Jump Cut

by Krishna Shastri

  ‘Picture-aa? What picture, saar? Latest-aa?’ said the shopkeeper.

  ‘Not film, you fu—misunderstand. Stills, photographs,’ said Rajarajan.

  Selva took the scenic route to his boss’s gate. The flunky had told him to come to the shop. He hadn’t told him how to get there. Selva walked as slowly as he could around the house, looking at the laptop. 46% done, it said.

  This was a new one, circumambulating the abode of the devil. What could that mean? If you were helping a good man get a bad man using not the straightest of methods, he guessed the devil was whom you sought for justice. It made sense.

  ‘I’ll fucking kill you,’ said Rajarajan. The small pack of wolves that he had managed to corral for the last couple minutes had brought in fresh troops and broken the flimsy fence of his reserve.

  The newly anointed film-maker didn’t seem to take Rajarajan’s threat seriously. He zoomed into his subject’s quivering nostrils. He wondered if his phone had captured the spittle coming out of the famous film-maker’s mouth. Guaranteed two million hits in a week on YouTube.

  ‘Where the fuck is Selva? Where’s the goddamn laptop?’ Rajarajan said. There was a small crowd around him now.

  ‘Here, saar!’ said Selva, waving from behind the mob.

  ‘Get me the frigging laptop,’ Rajarajan said.

  92% done, it said.

  Selva took a deep breath and pinched the bottom closest to him. It was an ample one, bursting out of a floral patterned nylex sari. Not that he knew it, but it belonged to ‘Karuvadu’ Kanaka, the scourge of the nearby fishing village. And, unlike him in his schooldays, she wasn’t wearing three pairs of shorts underneath. In fact, Selva could tell she was wearing none.

  ‘Dai, somari!’ she said, turning around.

  Kanaka may have been a fisherwoman by day but her main income came from her evening career as a ‘record’ dancer. In these gigs, mainly birthday celebrations and small-time political dos, her chief asset was her ‘dikkey’. And she was darned if she was going to allow a stranger to tamper with it, gratis.

  Selva stared at the woman’s bloodshot eyes for a brief moment before turning to look at the laptop’s monitor.

  Download complete, it said.

  ‘Karuvadu’ Kanaka’s right hook caught Selva in the chin the exact same second he yanked the pen drive out of the laptop. Its imperceptible click was drowned by the crack of her fist against his unprepared jaw. Selva didn’t know how but he managed to pocket the pen drive mid-flight. By the time he landed on the road, the laptop still miraculously held over his head, Rajarajan and his men had jumped into the fray. The next casualty was a phone that missed him by a whisker and exploded into a million pieces.

  An hour later, Selva, his white uniform a uniform brown, stood outside the potti kadai. His chin sported a bruise the colour of the shopkeeper’s imaginary tempo.

  It had taken him that long to calm RR. That he had managed to hold his precious laptop aloft and returned it to him, nary a scratch, had gone down well with his boss. And, miraculously, RR had bought the shopkeeper’s fairytale. The vases and other breakable objects around him hadn’t been that lucky, though.

  ‘Ennappa, how was I?’ said the shopkeeper.

  Selva wasn’t sure but it looked like the shopkeeper was attempting an impression of Sivaji Ganesan and failing.

  ‘You were atrocious,’ Selva said.

  The ‘Sivaji’ abandoned the shopkeeper to be replaced by an injured Vadivelu.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Purple tempo? A Chinese man in a turban? A friend called … what was that name again … Gujlir?’ Are you insane? All I asked you to do was tell RR someone had come here with the books and left before you could respond properly. That’s all!’

  ‘I got caught up in the flow,’ the shopkeeper said.

  ‘Well, you could’ve blown the whole thing,’ said Selva.

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘No,’ said Selva, grinning in spite of his jaw hurting like hell.

  24

  Ray looked at the man known as ‘PK’. Nicknames were odd beasts. They were born suddenly, unexpectedly. They usually had only one parent. And sometimes, feeding on myth and time, they grew larger than the person they represented. Would a guy with given name Raviprakash and surname Cherukupalli have ever imagined that those incongruous initials would stick for this long? That, too, on account of an innocuous statement he had made over twenty years ago?

  When Abie had first visited his new classmate Ravi’s house (to suss out what he was worth), the Telugu boy, intent on showing off his upmarket status, had apparently said to his gardener, ‘Hey, thottakara, don’t forget to water my poolakundis.’

  ‘Poolakundi’ meant flowerpot in Telugu, but in Tamil, it sounded uncannily like a juxtaposition of the words ‘penis’ and ‘arse’. Abie had considered the idea of a gardener watering his classmate’s two most vital organs for a whole minute before collapsing. A half-hour later, Abie, much exhausted on account of rolling on the cement floor of Raviprakash’s compound, had christened poor Ravi ‘poola kundi’, PK for short. And PK he had been since.

  ‘How’s the gardener, da,’ said Abie, by way of greeting, ‘still hosing your hole?’

  PK shook his head and hugged Ray.

  ‘Sorry, da, Ray, about Uncle. Was out of the country when it happened, was in the US actually. Touring with the troupe.’

  ‘Explanations not necessary,’ said Ray.

  He meant it. He knew that nothing short of suddenly winning a Tony would have kept PK away had he been here.

  ‘Ray wants a favour from you,’ said Abie. It was half an hour later. Coffee had been had and family met.

  ‘Can you play the role of a high-powered executive heading India operations for a multinational giant?’ said Ray. He had learnt to cut to the chase, even if it was thirty minutes into the story.

  ‘Damn, that’s pretty specific,’ said PK. ‘I didn’t know you were interested in producing Telugu plays.’

  Ever since Ray could remember, PK, like most Telugus, had been an amateur actor. Back in school, no annual day celebration at Vidya Vihar was complete without PK playing a Telugu-speaking Abhimanyu or Hanuman to a bewildered, predominantly Tamil audience. In adulthood, PK had formed and funded, god knew how, a theatre group that put up Telugu plays. They travelled to all Telugu-speaking corners of the world, and PK got to play the lead in every single production, with the exception of Sati Savitri.

  ‘Not in a play. In real life,’ said Ray.

  PK looked lost and Abie did the cuckoo move with his forefinger. Ray remained unfazed. That ship had sailed long ago.

  ‘Here’s the script in a nutshell: a guy ripped off my father, I want to get even. I’m asking you to pretend to be someone to achieve my plan. If we get caught, we could all go to jail. Simple,’ he said.

  PK looked at Abie and Ray. What he saw wasn’t one super successful six-foot Syrian Christian businessman and one IIT-topping software wunderkind from the Silicon Valley. He saw the guys with whom he had had a bottle of rum on the eve of their maths finals. And scored centums with. And ridden around town on a Bullet stolen from a neighbour. And escaped getting caught by the police only because they had knocked down the lone officer on duty.

  ‘I’m in,’ he said. ‘Won’t be the first time the three of us will be breaking the law.’

  Ray grinned. He hadn’t expected any different from PK.

  ‘Not three, two,’ said Abie. ‘Count me out, guys. I’m a family man. I just came along for the ride.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ray, ‘Abie actually had a far more sensible plan for me.’

  ‘Which was?’ said PK.

  Ray ran the back of his thumb along his neck from ear to ear.

  PK gave Abie a long, blinkless stare. It was Abie’s turn to shake his head.

  ‘Impressed,’ PK said.

  ‘Guess what?’ said Abie. ‘Lover boy’s been ditched. Mini’s getting married.’

  Ray laughed out loud. Abie
always had to have the last word. Some things never changed.

  ~

  ‘Thanks, Selva,’ Ray said.

  Selva touched his chin. It was still tender. If he were ever on the lam, a position his current mission had every possibility of putting him in, he would get ‘Karuvadu’ Kanaka to be his bodyguard.

  ‘Ada ponga, saar,’ he said. But the grin gave away the fact that his endeavour hadn’t been all pain.

  ‘What on earth made you pinch a strange woman’s bum?’ said Ray.

  ‘Time, saar. I needed eight more seconds for your precious software to download.’

  ‘You could have pulled out, right? You had the option of trying again.’

  Selva shook his head.

  ‘If I do it once, it’s like doing it a hundred times,’ he said. His forefinger was out and his look faraway.

  Ray let Selva’s response go, though it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense. Who was he to disagree with Rajinikanth’s punchlines, even when misquoted?

  ‘But, saar, what was so important about your software? What will it do?’

  ‘Well, it will make RR see exactly what I want him to see,’ said Ray.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘You’ll find out if all goes well,’ said Ray, checking his watch, ‘in exactly forty-eight hours.’

  ~

  Rajarajan looked at himself in the mirrors on the ceiling. His beer-belly had almost fully gone. The workouts were doing it for him. And the little pills his trainer had been giving him. Maybe he would cast himself in the lead in his next film. Hadn’t several of his counterparts, each one uglier than the previous, been doing it of late? He at least had his own hair.

  He wondered if he could talk to her about the phone call. She was young, educated, and ‘with it’. She would know. Not that he thought there was anything fishy about the call. Just needed a second opinion that would coincide with his. Something told him it wasn’t time to consult Ananth as yet. Nor his ‘friends’ in the industry, heaven forbid. The sharks would smell a deal and move in before him.

  ‘Am I speaking to Rajarajan?’ the male voice had said.

  It had the twang an Indian tongue acquired the moment it crossed a sea. Rajarajan didn’t know enough about accents. If he had, he wouldn’t have missed the unmistakable east-Godavari inflection to the drawl.

  ‘Have you heard of Google Corporation, sir?’ had been the next question.

  Google? Who hadn’t? Rajarajan reran the audio clip in his head. The man had identified himself as Kris Lokapalli, Head, India Operations, Google Films. Google Films? He didn’t know Google made films.

  ‘Sir, we would love to meet you. I think you are a perfect fit for our future plans,’ he had said.

  The bathroom door opened and a girl stepped out. She was wearing a towel and wiping her freshly shampooed hair with another.

  ‘Why so shy?’ he said. ‘Take it off. It’s not like I haven’t seen it before.’

  There was no fun in having fully clothed women in one’s ‘home videos’. In the old days, rigging up one Sony Handycam was so painful. Big old things that needed tons of camouflage, and all of it for a grainy picture on tape. Today, he could put ten cameras in the tiniest of spaces, totally undetectable. He could shoot high-definition pictures in low light. Get multiple angles. And never have to change a tape. Thank god for technology. Then the editing. That was a thrill entirely in itself. He had become so good at putting together these secret films, it was a pity he couldn’t release them legitimately. Close friends, their tongues imitating leaky taps, did get to see trailers, though.

  Rajarajan looked at the girl in the towel. The truth was she could wear all the clothes she wanted. The shower cam would have caught her, soap and all. He wondered how long this would last before she, too, like all the others who wanted commitment, would have to be told.

  ‘Heard of Google?’ he said.

  ‘Silly question,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, smartass, how about Google Films?’

  The girl shook her head. ‘I didn’t know Google was into films,’ she said.

  She picked up her phone lying on a chair and googled Google Films.

  ‘Nothing’s coming up,’ she said, looking at her display, ‘try your laptop.’

  Rajarajan flipped open his laptop. It was his trusty six-year-old Dell Inspiron B. Its patchy grey body did nothing to camouflage its wear or datedness in a world of super-snazzy, multi-coloured, ultraslim tablets. But he couldn’t do without it. He had used it first when Addi Dhadi was being made. That was the film that had launched him into the stratosphere.

  He remembered the words of Swami Satchidananda: ‘This machine is what has brought you luck, RR. Don’t ever let it go.’ From that day, the laptop had never left his side. Somehow, it didn’t matter to him that the godman (who was only a while ago a wastepaper vendor called Dilli) was now in prison with one-hundred-and-forty-three cases against him.

  Rajarajan googled ‘Kris Lokapalli Google Films’.

  Out popped twenty entries on his computer. Rajarajan gave the machine an affectionate pat.

  ‘See,’ he said to the girl, ‘old is gold.’

  He clicked on the first one. The girl peered over Rajarajan and read.

  ‘…Google Corporation is diversifying into the entertainment industry. While projects with Peter Jackson and the Wachowski Brothers are on the anvil, CEO Marty Schulberg says that plans are afoot to tap the ever-growing Indian market.

  ‘The Indian film industry has an untapped pool of creative talent that requires the right opportunity to make films for the international market. We are not talking of Bollywood alone. The Tamil and Telugu film industries have directors, cameraman and composers who can contribute…

  ‘…Kris Lokapalli, Head, India operations is bullish about the possibilities.

  ‘There are a couple of guys on my radar, they don’t know it yet but I’m going to rock their world…’

  ‘That’s me,’ said Rajarajan, pointing to the text.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said the girl.

  ‘Spoke to Kris Lokapalli a couple of days ago. He called me.’

  ‘How, I mean … why you?’

  ‘Why not me?’ said Rajarajan, cutting as an icicle. He didn’t even notice the girl’s towel had fallen off.

  ‘What I meant was how. How did he get your number?’ She hoped that he would be distracted by the Brazilian he had wanted her to have and let her off the hook.

  ‘It didn’t occur to me to ask, maybe because it would have been asinine to ask.’

  The girl picked up the towel and wrapped herself in it. When he got this way, it was like being in Antarctica. The thing was it could just as easily turn into a bushfire.

  ‘Hello, could you please tell me how you got my number because the dumb slut I’m screwing wants to know?’ This he said in a mock-feminine voice, shaking his head like a Thanjavur doll.

  ‘So, that’s what I am? A dumb slut you’re screwing?’

  Rajarajan got up and walked to the window. He could almost hear the sea from his air-conditioned room. He took his time lighting a cigarette. The X-ray gaze of the girl bored into his naked back.

  Guilt.

  That’s what everyone thrived on. The most-milked emotion in all movies. Like the piece of cork inside a cricket ball, the core sentiment around which ninety-nine per cent of Indian films built their plots. Son does something because mother guilt-trips him into it. Daughter abandons lover because of parents. They were all the same, only the relationships changed: friend and friend, brother–sister, husband–wife, guru–sishya, even dog–master. One was supposed to forever feel sorry about one thing or another.

  He, on the other hand, was blessed.

  From his childhood, he had never felt guilty about anything: at age eight, when he had blamed his cousin for killing the neighbour’s cat; at age eleven, when he had broken the leg of the boy who was chosen to play the lead in the school play; at age thirteen, when he had stolen his mother’s saving
s to visit the local prostitute…

  He turned around to look at Shruti. She was crying.

  Look at her. She was twenty-two, for god’s sake. And what a body. Only an impotent, homosexual yogi would turn her down. So different from all those actresses who were the same age. Not that he was complaining. They were willing and available, and oh-so-ready to please, with their flat abs and taut butts. But it was as if they had come out of a cold press. This one, on the other hand, was a girl as girls ought to be. Mint-fresh, innocent, unsullied. So what if she was Ananth’s daughter. She was the one who had thrown herself at him.

  As the saying went: old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.

  Maybe it would be good strategy to mollify her for the moment.

  ‘You know, this is the thing with you, you don’t watch what you are saying,’ he said. The girl didn’t shake off his hands from her shoulders.

  ‘Anyway, do you have warm clothes?’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘Because it’s cold in Switzerland this time of year.’

  The girl looked blankly at him.

  ‘Location hunting, you and me, first-class travel? What do you say?’ he said.

  The girl yelped, turned around and hugged Rajarajan.

  ‘But what location? There’s no movie,’ she said.

  ‘The best time for location hunting,’ he said, taking her towel off.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, picking the thought out of her head. ‘I’ll convince your dad.’

  25

  ‘No way,’ said Abie.

  ‘I’m sorry, da,’ said PK.

  The disembodied voice came from the half-open bedroom door, loud and clear.

  ‘Who gets chickenpox at your age?’ Abie said. ‘I mean, there’s got to be some logic.’

  Ray found himself smiling. Maybe this was the signal. Maybe this was the divine pause in his life’s film where his body, hurtling unstoppably down a mountainside, froze and the voice-over said: What the fuck, Ray? Maybe it was his cue to rewind the tape so that he would roll uphill, to a squeaky, speeded-up soundtrack playing backwards, till he was upright again.