PROLOGUE

‘What the hell?’ Samar Vir Singh rears up in bed, looking around dazedly for the source of the cacophony, his head throbbing fit to burst. His phone glows green in the gloom and he lunges for it, thumb jabbing downwards to shut the damn thing up.

There are sixteen missed calls from Zeeshan. But Zee never wakes up before noon. Is it that late already?

Also, sixteen?

Samar calls him back.

‘Hello?’

‘What hello-hello, bastard,’ laments Zeeshan Khan hoarsely, his famous baritone barely recognizable. ‘Here our balls are on the chopping block and you’re saying hello? We’re fucked. We’re finished. We’re dead. Where the hell are you?’

‘At home,’ Samar replies. ‘Stop being so dramatic, Zee. What happened?’

Zeeshan makes a weird gibbering sound.

Samar stretches and shakes his head. ‘I didn’t get that. Speak slowly.’

‘Get online and Google our names. Then call me back.’

‘But—’

But Zeeshan has already hung up.

Samar drops the phone onto the bed and looks about blearily for his iPad. It is nowhere in sight. The dark fitted suit he had worn last night is lying crumpled inside-out at the foot of the bed, along with the tight shoes his stylist insisted ‘went’ with it. Samar shudders. God, that outfit was uncomfortable. He walks over to the window and yanks open the curtains, wincing at the glare. Ah, there’s the iPad.

The early Mumbai sunshine illuminates a lean, muscular figure, clad only in white low-slung drawstring pyjamas. His hair is dark, his skin-tone warm, his feet well-shaped and sinewy as they grip the wooden floor. His prominent aquiline nose and strong, stubbled jaw combine to create a harsh effect, but he also possesses a sudden little-boy-smile which, when it flashes, makes nonsense of the harshness and puts even the rawest of Bollywood newcomers totally at ease.

He isn’t smiling now, though.

* Upstart duo badmouth industry bigwigs.

* ‘My dick can direct better than the moron who won Best Director,’ declares Samar Vir Singh.

* ‘Chutiyon ki baraat’ is how gen-now superstar Zeeshan Khan and edgy young director Samar Vir Singh summed up the sight of the Bombay film industry stepping onto the red carpet for the Sparkler Awards tonight.

Watch the video of the disgruntled nominees, who won nothing last night and ended up at the Oregano Bar and Kitchen for a late night bitch-fest, here.

Samar rubs his scummy eyes and clicks on the link. Zeeshan and he, dishevelled and disorderly in their awards night finery, bloom into sight, standing atop the deserted bar at Oregano, waving about bottles of Jack Daniels while singing a bawdy version of the classic song from Yaadon ki Baraat.

Samar swears and reaches for his phone. Zeeshan answers at the first ring.

‘You saw?’ he demands.

‘Yeah,’ Samar replies. ‘D’you have any idea who recorded it?’

‘That fat smirky waiter—Desmond. I’m sure it was him. He spits into the food and waters down the alcohol. I never tip him.’

‘Did we actually say all this stuff?’

‘We must have,’ Zeeshan replies morosely. ‘I remember you ranting on about how sycophantic directors are Bollywood’s biggest bane, and how the slippery slope of tiny, tiny compromises leads inexorably to a shit-pit full of glittering, diamond-encrusted, 100-crore turds. But it gets a little hazy after that.’

‘How mad is everybody?’

‘Seething. AK, the older Khans, the studio heads. There’s been abso no reply to the sorry-sorry smses I’ve been sending out all morning. Hell, they aren’t even taking my dad’s calls. He woke me up with the bad news, by the way, raving with crazy eyes about The Chawl.’

Samar holds his pounding head. ‘What chawl, fucker? We didn’t go to any chawl last night.’

‘The Chawl, man. You know, where my dad grew up. When me and my sis were little, we were always made to listen to Legends-Of-The-Chawl. “You are growing up in superstar Zaffar Khan’s sea-facing bungalow—but I grew up in a CHAWL. I shared a room with thirty people and a bathroom with four hundred people blah blah blah.” It was a nightmare, dude. If we dared ask for Hubba Babba chewing gum instead of bloody Boomer, we got a lecture on The Chawl, if we asked for a second scoop of ice cream, we got a lecture on The Chawl. Anyway, he thinks yesterday’s fiasco is going to send our family straight back to The Chawl.’

‘So the Khans are actually Chawlas?’ Samar can’t help grinning.

Zeeshan’s voice climbs an octave.

‘Don’t joke, bastard! We’ve attacked legends, and we’ve been recorded doing it. My dad’s shut himself up in his study with his lawyers. I think he’s trying to disown me.’

‘Sonix is calling,’ Samar says abruptly. ‘Gotta go.’

He hangs up on the still-talking Zeeshan and takes the incoming call.

‘What is this, yaar Samar,’ says the mild, conversational voice of Cougar Malhotra, the massively fat head of Mumbai’s biggest film production house. ‘What is this?’

Samar sighs and ploughs his hair off his forehead. ‘Yeah, I know. Major shitkrieg. Sorry.’

‘Sorry se kuch nahi hoga,’ Cougar breathes heavily down the line. ‘You must understand, you’re an outsider. Not like Zeeshan, whose dad will grovel for him and get him off the hook by pinning all the blame on your bad influence.’

Samar’s jaw sets.

‘Look, Cougar, whatever we said last night was completely justified. The awards were a travesty. They were—’

‘Samar, baby.’ Cougar’s voice grows even softer, which is never a good sign. ‘This film has been too long in the making. Two red-hot new directors have been hatched since you started it. You’re not hot anymore, you’re lukewarm, and there are lots of eager, lukewarm directors in Bombay. Lots.’

‘Stop pressing my buttons with that not-hot bullshit.’ Samar begins to pace the wooden floor, eyes blazing. ‘It’s a goddamn golden shackle anyway, being hot. If I hadn’t been so hot, as you put it, my film wouldn’t have had such an obscenely swollen budget and I wouldn’t have been forced to stuff it full of needy egomaniacs who can’t act for arse.’

‘Such ingratitude,’ Cougar sighs. ‘We’ve given you India’s biggest stars and a budget indie directors can only dream of.’

‘Fuck off. AK is a senile and obnoxious know-it-all.’

Cougar clicks his tongue. ‘The film is delayed and way over budget and the buck stops with you. Stop blaming others.’

‘I’m not blaming others,’ Samar snaps. ‘It’s entirely my fault. I was in too much of a hurry to make this film. I started shooting without completing my homework, and now that stupid, inexcusable decision has come back to bite me in the butt.’

‘AK thinks there’s nothing wrong with the film a good item song can’t fix,’ Cougar says. ‘Something sexy and catchy, maybe by that rap artist everybody’s nuts about. All of us at Sonix think it’s a good suggestion.’

In one graphic, concise, and feelingly uttered sentence, Samar Vir Singh tells his producer what he can do with his good suggestion.

‘We’re issuing an official apology on your behalf,’ is Cougar’s unfazed response. ‘Now for heaven’s sake, lie low and don’t talk to anyone.’

He hangs up. Samar curses and throws his phone down upon the bed, where it starts to throb and gleam as notifications—probing, salacious, insistent—pour in from what feels like every publication in the country.

SAMAR STORM at AFTERPARTY?

He was hashtagged as #Raw #Rare #SearinglyHonest and hailed as Indian cinema’s new hope less than three years ago, when he wrote and directed two brilliant films back to back, won a slew of awards, and rocked the box office.

Superstar AK famously said of him that, ‘Samar Vir Singh is a director who genuinely provides direction. Never have I seen such clarity, such rock-solid vision, and such sureness of touch in one so young.’

However, recent reports reveal that the young director’s much-lauded ‘clarity’ and ‘vision’ are now being talked of as stubbornness, cockiness, and even full-blown megalomania.

Certainly it is no secret that his third film, an untitled 125-crore rupee project for Sonix Entertainment, has been stuck in post-production for nearly six months now.

While the studio claims this is because the film requires a lot of special effects, insiders at After Animation talk of blazing rows in the edit suites, with the director almost coming to blows with Sonix top management.

‘Samar was fine through the shooting but now suddenly he doesn’t like how the film has shaped up,’ said an editor at After. ‘He’s talking of rewriting and reshooting some portions. Naturally, the producers are reeling.’

‘He’s lost his sense of judgement,’ our source at Sonix agreed. ‘In fact, he’s lost the plot entirely. Last night’s behaviour proves it.’

Beyond doubt, the director’s drunken, blistering critique of the industry that welcomed him with open arms can only be described as the own-goal of the decade.

‘People don’t like being made fun of,’ rued an industry insider. ‘Especially film people. There is talk of the movie being shelved.’

With his partner in crime Zeeshan Khan having conveniently fled the city to ‘shoot in Canada’ and Samar himself ‘out of town on personal business’, we can’t help but wonder if this is the end of the road for Samar Vir Singh, a maverick who was always out of place in the incestuous, highly hierarchical Mumbai film industry.