Show Business
“Yes, Tool, I told you. Blinds down in the car, side gate, back way into the building. As we’d agreed. Come on, Tool, give me a break, will you?”
“And don’t call me Tool. It’s undignified.”
“It’s your name, for Chrissake. I didn’t invent it.”
“Guruji sounds better.”
“Not to me. What’s all this, Tool? Are you going to abandon me, too?”
“Only if you persist in calling me by that abominable college nickname.”
I’ve never seen him so tetchy before. “OK, OK, Guruji it is,” I say. “Now act like one and give me some advice. I need it badly.”
“I know.” Tool scratches himself in an intimate place and scowls into his beard. Thejolly bright-eyed sage of our last encounter seems a world away from the irritable figure picking his toenails in front of me. Actually, he should have much more to bejolly about: thanks at least initially to my advice and guidance, he has become the rage of Bollywood, whereas his blessings have only brought me back where I started — in fact, behind where I started.
“As I see it,” he says, “your situation is this. By going away to Parliament you lost momentum; the pictures you canceled were given to other actors, some of whom did rather well. Your last hit was more than two years ago. The Mechanic flop still lingers in producers’ minds, and since then your public image has taken a beating thanks to your Swiss shenanigans. Whatever political popularity you had has been dissipated by your resignation. You are not returning to films triumphant on another field of battle, but vanquished or, at least, disillusioned. So it’s no surprise you’re no longer the obvious choice for the role of antiestablishment hero, gloriously conquering injustice and tyranny. If anything you’re seen as somehow part of the corrupt system you used to beat as a hero. In the circumstances, producers are no longer clamoring for your signature at extortionate rates; they’ve found other actors who’d do just as well for less. Right so far?”
“Thanks for cheering me up, Guruji,” I confirm bitterly.
Tool goes on, oblivious, his fingers caressing between his toes.
“Dilemma: if you say yes to one of these producers, you go down in their eyes, you become one of many, affordable, dispensable. If you keep saying no, you starve.” He smiles for the first time. “In a manner of speaking. That is how you see your choice, isn’t it?”
“You could say that,” I concede reluctantly. “So what do I do?”
“There is a third way.” Some of thejolliness returns to Tool’s face, like lights slowly coming on before a take. “A man came to see me yesterday, a fat fellow called Murthy. You don’t know him, but he’s a producer. In the South. And he’s very, very, wealthy.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He makes movies that don’t feature in the Filmfare awards and whose stars don’t get space in Showbiz, but that do extremely well with the masses. His last film grossed over a crore.”
“I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this chap. Murthy? Are you sure you’ve got the name right?”
“I’ve got the name right.” Tool tucks a foot under his thigh and blinks at me. “He makes mythologicals.”
I look at him like a tea-drinker waiting for the infusion to brew. “And?”
“That’s why you haven’t heard of him. He makes movies that people go to see as if they were going to a temple. When you go to see a reincarnation of God you don’t care who’s acting the part. So Murthy hasn’t had to look for big names in Bombay. He’s got his own regulars, and he does well with unknowns.”
“So now he wants to break in to normal Hindi films and is looking for a superstar? Me.”
“No.” Tool looks too self-satisfied as he registers my disappointment. “No, he believes in sticking to what he’s already doing well. He’ll continue doing mythologicals.”
“So why did he come to see you?”
The Guru looks at me disapprovingly beneath bushy eyebrows. “The relations between a guru and a client are always confidential,” he intones with a solemnity that, in happier times, would have made me laugh. Instead, I nod in contrite acknowledgment.
“All right,” I mumble, chastened, “but where do I come in?”
Tool raises one hand, with forefinger upright. “That’s the interesting part. Murthy is planning a new film — the mythological to end all mythologicals. A film about the end of the world. Kalki.”
I look at him, still unsure. “And?”
“You’d be perfect for the part!” the Guru beams. “The last avatar — a divine figure of grace and strength who comes into the world riding a white stallion, with a naming sword in his hand. He sees that dharma has been violated and mocked, and he launches on his divine dance of death because he must destroy a corrupt world. What a role! What a part!”
“You’ve got to be joking, Tool. Me? Do a mythological? I’d be a laughingstock.”
“N. T. Rama Rao isn’t. That’s about all he’s done, and he’s a Chief Minister. Think about it, AB. I have some influence with Murthy. I can convince him to offer you the part.”
“Convince him? Since when have I been reduced to this, Tool? In the old days a maker of mythologicals wouldn’t get in to see me. Convince him?”
“If you can do better yourself,” says Tool, affronted, into his beard, “you needn’t ask my advice.”
“I’m sorry. Go on. Let me hear the rest of it.”
“Murthy gets a big name, the biggest name he’s ever used. In turn, he delivers a massive publicity blitz, making Kalki your vehicle. You use it to restore your image — to identify yourself forever as the destroyer of corruption, not the begetter of it.”
I’m beginning to get the point. “I’m intrigued, Tool,” I admit. “I mean Guruji.”
“This,” he says with the sudden enthusiasm of a Sponerwalla, “could mark the beginning of your renaissance. A brave step to redefine yourself in the eyes of the masses. An opportunity to play the religious chord in the hearts of the Indian public. The formula wallahs don’t want you? To naraka with them! You will turn to God.”
I am swept up by his fervor, by the messianic light in his eyes. “I’ll do it, Guruji,” I breathe.
I don’t even ask him what he’s getting out of it. Or how much.
Exterior: Night
KALKI
The camera pans over a vast, arid plain, taking in an opulent city-dotted with poor people. Down its narrow streets, thin dark men in loincloths carry heavy gold-handled palanquins under whose lace canopies recline sleek women adorned with glittering jewelry. They pass a sad-eyed child wailing in the gutter, an old man lying sick and helpless on the side of the road, a cow dead or dying, flies swarming around its lank head. A beggar woman, infant at her hip, hand outstretched, asks piteously for alms. The women in the palanquins avert their imperious gazes, and the beggar stares after them as their bearers trot past, her hand still reaching out in futile hope.
Ahead, a sumptuous chariot, its gleaming carriage pulled by a healthy, impeccably white horse, comes to a halt. Its way is blocked by the broken-down cart of a ragpicker. As the mournful buffalo yoked to the cart chews ruminatively on a dry stalk, the ragpicker, his torn and dirty bundles slipping off the cart’s open back, examines his wooden wheel, which has come off entirely and tilted the cart to an acute angle.
“Out of my way!” snarls the mustachioed man in the chariot. He wears a silk tunic with a gold breastplate; bands of gold encircle his fingers, wrists, triceps and hang from his ears. He cracks his whip to lend emphasis to his command.
The ragpicker cowers and points helplessly to the broken wheel.
“Sahib,” he says anachronistically, for the usage was to be a legacy of colonialism, “my wheel is broken.”
“That’s not my problem,” the man in the chariot snaps. “Get your cart off the road.”
“Sahib, I ca- … cannot. The wheel will have to be repaired first.”
“Do you expect me to wait, imbecile? Push it out of my way.” This time the whip
comes down on the ragpicker’s shoulders.
“Ye-e-s, sahib.” The ragpicker tries to lift the collapsed end of his cart, but it is too much for hirn. Sweat breaks out in beads on his face, he grunts with the strain, but the cart will not budge. He goes to the front and tries to coax his buffalo to move. It does not. He prods the animal with a stick. The buffalo starts up, but the cart only creaks and collapses further, one corner now touching the dusty ground.
“Sahib … you see—”
The man in the chariot leaps down, red eyes blazing, and hits the ragpicker with his whip. His victim raises his arms across his face in a gesture of self-protection and abasement, but still the blows rain down. Hearing the disturbance, four men, clad in simpler versions of the whip-wielder’s costume, and with copper bracelets rather than gold, run in. A command is barked: the four push aside the ragpicker, seize his cart and bodily turn it over, and send the cart and its contents crashing and splintering against the wall. The buffalo, lowing, falls; the ragpicker’s worldly goods lie shattered and scattered at his feet; one of the four men cuffs him soundly for good measure as he sprawls on the ground. But the way is now free for the chariot.
An old blind woman with flowing white hair bends down to take the ragpicker’s head in her hands. “What have they done to you, my son?” she asks, sightless eyes staring into the camera.
He says nothing. She looks into a distance beyond the vision of the seeing and says in a terrible voice, “It will all be over soon, my son. Justice will come to this world. This evil will be destroyed.”
The ragpicker utters a disbelieving sound, half moan, half laugh. “How, Ma? Who will do it?”
“Don’t worry,” she replies in the same tone. “He will come.”
“Who, Ma?”
She does not need to answer, for the sound track thunders and flaming titles fill the screen like flashes of lightning:
ASHOK BANJARA
as
K A L K I
As the credits continue, the theme song is heard, sung by a chorus of voices bhajan-style to the accompaniment of a wheezing harmonium and clashing castanets:
In the darkness of the world
dharma’s banner is unfurled
as the evil and the sickness must be fought;
when all good is crushed and curled
and insults to God are hurled,
it’s time for action to take the place of thought.
Kalki! Kalki!
arise, o lord, your noble time has come; Kalki! Kalki!
descend to earth and strike adharma dumb.
The poor can eat no rice,
the rich indulge in every vice,
the awful time of Kaliyug is here;
men are trampled just like mice
as oppression claims its price,
but now the time for deliverance is near.
Kalki! Kalki!
Hope dawns at last upon your glorious birth! Kalki! Kalki!
Our salvation comes when you destroy the earth.
[“Now wait a minute/” the superstar said to the producer. “I thought Kaliyug was now. J thought Kalki was yet to come, that Kalki would come at the end of our modern era to destroy the present-day world, which has lapsed into immorality, et cetera, et cetera. Why then have you conceived this as a costume drama, set in the age of chariots and palanquins?”
[And the producer replied, “Mythologicals in modern dress? What you are saying? You are wanting me to lose all my money or what? No, my dear Thiru Banjara, when the Indian public is coming to see mythological, it is coming to see chariot, and palanquin, and costumes with much gold. How it matters what time story is being set? When our noble ancestors were thinking of Kaliyug, were they imagining motorcars and suit-pant, if you please? And kindly be thinking also of something else. If this filmistory taking place today, without palanquins and all, in independent India, and Kalki is to come down to destroy that, how will be reacting our friends the censors? You think they will be liking? You think they will be saying, ’Please show wickedness of our politicians, and police, and corruption and all, we will give U certificate and recommend entertainment-tax exemption’? No, my friend, they will be going cut-cut with scissors, they will be banning on grounds of likely to incite disaffection and public disturbance. And then where I will be? And not to forget: where you will be?”
[“You’re right, Murthy-ji,” said the superstar. “Forget I ever asked.”] Vignettes of Kaliyug, when the moral order of the world is turned upside down: in a luxurious palace rules an evil queen, with a hooked nose and white-streaked hair, seated on a throne of burnished gold. She is surrounded by courtiers with ingratiating smiles who bend deeply from their copious waists. A young man is dragged into her audience hall and flung at her feet. “He is from the stables,” says an oily courtier. “He wants more. He has been saying that the horses eat better than the stablehands.”
“Take him away and flog him,” says the queen. “Then send him away. We can hire two new stablehands on the wages this ungrateful men is being paid.” The man shouts his defiance as he is led out, but his eyes bear the haunted look of one who acknowledges his own defeat.
Next comes a young woman clad in a coarse black-and-white print. She has been going from pipal tree to pipal tree, telling stories about evil and injustice across the land. “Have her tongue torn out,” says the queen. The woman is too numbed with shock to protest as courtiers leap gleefully to execute the command.
An old Brahmin sage is then brought in, a former counselor to the late king. At first the queen is respectful; the old Brahmin has helped the throne in the past, he has persuaded bandits to lay down their weapons and embrace dharma, he is a man of learning and wisdom. But his message now is unwelcome: he wants the queen to retire, clad only in bark, to the forest to commune with the trees and the animals and to contemplate the Absolute.
“But I am not ready for such an exile,” says the queen.
“The people want it,” replies the Brahmin, “and I demand it of you. Otherwise I fear Nature herself will revolt against your rule, rivers will flow backward toward their source, clouds will drop blood rather than rain, the very earth will crack and blacken in its shame.” The queen trembles in rage. “Lock him up and starve him,” she screams as her courtiers scurry to obey. “I do not want to hear his voice again.” The Brahmin is led unprotestingly away, his face serene in its knowledge of the inevitable.
More vignettes: the poor and the wretched huddle in the streets, unshaded from the blistering sun, their pitiful bodies covered in soot-blackened rags, while the debauched rich cavort in sumptuous homes, partying at perpetually groaning tables on mounds of grain and flesh borne by flocks of occasionally groaning servants. As liquor flows from stone jars and animal bones are flung to the floor, skimpily clad women dance for the amusement of the revelers, shaking their pelvises to suggestive lyrics in a rhythm unlikely to have been heard in India much before A.D. i960. When the song ends, they fall into the arms and laps of their laughing patrons from whose embraces the camera cuts to shots of temple sculpture that render explicit in stone what the lyrics have already hinted at in words.
Yet more vignettes: Brahmins are abused and beaten by muscular men in chariots, their womenfolk used without fear of consequence. In one scene a laughing officer of the court rips the clothes off a protesting woman and takes her by force. [“Wonly mythological story with rape scene,” said the happy producer to the superstar. “But yit is all in the Puranas. Guruji was confirming.”] Moral collapse falls both ways. Slatterns seduce strangers in temples before the shocked but unblinking gaze of the deities. Servants become masters and claim their former mistresses; men of nobility and breeding are forced into the streets. The social order has broken down; the world is in chaos.
The land is scorched dry in dismay. Cracks and fissures open up in the earth; not a blade of grass grows. Plants and flowers wither into ashes, leafless trees raise skeletal branches in surrender. In the barren fields men and women begin to dro
p dead, their knees buckling in exhaustion. Seven suns appear in the scorching sky, each burning with the fury of heavenly rage. Their rays shoot down to earth like lasers, sucking the world drier still: wells crumble into dust, rivers are drunk up by the insatiable rays, the seas churn skyward and evaporate. Into this desolate land, in a little hut in the midst of a dying forest, a little boy is born to a Brahmin hermit and his dutiful wife. A boy who emerges in the shape of a well-known child artiste, with a halo shining round his head.
“The Lord has blessed your womb,” the saffron-clad hermit says to his wife, as he prostrates himself before his own son. “Vishnu has come to us.” And as she does likewise, throwing herself at the child’s pudgy feet, the boy is transformed by a cinematographic miracle into Ashok Banjara, clad in resplendent white, a bow in his hand and a quiver of divine arrows on his bare shoulder.
“Rise, Mother,” he says. “You have given me birth; you shall not bow before me.” He lifts her to her feet and turns to offer a respectful namaskar to the hermit, who takes the dust of the superstar’s feet onto his forehead before rising, his long white locks now lustrous with divine benediction.
“The world is no longer a fit place for the likes of you,” Ashok says sadly. “The natural order of the universe has been turned on its head; injustice and depravity reign; dharma is in disarray. The time has come to end it all.”