Show Business (36 page)

I'm sorry about all the things I said earlier. You know how sometimes things look so bleak that one says more than one intends to. But now the political blood is tingling again in my veins. We can show them yet, Ashok-bhai. It'll be the greatest comeback since Indira Gandhi.

Look at the bright side. Before all this happened, let's face it, you were heading downhill like an Indian Railways train — faster than anyone would have thought possible on the way up. People were used to you; they were tired of you. The accident, the grave risk to your survival, has been a great shock, the kind of shock that galvanizes the system. It was no longer possible to be bored by you.

Of course, it's been a shock to everyone, Ashok-bhai. And perhaps most of all to the public, whose property you've really been. The girls, your triplets, have taken it all rather well. Rather too well, perhaps: I've seen Sheela preening into a hand mirror before walking past the anxious throng into the hospital, Neela puts so much makeup on her dark face that she only looks human under flashbulbs, and Leela seems to emerge from every visit to your room with the air of someone walking out of a movie theater. None of this is more real to her than any other scene you've starred in, Ashok-bhai. And why should it be? You're hardly real yourself: they've seen more of you on the screen than in the flesh. You haven't spent much time with them at home or anywhere else. You even went on family holidays with a servant-maid in tow. You were, you
are,
a larger-than-life figure to millions, but to the few around you, you weren't quite as large as life.

Except perhaps for the little one. Little Aashish looks so sad and bewildered by it all, standing there with his short stubby thumb in his mouth and his big black eyes round in incomprehension, nibbling at his nonexistent nails, wondering why everyone is behaving like this. It's when I see him, your son, that I feel the greatest pain.

Sorry — hearing all this, if indeed you can, many of the things I've said must only make you feel worse. But you mustn't, Ashok-bhai. Just take it as one more incentive to get well again: to win back people; to win back your political place. I'm sure it'll gladden you to know how spontaneous the outpouring of good wishes is. People have really rallied around after the accident. You won't believe how kind everyone's been. Even people who've had their problems with you in recent years. Old Jagannath Choubey showed up with an enormous bouquet of flowers. Mohanlal came and fretted anxiously, pulling so much string off his fraying cuffs that I thought he'd unravel his entire shirt before he left. Pranay has been very solicitous, asking Maya how he could help, taking the girls out for an afternoon at the beach, commiserating with Dad and Ma. He's not really my type, but Dad thinks Pranay's too good a man to be associated with the Hindi film industry, and he's a villain! Even canny Sugriva Sharma, fresh from his recapture of what used to be your seat, sent a cable. I have it here somewhere — I'll read it to you: WISHING MOST SPEEDY RECOVERY STOP INDIA'S HEART BEATS FOR YOU STOP NATION'S SCREENS NEED YOU STOP SUGRIVA SHARMA. He released it to the press, of course, before it even got here: Parliament isn't the place for you, but the nation's screens are. Wily bastard.

In fact, Pranay's really been the best of the lot. I don't particularly like to admit it, because something about the fellow makes me uncomfortable, but he's really taken an awful lot of trouble. He's come every day; he must have had to cancel a shift or two to do it. And I hadn't imagined you two were so close, though I guess you
have
done a lot of films together. When the doctor wanted us to talk to you like this it was Pranay who volunteered to try it first. He's the only one who really seems to be able to console Aashish: in no time the boy climbs onto Pranay's lap and tugs at his absurd ties and for a moment forgets his bewilderment. One day Pranay rather ostentatiously took off a florid tie and looped it around Aashish's neck. He was delighted and wouldn't give it back. “It's yours, my boy,” Pranay said, “a present.” And I could have sworn I saw tears in his chronically red eyes.

Everyone is overcome by the occasion, Ashok-bhai. Your occasion.

Even that harridan Radha Sabnis. Look what she wrote in the latest
Showbiz:

Darlings, isn't it terrible what has happened to our precious Hungry Young-No-Longer Man? Cheetah hasn't always been nice about The Banjara, but we all love him, don't we? I'm praying and waiting for his recovery so that we can celebrate it together in a glass of Pol Roger 1969, his favorite champagne. [Funny, I didn't even know you
had
a favorite champagne.] In his meteoric career Ashok Banjara has come to personify the Hindi cinema as we know it — the style, the razzle-dazzle, the energy, the charisma. As they say in the ads for runaway prodigals, come back, Ashok — all is forgiven. We need you, lover-boy. Grrrrowl…

Lover-boy? Well, she might have chosen a more appropriate epithet, but as I said to Pranay, it proves her heart is in the right place. “Who'd have thought she even had a heart?” was his rejoinder. “Perhaps Ashok was one of the very few who dug deep enough to find it.” Odd remark, that, but I suppose he was just trying to be nice about you.

I've talked a lot with him myself, actually, somewhat to my own surprise. Not that there's much choice, when you're sitting together in the waiting room. Did you know that Pranay's some sort of closet Commie? Oh, very restrained and reflective and all that, but overflowing with conviction and jargon. “I was not surprised when Ashok entered bourgeois politics,” he said to me, well out of Dad's hearing, thank God.
Bourgeois
politics — can you imagine? “After all, every Hindi film hero is ontologically a counterrevolutionary.” He said that, really, “ontologically.” I had to look it up in the dictionary afterward. And I don't think he's even been to college. Where do these guys pick this crap up from?

“A counterrevolutionary?” I asked incredulously. “How?” He acquired this terribly intense expression, all beetle brows and outthrust jaw. “Because they serve, unconsciously or otherwise, to dissipate the revolutionary energies of the masses,” he replied. “The frustrations and aspirations that would fuel the masses' struggle for justice is sidetracked by being focused on the screen success of a movie star. The proletariat's natural urge to overthrow injustice is vicariously fulfilled in the hero's defeat of the straw villain — me.” I swear the guy didn't even smile. “Films in India are truly the opiate of the people; by providing an outlet to their pent-up urges, the Bombay films make them forget the injustice of the oppressive social order. Evil is personalized as the villain, rather than as the system that makes victims, not heroes, of us all. A false solution is found when the villain is vanquished, and the masses go home happy. The ownership and control of the means of production remain unchanged.”

Absurd, of course, but can you believe words like these coming out of the mouth of a Bollywood type? Especially this fellow, with his white shoes and ridiculous ties? And there was more, believe it or not. To make conversation more than anything else, I found myself saying something about the melting of class and caste barriers in Hindi movies, you know, along the lines of what I said to you just now about
Mechanic.
He objected quite strongly. “It is just the opposite. Romantic love across caste and class lines,” he declared solemnly, “is used to cast a veil over the classic contradictions inherent in these situations. It is an exploitative device to blur the reality of class struggle by promoting an illusion of class mobility. Instead of making the revolutionary youth want to overthrow the landlord, the Hindi film promises him he can marry the landlord's daughter. The classless cuddle,” he concluded, “is capitalist camouflage.”

“You ought to enter politics yourself,” I suggested half jokingly, only to receive an earful about the bourgeois parliamentary system.

Speaking about the proletariat, though, you know we've kept them out of here. I'm afraid a combination of hospital rules, security considerations, and Maya's preferences have left the great unwashed in the courtyard even as we troop into the intensive care unit for these measured monologues. I can't imagine Cyrus Sponerwalla is any too happy about that, but then we haven't let him in yet either. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you was that on my way in I spoke to one of the fellows waiting outside. He was, would you believe it, a rick-shawallah, condemned to a short and brutish life pulling human loads far too heavy for him through rough and pitted streets in rain and heat wave alike. He had spent all his savings to take a train from Calcutta to come and watch anxiously for your recovery. Somebody presented him to me and I stopped and talked, not just because I felt I had to, but because I was genuinely curious about what you meant to this man — a man who had, in effect, abandoned his livelihood to be by your bedside, or as close to it as he could get. Why did he like your pictures, I asked him.

He liked the action, he replied in Darbhanga-accented Hindi. Ashokji was a master of action, stunts, fights. He didn't like pictures without action; if there is no action, he asked, what is there to see?

And this action, what did it represent for him?

The triumph of right over wrong, he said. The victory of dharma. The reassertion of the moral order of the universe. Ashokji was the upholder of Right: for this reason, he was like an avatar of God. The other avatars, Rama, Krishna, maybe even Buddha and Gandhi, are all worshiped, but they lived a long time ago and it was difficult to really identify with any of them. Ashok Banjara, though, lived today: his deeds could be seen on the silver screen for the price of a day's earnings. And it was as if God had come down to earth to make himself visible to ordinary men. For me, sahib, he said, Ashokji
is
a god.

I left him, strangely humbled by the purity of his devotion to you, and trudged up the stairs into the hospital. I'm afraid I forgot to ask him his name.

 

Interior:Night

I can't believe I'm doing this.

Me, Ashok Banjara, superstar of the silver screen, heartthrob of the misty-eyed masses, unchallenged hero of every scene in which I have been called upon to play a part, languishing in the back rows of the House of the People, the Lok Sabha, while cretinous
netas
in crumpled khadi, their eyes and their waistlines bulging, hold forth inarticulately on the irrelevant. But it
is
me, its my chin that's resting on my despairingly cupped palm, it's my elbow that's weighing heavily on the polished wood of the parliamentary desk in front of me, it's my lids that are drooping resignedly over my disbelieving eyes as I take in the spectacle of representative democracy in action and yawn. Ashok Banjara, parliamentary acolyte, ignored and condescended to by people who wouldn't be cast as second villains in Bollywood: what is life coming to?

I thought they'd at least make me a minister. After all, not only was I better known and more widely recognized than everyone bar the Prime Minister, but I had, after all, conquered the dreaded Sugriva Sharma for them. I thought I'd get to pick my reward — “so what is it to be, Banjara-sahib, Foreign Affairs or Information and Broadcasting?” Perhaps, modestly discounting my extensive travels, I would pronounce myself insufficiently qualified to run the country's external relations and graciously accept I and B instead, where I could take care of the film industry. I even had a humble speech planned, expressing gratitude for the opportunity to serve.

But none of it. When the Cabinet list was announced, I scoured it in vain for the most famous name in India. “What's this?” I asked Maya in astonishment. “Where am I?” She thought that the jealous time-servers in the upper echelons of the party had prevailed upon the Prime Minister to name me as only a Minister of State or a deputy minister. “After all, Ashok, you
are
new to government.” I bridled at this, but she pointed out the names of other friends and allies of the PM (including a genuine political heavyweight) whom the chief also had felt obliged to relegate. So I waited.

But when the second tier of appointments to the Council of Ministers was announced, I did not figure among them either. And the Prime Minister wouldn't return my calls. “I am leaving message, sir,” Subramanyam assured me. “Yevery time I am leaving message, but they are simply not phoning.” It is an unusual situation for him, and he is even unhappier than I am at this reversal of his standing.

“What did they bring me here for?” I asked Maya incredulously, “if they don't want to give me anything to do?”

“I suppose,” she suggested ruminatively, “I suppose until they put you in the government, you should do what people in Parliament are supposed to do.”

“Make speeches?”

“You're good at that, aren't you?”

Well, there was no need to answer that. So here I am, immaculate in
kurta-pajama
of the purest white silk, the cynosure of most of the eyes in the visitors' gallery. But down here in the well of the House they won't let me get a word in. Whenever I raise my hand someone more senior is recognized ahead of me; by the time the queue thins, the debate is over. Whenever I raise my voice, I am shouted down. Half of the subjects discussed are obscure to the point of absurdity, and my flagging interest is not stirred by having to follow them through the speeches of a bunch of semieducated morons who would sound incomprehensible in any language. The other half of the subjects are hardly discussed at all: either they feature long ministerial monologues after which the party MPs are roused from their slumbers to vote dutifully for the government, or they degenerate into shouting matches with the stalwarts of the Opposition, who make up in volubility what they lack in numbers. Occasionally, both monologue and shouting match are punctuated by noisy walkouts by the other side, the Opposition protesting against a government bill it's numerically powerless to overturn.