Show Business

by Shashi Tharoor

  As the performance continues — the monkey donning absurdly elegant coats and caps, doing cartwheels, responding to Ashok’s questions — the monkey-man works the crowd, his fingers dipping deftly into pockets and handbags. The crowd is distracted by the monkey and by Ashok’s song:

  Say hello to the monkey-man, monkey-man, monkey-man,

  Say hello to the monkey-man, and give us some rice.

  We give more highs than a junkie can, junkie can, junkie can

  We give more highs than a junkie can, at half the price.

  Shouldn’t we be good to these people?

  (MONKEY NODS)

  Then try and climb up a steeple!

  (MONKEY RUNS UP A TELEPHONE POLE)

  Show them how you jump!

  (MONKEY JUMPS DOWN, LANDS SAFELY ON HIS FEET)

  Dance, and wiggle your rump!

  (MONKEY DOES SO, LIKE A HINDI FILM CABARET DANCER)

  Say hello to the monkey-man, monkey-man, monkey-man,

  Say hello to the monkey-man, and give us some rice.

  We give more highs than a junkie can, junkie can, junkie can,

  We give more highs than a junkie can, at half the price.

  Are these ba-a-d folks?

  (MONKEY SHAKES HIS HEAD.)

  Shall we show ’em some jokes?

  (MONKEY NODS)

  OK, do a striptease!

  (MONKEY PROCEEDS TO PULL OFF HIS LITTLE SEQUINED JACKET AND, DANCING, TUGS AT HIS OUTSIZE SHORTS)

  That’s enough, at ease!

  (MONKEY STOPS, DOFFS HIS LITTLE CAP)

  Say hello to the monkey-man, monkey-man, monkey-man,

  Say hello to the monkey-man, and give us some rice.

  We give more highs than a junkie can, junkie can, junkie can,

  We give more highs than a junkie can, at half the price.

  So Thakur, it’s time to go?

  (MONKEY NODS)

  Is this the end of the show?

  (MONKEY NODS, HEAD DROOPING, MIMING TIREDNESS)

  Time to collect your fee!

  (MONKEY LEAPS UP, PICKS UP CAP LARGER THAN ASHOK’S, AND TAKES IT AROUND THE CROWD)

  Folks, you decide what that should be!

  And as people give money, in some cases reaching for their missing wallets in puzzlement, Ashok packs up, singing:

  Say hello to the monkey-man, monkey-man, monkey-man,

  Say hello to the monkey-man …

  He is seen whistling the same tune as he enters a slum colony, his monkey perched on his shoulder. Little children run up to greet him, and he dispenses sweets liberally. He is hailed affectionately by passing extras, by shopkeepers, by a tea stall man, and he returns each greeting with a wave and a familiar word. After a while he stops and ducks into a curtained doorway. In a dark little room an old man lies on a string-bed charpoy, coughing piteously, while a beautiful young girl sits at the bedside, looking anxious.

  “Arré Ashok, is it you?” the sick man rasps.

  “Don’t strain yourself, Chacha,” our hero replies. “Look, I have brought some money for your medicine. You will be well soon.” He holds out a sheaf of notes to the girl, who looks embarrassed.

  “Go on, take it, Mehnaz,” Ashok says. “Your father needs the medicine. If I could read and write I’d have got it myself.”

  “You’re so kind, Bhaiya” Mehnaz replies. “I don’t know what we’d do without you. But you work so hard for this money — it isn’t right, somehow.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Ashok retorts. “Isn’t Chacha like a father to me? Take it.”

  The old man coughs again. “What’s the use?” he asks wearily. “I am not for this world much longer.”

  Ashok sits on the bed and takes the old man’s hand in his. “Don’t talk like that, Chacha,” he pleads earnestly. “You will be well soon, once we get the medicines.”

  “No,” the invalid coughs. “Son, I cannot last. There are two things I must tell you before it is too late.” His voice weakens, and Ashok has to bend low to hear him. “I know you have always thought you were the son of Pitlu the monkey-man. The truth is he had no son. He found you one day by the riverside, where he had gone to collect twigs for the fire. You were in a little basket, caught up in some brambles at the water’s edge. You were a tiny newborn baby, and he took you as a gift from God. Of course everyone in the chawl helped look after the baby, and my wife, your Chachi, God rest her soul, treated you like the son we had never had. You were brought up by all of us, by the entire chawl, though of course you belonged to the monkey-man, who said he needed a little boy to help him. And you seemed so happy with him, and with his monkey, no one was surprised when you took over from him in the end.” The old man, exhausted by his effort, stops, coughing. His daughter gives him a sip of water.

  “Then who is my real father?” Ashok asks urgently. “How do I find him?”

  “I have no idea. There was no name on the blanket you were wrapped in, and the basket has long since gone. But there is one clue.”

  “Yes?”

  “The talisman you wear on your wrist. That was with you the day you were found.” Ashok looks at it intensely, his only connection to an unknown world. “When you were little the string went around your wrist several times, but now I see it is as tight as a bracelet. Find out where that came from, and you might learn your origins.”

  “I always thought it was my father’s — Pitlu’s,” Ashok says. “But whenever I asked him what it meant, he would always say he didn’t know, that I had had it since birth and that I should always wear it.”

  “It is your most precious inheritance, Ashok,” the old man gasps.

  “Chacha!” Ashok sees the life ebbing out of his mentor, and his voice is almost a cry. “And the second thing you wanted to tell me?”

  “Look after Mehnaz,” the old man whispers. “She is not of an age to be alone in this world. You are like a brother to her. With her mother and aunt dead, she has no one.”

  “She will always have me,” Ashok vows.

  “Good,” Chacha says. “Find her — find her a husband just like you.” And with this shifting of paternal responsibility, the spark of dialogue that has kept him going so far fades out. His expression slackens, his eyes stare. He has gone to the great rerecording studio in the sky.

  “Abba!” wails Mehnaz. “Chacha!” cries Ashok. They fall on the inert form of the extra, who struggles to keep still. Then, in an apocalyptic moment, they look up at each other and fall into a mutually consolatory — and, of course, purely fraternal — embrace.

  Ashok — another Ashok, but the audience doesn’t know this immediately — walks proudly into a small house in his new uniform. He wears the pale khaki garb and starry epaulettes of an inspector of the Bollywood CID.

  “Ashok!” A gray figure rises from a cloth-and-wood easy chair to greet him. Despite the generous application of whitener on his hair, the figure is recognizably Abha’s faithful old retainer, Raju. “You have done it! Congratulations!’’

  “Yes, Father. As of today, you may call me Inspector Ashok.”

  “This is a proud day for me, son. If only your mother could see you now.” Raju wipes a sentimental tear from his eye. “If for all these years I have instilled in you the ambition to become a police officer, it has been only for her.” He clasps Ashok in a paternal hug, then stands back, one hand on the young man’s shoulder, and looks at him with wet eyes. “Son, the time has at last come when I must tell you something very important. For all these years, I held my tongue, out of fear that the truth could expose you and us to danger at a time when we could do nothing about it. But now, Inspector Ashok, you can do something about it.”

  “Father, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “Sit down, son, and I shall tell you.” And he does: in staccato flashback images the story spills out: Thakur, Kalia, talisman, everything. By the end Ashok sits shaken.

  “So you are not really my father, Father?”

  “No, son. Your father is not
a humble lathe operator in a factory who skimped and saved to send you to college and made an officer out of you. Your father is a fine man of good family who was condemned to rot in prison for a murder, a murder for which he was undoubtedly framed by Pranay Thakur’s thugs.”

  “But he might be a free man now! I must find him!”

  Raju shakes his head sadly. “In our country, Inspector Ashok, life imprisonment is really for life — unless death comes sooner. If your poor fine father survived the rigors of jail, rigors for which he was completely unsuited, he is probably still in jail now, twenty-two years later. As a police officer, perhaps you can trace him and get justice done.”

  (The judicial system of India is one about which our filmmakers are blissfully ignorant, which is perhaps why it features so frequently in our cinematic life.)

  “Do you know which jail he is in?”

  “What does a poor servant know of such things? But you — as a police officer you can probably find out.”

  “You have been a good father to me, Father — I mean Raju-ji. Whatever happens, I shall never forget all that you have done for me. But now I must set out to find my real father and avenge the tragic deaths of my mother and brother.” Ashok looks at the black string on his wrist. “By this sacred token of my mother’s love,” he vows, “I swear to avenge her.”

  “Ashok,” cautions the old man, “no hasty actions. Pranay Thakur is a powerful man. An angry youth will prove no match for him. You must use your strengths — your new position, the law — to track him down. That is why I have waited so long to tell you. Do not make me feel I have waited in vain.”

  Ashok turns to him soberly. “You are right, Father,” he says. “I must be patient. I must research the facts, build up a case. And then

  I shall get him.

  He won’t escape.

  I won’t let him

  Stay in one shape.

  I shall hang and draw and quarter him,

  Bury and plough and water him,

  Do everything I ought to him —

  Then turn him in to the forces of the law.

  I shall catch him

  By surprise.

  I shall match him

  Size for size.

  I shall flog and tar and feather him,

  Whip and lash and tether him,

  Tie his hands together (hmm!)

  And turn him in to the forces of the law.

  Scene: Ashok the monkey-man and Mehnaz the recent orphan scour a bazaar. They go to silversmiths, shopkeepers, jewelers, fakirs, showing the talisman on its string. Each person they approach shakes his head, unable to identify it. One offers to buy it. The monkey perched on Ashok’s shoulder turns the offer down on his behalf.

  Scene: Ashok the inspector goes from prison to prison, asking in vain about his father. In each frame the prison officials shake their heads too, out of tune with the insistent drumbeat of the sound track. The young policeman walks away, depressed but determined.

  During both sequences the sound track swells with a plaintive lament:

  Seeking —

  We must go on seeking.

  Must leave no stone unturned,

  No candle of hope unburned,

  No bit of truth unlearned —

  Must go on seeking.

  Seeking —

  We must go on seeking.

  Must keep our faith alive,

  And never cease to strive,

  Whatever we derive —

  We must go on seeking.

  Scene: Ashok, Mehnaz, and the monkey Thakur are at a village mela. Amid the colorful bustle of the fairground — painted animals and brightly dressed women, rusty carousels and lusty carousers, turbans and cotton candy in equally startling shades of pink — the trio continue their quest. They are seen receiving yet another negative shake of the head in response to Ashok’s extended wrist. Dispirited — indeed, none is more dejected than the monkey, who covers his eyes with his long fingers gloomily — they turn away.

  “I’m beginning to think we’ll never find out about your amulet, Bhaiya,” says a weary Mehnaz, pretty in a yellow ghagra choli and pouting most attractively at her costar.

  “We will, Mehnaz,” Ashok replies. “We must. I cannot rest until I have found out the truth about myself.”

  Mehnaz looks as if she might be prepared to tell him a few truths herself, but further conversation is thwarted by a commotion in the village square beyond the fairground.

  “What’s going on here?” asks Ashok.

  “It’s the Old Woman,” says a villager. “Some people are angry with her and want to drive her away.”

  “What Old Woman?”

  “You haven’t heard of the Old Woman?” The villager looks at Ashok as a Bombayite might regard someone who thought stars could only be seen in the sky. “She is well known in these parts. She has been wandering around for years. At first she was with a hermit who had helped her in some way. She collected alms for him, fed him, and so on. Then the hermit died and she took to sitting under a banyan tree for days on end, praying. People think she is a holy woman of some sort and they give her food and water. But it never lasts for very long. In village after village she has been driven away because of her madness.”

  “She is mad, then?”

  “You wouldn’t think so at first. But every once in a while, when she sees a baby, she starts screaming that it is hers and tries to snatch it away from whoever is carrying it, accusing that person of having stolen her child. As you can imagine, people don’t take too kindly to that. So they drive her away, and she wanders off to another banyan tree in another village, until it happens all over again.”

  “Sad story,” says Mehnaz.

  “Yes, something terrible must have happened to her in the past,” the villager clucks. “It used to be said that she had had some accident and could remember nothing — not even her name or address, who she was, where she came from. So she is just called the Old Woman.”

  “And a lot of other names, it seems,” says Ashok, heeding the voices raised offscreen. “Come, Thakur, let us see what they are doing to this poor Old Woman.” The monkey nods agreement, and they set off.

  Not a moment too soon. There is a mob gathered near the banyan tree, and the mood is ugly. Voices are raised, and so are fists: one unpleasant extra has a chappal in his hand with which he is threatening to beat the old lady if she continues to impugn the parenthood of his baby.

  In the center of this throng, her gray hair flowing wild about her, her body clad in shapeless white, her considerable bosom heaving and her face bathed in tears, is — you guessed it, audience! — Abha. Damsel no longer, but evidently in distress.

  “Would you raise your filthy footwear against your own mother?” Ashok asks sharply if irrelevantly, shaming the chappal-wielder, and ultimately the crowd, into retreat. (The original screenplay had called for a fight scene here, with Ashok and his monkey bashing up the mob, but this was regretfully deleted by the director in an uncharacteristic burst of sensitivity.) Ashok puts a protective arm around the Old Woman. “Come, Mother,” he says, using the term out of respect rather than recognition, but giving the audience their twenty-five paise’s worth of irony in the bargain. “Come with us. We shall look after you.”

  “Who are you, beta?” the Old Woman asks as her tormenters melt away, muttering. In the background the tune of “We must go on seeking” plays on, to alert the less attentive members of the audience.

  “I am just a humble monkey-man, Mother,” admits our hero. “But I cannot bear to see you treated like this. I never had a mother myself, and it galls me to see those who have been able to take their mothers for granted behave in this way. Come with us, Mataji. We have a humble home which is yours as long as you want to stay.

  “You are very kind,” Abha says gravely. “The blessings of Hanuman be upon you. And this girl?”

  “She is my sister, or rather she is like a sister to me,” Ashok explains. “Her father recently passed away and I am lookin
g after her, though a lot of the time I feel she is the one looking after me.”

  “Bless you both.” Then suddenly, as Ashok moves his arm, there is a crash of cymbals on the background track. The camera zooms into a close-up amid the screeching of violins, and Abha’s eyes, wide with astonishment, take in the sight of the talisman dangling from her rescuer’s wrist.

  “Where did you get that?” she screams, lunging for it. “You thief! You stole that! Give it to me.”

  Ashok catches her raised hand in a firm grip as Mehnaz looks alarmed. “Please, Mother, is this any way to treat someone who has done you no harm? This talisman is mine.”

  “Liar! How did you get it? Who gave it to you?”

  “It has been with me since birth.”

  (Another smash from the invisible percussionist.) “And who,” Abha asks with a catch in her voice, “are your parents?”

  Ashok’s voice drops. “I don’t know, Mother. You see, as a baby I was found in a basket on the river.”

  “My God!” says Abha and faints, a hand on her heart, as the refrain from “We must go on seeking” deafens the viewers. Before Ashok can prevent it, Abha has hit her head on the hard ground. The monkey, wincing, puts shocked hands to his ears as Ashok and Mehnaz look at each other in mutual bewilderment.

  When Abha is revived, the knock on her head has, of course, affected only her amnesia. She now remembers everything, and at some cost to the patience of the viewers, remembers it garrulously. The reunion of mother and son is tearful and heartrending. So is the background music.

  “Raju might still be working somewhere, in some factory in Bombay, and might know where your brother is,” Mehnaz points out.

  “Do you know how many factories there are in Bombay?” Ashok asks. “That would be impossible. I pray that my brother is alive and well and that Fate will lead me to him. But first, there are more urgent things to do. I must find my real father and try to get him out of jail. And then I must deal with this evil uncle of mine.”