Maximum City (59 page)

What is fascinating to me is not so much the scriptwriting process as hearing Vinod explain what is politically acceptable and what’s not. Infinite care has to be taken, as the papers put it, to avoid “hurting the sentiments of a particular community.” Vinod goes back and forth and back again over what religion the female leads should profess, what might cause offense, what would play well with the audience. Finally, he splits the difference: Mrs. Khan, the cop’s wife, is Hindu, and Sufi, the militant’s girlfriend, is Muslim. The constraints we operate under are peculiar to the country. Vinod can’t have fade-to-black in his movies. He had five of them in one of his early films, after he came out of the Film Institute, and the audience started jeering and whistling. They thought the arc light was going. In the interiors the projectionists cut fade-outs out of the reels to keep the audience from wrecking the theater.

One early draft ends with the heroine waiting for the hero to come down from a helicopter, dead or alive. When she sees him alive, she starts laughing. “You’re alive!” are the final words. But then Vinod runs through the end again and shakes his head. “Too late. The lights will come on and the doors open before they even get into the helicopter.” In theaters all across India, audiences have a built-in sense about when a movie is ending. This sense is aided by the doors opening and the dimmer lights coming on, five minutes before the actual ending. People with small children need to leave early, to get a taxi or rickshaw outside. So the last five minutes of any Hindi film are inevitably lost even if you stay in the theater, because most
people in front of you are standing up. This is why most movies end with a song or a rapid reprise of the film’s highlights, like the life of a dying man flashing before his eyes. It stretches out the end. Thus,
Mission Kashmir
ends with a pointless dream sequence of playing cricket in the snow and a reprise of a song.

The influence of the epics is strong. An incident in which Mrs. Khan asks the boy to lay down his arms for the sake of her husband is referred to, naturally and always, as the “Kunti scene,” after the mother in the Mahabharata. Like most Bollywood films, the film is a paean to motherhood, the one thing you can never be cynical about in a Hindi movie. Most Indian movies are about the joint family splitting up and coming back together again. For two and a half hours, they depict and overcome the dissolution of the country’s urban families into nuclear, single-parent, and divorced households. This film category is called the “social” movie. Housewives come to the matinee showing and weep copiously into little white cotton handkerchiefs embroidered with small colored flowers. Vinod himself is devoted, like a good Hindi movie son, to his mother. He cancels dinner plans with us once because his mother says you can’t eat food cooked during an eclipse.

The narrative principles that propel the plot are alien to those of, say, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I spent two years. I entertain myself by imagining what would happen if the script were put up in workshop. My contribution to the script is minimal at best. I propose an idea that departs from the standard Hindi film formula. Vinod thinks about it. “We can’t do it because if we put it in the film the audience will burn down the theater. They will rip out the seats and burn down the theater.”

I withdraw the suggestion.

He is not exaggerating. Indians take their films as seriously as Italians take opera. When they feel their heroes are diverging radically from what they ought to be doing, the audience can get physical. As we are scripting, we read that in Ludhiana, after the first showing of the film
Fiza
, in which the hero also plays a terrorist, the audience was disappointed by the way their idol was portrayed. They expressed their disappointment by getting up and ransacking the theater. I feel an enormous responsibility now as a scriptwriter. We construct the film with one anxious eye on the rickshaw wallah in the lower stalls with the can of petrol.

I ask Vinod his opinion of the art films made in India. It is not high. “I
think the art film in India is like speaking Greek or Latin to an average Indian. This is our colonial hang-up. The art cinema is made for the West, except Ghatak, who made films in Bengali for Bengalis. Ray’s power came from the West, after
Pather Panchali
, not from Bengal.”

Vinod can speak with authority about art films. As you learn in the course of a first meeting with him, he has been nominated for an Oscar. Fresh out of film school, he made a short film about homeless children in Bombay,
An Encounter with Faces
, which was nominated in the short non-fiction category for the Academy Awards. The two movies he made later were critically praised but barely broke even. After that, he started making flat-out commercial films: thrillers, romances, starting with
Parinda
, his first mainstream film. The underworld loved
Parinda;
it was the first time in Hindi movies they had been shown as they really are. I remembered Mohsin the hit man watching a scene from
Parinda
on the hotel room TV and telling me, “This is a correct scene.”

Since then, Vinod has made only two films,
1942: A Love Story
and
Kareeb
, for a total of five feature films in his entire career of two decades. Why does it take him such a long time, when other Bollywood directors are turning out one or two every year?

“Primarily because of the writing. I’m not a writer.” He resents having to make movies with hackneyed plots for what he calls the ulloo audience. “I’m constantly saddled with a viewer who’s cinema illiterate. It’s like trying to talk Shakespeare with Khem Bahadur”—Vinod’s Nepalese cook. “My fear is that through constant simplification and trying to talk Shakespeare with Khem Bahadur, I’ve lost the ability to discuss Shakespeare with people who know Shakespeare.”

This is something I gradually find out about Bollywood: The people working in it are far smarter than the product they turn out. “We are dwarfing our intellectual selves in order to make films for a Hindi film audience. You’re writing this great novel in the English language. Try doing it in Hindi; then you’ll know my tragedy. You’ll get fucked. You’ll have no fucking money to pay your children’s school fees.”

He allows himself to think, sometimes, of how it would be if his earlier art films had been a success, of if he had chosen to live in the United States after his Oscar nomination. He is sometimes burdened by the sense of a life not lived, the feeling that he took the wrong fork in the road a while back. “I want to make international films for the world market. I want to grow.
Where will I go from here? I can sit here in my wooden study with my Jacuzzi and stagnate for the rest of my life.”

There are two Vinods fighting “eyeball to eyeball,” as he is fond of saying about Khan and Altaaf, our lead characters. One is the avant-garde filmmaker from the Film Institute at Pune, student of Ghatak and Mani Kaul, worshiper of Kurosawa. The other is the big-budget Bombay producer, with something to prove to his commercially successful stepbrother, who cannot afford subtlety in his films lest it go over the heads of the ulloo audience. If he pledged his troth to either of these two personas—became wholly Vinod the committed art filmmaker or Vinod the Bollywood hack—he would be less tortured. As it is, the conflict is apparent in his films; it keeps him from winning an Oscar or having a megahit at the box office.

Vinod is attached to his home but not to the city. “Bombay’s never thrilled me. If I could take all my friends from here and live in Florida, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. Bombay has become like a goon city since the Sena and Bal Thackeray have taken over. There’s just one man who’s fucked up Bombay, and that’s Thackeray.” He was told by a government bureaucrat that if he wanted tax exemption for
Kareeb
, he would have to go to Thackeray. The most effective method of government control over popular cinema isn’t the censor’s office, it’s the tax office. Granting tax exemption to a film lowers the price of a ticket by half and could mean the difference between life or death for a film. But Vinod will not kowtow in front of Thackeray. If the Supremo causes trouble for him, he says, he will move out of the country.

Vinod tells me about the New Quit India Movement. It is a group of some fifty Bombay luminaries: dancers, actors, diplomats, and so on, loosely coordinated by a Parsi hairdresser who is in charge of some of the city’s most famous heads, and she has invited Vinod and Anu to join the exodus. They have resolved to emigrate en masse to Canada: to Vancouver. To this end, they have meetings, where they bring in experts to conduct lectures on how to get abroad and how to live there. They are all rich and can afford the $200,000 it costs to get Canadian papers. It is a uniquely Bombay dream of exile: You want to get out of Bombay, but you want to take your Bombay with you. The New Quit India Movement dreams of traveling in a social bubble halfway across the world, where it can re-create Malabar Hill and Pali Hill in a more salubrious environment.

Y
EARS FROM NOW
they will be asking me, “And what did he look like? And how did he walk?”

We are in Amitabh Bacchan’s bungalow, and I am shaking his hand. Not his waxwork in Madame Tussaud’s, the real thing. I have grown up with this man—or, rather, with his image. Now, for the second time, I am seeing him live. The first time was in 1979, at the old Deluxe Cinema in Woodside, Queens, where he’d come to launch
Kala Patthar.
He gave a speech onstage; I worshiped from afar. Bacchan was, then, the biggest star in Hindi films; the man who, when he was injured in the filming of a movie stunt, had the entire country praying for his recovery and tens of thousands of people lining up outside Breach Candy Hospital to give him blood.

The man himself is surprisingly bigger than his screen persona. He wears a loose white silk Pathan suit. When he shakes my hand, a smile comes on; I have never seen so many teeth in my life. It is not a smile of pleasure, or even of greeting. It is as if a switch has been flicked; there is a flash of light. A moment later, the switch is flicked off and the face resumes its stillness, sinks back into its slight daze.

Outside his bungalow, at all hours, groups of people wait to get his darshan, an auspicious viewing. Inside, he reigns in his office, which is just this side of showy, all beige leather and black wood. A large figurative painting of an old bioscope-wallah with a cluster of kids peering into it dominates one wall. On his desk are stacks of videocassettes and a couple of books, one of his father’s poems and, on top of it, Paul Reiser’s
Couplehood.

Vinod asks me later, “Do you think he weaves his hair? It looked strange, in the front.” From the back, too, it looks strange, unnaturally elongated over his neck. It is not just his hair that he has lost. Bacchan is desperate; his last few movies have flopped badly and the future of his production company, ABCL Ltd., is in doubt. When Bacchan first called Vinod from Mauritius, the director was so revved up about Vikram’s plot for a film about Kashmir that he started swearing. “Motherfucker. It’s a fucking brilliant idea.” Bacchan listened politely and agreed that it was brilliant. Later that night, Vinod felt bad that he had been so coarse around Bacchan, who is senior to him. But that was also a subtle indication of the
new position of the star—that a director could swear like a sailor around him and he would have to take it, to hang on the line from Mauritius. After the failure of his last couple of films, it was Bacchan who now had to call about roles.

Unlike many Hindi directors, Vinod shoots from a written and bound script, but no such product is necessary—or sufficient—to sign up the talent for the film. We have to go physically and “narrate” the script to the stars. This is the reason we are in Bacchan’s bungalow. We are going to tell him a story.

Bacchan tells us what effect our film should have on the audience. “You need to catch them by the crotch and shake them up.” He wants to make a truly breakthrough film, one in a different paradigm. As examples, he cites
Bombay
and
Bandit Queen.
And he has a keen sense of the primacy of his role as hero, the only hero. He wants something in the plot by which Khan can show his “smartness—supreme smartness.”

After we narrate the story to him, the superstar has a suggestion. “Can we make the system the villain?” asks Bacchan. “The common man is disinformed,” he begins. He saw Oliver Stone’s
JFK
, and it changed the way he looked at the world. In India, although the common man is intelligent, he has been lied to by the politicians and by the movies. But now the common man is waking up and realizing that the system is responsible for his travails. So now the common man will not accept a cliché ending in which the hero wins and everybody can go home.

Bacchan wants us to make a movie with an ending that will awaken the common man to what the system is doing to him. He wants the two protagonists, the cop and the militant, as they clasp in embrace at the end, to be shot dead by a single bullet. “Let’s really give the audience something to think about,” the star proposes. “They’ll sit in the theater for fifteen minutes after the lights have come on, thinking about who could have shot them. Then they’ll say, ‘Shit . . . it’s the system!’”