Seven

She was Dying to Become a Good Girl

Shaayad in baazuon mein hone ki keemat maut thi. Dekho— maine keemat chuka di, Rocky...Rocky...Main mujrim nahin hoon, Rocky.mera jurm...sirf tumhaara pyaar hai.

(Perhaps the price of your embrace was death. Look—I’ve paid the price, Rocky...Rocky...I’m not a criminal, Rocky...my crime. was only that I loved you.)

—Helen as Ruby in Teesri Manzil (1966)

Helen is presented as Manoj Kumar’s fiancee in the first few scenes of the 1964 thriller Woh Kaun Thi. And the audience already knows, at some instinctive level, that this is some kind of mistake.

It isn’t just that it is Helen; it’s the way she is presented. For starters, she seems to dance for a living. If she has a pressing reason and is shown to refuse money and gifts from greasy bounders, the audience might still allow itself to believe that she is a virgin. But this Helen is also Catholic— her name is Jenny. Again, as we have seen, this is often but not always a mortal sin. However, when all this is coupled with the fact that she wears skirts and shirts and has short hair, our sense of wrongness increases. The heroine of the pre-1990s Hindi film never has short hair. She can wear a short wig for purposes of deception (to play a prank, to infiltrate the villain’s den). She may also sport it for a song or two in early scenes when she is an unreconstructed young woman, but not after she has experienced the immediate alchemy of love and is about to be married. Even shoulder-length hair is permissible. But a pageboy combined with shirts and skirts? Something is certainly wrong.

Besides, even before Jenny makes her entrance, we have been given a clue that Manoj Kumar is meant for more hirsute things. The opening scene has him driving through a storm when his car is stopped by a woman in white with long hair (Sadhana). When she gets into his car, his windscreen wipers stop. Later, she asks to be let off at a cemetery and the gates open magically for her. She then vanishes among the graves, singing the big number, the leitmotif in the film: Naina barse rimjhim rimjhim (Tears fall like rain).

In contrast, Helen has two fairly ordinary songs. There’s Tiki riki tiki riki ta-turi (Nonsense syllables) and Chhodkar tere pyaar ka daaman/ Yeh bataa de ke hum kidhar jaayen (Were I to lose your love/ Tell me, where would I go?). When in the latter song she sings, Hum ko dar hai ki teri baahon mein/ Hum khushi se na aaj mar jaayen (I fear that in your arms/ I might die of joy), we know what’s going to happen. And it does.

She dies.

In Pagla Kahin Ka (1970), everyone at the nightclub where Jenny (Helen) dances stresses that she is a good woman. Sujit (Shammi Kapoor) assures us that she is as loyal as she is beautiful. Shyam (Prem Chopra) says it too. However, Jenny herself does not seem quite sure. In an early scene, on the beach, she rises from a dark bed of sand, rises obviously from Sujit’s embrace. She wants to leave; he pleads with her to stay a while longer. This is standard romantic stuff, but it is soon escalated when he proposes marriage and she puts him off on the tenuous grounds that as a nightclub dancer she may not be good enough for him. Tenuous because Sujit works in the same nightclub and is an orphan to boot, which in a caste-ridden society gives him only the edge of gender over her.

She then asks what would happen if she left him, if she were to turn unfaithful. He replies that she would not be able to. In a delightful fit of female perversity, she walks away, prompting him to sing: Tum mujhe yoon bhula na paaoge (You will not be able to forget me). She is allowed only a single verse of this serenade before we return to the nightclub for the New Year celebration and the title song of the film, Aashiq hoon ek mehjabeen ka/ Log kahen mujhe pagla kahin ka (I am in love with a beautiful woman/ So much in love that the world calls me mad).

Later, after Sujit has committed murder to defend Jenny’s honour and been acquitted on grounds of an insanity that he fakes, she does turn ‘unfaithful’. But only because Shyam has raped her while he was away. This drives Sujit truly mad and he ends up in a mental asylum.

In the asylum, psychiatrist Dr Shalu (Asha Parekh) is at hand to rescue him with some trips to a lake, a faked Jenny, and the complete version of Tum mujhe yoon..., as befits the leading lady. When Jenny explains to Dr Shalu the circumstances that forced her to abandon Sujit and marry Shyam, the good doctor has no sympathy and tells her what she should actually have done: Jenny should have killed herself. It may be disconcerting advice from a psychiatrist but it is good advice from a long-haired heroine. All of Jenny’s saris—and from the moment of Sujit’s arrest she is decorously clad in them—cannot wash away the guilt of her short hair.

So she pays.

She dies.

In Teesri Manzil, Helen had a bigger and more significant role than usual. The film begins with a suicide, a woman screaming as she jumps off the third floor of a Mussoorie hotel. Bathed in dark aqueous light, the ghouls gather. A distraught young man runs past the reception. He is stopped in his tracks by a lisped warning from Ruby (Helen), the hotel dancer: Rocky, tumhen wahan nahin jaana chaahiye (Rocky, you shouldn’t go there)—a warning made more potent by being the first line in the film, by the knowingness of Ruby’s tone and the expensive fur in which she is swathed.

A year later, Sunita (Asha Parekh) comes to Mussoorie to take revenge for her sister Rupa. She believes Rupa was seduced and then cast off by Anil Kumar Sona alias Rocky (Shammi Kapoor), the drummer in the hotel’s jazz band, causing her to kill herself. Rocky learns of her intentions and disguises his identity. Even as the two begin to fall in love, the story takes an unexpected twist when the police discover that Rupa did not jump off the third floor of the hotel but was pushed.

A love triangle has been set up inside the murder mystery, one in which Sunita’s youth and vibrancy will be pitted against the sexual allure of Ruby. (Ruby’s allure is showcased in R.D. Burman’s brilliant composition—and one of Helen’s best songs—Ai haseena zulfonwaali jaan-e-jahaan—O beauty of the dark tresses, the love of all the world.) While the mystery does have its moments, we know that Rocky/ Sona will choose Sunita. For we know that Ruby is a fallen woman. But her own ‘dying confession’ at the end, which forms the epigraph of this chapter, is chilling in what it reveals about our attitude to women.

Mujrim? Criminal? Ruby eavesdrops on conversations, intercepts letters, dances in a nightclub and wears black gloves. All these may be social solecisms but do not indicate criminality. We are never sure whether she knew who killed Rupa; if she did and did not reveal it to the police, she might be guilty of obstruction of justice. She certainly does not blackmail Rocky to keep his ‘secret’, which is not even much of a secret.

Mujrim? Or is that just wrongdoer, moral offender?

Among the other truisms with which Hindi cinema works is the belief that truth sits on the lips of dying men. Or women, even women on the fringes. This, then, is a moment of truth. Helen calls herself a mujrim because she is a fallen woman, and as a fallen woman, she must die. Sunita herself says as much earlier in the film: ‘When a young woman crosses certain limits in love, the only future she has is death.’ The limit here is the loss of virginity. In this archaic moral view, respectable Indian women are either virgins or married. The nightclub dancer who throws herself at the hero is neither, so she must die.

By being constructed as an outsider, the Helen figure had much to say about how we constructed our notions of ourselves.

The vamp’s world is a fringe world—hence the French appellation of demi-mondaine—and from the shadows she blows smoke rings at the status quo. Her womanhood is not linked to her womb; it is linked to her sexuality. The easiest way to establish the heart of gold within the prostitute/dancer is to give her a child as the reason for her to sell her body (Shabana Azmi in Bhaavna; Suchitra Sen in Mamta; the nameless courtesan who appears briefly in the song Yeh mahlon, yeh takhton, yeh taajon... in Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa). When, without child or other pressing social need (dying mother, ill father, sister to be married, brother to be educated), she offers her body for sale and does not choose death immediately afterwards, she is perceived as cocking a snook at the building blocks of our society: the ordinary heterosexual couple, whose fidelity to each other is, in civilized societies, only an ethical contract. The basic unit of society—the monogamous marriage—is besieged.

The vamp brings in her trail the threat of disruption. Rehabilitation is not an option, for the reformed bad girl is an even bigger problem: what is society to do with her? It is easier, all round, for the bad girl to die or disappear. Thus, death would become a recurring theme in Helen’s career.

There are two kinds of death that Hindi films offer. There’s death as a reward for stardom—since a death scene is generally a crowd-pleaser and allows for amplified histrionics. In Roti Kapda aur Makaan, Manoj Kumar had an interminably long death scene. In Sholay, Amitabh Bachchan dies with a panache that makes the remaining few last scenes of the film a let-down. In Muqaddar ka Sikandar, a deathfest, first Rekha, a courtesan, kills herself to deny Amitabh contact; then Amitabh kills her other suitor, Amjad Khan; and finally Amitabh himself dies spectacularly, leaving the pallid Raakhee to the second-string Vinod Khanna.

The bad girl’s death was never in the same league. It was of the other kind. She didn’t get a speech or suitable weepy music with which to end her screen time. She was simply cleared away by a bullet other such quick device.

It should be apparent by now that there is only one type of bad girl: the sexually fallen woman who did not have the moral fibre to kill herself. In Bombay 405 Miles (1980), Helen dies because she abandons her child and her husband for a life of ease as moll to a rapist, kidnapper and killer. Of course, Pran, the husband she abandons, is no saint either. He blackmails people by calling them up and telling them that he knows their secrets. But then, in the clearly defined morality of Hindi cinema, redemption often awaits the man who sins, should he repent in time. Bad girls have no such luck. They are either effaced by a careless script or die.

But even here it is possible to discern two separate kinds of death.

The first kind of death was simply Nemesis catching up with the wrongdoer. In these films, the Helen character was portrayed as unequivocally evil. Through the course of the tortuous plot of Love and Murder (1966), we gather that Helen (who does not even merit a name) belongs to a gang which is run by a psychedelic eye. One of the members of the gang helps rob a bank and then makes off with the money. The gang assumes that his sister Gita (Jaymala) has it. Since Gita has protection in the form of Ranjit (Ramesh Deo), they send Helen to vamp him, which she duly does, singing: Mere dil, meri jaan/ Tu keh de to kar daaloon/ Main dil ka haal bayaan (My love, just say the word/ And I’ll tell you what’s in my heart). In turn, Ranjit joins the gang and romances Helen to get information. It becomes obvious that Helen is the kind of woman who wants the money for herself, and is willing to double-cross the gang and Ranjit. Eventually everything is sorted out, but not before Helen has died, tortured by Ranjit who ties her to a strange contraption that administers shocks and asphyxiates her simultaneously. One might say she had it coming: a gang member, a double-crosser both in love and commerce.

In Nasihat (1967), Pinky (Helen) claims that not only can she dance, she can also make others dance to her tune. This dull film, which has Dara Singh playing the villain who dies and is replaced by the lookalike hero, could not even be rescued by Helen’s red gloves, her supporting chorus of orange miniskirts and the song Boy-oh-boy/ Mujhko deewaana na kar/ Aa mere kareeb aa (Boy-o-boy, do not madden me/ Come, come close to me). A gang-member, Pinky makes the fatal mistake of keeping a diary with which she blackmails the uber-boss (a cut-price version of the villain from Diamonds Are Forever) and gets killed for her pains.

Likewise, in Preetam (1971), Helen plays Sarita, with not a single redeeming feature, not even the excuse of being an outsider—Catholic, Anglo-Indian. Preetam (Shammi Kapoor) has been adopted after his murderous and abusive father was arrested and his mother died. He grows up into a good-natured wastrel while the true son of the family, Anil (Vinod Khanna), grows up into an intelligent and studious young man. Only, he isn’t intelligent enough to see through Sarita, his lady love, a cabaret artiste and part of a gang run by Preetam’s biological father who wants to destroy the family.

Anil dies before he and Sarita can be married. Quick on the uptake, Sarita claims to be carrying Anil’s child and threatens suicide. Preetam agrees to sacrifice his love for Sharan (Leena Chandavarkar) to keep the family honour intact, especially since he owes the family for adopting him. On the wedding night, Sarita should be sitting demurely on a flower-strewn bed, covered in her red sari. Instead here she is, stepping out of the bathroom wearing a red robe. She throws it open with a flourish—for us, because Preetam is asleep—and reveals a short red nightdress, the breasts accentuated in black sequins. She turns, again for us, and unzips her nightdress until we are quite sure that she is wearing nothing else underneath it. Then she climbs into bed with Preetam and awakens him.

When he turns her down, she urges: Come darling, aaj ki raat bhi koi sharam karta hai? (Who feels shame on a night like this?). She tells him the truth: Anil never touched her. She tells him a lie: she hated Anil and loved him (Preetam) from the first. He slaps her but she persists and gets in the last word. ‘Leave the door open, in case you change your mind,’ she says. ‘I’ll be waiting.’

Sarita harasses the family, smoking, drinking, refusing to divorce Preetam with an unanswerable question to her mother-in-law: ‘For an Indian woman, isn’t it a crime to even think of divorce?’

Here is the crime then: a sneaky attack on the ideal Indian woman and therefore on marriage. Naturally, she deserved her death.

Instances can be repeated endlessly. In Mere Jeevan Saathi (1972), Kamini kidnaps the hero when he is unconscious, keeps him captive in her palace, whips him when he will not play the piano for her, and tries to turn him into a toy boy. Many of these acts may be criminal but the real crime is her early declaration in the film that she is a hunter and that the more intelligent and dangerous the prey, the more the kill excites her. The temporary softening in the delirious panting of Aao na gale lagaalo na (Come hold me) is nullified by her exhilaration at the idea of pursuing on horseback a blind man who is on foot. When she plunges to her death off a cliff, it is clear to anyone that she is being punished for her sexual predatoriness.

The second kind of death reserved for the bad girl was expiatory. Here the vamp was generally portrayed as a good woman gone astray. For instance, in Pyaar Kiya To Darna Kya (1964), Nisha (Helen) is only a cat’s paw in a larger game of revenge being played by Jeevan (Pran). She is a dancer in his hotel and is in love with him. He wants her help in taking revenge against the rich boy and spoilt brat Rajesh (Shammi Kapoor) who, he wrongly believes, has insulted him by helping his sister marry a servant.

After they’ve succeeded in their plan, Nisha reminds Jeevan of his promise. He refuses to marry her and so she spills the beans to Rajesh. In a rage, Rajesh beats Jeevan up. Nisha arrives after Jeevan has been thrashed senseless and revives him with a glass of water. He shoots her, but she has already called the police. Her death here is an expiation of her connivance against the hero; it is not punishment, for she acted out of an honourable motive: love.

In CID 909 (1967), we’re in James Bond territory, with Feroze Khan playing the code-numbered secret agent of the title. Indian scientists, Lord love ’em, have invented a formula that will maintain international peace (?) and which has been pinched by a gang of spies (?!). The only problem is that the formula is in code. Sophia (Helen) tells her fellow gangsters that only two people can decode it: a famous professor and his daughter Reshma (Mumtaz), coincidentally and fortunately, Sophia’s friend.

And so Sophia arrives at Reshma’s house and invites her to her last performance in the city. CID 909 also turns up to watch over Reshma, which is part of his duties. Dressed in High Arabian Fantasy, Sophia kisses a glass and lilts: Yaar badshah, yaar dilruba/ Kaatil aankhonwaale/ Oh dilbar matwaale/ Dil hai tere hawaale (My lover, my king/ Your eyes are deadly/ My heart is your captive).

Later, Sophia tries to get hold of the formula herself. She is shot by the gang leader for this temerity, but not before she has released CID 909 and Reshma from captivity—last-minute proof that she was not entirely black-hearted. Again, therefore, she dies in expiation.

In Hum Tum Aur Woh (1971), Anita (Helen) leaves her poor husband Mahendranath (Ashok Kumar) because she wants a better life. Naturally, that very night he is offered a job in Singapore where we know he will make his fortune. We also know that Anita’s new life will founder. It does. She turns into Lily, further evidence of her descent, since the new Catholic name indicates not just her new profession, that of a dancer, but also a renunciation of her mainstream identity.

The film revolves around an attempt to kill off Ashok Kumar who wants to share his profits with his workers. When he is bundled off to Shimla, the gang follows and so does Lily, now inveigled into the scheme of murder. As part of the gang’s ultimate plan (too complicated to explain here), the heroine of the film, Aarti (Bharti), has also been kidnapped; she is the love interest of Mahendranath’s nephew Vijay (Vinod Khanna), the hero. Aarti is about to be disfigured when Lily—who has by now discovered that the marked man is the husband she so thoughtlessly rejected—arrives in a frightful wig, white boa and red dress at the top of the stairs, waving a whisky bottle and singing: Husn agar zid pe aa jaaye/ Baat kisiki na mane, na man (When beauty turns stubborn/ Nothing will turn it aside).

She gets the men drunk, cuts the heroine loose and in so doing seals her own fate. The gang now knows that she has gone over to the other side. She dies in Mahendranath’s arms. It is thus made clear that she was not an entirely mercenary woman without a heart. She is not even a fallen woman—earlier in the film we have seen her refuse a suspicious ‘dinner appointment’ with an admirer. However, she was misguided enough to abandon her husband. We are allowed to feel sorry for her but forgiveness and rehabilitation are more than can be expected.

In Upaasna (1971), Julie/Lily kills but she does so out of a moral reason. When we meet her, she is Lily, and doing one of her most sexually outrageous dances while Mohan (Sanjay Khan) is trying to drown his sorrows in her nightclub— he has been publicly dumped by the love of his life, Kiran (Mumtaz). Lily begins in a bathtub, blowing foam away. Then she steps out in a bikini, dries herself, gets into a pink dress with two panels held together by strings and begins the impersonal seduction of the cabaret.

Hi sweetheart, she breathes at a random drinker and then laughs. Sharam aati hai? (Are you shy?)

To Mohan: Aao darling, mere saath dance karo (Come and dance with me, darling).

To the accompaniment of flickering strobe lights and high-pitched squeals, she goes into a spectacular frenzy that ends with her in a heap on the floor. A huge brazen image of an uber-man wearing a loincloth appears. She has lost many of her clothes again and is in another bikini with a blonde wig and a feathery head dress. The song is also provocative: Oh meri jawaani pyaar ko tarse/ Ang ang se masti barse/ Mujhko bana le mehboob (My youth yearns for love/ Mischief pours from my body/ Make me your love). Most of the song is spent courting this bronzed statue, stroking its body, squirming on the floor in front of it, thrusting her pelvis up repeatedly until the statue cracks and a man steps out.

Later Lily takes the drunk Mohan home. There she reveals that she was in college with him, where she was known as Julie. She has had a rough life, she tells him, but adds that she is still fighting, although she is now a single mother with a child in boarding school. Inspired by this, he promises to try and put his life together. She offers to pray for him, and church bells ring.

In a situation that prefigures Imaan Dharam, which we shall discuss shortly, Mohan offers to play father. This works out rather nicely for everyone until Mohan sees Julie’s picture in the house of the ganglord.

Dressed in a white sari (clearly, to inspire our confidence in her story), Julie confesses that the ganglord is the missing father of her child; he promised her marriage, got her pregnant and then abandoned her. She also confesses that she killed him sometime later in order to protect a girl he was trying to rape. We know already that Kiran was forced by the same ganglord to smuggle diamonds and dump Mohan. We also know that he tried to rape her, and that she stabbed him and believing herself to be a murderer, has taken shelter in the house of Mohan’s brother Ram (Feroze Khan) who is well on the way to falling in love with her.

This is economical. At one stroke, it clears Kiran of her guilt and sets the stage for the reunion of the lovers. Here it is also interesting to contrast the way Julie dies with the way Ram dies. Julie is on her way to court to give evidence that will clear Kiran. She is shot outside the court and dies with a quick choke and gasp. Ram and Mohan give chase. Ram fights the smugglers and dies in Mohan’s arms after a long speech that makes everyone cry.

Imaan Dharam (1977) was supposed to be Helen’s big number, playing heroine to the One Man Industry. It is likely that Salim Khan, who co-scripted the film—and with whom Helen was then involved—managed to get this past the film’s producer because there were two other couples—Shashi Kapoor/Rekha and Sanjeev Kumar/Aparna Sen—offering star support to this unlikely combination. Besides, after Deewar, it was accepted that sexual transgression could be part of the Bachchan persona. Also that it little mattered who the heroine was in a film that starred Amitabh Bachchan.

In the film, Ahmed Raza (Bachchan) is a small-time hood who earns his living by playing witness for hire. One day, he is hired by Jenny Francis (Helen), a drunken prostitute, to play father to her daughter who wants to know who her father is—‘Sawaal jiska jawaab mere paas sachmuch nahin hai (A question to which I truly have no answer).’ This makes it clear that the child is not the cause of the prostitution but a by-product of it.

The relationship with the child civilizes both of them, which is in keeping with the rest of the film, where everyone seems to ascend to virtue, except for Sanjeev Kumar and Aparna Sen, who are already atop Mount Righteous. Jenny gives up drinking; Ahmed swears off lying (she is wearing white when he does so).

He offers to marry her but just before that can happen, she falls ill. He is sitting by her bed, regaling her with stories that are making her laugh. She laughs herself into a seizure caused by spurious medicines that have been created by the very people Ahmed Raza defends with his lies. She leaves him in charge of the child and pays for her sins. However, here Helen’s death is elevated to star status. She gets a proper scene, a little irony and a touch of pathos.

Perhaps because of the failure of Imaan Dharam, a flop that rocked the industry, or because of the whims of the editor, Dostaana (1980), the other film into which Salim wrote Helen, had her dying a quick death again—unsplendid, unremarked.

We first meet Sylvia leaning on a golf club and applauding prettily as the smuggler makes his shots. Beautiful shot! she coos. Main mar gayi! (I just died!)

Inspector Vijay Verma (Amitabh Bachchan) is hot on the trail of the smuggler and his men. His informant is John D’Souza (Pran), a man with a grudge against smugglers. As an honest checkpost official, he had once refused a bribe; the smuggler sent his men to kill his wife and cripple his son. Sylvia is his sister, who has infiltrated the smuggler’s gang. For all her goodness and courage, when she is caught at it, she has time enough only to give us this nugget of information before she dies.

Most of Helen’s other deaths were retributive. They became something of a habit, so that her halfway decent (sympathetic to heroine’s jealousy), halfway decadent (willing to sacrifice her love for the hero for a diamond necklace) character Lucy in Bairaag ends up dead almost as an afterthought. But then, there were three Dilip Kumars (a father and two sons) also cluttering up this messy film.

Helen was dying right up to Sannata (1981), where her end comes in a bathtub, but only after she finishes singing an abysmal song, its refrain in English: ‘Superman, Superman, you know how much I love you, you know how much I care for you.’

It would take iconic status, as we shall see, to restore her to a death that was cinematically significant.