LEELA

by Jerry Pinto

  ‘What’s in it?’ Dom wanted to know.

  ‘Cow dung and shrapnel,’ said the police officer.

  I picked it up to get a closer look and immediately a hush fell upon the place.

  ‘Put it down very carefully, back into the bucket,’ said the police officer. I did so. When it went back into the water, everyone seemed to unfreeze. ‘What are you doing, Madam? It could still have gone off.’

  The Naxalites had called for a bandh and one of the journalists said that it would be a great time for us to go out and get a feel of a city under siege. Dom didn’t want me to go along, but I insisted and we wandered around a quiet city. Our driver drove slowly, stopping for every football that the children kicked across our path.

  ‘Who knows?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘It may look like a football but it may well be something else altogether.’

  We wandered a little too successfully for eventually we were lost. I got out of the car and went to ask a policeman. Just then a series of thumps began. I realized that someone was shooting and the police were returning fire. But I was halfway to the policeman already so I ploughed on.

  ‘Can you tell me the way back to the Park Hotel?’ I asked.

  The policeman looked a little dazed. It took him a moment or two to put his thoughts in order and get the words out. Needless to say, we got back safely. Needless to say because if we hadn’t, I would hardly be here to tell my tale.

  When we returned to our Hotel room, there was Police Commissioner Mitra who seemed to be a bit annoyed.

  ‘Did you want your head blown off?’ He demanded. I took this for a rhetorical question and stayed silent.

  ‘Perhaps you could explain it to her,’ said Dom acidly. ‘I have failed.’

  I let them rant on and on. I have tried to live my life as a feminist would, in that I demand to be treated equally. This demand, to me, means not just equal rights but an equal share in any danger we may face.

  Years later, when we passed through Calcutta on our journey around the world for A Matter of People, Dom’s book on the population crisis, I suggested we look up our old friend, the Police Commissioner.

  He was delighted to hear from us and came over.

  Something had been nagging me for a while. I made bold enough to ask Mitra how he seemed to know where we were, who we had met, how I had ‘risked’ my life.

  ‘We had you followed around,’ he said. ‘It was our duty.’

  ‘What happened to Monodeep Sen?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh, he joined his father’s business,’ I was told.

  I did not ask what happened to the maker of bombs. I think I knew.

  TWELVE

  CAUTION: LEILA KHALED IS COMING

  I have worked all my life. I began working at the age of eighteen and I had always paid my way. Almost as soon as we got married in 1971, Dom left India to go to Hong Kong where he was to be editor of the Asia Magazine. Although I was tagging along with him, I could not spend my time doing nothing.

  So I went out to look for work in Hong Kong. I applied to the Hong Kong government television station, Dinsi Dintoi. After a written examination, I was invited to a viva voce. It was a panel of red-faced colonial types, each one an impressively stuffed shirt.

  ‘How would you report the students’ agitation?’ one of them asked me.

  ‘I would report both sides,’ I said. ‘I would give the government and the students equal opportunity to express their views. Or to make fools of themselves.’

  When I told my friends what I had said, they predicted that I had shot myself in the foot. That was no way to get a job in a government-funded organisation, they said. A couple of months passed and I began to believe them. But then I received another letter saying that I was hired.

  Michael Kay, the production controller, took an instant dislike to me. I don’t think I ever did anything to deserve it but once I was hired, he had notices put up saying, ‘Beware: Leila Khaled is on her way.’ Leila Khaled was the name of a Palestinian terrorist, which must have seemed very funny to him. He may well have been an intelligent man but he had so many chips on his shoulder that they negated his intelligence. He had had a three-month course at the BBC in London, and it had gone to his head. And through it. He wanted me to fail so badly that I decided that I would fight.

  For my first assignment, in the Chinese Section, he told me that I should try and film a song, an old Mandarin song, he said.

  ‘I don’t know any Mandarin,’ I protested.

  ‘But you do know music,’ he said.

  I did. I went to the library—they had a good collection of songs and I sat down and I listened to hundreds until I found one I could respond to. It was a ballad that told the story of a boy who was forced to sell his horse because of a famine.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Kay said. ‘Film it.’

  That was when I realised that I would need a horse and a rider and if we were going to be realistic, some place in Hong Kong that didn’t look like it belonged to the twentieth century.

  Run Run Shaw was the man who had the finest stables in Hong Kong so I called him and asked for a horse, a slim horse that might look like it had been through a famine. Then I drove around Hong Kong until I found a cove, a beach that looked remote. Next step? A Chinese boy who could ride bareback and we were all set.

  On the day before the shoot, Kay asked me what was happening. I told him what I was doing. His face clouded over until I told him my location. Then it brightened magically.

  ‘That’s far away from anywhere,’ he crowed.

  ‘Well, it is a period piece …’

  And how do you plan to feed your crew?’

  I must say I hadn’t thought about that because production companies generally provide for the crew’s food. Like any army, a film crew also marches on its stomach. I had planned on taking carrots and sugar cubes for the horse but I hadn’t planned on the people. I mentioned it to Dom in passing even as I was making arrangements for some Chinese food to be delivered there.

  The next day, we were working with a horse that didn’t want to go into the water and a little boy who was finding it hard to stop hamming and grinning for the camera. In the middle of this, I was rather surprised when Dom arrived at the shoot with some huge cardboard boxes.

  ‘Here,’ he announced grandly. ‘Food for the hungry.’

  I opened the boxes and found pâté sandwiches and smoked salmon.

  ‘Where did you get this from?’

  ‘The Peninsula Hotel,’ said Dom airily. He then handed me an astronomical bill. I could imagine Kay’s face if I were to present it to him and so, with a sinking heart, I decided that I would have to pay it myself. Meanwhile, the distributor of gourmet largesse found himself a rock and began to drink the cold beer he’d provided for himself. The Chinese crew approached the salmon and the pâté with some suspicion but they wolfed the sandwiches down eventually.

  Very pleased with himself, Dom pointed out a sampan going off into the sunset. We used it as the last scene in which the boy must bid farewell to the horse. It came off so well that Kay had to suffer the odium of having the two private channels calling and saying that it was beautiful. (The sampan scene in particular found favour. An image of it sailing into the sunset is an auspicious omen to the Chinese.) Kay had expected me to fail because film wisdom holds that shooting with children or with animals is a nightmare. I hadn’t heard of the dictum and in my ignorance, I had chosen a subject that had both. Kay must have thought I had played straight into his hands.

  That didn’t stop him trying again. General Romulo of the Philippines arrived with a dance troupe. Kay assigned me a single camera to shoot the dancers, even as they were performing for an elite audience at the Eagle’s Nest restaurant in the Hilton. This meant that we weren’t supposed to get in the way and still shoot dance, which is always a fairly strenuous job anyway. I devised a sign language and the cameraman Chen and I spent most of our time crouched in between tables, scuttling here and there. He almost went cr
oss-eyed, trying to keep me in his line of sight for directions while still keeping the dancers in focus. Again, we pulled it off. And again Kay fumed and raged to himself.

  I checked the manifests later and found that he could easily have assigned us the three cameras I had requisitioned.

  I must say these successes would not have been half as satisfying had I not been working against Kay’s freight of animus. Later, Dom interviewed Romulo in his hotel suite. For some peculiar reason, the hotel had decided that the general would be delighted if they added a huge replica of a piña hut built entirely of chocolate in his suite. I don’t know why they did this; perhaps it was simply because they could. But there it was and after the interview which went quite well, the sound man backed into the hut and knocked it over.

  In his panic, he began to rampage about, stamping the chocolate into the green carpet. Romulo was vastly amused.

  ‘Perhaps they will now take it away,’ he said.

  Dom very rarely cracked a joke. He was called Dom Morose or Dumb Moraes at Oxford. As anyone who has read either of their travelogues to India knows, Ved Mehta was in Oxford with him. When he came to India, Ved wanted to meet me. I find it odd when a man who says he is blind compliments me on my beautiful long hair, especially if he has not even touched it. When he repeated the compliment, on another occasion, I taxed him with it. He said airily, ‘I have a sixth sense for these things.’

  I thought he wanted to talk to me about Indian cinema; I found out that he wanted to talk about himself. When he came to meet us in Hong Kong, Dom went to see him at his hotel, the Peninsula at Kowloon. Ved wanted to see the Queen Elizabeth II, which was docked in the harbour, but the ship burned down that day. He also said he wanted to meet the biggest Sindhi family in Hong Kong and so I got on to the telephone and made the necessary calls. The Sindhi family was typical of the nouveau riche all over the world. They had a yacht with a bar at which there was a fountain. This fountain was in the shape of a woman whose breasts flowed with the finest liquors. In the master bedroom of the house, there was a purple velveteen bedspread on a king-sized bed. Since the walls were also velveteen, this was quite outrageous but these aesthetic sins paled when you realised that the bed and the walls were decorated with ropes of pearls. The bathroom was orange and purple, accented with the red of cockroaches. The library was stocked with fake books that were all alcohol bottles.

  Nothing was proportionate, nothing in good taste, nothing beautiful. The food was ordinary in the extreme: tandoori chicken, potato chips and ice cream. Ved enjoyed all this because it was exactly the kind of material he wanted. I didn’t.

  Hong Kong, I found, had a peculiar take on Buddhism. By some strange reading of the Dhammapada, people refused to donate blood, not even to their own children. The Chinese Buddhists would not even part with nail parings or hair. This meant that children with Rh factor problems, who needed blood transfusions immediately, would simply die. It seemed a dreadful thing and a subject for a story of public interest.

  I got permission from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital to position our camera outside the door of an operation theatre. We set up around six in the morning and waited. I didn’t know what we could expect, I didn’t know what would happen but somewhere outside on a road, a young man had an accident. He was brought to that very operation theatre. He was losing blood steadily and there was none to replace it.

  We could all see the level of the blood in the bottle that was attached to his arm drop steadily.

  ‘More blood,’ shouted the surgeon. ‘We need more blood.’

  ‘There is no more blood,’ said the matron.

  The family, who had been contacted, arrived. They were in tears—they knew their son was about to die, they knew this and they refused to donate the blood that could have saved his life. As he was being wheeled into the theatre, he died. In front of the camera.

  I still don’t know what to make of this moment. I still haven’t been able to understand it. At one level, those people loved their son. At another level, they believed they were doing the right thing by not giving him blood. As for me, I was doing my dharma as a documentary filmmaker, pointing my camera at his dying face. The matron sat down on the bench next to me.

  ‘We had four bottles of his blood type,’ she said. ‘That was the last one.’

  But it was not over.

  The doctor in charge of newborns took me to see the children born with Rh factor problems. All babies are beautiful but Chinese babies are particularly winsome. They lay in a row of such perfect prettiness, that your heart hurt a little.

  ‘They may all die tonight if they do not get blood,’ he said after a moment.

  I did not cry. I could not cry. But for the next five hours, the cameraman and the sound recordist and I did not speak. There was nothing to say.

  Then I thought, ‘Well, there are people of other faiths in this city.’

  So I went to the Hong Kong Cathedral and asked the priest to make an appeal for blood. In a makeshift camp outside the church, the armed forces, the firemen, the police, some expatriates, and some Chinese Christians donated blood.

  When Kay watched the rushes, he wanted to excise the shots of the young man dying.

  ‘Isn’t that what “documentary” means? An attempt to document what happens?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Then this happened. It happened in front of us. I will not cut it.’

  ‘It will upset the Chinese.’

  ‘Let it.’

  He looked aghast at the idea of the media being disruptive. I felt there was little point in making documentaries if they did not cause some stir, did not make some impact, did not start some new thought processes and upset some old ones.

  ‘Perhaps if we upset them into acts of charity, it might help save a few lives?’ I asked.

  The last vestiges of humanity must have remained in that stuffy fuddy-duddy for he left it alone. Inasmuch as I am proud of anything I have done, I was proud of my film on blood donation.

  THIRTEEN

  BREATHLESS VICTORY

  It was uncomfortable working with a man who did not like me but I could take it. I could even take the attitude of the Chinese to whom Indians were achas (from the Sikh soldiers who would use the word ‘achcha’ to indicate that all was well when on duty) and the white men were gwailos (or red faces). But one day, I was told that ‘Viewpoint’, a talk show I was doing for the government-run Hong Kong television was ‘going too far’.

  When I had been given the assignment, I was delighted. It was a ten-minute talk show, Monday to Friday, and I was determined it would not be one that was filled with frilly ladies talking about their hydrangeas or an interview with the secretary of the local club.

  ‘What do you mean, “going too far”?’ I asked.

  ‘You have been interviewing people on the black list,’ I was told. One of my interviews had been with a lay missionary who had worked extensively in the Chinese ghetto. She had criticized the government’s policies on housing for the Chinese, but she had never crossed the line into slander and had supported each one of her observations with facts and figures.

  ‘I didn’t even know there was a black list,’ I said, my hackles rising.

  But apparently there was one and all the other ‘journalists’ seemed to be aware of it and willing to pretend it did not exist. I could not. The sikh accountant-general came to see me that afternoon.

  ‘Leelaji,’ he said, ‘you must be wondering why you weren’t confirmed when you were selected?’

  Actually I was not wondering that at all. I have never understood these rococo hiring policies; either one is hired or one is not. I had been hired but apparently I had not been confirmed then.

  ‘It is because they think your parents were communists.’

  In those days of the Cold War, there could be no greater crime than being a communist. And verily, verily, the white man believed that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the sons. It did not matter that my fathe
r had never been a card-carrying member of the communist party or that my mother was a socialist, which is something completely different as both Nehru and Mao could have told these jokers. But to them anyone who wasn’t completely sold on capitalism was against them. So investigations had to be made in five countries since my parents had lived in six cities: Paris, Geneva, London, New York, Mumbai and Delhi. It had taken them three months to satisfy themselves that I wasn’t a fifth columnist or a red hat or something equally evil. But I was glad that I had still caused them trouble.

  The next day, I resigned. I wrote a long, angry letter, telling them that I thought they were making a mockery of the notion of journalism.

  After I left Dinsi Dintoi, one of my ex-colleagues in the English radio department rang me up.

  ‘What are you up to, old girl?’ he asked.

  I was up to nothing and I told him so.

  ‘Well, I have just the lark for you.’

  Many members of the English staff were moonlighting for Hong Kong cinema, dubbing the action films that came spilling out of the studios. They needed a female voice for a warrior princess. Could I play the lady?

  ‘Not quite the stuff, you’re used to doing, I know,’ he said, but that didn’t bother me.

  Since all this happened on the weekend, I took myself to a dubbing studio the size of a refrigerator and watched as a young Chinese woman rode up to the battlements, fought a battalion of soldiers, took a running leap at a ten-foot wall, fought another battalion of soldiers, took another running leap …

  It did not look like there was much work to do. Finally, when she arrived at the topmost level of an impossibly multilevelled castle, she began to speak, reeling off what sounded like lines of poetry.

  I looked down at my script.

  ‘Victory,’ I was supposed to cry.

  But hold on, I thought, when a warrior princess slices off the heads of three evil guards with a single blow, surely she may be allowed a grunt? And when she arrived at the roof, surely she would be a little breathless. Could I be a little breathless?