The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star

by Vaseem Khan

  Smoke erupted, then cleared… and there, impossibly, was Verma!

  The crowd doubled their screams of delight.

  Chopra blinked. Incredible! How could Verma have got up there in a few seconds, not to mention changed into a new costume?

  He was given no chance to find out as smoke billowed forth again to consume the star. Now the spotlight swung over to the far side of the stadium, again to a spot above the highest bleachers. More smoke… and there was Verma once more, again in a new outfit.

  More bellowing from the crowd.

  Yet more smoke, and Verma vanished for a third time.

  Now the spotlight moved to the rear of the stadium, and the whole act was repeated. This time, when Verma vanished, the spotlight swung all the way back to the stage. Another flurry of smoke whooshed over the dancing girls who remained frozen, awaiting Vicky’s return.

  The crowd roared in anticipation, counting off the seconds with the compere: 3… 2… 1…

  Emptiness.

  For a moment there was a stunned silence, as if a wrong chord had been struck during a familiar piece of music. Everyone had expected Verma to be on the stage when the smoke cleared.

  Yet he was not there.

  The music started up again, and the dance troupe awkwardly began the closing number. But Chopra could tell their movements were off. Clearly, they had been expecting Verma onstage.

  A few minutes in, the compere froze the dancers. Smoke billowed, passing a veil over proceedings; when it cleared, moments later, there was Verma again.

  The crowd released a sigh of relief.

  The dance was completed, and then, without even a goodbye to his loyal followers, Verma vanished backstage. Within moments the security personnel were herding everyone towards the exits.

  It was an abrupt and strange end to proceedings, Chopra thought.

  On the way home something continued to nag away at him. It wasn’t until later that night that he finally realised what it was.

  The Vicky Verma who had reappeared at the very end moved differently. If Chopra had been asked to swear to it he would have said that that Verma wasn’t the one who had begun the concert. But he couldn’t be sure, and no one else seemed to have noticed. Perhaps it was just his old policeman’s instincts making a nuisance of themselves, looking for something that wasn’t there.

  It probably wasn’t worth worrying about.

  THE CASE OF THE MISSING HELMET

  Chopra regarded the tall, thin, bespectacled man in the leather biker’s jacket seated before him.

  It was the morning after the concert and they were sitting in the office at the rear of Poppy’s Bar & Restaurant, the air-conditioner thundering away in the corner.

  Chopra had arrived early.

  He had a number of case files to look through and then a busy afternoon ahead, planning activity on open investigations with his associate private investigator Abbas Rangwalla.

  Rangwalla—once Sub-Inspector Rangwalla—had served for twenty years as Chopra’s second-in-command at the nearby Sahar station. Now he had become an invaluable member of the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency, the second venture that Chopra had embarked upon since retiring. The truth was that the restaurant largely ran itself, left in the capable hands of Chef Lucknowwallah and Chopra’s bilious mother-in-law, Poornima Devi. As a consequence, Chopra found that he had time on his hands, time that he wished to put to good use. He had retired from the police force, but how could one retire the experience and instincts honed over an entire career? The detective agency provided an outlet for his need to put to use those hard-won skills, and his even greater need to pursue justice, a cause ingrained within the folds and hollows of his heart.

  But Chopra’s morning routine had been interrupted by the arrival of an unexpected visitor.

  By day, forty-six-year-old Gerry Fernandes was a stock-market trader, a man who had made millions on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Under normal circumstances, Chopra and Fernandes’ paths would never have crossed—they came from different worlds. But there was one point where their lives did intersect: their passion for motorcycles. Specifically, their passion for one particular motorcycle: the Royal Enfield Bullet.

  Chopra and Fernandes had met at the local chapter of the Bombay Bullet Club, which Chopra had joined despite Poppy’s strenuous objections. His wife made no secret of her disapproval of his penchant for tearing up the streets on the back of the 500cc beast. Chopra was new to the club but Fernandes was an old hand, having served as ride captain on many an outing of the Bisons, as the group styled themselves.

  But today Fernandes was not here to discuss motorbikes. A shadow lay over his gaunt features. In the leather jacket emblazoned with the Bisons logo he looked like an accountant who had wandered into a costume shop and inadvertently walked out in the wrong outfit.

  “I’ve come to settle our account, Chopra,” said Fernandes, reaching inside his jacket for his chequebook. “How much do I owe you?”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” said Chopra. “We are friends.”

  “Business is business,” said Fernandes primly. “Everything in its place.”

  Chopra shifted in his chair. He knew that Fernandes was a very particular fellow, meticulous about money and notoriously ruthless in his business dealings. As a consequence, he had a very narrow circle of friends, and many detractors. It was only in the Bullet Club that Fernandes was able to relax his guard. Chopra had seen a side of the man that few had glimpsed. His careworn appearance belied his spirited demeanour when out on the open road.

  Two weeks ago Fernandes had approached him for help.

  It appeared that Fernandes’ father, a retired civil servant, had misplaced a valuable family heirloom. The fact that the “heirloom” was a motorcycle helmet was neither here nor there. The leather helmet—complete with goggles—had belonged to the legendary motorcyclist Erwin “Cannon Ball” Baker, who had worn it during his record-breaking transcontinental ride across America in 1914. Fernandes, who idolised Baker, had purchased the helmet at an auction in California. Not long afterwards, his father had smashed the display case in which the items had been housed, donned the ensemble, and departed for a joyride on Fernandes’ beloved Bullet.

  He had been discovered some hours later in a roadside ditch on the outskirts of the city, naked, incoherent, and with a small goat strapped to the back of the bike.

  Of the prized helmet there was no sign.

  Fernandes had been beside himself at the loss of his Baker memorabilia. In desperation, he had turned to Chopra for help.

  Having interviewed the senile paterfamilias, Chopra had asked an acquaintance specialising in hypnotherapy to examine him.

  The results had been impressive.

  Under hypnosis, Fernandes Senior not only led them to the lost helmet, but also on a tour of half-a-dozen previous lives, ranging from a junior miniaturist at the court of Emperor Jahangir to a famine-stricken farmer who had walked beside Gandhi on his legendary Salt March.

  These revelations had greatly perturbed the Fernandes household. Three maids had already quit, and the headman was walking around on eggshells lest he be once again belt-whipped by the old man while in the throes of his incarnation as prison-master of Calcutta’s Fort William dungeon, known to history as the Black Hole.

  Perhaps this explained Fernandes’ haggard appearance, Chopra thought, as his friend tore off a cheque and held it out.

  “If I take that cheque,” said Chopra, “we are no longer friends. You needed help; I did what I could. That’s what friends do.”

  Fernandes stared at him, then tucked the cheque back in his pocket. “Thank you,” he said with genuine emotion.

  After Fernandes had left, Chopra considered how lonely the pedestal of wealth and power could be. He had met many privileged individuals in his life and so often their lives were shadowed by unhappiness, contrary to the belief of the average man on the street. Sometimes this misery was self-inflicted, but at other times it was simply the toll th
at fate demanded.

  The noise of the television broke into his thoughts.

  It was a news item on last night’s concert. It appeared Vicky Verma had overexerted himself and was now confined to his south Mumbai home with a mysterious illness. This revelation was causing great consternation among his fans, as well as the Bollywood fraternity.

  Chopra next spent an hour with Rangwalla going over the caseload.

  Rangwalla’s arrival at the agency had been fortuitous. Chopra had been steadily drowning beneath the mountain of work that had deluged the agency since its very public first case, which had exposed a major human trafficking ring in the city. Rangwalla—employing the street smarts that had made him so able a policeman—had immediately helped whittle down the load.

  As they were winding up their meeting, Chopra’s phone rang; glancing at the number, he saw that it was unlisted.

  “Am I speaking to Chopra?” said a cultured, if somewhat dry, voice. “Proprietor of the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency?”

  “Yes,” said Chopra.

  “The same Chopra who recently assisted in the reacquisition of the Koh-i-noor?”

  Chopra was taken aback. “How do you know about that?”

  The details of his involvement in the return of the Koh-i-noor diamond—which had been stolen during a recent exhibition of the Crown Jewels in Mumbai—had been kept out of the public realm. Only a handful of people knew that he had been instrumental in tracking down the jewel.

  “That is irrelevant,” said the voice curtly. “I have been instructed by my client to request your attendance at her residence in Malabar Hill. It is a matter of the utmost urgency.”

  “What matter? What client?”

  “I am afraid I am not at liberty to discuss further details.”

  “You can’t expect me to drop everything and come running down to south Mumbai just on your say-so.”

  The voice paused. “Very well. My client is Bijli Verma, former film actress, and mother of noted actor Vikram Verma.”

  THE LIGHTNING BOLT OF MALABAR HILL

  The gilded Antakshari Tower had looked down from its precipitous eighteen-storey elevation atop Malabar Hill for the better part of five decades. Centuries earlier, Keralan pirates from the subcontinent’s deep south had surveyed the fledgling city from these once-forested heights, planning pillage and plunder. Now the tower’s lofty perspective provided expansive views over the nearby promenade of the Back Bay, the Hanging Gardens on the hill’s western flank, and the ancient Banganga water tank, which legend said had sprung from the earth where Lord Ram’s brother Laxman had fired an arrow into the ground. In the mid-nineteenth century the hill had been colonised by Mumbai’s British overlords, after the demolition of their redoubt within Bombay Fort.

  Now Malabar Hill was the city’s most exclusive address, commanding real-estate prices that rivalled any metropolis on earth, home to business tsars, Bollywood superstars, and political VVIPs. The state’s Chief Minister kept a bungalow there, as did the Governor. In the turbulent days before Partition the future Prime Minister of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah lived there in his sprawling bungalow South Court, plotting—with Gandhi and Nehru—the subcontinent’s shimmering future.

  As Chopra made the long drive down to south Mumbai he noted once again that Malabar Hill was not on the road to anywhere. One did not accidentally pass it on the way to somewhere else. To go to Malabar Hill, one must be invited.Perhaps this was what made it so exclusive.

  In the rear of the converted Tata Venture van, Ganesha peered out from the windows.

  Over the past months Chopra had discovered that his young ward enjoyed accompanying him on his travels around the city. In all good conscience, Chopra could not keep the little elephant cooped up interminably in the rear courtyard of the restaurant: as well as needing the exercise, Ganesha had shown that he had an adventurous streak. His naturally inquisitive nature had made him an able companion for Chopra, who could rely on the young calf to keep a vigilant watch on the suspect of the day. The arrangement had worked remarkably well and Chopra had all but stopped dwelling on just how strange it might seem that Ganesha was his “partner” in his new life as a private detective.

  This was India, after all, where the impossible became merely improbable.

  Antakshari Tower was set within its own walled compound fronted by a bunker-like guardhouse and a row of parking bays. Unlike Bahadur, the scrawny and often forgetful guard who patrolled Chopra’s residential complex back in Andheri East, the trio of guards who sprang from Antakshari’s guardhouse were well built and smartly uniformed.

  The guards rang into the tower and presently a tall vulpine man in a grey suit and tie materialised at the gate. To Chopra he resembled one of the many gargoyles adorning the Victorian-era buildings that were part and parcel of Mumbai’s British legacy. His grey hair was swept back into a prominent widow’s peak, his face was that of an ascetic, and rimless spectacles were perched uncomfortably on the end of an arrogant nose.

  In spite of the day’s oppressive heat he radiated a noticeable chill.

  “Chopra, I presume? My name is Lal. Please come with me.”

  Chopra recognised the voice from the telephone. “One second,” he said.

  He walked back to his van, opened the rear doors, and waited for Ganesha to trot down the ramp. “I won’t be long,” he said, patting the little elephant on the head.

  In spite of Poppy’s belief that he did not share her passion for Bollywood, the truth was that Chopra enjoyed a good movie as much as the next Mumbaiker. You could not spend thirty years in the city of dreams and remain uninfected by Mumbai’s virulent filmalaria. It was simply that Chopra considered himself an aficionado of the “Golden Age” of Bollywood, generally considered to have begun in the late forties—encompassing enduring classics such as Mother India and Aan, or Pride—and peaking soon after the release of the towering Mughal-e-Azam, The Grand Mughal, in 1960.

  Chopra also harboured a soft spot for movies from the seventies, particularly action flicks featuring his screen idol Amitabh Bachchan, who had reigned supreme at the time as India’s “angry young man.”

  It was during this latter era that Bijli Verma—then Nandita Goyal—had burst on to the scene.

  Exuding a raucous sex appeal, Bijli hit the industry like a one-woman earthquake. In the no-kissing world of seventies Indian cinema, she became the perennial other woman, the wet sari queen, the monsoon goddess dancing voluptuously against an alpine background as all around her the world fell apart. Volatile, raunchy, and excessive in personality, she singlehandedly turned the traditional Bollywood leading lady trope on its head. Bijli refused to play the demure, long-suffering foil to her leading men. Instead, she ad-libbed wild-eyed soliloquys, and would launch, without warning, into verbal assaults on her open-mouthed male co-stars.

  Chopra recalled how shocked veteran critics of the time had roundly decried Bijli’s antics. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Bijli had developed a cult following among younger movie-goers—including a smitten Chopra—a cult that ultimately grew into superstardom. Continuously at odds with the censors, her co-stars, and, seemingly, herself, her personal and professional life became the subject of salacious gossip, a grist to Mumbai’s insatiable rumour mill.

  Her birth name was soon forgotten as she was rechristened Bijli, “the lightning bolt.”

  The name appealed to her sense of self and stuck.

  Bijli reigned supreme as Bollywood’s number-one heroine for over a decade before marrying film producer Jignesh Verma. As with so many actresses in the industry, marriage and motherhood banked the fires of ambition, and soon Bijli Verma faded from the silver screen.

  Though not quite from public life.

  The former siren transformed herself into a socialite of the first order. The old fiery persona, too, had not altogether vanished, occasionally sparking a round of furious tabloid stories that Mumbai’s first lady herself studiously ignored.

  Chopra recal
led some of those stories: Bijli publicly castigating the Chairman of the Indian Central Board of Film Certification for his “medieval approach to censorship”; Bijli pouring a glass of champagne over the head of veteran thesp Raj “Gunga” Ganesham after he had criticised her son’s debut performance; Bijli denouncing religious demagogues following the burning of the Taj Palace hotel by terrorists in 2008.

  This latter very public airing of her views had attracted considerable unwanted attention: she had been threatened by known right-wing organisations, though, ultimately, nothing had come of those threats.

  In recent years the former starlet’s energies had been consumed by her only child, Vikram “Vicky” Verma, who had been launched with considerable fanfare into the Bollywood machine. As far as Chopra could make out, the young man had proved his mother’s son, garnering a great deal of media coverage for his wild ways.

  The elevator slid smoothly to a halt and disgorged them into a marbled antechamber on the topmost floor of the tower, hung with paintings of the Arabian Sea, dhows sailing into a red sunset.

  Lal stalked past a turbaned doorman and marched stiffly into the apartment.

  Chopra followed.

  He was not sure what he had expected—a glamorous dusting of tinsel, perhaps, as befitted the home of a legendary Bollywood seductress—but what he was confronted with was a seemingly ordinary, if unusually spacious, apartment. Yes, the furnishings were exquisite: expensive leather sofas, twin sitars flanking a high-backed divan with Rajasthani bolsters, a sunken bar, an antique pianola, but there was nothing here that Chopra would not have expected to find in any wealthy Mumbaiker’s home.

  And then he took a second look.

  On the walls, ensconced in various strategically placed niches, were framed posters of each of Bijli Verma’s many films. Accompanying the posters were display cases housing memorabilia from those same movies, Bijli Verma’s shrines to herself.