I’ve talked a lot with him myself, actually, somewhat to my own surprise. Not that there’s much choice, when you’re sitting together in the waiting room. Did you know that Pranay’s some sort of closet Commie? Oh, very restrained and reflective and all that, but overflowing with conviction and jargon. “I was not surprised when Ashok entered bourgeois politics,” he said to me, well out of Dad’s hearing, thank God. Bourgeois politics — can you imagine? “After all, every Hindi film hero is ontologically a counterrevolutionary.” He said that, really, “ontologically.” I had to look it up in the dictionary afterward. And I don’t think he’s even been to college. Where do these guys pick this crap up from?
“A counterrevolutionary?” I asked incredulously. “How?” He acquired this terribly intense expression, all beetle brows and outthrust jaw. “Because they serve, unconsciously or otherwise, to dissipate the revolutionary energies of the masses,” he replied. “The frustrations and aspirations that would fuel the masses’ struggle for justice is sidetracked by being focused on the screen success of a movie star. The proletariat’s natural urge to overthrow injustice is vicariously fulfilled in the hero’s defeat of the straw villain — me.” I swear the guy didn’t even smile. “Films in India are truly the opiate of the people; by providing an outlet to their pent-up urges, the Bombay films make them forget the injustice of the oppressive social order. Evil is personalized as the villain, rather than as the system that makes victims, not heroes, of us all. A false solution is found when the villain is vanquished, and the masses go home happy. The ownership and control of the means of production remain unchanged.”
Absurd, of course, but can you believe words like these coming out of the mouth of a Bollywood type? Especially this fellow, with his white shoes and ridiculous ties? And there was more, believe it or not. To make conversation more than anything else, I found myself saying something about the melting of class and caste barriers in Hindi movies, you know, along the lines of what I said to you just now about Mechanic. He objected quite strongly. “It is just the opposite. Romantic love across caste and class lines,” he declared solemnly, “is used to cast a veil over the classic contradictions inherent in these situations. It is an exploitative device to blur the reality of class struggle by promoting an illusion of class mobility. Instead of making the revolutionary youth want to overthrow the landlord, the Hindi film promises him he can marry the landlord’s daughter. The classless cuddle,” he concluded, “is capitalist camouflage.”
“You ought to enter politics yourself,” I suggested half jokingly, only to receive an earful about the bourgeois parliamentary system.
Speaking about the proletariat, though, you know we’ve kept them out of here. I’m afraid a combination of hospital rules, security considerations, and Maya’s preferences have left the great unwashed in the courtyard even as we troop into the intensive care unit for these measured monologues. I can’t imagine Cyrus Sponerwalla is any too happy about that, but then we haven’t let him in yet either. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you was that on my way in I spoke to one of the fellows waiting outside. He was, would you believe it, a rick-shawallah, condemned to a short and brutish life pulling human loads far too heavy for him through rough and pitted streets in rain and heat wave alike. He had spent all his savings to take a train from Calcutta to come and watch anxiously for your recovery. Somebody presented him to me and I stopped and talked, not just because I felt I had to, but because I was genuinely curious about what you meant to this man — a man who had, in effect, abandoned his livelihood to be by your bedside, or as close to it as he could get. Why did he like your pictures, I asked him.
He liked the action, he replied in Darbhanga-accented Hindi. Ashokji was a master of action, stunts, fights. He didn’t like pictures without action; if there is no action, he asked, what is there to see?
And this action, what did it represent for him?
The triumph of right over wrong, he said. The victory of dharma. The reassertion of the moral order of the universe. Ashokji was the upholder of Right: for this reason, he was like an avatar of God. The other avatars, Rama, Krishna, maybe even Buddha and Gandhi, are all worshiped, but they lived a long time ago and it was difficult to really identify with any of them. Ashok Banjara, though, lived today: his deeds could be seen on the silver screen for the price of a day’s earnings. And it was as if God had come down to earth to make himself visible to ordinary men. For me, sahib, he said, Ashokji is a god.
I left him, strangely humbled by the purity of his devotion to you, and trudged up the stairs into the hospital. I’m afraid I forgot to ask him his name.
Interior:Night
I can’t believe I'm doing this.
Me, Ashok Banjara, superstar of the silver screen, heartthrob of the misty-eyed masses, unchallenged hero of every scene in which I have been called upon to play a part, languishing in the back rows of the House of the People, the Lok Sabha, while cretinous netas in crumpled khadi, their eyes and their waistlines bulging, hold forth inarticulately on the irrelevant. But it is me, its my chin that’s resting on my despairingly cupped palm, it’s my elbow that’s weighing heavily on the polished wood of the parliamentary desk in front of me, it’s my lids that are drooping resignedly over my disbelieving eyes as I take in the spectacle of representative democracy in action and yawn. Ashok Banjara, parliamentary acolyte, ignored and condescended to by people who wouldn’t be cast as second villains in Bollywood: what is life coming to?
I thought they’d at least make me a minister. After all, not only was I better known and more widely recognized than everyone bar the Prime Minister, but I had, after all, conquered the dreaded Sugriva Sharma for them. I thought I’d get to pick my reward — “so what is it to be, Banjara-sahib, Foreign Affairs or Information and Broadcasting?” Perhaps, modestly discounting my extensive travels, I would pronounce myself insufficiently qualified to run the country’s external relations and graciously accept I and B instead, where I could take care of the film industry. I even had a humble speech planned, expressing gratitude for the opportunity to serve.
But none of it. When the Cabinet list was announced, I scoured it in vain for the most famous name in India. “What’s this?” I asked Maya in astonishment. “Where am I?” She thought that the jealous time-servers in the upper echelons of the party had prevailed upon the Prime Minister to name me as only a Minister of State or a deputy minister. “After all, Ashok, you are new to government.” I bridled at this, but she pointed out the names of other friends and allies of the PM (including a genuine political heavyweight) whom the chief also had felt obliged to relegate. So I waited.
But when the second tier of appointments to the Council of Ministers was announced, I did not figure among them either. And the Prime Minister wouldn’t return my calls. “I am leaving message, sir,” Subramanyam assured me. “Yevery time I am leaving message, but they are simply not phoning.” It is an unusual situation for him, and he is even unhappier than I am at this reversal of his standing.
“What did they bring me here for?” I asked Maya incredulously, “if they don’t want to give me anything to do?”
“I suppose,” she suggested ruminatively, “I suppose until they put you in the government, you should do what people in Parliament are supposed to do.”
“Make speeches?”
“You’re good at that, aren’t you?”
Well, there was no need to answer that. So here I am, immaculate in kurta-pajama of the purest white silk, the cynosure of most of the eyes in the visitors’ gallery. But down here in the well of the House they won’t let me get a word in. Whenever I raise my hand someone more senior is recognized ahead of me; by the time the queue thins, the debate is over. Whenever I raise my voice, I am shouted down. Half of the subjects discussed are obscure to the point of absurdity, and my flagging interest is not stirred by having to follow them through the speeches of a bunch of semieducated morons who would sound incomprehensible in any language. The other half of the sub
jects are hardly discussed at all: either they feature long ministerial monologues after which the party MPs are roused from their slumbers to vote dutifully for the government, or they degenerate into shouting matches with the stalwarts of the Opposition, who make up in volubility what they lack in numbers. Occasionally, both monologue and shouting match are punctuated by noisy walkouts by the other side, the Opposition protesting against a government bill it’s numerically powerless to overturn.
“After all the trouble they took to be elected to Parliament,” I innocently ask a pair of fellow MPs once, “why do they walk out of it so often?” An Opposition MP gives me a lecture on the importance of the symbolic gesture of protest, but the effect is rather ruined by a cynical colleague who asks why walkouts only occur after the exiting MPs have signed the attendance register that ensures their daily fee.
I’m out of place in this world. I clap my hands to applaud the PM; the other MPs thump their desks. I patiently wait for a speaker to finish; the others heckle and jeer and interrupt anything I try to say. I don’t know the difference between a starred question and an unstarred one or how to go about asking either; the others (those who count, anyway) can cite thirty years of precedents and use Robert’s Rules of Order the way a makeup man uses a handkerchief. I’ve been assigned to the Consultative Committee to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, but it’s never convened; the other MPs are bringing officialdom to book in the Public Accounts Committee or wangling foreign trips to inspect the use of Hindi — the national language, after all, not to mention the vehicle of my fame — in India’s diplomatic missions abroad. I can’t cope; and what’s more, I’ve come to realize I don’t care.
I look around me at my fellow-backbenchers in this teak-paneled sanctum of national legislation. Some snore sonorously, undisturbed in the innocence of their ignorance. Others are awake, but equally immune to contamination by ideas. The most knowledgeable are the most powerless: the members of the Opposition, one of whom said to the PM in frustration the other day, “We have the arguments, but you have the votes.” That is the ultimate clincher in parliamentary democracy: the irrefutable logic of numbers. How does the quality of the debate matter, if you can win by the simple issue of a three-line whip? The MPs are herded in to vote: what they do before and after is of little concern to the party bosses. The air around me is heavy with lugubrious inattention. I get up, unnoticed except by teenagers in the gallery whose dupattas rustle in dismay at my departure. I leave and wish I did not have to return.
“I’m bored,” I confess to Cyrus Sponerwalla, who has come to Delhi in the line of duty to see me. “I don’t know how long I can stand this life.”
Cyrus perspires less in the dry heat of the capital, and his bulk seems to take up less space in the larger, airier rooms here. His tone is correspondingly milder, his ideas more ingenuous. “If you can’t do much in Parliament, man,” my PR man advises me, “use your position there to do something outside it, like. This is a great public relations opportunity, man.”
“Oh, yeah?” I ask. His dated Americanisms are infectious. “Like what?”
“Well, when MGR was elected to the Tamil Nadu State Assembly and didn’t have much to do, like, he distributed free raincoats to all the rickshawallahs of Madras during the monsoon, so they could go about their business without fear of getting wet. And,” he ends lamely on seeing my expression, “without catching a chill.”
“Well, thanks very much for the helpful suggestion,” I reply, making no effort to keep the sarcasm out of my tone. “My district happens to be in its third year of drought. I’m sure they could think of all sorts of useful things to do with a raincoat.”
“It’s just an idea, like,” Cyrus says defensively. “You could do something else, sorta situation-specific. We could come up with another gimmick, something different, idea-wise.”
“Yeah,” I respond heavily. “Like an umbrella, perhaps?”
“Yeah,” Cyrus is enthusiastic. “Free umbrellas. With your picture on ’em. Or maybe the party symbol. Let’s see, man…”
“Sponerwalla.” My tone is warning. “You’re getting carried away. Umbrellas? In a drought?”
His three faces fall simultaneously. “They could keep the sun off their heads,” he suggests weakly.
“Or they could be applied with force to the posteriors of anyone who tries to distribute them. Talk sense, Cyrus. That’s what I pay you to do. And speaking of payment, who’d pay for all this? A few lakh raincoats or umbrellas or for that matter plastic buckets don’t come cheap.”
Cyrus ponders this. “The party?” he suggests. I shake my head. “Some rich businessman?”
“In exchange for what?”
“Surely there are some favors you could do a businessman? Putting in a word with a minister?”
“I cant do myself any favors here, let alone anyone else,” I retort. “Even if I can put in a word, why should a minister pay any heed?”
“Because you’re Ashok Banjara,” the Bombay man says confidently.
“That, Cyrus,” I sadly tell him, “is no longer enough.”
In fact, it’s actually better these days to be Abha Patel. She has given up the films, traded backless cholis and slinky dresses for heavy silk saris, let her hair run to gray (and tied it up in a businesslike chignon), and been elected to Parliament in a landslide. She hasn’t got a portfolio either, but she is heading so many committees and forums on women’s issues and doing it all so visibly that no one dare embark on anything that relates even tangentially to women without consulting her first. Under her high-necked and long-sleeved blouses she still sports her falsies, if only for consistency, but it’s her voice people are interested in these days. There are moments when I’m tempted to go to her for advice again. But too much water has flowed under too many bridges since the last time.
Cyrus leaves, but not before asking me to help a nephew get into the Planning Commission Secretariat. I tell him I didn’t even know there was a Planning Commission, let alone a Secretariat for it. He assures me there is, and that it would benefit immeasurably from the talents of a Darius, or possibly Xerxes, Sponerwalla. Wearily I tell him I will see what I can do. I am learning the vocabulary of political Delhi.
But I am still not at home here. Quite literally, in fact: they have yet to allot me a house because the previous occupants of official residences, usually defeated MPs, are traditionally slow to vacate them. So I am based — having refused to live at my father’s — in something called a hostel. It is only marginally better appointed than the dressing rooms at Himalaya Studios, and I have resolutely resisted getting used to it. Not that I need to. Subramanyam has found me a posh farmhouse in the suburbs, complete with air-conditioners, swimming pool, and more Italian marble than Michelangelo would have known what to do with. It’s called a farmhouse to get around the zoning restrictions, but there isn’t a cow in sight and the only agriculture practiced in the vicinity is landscaping. I was pleased, but Ashwin threw up his hands in horror at the thought of my living there. “The occasional Sunday brunch with intimate friends, perhaps,” he said, “but live there? You’ll destroy everything we’ve said about you in the constituency and confirm Sugriva Sharma’s worst exaggerations. You’ve got to live somewhere more fitting, Ashok-bhai. A standard government bungalow like any other MP. Or stay with us.” He was careful not to say “with Dad.“
“I guess you’re right about the farmhouse,” I conceded reluctantly, “but I’m not staying with Dad. I’ll wait it out in the hostel. I’m hardly here anyway.”
This is true. Whatever my political importance or relative lack thereof, I am still in great demand at receptions and parties of every sort and return to my TOA (“temporary official accommodation”) only to sleep. Maya is in Bombay most of the time anyway; she thinks it would be too disruptive to pull the kids out of their school. In any case I have the parliamentary fringe benefit of free domestic air travel and can always use it to meet my domestic obligations. Frankly, I don’t
mind the separation too much. I can be away from Maya without feeling guilty about it: after all, I’m sacrificing family life in the national cause. As the triplets grow (without somehow managing to grow up), it is a sacrifice I am increasingly willing to make. They are all of ten or thereabouts, and the house is already littered with cassette tapes, love comics, costume jewelry, and pinup posters of British pop stars and Pakistani cricketers. God knows who or what they will seize on when they enter their teens.
The only traditional home comfort I have brought with me is Subramanyam. He is disconsolately ensconced in a temporary office and clearly prefers dealing with producers to dialing politicians, a task at which he is conspicuously less successful. But having him around to take care of the big little things in life is the one positive element in my current existence. Well, not always positive. The biggest little thing he has to contend with these days is the flood of social invitations that have deluged me since my arrival in Delhi, and he hasn’t quite mastered the knack of wading through them.
Every time I leave Parliament feeling like the hero’s friend who doesn’t get the girl, I am consoled by the Delhi party circuit. This is a vast industry, probably the single largest contributor to the capital’s GDP and certainly to my now expanding waistline. I am invited to diplomatic receptions and ministerial inaugurations, spiritless launches of spiritual books, endless seminars on such appropriate topics as India’s Timeless Traditions, teetotal cocktails hosted by alcoholic party men, dinners to celebrate everything from a wedding to a new government contract. At these events I rub shoulders (and occasionally other anatomical parts) with journalists, party workers, bureaucrats, more journalists, middlemen, wives of middlemen, editors, itinerant intellectuals, foreign correspondents, diplomats, students, chronic partygoers, chronic party givers, yet more journalists. Subramanyam’s complete ignorance of the social pecking order outside Bollywood means that I attend far too many functions, none of them of the slightest political value to me. I am fed, lionized, photographed with, and generally (as the French ambassadress innocently trilled) “very solicited.” Some of the solicitations are more welcome than others. Few are turned down.