Show Business

TAKE SIX

Interior: Night / Day

I can’t believe I’m doing this.

Me, Ashok Banjara, best-educated actor in the Hindi film world, former member of Parliament, man of action who gave both “man” and “action” new definitions, Bollywood’s first megastar and most articulate of interviewees, lying in a hospital bed festooned in tubes and drips and bandages, listening to the hate and frustration and regret of a motley cast of characters from my life. But it is me, it’s my ears that are taking in this drivel, it’s my lips that refuse to move in response to my command, it’s my tongue that does not so much as flicker when I painfully demand of it the shout that will deliver me from these voices. What is the matter with me? The doctors of Bombay’s best hospital do not know. What is going to happen to me? Who tampered with the script?

The voices echo and resonate in my mind, the only part of me that Kalki’s act of destruction has left untouched. My mind, grown large enough to occupy the useless rest of me, is huge, cavernous, full of shadows and empty spaces, airless and vast, a prison for pain. My mind sees shades of light and degrees of darkness, feels the warming lick of a million tongues of flame, hears the hollow percussion of a lifetime’s listening. My mind does not sleep.

The voices fill it, merge, rise, withdraw, return; they do not leave me alone. They are the sum of all the voices I have ever heard, from the harsh Hindi of the ayah of my infancy to the Tamil lilt of my secretary, Subramanyam, and they swell to fill the spaces between my ears, between my ears and my heart, between my heart and my head. Through them I try to interpose my own clamorous, insistent, screaming, voice. But they do not hear me.

I hear them. Through the encroaching mists of pain that now shroud my senses, I hear them. They sit on that chair facing me, they look intently at the mask of my face for any sign of recognition or reaction, they avert their gaze or bury their face in their hands or blow their nose or weep, and it is as if I am a screen at which they are looking, something to which they respond but that cannot change what has already been said. They sit there, and sometimes they get up and walk about the room, and then they leave my line of vision. But I can always hear them.

The doctors are the worst. They come in, they consult their clipboards and they talk to the nurses as if I didn’t exist, didn’t need to be lied to. They cluck and frown and mutter phrases like “no progress” or “wery disturbing” without heed to the effect they are having on my morale. They think I can’t hear! One of them even sat here and said, “If you can hear me, cough.” As if I could raise a cough in my present state. Another tried “Blink.” Blink! If they only knew how hard it is for me to open my eyes once they are closed; it is easier for me to keep my eyes always shut or always open than to shut and open them to blink for their satisfaction. But I confront my pain and try. My eyes close. And they refuse to open again! I try, but the strength ebbs away from my lids, and they remain resolutely shut. “He blinked,” says a nurse, without conviction. “He closed his eyes,” retorts the doctor. And they label the experiment “inconclusive.”

Like my life. I don’t know what they can do to give that back to me; I feel it slipping away, like the wet sari of a dancing actress. For the moment that I hold her sari in my hands, I can feel its texture and its wetness and sense the shape of the body to which it is attached, but I know that with each twist of her hips, each choreographed shake of her bust, she is taking the sari out of my outstretched grasp. And that in the end the rain will still keep coming down, the music will continue playing, but I will be left holding nothing but my own emptiness.

I don’t want to die. I’m too young; I was having a good time; I’m not prepared for this. And yet the longer I lie here, stabbed by pain, the less I want to cling to life. The things I have heard — the things they all think of me! My God, is this what I have really been all these years?

But what about the others? The masses, the great public whom no one would let into this hospital? They came from everywhere and nowhere to see me, from the six thousand cinemas of our land they walked and trudged and took trains and rode to see me, from huts and hovels and dhabas and hotels they traveled to see me, and no one let them in. Instead access to me has been restricted to an intimate handful who care much less for me than those waiting outside. They are my true intimates, I want to shout to the doctors. It is in their lives, their hearts, that my legacy lies. Allow them in, they will numb my pain, they will revive me.

For doctor, there is much I have given them, huddled as they are in a world of little work and low wages, cramped space and closed prospects, social tyranny and perpetual struggle. I embodied their alternative, their other life. To invent something that is beyond reality, to incarnate escape and by so doing to make it true, as true as anything else they have ever known and infinitely more pleasurable: that is what I have done and done better than anybody else. I bestrode the cinema screen and I reified the dreams of millions, saying to them, Look, in me, Ashok Banjara, you can see your dreams come alive while you are awake, you can take my fate in your hands and we can triumph together. I have kept India awake by telling the nation it can dream with its eyes open. I have given each Indian the chance to reinvent his life, to thrill to the adventurous chase, to chase the unattainable girl, to attain the most glorious victory, to glory in the sheer joy of living. I have brought dignity to innumerable lives, doctor; more, I have brought hope.

The same hope that they are now holding out for me in their vigils outside this hospital. Let them touch me with it, doctor. Allow them to heal me with the truth of their devotion, as I have lifted them with my own truth. Yes, truth. For what I have done is take a part, a situation, a line of dialogue, an expression, a gesture and make it more than that: I have carved a space with each, made a shape, broken a shackle, freed a bird that has soared in countless imaginations. In my acting as in my life, I rode the stallion of time with the free rein of opportunity; and in so doing, I gave the ordinary people, the ones in the twenty-five-paisa seats, a truth more valuable than the tattered truths of their tawdry lives.

The pain is becoming unbearable. What is the truth of my life, doctor? Does it lie in the words of these mealymouthed intimates you have dragged in to see me, spouting their fears and their wishes and their self-justifications in the hope of eliciting the relief of a reaction? Is it hidden in the words my dharampatni, my wife of fifteen years, cannot bring herself to say? Is it visible in the innocence of round-eyed little Aashish, whose short stubby fingernails betray a parentage I know isn’t mine? Or can it be found, doctor, in the movement of the original of those fingernails, as Pranay turns knobs and dials he isn’t supposed to touch — Pranay, whom everyone thinks of as kind, smiling, decent, pulling tubes and wires and switches while I lie here helplessly and scream silently into the void?

He did it, doctor, and you don’t even notice! Through my pain I demand of you: how intensive is your care? Your nurses come in and take readings off machines that are no longer connected. Another nurse adjusts a drip hours later and does not try to find out how long it has been askew. I feel the pain and the desperation in equal measure, the dying and the rage at the cause of the dying, undetected in the bright lights of your hospital. The villain has done it — he has killed the hero. And you, the production crew, don’t even notice.

I feel reality leaving me. I feel it all flow out of me through the deep ravine of my mind, the reality I have known and held dissolving in the flames that envelop my being. In my pain Abha’s augmented bust bounces away from my grasp, Subramanyam’s soft syllables hiss in dissonance, Cyrus Sponerwalla’s three chins wobble precariously around my face, Gangoolie’s “so to say” echoes cavernously in my ears, Tool’s beard catches fire and the flames curl up between Mehnaz Elahi’s parted thighs, for I am the flame and I am in her. You are all coming in now because that infernal machine is beeping and I can see the golden outlines of your faces, Ma don’t weep I have never seen you weeping, Maya stony-eyed after fifteen years how could you be, Dad so pale and gasping I know I shall see you soon again somewhere else, Ashwin really shattered for at heart you always loved me and I knew you did, Pranay the bastard whose face I do not want to see. Dear doctor, please take him away, please take my pain away.

You are not real. None of you is real. This is not real. Only the pain is real. And me, I am not real either, and I will never be real again.

I am seeing you all now in flash forward, and you are out of focus, the print is overexposed, the celluloid has caught fire, for God’s sake do something, do something about this pain. Your shadows interweave with the flames in my mind, your silhouettes shift on the walls in a spectral dance, the flames flicker in your eyes and garlands of fire encircle my brain, I am falling now endlessly through the flames, in their illumination I see you all again, a funeral procession of fluttering shadows, the pain is gone now, in its place there is the limpid clarity of darkness and glowing and shadow and fire, always the fire, the final fire that will shoot me to the sky.

But not yet. Someone will find out how to stop the pain, someone will find out who did it, someone will arrest the villain for the crime, someone will find the lyrics to the theme song, someone will gather the crowds for a joyous celebration, and then, only then, as the flames flicker and the shadows dance and the people in the twenty-five-paisa seats applaud and whistle and the stories merge and melt and dissolve in the heat, only then will it be, only then can it be,

THE END.