by Suketu Mehta
So Sanjay Dutt is an angry man. “They talk about this country being the biggest democracy. It’s a fucking piece of shit,” says the man who will play a patriotic Muslim cop saving India in our movie. The star has a historical analysis of what’s wrong. “When the British left India, they left behind the law and they left behind all that shit. Ambedkar changed the constitution of the country, but he didn’t change the law. For the British, all those freedom fighters—Tilak, et cetera—were terrorists. When the constitution and the law don’t match, you’re talking about deep shit out here.”
On the wall of Sanjay’s study is a caricature of him, lifting weights and smoking a cigarette at the same time. The cartoonist is Raj Thackeray, the Saheb’s nephew. The only politician about whom he is careful not to say a negative word is Bal Thackeray, leader of the political party that started the riots that made him so fearful he asked for guns to protect his family from them. Because Bal Thackeray is the same man who, having demonstrated to all Bombay that he could put the Muslims in their place, also demonstrated his power, his magnanimity, and his love of the film industry by ordering his government to furnish bail for Sanjay Dutt, son of the Muslim Nargis Dutt.
Mahesh Bhatt is clear about what he feels for Sanjay: “He’s a criminal. He has the heart of a criminal.” It hasn’t stopped Mahesh from having just released a movie starring Sanjay. In 2000, Sanjay is on his third comeback in films, with Vastav and Mission Kashmir. Sanjay’s encounters with the underworld convinced him that they were superior to people in the film world. “They are honest about what they do. They don’t hide what they do. Film line is a piece of crap, bhenchod. Here it is how to fuck each other. If he’s coming up, send people to the movie theater to boo him, write bad things about him in the press.” His hatred for the family business is almost a physical object on the table between us.
I ask him what he would like to do if he were free of the case. He responds that he wants to make $3 million and then move to New York and live off the interest. He maintains a small apartment opposite Macy’s in Manhattan. He wants to open a steakhouse, and he knows all the famous ones: Peter Luger’s in Williamsburg, Morton’s of Chicago, Sparks’ on 43rd Street. In any case, he wants to get out of Bombay. “I used to love this place. It’s fucking too dangerous now.” His daughter by his first wife goes to public school in Bayside. He is happy for her. “Education is fun for them. I don’t see that here. Here you’re studying some shit: When did Aurangzeb invade India? Who the fuck cares?”
He asks me to stay for lunch. For Sanjay it consists solely of sautéed spinach, which he eats without rice or bread, in big spoonfuls. I am surprised, after all his talk about steakhouses. He explains that his high-protein diet caused kidney problems, so he now has to eat a mostly vegetarian diet. Sanjay’s personal trainer has just had a heart attack from the overuse of anabolic steroids and had to retreat, back to Venice Beach. Sanjay eats seven small meals a day, of stuff liked the boiled spinach.
A FEW DAYS LATER, on a Monday, I go to the TADA court again with Sanjay. This time there is to be an actual hearing of the blasts case. We pick up a man named Hanif Kadawala, not too far from my office.
“Are you also one of the accused?” I ask him.
“We are all innocent,” declares Sanjay.
Hanif, a small-time film producer and restaurateur, is one of the people alleged to have given Sanjay an AK-56 rifle after the riots. I did not know it then, but I was sitting with a man in the last months of his life. In February 2001, he was shot dead by the Rajan gang very near where we picked him up. Chotta Rajan had decided to take upon himself the determination of Hanif’s guilt or innocence. By that year, the gang lord or the police had killed 7 of the 136 accused in the case.
Sanjay spends the car ride juggling shooting schedules. He touches his eyes and lips and prays on sight of each temple en route.
I spend most of the morning trying in vain to get into the TADA court. While I wait, a succession of people come and go through the police post outside the jail: lawyers; the accused out on bail, come for their weekly registration; a mother and her two young children, a boy and a girl dressed in their Friday best, come to see the father inside; a stunningly beautiful young woman in a black burka, come to give comfort to her man in jail.
Finally, in the afternoon, I get an audience with Judge Kode, because, he explains, “It is my duty to help a young man.” He then embarks on a soliloquy about, among other things, my dharma as a writer, the nature of the city of Bombay, and the role of the judiciary. All the while he talks, he chews pan; there is a largish lump inside his left cheek, like the tumor it foreshadows. The judge tells me I must give a good impression of my country to the foreigners. “They think we are primitives.” He wants me to show them that India has the greatest judicial system in the world. He has personally recorded 8,000 pages of evidence, the total number of pages runs to 13,000. “I have not even taken a single day’s leave. Not one day casual leave, not one day—by the grace of God—sick leave.” Kode has twenty-three men guarding him. He met Ajay and asked for fifteen more.
Judge Kode’s court commences. Sanjay tells me, “It’s like a family.” And sure enough, the police and the court officers are chatting familiarly with the accused, asking after their families. Once we are inside the courtroom, Sanjay directs me to the front. “You sit here.” He smiles, turning to the rear. “We are the accused.”
The judge enters and the roll call is read, 124 names in all. “Hanif Kadawala!” and he stands up. “Salim Durrani! Yakub Memon!” I look back and there is a ragged army of hardened toughs sitting on rows of wooden benches, along with about five women sitting to the side. “Sanjay Dutt!” and the movie star half stands, and then sits back down, just one of the bomb-blasts suspects.
The judge takes his place. Behind him are wood-paneled walls without the usual picture of the Father of the Nation. Various administrative matters are dealt with, various petitions put forward by the lawyers. They want their clients to be exempted from court appearances because they are being hunted and killed by the Chotta Rajan gang. Nobody is using the mikes provided. I am seated right up front, one row behind the lawyers and directly in front of the judge, but I can’t make out what’s being said. The accused behind me cannot hear a single word. There is a constant murmur among them as they discuss the World Cup and their various careers in crime. An officer of the court periodically gestures toward them: “Shhhh! Shhhhhh!” And the hubbub quiets for a moment, then rises up again to its former volume. The fans overhead beat the air coming in through the open windows, through which I can see a palm tree and blue skies. It is overall a pleasant, restful atmosphere, and the man next to me, carrying a cell phone in defiance of the strict orders posted in the court, nods off. When he wakes up, he slyly reads a newspaper. I look at the clock on the wall, willing it to move faster, thinking of my lunch and of women, exactly as I did in school during a slow period. The fans, the constant murmur of the backbenchers, the drone of the lawyers and the judge: collectively they bring back those dead afternoons in class. The court is adjourning for summer vacation for two weeks. For the TADA boys, it is the last day of school and there is a holiday mood. With this difference: When it comes time to graduate, a decade hence, the ones who don’t do well will be hanged.
The judge gives them two weeks off. They can go anywhere in India. “But there should be no complaint against you,” the judge admonishes, ever the headmaster. Afterward Sanjay says, “It’s a joke. We can flee to Nepal and nobody would know.”
We leave the court in his car. At a traffic light, the usual street children run up. One of them presses his face against the darkened window and sees Sanjay. At once, we are surrounded by street children carrying newspapers and magazines. “Sanjay Dutt, you did good work in Border,” one of the kids says. “Sanjay Dutt, Sanjay Dutt, buy a magazine.” The star is half amused, half annoyed. “Ma ki chud! Gimme a Mid-Day.” The window is opened to get the afternoon paper and the kids crowd around. Sanjay re
ads the newspaper, paying no attention to them. “Look at what our man is doing,” he says, pointing to a headline about Sharad Pawar splitting from the Congress. The kids are entranced, but only for a moment; the red light at the opposite intersection has come on and there is business to be done. They leave the star and run off across the road, skinny bodies balancing heads stuffed with practical dreams.
I drive with the bomb-blasts suspect back from court, through Bombay roads plastered with giant blowups of his face.
Dreamworld/Underworld
Mission Kashmir has finally started shooting. Vinod is fond of quoting Fellini: “The only place where you can be a dictator and still be loved is on the movie set.”
The vast set for Mission Kashmir in Film City booms with Vinod’s amplified voice. “Silence!” The whole set is fiercely air-conditioned; everyone is wearing a sweater and people are catching colds. There is an army of people, men everywhere, even on top, on the catwalks. I ask Vinod what all these people are doing, if they’re all needed. “Everything is labor-intensive,” he replies. Each piece of equipment carries its own crew; a light will travel with three humans. Then there are other people, strugglers, visitors, gawkers, who just appear and are generally ignored, unless they get in the way. Dignitaries visit the set every day. The education secretary’s family comes one day, and Vinod’s child’s admission to a good school is assured.
Vinod is among the hardest-working people I have ever known. Right now, he is speaking on the phone, reading an article for research on the film, and answering my questions simultaneously. He has a motto: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” He is obsessed with every little detail of the production. “Who do you delegate to?” he asks me. “The standards of mediocrity are so deeply rooted here.” Vinod comes home around midnight from a day of shooting; his voice is hoarse and I ask him why. “I shouted, I cursed, I hit.” He has physically struck his assistant director.
Part of the shoot is in Kashmir, in Srinagar, where Vinod moves around in bulletproof cars under armed protection. In the middle of shooting a scene, the crew hears a series of loud pops. “They’re fireworks; they’re celebrating Dussehra,” Vinod explains to the crew, and asks the cameraman to hurry up with the shot. After it’s finished, he shouts out to his unit to pack up fast and clear the area. The crew now realizes there is no Dussehra in Muslim Kashmir; that was real shooting going on around them. Rocket-propelled grenades were fired at the Government Secretariat, two hundred yards away from the set, and four people died. But the shot got taken.
At another point, an actor playing an escaped militant is running along a canal when policemen on the other side of the canal, on the lookout for terrorists, see him running and raise their guns to shoot him. At the last minute they realize he is an actor. While there are real bombs going off in the city, Vinod is blowing up boats in Dal Lake in the service of entertainment. The line between the battles going on in the city and those staged for the film is so thin it almost disappears.
Vinod has decided to eliminate any mention of Pakistan as the villain. In the final version of the film, the conspirators announce, to the camera and to any interested terrorists, gang lords, governments, or academics, “We owe no allegiance to any government. We’re an independent group.” Vinod’s movies have a large following in Pakistan. There is, however, a shadowy figure in the foreground, seen only in silhouette, whom everyone answers to; he is the Mr. Big. Vinod directs the dialogue writer, Atul Tiwari, to put on a beard. “Osama,” he says, anointing him.
In the second half, all of a sudden, amid the bombing and the killing, the terrorist and his lady love are magically transported to childhood, to a lush cinematic valley of waterfalls and flowers, through a song of fantasy. Since Vinod can’t take the crew back to Kashmir—it is too dangerous by this time in Srinagar—the song is shot in Bombay, which is fitting. It is a Bombay re-creation of Kashmir, a studio set of Kashmir with carpets of flowers, cotton-wool blizzards of snow. Nobody need take war all that seriously. There will always be a break in the fighting for love and song.
I GO TO VINOD’S HOME shortly after Vikram says with satisfaction, “The climax is solid.” Hrithik Roshan, the boy newcomer we substituted for Shahrukh Khan, is now the biggest star in the country with just one picture, Kaho Na Pyaar Hai, made by his father, Rakesh Roshan. A phenomenon has been observed in theaters where Hrithik’s first film, a love story, has been showing: Young women faint when he comes into the frame. They have been fainting all over India and abroad too; there is a report of a mass fainting that his image occasioned in a theater in Mauritius.
Near riots are breaking out over Hrithik. A theater owner from Raipur calls his father, frantic. He needs two hundred thousand pictures of Hrithik with his signature printed across them; a mob of women is besieging the theater for them. When Hrithik visits the Taj coffee shop, another invasion of his female fans forces the staff to smuggle him out through the kitchen. In the suburbs, he is enjoying a quiet dinner at an Italian restaurant with his girlfriend when he is spotted. A crowd gathers and a passing double-decker bus stops and empties out, as its passengers rush in to get a look at his face.
His film has experienced the fastest climb to the top in the history of Hindi cinema; 99 percent collection for the Bombay circuit in the first week. Week by week, the receipts for Kaho Na Pyaar Hai actually grow, instead of diminishing as with other films. Hrithik, who was number three in the star list of Mission Kashmir (his contractual salary was eleven lakhs, four less than Preity’s), is suddenly elevated to the top. He is now asking for and getting two crores per picture from other directors. “I can’t sleep, I’m delirious,” the boy confesses to Vinod. The directors and producers are lining up outside his house with money in their hands.
Part of the reason for this fevered worship of the boy is that the traditional gods of the country, the cricketers, have just taken a bad fall. Most of them have been implicated in the match-fixing scandals; they have taken money to sell their country’s honor. When Sachin Tendulkar and Hrithik appear in a stadium together at a celebrity cricket match, the crowd’s long sustained applause is for the Bollywood star, not the sportsman. And all that Hrithik has completed so far is one movie. He is, in the age of television, an instant god.
So the “solid” climax melts. “There’s no way we can let Hilal Kohistani be killed by the ISI,” says Vinod. The villain can’t just be bumped off by unseen enemies. The hero of the box office has to be the hero of the movie. He asks me to write a truly heroic climax for Hrithik, in which he, not Sanjay, takes center stage. I come up with the idea of his killing Hilal in a climactic confrontation with his two fathers; his killing Hilal would mean that he kills what is worst in himself. “He becomes a hero,” says Vinod, nodding. Policeman Khan’s starring role gives way before the invincible might of the box office. Sanjay goes from main hero to one of two leads.
For the new climax, Vinod constructs a series of burnt-out houses around a man-made lake in Film City. Vast amounts of water are trucked to the set and dumped in a hole in the ground. Multiple fog machines wreath the set in a Kashmiri mist. The brochure for the film tells what happened next:
In the intense heat of the Bombay summer, the organic matter in the water rotted and liquefied and sent up a fierce stink. The director and crew and actors worked for more than a month in this miasma, struggling to control water and fog and wind, until they themselves absorbed a reeking odor that no amount of showering could fully banish.
I take my son to Film City to see the climax: two hundred gallons of petrol and a mighty blast. It is a tradition in Vinod’s action films to demolish his work at the end. For 1942, Vinod built a set that cost eighty lakhs and blew it up for the climax. The houses erected for Mission Kashmir meet the same fate: They go up in a ten-story-high column of fire, and everybody flees from the debris and ash raining down from the sky as the wind blows it toward us. Vinod is knocked backward by the force of the explosion. The loudspeakers on the set ring out, demanding, “
Ice for Vinod Saab’s backside!” I grab Gautama and run up the hill adjoining the lake. We keep hearing explosions as the gas pipes inside the set burst and jets of multicolored flame shoot up. As flaming pieces of the set fall down from the sky, they ignite small fires on the ground; the crew runs around putting them out. A group of sightseeing bureaucrats and their wives pause in their flight up the hill, turn around, and come back to watch, responding to the inner pyromaniac in all of us.
Vinod recovers his costs through sales of the music and some of the distribution rights, long before he has completed the film. It will do well, it might even be a hit, due to Hrithik’s phenomenal stardom. Because of all the women who fainted over him in Kaho Na Pyaar Hai, there is an automatic audience of many millions, never mind the merits or flaws of script, music, direction, or any other element in the movie. My work, I’m amused to realize, is irrelevant to the film’s commercial prospects.
Vinod appraises Hrithik like a prize heifer. On his set, he dresses his star in a tank top. “I want something that shows the most skin. They thought there was skin in Kaho Na Pyaar Hai; we’ll have much more.” He has Hrithik demonstrate, putting his shirt on and taking it off many times. The star’s biceps seem permanently flexed, even when he’s at rest. They feature prominently in many gratuitous scenes, as soon as the star drops into the picture, from the roof of a house, heaven-sent.
Hrithik is on the cover of the biggest newsmagazine in the country that week. The newspapers run several dozen articles on him each day. But he is modest as always; when we are watching the replay of a scene on a monitor, he sits on the floor on his knees while Vinod and I are on chairs. When Hrithik shakes my hand, I notice he has two thumbs on his right hand, a regular one and a smaller vestigial thumb growing out of it. It was not removed at birth because it is reputed to bring luck—and it certainly has, on a Cinemascope scale. The boy slaved for five years as an assistant director, eating bad food, sleeping in tents on location, and then in one week he became the biggest star in a country of 1 billion people. At the end of the year, Hrithik is to get married to his longtime sweetheart.
