Show Business

by Shashi Tharoor

  “Don’t I get to see him now?” I ask. “Privately?”

  “Can’t you see? Ze Guru his meditating,” she replies.

  “But I’ve come all this way just to talk to him,” I say.

  “What you ’ave to say, ze Guru already knows,” she declares sententiously. “Ze Guru alone decides hif’e needs to talk to you.”

  Ashwin beckons. He doesn’t want me to make a fuss.

  “Wait.” The Frenchwoman looks at her master. The Guru has opened one eye owlishly and is raising a hand. Slowly, he points at me and beckons. When Ashwin and the devotee try to follow me, he stops them with upraised palm. A long finger opens out and points exclusively to me. It folds back, a peremptory summons. I ought to feel insulted, but I find myself enjoying the privilege. “Private audience,” I say, shrugging at the Frenchwoman. She folds her hands to the Guru and walks out with Ashwin, shutting the door. I am alone with the man of God.

  As I walk toward him, I see that he is laughing. Great waves of silent mirth convulse him in his cross-legged pose, so that his be-robed body literally quakes on the mattress. Strands of gray beard disappear into his closed mouth, his sparkling eyes dance with merriment, his hands helplessly hold his sides. I don’t see what is so funny, unless, while he was meditating, some higher consciousness cracked a joke on the astral plane.

  “AB!” the Guru says at last. “So you really didn’t recognize me!”

  Incredulous, I advance closer to the august presence, trying to visualize a face behind the beard. “Tool!” I exclaim. “What on earth are you doing behind all that shrubbery?”

  “Shh,” Atul (“Tool”) Dwivedi, fellow Fransiscan and Coffee House habitue of collegiate notoriety, raises a long-nailed finger to his lips. “Not so loud, or you’ll have the entire ashram down on us.” He pats a place next to him on the mattress. “Try and look reverential, in case anyone looks in,” he says. “God, it’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you, god,” I respond irreverently. “How did all this happen? Didn’t you go off to BHU to study philosophy or something? No one’s heard a thing out of you since.”

  “I did go to the Benares Hindu University,” Tool confirms, his eyes now droll rather than divine. “To study philosophy. And — other things.”

  “And what happened to your hair? And this beard — almost white already?”

  “Don’t you remember my father? Premature baldness runs in the family. And the things I have thought about over the years,” Tool says, “have grayed me. But we’re not young anymore, Ashok, you and I. You must be over forty.”

  “Forty-one next week.” I had not really imagined that that disqualified me from thinking of myself as young. Tool has sobered me.

  “How do you stay like this? You must have a picture in the attic.” We had both seen The Picture of Dorian Gray in preference to reading the book.

  “Fifty pictures,” I joke. “Almost all of them hits.”

  “Yes, I’ve been reading about you.” Tool adopts the distant gaze of his scriptural discourse and quotes from memory. “Darlings, national politics will never be the same again, at least not for our ruling party. Cheetah has learned that a funny thing happened on the way to the quorum: the Prime Minister has decided to offer a party ticket to Bollywood’s reigning box office monarch, your very own Ashok Banjara. Of course, it can only be the kind of coincidence so beloved of our scriptwriters that the constituency from which the PM wants to make this MCP an MP has belonged for goodness knows how many years to the Banjara Daddy! Who would ever suggest that our hero hasn’t got everything on his own merit? Not Cheetah, my little cubs. After all, with so much talk these days of more women candidates being nominated, our Hungry Not-So-Young Man could make an excellent Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, eh? Grrrowl!” The Guru’s eyes twinkle at my evident astonishment. “So you see, I’ve been expecting your visit.”

  “I can’t believe you read that stuff, let alone know it by heart,” I say.

  “But I used to be a filmi fanatic in college! How quickly you forget,” Tool reproaches me. “Besides, theology can be trying. A Guru must have his little pleasures.”

  “Time for kama, hanh?” I joke. “By the way, thanks for the endorsement.”

  “My pleasure,” he responds, and I imagine the weak pun is intended. That’s how we all were at St. Francis’. “But it wasn’t entirely unmotivated. I need your help.”

  “You? Mine? I thought you had it made here. Women, prestige, adulation — what more could any Franciscan want?”

  The Guru scratches his bottom through the robe. “I’ll answer that philosophically some other time,” he replies. “But the short answer is, I’m getting rather tired of the rural life. Too many mosquitoes and not enough electricity. I’m thinking of making a move.”

  “And what can I do to help?”

  “Well, I need your advice, and some contacts,” the spiritual guide says matter-of-factly. “What would you say to my trying to set myself up in Bombay, as a sort of resident Guru to the stars?”

  “Why not? I admired your patter this morning.”

  “That’s nothing.” The Guru waved a dismissive hand, as if swatting one of his troublesome mosquitoes. “Bollywood doesn’t want abstruse comparisons between cinema and advaita. What it wants is a philosophy to justify itself by.”

  “Go on.” I am intrigued.

  “Your cinema world is full of mendacity, imitation, corruption, exploitation, and adultery,” he says in the briskly bored tone of a schoolteacher taking a roll call. “It’s endemic, it’s ingrained, it’s part of reality. In fact, all these things are part of the daily assumptions of the Hindi film industry and of those involved with it.”

  “And you think you can change that,” I suggest helpfully. “Reform it. Reintroduce spiritual values.”

  “On the contrary,” Tool retorts. “It can’t be changed. No one wants to change it, and the system wouldn’t work any other way. After all, despite these things, or more probably because of them, India now has the world’s largest film industry. And it’s one that flourishes with great efficiency and financial viability in the face of some appalling infrastructural, logistical, and technical drawbacks. It’s little short of a miracle that it works as well as it does. Not even a godman wants to mess with a miracle.”

  “So what do you want to do there?” I ask, puzzled.

  The Guru sighs. “I’ve done my stint of dharma,” he says. “I’ve spent the best years of my life learning, meditating, and now running an ashram. I’ve begun to enjoy a bit of kama at last, especially now that these foreign women have discovered me. The time has come, I think, for artha. I want to live well.”

  “Whatever happened to nonattachment?” I ask jocularly.

  “Oh, it’s very important,” Tool says. “I want my followers to be completely unattached to their material possessions. The best way of achieving this is, of course, to give it all to the ashram. As for myself, I will own nothing: everything will be in the name of the ashram, for the greater good of its members. But I will have the use of such things as the ashram sees fit to give me, and I intend to have so many that I can afford to be nonattached to any of them.”

  This sounds more jesuitical than Vedantic, but I listen keenly as the Guru abandons the digression and returns to my original question. “What I will give Bollywood,” he explains, “is a philosophical framework for its ills. I’m thinking of calling it Hindu Hedonism. Like the sound of that? No? Well, maybe I need to think about that some more. But labels don’t matter, so perhaps I won’t need one. The idea is to let people continue doing all the venal things that they are so successful doing, but to teach them to feel good about them rather than guilty. Done something you feel bad about? You were only fulfilling your dharma. Was it something really terrible? Well, you’ll pay for it in your next life, so continue enjoying this one. Guilt? Guilt is a Western emotion, a Judeo-Christian construct we only feel because we are still the victims of moral colonialism. The very notio
n of ‘sin’ as some sort of transgression against God’s divine will does not exist in the Hindu soul and should be eradicated from the Indian soil.”

  I stare at him in bemusement, unsure whether he is serious. He carries on unperturbed. “Moksha, salvation, is the thing — the idea is not to seek forgiveness for sin and liberation from guilt, but ultimately to escape the entire human condition, to be liberated from space and time and the endless cycle of birth and rebirth. The only sin is violation of your dharma, which means not doing what your situation obliges you to do: Arjuna having moral scruples about killing on the battlefield was in danger of violating his dharma, whereas when he fought and killed he was upholding it — not the kind of thing your Westerner with his Judeo-Christian moral code can easily live with, eh? The Occidental wants to die with no sins in this life to pay for; the Indian should look on death as an opportunity to experience immortality, with the sins of this and previous lives rendered irrelevant.”

  The Guru pauses for breath. “Shabash,” I say, feeling like Iftikhar. “And adultery? What do you say to the chap who’s cheated on his wife, lied to her, kept a mistress? What do you say to the mistress?”

  Tool looks at me like a lynx at midnight, seeing into my darkness. “Monogamy is a Western imposition,” he says shortly. “It didn’t exist in India before the British came. But that would be too easy.” He sounds sententious again. “The scriptures are full of examples of the noble heroes of our epics sleeping with more than one woman,” he intones. “Krishna is the obvious example — he loved sixteen thousand women, it is reliably recorded, and fathered, less reliably, eighty thousand sons. His greatest consort, his affair with whom is immortalized in painting and sculpture and dance all over India, was a married woman, Radha. Deception was therefore essential, though it was easier for a god than for other adulterers; once when Krishna spotted Radha’s husband shadowing her to one of their nocturnal trysts, he adopted the form of Kali, so that the spying cuckold saw his wife busy in adoration of his own favorite deity!”

  “Krishna was a god,” I demur. “His rules were different. What about humans?”

  “Arjuna embarked on one of the great erotic sagas of our history, traveling the length and breadth of India to expand his mind and expend his body. Even righteous Yudhisthira had at least three wives, and no one’s really counting. In fact, it is difficult to think of one hero from our Puranas, of one man who remained faithful to a single woman. My own contribution to national integration is that I have had congress with at least one woman from each of the twenty-two states and six Union Territories, including the Andamans — but then they went and annexed Sikkim.” He sighed. “So much to do. But I digress. The precedents are considerable, yes, even human ones. But,” he adds, anticipating my objection, “the postcolonial laws, regrettably, have enshrined this barbarism, what the cheerful Cheetah calls the monotony of monogamy, so lying and cheating become mandatory. Not to worry: the Puranas have an answer for that too. As Krishna explains to Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata:

  In the matter of truth and deception,

  There’s room for many an exception;

  It’s all right to lie

  In dharma, provi —

  -Ded it’s in areas enjoined since Inception:

  the protection of cows;

  the fulfillment of vows;

  defending either a marriage

  or a Brahmin’s carriage;

  but the most merit is earned,

  where women are concerned.

  In these cases above, be ambivalent,

  For our theology’s quite polyvalent;

  In every season

  There can be a good reason

  For a lie and Truth to be equivalent.

  “You made that up,” I accuse him admiringly.

  “The verse, yes, but every idea in it is gospel,” he swears. “Look it up. But in any case, AB, the Indian people never judged their gods by mortal standards. That’s why Krishna was worshiped for acting in ways his followers wouldn’t dream of tolerating in their own lives. Adultery, gluttony, theft, all came easily to the favorite deity of the Indian middle classes. But we’re not judgmental about our gods.” He smiled, more wickedly than wisely. “It’s much the same with you movie stars. You make the modern myths, so the same double standard applies to you. Your fans adore you for doing things they’d find shocking if their neighbors did them.” He looks at me searchingly. “So how do you like my Hindu hedonism? Will it play at the Prithvi?”

  “They’ll lap it up,” I agree. “Especially the actresses.”

  “Ah, the actresses.” A purply-pink tongue emerges from the midst of his graying foliage and licks a pair of dry mauve lips that briefly come into view. “I intend to explore with them the belief of the Alvar school twelve centuries ago that the soul, in its longing for God, must make itself female in order to receive divine penetration. The soul of an actress, I shall explain, starts off with a considerable advantage in this respect.”

  “And you, I take it, will provide the divine penetration?”

  “A mere mortal substitute, old soul. In anticipation of the sublimity of the spiritual process to follow.”

  I shake my head in admiration. “You’ve come a long way, Tool, since the days when we used to chat up the co-eds by saying that we would live up to the ideals of St. Francis, who was kind to birds.”

  “Who used to caress the birds.” Tool Dwivedi corrects me, shaking his head in turn. “You’ve obviously come a longer way, Ashok, if you started off being kind to them. But tell me, what can you do for me?”

  “I’ll happily introduce you to my friends and producers,” I respond without hesitation.

  “Good, but not directly,” the Guru says. “I don’t want too many awkward questions arising about our connection. St. Francis’ College is not a good background for a Hindu holy man who wants to be taken seriously in the West. Officially, I grew up on the mountainside at Rishikesh and the riverside in Benares.” The beard parts again in a smile.

  “And I’m not sure,” he adds, sounding anything but unsure, “that it’ll do either of us any good to be publicly associated with each other. No, Ashok, I want to keep you up my sleeve. In fact, I don’t mind at all if you conspicuously keep your distance from me. Could be useful later on. But give me a few names and unlisted phone numbers. Tell me a few inside stories. Help me know in advance what’s likely to be bothering some of these people. Straying husbands. Suicide attempts. Family secrets. There’s nothing more impressive than surprising a prospective disciple with some startling piece of information you couldn’t possibly have had in the normal course of things.”

  “You need Radha Sabnis, not me,” I reply. “But sure, I can give you some of that stuff. Just tell me when, and how.”

  “We shall arrange an even more private audience in due course to exchange that information,” the Guru chortles. “In the meantime, tell me how I can help you.”

  “You can repeat your endorsement in your Hindi session,” I suggest. “And —”

  “Consider it done,” he cuts in. “They are probably already exchanging amazed whispers about your having the longest audience the Guru has ever granted. But I shall find a way of making it more explicit for the villagers.”

  “Thanks. And in Bollywood you can help take someone off my hands who is getting just a little too awkward for me right now. She’s ripe for a religious experience. It’s just what she needs to take her mind off me.”

  “I understand fully,” says the Guru. “I shall expect Ms. Elahi’s private phone number from you shortly.”

  I shake my head again, in wonder and relief. This guy could end up solving all my problems.

  Exterior: Day

  MECHANIC

  SYNOPSIS

  Ashok is an automobile mechanic in Bombay, working in a garage repairing the big cars of the powerful (and the powerful cars of the big). One of the garages clients is an important politician, Pranay, whose pretty but spoiled daughter Mehnaz regularly dri
ves in to get her red sports car serviced. Ashok’s attitude to her is an uneasy compound of gender attraction and class incivility. But one day (with smartly choreographed dishoom-dishoom), he rescues her from assailants — and turns down the cash reward her father offers him. Mehnaz is smitten, Pranay resentful.

  Ashok lives in a slum where, as the theme song makes clear, he is the popular solver of everyone’s problems:

  (ASHOK DANCES AROUND A CAR, WRENCH IN HAND)

  I’m just a good mechanic

  If your car breaks down, don’t panic —

  I’ll fix it;

  If your engine starts to sputter

  Or your oil flows in the gutter

  Don’t allow your heart to flutter,

  I’ll fix it.

  (IN HIS SLUM, REPAIRING A CHILD’S BICYCLE, PATCHING A LEAKY ROOF)

  I’m just a good mechanic

  If you have a problem, don’t panic —

  I’ll fix it;

  If your rickshaw needs repair,

  If your roof lets in the air,

  Don’t worry, don’t despair,

  I’ll fix it.

  But the slum is to be razed to make way for a development, and Pranay, the local legislator, is in league with the developers. Mehnaz, now Ashok’s devoted admirer, is present when Ashok leads a demonstration against the demolitions. She follows him on a protest march to her father’s house. Pranay is outraged, but she refuses to reenter his home until he agrees to receive the protesters as well. He does so with ill grace, but after a bitter quarrel in which Pranay rejects their demands, Ashok storms out, Mehnaz by his side. Pranay’s hired goons give chase, but they fail to restore either their boss’s daughter or his dignity, and Ashok, aided by his slum friends (principally by his sidekick, the comedian Ashwin), routs them in style.

  That night Mehnaz, newly homeless, has to share Ashok’s slum hut, and finds it difficult to stay on her side of the thin cotton sheet he has strung up as a partition. As the sound track pants in rhythm with the hero’s heartbeat, Mehnaz softly sings: