The hermit nods. “Kaliyug has reached its nadir.”
“See,” says his wife, “I do not even have water with which to wash our Lord’s feet.”
“There is no need,” Ashok says, compassion battling smugness on his visage. “Your tears of joy as you bent to receive me have already bathed my feet.” His surrogate mother looks suitably gratified at this hyperbole.
“What will you do, my Lord?” the hermit asks.
“What is necessary.” Ashok looks around him. “For everywhere I see that dharma has been violated and mocked. Betake yourselves to pray for the next world, because this one is coming to an end.” And even as he speaks the skies appear aflame. Gigantic clouds, garlanded with fire, appear between the suns; thunder roars. “A mighty conflagration is building up,” Ashok says, “which shall reach from the bowels of hell to the thrones of the gods. And then the rains shall come, a mighty crushing flow that will dissolve what the fire has burned, till the dry riverbeds become surging torrents, and the seas swell up to invade the sandy coasts; then mountains shall tremble and crumble into the dust, and the earth sink under the cleansing flood. For twelve years this rain shall last, and through it all, I shall dance the dance of destruction, till no one of this cursed earth remains upon it. When it is all over, the fire spent, the waters calmed, then, once again, will peace and dharma return to the world. But for now, my blessed parents, you who have been chosen to bring me, as a son of Brahmins, upon this earth to fulfill my divine mission — I must bid you farewell.”
Ashok raises folded palms to them, the halo shining ever brighter around his head. He raises one hand, and instantly a white stallion appears by his side; his robes are transformed into the short battle dress of a warrior horseman; and in his right hand has sprung a brilliant sword, its sharp edges aflame with sulfur and righteousness.
“Kalki,” his parents breathe.
And then he is off, fiery weapon in hand, to show the forces of evil that he has come to put out their faithlessness with a great conflagration.
[This is how it happened.
[The crowds outside the studio were enormous; inside, the massed ranks of actors, extras, technicians, production executives, delivery boys, hangers-on pressed around the equipment for the shooting of the great horseback sequence. People were milling about; somebody shouted “close the doors,” and somebody did.
[Proud of his record of not having employed a double for most of his stunts (“They’d never find one who could really look like me,” he used to say), Ashok, flaming sword in hand, began his canter on the white stallion. For a moment it was as glorious as it was meant to be, the resplendent figure of righteousness charging onward to bring retribution to a faithless world. Then a flame seemed to spurt from the sword, singeing the horse, which bolted out of its rider’s control. The rest was a blur. The stallion ran wild, through the studio set, into the technicians and their equipment. Amid the screams Ashok Banjara fell, thrown by his mount; his sword fell with him, plunging into some carelessly strewn cloth, which promptly ignited; and with a whoosh the flames leaped to the ceiling.
[Tongues of flame licked scripts, sets, and sidekicks. Accompanying the screams of panic, cast and crew and hangers-on ran everywhere they could; someone got to the door but found it shut, the tumblers of the lock having fused in the heat. The blaze voraciously devoured wood, canvas, drapes, metal, and human flesh. Smoke choked the lungs of those who were screaming for help, acridly scarring the throats of dialogists, sapping the sinews of stuntmen, obscuring the eyes of actresses.
[When it was all over, the destruction was complete. The smoldering remnants of the set turned up twenty-seven bodies, including that of the producer, Murthy. Another twenty-three were admitted to the hospital, where four died in intensive care and one, an actress who had been burned beyond recognition, committed suicide with her mother’s help.
[Ashok Banjara had contusions, concussions, broken bones, and burns. But he survived.]
MonoiogLies: Night / Bay
PRANAY
So they tell me it doesn’t look too good. Vital signs in decline, the doctor said. I can’t say I’ll grieve for you, Ashok Banjara. In fact, your departure should make a lot of things easier. But still, I don’t really want you to go.
Now that’s a lot, coming from me. You’ve never liked me, but I’ve hated you. Right from the moment you took Maya away—but much more in the years since, for all you’ve done to her. When I came to the hospital first, befriended your parents, talked to your brother, it was all for Maya’s sake. To establish myself here where I could do her some good. But after all these weeks, Ashok, and I admit this grudgingly, I’ve developed a bit of an interest in you and your welfare. Especially after the doctor initiated these talking sessions, and I found myself the only one who was willing to volunteer for the first one. There’s a strange sort of bond that’s sprung up in the process. I don’t suppose you feel it. I don’t suppose you feel anything, for that matter. Not that feelings were exactly your strongest suit before the accident either, hanh?
Enough of that. I haven’t come here to be nasty to you. What I’ve had to do I’ve done already. Something tells me you even know it. And it’s really begun to take effect on you.
Poor Ashok Banjara. You’d have really enjoyed the adulation you’re getting at this time. This accident has really been the remaking of you. The crowds, the banners, the prayer meetings! OK, so the Prime Minister’s visit couldn’t take place as scheduled, but they say it’s only a postponement, pressing business of state or something. In any case, it’s not the bigwigs who matter. Take it from me. It’s the little guys, the ones who’ve had to give up something to hold this vigil for you outside the hospital, their love is the love that counts. I should know: I was one of them. Before I acquired my silk shirts and four hundred ties, I was like those chaps out there, the petty clerks and the youths without jobs. I was one of them, in spirit and in class origin.
Class origin. What’s the point of mentioning that to you? You probably think “class origin” refers to who you studied with at school. I’m the only one among you clods who reads. But it’s people like me who are the vanguard of revolution — we, the frustrated lower-middle-class whom your lot have squeezed to the point where we have to worry every day where our next meal is coming from. OK, not me personally, but I haven’t forgotten what it was like. I’m still from the underclass, and it never leaves you. I don’t have to force myself to remember.
Did you ever wonder why you were so much more popular a filmi hero than a politician? Why the mass adulation you enjoyed as an actor failed to translate into mass political support when you needed it? Elementary, my dear hot-son. Your screen image was that of the angry young man, the righter of wrongs, the rebel against injustice, the enemy of the establishment. But when you became a politician, you were revealed as what you are — the polar opposite of your screen image. A part of the establishment. The son of a politician. The Prime Minister’s man. The people who cared for you as a hero couldn’t care for you as a leader. You no longer meant anything to them.
Ironic, hanh? And even more ironic — when you ceased to be a politician and this happened to you, they forgot the political stuff and remembered you only as their hero. Look at them outside this hospital. You can see why I despair of the Indian proletariat. Sometimes I wonder if they are even capable of revolution.
I tried to talk to your brother about all this the other day. Nice fellow, your brother, as unlike you as it is possible for a brother to be. A decent chap, and seems to like me, though I say so myself. But the poor fellow was aghast at my politics. I could imagine him thinking how hypocritical it all seemed — successful screen villain emerging from the blast of air-conditioners to speak up for the proletariat. “Bathtub socialism,” somebody called it the other day. I see no contradiction. I was lucky enough to join the system and make it work for me. I know how to make myself useful to the Choubeys and the Gangoolies, useful enough to get what I want from them. But
that doesn’t mean I can’t see the system for what it is. The film world is the one place where these class distinctions don’t matter. You can take a street corner tough and make him into a star and even have the convent-educated daughters of millionaires pining for him, a man they wouldn’t have spoken to in the street or admitted into their living rooms. You can also have a rich man’s daughter, classy English accent and all, reduced to stripping for the roles she can get. Ability, public popularity, these are still the clinchers. Hindi filmland is India’s only true meritocracy.
Except — there’s always an except — except for all these filmi dynasties that have suddenly sprung up. Can you imagine it — spoiled, overfed kids whose only qualification is that Daddy was a star, leaping onto the screens and demanding star billing! And it’s actually working, that’s the unbelievable thing. The public is lapping up these tyros as if their being there was the most natural thing in the world. After all, we are a country that still believes in handing professions down from father to son, the same way the caste system came into being. If you are a doctor, your son must be a doctor. If you are a Prime Minister, your son must be a Prime Minister. If you are a movie star, your son must also be a movie star.
So I must qualify my earlier assertion. Bollywood may still be a meritocracy, but it is a meritocracy tempered by genes. And by looks. I’m not a bad actor. I know my limitations, but I grew up with the medium, I know what I can do. And yet, with a face like mine, who’d cast me as a hero? I might be able to act the pants off the idiots who call themselves the stars of the screen, but villain I am, villain I’ll always remain.
Except to Maya.
All those years that you were neglecting her, I remained the one person she could talk to. You didn’t know that, did you? But then you knew so little about her, you had so little time to devote even to thinking about her. You were so busy pursuing your own agenda, you never thought of finding out about hers. Like who she spoke to. Or what she spoke about. Or whether, finally, she felt she had to do something about it.
At the beginning it was just her needing to talk to someone. She rang me out of the blue one night. It was late, nearly eleven. You weren’t home; it wasn’t clear when you would be. She just wanted to talk. I had a woman with me, but I turned away from her and gave my full attention to Maya. Just the opposite of you: you had Maya but turned your attention to other women. As on the screen, so in real life: I had to be your antithesis.
The phone conversations increased in frequency and in length. She got from me, the man she didn’t — she had said couldn’t — love, the things that you, the man she did love, couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give her. Patience. Caring. Understanding. Support. Occasionally, but only when she asked for it, friendly advice. Which she never took, because mainly my advice was “Maya, leave him. Walk out.” She couldn’t do that, or she wouldn’t — and I suppose I always understood why.
But then she came to need more than telephonic communion. The first time she asked me to meet her it was for a cup of coffee at an expensive hotel, the kind of place you’d expect to find movie stars. When we went there at three the place was deserted, and even a passing journalist would have found nothing to remark about in the sight of the two of us drinking coffee in a public place. But when she suggested it again I worried about the risk of being seen — worried for her sake, not yours. And so she asked me to come to your home instead, the one place you were unlikely to be found.
I’ve been wanting to get this off my chest, but when I came here the first time I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even now, if I really believed you could hear all this, register it, react, I might not have the courage to speak so openly. But it’s important for me to make a clean breast to you. Before it’s too late.
I want you to understand something, Ashok. With Maya it was never just gender attraction, sex, call it what you like. It was, for me, very much more than that. We've abased the word “love” so com pletely in our business that it has come to mean much less than I intend it to, but I do love her. And always have. Even when she was completely yours and I had no contact with her beyond the occasional greeting at the sets when she came to visit you, which she still did, poor innocent, in those early days of your marriage. My feelings for her lay dormant during the years that had nothing to sustain them, but they were always there, like a current waiting to be switched on again. That kind of love doesn’t die, Ashok. It was always there for her, and on that our subsequent relationship was built. Not because I wanted to hop into bed with her or she with me.
I don’t suppose you could really understand that, because I don’t imagine you’ve felt anything for any woman beyond the desire to possess her. You must have agonized over whether you were the first to possess Maya, or whether I, insignificant villain that I was, had beaten you to it. Let me put you out of your misery. I hadn’t. Maya would not have slept with someone she didn’t love, and at that time she didn’t love me.
I’m saying this to help you come to terms with what I’m going to tell you now. In the last few years Maya was tormented by your treatment of her, torn between her duty to you and the triplets on the one hand and her need for love on the other. She thought she could find consolation in conversation with me, but it was soon obvious I had much more than my silences to offer her. Before she made that leap of faith she gave you so many chances, Ashok, to claim her back. You never seized any of them. One small gesture from you would have been enough, one sign that she mattered, that her loyalty was reciprocated by your love. You didn’t bother. In the end you whittled away her resistance with your indifference as surely as I did by my sheer constancy.
And so it happened. We loved, and we loved while unable to acknowledge our love. The fact that I gave her my love made her, ironically, a better wife to you: not out of guilt so much as because she was fulfilled in a way she had not been before and could turn to the other things you wanted out of her without the emptiness and bitterness she had choked on before. She became a diligent daughter-in-law, a dedicated mother, a loyal political wife on the campaign trail. And from wherever she was, she always returned from her duty with you to Bombay, and to me.
As long as you survive, Ashok, in any condition, she will never leave you. I don’t think you’ll survive, but if you do, I won’t mind. I have what I want, which is more than I had dared hope for.
And yes, I suppose you should know, though a husband less self-obsessed than you would have guessed it a long time ago. Aashish is not a Banjara. For in the course of discovering her love, Maya, our Maya, bore you my son.
KULBHUSHAN BANJARA
My son. My son, I cannot bear to see you lying there, bandaged and still, the life ebbing out of you. Why did this have to happen, Ashok? I expected one day to have you come and light my pyre, send my soul to another world. I cannot, I will not, imagine you going there before me.
There is so much to say, my son. So much I should have said earlier, before all this. But you would not have listened. And I was too proud to speak. That is what came between us, my pride and yours.
I will not make the mistake of lecturing you again. I — I’m sorry. The words do not come out easily, Ashok. They trip over lumps I did not know I had in my throat. They hurt.
You hurt me, but I took too long to realize how much I had hurt you too. Why could we never talk directly about these things, about our expectations, hopes, fears? You never saw beyond my disapproval, and I never looked beyond your resentment. Even though my disapproval has always turned out to be justified, because every time I disapproved of something you did it was for your sake. I knew it would be wrong for you, that it would hurt you. When you entered politics, how bitter you were about my disapproval! And yet I knew from the first day that the way it was happening, the way you were going into it, you were doomed to failure. Even I could not predict the scale of the disaster that would overtake you. But you would not listen, my son. You never did.
Ashok, stay on. Fight this — whatever this is that is taking its to
ll on you. Come back, and make a fresh start. You have all of us with you, and so many friends and well-wishers from the film industry, even the political world. And of course you have the people, the great ordinary masses of India. They all, we all, love you, Ashok. Come back to us. Don’t give up.
That friend of yours, that fine young man, Pranay, was telling us what this trag this accident has revealed about the place of films in our country. The experts, he says, were all predicting that as in other countries, television and video would sound the death knell of the film industry; that once people had alternative sources of entertainment, they wouldn’t turn to the cinema any more. There were visions of theaters closing down, film people being thrown out of work, stars reduced to the twenty-inch mediocrity of the TV screen. It hasn’t happened. And it hasn’t happened, Pranay says, because, in addition to the economic realities that restrict the number of people who can have access to TV and video, the magic of the cinema has not faded in India. This is something that the vast, nationwide outpouring of grief and support for you has proved again, beyond doubt.
Ashok, my son, there are rickshawallahs who have walked hundreds of miles to be by your side, beggars who have given their pitiful alms to temples in offerings for your recovery, housewives who have refused to eat until you are discharged from the hospital. You have incarnated the hopes and dreams of all these people and of all India. You cannot let them down now.
And you cannot leave me, Ashok. In all these years, I have made my disapproval clear, but I have not directly asked you for anything. I am asking you now, Ashok. Do not go away from me, my son. Let me take you in my arms and ask for your forgiveness.
I… I’ve said it at last. Forgive me, Ashok, for everything. For the lectures. For the disapproval. For the sin of always having been right, and of having known it, and of having shown I know it. Forgive me, Ashok, and come back to me. I want to hear you call me “Dad” again.