I didn’t have to make a journey to see Paritosh – no overcrowded suburban train, no choking taxi ride through the brown smoke of the Bombay highways. He came to have a coffee with me in the hotel. He was a busy man; he had things to do. His face was suffused now with the pleasure he felt in his busyness; some of the rage had been ironed away.
He had written his film. And the producer had found a backer. They had been able to start shooting, and to show rushes of early scenes to distributors. The distributors had bought the film. The backer had got an almost instant return on his investment, and he had put up money for a second film – Paritosh seethed with ideas. Paritosh had already got his writer’s fee for the first film; it was a substantial fee; he had, already, bought a bigger apartment in a better area. In five months his fortunes had changed; this was the kind of thing that was possible in rich, energetic, squalid Bombay; this was why the city drew people all the time.
He had retained a bigger financial share in the second film. This film, Paritosh said, was to be more for himself. The first one, the one that had bought him his apartment, was commercial, popular – but he wasn’t using the words to criticise his work: he was only describing a particular kind of film.
What was it about? What kind of story and characters had been filling his head when I had met him in his little room? What was the material he had been banking on? The film was set in a Bombay slum, one of the many shanty towns of the city. The hero was a young slum-dweller; he was a man of possibilities, but he was corrupted by a gangster. A commercial film, but topical, and strong. (And also, as fictions often do, carrying an unconscious echo of the creator’s predicament.)
To make the film, Paritosh said, they had had to build their own slum or shanty town. For legal reasons they couldn’t use a real place. They had taken photographs of various real places, and they had created a kind of composite Bombay slum. While the film was being shot, they had all lived in the various huts of the set. Just the day before, Paritosh said, they had begun to dismantle the make-believe slum they had lived in for many weeks. It had given him a pang.
December 1988 – February 1990
Acknowledgements
When you travel for a book like this, you often don’t know what you are looking for until you have found it. You need a lot of help on the way. On this journey many people helped. They shared their knowledge; they gave names and introductions. Three people, all of them newspaper editors, helped especially, from beginning to end: Nikhil Lakshman, Vinod Mehta, Rahul Singh. Vinod Mehta and Rahul Singh each did a part of the journey with me; but I must stress that I alone am responsible for what I have written. There are a number of other people I would like to remember here. In Bombay: Charu Deshpande; Ajit Pillai. In Bangalore: T. J. S. George. In Madras: K. P. Sunil. In Calcutta: Shekhar Bhatia; Viv Sanghvi; Sunanda Datta Ray; Satyabrata Bose. In Delhi: Rekha Khanna Mehta. In Chandigarh: Kanwar Sandhu. Other people who helped are mentioned in the text; sometimes, for obvious reasons, their names and circumstances are changed.
ALSO BY V. S. NAIPAUL
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An Islamic Journey
On the basis of his seven-month journey across the Asian continent, V. S. Naipaul here explores the life, the culture, and the ferment inside four nations of Islam: Iran, where the hysteria and rage of revolution continues; Pakistan, tragically underdeveloped decades after its founding as a homeland for the Muslims of India; Malaysia, governed by Muslims but economically dominated by the Chinese who constitute half of its population; Indonesia, confused about both its Muslim and its national roots, and by the rule of four regimes (two foreign) in less than forty years. Naipaul depicts an Islamic world at odds with the modern world, fueled only by an implacable determination to believe.
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AN AREA OF DARKNESS
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An Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul’s strikingly original responses to India’s paralyzing caste system, its apparently serene acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. The result may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.
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A BEND IN THE RIVER
In this incandescent novel V. S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man—an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
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Half a Life, 978-0-375-70728-5
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India: A Million Mutinies Now Page 66