Praise for Show Business
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
“One of the four best works of fiction of the year … a witty, ironic novel … splendid … immensely entertaining.”
—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
“A wacky, satirical tale of hits and misses in the worlds of politics and cinema … engagingly presented by Shashi Tharoor. Through a montage of shooting scripts, narratives and monologues, he invents a fictional world that is a metaphor for deeper concerns.”
—Time
“Exuberant and clever … what makes Show Business particularly impressive is its elaborate structure.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A rollicking, first-rate novel.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Tharoor’s sharp-tongued second novel [provides] … [a] scathing portrait of the Bombay film industry.”
—Village Voice
“In Show Business, Shashi Tharoor successfully captures the corrupt milieu of contemporary India … satirizing it mercilessly…. Shashi Tharoor is a deft narrator who cleverly weaves his story, interspersing it with film gossip columns and Hindi film songs…. Show Business is not just an entertaining novel. It portrays the social, political and cultural realities of India [with] insight.”
—Earth Summit Times
“A splendid satirical view of India.”
—Reader’s Catalog
“A writer of top class talent.”
—India Today
“A multi-layered work which can be read on many levels. While many readers may read it just as an entertaining story, there are deeper meanings embedded in this satirical work about India’s social and political reality.”
—India West
“Tharoor is one of those rare writers who felicitously combines gentle satire with an urgent concern for society’s ills. Another eloquent—and entertaining—commentary on contemporary India.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An effervescent and thoroughly fascinating rendition of the human comedy.”
—Booklist
“An immensely clever, wickedly satirical novel … [told] with tremendous verve. A satire of Swiftian aspirations about the grand illusion of story and history.”
—Toronto Globe & Mail
“Tharoor undoubtedly has some of Molière’s comic gift; he also has a profound understanding of human falsity and the incongruities that constitute life…. Show Business has in it the genesis of The Great Indian Movie.”
—Toronto Star
“A witty, ironic novel in which Indian film—and India itself—is seen from any number of revealing angles … A splendid novel.”
—International Herald Tribune
“With zest and narrative gusto,…Tharoor subjects [Hindi films] to a series of virtuoso parodies which are at once faithful, witty and affectionate…. Tharoor has succeeded in pulling off a considerable literary coup—by writing an enormously funny and enjoyable novel which has never for a moment been frivolous.”
—Jonathan Coe, Sunday Times, London
“Tharoor has a terrific ear…. His wit is peppery and alert…. This highly colored, entertaining, faintly monstrous book takes its risks with panache and triumphs spectacularly”
—Independent on Sunday London
“One of the finest writers of satirical novels currently operating in English.”
—Independent on Sunday, London (profile)
“A fast, fresh and funny read.”
—Arena, London
“Tharoor obviously knows Bollywood and its zany habits well. Much of what he writes is funny…. But with all its comic aspects, Show Business is a serious book…. Tharoor achieves just the right combination of cynicism and sorrow; moreover, he leaves the reader with something to think about, a notable accomplishment in itself.”
—Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong
“Show Business is Shashi Tharoor’s witty connection between the world of filmmaking and of politics: success in either, he says, involves the finding of effective ways of duping the masses. Except the Bollywood business also makes them laugh.”
—Sunday, Calcutta
Show
Business
A NOVEL OF INDIA
Shashi Tharoor
Arcade Publishing • New York
Copyright © 1991, 1992, 2011 by Shashi Tharoor
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-223-5
Printed in the United States of America
For my sisters
Shobha and Smita
in fulfillment of a twenty-year-old promise
to take them to the movies
Contents
TAKE ONE
Interior: Day
Exterior: Day—Godambo
Monologue: Night
Pranay
TAKE TWO
Interior: Day
Exterior: Day/Night—Judai (The Bond)
Monologue: Night
Kulbhushan Banjara
TAKE THREE
Interior: Night
Exterior: Day—Dil Ek Qila (The Heart Is a Fortress)
The First Treatment: The Original Version
Interval
Extracts from “Cheetah’s Chatter,’ Showbiz Magazine
Exterior: Night—Dil Ek Qila (The Heart Is a Fortress)
The Second Treatment: The Revised Version
Monologue: Day
Mehnaz Elahi
TAKE FOUR
Interior: Day
Exterior: Day—Mechanic
Synopsis
Monologue: Night
Ashwin Banjara
TAKE FIVE
Interior: Night
Exterior: Night—Kalki
Monologues: Night/Day
Pranay, Kulbhushan, Ashwin, Maya
TAKE SIX
Interior: Night/Day
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Interior: Day
I can’t believe I’m doing this.
Me, Ashok Banjara, product of the finest public school in independent India, secretary of the Shakespeare Society at St. Francis’ College, no less, not to mention son of the Minister of State for Minor Textiles, chasing an aging actress around a papier-mâché tree in an artificial drizzle, lip-synching to the tinny inanities of an aspiring (and highly aspirating) playback-singer. But it is me, it’s my mouth that’s moving in soundless ardor, it’s my feet that are scudding treeward in faithful obeisance to the unlikely choreography of the dance director. Move, step, turn, as sari-clad Abha, yesterday’s heartthrob, old enough to be my mother and just about beginning to show it, nimbly evades my practiced lunge and runs, famous bust outthrust, to the temporary shelter of an improbably leafy branch. I follow, head tilted back, arms outstretched, pretending to sing:
I shall always chase you
To the ends of the earth,
I want to embrace you
From Pahelgaon to Perth,
My love!
My arms encircle her, but, as my fingertips meet, she ducks, dancing, and slips out of my clutches, pirouetting gaily away. Drenched chiffon clings to the pointed cones of her blouse, but she raises one end of the soaked sari pallav to half cover her face, holding the edge across the bridge of her perfect nose in practiced coyness. Her large eyes imprison me, then blink in release. Despite myself, I marvel. She has done this for twenty years; it is my first attempt.
I shall always chase you
From now ‘til my rebirth
And it’s only when I face you
That I feel I know my worth,
My love!
I shall always chase you,
I’ll never feel the dearth|
Of my desire to lace you
Around my —
“Cut!” I am caught in midgesture, midmovement, midword. The playback track screeches to a stop. I freeze, feeling as foolish as I imagine I must look. Abha snaps her irritation, turns away.
“No, no, no!” The dance director is waddling furiously toward me. He is fat and dark, but nothing if not expressive: his hands are trembling, his kohl-lined eyes are trembling, the layers and folds of flesh on his bare torso are trembling. “How many times I am telling you! Like this!” Hands, feet, and trunk describe arabesques of motion. “Not this!” He does a passable imitation of a stiff-necked paraplegic having a seizure. The technicians laugh. I smile nervously, looking furtively at my costar. Abha stands apart from us, hands on hips in a posture of fury. But am I imagining it, or is there something softer around her eyes as she looks at me?
I open hapless hands to the dance director, palms facing him in a gesture of concession. “OK, OK, Masterji. Sorry.”
“Sorry? Is my good name you will be ruining. What all is this, they will be saying. Gopi Master has forgotten what is dance.” His pectorals quiver in indignation. “For you maybe doesn’t matter. You are bachcha. I am having fifteen years in this business. What they will say about me, hanh?”
I shrug my embarrassment. I thought I’d done what I had been told to do, but that doesn’t seem the right thing to say. Gopi Master stamps his feet, one oily ringlet of black hair falling over a flashing red eye. He tosses his curls and strides off.
“OK, OK.” This is the director, Mohanlal. Mohanlal looks like a lower divisional clerk. He wears a fraying white cotton shirt, black trousers, thick glasses, and a perpetually harassed expression. Right now it is even more harassed than usual. I am evolving a Mohanlal Scale of High Anxiety, ranging from the pained visage with which he embarks on any second take (one on the scale) to the extreme angst that furrows his face when the producer-sahib visits and wants to know why the film isn’t finished yet (ten). My terpsichorean incompetence has him up to about five, but he is teetering on the edge of six. I try to look earnest and willing.
“OK,” says Mohanlal for the third time. “Let’s get back to this. Abhaji, I am sorry. Just once more, please, I promise you. Right, Ashokji? We’ll get it right this time.”
“Right,” I respond, without confidence.
“OK, clear the stage.” Mohanlal’s instructions emerge in the mildest tone, and one of the producer’s sidekicks, standing beyond the arc lights, claps his hands like a manual relay station to reinforce them. The clapper boy holds his board up for the start of the take. I grin at Abha, hoping for sympathy. She averts her gaze.
“Lights! Camera! Action!”
Ah, the magic of those words! I suppose that’s what brought me into this business in the first place. Years of amateur theater, from college productions of Charley }s Aunt and The Importance of Being Earnest to postdegree forays into Pinter and Beckett, had given me an irrevocable taste for greasepaint and footlights. Except, of course, that there was no money in it, and not much recognition either — unless you count the occasional notice in the Hindustan Times, sandwiched between a dance recital and an account of a Rotary Club speech. I spent months rehearsing foreign plays after work with other similarly afflicted ex-collegians and four evenings at a stretch putting them on for audiences of a few hundred Anglophile Delhiites, all for no reward other than a mildly bibulous cast party at which ignorant well-wishers poured pretentious praise into my rum. After half a dozen of these productions I decided I had had enough. But I couldn’t stop wanting to act, and when I discovered that I could no longer face going to the office without the prospect of rehearsals afterward, I realized what I had to do. I had to take the advice of my classmate Tool Dwivedi, as avid a cinephile as ever queued in dirty chappals and torn kurta for black market tickets to the latest releases. I had to go into films.
“Only real world there is, yaar,” Tool had said between lengthy drags on his chillum, before disappearing to Benares to study Hindu philosophy. I had not heard from him since, but his enthusiasm lingered. I decided to act on his idea.
“But it’s all so artificial,” Malini had protested when I told her of my plans. Malini was an afterwork thespian too — an account executive in an advertising firm in whom I was moderately interested.
“Artificial?” I asked incredulously. “What do you mean, artificial? Isn’t all acting artificial?”
“You know, all that running around trees, chasing heroines. Singing songs as you waltz through parks. You know what I mean.”
“That isn’t artificial, that’s mass entertainment.” She raised her untrimmed eyebrows and I decided to let her have it. “You want artificial, I’ll tell you what’s artificial. What we’re doing is artificial. Here, in Delhi, putting on English plays written for English actors, in a language the majority of our fellow Indians don’t even understand. What’s more artificial than that?”
“Are you telling me,” Malini bridled, “that our work in the theater, in the theater, is artificial, and what you want to do in” — she uttered the phrase with distaste — “Bombay films, is not?”
She was beginning to get angry, and this was a bad sign: I had had hopes of a farewell kiss, if not more. But I was in too deep now to pull back. “Yes,” I said firmly. “We’re an irrelevant minority performing for an irrelevant minority in a language and a medium that guarantee both irrelevance and minorityhood. I mean, how many people watch the English-language theater in this country? And how many of those watch us?”
“Numbers? Is that all that matters to you?” Malini was scathing. “We’re reaching a far more important audience here, a far more aware audience. We’re in the front line of what’s happening in world theater. We’re doing plays that have taken Broadway and the West End by storm.”
“Yeah, ten years ago,” I retorted. “Look, Malini, English-language theater in India has no place to go but in circles, and you know it. The same old plays rehashed for the same ignorant crowd. Who cares? Films are for real.”
“Hindi films? Real? Give me a break.” She got up then; she was always fond of matching movements to words, to the despair of our directors. “Look, Ashok, if you want to go off and make a fool of yourself in Bombay, do what you like. But don’t give me this kind of crap about it, OK?”
That was my cue, and for the sake of fond farewells I should have taken it and recanted, if only to mutter “nevertheless it does move” under my breath. But no, I had to stand up for my choice, didn’t I? “It’s not crap,” I asserted. “Hindi films are real, much more real in India than anything we’re doing. They even constitute a profession, an industry, which is more than anyone can say for us, for Chrissake. And if all goes reasonably well,” I added hastily, because Malini seemed either about to explode or exit, “the film business will bring in some real money.” One hit, I thought, one hit, and I’d be raking in more than I could hope to earn in several years in the Hindustanized multinational I had predictably joined after college. Without tax deductions at source either. Wage payers in movieland were notoriously less finicky about the tax laws than the paisa-pinching a
ccountants who remunerated me for marketing detergents.
“And if all doesn’t go reasonably well?” Malini was angrier than she needed to be. It suddenly struck me that the woman cared. And I’d never noticed it before. “You’re chucking up a good job, decent prospects, a pleasant enough life here and serious theater to knock on the doors of the manufacturers of mass escapism. What happens if they don’t answer?”
“They will,” I said defiantly.
“Drop me a postcard when they do.” And she walked out, slamming the door behind her. Theatrical, that’s what she was, in a word. Theatrical. I didn’t try to go after her. There would be no going back to theater.
So here I am, in Bombay, filmi capital of India, shooting my first starring role at S. T. Studios, which has seen many a hero cavort his way to cinematic immortality. And in Choubey Productions’ Musafir, alongside the legendary Abha Patel, who has had a fair stab at cinematic immortality herself. Me, Ashok Banjara, sharing celluloid with the star whose bust, vividly painted by a proletarian social-realist on a cinema billboard, once caused a celebrated traffic jam. The magic words “Lights! Camera! Action!” are ringing in my ears, the bulbs are beaming in my face and likewise Abha, if only in her screen persona. So why am I so desperately unhappy?
Of course I shouldn’t be. After all, I’ve scored one in the eye of the dreaded Radha Sabnis, alias Cheetah of “Cheetah’s Chatter” in Showbiz magazine and author of the one and only reference to me in the filmi print media to date. That wasn’t too long ago, and every line is burned into my memory.
Darlings, Cheetah has been asking herself for weeks who is that tall, not-too-dark and none-too-handsome type who has been hanging around all the filmi parties of late? From his hungry expression and anxiety to please, I thought he might be a new caterer. Not an actor, surely? But yes, my dears, surprises will never cease in Bollywood. Actor he is, or rather wants to be. One glance at him, and Dharmendra and Rajesh Khanna can continue to sleep soundly: this soulful type with the looks of a garage mechanic isn’t going very far. Hardly surprising, then, that producers aren’t exactly falling over themselves to sign him. But then why, Cheetah asks herself, does he keep getting invited to the fun soirees of filmland? Simple reason, darlings: he’s a minister’s son. Our mystery man turns out to be none other than Anil, elder son of the Minister of State for Minor Textiles, Kulbhushan Banjara. Our canny filmwallahs seem to have adopted the maxim, if you don’t need him, at least feed him—no point offending a minister, after all. Who says our filmi crowd are out of touch with modern Indian realities, eh? Grrrowl!
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