. The script moves along with the aid of contrivances. The acting, especially by the first-time heroine, is so bad it borders on parody—she wanders through the movie looking stoned. Vinod blames her for his losses on Kareeb, because he had to waste so many takes on an untrained actress. Once, on the set, she was supposed to lift her right hand to her head. She kept flubbing it by raising her left hand. After it happened one too many times, Vinod went over to her, grabbed her right hand, and bit it. “The pain will remind you which hand to use.” He is the Werner Herzog of Indian cinema, a little bit mad.

  After Amitabh and Sharukh back out, Vinod decides to work on another script with me. It is set partly in London, with its theme the reconciliation possible between Indians and Pakistanis overseas. The film deals with Partition and is called Mitti, Soil. Vinod has a vision of two soldiers, one Indian, one Pakistani, growing up in similar homes in Bombay and Lahore. They grievously injure each other in a battle fight and find themselves in the same hospital in England. There, they gradually realize that their hatred is recent and shallow. They belong to the same “mitti.”

  It is a hokey plot, but it has a kind of benevolence; it is on the side of the angels. And it is in keeping with the headlines in the newspapers. Friendship is in the air; it is the spring of possibilities. The idea for the movie has its genesis in a journey from Delhi to Lahore through Wagah in 1999, when Prime Minister Vajpayee got on a bus—not a plane, not a limousine—to make peace with his enemy, Nawaz Sharif, in Lahore. Bollywood senses keenly that it marks a “moment” in the subcontinent’s history. I get calls simultaneously from the director Mahesh Bhatt and from Vinod to help them with projects based around the cataclysm that happened here fifty years ago. Partition affected them both: Vinod because he is a Punjabi Hindu from Kashmir and Mahesh because his mother was Muslim. Bollywood has long grappled with the vivisection of the motherland. Part of the reason is that this is one of the few industries in which Muslims and Hindus are equally represented. Muslim writers often write Hindu mythological epics; the ten-headed gods spout Urdu poetry.

  Bollywood is essentially a Punjabi-and Sindhi-dominated industry, founded by Partition refugees who took up a business that the established Bombay elites of the forties looked down on. In this, it parallels the story of Hollywood and the Jews. The saga of Partition fits with the great love stories of this part of the world, of Laila Majnooh, Heer Ranjha, and thousands of Hindi movies: two people who love each other against all odds against the tyrant father of the state, or twin brothers separated at birth in an accident of history. Partition, with all its heightened emotion, its sweep and tragedy, is a ready-made plot for Bollywood. It fits within the formula. Perhaps, deep in the scarred psyches of the refugees who made Bollywood what it is today, Partition created the formula.

  But in 1999, the Kargil war breaks out between the two countries and Mitti is abandoned, left in the dust. From Pakistanis as brothers we go back to the theme of the Kashmir film: Pakistanis as archfiends. A whole slew of movies about the conflict is released. Movies that have nothing to do with the war in the mountains but feature an army man or even a policeman fighting cross-border terrorism are being advertised as prophetic about Kargil. The script for Mission Kashmir struggles to catch up with the changing headlines. It is impossible to predict what the mood of the public might be when the film is finally released, whether it will want to see Pakistanis as a brother people or as murderous fanatics. Vinod’s worst nightmare now is that the developments in Kargil will run out of control and the unimaginable will happen: One country will drop an atom bomb on the other. “Then our film would be so outdated!” Without an atom bomb in it, the movie would bomb at the box office.

  VINOD STILL HAS TO CHOOSE new
leads for Mission Kashmir. Amitabh Bacchan is replaced by Sanjay Dutt, the troubled star out on bail for his involvement in the bomb blasts of 1993. Sanjay’s career is in bad shape at the moment; he seems to be on a gradual slope downhill from his summit. To replace Shahrukh, Vinod has picked someone completely new. This twenty-five-year-old son of a sporadically successful star of the seventies has made exactly one movie, which has been directed by his father and is several months away from release. His name is Hrithik Roshan.

  One morning Hrithik comes to Vinod’s house to have the script narrated to him. The first thing I notice about the newcomer is how startlingly, even uncomfortably, handsome he is: green eyes, a strong nose and jaw, arms like Popeye’s, and a thin body that has been worked out with zeal till it bulges in all the right places. He is polite and humble, listening closely to the story. But Vinod is taking a huge risk. If Kaho Na Pyaar Hai, Hrithik’s debut film, flops when it is released, so, in all probability, will Mission Kashmir. His role as Altaaf is central. But Vinod has seen the rushes of the movie and has made his choice, compelled perhaps by financial exigency. Hrithik comes cheap.

  There’s a reason Hollywood is unable to produce Indian films: Negotiating contracts in Bollywood would make any Wall Street entertainment lawyer jump out of his twenty-sixth-floor suite at the Oberoi.

  Vinod contacts several music directors and asks for their ideas for scores and songs. Anu Malik, the composer he has been working with on Kareeb, gets very emotional when he hears that Vinod is shopping around. He has a two-hour conversation with Vinod one Sunday morning in which he declares he is ready to work for free. He weeps and wails; he will not ask for one single paisa. The money is nothing compared to their friendship, he declares through his sobs. Vinod hears a crunching sound on the other end of the line. “What’s that?” asks Vinod. “I’m eating a radish,” answers the composer. “Just a minute, I’ll finish it.” Vinod hears him furiously crunching away; then he comes back to the phone, ready to weep afresh. “Not one single paisa! Not one single paisa will I take from you, if it’s about the money.”

  There are five territories in India where a film is sold and one territory that comprises all the overseas markets. A distributor comes to Vinod wanting the Central India territory. He hands Vinod a blank check. “You write the figure, sir. You know that scene in Parinda when he looks into the rearview mirror? I have it by heart. By heart!” Negotiating in the Hindi film industry is always an emotional business. Shameless flattery is a must.

  A distributor from Calcutta, Mr. Bagadia, comes in, and Vinod immediately greets him with an effusive hug. It is, I learn later, the first time the two have ever met. “Congratulations on the new issue,” says Mr. Bagadia. He might be referring to Vinod’s newborn son or to the Kashmir project or both. We talk with Mr. Bagadia about casting. He urges us to go for the glamour, for stars who are currently fashionable and, that most important quality, lucky. He has analyzed hundreds of films and has come up with certain lucky pairs, actors and actresses who, whenever they appear together in a film, it so happens that that film has been a hit. The film may not be a hit because of the pair; it is just a lucky omen. “Raakhee and Suresh Oberoi. No film in which they have both appeared has ever failed. Put them in your film, even if it is a small part. They don’t even have to be opposite each other.” Mr. Bagadia has spent a lifetime pondering why some films do well and others don’t. It is crucial to catch a star while he is still in vogue. Because, he says thoughtfully—and here I sense he is offering us the nub or gem of his accumulated experience, that single aphorism on which men base their lives—“A star is like a lipstick. When it fades, it fades.”

  The distributor is here to talk about money. For the entire Bengal and Bihar circuit, the distributor claims to have made less than fifteen lakhs in revenues for Kareeb. There is great bonhomie during the meeting, with only the slightest undercurrent of tension. The distributor allows as to how Kareeb flopped miserably and lost him lots of money, but he declares to Vinod that he distributes films for prestige, not money. Even if he knows in advance that it won’t make him money, if it is a prestige project like any film of Vinod’s, he will take it on at once. “We are not stalwarts of the industry like Vidhu Vinod Chopra,” he says, turning to me.

  As soon as he is out the door, Vinod asks me what I thought of Mr. Bagadia. I say I thought something sounded fishy. “That bastard swindled me,” says Vinod. The movie has done at least thirty to forty lakhs of business in Mr. Bagadia’s territory; the distributor gets 10 percent of whatever he reports. It is mostly a cash business; there are no mechanisms Vinod has at his disposal to check the real ticket sales. “There’s nothing I can do,” he says. He trusted him, on the director Yash Chopra’s advice. The distributor left saying he was going on to Yash Chopra’s house because he had a meeting scheduled with the director. Vinod asks his assistant to call Yash Chopra’s house. Yash Chopra is out of town.

  Vinod draws up agreements but normally doesn’t put his signature to them. “Legal agreements mean nothing,” he points out. The contract that the star and the director sign means nothing; the payment all depends on whether the star’s most recent film is a hit or a flop. To hedge their bets, the stars often work on three or four films at the same time, morphing from the role of a policeman in the morning to a terrorist in the afternoon to a demon lover at night. Vinod reaches over and shows me a piece of paper. It is that most closely guarded of Bollywood secrets, a written contract. It spells out the stars’ payment terms in language that would be a curiosity in a court of law, but is only a written form of the melodrama that Vinod puts into all his oral negotiations.

  Dear Sanjay,

  SUBJECT: Mission Kashmir

  1. I believe what has been happening over the last few weeks in the context of Mission Kashmir is astounding in terms of the shape that the project is taking, whether it is the script or the music or most of all the interest and the commitment being shown by you. I truly believe that the project is taking on staggering proportions.

  2. I appreciate this commitment but I want to let you know that I value your friendship and our relationship even more. I don’t ever want any misunderstanding specially on the more mundane issues of remuneration etc. to come in the way of this relationship. This is why I have discussed this issue with you quite frankly and candidly. I just want to put down here as a memory jogger what you and I have agreed on this issue.

  3. Much as I would like to pay you what you would be getting outside, but keeping in view that I do not take recourse to the normal ugly channels of finances, I would be paying you Rs. 25 lakhs. However, please bear in mind that if the film does not do well, I would only pay you a token sum of Rs. o. I hope this finds your approval.

  With best wishes,

  Yours truly,

  VIDHU VINOD CHOPRA

  And underneath, a handwritten line: Bonus 25 lakhs if film is a success.

  The contracts for the three leads are identical in their language. The figures in the case of the second male lead, Hrithik, are 11 lakhs if the film breaks even, 1 lakh if it doesn’t, and a bonus of 10 lakhs if the film is a hit. For the female lead, Preity, the payment is 15 lakhs if the film makes money, 1 lakh if not, and a bonus of 10 lakhs for a hit. Although the figures change later as the budget and Hrithik’s popularity swell, Vinod has covered his bets well; if Mission Kashmir goes the way of Kareeb, the total payment he will be out for to his stars is a piffling 2 lakhs. Similar terms have been arranged with the music directors, the cameraman, and others in the crew. Nobody gets any advances. Sometimes, nobody gets anything after they work either. “When Kareeb flopped, my art director didn’t get any money,” Vinod says. But he made it up later. When he made an advertising film, he hired the same art director and paid him three times the normal rate. “It’s very un-American. This can’t happen in America,” notes Vinod.

  WE NEED AT LEAST FOUR SONGS for Mission Kashmir. Ideally, the record companies would like a movie to have eight songs, so they can fill bot
h sides of a cassette. But recognizing that strife-torn Kashmir, with two bloodthirsty antagonists, does not make an ideal locale for a Bollywood number, Vinod originally thinks of settling for four songs, which is enough for one side of a cassette. “The other side can be filled with background music.” By the time the movie is finished, the number of songs has almost doubled, to seven. This is another creative decision forced by economics; the earliest revenue a Hindi film producer will see comes from advance sales of the music to record companies. Vinod’s films have traditionally done well overseas, as have the soundtracks of his previous films. His films are known, above all, for the excellence of their music; even people who have never seen 1942 will instantly recognize the tune of “Ek Ladki ko Dekha” and start humming along. He sells the music up front for three crores before he’s shot a single frame, getting two crores in advance, which partly finances the production of the film.

  Vinod reads out the lyrics composed for the songs by Rahat Indori. They have to do with flowers, with homeland, with destruction, with bombs. I ask Vinod if the lyrics are always in Urdu. “It’s difficult to know which is Hindi and which is Urdu,” he says. Since this is a film about Kashmir, the language used will tilt toward Urdu. This nationalist filmmaker, like all the rest of them, makes his films in Hindustani, not Hindi.

  The musicians are three hip young guys from the ad world: Shankar, Ehsaan, and Loy; a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Christian. I call them Amar Akbar Anthony. They play three songs for us in their music studio. They’ve overlaid the tracks with samples from all over the world. “Give me the Burundi drums,” says Ehsaan. Then he overdubs a Senegalese call to prayer from the album Passion Sources, itself a compilation of world music sources for the Martin Scorsese—Peter Gabriel collaboration The Last Temptation of Christ. The talk in the studio is of Nino Rota, Vangelis, John Coltrane. Into the mix are thrown tablas, guitars, piano, water bells, and the sound of an oar dipping into lake water. Hindi film music was world beat before Peter Gabriel or Paul Simon ever heard a talking drum. “For centuries people have been taking rhythms from all around the world, not instruments,” Loy points out. For example, music from the coastal regions of the world often shares the same basic rhythms. He drums them out with his mouth.