I still have the use of one hand, the one that was holding hers. I release my grip and find she has not released hers. In fact she is squeezing my palm so tightly that I no longer feel any sensation in my fingers — can’t do a damned thing with this hand. The improbable contents of my other one are meanwhile pressing and squirming insistently in my palm. I refuse to oblige: nothing will induce me to invite another moan down my esophagus. The female breast, a pedantic biology teacher had once told me, is only a muscle. This one has obviously been flexed so often it could lift weights.
At this moment my own weight is more than I can lift. I am crushed into the sofa: for a woman as thin as she is, Radha Sabnis packs a lot of power. And what’s more, she now has one hand free, thanks to my failed sortie. Her fingers are ruthlessly determined, discarding every obstacle in their way like panzers rolling into Poland. One by one, each of my pathetic defenses is dealt with, flung aside: T-shirt, belt, buttons. Unless I fight back, this will be an abject surrender. Air raid sirens wail in my mind: her fingers are tugging at my zip! With a superhuman effort — God, I could have done with a stunt man here — I try to wrench myself away. The result is a pelvic jerk that rolls us both off the sofa, sends us crashing into the coffee table, and deposits us on the floor with Radha still on top, mouth glued to mine and hand safely ensconced where I hadn’t wished it to be. A trickle of Pol Roger Rose, 1968, from the ruins of the coffee table drips stickily into my eyes.
Radha Sabnis lifts her head briefly and smiles at me. “Such passion, Ashok,” she says with a winsome shake of the head. “You really must learn to control yourself.” Before I can catch enough breath to reply, her teeth have padlocked my tongue again.
I give up. I close my eyes and think of Cyrus.
“Was she amenable, mood-wise?” he asks me later.
I pick lint from her carpet off the sticky champagne on my cheek. “You could say that,” I confirm shortly.
“What did she want, man?” he asks insensitively. “A donation to her favorite charity?”
I nod. “You could say that too.”
“I hope,” says Cyrus solemnly, “that you were in a charitable mood.”
Suddenly I find myself laughing. Laughing uncontrollably, in huge, whooping bursts that startle my public relations agent, who looks for all the world like a bewildered owl woken unexpectedly at daytime. I wipe tears and champagne from my eyes. “Cyrus,” I announce, “if your bloody idea doesn’t get me a better press in Cheetah’s column next week — you’re fired.” I am still laughing as I leave him, but Cyrus Sponerwalla is a very worried PR man indeed.
But I have another associate on my mind: my wife, who is waiting for me. I am supposed to pick up Maya from the beauty salon. She spends more time being beautified these days than when she used to act.
“You’re late,” she says as soon as she gets into the car. Maya can never resist an opportunity to restate the obvious.
“I’m sorry,” I concede. “I had to stop and see Cyrus on the way, and then all this hassle of coming by the back road, to avoid being mobbed … you know how it is.”
“I don’t, actually,” she replies tartly. “I don’t know how it is anymore. It’s a surprise when anyone recognizes me these days. What on earth have you got on your face?”
“My face?” I reach up to my cheek in alarm. My face is, after all, my fortune. “Where?”
“Near your eye.” She reaches across and pulls off a tiny yellow feather. The stuff Radha Sabnis has in her living room! Doesn’t a yellow feather symbolize something? “There’s all sorts of muck near your temple,” she says, handing it to me. I run a finger over the offending spot, which I find coated with cigarette ash in a wine base. “Where have you been?”
“Plying Radha Sabnis with champagne,” I reply truthfully. This is difficult, because in the last couple of years I have got used to lying to Maya about my extracurricular activities. But she has seen Radha Sabnis, at least at parties, so the truth is less likely to arouse suspicion than any version of the unconvincing tales she is clearly beginning to see through.
“But how could you get it onto your face?”
“Clumsiness,” I sigh. “Opened it badly — it sort of sprayed all over. Didn’t have time to clean up properly afterward.” Truth again.
Her little face settles into that tight look of disapproval I am becoming accustomed to. “You smell like a brothel,” she says. “And it’s not only the champagne.”
“What are you trying to say, Maya?” I keep my voice low. The chauffeur has heard this kind of conversation before, but there is no reason to make it easier for him. “You can ask the bloody driver where I’ve been. You’re not suggesting I’ve been having some sort of orgy with Radha Sabnis of all people, are you?”
She is silent. It is not the kind of question you can easily answer.
“Well, go on, are you?”
“No, I’m sorry, Ashok.” She doesn’t look at me, but at the back of the chauffeurs head. “I guess I’m getting a little irritable these days. You’ve got your own life, and I hardly see you. I’ve got nothing to do, Ashok. I’m bored.”
“I thought, with the house to run, and all the magazines you read, and the visits to the beauty parlor, and all the film functions, you had more than enough to keep you occupied. What more do you want?”
“I don’t know.” When she is in this mood I can scarcely believe she is the girl I fell in love with, the even-tempered, ever-smiling beti of the nation. “I miss my acting.”
“Now don’t start that again.” I am weary of this topic. We have discussed it more times than I have fought screen brawls. “You know we agreed you couldn’t go on after marriage. No one does: Babita, Jaya, you know them all. It was difficult enough to get my parents to agree to my marrying an actress. How do you think I’d feel to see my wife being chased around trees? It’s just not” — I am about to say “decent,” but think better of it — “worth discussing.”
“Well, I have to put up with you chasing other women around trees,” she retorts hotly. “And God knows where else you chase them.” Not that again, oh Lord, I think, but she has weightier matters in mind. “I’m a professional actress, Ashok Banjara, and I’m sick — sick — of not exercising my profession.”
I can’t take too much intensity in a moving car. Besides, Radha Sabnis has taken much of the fight out of me. “Look,” I say earnestly, “I can understand how you feel. Let’s wait for the doctor’s report on your frog test, OK? If it’s clear, I promise we’ll work out some sort of role, I mean a good role, for you in one of my next films.” (This isn’t hedging; I’m signed up for eleven films simultaneously at the moment, so I can’t talk in the singular.) “If you are pregnant, well, of course, that’ll be that.”
“Oh, Ashok, do you mean it, really? Is that a promise?” She is almost tearful in relief.
“Of course, Maya,” I reply expansively. “I don’t like seeing you upset like this.”
“You promise I can act again if I’m not pregnant?”
“Absolutely.” Anything to buy peace. I do not mention that, in a gesture of excitement he would not make for lesser luminaries among his clients, the doctor has already telephoned me this morning with the good news.
“I love you, Ashok,” Maya says fervently.
I take her hand in mine. “I love you, too, baby.” A small twinge of conscience strikes. “We’ll send the driver to pick up the doctor’s report in the afternoon.”
Back to work. I am no longer entirely sure where or to which film. I now have a secretary who schedules me, thrusts a piece of paper into the chauffeur’s hand, and sends me on my way, sometimes to do three films in the two shooting shifts theoretically available. In most Bombay studios, these are 9:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. (the day shift), and 6 P.M. to midnight (the evening, or more realistically night, shift). In my early days I would have been lucky to have enough work to shoot every day, but now I am so overcommitted I can’t meet my obligations within the two possible shifts. “G
imme dates,” scream the producers, sounding like socially starved American teenagers, “gimme dates.” So my secretary, the efficient Subramanyam, gives them dates, and sometimes they’re the same dates for three different producers. Which means I shuttle back and forth, leaving one shift early and arriving at the next one late, sometimes decamping after one shot and promising to be back for the next, not always keeping the promises. What the hell, the films seem to get made anyway, and as long as they have my name on them they don’t do too badly at the box office.
It’s not as if I’m being worked to the bone or anything. Any period of film shooting consists of bursts of frenetic activity interspersed with long bouts of hanging around waiting for people to set things up: scenes, lighting, equipment. In one eight-hour shift the director will probably expose anything from one thousand and two hundred to three thousand feet of film, the exact figure depending on how undemanding he is, how competent his crew and cast are, and how many technical things that can go wrong do go wrong. There’s about ninety to ninety-five feet of celluloid to every minute of filmed action, so the most productive crew actually gets about half an hour’s worth of film into the can at the end of an eight-hour shift — and most don’t manage half of that. Of that footage no more than one-fifth actually survives the cutting room floor and is included in the movie itself. Which means that each shift actually contributes something like three to six minutes to the movie people pay to see in the cinema theater.
“Have I shot anything for this film already?” I ask the secretary as I am about to leave. The film’s name means nothing to me, but then most Hindi film names don’t mean anything to anybody.
“Yes, sir,” replies my efficient Subramanyam. “You have done two shootings already, sir, last month. One-and-half shifts.”
“One-and-tf-half, Subramanyam,” I chide him gently. “You don’t know what it’s about, do you?”
Subramanyam looks bashful. “No, sir, I am not knowing.”
“Well, I guess I’ll find out. There’ll be plenty more shifts to catch up with the story.”
As the star, for a big film I’d have to put in anything from twenty to thirty shifts myself. When I’m doing a half dozen films simultaneously, some of them shot in locations far away from the other directors’ studios, “gimme dates” becomes a plaintive cry. I used to think that a movie that took three years to make actually involved people toiling every day for three years. Not a bit of it: all that probably happened was that the producer had too ambitious a cast, and he couldn’t get dates. It’s worst of all when both the hero and the heroine are stars in great demand. The dates he gives may not coincide with hers, and you can’t shoot love scenes on different shifts.
I turn up at Himalaya Studios and am hustled into costume: synthetic sweatshirt, blue baseball cap, unfashionably unfaded jeans and canvas shoes. A dirty white handkerchief is knotted hastily around my neck. I am some sort of local tough, defender of the neighborhood and general all-purpose good guy, who will of course go on to demolish the villains and marry the rich heroine.
“What’s supposed to happen here?” I ask the director, as the makeup man puts on the necessary traces of blush to heighten the rosiness of my cheeks. Nearly thirty years since Independence and we still associate pink skin with healthiness.
“We’re ready to shoot,” he says, trying to sound efficient and in charge. He’s a young fellow, some producer’s son, known to everybody, even me who’s his age, as The Boy.
“Congratulations, but that’s not what I meant,” I reply. “What are we ready to shoot?” I have long since given up looking at scripts. There are too many of them and they all read alike, and in any case it’s too much to keep up with three convoluted plot lines a day.
“Oh. I see what you mean.” The Boy is quick to catch on; it’s clear he knows his profession. “It’s an outdoor shot. Heroine’s car breaks down, some rowdies start bothering her, you tell them to buzz off, bash them up when they don’t, open the hood and fix the car. Simple.”
“Straightforward,” I agree. “Any deathless dialogue in this one, or can I make it up as I go along?”
The director looks dubious. There are directors here who make movies without scripts, contenting themselves with story lines on ever-changing scraps of paper, but The Boy is not confident enough for that. He tries to be flexible. “Just the line when you first tell them to buzz off — there’s some good stuff in there, I think. Something about haven’t they got mothers and sisters. The rest you can ad-lib.”
“Good.” The makeup man is finished. “Lead me to it.”
There is only one outdoor locale at Himalaya, which is not small as Bombay studios go. This is a street that runs past the studio’s administration office and canteen into a clump of bushes and flowering trees that could serve, if shot from the right angles, as a low-budget setting for romantic rural interludes. A red Fiat is already parked on the street, and there seems to be a girl in it, though from where I am approaching, most of her face is obscured by a large straw hat. As I step out into the street a ragged cheer goes up from the throng of hangers-on who always seem to manage to get onto the studio grounds. I wave grandly back at them, taking care not to walk close enough to be touched or importuned for autographs.
The director walks up with a closely typed page from the screenplay containing the dialogue he wants me to remember. I dismiss the proferred sheet. “Read it to me,” I say. The makeup man, a fat dark chap with a front pocket full of combs and brushes, hovers around, examining me critically in the bright sunlight. The mirror in his hand catches the light and reflects it into my eye as I am listening to The Boy, so I shoo him away with a gesture of irritation. He backs off but continues to examine me from a safer distance, the mirror turned away from my eyes.
The rowdies, in tight-fitting T-shirts and corduroy pants, mill about the car, trying to chat up the straw hat. The inevitable Arriflex camera (every Indian cinematographer uses Arriflex, as if they’ve never heard of any other brand) stands on a steel tripod, pointing at them. The electrical equipment is now in place, principally a blue wooden box the size of a car battery (for all I know it might well have been a car battery in an earlier incarnation), capped by three fuse boxes and sporting an array of sockets on the side from which sprout a tangle of wires of every color. The technicians, dark dusty men wearing dirty chappals and checked shirts that hang out of their trousers, are sitting around on makeshift wooden stools, waiting for me. Let them wait.
They’re not the only ones. In one cluster of folding chairs on the other side of the street sit unknown stalwarts of the production team, chatting, reading Hindi newspapers, drinking tea, seemingly disengaged from the day’s events. God knows who they are, or what their role is. Every unit I’ve seen seems to have some fifty people on its payroll at each shift, about twenty of whom are completely idle at any given time. My old friend Tool Dwivedi would have liked nothing better than to be one of them.
I’ve absorbed the mothers and sisters bit in the dialogue. “Got it,” I confirm.
“Ready for action?” The Boy asks.
“Sure. But you’re not.” I point up the steps we’ve just descended, where a fading board proclaims Himalaya Studios. “Aren’t you going to do anything about that?” My hand sweeps from the camera to the board.
“Salim!” the director yells. A scruffy boy shuffles past, bearing a sign far too large for him that says State Bank of India. The last time I’d been here the Himalaya administration building had masqueraded as a hospital. The lad drags the sign awkwardly up the steps. None of the twenty idle people move to help him.
Salim is a hired hand, slave labor without the slave’s security of tenure. The rowdies I shall soon have to bash up are a step higher on the biological scale: they are Junior Artistes, Bollywood’s very own term for what the rest of the world knows as extras. Once — just once — in my more naive days and at the prompting of one of the more senior Junior Artistes, I went to Jagannath Choubey to remonstrate mildly with h
im about the way he was treating them. “What for you asking me this-that?” Choubey retorted in heat. “Why, even the lowest artiste, B-class artiste — why to say artiste, even some poor old toothless man in village scene, some sick grandmother coughing in corner — all getting rupees forty per shift plus rupees seventeen and fifty paise, if you please, for transport and tiffin. Conveyance charge they are calling it. Conveyance charge! And if they say even one single word only on camera, just a jee-huzoor even, they are demanding fifty percent additional. And getting; and getting!”
I wondered whether, in the face of his outrage, it would be safe to say that I didn’t think this was a lot of money. He cut me off as if he had read my mind. “What-all are these people wanting, then, hanh? They are all unqualified for anything else. Uneducated people. Where else in India will any of them be earning so much?”
He had a point, and I backed away. That was many movies ago; but it occurs to me, as I eye The Boy’s rowdies near the red Fiat, that despite these terms there is never any shortage of Junior Artistes. They are produced on demand by “suppliers,” like any other commonly available commodity.
“Who’s in the straw hat?” I ask the director conversationally while the sign is being switched.
“Your heroine,” The Boy responds, as if astonished by the question.
“I gathered that,” I reply cuttingly. “But who is my heroine in this picture?”
The director looks mortally offended. “Mehnaz Elahi,” he tells me.
“Never heard of her,” I admit cheerfully. “Have I met her?”
I am not just being crass. There is a flood of new actresses washing up at the feet of producers these days. With the problems they are having getting dates for the handful of recognized big-name females who can still draw crowds at the box office (as poor Abha, falsies notwithstanding, no longer can), one way out for many producers is to cast an established hero against an up-and-coming heroine. I don’t mind too much because this new crop of heroines is good-looking, articulate, and largely uninhibited. The periods of enforced idleness at every shooting pass very pleasantly indeed in their company.