Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Bombay music now is different from the Bombay music I grew up with. For one thing, it relies more on electronic instruments and on African rhythms and voices. Many of the dance numbers feature a deep black voice popping up in the middle of the Hindi, declaring his laughing love for the very female Hindi voice. Indians like their male voices deep and their female voices high. But these days not that many people know the names of the playback singers; the Mangeshkar sisters no longer hold a monopoly. With the advent of electronic music, background music now competes with voice in a Hindi film song; the synthesizer is often more important and noticeable than the singer. And the masses love it; the great panwallah audience dances to it. Old-timers wince and complain, as old-timers are wont to do. They get especially incensed when the new boys set their electronics on the old songs and remix them with thumping disco beats and reggae voices and samples of rap. Suddenly a slow song, a lament, or a tender ballad becomes an urgent call to congress.

  Electronics opened up a whole new world to the Hindi film composers. They went a little crazy. Now they do not have to look for instrumentalists who know what a samba or a merengue beat is. They can steal it right off the synthesizer, off the sample compilation CDs. The digital readouts on Loy’s synthesizers announce the instruments they are mimicking: SWEET VIOLINS, AFRO DRUMS. I can make out ZOUK, and SENEGALESE CHANTING, and ZYDECO. Anything with a beat. This includes European classical music; the Indian musicians have not forgotten Mozart and have dressed up the Viennese lad in bongos and congas. Hindi film music is like Hinduism. All who come to invade it are themselves absorbed, digested, and regurgitated. Nothing musical is alien to it.

  One evening I take my family to see Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, a wonder fully entertaining film even though it falls apart in the home stretch. There are no villains in it. It is a big Punjabi puppy-love film about college romance, the middle-class Indian’s halcyon days. I have seen this school campus before somewhere. I know these characters. I try to think where. Then two words in a newspaper report about the set designer bring it back to me: Riverdale High. It was the American comic book resurrected in Hindi: Betty and Veronica fighting over Archie. The filmmakers grew up on Archie comics, which I too read, for a peep into America. When you want to escape India, you go to suburban America.

  My son Gautama sings “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” and “Chal Mra Ghoda,” in addition to “I’m a Barbie Girl” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” He is gathering his sources of pleasure from East and West. He is building his own vocabulary of Hindi film music that I have carried around all my life. When he is asked what he will miss when he goes back to America, he says straightaway, “Hindi movies.” When he misses Bombay in New York, he will sing “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” on the sidewalks of the far city. An Indian boy in America, singing a Hindi song from an Indian movie imitation of an American comic book; a Ping-Pong game of kitsch. Along with the Bhagavad Gita and Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, this too has wings.

  OVER THE MONTHS we work on Mission Kashmir, Vinod opens his home and his heart to me. He has been married three times, “and none of them knows how to make an omelet,” he complains. But both ex-wives visit his house regularly. When he has a backache, I walk into his house to witness the filmmaker lying on the floor, each of his three women—his harem, Anu calls it—massaging a different segment of his body. When he married Anu, he took her to the house of his first mother-in-law, who put the tilak on her forehead and blessed her, saying, “You are a daughter of this house.” He sees no reason to stop loving his ex-wives because he’s not married to them; more important, he sees no reason why they should stop loving him.

  I’m not sure why Vinod has taken me on. Then, slowly, I realize that what he wants is not so much a writer as a friend. I start getting invited to intimate functions at the Chopra household: birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations. No film folk are invited; often it is just Anu and Vinod’s immediate families, my family, and Ajay Lal and his family. Vinod has a way of sucking up other people’s lives and making them his own. He calls me every single morning and demands to know when I am getting to his house for the script session; when I make signs of wanting to leave in the evening, his face falls like that of one who is doomed to a long, lonely night. In the beginning I would accede to Vinod’s request to show up at eleven in the morning; gradually, as I realize I am getting to the director’s house before he has risen from his bed, I start stretching it.

  When my family leaves for America and I am alone for two months, Vinod summons me to his house one day and then calls for his cook. “From now on,” he instructs Khem, “lunch and dinner will be sent to Suketu from our house.” I protest, but Vinod will hear none of it. Every evening, Vinod’s driver arrives with an insulated tiffin full of Punjabi or Chinese or Italian vegetarian food; every morning another driver takes away the empty tiffin. In a poor country with a bad public health system, food takes on heightened meaning. In this filmi family, improbably, I have found a species of home.

  I invite people to my house for my birthday, and it is a tense party, with people who don’t like one another and not enough of them. Vinod changes his shooting schedule to make it. He arrives late, when almost everybody has left, but he fills up the room. He has just been to a filmi party and is full of entertaining stories and three beers. All of a sudden my party is happening, and I feel a rush of affection for him. In my two years in Bombay, he has been the one man who has always been generous with his time and his hospitality. It is done in a Punjabi way, not without taking something back and not without calling this fact to my attention. But there is an exuberance to him, a gregariousness, that puts a smile on the faces of people around him, people in the late stages of a lukewarm party. Being around Vinod, I get a sense that anything is possible: to marry and divorce women, make a lot of money, own a big house in Bandra, live a large life. Vinod carries his own power source within him, like an alkaline battery, like a nuclear submarine.

  Mahesh Bhatt’s Wound

  Mahesh Bhatt is in a bad mood. We are on a set for Mumbai Meri Jaan, a story about a middle-class immigrant to Bombay who makes good while retaining his small-town values. Tanuja Chandra is assisting him, and it is not going well. “I’m angry,” he rumbles ominously through the microphone. “There’s no enthusiasm.”

  The set is supposed to be Chunky Pandey’s bedroom—“my open-air Taj Mahal,” as one of his lines reads. There are the accoutrements of middle-class success: a bar stocked with Chivas Regal, a TV, a kitchen, and “a western-foreign-German-style toilet,” as another of Chunky’s lines describes it, continuing, “I stole the seat cover from a five-star hotel.” This visual extravaganza is being staged on the roof of the Happy Home and School for the Blind in Worli. A giant CEAT tire sign above us comes alive in red, gradually extinguishes itself, and reappears. There are about a hundred and fifty people on the set: light boys, sound people, actors, assorted assistants, and a sizable group of people who are doing absolutely nothing. “Only two or three people here know their job,” says Mahesh disgustedly. “That’s why our films have rough edges. It’s not like Hollywood, where everyone’s trained. I’m running a giant employment agency. They work with the whip.” The Indian film industry, like every other industry in the country, employs far more people than it needs to. The actors, especially Chunky, flub their lines repeatedly and the whole shot has to be done again. “Bhatt saab, please come here,” pleads Chunky after a rehearsal. Mahesh stays where he is. “You don’t need me to come there. You need to learn your lines. Learn your lines!”

  Mumbai meri Jaan, like so many other movies, offers a generic Bombay for sale to the provinces: rich people, fast women in fast cars, gangsters, policemen, consumer goods. To the Bihari immigrant walking around South Bombay, this part of the city is unreal, a film set. So astronomical are the prices for the flats here that the outsider does not say to himself, walking around Malabar Hill, “One day I shall live here.” He is walking in a dreamscape. Like this ridiculous set. If it were real,
it would be washed away—the bed, bar, toilet, red phone booth “stolen from MTNL,” the phone company—everything, with the first rain.

  I don’t know what I had expected when I met Mahesh: a good artist who had sold out? a philanderer? He has a reputation as a gasbag, losing no opportunity to be quoted in the papers on all manner of issues, including those entirely unrelated to cinema. I find an overweight, balding, rumpled man who looks older than his forty-nine years but is charming and likable and most at ease with the young.

  He is now writing a film set during the time of the riots, about his mother. She is a woman of two secrets. One is that she is his father’s mistress; he and his siblings are illegitimate. The other is that she is a Shia Muslim. One day his mother stopped outside a wedding hall and asked his elder sister to go inside. When the girl returned, his mother interrogated her about the wedding—how did the bride look? how was the groom?—and wept all night. It was the wedding of her lover, Mahesh’s father, to a more respectable woman.

  The relationship continued after the marriage, all his mother’s life. When his father, a Gujarati Brahmin producer of B movies, would visit their home, “there was never any completion,” says the producer son about his producer father. “He never once took his shoes off. He would never take off his shirt like other fathers and put on a singlet and sit down and read the newspaper.” Mahesh adores his mother, now in her eighties. “I used to bring glowworms in a bottle to put in my mother’s hair,” he says, with an easy laugh.

  The film about his mother and the riots—Zakhm, Wound—is the last film Mahesh will direct. He has sworn this. He has averaged more than one movie a year, some twenty-seven films in his quarter-century career. Mahesh is bored by the whole exercise of direction. It is concentrated hard work, seven days a week, toward a pointless exercise. He is now at the stage where he “phone-directs” some of his movies. He hates driving to the film shoots, hates having to appear enthusiastic. So he issues instructions to the actors on the set over the phone, as he’s driving or from home.

  “My earliest memories of the movies are sitting inside a preview theater on someone’s lap—my mother or my aunt or the maid—and seeing this black-and-white screen. I went toward it to try to touch it”—he mimes a child’s hand slowly touching a huge screen—“but as I got nearer it was just black and white dots and I lost the picture. Then I was pulled back. My life has become like that; I don’t see the magic anymore. It’s just the making of the film, and there are no arms to pull me back so I can see the whole picture.”

  He tells me the plot of Zakhm, in which the secret of the hero’s mother’s religion comes out only at the end, when he has to decide what type of funeral to give her. The film is in the form of a flashback during the Bombay riots, when the hero is at the hospital at his mother’s bedside with Thackeray’s mobs loose outside. He would not, however, name Thackeray in the movie. “I don’t want to make a film about politics.”

  The Hindi film industry has always had the secularism of a brothel. All are welcome as long as they carry or make money. The financier might be a hard-core Hindu nationalist. The lyricist can be a fundamentalist Sunni. A star who plays a Hindu will actually be Muslim, and his heroine, playing a Muslim, will be Hindu, and none of that matters to the public. But the 1993 riots toppled the pyramids of power in the film industry. The lower-level technicians became newly bold and demanded favors, questioned authority. The Sena men were making the rounds of the studios to check for Muslim employees. Hindus higher up in the industry, not knowing that Mahesh’s mother was a Muslim, would abuse Muslims in front of him. One of Mahesh’s light men was trapped in Behrampada, one of the worst-hit areas. His family was surrounded by a Hindu mob and his wife was screaming on the phone to Mahesh, “They’re coming to get us!” Mahesh was trying to get food sent to the light man’s house when one of his Hindu spot boys came up and told him their union was asking Bhatt Saheb not to take up the case of the Muslims. Mahesh responded angrily, “He’s not a Muslim, he’s an employee!”

  We discuss how all this might enter into Zakhm. He sees the hero as a man in love with his mother, deeply hating the man who would come to fuck her. “It’s a triangle,” he explains. At his mother’s funeral, as he is walking, sacred verses from Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity ring through his head. “I have the soundtrack in my head,” he says. He tells me about how his mother would take him to a church, where he would be asked to “kiss the blood of Christ, kiss the blood of Jesus.” Then she would take him to a Muslim shrine and make him recite, “Lahilla Allah Lahilla.” While bathing him, she would recite his caste origins, “You are a Nagar. Your gotra is Bhargava.” Because she considered herself married to her Hindu lover, she kept the Muslim part of herself secret. As a boy, Mahesh hated her for being Muslim, so he would try to disturb her namaaz. As an adult, he has decided to celebrate her and her religious identity through this movie. But his mother is fearful. During the riots, she asked whether it was safe for him to give his two daughters Muslim names. Zakhm will borrow from Mahesh’s life in more ways than one. His mother will be played by her own granddaughter, Mahesh’s daughter Pooja.

  Like Vinod, Mahesh hates the business that has been so good to him. “This is a sick industry. There’s no fucking money here—it’s a victim of its own hype.” When he makes a film now, there is a fear it won’t work, right at the outset, because nine out of eleven films don’t make back their investment. He has lost his feel for the formula. “I can analyze it but the flow is missing.” But he knows exactly what his purpose in life is, as a man who makes movies. “We are distilleries of pleasure.”

  TANUJA ARRANGES A PREVIEW of Sangharsh just for my friends, in gratitude for having helped her in the making of it in Madanpura. It is a strange meeting of worlds, my book come alive. There is Monalisa and Girish and Sunil and Kamal and Rustom and Ishaq, and a whole host from Madanpura. After the show, they all stand in two lines along the corridor, resting against the walls, shy, awkward, as Mahesh and Tanuja stand at the head of the line and talk to me. They have just been to the Novelty cinema and have seen a full house, hundreds of people, rapt in their creation. Sangharsh is getting blasted by the critics. “But when I saw all those people at Novelty,” Tanuja says, “I felt they were a more important audience than the intellectuals.”

  “That is your only audience!” booms Mahesh. “Never forget that.”

  We all go to the Gallops restaurant at the racetrack. The maker of the film about the riots sits across the table from the rioter. Sunil patiently feeds his daughter, whom he has brought along to see the big people. But conversation flags. The class boundary is too high.

  The preview for my friends turns out to be unexpectedly profitable for Tanuja. A couple of days later, she calls me, frantic. She has just seen her film, not three days old in the theaters, on her TV screen. It is being aired illegally by the cable operators in Bandra and Borivali. The overseas distributors, who don’t have a stake in the Indian market, sell prints of new films to the local cable operators. The first week is crucial for a Hindi film; most of the money it makes in its lifetime will be made during that week, and if people can already watch it on their TV screens, why should they pay to see it in a theater? Tanuja wants me to ask Sunil, the cable operator, not to screen it in his area. Sunil tells me there is one cable “distributor” for the suburbs whom she should speak to. A deal is struck. As a favor to Tanuja, because she is a friend of Sunil’s and has done him the honor of inviting him to her premiere, the cable operators of Bombay and Thane will desist from screening it for their subscribers for one month on the distributor’s orders. And for a payment of 50,000 rupees.

  “But this is blackmail!” I protest.

  “It’s a good deal,” she responds.

  Filmmakers go to great lengths to protect their films from getting into the hands of the pirates, who sell DVDs even before the film is released. With Kareeb, Vinod traveled around India, personally appealing to police departments to protect his films from cabl
e piracy. In Ahmadabad, he told me, a senior police officer lined up the leading cable operators of the city after Vinod complained that it was being shown illegally on TV there. “What shall I do with them?” the policeman asked Vinod.

  “Break their legs,” he suggested.

  “No problem,” responded the officer.

  I OPEN THE PAPER one Monday morning and see a large photograph of an old woman under the name SHIRIN, a Muslim name—but she is wearing the Hindu tilak on her forehead. Mahesh’s mother has died. But her celluloid version is about to be born on the big screen.

  As the film’s release date approaches, a controversy arises over whether or not Mahesh is really a bastard. Mahesh’s film—and much of his life—is built on the premise that he is. His father says he isn’t and places an advertisement in the papers to that effect, claiming he legally married Mahesh’s mother. Ugly insults fly between the family members. “My mother was supposed to be his mistress,” Mahesh insists to me. “Though they repeatedly claimed they were married, they had no documents to prove it.” Mahesh’s illegitimacy is very important to his sense of who he is. And now Mahesh is a big man. The bastard has become a star and can fight his demons in 70mm, with 1 billion people as his audience. His mother, who always had to hide her love, for her God and her man, has been reincarnated as her granddaughter and is now the goddess, the object of veneration, of celebration. Her son has made her legitimate again. By celebrating his illegitimacy, Mahesh is also vanquishing it. Art is where you fight your demons.