Maximum City (66 page)

It got worse. One day Eishaan was eating his meal, which turned out to be kadhi with pakodas, yogurt soup with dumplings. He has a habit of picking and turning over his food before putting it into his mouth, which served him well on this occasion. A pakoda broke open under his fingers, and he found a whole cockroach nestled in it. The next day he found a worm in the rice. So the star took on yet another role: that of maid. He got a broom and mop and went into the kitchen and started in. He didn’t stop till he had cleaned out the whole kitchen.

Eishaan carried his statue of Durga with him to the shoot and made a small temple in his hotel room. He believed that as a result of bad karma, she was punishing him with bad food. “I never dreamed of this kind of khana. My goddess was showing me that this is also part of life.”

In the middle of all this a hero of my childhood days appeared on the set. Eishaan shows me a photo of a man dressed in saffron swami’s robes. “Dara Singh,” he says, and the name takes me back. Dara Singh versus King Kong. He was India’s greatest pro wrestler, and his name became a synonym for a strong man, a fighter. He used his wrestling success to become a god of the B films and was even nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament. The director knew the wrestler well; he had launched his son in another film. In
Jai Shakumbhari Maa
, Dara Singh plays a saint who worships the goddess. The wrestler is known all over India. Buses pulled off the highway near the town when the drivers heard that Dara Singh was in a shoot there, and everyone got off and came running toward him to touch his feet. “Daraji! Daraji!”

The wrestler stayed on the set for a day. Dara Singh was still supple in his old age; he never ate rice and his fingers were still very strong. Then came mealtime. “They gave him potatoes.” Eishaan had a conversation with him about food, which was predominant on the minds of the starvedcrew,
especially after they were forced to watch but not touch the red and green baskets full of vegetables in the scenes. The wrestler agreed with Eishaan about the necessity of eating well. “He said, Whatever a man does, he does for his stomach. If the stomach doesn’t have good food, what use is anything?” So Eishaan bought fruits and sent them to him.

The potatoes kept coming. Eishaan started going to the market and buying his own provisions. He laid out a breakfast spread in his room every morning: cheese, jam, bread, butter, fruits. The crew began their mornings in his room and loaded up for the day. Sometimes, the star would also buy the crew dinner. All this was not cheap. Of the 21,000 rupees that Eishaan is to get as his total fee, his personal expenses ran to 13,000. I ask him if he was reimbursed by the producer, and he laughs. While returning to Delhi, the bus with the crew broke down for a couple of hours. It was dinnertime, and the bus would not reach Delhi till 2 a.m. The producer distributed 400 rupees for twenty people, to buy dinner. “He’s a Muslim but he has a PhD in Bania,” the merchant caste. It was obviously going to fall short, so the struggler from Dubai brought out his wallet and bought dinner for everyone, paying 1,200 rupees. He did not ask his fellow artistes to split the check. “I can’t tell people, ‘Give me twenty rupees each.’” For his pains, the woman who plays his mother called him a fool.

The whole experience with
Jai Shakumbhari Maa
has driven home at least one truth for Eishaan. “In films, I know I can never be a star unless something clicks.” No Subhash Ghai or Yash Chopra will spend crores of rupees on him, he now knows. He thinks he trusts people too much—such as the producers who were supposed to launch him early in his career and never did, or died on him. He thinks he gets too emotional with people, and he should save his emotion for the camera.

But then his natural optimism reasserts itself. “Nana Patekar became a star at forty-two,” the twenty-five-year-old remembers.

Eishaan turns over the pictures of the photo album and stops at one picture, which shows him wearing a U.S. Cavalry hat and writing something, surrounded by a crowd of people. “This was the moment of my life,” he recalls. He is signing autographs. At last, Eishaan the cloth merchant is signing autographs. When he went for his morning jog, the crowd used to jog with him. They would come to the hotel and ask at reception, We hear there’s a hero staying here, we want to meet the hero. “They used
to come in fives to my room. They used to come to shake my hand. Then I said, I wish my brother was here to see all these things.” The aunty whose house Eishaan used to go to sometimes for food had three daughters, and all three developed a crush on him. They still call him in Bombay and send him cards. A girl in the film sent him a message through another girl, to tell him that she was in love with him. And the go-between herself fell in love with him. He turned both of them away: “I said, I’ve just had a major breakup a year and a half ago, I don’t want to get into any mess.” The late-afternoon light falls on his face from the window, illuminating it. “I was very popular among the girls.”

T
HE WORLD WAS TO END
on May 8, 1999. The papers were full of it: a particularly malevolent arrangement of the constellations. Tens of thousands of people fled Alang, the shopbreaking yards in Gujarat, for their villages. Hundreds of thousands fled Bombay, especially the Gujaratis; Sunil, the Sena man, opened a travel agency to take advantage of the phenomenon and made a killing by scalping bus tickets out of the city. When I call up Ali one day that summer and ask him why I haven’t heard from Eishaan for a while, he laughs pretty hard. “He’s very stupid,” says Ali. Eishaan is back in Jaipur. Things had been going well for Eishaan; besides
Shakumbhari Maa
and the TV serial, he was just about to sign another film. Then he got a call from his father in Dubai. “Son, the world is going to end, so let us die together! Come to Jaipur.” The father flew in from Dubai, and on May 6 Eishaan fled Bombay and got on the train to Jaipur. There, the whole family awaited the apocalypse. Meanwhile, Eishaan missed out on the second film. “I really thought it was a joke,” says Ali. “He doesn’t know what to do; he’s trapped between extreme orthodoxy and extreme modernism. That’s his problem.”

W
HEN THE WORLD SURVIVES
, Eishaan goes back north for the second shoot of
Shakumbhari Maa.
When he returns to Bombay, he comes over with Ali and my friend Anuradha Tandon, a woman-about-town, to my office one night for a fine evening of drink and story. The presence of a pretty woman in the room adds to Ali and Eishaan’s volubility; they are
refreshed, as if by a fresh breeze from over the sea. Eishaan is talking to Anuradha about his film, searching for a parallel. “Have you ever heard of a film called
Jai Santoshi Ma?”

“Shakumbhari Maa is her aunty,” Ali mumbles into his vodka.

Eishaan has brought a small video camera, on which he shows us scenes from the second shoot of his film. “This is
The Making of Shakumbhari Maa.”
There he is, in a disco, with a bottle of liquor in front of him. A troop of dancers in western clothes are singing, in English, “She made me crazy.”

“Here I have this misunderstanding that my wife is carrying on with my cousin. So I am drinking.”

“Social message,” explains Ali.

Normally, the liquor bottles in Hindi films—they were all Vat 69 in the seventies—are filled with Coke. But
Shakumbhari Maa
did not have the lavish budgets of those films, to throw away on Coke. “They mixed the Coke with water. They got one Coke between six liquor bottles.” So Eishaan had to take swigs from bottles of highly diluted Coca-Cola and act like a drunk. After he gets drunk, he throws the bottles around, demonstrating his distress. When he did, there were two assistants standing behind the camera holding a sheet spread to catch the bottles, so they could be used again. Another scene takes place in dense fog. The production ran out of the powder used for the fog effect, so they burnt cow dung. It stung the stars’ eyes, which led to a further happy economy: “I didn’t need glycerine for the scenes.”

The schedule of the second shoot was packed, from noon to midnight every day. This time, to avoid the problems of technicians stealing food ahead of more genteel members of the cast, the producer had an inspiration: He parceled out individual portions in plastic bags for each person. The food came from a Sardar’s hotel and was very good and copious, with costly ingredients—“paneer was like bloody flowing”—but the producer did not believe in the added expense of plates. The crew was expected to eat straight from the bags, four in each parcel, for rice, roti, dal, and vegetables. They had to tear open each bag with their teeth to get at the nourishment within. Eishaan remarked to the producers that when the autopsy was done on their dead bodies, they would find a hundred yards of plastic in each corpse. “Out of shame the producers called up friends in an ashram, and they sent a hundred plates.”

After a while, the plastic-enhanced diet took its toll on the star. “I got stomach problems. I got loose motions.” The whistle of the cooker in the house of the people who owned the hotel tormented Eishaan; here was good homemade food being cooked every day. The daughter of the owner had a crush on him. He took advantage of this to ask her to get him some dal and khichdi for his unsettled intestines, and she obliged.

We see another scene on the camcorder, of the young heroine in a river, drowning. She is flailing her arms around and screaming; she has really thrown herself into the scene. Then the hero saves her. We remark to Eishaan that she acted well.

“She wasn’t acting. She can’t swim. She really was drowning.”

Acting the scenes on the banks of the Ganges posed special problems. Eishaan recalls the time when he had to sing a tender love song to the heroine. “On the shores of the sea”—he sings the song for us, clicking his fingers—while, just out of the frame, dead bodies floated by in the river.

At one point, a bald head appears in the frame. “Who’s that?” I ask. It belongs to a sadhu; this being Hardwar “there were always thirty or forty sadhus around, all of them potheads.” They were taking a break from their religious austerities, crowding around the sets of the mythological film, creating a traffic jam. All of them wanted bit parts in the film, and their requests could not be taken lightly, since many of them were dangerous. “All the dacoits from Bihar and UP, whoever has a criminal record, runs up there and shaves his head,” explains Eishaan.

I ask him when the film will be released.

There is a pause.

“They have to find buyers first.”

Jai Shakumbhari Maa
is competing with another mythological,
Devi
, which has, reel for reel, many more miracles. Eishaan is thinking of buying the rights to release his film in Rajasthan, where he is confident he can double his money. He would need two to three lakhs for publicity, which with this sort of movie mostly involves hiring auto-rickshaws with loudspeakers roaming through the villages, alerting the citizenry to the fabulous entertainment soon to set up tent in their midst. Since filming began, the producers have discovered that a new temple to Shakumbhari Maa is about to be installed somewhere in the northern suburbs of Bombay. The director instructed his cast and crew that henceforth everybody was to pray to this goddess.

Eishaan is much more confident now than when I first met him. He doesn’t answer all my questions unless I repeat them three or four times, and even then he doesn’t answer some of them. He has started to stand me up; he is not returning some of my calls. There is no disrespect involved, it is just that his status has changed. In my office, he automatically takes the armchair. But even so, he mixes the drinks and serves all of us, refreshing our glasses periodically.

At last I see
Jai Shakumbhari Maa
, in a plush preview theater in Bandra. The audience is mostly Eishaan’s friends and family and a couple of distributors. It is the kind of movie where most of the people in the titles have only one name. My friend doesn’t seem to be very high up on the totem pole of this movie, judging by the misspelling of the star’s name in the titles. It is now “Eisshan.”

It is not just an out-and-out mythological film. As Eishaan tells me, “It has romance, action, everything.” Since the big stars are charging a crore and up for their films, even mainstream producers are getting into the quickie B and C movies, Ali had explained. There were three ways to survive. One was to make a horror film that didn’t need to show any famous faces, another was to make a sex film, and the third was to make a religious film. “Or a combination: horror, sex, and tantric religion.”
Shakumbhari Maa
possesses all three ingredients.

The film deals with a contest between the forces of evil, summoned by a tantric, and the forces of good, marshaled by the vegetable goddess. In the beginning, there is an extended family in a village, including two brothers, one with a virtuous wife, the other married to a harridan. The second brother wishes to go to America. A wandering singer sings the praises of Shakumbhari Maa, and the entire village turns out to pray to her. The brother sings and prays, and immediately a telegram arrives, summoning him to an American job. His noble sister-in-law sells her jewelry so the family can pay for the tickets. When they come back from living abroad (established through two shots of an Air India plane, one taking off, the other landing), they are “Americanized.” They have brought a suitcase full of money (ten lakhs) to save the older brother’s business, but alas! they checked it through and, as per Air India custom, their baggage has been lost in transit.

When we first see Eishaan, he is wearing a denim shirt, jeans, and a hat such as was favored by the U.S. Cavalry. The mother and daughter wear
T-shirts, pants, and skirts; they are NRIs and therefore sluts. Through the film, the producers seem to have utilized the exhibition-cum-sale of garments well. The costumes range from high-slit long skirts to a polka-dotted vest and bright red cravat for Eishaan to a raggedy dress with patches that the bad mother and daughter are forced to wear when they become poor.