“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 e
vents 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 para
llel 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.
Interior: Night
I can’t believe I’m doing this.
Me, Ashok Banjara, undisputed Number One at the national box office, the man for whom the filmi press has just invented the term megastar, the hero who earns in a day what the president of India makes in a year, not to mention lord and occasional master of the pulchritudinous Mehnaz Elahi, chucking my little triplets under their shapeless one-year-old chins, lip-synching the juvenile inanities that their fond mother addresses them from the other side of the cot. But it is me, it’s my mouth that’s puckering in an inaudible kitchy-koo, it’s my finger that Leela, or is it Sheela, or even blue-faced Neela, stretches out to grab in her chortling little grip. Me, Ashok Banjara, proud father, a role that sits uneasily on my expensively padded shoulders. But I am happy to play it, at least for a few takes. I stroke each of my daughters’ chubby cheeks in farewell, and they gurgle in response; the Banjara magic appeals to females of every generation. My eyes meet Maya’s over the cot, and we exchange a complicitous smile.