India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (13 page)

At the sound of his name, the aforementioned landlord returns. He is carrying two cups of tea in large plastic thimbles. He smiles generously, passes us both a cup and exits. He’s gone before I have time to mime my thanks.

For a month-long course, it seems remiss of Naval to turn up a full week late. I enquire what caused his delay. A more polished version unfolds. It is a story, I suspect, that he has been rehearsing. For retelling when he’s famous, perhaps.

I must understand. Time was always tight. He had only learned about Actor Prepares a fortnight before the course started. Who told him about it? He stumbled on it while surfing the Web. His real passion is to become a director. He figures acting might provide a back-door in. So he started searching around for acting schools. A Google search brought up Anupam Kher’s academy. He saw that it ran a full-time course over three months. It sounded perfect. Then he clicked on the fees and his heart sank. The full-time course was way beyond his budget. As he browsed, however, he noticed that the school ran evening classes. The course lasted just a month. The cost, fifteen thousand rupees. It would hurt his pocket, yet it lay within the realms of the possible.

‘I bought a chai wallah stall,’ he says, laughing ruefully and raising his thimble in an ironic toast to the idea.

The experiment fell flat. Naval’s childlike hopes of raising some fast cash did not materialise. For one, the other tea vendors proved vicious competitors. No sooner did he set up shop, than a kettle-waving pedlar would appear with foul curses and dismal
threats. Naval ended each day like one of his soggy tea bags, drained of energy and squashed underfoot. The police turned out to be even more unpleasant. They’d bark insults at him and threaten him with their wooden lattis. One even cuffed him around the ear. Naval’s tea-peddling exercise lasted four days before he decided to pack it in and sell back the equipment.

By now, the course start-date was almost upon him. His prospects of attending were dwindling by the moment. The aspiring director was over one thousand four hundred kilometres away and flat broke. The time had come for radical action. Naval owned only one asset of any value, an HP Compaq laptop. His father had bought it for him from Nehru Place in Delhi, a giddying flea market of illegal software and cheap electronics. The computer cost 26,700 rupees and was bought to assist him in his studies. Naval decided it had to go. It took him a couple of days to find a buyer, and then a couple more days for the buyer to find the money. As soon as Naval had the cash in hand, he grabbed his suitcase and jumped ticketless onto the first train to Mumbai.

‘Look,’ he says, leaning over towards his small cache of possessions. ‘I still have the bag for the power cable.’

He shows me a black, zipped pouch. The faded imprint of the ‘HP’ logo is still visible on the side. He uses it to store his valuables, he explains. I can’t but notice that it looks awfully empty.

I presume it is his first time in Mumbai. Quite the opposite, he replies. ‘Oh yes, I have been many times. Maybe five or six. I forget exactly.’ The answer surprises me. He had no family or friends here, only the telephone numbers passed on by the mysterious Mr Dev. Why on earth would he have visited so frequently?

‘I came to meet Salman Khan,’ he tells me, his face as straight as a masked divinity from a folk rendition of the Ramayana. ‘You have heard of Mr Salman, no?’

I had. With blockbuster hits such as
Tere Name
and
Dabangg
, he is one of the most sought-after actors in Bollywood. London’s Madame Tussauds has even immortalised him in wax.

‘He is an emotional person, Mr Salman,’ Naval continues, his use of the honorific prefix passing on a quasi-regal feel to its subject. ‘His mind is very nice. Mr Salman appears very angry on the screen, but he has a soft heart. He is a very simple, full of sympathy guy.’

Naval speaks as if he knows the front man of Hindi cinema. However, it rapidly becomes clear that he’s just a faceless fan, one of millions. His bond is with the actor’s on-screen persona, not the man sitting down to breakfast in Flat No. 3, Galaxy Apartments, Bandra.

The give-away comes as Naval recounts his visit to the above residence. He’d tracked down the address on the Internet. It was seven o’clock in the morning. The gruff security guard at the gate asked his name and his purpose. ‘Naval Dwivedi. To see Mr Salman,’ he told him honestly. Did he have an appointment? No. Was he an acquaintance of Mr Salman? Not strictly. Then he was sorry, it would not be possible. Naval should send a letter. ‘Actually this guard feels irritated to me. He says angrily, “go”.’ When Naval stood his ground, the guard pushed him in the chest and threatened to beat him up. The aspiring director beat a reluctant retreat.

My mouth lolls open in disbelief. Could anyone really be so naive? Did he really think an unannounced visit to a Bollywood celebrity would play out differently? Naval’s description of the incident suggests he remains to this day incredulous at the guard’s reaction.

I try phrasing my doubt with an eye to Naval’s feelings. ‘Would email not have been easier? Or the post, as the guard recommended?’

He did write a letter, Naval says. ‘Salman sir,’ it read. ‘I want heartily to meet to you please. My contact number is . . .’ A ten-digit mobile number follows. He is still waiting on a reply.

Despite the helping hand of Google, Naval has no trust in email or the Internet. ‘What’s to stop his people stealing my script?’

So then I ask him more directly. Had it not entered his head that the guard might bar his way? If it did, he hadn’t let it tarry long. Naval’s quest has a large dose of the pilgrimage about it. He is riding towards his destiny, an Indian Don Quixote tilting
at his own private windmills. An adherent of God, Ram, Jesus and Krishna, he doesn’t just believe in miracles. He expects them. Sprawling under the abusive invective of the security man presented one such moment: ‘I felt very nervous. I pray to God. “Oh, God, why am I here? What I do? Why no help me, my God?”’ Again, he was left waiting for a reply.

I find myself wondering how he had originally envisioned his meeting with Mr Salman. His fertile imagination, I feel sure, would not have rested as the Mumbai Rajdhani Express trundled half the length of the country towards India’s Tinseltown.

The hunch proves true. He’d prepared a little speech. Could he share it? Of course: ‘I am saying, “Mr Salman, I have script about dowry. I have very nice script about driving this system out. It’s a cancer. My Indian brothers hate dowry.”’

Naval continues sitting there, stock-still, one leg folded snugly over the other like a knot in a shawl. His thoughts too remain fixed, focusing in on the divine. ‘God say to me, he say, “I have your heart.”’ Such is his faith that he can put the security man’s hostile reception easily behind him. In the scheme of things, it marks nothing but a minor setback. God was, he decided, testing his resolve. Three more times (or was it four?), he returned. He’d hop on the train, sleep on the platform and hike out to Galaxy Apartments. With each visit, the guard bristled that bit more. By the fourth time, Naval didn’t even approach the gate. He just watched from afar, eating bread pakoras and watching for his thunderbolt from the sky. Once more, Naval had to learn what it was to wait.

‘I no see him. I have fear,’ he admits, reflecting on his failed sorties out to Bandra. ‘Still I have only ever seen him in the movies.’

Then, as if finishing one scene and immediately jumping ahead to the next, he reveals a new twist in his story: ‘I belong to Mizapur, in Uttar Pradesh. It’s not very much developed.’

‘I thought you were from Delhi?’

On reflection, this was foolish. Delhi, as with all India’s mega-cities, is an agglomeration of immigrants. Around half the
population come from somewhere else. Economic hardship and the hope of a job draw most. For Naval, it was the promise of further studies. His father had enrolled him on an MBA course at the august-sounding All India Management Association. In reality, the Association is not an institution of the bricks and mortar kind. Instead, AIMA (as the Association refers to itself) is a publicly run catch-all for thousands of second- and third-rate business-education providers. Even if it did have an impressive campus, Naval would never see it. His course was conducted via correspondence. Why this necessitated a move to the capital I didn’t quite understand. Perhaps Delhi’s postal service was more reliable than that of Mizapur?

Either way, Naval didn’t trouble the postman too much. After a couple of assignments, he decided the world of business wasn’t for him. He dropped out. Swapping his corporate-strategy books for script paper, he began penning his screenplay.

‘Did you tell your father?’ I enquire, half fearing his response.

‘No,’ he answers, confirming the worst. He looks at me as if I must have lost my mind. ‘My father is very strict. He heaps on pressure like a gas cylinder. My family has a very limited concept about job. You must be engineer, scientist, teacher or civil servant.’

It is a story I had heard across India and would continue to hear again. It is the perennial dilemma: the parents’ understandable desire to see their children ‘well set’ versus their offspring’s youthful impulses to follow the hearts. The saddest fact about the tussle is that it leaves no victors.

‘Now my father thinks I have completed the course because that is what I told him. I tell him that I have part-time job and that I am going for interviews with banks and manufacturers and all.’

For all his recklessness, I suddenly feel a surge of admiration for this young man from Uttar Pradesh. He has risked everything on a dream. How much easier would it have been just to go along with his parents’ wishes? To do the job he was told to do, to marry the
girl he was instructed to marry, to hide his unhappiness, to swallow his frustration?

I find myself wondering if I would have the courage to do the same. The romantic side of me would like to think so. Brave new worlds,
carpe diem
and all that. Even before the phrases fully take shape, I can sense my more realistic alter ego smirking. ‘Lily-livered,’ it goads. Sitting there, immersed in someone else’s tale, I guess I’m glad I never had to decide. Or never, at least, in such a stark, all-or-nothing manner as Naval.

Naval doesn’t see it that way. Maybe it’s the adrenalin of studying at Anupam Kher’s school, of the feeling that his journey is finally reaching its climax. His breakthrough is waiting around the corner, a crouching cat ready to pounce on its prey.

Whatever the reason, he views the irrevocable family split as a natural phenomenon, as prefigured as Rama’s departure from the throne of Kosala into his forest exile.

Naval’s universe is different from that of his father. A plunging Himalayan pass divides the two. The young acting student is caught up in the whirlwind of aspirational India. He has been shown a new world. It only requires his feet to follow. In a sense, chasing his dream is not a choice. It is a question of internal geography, of orienting himself towards his proper course. The MBA student, slotting his homework in the post, no more opted to jump the Mumbai train than a pet fish might choose to swim in circles.

‘I am a high visioner,’ Naval tells me with utmost seriousness. ‘Always, I am asking “why?”’ To clarify his point, he touches his hair with a look of childlike curiosity. ‘Why black, and not white?’

His father, on the other hand, is the polar opposite: ‘He doesn’t let me watch television. Mentally’ – Naval taps the side of his head with his index finger – ‘he thinks TV serials and film are corrupt. He has very limited views.’

My admiration for his decision doesn’t preclude a degree of concern for his current predicament. What will he do when the course ends? How will he feed himself? What will his father do
when he finds out Naval is a struggling actor in Mumbai and not a junior manager on some nameless industrial estate in Delhi?

The questions trip out one after another. I immediately feel guilty for asking them.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound like your father,’ I say, in a belated attempt to dispel some of the negative energy that I’ve let loose.

Naval merely smiles. ‘I have thought it all through.’

Then he begins to rock slightly. Forward, back. Forward, back. Like a psychiatric patient building up to a fit. The action discomforts me. Throughout, his lips are moving, as if mumbling silent stanzas of an ancient mantra. I sense that he’s talking to himself, or to his shadow double. What it is that Nawal is wrestling with, I’ve no idea.

He eventually stops rocking. His face has a calm, resolute expression. When he speaks, it’s with cold assertiveness. I’ve not heard him use such a tone before, yet it feels familiar. Then I realise. It’s been there all along – a quiet, shatter-proof confidence buried deep inside him.

‘I try and think good ambitions. I am inspired by Abraham Lincoln and Dr A. P. J. Adbul Kalam [a former national President, who became known as the Missile Man of India because of his support for ballistic weaponry]. Film is my passion. Please understand this. In North India, dowry is big problem. My neighbour, she died. She was twelve years old. She loved to me so much. I feel what we doing in society. Why? Is this right or wrong? My heart and soul says it is very wrong. It is not good culture. I hate this.’

Yet again, Naval’s version of events leaves me slightly nonplussed. Was his neighbour killed in a dowry dispute? The thought is horrifying. I want to ask him more, but he has said all that he desires to say. He is staring straight at me. No, through me. His eyes, two wells of curtained nightfall, have grown dark and intense.

I hold my pen prone over the page, indicating for him to continue.

He needs no prompting. It’s as if the words emerge from out of him in a physical, almost molecular sense, like tattoos on his skin.

‘After the course, I plan to stay here. My mind showed that I could not have success in Delhi. I will stay the maximum time. I believe God will help me if I will do good. I am going alone, alone, but I feel near God. All around me. We are buried in the earth. No again chance give from God.’