Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘It’s a dangerous business, this shooting,’ I said.

  ‘And tiring. And so slow, so very long, bhai,’ Zoya said. ‘I feel like I’ve been doing this film for ever. But it’s been a lot of fun. There are such specimens on that set.’

  Then she got up and imitated Dheeraj Kapur exhorting the cinematographer to go faster with his lighting, ‘Please, sir, already we are thirty-four per cent over budget, and thirty days over.’ She had him exactly, his paunchy walk and his Punjabi heartiness, his delicate way of holding a cigarette with his middle finger and thumb, and even the shortness of his upper lip, which gave him the look of a mildly ferocious dog. She came alive when she was acting, my Zoya. When she was Dheeraj Kapur, there was none of that distance that usually separated Zoya Mirza from the outside world and those of us who lived in it. She was not deep behind the black shine of her eyes, unreachable. She was there, in the downy surfaces of her forearms, in the large, ambling gait of the producer. Her life sparkled and sparked, here, here, for me. I laughed and pulled her down into my lap, until she got up to do someone else. She could do a perfect Manu Tewari. She made me see his square, communistic beard, the way he fingered it when he was trying to appear impressively thoughtful. I don’t know quite how, but she made me feel his labouring seriousness, his hair-dissecting scalpel of a mind, his eager belief in fairy tales about the future. I suppose that is what a great actress should do. She made you want to believe, and so you did.

  When I finally took her to bed, I had no doubt. I was whole. In our talking, and the laughter that had passed between us, I found my strength again. I went into her four times that day, and she came into me. I did not distrust her pleasure, or mine. It was all one. And my penis was heroic. I did not point out my growth to her, there was no need. Her moans as she took her satisfaction were all the proof I needed.

  International Dhamaka flopped. After all that publicity, after all the money pumped into MTV song clips and gigantic six-sheeter hoardings and Dhamaka lunch boxes in bright red plastic, nobody came to see it. On the first day itself, collections were sixty per cent in Bombay, and lower outside. The critics were cruel to the film, but we had half-expected that, and nobody in the film industry really cared what the critics had to say, if the people came. If the public paid for tickets. But, by the middle of the second week, ticket sales were lower than forty per cent nationwide. The foreign markets, where we had expected the film to be a full-speed hit, treated us only slightly better. The maderchod NRIs didn’t come either. I was on the phone to Dheeraj Kapoor day and night, we put up new hoardings in the metros, we increased the frequency of the TV spots, with added titles that invited the public to see ‘Superhit International Dhamaka’. We told them to be part of the magic. We tempted them to see the world.

  But the gaandus wouldn’t come. We cut seven scenes, edited down fourteen others and shot a new song, with not one or two but three top models wearing hardly more than fluorescent bikinis and some gauze. We had this item song in the cinemas in Bombay and Delhi in a record thirteen days, but still the bastard public wouldn’t come. By the end of the third week, the trade papers fearlessly and unanimously listed International Dhamaka as a flop. I couldn’t deny this. It was a flop.

  Until now Dheeraj Kapoor had counselled patience, faith, stamina. He had told me stories of how G.P. Sippy had kept Sholay in the cinemas for a month, while the industry mocked him, while he lost money. Finally, word of mouth about Gabbar Singh had made the difference, and the audience had packed into the cinemas, and kept Sholay showing for five continuous and enormously profitable years. But now, even Dheeraj Kapoor admitted that International Dhamaka was a flop. It was his film as much as mine, but in that fourth week he let it go. ‘No more, bhai,’ he said to me on the phone late one night. ‘You’ve spent too much already. We have to accept. We have to adjust.’

  So I let it pass out of the cinemas. I had to confront the truth: International Dhamaka was a flop. I couldn’t put a pistol to the audience’s head and make them sit in the cinemas, so International Dhamaka was a flop. But it was a good film. I had seen it so often that I think I could hardly see what was on the screen any more, I was so sunk in the details of framing and sound and pacing. Now I watched it again. Yes, it was a good film. You couldn’t doubt that. It had action, love, patriotism and unforgettable songs. It was beautiful and perfect. So why had it been rejected? Why was the public flocking in to see Tera Mera Pyaar, which was a nonsensical, badly shot little piece of romantic boy-loses-girl-and-cries-and-cries rubbish, made with three crores and unknown actors? ‘We can’t know,’ Dheeraj Kapoor said. ‘You can’t ever know, bhai. The audience is a bastard. Every chutiya in the industry will now give you thirty-six reasons our film didn’t work, but during the preview shows they all loved it. All the analyses after a film is released are useless. You can’t tell the future. And you can’t really tell the past. We can’t know.’

  I wanted to know, I had to know. I asked Guru-ji. He was in South Africa at the time, giving a series of lectures, but he made time to call me. He knew I was in trouble, he knew how sad and helpless I was. He understood that I had never been this helpless, so he took care of me. He was more than a father, he was motherly. I knew he had been unable to see into the future of this film, but I asked him to look into its past. ‘It had everything, Guru-ji,’ I said to him. ‘It had every element that a viewer looks for. So why didn’t it work?’

  ‘You want a reason?’

  ‘Yes, I want a reason, Guru-ji.’

  ‘That is the trouble, that you want one reason.’

  ‘But, Guru-ji, you are the one who keeps telling me that the world is not chaos. You gave a lecture yesterday to seven thousand people about the cycles of time, and how we are moving steadily towards a new age.’

  ‘I said that?’

  He had that roomy grin on, I could tell, that flash in his eye that just ate up your confusion. ‘Yes, you said that. I read your lecture on the website. You said that what we do has a purpose.’

  ‘I did say that, beta. The fault is in your question. When you ask for a reason.’

  I stopped, I thought. I still couldn’t grasp what he was moving me towards. ‘I don’t understand, Guru-ji. Please tell me.’

  ‘You ask for a reason, for one reason. But there are hundreds of reasons, thousands of them. There is not only one immediate cause. There are many. All these reasons meet each other and cross each other, and flow forward in the service of the grand purpose. And you stand at the place of the crossing of these thousands of reasons, and ask for one.’

  ‘So maybe the reason was not in the film at all.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe the time needed something else. Maybe the flow was moving in a certain direction when your film released.’

  ‘Was it? Was it?’ My mind was too small to see this intermingling of velocities, to encompass all of it without rupturing like a bulging paper bag. But he was Guru-ji, and I needed this from him. He could see all of it, and I wanted him to give me some faith in this flow I was being tossed by. ‘Please, Guru-ji. Tell me.’

  ‘Yes, Ganesh,’ he said. ‘There were many reasons which had nothing to do with the film itself. You told the truth, but right now the public is comforting itself with young love. They will wake up to your truth, but not now. And, Ganesh, why do you worry only about reasons? There are many purposes. Attracting an audience into the cinemas and making money exist as purposes only in the immediate sense. Your film will find its dharma in the long future, in the net of consequences that grow from its release. You have succeeded, you just don’t know it yet.’

  I could see the web of action and purpose and effect that he was talking about, or at least a pale ghost of it. He was Guru-ji, he could see this vast story that was so much larger than my story, he had gone beyond the limitations that I had, that Manu Tewari wrote within. We believed that a hero saw his goal in the first act, and his enemies, and so his quest went in a lovely arcing line towards the climax, and towards his victory. We believ
ed that because this hero was fearless and strong, he would gain his prize in the eighteenth reel. But I saw now that we were not to know our causes, or our effects. Only the enlightened ones knew what that story was. Only Guru-ji could shatter the prison of time, and look directly into the blazing confusion of creation. ‘Guru-ji, it is good of you to tell me that,’ I said. ‘I thought I had been defeated.’

  ‘You are not defeated,’ he said. ‘Have faith, and do your work.’

  I tried. I kept up with my meditation, and my exercises, and I buried myself in work, of which there was plenty. I ran three operations for Kulkarni, and of course found ways to sweep up a few of my own personal enemies in the minor bloodletting these entailed. That was pleasing. But I was distracted. I had discipline enough to keep to my routine, but I found no joy in it. Zoya, on the other hand, called me every other day with exuberant tales of her acting triumphs on various sets. She had signed six films with top banners, three of them after International Dhamaka had been released and declared a flop. Of all of us, she was the only one who emerged from this disaster unscathed. In fact, she was stronger, she was more beautiful than ever, and she was on television every half-hour. The industry and the public had somehow decided that she wasn’t responsible for the soggy Dhamaka of our film, and so she thrived. Meanwhile, my half-inch gain had withered down to a quarter, and even that slight advantage depended on how I held the ruler against my lauda. Sometimes, very late at night, I caught myself thinking that I had somehow deceived myself earlier into believing that I had grown, that Dr Reinnes had helped me with his science. And then the white chasm of despair beckoned temptingly. But no, I persevered. I remembered Guru-ji and I went on. And yet, I was despondent. Sometimes I woke up early in the morning and opened a certain black file and went through our reviews. The Hindi and Gujarati papers had been the most enthusiastic about International Dhamaka, and the Punjabi magazines only slightly less so. The Dainik Samachar had loved the music, and said that ‘Zoya’s debut is the most promising in years’. But without a single exception, the English newspapers and magazines had been unkind to us. Times of India, Indian Express, Outlook, bastards all. I had kept the bad reviews as well, and was sometimes compelled to read them, even the snobbish English ones. ‘International Dhamaka is too loud, too long and too witless to make much of a dhamaka,’ said the critic for India Today. Kutiya, randi. ‘All the international stunts and empty patriotism add up to boredom.’ That was Outlook. Bastards.

  There was one who worried me like a burrowing insect under my skin, like a speck of coal in my blood-ridden eye. His name was Ranjan Chatterjee, and he wrote for The National Observer, had written weekly film reviews for thirty-two years. He was always described in the magazines as ‘veteran movie critic Ranjan Chatterjee’, and he poured out his accumulated frustration and rage on us. ‘One falters in the face of such arrogant carelessness,’ he wrote. ‘One quails.’ I had to get Manu Tewari to explain who this ‘one’ was, and why Ranjan Chatterjee was writing about this disembodied number. ‘Forget that maderchod, bhai,’ Manu Tewari told me. ‘He’s a bitter old budhau, nobody reads him any more.’

  I did, though. I read him through to the end, and then read him again, months later. And then again. ‘International Dhamaka strains one’s credulity even more than the usual Bollywood film,’ he wrote. ‘It is a string of tired film clichés strung together. These bhais live in unreal gilded luxury and fly around the world as if they are catching the morning train to Nashik. They are more slick than James Bond, and more suave than Casanova. One has long since given up hope that the commercial cinema would be concerned with realism. But the superficially glossy International Dhamaka makes one wonder if the filmmakers have ever met a real gangster.’

  I caught myself thinking about this Ranjan Chatterjee during meetings, and in the mornings, I shook out of a fragile sleep with his ‘one’ rattling in my head. I had to do something about him. So I gave my instructions. The wrinkled old chutiya lived in Bandra East, in a block of flats that the government had built for journalists and writers. The very evening I gave my orders – it was a Friday – Ranjan Chatterjee was coming home from a first-day first show, with dinner afterwards paid for by the producers, who hoped to mollify him. He was walking fast, up from the garage towards the lift. The bastard was no doubt eager to get to his flat and put together a poisonous little garland of insults for the film he had just seen, to slap the entire crew of a hundred and fifty people with his abuse on Sunday morning. He had that spring in his step, the codger. But he never made it to his typewriter: Bunty and four of his boys were waiting at the corner of the building. They put a hand under each of Ranjan Chatterjee’s arms and carried him to the back of the compound. He was making little squealing noises. They stood him up against the wall, and then they broke both of his legs. They wielded those bars that road workers use to pry up chunks of cement. When the first crisp tap landed on his right thigh, Ranjan Chatterjee shook to the ground and began to scream. The windows up the side of the building lit up, and the chowkidars came running around the corner, and stopped short as soon as they saw a drawn pistol. After his other leg took a blow, Ranjan Chatterjee screamed some more, screamed enough to wake up the entire housing society. Bunty waited for him to stop.

  He settled finally into a slobbery wet sobbing, and Bunty slapped him lightly on the cheek. ‘Hello,’ Bunty said. ‘Arre, listen to me. Listen.’

  Ranjan Chatterjee raised his head and began vomiting. Bunty flinched away in disgust, and then reached down and grabbed a handful of hair and raised up the bastard’s head. ‘Does it hurt?’ Bunty said. ‘Tell me, does it hurt?’

  Ranjan Chatterjee blinked his watery, wide-open eyes, and finally he was able to find Bunty. He began to wail, to make a small sound like a lonely kitten. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Ah, ah, ah. Yes, it hurts.’

  ‘Good,’ Bunty said. ‘Then you know this is real. And that you have met a real bhai.’

  He slammed Ranjan Chatterjee’s head down, and walked away. He and the boys got into their waiting car, and away they went, no trouble, no fuss. In the car they all sang the theme song from International Dhamaka: ‘Rehne do, yaaron, main door ja raha hoon.’ I know all this because one of the boys had been shooting it all, taping it on a little Canon digital camera with an attached spotlight. Even in that one harsh light, the detail that Canon caught was amazing, and the resolution was like nothing I had seen before on video. I could see the snot sliding out of Ranjan Chatterjee’s nostrils, and his tiny little pupils. They brought the tape to me the next afternoon, it was hand-delivered to Bangkok and on to Phuket. I watched it fourteen times that first evening, and then I took a Chinese girl, and that night I slept deep, long and hard. I was relaxed, I had expelled Ranjan Chatterjee from my system. Yes, maybe life had a higher order that only the enlightened ones could see. Maybe the stories that we ordinary mortals told were only small lies, convenient explanations for what we couldn’t understand. But still, breaking Ranjan Chatterjee’s legs gave me what Manu Tewari would have called ‘closure’. I had done it, and I felt better, the story was complete. I was finally free of International Dhamaka, and I could get on with my life.

  I sank into my sleep like a deep-sea diver seeking calm water under a storm. Every night, I slept long at night, and I woke up and then I slept again. Three months had passed, and I had settled back into my routine of exercise and work. I made money, I discussed intelligence and tactics with Kulkarni, I talked to Guru-ji and Jojo, I flew to Singapore twice to meet Zoya. I also slept a lot. I found that I needed nine hours at night, instead of my usual six, and also I took naps during the day. I curled up on sofas, and retreated to my bedroom after lunch. Once, in the middle of a web-surfing session, I even lay myself down under the desk for a quick quarter-hour doze. I just needed to sleep.

  Jojo said I was depressed, and Guru-ji said I was just exhausted from the added strain and stress of a year and a half of filmmaking. Whether it was despair or anxiety or something else altogether, I slept.
That evening in September, I had fallen asleep on deck, in the armchair that was placed in the bow of the boat for me. We were anchored off Ko Samui. I was reading some spreadsheets, and then I was asleep. In my sleep I knew I was sleeping. I knew I was on the Lucky Chance, that I was floating on quiet water, that the sky was vanishing away from me into the dark. I was asleep but not restful in my sleep. I wanted rest but I could not find it.

  Then Arvind was patting me awake. ‘Bhai,’ he said. ‘Come. You’ve got to see this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘On television, bhai. It’s amazing.’

  ‘Gaandu, you’re waking me up to watch a television show? How late is it?’

  He was already half-way down the stern, and this was Arvind the ever-respectful. There must be something truly astonishing on television, I thought. ‘A few minutes till eight o’clock, bhai,’ he said, and hurried towards the door to the main cabin. I shoved myself up and followed, dizzy and reeling, through a dislocation of time. I felt unhinged from the day and night. The evening was unreal to me, even though I could feel the wood under my passing hand.

  On the television, a building was burning. There was a city skyline, and a building was burning. I sat down. ‘What’s this?’ I said.

  ‘New York, bhai,’ Arvind said. He was perched on the edge of a chair, crouched forward. The others were crowded into the room. A Thai voice spoke excitedly over the images.

  ‘A film?’

  ‘No, bhai. It’s real. A plane flew into the building.’

  It looked like a film, I thought. One of those big American disaster-and-adventure-and-terrorism movies. ‘An accident?’ I asked. Arvind didn’t know, he raised his hands. ‘Get to an English channel,’ I said. My blood was humming.