Sacred Games (101 page)

‘And who are you, Basu Bhattacharya?' I said amidst general laughter. But I was grinning. The story was good, and all the major objections I had raised earlier had been addressed. I knew exactly what was going to happen in the story, but still it had made my stomach tighten, and the scene where the boy said goodbye to his mother and went off to fight his war had brought forth a painful constriction of my throat. I turned to Manu. ‘Okay,' I said. ‘I think we're ready to shoot.'

He pumped his fists and jumped up and down three times and then clasped my hands. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘I agree, bhai. We are ready. Let's start. Let's begin.'

I was impatient to start shooting, and Zoya was more than ready. She had gone to the Miss Universe contest in Argentina, and had come in as fourth runner-up. We had been certain that she would win, that she would be occupied with Miss Universe duties for a year, but the judges had made their inexplicable decision, and she was now free and impatient. ‘We will start immediately,' I said to Manu. ‘But today I want you all to celebrate. I'm giving you two nights. And everyone gets a bonus. Take the launch and go. You can stay at the bungalow.'

I gave them each twenty thousand baht and sent them away. I kept back only Arvind and a skeleton crew of three, and the screenplay. I read the whole thing over, I pored over Manu Tewari's fanatically neat handwriting, his orderly lines in which he had contained so much shooting and kissing and car crashes and tears and torn hearts. I read it all twice, and then I called Jojo and read the whole thing to her. I intoned, ‘Fade to black,' and then I asked, ‘Does it work?'

‘Yes,' she said.

‘Yes and what?'

‘Arre, what do you mean, what? I said it works.'

‘I know you, saali. You can say yes, and have it mean exactly no. So, tell me.'

‘I did tell you. It works for what it is.'

‘What is it exactly?'

She took a dragging breath. ‘Gaitonde,' she said, ‘I didn't mean anything. It's a great script. It'll be a hit.'

I breathed in myself, and took a moment to press down my anger, and
said in as reasonable a voice as I could, ‘No, no, Jojo. We have to know if anyone has any doubts. We have to know now so we can fix it.'

She knew I wasn't going to let her retreat, so she gathered herself and came forward. ‘Fine. What I was saying was, that it is good enough for what it is. And what it is…It's one of those movies in which men blow up things and fight a lot and cry over each other.'

‘My boys and I fight and cry on this boat. What's wrong with that?'

‘Nothing. I told you, your film is going to be a hit.'

‘But?'

‘But nothing. It's just not the kind of film I enjoy too much myself.'

‘You're saying that women won't come? You wait, with the stars we have, and the way we shoot the songs, every woman will come with her children and her grandmother. And they'll all want to see Zoya.'

‘Baba, I said it'll be a hit, no? All I'm saying is that it's a certain kind of film.'

‘Yes, it's not the kind where you have three women jabbering at each other about how sad and put-down they are for one and a half hours, and then another two women ranting about how bad men are for another hour. Gaandu, you make a dozen television shows like that if you want, but you're not going to shove my film down that smelly path.'

The slow ripples of her laughter calmed me down. ‘Gaitonde,' she said, ‘I'm not trying to shove your maderchod film into anything. You are going to stuff it down the whole of India's throat anyway, including the women. We won't escape. So don't worry. Just tell me, what are you calling this bastard?'

‘Don't abuse my film,' I said. ‘You abuse me relentlessly, but don't you dare call my film names.' I was smiling. ‘I was thinking of calling it
Barood
.'

‘That was used in the seventies.'

‘I know. But I still like it. You don't?'

‘Not too much. It doesn't suggest the international angle.'

‘So, you want to call it
International Barood
?'

I lay back on the bed and waited for her to stop laughing. I was laughing a little myself. ‘Be serious. This is important, a title can really help a film's sales.'

‘Yes, yes. It's too bad
International Khilari
has been used. That would've been perfect.'

That would indeed have been perfect. But it had been used, and not too long ago, so we went on to other ideas, from
Love in London
to
Hamari
Dharti, Unki Dharti
. It was quite a pleasure, to cast about in old, half-remembered titles, and to find words and little pieces of language, and play with them and put them together like pieces of a puzzle, trying to find the words that would express the feeling of the screenplay, of life itself. But then my pleasure was interrupted by my own band of international khilaris. A phone call came in on the local line: Manu Tewari and three of the others had been arrested.

‘What? Where? How?' I snarled at Arvind. The boys had clear instructions to keep a low profile, to stay out of trouble, to be invisible. All of us had come into Thailand by sea, and had never gone through any kind of immigration, and as far as the Thai authorities knew, we did not exist.

‘It's that bastard writer, bhai,' Arvind said. ‘He got into a fight with an American sailor at the Typhoon bar.'

‘That little chodu?' I was amazed. Manu wrote good violence, but he wasn't a fighter. He watched, and waited, and considered, and then usually wrote. ‘He fought over what?'

‘There's a girl at the Typhoon bar he likes.'

‘So?'

‘She was with an American sailor from the carrier.' There was an American aircraft carrier at the head of the bay, accompanied by two smaller ships. The carrier was grey and vast as a mountain, and had two days ago disgorged three thousand sailors on to Patong beach. ‘This sailor had bought her out of the bar for the last two nights. She was sitting on his lap. The sailor was saying rude things about her in English to his friends, how she sucked his lauda. The girl didn't understand, but Manu did. He said something to the sailor. The sailor said something back. Manu broke a Heineken bottle over his head.'

‘Bhenchod.'

‘So then the sailor knocked Manu over the table. And the sailor's friends came into the conversation. And the boys jumped them in turn. So they're all in jail.'

I felt like leaving them all in jail, but I needed Manu. So I got them out. Of course I couldn't get directly involved in the mess, but I sent off Arvind with the necessary money, and I got on the phone and made calls. Three days, two lawyers and a hundred and twenty thousand baht in bribes later, I had them back on the yacht. There was a furious green welt across the left side of Manu Tewari's face, and he was as tottery as a collapsing socialist state. The boys told me he hadn't slept for three days. For all his sympathies with the oppressed, it turned out he had never been inside a
jail before, and the Thai cells had affected his nerves very badly. I sent him off to bed, and gave the boys a good talking-to.

‘Bhai,' Amit said. ‘What were we supposed to do? We were just sitting there drinking. All of a sudden this bastard Manu stands up and hits the American with his beer bottle. And the American was one of those huge goras, as big as a truck. So he shook his head and slugged Manu across the room. And his friends jumped in. So we did.' He shook his head. ‘All over some whore. And he's never even taken her gaand.'

So then they told me. At the Typhoon bar there was this Thai whore who called herself Debbie. Six months ago, Manu had gone to the bar with the boys and had bought Debbie a drink and started asking her where she came from, how many brothers and sisters she had, what sort of house they lived in. Debbie was a sharp little churi, she saw her opportunity, and gave Manu Tewari enough material to write four tragedies – she told him, in very broken English, about her crippled farmer father, and her silent, hard-working mother, and their rickety wooden house in the hills above Nong Khai, and her barefoot, wormy brothers and sisters, and all the rest of it. So for the last six months, each time we had come into Patong, Manu Tewari had taken this Debbie out for lunch and dinner, and bought her dresses and belts and perfumes, and maybe – even though he wouldn't admit to it – had given her cash to help send her little siblings to school in the far-off hills of Nong Khai. He had done all this without touching her mountains and valleys even once. But she was, after all, a working bar-girl. The American sailor had paid in good dollars for Debbie's chut and her lund-lasoons and for the right to talk about it, and so the big maderchod had set off Manu Tewari's socialist notions of honour. And cost me a lot of money.

‘Bastard writer,' I said. Only a rule-giving Manu Tewari type could sail around Thai waters for six months and not get his lauda wet. I gave my instructions. The next week, the boys went back into Patong and took Manu Tewari along. That night, while he slept, they slipped two girls into his room. The girls were both seventeen years old, both had long silky black hair down to their tight little behinds, both had creamy little breasts, and both were naked when they went into Manu's bed. He woke up gasping, but they didn't give him time to ask any of his questions, one put something into his mouth, and the other put something of his in her mouth. His socialism failed completely, but his lauda stood up, and he exploited both of them mercilessly until the next morning. Then he slept, and when he woke he was full of regret and a bad conscience and started
telling them he was sorry. So the girls started playing with each other's chuts and pushed their nipples into his lips. He groaned a little, but he stopped talking, and then oppressed them well into the evening. He didn't mention beautiful Debbie from the Typhoon bar even once.

That's what you have to do with writers sometimes: shut them up. They get so caught up in language and stories and rules that they can't see the simplest facts. Or all the beautiful warm curves that cash buys. But the lauda feels, it knows. You have to give the lauda a chance.

 

We made the film. It was shot in Bombay, London, Lausanne, Munich, Tallinn and Seville. I watched weekly rushes in Bangkok, and gave my reactions and advice, but always through Dheeraj Kapoor and Manu Tewari. All the other crew, and especially the actors, had no idea who they were really working for. I knew I had to protect Zoya and her future, and so I kept security very tight. And as I watched her, week after week, I knew her future was going to be very-very big. I knew she was beautiful, but to see her on a big screen was to feel like a child in the face of a golden combustion of light. She was thirty feet high, weightless as a dream, and when she smiled your heart slammed into your spine and staggered you back like a bullet. Her cheekbones were as sharp as falling swords, and as she stalked away from the camera, there was a serpent slide to her back that shivered up your neck. It wasn't just me, Arvind watched the rushes with me and was also awed and silenced. After listening to us rave about the girl for six weeks, Suhasini came along and watched a rough cut of the song shot in Estonia, and all her sarcasm and competitiveness vanished, and she turned to us as the lights came on, and said, ‘Okay, I'll admit it. The girl looks good.'

‘Just good?' Arvind said. ‘Come on. Tell the truth. If not to me, at least to Bhai.'

Suhasini put an arm under his, and leaned across him. ‘Fine, fine. Bhai, the girl was definitely the right choice. She's going to be a huge success. Stupendous.'

Even the women saw it, Zoya
was
stupendous. Her fame grew as the production rolled on, as the carefully timed press releases were sent out, as her photographs began to appear on the covers of film magazines, as flashes of the songs appeared on television. She was very busy now, and was able to fly out to Singapore only intermittently, and much less often than before. And I must confess that I was glad about this. To admit this to myself was gratingly hard back then, it felt like two stones grinding
against each other just under my navel. But the stinking truth that came bobbing up my throat was that as Zoya grew bigger, I felt that I grew smaller. Oh, I was powerful, I was feared, I was rich, I could give life, or take it. I supported families, and generations of children had been born in the homes that I had built, that flourished under my protection. I was not afraid of her success, after all I had built it, I had created her. And yet. It was hard to admit, hard to know, and it is hard to tell now: as Zoya grew into the nation's goddess, my lauda shrank.

I am not lying, and I was not deluded, I was not crazy. The thing grew smaller. Not so much in length but in its circumference and heft. I remembered it being hard and muscled and healthy, and now it seemed apologetic and wan. Once it needed no excuses, now it was weakened by constant doubt. No, not that Zoya ever said anything. She was still as energetic in her sucking, as compliant as always and as expressive of her pleasure. She moaned when I took her, she shut her eyes, she flung her arms over her head – as always – when the shudders spread from her chut. Once, pounding on her daana, taking her to that edge, driving her over it into the fall of joy, had made me feel righteous and victorious. I was the ruler of her rich brown expanses. But now I had seen what an artful actress she was. On screen, she had made me believe completely that she was someone else. But then, how was I to know that the Zoya I knew, who I thought I knew, was not actually someone else? Was my Zoya only a performance? Were those moans only acting?

This is the ache, if you are unfortunate enough to care what a paid woman feels and thinks. This is the fatal squeeze of that paradox. The more she shrieks from the press of your pleasure, the more you suspect that her sighs are overstated, that you are not pleasing her at all. And you can never know the truth. If you ask, she will tell you what she thinks you pay her to say. If you don't ask, you will get angry. You will get angry enough so that the only reaction you will accept from her as true is the evidence of her pain. I grew rough in my handling of Zoya. I pulled at her hair, I bit her breasts and tugged at her nipples, and she winced and writhed but never tried to stop me. I understood why. After all, I gave her money. I had paid for parts of this perfect physique. And yet I could never be sure that it was not invulnerable to me, that this body did not escape me most precisely at those moments when I took it most deeply. I grew angry. One morning I took her in a way that I had rarely done before, I took her like I took the boys in jail, like I had taken Mumtaz of the luscious gaand. I ploughed into Zoya from behind, I held her by the hair and
took her hard. She screamed and gave way before me. My fingers left scarlet clusters on her sides. ‘Saali,' I spat out at the flexing camber of her back, ‘randi, take it, here, here. Take it.'