May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (33 page)

A spate of similar “marriages” followed, all carefully documented by the film magazines. The trend hit a new high, or low, when a well-known director, Mahesh Bhatt, converted to Islam in a half-hour ceremony that immediately preceded his second wedding—enabling him to marry wife number two without divorcing wife one. “It was the best solution for the three of us,” he told me in utter seriousness. “For me, divorce would have been the final rejection of a person I couldn’t amputate from my life. And I had to give my second wife some kind of legal respectability.” Under Hindu law, however, his marriage was illegal. “If my first wife contests it, I’m dead and gone,” he admitted.

I never understood how the stars found time for such extracurricular activities, given that some of them worked in as many as fifteen movies at once, often rushing frantically to play two different lead characters in two different films on two different sets in a single day. Farha, for example, told me that she had recently worked twenty-four hours straight. First she did studio shots for one film; then she stayed up all night performing stunts in an underground train station for another. Clearly, this was not Hollywood. No commercial actress in Bombay ever spent months studying the soul of a character, not least because the character was almost always the same. As Das Gupta wrote in
Talking About Films
, a book of his essays: “What passes for acting is a game between the producer and the audience, played with well-established types—the crying mother, the doting father, the dancing, singing, dewy-eyed heroine, the sad-faced or epileptic hero, the comic, the precocious child—in which a few mannerisms of the actor are enough for the audience to take the details for granted.… Similarly the situations are stock situations, with stock responses too ready-made to require any exploration of why or how something has happened; the sooner the rest of the action springing from a situation (in a nightclub, a swimming party, a sentimental scene between father and daughter) can be taken for granted, the better.”

The Hindi commercial movie should not be confused with art films by directors like Satyajit Ray that are shown by film societies in New York, Paris or Rome. About fifty of these films used to be produced each year in India, most of them explorations of the dark side of the human character, intended for the urban intelligentsia. They almost never made money. What the motor rickshaw drivers and tea shop owners of India wanted was essentially a musical, loud and garish—a genre that would have baffled most Americans. Chandra Barot, a Hindi film director, certainly found this to be the case. “When I visited 20th Century-Fox, they asked me, ‘Why do you have songs in every film?’ ” he told me. “But basically we’re very simple people. All the films have the same story.” The story usually was about a young girl and a young boy who loved each other but encountered problems, often because the girl’s father opposed her marriage. It all usually worked out in the end, but not before a series of violent fights, car chases and, of course, the elaborate songs and dances, in which the hero would put his arms around the heroine, maybe give her a kiss (permitted only recently by the censors) and then dissolve with his loved one to, say, a meadow of buttercups in Kashmir, where the couple would suddenly be seen bursting into song. The meadow would have nothing to do with the locale or story line of the film, but the audience never cared. “The main difference between American films and Indian films,” said the actress Rekha, “is that American films make sense, and Indian films don’t.”

The dancing mixed Western disco with Indian classical and folk dance and was often punctuated by aggressive pelvic thrusting that was more vulgar than anything I ever saw in an R-rated American movie. The songs were lilting and undeniably catchy—I heard them coming from radios in back alleys all over India, and sometimes found myself
singing them for days afterward—but the women’s voices were pitched so high that it sounded to me as if Alvin and the Chipmunks had done the soundtrack. In fact, the female vocals in nearly every Indian commercial film were dubbed by either Lata Mangeshkar, the undisputed empress of Indian film singing, or her sister, who had an identical high-pitched voice. The result was that when every woman in every Indian film opened her mouth to sing, she sounded exactly the same. No one in India thought this was at all peculiar.

THE THREE LEADING COMMERCIAL INDIAN ACTRESSES THROUGHOUT THE
mid- and late 1980s were indisputably Rekha, Dimple Kapadia and Sridevi. Although their positions as numbers one, two and three shifted according to their most recent box-office hits and failures, no other commercial actress came close to touching their star quality. When I was in Bombay in the summer of 1986, Rekha, the longtime queen of the Hindi screen, who had been number one for years, had recently been surpassed by her younger rival, Sridevi (pronounced Shree-day-vee). Dimple, as everyone called her, had recently reentered the film world after a disastrous marriage and was not yet in the running. Two years later, after Sridevi had suffered a few box-office flops, Rekha was back on top as number one and elder stateswoman. Dimple had come roaring back as well and had at times threatened to take the number-one spot for herself. This was all sometimes very hard to follow, even for those who made a career of it. “We find it difficult to keep up as far as the girls are concerned,” admitted Nari Hira, the publisher of
Stardust
, the leading film magazine.

The first actress I met was Dimple, who was shooting one afternoon at a bungalow in a high-rent section of Bombay. This was in the summer of 1986, when she was still down on the lower rungs of the film industry. Even so, most men, even intelligent, professional men who never went to the Hindi films, used to go into raptures over Dimple. When I first saw her on the set, I could see why. She was beautiful—tall, shapely, with enormous eyes, swollen lips and a dramatic cleft in her chin. She was wearing a curly long-haired red wig and a green-and-cream silk sari. The film was called
Insaaf
, or “Justice,” and Dimple played twin sisters, one a nightclub singer, the other a doctor. Naturally the singer was raped, then jumped off a building out of shame. When I arrived on the set, Dimple was in the middle of a scene, shot in a bedroom, in which the nightclub singer was telling
her lover, a former college professor, that she had just aborted his child. When the lover asked why, she replied that it was because they were not husband and wife. The lover, by now extremely agitated, declared his love and asked for her hand in marriage, at which point the singer admitted that she had made up the abortion story and that she was still carrying his child. At the melodramatic conclusion of the scene, Dimple burst into real tears.

“It just happens sometimes,” she said afterward in her dressing room, still sniffling. “That scene was from within. Until yesterday, I didn’t know where this character was at. But now I’m getting it. She wanted to be an actress and she couldn’t make it, so she got into this nightclub scene.” I asked her about her attempt to make a comeback after her failed marriage. “The comeback has been no comeback,” she said flatly. “I don’t know what people were expecting from me.” Dimple had the straightforward, no-excuses manner of someone who had been through too much to put up a front. At least her life had provided abundant material for the scene she had just played. At the age of fourteen she had starred in
Bobby
, a love story that became one of the industry’s all-time hits. The film made Dimple into a sensation, but instead of using it to launch her career, she married, at the age of fifteen, the country’s most popular leading man at the time, Rajesh Khanna. He promptly told his new wife that her acting days were over. “My husband believed that my place was at home,” Dimple said. “It was not a husband-wife relationship—it was father-daughter.” After two children and ten years of marriage, she finally walked out. “It’s a big stigma to leave a man,” she said. “I didn’t expect to be accepted. But after I left him, it made a tremendous difference to me. The best part was that I was earning my own bread.” I could see by now that Dimple was clearly pleased with her outburst of tears in the previous scene. “That one shot gave me a lot of pleasure,” she said. “That kind of high I’ve never been able to experience with anything else in my life. And if I can get that high twice or thrice a year—I just love it.” Another marriage was not in her future since she, too, was involved with an actor who she said would “never” leave his wife. I asked her why she stayed in the relationship. “I don’t owe anything to anyone,” she said. “If I’m happy, I’m going to do it.”

Some days later I met Rekha, a stunning thirty-two-year-old beauty who that summer had seen her career eclipsed by her young friend Sridevi, in a widely discussed Indian version
of All About Eve
. Even worse, the dreaded Sridevi had the effrontery to be linked romantically
with the leading man, who was said to have been Rekha’s lover of many years. I decided it would be best to bring up a less incendiary topic first, so in Rekha’s dressing room one muggy evening I began by asking her about one of her favorite subjects—Rekha, a mythic being she had come to see as larger than herself. “Nobody can take my position, not even myself,” she announced to me as she draped her forehead with jewels for an upcoming scene. “Not even the human being that I am can ever take Rekha’s position. No. That is only for her. She has taken that position for life.” Although she viewed herself as a deity, Rekha was warm, friendly and so talkative that it was difficult to guide the conversation to a new topic. Listening to her voice, however, was lovely. She had learned to speak English with a smooth, almost musical upper-class Indian accent that veered toward the British.

The goddess had arrived in Bombay from south India more than a decade before as “a round ball of flesh,” as Rekha herself said. But she had ambition, she had street smarts and, most important, she had the quality called
oomph
in Bombay, which was the powerful sex appeal necessary for success. So her movies did well. As the years passed, Rekha slowly transformed herself, changing her makeup, learning how to dress and slimming down with the help of Jane Fonda’s workout videos. Soon she was starring in movies with Amitabh Bachchan, the male megastar. Even upper-class housewives went to their beauty salons and said they wanted to look like Rekha—full lips, dark, dramatic eyes, lustrous black hair. At the same time, the gossip magazines were chronicling Rekha’s depressions, tantrums and periods of Garbo-like reclusiveness, which merely added to her appeal. When she did speak, she had the unfortunate habit of saying whatever came into her head, revealing on several occasions that all she read was
Cosmopolitan
magazine and
Archie
comic books. But then Rekha hit thirty and was immediately branded as “aging” by male audiences, who preferred, she said, “a child-woman, impish, bubbly, voluptuous.” Rekha insisted to me that she still had that kind of appeal, but the talk in the industry was that she had in fact become, after all her workouts, much too sleek for the tastes of the masses. This set the stage for Sridevi, the more recent arrival out of south India, who was every bit as plump, popular and savvy as Rekha had been a decade before. Suddenly it was Sridevi’s face that appeared on movie posters across India. Only twenty-one years old that summer, Sridevi had already signed up for more movies
than Rekha, which had earned her the title of Miss Number One in Bombay.

“She’s
one
of the number ones,” Rekha corrected, with a tiny frown. “There are a lot of number ones.” Both she and Sridevi continued to insist that they were friends, and they made a big fuss of greeting each other in public. A year before, when I had been on a plane from Madras to Delhi, I had watched as Sridevi and Rekha unexpectedly ran into each other on the same flight. They squealed with delight across the cabin, throwing the rest of the passengers into an uproar. Such behavior was great entertainment for their fellow actresses in Bombay, who believed that the two were obsessed with each other and actually imitated each other in their films. The friendship, these other actresses told me, was more like détente—Sridevi was so afraid of Rekha’s venom and Rekha was so fearful of Sridevi’s success that the two refrained from clawing at each other in public. Rekha, though, had her moments.

“She’s a cute kid,” Rekha said when I finally got around to raising the issue of Sridevi’s success. “She came into the industry at a time when I was thinking of stepping out. People missed me so much, and she almost had perfect timing in filling that gap. She is very intelligent. Of course, she’s much more immature than me, but in no time she’ll learn.”

I found Miss Number One at another studio in Bombay, impatiently waiting for her next scene on the set
of Mr. India
, a big-budget special-effects film with a bizarre plot twist in which she played a reporter for a newspaper called
The Crimes of India
who falls in love with an invisible man. The set, a futuristic grotto of aluminum foil that looked like
Star Wars
run amok, appeared to be the headquarters of a diabolical villain. The producers had hopes for a blockbuster, and when
Mr. India
was released a year later, it quickly became a big summertime hit. I dragged an Indian friend, Bim Bissell, to see it with me. Bim worked at the World Bank in Delhi, had a son in an American university and was one of the many Indians who had stopped going to the cinema halls years before. I think she looked upon our excursion as a minor adventure. “I haven’t been in this theater since I was in college,” she told me as we took our seats. The theater was hot, gritty and smelly, but the movie, which had received something better than the usual disdainful reviews, turned out to be absurd fun. Much of its success was due to Sridevi, who was charismatic on-screen, especially in one memorable song-and-dance number when she was
costumed Bombay-style in a clinging gold lamé gown with a matching gold headdress and fingernails.