The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star

by Vaseem Khan

  The woman stirred to life, opening eyes encrusted with dirt and mucus. She blinked at the boys, but said nothing.

  “What are you doing here, eh?” asked the tall boy.

  “Wait! We should just leave her be,” protested a slim boy carrying a satchel. “My dad said we should be kind to poor people.”

  “Balls to your dad!” exploded the tall boy. “And balls to poor people. They just clutter up the place, making the whole area look like a tip. What are they good for, anyway? Begging and stealing, that’s what.” He turned back to the Mad Woman. “We don’t want you around here. Go on, get out.”

  He punctuated his order by jabbing her again with the stick.

  Without warning, her hand whipped out from beneath the rags, wrenched the stick from him, and flung it back. It clattered off the boy’s shins with a satisfying crack, and he collapsed to the ground with a yelp of pain.

  “Rahul!” cried his friends, racing to his aid.

  The boy staggered to his feet, vigorously rubbing his shins. “You saw her,” he ground out, “she attacked me. She’s insane.” He looked around, and picked up a rock.

  “Rahul, wait!” said the slim boy in alarm. “Let’s just leave her here. She isn’t harming anyone.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Rahul, and flung the rock. It struck the woman on the side of her skull. She cried out, her hand rising to her head.

  “Oh!” gasped the pudgy boy, as if astonished that his friend had actually thrown the missile.

  Rahul grinned, and bent down for another. “I’ll show you, you old witch.”

  “Stop it!”

  The trio looked around to see Irfan and Ganesha standing before them.

  “Who the hell are you?” said Rahul, frowning, rock clutched in his hand.

  “You’d better not throw that,” warned Irfan.

  “Or what, pipsqueak?” glared Rahul.

  “You’ll be sorry.”

  “I think it’s you who’ll be sorry,” the boy threatened, raising the rock.

  Ganesha charged.

  Rahul’s eyes widened in astonishment. He threw the rock but it bounced harmlessly off Ganesha’s hide as he steamed into the boy, knocking him backwards into the rubbish mound. His companions took one look and fled.

  Eventually, Rahul extricated himself from the rubbish tip.

  Gunk clung to him. Rotten mango pulp made his face glisten. At least, Irfan hoped it was mango pulp. The alternatives did not bear thinking about.

  Rahul glared at the boy and the little elephant. “I’ve seen you around,” he growled. “I’ll see you again, one day.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” said Irfan.

  They watched as Rahul limped around the corner.

  Irfan turned and looked at the Mad Woman.

  Her eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead. Blood trickled from the wound on her skull, snaking down towards her chin, but she appeared not to notice. He realised that she no longer looked frightening. Just a sad old woman down on her luck. Irfan had slept on the streets himself, had known poverty and the pain of constant hunger, and the greater, more poignant pain of an irredeemably bleak future. He had suffered, and in that suffering had been tempered. But there had been times when he had prayed for help, prayed for a single ray of light in the darkness. His prayers had been answered in the shape of Chopra and Poppy, two good people whose kindness had shone in the empty desert of his former life.

  He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and moved cautiously forward. “I’m going to wipe off the blood,” he said.

  Her eyes stared ahead.

  Taking this as a sign of assent, he dabbed away at her skull as Ganesha looked on with concern in his dewy eyes. “There,” he said finally. “Good as new.”

  The woman had still not looked at him.

  “My name is Irfan. This is Ganesha. He’s an elephant. We live in Poppy’s Restaurant. It’s not far from here. If you want I can get you something to eat.”

  No answer.

  “Why do you sit here all day? Next to the latrine? Isn’t there somewhere else for you to go? Anywhere is better than here, surely.”

  Silence.

  “Those boys might come back. If I were you, I would find somewhere else to sit.”

  Nothing.

  “Well, we must leave now,” said Irfan. He looked thoughtfully at the woman. “You know, a friend of mine told me that when people go into themselves they are searching for something. I hope you find whatever it is you are looking for.”

  Finally, her head moved.

  Her eyes wandered around his face, not settling, then she raised a hand and searched the air.

  That was when Irfan realised that the Mad Woman was blind.

  The realisation shook him, and he felt indescribably sad that he had thought of her as a crazy old witch. It taught him once again that one must never be too quick to judge.

  He lowered his face and felt the woman’s coarse fingers move over him. Then her hand dropped back to her lap. Suddenly, Ganesha moved forward. He raised his trunk and gently brushed the woman’s face.

  She sat still as he examined her.

  When he had finished, tears glistened on her cheeks.

  “Why are you crying?” asked Irfan. “He was just being friendly.”

  The woman said nothing, weeping silently, head bowed.

  Finally, she hitched her shoulders.

  “My name is Usha,” she said. “Once upon a time I used to be a teacher.”

  Chopra pulled the Tata Venture into the deserted car park of the Goldspot Cinema and checked his watch. He knew that Poppy would be annoyed, but there was one last errand he had to run before he could return home and sit down to dinner with the Malhotras.

  He swung himself out of the van’s front seat and stood staring up at the dilapidated façade of the cinema, a burst of nostalgia warming his heart.

  The Goldspot had been a fixture of his youth. As a bachelor he had been inspired by his first action-packed Bachchan blockbusters here; later, as a married man, he and Poppy had come to the cinema—with its sooty exterior and tatty Rexine seats, its cracked plaster mouldings and velvet curtains, its odour of incense and bubblegum—to watch the screen come alive with the greatest romances of the age, Poppy squeezing his hand, held shyly in the dark… It had been their special place, and it pained him to see it humbled, brought low by the multiplexes that had spread like wildfire around the city. He knew that the Goldspot was locked in a long-standing dispute with the local authorities who wished to demolish it and raise a shopping centre on the site. But the owner, seventy-year-old Cyrus Dinshaw, had dug in his heels and refused to sell.

  Chopra strolled past the ticket clerk asleep in his booth, and made his way into the darkened interior.

  A black-and-white movie was showing: the Dev Anand classic Guide. Spidery lines jumped across the screen; the picture jerked fitfully between the moth-eaten curtains like a man caught in a nightmare.

  Chopra made his way up a flight of narrow wooden steps, lined with old movie playbills from the sixties and seventies, to the projection room, where he found his friend Cyrus Dinshaw examining a section of old film stock under a magnifying glass. Beside him the ancient Leica two-reel projector whirred and clacked like a steam train.

  Cyrus had steadfastly refused to bow to the new gods of digital technology, another reason his customer base had steadily dwindled. It was also the reason Chopra continued to frequent the cinema—he and Cyrus agreed on this at least.

  “Take a look at this, Chopra,” grunted Cyrus without looking up.

  Chopra bent over the old man’s shoulder, looking past his balding dome to the strip of 35mm film, a series of black-and-white negatives of a scene involving two actresses that he recognised, screen legends both.

  “Cellulose nitrate,” continued Cyrus. “They stopped making this back in the fifties. The stock had a tendency to catch fire and explode. Very temperamental stuff, cellulose. I got this batch from an old collector. He died a
couple of weeks ago and his wife wanted to clear out the junk. Junk! Hah!” He raised a hoary head and fixed Chopra with a bayonet glare. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  Chopra dragged over a wooden chair and sat before Cyrus, watching him work.

  The old man was a rabid collector of knowledge about the movie industry. It was from Cyrus that he’d first learned how the Russians utterly adored the great Raj Kapoor. It was from Cyrus that he’d learned that kissing had been done away with in Indian cinema as part of the freedom struggle, a protest against the spread of British values. It was from Cyrus that he’d learned that the incomparable writing duo of Salim–Javed, despairing of the lack of recognition for scriptwriters in Bollywood, had once gone out in a rickshaw with a pot of red paint and painted their names on all the posters for their latest film. “Of course, the rumour mill said they loathed each other. They used to salt each other’s tea, and fight tooth and nail over every line they wrote.” He seemed to know every snippet of gossip going; given that he appeared never to leave the projection room of his beloved theatre, Chopra surmised he must be straining such information from the very air.

  “I’m on a case—” Chopra began.

  “How’s that elephant of yours?” interrupted Cyrus. “Discerning little fellow, as I recall.”

  The last time Chopra had ventured to the Goldspot, Ganesha had accompanied him, and won Cyrus over by sitting glaze-eyed through the entire length of the old maverick’s Guru Dutt collection.

  The movie bug had bitten Ganesha deeply, to Chopra’s mild annoyance.

  “Still in love with the silver screen,” said Chopra. “Which, as a matter of fact, is the reason I am here.”

  Quickly, he explained the case that he was investigating. He knew that Cyrus could be trusted to be discreet—who would he tell, anyway? The old widower had almost no friends and rarely left his beloved cinema. “I need to know more about P. K. Das. What can you tell me?”

  Cyrus leaned back in his chair. “One of our foremost producers—he’s made some of the most successful films of the past forty years. He built Himalayan Studios up from nothing to one of the biggest production houses in the country. He’s won just about every award imaginable. As far as anyone is aware he is a shining light of our cultural heritage, a grand old patron of the arts, an all-round good egg… Pah!”

  “Pah?”

  “It’s the movie business, Chopra. Nothing is quite what it seems. There have been rumours for decades. Das is a notoriously ruthless character. He rules his productions with an iron fist and has been known to sink careers without a trace, to resort to blackmail and intimidation, anything to get his way. Over the years this has made him many enemies. But you know what they say: who needs friends when you have success? And Das has had a great deal of success. Frankly, just two short years ago, he was standing on top of the mountain. He had nothing left to prove and could happily have sailed off into retirement, rich and feted till his dying day.”

  “But something happened.”

  “The Mote in the Third Eye of Shiva happened. This movie has been Das’s white whale for two decades. He could never get it off the ground because of the vast expense involved. It was only after the unprecedented success of his past three movies that he was able to get enough backers on board.” Cyrus scratched his chin. “Das has sunk everything into this project. His studio is mortgaged up to the hilt. He’s borrowed from every bank in the city. And it still wasn’t enough. The rumour is that he has taken money from the underworld.” He shook his head sadly. “We’re back to the bad old days of the eighties. Do you remember that?”

  Chopra did remember.

  For decades the Indian government had refused to officially recognise the movie industry, effectively blocking producers from legitimate sources of funding. Inevitably, this let in the unscrupulous agents of the city’s organised criminal gangs. The combination of glamour and a chance to launder dirty money via financially opaque movie productions was too tempting. In time, the underworld dons began to call the shots, and attacks on producers, directors, and actors who refused to toe the line became commonplace. Chopra himself had investigated more than one case of extortion and blackmail, and even a broad-daylight shooting of a well-known producer, which had blown the lid on the whole sorry affair.

  Many believed those dark days were behind the industry, yet it seemed Das had so far overreached himself that he had had to go back to the poisoned well.

  Chopra’s thoughts fastened on Mr. Pyarelal, the thug-like individual he had encountered at Film City. It seemed altogether probable that Pyarelal was representing whichever crime outfit Das had got into bed with, there to keep an eye on their investment.

  “Let’s assume you’re correct,” said Chopra. “Why would this outfit kidnap Vicky? Why would they jeopardise the production? If they’ve sunk money into it, then aiding its collapse will lose them everything. It makes no sense.”

  A silence fell between them as they considered the matter, broken only by the chattering of the projector.

  “I can tell you why they may have taken Vicky,” Cyrus announced at last. “In one word: insurance. It’s a relatively new practice, but as the costs of the big-budget productions have skyrocketed, producers have been investing to protect themselves against the vagaries of fate. After all, if you’ve just pumped one hundred million rupees into a film riding on the shoulders of Salman Khan, what chance have you got if something happens to him? My guess is that with costs racking up the way they are on Das’s cursed project, his more unscrupulous backers have decided that the only way for them to recover their money is to bring the whole thing down on its head. I’m sure if you get hold of the insurance papers you’ll see a kidnap-and-murder clause. It’s standard practice these days. In the event of Vicky Verma’s disappearance there’ll be an enormous payout, you mark my words. And it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Das is in on the whole thing. He’s a man gambling in the last-chance saloon.” He sighed. “The terrible thing is that the whole scheme only works if Vicky never comes back.”

  As Chopra settled down to dinner with the Malhotras this stark warning sat uneasily in his stomach. If his old friend was correct, then Vicky’s life was in even greater danger than he had suspected.

  “Something on your mind, Chopra?”

  Chopra looked up from his contemplation of the Madras lamb curry before him.

  Gulshan Malhotra, an amiable, middle-aged English literature teacher from Poppy’s school, peered at him through round-framed spectacles.

  “No, nothing in particular,” said Chopra, more gruffly than he intended. He realised that he was being an ungracious host. The Malhotras—Gulshan, and his wife, Sudha, who also worked at St. Xavier—were perfectly pleasant people, good-natured and articulate. They had taken on the conversational load, deftly filling in the potholes left by Chopra’s maudlin silences. Poppy, dressed in an eye-watering mustard-coloured sari, dark hair popped up in a topknot, cheeks flushed from the kitchen—or, possibly, Chopra suspected, from the high level of spice in the curry—had flashed him the odd look of mild irritation.

  He felt a sudden sense of chagrin.

  This was a special occasion for his wife. They rarely had dinner guests, and this was the first time Poppy had invited over colleagues from her workplace. Indeed, this was the first real job Poppy had ever had. For most of her life she had been content to manage her home while pursuing various social and charitable causes, but now, in thrall to her idol Sunita Shetty’s vision of the Modern Indian Woman, Poppy had finally joined the rat race.

  After twenty-four years of marriage, Chopra knew that his wife was an incurable romantic. She had a generous nature and a heart as wide as an ocean, yet she was quick to anger and could take offence at the slightest insult. It was one of the things he had grown to love about her.

  He cleared his throat. “Actually, you’re right. I apologise for being preoccupied. It’s a case I am currently investigating within the movie industry. I cannot reveal the
details—and I must ask you to keep this in confidence—but I have been engaged by Bijli Verma.”

  This pricked up everyone’s ears. Malhotra leaned forward. “Well, that’s quite a coup for your agency, I’ll bet. You know, I’ve always loved the pictures. I came to Bombay as a young man determined to become an actor. I was a big fan of old Bollywood, especially Raj Kapoor. I still remember the first time I saw Awaara, when he unveiled his lovable Chaplinesque ‘little tramp.’ What a movie!” Stars shone in his eyes. “So what’s Bijli gotten herself into, then?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say, but she’s in genuine trouble.”

  “Hmm. Well, she’s always courted controversy. Do you remember after the 2008 terror attacks, she came out and made a big noise about right-wing fundamentalists operating in the city? There was one outfit, in particular, that swore to make her eat her words. Led by some rogue radical, if I remember, a scoundrel disowned by all the regular Muslim institutions in the city. A real fire-and-brimstone character. It’s a pity he vanished into the woodwork before the police got to him.”

  Later, as he helped Poppy load the dishes into their new dishwasher, Chopra dwelled on Malhotra’s words. He recalled the furore in the papers at the time but, with the storm of news around the attacks, the death threat had quickly died its own death. It seemed hard to believe that the individual in question had resurfaced years later to carry out that threat, by kidnapping Bijli’s son.

  “You’re overworking yourself again, aren’t you?”

  Chopra smiled at his wife. She stood, hands on hips, head tilted to one side, examining him with her dark, quick eyes. There was no one who knew him better, who cared for his welfare more fervently. And the same was true of his feelings for her, though he was decidedly more sober in his expression of those sentiments. His wife was a kingfisher, he had always felt, loud and iridescent; whereas Chopra thought of himself as more of a crow: dark, sombre, and willing to stay in the shadows.