India (16 page)

Subroto – who came from Bengal, and worked in Bombay in the art department of an advertising agency, but was reconciled to living in the city as a paying guest, the buying or renting of an apartment of his own being too far beyond him – Subroto took me one afternoon to meet a friend of his, a film writer who had fallen on hard times. Hard times in Bombay meant hard times. For the film writer it meant a fall almost to the level of his potential
audience, the people who (as the writer himself was to say) filled the sweaty, broken-down cinemas, and looked to the screen for release.

The writer lived in an apartment block in Mahim in mid-town Bombay, near a vegetable market that gave off warm rotting smells. In this apartment block there were 10 apartments to a floor, as in Nandini’s block; but the block wasn’t as well kept as Nandini’s. As Subroto and I went up the concrete steps we had glimpses, through open doors, of clutter in small rooms, and sometimes of figures stretched out in afternoon rest on beds or on the floor; and my fancy was ready – in the general atmosphere of the place – to work up these figures and postures into more sinister tableaux.

We came to the floor we wanted, and followed a verandah or gallery, very bright in the afternoon sun, to where it opened into a room freshly painted and almost bare. This room, of slanted sunlight and shadow, had two beds against opposite walls, two folding chairs, and three pieces of basketwork on one wall as the chastest kind of decoration, a touch of home, perhaps a touch of Bengal. In that setting, with its clear and sharp details, the details almost of improvised stage properties, there was my host the writer, a tall man in white Bengali costume, a man in his forties, handsome, ironic, with the hint of a suppressed rage, a man to whom my heart at once went out.

I realized a little while later that the room, so plain and without disorder, would have been specially prepared for our visit. It was the only room in the apartment. Two people lived and slept in that room. There was an adjoining kitchen area, beyond a doorway with a curtain.

The writer said: ‘Calcutta is where I studied. I keep on drifting back. It’s my home town, mentally. It’s where I feel comfortable. That’s where I feel things are happening all the time, and that’s where I acquired the ambition of being a film writer. It is difficult for a film writer to survive – I knew that, and for 11 years I was a cost accountant. That was the time efforts were being made to make India a very big industrial country. A lot of building was going on in many parts of the country, and I was a cost accountant in the construction industry. I got shifted from one place to another and went all over the country, and often stayed in wild and empty places. I became a nomad, and have remained that way since.

‘One fine day I just got up and went away from my job. It
happened here, in Bombay. I had come to Bombay with my firm. Bombay was becoming a very industrial city at that time, in the late 60s. And I went away from my job here and I got involved in a lot of theatre activity. I used to read a lot in my time off when I was with the building industry; in some of the places where we were you had nothing else to do. And when I came to Bombay I found that a lot of the friends I had here, people I had met elsewhere, were theatre people.

‘In the 70s a lot of theatre people became film people. There was a government Film Finance Corporation. Money was up for grabs. So a lot of my friends grabbed this money and joined the movement, and a lot of good films were made. But then these good films didn’t get released. They made the seminars, they made the festivals, and a lot of very long articles were written about them. But unfortunately the films themselves were never seen because they were never released.

‘I will tell you how I managed when I left the building firm. I was living on the roof of a high-rise building with two friends, under the water-tank. We bribed the watchman. That’s how we lived for one year. The best view in town, and free. This was in 1969. I was twenty-seven. The only thing we could afford was country liquor. The deal with the watchman was like this: we would bring a bottle one night, and he would bring a bottle the next night. The result was that we became drunkards up there. We had no option. The watchman wouldn’t allow us a free evening to ourselves – that was part of the deal.

‘The watchman was from Nepal, and he told us frightening stories about Nepal. He told us he walked for 27 days to get from his village to the Indian border, and he was starving for those 27 days. He came here to get a job, and when he got his first pay packet he went to a restaurant and ate so much food he came down with dysentery. When he got drunk he used to say, “Everybody should be shot!” And we would agree with him.

‘We were making up stories, trying to write screenplays. Then one of our friends got some money. And he made a film. Three of us had collaborated on the screenplay, and when the film came out my name was not on the credits. This was my first lesson in art cinema. We were very emotional and foolish. Instead of beating the hell out of the director, we said, “I’m not going to work with you again.” Which suited him.

‘Let me tell you how I got into the commercial side.

‘At that time whole villages in the Punjab were migrating. Many of them were being smuggled into England. Very few of them had valid passports and what not. There was a very famous actor in the commercial cinema who said he wanted to make a film about these Indian emigrants. The actor was very famous. In fact, he was at his peak.

‘By that time I had left the top of the high-rise and the Nepalese watchman, and I was staying in a boarding house. Two of us were sharing a room. We never had a room to ourselves in those days. My friend was working for this famous actor, and this actor was looking for a bright young man. And that’s something else you’ll learn: they’re
always
looking for bright young men. I apparently fitted the slot. I was young enough, and the famous man thought I was bright enough.

‘The only other option I had at that time was to go back to construction work. The Gulf was opening up at that time, and my old firm were threatening to send me to the Gulf. I was actually still under contract to that company, and had been under contract when I walked out on them – for this great freedom to be a writer.

‘So word got to the actor, and the great man sent for me. His office was in Santa Cruz, near the airport. Santa Cruz was part rich, part very slummy. The actor’s office had become part of the slums. In the 30 years since he’d built his offices there, the green had gone and the slums had come. Slum all around, and in the middle there was this ramshackle office building. And I found that the interior of the building had nothing to do with what was outside – it was plush, carpeted, centrally air-conditioned. Nothing to do with the outside. I had walked into the dream factory.

‘The office was big – colossal. I had to walk through two rooms to get to the actor’s private chamber. And that was huge. What struck me were the books on the walls. Those editions of the Nobel prizewinners in 30 volumes. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
was on the other side, and there were marvellous globes and expensive coffee-table books about animals and flowers. The screenplays of all the so-called film classics of the West were on the other side. Right above his head, in fact.

‘He started talking about this film about Indian emigrants. He gave me the outline of the plot. I said – ’

I broke in to ask the writer, ‘What was the outline?’

Two lines. Just two lines. I said, “It’s a very brilliant idea.” He looked at me with sparkling eyes and he said, “That’s a very intelligent remark to make.”

‘Let me tell you a little about this famous actor. He was perennially young. He
is
perennially young. He was about fifty then, perhaps fifty-one, fifty-two.

‘ “So,” he said. “Let’s try to do the line-up.” ’

I asked, ‘He wanted that straight away?’

‘He wanted it right off. That was my first lesson in this new course. How to write a film script for commercial films.

‘I was very excited. I thought it was the biggest thing to happen to me, as I picked my way back through the slums outside. I went back to my boarding house. That was in the middle of one of the ugliest slums in Bombay, one of the ugliest of those so-called fishing villages. I burned the proverbial midnight oil that night. Luckily, my roommate was a Punjabi. He knew what the emigrants were like, and he gave me some ideas of their characteristics. I wrote a couple of scenes.

‘I took them in to the office the next day. The actor read the scenes in front of me – four scenes in seven pages – and he clapped his hands and said, “This is wonderful! Let me just look at these pages. I will work out some ‘lines’ and we will talk about it tomorrow.”

‘The next day came, and he said, “I’ve thought out everything.” And for three hours he told me a story – the story of the film we were supposed to be working on. It was a horrifying experience. It had nothing to do with the village or the humiliations of the emigrants. It was like every other commercial story – it was about spies and shootouts and gangs. It was pretty awful.

‘So I looked at him. And at that moment it flashed through my head: “If I tell him it’s a very good story, I’ve got a job.” So I told him, “It’s a very good story.” And he paid me on the spot. Advance money. A contract was made. It was quite favourable to me. He gave me 5001 rupees that morning. It’s an Indian custom, that extra one rupee. Even if it’s a million rupees, they will pay you that extra one rupee. It’s for good luck. Though actually I think the one rupee was my payment for saying it was a good story, and the other 5000 rupees was for my good luck in thinking I should say it. So I thought, “Keep on saying it’s a good story.”

‘It took two years to make that film. And I wrote nothing. Not
one single line. I will swear by anything you want that I didn’t write a single line. I just kept listening to his rubbish every second day, and I kept saying, “Wonderful!”

‘I was making 10,000 rupees a month for saying yes to him. That was what everybody else was saying to him. This great man used to live in a very strange world. If you are a star you live in a very strange world. You manufacture a world where everyone keeps on saying yes to everything you say. If you say no, you are out of that world. And permanently. The rejection is like Jehovah’s revenge or something. They live in this world, and they lose touch with reality, with the audience, with the audience’s taste. That’s why so many films fail. And when they don’t run, there’s always a fall guy.

‘He would call me into his office apparently for a story session, and I would listen to him talking about the wonderful films he was going to make. These people, their heads are like a bubbling kettle. I would listen to him for anything from two hours to seven hours, eight hours. And this went on for two years.

The film came out. My name was on the credits. But I hadn’t written anything, I swear to you. Because there was no
written
script. This was what I learned: that films can be made from scraps that come out, scraps of conversation. In fact, a writer was looked down on. A film writer was supposed to
talk –
to be a talker of scenes, rather than a writer. So that they could get a
feel
of the scenes without having to read. Because reading is something
nobody
in the film world does. The writer is the odd man out.

‘They
talk
about stories. They talk about scenes. Even if you write a scene, they shoot it differently. They change while editing, while shooting. And all actors here fancy themselves to be writers. An actor may come and, if he’s got clout, he may change a line.

‘This was in 1972. I was thirty, and everybody thought I was a brilliant young man. Until the film came out. And it flopped. It didn’t run at all. And I learned another lesson: that when a film doesn’t run, invariably the writer has to take the blame.’

‘How much had been spent on the film?’

‘Close to nine million rupees. It was extraordinary. Huge houses would be erected for the village scenes. Places where even maharajas wouldn’t stay, and those houses were supposed to be village huts. The hero was an unemployed village youth. The clothes he wore in the film had been stitched at a cost of a lakh of rupees.
And he would stand in those lovely clothes, and employers would tell him, “This job is not for you.” The man saying that – playing the employer, the owner of the factory – he would be an extra, earning 30 rupees a day in those days. And he would be wearing shabby clothes of his own – because you don’t have to find clothes for an extra.

‘I hated every moment of it. I hated myself for doing it.’

I said to the writer, ‘But you knew what Hindi films were like.’

‘Yes and no. I saw Hindi films, but I didn’t know how they were actually made. And they’re still being made the same way. How can it be otherwise? Nobody who made a film went to see a cinema show with the audience. In those days they would have this private viewing theatre. They never saw the film with the sweaty audience. The halls are terrible. They are advertised as air-conditioned, but the air-conditioning often doesn’t work, and it’s hot and humid and sweating and it’s packed.

‘So I took the blame, and I went away from Bombay. And I drifted around for a while, mostly in Calcutta and Bengal. I didn’t want to return to the film industry at all.

‘But it’s hard to leave the film industry. A friend wanted to make a film in Bombay. So I came back, and started up again. At that time I had the reputation of being a very good script-writer, without having written a script. Many of the things I had worked on had remained at the ideas stage, and ideas can be brilliant. Then this friend, with four disasters behind him, wanted to make a quick, cheap film. He wanted to make it just to survive – a film which we could make quickly.

‘There was a well-known actress who was a friend of the group. We thought we could cash in on her name. So we started shooting without knowing where the next day’s money was going to come from. After eight days the money ended, and the shooting stopped. We didn’t know what to do. And then – you wouldn’t believe – a man came and said he wanted to back the film. He was acting for somebody, and I actually believe we got the backing because the person for whom the man was acting liked the story of the film.