Jump Cut

by Krishna Shastri

  ‘Er … that could be arranged … I suppose. What do you say, Mona?’ Abie said.

  ‘Well … you are the boss, Kris. You sign the cheques,’ she said.

  Ray made a quick calculation of how much the airfare and stay for Rajarajan and his accompanists would set him back by. Of course, then there would be the simple task of constructing Google’s fictional movie offices and finding their imaginary CEO, Marty Schulberg. Thanks to ‘Kris Lokapalli’s’ vision, what was supposed to be a Roger Corman shoestringer was quickly turning it into a David Leanish epic with exotic locales and an international cast, leaving nothing for bail money.

  Where was the high-powered rifle that shot tranquilizer darts when you needed it?

  Two green teas and three-thousand-odd rupees later, it looked like it was done. For the time being, at least, Rajarajan had bought it. It appeared to anyone who was watching that Google Films, Kris Lokapalli and, most of all, Mona Mathai, were touchable realities for the filmmaker. Meeting Two was scheduled for later that week. Abie asked for the bill and paid in cash. That had been Ray’s brief. No credit cards and awkward identity-revealing signatures.

  ‘Hey, I need to take a leak,’ said Abie, ‘wanna come?’

  Sumi gave him the look she reserved for his comments at PTA meetings.

  ‘No, I’m good,’ she said.

  Abie left, and Rajarajan settled comfortably into his seat.

  ‘You know, you must come see my beach house,’ he said.

  This guy didn’t waste time. He didn’t know if she was single or married, didn’t wonder if such an invitation was appropriate for someone he had met less than an hour ago, and didn’t care that what could be a life-changing, multi-million-dollar dream deal was on the anvil. All he could see was her cleavage and the wireless message it was sending the misinformed brain in his pants.

  ‘Would love to. Just don’t know how I can fit it in … with all the meetings,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’m good at fitting things in.’

  It wasn’t like she was unused to male attention. And it wasn’t like people hadn’t made passes at her before. But in spite of being in a public place, with Abie only a minute away, for the first time, Sumi felt unsafe in the company of a man. She had an urge to yank off the thick white tablecloth and wrap it tight around herself. Ray was right. This was a man who needed to be put away.

  ‘Hi, Sumi,’ said a voice.

  Sumi spun around with relief at having her name called out.

  From his air-conditioned perch above them, Ray watched the dhoti-clad man walk up to Sumi from behind her. Even at that distance and through the tinted glass, the figure of Suresh Ratnam was unmistakable. Suri Periappa, Sumi’s favourite among her father’s three brothers, was the guy who had been instrumental in turning it around for Abie in the Battle for Sumi. The man with the incongruously Travoltan gait and forbidden taste for medium rare steaks who ran the multi-million-dollar industrial gasket company of the Madras General Products group was hard to miss and (as his competitors would vouch for it) even harder to stop.

  There wasn’t a thing Ray could do about it.

  Ratnam looked at his niece, his hands stretched out in the ‘what-are-you-doing-here’ position. Sumi smiled at him and looked at Rajarajan. There was no change in his expression.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, getting up to give Suri Periappa his hug.

  ‘Just hello? What, no “periappa”?’ said her uncle, returning her delicate hug with an ursine one.

  Among the four brothers, Suri Periappa was the one who had bucked the stiff upper lip trend in the family and been demonstrative with all the kids. How had she thought she could get away with not addressing him as ‘periappa’? Ratnam was a man who got what he wanted, prising it free with a crowbar if necessary. Affection included.

  ‘Sorry, Periappa, just distracted,’ she said.

  Sumi figured the game was up anyway, unless the man at the table was dumber than the audience he pandered to.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Suresh Ratnam, pulling away and noticing his niece’s attire for the first time.

  ‘What’s with the … er … outfit,’ he said, ‘taken up modelling-geedelling or something?’

  Ray leapt off his seat. The fool Abie seemed to have pulled out the earpiece. He threw his credit card on the table and charged out. A waiter, his tray full of glasses, jumped out of the way and twirled like a ballerina to keep his balance. Ray yelled sorry and rushed down the stairs. The voice in his head was clear: no directorial cues needed for Sumi, stop Abie mid-piss at any cost.

  Rajarajan stared at the black-and-white duo standing in front of his table. One balding dhoti-clad man who looked vaguely familiar and one woman in a black business suit who till a minute ago was the lead actor in his fantasy.

  ‘What, no introductions?’ Suresh Ratnam said.

  ‘Sure … er … sorry,’ Sumi said, ‘this is Rajarajan. Meet Suresh Ratnam…’

  ‘…Sumi’s favourite uncle,’ said Suresh Ratnam, completing his niece’s sentence.

  The men shook hands. In the background, Sumi caught a glimpse of Abie walking out of the gent’s loo. A charging Ray skidded and came to a halt ten feet too late. To Sumi, Ray looked like a character in a silent film, gesturing wildly with no soundtrack to stop Abie from striding towards disaster. The deafeningly noiseless drama taking place in Ray’s and Sumi’s heads somehow made Rajarajan turn around. His amygdala was obviously good. Ray dived behind a pillar, only just managing to become a flash of a trouser leg and a disappearing shoe to the eye in Rajarajan’s twirling head.

  ‘Ah, here comes my man,’ said Ratnam, seeing a clueless Abie ambling towards him.

  The Syrian-Christian son-in-law of sorts had always been A-OK in Ratnam’s book, plying him with choice t-bones far from the prying Iyer eyes of his family.

  Ray went ‘ouch’ behind the pillar. He didn’t know whether it was because his hand had accidentally touched the artistically placed cactus there or because he guessed what was coming in the next minute or two.

  But Abie stopped in his tracks and felt around in his pocket. Then he turned around and headed straight back in the direction of the gent’s loo. At that exact moment, Ratnam’s phone rang. He picked it up, waved apologetically to Sumi and Rajarajan, and headed off behind Abie.

  ‘Sumi? Periappa?’ said Rajarajan.

  Sumi shook her head and smiled. How was she to rescue Mona Mathai, hanging from a jagged cliff by the last flimsy fibre of a hastily woven rope?

  ‘Long story,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, Mona or Sumi … or whatever your name is … I’m a film-maker. I love long stories,’ Rajarajan said.

  Ray caught up with Abie.

  ‘Disaster,’ he whispered in his ear.

  Ratnam, who was still on his phone, gestured to Abie as if asking him to hold on.

  ‘What’s this guy doing here? I seem to have misplaced the earpiece in the loo—’ Abie said.

  ‘Fuck the earpiece … I’ll divert Suri Periappa, you head back to the table. RR smells a rat. I think we’re goners … but … what the hell…’

  ‘Okay,’ said Abie.

  ‘And don’t say a word. Nod intelligently and leave it to Sumi,’ said Ray.

  Rajarajan waited for Sumi to finish drinking her water.

  ‘The man you met just now is Suresh Ratnam, the CEO of MGP…’ said Sumi.

  ‘Ha … no wonder he looks familiar. Big shot. Didn’t he win some international award recently?’ said Rajarajan.

  ‘He might have … he’s won several,’ said Sumi.

  She wondered if Rajarajan had seen the award ceremony on CNN-IBN. If he had, he couldn’t have missed her and Abie in the front row.

  ‘Well, his daughter and I were classmates … Suchitra was her name, Suchi for short,’ she said.

  ‘And?’ said Rajarajan.

  ‘And, Uncle Ratnam was my local guardian,’ Sumi said. The shaggy dog tale had taken shape fully in her head now. She h
oped Rajarajan would buy it.

  ‘My parents were in Delhi and I studied in Chennai … hence the guardianship. Suchi and I were so close that people thought we were sisters. We were roughly the same height, same size, same tastes. So similar that Uncle Ratnam named me Sumitra, Sumi for short. That’s what he’d call me. And … he insisted that I call him periappa of all things.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Rajarajan. Sumi could see that while he nodded with his head, his brain needed a bit more.

  ‘And then…’ said Sumi. She swallowed hard and looked skywards. That’s what film heroines did when they wanted to convey anguish.

  Rajarajan looked concerned.

  ‘And then … Suchitra, Suchi died…’

  Abie, who had come in when the story of Suchi had begun, attempted a sniffle and failed. Neither Sumi nor Rajarajan took any notice.

  ‘How?’ Rajarajan said.

  ‘Leukaemia,’ said Sumi and ‘On the ghat section of Kodaikanal,’ said Abie simultaneously. While she had taken the route taken by every tragic hero from Rajesh Khanna to SRK, Abie had gone for the gorier option.

  Sumi aimed a kick at Abie’s foot and let fly. But it was the director who jumped out of his seat. Obviously, not the kind of footsie he had been looking for.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Which is it? Leukaemia or car crash?’ said Rajarajan.

  ‘Both, actually,’ said Sumi. This time her heel found Abie’s toe and went in with a satisfying squelch.

  ‘How’s that?’ said Rajarajan.

  ‘Well … Suchi was diagnosed with cancer, fourth stage. So she decided to spend her last days with the family in Kodaikanal and on the way back…’

  ‘The driver of their car fell asleep and drove off the road. The car fell thirty feet into a gorge…’ said Abie.

  ‘The details are not important…’ said Sumi.

  ‘Tell me, Kris,’ said Rajarajan, ‘how come you know so much about Mona’s life?’

  This time Sumi kicked Abie and held her shoe there like she was flooring the brake pedal to his bullshit.

  ‘You know, RR, when you spend as much time on long flights as Kris and I do, you get to know a lot about each other’s lives. I’m sure it’s the same with you and your ADs,’ Sumi said.

  Rajarajan smiled. ‘Who knows, Mona, soon it may be me instead of Kris on those long flights with you,’ he said.

  27

  The rain had come out of nowhere, like it usually did in Chennai. And did what it usually did – proved that the city’s orifices needed a good proctologist. Ray looked out of his window at the instant lake that had formed outside his house. A run-off from a nearby drain carried multi-coloured plastic covers into the ‘lake’ in a haphazard fleet. Poor substitutes for the feverishly made paper boats from the furtively torn pages of his childhood. Dog Raj looked at him like everything was his fault.

  ‘Anyway, where can we go, Raju?’ he said. ‘Nothing to do but wait.’

  A grey car stopped outside his house and a person got out from the passenger’s side. He had got used to it all over again. This was India. Left: passenger; right: driver.

  Even from that distance, the raincoat and its hood obscuring pretty much everything, he knew it was her. She looked in through the partially open window on her side and said something to whoever was driving, waved and headed in.

  He ducked from his window and retreated into the bedroom. The Lab leapt up and followed him.

  ‘What the hell are you so excited about?’ he said to the dog. ‘You deal with her, all right.’

  The bell rang, as it would in her case. Had the situation been reversed, there was every chance that after making it to the door, he would have chickened out and run away. A hundred pressed numbers that hadn’t made it into phone calls, a thousand half-formed thoughts that hadn’t turned into words and a million normal impulses that had been snuffed out before turning into deeds were evidence.

  The bell rang again. Dog Raj was at the door now, scratching it and whining, disproving the theory about canines, men and best friendships.

  Ray opened the door. She stood in a small pool fed by slowly dying streams from her raincoat. He wondered what his expression conveyed – fake surprise or fake calm?

  Dog Raj skidded around on the wet floor in a shameless show of affection. Padmini gave the mutt’s jowls a jolly old shake.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said.

  It took him a second to realize she wasn’t addressing the Lab.

  ‘Why don’t you come in first,’ he said.

  Padmini removed her saturated raincoat and deposited it on the floor. She was drenched inside.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said.

  ‘Let me get you a towel.’

  ‘Screw the towel, tell me what the hell you’re up to.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The rain showed no signs of abating, coming down like dirty sheets on a dhobi’s line. She looked out of the window for a long time. ‘You know, if you were Dog Raj, I could have straightened this out by taking a rolled-up newspaper to you.’

  The image of him on her lap, face down, having his bottom spanked with the day’s edition of the Hindu was impossible to suppress. He did manage to suppress the smile, though.

  ‘Not too late,’ he said. He hoped he had a straight face.

  She ignored the humour and stared at the floor. She seemed to be looking everywhere except at him. It meant she was really angry.

  ‘Sumi has given me the gist. This is insane … whatever you’re up to. And … and … Abie and Sumi are involved, too? Google Films? Secret meetings? Fake books? Who the hell do you think you are, Ocean’s 3?’ she said.

  Ray remembered the day after their Class 12 finals. They were all celebrating, at Satyam, watching Titanic. It was during the interval; she had taken him aside and taken him apart (having found out what he, Abie and PK had been up to on the night before the maths finals). That was about fifteen years ago.

  ‘I don’t have much of a choice,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you do. Going back to the US, taking legal action – there are umpteen sane options. You don’t have to do this. You are jeopardizing everything you’ve built in the last ten years—’

  ‘No,’ he said. He was surprised by the edge in his voice.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean no.’ His voice was softer this time.

  Her shoulders sagged. He could see the intensity draining out of her and joining the puddle of water on the floor. She shook her head and played with the Lab’s jowls which were within easy reach.

  ‘Read the Panchatantra?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, there’s this story. It’s about a brahman and a mouse. If you’ve got a minute…’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Good time as any for a fairytale.’

  ‘Folktale, not fairy,’ he said. ‘Well, anyway, there was this brahman who used to beg for his food every day and keep the food on a little shelf in his hut. Then he would take a dip in the river, pray and come back to his hut to eat his meal. One day, he found that his food had been stolen by mice. So he changed the place where he kept the food. It was of no use because the mice got it anyway. This went on for a few days, and try as he might, the man just couldn’t outwit the mice. Wherever he hid the food, they got it. Finally, the starving and frustrated man went to a wise sage for advice. The sage said, “Son, get the mouse king’s treasure and your problem will be solved.” So the man searched all over the house and found a tiny treasure chest in which was contained the mouse king’s treasure—’

  ‘Where are you going with this?’

  Ray continued like he hadn’t been interrupted.

  ‘…took the chest and hid it in a friend’s house. That night, he kept the food on a high shelf. The mouse king leapt, couldn’t make it to shelf, and fell to the ground. From that day, the mouse king could never reach the food and his followers abandoned him one by one,’ he said.

 
; ‘And?’ ‘The man lived happily ever after.’

  ‘Have you gone totally mad? I’m quite worried for you.’

  ‘Don’t you get it? I’m going after Rajarajan’s treasure. That’s the only option I have. Filing a case against him or going to the newspapers – in any of these scenarios, victory is possible for me only if I get his treasure first,’ he said.

  ‘What treasure?’

  ‘The film industry.’

  ‘I still don’t get it.’

  ‘All Rajarajan has is the film industry. I take it away from him and he becomes the mouse king who’s lost his treasure. Unable to jump, unable to steal, unable to lead when there is no one following,’ he said.

  For the second time since he had known her, Ray saw confusion in Padmini’s eyes. The first time was when he had stood at the lift outside her apartment on the morning not so long ago, when he thought he would never see her again.

  ‘You are being naïve, Ray. You can’t base your life on a folktale. And I’m sure Veda Vyasa or Vishnu Sharma or whoever it is who was supposed to have put the Panchatantra together wasn’t expecting such a bizarre interpretation…’

  ‘It worked for me before,’ said Ray.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, when my mother died, and I realized that I wasn’t equipped to deal with it, I followed a story from our moral science textbook. Got a minute?’

  She nodded. Ray went in followed by Dog Raj. Padmini looked out of the window. She thought of the empty plot in which they used to hang out on the occasional Sunday in the old days, eating raw mango with salt and chilli powder. The frangipani and the gulmohar were gone, swallowed by a gaudy concrete monster on stilts. In the pouring grey rain, the building looked like it was sorry to have done that.

  ‘Here.’

  Ray handed her a book. The brown paper wrapper around the book and their school label stuck on it gave away its vintage. Padmini couldn’t suppress a smile on seeing his unbending handwriting, the ‘i’s, ‘j’s and ‘p’s at perfect right angles to the lines. So different from her own slanted-enough-to-tip-over style.

  Satyajit Ray Raman