Authors: Suketu Mehta
Ali Peter John likes lounging by the poolside of the Sun ‘n’ Sand hotel, especially when his vodka and chicken sandwich are paid for by someone else. But he is no sponger; he pays for his meal in stories, many times over. For Ali Peter John is, as his former drinking buddy Mahesh Bhatt describes him, “God of the strugglers.” His perch as a columnist for
Screen
magazine gives him license to roam the highways and bylanes of Bollywood.
Ali is a fixer, a messenger between worlds, a conduit between high and low Bombay. In appearance he is a low, shambling, suspicious sort of figure, with what is called in the marriage market “disunited vision,” so he can look at you without looking at you. He sports a short beard that makes him look like a smuggler’s henchman and generally fails to button the top half of his shirt. But his articles in
Screen
read almost like sermons, so full of moral purpose are they.
Ali is an authority on B and C movies, the sudras and untouchables—and sure-fire moneymakers—of the industry. The film trade magazines are filled with full-page color ads for them, in the sex-and-horror category. Such films are shot very quickly, start to finish in a week, in rented bungalows on Madh Island. Then they are shown to the Censor Board in Madras, where the censors are more lenient than in Bombay. They often do better than the big-budget films in the interiors, places like UP and MP, and the small theaters in Old Delhi, and they have names like
The Devil and Death, Thirsty Soul
, and
Vampire.
“They’re a mix of horror, sex, and loud music,” explains Ali. Often, in the late shows, hard-core porn is inserted at random within the film by the individual theater owners, footage that has nothing to do with the advertised film but is the real draw for the almost entirely male audience.
Listening to Ali, you get the impression of a man who is haunted by the struggling actors who have come to Bombay and failed; he retains special
solicitude for women. Ali says that of every hundred girls who come to the city to become actresses, “ten are lucky, ninety are doomed.” The auditions are often held in places like the Hotel Seaside in Juhu, which Ali has renamed the Hotel Suicide, because of what it drives some of the female strugglers to after an audition in one of its rooms.
The movies will always be linked with sex and death for Ali; both signify opportunity. “Whenever anyone died we got a holiday in school and saw films.” He grew up in Andheri East, home of poor Christians and Warli tribals. When the junior artistes started renting flats there, “it was like the invasion of a certain culture.” The Warli women were very beautiful, and the struggling actors would pick them up, telling them, “we are from the world of the movies.” The boy Ali was very impressed by the flamboyant actors, and it was a shock for him to learn, when he grew up, that “they were working as peons in offices.” He now sees them in the speakeasies on Yaari Road in Andheri, in the Urvashi beer bar, in Leo’s Country Liquor Bar, behind the dirty curtain, sitting over their 9-rupee bottle of desi liquor and planning the ways they will conquer the world, telling the other strugglers, “Tomorrow I have a shoot with Amitabh Bacchan.”
“Being in this line for so many years, I am very shocked at their level of hiding reality,” says Ali. “They will never show you they are frustrated.” The better-off strugglers live in certain hotels and guesthouses that are associated with luck. The Marina Guest House in Bandra, for example; Rajendra Kumar used to live there. Ali tells me what the strugglers survive on: the Rice Plate. “Eight rupees. Rice, six puris or two chapatis, one dal. If the hotel is very large-hearted, then a small container of very watery curd and two vegetables. Eaten in the right place, it is the most balanced diet. Sometimes if they are in a good mood they give you sweet also.” For the struggler who is getting small roles, there are the Muslim-owned hotels, where for 20 rupees he can get a very good biryani.
Ali and I take a rickshaw to Yaari Road, which is buzzing in the evening, with lots of little eateries along the sides. Ali points out a waiter at one shack: “That guy has eight stories in his pocket. He is ready to narrate. There must be lakhs of film stories in Bombay.” Just as there are struggling actors, there are also struggling scriptwriters. They seek an audience with a producer or director and narrate their story in real time and with real acting. In the emotional scenes, they weep affectingly. In the action scenes,
they jump and flail around in the director’s office. They will usually have saved the director the trouble of casting; the star is already picked out. “And Vinod Khanna is running, running . . . he falls on the ground, rolls on the ground . . . and then he gets caught.” Ali mimics the narration. “Meanwhile, Vinod Khanna is nowhere, he is away drinking somewhere.”
The long-distance telephone booths of Yaari Road are full of young people phoning home, telling their parents, their siblings, that the big break is just around the corner. Many of them belong to the junior artistes guild and have a precise caste system, Ali explains. If an actor in a party scene is wearing a suit, he is considered A-Class and gets paid double the amount that goes to another actor, relegated to C-Class because he is standing behind the A-Class actor. The strugglers whom nature has blessed with a resemblance to Amitabh Bacchan or Shahrukh Khan find work as professional doubles. Some female equivalents work in brothels. The hick from out of town is shown a photo album of the house’s inventory. He picks a film-heroine look-alike, pays an exorbitant sum for her favors, and due to the low light and his nervousness goes back home convinced that he has spent a night with a Bombay actress. Every time he sees her onscreen he flushes with secret pride.
Ali promises to introduce me to a “genuine struggler,” a man named Eishaan.
A few days later, we are sitting in the canteen of Filmalaya Studios. It is a shack, but a five-star shack according to Ali, because it has five fans. Across from me at the table—which is fashioned from a giant Coca-Cola billboard—is a clear-faced, bright-eyed young man, wearing an earring in one ear and a gold teddy bear dangling from a chain around his neck. His brother Hitesh sits next to him, so different in looks he must have come from another gene pool. This is one of Ali’s acolytes, Eishaan the struggler. “If he wasn’t struggling he’d never be sitting in this canteen,” declares Ali. For Eishaan did not run away from a village in Bihar to come to the film world to try his luck; he managed a flourishing cloth business in Dubai for five years before he came to Bombay. He is a Sindhi, a nonresident Indian struggler, who has seen both feast and famine in his twenty-five years. He has traveled in a Mercedes, in a Rolls-Royce, and in the Bombay local trains. He stayed with thirteen people in a one-bedroom flat in Andheri before his family moved to a house in Jaipur, which his mother sold her jewelry to buy. He’s been dreaming about being a hero since he
was sixteen and poring over the centerfolds in
Screen
magazine. At that time one of his uncles, working for a production company in Bombay, got him work as a model in a photo shoot, and he pocketed 800 rupees. For a teenager in Jaipur, it must have been a big deal, signifying much more than its purchasing power.
The teenager finished school up to the twelfth standard and then his family moved to Dubai, where he managed a textile shop for an Arab man, making 70,000 rupees a month. Then in the Gulf War business went down. He kept visiting Bombay. He felt he should do something else, something closer to his heart. Back in Dubai, a supermarket manager named Starson—“he knew about stars”—wandered into the cloth shop. “He used to tell me, You are not an ordinary person. I see something in you.” The young man was in this cloth shop at this time, Starson said, but it was only a rest stop, to drink some water. “This is not the end. You’ll be ruling.”
This boy felt he could tell Starson his dream. “He said do it. There will be a lot of trouble, but never give up.”
So the cloth shop manager left Dubai and went to Bombay to be a movie star. When he came to the city, it had changed its name to Mumbai, so he changed his name too. When he was born, his parents, with their middle-class lack of imagination, had named him Mahesh, the sheer ordinariness of which he had been laboring under all these years. In the fifties and sixties, Muslim actors changed their names to Hindu ones—such as Dilip Kumar—to be accepted. In the nineties, there was no such need. Even as the BJP and the Sena were ascendant, the biggest movie stars in the country were a trio of Muslim stars, the Khans: Shahrukh, Aamir, and Salman. Mahesh changed his name to Eishaan, which has an Urdu ring, a filmi ring, to it.
Eishaan started out taking a multitude of classes: action classes, acting classes, dance classes. The dance class cost 1,000 rupees a month, the action class 5,000 rupees for three months, and the acting class cost 15,000 rupees. In the action classes they were taught Tae Kwon Do. Then they would be taken to the beach to learn filmi action—diving and rolling and throwing punches. He demonstrates. “They should pass by just a little bit,” just barely missing the body, just as the audience hears the satisfying
dhishoom!
He thought the acting teacher saw something special in him. “My sir Roshan Taneja kept me on as an assistant for a year and a half,” he says proudly. Then he adds, “Unpaid. It was my honor.”
He got offered roles in C films and in television serials, but he had set his sights on the A films. Eishaan is very clear about what kind of roles he will accept. “I came here with an intention of becoming a hero. It was not to become an actor.” He then met a producer who promised him a role in a film he was doing. Every two or three months he would inquire of the producer about the status of the film and would be told, “We’re looking for a director.” The director was never found. Meanwhile, Eishaan had stopped making his rounds of the producers’ offices, believing that his launch was imminent. He kept waiting for a year and a half, and in that period he lost his other contacts.
He started afresh, and after four or five months he met Chetan Anand at a fashion studio and gave the director his portfolio. Chetan Anand was a legendary film director who had come over from Pakistan after Partition and was part of a film dynasty. He was doing a film about Partition, a Muslim girl falling in love with a Hindu boy. Eishaan was at a friend’s place when he got the call from Chetan Anand. “You’re on,” said the director. “I was out of the world,” recalls the struggler. “I started dreaming, when they say ‘Action!’ how I would react.” He spent nine months with the director, recording seven songs. Then the eighty-seven-year old Anand fell sick. “He had some liver problem; he lost both livers,” says Eishaan. Anand died, and so did the movie.
Eishaan’s family and friends demanded that he come back to the cloth business. “But people don’t understand the importance of a Chetan Anand sitting with me discussing a scene for hours on end. That was pleasing to the actor in me. But a mother and father sitting in Jaipur don’t know who Chetan Anand
is.
My parents were praying to God: ‘Give him some intelligence and make him come back.’”
Eishaan decided to stay in the city, because if he left he could never return. “Now here came the truth: However much you bend, the world will make you bend more.” The struggler was now having trouble even getting into television, at which he had turned up his nose earlier. Now even film actors were ready to do television, in the economic slump of the mid-nineties. And the TV producers wanted known faces even on the small screen. Eishaan made his daily rounds of the producers’ offices, carrying his two pictures of himself. “I know what happens to those pictures, when there are more than ten thousand people coming to your office.”
I have seen such pictures in a thick photo album in Vinod’s office, for
the director to consult when he is casting minor roles. The album has young people, old people, children, mothers, grandfathers. It has attractive, even stunning, people; it has repulsive and villainous people. It has demure Hindustani naris; it has tarty vamps with breasts spilling out of tight blouses. All of humanity that is useful to the screen is represented here. They start out in the pages of this album on the first stage of their long journey to the screen, where the pictures come alive with a jerk.
Every morning Eishaan goes to the gym or for a jog, to keep fit and, more important, to look fit. He has to spend on clothes, to keep up his presentation, until he proves himself as an actor; then, as with the older, established Hindi film actors, he can safely run to fat and dress like a slob. His car is in an advanced state of melancholy. The white Maruti has a large brown rust spot on the front, and when you close the door it rattles shut. But he keeps it anyway, at considerable expense. “To get entry inside a studio you need a car, so the doorman will salute you. In a taxi he’ll let you go; in a rickshaw he’ll ask you questions; and if you’re walking he won’t allow you in. When I was working in Dubai I was the boss; now I have to say ‘sir, sir.’ For a struggler, this is the rule of life: You have be very buttery.”
His is the eternal quandary of the novice job seeker. “I don’t understand when they ask you ‘What have you done? Have you done anything before?’ If everyone asks the same question, when do I get the chance to do something?” He envies the female strugglers. “Girls have it easy; there is the couch.” Eishaan avoids modeling because of the homosexuals in the fashion business. He sometimes resents the hundreds of thousands of people who want to be stars and compete with him at the lower end of the chain, who are willing to work for free. “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry brushing his teeth in the mirror thinks, If Nana Patekar can do it why not me? But they make it tough for people who are actually talented.”
When Eishaan came to Bombay, he was inspired by the stories of stars who had come up the rough way, such as Mithun Chakraborty. “He was my idol, the way he struggled, the way he came up in life. He used to sleep in footpaths, he was eager to get his bread.” So worshipful of Mithun was Eishaan that he once had a big fight with his father over him. In his house in Jaipur, he had installed a huge laminated portrait of the star in the living room. When Eishaan’s father came down from Dubai and saw the picture, he removed it without his son’s knowledge. Eishaan went on a hunger fast.
His family, faced with a choice between living with the dark actor’s massive likeness and their son’s starving to death, yielded. They put the picture back up.