Show Business

by Shashi Tharoor

  “Subramanyam,” I explode one morning, “I can’t believe you sent me to a reception to celebrate the National Day of Outer Mongolia.”

  “But wery important I am thinking,” he replies defensively. “Diplomatic and all.”

  “There were about two thousand people there, almost entirely gate-crashers from the university looking for free drinks,” I tell him feelingly. “The ambassador hadn’t the slightest idea who I was. I was pinned to a corner by a Chinese woman interpreter in glasses who kept telling me how much cleaner Beijing was than Ulan Bator. The gate-crashers all recognized me, though, and kept pestering me for autographs. I was so busy signing napkins that I couldn’t even take a sip from my drink. At the end of the evening the interpreter said it was most interesting that Indian students couldn’t drink alcohol at a foreign embassy without a signed permit from a member of Parliament. She was going to report it as a rule they would do well to apply back home in China.”

  Subramanyam looks suitably’ chagrined, though I think he has rather missed the point. I resume my attack, brandishing a slip of paper. “And what was this?”

  He looks at the note he had neatly written out for me, on the basis of a telephone message. “Evening with Mrs. Sippy group, sir,” he enunciates, as if I can’t read.

  “I know what it says, you idiot, but what did you think it meant?”

  “Mrs. Sippy, sir, you are knowing Mrs. Sippy, wife of wee-eye-pee producer in Bombay. Many big movies, sir. I thought you be happy, sir, to be accepting Mrs. Sippy invitation. Wery correct it was done, sir. Secretary called and all, said no time to be sending card. Real style, sir, no?”

  I take a deep breath. “Subramanyam,” I explain with more patience than I possess. “It turned out to be Mississippi. A group from Mississippi. American visitors, Subramanyam. They wanted to know about Indian culture and customs. They spoke very slowly and clearly and loudly because they knew they were talking to a foreigner. They asked about sacred cows and whether I was from the acting caste. They wondered if Indian women were branded on their foreheads at birth. How can I ever forgive you, Subramanyam?”

  “I am sorry, sir,” he says miserably. “I am not understanding all this new-new names. You better be getting someone better, sir.”

  “Don’t be silly, Subramanyam,” I respond in some alarm. What would I do without him? “You’ll learn. These social engagements don’t matter very much anyway. I have more than enough of them to attend. My real problem is during working hours. I’ve really got nothing to do.”

  A wary gleam lights up in Subramanyam’s beady eyes. Intimate awareness of my political unimportance has helped make him chronically homesick and, sometimes, presumptuously familiar.

  “Why not you going back to films, sir?” he asks. “Though Mechanic not doing wery well, many producers are wanting, sir.”

  “I’m afraid they’ll just have to want some more, Subramanyam,” I advise him. “I’ve only been an MP a few months, after all. It’s hardly time to give up.”

  “Oh no, sir, you are misunderstanding,” Subramanyam assures me. “I am not saying you should be giving up political life, no sir. But you can be doing both films and politics, sir, like MGR he was doing.”

  I wish everyone wouldn’t keep throwing MGR at me. Ashwin, Cyrus, now even Subramanyam. The fellow went on to become a Chief Minister, of course, which has rather stolen my thunder. I’m just a backbench MP, the political equivalent of the fat-arsed females with tree-trunk thighs who dance behind the heroine.

  “I don’t know how the PM would react to that, Subramanyam. Let me see. I’ll think about it.”

  Ashwin, who lives where he always has, with our parents, is categorical. “The party wouldn’t like it at all, Ashok,” he says firmly. “It wouldn’t fit well with the new image they want you to build, and it would give Sugriva Sharma and his ilk a chance to say I told you so. Remember how the good Pandit used to declare during the campaign that you’d be too busy chasing actresses for the cameras to do anything for the common people of the constituency? Our people’s line always was that you’d achieved all you wanted to in Hindi films and that you now wanted to turn your energies to serving the district. When you announced after the election that you would wind up the film projects that were in hand and cancel the ones on which shooting hadn’t yet begun, it got very favorable play. You can’t go back on that now.”

  “But I’m not doing very much here, Ash,” I say. “And I — I’m bored.”

  He gives me a look of withering contempt, like a makeup man asked to powder the arms of a too-dark actress. “You should have thought of that earlier, shouldn’t you?” it seems to say. But Ashwin’s only words are: “Then it’s about time you took up my suggestion, Ashok-bhai.”

  “No.” My reaction is not as strong as usual, because his look has shaken me; but the word comes out instinctively. His suggestion was that I start receiving the inevitable flock of visitors and supplicants from the constituency — and, because I didn’t have an acceptable house of my own, that I do so where they were still coming, in other words, at my father’s house.

  Ashwin shrugs, but it is not a gesture of indifference. He cares: there are really people in politics who care. “Look, they’re not coming all this way just to see Dad, or to hear me tell them you’re tied up in Parliament. The handful I send you there get little more than a namaste and a smile from you, in some open space like the Lok Sabha courtyard. That’s not enough, Ashok. They want to sit properly and talk to you, tell you their problems, seek your help. You’ve got to start doing this.”

  “Fat lot of good it’d do,” I cut in. “What little we can deliver by way of favors, you’re already doing in my name.”

  “You know it’s not the same thing,” he said, visibly curbing his evident impatience. “Ashok, why won’t you do this?” No “Ashok bhai” here. I notice that the suffix always slips when he can’t summon even ritual respect for me.

  I go on the offensive for once. “You know perfectly well why I won’t set myself up at Dad’s place. He never issued one word of support for me during the election — no endorsement, no campaign appearance, nothing. When I won, he couldn’t find it in his heart to congratulate me. Not even when I came home in triumph.”

  “Ashok-bhai, you’re overreacting.” He’s trying.

  “You know what he said? Within my hearing, to you? He said, ’Ashwin, well done.’ Just that. And then he turned to me, I was standing there looking at him, and the words just stuck in his throat.”

  “Words, words — why do the words matter so much to you, Ashok-bhai? Everyone knows how he must have felt. Does everything have to be a line of dialogue from a script before you can see it?”

  Despite myself, I decide to let that pass. “What would you say he felt at the time?”

  “Pride, satisfaction, the obvious things.”

  “Well, he didn’t exactly make them obvious.”

  “Oh, Ashok-bhai, you’re being childish. What gesture did you make to him? Did you go and touch his feet and seek his blessings?”

  I take a deep breath and expel it very slowly. “Ashwin,” I say calmly, “I don’t care to discuss this any further. And I am not coming to hold court in my father’s house. That’s final.” He eyes me evenly, and I realize with a pang that he doesn’t like me at all. It is a half-formed suspicion that has nestled at the base of my consciousness for a long time, like a coiled serpent waiting to spring. I recoil from its hiss now and turn away from my brother. “If these people want to sit and talk to me, send them here,” I say, waving my hand to take in the drab white walls of the hostel room.

  “Are you serious?” Ashwin asks, his eyes narrowing.

  “Every morning, from nine to ten,” I confirm expansively. “Oh — and don’t feel obliged to be here yourself, if you’d rather not.”

  I want him to turn to me, to take me in his arms and say, “Brother, I know you need me, I know my resentment has hurt you, I am sorry, I shall always be by your side.” But of cou
rse he does not.

  “If you think you can manage on your own,” he says stiffly, “I’ll be happy to direct them here and leave it all to you.” And this is the same Ashwin who has told me for weeks that I need a political mentor, a political handler, and a political secretary — none of which I have yet acquired.

  I nod. “Do that,” I say. “I’ve asked too much of you already.”

  He leaves, and I watch him go, noticing him really as if for the first time: the walk, the movement of his arms, the shape of his narrow hips under the kurta-pajamas. He is so much like me.

  “Ashokji.” Dr. Sourav Gangoolie, party treasurer and Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, rises from a plush chair in his air-conditioned office and waves his unlit pipe in my general direction. “So glad you could come.”

  His warmth is as unreal as the frigidity of the air in the room. I sit gingerly in the chair he offers me and find myself sinking with uneasy comfort into its leather-upholstered welcome. On the wall a lurid Husain print portrays Indira Gandhi as Durga, all-conquering goddess of South Block.

  “Some tea?” Dr. Gangoolie — the honorific is of as uncertain provenance as the spelling of his surname, but that is what everyone calls him — blinks at me behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. He wears, unusually for a politician, safari suits rather than more indigenous garb and tries to conceal buck teeth behind a trimmed beard and a rarely lit pipe, whose function, it has long been rumored, is primarily to prompt him to keep his lips sealed. With his short hair, beaky nose, and prominent ears he looks like a subspecies of owl, but a more knowing and less corpulent variety than the genus Sponerwalla. Fittingly, Dr. Gangoolie has a reputation for both erudition and discretion, which has only increased with his appointment to the Prime Minister’s Secretariat while still holding his party post. Behind his desk is a framed caricature of Dr. Gangoolie himself by the cartoonist Kutty, but where smoke curls out of the pictorial pipe, the real one is, as far as I can make out, unlit.

  “Oh — no, thank you. I’ll wait,” I reply. I expect I’ll get another cup when I’m with the PM, and few liquids are as undrinkable as government-issue tea.

  Dr. Gangoolie seems somewhat put out by my reply, for he opens his mouth and closes it again on the mouthpiece of his pipe. I feel impelled to ease the strain. “As you know, I’ve been trying to see the Prime Minister for some time now,” I say defensively.

  “Yes, yes.” He looks uncomfortable, like a producer reminded of a promise. “The PM has been really, so to say, busy. So many meetings, visitors, overseas trips, you know how it has been.”

  “Yes, of course,” I reply graciously. “I can well imagine. But I am glad the summons has come at last.”

  “Oh, dear.” The resemblance to an owl becomes even more pronounced as Dr. Gangoolie tilts his head sideways and examines me in dismay through his glasses. “I fear there has been, so to say, a misunderstanding.”

  “There has?” Dr. Gangoolie’s habit of lapsing into a sibilant “so to say” is beginning to grate.

  “I am afraid so.” Dr. Gangoolie takes his pipe out of his mouth and smiles ingratiatingly, but the eyes behind the glasses are stern. “You see, it is not the Prime Minister who wishes to see you today, but, so to say, me.”

  “You?” I flush with embarrassment. “But my secretary said the Prime Minister’s office had called — I’m sorry,” I mutter, cursing Subramanyam for taking so long to get the hang of this place.

  “That’s all right,” Dr. Gangoolie says in a tone that almost sounds cheerful. But he does not offer me another cup of tea. “How are you, so to say, getting on here in Delhi, Ashokji?”

  “It’s a different world for me, Dr. Gangoolie,” I reply candidly. “And there’s still a lot I have to learn. But I do wish I could be of some greater use to the party and the government than adorning the back benches and casting the occasional parliamentary vote.”

  “Indeed you can, Ashokji.” Dr. Gangoolie looks delighted at the turn of the conversation. “That is precisely why I have, so to say, called you here today. It is — uh — a rather delicate matter.”

  “I’m all ears.” I sit up. This is the first time the powers-that-be have taken any interest in me.

  “Of course, what I am about to say must not, so to say, go beyond these four walls.” He indicates them with a sweep of his pipe, as if to leave me in no doubt about which four walls he means.

  “Of course.” I am at my professional best; my voice reflects a man who is firm, clear, dependable.

  He looks suitably gratified. Then his expression changes. “How much did the party contribute to your election expenses, Ashokji?” he asks abruptly.

  I am somewhat taken aback by the question. “I don’t really know,” I say tentatively. “My brother, Ashwin, handled that kind of thing.”

  “But would you hazard, so to say, a guess, perhaps?”

  “Oh, seven, eight lakhs?”

  Dr. Gangoolie gets up, walks over to his desk, pulls a file out of a drawer, consults it. “Seventeen lakhs, three hundred and four rupees,” he says, slipping the file back and closing the drawer with the turn of a key, “and sixty-two paise.”

  I raise my eyebrows, impressed.

  “One of our higher subventions,” he says smugly, “but then it was, so to say, an important race. Some of our other first-time candidates got only eight-nine lakhs.”

  “I’m grateful,” I say.

  “Not at all, not at all,” Dr. Gangoolie waves his pipe dismissively. “It was our duty as a party. Posters, Jeeps, megaphones, speaking arrangements, so to say, tea and coffee for party workers, petrol, garlands, transport for older voters — there are so many things that cost money in winning an election. And do you know how much the Election Commission allows us to spend? In total?”

  “No,” I confess.

  “One lakh exactly,” Dr. Gangoolie says. “And that is what our accounts officially, so to say, show — perhaps even a few rupees less.”

  It is my turn to blink. “But that’s absurd,” I say. “How can anyone run a campaign on so little?”

  “Well, some candidates don’t even have that much,” Dr. Gangoolie responds contentedly. “But the bigger parties, and certainly ours, are left with no choice, so to say, but to violate the laws.”

  “You mean my campaign was illegal?”

  “No more so than most, so to say, of the other victors. If not, indeed, all of them.” The pipe describes a large circle, taking in the entire rotunda of Parliament.

  “But our party” — I use the possessive pronoun with self-conscious pride — “has been in power for so many years. Why didn’t we change the law?”

  “We didn’t need to.” Dr. Gangoolie assumes the professorial air for which he is especially respected by the dropouts and dunderheads who dominate our party. “Some laws exist, so to say, to codify an ideal, a desirable, not to mention politically salable, state of affairs. It is widely recognized that their fulfillment may not, so to say, always be realizable in practice.”

  “In other words, everyone knows the law is there to be broken?”

  “Ignored, my dear boy, not broken.” Dr. Gangoolie taps the bowl of his pipe on an ashtray, but nothing emerges. “You ask why we don’t, so to say, change it. Why bother to when it poses no difficulties in practice? Whom would it help? In fact, the present restrictions imply certain, so to say, advantages for a party in power. To spend above the legal limit, one needs illegal money, or perhaps I should say money that has not been accounted for.” I nod. “Who has the easiest access, so to say, to such sources of funds?”

  “A party in a position to do favors?” I suggest.

  “Precisely. You are, so to say, a quick learner.” Dr. Gangoolie beams, yellowing teeth parting his black beard. “So in fact a low legal limit is of some benefit to us, because we are usually in a position to do better than others once the account books are closed. In fact, raising such funds has been among my, so to say, principal functions for the party.”r />
  “I’ve heard.”

  Dr. Gangoolie acknowledges his repute with a nod. “But these days things are not, so to say, so easy.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, the Prime Minister and the people around him are anxious, so to say, to clean up the party. The government is launched on a full frontal assault against corruption — a term much misused in our public life, incidentally, but that is, er, another matter. The Finance Minister is busy conducting raids against businessmen whose books are not, so to say, as clear as the complexions of your leading ladies.” He allows himself a little laugh at this witticism. “It is not a good time to be asking them for unaccounted donations on the side.”

  “I see.” I am not at all sure how far I can see, or where all this is leading. But something tells me I will not have long to wait to find out.

  “But elections still have to be fought, our democratic processes, so to say, defended,” Dr. Gangoolie adds without irony. “So our minds have turned to alternatives. Instead of getting our funds, so to say, in small quantities from large numbers of Indians, why not get them in large amounts from one or two foreigners? It is easier, much less messier, altogether simpler. For myself, too, I must admit to a certain sense, so to say, of relief at not having to repeatedly stretch my hands out to some of the grubby little men with whom we are obliged to do business. Meet a foreign businessman, strike a deal (in the national interest, of course), agree on a certain, so to say, commission — nothing corrupt here, it is, so to say, a standard practice — and a generous amount of foreign exchange goes directly to a bank account in Liechtenstein or Switzerland.”

  “Ah.” I am beginning to feel distinctly uneasy.

  “And this, Ashokji, is, so to say, where you come in.”