Maximum City (67 page)

But Eishaan is finally a hero, not just an actor. He goes through every single heroic action. He sings love songs while thrusting his crotch forward and rotating it in a circle, he takes on three armed thugs single-handedly and vanquishes them—so powerful is his punch that it creates a reverse sonic boom; you hear the sound
dishoom!
of fist connecting with villain even before it has actually done so on the screen—he drinks whiskey when he loses his girl, and he makes money in business.

The plot, like the Lord, moves in mysterious ways. The storytelling style of the movie follows a kind of jump-cutting of the script. A character proceeds from one momentous event in his life to another—marriage, expulsion from the family, heartbreak—without the tedious intermediary details of motivation or purpose explained to the audience. You see them going from point A to point Z; the intervening alphabet actions have occurred offscreen. As a result, each succeeding scene is a happy surprise, because you never know what to expect next. My attention is seized in a way that it never is in mainstream Hindi films.

The film knows the issues and prejudices that press most heavily on the rural Indian’s mind. On the shoot, when Eishaan was subjected to the potato-heavy diet, he had told the producers, “You are treating us like a new bride who’s come without a dowry.” Meanwhile, in the film, the goddess was rescuing Eishaan’s bride, who had indeed come without one. The evil mother interrupts her son’s wedding to demand a dowry from the bride’s poor father. The father is humiliated—this is the ultimate nightmare of a village father with an unmarried daughter—but the bride prays to Shakumbhari Maa and, in contravention of the Indian Penal Code, the goddess is incarnated as an old woman bearing an impressive dowry: stacks of rupees, jewels, and saris. All this later turns into ashes when the mother and her evil brother, Mr. Bob, try to steal it.

The periodic interventions of the goddess knit the film together. When all seems lost, she appears, a young maiden of a startling shade of blue, adorned with ornaments in an equally alarming shade of gold. In one scene, her powers transport a series of plates of food through the air from
the dining table to the shrine room; when the hungry villains follow, her clay idol smacks them about the head and shoulders while flying through midair.

Shakumbhari Maa is sometimes preceded by her singing dhoot, or agent, the singing wrestler. Dara Singh is the “fakir baba” and wears saffron. “Is he meant to be Muslim?” I ask Eishaan. “No, he is a pir. We don’t know what religion it is.” A holy man, maybe Muslim, maybe Hindu, wandering the countryside, singing the praises of a Hindu goddess. The villages will have no problem with this. The music composer and lyricist responsible for writing the Hindu devotional songs is a Jain. The executive producer and villain (Mr. Bob), Shaheed Khan, is Muslim. He too is a follower of Vaishno Devi.

As soon as the heroine gets married, she stops flouncing around in a miniskirt and ankle boots and appears in a sari. As Eishaan reposes on their flower-bedecked nuptial bed during their wedding night, his new bride blows a conch and pauses to sing a devotional hymn while he drifts off to sleep. A little later, she saves her sister-in-law from premarital sex. “Old-fashioned!” complains the interrupted male, abusing the heroine. Does she realize that abroad this kind of behavior is common? “This is India,” the virtuous wife responds, and delivers the following peroration in furious Bengali-accented English: “What do you think to play with the chastity belt? Is it the culture of any country? Show me one of the university which educates and encourages to this type of vulgar and sinful deed!”

I laugh very hard at this, till I notice that none of the old ladies sitting in the theater are amused and I have to put my hand over my mouth and bite hard. The audience for this movie is not cynical; they have no notion of irony or camp. I am still laughing, a few days later, as I tell Monalisa about it. “It’s a hilarious film.”

The bar dancer doesn’t laugh either. She immediately corrects me. “It’s not funny. It’s a movie about God.”

The deep roots most Indian movies have in the epics are evident in this film. The evil mother is called Kaikeyi, the evil uncle Shakuni, the loyal cousin compares Eishaan to Ram, his wife to Sita, and himself to Lakshman. These names function as a shorthand for the village viewer, readily slotting each character into an established mythological role: the bad stepmother, the good brother. The Indian viewer doesn’t like surprises. And there is an added bonus for the audience. A note at the end of the press
release at the preview screening promises that Shakumbhari Maa will surely grant the desires of anyone who sees this film, hears its story, or preaches its message. These words preface the Mahabharata and many other Hindu narratives. The very act of listening will confer spiritual benefit upon the listener.

D
URING THE INTERMISSION
, Shiv Kumar, the director, tells me he has tried to send a message to the youth, in a format that would be pleasing to them. This may explain why the heroine, wearing six-inch heels, gyrates her butt in one of the shortest skirts I have seen onscreen, shortly before she dons a sari and prostrates herself in front of the goddess. There are quite a few such scenes pleasing to the youth: plenty of short skirts, transparent blouses, on-screen kisses, and raucous innuendo in the dialogue, interspersed between scenes of devout fervor. The director reminds me that he has been making very different types of films for many years, sex comedies mostly. Here now is a completely new genre: the mythological sex comedy.

Kumar claims the budget of the film was eighty lakhs; Eishaan tells me it was closer to forty. In the film industry, every person has a “discount level,” a percentage by which what he says should be disbelieved. Kumar’s discount level, therefore, is 50 percent. Whatever the budget, unlike many bigger films it has a good chance of making money. One of the reasons is that the Uttar Pradesh government, bowing before the goddess, has exempted it from entertainment tax.

T
HE FILM INITIALLY RECEIVES
favorable publicity. The trade magazine
Super Cinema
reports, “The price that a devotional film fetched in North recently left many gaping. Once in a while comes a devotional film that really sweeps the market like hurricane.” Unfortunately, the hurricane turns into a light sprinkle and then dries up altogether.
Shakumbhari Maa
was never incarnated on a Bombay theater screen for paying customers. In Bombay nobody dies of famine; the city needs not a Vegetable Goddess but a Housing Goddess, a Traffic Goddess, a Good Government Goddess.

But the goddess in her many avatars continues intervening in the course of Eishaan’s life. One night he is at a cousin’s house in Worli. They
keep insisting that he stay for the night; three times he is about to leave and three times they pull him back, even getting out shorts and a toothbrush for him. But something compels him to drive back to his place in Andheri. At around 2 a.m., near Mahim Church, he sees a mob on the street. He had been thinking about his forthcoming pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi, eagerly anticipating the eight-mile trek up to her shrine. When he sees the mob, his first thought is that riots have broken out; it is a heavily Muslim area. The mob stops his car and demands that he open the door. Then he sees a body on the road, of a woman who has been knocked down by a cab. Her head and thigh are bleeding profusely. The cab has fled, and she needs to be taken to the hospital. The crowd puts her in the backseat and he drives to Leelavati Hospital, where he discovers that she has no money for treatment. So the struggler takes out his wallet and gives 2,000 rupees to the doctor for the stranger’s treatment and stays by the woman’s hospital bed all night. The next day he searches out her relatives, puts them and the woman into a cab, and gives the cabbie money to drive them to a less expensive hospital in Malad.

Eishaan is of the opinion that the goddess was testing him. “When I was driving I was thinking about Vaishno Devi, and how it would be the best place to celebrate my birthday.” If the goddess had not moved him out of his cousin’s house in the middle of the night and placed him at that exact spot where the woman had just been knocked over, she might not be alive today. So he will go to Vaishno Devi with his parents, celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday, and know that he has been faithful to her dictates.

After
Shakumbhari Maa
, the heroine, Raashee, goes on to star in
Club Dancer No. 1.
From playing the chaste devotee of the goddess, she goes back to playing with the chastity belt. Eishaan disappears from Bombay, perhaps to Jaipur, perhaps back to his family business in Dubai.

When Vinod first told Ajay Lal that Sanjay Dutt had been finalized for the role of Khan in
Mission Kashmir
, the policeman commented, “It’s going to be a TADA movie.” He was referring to the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act, under which the actor had been jailed for two years for his involvement in the bomb blasts. One of Ajay’s best friends has cast as his lead a man that Ajay himself has interrogated. Sanjay is not the
only one involved in the film who has been indicted for murder and conspiracy. Ramesh Taurani, out on bail for the murder of the music producer Gulshan Kumar, has bought rights to the music for
Mission Kashmir.

I first meet Sanjay Dutt when he comes to Vinod’s house to hear the Kashmir script. It will be quite a challenge for him, as he is stepping into a role written for Amitabh Bacchan. He sits on the terrace with Vinod, Anu, and me. “You guys must feel small sitting next to him,” comments Anu. Sanjay is built like a brontosaurus.

I mention my photographer friend Dayanita Singh in Delhi, and he says, “That’s my sister. She stays with us whenever she comes to Bombay.” Dayanita went to school with Sanjay; he considers her his rakhi sister. In boarding school, he was always the one who got beaten most by the teachers. He is the son of two of the country’s greatest stars, the powerful member of parliament and actor Sunil Dutt and the Muslim actress Nargis. The teachers had to demonstrate to the world that they were not awed by this. They had the power to beat this Bombay film-world brat; who does he think he is? Once, for some minor infraction, a teacher asked him to crawl up a gravel slope on his hands and knees. The skin came off his forearms and knees. The next day the teacher ripped off the bandages and asked him to crawl back up the same slope. Another time he was beaten so badly that gangrene set in. His parents had to put him in hospital in Delhi. He was a skinny boy in a British-style boarding school. So he sought out the tough boys, the Sardars, and made Dayanita tie rakhis on them, making them, by extension, his brothers too. He grew up fascinated by guns and muscles.

I have been told by Mahesh that Sanjay will not talk about his jail experiences. Dayanita has said the same thing. But sitting on Vinod’s terrace, Sanjay is extraordinarily friendly. Maybe it’s because of who has introduced me to him. “Those were dark days,” says Sanjay. Almost all of the film industry turned their backs on him when he was arrested. “This man”—indicating Vinod—“was the only guy that stood by me.” His case will take years more to get through this level of the courts. If the verdict goes against him he can appeal, and so it will go on well into the twenty-first century. He invites me to go to court with him the next day, where he is to sign his bail register.

W
HEN WE STEP OUTSIDE
the car at the TADA court on Arthur Road, one of the passersby in the crowded street sees Sanjay and yells out
Kartoos!
It is the name of his latest film, Hindi for a bullet cartridge. The whole street is staring at us. One of Sanjay’s fellow undertrials in the blasts case whispers with him. A man has been shot in Chowpatty by the Rajan gang. Sanjay is well acquainted with the man who was shot; he too is one of their mates in the trial. I get the sense that Sanjay considers these outlaws his real kin. Among them, he has found the friends he never had in boarding school, the tough guys who will protect him from the class bullies and sadistic teachers.

We drive back to his apartment, which has a nice view of the Bandra seafront. He moved into this flat just two weeks ago. We sit in his study, which is furnished in blond wood. Tea is brought in, and he pours me a cup, adds sugar to my taste, and stirs it before giving it to me. He talks about growing up troubled. He started taking drugs in the way a boy from a good Bombay family might, “Just to be in the scene. Smoking a little grass, meeting the women.” But the grass wasn’t enough. “One out of every ten people is an addict. I was the one.” So he got onto the stronger stuff: quaaludes, cocaine, heroin. “I’ve done everything,” he says, a couple of times. “I was all the time in the loo, fixing a shot, sleeping.” He allows himself an excuse. “I’ve had a hard life. My mother died when I was twenty.” He lost his mother to cancer in 1981 and then his wife, in the same hospital, Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan. He used to walk wintry New York streets alone, weeping.

Sanjay used to get his supply from Do Tanki in Null Bazaar. I remember Mohsin the hit man telling me about Sanjay coming to that part of the city “to smoke charas with Muslims.” They were proud of him, proud of his Muslim mother. Gradually he realized that he was addicted and traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to seek treatment. Sanjay is fascinated by a certain Marlboro Man idea of America. One of his friends in the treatment center raised longhorn cattle in Texas. Sanjay had money saved up in Bombay and decided to put it into a cattle ranch with him. He stayed with the rancher for a month before his father came to retrieve him. It took his father two hard days of pleading and arguing to persuade his son to come back to Bombay.