Show Business

TAKE TWO

Interior: Day

I can’t believe I’m doing this.

Me, Ashok Banjara, leading superstar of the Indian cinema, commander of fees in the range of several lakhs (can’t be too precise, you know how these income tax chaps are), not to mention son of the general secretary of New Delhi’s ruling party, wooing an aging gossip columnist over pink champagne, lip-synching the obligatory inanities that an invisible tape in my head plays back to me from a dozen remembered screenplays. But it is me, it’s my mouth that’s saying these improbable things, it’s my hand that is placed, with exaggerated lightness, on her gnarled and painted claw. Radha Sabnis, the dreaded Cheetah of Showbiz magazine, sits in her lounge, flattered by my attentions, while I pour on the butter that wouldn’t normally melt in my mouth. I have come to make peace.

Cheetah sits in an imitation leopard-skin pantsuit on an imitation velvet sofa, guzzling the champagne, for which she is embarrassingly grateful, and eyeing me from under artificial lashes with what some lyricist might call a wild surmise. She is of medium height, thin, really thin, like a Bangladesh refugee in costume, and she has a pale death-mask face that seems to have been meticulously disarranged by a malicious undertaker: a hooked nose like the beak of an injured parrot; exaggeratedly shaped eyebrows arched in an expression of perpetual interrogation; a profusion of deep lines that deepen asymmetrically every time she speaks a word; pinched, sallow cheeks; and the whole effect framed by lusterless shoulder-length hair practically dripping with henna. This discredit to the species wields the most powerful pen in Bollywood, and my visit to her is the idea of my new PR agent, Cyrus Sponerwalla.

Cyrus is bespectacled and overweight, but he knows his stuff, and he’s got good ideas like the one that contracted his Parsi profession-derived surname from Sodawaterbottleopenerwallah to its current incarnation. Imagine converting a liability like that into an exclusive, distinctive, slightly exotic sounding name that fits on visiting cards, is easy to pronounce, and is a surefire conversation starter. “Icebreaker,” Cyrus corrects me. “The ice is what you need the soda-water-bottle-opener-wallah for, party-wise.” But Cyrus Sponerwalla is not here to hold my hand, nor the Cheetah’s, for that matter. In making love or war, surrogates just aren’t good enough.

“This is most generous of you,” says Radha Sabnis, the questioning curve of her ridiculous eyebrows suggesting that she doesn’t think it’s anything of the sort. “Pol Roger Rosé, 1968. A wonderful champagne.”

“Orly airport, duty-free,” I lie. I have in fact picked it up from my friendly neighborhood smuggler, the real-life equivalent of the Godambos I crush on celluloid. Ah, the wretched dualities of Indian life: the cinemagoer’s traitorous villain is the Bombayite’s helpful purveyor of necessities unreasonably banned by our protectionist government. “On my way back from shooting Love in Paris. It was the best champagne in the shop.”

“But how sweet of you,” she purrs. “And the Customs must have allowed you only one bottle.”

“Just the one.” I nod. “But then I had only one person in mind to give it to.” I apply slight pressure on her bony hand, resting on the coffee table.

“And what’s the occasion, if I may ask?”

“Occasion? Do we need an occasion?” I laugh disarmingly, but she nods, unamused. “Well, let’s just say it’s our fifth anniversary.”

“I don’t understand.” She seems to be about to move her hand from under mine. The seventy-five-proof gratitude is apparently, like its owner’s soul, wearing thin.

“The fifth anniversary of my first mention in your column,” I say as lightly as I can. It still rankles, but I’ve gone too fast: Cyrus had warned me against raising substance too soon.

“Oh, that,” she says, unperturbed, but noticeably wary. Damn.

“I thought it was time to bury the hatchet,” I plunge in recklessly.

“But there isn’t any hatchet to bury.” She withdraws her hand and pulls out a cigarette.

I am quick to convert defeat into victory. My newly freed fingers reach for the gold-plated lighter on her coffee table just before she can get to it. Our hands meet briefly over metal and butane. It takes me two attempts to light her cancerous weed, but at last I succeed. As she inhales, I pour more champagne.

“You’re right,” I respond (Cyrus would be proud of me). “All the more reason to celebrate. Cheers.”

We both raise glasses. I gulp; she sips. She still looks wary, but one of her hands has dropped idly back into her lap while the other transfers the cigarette in and out of the red gash that passes for her mouth.

“You can’t bribe me, you know,” she says archly. “Not even with Pol Roger.”

“Bribe you?” I laugh insincerely. “The thought wouldn’t cross my mind. No one bribes the dre—, er, the famous Radha Sabnis.” Watch it, Banjara, watch it. One more slip like that and you’re a garage mechanic for life.

She looks at me speculatively. As so often with those of the female persuasion, I find myself obliged to say something.

“Look,” I venture shamelessly, “I’ve always admired you greatly. …”

“Really?” Her eyebrows are most disconcerting, but she is not displeased.

“Really.” I am determined now. “Best writer in Showbiz” — I quickly see this would not be enough and hastily add an expansive suffix — “-ness. In show business,” I repeat for good measure. “Really perceptive, insightful. Everyone thinks so. And I’ve always said to myself, Ashok, I’ve said, what a shame it is that you don’t know Radhaji better. Why should you condemn yourself perpetually to being on her wrong side?”

“A-ha.” That’s all she says. Inscrutably, she knocks some ash into a brass bowl.

“So I thought, why not come and see you? Show there are no hard feelings, you know, from my side at least. And really, answer any questions you might have or anything. Just to show you I’m not such a bad chap after all.”

“But I have no questions.” This sounds tough, but with that extraordinary face it is impossible to be sure she means it to be. The body language is more promising. She has crossed her legs again, and her knees are pointing toward me. Mustn’t give up hope.

“Well, maybe I do. You know, perhaps you can tell me what you think I’m doing wrong. Give me some advice.”

“Advice?” She uncrosses and crosses her legs again and leans back on the sofa. “What advice could I possibly give you?”

“Tell me” — here I place my hand once more on hers — “how I can become a good enough actor to win the praise of Radha Sabnis.”

She gives me a twisted smile, but doesn’t move her hand. “Now that would be something, wouldn’t it?” she asks, and the lines on her face fall into an indecipherable disarray.

I decipher them my way. I get up from my chair, walk around the coffee table, seat myself next to her on the sofa, and take her hand firmly in mine. “I need your advice, Radhaji,” I implore, looking earnestly into her eyes as if emoting for a close-up.

She doesn’t flinch. “Are you sure that’s all you need?” she asks, stubbing out her cigarette with deliberate care.

Christ, I was afraid of this. I had warned Cyrus: I’ll turn on all the charm you want, Sponerwalla, but don’t expect me to so much as kiss the witch. To which he’d said, “Look at it this way, man.” (Cyrus’s American PR slang was always a decade out of date.) “No one knows whether she’s thirty-eight or eighty-three. Approach her in the spirit of scientific inquiry, Ashok. Market research, man. Like, we do it all the time. If it comes to that, you might be the first real human being to find out, truth-wise.”

Radha’s loaded question hangs in the air: “Are you sure that’s all you need?” She seems to expect a reply. Despite myself I murmur, “Perhaps not.” Let’s play along, flatter the hag.

“Hmmm.” She puts down the champagne glass. “If you insist.” And before I even realize what is happening, she has put an arm around my neck and brought her mouth down on mine.

Kissing is one thing they don’t practice in the Hindi cinema: our censors don’t like it. But no amount of practice would have prepared me for kissing Radha Sabnis. I am buffeted by a mistral of cigarette fumes, then swept away into alternate waves of asphyxiation and resuscitation. Holding my own in the exchange is like trying to out-blow a vacuum cleaner. I am still orally imprisoned, eyes shut in breathless disbelief, when I feel her fingers explore my T-shirt like a skeleton searching for a burial ground. My eyes rounding in horror, I attempt to pull myself away. But I’m obviously not trying hard enough. My lips remain locked on hers and I am aware of the pressure of her teeth: there seem to be about two thousand of them, each as large and strong as a key on Gopi Master’s harmonium. She must chew neem twigs before breakfast, and unfortunate actors after. As I try to move she half rises, mouth still glued to mine, and pushes me down with a firm hand. Boy, she’s strong. The other hand is pulling my T-shirt out of my waistband. Christ, this is serious! Eyes closed, I put out a hand to stop her and discover something softer and fuller than I expected upon her anatomy. The appendage seems vaguely familiar, like an old friend encountered in a strange country. Reacting instinctively, I squeeze. Without moving her mouth, Radha Sabnis moans into my throat. I open my eyes in amazement to see what the hell I am up to and close them just as quickly. I must move my hand, the woman might get the wrong idea. But I can’t — my arm is pinioned to her chest by the way she has positioned her body.

For a brief moment I contemplate surrender. Isn’t that what inevitably happens in our filmi “rape scenes”? But wait a minute, not to me! I’m a hero!

I still have the use of one hand, the one that was holding hers. I release my grip and find she has not released hers. In fact she is squeezing my palm so tightly that I no longer feel any sensation in my fingers — can’t do a damned thing with this hand. The improbable contents of my other one are meanwhile pressing and squirming insistently in my palm. I refuse to oblige: nothing will induce me to invite another moan down my esophagus. The female breast, a pedantic biology teacher had once told me, is only a muscle. This one has obviously been flexed so often it could lift weights.

At this moment my own weight is more than I can lift. I am crushed into the sofa: for a woman as thin as she is, Radha Sabnis packs a lot of power. And what’s more, she now has one hand free, thanks to my failed sortie. Her fingers are ruthlessly determined, discarding every obstacle in their way like panzers rolling into Poland. One by one, each of my pathetic defenses is dealt with, flung aside: T-shirt, belt, buttons. Unless I fight back, this will be an abject surrender. Air raid sirens wail in my mind: her fingers are tugging at my zip! With a superhuman effort — God, I could have done with a stunt man here — I try to wrench myself away. The result is a pelvic jerk that rolls us both off the sofa, sends us crashing into the coffee table, and deposits us on the floor with Radha still on top, mouth glued to mine and hand safely ensconced where I hadn’t wished it to be. A trickle of Pol Roger Rose, 1968, from the ruins of the coffee table drips stickily into my eyes.

Radha Sabnis lifts her head briefly and smiles at me. “Such passion, Ashok,” she says with a winsome shake of the head. “You really must learn to control yourself.” Before I can catch enough breath to reply, her teeth have padlocked my tongue again.

I give up. I close my eyes and think of Cyrus.

“Was she amenable, mood-wise?” he asks me later.

I pick lint from her carpet off the sticky champagne on my cheek. “You could say that,” I confirm shortly.

“What did she want, man?” he asks insensitively. “A donation to her favorite charity?”

I nod. “You could say that too.”

“I hope,” says Cyrus solemnly, “that you were in a charitable mood.”

Suddenly I find myself laughing. Laughing uncontrollably, in huge, whooping bursts that startle my public relations agent, who looks for all the world like a bewildered owl woken unexpectedly at daytime. I wipe tears and champagne from my eyes. “Cyrus,” I announce, “if your bloody idea doesn’t get me a better press in Cheetah’s column next week — you’re fired.” I am still laughing as I leave him, but Cyrus Sponerwalla is a very worried PR man indeed.

But I have another associate on my mind: my wife, who is waiting for me. I am supposed to pick up Maya from the beauty salon. She spends more time being beautified these days than when she used to act.

“You’re late,” she says as soon as she gets into the car. Maya can never resist an opportunity to restate the obvious.

“I’m sorry,” I concede. “I had to stop and see Cyrus on the way, and then all this hassle of coming by the back road, to avoid being mobbed … you know how it is.”

“I don’t, actually,” she replies tartly. “I don’t know how it is anymore. It’s a surprise when anyone recognizes me these days. What on earth have you got on your face?”

“My face?” I reach up to my cheek in alarm. My face is, after all, my fortune. “Where?”

“Near your eye.” She reaches across and pulls off a tiny yellow feather. The stuff Radha Sabnis has in her living room! Doesn’t a yellow feather symbolize something? “There’s all sorts of muck near your temple,” she says, handing it to me. I run a finger over the offending spot, which I find coated with cigarette ash in a wine base. “Where have you been?”

“Plying Radha Sabnis with champagne,” I reply truthfully. This is difficult, because in the last couple of years I have got used to lying to Maya about my extracurricular activities. But she has seen Radha Sabnis, at least at parties, so the truth is less likely to arouse suspicion than any version of the unconvincing tales she is clearly beginning to see through.

“But how could you get it onto your face?”

“Clumsiness,” I sigh. “Opened it badly — it sort of sprayed all over. Didn’t have time to clean up properly afterward.” Truth again.

Her little face settles into that tight look of disapproval I am becoming accustomed to. “You smell like a brothel,” she says. “And it’s not only the champagne.”

“What are you trying to say, Maya?” I keep my voice low. The chauffeur has heard this kind of conversation before, but there is no reason to make it easier for him. “You can ask the bloody driver where I’ve been. You’re not suggesting I’ve been having some sort of orgy with Radha Sabnis of all people, are you?”

She is silent. It is not the kind of question you can easily answer.

“Well, go on, are you?”

“No, I’m sorry, Ashok.” She doesn’t look at me, but at the back of the chauffeurs head. “I guess I’m getting a little irritable these days. You’ve got your own life, and I hardly see you. I’ve got nothing to do, Ashok. I’m bored.”

“I thought, with the house to run, and all the magazines you read, and the visits to the beauty parlor, and all the film functions, you had more than enough to keep you occupied. What more do you want?”

“I don’t know.” When she is in this mood I can scarcely believe she is the girl I fell in love with, the even-tempered, ever-smiling beti of the nation. “I miss my acting.”

“Now don’t start that again.” I am weary of this topic. We have discussed it more times than I have fought screen brawls. “You know we agreed you couldn’t go on after marriage. No one does: Babita, Jaya, you know them all. It was difficult enough to get my parents to agree to my marrying an actress. How do you think I’d feel to see my wife being chased around trees? It’s just not” — I am about to say “decent,” but think better of it — “worth discussing.”

“Well, I have to put up with you chasing other women around trees,” she retorts hotly. “And God knows where else you chase them.” Not that again, oh Lord, I think, but she has weightier matters in mind. “I’m a professional actress, Ashok Banjara, and I’m sick — sick — of not exercising my profession.”

I can’t take too much intensity in a moving car. Besides, Radha Sabnis has taken much of the fight out of me. “Look,” I say earnestly, “I can understand how you feel. Let’s wait for the doctor’s report on your frog test, OK? If it’s clear, I promise we’ll work out some sort of role, I mean a good role, for you in one of my next films.” (This isn’t hedging; I’m signed up for eleven films simultaneously at the moment, so I can’t talk in the singular.) “If you are pregnant, well, of course, that’ll be that.”

“Oh, Ashok, do you mean it, really? Is that a promise?” She is almost tearful in relief.

“Of course, Maya,” I reply expansively. “I don’t like seeing you upset like this.”

“You promise I can act again if I’m not pregnant?”

“Absolutely.” Anything to buy peace. I do not mention that, in a gesture of excitement he would not make for lesser luminaries among his clients, the doctor has already telephoned me this morning with the good news.

“I love you, Ashok,” Maya says fervently.

I take her hand in mine. “I love you, too, baby.” A small twinge of conscience strikes. “We’ll send the driver to pick up the doctor’s report in the afternoon.”

Back to work. I am no longer entirely sure where or to which film. I now have a secretary who schedules me, thrusts a piece of paper into the chauffeur’s hand, and sends me on my way, sometimes to do three films in the two shooting shifts theoretically available. In most Bombay studios, these are 9:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. (the day shift), and 6 P.M. to midnight (the evening, or more realistically night, shift). In my early days I would have been lucky to have enough work to shoot every day, but now I am so overcommitted I can’t meet my obligations within the two possible shifts. “Gimme dates,” scream the producers, sounding like socially starved American teenagers, “gimme dates.” So my secretary, the efficient Subramanyam, gives them dates, and sometimes they’re the same dates for three different producers. Which means I shuttle back and forth, leaving one shift early and arriving at the next one late, sometimes decamping after one shot and promising to be back for the next, not always keeping the promises. What the hell, the films seem to get made anyway, and as long as they have my name on them they don’t do too badly at the box office.

It’s not as if I’m being worked to the bone or anything. Any period of film shooting consists of bursts of frenetic activity interspersed with long bouts of hanging around waiting for people to set things up: scenes, lighting, equipment. In one eight-hour shift the director will probably expose anything from one thousand and two hundred to three thousand feet of film, the exact figure depending on how undemanding he is, how competent his crew and cast are, and how many technical things that can go wrong do go wrong. There’s about ninety to ninety-five feet of celluloid to every minute of filmed action, so the most productive crew actually gets about half an hour’s worth of film into the can at the end of an eight-hour shift — and most don’t manage half of that. Of that footage no more than one-fifth actually survives the cutting room floor and is included in the movie itself. Which means that each shift actually contributes something like three to six minutes to the movie people pay to see in the cinema theater.

“Have I shot anything for this film already?” I ask the secretary as I am about to leave. The film’s name means nothing to me, but then most Hindi film names don’t mean anything to anybody.

“Yes, sir,” replies my efficient Subramanyam. “You have done two shootings already, sir, last month. One-and-half shifts.”

“One-and-tf-half, Subramanyam,” I chide him gently. “You don’t know what it’s about, do you?”

Subramanyam looks bashful. “No, sir, I am not knowing.”

“Well, I guess I’ll find out. There’ll be plenty more shifts to catch up with the story.”

As the star, for a big film I’d have to put in anything from twenty to thirty shifts myself. When I’m doing a half dozen films simultaneously, some of them shot in locations far away from the other directors’ studios, “gimme dates” becomes a plaintive cry. I used to think that a movie that took three years to make actually involved people toiling every day for three years. Not a bit of it: all that probably happened was that the producer had too ambitious a cast, and he couldn’t get dates. It’s worst of all when both the hero and the heroine are stars in great demand. The dates he gives may not coincide with hers, and you can’t shoot love scenes on different shifts.

I turn up at Himalaya Studios and am hustled into costume: synthetic sweatshirt, blue baseball cap, unfashionably unfaded jeans and canvas shoes. A dirty white handkerchief is knotted hastily around my neck. I am some sort of local tough, defender of the neighborhood and general all-purpose good guy, who will of course go on to demolish the villains and marry the rich heroine.

“What’s supposed to happen here?” I ask the director, as the makeup man puts on the necessary traces of blush to heighten the rosiness of my cheeks. Nearly thirty years since Independence and we still associate pink skin with healthiness.

“We’re ready to shoot,” he says, trying to sound efficient and in charge. He’s a young fellow, some producer’s son, known to everybody, even me who’s his age, as The Boy.

“Congratulations, but that’s not what I meant,” I reply. “What are we ready to shoot?” I have long since given up looking at scripts. There are too many of them and they all read alike, and in any case it’s too much to keep up with three convoluted plot lines a day.

“Oh. I see what you mean.” The Boy is quick to catch on; it’s clear he knows his profession. “It’s an outdoor shot. Heroine’s car breaks down, some rowdies start bothering her, you tell them to buzz off, bash them up when they don’t, open the hood and fix the car. Simple.”

“Straightforward,” I agree. “Any deathless dialogue in this one, or can I make it up as I go along?”

The director looks dubious. There are directors here who make movies without scripts, contenting themselves with story lines on ever-changing scraps of paper, but The Boy is not confident enough for that. He tries to be flexible. “Just the line when you first tell them to buzz off — there’s some good stuff in there, I think. Something about haven’t they got mothers and sisters. The rest you can ad-lib.”

“Good.” The makeup man is finished. “Lead me to it.”

There is only one outdoor locale at Himalaya, which is not small as Bombay studios go. This is a street that runs past the studio’s administration office and canteen into a clump of bushes and flowering trees that could serve, if shot from the right angles, as a low-budget setting for romantic rural interludes. A red Fiat is already parked on the street, and there seems to be a girl in it, though from where I am approaching, most of her face is obscured by a large straw hat. As I step out into the street a ragged cheer goes up from the throng of hangers-on who always seem to manage to get onto the studio grounds. I wave grandly back at them, taking care not to walk close enough to be touched or importuned for autographs.

The director walks up with a closely typed page from the screenplay containing the dialogue he wants me to remember. I dismiss the proferred sheet. “Read it to me,” I say. The makeup man, a fat dark chap with a front pocket full of combs and brushes, hovers around, examining me critically in the bright sunlight. The mirror in his hand catches the light and reflects it into my eye as I am listening to The Boy, so I shoo him away with a gesture of irritation. He backs off but continues to examine me from a safer distance, the mirror turned away from my eyes.

The rowdies, in tight-fitting T-shirts and corduroy pants, mill about the car, trying to chat up the straw hat. The inevitable Arriflex camera (every Indian cinematographer uses Arriflex, as if they’ve never heard of any other brand) stands on a steel tripod, pointing at them. The electrical equipment is now in place, principally a blue wooden box the size of a car battery (for all I know it might well have been a car battery in an earlier incarnation), capped by three fuse boxes and sporting an array of sockets on the side from which sprout a tangle of wires of every color. The technicians, dark dusty men wearing dirty chappals and checked shirts that hang out of their trousers, are sitting around on makeshift wooden stools, waiting for me. Let them wait.

They’re not the only ones. In one cluster of folding chairs on the other side of the street sit unknown stalwarts of the production team, chatting, reading Hindi newspapers, drinking tea, seemingly disengaged from the day’s events. God knows who they are, or what their role is. Every unit I’ve seen seems to have some fifty people on its payroll at each shift, about twenty of whom are completely idle at any given time. My old friend Tool Dwivedi would have liked nothing better than to be one of them.

I’ve absorbed the mothers and sisters bit in the dialogue. “Got it,” I confirm.

“Ready for action?” The Boy asks.

“Sure. But you’re not.” I point up the steps we’ve just descended, where a fading board proclaims Himalaya Studios. “Aren’t you going to do anything about that?” My hand sweeps from the camera to the board.

“Salim!” the director yells. A scruffy boy shuffles past, bearing a sign far too large for him that says State Bank of India. The last time I’d been here the Himalaya administration building had masqueraded as a hospital. The lad drags the sign awkwardly up the steps. None of the twenty idle people move to help him.

Salim is a hired hand, slave labor without the slave’s security of tenure. The rowdies I shall soon have to bash up are a step higher on the biological scale: they are Junior Artistes, Bollywood’s very own term for what the rest of the world knows as extras. Once — just once — in my more naive days and at the prompting of one of the more senior Junior Artistes, I went to Jagannath Choubey to remonstrate mildly with him about the way he was treating them. “What for you asking me this-that?” Choubey retorted in heat. “Why, even the lowest artiste, B-class artiste — why to say artiste, even some poor old toothless man in village scene, some sick grandmother coughing in corner — all getting rupees forty per shift plus rupees seventeen and fifty paise, if you please, for transport and tiffin. Conveyance charge they are calling it. Conveyance charge! And if they say even one single word only on camera, just a jee-huzoor even, they are demanding fifty percent additional. And getting; and getting!”

I wondered whether, in the face of his outrage, it would be safe to say that I didn’t think this was a lot of money. He cut me off as if he had read my mind. “What-all are these people wanting, then, hanh? They are all unqualified for anything else. Uneducated people. Where else in India will any of them be earning so much?”

He had a point, and I backed away. That was many movies ago; but it occurs to me, as I eye The Boy’s rowdies near the red Fiat, that despite these terms there is never any shortage of Junior Artistes. They are produced on demand by “suppliers,” like any other commonly available commodity.

“Who’s in the straw hat?” I ask the director conversationally while the sign is being switched.

“Your heroine,” The Boy responds, as if astonished by the question.

“I gathered that,” I reply cuttingly. “But who is my heroine in this picture?”

The director looks mortally offended. “Mehnaz Elahi,” he tells me.

“Never heard of her,” I admit cheerfully. “Have I met her?”

I am not just being crass. There is a flood of new actresses washing up at the feet of producers these days. With the problems they are having getting dates for the handful of recognized big-name females who can still draw crowds at the box office (as poor Abha, falsies notwithstanding, no longer can), one way out for many producers is to cast an established hero against an up-and-coming heroine. I don’t mind too much because this new crop of heroines is good-looking, articulate, and largely uninhibited. The periods of enforced idleness at every shooting pass very pleasantly indeed in their company.

“I think she was at the muhurat” the director says, “but I remember you made only a fleeting appearance.”

“Ah, yes, that’s possible.” I am slightly embarrassed. The muhurat of any film, the auspicious moment when the opening shot is canned, is not an event its star is supposed to miss. But Subramanyam had, bless him, “given dates.” Not that I minded too much. Muhurats are packed with oversize individuals in undersize clothes, their eyes and thighs gleaming with a synthetic sheen. When they are not emitting raucous cries of recognition (while looking, in the midst of each embrace, for the next famous face to recognize) their tendency is to drape refulgent garlands on every available tripod, clapper board, or neck. I’m happy to avoid them. In any case, marigolds make me sneeze.

“OK, the signs up,” says The Boy. “Let’s go.” The cameraman takes up position. So do the rowdies. A sound man crouches behind the car, holding a mike on a fishing rod.

“Start sound! Camera! Action!”

The rowdies start their harassment. The girl in the straw hat looks helpless. I march in, upbraid them. They are not much impressed by my invocation of their mothers and sisters. They are more impressed by my fists. This is not a choreographed stunt scene, merely an impromptu thrashing. One or two of my blows almost make contact, but I manage to stop them just short, knowing from prior carelessness how painful sore hands can be. They turn tail and flee. I turn to the damsel I have rescued from distress.

“That takes care of them,” I begin. And then I dry up completely.

For the car door opens, just as it is supposed to, and out steps the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She takes off her straw hat, and I am at a complete loss for words.

“Cut!” says the director. He strides into the frame. “What happened?” he demands. “You’re supposed to say, can I help …” He stops, because it is apparent I am not listening to him. Nor is the girl. She is looking directly at the expression on my face, and an intuitive smile is playing at the corners of her mouth.

“Oh,” says The Boy, taking this in. “Ashok Banjara, meet Mehnaz Elahi.”

“Hello,” she says. Her voice reaches deep inside me and strums a responsive chord. An echo emerges: “Hello,” I say.

“Well, now that we’ve got that out of the way,” says the director impatiently, “can we try that shot again? Only this time, you’re supposed to say …”

I get through that shift in a trancelike state. At the first opportunity, when Mehnaz has disappeared for a costume change, I ring Subramanyam.

“Change my dates a bit this month,” I instruct him. “I want to give priority to this young director’s film. Give him whatever shifts he wants.”

“I am doing, sir,” Subramanyam confirms disapprovingly, “but many producers not being happy with you. I just warning you, sir.”

“Good man. Now give The Boy all the dates he wants, OK? And one more thing — find out all you can for me about Mehnaz Elahi.”

Why did I marry Maya? This is probably a hell of a time to ask myself that question, with her expecting our first child in eight months. But as I sit next to her in our living room, answering intimate queries posed by a gushingly sympathetic reporter from Woman’s World (“Filmdom’s Dream Marriage”), I find myself asking it all the time. I look at her, hear myself talking about her to the public, gauge the disarming impression of mutual love and affection we are projecting so effortlessly, and wonder what it would be like to interview myself. Off the record, of course.

What did you see in her? A lovely face, a pretty smile, a gentle vulnerability that made me want to reach out and hold her, protect her against the world. Simplicity, too, of a kind I’d never come across in Delhi. A simple girl, good-natured and kind, with simple tastes, modest, unassuming, soft-spoken. A girl everyone loved.

Everyone loved her, so you thought you did, too? Well, that wouldn’t be fair. Everyone loved her, so I began to take more notice of her. And when she returned my attention, I felt terribly flattered that the girl everybody admired, admired me.

And love? Where did that come in? The first time I held her in my arms. It was actually on camera, a scene from Ganwaari. She looked up at me, and there was a kind of light in her eyes. I felt all sorts of emotions run through me that I couldn’t explain or define. I decided it must be love.

And her? Oh, she loved me. There was no doubt about that.

Did you want to take her to bed? Yes — and, oddly enough, no. I wanted to take her to bed, once. Very badly. I wanted to be the first man in her life, that way. Introduce her to that world, seal my possession of her. Sort of exercise the rights of a husband. But once I had that, once I was a husband, the need cooled very rapidly. She’s not a very sexy type, really. Small, and thin, and let’s face it, not much of a figure. Looks great in a sari, less great in a salwar-kameez, awful without either. I can’t say I married her to improve my sex life.

So were you the first man in her life? Funnily enough, I don’t know. I guess so, I mean it’s almost inconceivable that Maya … But there was someone she was close to before me, a minor actor, an inconsequential villain type. I can’t imagine that she’d have gone to bed with him, but then I can’t imagine he’d have not gone to bed with her. The devil of it is, I can’t ask her. I can just see her lip trembling and her eyes watering at the very thought of my doubting her. But …

And how’s it been? Your sex life? With Maya, not terribly good. It didn’t take me long to realize I’d married someone who reminded me of my mother. After that it was difficult to summon up much desire for her. I mean, I admire the girl, but how can you feel passion for someone you put on a pedestal? I think we’re both relieved she’s pregnant now. Production launched, rehearsals can be suspended.

And apart from Maya? What kind of question is that? I’m a married man.

Did that ever stop you? Not really. Well, yes, for a bit. But a man has his needs, you know, and God knows I have the opportunities. Everyone seems to want to bed an actor. You should see some of the fan mail Subramanyam has to process every day. Traditional housewives in Jabalpur write to describe in loving detail what they’d like me to do to them. We just send them a printed postcard in reply, but Subramanyam shows me some of the more extraordinary propositions. And that’s long distance. Here in Bombay, it’s actually worse. Or better, depending on your point of view. It’s always more difficult to turn the girls away than to simply enjoy what comes my way. I mean, come on, no one takes it seriously.

What about Maya? Well, yes, I suppose she’d take it seriously, if she found out. So a certain amount of discretion has been necessary. I’m not sure how effective it’s been, though. This industry’s full of rumors. Word gets around.

Why don’t you tell her, directly? Ah, well, yes. But no, not really. I couldn’t do that.

Why not? I couldn’t. She has a fiery temper, you know, which I never suspected existed. Shows you how premarital appearances can be deceptive. She would erupt. She might just walk out, leave me.

So what? What do you mean, so what? It was the marriage of the decade, for God’s sake. Not just in the film press — we made the front page of the Times of India. And I don’t want to give her up. It’s not as if I want to marry any of these girls, for Christ’s sake. My marriage to Maya is important to me. If it ends in disgrace, it’ll destroy me.

Nonsense. The public doesn’t care all that much. Look, being Maya’s husband is part of my image now. People see me not just as Ashok Banjara, but as the guy Maya saw enough in to marry and give up her career for. To go from that to being the guy Maya walked out on — it would finish me, really. And what about my father? He’s grudgingly accepted my profession, now that it’s made me more famous than he is. But one of the first things he said to me about it was, “Son, you’re now a public man. And a public man has public responsibilities. Make sure you live up to yours.” How do you think he’ll react to having his son the centerpiece of a scandalous divorce? Forget it. The costs are too high.

So you’re scared. Perhaps, but it’s not just that. Where else would I find a wife like Maya? She’s ideal, man, the nation’s ideal bahu. Half these women I take to the bedroom I wouldn’t be caught dead with in a living room. Maya’s all right. I just wish she’d ease up a bit, stop complaining so much, be a bit more fun to be with.

And let you sleep with other women. (Silence.)

Well? I have nothing more to say. This off-the-record interview is over.

Naw. It’s much easier to deal with Woman’s World. “I was saying all these romantic things to Maya on screen when I realized I meant every word of the dialogue,” I say to the interviewer joshingly, “and which Hindi film actor can afford that? So I had to marry her, before someone changed the script.”

The woman journalist laughs. When I see her to the door she presses a piece of paper into my hand. After she has left, I see that it contains her private phone number and two words: “any time.”

For a long moment I look at it, recalling the woman’s skimpy low-cut blouse and readiness to laugh. I push the piece of paper into a pocket. Perhaps some time.

Cyrus Sponerwalla bursts in while I’m with Subramanyam. His three chins are flapping about as excitedly as the magazine in his hand.

“Listen to this,” he declaims.

Darlings, Cheetah is so impressed by Ashok Banjara these days. All of you pets know that I haven’t always thought very highly of our tall-fair-and-handsome hero. But in his recent films the Hungry Young Man has really polished up his moves. In Love in Paris he really brought a certain je ne sais quoi to the hackneyed role of the Indian lover abroad. And reliable sources whisper in my ear that he has a highly developed taste in champagne, Cheetah s favorite drink. No wonder the industry is bubbly over him, eh? Grrrowl …

He looks up, breathless from reading. “So how about that, hanh? Should do you some good, faith-wise.”

“Sure, Cyrus,” I grin. “Faith fully restored. Only, next time there’s a bottle to be presented to the lady in question, you go. OK?” He turns to leave. “And Cyrus …”

“Yes?”

“Before you do, get some exercise, OK? You’re in no sort of shape for scientific inquiry.”

Exterior: Day/Night

JUDAI

(The Bond)

“What!” The villains face rises to fill the screen as his voice resounds through the hall.

“Yes, Thakur. It is written in the stars and in the palm leaves handed down for generations that foretell your family’s destiny. Your sister’s son will bring about your downfall.”

“Never!” screams Pranay, a short, angry figure in jodhpurs and black boots, a riding crop in his stubby hand. “This shall not come to pass!” He flicks his whip at the pandit who has brought him the news, scattering the learned man’s papers. The Brahmin bends in dismay to pick them up as the feudal Thakur strides purposefully down the immense chandeliered hall, his footsteps echoing on the marble floor.

In a bedroom of considerably less elegance, the Thakur’s sister, Abha, in the throes of childbirth, heaves and moans. Her blanket is modestly drawn up to her neck, but a few beads of sweat stand on her forehead like the pearls she has been used to wearing in her earlier films. A kindly midwife, Amma, murmurs encouraging words of solicitude. Soon a cry is heard, a baby’s response to the world he has just entered. Amma smiles beatifically.

But something is wrong — Abha is still in pain! Amma’s saintly brow creases in puzzlement and worry. Abha moans again, gasps. Her body arches under the blanket. “What is happening, beti?” Amma asks anxiously. The answer comes soon, but not from Abha’s lips. A second wail is heard, louder than the first; the two wails form an unmusical duet.

“Twins!” exclaims Amma. “Abha, you’ve become a mother of twin boys!”

Abha smiles exhaustedly. Two babies, miraculously clean and umbilicus-less, are placed on her pillow on either side of her. She turns her head from side to side. The babies (somewhat too large to be convincing, but then where can you get newborns to be Junior Artistes?) gurgle happily.

Outside the bedroom Amma summons a family retainer, Raju, a thin man in a khaki shirt, a brown Nehru cap, and a dustcloth draped over one shoulder. “Abhaji has had twin sons. Go and give the Thakur-sahib the good news.” Raju brings raised palms together in an obedient namaste.

“Wonderful,” says the Thakur insincerely as Raju, hands still folded in supplication, conveys the glad tidings to him in his chandeliered hall. “We shall distribute sweets in the village. Tell my sister I shall come and see my new nephews tomorrow.” Raju nods, does namaste, and is dismissed.

He has not gone far, however, when he hears the Thakur summon his sidekick, Kalia, an immense black bald-headed man instantly identified by the audience as a villainous sidekick from scores of other films. Raju stands near a convenient window and listens.

“Kalia,” Pranay announces, twirling his evil mustache, “the astrologers have forecast my downfall at the hands of my sister’s son. I don’t know which one of these two is destined to oppose me, but the only way to be safe is to kill them both. See that it is done, Kalia — tonight.”

The swell of background music paints an aural exclamation mark on Raju’s horrified forehead. He gasps in shock, then sets out at a fast clip for Abha’s home.

“No!” screams Abha, clutching her infants to her considerable bosom. “This cannot be!”

“It is true, Abhaji,” Raju says sadly, tears in his rheumy eyes.

“There is only one thing to do,” Amma opines. “You must flee with the babies, somewhere where they will be safe.”

“But where?” asks Abha in desperation. “Where can I go?” She looks directly at the camera. “If only my husband, the boys’ father, had not been jailed for a crime he did not commit,” she declares for the audience’s benefit, “he would never have let my evil brother do this to me.”

“What is the use of thinking about him now?” Amma asks impatiently. “You must go soon.”

“I have a cousin who works in a factory in Bombay,” Raju says. “We can go there. He will get me a job in the factory, and the boys will be safe.”

“You have no choice,” Amma confirms. “Quick, let me get you ready.”

Soon they are prepared to leave. Abha removes from around her neck a black string necklace with two talismans hanging from it.

“Your father gave this to me,” she whispers to the babies. “Now you must have it, for luck.” She snaps the string in two, then ties each half to a baby’s wrist. A close-up reveals a single talisman dangling from each baby’s pudgy arm. The two are identical.

Exterior: twilight. Raju and Abha are seen running down a path toward a river. Each carries a basket. Thick foliage abounds on both sides.

“I shall take one basket across,” Raju says, “and then come back for you.”

He wades across the river, baby and basket aloft. Abha stands at the water’s edge, looking helpless, her own basket heavy in her hand. The music on the sound track is dramatic, suspenseful.

“There she is!” a voice cries out as the violins explode in a heart-stopping crescendo. Kalia it is, with another bandit by his side, both on horseback. “The babies must be in the basket. Come on, let’s get her!”

“No!” Abha screams as the horses canter down the path. Raju, three-quarters of the way across the river, looks back in uncertainty. “Go on!” she instructs him. “They haven’t seen you yet. Go on, quickly! I’ll manage on my own somehow.”

Raju hesitates, hears the horses’ hooves, and wades on. He soon disappears into the foliage on the other side.

Abha steps into the water, trying to hold the basket high. The current swirls relentlessly around her. “Stop!” cries Kalia, charging onward. “Stop!”

Abha takes another step forward, stumbles. A shot rings out, then another. She screams. A red stain appears on her blouse. She falls, and the basket slips out of her grasp. With a last despairing wail, she reaches out for it, but the basket is caught by the current and floats rapidly downriver.

“No!” she screams again (her dialogue was easy to learn). The basket disappears, and Abha sinks under the water as Kalia and his accomplice draw their horses up to the rivers edge.

“Too bad,” says Kalia as Raju, panting, gapes at them through a gap in the jungle shrubbery that he has hidden in. “All drowned, for certain. Well, that’s what the Thakur wanted, wasn’t it?” His partner nods: he has a nonspeaking part.

“Well, let’s get back to the boss and give him the sad news,” Kalia laughs. “He won’t be too upset: she was only an adoptive sister anyway.” The two wheel their horses around and canter back up the path.

Raju is seen running, the basket in his hand. The camera cuts to the other basket floating safely on the current. Inside the baby cries, waving a pudgy fist with a black string talisman dangling from his wrist. The waters swirl, Raju runs, the basket floats, the baby cries. And the opening credits fill the screen.

As the director’s name fades from the screen, the camera pans to a pavement scene in Bombay. A man and a monkey are performing tricks, and they seem to have attracted a larger crowd than such exhibitions usually do in a blasé city. The reason is soon apparent: the man in the lungi, sleeveless shirt, and dirty cap, waving an hourglass-shaped tambouret that clicks rhythmically in tune with his patter, is none other than Ashok Banjara. The crowd that inevitably gathers to watch open-air film shootings is therefore doubling as the monkey-man’s audience.

“Performing monkey! Come and see!” Ashok calls out, as if to attract even more custom. “Tricks you’ve never seen before!” He rattles his tambouret. “Performing monkey!”

The monkey hops about on the hot concrete sidewalk. “Come on, Thakur!” Ashok calls out to him. “Do you like these people?” The monkey nods his head. “Are they bad people?” The monkey shakes his head. “Is this lady pretty?” The monkey nods vigorously, sending titters through the crowd and provoking an embarrassed giggle from the extra playing the lady in the throng. “Would you like to marry her, Thakur?” The animal nods again, its eyes opening lustfully wide and eliciting a louder laugh from the spectators. The lady now looks decidedly uncomfortable. “Do you think she’ll marry you?” The monkey slowly, sadly, shakes his head. This time the lady joins in the appreciative laughter.

As the performance continues — the monkey donning absurdly elegant coats and caps, doing cartwheels, responding to Ashok’s questions — the monkey-man works the crowd, his fingers dipping deftly into pockets and handbags. The crowd is distracted by the monkey and by Ashok’s song:

Say hello to the monkey-man, monkey-man, monkey-man,

Say hello to the monkey-man, and give us some rice.

We give more highs than a junkie can, junkie can, junkie can

We give more highs than a junkie can, at half the price.

Shouldn’t we be good to these people?

(MONKEY NODS)

Then try and climb up a steeple!

(MONKEY RUNS UP A TELEPHONE POLE)

Show them how you jump!

(MONKEY JUMPS DOWN, LANDS SAFELY ON HIS FEET)

Dance, and wiggle your rump!

(MONKEY DOES SO, LIKE A HINDI FILM CABARET DANCER)

Say hello to the monkey-man, monkey-man, monkey-man,

Say hello to the monkey-man, and give us some rice.

We give more highs than a junkie can, junkie can, junkie can,

We give more highs than a junkie can, at half the price.

Are these ba-a-d folks?

(MONKEY SHAKES HIS HEAD.)

Shall we show ’em some jokes?

(MONKEY NODS)

OK, do a striptease!

(MONKEY PROCEEDS TO PULL OFF HIS LITTLE SEQUINED JACKET AND, DANCING, TUGS AT HIS OUTSIZE SHORTS)

That’s enough, at ease!

(MONKEY STOPS, DOFFS HIS LITTLE CAP)

Say hello to the monkey-man, monkey-man, monkey-man,

Say hello to the monkey-man, and give us some rice.

We give more highs than a junkie can, junkie can, junkie can,

We give more highs than a junkie can, at half the price.

So Thakur, it’s time to go?

(MONKEY NODS)

Is this the end of the show?

(MONKEY NODS, HEAD DROOPING, MIMING TIREDNESS)

Time to collect your fee!

(MONKEY LEAPS UP, PICKS UP CAP LARGER THAN ASHOK’S, AND TAKES IT AROUND THE CROWD)

Folks, you decide what that should be!

And as people give money, in some cases reaching for their missing wallets in puzzlement, Ashok packs up, singing:

Say hello to the monkey-man, monkey-man, monkey-man,

Say hello to the monkey-man …

He is seen whistling the same tune as he enters a slum colony, his monkey perched on his shoulder. Little children run up to greet him, and he dispenses sweets liberally. He is hailed affectionately by passing extras, by shopkeepers, by a tea stall man, and he returns each greeting with a wave and a familiar word. After a while he stops and ducks into a curtained doorway. In a dark little room an old man lies on a string-bed charpoy, coughing piteously, while a beautiful young girl sits at the bedside, looking anxious.

“Arré Ashok, is it you?” the sick man rasps.

“Don’t strain yourself, Chacha,” our hero replies. “Look, I have brought some money for your medicine. You will be well soon.” He holds out a sheaf of notes to the girl, who looks embarrassed.

“Go on, take it, Mehnaz,” Ashok says. “Your father needs the medicine. If I could read and write I’d have got it myself.”

“You’re so kind, Bhaiya” Mehnaz replies. “I don’t know what we’d do without you. But you work so hard for this money — it isn’t right, somehow.”

“Don’t be silly,” Ashok retorts. “Isn’t Chacha like a father to me? Take it.”

The old man coughs again. “What’s the use?” he asks wearily. “I am not for this world much longer.”

Ashok sits on the bed and takes the old man’s hand in his. “Don’t talk like that, Chacha,” he pleads earnestly. “You will be well soon, once we get the medicines.”

“No,” the invalid coughs. “Son, I cannot last. There are two things I must tell you before it is too late.” His voice weakens, and Ashok has to bend low to hear him. “I know you have always thought you were the son of Pitlu the monkey-man. The truth is he had no son. He found you one day by the riverside, where he had gone to collect twigs for the fire. You were in a little basket, caught up in some brambles at the water’s edge. You were a tiny newborn baby, and he took you as a gift from God. Of course everyone in the chawl helped look after the baby, and my wife, your Chachi, God rest her soul, treated you like the son we had never had. You were brought up by all of us, by the entire chawl, though of course you belonged to the monkey-man, who said he needed a little boy to help him. And you seemed so happy with him, and with his monkey, no one was surprised when you took over from him in the end.” The old man, exhausted by his effort, stops, coughing. His daughter gives him a sip of water.

“Then who is my real father?” Ashok asks urgently. “How do I find him?”

“I have no idea. There was no name on the blanket you were wrapped in, and the basket has long since gone. But there is one clue.”

“Yes?”

“The talisman you wear on your wrist. That was with you the day you were found.” Ashok looks at it intensely, his only connection to an unknown world. “When you were little the string went around your wrist several times, but now I see it is as tight as a bracelet. Find out where that came from, and you might learn your origins.”

“I always thought it was my father’s — Pitlu’s,” Ashok says. “But whenever I asked him what it meant, he would always say he didn’t know, that I had had it since birth and that I should always wear it.”

“It is your most precious inheritance, Ashok,” the old man gasps.

“Chacha!” Ashok sees the life ebbing out of his mentor, and his voice is almost a cry. “And the second thing you wanted to tell me?”

“Look after Mehnaz,” the old man whispers. “She is not of an age to be alone in this world. You are like a brother to her. With her mother and aunt dead, she has no one.”

“She will always have me,” Ashok vows.

“Good,” Chacha says. “Find her — find her a husband just like you.” And with this shifting of paternal responsibility, the spark of dialogue that has kept him going so far fades out. His expression slackens, his eyes stare. He has gone to the great rerecording studio in the sky.

“Abba!” wails Mehnaz. “Chacha!” cries Ashok. They fall on the inert form of the extra, who struggles to keep still. Then, in an apocalyptic moment, they look up at each other and fall into a mutually consolatory — and, of course, purely fraternal — embrace.

Ashok — another Ashok, but the audience doesn’t know this immediately — walks proudly into a small house in his new uniform. He wears the pale khaki garb and starry epaulettes of an inspector of the Bollywood CID.

“Ashok!” A gray figure rises from a cloth-and-wood easy chair to greet him. Despite the generous application of whitener on his hair, the figure is recognizably Abha’s faithful old retainer, Raju. “You have done it! Congratulations!’’

“Yes, Father. As of today, you may call me Inspector Ashok.”

“This is a proud day for me, son. If only your mother could see you now.” Raju wipes a sentimental tear from his eye. “If for all these years I have instilled in you the ambition to become a police officer, it has been only for her.” He clasps Ashok in a paternal hug, then stands back, one hand on the young man’s shoulder, and looks at him with wet eyes. “Son, the time has at last come when I must tell you something very important. For all these years, I held my tongue, out of fear that the truth could expose you and us to danger at a time when we could do nothing about it. But now, Inspector Ashok, you can do something about it.”

“Father, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“Sit down, son, and I shall tell you.” And he does: in staccato flashback images the story spills out: Thakur, Kalia, talisman, everything. By the end Ashok sits shaken.

“So you are not really my father, Father?”

“No, son. Your father is not a humble lathe operator in a factory who skimped and saved to send you to college and made an officer out of you. Your father is a fine man of good family who was condemned to rot in prison for a murder, a murder for which he was undoubtedly framed by Pranay Thakur’s thugs.”

“But he might be a free man now! I must find him!”

Raju shakes his head sadly. “In our country, Inspector Ashok, life imprisonment is really for life — unless death comes sooner. If your poor fine father survived the rigors of jail, rigors for which he was completely unsuited, he is probably still in jail now, twenty-two years later. As a police officer, perhaps you can trace him and get justice done.”

(The judicial system of India is one about which our filmmakers are blissfully ignorant, which is perhaps why it features so frequently in our cinematic life.)

“Do you know which jail he is in?”

“What does a poor servant know of such things? But you — as a police officer you can probably find out.”

“You have been a good father to me, Father — I mean Raju-ji. Whatever happens, I shall never forget all that you have done for me. But now I must set out to find my real father and avenge the tragic deaths of my mother and brother.” Ashok looks at the black string on his wrist. “By this sacred token of my mother’s love,” he vows, “I swear to avenge her.”

“Ashok,” cautions the old man, “no hasty actions. Pranay Thakur is a powerful man. An angry youth will prove no match for him. You must use your strengths — your new position, the law — to track him down. That is why I have waited so long to tell you. Do not make me feel I have waited in vain.”

Ashok turns to him soberly. “You are right, Father,” he says. “I must be patient. I must research the facts, build up a case. And then

I shall get him.

He won’t escape.

I won’t let him

Stay in one shape.

I shall hang and draw and quarter him,

Bury and plough and water him,

Do everything I ought to him —

Then turn him in to the forces of the law.

I shall catch him

By surprise.

I shall match him

Size for size.

I shall flog and tar and feather him,

Whip and lash and tether him,

Tie his hands together (hmm!)

And turn him in to the forces of the law.

Scene: Ashok the monkey-man and Mehnaz the recent orphan scour a bazaar. They go to silversmiths, shopkeepers, jewelers, fakirs, showing the talisman on its string. Each person they approach shakes his head, unable to identify it. One offers to buy it. The monkey perched on Ashok’s shoulder turns the offer down on his behalf.

Scene: Ashok the inspector goes from prison to prison, asking in vain about his father. In each frame the prison officials shake their heads too, out of tune with the insistent drumbeat of the sound track. The young policeman walks away, depressed but determined.

During both sequences the sound track swells with a plaintive lament:

Seeking —

We must go on seeking.

Must leave no stone unturned,

No candle of hope unburned,

No bit of truth unlearned —

Must go on seeking.

Seeking —

We must go on seeking.

Must keep our faith alive,

And never cease to strive,

Whatever we derive —

We must go on seeking.

Scene: Ashok, Mehnaz, and the monkey Thakur are at a village mela. Amid the colorful bustle of the fairground — painted animals and brightly dressed women, rusty carousels and lusty carousers, turbans and cotton candy in equally startling shades of pink — the trio continue their quest. They are seen receiving yet another negative shake of the head in response to Ashok’s extended wrist. Dispirited — indeed, none is more dejected than the monkey, who covers his eyes with his long fingers gloomily — they turn away.

“I’m beginning to think we’ll never find out about your amulet, Bhaiya,” says a weary Mehnaz, pretty in a yellow ghagra choli and pouting most attractively at her costar.

“We will, Mehnaz,” Ashok replies. “We must. I cannot rest until I have found out the truth about myself.”

Mehnaz looks as if she might be prepared to tell him a few truths herself, but further conversation is thwarted by a commotion in the village square beyond the fairground.

“What’s going on here?” asks Ashok.

“It’s the Old Woman,” says a villager. “Some people are angry with her and want to drive her away.”

“What Old Woman?”

“You haven’t heard of the Old Woman?” The villager looks at Ashok as a Bombayite might regard someone who thought stars could only be seen in the sky. “She is well known in these parts. She has been wandering around for years. At first she was with a hermit who had helped her in some way. She collected alms for him, fed him, and so on. Then the hermit died and she took to sitting under a banyan tree for days on end, praying. People think she is a holy woman of some sort and they give her food and water. But it never lasts for very long. In village after village she has been driven away because of her madness.”

“She is mad, then?”

“You wouldn’t think so at first. But every once in a while, when she sees a baby, she starts screaming that it is hers and tries to snatch it away from whoever is carrying it, accusing that person of having stolen her child. As you can imagine, people don’t take too kindly to that. So they drive her away, and she wanders off to another banyan tree in another village, until it happens all over again.”

“Sad story,” says Mehnaz.

“Yes, something terrible must have happened to her in the past,” the villager clucks. “It used to be said that she had had some accident and could remember nothing — not even her name or address, who she was, where she came from. So she is just called the Old Woman.”

“And a lot of other names, it seems,” says Ashok, heeding the voices raised offscreen. “Come, Thakur, let us see what they are doing to this poor Old Woman.” The monkey nods agreement, and they set off.

Not a moment too soon. There is a mob gathered near the banyan tree, and the mood is ugly. Voices are raised, and so are fists: one unpleasant extra has a chappal in his hand with which he is threatening to beat the old lady if she continues to impugn the parenthood of his baby.

In the center of this throng, her gray hair flowing wild about her, her body clad in shapeless white, her considerable bosom heaving and her face bathed in tears, is — you guessed it, audience! — Abha. Damsel no longer, but evidently in distress.

“Would you raise your filthy footwear against your own mother?” Ashok asks sharply if irrelevantly, shaming the chappal-wielder, and ultimately the crowd, into retreat. (The original screenplay had called for a fight scene here, with Ashok and his monkey bashing up the mob, but this was regretfully deleted by the director in an uncharacteristic burst of sensitivity.) Ashok puts a protective arm around the Old Woman. “Come, Mother,” he says, using the term out of respect rather than recognition, but giving the audience their twenty-five paise’s worth of irony in the bargain. “Come with us. We shall look after you.”

“Who are you, beta?” the Old Woman asks as her tormenters melt away, muttering. In the background the tune of “We must go on seeking” plays on, to alert the less attentive members of the audience.

“I am just a humble monkey-man, Mother,” admits our hero. “But I cannot bear to see you treated like this. I never had a mother myself, and it galls me to see those who have been able to take their mothers for granted behave in this way. Come with us, Mataji. We have a humble home which is yours as long as you want to stay.

“You are very kind,” Abha says gravely. “The blessings of Hanuman be upon you. And this girl?”

“She is my sister, or rather she is like a sister to me,” Ashok explains. “Her father recently passed away and I am looking after her, though a lot of the time I feel she is the one looking after me.”

“Bless you both.” Then suddenly, as Ashok moves his arm, there is a crash of cymbals on the background track. The camera zooms into a close-up amid the screeching of violins, and Abha’s eyes, wide with astonishment, take in the sight of the talisman dangling from her rescuer’s wrist.

“Where did you get that?” she screams, lunging for it. “You thief! You stole that! Give it to me.”

Ashok catches her raised hand in a firm grip as Mehnaz looks alarmed. “Please, Mother, is this any way to treat someone who has done you no harm? This talisman is mine.”

“Liar! How did you get it? Who gave it to you?”

“It has been with me since birth.”

(Another smash from the invisible percussionist.) “And who,” Abha asks with a catch in her voice, “are your parents?”

Ashok’s voice drops. “I don’t know, Mother. You see, as a baby I was found in a basket on the river.”

“My God!” says Abha and faints, a hand on her heart, as the refrain from “We must go on seeking” deafens the viewers. Before Ashok can prevent it, Abha has hit her head on the hard ground. The monkey, wincing, puts shocked hands to his ears as Ashok and Mehnaz look at each other in mutual bewilderment.

When Abha is revived, the knock on her head has, of course, affected only her amnesia. She now remembers everything, and at some cost to the patience of the viewers, remembers it garrulously. The reunion of mother and son is tearful and heartrending. So is the background music.

“Raju might still be working somewhere, in some factory in Bombay, and might know where your brother is,” Mehnaz points out.

“Do you know how many factories there are in Bombay?” Ashok asks. “That would be impossible. I pray that my brother is alive and well and that Fate will lead me to him. But first, there are more urgent things to do. I must find my real father and try to get him out of jail. And then I must deal with this evil uncle of mine.”

“But how can you get him out of jail?” Abha asks.

“Ma” (the use of the word brings tears to the actress’s eyes, not necessarily for the reasons intended in the script), “in the years that I have been a humble monkey-man I have made a number of friends who are on the wrong side of the law. We will find a way.”

Abha looks at her newfound son, her eyes brimming with hope and pride. “Pray that they have not moved him to another jail,” she says.

“Let’s go, Ma,” says the hero. The monkey hops excitedly about on Ashok’s shoulder as they walk on. The sound track reminds the audience that they must go on seeking.

“You may visit the prisoner,” the jail official tells Inspector Ashok. The young man, controlling his excitement with difficulty, walks to the cell. On a rough wooden stool sits Ramkumar, head bowed, wearing a prison uniform and a thick beard. He is a well-known character actor, a euphemism for someone who can act but isn’t as good-looking as the (invariably characterless) hero.

“Father,” breathes Ashok.

Ramkumar looks up dubiously. “What do you want?” he asks gruffly. “Who are you?”

Ashok grips the bars of the cell. “I am your son,” he beams.

“I have no son,” Ramkumar replies. “Stop torturing an old man. Go away.”

“B-but you have! Your wife, Abha, gave birth to twin sons while you were in jail!” Ashok exclaims. “My revered mother and brother died at the hands of the henchmen of Pranay Thakur, but I survived. Didn’t anyone tell you this?” He takes in the expression of growing astonishment and wonder on his father’s face and realizes that, of course, no one could have. “I’m sorry, Father.” He thrusts out his wrist. “Do you recognize this?”

“I gave it to your mother many years ago.” His voice breaking, Ramkumar gets up from his stool and walks warily toward the bars of the cell. “And I thought she had simply decided to abandon a jailbird.” He shakes his head, grieving. “How do I know you are telling the truth, that you didn’t just pick this talisman up somewhere? Why have you come to me only now?”

“Because I have only just found out about you and traced you to this jail,” Ashok says. He bends to touch his father’s feet through the bars. “If you don’t believe me, I’ll bring Raju-ji to you tomorrow. You remember Raju?”

“The servant? Yes, of course I do. But” — a blur covers his eyes, and in a single point of light at its center Ramkumar sees his wife, young again, arms outstretched to him as he is dragged away in handcuffs — “it won’t be necessary.” Ramkumar looks at Ashok still bent, and slowly, as if marveling at the moment, places a hand on his visitor’s head. “Bless you,” he says, “my son.”

“Father!” exclaims Ashok, rising. They embrace, despite the bars between them. (The filmmakers are unaware of prison regulations and they’ve never heard of the Jail Manual, but even if they were and had, they wouldn’t let realism come in the way of art. These men from Bombay belong to a purist school of aesthetics.)

“It breaks my heart to discover a son and to know that these bars will always remain between us, while that wretched killer who has reduced me to this goes free.”

“Father, I promise you will not have to remain in prison much longer. I will check every rule, explore every legal right you have, to get you out of here. I am a police officer. I can do it.”

“You give me hope, my son,” says Ramkumar, pride in his voice. “But — do not tell the police I am your father. They will hold it against you, my son, that your father is a convicted criminal. It may even make it more difficult for you to intervene to secure my release. After all these years, I can afford to wait a little longer if need be, but don’t take any risks.”

“You are right, Father,” Ashok agrees. “Very well, I shall keep our relationship a secret. But only until justice has been done and you are a free man again!”

Outside the prison Inspector Ashok walks on air, a starry look in his eyes. He whistles; he does a quick hop, skip, and jump. Startled passersby look at him askance. A lovely girl in a cotton salwar-kameez, books in her arms, hails him.

“Ashok!” calls Mehnaz. She is wearing outsize sunglasses, apparently to enhance the scholarly look she must sustain for the scene. “What are you doing in this uniform?”

Ashok blinks. “Do I know you?” he asks, though he is clearly not unhappy at being recognized by this exquisite stranger.

“Stop teasing me,” she says. “If the police catch you in this, you’ll really be in for it.”

“But I am the police,” Ashok protests.

“Very funny,” says Mehnaz. “But I must say, it looks good on you, Bhaiya. Is it part of the plan?”

“If you say so,” agrees Ashok, mystified.

“Anyway, I knew you wouldn’t let me walk alone to college,” Mehnaz says satisfiedly. “Having forced me to stay out of all your exciting plans and told me I had to finish my studies, I did think the least you could do was accompany me.”

“You bet,” confirms Ashok, who knows a good thing when he sees it and is, in his elation, game for anything.

“I suppose you think the uniform will frighten all the college dadas into behaving themselves,” Mehnaz goes on chattily.

“It should, shouldn’t it?” Ashok agrees.

“You’re talking funnily today, Ashok Bhaiya.” The girl giggles. They have reached a park that blooms conveniently on their way to the college. “You’re really speaking strangely.”

“Would you prefer me to sing, instead?” Ashok asks. Mehnaz laughs and runs toward a tree. Ashok bursts into playback:

Gulmohars, roses and the iris growing green,

You are more lovely than any flower I’ve seen;

Take off those glasses and put jasmine in your hair,

And let me watch you just — standing there.

Oooh, standing there.

(Mehnaz laughs, runs around the tree, then skips lightly over the grass and puts one foot on a park bench. She slips her glasses up her forehead and holds her chin in one hand, surveying Ashok in mock disapproval.)

Mountains, oceans, valleys around the tourist scene,

You are a better sight than any place I’ve been;

Turn off that frowning look and sit upon that chair,

And let me watch you just — sitting there.

Oooh, sitting there.

(Mehnaz sits on the park bench while Ashok dances around it, singing. He plucks a rose and gives it to her. She inhales its scent, then stretches languorously on the bench, coyly veiling herself and the rose with her thin gauze dupatta.)

Love-poems, sonnets and the words that I can glean,

You are more to me than any verse could mean;

Slip off that screen of cloth and leave your fragrance bare,

And let me watch you just — lying there.

Oooh, lying there.

He brings his face amorously close to hers. Mehnaz leaps off the bench and runs to the pathway, laughing. Ashok follows, catches up with her. She is panting: “Bhaiya, what has come over you? I’ve never known you to behave like this.”

“But you’ve never known me,” Ashok points out.

“Don’t be silly,” Mehnaz says. “The joke’s gone far enough. Hurry up, or I’ll be late for class.”

“Wait,” says Ashok, catching hold of her hand. She looks at his hand in hers, and the color mounts to her cheeks. “Who am I?”

“You’re Ashok, of course,” she responds impatiently.

“Fair enough. And how do you know me?”

“You’re my Bhaiya, aren’t you?” She is irritated now and pulls her hand away to walk on. Ashok stands still for a moment, scratching his head in puzzlement. “Am I?” He asks himself. Then he follows her.

“I’ll take you to college,” he says, “but there’s something really peculiar going on.”

“I’ll say,” agrees Mehnaz with spirit. “Are you sure you haven’t been drinking or something?”

“I’m beginning,” Ashok mutters, “to wonder myself.”

“And who are you?” asks the prison officer dubiously.

“I am his wife,” replies Abha.

“And I am his son,” adds Ashok, monkeyless for the occasion.

The prison officer is not impressed. “He has been in this jail for twenty-two years,” he says pointedly, “and there is no record of a wife and son. In fact, it says here” — he picks up a yellowing folder held together with dangling string and leafs through dusty pages — “wife deceased. Next of kin, Pranay Thakur.” He looks up at them. “Now you go and get a letter from Pranay Thakur to confirm that you are who you say you are, and I will see what I can do. But I can’t promise anything.”

They protest, they plead, but the iron wall of prison bureaucracy, at least as interpreted in Bombay, is not moved. “Oh, and one more thing,” the official adds. “Even if you get such a letter, please remember that visiting days are Thursdays only. This is not a hotel, that you can come in and see people when you like.”

When the devastated pair leaves, the prison official turns to a colleague on an adjoining desk. “Strange, this sudden burst of interest in Ramkumar,” he observes. “For twenty-two years not a soul wants to see him, and now suddenly three people this week. Remember the police inspector the other day? I wonder if I shouldn’t send word to Pranay Thakur.”

Outside, Ashok is grimly determined. “We tried it your way, Ma,” he says through gritted teeth, “and you saw how they treated us. If there was any justice my father wouldn’t be in prison at all, and now we’re not even allowed to see him! Fine, at least we know he’s there. Now you leave it to me and my friends. We’ll have him out very soon, Ma — and then we’ll turn our attention to your adopted brother.”

“All right, my son,” Abha sighs. “But be careful.”

It is dark, but Ashok’s face is clearly visible in the moonlight as he stands at the foot of a tree outside the prison walls, a stout length of hemp in his hands. He puts one end of the rope over his monkey’s shoulder. “Go, Thakur,” he says.

The monkey holds the rope in his thin fingers and leaps onto the tree.

“Shabash” says Shahji, one of the two men accompanying Ashok. Both are familiar faces from the first scene at the chawl, people whom Ashok had greeted cheerily as he walked in with his day’s pickings.

The monkey scurries along the thin branch that overhangs the prison courtyard. He leaps down and runs to a drainpipe, which he ascends nimbly. Reaching a barred window, the monkey loops his end of the rope around a bar, then proceeds to tie it into a knot. (The audience in the front rows of the movie theater applaud, cheer, and whistle at this: the improbable is far more fun than the credible.)

When the monkey has returned, mission accomplished, to his habitual perch on his master’s shoulder, Ashok tugs at the rope to test it. It is firm. Quickly, he ties the other end to the tree trunk. The rope looks taut and strong.

“Let’s go, brothers,” he breathes.

One by one, the heroes of the chawl clamber up the rope, over the prison wall, and reach the window. Ashok, the first, uses a steel file he has been holding in his teeth to saw rapidly through two of the bars. He jumps in, and the other two follow.

Whispered words are uttered, and the men fan out. The action is swift. A sleepy guard is surprised by Shahji and his friend is knocked out, his bunch of keys taken. Another looks up from his plate to find a knife at his throat and a grinning monkey on his table. Ashok raises a menacing finger to his lips. “One word,” he whispers, “let alone a scream, and —” He mimes the act of drawing the knife across the guard’s neck. The man chokes. Ashok puts a hand over his mouth and gestures with the knife. “Ramkumar?” he asks. “Don’t tell me — just point.” The terrified guard, extending a shaking finger, leads Ashok to Ramkumar’s cell. The monkey cheerfully helps himself to the abandoned dinner.

“Open it,” Ashok commands at the cell door. As the guard fumbles with the purloined keys Shahji gives him, Ramkumar looks up, astonished.

“Ashok!” he exclaims.

“You recognized me?” Ashok asks in disbelief.

“But of course,” Ramkumar says. “Though your disguise is pretty good.”

“Disguise?” asks Ashok.

“I didn’t expect you to do it this way,” Ramkumar says.

“It’s the only way,” Ashok replies as the cell door swings open.

“Thank you,” whispers Shahji politely, administering a swift blow with his flashlight to the back of the guard’s head. Both guard and hero descend to the floor, Ashok in order to touch his newfound father’s feet. (If one were ever in doubt as to the North Indian conservatism of the makers of Hindi films, one need look no further than the number of times the characters touch each other’s feet. Some of the producers expect the same of their supplicants, and they don’t always stop at the feet, either.)

“Come with us, Father,” says Ashok, leading him to the rope at the window. “Do you think you can do this?”

“I have broken rocks for twenty years, my son,” Ramkumar replies in a gruff voice. “I can do it.”

They clamber out to freedom. Once on the other side of the wall, Ashok unties the rope from the tree trunk, knots the bunch of keys to it, and flings it back in a sweeping parabola through the open window.

“Let them figure that out by themselves,” he chuckles, the monkey applauding his efforts. “Come on, Father, let’s go. Ma is waiting for you.”

“Ma?” Ramkumar’s bewilderment is complete. “I thought you told me she was dead.”

“When could I have told you that, Father?” Ashok asks in surprise.

They get into a waiting Tempo, with Shahji at the wheel, and drive off into the night. The camera catches a glimpse of Ramkumar. Hope, fear, confusion, and excitement are reflected simultaneously on the character actor’s face.

The sounds of music and the twinkling of lights strung on trees indicate that a party is taking place, but for those in any doubt, outside the entrance there is also a red banner that announces in large, white letters: WOMEN’S COLLEGE, FANCY DRESS PARTY, IN AID OF POLICEMAN’S BENEVOLENT FUND. (Had anyone suggested to the scriptwriter that no women’s college in its right mind would be associated with such an event, and that even if it were, it would not have called the function a “fancy dress party” or misspelled “policemen’s,” the objector would have been given a lecture on the creative necessity of artistic license. The misspelling, however, would have been attributed, not to the sign writer at Himalaya Studios, but to a conscious, realistic attention to detail — for which there is always a time and place in the Hindi film.)

Inside the college overdressed extras laugh and whirl with a gaiety rarely seen in any social event at a real women’s college in India. Mehnaz is in full evening gown, complete with sash and fake tiara: she makes a convincing beauty queen (her sash proclaims her to be “Miss Alternative Universe 1975”). As she sips a respectably nonalcoholic drink and laughs with a group of girls, a man in a kathakali mask sidles up to her.

“Remember me?” asks Inspector Ashok, lifting his mask briefly to grin at her.

“Ashok!” squeals Mehnaz. “But what are you doing here?”

“This is a policemen’s ball, and I’m a policeman,” replies the man in the mask.

“Ha-ha, big joke. I thought you were going to prison tonight.” In Hindi, one cannot distinguish between “prison” and “the prison” as one might in the language of the banner writer, so Ashok’s surprise is understandable.

“Me? But what have I done to deserve that?” he asks.

Mehnaz laughs. “Always teasing me, aren’t you, Ashok?”

“Am I?” But before Ashok can pursue this line of inquiry much further, a roll of drums indicates the music will be hard to compete against. “Let’s dance,” he says, and before she can protest he has swept Miss Alternative Universe 1975 onto the floor.

The band establishes the music director’s modernity by wielding a number of electric guitars in addition to more traditional, indigenous equipment. The band members also sing the first line of each verse in what they believe to be English:

I–I-I–I-I–I luff you,

Don’t you know that’s really true,

That’s why I wanna hold you tight,

Sweetielet’s dance tonight.

I–I-I–I-I–I luff you,

Don’t you feel that I really do,

Can’t you see that it feels right,

Sweetie let’s dance tonight.

I–I-I–I-I–I luff you,

Don’t you see it just like new,

It’s the moment to see the light,

Sweetie let’s dance tonight.

Ashok and Mehnaz are proficient dancers, although dancing is an unusual skill to have acquired in a factory worker’s hutment and a chawl, respectively; the extras soon gather around them and applaud, just in case the audience itself is not so inclined.

Outside it is dark. Ashok and Mehnaz emerge from under the banner, still masked and gowned.

“How are you going home?” Ashok asks.

“You’re taking me, silly,” Mehnaz replies. “Except I thought you said you’d come after the show and wait for me outside.”

“Listen,” Ashok begins, “we’ve got something to sort out here. Look at me properly.” He reaches for his mask, but on the way his hands stop at her face, and he cannot resist cupping her chin in his hands.

“Take your hands off my sister,” says a voice from the shadows.

Both Ashok and Mehnaz whirl around toward the voice. The face is half hidden in the darkness so Inspector Ashok cannot see it, but Mehnaz recognizes her brother and brings a hand up to her mouth. “Ashok!” she gasps. “But then who is —?”

There is no time to complete the question as her brother, schooled in the rough-and-ready social norms of the chawl, which neither permit a stranger to fondle your sister nor encourage you to forgo the advantage of surprise, leaps out of the shadows and administers a swift blow to the inspectors solar plexus. Police training, however, is not to be sneezed at because the cop, while still doubled over in pain, brings his knee up into the advancing assailant’s groin. A few more blows are traded, dishoom, dishoom, with the man in the kathakali mask getting somewhat the worse of the exchange (for by this point the actor playing him is a double, of course). Then Ashok, whose face has still not been fully visible to his fellow-combatant throughout the encounter, twists the inspector’s arm behind him. The kathakali cop groans with pain. Suddenly — just as the chawl pugilist, standing behind (and therefore completely outside the view of) his rival, is about to apply the final ounce of pressure that will break his twin’s arm — a shaft of moonlight falls on their vein-popping wrists, and Mehnaz sees the two identical talismans glistening in the penumbra.

The background music slams into everyone’s deafened consciousness. Mehnaz’s look requires no interpretation: at last she understands what has been happening.

“ Bhaiya!” she screams, running to separate them for now, and to unite them forever. “Stop! Look!”

Ashok heeds these admonitions. He stops. He looks. His eyebrows rise, his jaw drops, and his fingers release their pressure. The inspector takes advantage of this to turn around, fist ready — and then freezes in astonishment as he finally sees the full face of his attacker.

As the two men, immobile, stare at each other, Mehnaz reaches up and slips off the inspector’s mask.

“Ashok,” she says simply, “meet Ashok.”

The brothers stretch a hand to each other, touching the other’s talisman and silently comparing it to his own. Then they embrace, and Mehnaz smiles blissfully.

Fortunately, this time the mutual explanations are delivered offscreen.

“Thakur-sahib.” Kalia isn’t noticeably older now than at the start of the film, but when you have no hair it is difficult to find something to whiten for the desired effect.

“Yes?” Pranay is just as cruel, his eyes just as bloodshot, his mustache just as evil, but paint streaks his temples and more sinister lines have deepened the evil cast of his face.

“Thakur-sahib, we have just heard that Ramkumar has escaped from prison.”

“Hmm.” Pranay s voice has acquired the richness so necessary in a convincing major villain; even his hmms resonate on the sound track, sending shudders down the spines of the children in the audience. “That is disturbing.”

“He is an old man, Thakur,” Kalia suggests.

“And a weak one,” Pranay laughs. “He was easy meat for us when we wanted him out of the way, wasn’t he? I was so shocked when I discovered my father had left everything to Abha and him, rather than me. But when we hung that murder of yours on him, they didn’t stay around to claim their inheritance, did they? Heh-heh. No, I don’t think we need worry too much about Ramkumar.”

“Sir, our contact man at the prison says that a few days before the escape, a woman and a man claiming to be Ramkumar’s wife and son came to the prison and asked for him.”

“What? How can it be? You told me, Kalia, that you saw them drown with your own eyes.”

“I did, Thakur-sahib. But the current carried them away and it is possible, though,” he adds hastily, “not very likely, of course, that your sister and one of the babies survived.”

“Then why have they waited all these years to reappear? No, I don’t believe it.” Pranay waves a dismissive whip. “But to be safe, Kalia, we must be a little more careful. At least until the police re-arrest Ramkumar.”

“I’m afraid that will not happen, Thakur.” Kalia looks down at the floor. “You see, with time off for good behavior, Ramkumar was to have been released two years ago. I had been paying our friend at the prison to — er — misplace the file. I am afraid this omission has now been discovered. No one guesses our involvement, of course, but I believe some inspector established that Ramkumar should not have been in prison at all. Everyone is so embarrassed they have quietly decided to forget the matter of the jailbreak.”

“Are you sure no one suspects us?”

“Positive, Thakur.”

But neither of them notices, high up on the rafters of the chandeliered hall, that a monkey has been eavesdropping on their conversation. A monkey holding, in its long, firm fingers, a small and powerful miniature tape recorder.

It is evening. Dressed in the brocaded raiments of debauchery, Pranay sprawls comfortably on a dhurrie, leaning against stuffed cotton bolsters and pulling on a hookah. By his side, on a brass tray and beside an elegantly curved brass jug, stands a bottle of Vat 69, the Hindi film villains favorite tipple. Pranay establishes his villainy by periodically removing the pipe of the hookah from his mouth and inserting the top of the whiskey bottle in its place. He gulps it down as if it were colored water, which of course is precisely what it is.

“Let the nautch commence.” Kalia claps his hands, and with a tinkle of anklets the dancer enters the hall, raising a half-cupped palm to her forehead in a courteous adaab. Pranay nods appreciatively, as does the bulk of the audience in the theater. It is, of course, Mehnaz, accompanied by one of the Ashoks (complete with false handlebar mustache) and Ramkumar (his beard topped off with the additional disguise of a turban). The girl is covered from neck to ankle in finery, from glittering jewelry to billowing skirt atop calf-hugging silk pantaloons, yet each step she takes radiates more sex appeal than the shimmer of seven veils. The allure of what is left visible is heightened by traditional artifice. Her bare feet are painted red along the sides of the soles and her ankles are caressed by silver payals. Her hennaed hands and kohl-lined eyes transmit messages more eloquent than the lyrics of the conventional, euphemism-laden song to which she now performs:

Don’t tell me to leave, my master,

With you my heart beats faster,

My palms perspire

With nameless desire,

Don’t tell me to leave, my master.

I am drawn to you like a moth to a candle,

Your heat is more than I can handle,

I am lost,and without shame,

I singe myself in your flame

And fall at your feet like a sandal.

Don’t tell me to leave, my master,

This soul isn’tmade of plaster,

It throbs with the need

Tobe strung like a bead —

Don’t tell me toleave, my master.

(Unnoticed by the besotted Pranay and the ill-begotten Kalia, Ramkumar has slipped discreetly away on an errand of his own. The cinema audience sees this, but the dance goes on.)

Don’t tell me to leave, my master,

If you do it’ll bea disaster,

Like a house with no roof,

I’d be warpwithout woof,

Don’t tell me to leave, my master.

Mehnaz dances to these words as so many Indian actresses have done, with a demure grace completely unrelated to the content of the lyrics. At the song’s end Pranay, bleary-eyed from many swigs out of his bottle, beckons the girl with a crook of his finger.

“Come here, my dear,” he slurs poetically.

Mehnaz looks at Ashok, who nods. She walks to the Thakur, kneels suggestively before him — and in a flash pulls out a gleaming dagger from inside the folds of her skirt and holds it to his throat.

“Don’t anybody move,” says Ashok, pulling a knife on Kalia. He grins at the goggling Pranay. “Hello, uncle,” he says.

Upstairs, Ramkumar rummages through papers in a drawer. At last he finds what he is looking for and holds it up to the light with a gleam of triumph in his eyes. “I’ve got it,” he breathes. “The will!”

He runs into the hall, brandishing the document. “The game is up, Pranay,” he declaims, dramatically sweeping off his turban. “You thought you had got rid of me forever. Now I have the proof that this zamindari really belongs to Abha and me.”

“Not so fast, Ramkumar,” Pranay has regained his evil composure. “Your entitlement only derives from your marriage to my sister. With Abha dead, I am the legal heir. Let me see you fight that in a court of law.”

“There will be no need for a court of law,” says a quiet voice. Abha has entered the hall! Pranay’s consternation is real. “But — I thought —” He staggers to his feet. “Kalia, you told me —” He takes two steps forward, unimpeded. It is a clever maneuver. Before Mehnaz catches on to what is happening, Pranay wheels around, grabs her wrist, and takes possession of the dagger. He now holds it to Mehnaz s throat.

“Drop your knife, nephew,” he snarls.

Ashok does as he is told. Kalia, relaxing, bends to pick it up. Suddenly there is a blur of motion as a brown, furry object jumps in through a high window and alights on the chandelier. It is Thakur, the monkey, his tail aloft like a soldiers proud standard. As Pranay cries out in alarm, the monkey loops his tail around the chain of the chandelier and swings from it, rocking the fixture dangerously to and fro.

“Watch out!” cries Ramkumar. He, Ashok, and Abha step back. The monkey swings defiantly one last time and then releases his tail. As he leaps through the air, straight for Pranay, the chandelier comes crashing down on the bald head of the bending Kalia.

The monkey knocks the dagger out of Pranay’s hand with an emphatic swipe. Mehnaz runs to the others. Pranay, cursing, lunges at the monkey, who leaps out of harm’s way.

“It’s all over, Pranay,” says Ramkumar. “My sons have all the proof they need of your evil doings. You’re going to jail for a long, long time.”

“Not without a fight,” says Pranay, who knows what the audience wants. He pulls a ceremonial sword off the wall and charges toward them.

Ashok parries his first thrust with a cushion, then sidesteps to the wall and pulls down a sword also. As the others watch helplessly, the two clash and thrust and parry, knocking over furniture and lamps, slashing bolsters and paintings, and considerably reducing the value of Abha’s inheritance (while enhancing the producer’s tax write-offs).

At last, with neither having the upper hand, Ashok leaps toward a door. “Come and get me, Pranay,” he mocks. Pranay steps forward, an evil grin of pursuit on his face, when a voice from the opposite door stops him.

“I’m here, Thakur,” says Inspector Ashok, standing at one door. Pranay looks at him aghast, then back to the other Ashok, by the other door.

“No, I’m here, Thakur,” says Ashok the monkey-man.

As Pranay remains motionless, disoriented by the twin apparitions, the brothers leap simultaneously at him. This time the fight is an unequal one. Pranay is overpowered, and Ashok the monkey-man stands poised to strike him with the dagger when Ramkumar speaks.

“No, son,” he says. “We will not treat him the way he treated us. He must face the full justice of the law, and pay for his crimes in prison.”

Ashok looks regretfully at his father. Then, obediently, he lowers his dagger. Inspector Ashok produces handcuffs instead, which are quickly applied to Pranay’s wrists.

“In the name of the police,” Ashok says solemnly in a procedure unknown to the authorities, “I place you under arrest, Pranay Thakur.”

Ramkumar and Abha smile at each other in parental pride. The monkey applauds.

“There is one thing that remains to be done,” Ashok the monkey-man says.

“Oh, and what is that?” asks Mehnaz.

“Before Chacha, your father, died, he asked me to do something very important,” Ashok recalls.

Mehnaz s pretty brow puckers. “And what was that, Bhaiya?” she asks.

Ashok takes her hand. “To marry you,” he says mischievously, “to someone just like myself.”

He pulls her by the hand to Inspector Ashok, who looks as if, under all that makeup, he just might be blushing. And he joins both their hands together. Laughing, the three embrace. Ramkumar and Abha exchange yet another look of parental pride. And the monkey, not to be outdone, leaps onto the trio and tries to embrace them all in his long thin arms.

The sound track fills with a fast, joyful rendition of “We must go on seeking” as the screen announces THE END.

[The Usual Note: this time we have omitted only two songs in the condensation, but a couple of fight sequences toward the end, three separate scenes of Pranay tyrannizing his tenants on horseback, one rape, a set of flashbacks about the murder for which Ramkumar was framed, and a pair of subplots involving Raju the faithful retainer and Shahji the chawl friend have also been excised in the interests of brevity — which, as we all know, is the soul of It.]

Monologue: Night

KULBHUSHAN BANJARA

Yes, its true I always disapproved of you. Can you blame me? You were serious about nothing, Ashok, even as a boy. You had a gift for acting as a child, though we really thought of it as pretending — you were a very good pretender. But while you could be anyone you wanted with a few simple props, you never wanted to be what I wanted you to be. Oh, I know that sounds like the typical complaint of every father with ambitions for his son, but was I wrong to harbor such ambitions? You were worthy of them: you had the looks, the charm, the style, the glib tongue. And I could have opened doors for you, brought you into the party the right way, got you to move up from the grass roots where only I could have planted you. But you didn’t want it. Your brother, Ashwin, with half the natural talent for politics that you had, followed me because I told him I needed a political heir — but not you. First, you preferred that stupid job selling detergent powder to middle-class housewives, and then you went off to Bombay to become, of all things, a film actor. Of course I disapproved.

But even at the height of my disapproval, I never ceased to be your father, Ashok. I know you always accused me of never having lifted a finger to help you. I did not deny the charge. Why should I? You chose this disreputable profession, knowing full well what my views on the matter were. Why should you have expected any help? “My son neither gets any help,” I declared to anyone who asked, “nor does he expect any.” And I said those last words with pride, though God knows you had not given me much by then to be proud of.

But you didn’t know, Ashok, that a father never switches off his fatherhood, whatever his son may do. In those early days in Bombay, when you were still shamefacedly “borrowing” money from your mother to make ends meet — money, incidentally, that you have not remembered to repay her, though she would never mention it — I received the visit of an oily creature named Jagannath Choubey. He did not come to my office at Kapadia Bhawan, where I was then Minister of State for Minor Textiles, but to the house, during the hours I kept for visitors who are not personal friends. In fact, the only reason I gave him an appointment at all was because he said he was calling on me at your suggestion. You never wrote or telephoned much in those days, so I had no way of disproving this, and any contact with you, however indirect, was welcome. So I told him to come.

This Choubey sat corpulently opposite me and presented himself as your great benefactor. “Your poor boy,” he said, “has been badly treated”; and he went on to list a long series of disappointments you had had, parts you had sought and been turned down for, petty indignities you had been made to suffer at the hands of producers until he, Choubey, had come by like a porcine knight in shining armor and rescued you by offering you a part in his film. You can imagine, Ashok, the rage I felt building up inside me as this unctuous fellow tried to slip me into his debt for having done you a favor he implied you did not deserve, a favor I would have much preferred him not to do in any case. But I controlled my anger and said nothing. I was waiting for the object of the exercise to make itself known.

Soon enough, Choubey came to the point. It so happened, he said, that he had a few small-scale textile mills, nothing too grand, you understand, just small operations, which unfortunately had been granted licenses up to only half of their real capacity. It would be so much better for him if he could be licensed to expand his production, well, indeed to double it. This required very little effort, just a signature, mine in fact, on a file that had been pending in a subordinate’s office for some time. He was sure that once he had explained his position to me I would see my way clear to appending that little, but very useful, signature on that minor little file whose expeditious clearance nobody would particularly notice.

He made it all sound so very simple, Ashok. “And this is why my son sent you to see me?” I asked. I wasn’t sure, you see, and I had to know.

“Well, not exactly,” he said shiftily, then — “Yes.” And I knew immediately that you had done nothing of the kind, that indeed you probably did not even know that Choubey was seeing me. And that intensified and focused my anger, till it became a pure white glow of heat inside me, directed at the overfed, oil-oozing opportunist across the table.

I leaned back in my chair. “And if I were to find myself unable to approve that proposal on the file?” I asked amiably.

He was prepared for this line of questioning. “Then I am very much afraid the financial realities of my business would not be, how you say, permitting me to continue producing my current film,” he said. “Most unfortunate this would be. Especially, I am so sad to say, for your elder son’s future.”

“You presumably have a lot of money tied up in that film already, Mr. Choubey,” I observed mildly.

“Tax write-off,” he responded smugly. “I have been looking for a few good losses to show.”

“Then you do just that, Mr. Choubey,” I advised him. “I have no desire to see you, or anyone else, advance my son’s prospects in this disgusting film world of yours. If all the inducement you need to put an end to this nonsense is my refusal to sign a file I am not at all sure I should sign anyway, I am happy to give you such an inducement. Good-bye.”

The fat little man was a picture of dismay and consternation. He sat squirming miserably in his chair, making little inarticulate noises of supplication, until I cut him short. “And I’d be careful about that tax return you submit when you cancel your film,” I added. “I intend to talk to my good friend the Minister of State for Revenue about the circumstances of your proposed write-off. I believe his department would like to look at that return very carefully indeed, as well as your returns for the last few years while they’re about it.”

“Sir,” he whined despairingly, “there seems to have been some misunderstanding. I am not at all threatening to be canceling this film or to be writing it off against taxes, no, no. There is no need at all for your good self to be mentioning anything about it to the Revenue Department.”

I agreed that if the film continued to be made and was suitably released, there would be no grounds for suspecting it to be a fraudulent venture to demonstrate losses for tax purposes.

“Oh, yes, sir, I will personally guarantee that this film is being finished most satisfactorily, sir, and given widest possible release,” he assured me.

“In that case, after that happens and the connections drawn in this unfortunate conversation have ceased to exist,” I said, “you may return to discuss the matter of your textile mills. I shall then, but only then, see what I can do.”

The little man scurried away in gratitude, his short fat legs practically tripping on his dhoti as he fled. I suspect he had the picture completed in record time thereafter. It was your first film, Ashok, and it did well. I never sought any credit for its successful completion. And when Choubey came back to me later, I did give him something of what he wanted. Not all of it, but some expansion was authorized. He was extremely grateful.

Your mother was, of course, much prouder of your cinematic accomplishments than I could be, and she would drag me off to see your films whenever they came to Delhi. Frankly, they didn’t mean much to me. I was embarrassed to see my own son doing some of the ridiculous things you were paid to do, but what astonished me more was that no one else thought any the less of you for it. Indeed, that the adulation you received for doing these absurd things was far greater than, say, I got for an impressive speech in Parliament. I am not sure my disapproval diminished immediately or at all, but it was accompanied by a grudging acknowledgment that perhaps what you were doing counted for something after all. But if you had to acquire fame as a public entertainer, I would still probably have preferred you to have been a classical sitarist or even a test-match cricketer as my colleague Bhagwat’s son became, not a fellow who earned his status by wearing drainpipe trousers and shaking his hips before the camera.

And of course you were in another world from us, or perhaps really two different worlds. What worried me the most was not just the world you inhabited, though your poor mother was constantly terrified you were going to come home married to some twice-divorced cabaret artiste, but the world you portrayed in your work. I couldn’t help feeling that whereas I and your younger brother were functioning in the real India, going out to our constituency, dealing with the real issues of politics, handling the wheelers and dealers who keep the political machinery working, you, my heir and fondest hope, were lost in a never-never land that bore no relation to any accurate perception of the India in which we live.

I’ll try and explain myself to you, Ashok, to describe the gulf I felt between our worlds. My India is periodically torn apart in outbursts of communal and sectarian violence; but communal awareness only enters your films if the producer wants to obtain an entertainment-tax waiver for “promoting national integration.” Every hero, and for that matter every villain, in your films is casteless and unplaceable, an “Ashok” or a “Ramkumar” or a “Godambo,” whereas in my India you will never get anywhere with a man without knowing who he is, where he comes from, what his caste affiliations are. (In my constituency a man’s surname alone can frequently tell you which way he will vote, but in your films hardly anyone of consequence in the script has a surname.) In my India poverty means distended bellies and eyes without hope, whereas in your films the poor change costumes for each verse of their songs and always have enough strength to beat up the villains. In your films evil is easily personalized — a wicked zamindar, a cruel smuggler — but in my India I see that evil pervades an entire social and economic system that your films do nothing to challenge, a system that indeed places the likes of your own producers among the grubby cluster at its pyramid.

So smugglers are villains? Fine. Why do they smuggle? Because people, Indians, want goods from abroad that our laws don’t allow into India. Why don’t our laws allow these goods? Leaving the intricacies of foreign exchange balances aside, it is primarily to protect Indian industrialists who make inferior versions of the same goods, often at higher prices, and want to unload them on the hapless Indian consumer without the fear of foreign competition. These worthy nationalists safeguard the indefinite continuance of their highly profitable inefficiency by pouring some of their easily gotten gains into the coffers of the leading political parties, which parties, of course, then reaffirm the policy of protection. Can you make a virtue out of that? Yet some of the most stirring patriotic speeches in your films are made against smugglers, who after all are merely meeting a need, helping the common man to beat the vested interests.

But the ironies don’t stop there, since in our country even challenging a vested interest becomes a vested interest. So smugglers are antinational? Very well, but Bombay’s most successful smuggler is avidly sought after for campaign contributions by every party, including mine, and his endorsement is highly valued for the bloc of votes it delivers from his community. So basically the same class of people pass the protectionist laws, get support from both the beneficiaries and the violators of these laws at election time, buy goods from the smugglers, and denounce them in their films. You sort out the various conflicts of interest there if you want to, but don’t tell me it’s a simple case of good versus evil.

I told my Prime Minister once that we would solve half the crime in this country by not passing laws that everyone felt it necessary to break. She looked down her patrician nose at me in that way she has, her eyebrows almost meeting in a disapproving exclamation mark just below her streak of white hair. I later learned that she had been thinking of putting me in the Home Ministry, but she concluded my attitude was not the right one for someone who would have to supervise the police.

In politics we are always looking behind and between the lines, tracing hidden agendas, seeing into the motivations for any position that is taken, understanding that what is said is not necessarily what is meant and that what is meant is not necessarily intended to mean the same thing for all time. In your Hindi films there is nothing beyond the surface; everything is meant to be exactly what it is shown to be. There are no hidden meanings, no inner feelings, no second layer to life. All is big, clear, simple, and exaggerated. Life is black and white, in technicolor.

And yet I suppose our worlds are not that far apart after all. You function amid fantasies, playing your assigned role in a make-believe India that has never existed and can never exist. As a politician I too play a role in a world of make-believe, a world in which I pretend that the ideas and principles and values that brought me into politics can still make a difference. Perhaps I too am performing, Ashok, in an India that has never really existed and can never exist.

I joined politics in the days of the nationalist struggle, in the Quit India movement. You know that, I suppose, yet how strange it is that I should be sitting here today and telling you these things that you have never asked me to tell you or never shown much curiosity about. I was a good student, and my teachers had high hopes for me, but like so many others in those heady, futile days of 1942, I felt I had to heed the Mahatma’s call to take to the streets to clamor for the British to leave. It was all quite pointless, of course, because the British weren’t going to “quit,” especially in the middle of a war, just because a few lakhs of us shouted in the streets that they must. So we ended up getting a few bones broken by police lathis and spending our classroom hours in jails. It destroyed a few people, though of course imprisonment during 1942 was a most useful credential for political advancement after Independence. But it changed very little politically. It is interesting how, in so many countries, national myths are built around events of little historical significance — the Boston Tea Party, the evacuation of Dunkirk, the Quit India movement — while the events that really changed the course of a nation’s destiny never seem to linger as long in the popular imagination.

Anyway, I was luckier than most, because I spent a few days in jail and then my father used his connections with the British — who had given him the grand title of Rao Bahadur just the previous year for his contributions as a businessman to the war effort — to get me out and send me up to Cambridge. So nationalism got me a British degree instead of the Indian one I had been enrolled for and kept me out of trouble — and the war. I finished my studies in time to come back and join the Congress party in my home district before Independence. There aren’t too many of us from that generation with qualifications like that — Shankar Dayal Sharma, some of the Bengal Communists, a mere handful in all, who were always in the right places at the right times and can claim that our academic and nationalist credentials are both impeccable. The Communist fellows, of course, went and blotted their copybook by opposing the Quit India movement, not on the sensible grounds that it wouldn’t work, but because they didn’t want to weaken the British war effort that was so important to Stalin’s survival. They betrayed nationalism in India to protect communism in the Soviet Union, and though they continue to bray that history vindicated their choice, the Indian electorate never forgave them for it.

So I embarked on the only career I’ve really had, political office, and for the first twenty years I almost didn’t have to think about getting elected because we were the party that had won the country its freedom, and in an overwhelming majority of constituencies that was all the voters needed to know. I rose steadily, if unspectacularly, up the political ladder, holding state office, then national portfolios as a deputy minister and a Minister of State. I suppose if I had been just a little more willing to keep some of my more unconventional opinions to myself, if I had shown just a little more patience with the arrant nonsense spouted by our in-house socialist ideologues, I might be a cabinet minister today, or at least have spent some of my Minister of State days in a more important ministry like Home. Instead I have gone from party hack to party elder statesman without the usual intervening phase of senior government responsibility.

But I’m digressing again about myself, like a typical politician, and that won’t do at all, will it? The doctor had told us to speak to you about things that would directly interest you, and I can’t pretend that my political career has ever been of much interest to you, eh, Ashok? See, your expression hasn’t changed at all. When Pranay came out of your room he swore he had seen you react a couple of times, and that’s what gave us all hope to go on with this strange hospital experiment. But then I suppose your filmi friends have so much more to tell you about what you want to know.

Even so, I want to finish the point I was trying to make about your world and mine. Which is that we are both involved in pretense. Politicians make speeches in which they pretend that their actions and positions are motivated by policy, principle, ideology, the interests of their constituents, their vision of India, whatever; and they pretend that they expect people to support them, vote for them, give them money, on that basis. But of course issues and values determine little of their actual actions and less of the support they really get: they win on caste calculations, they get money for suborning laws they have enthusiastically passed, they switch parties and abandon platforms at the dangling of a lucrative post or a ministerial berth. And yet why should anyone be surprised? Politics is the art of the expedient: no politician can afford to look beyond the next election and the means that will help him win it. Politics is an end in itself, just like the Hindi film. You cannot judge either by external standards.

And then politics has changed so much since I began my career, just as your motion pictures have. When I used to enjoy seeing Hindi films, the heroes were like Dilip Kumar, intense, sincere, full of dignity, nobility, a willingness to suffer and make sacrifices. Just like the heroes of our national movement, the men inspired by the Mahatma. Look at the men in power today — hustlers, smugglers, fixers, men who can rent a crowd, accept a bribe, threaten or co-opt a rival, do a deal; men who would say that they have risen by dint of their energy, their drive, their refusal to be cowed by the rules. With people like this at the top of our politics, is it any surprise that the heroes of our films are men of the same stamp? And seeing the connection, can I be surprised that this is the kind of hero you’ve always portrayed?

I’m sorry, Ashok, I’m lecturing you. You never liked that, did you? I often wondered how I had lost you, where my hold on your allegiance, your admiration, had slipped. I was always aware of the risk that with my busy political life I might neglect my children, so I went out of my way to make sure I spent enough time with you — well, “enough” is a subjective word, but certainly a lot more time than I could easily spare. And yet when we were together I constantly felt you would rather be somewhere else, even that my contact with you distanced you from me rather than drew us closer. I asked your mother about that once, and she replied, “You’re always lecturing him, KB. How do you expect the boy to enjoy being with you if all the time you’re lecturing him?” I had no answer, because what she called lecturing I saw as the essential transmission of paternal wisdom from father to son, and my advice and guidance was always given with love, Ashok. Your brother listened dutifully: you switched off your mind and withdrew yourself from me even before you had left the room.

Once when I took my disappointment and hurt to your mother, she said in that quiet voice of hers, “Why are your surprised, KB? Love, like water, always flows downward.” Of course: we can never expect our children to love us as much as we love them. We can’t help loving you, the products of ourselves; we have known you when you were tiny and weak and vulnerable and have loved you when there was no real you to love. But your love, every child’s love for his parents, is born out of need and dependence. That need decreases with every passing year, while ours, the parents’, only grows. It’s an uneven emotional balance, Ashok, and always it’s the children who enjoy the position of strength in the equation of needs. The pity of it is that you don’t see that; you think yourself the weaker and react to my imagined strength, whereas if you only saw how great is my need for your love, you might find loving me so much easier. Ashok, I don’t want to believe it’s too late for that now.

No, I’m not here to upset you. Though the doctor did say that it could do no harm: “We think he can hear, we believe he can even understand what is being said to him, but he is either unable or unwilling” — can you imagine that, Ashok, unwilling? — “to respond. But it is important to keep talking to him, to help him recall things, to provoke and stimulate him, yes, even to make him angry. The important thing is to get a reaction.” But I don’t seem to have succeeded there, have I, Ashok? You’re not reacting to me at all. As usual. I have never been able, all these years, to get you to react to me.

Though sometimes you say or do something that prompts your mother to smile at me and say, “See, he’s your son after all, KB.” I won’t hide what the first of those was, at least after you became an adult. You made us very happy, Ashok, when you decided to marry Maya. Your mother and I could scarcely believe that, after all those years of squiring completely unsuitable girls at college and in Delhi and (we imagine) in your early years in the Bombay film world, you actually brought home the kind of girl we would have been happy to arrange your marriage with. “We can’t have done everything wrong,” I said to your mother, “if these are the qualities he voluntarily looks for in a wife.” And everything since then has, of course, only vindicated our enthusiastic endorsement of your choice. The girl has been a saint, Ashok. To put up with all the things you made her put up with, without complaint, at least without public complaint, and to continue being a good wife and mother to your children. Really, you should give thanks to your Maker every day for the good luck He brought your way in the form of that remarkable woman, your wife.

It is strange, isn’t it, how so many of the events of your life seemed to parallel your films, and vice versa. Life imitating art, perhaps — if Hindi films can be called art. The most astonishing thing was your doing that film in which you played a pair of twin brothers, precisely when Maya was delivering your own triplets! Your mother and I never stopped marveling about that. And yet it was at that very time, was it not, that you took up with that Mehnaz Elahi of yours. She was with you in that very film — cast opposite you, you later admitted, at your own request. How could you do that, Ashok? When your wife was undergoing a difficult pregnancy and bringing your heirs into the world? Shame on you. Yes, Ashok: shame on you.

We never said a word throughout the whole sordid business, your mother and I. Not one word, in public or in private. Why should we express what we felt when we were the only ones, it seemed, feeling any of it? It appalled me that your whole filmi press took it all for granted: there were knowing references to your affair with this girl, but nothing more. Your liaisons, your activities, were reported without even a hint of raised eyebrows, let alone condemnation, though you had a wife and three children sitting at home, a wife who had given up a lot to be your wife. “Every actor in Bombay has extramarital affairs, Ma,” you had the gall to tell your mother. “It’s sort of expected of us. It would be unnatural if I didn’t.” And what about the values we brought you up with? Was it not unnatural to abandon them?

I shouldn’t get angry. It’s not my emotions the doctor wants to stir up. But it was a shame, really. After that, Ashok, you couldn’t very well claim not to understand why I still disapproved of you.