Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Mahesh takes me to the all-important Censor Board preview of Zakhm. We wait outside on the terrace of the Liberty Cinema until the board is finished viewing and debating the film. As we go in, the chairwoman of the committee says, “We want to commend you for a very sensitive film.”

  Mahesh, Tanuja, and I stand in one of the front rows, with our backs to the screen, facing the censors: four Hindu women and one Hindu man, all middle-class types, doctors, accountants.

  The chairwoman starts asking why the Muslim policeman is shown as the good guy. The policeman is Hindu, Tanuja insists. “What’s his name?” the chairwoman asks. Mahesh and Tanuja look at each other. He’s a Hindu policeman, they say, but he is just called Sharad, which is the actor’s name. The censors want that to be made explicit, so it won’t look as if the police are divided along communal lines. “Although we all know that the force is communalized,” the chairwoman adds. Also, the line spoken by the bad Hindu cop, “This Mussulman boy—” should be changed to “This boy—”

  Mahesh agrees with the woman before she finishes her sentence. This is his last film, and he has been to dozens of such bargaining sessions. In the elevator going up, he had told me about how, at his first censor screening when he was twenty-one, he argued with the censors and refused to make the cuts they demanded and walked from Liberty to Mahim because he was so angry. He thought that twenty-five years later things would have changed for the better, but they haven’t. All that’s changed is that he is much less confrontational.

  The chairwoman commends Mahesh for the fact that his film has no nudity, no onscreen violence, no profanity, and for the sensitive handling of the illegitimacy issue. However, she says that because the film deals with issues of communalism, the board has decided on the A, for Adult, certificate.

  This is a death blow to the film’s revenues; people will not be able to bring their children under eighteen to the movie, eliminating a substantial part of the audience.

  Mahesh makes a very low-key plea for them to change their minds. “I don’t want to get into an argument, but I feel this film should be seen by younger children.” If fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds could see it and be swayed by its ideas of tolerance and for the ideal of a united country, it would benefit the country, he says. But he leaves it up to them. The chairwoman says they will think about their decision and let him know tomorrow. If they stick with their A decision, it will also affect the television sales of the film. So there is an economic incentive for filmmakers not to deal with political issues. Reality is not for children—or for teenagers either.

  THE CENSORS FINALLY INSIST on an A certificate. The chairwoman of the committee argued strenuously for a U/A certificate, but the others on the committee wanted to go even further, showing it to the police force for their approval, lest it incite communal hatred. If the film caused trouble, the committee would shoulder the blame for having passed it without any cuts.

  As it turns out, getting an A certificate is the least of Mahesh’s troubles. Without having seen the film but on the basis of a written synopsis, the chairperson of the overall Censor Board, a faded actress, refers the film to the state Home Department for clearance. One of the functionaries on the Censor Board—made up mostly of housewives and men with time on their hands—has been unable to sleep all night after watching the film, and this is one of the reasons the chairperson gives for needing it to be cleared by the government. The film should properly have been referred to the Union Government, since it is an India-wide release. Taking a film about the riots for approval to the very government that was implicated in the riots is asking for certain trouble. And the state government can really make things tough for Mahesh if it has a yen to; it can shut down all his projects, including his television serials. He tells me this is his last film, and he’s not prepared to lose his dignity; like other filmmakers, he won’t go to Bal Thackeray, cap in hand.

  Mahesh’s daughter Pooja comes along to our meeting with the chief secretary of the Maharashtra government, Mr. Subrahmanyam. I am traveling with them as one of their writers. It is in the bureaucrat’s office; through its two large bay windows, all I can see is the sky and the Air India building. It is one of the rare views in Bombay uncontaminated by human beings. The secretary himself is a fat man with a face scarred by a skin disorder that has turned it white and red, as if it were strobe-lit. Pooja is there essentially as ornamentation, as star dazzle. The chief secretary isn’t dazzled. He is a big man in his chair, a god in his frog pond. And he lets us know it.

  The secretary recounts how he had cleared the film Bombay, on which he says he was alone against the government in holding that an artist had the right to his opinions. The police had opposed him. But clearance was possible only after the film’s director had appealed to Thackeray; Amitabh Bacchan had personally gone to the Sena leader and begged for his permission to release it. The film was about the riots, and Hindus and Muslims were shown as being equally to blame for the events. When the film was shown to the Saheb for his imprimatur, he wanted just one scene cut: the one at the end where his alter ego is shown apologizing for the massacres and the burning. He had no wish to forgo responsibility for his valiant acts.

  “He bought his peace,” the secretary recalls, suggesting that Mahesh should do likewise. Mahesh refuses. “I am not prepared to do that.” The secretary’s assistant then says he will have to get a letter from the chairperson saying that the Censor Board would not release the film, but the letter wouldn’t be forthcoming. She would say the film would be judged by a higher tribunal, and the matter was being looked into by the state government. “Since they have not made any decision, you can’t appeal it,” the secretary points out. Mahesh’s timing is bad, he adds. The Srikrishna Commission Report has just come out. “If your film is anti-Hindu—and if you are saying the truth about the riots it has to be anti-Hindu—it won’t see the light of day.”

  Mahesh says that it does take a position against the Hindus.

  In that case, declares the secretary, “It will remain in the cans. We will ban it.” He does it all the time; that very morning, the secretary says, he banned a play. He makes it very clear that he thinks the Hindus started the riots; nevertheless “the present government is pro-Hindu. You would not have had this problem under the Congress government.”

  Mahesh and Tanuja try to explain that the riots figure only peripherally in the film, and scenes of rioting are never actually shown. The chief secretary says he hasn’t seen the film but, he repeats, it will still “never see the light of day” if it said the truth and took a position against the Hindus. “Hindus like to think they are secular, when they aren’t.” He laughs. “Muslims aren’t secular at all.” Recalling the emotional power of Mahesh’s earlier films, such as Saaransh and Arth, the secretary adds, “If it’s emotionally very strong you’re in trouble.” Mahesh’s movies are innocent of subtlety or restraint. A Sikh always carries a sword; a Muslim always has on a skullcap and Ali Baba—style shoes. He doesn’t believe in holding back the tears; he gets his actors to cry as often as possible. Tanuja, who had co-written Zakhm, had defined for me the secret of success in a Hindi movie: “It has to make people’s insides churn.” The Indian public thinks with its heart. This passion can topple governments, empires. The government can stomach a documentary film about the riots but not an emotional, mainstream one. The Enlightenment hasn’t reached these shores; it carries no weight. Democracy here is a balancing of opposing passions.

  Mahesh responds that he will go to Delhi and meet the prime minister, who had recently told him he admired his work. The chief secretary laughs. “He has a hawk as home minister. The film will be shown to him” and it will be banned.

  MAHESH AND TANUJA WORK right through Diwali, frantically trying to get the film through the various political and bureaucratic hurdles, taking the issue to the media. The film is screened for a committee of government officials, including the Bombay Police Commissioner, who then asks for a police nominee on the Censor Board, to
screen every film to filter out negative portrayals of policemen. “It generates more heat—the fact that a bad cop is there—than the neutral effect generated by a good cop,” the commissioner explains.

  Mahesh gives in and makes some cuts and reshoots some scenes to please the censors. The saffron headbands that the rioters wear, which “represent a certain political party” according to the written report from the Censor Board, are replaced with black ones. A scene “where Muslim character is pointing out his frustrations is not necessary.” A staged encounter where the police shoot a man running away from them is deleted. A speech made by the Thackeray stand-in—“We have tolerated these people long enough and now the time has come for a national cleansing”—is cut. Mahesh wants it both ways. He wants to be a hero to the press, for holding the torch of defiance against a fascist establishment; but he also wants his film released. Crores are riding on it.

  After the political cuts are made, Zakhm is released and goes on to win an award from the President of India: Best Feature Film on National Integration.

  The Struggler and the Goddess

  I am at a table outside the Sun ‘n’ Sand Hotel in Juhu in the late afternoon, watching the sun begin its decline and fall into the sea. This is the hotel where movie stars and gang lords used to come to see and be seen, the hotel where Monalisa lost her virginity to the movie producer Hari Virani.

  Ali Peter John likes lounging by the poolside of the Sun ‘n’ Sand hotel, especially when his vodka and chicken sandwich are paid for by someone else. But he is no sponger; he pays for his meal in stories, many times over. For Ali Peter John is, as his former drinking buddy Mahesh Bhatt describes him, “God of the strugglers.” His perch as a columnist for Screen magazine gives him license to roam the highways and bylanes of Bollywood.

  Ali is a fixer, a messenger between worlds, a conduit between high and low Bombay. In appearance he is a low, shambling, suspicious sort of figure, with what is called in the marriage market “disunited vision,” so he can look at you without looking at you. He sports a short beard that makes him look like a smuggler’s henchman and generally fails to button the top half of his shirt. But his articles in Screen read almost like sermons, so full of moral purpose are they.

  Ali is an authority on B and C movies, the sudras and untouchables—and sure-fire moneymakers—of the industry. The film trade magazines are filled with full-page color ads for them, in the sex-and-horror category. Such films are shot very quickly, start to finish in a week, in rented bungalows on Madh Island. Then they are shown to the Censor Board in Madras, where the censors are more lenient than in Bombay. They often do better than the big-budget films in the interiors, places like UP and MP, and the small theaters in Old Delhi, and they have names like The Devil and Death, Thirsty Soul, and Vampire. “They’re a mix of horror, sex, and loud music,” explains Ali. Often, in the late shows, hard-core porn is inserted at random within the film by the individual theater owners, footage that has nothing to do with the advertised film but is the real draw for the almost entirely male audience.

  Listening to Ali, you get the impression of a man who is haunted by the struggling actors who have come to Bombay and failed; he retains special solicitude for women. Ali says that of every hundred girls who come to the city to become actresses, “ten are lucky, ninety are doomed.” The auditions are often held in places like the Hotel Seaside in Juhu, which Ali has renamed the Hotel Suicide, because of what it drives some of the female strugglers to after an audition in one of its rooms.

  The movies will always be linked with sex and death for Ali; both signify opportunity. “Whenever anyone died we got a holiday in school and saw films.” He grew up in Andheri East, home of poor Christians and Warli tribals. When the junior artistes started renting flats there, “it was like the invasion of a certain culture.” The Warli women were very beautiful, and the struggling actors would pick them up, telling them, “we are from the world of the movies.” The boy Ali was very impressed by the flamboyant actors, and it was a shock for him to learn, when he grew up, that “they were working as peons in offices.” He now sees them in the speakeasies on Yaari Road in Andheri, in the Urvashi beer bar, in Leo’s Country Liquor Bar, behind the dirty curtain, sitting over their 9-rupee bottle of desi liquor and planning the ways they will conquer the world, telling the other strugglers, “Tomorrow I have a shoot with Amitabh Bacchan.”

  “Being in this line for so many years, I am very shocked at their level of hiding reality,” says Ali. “They will never show you they are frustrated.” The better-off strugglers live in certain hotels and guesthouses that are associated with luck. The Marina Guest House in Bandra, for example; Rajendra Kumar used to live there. Ali tells me what the strugglers survive on: the Rice Plate. “Eight rupees. Rice, six puris or two chapatis, one dal. If the hotel is very large-hearted, then a small container of very watery curd and two vegetables. Eaten in the right place, it is the most balanced diet. Sometimes if they are in a good mood they give you sweet also.” For the struggler who is getting small roles, there are the Muslim-owned hotels, where for 20 rupees he can get a very good biryani.

  Ali and I take a rickshaw to Yaari Road, which is buzzing in the evening, with lots of little eateries along the sides. Ali points out a waiter at one shack: “That guy has eight stories in his pocket. He is ready to narrate. There must be lakhs of film stories in Bombay.” Just as there are struggling actors, there are also struggling scriptwriters. They seek an audience with a producer or director and narrate their story in real time and with real acting. In the emotional scenes, they weep affectingly. In the action scenes, they jump and flail around in the director’s office. They will usually have saved the director the trouble of casting; the star is already picked out. “And Vinod Khanna is running, running . . . he falls on the ground, rolls on the ground . . . and then he gets caught.” Ali mimics the narration. “Meanwhile, Vinod Khanna is nowhere, he is away drinking somewhere.”

  The long-distance telephone booths of Yaari Road are full of young people phoning home, telling their parents, their siblings, that the big break is just around the corner. Many of them belong to the junior artistes guild and have a precise caste system, Ali explains. If an actor in a party scene is wearing a suit, he is considered A-Class and gets paid double the amount that goes to another actor, relegated to C-Class because he is standing behind the A-Class actor. The strugglers whom nature has blessed with a resemblance to Amitabh Bacchan or Shahrukh Khan find work as professional doubles. Some female equivalents work in brothels. The hick from out of town is shown a photo album of the house’s inventory. He picks a film-heroine look-alike, pays an exorbitant sum for her favors, and due to the low light and his nervousness goes back home convinced that he has spent a night with a Bombay actress. Every time he sees her onscreen he flushes with secret pride.

  Ali promises to introduce me to a “genuine struggler,” a man named Eishaan.

  A few days later, we are sitting in the canteen of Filmalaya Studios. It is a shack, but a five-star shack according to Ali, because it has five fans. Across from me at the table—which is fashioned from a giant Coca-Cola billboard—is a clear-faced, bright-eyed young man, wearing an earring in one ear and a gold teddy bear dangling from a chain around his neck. His brother Hitesh sits next to him, so different in looks he must have come from another gene pool. This is one of Ali’s acolytes, Eishaan the struggler. “If he wasn’t struggling he’d never be sitting in this canteen,” declares Ali. For Eishaan did not run away from a village in Bihar to come to the film world to try his luck; he managed a flourishing cloth business in Dubai for five years before he came to Bombay. He is a Sindhi, a nonresident Indian struggler, who has seen both feast and famine in his twenty-five years. He has traveled in a Mercedes, in a Rolls-Royce, and in the Bombay local trains. He stayed with thirteen people in a one-bedroom flat in Andheri before his family moved to a house in Jaipur, which his mother sold her jewelry to buy. He’s been dreaming about being a hero since he was six
teen and poring over the centerfolds in Screen magazine. At that time one of his uncles, working for a production company in Bombay, got him work as a model in a photo shoot, and he pocketed 800 rupees. For a teenager in Jaipur, it must have been a big deal, signifying much more than its purchasing power.

  The teenager finished school up to the twelfth standard and then his family moved to Dubai, where he managed a textile shop for an Arab man, making 70,000 rupees a month. Then in the Gulf War business went down. He kept visiting Bombay. He felt he should do something else, something closer to his heart. Back in Dubai, a supermarket manager named Starson—“he knew about stars”—wandered into the cloth shop. “He used to tell me, You are not an ordinary person. I see something in you.” The young man was in this cloth shop at this time, Starson said, but it was only a rest stop, to drink some water. “This is not the end. You’ll be ruling.”

  This boy felt he could tell Starson his dream. “He said do it. There will be a lot of trouble, but never give up.”

  So the cloth shop manager left Dubai and went to Bombay to be a movie star. When he came to the city, it had changed its name to Mumbai, so he changed his name too. When he was born, his parents, with their middle-class lack of imagination, had named him Mahesh, the sheer ordinariness of which he had been laboring under all these years. In the fifties and sixties, Muslim actors changed their names to Hindu ones—such as Dilip Kumar—to be accepted. In the nineties, there was no such need. Even as the BJP and the Sena were ascendant, the biggest movie stars in the country were a trio of Muslim stars, the Khans: Shahrukh, Aamir, and Salman. Mahesh changed his name to Eishaan, which has an Urdu ring, a filmi ring, to it.