Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (21 page)

“I've just been reading the
New York Times
review of your novel
Show Business,
” said Bikramjit (“Blondie”) Singh, “and it sounds great! I want to make a movie of it.”

I was a bit taken aback. You haven't read the book yet, and you want to make a movie out of it? was the first question that came to mind. Or did he want to make a movie of the review?

“Of course I'll read the book, but I'm sure I'll like it. The review sounds fabulous. You know, seven people sent it to me — friends and associates from all over America. A business partner of mine in New York wrote a note with it. It just said: Call him! I was reading the review in the bathtub, and I was so excited I just had to call you immediately.”

I had never known my prose to have interrupted anyone's
ablutions before. I was suitably flattered. “Fine, I'll meet you in New York,” I agreed. Then the author in me asserted himself: “But read the book first.”

He did. And it left his enthusiasm unimpaired. So Bikramjit (“BJ” to his American friends) and his attractive wife Jeana called on me in New York to persuade me of their credentials to commit my immortal prose to perishable celluloid. BJ was a larger-than-life character, a bearded Sikh who wore his long hair in a ponytail, dressed in a beaded vest, Levi's, and cowboy boots, and spoke like the Indian public schoolboy he had been (Bishop Cotton's, Simla) before he made his adventurous way to America. He was relaxed, garrulous, and engaging, the epitome of the Indian-American entrepreneur. He had just returned from a trip to Mahabalipuram, where he'd persuaded the local stonecutters, heirs to a centuries-old tradition of temple carving, to sculpt statues of Elvis Presley and Madonna for the American market (“They've done Indian gods and goddesses, now they can do an American god and goddess — what's the difference?”).

Though based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, BJ had been involved in Bollywood for years. He rattled off the names of a number of productions he'd been associated with (of which
Mr. Natwarlal
was the only title I recognized). I had, as a writer in love with the printed word, never imagined that anything of mine could be filmable. I thought I wrote highly literary fiction, in which the prose style, the metaphors, the subtle allusions, even the very architecture of the novels, were central to what I was trying to convey. How could the multiple narratives of
Show Business,
its
interlocking stories of films and filmdom, its shifts in perspective, its political and religious subthemes, translate onto the screen? I was apprehensive, and intrigued.

“Who'll write the screenplay?” I asked. (I had made it clear that, as a result of my responsibilities for United Nations peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia, I could not be involved in any way with the production.)

“I will,” replied BJ. “I couldn't trust anyone else to do it. And besides, I'll be faithful to the book.”

He was — to begin with. The first draft of his screenplay consisted of almost the entire novel, slightly rearranged but otherwise largely unaltered. I was relieved — until I realized that this draft, if it was ever filmed, would make an eight-hour movie. “I'll have to cut it a bit,” BJ admitted.

And so began the saga that transformed my book into his movie, a process every author who has signed away the rights to his work knows only too well, and only too painfully.

The first surprise came when my agent showed me the signed contract that gave BJ the “option” to the book — the usual Hollywood arrangement whereby, for 10 percent of the total fee, the producer retains exclusive rights for a period of time to “develop the property” and search for his funding. The contract was signed “Caliph S. Kahn.”

I rang up BJ. “I thought you said you wanted to make the movie.” I said. “Who the hell is Caliph S. Kahn?”

“I am,” he replied.

“But you told me you're Bikramjit Singh!”

“I am Bikramjit Singh,” he responded equably. “BJ to my friends here, Blondie to my friends in Bollywood. But my full name is Caliph Bikramjit Singh Khan, spelt Kahn in
the American style. You've written about Indian secularism — how much more secular can you get?”

So he was going to sign the contract as Caliph S. Kahn, write the screenplay as Bikramjit Singh, work in Bombay as Blondie Singh, and direct the movie as B. J. Kahn. “Hope you don't mind,” he said disarmingly.

If his wife and the taxman didn't, how could I? I asked my agent whether she was bothered by the multiple identities of the man who'd bought my book. “Naw,” she replied. “Happens all the time in Hollywood.”

I couldn't help feeling a bit like a father who's given his daughter away and discovers the suitor carries four different driving licenses. What else didn't I know? I wondered, till my agent gave me sage advice.

“You've got to let go,” she said. “It's not your book anymore. You've signed the contract. Now it's his project.”

And so it was, but in the months to follow I couldn't help indulging my quasi-paternal curiosity about its evolution. BJ raised the funds from a Taiwanese financier based in San Francisco and an Indian-American businessman from Los Angeles. The script began to be whittled down; though the contract didn't call for it, BJ showed me each draft, and I winced as more and more of the novel disappeared from the screenplay. I gamely suggested alternative cuts, feeling like an amputee choosing which of his limbs to surrender to the butcher's knife.

The casting process began: BJ returned from trips to Bombay with stories of the big-name stars who, he said, were practically clamoring to be cast in his film. Chunky Pandey, a bankable name, had agreed to play the hero. “And Mehnaz?”
I asked, referring to the hero's superstar mistress. “That's proving more difficult,” BJ replied, “though so-and-so and you-know-who are very interested.” (He dropped a couple of names that made me catch my breath.) “But I'm not sure they're quite right for the part. Who would you suggest?”

I hesitantly mentioned that I had rather imagined my Mehnaz as a cross between Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi. BJ looked at me as if I had spoken in Sanskrit. “Zeenat Aman? Parveen Babi? They're retired, man. Re-ally-tired. We could think of them for the mother's role, maybe.”

I stopped making casting suggestions after that. In the end the part went to an Indian starlet from Hollywood — “she was the lead dancer in this year's Oscar ceremonies,” BJ explained. (She had apparently swayed, in diaphanous veils and with a diamond in her belly button, to all the songs from
Aladdin.
)

As filming proceeded on location in Bollywood, and a dozen other scenic locales up and down the country, BJ kept insisting I come and witness the action. “We want you to play a part too,” BJ insisted. “Put your signature on the film. Like Alfred Hitchcock always appeared in his movies.”

“It's your movie, BJ,” I said. But I couldn't help asking what walk-on part he had in mind for me. A Bollywood superstar at a film reception? A parliamentary
neta
in one of the novel's political sequences? One of the hapless directors of the hero's many films-within-the film?

“The journalist,” he replied, “at the hospital, who asks the public what the dying hero means to them. Perfect part. Written for you.”

Written by me, I wanted to say, but I had to admit the
idea was apt. After all, that was what I was, the writer asking what the film hero means to his audience. But I was, in the end, reluctant to put my signature on someone else's work, and I never did go to the sets.

For someone else's work is inevitably what it became. Out went my triple-narrative structure, my literary concern with reality and illusion, my attempt to use cinema as a metaphor for a larger exploration of Indian society. The film focused on the movies I'd parodied; they were, after all, what Bollywood knew, and what Bollywood did best. The larger part of my novel — the lives of my protagonists — became the smaller part of the film. Several of my favorite characters and relationships were eliminated: the bitchy gossip columnist who more or less rapes the hero, the hero's aging politician father who is bitterly disappointed in his successful son, the smarmy treasurer of the ruling party who takes advantage of the hero's lack of a moral center. The hero's discovery that a famous actress's bust is a pair of falsies proved too much even for Bollywood, and was omitted. My genderless prime minister became an imitation Indira Gandhi. Even the name of the book,
Show Business,
an allusion not only to the cinema world but also to the pretenses of politicians and the superficialities of godmen, gave way to the poster simplicity of
Bollywood
. My book had tried to do many things; by the final cut, BJ had done just one thing — he'd made a slapstick comedy about Hindi movies. “I simply left out the politics and religion,” he cheerfully told
Time
magazine.

Time
(which ran a three-page color feature paralleling BJ's
Bollywood
and Mani Ratnam's
Bombay
) clearly didn't
mind. Still, the film's California premiere highlighted my ambivalence. The prominent local ethnic paper,
India West,
headlined its lengthy review “Bollywood Misses Tharoor's Insights into Film World.” The critic deplored the film's “jettisoning of Tharoor's incisive look at the dream factory” and its “failure to explore the great potential of the novel.” The reviewer, I noted with a pang, cited all the elements from the book that I would have liked to see in the film myself. Fortunately for BJ, hers was a minority view. The rest of the press, at festivals in Toronto and Berlin, and at premieres in California and New York, lapped it up.

And why not? Prose and cinema are different arts; they proceed from different premises, use different techniques, tell their stories in different ways. There are images that can be conveyed in a single frame that a book could not pull off in a hundred pages; equally, there are complexities on the printed page that transcend, and so escape, the images on the screen. The author is wedded to his creation, but in writing his book he is fettered only by the limits of his imagination. The film producer, on the other hand, is a craftsman who has to work within the limits of his budgets, the sets and props he finds available or affordable, the conventions of his medium, the attention span of the average cinegoer (BJ's first version, which had retained more of the book, was deemed an hour too long by the experts at Toronto), and of course the talents and abilities of his cast and crew.

And it's not as if the only results of the conversion from book to film were negative. Some shots looked exactly as I'd imagined them when I was writing; there's nothing quite like the thrill of seeing a gleam in your eye become a picture on
the screen. Some film scenes actually worked better in the movie, because they came to life as they could never quite do through words alone. And I was both surprised and delighted to hear my tongue-in-cheek songs from the novel set to Tushar Parte's hummable melodies. One of the more unlikely rewards I've had from this experience is being able to revel in the improbable credits “Lyrics by Shashi Tharoor.”

So when people come up to talk about “your movie,” I don't disown it completely. It's dismaying, of course, that when people hear you've written a book, they treat you either with indifference or with the polite condescension one reserves for those who spend so much time doing so much work to produce so little (and for so little reward). But the moment they hear your book's been made into a movie, eyes light up, the interest they've feigned (“Oh, a book? What's it about?”) becomes real (“Oh, a movie? Wow! Who's in it?”). Chunky Pandey wouldn't recognize me if he ran me over in his Mercedes, but everyone I meet at a party instantly assumes Chunky must have dropped by my place every other day to get a handle on his character. (Which, on balance, perhaps he should have.) And let's face it, films are a mass medium in a different league from books: even a flop will get seen by more people than bought the hardback. “Shashi's movie” is a phrase spoken with far more admiration than “Shashi's literary prizes.” Even though, as I vainly point out, it isn't Shashi's movie.

Which means I have been getting some vicarious pleasure out of Bollywood. But the dilemma remains. Do I put up the full-size color poster BJ has given me? Display the calendar? Wear the T-shirt? Hide the book? The ultimate
recourse of the author is, of course, to have it both ways. So my message to all and sundry is: If you like the film, you must read the book. But if you don't like the film, you must still read the book, to discover what the filmmaker missed.

Of course, I'm hoping Blondie doesn't read this in his bathtub.

D
ID ANYONE NOTICE THAT JULY
21, 1999, marked the centenary of Ernest Hemingway's birth? It is curious, of course, that a man who was seen as a such a literary giant in his time — his suicide in 1961 even made the front page of the Indian papers — should be so completely forgotten four decades later. Today there seems something embarrassing about his macho prose, the chest-out beer-swilling sentences strutting across the jungle of the page, hunting rifle in hand, each phrase advertising the author's manhood. In these more enlightened times, Hemingway seems as dated as a Victorian novelist, the exemplar of another era, whose values seem recognizable but inapplicably foreign.

And yet Ernest Hemingway had just become the exemplar of something quite contemporary, a phenomenon very much of the last materialistic years of the twentieth century. I have in front of me a press release from a body calling itself Fashion Licensing of America Inc., announcing good news for all those who thought Hemingway was
dead and buried (or interred in libraries). “His fame lives on,” the release says, “thanks to the Ernest Hemingway Collection, a new body of licensed products embracing furniture, accessories, gifts and textiles.” These feature such Hemingwayesque delights as a “Kilimanjaro king bed” for the modest sum of $3,499, an amount the grizzly writer, who prided himself on unrolling a mat by a campfire, would never have dreamed of spending on his own sleeping arrangements. If the ninety-six-piece Ernest Hemingway furniture collection (also including lamps, clocks, and even a duck decoy for the Hemingway-wannabe hunter) does not appeal, one can always pick up a $600 Mont Blanc Hemingway pen, whose cost at least can be guaranteed to inspire the short sentences for which its eponymous author was famous.