Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  “It’s going good!” my friend Rustom, who has shot the stills for the movie, observes to him.

  “It’s going too good.”

  It is going too good. The balance of good and bad fortune in the universe is dangerously tilted toward this young man; it has to right itself. And so it is that, one day in January, as the man Hrithik most loves on the earth—his father, Rakesh Roshan—is getting into his Mercedes, two young men walk up and fire six bullets at him with a .32 pistol. One of the bullets lodges in his breastbone, saving his heart. It is four days after the release of the film Roshan has directed and produced. He had the foresight to keep distribution rights for most of the territories, so overnight he has become one of the wealthiest men in the industry. All the movie industry congregates around his hospital bedside, sympathizing, fearing, asking, “Why?”

  Vinod tells me why. “They want Hrithik to do a film for them.”

  So popular is Hrithik that the gang lord Abu Salem, who has branched off from the D-Company, wants him to act in his film. They—that is, a frontman for Salem, another Bollywood director—went to Rakesh Roshan a few days ago and asked him to get his son to sign on to a film they were producing. Roshan refused. Smita Thackeray, the Saheb’s daughter-in-law, had also asked; she could be safely refused now since the Shiv Sena was out of power. Roshan had been getting calls from Abu Salem and had told his son, “Drive carefully.” But not much else. Two days after the meeting, the hit men shot him. The Roshans are considering settling with the gangs. It would be quite a twist on the Hindi film formula: A father gets shot, and the son, instead of taking revenge, becomes the star of the killers’ film. He may not be able to summon the requisite level of enthusiasm needed for a great performance, but his face alone will cause women to faint, and the gang will make its money. Here was the casting couch turned on its head with a vengeance.

  So now both our lead stars are under the shadow of the underworld: The older one is out on bail for his connections to them and the younger one has seen his father shot because of his success. Underworld and dreamworld—in Bombay they are reflections of each other.

  Some of this has to do with the nature of film financing in the 1990s. Most Bollywood productions do not get bank loans; they are funded privately. The banks do not understand or trust Bollywood. The funds required for a production are huge, and a family in the industry may be working on several projects at once. The time between investment and return can be years if the film doesn’t do well. Who would have that amount of cash lying around? Only the underworld. The gangs are very happy to see black money turn into Technicolor dreams. A hit film can bring in a fourfold return on investment within the first four weeks of its release. So for the underworld, investing in films is one of the quickest ways to get a return on illegal investment. Without underworld financing, the Hindi film industry would collapse overnight. It would have to rely on financing from banks and stockbrokers, who do not share the cinematic taste of the dons. Their dreams would be nowhere near as extravagant, as violent, as passionate.

  The gangs have an advantage when it comes to casting. Their preferred way of doing business is to take an unknown but pliable director and producer with a couple of B films to their credit, and then call around to the leading stars of the moment, demanding that they cancel their other commitments and act in their film. With a prominent star, the producer is at least guaranteed recovery of costs. The gangsters are particularly keen to acquire overseas rights for the films and have a near lock on the Bollywood roadshows, those hybrid assemblages of actors, musicians, and vaudeville comedians that roam the globe from Barcelona to Boston, wherever Indians and those who love Indian movies reside.

  There is a curious symbiosis between the underworld and the movies, as I had seen with Tanuja in Madanpura. Hindi filmmakers are fascinated by the lives of the gangsters and draw upon them for material. The gangsters, from the shooter on the ground to the don-in-exile at the top, watch Hindi movies keenly and model themselves—their dialogue, the way they carry themselves—on their screen equivalents. Like everybody else in Bombay, the gangsters are starstruck. They delight in their power over the industry’s biggest names. In their conversations, they make it a point to denigrate them. Chotta Shakeel, talking with one of his producers, calls Rakesh Roshan Takla, baldy; Hrithik Chikna, dandy; and Shahrukh Khan Hakla, stutterer. It is the easiest way of demonstrating to fellow Indians who is boss: Bring a movie star who can vanquish a thousand brawny villains on the screen down to his knees with just one phone call, begging for his life in front of a puny tapori. Some of the gangsters frown upon the immorality of the movie folk. In between religious discussions, the men sitting in Kamal’s office often talk about the sex lives of people in the film industry, what the producers and directors make their female stars do. “It’s a very cheap line,” says the mob financier with disgust, and the others repeat, “Very cheap line.” It’s a complex relationship between the gangsters and the stars, part adoration, part self-hatred. In the end, it’s not about the money.

  A CLOSE FRIEND of Vinod’s, Manmohan Shetty, who owns the leading film processing facility in the country, gets a threatening call from Abu Salem, demanding money. (It was Abu Salem who ordered music magnate Gulshan Kumar killed for not paying up.) At Vinod’s suggestion, Manmohan goes to Ajay Lal for protection, just before Ajay is to go on leave, and asks if he should just pay the extortion demand. Ajay tells him that if he does he will have to pay all the gangs. The producer won’t accept an armed police escort because he is too embarrassed to be seen with a gun-toting bodyguard, so he mostly stays in his house. One day he is walking from his car to his office. A man in his early twenties fires at him from five feet. The gun locks; Manmohan hears the click-click and runs into the office before the shooter can fire again. Manmohan was under the impression that there was an understanding and he had until January to pay.

  Abu Salem calls him after the encounter. “This is just the trailer. The main picture is about to start.” He wants to make an example out of Manmohan. The public is now thinking that the extortionists are not serious but have been wiped out in encounters. The public needs to read the name Abu Salem in the papers, so that if he calls on their phones they will know who he is and be frightened.

  There is to be a meeting of film producers with Chaggan Bhujbal, the state’s home minister, about the extortion issue. Vinod has been advised by Ajay not to attend, because half of the producers who will show up are themselves connected in some way to the underworld. Their identities are common knowledge. But Vinod cannot come out like a hero and demand stern action against the gangs, since he has been advised by Ajay that the gangsters will be getting a full update on who says what at the meeting immediately after it ends, from their front men in the industry. Besides, even the government officials at the meeting have ties to the gangs.

  Vinod and Tanuja Chandra take me along to the meeting on Saturday evening, in an enormous conference room of the State Guest House, Sahyadri. No one asks me for identification as I walk in. In Bombay, you get past doormen if you look like you’re not going to tolerate questions. The room is filled with producers, a couple of mid-level stars, Chaggan Bhujbal, and the entire police leadership of the city. As we enter the room, there are dozens of TV cameras and journalists; the meeting seems more of a photo opportunity than anything else. Then the TV cameras are told to leave, so we can talk. The chief of the Crime Branch, Sivanandan, starts on the offensive. In reply to a question about why the filmmakers in the south are not being targeted by the gangs, he replies that maybe the southern film producers do not get their financing from the underworld.

  The minister and the police complain that most filmmakers targeted for extortion never come to the police for help; when they do, they claim, they are never touched. At this, Manmohan Shetty points out that he had asked both Ajay and Sivanandan for protection when he got calls from Abu Salem, and both of them told him that the Abu Salem gang was a “negligible force” in Bombay. “Thanks to th
e underworld’s inefficient equipment I was saved,” Shetty concludes.

  Then begins a parade of film producers suggesting to the minister what he should do. One of them says, “These people are not criminals. They are traitors and should be treated as traitors. Everybody knows that when they enter the police station they are treated as VIPs.” His voice rises a couple of decibel levels. “Bring their whole families and put them against a wall and shoot their entire families!”

  Sivanandan reads out statistics demonstrating that the number of alleged gangsters killed in encounters has increased every year; in 1999 there were 89, “an all-time record,” he points out, with no little pride. Nobody comments that the crime charts also rose correspondingly. The encounters have not stopped the necessity of this very meeting. One producer says he was provided police protection but the gangs shot his watchman right at his gate. “The protection was provided to you, not to the watchman,” the police commissioner retorts. “You were not touched.” The watchman, of course, was expendable.

  Vinod speaks up. He wants to know why the government isn’t making serious efforts to ask for the extradition of the gang lords from the countries they are hiding in. Instead, the state government has recently made public a list of people in the movie industry who have huge outstanding dues for police security provided to them. The directors and stars shouldn’t have to pay for security, notes Vinod, since as taxpaying citizens it is their right to have the state protect their physical safety. If things continue this way, the industry may move to Hyderabad to the super-efficient domain of Chandrababu Naidu. Lakhs of people work for the film industry in Bombay, one of the producers notes. Bombay’s economic livelihood depends on the movie business.

  But it is an empty threat. Vinod spoke to me about it earlier. “All said and done, it is the best city in India in terms of living. The Hindi film industry doesn’t have an option.” It is no accident that the Hindi film industry is based in Marathi-dominated Bombay rather than Hindi-dominated Delhi, because film is not about language. It is fundamentally a mass dream of the audience, and Bombay is a mass dream of the peoples of India.

  Bhujbal, the home minister, promises to act. “Since this is a democracy, I can’t say it openly. But let me tell you, I have decided to impose the strictest penalty on the extortionists. The ultimate penalty. I can’t say it publicly, but it is the ultimate penalty.”

  On our way out we meet a senior policeman from the territory where most of the movie folk live. “I don’t have much to do with these higher-ups,” the new commissioner reassures Vinod. “But I want you to know that I am fully committed to my job. In the last five days I have killed two people.”

  On the way home from the meeting, Vinod and I are driving past a garbage-infested lot in Juhu, over which is a sign, THIS LAND IS THE PROPERTY OF THE COMMISSIONER OF POLICE.

  “Look at that,” Vinod points out. “That’s the state of our police. This country is fucked.”

  IT HAPPENS EARLIER than expected. The first call comes to Vinod’s production office before he’s even finished shooting the movie. His accountant picks up. The caller asks for Vinod; the accountant says he is on the set. “Tell him to call Abu Salem.” And a phone number is left. By evening, another phone call comes. “Why hasn’t he called? We’ll blow his head off.”

  Vinod’s production manager arrives on the set in the middle of shooting the climax. Vinod knows instantly from his face, which has gone white, that something is seriously wrong. Within five minutes, Vinod starts making his calls. He goes all the way to the top and speaks to the country’s home minister, L. K. Advani. Advani tells him not to worry; all the security agencies of the country are with him. In short order, Vinod has a commando sitting in his car, a jeepful of armed policemen following him, and fifteen guards around his house, his office, and the sets.

  By the next day, he tells me the matter has been sorted out; he received another call saying, “You are like our brother.” Some string was pulled somewhere, and some puppet’s hand jerked up and dropped the gun pointed at Vinod. I go that night to Vinod’s. He is in a good mood, dancing around his son. We sit on the ledge outside the living room, looking at the almost full moon, drinking scotch. It isn’t Advani who has fixed it with Salem, it is Sanjay Dutt. It was Salem who had taken the Maruti to Sanjay’s garage; Salem was a batchmate of Sanjay’s in the bomb-blasts case, Number 87 in the Bombay Blasts Conspiracy. Salem had been treated as a servant by Dawood and his court. He had always wanted to be in the movies, so now he was a specialist in extorting the film industry. Sanjay had called up his old colleague and reminded him, “I’ve spent two years in jail for you. Vinod is like my brother,” he said. “He stood by me when I was in jail.”

  Vinod has been extraordinarily lucky in his casting choices. Signing Sanjay Dutt has turned out to be even more fortuitous than signing Hrithik. Bacchan could never have called off Abu Salem’s killers. But Anu is petrified.

  Her husband’s grandiose talk does not help either. “My brother owns an interest in a resort in the Maldives. We will go there and raise a private army and spend six years going after these guys.” He will call Farrokh Abdullah to send Kashmiri commandos to protect him. “I’m a Kashmiri citizen.” He will take Hrithik to Delhi and hold a press conference, during which he and the star will publicly ask for political asylum from another country, because India has become a “banana republic.” The union government will thus be shamed into seriously going after the extortionists. Vinod is going to buy a revolver! He is on his third scotch now and feels personally affronted, unmanned, by having to hide out in his house behind a wall of armed guards. His Punjabi machismo is threatened. He recites what he would like to say to Salem: “Come to Carter Road, motherfucker, and let’s have it out.”

  The calls stop for the moment. But just in case, Vinod plans to leave the country well before the film’s release.

  A GOLD MINE OPENS UP in the sky: Sony/TriStar decides to buy the rights to distribute Mission Kashmir overseas. It will open in Times Square, the first Hindi movie ever to do so. As the October 2000 release date approaches, there is an enormous buzz about our movie. Representatives from the gluemaker Fevicol come to Vinod before the film is even finished. They want to be “associated” with the film. The company’s ad slogan is Bharat Jodo; they will glue the splintering country back together. Mission Kashmir, they feel, is a film about national integration, the glue of secularism that holds the country together, and is a fit enterprise for Fevicol to be associated with. For this privilege they offer one crore. Vinod rejects it, and chastises his assistant for even entertaining the offer. Not because it is cheesy, but because the price is too low.

  For the premiere, Sony flies forty-nine people around the world, in first and business class, and puts us up in first-class hotels in London and New York. But Hrithik and Preity Zinta are absent at both the London and the New York premieres, which takes the wind out of the events. Why? I ask Anu.

  “Abu,” she replies.

  The actors can leave the country only at the pleasure of the exiled gang lord. Hrithik has signed up to do a touring show for the man who shot his father. This is to be his first stage show, but it is not till next year; with the star’s popularity among overseas Indians, it is guaranteed to bring in unprecedented revenues. Salem does not want Hrithik leaving the country to promote anybody else’s venture first, even if it is just a movie. So he had demanded of Rakesh Roshan, not long after Salem’s bullets had come out of his body, that his son stay home. He called Preity and told her not to go either. Sanjay was also similarly instructed, but because he had spent two years in jail for Salem, he got a special dispensation. The bhai has now become an emigration officer, issuing or denying exit permits as it suits him.

  MISSION KASHMIR OPENS to mixed reviews. They praise the performances and the music but find holes in the script. They point out, justly, that the script doesn’t mention the everyday sufferings endured by the Kashmiris that drove their young men into militancy. Some of the
criticism is unfair; it originates from a powerful critic—turned—movie director whom Vinod once hit in public for insulting Anu. He had slapped the critic in the balcony of a movie theater, regretting only that he hadn’t toppled him over the balcony into the stalls below.

  But there are pleasures in the finished film. Vinod’s technical prowess, his natural feel for cinema, is obvious in scenes such as the one where the boy Altaaf waits in the darkness for Khan with a gun. Khan and his wife come home and move through a series of rooms, switching lights on; the camera moves between light and dark, light and shadow. Sanjay gives one of his best performances: the sense of a man overwhelmed by tragedy but somehow struggling on. For the first week of its release, it is the number-one film in the vast country. One million people a day are watching the characters we have been living with for the past two years.

  At a screening at Rashtrapati Bhavan for the President of India, both Sanjay Dutt and Ramesh Taurani, who is releasing the music for the film, are present; both are officially out on bail and are being tried for murder.

  The columnist Ali Peter John interviews the actor in Screen:

  ALI: Just some years ago, you were lying alone desperate in a dark dungeon in Arthur Road Jail. What were the thoughts that crossed your mind while you climbed the steps of Rashtrapati Bhavan?