by Samit Basu
Far ahead, the F-16 goes through a sharp turn, its bubble canopy gleaming in the sun.
“Make this quick,” Vir says.
“Just a heads-up. You’ve killed the Viper, right?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, if you don’t, the Pakistanis have evidence of an act of war. Listen, he’s probably seen you and has good pictures of you. You need to take him out. Think like a pilot. Don’t race him. Dance with him. He’s a fatty.”
“Go to hell,” Vir snaps.
The fatty is close now, Vulcan hammering away. Vir flies up, making short, sharp, diagonal dashes, flitting bat-like closer to the F-16 until he can see the pilot, who’s chattering excitedly into his mouthpiece as he tries to steer his wobbling craft into position. A burst of speed, and Vir is directly above the Falcon. He drops gently on it, and hangs on. Panicking, the pilot cuts loose. Vir darts aside as the jet roars away, leaving him wobbling and coughing in its slipstream. When the roar has faded somewhat, he puts the phone to his ear.
“That was good advice,” he says.
“Hey, no problem. Excellent network on these satellite phones, huh? What is it? Thuraya? Globalstar? My phone usually gets cut off when I walk from my bedroom to my kitchen.”
“Focus. What do I do now?”
“Oh, yeah, babbling, sorry. I do that. You should head north. Don’t turn right until you reach Tajikistan. Come back through Nepal or Bhutan. Try not to provoke the Chinese.”
“Has he got pictures of me? Is our secret out?”
“I’ve been trying to jam his communications, but I don’t know — something might have got through. Why don’t you ask him? He’ll probably be back, get him then. He’ll have told them about you, but without pictures everyone will assume flying men are American.”
True enough, the F-16 is back, and this time it’s locked in on Vir. There are two Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles on rail launchers on its wingtips — the pilot launches them both in quick succession and then comes in, cannons blazing.
Vir pauses for a second and looks around, taking in the majesty of the scene. The Karakoram Mountains lie to the north, harsh cliffs and peaks cutting dagger-like shadows. No clouds here: the sun is bright, unrelenting. He breathes in, enjoying the mountain air. And then the missiles reach him. Vir darts aside politely, watches the Sidewinders shoot past, and then races towards the jet.
Afraid now, the pilot swerves sharply. But Vir is faster, he joins the F-16 in flight and together they head for the hills. Ahead of them, the Sidewinders swerve and circle, sensing their target’s trajectory. The pilot now sees Vir’s face clearly for the first time: this is no small robot spy drone, this is another man, their skins are the same colour. His jaw drops; he stares at Vir with religious awe, unable to persuade his hands to move the controls any longer. Time stops; human and superhuman make eye contact.
“Sorry,” Vir says. He streaks upwards as the Sidewinders close in on him and miss, smashing into the F-16’s canopy instead.
The blast hits Vir hard, a flying wing from the shattered F-16 hits him even harder. He rolls and tumbles in mid-air, losing all control, and hurtles flailing towards the mountainside, seeing serious pain await him at rainbow’s end. Burning debris races with him. His mind begins to drift away in a torrent of fire and wind.
Snapping to attention, he spots in the shadow of a rock-face a dark hole in the centre of a ring of flaming debris, a crack in the mountain: a cave. Using the very last of his strength, he aligns his body to the cave-mouth, swims into the right parabola, and manages to rocket into the darkness just as the broken jet smashes thunderously into the mountainside around him.
Vir slides toboggan-like through the cave, the sudden coolness strangely relaxing even as his body screams with pain. He dimly hears the sound of men shouting. Turning his head as he slides, he sees bearded, robe-clad, gun-wielding men up ahead, in front of a lantern-lit door. He smashes through the door, taking the men with him, on to a metal platform, through a crude iron gate, and suddenly the world is well lit again, and he’s back in mid-air inside the mountain, the gunmen falling by his side, screaming. And then he crashes into the cavern floor, slides a little more for good measure and, thankfully, stops.
Flat on his back, breathing raggedly, he takes in the scenery. A huge cavern that’s been converted into a bunker. Well-lit, generators humming, crude electrical wiring everywhere. To his right, rows of tables, some covered with guns and ammunition, some with food and supplies, others with computers. Platforms, tunnel openings and ammunition racks line the cavern walls. Sirens wail. Gun-wielding men in boots thunder down metal steps and out of inner caves, shouting.
Vir sighs. To his left, a white-robed man sits unperturbed, typing at a computer. Vir squints and peers at the screen, expecting blueprints, war plans; instead he sees a Facebook homepage. The man rises, turns slowly and looks at Vir. And as Vir sees, through the red and green worms of pain floating across his vision, the man’s face, the long salt-and-pepper beard, the deep, sad eyes, the straight, proud nose, the famous white turban, he closes his own eyes and starts laughing uncontrollably as he drifts into unconsciousness.
When he opens his eyes again, there are about thirty AK-47s pointed at his face, and a man is trying, unsuccessfully but passionately, to stab him in the chest with a Gerber Infantry knife. As Vir looks at him, he leaps backwards, muttering sheepishly. Someone has tied his hands and feet together. He snaps the ropes without effort and rises to his feet slowly, looking for the white-robed man. He has disappeared, though there are several lookalikes among the gunmen around him. On a high platform to his left, a few women who look like belly-dancers squeal, giggle and point. Vir realises, suddenly, that he has been naked for a while. His belt, the only surviving article of his clothing, lies around the smoking ruins of his shoes. A sound comes from it. It’s his phone, beeping.
One of the gunmen picks up the phone and takes the call. Vir doesn’t know whether it’s his mysterious new ally or his squadron leader. He snatches the phone from the gunman and puts it to his ear. Static, mostly. Satellite phones are useless indoors, especially burnt ones.
Seeing their protests ignored, the gunmen begin to shoot him; bullets fly off his skin. He was once caught in a hailstorm, this doesn’t feel very different. His muscles creak to life, one by one. Acupuncture by AK-47. More people scream, howl, fall to their feet in prayer, throw things; he’s not particularly bothered any more.
“We’ll talk later,” he says into the phone, and crushes it with his fist. He heaves a huge and weary sigh, and stretches, looking curiously at the men emptying their guns in his unyielding flesh. Some have gone to get grenade-launchers; others just stand around uselessly. Something in their faces moves him to pity; their fight was a dark one before, but it is hopeless now.
He politely asks a nearby cowering man for his robe, and gets it. And then he flies off, out of the cavern and into the sky.
CHAPTER TWO
“The wonderful thing about Bollywood,” Uzma says, gently twirling a strand of her long black hair, “is that everyone in the industry is so nice.”
All the other actresses sitting or standing in the crowded Daku Samba Entertainment office lobby look at her with identical expressions of incredulity, wondering whether Uzma is joking, mad, drugged or all of the above. Even Uzma’s (current) best friend and Mumbai hostess Saheli feels slightly apprehensive as she nods and smiles beside her.
“You’ve been lucky,” Saheli says. “Most outsiders trying to get a job here have horror stories.”
“I’ve heard a lot of that too,” Uzma says. “But you know what? I think it’s all made up by people to scare newcomers away. Discourage competition. I think if anyone comes in with the right attitude and the right kind of talent Bollywood’s much more warm and welcoming than anything back home. And people who haven’t landed an acting gig after spending years here? They should probably just quit.”
Saheli flinches and scans the room, half expecting all the other a
ctresses there to fly screaming at Uzma and tear her limb from limb in a frenzy of manicured nails and strategically applied stilettos. But no, they’re just sitting there listening to her, and none of the women, several of whom have clearly been auditioning unsuccessfully for at least a decade, even seem angry — though some look extremely depressed.
Uzma does cut a fairly formidable figure: tall, toned, dark, smouldering, impeccably dressed, and a rich Oxford accent to boot — essential for those romantic blockbusters where the hero, in between foiling international terrorist plots in Sydney and dancing in Macau, pauses to play American football for Oxford. But while Saheli has spent most of her life instantly disliking women like Uzma — and, it must be said, Uzma herself, during their days together at St Hilda’s — she’s becoming accustomed, slowly, to the fact that she’s become really fond of Uzma now. Her initial dismay on reading that email about Uzma’s planned visit to Mumbai — Just a week, darling, until I find digs of my own. It is my first time in your city and I haven’t seen you in SO long — disappeared the moment she saw her former classmate step out of the airport.
A pure Bollywood moment: the crowd parted like the Red Sea as Uzma sashayed out, effortlessly performing the Heroine Time-Slowing Effect, her hair unfurling, cascading, shining, a smile of pure delight spreading across her face as she saw Saheli goggling at her. Unmindful of the jaw-dropping eye-popping handbag-flopping effect she had on the crowd, Uzma raced across the tarmac and swept Saheli up in an enthusiastic embrace. Several men in the crowd burst into spontaneous applause. Babies gurgled. Aunties wept joyously. As far as Mumbai was concerned, Uzma Abidi couldn’t have made a better entrance.
“Uzma Abidi?” a dishevelled assistant director calls, entering the lobby. “Come in, please.”
Uzma is ushered through the door. It shuts, and the large Warhol-style portrait of the leering henchman from Bollywood’s most famous epic resumes its gap-toothed observation of the assembled ladies. A disgruntled murmur fills the lobby.
A tiny model-type in a tinier dress taps Saheli on the shoulder and voices everyone’s concern: “Who is that?”
“Her name’s Uzma. She’s new in town,” Saheli says, wondering exactly when she had signed up to play a supporting character in Uzma’s biopic. That Uzma is in Mumbai now, looking to become the next Aishwarya Rai, is mostly Saheli’s fault.
Uzma had been exposed to Bollywood a little while growing up in England, mainly videos of blockbusters from the seventies and eighties, a time when Indian men had hairy chests and unrepentant paunches, wore cravats and bell-bottoms and were social chameleons equally at ease in tribal villages surrounded by feather-duster-sporting dancers and in underground lairs full of metal drums, collapsible henchmen and chained virgins.
Saheli had introduced her to the New Bollywood, the in-your-face, slick, Armani-enabled imperial-ambitions, global Bollywood, the dream machine that had spawned hundreds of enterprises like Daku Samba Entertainment. Told her stories of hip, edgy companies with producers flaunting designer eyewear and customised iPhones, swanky offices with intentionally ironic decor and voluptuous receptionists with call-centre New York accents. Of a new generation of actors who had come from nowhere and were currently staring back at the world through giant screens and YouTube windows everywhere, talking about how they would only shed their clothes if the role demanded it. Of girls from Mexico and Germany, and everywhere else, gathering in Mumbai like tinsel-tinged salmon. Of young, ambitious, world-cinema-educated, genre-blending, fast-talking, next-big-thing directors actually interested in making good films. Uzma had fallen hard, and decided that Bollywood was a bandwagon she had to be on top of, making suggestive hip movements with men twice her age.
“She’s fresh, no? And not bad looking,” Tiny Model says, trying to add to her air of casually detached interest by pretending to be absorbed in a tabloid whose front page proudly proclaims: MAN-TIGER MONSTER SIGHTED IN KASHMIR: IS THIS THE NEXT MONKEY-MAN? “Does she have, like, connections?”
“No,” Saheli replies, surprised to find how proud she sounds. But, yes, in the face of all logic, she’s thrilled to bits by what Uzma has achieved in two weeks in Bollywood.
Day One: Uzma arrives from Lucknow, where she has spent two weeks with her great-aunt, who had stayed in India when her sister, Uzma’s grandmother, had moved with her husband’s family to Lahore in 1947. Unfortunately Uzma’s great-aunt’s sense of connection with the outside world had also been packed into one of those large aluminium trunks all those years ago, so Uzma is glad to have escaped.
Mumbai takes one quick look at Uzma and clasps her to its sweaty bosom. On their journey from the airport to the nearest local train station, the auto-rickshaw driver bursts into song in Uzma’s honour and insists that, as a token of India’s generosity, her ride with him costs nothing. He does take half the fare from Saheli, though. On the long three-stage journey to Saheli’s home, a flat in Navi Mumbai, Uzma is dismayed to find that the fortress from which she intends to launch her assault on Bollywood is at least two hours’ journey away. But her mood is considerably improved when Saheli’s parents — who had spent three long years clucking uncomfortably about the clothes they’d seen Uzma wearing in Saheli’s photos — see her and fall in love. Saheli is too flabbergasted at the miracle she has recently witnessed — a woman in the crowded ladies’ compartment on their local train actually getting up to offer Uzma her seat — to notice that she has been cast as Uzma’s sidekick in her own home.
Day Two: Uzma ventures forth to conquer the big, bad world of Bollywood. Her first stop: a coffee shop where she meets Chrisann, a film-journalist friend of Saheli’s. Within ten minutes Chrisann, widely known as the snootiest woman in the greater Mumbai area, offers Uzma her complete list of film-people phone numbers and an invitation to the premiere of the new blockbuster Khatra: Luv In The Time of The Dangerrr where she will have the opportunity to meet “industry insiders”. An hour into this five-minute meeting Chrisann’s brother Bruno, a TV producer, turns up, is instantly smitten and asks Uzma if she’s interested in becoming a cricket presenter — one of a fast-growing breed of glamorous young women called upon to provide in-depth cricket analysis in skimpy clothing for India’s never-ending slew of cricket shows.
Uzma, whose interest in cricket is nonexistent, turns this offer down, but accepts a lift to Bandra for a small, intimate evening at Toto’s which turns, in several stages, into a pool party at a B-list Bollywood star’s house, several phone numbers and one inebriated proposal of marriage from a society photographer. Uzma stumbles into Saheli’s house at four in the morning smelling of Mumbai, and Saheli’s parents laugh nervously but fondly as they let her in.
Days Three to Eight: Saheli and her parents mope forlornly around the house, missing Uzma desperately. Uzma’s memories of these days are blurred at best, but from extensive reconstruction Saheli has deduced the following: Uzma drifts from party to meeting to launch to premiere to party, making friends, influencing people. Before she has faced the camera even once, she is featured in two human-interest pieces about the most promising newcomers in the film industry, and in three tabloids as the secret new girlfriend of three separate stars. Seven industry big-wigs “discover” her at various nightspots. She is offered dozens of reality shows and contests, most of which involve singing or speaking in Hindi, neither of which Uzma is really capable of.
She runs out of money on Day Four, and graciously begins to accept film offers. She finds out soon, though, that the enthusiasm that producers, directors and actors feel when they meet her at parties doesn’t extend as far as their chequebooks. Using the acumen genetically acquired from her mother, a leading corporate lawyer in London, she soon figures out that the contracts she is being asked to sign involve her a) never working for anyone else and b) sitting and waiting for films that, thanks to the global economic recession, might never be made. She signs up for a few ad shoots instead, becomes the first outsider in the history of the Mumbai entertainment industry to turn a profit w
ithin their first week, and spends all her newly acquired riches getting a Sapna Bhavnani haircut.
She makes exciting new friends: Capoeira dancers from Brazil who have come to Bollywood to be instructors, Zen Buddhist monks who moonlight as DJs, Formula One glamour girls from Australia. An A-list star invites her over to his sea-view flat to give her advice, gives her advice all night, and his wife returns from a bag-buying trip to Mauritius and gives her Ethiopian coffee in the morning.
Day Nine: A bleary Uzma returns to Navi Mumbai to take stock. Saheli listens, gaping, as Uzma trots out Bollywood-insider stories about treadmills for dogs and secret liaisons among rival domestic help cliques in Pali Hill. Saheli feels a terrible pang of sorrow when Uzma announces her intention of leaving at the end of the week she’d invited herself for. Saheli’s parents are even more stricken: Uzma is the daughter they’ve always wanted, they tell her. Uzma spends her evening with Saheli’s family, turning off her constantly ringing phone after an hour. Saheli’s father gives her Instructions Essential for Single Girls in the City. Uzma is surprised when he warns her not to tell any prospective landlords that her parents are from Pakistan.
At midnight, Uzma’s parents call from London. They are worried: a few plainclothes policemen have come to their house and asked several questions about Uzma. On being assured that the only danger Uzma faces currently is the prospect of exploding from all the food Saheli’s mother is force-feeding her, everyone laughs heartily.
Days Ten to Twelve: Saheli calls in sick and plays trusty sidekick. The dynamic duo’s mission: to find Uzma a place to live. They wander up and down Mumbai and find that all available housing is a) too expensive b) too small c) too remote d) simply not available because Uzma is female, Uzma is Muslim, Uzma is single, Uzma is foreign, Uzma is alone, Uzma is an actress, and you know what they say about struggling actresses. Uzma is dismayed, all the more so because it seems to cause each prospective landlord genuine pain to turn her away. They all assure her of their undying sorrow and regret. They promise to help her find any place but theirs. There are three or four places where they don’t run into categories a) to d) but another problem rises, like Godzilla from an iceberg, in each of these places e) it just doesn’t feel right.