Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Shakumbhari Maa is sometimes preceded by her singing dhoot, or agent, the singing wrestler. Dara Singh is the “fakir baba” and wears saffron. “Is he meant to be Muslim?” I ask Eishaan. “No, he is a pir. We don’t know what religion it is.” A holy man, maybe Muslim, maybe Hindu, wandering the countryside, singing the praises of a Hindu goddess. The villages will have no problem with this. The music composer and lyricist responsible for writing the Hindu devotional songs is a Jain. The executive producer and villain (Mr. Bob), Shaheed Khan, is Muslim. He too is a follower of Vaishno Devi.

  As soon as the heroine gets married, she stops flouncing around in a miniskirt and ankle boots and appears in a sari. As Eishaan reposes on their flower-bedecked nuptial bed during their wedding night, his new bride blows a conch and pauses to sing a devotional hymn while he drifts off to sleep. A little later, she saves her sister-in-law from premarital sex. “Old-fashioned!” complains the interrupted male, abusing the heroine. Does she realize that abroad this kind of behavior is common? “This is India,” the virtuous wife responds, and delivers the following peroration in furious Bengali-accented English: “What do you think to play with the chastity belt? Is it the culture of any country? Show me one of the university which educates and encourages to this type of vulgar and sinful deed!”

  I laugh very hard at this, till I notice that none of the old ladies sitting in the theater are amused and I have to put my hand over my mouth and bite hard. The audience for this movie is not cynical; they have no notion of irony or camp. I am still laughing, a few days later, as I tell Monalisa about it. “It’s a hilarious film.”

  The bar dancer doesn’t laugh either. She immediately corrects me. “It’s not funny. It’s a movie about God.”

  The deep roots most Indian movies have in the epics are evident in this film. The evil mother is called Kaikeyi, the evil uncle Shakuni, the loyal cousin compares Eishaan to Ram, his wife to Sita, and himself to Lakshman. These names function as a shorthand for the village viewer, readily slotting each character into an established mythological role: the bad stepmother, the good brother. The Indian viewer doesn’t like surprises. And there is an added bonus for the audience. A note at the end of the press release at the preview screening promises that Shakumbhari Maa will surely grant the desires of anyone who sees this film, hears its story, or preaches its message. These words preface the Mahabharata and many other Hindu narratives. The very act of listening will confer spiritual benefit upon the listener.

  DURING THE INTERMISSION, Shiv Kumar, the director, tells me he has tried to send a message to the youth, in a format that would be pleasing to them. This may explain why the heroine, wearing six-inch heels, gyrates her butt in one of the shortest skirts I have seen onscreen, shortly before she dons a sari and prostrates herself in front of the goddess. There are quite a few such scenes pleasing to the youth: plenty of short skirts, transparent blouses, on-screen kisses, and raucous innuendo in the dialogue, interspersed between scenes of devout fervor. The director reminds me that he has been making very different types of films for many years, sex comedies mostly. Here now is a completely new genre: the mythological sex comedy.

  Kumar claims the budget of the film was eighty lakhs; Eishaan tells me it was closer to forty. In the film industry, every person has a “discount level,” a percentage by which what he says should be disbelieved. Kumar’s discount level, therefore, is 50 percent. Whatever the budget, unlike many bigger films it has a good chance of making money. One of the reasons is that the Uttar Pradesh government, bowing before the goddess, has exempted it from entertainment tax.

  THE FILM INITIALLY RECEIVES favorable publicity. The trade magazine Super Cinema reports, “The price that a devotional film fetched in North recently left many gaping. Once in a while comes a devotional film that really sweeps the market like hurricane.” Unfortunately, the hurricane turns into a light sprinkle and then dries up altogether. Shakumbhari Maa was never incarnated on a Bombay theater screen for paying customers. In Bombay nobody dies of famine; the city needs not a Vegetable Goddess but a Housing Goddess, a Traffic Goddess, a Good Government Goddess.

  But the goddess in her many avatars continues intervening in the course of Eishaan’s life. One night he is at a cousin’s house in Worli. They keep insisting that he stay for the night; three times he is about to leave and three times they pull him back, even getting out shorts and a toothbrush for him. But something compels him to drive back to his place in Andheri. At around 2 a.m., near Mahim Church, he sees a mob on the street. He had been thinking about his forthcoming pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi, eagerly anticipating the eight-mile trek up to her shrine. When he sees the mob, his first thought is that riots have broken out; it is a heavily Muslim area. The mob stops his car and demands that he open the door. Then he sees a body on the road, of a woman who has been knocked down by a cab. Her head and thigh are bleeding profusely. The cab has fled, and she needs to be taken to the hospital. The crowd puts her in the backseat and he drives to Leelavati Hospital, where he discovers that she has no money for treatment. So the struggler takes out his wallet and gives 2,000 rupees to the doctor for the stranger’s treatment and stays by the woman’s hospital bed all night. The next day he searches out her relatives, puts them and the woman into a cab, and gives the cabbie money to drive them to a less expensive hospital in Malad.

  Eishaan is of the opinion that the goddess was testing him. “When I was driving I was thinking about Vaishno Devi, and how it would be the best place to celebrate my birthday.” If the goddess had not moved him out of his cousin’s house in the middle of the night and placed him at that exact spot where the woman had just been knocked over, she might not be alive today. So he will go to Vaishno Devi with his parents, celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday, and know that he has been faithful to her dictates.

  After Shakumbhari Maa, the heroine, Raashee, goes on to star in Club Dancer No. 1. From playing the chaste devotee of the goddess, she goes back to playing with the chastity belt. Eishaan disappears from Bombay, perhaps to Jaipur, perhaps back to his family business in Dubai.

  Accused: Sanjay Dutt

  When Vinod first told Ajay Lal that Sanjay Dutt had been finalized for the role of Khan in Mission Kashmir, the policeman commented, “It’s going to be a TADA movie.” He was referring to the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act, under which the actor had been jailed for two years for his involvement in the bomb blasts. One of Ajay’s best friends has cast as his lead a man that Ajay himself has interrogated. Sanjay is not the only one involved in the film who has been indicted for murder and conspiracy. Ramesh Taurani, out on bail for the murder of the music producer Gulshan Kumar, has bought rights to the music for Mission Kashmir.

  I first meet Sanjay Dutt when he comes to Vinod’s house to hear the Kashmir script. It will be quite a challenge for him, as he is stepping into a role written for Amitabh Bacchan. He sits on the terrace with Vinod, Anu, and me. “You guys must feel small sitting next to him,” comments Anu. Sanjay is built like a brontosaurus.

  I mention my photographer friend Dayanita Singh in Delhi, and he says, “That’s my sister. She stays with us whenever she comes to Bombay.” Dayanita went to school with Sanjay; he considers her his rakhi sister. In boarding school, he was always the one who got beaten most by the teachers. He is the son of two of the country’s greatest stars, the powerful member of parliament and actor Sunil Dutt and the Muslim actress Nargis. The teachers had to demonstrate to the world that they were not awed by this. They had the power to beat this Bombay film-world brat; who does he think he is? Once, for some minor infraction, a teacher asked him to crawl up a gravel slope on his hands and knees. The skin came off his forearms and knees. The next day the teacher ripped off the bandages and asked him to crawl back up the same slope. Another time he was beaten so badly that gangrene set in. His parents had to put him in hospital in Delhi. He was a skinny boy in a British-style boarding school. So he sought out the tough boys, the Sardars, and made Dayanita
tie rakhis on them, making them, by extension, his brothers too. He grew up fascinated by guns and muscles.

  I have been told by Mahesh that Sanjay will not talk about his jail experiences. Dayanita has said the same thing. But sitting on Vinod’s terrace, Sanjay is extraordinarily friendly. Maybe it’s because of who has introduced me to him. “Those were dark days,” says Sanjay. Almost all of the film industry turned their backs on him when he was arrested. “This man”—indicating Vinod—“was the only guy that stood by me.” His case will take years more to get through this level of the courts. If the verdict goes against him he can appeal, and so it will go on well into the twenty-first century. He invites me to go to court with him the next day, where he is to sign his bail register.

  WHEN WE STEP OUTSIDE the car at the TADA court on Arthur Road, one of the passersby in the crowded street sees Sanjay and yells out Kartoos! It is the name of his latest film, Hindi for a bullet cartridge. The whole street is staring at us. One of Sanjay’s fellow undertrials in the blasts case whispers with him. A man has been shot in Chowpatty by the Rajan gang. Sanjay is well acquainted with the man who was shot; he too is one of their mates in the trial. I get the sense that Sanjay considers these outlaws his real kin. Among them, he has found the friends he never had in boarding school, the tough guys who will protect him from the class bullies and sadistic teachers.

  We drive back to his apartment, which has a nice view of the Bandra seafront. He moved into this flat just two weeks ago. We sit in his study, which is furnished in blond wood. Tea is brought in, and he pours me a cup, adds sugar to my taste, and stirs it before giving it to me. He talks about growing up troubled. He started taking drugs in the way a boy from a good Bombay family might, “Just to be in the scene. Smoking a little grass, meeting the women.” But the grass wasn’t enough. “One out of every ten people is an addict. I was the one.” So he got onto the stronger stuff: quaaludes, cocaine, heroin. “I’ve done everything,” he says, a couple of times. “I was all the time in the loo, fixing a shot, sleeping.” He allows himself an excuse. “I’ve had a hard life. My mother died when I was twenty.” He lost his mother to cancer in 1981 and then his wife, in the same hospital, Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan. He used to walk wintry New York streets alone, weeping.

  Sanjay used to get his supply from Do Tanki in Null Bazaar. I remember Mohsin the hit man telling me about Sanjay coming to that part of the city “to smoke charas with Muslims.” They were proud of him, proud of his Muslim mother. Gradually he realized that he was addicted and traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to seek treatment. Sanjay is fascinated by a certain Marlboro Man idea of America. One of his friends in the treatment center raised longhorn cattle in Texas. Sanjay had money saved up in Bombay and decided to put it into a cattle ranch with him. He stayed with the rancher for a month before his father came to retrieve him. It took his father two hard days of pleading and arguing to persuade his son to come back to Bombay.

  As we are talking, Sanjay’s mobile phone rings and he lies to someone, probably a director trying to find out why he isn’t on the set. “I’m in Alibag,” he says. He makes another call, speaks in a low tender voice to someone else.

  He was always extremely protective of the women in the family, Dayanita told me. When she would stay at the Dutts’ house in Bombay, on the nights she was out late in the city she would come home to find Sanjay waiting up, no matter what hour of the night it was. He would look at his watch, look at her, and then go off to his room without saying a word.

  He took this concept of protection to extreme lengths. “I love guns,” the star declares. During the riots, he became possessed by the idea that his family was in danger. He had been fearing for their lives: that the Hindus were out to get the Dutts during the riots because of his Muslim mother and his father’s public stance against the Sena. So, according to Ajay Lal, he called Anees, the brother of Dawood Ibrahim, and Abu Salem and asked them to send down some “guitars,” AK-56s. Ajay told me what they extracted from Sanjay in return for the guitars. “The guys who did the blasts brought a Maruti laden with AK-56s and grenades in a special hidden cavity from Pakistan to Bombay. They needed a place to open the cavity—they couldn’t just do it on the roadside—so the natural place was Sanju’s garage. Sanju, like a lot of other people, had a fascination with the underworld.” The cop did not think well of the star.

  Sanjay was at the peak of his career in 1993, when the blasts occurred. His film Khalnayak (Villain) was that year’s highest-grossing film. He played an assassin hired by the underworld. AN AMAZING PORTRAIT OF A SENSITIVE VILLAIN, the posters announced. He was shooting in Mauritius when Ajay detected the blasts case and started arresting the conspirators. The guns were taken from Sanjay’s house by his friends and destroyed in a foundry. In the foundry, the police found a spring and a rod belonging to one of the rifles, on the basis of which he was arrested.

  Sanjay blames his troubles on Sharad Pawar, the powerful leader of the Nationalist Congress Party, one of whose main rivals is Sanjay’s extraordinarily popular father, Sunil Dutt. I tell him about my meeting with a Muslim government clerk in Jogeshwari, who, when I asked him what party he votes for, had said, “Whatever party Sunil Dutt is in.”

  Pawar had told his father that he could get Sanjay released in fifteen days if he turned approver in the case. “If I had turned approver that would mean admitting that I was part of the conspiracy. How would that look? How would it reflect on my family?”

  His father told him to come back from Mauritius. Pawar had assured Sunil Dutt that his son would be picked up for half an hour and then released. But when Sanjay came down the escalator from the arrival gate, he saw two hundred commandos waiting for him with drawn guns. Among them was Ajay Lal, who whisked Sanjay away and interrogated him. Then he was put in the Arthur Road jail. In the middle of his first night there, men came into his cell. They were prisoners, and they belonged to the Ashwin Naik gang. The men took Sanjay to their leader, an engineer, educated in London, who had to come back home to join his brother the gang lord. (Vinod’s gangster film Parinda was based on the relationship of these brothers.) The don asked him how he was faring. Sanjay said he missed his father. So the don got out his cell phone and gave it to Sanjay. His father was astonished to receive a call from his jailed son at 11 p.m.

  Shortly after he was put in prison, his father came to visit him. “Now I can do nothing for you,” he admitted to his only son, and went away. “I cried and cried,” Sanjay recalls. He could not be released on bail; the government wouldn’t grant it. The first judge, Patel, had become fixated on getting Sanjay. According to Sanjay, the trouble began when his lawyer asked the judge to recuse himself. The judge rejected the petition and turned on Sanjay with new hatred.

  In the jail he was removed from the general population. “They said they had information that I would be killed. For my safety they put me in solitary confinement, which was a fucking joke.” For three months he hardly saw daylight. It was an eight-by-eight-foot room with a toilet in it, in which the star had to bathe, shit, and brush his teeth. His family sent food to him from home, but it was eaten by other convicts before it got to him, and he had to eat the barely edible jail food. The solitude could drive a man out of his mind.

  Sanjay made friends with the natural world. Through the tiny air vent, four sparrows would come into his cell every evening, and Sanjay would put his massive hand out with crumbs in it. He was starved for touch, and they would let him touch them, so he would caress the little birds. He made friends with the ants, too, that came out of the sewage pipe. “Amazing things, these ants. There is some kind of language between them. If one is going the wrong way, another ant will tell him.” He would lie flat on the floor and watch them for hours on end, as they struggled with their crumbs of food, carrying them over the sewer line. “If the crumbs were too big for them, I would hold the crumb and lift it over the sewer line. It was like a helicopter ride for them.” There were no clocks, of course, in the cell, but Sanjay k
new the time because of a rat, an enormous bandicoot. “I named him General Saab because in the night he used to enter the cell exactly at twelve, and at one o’clock he used to leave. He was like a general, walking around the barracks.”

  But the attractions of the vermin paled. He hadn’t seen his family in three months. One day he went berserk and banged his head against the bars till it bled. His head required ten stitches. Frightened, the jail authorities removed him and put him in another cell with twenty-one hard-core terrorists from Punjab, who looked after him very well. “They were highly emotional, lovable Sardars.” They cooked for him. They took stones, made a hearth, took the jail food, and transformed it into something else altogether, tastier, more nutritious.

  Gunmen of all the gangs mixed freely in the jail. Sanjay met a lot of shooters, studied how the recruiting was done, starting from the children’s barracks, where the sharp boys were picked up, their bail arranged, their families taken care of. After he was released, he shared this knowledge with directors of gangster movies, who made films based on the characters he’d met. And his own ability to play gangsters was unsurpassed in the industry. Jail was good for his acting skills. “People say I’ve matured and there’s a lot of pain in my eyes.”

  But none of the real shooters looks remotely like Sanjay. I remark to him that the shooters I’ve met tend to be small and skinny and he nods. He has noted the same thing. “Their eyes are absolutely cold.” He has noticed another quality of the gangsters and terrorists. “People who are connected with crime are very godfearing. They used to pray a lot, they used to hate the fucking government.” Once he became involved with crime, he followed suit. In jail, he prayed for four hours a day.

  What was the worst thing about jail? I ask him.

  “It was, Why have you done this to me? Why have you put me in jail? I saw shooters who have killed thirty people come and go in front of me. I started thinking, I’ll fucking kill people when I get out. I was two hundred pounds of muscle weight when I went into jail. In three months, I lost seventy-five pounds.” And he was threatened with torture. “They showed me the third degree to break me.”