Death in Mumbai (15 page)

In the media scrum that followed, Moon, who migrated from Calcutta to Mumbai seeking celebrity, found herself variously portrayed as a harlot, a hard-headed careerist, even a gold-digger. ‘Two days after my mother's death a reporter—he was from your newspaper,' she said when we met, ‘called to ask me if I had ever been arrested from the Marriott for soliciting. What kind of question is that? Is there no decency?'

These questions followed her wherever she went. No landlord, even in emancipated, seen-it-all Andheri, was
willing to rent their home to her. Her old flat at Yamuna Nagar, where the shootout happened, was certified as having ‘bad vastu', and so, in this city where a house has greater premium than body and soul, it found no takers. Her younger brother who lived in Calcutta eventually came down to Mumbai and leased a flat for her in his name.

It was a year after the tragic shootout when the neighbours discovered the identity of the young woman living in their midst. Indignation reigned all around, and Moon was asked to vacate the flat. The matter reached the police, and an inspector had to come in to attest to her character before she was allowed to stay on, but only until the lease expired. It would not be renewed.

Shakir Shaikh saw Moon's notoriety merging with his own ambitions—‘With her in, the curiosity value would go up even further, it will be easier to sell the film.'

Via via—that great Mumbai modus operandi—he sent her feelers to play the lead role in
Oh! Maria.
Moon, who had been avidly reading about the killing and Maria Susairaj, was not interested. She had set her sights higher. ‘I would rather do a small role in a Yash Raj film than play the heroine in some B-grade movie,' she said dismissively. ‘This business is all about perception.'

That principle, I was learning, guided her entire life. After giving me the runaround—‘I am busy'; ‘I am travelling'; ‘I am unwell'; ‘Talk to my manager' (who did not exist because he had been sacked)—she agreed to meet me. A word from influential quarters, via via, helped.

We met at a coffee shop in Oshiwara. The coffee shop was on the terrace of a building that housed Lebanese,
Chinese and Indian restaurants, hosiery shops, film producers' offices, and most prominently, shared space on the terrace itself with the sprawling Sykz gym, which hosted a constellation of minor stars every evening. There was Koena Mitra, her body evidently touched up by a skilful scalpel; breasts rock steady as she vigorously pounded the treadmill. There was Gauhar Khan crunching her washboard abs under the eagle eye of a personal trainer. Rumour had it that when Ekta Kapoor came in to exercise, even the Jat hunks, usually enraptured by their own pecs in the mirror, swivelled to stare at her.

Coffee guzzlers sat across the glass wall trying to ignore the fishbowl gymnastics. Moon walked in dressed in the fashion of the day, indigo skinny pants, a patterned shirt tucked into them. In her pretty ballerina flats she stood slender and tall. She was striking rather than beautiful, and her startling grey contact lenses gave her a vampiric edge. She ordered a cappuccino, which was discarded after a few sips. The carrot cake was firmly rejected. ‘Na baba, I am 58 kilos, I need to be like her,' she said, pointing to Gauhar Khan. ‘She is 52 kilos. I need to lose 6 kilos for the music video that I will be doing.'

Both her Hindi and English were mongrelized, and she spoke with a thick Bengali accent that was at odds with her chic appearance. She started the interview as if reading out her résumé. ‘I am from central Calcutta…' but later, as the formality receded, she became friendlier, more at ease, and corrected herself. ‘Actually, I am from North Calcutta, and I studied in a Bengali medium school, which I left halfway through.'

Moon's father owned a furniture workshop in the old market of Bau Bazar, and her mother had been a housewife whose great ambition to dress up like Dimple Kapadia in
Bobby
was thwarted because she married too young, and into a conservative family.

‘As a kid I loved watching TV, I was fascinated by models and beauty queens.' She was ten the year Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai were crowned Miss Universe and Miss World, and wanted to wear make-up and strut down the catwalk like the models she admired here. ‘Studies didn't interest me one bit. My brother was just the opposite, he's sincere and hard-working when it comes to studies, and which is why he is now in Illinois doing his M.Tech.'

The year she turned seventeen, Shah Rukh Khan came to Calcutta for a show at the Netaji Subhas Bose Indoor Stadium. A friend of Moon's who knew the organizers got her in as one of the models walking on the stage flanking Khan. It was a chance to rub shoulders with the superstar, and the money was good too—Rs 5,000. During the show she befriended two girls, and through them started to get modelling jobs.

‘My father was very strict, and totally against my modelling, but since I was sure about what I wanted I began throwing tantrums and stopped eating.' Moon's mother, who had not been allowed to dress like Bobby, became her ally, using silence—that infallible Bramhastra in the battle between men and women. ‘She told me that I should go ahead and do all the things she herself couldn't achieve. My mother was just nineteen years older to me; she was my hero, we were best friends,' she said, her eyes
welling up. Her grief venting at the slightest impress of memory, she wiped away the tears unselfconsciously and carried on as if interrupted by a sneeze.

Worn down by his daughter's demonstrative rebellion and his wife's silent displeasure, Moon's father relented. She began modelling for catalogues for
Sananda
and the designers Mona Pali. ‘I was a good clotheshorse, and soon I started getting noticed. I also had a mixing nature so there were no problems with the other models.' Eventually the family allowed her to travel out of town for shows. ‘Since many men in the fashion world were believed to be gay they assumed that I would be safe.'

One day, the owner of the showroom to which her father supplied furniture spotted Moon and approached the family with a proposal of marriage for his son. ‘I met this boy under duress, but in the very first meeting I quietly told him to get lost. I had other dreams. I wanted to be this girl from North Calcutta who could go out into the world and do something special. I told my Papa, “I am just eighteen, give me just five–six years, and if in that time I unable to do something special, I will get married to whoever you say.”'

In the pre-L'Oreal generation, an academic duffer's best bet was to study home science, and an ad extolling her homely-comely charms in the matrimonial section of a newspaper. But the collective fetishizing of Sushmita Sen, Aishwarya Rai, and Priyanka Chopra as beauty queens opened up a whole world of possibilities for middle class girls who otherwise failed at the Great Indian Crucible: Studies. Now, everyone was worth it, deserving of a stab at
the good life. Beauty pageants became the new UPSC. You could be Miss Sector 27, Miss Kanpur, Miss Asia-Pacific, and if all went well, Miss World. Sushmita, Aishwarya, Bipasha, Priyanka—non-graduates all—came to symbolize the resurgent Indian woman. Aware that she would not be able to hold off her father's pressure for long, and desperate for a quick exit from her oppressively conservative environment, Moon entered a beauty pageant.

In the early 1990s Maureen Wadia, the air hostess-turned-socialite wife of the industrialist Nusli Wadia, had the bright idea of launching a magazine and using it as a platform to run a beauty contest, much like
Femina
magazine's Miss India pageant. But unlike
Femina's
decorous corn-kebab appeal,
Gladrags
was more fun-between-the-sheets, preferably Bombay Dyeing, and for a while the magazine was a big favourite with solo gentlemen travellers on the Rajdhani and Indian Airlines.

The pageant followed in the same vein. It had no inhibitions when it came to blowing its own crumpet. ‘My fellow Calcuttan Koena Mitra became famous after participating in the contest. Then John Abraham, whom I just love, had also been a
Gladrags
model. As opposed to the classier
Femina
Miss India,
Gladrags
had a bolder image that suited my outgoing personality better. Besides,' she admitted, ‘I also didn't have the educational qualification for
Femina
Miss India, as I had not cleared high school.'

She was shortlisted from the east zone, and called to Mumbai. It was to be her first exposure to the competitive megawatt world of Mumbai models. ‘They were bitchy and made fun of me that I could not speak properly, meaning I lacked English [skills].' Undeterred by the jibes, Moon chose to speak in Hindi on stage, which led the actor Anil Kapoor to cheer for her. Among the judges, unbelievably, was John Abraham. She stayed on in Mumbai for twenty one days. ‘It was fantastic, I could go anywhere, at any time, do what I liked. I realized that in this city everything depends on you. Nothing else matters, and that was such a heady discovery. ‘“Yehi ek jagah hai,” I told myself, “where I can have a free life.”'

When her horrified father refused to let her move to Mumbai, Moon went on a hunger strike, and then took it further by swallowing a handful of sleeping pills—‘Just enough to knock me out but not kill me.' Once again, Moon's father was forced to back down, and matters proceeded swiftly. She contacted a real estate broker who had advertised in the classified section of the tabloid that had carried her photograph from the contest. On July 12, 2004, Moon Das, aged twenty, landed at her Rs 5,500 a month PG at RNA Arcade, Andheri.

Her first move was to call up the models she met during the
Gladrags
contest, who had promised her work. ‘I would spend hours at the nearby STD booth every day trying to call them and other people who might help, but no one had any time for me. I was so bewildered, this wasn't the Bombay I had imagined, and I didn't know how to break through this wall.' There was no one to entertain her tears,
or to yield to her tantrums. ‘After a month of this my landlady advised me to go back home and I thought it would indeed be the best course.'

But then the via via line crackled to life. ‘Kapil Khanna, a 2002
Gladrags
model whom I had managed to get in touch with through some people, phoned me, inviting me to a Page 3 party.' Moon could not recall who the host was or even where the party was, but distinctly remembered what she wore: a white corset teamed with a yellow micromini. ‘That's because I got so many compliments, everyone looked at me that evening and someone even clicked my picture.'

As with the very young, it took just one evening of fun to erase the misery of the month, and Moon resolved to stay put. Her friendship with Kapil Khanna deepened, and he helped her negotiate through the maze of advertising agencies and model coordinators.

‘I began the rounds of auditions and soon I was doing print ads for Kelvinator, Durian, Roopam… I shifted to a PG in Bandra, taking buses everywhere to save money. During this period my mother and I spoke a hundred times a day, I shared every minute thing that happened through the day. Reliance had just introduced the Rs 1 per minute talktime scheme; my mother and I made full use of that. For the last four years I've been their platinum customer. Gradually, I also started doing shows, travelling to Goa, Pune, Nagpur, Ahmedabad, gaining in confidence with each show. Now, if someone made fun of my lack of English, or my accent, I'd smartly turn around and say, ‘Aap Bangla mein bol ke dikhao.' (Why don't you speak in Bengali?)

The attitude was in place, but she lacked the sophistication and skill to become a top-rung model. Intense competition and poor diction also ruled out films and television, leaving ambitious Moon with the option of becoming that uniquely Bollywood creation, an ‘item girl'.

But even that breakthrough would not be easy—there were A-list heroines competing for item songs in the big films. With movies still out of her reach and bump-n-grind girls Rakhi Sawant and Meghna Naidu well entrenched in the music video scene, Moon, ready to pay her dues, set her sights lower. This was the time when the world was outsourcing to India, and ‘Bangalored' became an acceptable verb. The sensex was pole-vaulting above 20,000, and corporate India was full of Big Boys Who Played at Night.

‘Almost every second or third week one company or the other would have its annual conference, off-site meetings, or dinners for dealers. The standard entertainment here would be a live show. Typically, a troupe comprised a singer, say Abhijit, Juggy D, or one of the contestants from music talent shows like
Sa Re Ga Ma
. In addition, there would be a mimicry artist, usually from
Laughter Challenge
, and the grand finale would be a performance by an item girl.' After which the sexed-up but too-sozzled-to-do-anything men would head home feeling vaguely satiated. This suited Moon who told me, without any sense of irony, that she had become famous in the dealer circuit as a ‘hot performer'.

Since then the economic downturn had been unkind. Corporate perquisites vanished, leaving Moon and others like her to slip even further down the ladder. When we
met, she had just returned from Bilaspur, where she was performing at a Sikh wedding. ‘It was so dull, I tell you. These people were a blight on the name of their usually lively community. We had to literally plead with them to clap. Poor Vinit [one of the winners of a television talent hunt, and now a playback singer] sang for six hours and I made four entries.' The number of entries is important, she stressed. A dancer must not do too many encores, as it brings down her value, and at each entry a group of at least six background dancers must first get on stage before the main item girl makes an appearance.