Maximum City (69 page)

The judge gives them two weeks off. They can go anywhere in India. “But there should be no complaint against you,” the judge admonishes, ever the headmaster. Afterward Sanjay says, “It’s a joke. We can flee to Nepal and nobody would know.”

We leave the court in his car. At a traffic light, the usual street children run up. One of them presses his face against the darkened window and sees Sanjay. At once, we are surrounded by street children carrying newspapers and magazines. “Sanjay Dutt, you did good work in
Border,”
one of the kids says. “Sanjay Dutt, Sanjay Dutt, buy a magazine.” The star is half amused, half annoyed. “Ma ki chud! Gimme a
Mid-Day.”
The window is opened to get the afternoon paper and the kids crowd around. Sanjay reads the newspaper, paying no attention to them. “Look at what our man is doing,” he says, pointing to a headline about Sharad Pawar splitting from the Congress. The kids are entranced, but only for a moment; the red light at the opposite intersection has come on and there is business to be done. They leave the star and run off across the road, skinny bodies balancing heads stuffed with practical dreams.

I drive with the bomb-blasts suspect back from court, through Bombay roads plastered with giant blowups of his face.

Mission Kashmir has finally started shooting. Vinod is fond of quoting Fellini: “The only place where you can be a dictator and still be loved is on the movie set.”

The vast set for
Mission Kashmir
in Film City booms with Vinod’s amplified voice.
“Silence!”
The whole set is fiercely air-conditioned; everyone is wearing a sweater and people are catching colds. There is an army of people, men everywhere, even on top, on the catwalks. I ask Vinod what all these people are doing, if they’re all needed. “Everything is labor-intensive,” he replies. Each piece of equipment carries its own crew; a light
will travel with three humans. Then there are other people, strugglers, visitors, gawkers, who just appear and are generally ignored, unless they get in the way. Dignitaries visit the set every day. The education secretary’s family comes one day, and Vinod’s child’s admission to a good school is assured.

Vinod is among the hardest-working people I have ever known. Right now, he is speaking on the phone, reading an article for research on the film, and answering my questions simultaneously. He has a motto: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” He is obsessed with every little detail of the production. “Who do you delegate to?” he asks me. “The standards of mediocrity are so deeply rooted here.” Vinod comes home around midnight from a day of shooting; his voice is hoarse and I ask him why. “I shouted, I cursed, I hit.” He has physically struck his assistant director.

Part of the shoot is in Kashmir, in Srinagar, where Vinod moves around in bulletproof cars under armed protection. In the middle of shooting a scene, the crew hears a series of loud pops. “They’re fireworks; they’re celebrating Dussehra,” Vinod explains to the crew, and asks the cameraman to hurry up with the shot. After it’s finished, he shouts out to his unit to pack up fast and clear the area. The crew now realizes there is no Dussehra in Muslim Kashmir; that was real shooting going on around them. Rocket-propelled grenades were fired at the Government Secretariat, two hundred yards away from the set, and four people died. But the shot got taken.

At another point, an actor playing an escaped militant is running along a canal when policemen on the other side of the canal, on the lookout for terrorists, see him running and raise their guns to shoot him. At the last minute they realize he is an actor. While there are real bombs going off in the city, Vinod is blowing up boats in Dal Lake in the service of entertainment. The line between the battles going on in the city and those staged for the film is so thin it almost disappears.

Vinod has decided to eliminate any mention of Pakistan as the villain. In the final version of the film, the conspirators announce, to the camera and to any interested terrorists, gang lords, governments, or academics, “We owe no allegiance to any government. We’re an independent group.” Vinod’s movies have a large following in Pakistan. There is, however, a shadowy figure in the foreground, seen only in silhouette, whom everyone
answers to; he is the Mr. Big. Vinod directs the dialogue writer, Atul Tiwari, to put on a beard. “Osama,” he says, anointing him.

In the second half, all of a sudden, amid the bombing and the killing, the terrorist and his lady love are magically transported to childhood, to a lush cinematic valley of waterfalls and flowers, through a song of fantasy. Since Vinod can’t take the crew back to Kashmir—it is too dangerous by this time in Srinagar—the song is shot in Bombay, which is fitting. It is a Bombay re-creation of Kashmir, a studio set of Kashmir with carpets of flowers, cotton-wool blizzards of snow. Nobody need take war all that seriously. There will always be a break in the fighting for love and song.

I
GO TO
V
INOD’S HOME
shortly after Vikram says with satisfaction, “The climax is solid.” Hrithik Roshan, the boy newcomer we substituted for Shahrukh Khan, is now the biggest star in the country with just one picture,
Kaho Na Pyaar Hai
, made by his father, Rakesh Roshan. A phenomenon has been observed in theaters where Hrithik’s first film, a love story, has been showing: Young women faint when he comes into the frame. They have been fainting all over India and abroad too; there is a report of a mass fainting that his image occasioned in a theater in Mauritius.

Near riots are breaking out over Hrithik. A theater owner from Raipur calls his father, frantic. He needs two hundred thousand pictures of Hrithik with his signature printed across them; a mob of women is besieging the theater for them. When Hrithik visits the Taj coffee shop, another invasion of his female fans forces the staff to smuggle him out through the kitchen. In the suburbs, he is enjoying a quiet dinner at an Italian restaurant with his girlfriend when he is spotted. A crowd gathers and a passing double-decker bus stops and empties out, as its passengers rush in to get a look at his face.

His film has experienced the fastest climb to the top in the history of Hindi cinema; 99 percent collection for the Bombay circuit in the first week. Week by week, the receipts for
Kaho Na Pyaar Hai
actually grow, instead of diminishing as with other films. Hrithik, who was number three in the star list of
Mission Kashmir
(his contractual salary was eleven lakhs, four less than Preity’s), is suddenly elevated to the top. He is now asking for and getting two crores per picture from other directors. “I can’t sleep,
I’m delirious,” the boy confesses to Vinod. The directors and producers are lining up outside his house with money in their hands.

Part of the reason for this fevered worship of the boy is that the traditional gods of the country, the cricketers, have just taken a bad fall. Most of them have been implicated in the match-fixing scandals; they have taken money to sell their country’s honor. When Sachin Tendulkar and Hrithik appear in a stadium together at a celebrity cricket match, the crowd’s long sustained applause is for the Bollywood star, not the sportsman. And all that Hrithik has completed so far is one movie. He is, in the age of television, an instant god.

So the “solid” climax melts. “There’s no way we can let Hilal Kohistani be killed by the ISI,” says Vinod. The villain can’t just be bumped off by unseen enemies. The hero of the box office has to be the hero of the movie. He asks me to write a truly heroic climax for Hrithik, in which he, not Sanjay, takes center stage. I come up with the idea of his killing Hilal in a climactic confrontation with his two fathers; his killing Hilal would mean that he kills what is worst in himself. “He becomes a hero,” says Vinod, nodding. Policeman Khan’s starring role gives way before the invincible might of the box office. Sanjay goes from main hero to one of two leads.

For the new climax, Vinod constructs a series of burnt-out houses around a man-made lake in Film City. Vast amounts of water are trucked to the set and dumped in a hole in the ground. Multiple fog machines wreath the set in a Kashmiri mist. The brochure for the film tells what happened next:

I take my son to Film City to see the climax: two hundred gallons of petrol and a mighty blast. It is a tradition in Vinod’s action films to demolish his work at the end. For
1942
, Vinod built a set that cost eighty lakhs and blew it up for the climax. The houses erected for
Mission Kashmir
meet the same fate: They go up in a ten-story-high column of fire, and everybody
flees from the debris and ash raining down from the sky as the wind blows it toward us. Vinod is knocked backward by the force of the explosion. The loudspeakers on the set ring out, demanding, “Ice for Vinod Saab’s backside!” I grab Gautama and run up the hill adjoining the lake. We keep hearing explosions as the gas pipes inside the set burst and jets of multicolored flame shoot up. As flaming pieces of the set fall down from the sky, they ignite small fires on the ground; the crew runs around putting them out. A group of sightseeing bureaucrats and their wives pause in their flight up the hill, turn around, and come back to watch, responding to the inner pyromaniac in all of us.

Vinod recovers his costs through sales of the music and some of the distribution rights, long before he has completed the film. It will do well, it might even be a hit, due to Hrithik’s phenomenal stardom. Because of all the women who fainted over him in
Kaho Na Pyaar Hai
, there is an automatic audience of many millions, never mind the merits or flaws of script, music, direction, or any other element in the movie. My work, I’m amused to realize, is irrelevant to the film’s commercial prospects.

Vinod appraises Hrithik like a prize heifer. On his set, he dresses his star in a tank top. “I want something that shows the most skin. They thought there was skin in
Kaho Na Pyaar Hai;
we’ll have much more.” He has Hrithik demonstrate, putting his shirt on and taking it off many times. The star’s biceps seem permanently flexed, even when he’s at rest. They feature prominently in many gratuitous scenes, as soon as the star drops into the picture, from the roof of a house, heaven-sent.

Hrithik is on the cover of the biggest newsmagazine in the country that week. The newspapers run several dozen articles on him each day. But he is modest as always; when we are watching the replay of a scene on a monitor, he sits on the floor on his knees while Vinod and I are on chairs. When Hrithik shakes my hand, I notice he has two thumbs on his right hand, a regular one and a smaller vestigial thumb growing out of it. It was not removed at birth because it is reputed to bring luck—and it certainly has, on a Cinemascope scale. The boy slaved for five years as an assistant director, eating bad food, sleeping in tents on location, and then in one week he became the biggest star in a country of 1 billion people. At the end of the year, Hrithik is to get married to his longtime sweetheart.

“It’s going good!” my friend Rustom, who has shot the stills for the movie, observes to him.

“It’s going too good.”

It
is
going too good. The balance of good and bad fortune in the universe is dangerously tilted toward this young man; it has to right itself. And so it is that, one day in January, as the man Hrithik most loves on the earth—his father, Rakesh Roshan—is getting into his Mercedes, two young men walk up and fire six bullets at him with a .32 pistol. One of the bullets lodges in his breastbone, saving his heart. It is four days after the release of the film Roshan has directed and produced. He had the foresight to keep distribution rights for most of the territories, so overnight he has become one of the wealthiest men in the industry. All the movie industry congregates around his hospital bedside, sympathizing, fearing, asking, “Why?”

Vinod tells me why. “They want Hrithik to do a film for them.”

So popular is Hrithik that the gang lord Abu Salem, who has branched off from the D-Company, wants him to act in his film. They—that is, a frontman for Salem, another Bollywood director—went to Rakesh Roshan a few days ago and asked him to get his son to sign on to a film they were producing. Roshan refused. Smita Thackeray, the Saheb’s daughter-in-law, had also asked; she could be safely refused now since the Shiv Sena was out of power. Roshan had been getting calls from Abu Salem and had told his son, “Drive carefully.” But not much else. Two days after the meeting, the hit men shot him. The Roshans are considering settling with the gangs. It would be quite a twist on the Hindi film formula: A father gets shot, and the son, instead of taking revenge, becomes the star of the killers’ film. He may not be able to summon the requisite level of enthusiasm needed for a great performance, but his face alone will cause women to faint, and the gang will make its money. Here was the casting couch turned on its head with a vengeance.

So now both our lead stars are under the shadow of the underworld: The older one is out on bail for his connections to them and the younger one has seen his father shot because of his success. Underworld and dreamworld—in Bombay they are reflections of each other.

Some of this has to do with the nature of film financing in the 1990s. Most Bollywood productions do not get bank loans; they are funded privately. The banks do not understand or trust Bollywood. The funds required for a production are huge, and a family in the industry may be working on several projects at once. The time between investment and
return can be years if the film doesn’t do well. Who would have that amount of cash lying around? Only the underworld. The gangs are very happy to see black money turn into Technicolor dreams. A hit film can bring in a fourfold return on investment within the first four weeks of its release. So for the underworld, investing in films is one of the quickest ways to get a return on illegal investment. Without underworld financing, the Hindi film industry would collapse overnight. It would have to rely on financing from banks and stockbrokers, who do not share the cinematic taste of the dons. Their dreams would be nowhere near as extravagant, as violent, as passionate.