‘No, no, Gaitonde. I had to work very hard to get crazy. What about you, Gaitonde? What made your screws come loose?’
‘Saali, control your mouth.’ It was strange, I was furious at her, but somehow glad. ‘My screws are fine.’
‘Yes, yes. That’s why you’re sitting in jail and killing people on every side and behaving like Hitler.’
‘You’re lucky you’re not here, in front of me.’
‘I’m sure you can have me killed anyway, you big man.’ And she burst out laughing again, with that baffling and hearty hilarity.
‘Don’t waste my time and my battery,’ I said. ‘Bunty said you were making problems.’
‘Bunty is a chutiya. I won’t send any girl to that jail. And a woman like you want is not going to come to any jail in the first place.’
‘Bunty is an intelligent boy, and he would have listened to you if you hadn’t sounded like a…’
‘Like a what?’
‘Can you get a woman like we want? A film star?’
‘Maybe some television actress. And not at the jail.’
‘Forget about the maderchod jail.’
‘It’ll cost money.’
‘Everything costs money. Just be reasonable, and don’t try to take advantage of us.’
‘I do honest business.’
‘Do good business with me, and you’ll have a lot more business.’
‘Good.’
‘And don’t call me Hitler again. You don’t know how much I work for…’
‘Yes, yes, you are a great benefactor of the poor. You give like a king. Listen, I need to go, I have work to do. I’ll get in touch with your Bunty about arrangements.’
And she clicked off. Mad and maddening. But she was a good businesswoman – she got us a television actress, or at least an actress who was on television now and then, named Apsara. This Apsara was actually a film star too, a vamp who had been in a couple of movies with Rajesh Khanna during the downward slide of his career, when he started to look like a fat Gurkha. Apsara had been around ever since, one of those faces you remembered but couldn’t quite put a name to. ‘For this you’re making me pay fifty thousand?’ I told Jojo. She had set up the transaction with Bunty, but I had called her to argue over the price. It was an excuse, I admit. I wanted to talk to her. I told her, ‘At least get us a real star from the period. You know, like Zeenat Aman or someone.’
‘Gaitonde, that’s the trouble with you men. In your dreams you think every famous woman is secretly for sale. From the period you want? Why don’t I get you Indira Gandhi?’
‘What? You’re saying this to me? You’re making a deal with me for this woman, and you’re telling me that I’m imagining things?’
‘The deal is happening because men imagine things. Poor Apsara. She needs the money.’
Poor Apsara turned out to be something of a drinker, but she was a happy drunk. We set it up: Advani showed up at the Juhu Centaur the next Saturday afternoon, to meet one of our boys who had a suite under the name of Mehboob Khan. Advani had a drink in the suite, my boy gave him a brown paper packet containing five lakhs, and then left him alone. A door opened, and Apsara floated in, wearing a white garara, very Meena Kumari. She had got heavy, but her skin was still luminous and light, and Advani must have thought he had gone to heaven. She asked him for a drink, and then sang songs to him. He told her he was her biggest fan. She acted out scenes for him, and he took the part of Rajesh Khanna in the scene from Phoolon ki Rani where the vamp takes the bullet for the millionaire playboy hero because she’s so in love with him. Advani remembered every line of dialogue.
I got all this from Jojo the next day. I couldn’t stop laughing. ‘So they acted for each other?’ I said. ‘And then? Did he actually do anything?’
‘The old man’s got a lot of dum for someone that skinny and that old, that’s what Apsara said. I think she liked him.’
‘She thought he was Rajesh Khanna, saali drunken old buffalo. Women are crazy.’
‘As crazy as men.’
And we laughed together. By this time we were talking every day. Somehow it had become a routine: at first it was me that called her, usually in the mornings, after I had finished my early call with Bunty. Then on a court day I didn’t call her, and when I got back to the barrack I slept, and was wakened by the phone. ‘Where were you, Gaitonde?’ It was her. So we talked. After the Apsara deal, we did some more business – Advani needed more apples, as did certain other lawyers, and policemen, and judges. But Jojo and I talked, and business was only a small part of it. We talked of everything.
Thirteen months passed.
Thirteen months can pass just like that. The days slid into each other. I went to court, I took care of my company. Things changed, things remained the same. We got the charges against Dipu and Meetu dismissed. Date went off to Nashik jail to serve the rest of his sentence, Kataruka was released. Bunty was arrested, came into the barrack. The baba log in the children’s barrack changed, and there was a new Mumtaz for me. Bunty was released. Our war with Suleiman Isa continued. The government changed in Maharashtra, the government changed in Delhi. I ruled over and mediated disputes in the jail. In the barrack, I had to set up a committee to make decisions over television-watching, since the Sunday mornings full of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana made the Muslims and Christians feel put down and want programmes of their own, and the Tamil and Malayali boys wanted to watch their Hot Songs programme at midnight, and then the Marathi lads demanded regular film-viewing. We provided whole goats to the Muslim prisoners on their festival days and told them that we would make any arrangements necessary on their fasting days, and see to it that the jail staff didn’t interfere. So everyone was happy. Outside the jail, we fed Advani his apples, and inside he accommodated us, adjusted with us. My son grew, he walked, and on his weekly visits I played with him in Advani’s office, and held him in my arms, taking in that dewy smell of the top of his head while he struggled and laughed and spoke to me in languages I couldn’t understand. I changed also, inside this jail. Perhaps because of the time I had, I grew more quietly reflective, more interested in the world. I regularly read the newspapers, watched all the news programmes on television, and the political debates on Sundays, and the American movies in English. From television, I learned history. In jail I educated myself, I became a man aware of my past, my country’s long story. But in spite of this thoughtfulness, or maybe because of it, I developed an embarrassing ailment: I suffered from piles. A minor indisposition, not an illness really, but how I suffered. I rose from the latrine trembling, dizzy with pain, nauseated by the bright red blood. I consulted doctors, changed my diet, took herbs prescribed by famed ayurvedic sages, but no, I still squirmed and squeezed and suffered, I suffered.
‘You have too much tension,’ Jojo said. ‘Your life is entirely tension. And your trouble is that you carry all the tension in your gaand. You need to relax.’
‘Listen, my fine guru,’ I said, ‘I’m a don, I’m in jail, people are trying to keep me here, other people are trying to kill me. You want me to relax? How am I supposed to relax?’
‘You think you have such a hard life.’
‘Don’t start that argument again. Suppose I agree with you, okay, I need to relax. How am I supposed to?’
So she got me to start exercising regularly, and two weeks later we brought yoga into the jail. Advani was quite happy with the idea. He got a story in the Bombay Times, with a full-colour picture and a blurb that described him as the ‘most progressive jailer of our times’. Bunty and my boys were happy because two of the yoga teachers were women, and they got to look at them twist and reach and turn for a full hour. But I hushed their sniggers, and told them to concentrate and do what they were told. I had to trust and hope in yoga because my gaand was on fire. And I tell you, it worked. I felt calm, and relaxed. I relaxed not just in my muscles, but somewhere deep down in my soul. All that breathing in, breathing out, it eased some knot inside me. My piles got better. I
won’t lie to you and tell you that I was completely cured, but I was at least seventy per cent better.
‘See, always listen to me,’ Jojo said when I told her. ‘Seventy per cent is large.’
‘Yes. So I only feel like I’m passing large razor blades some of the time.’
‘Gaitonde, for a hard man you complain a lot. Do you have any idea what it feels like to give birth?’ And then she was off. This was one of her themes: that the world suffered, and in it women suffered the most, and the suffering of women passed unnoticed. ‘Bastard men make suffering the duty of women,’ she said. ‘All those suffering mothers in the films. And women are also chutiyas for believing it.’ Early on in our friendship, I had tried to argue with her. I’d said to her, do you think men don’t suffer? Let me tell you a few stories of men torn up and dying and working all their lives for little pay and food a dog wouldn’t eat. But she always had four stories for every one of mine, and I grew to enjoy listening to her, somewhere in all those woebegone tales there would be little tasty titbits about her. I knew that she grew up in a village, brought up by her mother – there was a sister somewhere, who she never talked to. The father had died early. When she had come to Bombay as a young girl, she had spoken only Tulu and some Konkani, no Hindi or English or anything else. Jojo’s sister’s husband had run off with young Jojo, told her that he would make her a movie star, but after months and months of doing the rounds of producer’s offices, he had prostituted her to one of them. He told her all the girls had to do this, compromise was the price of fame and part of the business, everyone compromised. She had understood this by now, and had done it, but the film had never materialized. Then there had been another producer, and then another. He began to beat her, this boyfriend. She spoke Hindi fluently by now, and some English. So she ran away. The boyfriend found her, beat her. She cracked his jaw with a pestle, so he left her mostly alone after that. But there was the question of making a living. So she struggled, starved, then went back to one of the producers and compromised, and then another. Now she kept their money for herself, and saved. She got into the dancer’s union, and worked in a few movies, as a dancer in the big production numbers. For a while she held on to the dream, that she would some day be an actress, a Mumtaz who worked her way up from the chorus line to a star’s gigantic close-ups. But she wasn’t stupid enough to believe it for long. And she was smart enough to understand both demand and supply: she knew rich men, and she knew young girls who needed a way to survive in the city. So she began her business. But her business wasn’t only sex. She did get some of the girls acting jobs. And she herself, finally, became a producer. With some of her money, and some of mine, that year she started planning the production of a television serial, about two young girls who became friends at school, where one was the rich darling of the teachers, and the other a poor foundling, and these two came together to the city and suffered and suffered. Jojo was very clear about our partnership. ‘Listen, Gaitonde,’ she told me. ‘This is a business deal, nothing more, nothing less. I want all the money in white, by cheque. And no funny business. All I owe you is money, nothing more. You offered first, I didn’t ask.’
‘Achcha, baba,’ I said. ‘You don’t owe me anything else. Business, that’s all.’ She sent me the script of the pilot episode, and I read it. And then never wanted to read one of her scripts again. Bunty was right. As he had said, what man could watch scene after scene of women crying over rubbish and then hugging each other? I told Jojo that I liked it. If this crying was what she wanted to make serials about, if that was what women wanted to watch, let them have it. I knew that despite Jojo’s cheerfulness, her jaunty cursing, there were days when she didn’t get out of bed, when she couldn’t speak to anyone, when the entire world seemed to her a jungle of ash, a cremation ground filled with walking corpses. These black moods took her sometimes, and she lived through them only by promising herself death. That’s what she told me one morning.
‘I tell myself that if it gets too bad, I’ll kill myself. And I have the pills ready. And then I count up the things in life that are good. The pain still hurts, but I know it isn’t endless, because I have the pills. Then I can go through another day. And then another.’
She frightened me. I tried to make her see a priest, or a magician, or a doctor. I had seen shows on television about depression. She told me to mind my own business. ‘Read my serial scripts,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’ll learn something about women, Gaitonde.’
I didn’t read any more, but I did keep talking to her. Right from the start, she refused to come to the jail to see me. ‘The only reason we can talk this way is because we haven’t met, Gaitonde. Don’t you understand that?’ I knew she wasn’t shy of men or of sex. In fact she was quite the opposite, she had men, she chose them and took them. ‘Why should men always be the ones who select and chase and take? I make my own money, I take care of myself, I want my own fun. I’m not ashamed of what I want.’ So she chose men sometimes, and she took them to bed. She told me this after we had become frank friends, and she told it to me with no fear, no shame. When she told me this, a twist of alarmed excitement came up my throat, as if I had just run off the edge of a roof in the dark. ‘That’s, that’s disgusting, Jojo,’ I whispered urgently into the phone. ‘Why?’ she snapped right back. ‘You can chodo those boys of yours in jail because you’re a man and need relief? And that’s not disgusting? But I am? You make me laugh.’ Of course I told her that was different, that she was a woman. And she said, ‘Yes, I’m a woman, and a woman can have ten times as much pleasure as a man. Don’t you know that?’ That was true enough. Everyone knew that. I said, ‘That’s why saali women need to be locked up, randis that they are.’ And she burst out laughing, and said, ‘But, my bhai, you’re locked up and I’m not. I’m free.’ She was free. She took men, and she called them her thokus. She made me laugh with stories about them, about how they cried when she left them, and the size of their parts, and their vanities. And she refused to meet me. ‘Not now,’ she said, ‘and not later. I’m not going to be one of your thokus, and you don’t want to be mine. We’re bhidus, bhidu.’ It was true. We were friends.
In May, TADA lapsed, but I remained in jail. The law was gone for the rest of the citizens, but since I had been charged under it, I still writhed under its heel. My case was still to be adjudicated under its rules, which were no laws but arbitrary edicts. I cursed my lawyers, and threatened to get new ones. Do we live in a dictatorship? I said. Have I no rights as a citizen? What are you, top lawyers or bhangis? Why am I paying you these truckloads of money?
Finally, finally, they got my case before the Bombay High Court and fought a good battle, all the way to a victory. The judge said he would let me out, on the condition that I should not threaten or even attempt to make contact with the government witnesses in the other cases pending against me, and that I was not to leave the city limits, and this, and that. Agreed, I said, agreed to anything and everything, your honour. And suddenly I was out. I was in court one morning, and then it was over, and I was in a car on the highway, on my way home. It was that simple. Suddenly I was sitting in my bedroom, with Subhadra to my left and my son running around the bed. It was stunningly quiet, and the rooms seemed immense, much larger than I remembered them. There were visitors, but Kataruka kept them at bay. He was an old hand at going into jail, and coming out. He insisted that a party and visitors and noise was the wrong thing, appropriate as it may sound. And a quiet evening is what I wanted, true. I ate the dinner that Subhadra served me, I put Abhi to bed. When the door was shut to Kataruka and the others, I reached for Subhadra. She came to me pliantly, and I truly went home.
After she was asleep, I got up, put on a kurta and slid open the door. I went up to the roof, to my old perch by the water tank. The night was hazy, no stars, just a low glow from the scattered lights. I was twenty-seven years old and I was home once again. There was that old smell, oil and burning and refuse, slightly stinging in the nostrils but alive, so full of li
fe. I took it in, and I called Jojo.
She picked up on the first ring. ‘Gaitonde.’
‘I’m out.’
‘I know.’
‘Will you meet me?’
‘No. How is Subhadra?’
‘She’s fine. Don’t talk about her.’
‘Okay. We won’t talk about her.’
‘So you refuse to meet me?’
‘I completely refuse.’
‘I could have you picked up and brought to me.’
‘You could. Will you?’
‘All right, no.’
‘Good. I’ll tell you what, Gaitonde – I’ll send you a girl.’
‘You’ll what?’
‘Don’t act shy with me, Gaitonde. I know what you need. You’ll like this one. High price, but good for you.’
‘You know what I need?’
‘See if I do.’
I did see. The next morning, she sent me the girl. Her name was Suzie, and she said she was eighteen, from Calcutta. She was half Calcutta Chinese and half Brahmin Bengali, and she had long straight black hair, long delicate arms that she crossed and folded when she laughed, and skin like thin white marble. I put her face-down and kissed the back of her neck while I was inside her. She moaned and drove back against me.
Afterwards, from the car, I called Jojo. ‘What did I tell you, Gaitonde?’ she said. ‘Isn’t she something?’
‘Yes, yes, you were right.’
‘In two years she’ll have a show on MTV, you wait.’
‘That may be. But I was thinking of you while I was on top of her.’
‘You are on top of an eighteen-year-old, and you’re thinking of an old woman like me? Gaitonde, you are an idiot, like every other man in the world.’
I had to laugh with her. I had waited for Suzie in a small hotel near Sahar, and now we were on the highway, going home. The traffic was moving fast, and the sun flashed off the roofs of the cars. I was free. ‘I feel good,’ I said to Jojo.
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