Video Night in Kathmandu (39 page)

There were, perhaps, a few other reasons for this sudden rush of patriotism (even as I talked to Persis, another Prodigal Child was returning to India—Bhagwan Rajneesh, who was being deported from the United States amid charges of fraud and clouds of rumors about free-love orgies and drug running and now proclaimed that the motherland he had quit only three years earlier was the greatest country in the world). Before our conversation was over, Persis had reeled off for me, unsolicited, all the movies she had made in Hollywood. Only two of the titles were familiar—
Nighthawks
and
Star Trek
—and in the latter, the most famous of her roles, the Wilhelmina model and former
Miss India had been forced to play the entire movie with a shaven head, an indignity to which I could hardly imagine Jessica Lange or Kathleen Turner submitting. Though she had certainly cornered the market on Indian females, Persis herself admitted that she was seldom offered more than one role a year. And that was always the part of an “exotic.”

IF THE INDIAN
industry was Hollywood made thirty times larger, however, it was also Hollywood turned back thirty years. For one thing, its production musicals still operated on a superstar system, still reveled in Busby Berkeley-style show stoppers and still favored grand religious themes with epic casts. For another, it had spawned a whole shadow industry of fanzines and gossip rags,
Cine Blitz
and
Filmfare
and
Movie
and 600 others that diligently bit the hand that fed them. Now, moreover, it was being challenged for the first time ever by television. “It’s just like Hollywood in the fifties,” said a Bombay producer, boasting that TV would simply inspire moviemakers to fight back with bigger and therefore better films. “It’s really like Hollywood in the fifties,” said a leading movie critic, pointing out that the early movies of the Indian cinema, full of Cowardian repartee and Shavian wit, had given way to musical spectaculars. “The scene is just like Hollywood in the fifties,” said the editor of
Stardust
, the biggest movie mag. “There are affairs! Love children! Abortions! Even bigamy!”

The moviegoing public seemed equally old-fashioned—even when it came to foreign films. At the Regal cinema in central Bombay (“the Home of Great Motion Pictures”), the big hits of the past year had been
Gone with the Wind
and
Ben-Hur.
Around the corner, one of the few other English-language cinemas in town was showing
The Sound of Music.
And one day I turned to the
Times of India
to consult the movie page and there found a new release advertised as “one of the all-time great love stories.” Farther down, I discovered that the movie in question was the doggy Disney cartoon
Lady and the Tramp.

HOLLYWOOD AGAIN CAME
to mind the day I visited Film City, a studio complex on the outskirts of Bombay. The skies were a brilliant blue above the scrub hills, and the dry ridges seemed a perfect vantage point for a posse to scan the horizon for
stray Indians. Inside the run-down complex (“We Solicit Silence,” said the sign at the entrance), nine or ten movies were in production (some of them doubtless featuring exactly the same actors, in much the same roles). Taking a seat on a sunlit patch of grass, I spent the next couple of hours watching the filming of a complex, if formulaic, pas de deux that would grace a movie called
Pyaasi Raat (Thirsty Night).

A few men held up reflecting mirrors and a couple of assistants stood behind small cameras. Three bigwigs sat on director’s chairs. Twenty or so others stood around getting a free taste of saucy entertainment. The principals, I gathered, were a pretty young girl in red thigh-length boots and heavy makeup, wearing a short dark blue frock that left her midriff bare, and a rotund swain dressed from head to toe in spotless white, with a T-shirt that declared, with brute simplicity, “Break Dance.”

The scene called for the girl to approach the man, shaking her hips and wriggling her breasts. She was to slink up behind him, curl her body around his, stroke his face and put her uptilted head first on his left shoulder, then on his right. He was to break away, sending her into a frenzy of frustration. The scene picked up again with him standing contemplative against a tree (the same tree, I thought, heart beating, that had served as a love nest in a thousand Hindi movies through the ages). She had to approach him again, wind her body around his and then, pinning him against the trunk, lift her head for a kiss. When he recoiled, she was to push him down to the ground, hover over him where he lay and then, as she leaned down to kiss him, lose her balance so that the energetic couple would tumble over and over in the grass. This complicated movement was set to some capering melody, and throughout the contortions, the actress had to lip-synch (with the emphasis on lips) a tune sung by Lata Mangeshkar, or someone exactly like her.

The two went into action. “Come on, Kammy darling,” urged the behind-camera choreographer—a slinky, very dark lady in sunglasses and a negligent robe—as the onlooking crowd tensed with excitement, “Vikky love, get closer.” The two writhed together uncomfortably as the music bounced merrily along. Cut!

Out slithered the choreographer to give Kammy a few lessons in wriggling and flouncing. “Shake your hips like this, lovey,”
she began, and toss your hair like this and narrow your eyes this way, and open your lips that way. When you rub against him, touch him like this; when you fall on top of him, tumble like this.

She danced back behind the camera, and Kammy practiced her moves. The onlookers stared on happily. “More sexy, love,” came the choreographer’s cry. “More sexy. Like this!”

IT WAS NEVER
difficult, of course, to mock the Hindi cinema, to find fault with everything from the coarseness of its moves to the poverty of its imagination. Fairy-tale plots, broad innuendos, unquestioned piety, heroes and villains, a weakness for spectacle and a shrewd determination to give the groundlings what they wanted—all, of course, were the essence of Chaucerian or Shakespearean art. But Hindi movies remained—critics forbid!—irredeemably vulgar. They were as fat and fleshy and cartoonish as the characters they celebrated. They played—no, pandered—to the lowest common denominator in mankind. Why on earth did they always have to be so loud, so bright, so broad?

One answer, perhaps, was that they were reflections of the world around them. Movies were everywhere in India. But then everything was superabundant in India: signs, shrines, spices, smells, men, gods, beggars, cows, sobs, titters, marvels, horrors and more marvels. India itself seemed all perpetual motion and emotion, an overfull, overbright, overdone triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. Here was life, not on the grand, but on the epic scale, the Human Comedy, the Human Tragedy, played out on streets filled with too many people, too many feelings, too many schemes. India itself was simply too much.

The country’s recent history alone was something of a tumultuous spectacle, piled higher with incident and thicker with Tragedy, Comedy, Melodrama—proliferative plotting and nonstop action—than any movie on earth. In the few months before I arrived in India, its longtime, risen-and-fallen-and-rerisen Prime Minister had sent her army to storm a sacred golden shrine, and then had been killed by her own bodyguards. Her son, who had never before held office, became Prime Minister. Riots had swept through the capital; men were burned alive, whole settlements were put to the torch, trains rolled through
the countryside piled high with bloody bodies. Five weeks later, a cloud of poison gas had escaped from a chemical plant, killing thousands as they slept, in the worst industrial accident in history. Three weeks after that, the world’s largest democracy had held a national election. A typhoon in neighboring Bangladesh had killed as many as 20,000 people and swept whole islands into the sea. An Air-India plane had suddenly, inexplicably, fallen from the heavens, and 329 people had been killed, in one of the worst airline disasters ever recorded. A peace agreement between the Hindus and Sikhs had been reached at last, following which the moderate leader of the Sikhs was promptly assassinated by his followers. Meanwhile, civil war continued in Sri Lanka, there was more unrest in Assam and each day brought news of another politician gunned down by turban terrorists.

Yet this constant explosion of eventfulness was, if anything, even more unrelenting on the small scale. For the sights of India are, to a large extent, the streets themselves, and the streets are chaotic open-air stages presenting life in the raw and humanity in the round. Through the avenues of Bombay stream sadhus and shamans, bullock carts and cows, rickshaws, rusty Ambassadors, turbaned men and veiled women, three-legged dogs, two-toed beggars, buses and bicycles and rites and sights and more people, more soldiers, more cows. Bleeding into this pandemonium is the confusion of the temples—not, as a rule, havens of meditation and quiet, but the Indian compendium all over again, a bombardment of sights and sounds and smells, monkeys, flames, chants, offerings, holy men, pilgrims, wonder-workers, musicians, more rites, more sights, more people. The streets of India are swollen with an embarrassment of riches, a richness of embarrassments. And it is on the streets that millions live, make love, defecate, and die.

This sense of febrile hyperactivity clings as tenaciously to Indians as the smell of curry. It assaulted me, indeed, before I had even set foot in the country. No sooner had I stepped into a Bombay-bound Cathay Pacific flight than whole mobs of Indian families began crashing into the cabin behind me, loaded down with VCRs, trailing in their wake five extra pieces of hand luggage, or maybe six, straggling a crush of miscellaneous loved ones and possessions. And no sooner had any of them sat down than they began shouting across the aisles at their children or
calling out to relatives or standing up again to order the mostly Chinese cabin attendants to bring drinks and then more drinks. The kids started slithering over seats, their mothers raced to the bathroom, the men took up permanent residence in the aisles and began crying out gossip to friends and presumed enemies several cabins away. The attendants tried to restore order and send people back to their seats, and the scheming and the screaming only mounted. The passengers ordered more drinks and second meals and vegetarian meals and second vegetarian meals, and the attendants told them that none were available. The demands grew louder, the attendants told them to be quiet. The passengers bawled, the attendants snapped. Shouting matches broke out, and all the while, tens of families kept trundling inexorably through the aisles, transporting curries, heirlooms, squalling kids, more pieces of luggage, and then some more. Before long, the arguments turned into all-out, ten-decibel warfare. The attendants shouted their orders, the crowds milled all around. And through it all, a solemn Sikh looked around the cabin sadly, and began philosophizing, as only an Indian can, about mass hysteria. Where did it come from? How was it caused? What did it mean?

Not surprisingly, this sense of fertility run amok had also seeped from the country’s textures into its texts. “Indians,” John Russell wrote shrewdly, “are prodigious, irrepressible, never-tiring talkers.” They are also, he might have added, fabulous raconteurs and rhapsodists, storytellers and sermonizers, purveyors of small talk and big; the garrulous gurus are only the most celebrated examples of the country’s indefatigable speech-makers, their books less often written than transcribed from the hundreds of thousands of words they spin out of their mental loom each year. The whole country, it often seems, suffers from a kind of elephantiasis of the imagination; it teems and seethes, Babel-like, with texts on the subject of mortality and divinity. There is no place for the lapidary in India, and irony is quickly lost; amid all the agitation and animation, the only appropriate forms are rhodomontade, litany, hyperbole and exclamation. India’s national epic, the
Mahabharata
, fifteen times longer than the Bible, is the longest poem ever written.

Nor is it ever possible to detach oneself from the whole clangorous Indian gallimaufry. Its smell seeped into the third-floor
apartment where I stayed, its street cries penetrated the walls. When my car stopped at an intersection, a man carrying a limp child appeared by my side, an amputee began pounding on the windows. When I walked out of a serene Victorian library in central Bombay, a swarm of beggars was instantly around me, unaccommodated and bare. All doors were flung open in India, all boundaries collapsed: everything was thrown together in the streets. And next to this 3,000-ring circus, with a cast of thousands of hundreds of thousands, appearing in your neighborhood twenty-four hours each day, the overcrowded and impossibly melodramatic movies begin to make a little sense. They even begin to look rather small.

FOR FOREIGNERS, WHO
do not have to live with the consequences, India’s whirligig of earthly horrors and delights may often be the greatest show on earth. “India has everything,” said a Yugoslavian girl I met in Tibet. “India is life on the stage,” said a Canadian sitting nearby. “India is so different,” said a Swiss designer. “I see many good things, also many bad things. The people are so generous, and so selfish.” Every trip through India was to some extent a magical mystery tour into chaos and color and commotion. India might not be the easiest or loveliest place in the world, most travelers agreed, but it was surely the most shocking, the most amusing, the most overwhelming; the happiest, and the saddest; the most human—certainly the only country, as Geoffrey Moorhouse writes, “where superlatives were as much in order as adjectives anywhere else.” India had everything, and its opposite; and if the West often struck me as a masculine culture, dedicated to assertion, virility and power, while Southeast Asia seemed feminine in its texture, all softness, delicacy and grace, India was both, and neither, as grotesque and fascinating as a hermaphrodite.

Small wonder, then, that India freaked out its visitors, and psyched them out, more than any other place I knew. One night, as I slept in a tiny inn in Kyoto, the screen door was violently pulled back and in stumbled a young Chinese photographer from Hong Kong. Taking one look at me, he registered my origins and began raving. He had just arrived, he said, from the land of my forefathers. “Varanasi,” he said, spitting out the name. “They call it a holy city. But it is a filthy city, a stinking
city, a city full of shit!” He had had enough, he said, more than enough of “silk men” and a holy river that was only a large-scale bathroom. He had had enough of cosmic dirt. He had had it up to here with the world’s most persistent touts. He had had enough of being hounded and harassed. He had been taken, he said, for $350. He had been in India for six weeks, he went on, and six weeks was enough—no, more than enough. He could stand it no longer. And he wanted to go back, and he could talk of little else.