Show Business (10 page)

You won't believe this, but sex was not the important thing with Maya. No, I'm not going to put you out of your misery and admit to — boast about — having taken her to bed. That might matter to you, but I see no reason to oblige. We were close, very close, as close as I could ever have hoped to be to Maya. How close that was is not for me to tell you, Ashok Banjara. It's between your wife and you: whatever she told you, whatever she wants you to believe, is fine with me. What mattered to me was something I couldn't have.

I still remember the evening. It was just after we'd completed
Godambo,
doing the last bit of dubbing. I waited for her to finish her recording with you and Abha — she and I had so few scenes together, after all — and drove her home. Only I didn't go home. I stopped the car at Worli, by the sea-face where that expensive hotel has gone up. It wasn't there then. We stood by the seaside, letting the warm breeze from the Arabian Sea blow specks of spray through our hair. The evening stretched across the horizon like a woman waiting to be embraced. I turned to her, took her in my arms. At first, unresisting in surprise, she allowed herself to be enfolded in them, but she stiffened as I began to speak.

“Maya, I want us to be married. I can't promise you a big house, or lots of money. But I love you, Maya. I'll be good to you.”

She pulled herself away, not harshly, but firmly. “Pranay, what are you talking about? What is all this talk of marriage?”

“Why not? You know what you mean to me.”

She looked away then, to the streaks of orange and blue that were the sun's farewell testaments for the day. When she spoke her voice was steady, but the steadiness came with effort. “You've been very good to me, Pranay. Very sweet, and very kind. I'll never forget that.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I interjected bitterly. “I'm not standing here looking for gratitude.”

“But I
am
grateful.”

“Is that all? Are you saying that — everything we've had doesn't mean anything more? Don't you care for me at all?”

“I care for you.” Her voice was low.

“And I care for you! Marry me, Maya — I'll make you happy.”

“I'm sorry, Pranay.” She looked at me for a moment, and I swear I saw a wetness in her eyes, but she turned away again and spoke without looking at me. “But I just don't love you, that's all.”

“Why not?” I wanted to rail. But I was shattered, and hurt, and suddenly very desperate. “It doesn't matter,” I found myself pleading. “Love will come afterward. It always does. Look at all the arranged marriages that take place in our country. Do you think any of these people love each other? They haven't even seen each other properly, for God's sake! Love comes, in its own time. I'll wait for you to learn to love me. Just like an arranged marriage.”

She looked at me directly, and her eyes were as dry as her tone. “No one,” she said, and not even her voice could sweeten her blunt-ness, “would arrange
our
marriage, Pranay.”

I gaped at her wide-eyed and understood there was nothing more to say.

I drove her home in silence. As she opened the car door, she turned to me in her seat. “Thank you, Pranay,” she said. And she leaned over and gave me the briefest, saddest kiss I have ever had. On my narrow,
paan-stained
mouth.

Then she was gone, and the door of my car clicked faintly closed. She had not pushed it hard enough. I sighed. I would have to open and shut it again, only this time much, much harder.

Godambo
was a hit. You were a star after your second film. Maya was noticed — by other producers, by you. They wanted her innocence, as you did.

I didn't do too badly myself out of that film. Offers came for better roles. As a villain, of course, but not just a secondary one. I got scripts in which I survived till the last reel and in the end fell at the hera's hands, not in some bumbling accident like that stupid floor trap. I played all the parts a villain could hope for. The rapacious moneylender, the
seth-sahukar,
preying on the womenfolk of the poor hero's indebted family. The tyrannical landlord, flogging his servants and lusting after his tenants' wives as he canters through his extensive domains on horseback (all this when
zamindari
had long been abolished in the world outside the film studio, but the picture was always set in an undefined, vaguely contemporary period). The city gangster, in checked jackets and ill-fitting sharkskin suits, drinking incessantly, blowing smoke rings at a sequined vamp, and generally having a wonderful time until brought to book by an improbably honest cop for some carefully unspecified crime. I played them all, and as my screen credits grew with my bank balance, I put the money I couldn't legally show the bank into a place of my very own in Juhu. And I watched you and Maya from afar.

Three films, that's all you gave her. Three films, all opposite you, for the actress who was the brightest, freshest talent in the Hindi cinema of her day. Three films to prove her worth, to capture the heart of the Indian public and to break mine. Three films before you obliged her to “retire” so you could marry her.

And I wasn't in any of them. Probably just as well, because I'm not sure I would have been able to bear losing her to you every day, on and off the set. To be obliged to succumb to you on screen, and to watch her succumb to you between takes.

I wonder when it all began. I suppose with
Ganwaari,
just after
Godambo,
when Maya made the transition from sisterly schoolgirl to girlish heroine and Abha from heroine to supporting actress. The famous film about the village girl (Maya was a natural for that part, wasn't she?) who wins a competition to come to the city and spend a week watching her favorite movie star (you, who else?) at work. Surprise, surprise, the worldly-wise Hindi film hero is completely won over by the innocent village belle and spurns his cinematic leading lady (Abha, whose rage seemed genuine) to clinch the
ganwaari
girl at the fade-out. I hated the film, but it was an unexpected success at the box office; it made Maya, and it confirmed you in stardom. Even then, before it was known that your interest in Maya was extending offscreen as well, I saw the movie as symbolic, a portent. And everywhere I went, on street corners, at wedding receptions, in holiday processions, I kept hearing that wretched song from the film:

Is it true? Can it really be?
Is it a dream, or can this be really me?
Standing he-eere, in your embrace …
Is it true? Can it really be?
Could it be a mistake, can you really see?
That your lo-ove shines on my face …

I'm just a little girl from the heart of India,
I know nothing of worldly sin, dear,
I'm just a village girl with stars in her eyes,
And you've taken me by — surprise.

Is it true? Can it really be?
Is this life or a Bombay moo-ovie?
That puts my hand in yours …
Is it true? Can it really be?
Are you, my hero, really free?
To give me a joy that endures …

This doesn't happen in my part of India,
My heart beats so much you can hear the din, dear,
I'm just a village girl who's never told lies,
And you've just made me your — prize.

Is it true? Can it really be? …

It was true, of course. And the song was played everywhere, on transistors and record players, over Muzak systems and public-address loudspeakers, by radio disc jockeys responding to importunate requests from Jhumri Tilaiya, by two hundred-rupee per evening hired bands at every imaginable public festivity. And every time I heard it I kept seeing that scene from the film where she looked up at you holding her, and I saw an adoration in her eyes that no amount of nervous direction from Mohanlal could ever have placed there. And I knew you had won her.

The next couple of movies made a star out of her and a prophet out of me. Maya and her makeup men managed to combine her fresh-faced innocence with just enough expert artifice to make her a convincing heroine, without losing the quality that made audiences like her in the first place. She didn't have the figure of Abha or Vyjay-antimala, she couldn't dance like Hema Malini or Saira Banu, but she captivated every cinemagoer in the country. They loved her, Ashok. She was every man's sister or daughter, every woman's ideal. And she could act: she was a true professional.

And then during the shooting of that third film, Radha Sabnis broke the news in
Showbiz:

    Darlings, brace yourself for a shocker from Bollywood! Your Cheetah has learned that Ashok Banjara, the common man's superstar, the actor whose success gave hope to every garage mechanic in the country, is about to wed! And who is the brave and noble woman prepared to make Saddy Longlegs the happiest ham in Vers ova?
That's
the shock, little jungle creatures: it's none other than the nation's sweetheart, Maya Kumari! Is it true? Can it really be? I'm afraid it is, darlings. When the bombshell bursts, don't say Cheetah didn't warn you! Grrrowl …

I grrowled a few times myself, in between tears of impotent rage. I drank myself silly for a week. And then I went back to Sunita, not for the last time, and pushed her against the wall. I closed my eyes and imagined it was Maya. It didn't work, and I wept my drunkenness and shame into the sink, not knowing who I hated more, myself or you.

What you did was a crime, Ashok Banjara. You deprived India of its most cherished celluloid daughter, you deprived the Hindi film industry of its finest actress, and you deprived me. You deprived me not of hope, because by then I had none for myself, but of that last vestige of pride left to a man who has not been rejected for someone else. Once she agreed to marry you, having refused to marry me, I could no longer take solace in telling myself she had given me up for her career. Instead, she gave up her career for you.

You made her do it, of course. All those interviews about “I wouldn't want my wife to feel she needs to work” — disingenuous bastard. And then you got
her
to tell the press, “I'm giving up films of my own free will because I want to be the ideal wife and daughter-in-law.” Did anyone believe those words weren't scripted for her, and rather badly at that? “Ideal wife and daughter-in-law”: does anyone ever
talk
like that, outside the movies? Come on, Ashok, you could have done better. Couldn't you for once have had the courage of your characterless convictions and simply announced, “No wife of mine is going to be pawed and chased and hugged in public, not even by me. Maya is being instructed to retire from films to preserve my exaggerated sense of self-esteem.” But no, you weren't capable of that kind of honesty, were you. I know what you're going to say: how can I blame you — every single Indian actress has “retired” after marriage, from Babita to Mumtaz, from Jaya to Dimple, who only came back to films when her marriage was over. Why these intelligent and resourceful women should all behave as if the acting profession were incompatible with married respectability, I don't know. But they've set the pattern, and that lets the slimy hypocrites like you off the hook.

Even if you'd stopped at that I'd have found it impossible to forgive you. But you then spent the next five years making it much worse.

 

Interior: Day

I can't believe I'm doing this.

Me, Ashok Banjara, leading superstar of the Indian cinema, commander of fees in the range of several lakhs (can't be too precise, you know how these income tax chaps are), not to mention son of the general secretary of New Delhi's ruling party, wooing an aging gossip columnist over pink champagne, lip-synching the obligatory inanities that an invisible tape in my head plays back to me from a dozen remembered screenplays. But it
is
me, it's my mouth that's saying these improbable things, it's my hand that is placed, with exaggerated lightness, on her gnarled and painted claw. Radha Sabnis, the dreaded Cheetah of
Showbiz
magazine, sits in her lounge, flattered by my attentions, while I pour on the butter that wouldn't normally melt in my mouth. I have come to make peace.

Cheetah sits in an imitation leopard-skin pantsuit on an imitation velvet sofa, guzzling the champagne, for which she is embarrassingly grateful, and eyeing me from under artificial lashes with what some lyricist might call a wild surmise. She is of medium height, thin,
really
thin, like a Bangladesh refugee in costume, and she has a pale death-mask face that seems to have been meticulously disarranged by a malicious undertaker: a hooked nose like the beak of an injured parrot; exaggeratedly shaped eyebrows arched in an expression of perpetual interrogation; a profusion of deep lines that deepen asymmetrically every time she speaks a word; pinched, sallow cheeks; and the whole effect framed by lusterless shoulder-length hair practically dripping with henna. This discredit to the species wields the most powerful pen in Bollywood, and my visit to her is the idea of my new PR agent, Cyrus Sponerwalla.