Maximum City (63 page)

Like Vinod, Mahesh hates the business that has been so good to him. “This is a sick industry. There’s no fucking money here—it’s a victim of its own hype.” When he makes a film now, there is a fear it won’t work, right at the outset, because nine out of eleven films don’t make back their investment. He has lost his feel for the formula. “I can analyze it but the flow is missing.” But he knows exactly what his purpose in life is, as a man who makes movies. “We are distilleries of pleasure.”

T
ANUJA ARRANGES A PREVIEW
of
Sangharsh
just for my friends, in gratitude for having helped her in the making of it in Madanpura. It is a strange meeting of worlds, my book come alive. There is Monalisa and Girish and Sunil and Kamal and Rustom and Ishaq, and a whole host from Madanpura. After the show, they all stand in two lines along the corridor, resting against the walls, shy, awkward, as Mahesh and Tanuja stand at the head of the line and talk to me. They have just been to the Novelty cinema and have seen a full house, hundreds of people, rapt in their creation.
Sangharsh
is getting blasted by the critics. “But when I saw all those people at Novelty,” Tanuja says, “I felt they were a more important audience than the intellectuals.”

“That is your
only
audience!” booms Mahesh. “Never forget that.”

We all go to the Gallops restaurant at the racetrack. The maker of the film about the riots sits across the table from the rioter. Sunil patiently feeds his daughter, whom he has brought along to see the big people. But conversation flags. The class boundary is too high.

The preview for my friends turns out to be unexpectedly profitable for Tanuja. A couple of days later, she calls me, frantic. She has just seen her film, not three days old in the theaters, on her TV screen. It is being aired illegally by the cable operators in Bandra and Borivali. The overseas distributors, who don’t have a stake in the Indian market, sell prints of new films to the local cable operators. The first week is crucial for a Hindi film; most of the money it makes in its lifetime will be made during that week, and if people can already watch it on their TV screens, why should they pay to see it in a theater? Tanuja wants me to ask Sunil, the cable operator, not to screen it in his area. Sunil tells me there is one cable “distributor” for the suburbs whom she should speak to. A deal is struck. As a favor to
Tanuja, because she is a friend of Sunil’s and has done him the honor of inviting him to her premiere, the cable operators of Bombay and Thane will desist from screening it for their subscribers for one month on the distributor’s orders. And for a payment of 50,000 rupees.

“But this is blackmail!” I protest.

“It’s a good deal,” she responds.

Filmmakers go to great lengths to protect their films from getting into the hands of the pirates, who sell DVDs even before the film is released. With
Kareeb
, Vinod traveled around India, personally appealing to police departments to protect his films from cable piracy. In Ahmadabad, he told me, a senior police officer lined up the leading cable operators of the city after Vinod complained that it was being shown illegally on TV there. “What shall I do with them?” the policeman asked Vinod.

“Break their legs,” he suggested.

“No problem,” responded the officer.

I
OPEN THE PAPER
one Monday morning and see a large photograph of an old woman under the name
SHIRIN
, a Muslim name—but she is wearing the Hindu tilak on her forehead. Mahesh’s mother has died. But her celluloid version is about to be born on the big screen.

As the film’s release date approaches, a controversy arises over whether or not Mahesh is really a bastard. Mahesh’s film—and much of his life—is built on the premise that he is. His father says he isn’t and places an advertisement in the papers to that effect, claiming he legally married Mahesh’s mother. Ugly insults fly between the family members. “My mother was supposed to be his mistress,” Mahesh insists to me. “Though they repeatedly claimed they were married, they had no documents to prove it.” Mahesh’s illegitimacy is very important to his sense of who he is. And now Mahesh is a big man. The bastard has become a star and can fight his demons in 70mm, with 1 billion people as his audience. His mother, who always had to hide her love, for her God and her man, has been reincarnated as her granddaughter and is now the goddess, the object of veneration, of celebration. Her son has made her legitimate again. By celebrating his illegitimacy, Mahesh is also vanquishing it. Art is where you fight your demons.

Mahesh takes me to the all-important Censor Board preview of
Zakhm.
We wait outside on the terrace of the Liberty Cinema until the board is finished viewing and debating the film. As we go in, the chairwoman of the committee says, “We want to commend you for a very sensitive film.”

Mahesh, Tanuja, and I stand in one of the front rows, with our backs to the screen, facing the censors: four Hindu women and one Hindu man, all middle-class types, doctors, accountants.

The chairwoman starts asking why the Muslim policeman is shown as the good guy. The policeman is Hindu, Tanuja insists. “What’s his name?” the chairwoman asks. Mahesh and Tanuja look at each other. He’s a Hindu policeman, they say, but he is just called Sharad, which is the actor’s name. The censors want that to be made explicit, so it won’t look as if the police are divided along communal lines. “Although we all know that the force is communalized,” the chairwoman adds. Also, the line spoken by the bad Hindu cop, “This Mussulman boy—” should be changed to “This boy—”

Mahesh agrees with the woman before she finishes her sentence. This is his last film, and he has been to dozens of such bargaining sessions. In the elevator going up, he had told me about how, at his first censor screening when he was twenty-one, he argued with the censors and refused to make the cuts they demanded and walked from Liberty to Mahim because he was so angry. He thought that twenty-five years later things would have changed for the better, but they haven’t. All that’s changed is that he is much less confrontational.

The chairwoman commends Mahesh for the fact that his film has no nudity, no onscreen violence, no profanity, and for the sensitive handling of the illegitimacy issue. However, she says that because the film deals with issues of communalism, the board has decided on the A, for Adult, certificate.

This is a death blow to the film’s revenues; people will not be able to bring their children under eighteen to the movie, eliminating a substantial part of the audience.

Mahesh makes a very low-key plea for them to change their minds. “I don’t want to get into an argument, but I feel this film should be seen by younger children.” If fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds could see it and be swayed by its ideas of tolerance and for the ideal of a united country, it
would benefit the country, he says. But he leaves it up to them. The chairwoman says they will think about their decision and let him know tomorrow. If they stick with their A decision, it will also affect the television sales of the film. So there is an economic incentive for filmmakers not to deal with political issues. Reality is not for children—or for teenagers either.

T
HE CENSORS FINALLY INSIST
on an A certificate. The chairwoman of the committee argued strenuously for a U/A certificate, but the others on the committee wanted to go even further, showing it to the police force for their approval, lest it incite communal hatred. If the film caused trouble, the committee would shoulder the blame for having passed it without any cuts.

As it turns out, getting an A certificate is the least of Mahesh’s troubles. Without having seen the film but on the basis of a written synopsis, the chairperson of the overall Censor Board, a faded actress, refers the film to the state Home Department for clearance. One of the functionaries on the Censor Board—made up mostly of housewives and men with time on their hands—has been unable to sleep all night after watching the film, and this is one of the reasons the chairperson gives for needing it to be cleared by the government. The film should properly have been referred to the Union Government, since it is an India-wide release. Taking a film about the riots for approval to the very government that was implicated in the riots is asking for certain trouble. And the state government can really make things tough for Mahesh if it has a yen to; it can shut down all his projects, including his television serials. He tells me this is his last film, and he’s not prepared to lose his dignity; like other filmmakers, he won’t go to Bal Thackeray, cap in hand.

Mahesh’s daughter Pooja comes along to our meeting with the chief secretary of the Maharashtra government, Mr. Subrahmanyam. I am traveling with them as one of their writers. It is in the bureaucrat’s office; through its two large bay windows, all I can see is the sky and the Air India building. It is one of the rare views in Bombay uncontaminated by human beings. The secretary himself is a fat man with a face scarred by a skin disorder that has turned it white and red, as if it were strobe-lit. Pooja is there essentially as ornamentation, as star dazzle. The chief secretary isn’t dazzled.
He is a big man in his chair, a god in his frog pond. And he lets us know it.

The secretary recounts how he had cleared the film
Bombay
, on which he says he was alone against the government in holding that an artist had the right to his opinions. The police had opposed him. But clearance was possible only after the film’s director had appealed to Thackeray; Amitabh Bacchan had personally gone to the Sena leader and begged for his permission to release it. The film was about the riots, and Hindus and Muslims were shown as being equally to blame for the events. When the film was shown to the Saheb for his imprimatur, he wanted just one scene cut: the one at the end where his alter ego is shown apologizing for the massacres and the burning. He had no wish to forgo responsibility for his valiant acts.

“He bought his peace,” the secretary recalls, suggesting that Mahesh should do likewise. Mahesh refuses. “I am not prepared to do that.” The secretary’s assistant then says he will have to get a letter from the chairperson saying that the Censor Board would not release the film, but the letter wouldn’t be forthcoming. She would say the film would be judged by a higher tribunal, and the matter was being looked into by the state government. “Since they have not made any decision, you can’t appeal it,” the secretary points out. Mahesh’s timing is bad, he adds. The Srikrishna Commission Report has just come out. “If your film is anti-Hindu—and if you are saying the truth about the riots it
has
to be anti-Hindu—it won’t see the light of day.”

Mahesh says that it does take a position against the Hindus.

In that case, declares the secretary, “It will remain in the cans. We will ban it.” He does it all the time; that very morning, the secretary says, he banned a play. He makes it very clear that he thinks the Hindus started the riots; nevertheless “the present government is pro-Hindu. You would not have had this problem under the Congress government.”

Mahesh and Tanuja try to explain that the riots figure only peripherally in the film, and scenes of rioting are never actually shown. The chief secretary says he hasn’t seen the film but, he repeats, it will still “never see the light of day” if it said the truth and took a position against the Hindus. “Hindus like to think they are secular, when they aren’t.” He laughs. “Muslims aren’t secular at all.” Recalling the emotional power of Mahesh’s
earlier films, such as
Saaransh
and
Arth
, the secretary adds, “If it’s emotionally very strong you’re in trouble.” Mahesh’s movies are innocent of subtlety or restraint. A Sikh always carries a sword; a Muslim always has on a skullcap and Ali Baba—style shoes. He doesn’t believe in holding back the tears; he gets his actors to cry as often as possible. Tanuja, who had co-written
Zakhm
, had defined for me the secret of success in a Hindi movie: “It has to make people’s insides churn.” The Indian public thinks with its heart. This passion can topple governments, empires. The government can stomach a documentary film about the riots but not an emotional, mainstream one. The Enlightenment hasn’t reached these shores; it carries no weight. Democracy here is a balancing of opposing passions.

Mahesh responds that he will go to Delhi and meet the prime minister, who had recently told him he admired his work. The chief secretary laughs. “He has a hawk as home minister. The film will be shown to him” and it will be banned.

M
AHESH AND
T
ANUJA WORK
right through Diwali, frantically trying to get the film through the various political and bureaucratic hurdles, taking the issue to the media. The film is screened for a committee of government officials, including the Bombay Police Commissioner, who then asks for a police nominee on the Censor Board, to screen every film to filter out negative portrayals of policemen. “It generates more heat—the fact that a bad cop is there—than the neutral effect generated by a good cop,” the commissioner explains.

Mahesh gives in and makes some cuts and reshoots some scenes to please the censors. The saffron headbands that the rioters wear, which “represent a certain political party” according to the written report from the Censor Board, are replaced with black ones. A scene “where Muslim character is pointing out his frustrations is not necessary.” A staged encounter where the police shoot a man running away from them is deleted. A speech made by the Thackeray stand-in—“We have tolerated these people long enough and now the time has come for a national cleansing”—is cut. Mahesh wants it both ways. He wants to be a hero to the press, for holding the torch of defiance against a fascist establishment; but he also wants his film released. Crores are riding on it.

After the political cuts are made,
Zakhm
is released and goes on to
win an award from the President of India: Best Feature Film on National Integration.

I am at a table outside the Sun ‘n’ Sand Hotel in Juhu in the late afternoon, watching the sun begin its decline and fall into the sea. This is the hotel where movie stars and gang lords used to come to see and be seen, the hotel where Monalisa lost her virginity to the movie producer Hari Virani.