Show Business

by Shashi Tharoor

  “AB-yaar, you mean,” I joked. “Me and MGR? Come on, Sponerwalla, I’d look awful in dark glasses and a Gandhi cap.”

  Cyrus was easily distracted. “Wonder why they call it, like, a Gandhi cap,” he mused bibulously, turning the melting ice speculatively around in his forbidden liquid, “when the old Mahatma didn’t wear one himself. Or very much else,” he observed irrelevantly, “clothes-wise.”

  So we moved on, topic-wise; and Sponerwalla never raised the idea again. But the thought lingered at the back of my mind, in the recesses we subconsciously reserve for the vaguest of our aspirations. I never did find a moment to pull it out of that obscure mental corner, dust it off, and hold it up to close examination. There was too much else to do: Subramanyam kept giving dates, Mehnaz kept clamoring for them, there were too many shootings and parties and interviews and trysts to think about anything else, let alone politics. Which, in any case, was my father’s world and my brother’s, emphatically not mine.

  Oh, once in a while the thought slipped in by itself, like a shaft of light through half open blinds, when I was feeling particularly jaded by my fourth interchangeable role of the week or worn out by the insatiability of Mehnaz’s appetite for me. Then I would briefly indulge it, playing with the idea the way I played with one of the triplets’ plastic ducks found unexpectedly in the bath, squeezing the toy idly with soapy fingers till it slipped out of my grasp. Wouldn’t it be great, I would think on these occasions, to abandon everything, the dance sequences and the love scenes, the Masters and the mistress, and surprise Dad with my engagement in his cause? But then I would think of how exactly I’d have to go about getting involved in politics, what it would imply my actually doing, and my half-risen enthusiasm would fade rapidly. I didn’t fancy myself squatting with the slum-dwellers in a dharna against their proposed eviction or leading clamorous demonstrations against petrol prices, like the few politically active Bollywood stars I knew. That wasn’t my scene, man, as even Cyrus would admit. And so the idea would float away as casually as it came, quickly supplanted by the more important bath toys of the real world.

  And then suddenly, without my doing anything to plan, it took over my life. I realize now that Cyrus and I weren’t the only people to have had this particular thought, but I’m still a little bewildered by the speed with which it all worked itself out. I was at some function to be felicitated on my thirty-fourth (or possibly forty-third, I’ve lost count) straight silver jubilee film when some joker with a paper flower in his lapel suggests before a microphone that I am the most popular man in India. No political leader, he says, not even the fellow with his name in The Guinness Book of World Records for the globe’s largest electoral plurality, can come close to my popularity anywhere in the country. Someone in the crowd shouts out “Ashokji for Parliament!” and pandemonium breaks loose; soon the assembly have taken up the cry in a chant and will not subside till I stand up with folded hands and promise to consider their demand. This is just to buy some peace, not because I have the slightest interest in following my dear dad’s ponderous footsteps, but startlingly the news is all over the papers the next day: “Banjara thinking of joining politics.” Within a day a bigwig from my father’s party is on the phone: could I come to Delhi, the Prime Minister wants to meet me.

  Well, of course I go, and after the inevitably delayed flight I am met at the tarmac and whisked off directly to the prime ministerial presence. Dad is nowhere in sight. Just as well, as it happens, because it turns out they’re offering me his seat.

  It’s going to be a tight election, the PM says. The Opposition thinks, rightly, that Dad’s seat is vulnerable, and they are planning to field one of their stalwarts, a recent defector from the ruling party — Pandit Sugriva Sharma, Mr. Turncoat himself, who has changed parties more often than Mehnaz has changed costumes and probably for more money as well. The learned Pandit is a man of much erudition and little scruple who has therefore acquired a reputation for great political principle: each time he quits a party he makes it sound like an act of self-sacrifice in pursuance of a noble cause. In the process he has assembled a handy coalition of interest groups whom he has persuaded at some point or another that he is their ablest defender: slum-dwellers, untouchables, Muslims, and the left. In the present climate, poor old Dad doesn’t stand a chance against him. The party is deeply anxious; defeat would not only mean the loss of a seat that the party has held since Independence, but would also show that the Pandit is more popular than the party he left. That could be fatal for the party — losing this one seat to Pandit Sugriva Sharma might give the Opposition a boost that could well threaten the government nationally. In short, the PM wants him beaten. But how?

  Enter, on a white charger, Ashok Banjara: popular, especially among the underprivileged, whose fantasies he embodies; potentially as effective a campaigner as the experienced Pandit, and demonstrably a better speaker; and, as a bonus, heir to the family’s long connection to the constituency. I couldn’t have been more ideal as the choice for assuming my father’s drooping mantle. The PM’s measured eloquence wins the day. I agree before I have entirely realized what I am agreeing to.

  On the drive to my father’s, though, just one thought suffuses my mind: at last I am doing what he had wanted me to. For years he has been berating me for having chosen films rather than politics. Now finally I can give him something to be proud of: not just a son who walks in his father’s footsteps, but one who is actually invited to do so by the leading politicians of the country. I can already imagine our reconciliation: I shall bend to touch his feet and ritually seek his blessing, and he will embrace me, tears — who knows? — pouring down his usually stony cheeks.

  My brother, Ashwin, opens the door for me. Something is not right: he looks positively funereal. I burst past Ashwin to my father’s study, and find him sitting in his armchair, looking as still as death. Oh, no! I begin to wail inside myself, but he looks up at the interruption and my heart calms down. Thank God you’re alive, Dad, my mind says, thank God you’re alive today.

  “Dad, you’ll never believe what’s just happened!” I exclaim.

  “I have no choice but to believe it,” my father says heavily, and my excitement freezes like a horse shot in midgallop.

  “He knows,” my brother says quietly, blinking behind his glasses. “The Prime Minister’s office just called.”

  Now I understand the gloom. “You mean you’ve only just been told they weren’t going to give you the ticket? I’m so sorry, Dad. I naturally assumed you were behind — all this. I had no idea.”

  I sit down gently in the chair next to my father’s. Dust rises from it: he has been alone in that room too often. “I’m really sorry about the way they’ve handled this, Dad,” I say. “But the PM seemed in no doubt that you would have lost to Sugriva Sharma. At least they’re not giving your seat to someone else. It’s in the family — and it’s me, your son and heir, doing what you’d always wanted me to do. Aren’t you happy about that?”

  “Why are you doing it?” my father asks abruptly.

  “Because they asked me to. The Prime Minister asked me to.”

  “And why do you think the PM asked you?”

  This is hardly the way I had expected the conversation to go, but I humor him. “Because I can win.”

  “Correct.” My father’s face shows no signs of pleasure at my answer. “And why do you want to win?”

  I stare at him nonplussed, unable to comprehend the question.

  “I can understand the party’s motives,” says my father. “I can’t understand yours.”

  “But Dad, you’ve been telling me for years I was wasting my time in films! Here’s a chance now to put my years in films to good use, in an area you wanted me to!” My voice is rising.

  “I can see that, Ashok, I’m not a fool. But why do you want to do it? The party wants to retain the seat. Why do you want to win it?”

  I am again wordless with incomprehension. My father tries a different tack.


  “What will you do with your victory? What will you do once you’ve won?”

  I get what he’s driving at. After all, I’ve seen Robert Redford in The Candidate. “I’ll do,” I say firmly, “what the party and the government want me to do.”

  “What do you believe in?” My father is relentless today.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve just been adopted as the prospective parliamentary candidate of the country’s ruling party,” my father snaps. “What are your beliefs? What do you believe in?”

  I try a conciliatory tone. “Come on, give me a break, Dad,” I say. “I believe in what you believe in.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Oh, you know, democracy, nonalignment, socialism.”

  “I don’t believe in socialism. I’ve tried to tell you that for fifteen years. If I did, or was prepared to pretend I did, I’d still have the party ticket today.”

  “Well, whether you believe in it or not,” I snap back, “the party does. It’s part of the officially adopted platform you would have been sworn to uphold if you had been a candidate.”

  “So you believe what the party tells you to believe.”

  “How does it matter?” I am really exasperated now, and I’m shouting. “When has any of this ever mattered to anybody? Does anyone vote because of what a politician believes? Does he then conduct himself in office according to what he believes? The name of the game, Dad, is winning elections. That’s what the party has taken me on board to do, and I thought you’d at least be happy about it, for Chrissake.”

  “Why should I be happy? For nearly twenty years now I have been urging you to join me, to take an interest in my work, to involve yourself in the constituency. You have done none of these things, you have not heeded a single request. Now, when you do, it is at the behest of my enemies in the party — and it is at my expense.”

  “Dad, they would have taken the ticket away from you anyway. I heard the way they talked about your chances.”

  “You don’t understand a thing, do you?” My father’s voice is already hoarse, his face tired and weak. I realize with a shock that he has become what I had never thought of him as becoming — an old man. “It was I who told the PM I would not be a candidate at these elections against Pandit Sugriva Sharma. I know precisely the reasons why I am vulnerable, foremost among them my age and the sense that I have exhausted my capacity to do anything for the constituency. Especially since it is clear they will never make me a full minister. But I also told the PM who should get the ticket in my place. And till a few minutes ago, I thought the party had concurred with my judgment.”

  “Who?” I stand up from the chair and demand belligerently. “Who would you rather have had the ticket than me, your own son?”

  “My own son,” he says, and I realize he is not echoing my question but answering it. “Your brother. He has worked long and hard to deserve this opportunity. He has involved himself in the problems of my constituents. He knows the names of hundreds of them, their difficulties, their hopes. He has walked the roads and tramped through the fields; he knows each village by sight. The people recognize him, trust him, and love him — and he does not suffer from my handicaps of age, unrealized ambitions, and unfashionable beliefs. Pandit Sugriva Sharma would not have beaten him.”

  I turn around to look at my brother, who stands near the doorway, looking deprived. Christ, I’d had no idea what was going on. “All the more reason,” I say quickly, “why I need you to be my campaign manager, Ashwin. I can’t win without you.” I walk up to him and look him in the eye. “Ashwin — will you help me?”

  His eyes drop behind his spectacles. “Of course, Ashok-bhai,” he mumbles.

  I turn to my father, who is sitting hollowly in his chair, embittered in defeat. I realize he is waiting for me to ask him the same question. He will then, graciously but grudgingly, extend to me his blessings.

  I look at him, slouched sullenly in his chair, his face set in that look of disapprobation I have seen on his face all my life, and decide I am not going to give him the satisfaction.

  “You’ll never be able to stop disapproving of me, will you, Dad?” I ask.

  Then I walk out of the study, and out — as far as I can help it — of his life.

  I am tired. The speeches are all right; that’s like acting a particularly undemanding part. It’s the trudging through the countryside that kills me. In the chappals that are part of my nationalist attire, my feet take a pounding from the hard, unrelenting soil, from the slushy muck of the fields, from the grimy dust in the streets. Once in a while some villager runs up with a lota and washes my feet in ritual welcome. But before the water dries, I am off again, and wet feet seem to suffer much more the depredations of rural pedestrian travel. I am getting increasingly anxious to shake the dust of the Hindi heartland off my toes.

  As I walk through villages, trailing behind me the curious crowd of idlers, party workers, and fans (many, alas, too young to vote), as I smile and engage in the rituals of campaigning — talking, questioning, ducking into thatched huts to solicit the peasantry, sitting on charpoys with hookah-puffing farmers to seek their wisdom, standing on the back of the flatbed Tempo to harangue the bazaar through a megaphone — I cannot escape the unworthy suspicion that Ashwin is deliberately putting me through this punishing schedule to get back at me. But when I ask if all this is really necessary, he has a reasonable answer: with an opponent like the Pandit, I can’t leave anything to chance. I need to make myself known to the voters as someone who is not just jetting in from Bombay and expecting to win on my stardom alone.

  Maya has come down to help and she is a great hit, wearing simple cotton saris and greeting the women with great respect, not just with folded hands but, in the case of the maternal figures, with an attempt to touch their feet (she rarely has to go through with the whole gesture because the toothless old ladies lift her up in, well, touched gratitude). I watch her in action, ever the dutiful housewife, and realize once more what an asset she is as a wife. To think, for instance, of Mehnaz in this role, with her exquisitely painted face and nails, her silks and her urban chatter, is inconceivable: she would lose me ten votes for every one her glamour obtained. Whereas Maya is, as always in public, perfect in the role.

  The fact that she abandoned her brief filmi comeback after the disastrous Dil Ek Qila has only helped. Rural voters don’t think too highly of young actresses, though they like to watch them: in their lexicon the term actress equals something between “brazen hussy” and “fallen woman.” They see Maya, though, as a wife and mother; she doesn’t look or behave like an actress and the few who know she was one also know she gave it up to be the wife and mother she now so plainly is. So she is welcomed into their homes, where she asks knowledgeably about babies’ colic and the availability of sugar. Between her and me, we’ve sewn up the female vote in the constituency, and, as everywhere in India, men are merely a minority. When Maya goes back to Bombay to rejoin the kids, promising to return in a week’s time for the concluding stages of the campaign, I am feeling extremely confident.

  Ashwin is not.

  Much against my better judgment I have agreed, at his request, to attend a strategy session with the main campaign workers one night. It has been a particularly exhausting day, and I am not fully attentive as he introduces a number of disquieting trends and a larger number of unquiet party men in terms that fail to register clearly in my bleary consciousness. To my uninitiated mind, earnest Rams merge with voluble Shyams, caste calculations fuse confusingly with the arithmetic of the campaign accounts. As the conversation wears on, though, my confidence fades. The details may still be fuzzy in my mind, but the overall picture is depressingly clear.

  The consensus of the professionals seems to be that the Pandit has too many groups committed to him: the Brahmins because he is a Brahmin, the minorities because he is known as a champion of the minorities, the poor because he can always blame the party in power for their poverty. The
latest blow is that, after a national deal between their parties, the official Communist party candidate has just withdrawn in his favor. The traditional mistrust of the outsider is also being assiduously cultivated by Sugriva Sharma’s campaigners. Although we are both first-time contenders in this constituency, the Pandit is a former Chief Minister in this same state, and he can trace his roots — as he never fails to remind his audiences in the broad local dialect — to the hills a hundred kilometers away. Whereas I don’t look or sound like a local, and I haven’t a fraction of his political experience to offer. The Pandit, I learn, has taken to referring to me patronizingly as “the boy,” a term that is gaining circulation; his sidekicks more disparagingly call me naachnewala, the fellow who dances. The Rams and Shyams shift uneasily in their steel folding chairs, shaking their heads grimly and drowning their despair in endless cups of oversugared tea.

  I cannot believe this. “What about my crowds?” I ask. “What about the way people follow me about? What about Maya?”

  “We can’t afford to read too much into all that,” Ashwin says. “It might just be the Madurai effect.”

  “The what?”

  “The Madurai effect. Sorry, political shorthand.” Is it my imagination, or does Ashwin seem to revel in reminding me of my ignorance at every opportunity? “In the 1967 elections, the biggest crowd in the history of Indian elections turned up at Madurai to listen to Mrs. Gandhi, the new Prime Minister, campaign for the local Congress candidate. They stayed four hours in the heat and applauded her to a man. When the voting actually took place, the Congress candidate lost his deposit.”

  “In other words,” I interpret the lesson, “they came out of curiosity, not out of support?”

  “Exactly,” Ashwin nods. “In our country, elections are a popular tamasha every five years, a spectacle, an entertainment for the bored masses. People will gather to watch an unusual candidate in much the same spirit as they might stand around to watch a monkey-man performing tricks.” I look at him sharply, but the simile seems to have been chosen at random. I don’t know how faithfully Ashwin has watched my films. In fact, I realize with a twinge of guilt, I don’t know very much about Ashwin at all. I spent very little time with him after going to college and entering my own world. I have no real image of my brother since the days we played cricket outside the house as schoolboys. I recall with a fond smile that I used to bully him into long spells of bowling.