Death in Mumbai (18 page)

Post the saas–bahu sarson-da-sagas, Indian television was awash with tacky reality TV programmes, formats
imported from the West. Most of these shows hosted an assortment of P.T. Barnum-style circus freaks, and encourage bickering, bitching, and bad-mouthing. Moon, with what she called her ‘back story', thought she was a perfect fit for some of these shows. But before that, there were other challenges to be dealt with.

The first anniversary of her mother's death was approaching, and she couldn't summon the nerve to return to Calcutta to face her father and neighbours. She fell ill with severe gastroenteritis, brought on by poor eating and stress, and had to get herself admitted to a nursing home in the middle of the night. She told me all this on the phone one day, sounding rather depressed. I invited her for lunch to Oh! Calcutta, hoping it would cheer her up. We ordered cold beer, aloo dum, bhetki, and loochi. She was clearly tempted—‘I really miss Bengali food'—but she wouldn't touch more than a few morsels, as always, leaving food on her plate. She discussed her anxiety about meeting her father. ‘I respect him a lot but don't share much with him, it was different with my mother. But then, who else is there to guide me? Sometimes it's so tiring, I have to take all the decisions by myself.'

We sat in companionable silence until she spoke up again in a low voice: ‘Mujhe Ishu ke sharan mein aana hai' (I want to be under Jesus' shelter). I did a quick alcohol check, but we were still on our first pint. Her friends, the actress Vaishnavi and the singer Jimmy Felix, had been reading to her from the Bible and demonstrating His miracles.

‘Vaishnavi showed me the dengue report of a girl which was positive in the morning but after prayers turned
negative. Likewise Rakhi Sawant's mother had gallstones which disappeared overnight after prayers. My father has been diagnosed with high blood pressure and gastroenteritis, I worry for him, and generally I want peace. I am told confession is good for the soul. The pastors told me that maybe my mother and mama have not forgiven me for causing their deaths, so I need to seek forgiveness. My entire family is suffering. Pastors told me that often there is doubt followed by fear but all that is mitigated if you leave everything to Jesus.'

She then called Vaishnavi and arranged to meet her in the evening at the church. A few days later I got a call from Moon, who said that she had been shortlisted by Synergie Adlabs, where Neeraj last worked, to participate in
Sach ka Saamna
, modelled on the format of
Moment of Truth
, where contestants were put through a polygraph test. They got paid for accurately answering a set of questions and there was a jackpot at the end. But as the stakes went up the questions got more personal, more intrusive. ‘I am not afraid of these questions, it'll give me a chance to clear my name. I think it's a miracle of God that I got this call. Once I get a clean chit and people know that I didn't use Avinash, that I am a good girl, I can go back to live in Calcutta.'

I did not hear from Moon for some time after that meeting. Three months later I saw billboards all over Mumbai announcing a new dance competition on television called
Dancing Queen
, with Moon striking a pose in the line-up of contestants. I called to congratulate her and she invited me to her new apartment. She opened the door
dressed in a buttoned-up nightie and Daffy Duck slippers. Her hair was in a ponytail and she looked well scrubbed, healthy, and happy. ‘This flat has positive vibrations and is considered a lucky house in Shastri Nagar. All the previous residents like Gracy Singh, Rahul Roy, Vaishnavi, Deepak Tijori have gone on to buy their own apartments.'

As we caught up she told me that she did go to Calcutta for the anniversary of her mother's death, and stayed on for eighteen days. ‘I looked after my father, got his checkups done, bought him new clothes, organized the house, and helped my brother shop before he left for Illinois.'

‘My father,' she looked up, ‘he behaved very well with me. There was a guy who has been wanting to marry me, despite everything that has happened. But my father told him now is not the time, that I was doing things with my life. Imagine! He said that. Which is why, though the prize money was Rs one crore I decided against doing
Sach ka Saamna
. They ask all kinds of questions. It's okay to answer questions on Avinash, but there would also be questions like how often I have sex, how many boyfriends I have had. I can't answer those in front of my father.'

Dancing Queen
approached her because ‘everybody on that show had a story, and they liked mine'. Other participants included a former dance bar girl who had fallen on bad times, a girl who was dancing to save her AIDS-stricken friend, and yet another participant with leucoderma, fighting to gain acceptance in society.

Though she was knocked out of the competition halfway through, she performed to the chartbuster of the time, A.R. Rahman's ‘Masakkali,' in a special episode. It's a song
about setting a caged bird free. ‘It couldn't be closer to my life.
Dancing Queen
has really set me free.'

‘Ever since Jesus has come into my life, my life has changed. My equation with my father improved, I've started getting good work, my brother got his visa to the United States, I got this house…'

The house had a sofa, a couple of mattresses piled up on the floor, a television and a stereo system covered by a sheet, and a teetering rack of CDs. On one of the walls was a large framed poster of Moon in her oomphy avatar, lips curled in an exaggerated pout; and in the same room there was a picture of her without make-up posing with her brother. Finally, the two Moons coexisting in the same space without conflict.

As she watched me looking around the room, she said, ‘All my earlier houses were just places to shack up because I always believed that I was here in Mumbai for a short while and then I'd go back to Calcutta. But see how I have done up this house—Mumbai is home now, and if that is to be so I must live in it properly.'

6

R
AM
G
OPAL
V
ARMA

‘Power and sex are the only two realities of life.'

—Ram Gopal Varma, director of
Not a Love Story
,

inspired by the Neeraj Grover case

R
AM
G
OPAL
V
ARMA'S
office is at the edge of Oshiwara, where the middle class ghetto of Millat Nagar tapers into the swamp. It's distinguished by the director's personal vehicle, a Land Rover that is nearly as wide as the street, and his slew of young male assistants.

Inside the office, bereft of any feminine presence, Ramu, as he is known in Bollywood, sits in a chilled, windowless, vault-like room. Thick glazed paper, patterned with globes and assorted world maps, covers the walls. From behind a formidable desk, the master of this universe was waging a battle for the many virtues of Maria Susairaj.

In appearance he may be closer to Sancho Panza, but Ramu is Bollywood's Don Quixote, tilting at the windmills. Appalled by the media vilification following the court verdict, he tweeted endlessly in defence of Maria, taking on irate anchors, even mischievously offering to cast her in a film.

This is the kind of impishness that made him rename one of his biggest duds
Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag
, and get into a Twitter war with the director Karan Johar who said the promos of
Phoonk 2
were so ‘scary' that he'd have to see the film with the director—to which Ramu snidely responded saying he was fine as long as Karan did not insist on holding his hand.

While he was at school in Hyderabad, he was often bullied, he told me. Now that he is all grown up (though his one-time collaborator Mani Ratnam insists he still isn't), Ramu has developed the appetite for a good scrap, and a near-obsession with the psychology of violence. His last happy film—not necessarily for the distributors—was the delightful caper
Daud
in 1997.

While others hemmed and hawed and cast and canned, the prolific director, who often churns out up to three films a year, finished
Not a Love Story
, ‘inspired' by Neeraj's death, in five months flat. His budget: Rs three crore, the same amount Ekta had planned to spend on her Neeraj Grover film. Emile Jerome's lawyer, Wahab Khan, who Ramu interviewed for his research, could not believe the film had been finished so quickly. ‘But he just met me two months ago!'

On the other hand, Maria's lawyer Sharif Shaikh, who refused to cooperate on the film, said he was contemplating
legal action against it and asked Ramu to show him the film before release.

On the morning of the court verdict, there were full page advertisements for the movie in the newspapers, and by afternoon, as judge M.W. Chandwani read out from his 175-page-long judgment, Ramu had released a trailer. It was an arresting teaser, featuring a man and a woman swabbing blood from an apartment floor before going on to make love, while an inert foot jutted into the frame. The catch line read: ‘In the summer of 2008…two lovers did a terrible thing…'

The use of the word ‘terrible' is clever. It's not meant to condemn—rather to titillate, rousing the voyeur in his audience. The idea of two people making love next to a dead man had caught his imagination, and became the point from where Ramu spun the love story. ‘The title is deliberately misleading,' he said, with a happy grin. Once again, Maria's confession became instrumental in perpetuating the urban legend of Neeraj's death.

In a clever riff on one of his most loved films, Ramu recorded a slower version of the title song from
Rangeela
and used it on Mahie Gill, the actress who played Maria, as she swirled across the screen in a gown that appeared ominously red. ‘I see Maria as the girl who wanted to be famous. Had she succeeded, she would have become a celebrity actress like Milee, Urmila's character in
Rangeela
, but she didn't, instead ending up infamous as a murder accomplice. It's just a matter of circumstance.'

He is so caught up with the drama of Maria's life and the ‘dignity with which she conducted herself' at the press
conference called by her lawyer, that he laughingly confessed to being ‘half in love with her'.

There are some themes that recur with monotonous frequency in his films: the moral void, the claustrophobic apartment setting, and memorably, the swaying derrière of his leading ladies.
Not a Love Story
has all these motifs.

He seemed pleased at the mention. ‘Power and sex are the only two realities of life.'

Ram Gopal Varma on a roll is one of journalism's guilty pleasures. He is a terrific raconteur, offering sharp (if often deliberately provocative) insights, and is utterly droll, delivering one wisecrack after another, managing to look poker-faced and wild-eyed at the same time.

A typical RGV-ism is: ‘Shah Rukh Khan is confidence personified, because he is very bright. Salman Khan is confidence personified because he is very dumb.'

He also understands the delusions of stardom—the nonstop hustling, and above all the overarching ambition that crackles through the lanes he inhabits. ‘There's this woman, an aspiring actress, who sends me risqué jokes and messages every night. After a certain hour of the night, if a woman you don't know sends you such sexy jokes, it means something. But if your desire to become an actress is greater than anything else, then offering a sexual favour is a very small price [to pay], and you will not mind it.'

He never responds to her, has never met her, having rejected her photographs, but her persistence keeps up their non-relationship; a bunny-boiler's obsession that he will no doubt mime cinematically some day. Like Ekta's stalker who infiltrated the Balaji office disguised as a
pandit, there was a young man who stood outside his home for over a year and a half. ‘No matter what time of the day I emerged, he would be there—all he wanted to do was greet me; it was spooky.'

After he created such unlikely stars as Manoj Bajpai and Rajpal Yadav, and acquired a reputation as Bollywood's talent spotter—Anurag Kashyap, Shimit Amin, and Jaideep Sahni all began their careers with Ramu—aspirants started thronging his office night and day. ‘There are people, literally unwashed masses, who come to his office directly from Mumbai Central station. They'll come with a suitcase and two crumpled pages of a storyline, pleading for an audience with Ramuji for just two minutes,' a former colleague said.

That is about all the time he has to spare. Famously, he doesn't conduct auditions. In the time it takes for an aspiring actor to walk from the reception and open the glass door to his office, Ramu makes up his mind whether they have the ‘It' factor or not. ‘Once a music director came to me with a tune. Within thirty seconds, I knew it wasn't for me and I told him to stop. He complained, “Aapne to mukhda bhi nahin suna” [You haven't even heard the opening refrain]. So I told him, “Even thirty seconds of my life are very precious, I can't let you waste them. It is another matter that I may spend five hours explaining to you why I didn't like your thirty seconds of music, but that's my prerogative.”'

Equally, there is a long line of actors he has benignly patronized despite repeated flops. They're mostly women like Antara Mali and Nisha Kothari, with whom he has
been linked romantically (that's a debatable word with Ramu, but more on that subsequently), but also male stars like Abhishek Bachchan and Riteish Deshmukh—both men with powerful fathers.

Is that what he meant by sex and power being the only two realities in life, I wondered. With Vilasrao, Riteish Deshmukh's father, he played a memorable role in pruning some of the former chief minister's pelf. Vilasrao Deshmukh had to step down after the furore that followed his visit to the destroyed wing of the Taj Mahal Hotel during the 26/11 terror attacks in the company of Ramu and Riteish.