‘Oh, he’s got a big function tomorrow. You should come, too.’
The watchman chuckled humourlessly.
‘Yeah, Anushka and I’ll be there. Send the BMW to pick us up,’ he said.
Selva ducked into his car, came out with a cover and handed it to the watchman. The watchman pulled out an invite from it. Stapled to the lavishly produced invite was a VIP pass that said ‘Admit Two’.
‘Seriously?’ he said.
‘I’ve already booked Anushka’s dates. Bring along whatsername … Dhanam, the maid,’ said Selva. ‘Make sure she bathes though.’
Selva paused outside the door for a moment, figured it wasn’t his funeral, and rang the bell.
The doorbell let off four muted chimes, synthesized versions of temple bells. A house christened ‘Dharmaalayam’, an imitation temple door at the entrance, and a doorbell designed to summon God. Did the master of a house whose theme was divinity know his daughter was a fallen angel?
The door opened. It was the fallen angel. It took Selva only a second to realize that the ‘slut’ sporting a baggy T-shirt and baggier eyes was just a girl like his nieces in Vallivanam. She looked like a hastily ironed-out photograph of herself that had been crushed and thrown into a wastepaper basket.
‘You’d better go,’ she said.
‘RR saar wants you to come,’ he said.
‘Go. Now!’
‘Who is it?’ It was Sundaresan’s disembodied voice.
‘No one.’ Shruti tried waving Selva away like he was a wasp. He heard Sundaresan stomping down the staircase.
One look at the lawyer, and Selva realized why the girl had wanted him gone. Before he knew it, Sundaresan had loped across the large living room, pushed Shruti roughly out of the way and was standing in front of Selva, stubborn as a sight screen.
Unlike ‘Karuvadu’ Kanaka’s fist, which had come out of nowhere in their exchange outside the potti kadai, Selva saw Sundaresan’s open hand coming at him from behind his neck quite clearly in a slow-motion, one-eighty-degree arc. Not that it mattered, because the result was pretty much the same.
Not taking a cue from the heroes of countless Tamil movies who could duck speeding bullets if necessary, Selva stood rooted to his spot. Sundaresan’s palm caught Selva on his right ear like a fleshy cannonball. The resultant sound in his ear, like a speaker gone bust, and his own flight path, made Selva realize that the slow-motion part had been an illusion.
~
Back in his house, Ray was preparing for the journey to the quiet, dark, untouchable place he had discovered in his head with the help of the 120-page ruled notebook. A place he had made a ritual of going to when things threatened to go beyond his control. The gulmohar outside his bedroom window and the night sounds of creatures without agendas were his travel agents.
The coming day would decide a few things – whether he was insane or not, whether he would be a fugitive from justice or a celebrity no news channel could get enough of, or both, or whether he would be plain old dead or alive.
The phone rang. It was Selva.
‘Saar, everything gali! Come quickly,’ he said and hung up.
Ray called him back.
‘Calm down. What gali? Come where?’ he said.
‘This Sundaresan fellow has gone mental. We have to stop him. He’s gone to RR’s house, threatening all kinds of things.’
‘Okay. You sound like your mouth is full of Rajaram’s peanut candy balls.’
‘Fate, saar, fate. People are hitting me these days as though there is a government order.’
‘I’m sorry, Selva, but just follow him! I’m on my way.’
‘And, saar, one more thing.’
‘What?’
‘He’s got a gun.’
By the time Ray reached Rajarajan’s street, things were pretty much the same as they had been that night when he had first met Selva. A couple of buses stood parked in the shadows like giant bread boxes on wheels. A mournful song about untrustworthy women wafted out of the slum. The potti kadai man was at his mesmeric daily ritual: making the endless steamy brown liquid ribbon that stretched and shortened from one glass to another.
There was no sign of a single paying customer, gun-toting lawyer or swollen-jawed chauffeur.
After ringing Selva and getting no signal, Ray did the only thing he could under the circumstances.
‘One tea,’ he said.
‘Saar, long time,’ said the potti kadai man. He handed over the foam-headed glass like he had been expecting Ray all along.
He took a sip of the diabetes-inducing beverage and thought of the shopkeeper’s story to Rajarajan. It had featured purple tempos and far-eastern men with unpronounceable names wearing turbans. No more bizarre than what he was doing now. Having a quiet tea outside the house of a man he was going to scam for all he was worth in less than twenty-four hours while waiting for a crazed advocate with a loaded firearm to show up.
An auto turned into the street followed by a Mercedes that looked like it was glued to its bumper. Ray handed the glass back to the potti kadai man and got up. He didn’t know exactly what he was going to do but he realized he ought to be standing up if nothing else.
‘Story not over-aa?’ said the potti kadai man.
He shook his head. He had to hand it to the shopkeeper. He didn’t need dialogue or a voice-over to get the picture.
A man jumped out of the auto followed immediately by another jumping out of the driver’s seat of the Merc. Man No. 1: Sundaresan, in a barely in-place dhoti and a partially unbuttoned shirt. Man No. 2: Selva, his snow-white uniform sporting some wear and tear.
‘I’ll kill the bastard!’ Sundaresan’s yelled-out threat to no one in particular sounded even louder as the plaintive song on the radio came to an end just then. The man lifted his shirt, fumbled about with the ‘waistband’ of his dhoti and produced a handgun.
The utter horror of watching an ordinary man producing a firearm in real life was somewhat compromised by Sundaresan’s precariously tied dhoti coming loose and falling off, revealing an ancient pair of A-fronts that looked like he had been using them for target practice.
At the sight of the gun, Selva ducked behind the Merc with the agility of a spotted deer, the shopkeeper disappeared under his counter of sweetmeats and the auto driver didn’t wait to haggle.
For a moment, Sundaresan stood motionless in the middle of the road, a glinting gun in his hands and ratty underwear covering his privates. The song on the radio had changed to a racy number about men on missions being like Arjuna’s arrows. Ray walked up to the advocate. It took Sundaresan a second to figure out who it was.
‘You?’ he said.
Ray looked at the man who had laughed like there was no god on the last occasion they had met. No laugh now.
Sundaresan pointed the gun at Ray with a shaky hand.
‘Don’t think you can stop me,’ he said.
Behind Sundaresan, Ray saw Selva tiptoeing towards the advocate, arms outstretched, only the title theme of The Pink Panther missing. Ray gestured as unobtrusively as he could for Selva to stop.
‘Why would I stop you?’ Ray said.
Sundaresan’s eyes darted from Rajarajan’s house to the road to the potti kadai to his target in rapid random sequence.
Either because he hadn’t understood Ray or because he had a better plan, Selva continued his odyssey. As Ray’s eyes widened in a silent ‘NOOOO!’, Selva grabbed the fallen dhoti and darted back behind the Merc. Next, a hand sporting the ‘thumbs up’ sign appeared from behind the car, was shaken a couple of times to emphasize a victory that Ray didn’t quite get, and retracted.
Sundaresan twirled like a disoriented dervish, his eyes on the road, and ended up in roughly the same position he had been: facing Ray with the gun pointed at him.
‘Where is my dhoti?’ he said. ‘Give it back this instant or I’ll shoot.’
Ray didn’t know what to worry about, the gun going off or the underwear coming off.
�
��How could I have your dhoti when I’m standing in front of you?’
Selva’s periscope hand reappeared from behind the car. This time it waved the dhoti like a flag. Something in Ray’s eyes made the advocate turn around just in time to see the last of his dhoti disappearing.
The half-naked advocate charged towards his stolen garment by which time Selva was on the other side of the car.
‘Va, da, my raja!’ Selva waved the dhoti at Sundaresan. ‘You’ll have to kill me before I give it back to you.’
‘Don’t think I won’t. I’ll kill every one of Rajarajan’s pimps and kill him, too,’ he screamed.
Selva threw the rolled-up dhoti over Sundaresan’s head at Ray like a football. Ray caught it. The gun waved wildly between Ray and Selva.
‘Throw it back. Let’s make the fat bastard run,’ Selva said.
Ray held the dhoti just out of Sundaresan’s reach, and stuck out a hand for the gun.
‘Enna, saar, you spoilt everything,’ said Selva.
‘Give me the goddamn dhoti!’ Sundaresan said.
‘Give me the gun.’ Ray’s hand remained stretched out.
‘That fucker, Rajarajan. I thought he was my friend. He fu—do you know what he did to my daughter? She’s a child, for god’s sake.’ Sundaresan wept.
Ray took the gun out of the advocate’s limp hand and gave him his dhoti.
‘Your daughter-aa-na, you feel pain,’ Selva said. ‘What about all the other girls on the CDs, you bastard? Didn’t you know about them? They were also daughters. And all the poor bastards who were cheated by your “friend”. Did you think whose sons or fathers they were before you hushed things up in court?’
Ray took the man still wearing only his underpants to the potti kadai.
‘See your state,’ said Selva. ‘Standing in the middle of the road in your komanam. Your money, your big degree, your gun. Can any of them undo the pain your girl is going through?’
‘Enough, Selva,’ said Ray.
Ananth Sundaresan, school pupil leader, pampered son, feared husband, proud owner of a Bentley, member of the Madras Club, two-lakh-per-hour hotshot lawyer to the rich and famous, collapsed on the rickety bench outside the tea shop. He began to cry. In big, racking, honest sobs, like people in the nearby slum did. Because it was too late now to be Ananth Sundaresan, good father.
‘Tea?’ said the potti kadai owner, emerging from behind the counter.
33
Ray mentally ticked off the names from the list he had begun drawing up the night he had met Selva. They were all there.
Seventy-three-year-old K. Balakumar, wheelchair-bound veteran movie director, who had given Rajarajan his first break.
Sri Ramya, former heroine, and former wife, and mother of RR’s only legitimate child.
Arul Murugan, the piano teacher from Dindigul, runaway client of Advocate Chari, whose dreams of becoming a music director were shattered along with four of his ribs.
Reema Chaturvedi, whose name was once spelt S-O-N-A-L in gold letters on the marquee, and whose current calling card said ‘Sister Jennifer, Senate of God’.
‘Cine View’ Ekalavyan, lover of contraband Cuban cigars, and Tamil Nadu’s very own David Thomson.
Debdutta De, persistent piracy police and underground legend, at his first film function as an invited guest.
And, finally, T.K. Raman, gentleman, writer and father-par-excellence, in his seat in spirit, not entirely approving of his son’s recent decisions and – if he knew him at all – wholly delighted with his ability to produce and direct a thriller.
While Ray’s guests were seated in the VIP box to facilitate their safe passage later, the rest of I-Zone theatre, the go-to place for all functions filmy, was packed tighter than a superstar’s diary.
The Tamil and English press occupied two full rows on the left and right respectively, each fixing one unblinking eye on the enemy (in case they got more ‘goodies’), and the other on the stage. Like a swarm of limelight-seeking rain-flies, a flashmob of accompanying camerapersons was everywhere. The stage was empty for now but their telescopic sights were trained in its direction, poised to immortalize what the invitation had declared would be ‘the announcement of the century’. A select few film folk, their fortified walls scaled by a well-paid PR girl, were there, too, making certain their clothes, cleavage and captions had been captured at the ‘red carpet’ stage for Page 3.
All other seats were occupied by the average person from Tamil Nadu, the non-entity whose hard-earned money powered the tinsel merry-go-round referred to as ‘Kollywood’. Outside the controlled mayhem of the auditorium, word was the police were losing to an ever-growing mob that hadn’t been able to get in.
Ray stood leaning by an exit on the left – where his dad would have stood in his day. He couldn’t hear his heart. He didn’t know whether it had to do with the pandemonium outside or the calm inside.
~
The auditorium looked like an action film had shattered its 70mm boundaries and spewed its debris into the real world – a scene Woody Allen may have devised had he been forced into making a summer blockbuster.
It had taken the police more than an hour to quell the chaos of the mob.
Two men, one sitting in the front row and the other gripping the lone chair on the stage for support, were all that remained in the theatre.
It looked like the definitive south Indian ritual of celluloid superstardom – the cut-out abhishekam – had been performed on the man on the stage. Only, instead of milk, ghee and beer, the ingredients used seemed to be an uneven mix of footwear, plastic bottles and theatre food.
The man in the front row looked like his job was done.
‘Why?’ said the man who used to be Rajarajan.
~
In the midst of the flying slippers, Rajarajan was relieved to see his best buddy, Ananth Sundaresan, walking towards him. At last, an umbrella to shield him from the shower of hate.
‘Thank god!’ he said. ‘We have to sue these bastards as soon as we’re safe.’
Sundaresan shoved RR’s outstretched hand aside. The director shut his eyes and gave himself up to the man who had made inconvenient things go away so often with a swoosh of his legal wand. His exercise buddy would wrap his arms around him and somehow rush him to safety.
Instead, RR’s nose crumpled like a paper cup.
As he stood there, his white designer linen shirt getting itself a spontaneous, if uneven, band of red, he understood what it felt like to be at the receiving end of a punch in real life. It was quite different from the million SFX-laden, sound-assisted fake punches he had overseen in his films. No flying through the air in a graceful wire fu arc and crashing into a conveniently placed transformer in a shower of photogenic sparks. He stood rooted to his spot, listening to the inside of his nose go ‘crunch’ like the chewy piece of cartilage he loved in the Chicken Chettinad from Ponnuswami’s, followed by the rusty taste of blood in his mouth. He stopped himself from collapsing only by grabbing the nearest chair.
‘She was my daughter, you motherfucker,’ Sundaresan said.
Though his voice was soft, RR heard it over the din like it was in DTS.
Sundaresan turned around and gave a ‘thumbs up’ to someone in the rampaging crowd.
‘Thanks,’ he said to the man in the crowd and turned back to RR. ‘I’m going to pull out every old case and sue your ass off so bad, you’ll be in court for the rest of your life.’
Sundaresan walked away.
Impaired by the punch and a lost contact lens, RR squeezed his eyes to get the recipient of Sundaresan’s gratitude into focus. It was a man standing dead still by the main entrance, his hands in his pockets, seemingly unmoved by the chaos.
He had seen him only once before, and in entirely different circumstances, but RR had no trouble recognizing the man.
It was Raman’s son.
~
‘You ask why? What choice did you give me?’ said Ray.
Rajarajan rewound
to their first meeting. It had been just another day.
Some disgruntled fool temporarily gathering the requisite temerity and landing up at his doorstep to ask for his ‘due’, he had thought. The average ones went away soon enough, daunted by nothing more than the contact list on his phone and a few well-worn threats, never to return. The obstinate ones went, too, having got their lesson on a dark night in a blind alley from moonlighting stuntmen.
He had figured the NRI boy, mild-mannered son of a mild-mannered father, belonged to the former group.
‘Why didn’t you just, you know, contact me again? Just said what you wanted?’ Rajarajan said.
‘I did,’ Ray said. ‘But you weren’t listening.’
~
There were five people on stage. Rajarajan sat in the middle. His was the widest, tallest chair.
First one to RR’s left, was music director Sam Prasad, wearing a tight-fitting sequined jacket and an ill-fitting toupee. The hotshot composer just two films short of his hundredth film was known in all of south India as ‘Isai Tsunami’. To filmy insiders, however he was ‘bum boy’ – a sobriquet he had earned as much for his fondness for young male musicians as his predilection to bum tunes from wherever he could.
Next to him sat a man who defied categorization. Producer–director–actor Chandra Kumar. Less than a decade ago, he had stormed the Tamil film scene coming out of nowhere, starring, financing, writing and directing five back-to-back hits that had won a vanity van of awards to boot. Newspapers were full of how he had created a pan-Indian market for himself by dubbing his films into Telugu and Malayalam and how Bollywood’s Khans and Kumars were tripping over each other to acquire the Hindi rights of his films. Not many knew, or cared, that Kumar’s favourite pastime was trawling the net with a team of enthusiastic ADs to download small-budget films from South America, the Middle East or Timbuktoo – he really didn’t care where – so long as they didn’t find a release in India, and he could ‘remake’ them frame-by-frame.
To RR’s immediate right sat celebrated photographer-cum-graphic designer, Revi Vettikad, whose camera lens and Photoshop filters were channels-of-production no big budget film could avoid. Superstars wrote him into their contracts. Starlets bent themselves backwards, for, apparently, that was how he liked it, to be on his limited-edition calendar featuring twelve beauties in various stages of undress. Rumour was his library had the biggest collection of advertising black books dating to the ’70s and that in the five-hundred-odd films for which he had designed the publicity campaigns, not one was original, making him the biggest art thief in the modern world.
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