‘These Romeos are ruinous. No! We’re playful paramours.’
‘Open the doors of your heart and let the thief in. In bondage let us fly together like kite and string.’
‘The whole world admires my beauty, I could bewitch the world.’
‘I’ve pined for all these years, I’ve sought you in my prayers to God. No-one has longed as much as me. You have taught my heart to beat, my love.’
‘You have plundered my soul, tell me and I will even leave this world for you.’
It’s as if Indians put all their repressed longing and love into their movies. As someone who hasn’t had much romance in my long-distance marriage, I understand the need. I also enjoy the innocence. When I watch an Indian movie I am thirteen again; dreaming that one day a handsome prince will run to me over fields of flowers and, while my long hair flies back in the wind, he will get down on one knee and profess undying love until the end of the world. The soppy lyrics and high passion are all rather adolescent, full of frottage and foreplay. A man and woman may get so close a piece of paper wouldn’t fit between them, but they shall never kiss, let alone have sex. Indians would be too offended and actresses would lose their reputations. The women lose their careers soon enough – after they marry, most find it hard to get roles because Indian men don’t want to see them on screen lest they lust after another man’s wife.
With its crocodiles, interplanetary love and Rambo cloning, today’s flick, Yaardein, is a sign of how mainstream Hindi movies are changing while still staying the same. It’s targeted at NRIs in America, Britain, the Gulf and Australia who provide sixty-five percent of a film’s income in today’s market. Indian sensibilities remain strong; Yaardein’s heroine may sing sexily in sheets but she and her sisters are happy to leave London for India to have arranged marriages. The western influence is confined to the prominent Coca-Cola product placement, the girls’ skinnier bodies, cheerleader outfits and glittered baseball caps and the boys’ camp eighties Wham look. Plus the occasional English phrase: ‘Hey babe, I’m a superman’, ‘Geez man, how you doing man, cool man’ and ‘I’m in love’ are splattered among the dialogue.
For me, though, the best thing about Yaardein is its star. The heart-thump spunk of the moment, Hrithik Roshan, is a freak. He has green eyes, an angular face, a chunky torso, skinny legs, rubber hips, a brilliant moonwalk and an extra thumb on his right hand. He won’t get the digit cut-off, as he believes it brings him luck. His father, Rakesh, is a famous director who insists all his movies have titles starting with the letter ‘K’.
One night I meet some westerners who share my love of Hindi films. Ruth is a petite, laid-back Australian married to a local (Indre), and Jeni is a tall, jumpy redhead from America volunteering on Women’s Poverty Programs. They don’t live the life of diplomats so I invite them to enjoy the Biosphere for all it’s worth. They turn up the airconditioning, raid my CDs, eat pasta and down two bottles of wine. Then Ruth drops a bombshell.
‘You know, Indre and I are good friends of Preity Zinta’s.’
‘Shutttttttup,’ I scream.
Preity is the Julia Roberts of India, a huge star. I yell again when Ruth tells me she once travelled to Switzerland with Preity on a shoot and got a ten-second part in Chorie Chorie Chupke Chupke (Quietly, Stealthily). It’s a great film. Preity plays a rough prostitute with a heart of gold who has a child for a rich woman who’d lost the ability to conceive when she fell down trying to catch a cricket ball. It was a gutsy role for Preity to do, despite the fact that in the prostitute scenes she wears a taffeta gown to her knees.
‘When she’s next in town I’ll give you a call, we’ll go out,’ Ruth teases.
‘Shuuuuuuuttup, what are you saying?’ Jeni and I yell in unison.
Two weeks later, Ruth, Jeni and I sit in the suite of a five-star hotel watching Preity do interviews with star-struck journalists asking questions like, ‘Oh God, you’re so cool, and so great. It must have been so amazing to work with Aamir, isn’t it?’
Preity puffs on a cigarette, asks them not to print that she smokes and giggles gorgeously. She is twenty-six and more beautiful in real life than on film, with dimples, pouting lips, flawless skin and a hot bod. Jeni is dumbstruck and I try and chat while looking casual. Then Aamir Khan walks in. Aamir is hot. Short, stocky, with a little goatee and big brown bedroom eyes, he produced and stars in this year’s huge hit, Lagaan, which will be nominated for an Oscar. I gulp, more star-struck than when I met Salman Rushdie, Courtney Love, Mike Myers, Faithless and Shirley Manson. Aamir asks me if I’ve seen Lagaan; I stammer no, and Jeni jumps up and jumps in.
‘Hi, yeah, I have and I liked it, even though I’m American, it was about boring cricket, it was three and a half hours long and it was in that bizarre Hindi Rajasthani dialect, so I couldn’t understand a word.’
He looks at her, cocks an eyebrow and drawls, ‘Thanks. I think.’
Aamir walks out. Jeni crumbles to the sofa and screams, ‘Shiiiiiiiiit, I can’t believe I said that.’
Nonetheless we are invited to a special preview of Preity and Aamir’s new film Dil Chahta Hai (What the Heart Wants). We bolt through a gaggle of kids wanting autographs and somehow in the chaos I end up in a tinted black Mercedes with Preity and Aamir. I sit stunned in the front seat while they chat about their upcoming tour of the US in the back. They plan the movie hits they will mime and dance to get all those thousands of NRIs screaming in the aisles. I make a suggestion for the opening act.
‘Preity, why don’t you come down from the ceiling on a mirror ball like Madonna on her last tour?’
The Indian superstars stare at me blankly. I turn back to the front, grimace and shut the hell up until we pull up at the parliamentary theatre.
We walk down the red carpet through an honour guard of star-struck soldiers who drop their mouths and weapons and wonder who the hell I am. Beyond the machine guns and metal detectors, a party is in full swing. It’s an all-star cast. I recognise two of India’s most internationally famous actresses, Shabana Azmi and Nandita Dass (from Fire and Earth), Jeni spots fashion designer Ritu Beri and Ruth points out other directors, producers, spunks and starlets from movies and TV. We wait for an hour until Home Minister L.K Advani suspends parliament to attend. The lights dim and a new kind of Indian mainstream movie is born.
Written and directed by twenty-seven-year-old Farhan Akhtar (the son of the famous musical director Javed Akhtar who’s now married to Shabana Azmi), Dil Chahta Hai is about the year between college and marriage – the one brief moment most middle-class Indians have to be free. Three male friends spend the time hanging out, going to Goa and falling in love – one with an older divorced alcoholic, one with lots of girls, and Aamir’s character with Preity’s character, who is already betrothed. Of course the older woman dies, the flirt falls in love with an arranged match, Preity’s character gets the permission to marry Aamir’s character and no-one even kisses. But otherwise it’s radical. The movie uses real sound (not badly dubbed, overly dramatic studio effect), they dance to a trance beat in leather and silver pants and take the post-modern piss out of the Indian film culture with a song featuring a woman’s sari being blown tight against her body while she dances on a hill. (The blowing sari is ubiquitous in Indian cinema – it clings in a sensual way signifying passion and abandon, but its status as the traditional dress also signifies goodness and tradition. The character’s honour is preserved even though you can see the outline of her bosoms and hips.) Dil Chahta Hai is cheeky and irreverent but not too rude. The best jokes are against westerners – an Australian drunken tramp and a Swiss slutty thief provide slapstick while subtly showing that India is the best country and foreigners are loose and immoral. For the first time I find myself laughing with a Hindi flick and not at it. Until the action moves to Sydney, then I nearly cry with longing as Preity and Aamir dance around the trees in Hyde Park, flirt on the Luna Park roller coaster, run to catch a train at Homebush and cry in my favourite place in the world, Waverley
Cemetery.
The night ends with Jeni, Ruth and I joining the Bollywood Brat Pack at Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar’s bungalow. We sit watching Preity entertain with stories of fame, including one about a mob of NRIs knocking Angelina Jolie aside while pushing to get Preity’s autograph at JFK airport.
When Preity drops me home, I walk over to Lakan and whisper, ‘Preity Zinta is in that car.’ He nearly faints.
When I get up at eleven the next day, Lakan has told Rachel and she has told everyone in the compound. I have breakfast to the sound of Rachel on the phone telling everyone she knows about my adventure. To me it sounds like: ‘Tamil, Tamil, Tamil, Tamil, madam, Tamil Tamil, Preity Zinta, Aamir Khan, Shabana Azmi, Ha ha, ha, ha.’
When I call Aarzoo and Billie they scream for an hour.
‘Shuuuuuuuuttup, what are you saying?’
Dil Chahta Hai becomes the soundtrack of summer played at every party. Jeni and I now have status in Delhi and we don’t want to lose it by dancing badly, so we decide to learn some Bollywood moves. Along with Rebecca, a Melbourne traveller staying with diplomat friends who live nearby, we head off to the neighbourhood teacher. We watch a class of ten-year-olds mix some hard-core dance styles – wriggling their hips and making some sensual eye movements that would make the ‘Young Talent Team’ turn in their graves. Then it’s our turn. The teacher Reshna is in her mid-twenties, with gorgeous big eyes that betray she is dubious about our desire to dance. Still, she shrugs, leads us in a bow to Shiva and shows us some moves. Within half an hour we are wet with sweat and tears of laughter and our backs are aching. The dancing is like liturgical gone luscious, involving acting out every word sung. We point to our eyes and flick our hips as we sing ‘look at our pretty eyes’. We shake our heads and wag our fingers as we say ‘don’t you tease me’. We open and close our imaginary dupattas, walk with water jugs and learn to head jerk, hip roll and shoulder shimmy. Rebecca is fantastic, especially at the shoulder moves, Jeni likes the jumps, while my favourite action involves slapping my hands together and twisting them. (Reshna says this means ‘I will say bad words at you’.)
Driving back from Old Delhi the next day, Rebecca and I look up from our chat to see a car full of lads staring at us. I try out the hand twist. The lads scream, shout and fall about laughing hysterically.
Later, I ask Aarzoo what I did wrong and show her the action. She screams.
‘Sarrrrrrah, you stuuuuuupid, you told them you were a eunuch.’
We give up on lessons, not because of the eunuch mistake, but because we just can’t manage the coy, flirtatious, bug-eyed innocence that Indian girls pull off while moving their bodies like bawdy babes from a bordello.
But I’m not dismissing the celluloid scene yet. There’s one more actor I want to meet. More than an actor, he is India’s hero, a man worshipped as a God, a man with three temples dedicated to him, a man who stopped the nation when he lay at death’s door, a man who inspired a character in the Satanic Verses and stands waxed in Madame Tussauds. The man the Indians call the ‘Big B’.
Amitabh Bachchan.
The Big B was the angry young man of the seventies who went on to star in more than one hundred films, including the classic western Sholay that ran for six years in Bombay. Then he was lanky and big-lipped and wore tight white denim flares. Now, at sixty, his beard may be silver but his hair is like Ray Martin’s – jet-black, thick and boofy. I’ll be lynched if I call it a wig, so I won’t. With a deep resonant voice, a commanding presence and not a bad shoulder shimmy, Amitabh Bachchan is worshipped as the classiest Indian in the world. Jonathan is finally home from his latest travels and I convince him to do an interview with the superstar who once refused to talk to the media for seventeen years after a bad review. For Mr Bachchan is talking now. The megastar owes millions in tax and has had to take a day job for Rupert Murdoch. The Big B is the host of the Indian version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’, or Kown Banega Crorepati. With an audience of up to twenty-eight million, ‘KBC’ is the most popular show on television (barring the soap with a title that translates as ‘Mothers-in-law were daughters-in-law too one day’).
Jonathan and I fly to Mumbai together and drive straight to nearby Bollywood, the dream factory of India. The approach to Film City is hardly a boulevard of glamour. The road is awash with mud and mashed rubbish, potholes and sodden slums. Elephants and pigs, cows and crows, rats and cats and kids forage the filth, and mosquitoes rise with the rich smell of rotting garbage. Slick sarongs cling to scrawny legs and women lift up their saris to walk through the black oily mud. Beyond the iron gates of the studio a fibreglass temple rots in the lantana. Up on the hill stands a building I’ve seen many times before – the ubiquitous mock-Tudor mansion used in all the main movies.
The director and producers of ‘KBC’ bustle around in matching blue t-shirts herding the star-struck contestants into makeup and controlling the crowd bussed in from Mumbai. They tell us that the Big B is the most professional and punctual man in the business but then admit he will be late today. The three hundred-strong audience will wait, so will the contestants, the two hundred and thirty crew and Jonathan.
I hate to wait so I head to a studio down the hill where a film shoot is in progress. The director, Harry Baweja, is woken from a nap in his car and is happy to let me watch. Harry looks like Fred Flintstone; rumpled, square-headed, big-grinned and relaxed, despite the fact that his film has no name, no script, no storyboard and no cast, barring the hero, Ajay. Harry screams ‘break over’, skols a chai and gives me the pitch in a bizarre Indian–American twang.
‘It’s in Rajasthan, roooight? Where women are in purdah, got it? No school cos of purdah, so in this small town, the mother wants some education for daughter, goart it? So a tutor teaches from behind a screen and they fall in love. She becomes a rebel, the dad finds out and forces an organised marriage with another man and the hero teacher gets arrested and roughed up. That’s the scene what we’re doing now.’
Ajay’s face is caked in orange makeup and his thin hairy chest pokes through a ripped white pirate shirt as ropes are stretched out from his arms. Harry screams ‘actiooon’ and six actors dressed as cops begin to beat the star with floppy foam lathis. Over and over and over again. Shots are taken from every conceivable angle while Ajay grimaces, flinches and slowly twists to look resolutely, righteously and revengefully at the tracking camera. Like most Indian industries, it’s labour intensive. Four men lift the cameras, five push the shooter chair and three shoot. Two makeup artists apply pancake and redraw police moustaches, ten men move heavy smoking lights, eight sit up in the ceiling watching and four turn on the portable airconditioners as soon as Harry says ‘cut’ and off when he says ‘ready’. There’s one man who turns on the smoke machine, two who flap the steam across the set, and about twenty who make chai. The only woman on set takes notes for continuity. The black background screen is scratched with ‘I love Azma’, the lights are antique, and an old-fashioned electronic box of sizzling sockets looks frayed and flammable. I retreat nervously outside where I’m approached by a slimy man with bad acne scars.
‘Hello, madam, you are actress, yaar?’
‘No.’
‘Yaar, but you are good. Do you want to come on a fifteen-day cruise to Singapore and Saudi, we will film, you can be extra. You can wear bikini. Yaar?’
Somehow I refuse this chance for a big break and walk back to the safety of the ‘KBC’ studio to wait for the Big B.
Two hours later we are invited to the star’s dressing room – a pinewood Swiss Chalet that’s a shrine to himself. Above the massive bed and on every wall are life-sized posters of Amitabh shooting, swaggering and sexing it up. I’m searching for his less glamorous new Coke and car ads when the real thing swivels around in his makeup chair. He stands, dismisses his butler, gives Jonathan a firm handshake and nods gruffly at me.
I am face to face with the screen God of India.
God is chewing gum, he is incredibly tall with a pot
-belly and elegantly dressed in a white kurta. He has slightly googly eyes, wrinkles, a large nose and a deep voice that’s even more resonant and rich than it sounds on television. God is guarded, reserved and looks serious, fastidious, cool and disinterested. Yet he can act. When we turn on the camera he plays down his fame and turns up his humility. When Jonathan asks the secret of his success he says, ‘You’d better ask the person upstairs that. Things have just happened to me. I didn’t try too hard, things just flowed, I find it very embarrassing to be seen as a god, sometimes shocking, in India people have a more emotional attachment to their heroes, a unique way of showing affection.’
The Big B tells us he likes meeting the common people but when he walks onto the set he seems utterly uncomfortable. Until filming begins. Then he transforms, and turns on the charm; smiling, laughing and using his rich rumbling voice, he encourages the star-struck contestants with his stage pattern – ‘sure?’, ‘confident?’ and ‘okay computer-ji, lock it in’.
The audience titters and the contestants are so overawed that the director has to re-shoot scenes because one of them freezes completely. Another gives Bachchan a poem, a third (a bloke) smiles when he loses and says, ‘Hug me and I won’t care.’
My favourite contestant is a Sikh in a pink taffeta turban; he stutters, ‘Ccccccan I ttttell you a secret?’
‘Yees,’ says Amitabh.
‘I’m madly in love with you.’
Amitabh grins modestly. They leave it in the show. At the end, a woman walking out in tears turns to me and sniffs, ‘A demigod stepping down from a plane to relate to us.’
There’s only one man Indians are more likely to worship than the Big B. But this bloke admits he is indeed God in human form. His name is Sai Baba.
At the Amma ashram I’d met a middle-aged Australian from the Gold Coast called Krishini and her tall, eccentric English girlfriend Shivani Ma. Shivani Ma spun me a fantastic tale about finding the Divine Master that began when she was in her twenties and her mother was dying.
Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure Page 25
