I hate my hands, Ashok. I hate their shortness, their stubbiness, their roughness, their virtual lack of nails. That’s probably a genetic trait: I come from a long line of insecure, nail-biting failures. Your long fingers, your hard and gleaming nails — what a thing to envy you for, Ashok Banjara. But I do.
None of this means anything to you, does it, Ashok? Hell, why blame you. You’ve never stumbled into a big star’s closet and found the most incredible collection of ties in the world, a real parade of ties, red and black and blue ties, ties with stripes of every known width and color, plain ties and polka-dotted ties, ties with the badge or shield of an exclusive club on them, ties in silk and rayon and polyester and cotton, broad ties and narrow ties, ties with discreet little designs and ties with psychedelic patterns. The most pointless article of clothing in the world, devoid of purpose, an anachronism even in the climates where it’s wearable, a flagrant luxury in our country: what an advertisement for this star’s success, that he could afford to throw away so much money on so many useless foreign ties! You wouldn’t understand what I felt, Ashok Banjara. You’ve never reached up, awestruck, to touch these ties and brought the entire rack down on your head so that you sat swathed in a riot of colors, held down by a dharna of textures, trapped in a gherao of ties. You’ve never bent down to pick them up, one by incredible one, and rearranged them lovingly in that remote stranger’s closet, knowing the distance that stretches between that stranger’s world and your own, even as you touch and feel the dimensions of that distance. You’ve never vowed, Ashok Banjara, that one day you, too, will possess a collection of ties like that, more ties than you will ever find occasion to wear.
What do you know, Ashok Banjara, you for whom a tie was an object of routine daily wear, something you had to put on to go to the office, not a magical symbol of material success?
What do you know of living in some godforsaken matchbox in a decrepit old building and traveling two hours to make it in time for the nine o’clock shift? What do you know of sitting around the Prithvi Café, drinking oversweet cups of tea because you’ve got nothing else to do, and drinking them as slowly as possible because you can’t afford to keep ordering more, and you can’t afford to leave? What do you know of the cut-and-crimp tailors of Linking Road, Bandra, who are the world champions at prolonging the life of your old clothes, lengthening, tightening, reversing, adding, patching them into posterity, and who can imitate any star’s costume for you at a sixth the price? What gives you the right, Ashok Banjara, to be one of us?
You’ve never forgiven me, of course, for knowing Maya before you did. I can understand that. She wasn’t the kind of girl I could have expected to meet, let alone be close to. My woman, my only regular woman, really, during those first years in the industry, was Sunita. I know some people called her my wife, but of course we weren’t married. I mean, who would marry a vamp? Sure I lived with her for a while, but it was a practical arrangement, you know, and I also lived away from her just as much. I don’t want any more of that Pranay-dumped-his-wife stuff being flung at me. Sunita wasn’t my wife. And in the circumstances of her life and work, she couldn’t be anyone’s wife. Really.
I mean, look at her life. Sincerely, would you have married her? OK, not you, Ashok Banjara, Esq., but anyone? She comes out of some Gujarati hick town, Jamnagar or Junagadh or somewhere, the kind of town where the biggest thing around is the cinema theater, it’s the only place of escape. So what does she do when she’s had enough of this backwater? She gets into a train one day with her life’s savings tucked into her cleavage to make it in the only other world she can imagine, the fantasyland of Bollywood. Sunita knows that her only assets are those contained in her blouse, and I’m not referring to the grimy notes she has spent within a week of arriving in the city. So she does the round of the producers’ offices, and she wears out the hook of her one good bra in a succession of sleazy hotels. Soon she is doing the bump and grind vertically too, for a change, as one of the half dozen sidekicks of the principal vamp in some sizzling dance number. She does it well, she has practiced all the moves, and she is known to be willing to oblige the producer anytime he wants a special favor. Nothing unusual about that — hell, they are all equally willing, but they’re not all as worthy of crumpling the producers’ sheets as Sunita is. So she gets her breaks; she rises from the ranks of the secondary vamps till she is doing her own cabaret numbers. Solo, or in duets with a villain. Like me. Yes, that’s how I met her.
She had a heart of gold, Sunita. She took me in, showed me more kindness than I deserved, gave me free run of her flat and her body. She looked on sex as some sort of divine gift to women, a commodity that was easy to offer, cost nothing to give, and brought in great rewards. “It’s not much work and it seems to make them so happy,” she said innocently to me once. “Imagine if some producer wanted me to sweep his floors instead, or clean out his bathroom. Now that would be much more difficult. I’d hate to do that, even for a role. But to give him sex? It’s so easy, and sometimes it’s even fun.”
You think I’m making this up, don’t you? You’ve heard all the stories about how much these women suffer, how they endure the humiliation with teeth clenched and eyes closed, only the thought of their starving babies keeping them on the bed while the raunchy paunchy producer heaves and pants over them. Well, I’m not denying that that does happen, there are some women like that, but for the most part, my friend, they know precisely what they’re doing and why. Sunita did.
Thing is, once people expect it from you it’s kind of difficult to stop. Sunita had been giving herself so readily that the mere fact of my moving in couldn’t change the pattern. There was one producer who cast her in his films on one condition: that after the shooting was over, she would repeat the dance number for him in a private performance, this time without any clothes on. He’d set it all up, playback track, lights and all, and she’d repeat exactly the same moves, choreographed by Gopi Master or Sonia Bibi or whoever, minus her costume. Drove him wild, of course. When he called out “Action!” afterward, it was an announcement of his own intent.
What Sunita didn’t know was that the camera that stood there, supposedly as a prop — something he could look through and imagine himself directing — actually had film in it. Film which he then screened for his intimates. We found out when I walked in on one of the showings, at the producer’s place. Had some sort of errand to run, message to deliver or something, and they let me into his sanctum sanctorum, a bar with mirrored walls and a projection unit. So I walked in and found my wife, sorry I mean the woman I was living with, shaking her bare breasts at me from every reflectable angle and a bunch of old drunks slapping their thighs in delight. I went back and told her, and then I walked out of her life. Well, sort of. I walked out, but not for the last time. Sunita was a girl you kept going back to. Like she said, it didn’t cost you anything.
Anyway, that was the nature of my love life during my first few years in films. Whores at Kamathipura, slatterns from the studios, Sunita. Can’t say there’s much progression there. Till Maya came along.
You barely noticed Maya, of course. You were too full of yourself for that, Ashok. Full of what you thought of as the success of your first film, full of your new hero role in Godambo, full of the attentions of the college girls and new generation lady-journalists who had just begun to flock around you in those days. Girls who wore jeans and T-shirts, and cut their hair shoulder-length, and spoke English; girls you could take to the disco and give smarmy interviews to for the new glossy magazines that were outchattering Cheetah. Maya was small, and simple, even somewhat plain. Her hair was so long she could have sat on it. She wore it in plaits; and she favored salwar-kameez that clearly hadn’t been tailored in a metropolis. She was decidedly unglamorous. She spoke English, but it was a language she’d learned, and she didn’t sparkle with the slang and facile abbreviations of Bombay or Delhi. She was the sisterly type, wasn’t she, the good little girl next door. You took one look, and you ig
nored her.
I didn’t ignore her. I went up to her on the set. I talked to her. I asked her about her family. Her father was a minor government servant, a railway official I think, then posted in some mofussil town, Bhopal or Bhagalpur or Bhatinda, one of those Bhs. She had no one in Bombay. She didn’t seem the Sunita-style fortune-seeking type, so I wondered what had brought her to moviedom. Incredible: she was a serious stage actress, she had done a Tendulkar play or something in this Bh town, and this guy in the audience came backstage and told her she had to be in the movies. Of course she didn’t take him seriously — who does he think she is? Lana Turner? — but no, he was on the level, he came to see her parents, explained he was something of a talent scout, even named two or three actors he’d discovered this way. And he turned out to be Jagannath Choubey’s brother.
Didn’t think it happened like that, did you? Well, at least you didn’t imagine it then, right? Now, of course, you know the whole story. I suppose.
Actually it wasn’t that uncommon. Not everybody in movies was born into it, like me and all the Kapoors, or lucked into it, like you. Rajesh Khanna actually won a talent contest. First prize was a screen test. He passed with flying colors.
Maya was so seedhi-saadhi, so innocent of any guile. She was the kind of girl any lower-middle-class Indian boy like myself meets all the time, unless he happens to be lower-middle-class in the film world, in which case he only gets to meet starlets and sluts (if that isn’t tautological). The moment I met her I realized I’d been waiting and wanting to meet her. Call it love at first sight. No, Ashok, I guess you won’t want to call it that. Call it anything.
She was sweet. She was trusting. She didn’t respond to me the way other Bombay actresses would, evaluating my unimportance, categorizing me by my role, my accent, my paan-stained mouth. She saw someone older, wiser, someone who knew the ropes, who told her where things were, how things should be done, what — and more important, who — should be avoided. For the first time in my life, Ashok, I began to feel I was more than the secondary villain.
And increasingly I became aware that the girl depended on me.
OK, so she had no one else. Except for some distant relatives charged by her parents with keeping an eye on her and whose reaction to the film world was either to gawk or to disapprove. Not much good that could do her. I was far more useful.
Don’t look so triumphant! It was also more than that. Inevitably, our contact extended beyond the studio. We started going out together. I gave her lifts home, to the little flat in Bandra where she’d found paying-guest accommodation. The landlady had a strict no-male-visitors rule, not even for relatives, and you can imagine what she would have thought of me. So I dropped her off, and sometimes, when she had the energy and I had the time, I took her out. Once or twice to the Prithvi Cafe, in fact, just to show her what that was like. I wasn’t yet in the five-star-hotel league in those days, though I did give her lunch at the Sun ’n’ Sand once, where she stared at the pool-side bikinis in shocked disbelief. But most of the time it was walks at the beach, pau-bhaji from a roadside vendor, bhel-puri out of folded leaves while we strolled at the edge of the sand and let the seawater trickle through our toes. Neither of us was famous enough to be recognized, let alone mobbed: we were just another of the lower-middle-class couples thronging Chowpatty, getting sand into our sandals and stars into our eyes. I bought her a paan once, and because she was so hesitant, I put it into her mouth. She blushed and turned away in such confusion that she made me feel I’d propositioned her.
I hadn’t really thought of her that way, you know. There are some women you look at physically, judge them primarily by what you think they’d look like under all those yards of cloth that Indian tradition and Indian tailors conspire to ensure they’re swathed in. Then there are women you can’t possibly think of that way — older relatives, for instance, or some of the asexual buffalo with hairy moles on their chins you run into at Crawford Market, browbeating the butcher. But somewhere in between there are women whom you relate to quite differently, women who are pleasant and attractive, maybe even beautiful, but whose physicality is not the first thing that strikes you about them, perhaps not even the second thing. These are women with a certain other quality, a grace, a gentleness, an inner radiance that surrounds them when they smile, or speak, or move; women you can love, or worship, or hope to marry. I bet you think that’s naive provincial nonsense, don’t you, Ashok? You urban sophisticates know that ultimately all women are reducible to what you want out of them. And it’s always the same thing.
I didn’t buy Maya another paan, but I saw a lot more of her afterward, and I began to think of her — well, differently. A day without her seemed to go on forever; I needed her laughter to shorten the hours. I stopped living with Sunita. I shaved more often for Maya; the trademark stubble on my face became a calendar of her absences. I began reading then, reading seriously, acquiring the vocabulary I’m using today and the ideas I haven’t yet had a chance to use. I didn’t stop chewing paan, but I saw Maya didn’t like me spitting it out in public, so I found more discreet ways to get rid of the red stuff. She changed me, Ashok Banjara. Or perhaps it is truer to say I changed myself for her.
And how did she react to me? What did she feel about me? I bet you’d like to know. Did you ask her, Ashok, or did you dismiss the subject as being of no consequence? She must have told you something about me, surely? After all, I was the only man in her life between her father and you. She must have wanted to speak about me.
But I suppose you didn’t want to hear any of it. Pranay the interlude, an episode best forgotten. Pretend it never happened.
No, I’m sure there is something you wanted to know. I imagined you in those days seething with resentful curiosity about it. How far had we gone? You must have found it difficult to convince yourself that this small-time villain with the red-stained mouth contented himself with walks on the beach. Maya was no schoolgirl, after all, even though she was cast as one. She turned twenty during the shooting of Godambo, didn’t she? I heard the technicians refer to her once as the Virgin Maya, and I couldn’t even blow them up for their irreverence from fear of insulting her by implication. So the Virgin Maya she remained. But after her association with me, you must have wondered, was she still really a virgin? Or was she all maya, mere illusion?
What did she tell you? I can’t believe you didn’t ask. Or was she so offended by the question, you couldn’t insist on the reply? I can imagine her, all hurt pride and tears, as you cast implied aspersions on her moral standards. Well, you must have thought, I can always find out on the night. But then she was a bloody good actress, wasn’t she? And there can be so many reasons for an absence of blood.
So did you really ever feel sure, Ashok Banjara? Could you easily bear to look at me and wonder whether I’d felt your wife between the sheets before you even realized she existed? Oh, I bet that burned you up.
Or maybe not. After all, you were lucky in the things that really mattered. There had been no publicity: in those days neither Maya nor I was important enough for anyone to write about our relationship. There were no gossip-column stories about us, neither of us gave Showbiz interviews in which we could refer to the other as “just good friends,” even the industry didn’t pay us that much attention. After Godambo it might have been different. But by then it was all over between Maya and me.
You won’t believe this, but sex was not the important thing with Maya. No, I’m not going to put you out of your misery and admit to — boast about — having taken her to bed. That might matter to you, but I see no reason to oblige. We were close, very close, as close as I could ever have hoped to be to Maya. How close that was is not for me to tell you, Ashok Banjara. It’s between your wife and you: whatever she told you, whatever she wants you to believe, is fine with me. What mattered to me was something I couldn’t have.
I still remember the evening. It was just after we’d completed Godambo, doing the last bit of dubbing. I waited for her to
finish her recording with you and Abha — she and I had so few scenes together, after all — and drove her home. Only I didn’t go home. I stopped the car at Worli, by the sea-face where that expensive hotel has gone up. It wasn’t there then. We stood by the seaside, letting the warm breeze from the Arabian Sea blow specks of spray through our hair. The evening stretched across the horizon like a woman waiting to be embraced. I turned to her, took her in my arms. At first, unresisting in surprise, she allowed herself to be enfolded in them, but she stiffened as I began to speak.
“Maya, I want us to be married. I can’t promise you a big house, or lots of money. But I love you, Maya. I’ll be good to you.”
She pulled herself away, not harshly, but firmly. “Pranay, what are you talking about? What is all this talk of marriage?”
“Why not? You know what you mean to me.”
She looked away then, to the streaks of orange and blue that were the sun’s farewell testaments for the day. When she spoke her voice was steady, but the steadiness came with effort. “You’ve been very good to me, Pranay. Very sweet, and very kind. I’ll never forget that.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I interjected bitterly. “I’m not standing here looking for gratitude.”
“But I am grateful.”
“Is that all? Are you saying that — everything we’ve had doesn’t mean anything more? Don’t you care for me at all?”
“I care for you.” Her voice was low.
“And I care for you! Marry me, Maya — I’ll make you happy.”
“I’m sorry, Pranay.” She looked at me for a moment, and I swear I saw a wetness in her eyes, but she turned away again and spoke without looking at me. “But I just don’t love you, that’s all.”
“Why not?” I wanted to rail. But I was shattered, and hurt, and suddenly very desperate. “It doesn’t matter,” I found myself pleading. “Love will come afterward. It always does. Look at all the arranged marriages that take place in our country. Do you think any of these people love each other? They haven’t even seen each other properly, for God’s sake! Love comes, in its own time. I’ll wait for you to learn to love me. Just like an arranged marriage.”
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