Death in Mumbai

by Meenal Baghel

  But she imbibed Ravina Raj Kohli’s instructions well. ‘I am not saying we are ashamed of what we do… We did create Kyunki, Kanyadan, Kavyanjali, Kasautti which have been about the urban middle class, but you are not my audience. You can go home and see Desperate Housewives just like I do.’

  Her serials are a volatile mix of traditional Indian motifs, often featuring joint families with all their stereotypes, clashing modern values, and are as formulaic as a Bollywood film. When Peter Chernin, then COO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (which owns Star TV in India), came to Ekta’s home for a meal he asked her what was wrong with one of their new launches, and why it wasn’t doing well. ‘Even then I told him that his new channel was trying to be a niche channel, and that could never be profitable in India.’

  A few years after this well-meaning advice, Star TV terminated their decade-long exclusive partnership with Ekta, axed three of her daily soaps, and divested their 25.99 per cent share in her company. Balaji Telefilms’ stock went into a tailspin, sparking a shiver of excitement among Bollywood’s obituary writers.

  We met again on the day her company lost its arbitration case against Star TV. She had just emerged from a marathon meeting with her creative team, but was still smarting from the judgment. ‘I gave Star the best eight, nine years of my life, I took them at face value, but they f***** me over…’

  ‘Then again,’ she lowered her pitch by a notch or two, ‘my Rahu mahadasha has begun, and I’ve been told my secret enemies will start to surface.’

  I asked with curiosity: ‘For how long will the mahadasha go on?’

  ‘Eighteen years, man!’

  Early propagators of astrology, the Babylonians and the Mayans would read chicken liver for as many as six thousand warning signs. The greater the fear of uncertainty, and the less assurance there is of certitude, leaves the diviner and the follower to try every possible form of propitiation.

  Such was the case with Ekta, who wore a stone on every finger, even two on some. Over the many doors of the seven-storeyed Balaji House, horseshoes, clutches of fresh neon-green chillies and lemon are tied along with coconuts wrapped in an auspicious red, dangling like the breasts of a baboon. On Ekta’s fifth floor domain as well as at her Juhu house the Gayatri mantra, sung in a fast-paced tinny-voice, as if on a worn-out tape, plays round the clock working like a force field against any possible evil eyes.

  A former employee clued me in, ‘Whenever you meet her, take a close look at her shoes.’ The woman who could easily afford the latest Manolos and Louboutins only ever wore a pair of worn-out platform slip-ons, straps in tatters, with the clunky rubber heels roughened. ‘She considers them her lucky shoes and won’t trade them for another pair.’

  Not long after hearing this, I read an interview with Ekta in Hindustan Times in which, speaking about her shows on Colors, Ekta said her association with the channel would be fruitful, she knew, because when it’s creative head first called she’d been in a puja, and as soon as their conversation ended a flower dropped from the head of the idol. It was, Ekta said, a divine seal of approval.

  I sat in on one of her meetings, hoping to catch some of the action—it was rumoured that in fits of rage she threw slippers (the lucky ones?) at errant employees; but while I was there, she remained regrettably in control.

  Of the ten serials that are in production at any given time, Ekta only looks after three—the rest are taken care of by associates—but she decides the look and casting for each of the shows. ‘I remember we shortlisted a girl for our serial Kasturi, but when I came back from out of town and saw the hoardings, I realized her face did not reflect the innocence demanded by the character. Overnight the hoardings were brought down, a fake story about how pressure had made the actress ill was circulated in the media, and a new girl was found.’

  Ekta talked from behind a presidential-size desk as Vikas showed her auditions of aspirants—this is what Neeraj Grover used to do at Balaji Telefilms. Also present were seven or eight young women, all under thirty. Ekta stared hard at the computer screen, and pressed the enter key with the speed and concentration of a tabla player beating a riff on the dagga. Though the air conditioner remote was lying next to her, she passed it to one of the girls every few minutes: ‘On karo… ab off karo. Switch it on… ab off…’

  Mothers, sisters—‘kindly faces’, buas and sisters-in-law—‘nice bitchy faces’ were swiftly cast before trouble erupted. ‘Where’s the father? The Marathi actor I asked you guys to locate, the one who looks like an older Ajay Devgn?’ There was a shuffle of confusion, and Vikas pressed ahead trying to show her other options, but she refused to be appeased.

  ‘WHERE IS THE GUY I WANT?’

  The entire group involuntarily moved back a step. Was I about to witness a famous Ekta blowout? Instead, she abruptly switched her tone and turned to me. ‘I got the idea for the film on Neeraj from something you said. General wisdom is that creative directors like him have no clout, they merely audition…but I got thinking, and it struck me that I get to see only what they choose to show me. They actually have the power to make or break someone’s career. If my staff shows me the photograph of an actor just as I am leaving for home, getting into the car, ninety per cent chances are I’ll say okay. That’s the time I am exhausted and not as hawk-eyed… This power and what they choose to do with it is what I want to explore in the film.’

  She then got up, and with a gesture intended to be theatrical, pulled me into the corridor. ‘If you’re doing a book on Neeraj Grover, you must speak to Smita Patil,’ she said sotto voce. ‘She’s a spook, man!’

  Though Neeraj had quit working for Ekta Kapoor several months earlier, when he went missing Ekta got one of her colleagues to contact a clairvoyant for his whereabouts. It was a far more reliable source of information for her than any detective could offer. ‘I knew Neeraj was dead even before the police announced it. This woman had told us that his girlfriend, along with two other men, had killed him, and she also gave details of where his body could be found.’

  Two days later she texted me the mobile number of her clairvoyant, Smita Patil.

  The phone beeped, and Narendra Chanchal’s ‘Chalo bulawaa aaya hai, maata ne bulaya hai’…rang in my ear. Mid-crescendo, Smita Patil cut him short and answered the phone. She had been a Goregaon girl who got her degree in textile designing from Sophia Polytechnic, and married an assistant geologist in ONGC. For several years she taught art in various schools, all the while nursing political ambitions. In 1999 she was jailed during a political agitation, and was featured in the Bombay Times as ‘Star of the Week’.

  A devotee of Durga from her early days, she did the punishing nine-day nirjala vrat every Navratri to invoke the goddess. ‘People started making fun of my bhakti so I prayed hard to Mata Rani, saying she needed to manifest herself and save me from such humiliation. In 2005, Mata Rani housed herself in my body and she has stayed on since, constantly showing her chamatkar.’

  Every Tuesday at her home, which is right next to a teeming mall at Bhayander, she holds a durbar where Mata Rani—and here Smita Patil referred to herself in the third person—gives darshan seated on her high chair, doling out individual benedictions after the prayers. From healing invalids to blessing the childless, Mata Rani’s bounty, she says, knows no limit.

  ‘In May last year one of my bhakts, a girl called Rasika, came in with her boyfriend Kushal who works at Balaji, he wanted to know the whereabouts of his friend Neeraj. I took one look at Neeraj’s picture and said, “The boy is no more, his girlfriend and two men are responsible, and the body can be found near water.” Kushal told me no one would kidnap Neeraj, and that he didn’t think that’s what had happened. So I closed my eyes again and told him that Mata Rani had spoken and that the girlfriend should be taken to the CBI and she would confess.’

  ‘This Kushal called me one evening some days later and said, “Mata Rani, please switch on the TV. Whatever you said has come true.”’ She has guided several celebrities in addi
tion to Ekta, even telling a powerful Shiv Sena politician that he was going to die soon.

  And, did he? It was impossible to resist the question.

  ‘Within three days of my informing him this, he had an accident and died.’

  But it’s not easy being Mata Rani, taking care of bhoot–balaayein, and dialoguing with the spirits. ‘If it’s a shaitani shakti I have to counter, I suffer tremendously, my feet get crooked, I start yelling and then my body starts to get heavier and heavier. Mata Rani needs to be in a pure environment and you can imagine what that means in a filthy city like Mumbai… It’s difficult to walk on roads, travel by train, I can’t clean my house, wash utensils, normal life is not possible with Mata Rani constantly living in my body. The family life is affected too.’ But her children, one of whom studies aeronautical engineering in Nashik while the other is in class XI, have come to accept the new presence in their mother’s life.

  ‘My dream is to serve the people and have a temple built in Mata Rani’s name at my residence, for that’s where her shrine stood four hundred years ago, and which was later buried under rubble. Mata Rani needs to be brought out from under the earth and allowed to breathe.’

  Superstitions and clinging to totems sit oddly with the woman I’ve been interviewing. Ekta is bright, humorous, and in possession of a combative streak. I mentioned this to a television insider who has dealt closely with Balaji Telefilms, and who agreed to speak provided I kept his identity concealed. ‘To understand the Ekta phenomenon,’ he said chuckling quietly, ‘you must also know the father and the mother. Brand Ekta is the three of them operating as a unit.’

  Shobha Kapoor, a former flight attendant, is the canny dowager whose business deals are as sharp as her diamonds. Her rough cuts are offset by Ekta’s father. Jeetendra was India’s original dancing star who, when thirty was thought of as middle age, famously endorsed a brand of virility capsules called ‘Thirty Plus’. ‘Jeetendra is charm and gentleness personified,’ my informer explained.

  The final member of the troika is Ekta, the unpredictable, superstitious diva with a famous temper, who creates amidst chaos. ‘The mother will play hardball with a channel in the morning, but blame Ekta’s working style when executives complain of schedules going awry or tapes coming in late. If the channel ever suggests dropping a Balaji show that may be faring poorly, Jeetendra will take the executives out for a drink by the evening and get emotional and apologetic, saying: “You know just how eccentric Ekta is, all the shows are like her babies, I understand your problem but if you drop one of the shows, she may get upset, that in turn may affect her creativity, and impact the rest of the serials on the channel…”’ The insider laughed, putting aside his masala chai. ‘It’s a brilliant strategy.’

  I got the drift of her mercurial style one evening when she called me over to her house. ‘I’ll be relaxed there and we can chat at leisure.’ But the meeting was rescheduled four times before she sent a message saying that she would definitely be home by 11 pm. These days Amitabh Bachchan might woefully blog about waterlogging at his house each time it rains heavily, but until recently, the Juhu Vile-Parle Development Scheme was one of the most elegant addresses in Mumbai. A generation of movie stars—Dharmendra, Amitabh Bachchan, Rakesh Roshan, Shatrughan Sinha, and Hema Malini—live in plush fenced-off bungalows there. A few years ago, when Hema Malini decided to reconstruct her home, she looked around for a temporary apartment in the vicinity—but quickly dropped the idea when she discovered she was expected to share the elevator with the other residents of the building.

  Her contemporary, and one-time suitor, Jeetendra has a house which stands out in the neighbourhood as one of the largest. It also resembles a Jain temple, built as it is in blinding-white marble. But the presiding deity was not in.

  Instead, I was ushered in with my Mumbai Mirror colleague Vickey Lalwani into a high-ceilinged room so large that it looked unused. In a far corner, Ekta’s photographs in various poses lined the shelf—she has a sweet face and a lovely smile, but the hauteur in the eyes is unmistakable. A sprawling chandelier hung over a bare dining table; Grecian-style pillars and a forlorn-looking marble nymph added to the mausoleum-like feel. The same tinny-voiced Gayatri mantra was playing here too, though there didn’t seem to be a soul around. As the minutes elapsed, Vickey and I silently stared at Ekta’s black pug desperately humping a velvet sofa cushion.

  Suddenly, Jeetendra glided noiselessly into the room, looking dressed for a night out. After solicitous small talk he called out, conjuring a flurry of liveried attendants, as he did Ekta who arrived within seconds. It was past midnight, but she had been out jogging. ‘The three most important things in my day are: exercise, prayer, meetings, in that order of priority.’ She would jog anywhere, any time, which explained her perennial uniform of T-shirts and track pants. Very different from her growing-up years, when she favoured hip clothing.

  ‘I was 84 kilos when I was eighteen, that’s the heaviest I’ve ever been. That happened because when I’d be at home, I would do nothing but sit in front of the TV or talk to my friends on the phone, and eat tubs of ice cream. That too full cream—there were none of the 96 percent fat-free gelatos in those days.’ She laughed. ‘One of the reasons I partied so hard was to get slim. It was my way of keeping away from junk. I wanted to get into “fashionable” clothes,’ she rolls her eyes and makes the quote sign, ‘dance like crazy, and just hang. By the time I was twenty, I was drinking hot water twenty times a day and my weight had come down to 51 kilos.’

  That must have made her happy.

  ‘I can’t say about that but I do know I looked ill. I remember my friend, the former actress Neelam, was hospitalized with meningitis; when I went to see her at the hospital her mother was berating her for not eating properly, and then she whipped around to stare at me and said, “You’re falling sick next.”’

  The partying and the skimpy clothes, Ekta said, were a passing phase. Recently, she tried to stop her friend’s sixteen-year-old daughter from going off with a television actor after a late night party, and was snubbed for her efforts. ‘The young these days are so at ease with their sexuality, and they know what they want in life. They have the drive and the ambition, but I find many of them are so happy with their limited forty-thousand-rupee-a-month lifestyle that they will not work harder to get into the one-lakh-rupee bracket. They need to inculcate the value of hard work.’

  Her own strong work ethic and her faith guide her life. Apart from visiting Siddhivinayak Temple every Tuesday, a Shani temple every Saturday, and the Tirupati Balaji temple before launching a show, Ekta said she needed to pray for ‘just seven minutes’ every day.

  Ekta puts in sixteen hours a day—her friend, the Bollywood scriptwriter Mushtaq Shaikh, is writing a book on her called Holidays Not Allowed—working through the night, and very often clearing an episode that’s scheduled for telecast later that evening at 4 am. When Balaji Telefilms became a public listed company, the joke in the Star TV office was that the risk factor in the share prospectus should mention ‘Possibility of Ekta getting married’. Neeraj, who often complained to his roommate Haresh Sondarva about the ‘inhuman working conditions at Balaji’, and fretted about the long and irregular hours, nonetheless greatly admired Ekta’s drive and success.

  ‘I have no family time,’ she admitted. Four years ago she built herself a multi-storey bungalow a few hundred metres away from her parents’ home. ‘I wanted to know what it was like to live by myself.’ She shifted into the house with three household helpers, but didn’t last beyond a few days. ‘It was beautiful, but awfully quiet… Here, I know that I have my space but also the knowledge that my parents are floating about somewhere.’

  At thirty-six, she is in a ‘happy space: I have satisfying work, friends, my own time, I lead a cocooned life.’ But things at Balaji have been getting worrisome. News came in that their ambitious show Mahabharat on 9X channel (for which Maria had auditioned) would go off the air mid-narrative. The expensive period s
ets erected cannot be used for any other show, and the money owed to them is unlikely to be paid.

  Elsewhere, reality TV shows were flourishing, contributing about 25 percent of the total programming. During a trip to Mysore I met Maria Susairaj’s journalism teacher Shabana Mansoor, who has since quit teaching to pursue research on the ‘Priming Effect of Television on Young Female Adults’. The research was inspired by a train conversation with a young woman who said she would never want to marry a man whose mother was alive. She had been convinced that mothers-in-law were terrible creatures after growing up on a staple of Ekta Kapoor’s trademark ‘K’-serials. ‘But when I went for my fieldwork I found that most young women now watch the soaps mainly for fashion and interior tips, and their real interest lies elsewhere.’ In the villages of Kerala and Karnataka, Shabana was repeatedly asked why she had omitted asking questions about Roadies and Splitsvilla, the two most popular reality shows on television.

  Balaji had been unable to cash in on this brash new phenomenon, still stuck with heavy duty drama. But Ekta had a plan to expand her business, which was soon revealed. As a first step she made up with Star TV, producing new shows for them. After parting ways with her mamaji, Shobha Kapoor’s brother and the well-known film distributor Ramesh Sippy, Ekta became firmly in charge of the family’s film business. A new CEO was hired, and five films had already been green lit. Three of these were based on real-life incidents, trying for a touch of realism that Ekta could not bring to her television programmes. The film on Neeraj Grover’s death never got made, though Ekta produced one of the most celebrated movies of 2009, Love, Sex Aur Dhoka, an edgy triptych about sexual betrayal, cinematic aspirations, and parental disapproval—themes that deeply resonated with Neeraj’s killing.

  But none of the stress from the dwindling bottom line was evident at the party the day after Diwali. It was the annual card fixture the Kapoors hosted to celebrate the festival. Invites had been texted that morning, but it was expected to be a full house. At 1 am the road leading to Ekta’s house was crammed with gleaming Mercedes and Beemers. In that darkened lane, Ekta’s bungalow was lit up like a piece of jewellery. The lift inside the house carried us to the third floor, and into a hall marked by its quietness. On a cluster of large round tables, Jeetendra, Rakesh Roshan, Sunita Menon, Sawan Kumar Tak, and Manish Malhotra were playing cards with serious intent.