Sacred Games (99 page)

‘At the very end of the letter,' Jojo said, ‘after he signs off, he adds a request.' She snorted. ‘He lists English as one of his languages, up front in his letter. But at the end, he writes, “I await your speedy and kind response. Please answer my letter in Hindi only.” This Sanjay Kumar is not very smart. Or he thinks model co-ordinators in Bombay are chutiyas.'

‘Who would dare to think you are a chutiya, Jojo? No, no. The poor boy is just trying to move ahead in the world. Remember, you were there once.'

‘I was never such a gaandu as this. Sending letters to Bombay. Wanting replies in Hindi. Listen, I've been in the business for a while now. I have
a feeling for people now, for who moves ahead and who doesn't. And I'm telling you, this one doesn't have a chance. Even if he looks like Hrithik Roshan, he doesn't have a chance. If he comes to Bombay, he'll be eaten up.'

I couldn't argue against that. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘Yes.' Sanjay Kumar didn't have a chance. He probably didn't have a chance even if he stayed in that rotting, choking village of his. But whether he stayed or left, he was going to keep watching movies, making lists, continue writing letters. Stupid bastard. But there were crores and crores like him, up and down and across the country. They were there, and they were our audience. I was going to make my film for them.

 

Of course I consulted Guru-ji before I put any cash into play. I wanted to see Jamila on the screen, and I was sure she would succeed as a star, but I wanted direction. I wasn't about to rush into a game I knew nothing about without some knowledge about what was to happen. But Guru-ji could see nothing, he couldn't see into the future of my movie with any specificity. ‘I have a good feeling about the project, beta,' he said. ‘But that's all. It happens sometimes, it's like trying to see through a warped lens. Some things get blanked out, some things come into sharp focus. I can't see anything bad.'

‘But you can't see anything good,' I said.

‘No, not that either. But it's a minor risk, compared to some of the things you've done. And are doing.'

He was absolutely correct, as usual. I had risked my life many times, and this was just money. I remembered then what Paritosh Shah used to say, if you let Lakshmi go, she comes back to you multiplied, if you try to imprison Lakshmi she will escape you and never come back. For Jamila, I had to let my Lakshmi out into the world, to move as she pleased. It was only appropriate.

So I made a movie for Jamila. Getting the production team together was easy enough. I had the money, so I hired the best. Actually, I had Jojo find me a producer, a man named Dheeraj Kapoor, and this Dheeraj did the hiring. Dheeraj had made three hits in a row, all in the four to six-crore budget range, with respectable actors and strong scripts. Now he was hungry for a chance to jump into a higher league, to play the game with twenty-odd crores and real stars. I liked hungry men to work for me. You had to watch them closely, but they performed well. And this Dheeraj was a coming man, I could feel it. He would succeed.

Meanwhile the new Jamila went from triumph to triumph. We had given her a new name, a name to fit that star she was becoming: she was now ‘Zoya Mirza'. It was a good modern-sounding name, short and easily written and pronounced, it had that hip Z sound at the beginning and towards the end. It was a new name that could live in this new world. And once the work on her face was complete, she was more than new. She was the future. What Dr Langston Lee had done to her cheeks, her hairline, her chin, her nose, was not radical. It was just a little bulk taken off there, a hair's breadth of length added there. She was the same, and yet she was completely different. Before, she was striking. Now, she was dazzling. Sometimes it was hard to look at her, it was as if she were far away, even when she was sitting right next to me. Her beauty made me yearn, and it was hard to bear. She was complete, and she made me feel that big raw hole somewhere deep inside me, a wound that ached when she was far, and even more when she was near.

And she succeeded. She got more ramp work than anyone else in town, and two glossy covers in a month. There was a buzz about her even before she won Miss India, and more afterwards. She won the contest easily, and without having to compromise in the usual ways. She stayed tantalizingly out of the reach of the photographers and the judges and the publishers, and collected her crown. She made the chief editor of the sponsoring newspaper believe that he would get between her legs if she won the crown, and slipped away from him altogether. She was able to do all this because of my support. Not that we applied pressure, or bribed anyone, or used any of our other techniques. No, I just provided the resources that let her become the unearthly Zoya, that let her say ‘No'. Cash creates beauty, cash gives freedom, cash makes morality possible. Cash makes films. So I started work on my movie with Manu Tewari.

This Manu had already written three small films, the last of which had won the National Award for best picture. I'd seen it, and thought that for an art movie about hijras it wasn't so boring, and that the writing was actually quite powerful. So we flew Manu Tewari out to Thailand. I was willing to let Dheeraj and his team make many other choices, but I wanted control over the story. I had an idea or two myself, and I had watched a lot of films recently, and followed the weekly collections in India and abroad. I knew what I wanted in my movie. But this Manu turned out to be a socialist, and full of rules besides. For the first three days he was with us, he was as quiet and still as a rabbit who looks up and finds himself in a den of tigers. Dheeraj Kapoor had told him only
that he was flying out to Bangkok to meet the financier of the film, nothing else. And in Bangkok, Manu had been picked up, put on a flight to Phuket, and suddenly he found himself on a yacht with Ganesh Gaitonde and lots of mean-looking boys with big guns. Of course he was paralysed, he didn't know where to sit, when he was allowed to stand, or whether he could piss without permission. The boys amused themselves the first couple of days by being especially bloodthirsty in front of him, by reloading their pistols and waving them about and generally terrifying the wits out of the poor writer.

Finally I shooed them off, and sat Manu Tewari down with a glass of Scotch, and calmed him down. I praised all his movies, and told him that the last one had made me cry, and that too for hijras, which was a far greater compliment to him than any bhenchod National Award. He settled down a bit then, and took a sip of Scotch, and began to grin a little. Writers are pathetically susceptible to praise. I have worked with politicians, and gangsters, and holy men, and let me tell you, none of these can compete with a writer for mountainous inflations of ego and mouse-like insecurities of soul. I anointed Manu with large helpings of his own glory, and he relaxed. Of course, coming from Ganesh Gaitonde, the admiration was ten times as delicious. Manu Tewari slowly relaxed back into the sofa, and took another Scotch, and told me stories about the making of his hijra movie, how they had to persuade their hero that playing a laudaless, skirt-wearing, hand-clapping hijra was not going to cripple his career for ever. Manu Tewari was himself a medium-sized piece, medium in every way. You could have taken him as a blueprint for all that is average in the world, he was not short but not too tall, he had grown up in Bandra East as the son of a Class II employee in the state Ministry of Finance, and he had gone to college at Rizvi and had had a totally undistinguished academic career. I knew all this about him from Dheeraj's background report, but no report could have contained the madness that he hid somewhere deep inside that unremarkable body, that he let out only when he talked about movies.

‘
Naajayaz
was good, bhai,' he said. ‘The scenes between Naseer and Ajay Devgan were very good, but somewhere in the second half it began to drag a little. That's Mahesh Bhatt's problem in his later movies, he either moves everything too fast, or he drags it out. So the poor public is either confused or bored.' I had quite liked
Naajayaz
, but I let it pass and listened to him. Manu Tewari certainly knew his movies, he even knew details about some obscure underworld movie which had been under pro
duction from 1987 to the summer of 1990 and had come and disappeared in 1991, without anyone noticing. Except Manu Tewari. He knew who the music director was, and what ad films the cinematographer had done after that movie, and who the director had been chodoing during the song schedule in Australia, and how the film had done average business in Bombay and Hyderabad, but had been totally rejected in the Punjab circuit. He went on, ‘But the best crime-and-gangster movie of the early nineties was
Parinda
. It moved our films in a new direction, in terms of texture and realistic atmosphere. Clearly, Jackie Shroff found himself as an actor in that film, and he was a different Jackie afterwards. And it introduced Nana Patekar to a national audience. And Binod Pradhan's cinematography set a new standard altogether.'

He spoke of
Naajayaz
and
Parinda
with the seriousness of a man talking about the nature of God, or the history of the world. Actually, movies were his entire world. He had grown up in his quiet little flat, with his one sister and one brother, and he had led a colourless and blameless life. But through it all he had grown this thing inside himself, this worm, this python that ate films to survive, that swallowed them whole and kept them for ever. You had to give him the merest excuse to talk about
Mughal-e-Azam
, and he would go on for an hour. But to get him to talk about his own mother took some severe nudging from me. And even then he only said, ‘What to say about her, bhai? She's a housewife. She looked after us.'

For all his bright-eyed curiosity about the details of other people's adventures and agonies, that was all he could find to say about his mother. But I had only been trying to make family chat, a management technique I had learnt from Guru-ji. This Manu Tewari was comfortable enough now. It was time to get down to business. ‘All right. So,' I said, ‘let's talk about the story.'

He sat up straight then. When it came to work, he was instantly focused, that first time and always afterwards. ‘Yes, bhai,' he said. ‘Please tell me.'

We were sailing from Kata beach to Patong. In the late afternoon grey, the glassy sea slid beneath us. A towering cloud-bank hung over us to the east, still and perfect and unreal. I took a deep breath. ‘I was thinking of a thriller,' I said.

‘Yes, yes, bhai,' Manu said. ‘Excellent. A thriller.'

‘I like those films where there is some danger, and the hero has to avert the threat.'

‘A suspense story. I like it, bhai.'

‘The girl helps the hero, and they fall in love.'

‘Of course. And we'll do an international thriller, so that the songs can be shot abroad with justification.'

‘International thriller, yes.' I was starting to like the boy.

‘Did you have any ideas about the hero, bhai? Who is he? An ordinary man? A policeman? A secret agent?'

‘No. He's one of us.'

‘You mean…?'

‘It's a crime thriller.'

‘Okay, okay. I see the story. The hero is on the wrong side of the law, but he was driven into the underworld by circumstances.'

‘Yes. I want to start with him coming to Bombay.'

‘Right, right,' Manu said.

But he was looking doubtful. ‘What?' I said.

‘In a thriller, bhai, there may not be enough time to develop his entire history.'

‘Why? You have three maderchod hours.'

‘True, true, bhai. But you'll be surprised how quickly three hours fill up. You have five, six songs, that itself is close to forty minutes. Then, you have space for maybe forty scenes before the interval, thirty, thirty-five afterwards. And a thriller has to start with the danger, tell the audience what they're supposed to be scared of, what is at stake, and then it should race to the finish. And also…'

‘What?'

‘The boy coming to Bombay, becoming a criminal. It's been done, in
Satya
. And
Vaastav
, that also had the introduction-to-the-underworld theme.'

‘I don't care if it's been done. It's still true. Look at all these boys who are with me.'

‘Of course, bhai. They have been telling me their stories. But, you see, the audience gets used to things. First time, they love it. Second time, they love it less. Third time, they say, “It's too filmi, yaar,” and they reject the truth altogether. You see?'

I saw. I had done the same myself. ‘The audience is a bastard,' I said.

At this he jumped up and clasped my hand. ‘Yes, bhai, yes, the audience is a gaandu, it is a madman, it is a monster of a baby that must be fed.' He realized then that he was perhaps being a bit too familiar, so he let go of my hand and backed away. But his eyes were brilliant with sudden
sympathy, and he couldn't stop himself from going on. ‘Nobody knows what this maderchod audience wants, bhai. Everyone pretends, but nobody really knows. You can make a big film, spend and spend on publicity, and in the cinemas you won't even hear crows calling. Meanwhile, some B-grade, shoddily made film with no story to speak of will make a hundred crores.'

‘But you still try to predict what they want. And you have all these rules. Why only forty scenes before the interval? Why not sixty?'

‘Can't be done, bhai. The audience is unpredictable, but it is also very rigid. It wants only what it wants, in the way it is used to getting it. Even if you have a really dhansu story, if you change the shape of the story the audience will throw things at the screen, and tear up the seats, and riot. That's the thing, bhai. You have to do new things in old ways. Or old things fitted out in new clothes. Your film has to be hatke, but not too hatke. The art-film types keep saying they're doing new-new things, but they also have to obey the rules. It's just a different set of rules, and a different audience. You can't get away from the rules.'