Show Business (20 page)

Lawrence must be fifty if he's a day, a wizened and wiry little man with more energy than Radha Sabnis after champagne. He wears a sleeveless T-shirt, tight corduroy trousers, and smooth-soled dancing shoes specially made for his tiny feet by a Chinese cobbler in Calcutta. Lawrence doesn't just direct, he dances all the routines himself, my bits and Mehnaz's, explaining every step and repeating every action till we've got it right and his T-shirt is soaked in sweat. Through it all Mohanlal pulls threads off his white cotton shirt and gray hairs off his now more sparsely covered head. A feature of Lawrence's dancing style for me is the use of martial gestures: feet kicked high and strong, hands slashing through the air karate-style, assertive thumps of leather boots. Thanks to Lawrence I can dance and still retain my macho image; nor is my lack of fluid
bharata natyam
grace any longer a handicap. But Lawrence also comes up with the hip wiggles and pelvic gyrations that have pushed Mehnaz Elahi so rapidly to stardom. I stand and watch this quinquagenarian gnome, all lean dark skin and sinew, stretch and swivel and grind his nonexistent curves for Mehnaz to imitate, and I resist the urge to laugh. No one else, not even Mohanlal, seems to find anything incongruous in the movements of this fisherman's son, whose style nets him more dance direction assignments than he can have had chicken dinners throughout his entire childhood.

But today's scene is a curious mélange: a traditional, even hackneyed, girl-and-boy-get-amorous-in-the-rain song, with traditional, definitely hackneyed lyrics, being picturized to Lawrence's untraditional, jack-kneed dance movements. While Mehnaz changes into the chiffon sari and skimpy blouse she is supposed to get wet in this scene — the kind of costume that would have made poor Abha's deception impossible, but which heroines have only been called upon to don in these bolder times — Mohanlal spends fifteen anxious minutes discussing the picturization with Lawrence and me. Mehnaz has to be coy and revealing at the same time, and Lawrence has no doubt which he prefers. It is largely thanks to him that this daughter of an aristocratic Hyderabadi family has become the barest exponent of Bollywood's brave new whirl.

Mohanlal no longer speaks to me in Hinglish: I've been mouthing Salim-Javed dialogues for too long now to need that concession to my Anglophone background. Lawrence's Hindi has never been too strong, though, and it is soon apparent that his planned moves for Mehnaz completely contradict the reticence of her lyrics. Mohanlal, his anxiety climbing to a nine, feels the dance has to be altered to conform to the song. Lawrence is volubly outraged. “Change the lyrics,” I suggest jokingly. “We can't,” Mohanlal replies in all seriousness, his pitch ascending to a ten, “the song's already been recorded.” Of course I know that, but my point is that no one is going to care about the lyrics anyway; they're just going to want to see Mehnaz succumbing to me on screen, and the words she's mouthing will seem incidental. I take Lawrence's side in the debate. Voices are raised. Mohanlal's voice and nerves both threaten to snap, but finally he gives in. Things have changed since
Musafir.
I don't lose too many arguments on the studio floor.

Mehnaz enters at last, a vision in blue georgette on creamy flesh, and Lawrence, appropriately enough, blows a shrill whistle. He is not expressing admiration, merely signaling to the idlers that their time has come to be usefully engaged. The hubbub in the studio dies down. Mohanlal collapses on a chair. We are ready to begin.

“Lights! Camera! Action!”

The tape starts, but the rain doesn't. We try again. This time the rain does, but the tape doesn't. Mehnaz and I are prematurely wet and growing increasingly exasperated. “It doesn't matter,” says Mohanlal, uncharacteristically calm. “We'll show it raining before the song starts, so you
can
be wet already. OK? Ready, Ashok?” This last is because I have been staring somewhat obliviously at Mehnaz in the first flush of her wetness. I have seen her without anything on in the privacy of her bedroom, and yet when I watch her fully dressed in public it is as if I am seeing her for the first time.

“Ready,” I reply, though I feel anything but. The tape starts, and I pretend to sing:

Let me shelter you from the rain,
Keep you safe from all pain,
Kiss you again and again,
Let me hide you from the eyes of the world.

Kisses aren't legal yet with our censors, so Mehnaz evades my offered lips and escapes my clutches, dancing away. But I catch hold of one end of her sari
pallav,
which unravels, so as I flamenco toward her she is forced to pirouette back to me, pleading:

Let me slip away, my dear,
And overcome my fear,
Please don't come so very near,
Let me hide before my modesty's unfurled.

“Cut!” Rarely have I so resented a directorial intrusion. “Now what's the matter?” Mehnaz asks. Mohanlal's anxiety is compounded with embarrassment: it turns out her bra strap's showing. “What do you expect, with this blouse your tailors given me?” she flashes with spirit. “There's more cloth on one of Ashok's handkerchiefs.”

I would have preferred her not to reveal so much familiarity with the contents of my pockets, but the point is taken. There is a hasty consultation: actress, director, costume designer, wardrobe attendant, and (since I have nothing better to do) me. Alternative blouses are brought out for inspection and discarded, for a variety of reasons, as inappropriate. The final solution, I have to admit, comes from me: she could wear the same blouse, but without a bra.

Mehnaz looks at me expressively, and I move my hands in a Can you think of anything better? gesture. She retreats to her dressing room while the cameraman calls unnecessarily for a baby — not one of my triplets, thank God, but a small spotlight — and the makeup man powders my glistening nose. When she returns, my heart skips a beat. Little has now been left even to my satiated imagination.

“Go easy on the close-ups,” Mohanlal mutters to the cameraman in less-than-chaste Punjabi. “Keep her you-know-whats out of the frame. I don't want the censors cutting the entire bloody song.” The cameraman raises a blasé eyebrow and nods elliptically.

We start again. The first couple of verses go without incident.

ME:

Let me shelter you from the rain,
Keep you safe from all pain,
Kiss you again and again,
Let me hide you from the eyes of the world.

MEHNAZ:

Let me slip away, my dear,
And overcome my fear,
Please don't come so very near,
Let me hide before my modesty's unfurled.

I pull her to me, drop the end of the
pallav,
and hug her, as we dance in a circle. She has only the thin blue strip of the blouse between her neck and her navel, and I am strongly aroused:

Let me hold you 'gainst my chest,
Feel the pressure of your breast,
Hug, caress you and the rest —

“Cut!” We hear the dance director's whistle before the actual word. This time it is Lawrence who is unhappy. We aren't going around fast enough in the circle and we're holding each other too close (no surprise there). He summons an assistant, a thin, sallow man in glasses, grips him at the elbows, shows us where his heels are, and demonstrates the way he wants us to dance. Mehnaz studies them attentively, but when I stare at these two middle-aged men solemnly going around in circles, I cannot help breaking into a broad grin. Lawrence is not amused. “Let's see you do it now!” he says, blowing his whistle.

We start, but Mehnaz falls headlong into my arms and the whistle is blown almost immediately. In getting her grip and pace right, Mehnaz failed to notice her feet and tripped on an inconvenient plant. Lawrence now decides, much to my resentment, since I have done nothing wrong, to dance with her himself in order to show her how it should feel. I watch Mehnaz, blouse bouncing, in his arms and feel a twinge of possessiveness. A makeup man comes up with a dirty handkerchief to clean the current mixture of rainwater and sweat off my face, but I wave him away angrily.

At last, we continue:

Let me hold you 'gainst my chest,
Feel the pressure of your breast,
Hug, caress you and the rest —
Let me wrap you up and keep you near my heart.

I wrap the
pallav
around both of us. I can feel Mehnaz's heartbeat through the syncopations of the sound track. I imagine it is her own voice, and not that of the pockmarked fifty-six-year-old playback-singing veteran, that is breathing huskily at me:

Let me go, dearest, please,
I must plead for my release,
Your importunings must cease,
Let me save myself and hold myself apart.

The whistle sounds again. This time Mehnaz's lips were out of sync with the sound track. She flushes, but I move my lips to indicate, “Don't worry.” We resume, and a dhoti-clad delivery man bearing a tiffin-carrier walks into one of the reflectors, sending Mohanlal's hands skyward and the cameraman into paroxysms of choice Punjabi invective. At last we catch up to the bit where Lawrence gets really bold: I push Mehnaz back from the waist as we dance, my face dangerously close to hers, my hands shimmering on her torso, and intone:

Let me taste your shining lips,
Place my hands upon your hips,
Feel your rises and your dips,
Let us travel to the heights of paradise.

Mehnaz is obviously aflame. She wants me, she wants me here and now, but the script and the situation leave her no choice:

Let me be, precious one,
I am burning like the sun,
I'm afraid I have to run,
Let us only speak the language of our eyes.

“Cut it!” Mohanlal shouts in triumph. “Thank you, Ashokji, thank you, Mehnazji. We'll use that one.”

“Sorry, boss.” The cameraman is lugubrious. “We can't.”

“What d'you mean?” Mehnaz, already beginning to turn toward the dressing room, is apoplectic.

“Look, Madam.” The cameraman points into the distance. Well in the background, unnoticed by all of us but certain to show up on the screen, a uniformed security guard sits placidly on a stool, surveying the scene with indifference.

“I don't believe it,” I say, but secretly I am happy to cavort once more with Mehnaz for the camera. Strange: with Maya, the moment I realized I loved her and wanted her to be mine, I desired nothing so much as to lock her away from prying eyes, to protect her from the cheapening gaze of the public. But with Mehnaz, I can resist no opportunity to flaunt her in front of everyone. I enjoy being with her in public, and I enjoy being watched enjoying her. “Let's do it again,” I say decisively.

Mehnaz acquiesces, as she always does with any of my suggestions. I begin to look forward to making a few more suggestions, of a more intimate nature, after the shooting.

The rain falls, my enthusiasm rises, her blouse falls and rises, and we sing-dance to the throbbing climax:

ME:

Let me taste your shining lips,
Place my hands upon your hips,
Feel your rises and your dips,
Let us travel to the heights of paradise.

MEHNAZ:

Let me be, precious one,
I am burning like the sun,
I'm afraid I have to run,
Let us only speak the language of our eyes.

I am still holding her when the whistle blows. As the lights are switched off, I take her face in my hands, and in full view of the entire unit, kiss her full-bloodedly on the mouth. She does not pull away from me; I can feel her nipples harden against my shirt. Her tongue darts between my teeth, and my hands caress the small of her back, pressing her body into mine. Our need is so urgent we might have gone on, but the uncharacteristic silence of the unit, which ought to be busy making dismantling noises, reminds us of our audience. Mohanlal's eyes are almost bulging through his glasses. We laugh and trip and stumble toward her dressing room. The shocked silence follows us, as I imagine its authors would have liked to.

I unhook her blouse even before her startled Chinese dresser has fled the room. Her breasts fill my hands like
prasad
from a generous temple, and I take them in worship, ritually putting them to my mouth, my eyes, my forehead. Her moans are chanted slokas of desire, invoking heavenly pleasures. No man may wear a stitched garment in the sanctum sanctorum of the divine; I bare myself in reverence. In turn, I pull at the coil of her earthly attachment, the knot of her sari. It collapses wetly at her feet, followed by her drenched petticoat. Liberated from these worldly shackles, she circles me seven times, her fingers tracing mystical patterns on my torso. My own hands light the lamp of her womanhood and move in a rite of oblation. She kneels, her mouth closing on the object of her veneration, upright symbol of procreative divinity. Her prayer is bilingual. Our fingers pour ghee on the flames of our need. Rising, the flames unite us with the sacred thread of desire and we are as one in the lower depths of our higher selves.

I have no idea why I'm suddenly turning all religious about Mehnaz. After all, the girls a Muslim, for Christ's sake. And we usually prefer the missionary position.

Money is becoming a bit of a problem. I don't mean the lack of it, but as Maya pointed out, what to do with what I have.

The problem is, basically, that Subramanyam keeps asking producers for ever more outrageous amounts of money, and the producers then astonish us by paying what we ask for. They come to me in shabby
dhotis
and stained
kurtas,
clutching synthetic briefcases that, when opened, turn out to contain bundles of incredibly crisp notes of whose existence the Department of Revenue is blissfully unaware. These notes change hands, with sometimes the briefcase thrown in as well, and no receipt is ever issued. Over the years I have had to think of increasingly ingenious places to cache the stuff, and it is beginning to — if the verb can be pardoned — tax my imagination.

The small portion of my cinematic remuneration that comes by check is, of course, dutifully banked and the proceeds recorded by Subramanyam in his neat, precise hand in a register that is available for inspection whenever officialdom so desires. Actually, officialdom has never yet so desired, possibly because my father's party has never yet been out of power. Not that my father has consciously tried to protect me. He would never raise a finger to protect me, but he doesn't have to: that is the beauty of being important and influential in India, the number of things you get without having to ask for them. Yet I cannot entirely overlook the possibility that some over-zealous tax official will try to prove his integrity by raiding the son of a senior congressman, and if that happens it is obvious I cannot afford to have my briefcases lying about.