THE STRUGGLER AND THE GODDESS
Suketu Mehta
I am at a table outside the Sun-’N’-Sand hotel in Juhu in the late afternoon, watching the sun begin its decline and fall into the sea. This is the hotel where movie stars and gang lords used to come to see and be seen, the hotel where [the beer bar dancer] Monalisa lost her virginity to the movie producer Hari Virani.
Ali Peter John likes lounging by the poolside of the Sun-’N’Sand hotel, especially when his vodka and chicken sandwich are paid for by someone else. But he is no sponger; he pays for his meal in stories, many times over. For Ali Peter John is, as his former drinking buddy Mahesh Bhatt describes him, ‘god of the strugglers’. His perch as a columnist for Screen gives him licence to roam the highways and bylanes of Bollywood.
Ali is a fixer, a messenger between worlds, a conduit between high and low Bombay. In appearance he is a low, shambling, suspicious sort of figure, with what is called in the marriage market ‘disunited vision’, so he can look at you without looking at you. He sports a short beard that makes him look like a smuggler’s henchman and generally fails to button the top half of his shirt. But his articles in Screen read almost like sermons, so full of moral purpose are they.
Ali is an authority on B and C movies, the Sudras and untouchables—and sure-fire moneymakers—of the industry. The film trade magazines are full of full-page colour ads for them, in the sex-and-horror category. Such films are all shot very quickly, start to finish in a week, in rented bungalows in Madh Island. Then they are shown to the Censor Board in Madras, where the censors are more lenient than in Bombay. They often do better than the big-budget films in the interiors, places like Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, and the small theatres in Old Delhi, and they have names like Shaitan aur Maut, Pyaasi Aatman and Daakan. ‘They’re a mix of horror, sex and loud music,’ explains Ali. Often, in the late shows, hard-core porn is inserted at random within the film by the individual theatre owners, footage that has nothing to do with the advertised film but is the real draw for the almost entirely male audience.
Listening to Ali, you get the impression of a man who is haunted by the struggling actors who have come to Bombay and failed; he retains a special solicitude for women. Ali says that of every hundred girls who come to the city to become actresses, ‘ten are lucky, ninety are doomed’. The auditions are often held in places like the Hotel Seaside in Juhu, which Ali has renamed the Hotel Suicide, because of what it drives some of the female strugglers to after an audition in one of its rooms.
The movies will always be linked with sex and death for Ali; both signify opportunity. ‘Whenever anyone died we got a holiday in school and saw films.’ He grew up in Andheri East, home of poor Christians and Warli tribals. When the junior artistes started renting flats there, ‘it was like the invasion of a certain culture’. The Warli women were very beautiful, and the struggling actors would pick them up, telling them, ‘we are from the world of the movies’. The boy Ali was very impressed by the flamboyant actors, and it was a shock for him to learn, when he grew up, that ‘they were working as peons in offices’. He now sees them in the speakeasies on Yaari Road in Andheri, in the Urvashi beer bar, in Leo’s Country Liquor Bar, behind the dirty curtain, sitting over their nine-rupee bottle of desi liquor and planning the ways in which they will conquer the world, telling the other strugglers, ‘Tomorrow I have a shoot with Amitabh Bachchan.’
‘Being in this line for so many years, I am very shocked at their level of hiding reality,’ says Ali. ‘They will never show you they are frustrated.’ The better-off strugglers live in certain hotels and guesthouses that are associated with luck. The Marina Guest House in Bandra, for example; Rajendra Kumar used to live there. Ali tells me what the strugglers survive on: the Rice Plate. ‘Eight rupees. Rice, six puris or two chapatis, one dal. If the hotel is very large-hearted, then a small container of very watery curd and two vegetables. Eaten in the right place, it is the most balanced diet. Sometimes if they are in a good mood they give you sweet also.’ For the struggler who is getting small roles, there are the Muslimowned hotels, where for twenty rupees he can get a very good biryani.
Ali and I take a rickshaw to Yaari Road, which is buzzing in the evening, with lots of little eateries along the sides. Ali points out a waiter at one shack: ‘That guy has eight stories in his pocket. He is ready to narrate. There must be lakhs of film stories in Bombay.’ Just as there are struggling actors, there are also struggling scriptwriters. They seek an audience with a producer or director and narrate their story in real time and with real acting. In the emotional scenes, they weep affectingly. In the action scenes, they jump and flail around in the director’s office. They will usually have saved the director the trouble of casting; the star is already picked out. ‘And Vinod Khanna is running, running … he falls on the ground, rolls on the ground … and then he gets caught.’ Ali mimics the narration. ‘Meanwhile, Vinod Khanna is nowhere; he is away drinking somewhere.’
The long-distance telephone booths of Yaari Road are full of young people phoning home, telling their parents, their siblings, that their big break is just around the corner. Many of them belong to the junior artistes guild and have a precise caste system, Ali explains. If an actor in a party scene is wearing a suit, he is considered A-class and gets paid double the amount that goes to another actor, relegated to C-class because he is standing behind the A-class actor. The strugglers whom nature has blessed with a resemblance to Amitabh Bachchan or Shah Rukh Khan find work as professional doubles. Some female equivalents work in brothels. The hick from out of town is shown a photograph album of the house’s inventory. He picks a film-heroine lookalike, pays an exorbitant sum for her favours, and due to the low light and his nervousness goes back home convinced that he has spent a night with a Bombay actress. Every time he sees her on screen he flushes with secret pride.
Ali promises to introduce me to a ‘genuine struggler’, a man named Eishaan.
A few days later, we are sitting in the canteen of Filmalaya Studios. It is a shack, but a five-star shack according to Ali, because it has five fans. Across the table from me—which is fashioned from a giant Coca-Cola billboard—is a clear-faced, bright-eyed young man, wearing an earring in one ear and a gold teddy bear dangling from a chain around his neck. His brother Hitesh sits next to him, so different in looks he must have come from another gene pool. This is one of Ali’s acolytes, Eishaan the struggler. ‘If he wasn’t struggling he’d never be sitting in this canteen,’ declares Ali. For Eishaan did not run away from a village in Bihar to come to the film world to try his luck; he managed a flourishing cloth business in Dubai for five years before he came to Bombay. He is a Sindhi, a NRI struggler, who has seen both feast and famine in his twenty-five years. He has travelled in a Mercedes, in a Rolls-Royce and in the Bombay local trains. He stayed with thirteen people in a one-bedroom flat in Andheri before his family moved to a house in Jaipur, which his mother sold her jewellery to buy. He’s been dreaming about being a hero since he was sixteen and poring over the centrefolds in Screen. At that time, one of his uncles, working for a production company in Bombay, got him work as a model in a photo shoot, and he pocketed eight hundred rupees. For a teenager in Jaipur, it must have been a big deal, signifying much more than its purchasing power.
The teenager finished school up to the twelfth standard and then his family moved to Dubai, where he managed a textile shop for an Arab man, making seventy thousand rupees a month. Then in the Gulf War, business went down. He kept visiting Bombay. He felt he should do something else, something closer to his heart. Back in Dubai, a supermarket manager named Starson—‘he knew about stars’—wandered into the cloth shop. ‘He used to tell me, “You are not an ordinary person. I see something in you.”’ The young man was in this cloth shop at this time, Starson said, but it was only a rest stop, to drink some water. ‘This is not the end. You’ll be ruling.’
The boy felt he could tell Starson his dream. ‘He said, do it. There will be a lot of trouble, but never give up.’
So the cloth shop manager left Dubai and came to Bombay to become a movie star. The city had changed its name to Mumbai, so he changed his name too. When he was born, his parents, with their middle-class lack of imagination, had named him Mahesh, the sheer ordinariness of which he had been labouring under all these years. In the 1950s and 1960s, Muslim actors changed their names to Hindu ones—such as Dilip Kumar—to be accepted. In the 1990s, there was no such need. Even as the BJP and the Sena were ascendant, the biggest movie stars in the country were a trio of Muslim stars, the Khans: Shah Rukh, Aamir and Salman. Mahesh changed his name to Eishaan, which has an Urdu ring, a filmi ring to it.
Eishaan started out taking a multitude of classes: action classes, acting classes, dance classes. The dance classes cost thousand rupees a month, the action class five thousand rupees for three months, and the acting class cost fifteen thousand rupees. In the action classes they were taught tae kwon do. Then they would be taken to the beach to learn filmi action—diving and rolling and throwing punches. He demonstrates. ‘They should pass by just a little bit,’ just barely missing the body, just as the audience hears the satisfying dhishoom! He thought the acting teacher saw something special in him. ‘My sir, Roshan Taneja, kept me on as an assistant for a year and a half,’ he says proudly. Then he adds, ‘Unpaid. It was my honour.’
He got offered roles in C films and in TV serials, but he had set his sights on the A films. Eishaan is very clear about what kind of roles he will accept. ‘I came here with the intention of becoming a hero. It was not to become an actor.’ He then met a producer who promised him a role in a film he was doing. Every two or three months he would enquire of the producer about the status of the film and would be told, ‘We’re looking for a director.’ The director was never found. Meanwhile, Eishaan had stopped making his rounds of the producers’ offices, believing that his launch was imminent. He kept waiting for a year and a half, and in that period he lost his other contacts.
He started afresh, and after four or five months he met Chetan Anand at a fashion studio and gave the director his portfolio. Chetan Anand was a legendary film director who had come over from Pakistan after Partition and was part of a film dynasty. He was doing a film about Partition, a Muslim girl falling in love with a Hindu boy. Eishaan was at a friend’s place when he got the call from Chetan Anand. ‘You’re on,’ said the director. ‘I was out of the world,’ recalls the struggler. ‘I started dreaming, when they say “Action!” how I would react.’ He spent nine months with the director, recording seven songs. Then the eighty-seven-year-old Anand fell sick. ‘He had some liver problem; he lost both livers,’ says Eishaan. Anand died, and so did the movie.
His family and friends demanded that he come back to the cloth business. ‘But people don’t understand the importance of a Chetan Anand sitting with me discussing a scene for hours on end. That was pleasing to the actor in me. But a mother and father sitting in Jaipur don’t know who Chetan Anand is. My parents were praying to god: “Give him some intelligence and make him come back.”’
Eishaan decided to stay in the city, because if he left he could never return. ‘Now here came the truth: However much you bend, the world will make you bend more.’ The struggler was now having trouble even getting into TV, at which he had turned up his nose earlier. Now even film actors were ready to do TV, in the economic slump of the mid-1990s. And the TV producers wanted known faces even on the small screen. Eishaan made his daily rounds of the producers’ offices, carrying his two pictures of himself. ‘I know what happens to those pictures when there are more than ten thousand people coming to your office.’
I have seen such pictures in a thick photograph album in Vinod’s [Vidu Vinod Chopra’s] office, for the director to consult when he is casting minor roles. The album has young people, old people, children, mothers, grandfathers. It has attractive, even stunning, people; it has repulsive and villainous people. It has demure Hindustani naris; it has tarty vamps with breasts spilling out of tight blouses. All of humanity that is useful to the screen is represented here. They start out in the pages of this album on the first stage of their long journey to the screen, where the pictures come alive with a jerk.
Every morning Eishaan goes to the gym or for a jog, to keep fit and, more important, to look fit. He has to spend on clothes, to keep up his presentation, until he proves himself as an actor; then, as with the older, established Hindi film actors, he can safely run to fat and dress like a slob. His car is in an advanced state of melancholy. The white Maruti has a large brown rust spot on the front, and when you close the door it rattles shut. But he keeps it anyway, at considerable expense. ‘To get entry inside a studio you need a car, so the doorman will salute you. In a taxi he’ll let you go; in a rickshaw he’ll ask you questions; and if you’re walking, he won’t allow you in. When I was working in Dubai I was the boss; now I have to say “Sir, sir”.’ For a struggler, this is the rule of life: You have be very buttery.’
His is the eternal quandary of the novice job seeker. ‘I don’t understand when they ask you “What have you done? Have you done anything before?” If everyone asks the same question, when do I get the chance to do something?’ He envies the female strugglers. ‘Girls have it easy; there is the couch.’ Eishaan avoids modelling because of the homosexuals in the fashion business. He sometimes resents the hundreds of thousands of people who want to be stars and compete with him at the lower end of the chain, who are willing to work for free. ‘Every Tom, Dick and Harry brushing his teeth in the mirror thinks if Nana Patekar can do it why not me? But they make it tough for people who are actually talented.’
When Eishaan came to Bombay, he was inspired by the stories of stars who had come up the rough way, such as Mithun Chakraborty. ‘He was my idol, the way he struggled, the way he came up in life. He used to sleep on footpaths, he was eager to get his bread.’ So worshipful of Mithun was Eishaan that he once had a big fight with his father over him. In his house in Jaipur, he had installed a huge laminated portrait of the star in the living room. When Eishaan’s father came down from Dubai and saw the picture, he removed it without his son’s knowledge. Eishaan went on a hunger strike. His family, faced with a choice between living with the dark actor’s massive likeness and their son starving to death, yielded. They put the picture back up.
Eishaan is on the lookout for One Good Role. He knows that people aren’t taking chances on newcomers—the costs of movies these days don’t allow for risk-taking—but One Good Role can make it all happen, as it did for Manoj Bajpai, who struggled for years before he got the role in Satya which made him a star. It will happen for Eishaan too, he says. ‘I know my calibre.’
‘These struggle stories are the biggest enemies of the younger generation,’ says Ali mournfully. ‘One success story destroys one thousand lives.’ He could write about Anupam Kher, who came from Simla to Bombay to make it as a star. He used to walk from Bandra to the Prithvi Theatre, says Ali; he had only two pairs of khadi kurta pyjamas, which he would wash in the night and walk them dry in the morning. He lived on vadapav and tutored slum children for five rupees a month. Then Mahesh Bhatt discovered him and cast him in Saaransh, and now he is a star as well as a director. ‘These stories drive the people sitting in the village mad,’ notes Ali.
I tell Eishaan that I’d stopped over in Dubai for a day on my way to America. He had loved living there. ‘The traffic was so disciplined, everyone drove in their lanes.’
His family there is wealthy. I ask whether he would return to Dubai.
‘I love my India,’ he says, in the manner of a man confessing to adultery.
He does think sometimes about what it might be like if he returned to his life in Dubai, with all its comforts. But Bombay has a unique advantage for an actor. ‘In Bombay you watch everything. For an actor you need to observe so many things.’ It begins when he flies into the city, observes the people in the slums by the airport, and sees a city of strugglers. ‘They are fighting with their lives. It’s raining, pouring, but still they’re fighting. Probably we people are addicted to this life, we need news every moment of every day.’ If he leaves Bombay, after two days he wants to come back, Eishaan declares.
Ali goes him one better. ‘It takes me one day. I want to come back after one day away.’ Ali is not at home outside Bombay. He tells us about a recent trip to the small town of Khambhat, where he was watching a movie. Midway through the film, a message flashed on the screen: ‘Chandulal Shah is dead.’ Chandulal Shah was somebody who lived in the town. The movie had to end and everybody had to go home.
When Eishaan came to Bombay to make it in the movies, he knew it would be a struggle. ‘But I never thought it would be harder every time.’ He had enough savings for two or three years and supportive family and friends. In the beginning, he had rented a flat, paying five thousand rupees a month. But his expenses averaged thirty-five thousand a month. Once every three days he would go out to dinner, buying meals for a multitude of cousins who were always coming and going, taking out-of-town visitors to the beer bars.
Over the years, as his star dipped, so did his budget, which is now down to eleven thousand rupees a month. He has had the great good fortune of being able to stay rent-free in a flat owned by one of his best friends, who has given it to him for two years. Eishaan doesn’t go out to the discos any more, doesn’t even go out for dinner. ‘Today, to pay three hundred fifty for a prawn dish— it’s horrible, a criminal wastage.’ He has learned to cook and clean for himself.
The cousins have by now withdrawn their financial support. Hitesh tells me he still sends his brother money and keeps trying to persuade him to come back to the soft life in Dubai. ‘I speak to him for twenty minutes on the phone—’
‘That costs him around five hundred rupees,’ interjects Eishaan, quantifying his brother’s love.
‘—and I tell him you can live a better life somewhere else. He has gone through such a bad phase. Every second of these four years has given huge tension.’ Hitesh recalls Eishaan’s excuses for not getting roles: it was the monsoon, so there were no shoots; then it was Ganapati, so there was a holiday, then Diwali; then it was the Hindu period of shradh, so no filming. After a while, Hitesh got angry with him. It wasn’t because he wasn’t earning money but because of ‘the psychological point: He suffers. That is more important, for me at least’. He was worried that Eishaan would do something dangerous, something wrong, ‘when people bang you on every part of your body’.
It has gotten so Eishaan doesn’t go home to Jaipur any more. ‘They all ask, “Is nothing happening?” A friend who doesn’t know me much in Dubai calls me up and asks, “Nothing is happening?” My parents, relatives, well-wishers are saying, “All these people are coming in, why not you?” I have no answer to this question, Why not me? Sometimes I blame it on God, sometimes I don’t answer.’
Eishaan is a devout follower of the goddess Durga in all her many avatars. ‘I have a small temple at home. When I feel like breaking down, I break down in front of god. I always feel that god is trying my patience. Every ten to fifteen days I have a tendency to crack.’ So Eishaan, in his depths, weeps and wails in front of the statue of his Ma. Why is she being so cruel to him? She has given a chance to all the others, why is she denying a chance to him, her most devoted son?
A few months later, Ali gives me the glad news that Eishaan has signed a B film, in which he is the star. Ali thinks I have something to do with this. ‘He met you, and within two meetings he became a hero; otherwise he has been waiting for last four years.’
I meet Ali and Eishaan at the Sun-’N’-Sand and the struggler tells me how it happened. On Durga Ashtami, he prayed to Durga, and finally the goddess responded. A well-wisher, the secretary to an actress, called him. There was a director looking for a lead. Eishaan met the director in a hotel, he met the photographers, and it was finalized in less than an hour. It is a mythological film about Shakumbhari Devi, the vegetable goddess, one of the nine avatars of Durga. In times of great hunger, the goddess appears and distributes food. Once, when there was a famine, she wept, and her tears irrigated the land. There is currently a vegetable shortage all over the country—onions are at sixty rupees a kilo—and it is bringing down governments. There is a temple dedicated to this devi in the north, but it has no idol; now this film is going to give her a celluloid one. The goddess has incarnated herself expressly for Eishaan, so that he could get work.
The project is a low-budget film; it will be shot in 16mm and transferred to 35mm for projecting. Nobody’s getting paid anything much, and the film-makers will release it themselves since Eishaan is sure ‘no one will want to buy it’. But there is a consolation, as far as Eishaan is concerned: ‘They’re sure they want to complete it.’ The producers have decided to capitalize on their assets. Mr Agarwal, the financier, owns a lodge in the foothills of the Himalayas where the cast and crew will stay. The producers have also funded an ashram in Haridwar featuring a 108-foot statue of the Goddess Vaishno Devi, another of Durga’s incarnations, which will be prominently featured in the movie, along with sermons from the guru of the ashram, to whom the producers are devoted. Religious merit and financial profit will be accumulated simultaneously.
‘This would play in the villages. The devi would be hyped.’ The producers might give the film different names for the big centres and for the villages. Jai Mata Shakumbhari Devi would be appropriate for rural areas; for the urban areas, they might go with Vilayati Saas, Desi Bahu or Kudrat ka Kamaal. They’ve already recorded five songs with top singers; Eishaan is featured in a duet and in a sad song. The film’s trump card: Two of the songs are full-scale aartis; it would be incumbent on the devout Hindu audience to get to its feet in the theatre, clasp their palms in worship, and throw coins at the screen when the goddess is glimpsed. Some might even bring their own lamps to the theatre and do aarti during the songs. ‘The director—Shiv Kumar—is getting a kind of rebirth,’ says Eishaan.
Shiv Kumar is a big name in Bhojpur. He made three sex films, guiltily. He is actually a very religious person, associated with the Radha Soami group, and has taken an oath that he won’t drink alcohol or eat meat. Shiv Kumar’s previous directorial ventures were titled Beabroo, Badnaseeb and Badtar. The producer made back his money on all three.
‘He was a struggler whom I put into college as a student,’ declares Ali. He worked as a production assistant and thus got into the industry. Then he started Beabroo. ‘The story was about women being used. Men selling them and women being sold. Every third scene was a sex scene. The girl is about to take off her clothes, the man is about to take off his clothes, the bed is shown, and cut!’ All the songs had double meanings. But the film had a message, explains Ali. ‘No, such things should not happen. This is very bad! The censors were saying, “What a message! This is fantastic!”’ It became a huge hit for its circuit.
Kumar’s fourth film will be shot in Dehradun, Haridwar and Mussoorie, over forty-five days. The heroine, Raashee, is slim and tall and has an ‘Indian look’, explains Eishaan. She’s dark. The role came just in time for him. ‘Since I saw you last I have gone through a lot of mental torture with my family,’ Eishaan tells me. An astrologer had come to his home and, in the presence of his brother and his cousin, told him he was wasting his time. ‘It’s a criminal waste. Go back.’ His family members seized on the astrologer’s prophecy. ‘They took me left–right. “See, see what he said? Now you leave this.”’
But then Eishaan brought out his trump card: his starring role in Jai Mata Shakumbhari Devi.
And what was their reaction?
‘They are excited. I know. They have to be.’ His brother didn’t believe it until he showed him the train tickets given to him to travel north for the shoot. Eishaan hasn’t seen the script yet. The director has narrated the story to him. ‘I didn’t want to ask the director for a script,’ Eishaan says.
Ali approves of his decision. ‘If you ask for a script, you’re almost asking for disqualification, even if you’re an established star. “Who are you? You think we are making shit?”’
Eishaan is prepared to go in complete humility. ‘People won’t have much of an ego problem under this banner. I told the director, “Even if your cook is missing, I’ll be there.”’ Ali advises the star that he should not put on weight during the shoot, as will happen if they look after him well. Eishaan responds that he is carrying his jogging shoes, and will live on jaggery and peanuts. Ever generous, Eishaan is lending his flat—which is itself on loan to him from a friend—to his Muslim neighbours, in whose family there is a wedding, for the time he’s gone. Property is always communal in Bombay; there is a constant circulation of sleeping space.
The star comes to my office in Elco Arcade, fresh from the first segment of his shoot. He looks good; he has just been jogging on the beach. He has thrown himself into the film. ‘I want to sleep and breathe the role.’ Eventually he would like to work with a renowned director, he tells me, like Vidhu Vinod Chopra. But I don’t think he’s asking me for an introduction to Vinod. Eishaan is not that pushy. It’s part of his problem: He’s not that pushy.
The shooting of Jai Mata Shakumbhari Devi has come to a hopefully temporary halt, because the director suddenly got a spate of TV work. He was asked to submit two serials to Doordarshan. He has offered Eishaan the role of the heroine’s second husband in the serial. Eishaan has now actually been paid for his work—a first instalment of ten thousand rupees, for what was supposed to be three days’ work. It grew into twenty-two days. There’s just one small problem: ‘The cheque hasn’t cleared yet.’
The producers had put their star up in the hotel they owned, in a leaking room with another actor who smoked like a chimney and snored. Eishaan can’t take cigarette smoke. He recorded his room-mate’s snores and played them for the producers, who agreed to transfer him to another room.
The budget was one notch below shoestring; it was the plastic tip of the shoestring. The producers were too cheap to give Eishaan a tape of the songs, so he stole it from the sound studio. They were too cheap to give him a photograph to show his brother that he was working, so he stole it from the stills album. The inexperienced producers didn’t arrange for enough security on the sets. ‘When I was not shooting, I used to assist the director. I used to shout Silence! and give the clap.’ This led to altercations with the public. One Saturday, Eishaan was trying extra hard to keep control of his temper, because he realized the hot-headed influence of Shani Maharaj. But a tapori kept interfering with the shot. The star-cum-security-guard asked him to keep quiet. It escalated into fisticuffs. Eishaan pulls out a newspaper clipping. ‘Hero thrashed by public’, reads the headline, from a Haridwar paper. Actually, insists Eishaan, it was the other way round: ‘I bashed him straightaway.’ But he is grateful that the newspaper wrote it the way it did; if he had been portrayed as a hero that beats up the public, the local toughs would have been hunting for him.
The shooting ratio was roughly one to one. ‘Usually the first take was the last, except when a person in the public was passing by and got caught in the background of the shot.’ Then, grudgingly, there was a second take. The costume department in the film depended on what was available daily in the market, like vegetables. Every morning the woman in charge of costumes went shopping in the local market for clothes; until they arrived, the entire set was in a state of tension. The hotel where they were staying had an ‘exhibition-cum-sale’ of garments on the premises. The producer spotted this and instantly saw an opportunity. He asked his star to select the clothes he needed for the day’s shoot from the sale, wear them for the filming, and then return them at the end of the day, telling the merchants they didn’t fit.
On the set of the film about the vegetable goddess, there was a severe shortage of vegetables. The cast and crew were fed a diet of potatoes. ‘Not a single dish excluding potatoes. Even the yoghurt had potatoes.’ Eishaan began losing his patience with the tuberous diet. He tried hinting subtly at his discomfort; he composed and recited aloud satirical verses on the potato. The producers simply said that Eishaan complained too much. Shooting on the set alternated with an unseemly scramble for nutrition. The technicians were hardened veterans of many a B movie. ‘When the food was served the technicians would take four or five rotis and a lot of vegetables and disappear. We would have to wait in line with our plates until they got more food.’
It got worse. One day Eishaan was eating his meal, which turned out to be kadhi with pakodas. He has a habit of picking and turning over his food before putting it into his mouth, which served him well on this occasion. A pakoda broke open under his fingers, and he found a whole cockroach nestled in it. The next day he found a worm in the rice. So the star took on yet another role: that of maid. He got a broom and mop and went into the kitchen and started cleaning. He didn’t stop until he had cleaned out the whole kitchen.
Eishaan carried his statue of Durga with him to the shoot and made a small temple in his hotel room. He believed that as a result of bad karma, she was punishing him with bad food. ‘I never dreamed of this kind of khana. My goddess was showing me that this is also part of life.’
In the middle of all this a hero of my childhood days appeared on the set. Eishaan shows me a photograph of a man dressed in saffron swami’s robes. ‘Dara Singh,’ he says, and the name takes me back. Dara Singh versus King Kong. He was India’s greatest pro wrestler, and his name became a synonym for a strong man, a fighter. He used his wrestling success to become a god of the B films and was even nominated to the Rajya Sabha. The director knew the wrestler well; he had launched his son in another film. In Jai Mata Shakumbhari Devi, Dara Singh plays a saint who worships the goddess. The wrestler is known all over India. Buses pulled off the highway near the town when the drivers heard that Dara Singh was in a shoot there, and everyone got off and came running towards him to touch his feet. ‘Daraji! Daraji!’
The wrestler stayed on the set for a day. Dara Singh was still supple in his old age; he never ate rice and his fingers were still very strong. Then came mealtime. ‘They gave him potatoes.’ Eishaan had a conversation with him about the food, which was predominant on the minds of the starved crew, especially after they had been forced to watch but not touch the red and green baskets full of vegetables in the scenes. The wrestler agreed with Eishaan about the necessity of eating well. ‘He said, “Whatever a man does, he does for his stomach. If the stomach doesn’t have good food, what use is anything?”’ So Eishaan bought fruits and sent them to him.
The potatoes kept coming. Eishaan started going to the market and buying his own provisions. He laid out a breakfast spread in his room every morning: cheese, jam, bread, butter, fruits. The crew began their mornings in his room and loaded up for the day. Sometimes, the star would also buy the crew dinner. All this was not cheap. Of the twenty-one thousand rupees that Eishaan is to get as his total fee, his personal expenses ran to thirteen thousand. I ask him if he was reimbursed by the producer, and he laughs. While returning to Delhi, the bus with the crew broke down for a couple of hours. It was dinner time, and the bus would not reach Delhi till 2 a.m. The producer distributed four hundred rupees for twenty people, to buy dinner. ‘He’s a Muslim but he has a PhD in Bania.’ It was obviously going to fall short, so the struggler from Dubai brought out his wallet and bought dinner for everyone, paying 1200 rupees. He did not ask his fellow artistes to split the bill. ‘I can’t tell people, “Give me twenty rupees each.”’ For his pains, the woman who plays his mother called him a fool.
The whole experience with Jai Mata Shakumbhari Devi has driven home at least one truth for Eishaan. ‘In films, I know I can never be a star unless something clicks.’ No Subhash Ghai or Yash Chopra will spend crores of rupees on him, he now knows. He thinks he trusts people too much—such as the producers who were supposed to launch him early in his career and never did, or died on him. He thinks he gets too emotional with people, and he should save his emotions for the camera.
But then his natural optimism reasserts itself. ‘Nana Patekar became a star at forty-two,’ the twenty-five-year-old remembers.
Eishaan turns over the pictures in the photograph album and stops at one which shows him wearing a US Cavalry hat and writing something, surrounded by a crowd of people. ‘This was the moment of my life,’ he recalls. He is signing autographs. At last, Eishaan the cloth merchant is signing autographs. When he went for his morning jog, the crowd used to jog with him. They would come to the hotel and ask at the reception, We hear there’s a hero staying here, we want to meet the hero. ‘They used to come in fives to my room. They used to come to shake my hand. Then I said, I wish my brother was here to see all these things.’ The aunt whose house Eishaan used to go to sometimes for food had three daughters, and all three developed a crush on him. They still call him in Bombay and send him cards. A girl in the film sent him a message through another girl, to tell him that she was in love with him. And the go-between herself fell in love with him. He turned both of them away. ‘I said, I’ve just had a major break-up a year and a half ago, I don’t want to get into any mess.’ The lateafternoon light falls on his face from the window, illuminating it. ‘I was very popular among the girls.’
The world was to end on 8 May 1999. The papers were full of it: a particularly malevolent arrangement of the constellations. Tens of thousands of people fled Alang, the ship-breaking yards in Gujarat, for their villages. Hundreds of thousands fled Bombay, especially the Gujaratis; Sunil, the Sena man, opened a travel agency to take advantage of the phenomenon and made a killing by scalping bus tickets out of the city. When I call up Ali one day that summer and ask him why I haven’t heard from Eishaan for a while, he laughs pretty hard. ‘He’s very stupid,’ says Ali. Eishaan is back in Jaipur. Things had been going well for Eishaan; besides Shakumbhari Devi and the TV serial, he was just about to sign another film. Then he got a call from his father in Dubai. ‘Son, the world is going to end, so let us die together! Come to Jaipur.’ The father flew in from Dubai, and on 6 May Eishaan fled Bombay and got on the train to Jaipur. There, the whole family awaited the apocalypse. Meanwhile, Eishaan missed out on the second film. ‘I really thought it was a joke,’ says Ali. ‘He doesn’t know what to do; he’s trapped between extreme orthodoxy and extreme modernism. That’s his problem.’
When the world survives, Eishaan goes back north for the second shoot of Shakumbhari Devi. When he returns to Bombay, he comes over with Ali and my friend Anuradha Tandon, a woman about-town, to my office for a fine evening of drink and story. The presence of a pretty woman in the room adds to Ali and Eishaan’s volubility; they are refreshed, as if by a fresh breeze from over the sea. Eishaan is talking to Anuradha about his film, searching for a parallel. ‘Have you ever heard of a film called Jai Santoshi Ma?’
‘Shakumbhari Maa is her aunt,’ Ali mumbles into his vodka.
Eishaan has brought a small video camera, on which he shows us scenes from the second shoot of his film. ‘This is The Making ofJai Mata Shakumbhari Devi.’ There he is, in a disco, with a bottle of liquor in front of him. A troop of dancers in Western clothes are singing, in English, She made me crazy.
‘Here I have this misunderstanding that my wife is carrying on with my cousin. So I am drinking.’
‘Social message,’ explains Ali.
Normally, the liquor bottles in Hindi films—they were all Vat 69 in the 1970s—are filled with Coke. But Shakumbhari Devi did not have the lavish budgets of those films, to throw away on Coke. ‘They mixed the Coke with water. They divided one Coke between six liquor bottles.’ So Eishaan had to take swigs from bottles of highly diluted Coca-Cola and act like a drunk. After he gets drunk, he throws the bottles around, demonstrating his distress. When he did, there were two assistants standing behind the camera holding a sheet spread to catch the bottles, so they could be used again. Another scene takes place in dense fog. The production ran out of the powder used for the fog effect, so they burned cow dung. It stung the stars’ eyes, which led to a further happy economy: ‘I didn’t need glycerine for the scenes.’
The schedule of the second shoot was packed, from noon to midnight every day. This time, to avoid the problems of technicians stealing food ahead of more genteel members of the cast, the producer had an inspiration: he parcelled out individual portions in plastic bags for each person. The food came from a Sardar’s hotel and was very good and copious, with costly ingredients— ‘paneer was like bloody flowing’—but the producer did not believe in the added expenses of plates. The crew was expected to eat straight from the bags, four in each parcel, for rice, roti, dal and vegetables. They had to tear open each bag with their teeth to get at the nourishment within. Eishaan remarked to the producers that when the autopsy was done on their dead bodies, they would find a hundred yards of plastic in each corpse. ‘Out of shame the producers called up friends in an ashram, and they sent a hundred plates.’
After a while, the plastic-enhanced diet took its toll on the star. ‘I got stomach problems. I got loose motions.’ The whistle of the cooker in the house of the people who owned the hotel tormented Eishaan; here was good home-made food being cooked every day. The daughter of the owner had a crush on him. He took advantage of this to ask her to get him some dal and khichdi for his unsettled intestines, and she obliged.
We see another scene on the camcorder of the young heroine in a river, drowning. She is flailing her arms around and screaming; she has really thrown herself into the scene. Then the hero saves her. We remark to Eishaan that she acted well.
‘She wasn’t acting. She can’t swim. She really was drowning.’
Acting the scenes on the banks of the Ganga posed special problems. Eishaan recalls the time when he had to sing a tender love song to the heroine. ‘On the shores of the sea’—he sings the song for us, clicking his fingers, while just out of the frame, dead bodies floated by in the river.
At one point, a bald head appears in the frame. ‘Who’s that?’ I ask. It belongs to a sadhu; this being Haridwar ‘there were always thirty or forty sadhus around, all of them potheads’. They were taking a break from their religious austerities, crowding around the sets of the mythological film, creating a traffic jam. All of them wanted bit parts in the film, and their requests could not be taken lightly, since many of them were dangerous. ‘All the dacoits from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, whoever has a criminal record, runs up there and shaves his head,’ explains Eishaan.
I ask him when the film will be released.
There is a pause.
‘They have to find buyers first.’
Jai Mata Shakumbhari Devi is competing with another mythological, Devi, which has, reel for reel, many more miracles. Eishaan is thinking of buying the rights to release his film in Rajasthan, where he is confident he can double his money. He would need two to three lakh for publicity, which with this sort of movie mostly involves hiring auto-rickshaws with loudspeakers roaming through the villages, alerting the citizenry to the fabulous entertainment soon to set up tent in their midst. Since filming began, the producers have discovered that a new temple to Shakumbhari Maa is about to be installed somewhere in the northern suburbs of Bombay. The director instructed his cast and crew that henceforth everybody was to pray to this goddess.
Eishaan is much more confident now than when I first met him. He doesn’t answer all my questions unless I repeat them three or four times, and even then he doesn’t answer some of them. He has started to stand me up; he is not returning some of my calls. There is no disrespect involved, it is just that his status has changed. In my office, he automatically takes the armchair. But even so, he mixes the drinks and serves all of us, refreshing our glasses periodically.
At last I see Jai Mata Shakumbhari Devi, in a plush preview theatre in Bandra. The audience is mostly Eishaan’s friends and family and a couple of distributors. It is the kind of movie where most of the people in the titles have only one name. My friend doesn’t seem to be very high up on the totem pole of this movie, judging by the misspelling of the star’s name in the titles. It is now ‘Eisshan’.
It is not just an out-and-out mythological film. As Eishaan tells me, ‘It has romance, action, everything.’ Since the big stars are charging a crore and up for their films, even mainstream producers are getting into the quickie B and C movies, Ali had explained. There were three ways to survive. One was to make a horror film that didn’t need to show any famous faces, another was to make a sex film, and the third was to make a religious film. ‘Or a combination: horror, sex and tantric religion.’ Shakumbhari Devi possesses all three ingredients.
The film deals with a contest between the forces of evil, summoned by a tantric, and the forces of good, marshalled by the vegetable goddess. In the beginning there is an extended family in a village, including two brothers, one with a virtuous wife, the other married to a harridan. The second brother wishes to go to America. A wandering singer sings the praises of Shakumbhari Maa, and the entire village turns out to pray to her. The brother sings and prays, and immediately a telegram arrives, summoning him to a job in America. His noble sister-in-law sells her jewellery so the family can pay for the tickets. When they come back from living abroad (established through two shots of an Air India plane, one taking off, the other landing), they are ‘Americanized’. They have brought a suitcase full of money (ten lakh) to save the older brother’s business, but alas! they checked it through and, as per Air India custom, their baggage has been lost in transit.
When we first see Eishaan, he is wearing a denim shirt, jeans, and a hat such as was favoured by the US Cavalry. The mother and daughter wear T-shirts, trousers and skirts; they are NRIs and therefore sluts. Through the film, the producers seem to have utilized the exhibition-cum-sale of garments well. The costumes range from high-slit long skirts to a polka-dotted vest and bright red cravat for Eishaan to a raggedy dress with patches that the bad mother and daughter are forced to wear when they become poor.
But Eishaan is finally a hero, not just an actor. He goes through every single heroic action. He sings love songs while thrusting his crotch forward and rotating it in a circle, he takes on three armed thugs single-handedly and vanquishes them—so powerful is his punch that it creates a reverse sonic boom; you hear the sound dhishoom! of fist connecting with villain even before it has actually done so on the screen—he drinks whisky when he loses his girl, and he makes money in business.
The plot, like the Lord, moves in mysterious ways. The storytelling style of the movie follows a kind of jump cutting of the script. A character proceeds from one momentous event in his life to another—marriage, expulsion from the family, heartbreak— without the tedious intermediary details of motivation or purpose explained to the audience. You see them going from point A to point Z; the intervening alphabet actions have occurred off-screen. As a result, each succeeding scene is a happy surprise, because you never know what to expect next. My attention is seized in a way that it never is in mainstream Hindi films.
The film knows the issues and prejudices that press most heavily on the rural Indian’s mind. On the shoot, when Eishaan was subjected to the potato-heavy diet, he had told the producers, ‘You are treating us like a new bride who’s come without a dowry.’ Meanwhile, in the film, the goddess was rescuing Eishaan’s bride, who had indeed come without a dowry. The evil mother interrupts her son’s wedding to demand a dowry from the bride’s poor father. The father is humiliated—the ultimate nightmare of a village father with an unmarried daughter—but the bride prays to Shakumbhari Maa and, in contravention of the Indian Penal Code, the goddess is incarnated as an old woman bearing an impressive dowry: stacks of rupees, jewels and saris. All this later turns into ashes when the mother and her evil brother, Mr Bob, try to steal it.
The periodic interventions of the goddess knit the film together. When all seems lost, she appears, a young maiden of a startling shade of blue, adorned with ornaments in an equally alarming shade of gold. In one scene, her powers transport a series of plates of food through the air from the dining table to the shrine room; when the hungry villains follow, her clay idol smacks them about the head and shoulders while flying through midair.
Shakumbhari Maa is sometimes preceded by her singing doot. Dara Singh is the ‘fakir baba’ and wears saffron. ‘Is he meant to be Muslim?’ I ask Eishaan. ‘No, he is a pir. We don’t know what religion it is.’ A holy man, maybe Muslim, maybe Hindu, wandering the countryside, singing the praises of a Hindu goddess. The villages will have no problem with this. The music composer and lyricist responsible for writing the Hindu devotional songs is a Jain. The executive producer and villain (Mr Bob), Shaheed Khan, is Muslim. He too is a follower of Vaishno Devi.
As soon as the heroine gets married, she stops flouncing around in a miniskirt and ankle boots and appears in a sari. As Eishaan reposes on their flower-bedecked nuptial bed during their wedding night, his new bride blows a conch and pauses to sing a devotional hymn while he drifts off to sleep. A little later, she saves her sister-in-law from premarital sex. ‘Old-fashioned!’ complains the interrupted male, abusing the heroine. Does she realize that abroad this kind of behaviour is common? ‘This is India,’ the virtuous wife responds, and delivers the following peroration in furious Bengali-accented English: ‘What do you think to play with the chastity belt? Is it the culture of any country? Show me one of the university which educates and encourages this type of vulgar and sinful deed!’
I laugh very hard at this, until I notice that none of the old ladies sitting in the theatre are amused and I have to put my hand over my mouth and bite hard. The audience for this movie is not cynical; they have no notion of irony or camp. I am still laughing, a few days later, as I tell Monalisa about it. ‘It’s a hilarious film.’
The bar dancer doesn’t laugh either. She immediately corrects me. ‘It’s not funny. It’s a movie about god.’
The deep roots of most Indian movies in the epics are evident in this film. The evil mother is called Kaikeyi, the evil uncle Shakuni, the loyal cousin compares Eishaan to Ram, his wife to Sita, and himself to Lakshman. These names function as a shorthand for the village viewer, readily slotting each character into an established mythological role: the bad stepmother, the good brother. The Indian viewer doesn’t like surprises. And there is an added bonus for the audience. A note at the end of the press release at the preview screening promises that Shakumbhari Maa will surely grant the desires of anyone who sees this film, hears its story, or preaches its message. These words preface the Mahabharata and many other Hindu narratives. The very act of listening will confer spiritual benefit on the listener.
During the intermission, Shiv Kumar, the director, tells me he has tried to send a message to the youth in a format that would be pleasing to them. This may explain why the heroine, wearing sixinch heels, gyrates her butt in one of the shortest skirts I have seen on screen, shortly before she dons a sari and prostrates herself in front of the goddess. There are quite a few such scenes pleasing to the youth: plenty of short skirts, transparent blouses, on-screen kisses, and raucous innuendo in the dialogue, interspersed between scenes of devout fervour. The director reminds me that he has been making completely different types of films for many years, sex comedies mostly. Here now is a completely new genre: the mythological sex comedy.
Kumar claims the budget of the film was eighty lakh; Eishaan tells me it was closer to forty. In the film industry, every person has a ‘discount level’, a percentage by which what he says should be disbelieved. Kumar’s discount level, therefore, is 50 per cent. Whatever the budget, unlike many bigger films it has a good chance of making money. One of the reasons is that the Uttar Pradesh government, bowing before the goddess, has exempted it from entertainment tax.
The film initially receives favourable publicity. The trade magazine Super Cinema reports, ‘The price that a devotional film fetched in North recently left many gaping. Once in a while comes a devotional film that really sweeps the market like hurricane.’ Unfortunately, the hurricane turns into a light sprinkle and then dries up altogether. Jai Mata Shakumbhari Devi was never incarnated on a Bombay theatre screen for paying customers. In Bombay nobody dies of famine; the city needs not a vegetable goddess but a housing goddess, a traffic goddess, a good government goddess.
But the goddess in her many avatars continues intervening in the course of Eishaan’s life. One night he is at a cousin’s house in Worli. They keep insisting that he stay for the night; three times he is about to leave and three times they pull him back, even getting out shorts and a toothbrush for him. But something compels him to drive back to his place in Andheri. At around 2 a.m., near Mahim Church, he sees a mob on the street. He had been thinking about his forthcoming pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi, eagerly anticipating the thirteen-kilometre trek up to her shrine. When he sees the mob, his first thought is that riots have broken out; it is a Muslim dominated area. The mob stops his car and demands that he open the door. Then he sees a body of a woman on the road who has been knocked down by a cab. Her head and thigh are bleeding profusely. The cab has fled, and she needs to be taken to the hospital. The crowd puts her in the back seat of his car and he drives to Leelavati Hospital, where he discovers that she has no money for treatment. So the struggler takes out his wallet and gives two thousand rupees to the doctor for the stranger’s treatment and stays by the woman’s hospital bed all night. The next day he searches out her relatives, puts them and the woman into a cab, and gives the cabbie money to drive them to a less expensive hospital in Malad.
Eishaan is of the opinion that the goddess was testing him. ‘When I was driving I was thinking about Vaishno Devi, and how it would be the best place to celebrate my birthday.’ If the goddess had not moved him out of his cousin’s house in the middle of the night and placed him at that exact spot where the woman had just been knocked over, she might not be alive today. So he will go to Vaishno Devi with his parents, celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday, and know that he has been faithful to her dictates.
After Shakumbhari Devi, the heroine, Raashee, goes on to star in Club Dancer No. 1. From playing the chaste devotee of the goddess, she goes back to playing with the chastity belt. Eishaan disappears from Bombay, perhaps to Jaipur, perhaps back to his family business in Dubai.
Extracted from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.