SMALL FILM, GIANT FOOTPRINT

Anyone who has ever watched Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro -- and frankly, one doesn't know a soul who hasn't -- has their favourite moment from the film. The easiest to recall are the "thoda khao thoda phenko" scene at Commissioner DeMello's Madh Island bungalow, the loony telephone episode at Tarneja's house, a drunk Ahuja mistaking DeMello's coffin for a car and 'towing' it away, and the Mahabharata climax where the entire cast gatecrashes a live performance with Dhritarashtra periodically intoning in sheer frustration -- "ye kya ho raha hai?" as emperor Akbar making an inexplicable guest appearance.

Now there are two happy coincidences for JBDY fans. NFDC, which is reviving its classics on DVD has recently brought out a new edition complete with an add-on disc about the making of the film and an interactive game, and Delhi-based journalist Jai Arjun Singh has written a witty, entertaining book in the film's 30th year, chronicling its fascinating journey from a nutty idea in Kundan Shah's head to an insane black comedy that has now achieved cult status as a nihilist classic or simply great social satire.

There may have been a third happenstance -- the sequel Shah has been working on forever, but sadly what won't be, after Ravi Baswani's sudden demise last year. Just as well, for, as Singh records, the absolute freedom the director enjoyed to execute his vision and the goodwill and camaraderie during the shoot between everyone involved on the project is impossible to replicate. This was a time when films could be made for under Rs. 7 lakh -- even granting that this was a low-budget NFDC production, that's still a pittance and again, making a similar film with stars and on a Rs 30 crore budget would obviously change the dynamics dramatically. In fact, in the DVD about the making, Shah admits as much, describing how many top-line stars want to work with him, but are unwilling to surrender to the lunacy he demands.

Those were the days when Vinod Chopra and Sudhir Mishra worked as Shah's assistants -- the protagonists were given their name. Renu Saluja, one of India's finest editors who is sadly no more, was involved in every aspect of the shoot and had the wherewithal to make a coherent film of the endless footage they'd shot -- including scenes with young Anupam Kher as a 'Disco' killer which were dropped from the final edit. Naseeruddin Shah, the only star in the show, could make scant sense of the madness and was spotted banging his head on the wall during the telephone scene, but stood by his director all through and even offered to cut into his fees to bail him out. Needless to say, everyone got paid next to nothing and the entire unit lived through the shoot on a prayer.

The otherwise reticent Shah has spoken extensively to Singh about the making of the film and so have others, including writer Ranjit Kapoor and many of the actors who got their first big break with JBDY. But every now and then -- between describing his journey from being the son of a Gujarati business family to an unexpected selection at the FTII and even more unbelievably, getting funds from NFDC for his crazy concept to ultimately executing it in the most arbitrary fashion possible -- he plays down the significance JBDY has assumed over the decades. "It's a sad state of affairs if JBDY has become the be all and end all of a 'socially aware' film," he says. "There should have been many more like it. If this film is on such a pedestal, all it tells me is that Indian cinema hasn't achieved enough."

Excerpts from 'Deliverance' a novella by Gauri Deshpande, translated by Shashi Deshpande:

• "Why is it like this? Is it the same with everyone? I get on well with my daughters when they're away but I don't want to be with them everyday."

• "How will we ever know, before we really become mothers, whether we are fit for motherhood?"

• "Before I became a mother I had thought that this new experience, this new person, would fill some gap in my life, that I would become more complete, that one of my life's potentials would now be realised, and so on. But what happened was just the opposite. Because of the children all my activities were curtailed. I began to wonder whether we shouldn't deduct fifteen or twenty years from our lives on account of them. No going out, no seeing anything, not even just simple reading and writing. Keep yourself ready for fulfilling the children's demands -- that is all! Since it was my lot, since it was inevitable, I did everything, grumbling all the while, and once the novelty wore off, with anger."

• "To whom can I speak of this? Ultimately, only to myself. In this world everyone will say -- you took it on knowingly, now go through with it. But when I see what the children and I suffer as we go through with it, I think one must speak the truth some time. Don't go on praising motherhood -- say that it is boring, repetitive, constricting and devastating, both for the mind and the body. Does everyone know this truth, and is this why they cloak it with fond admiration, praise, love and regard? Did my grandmother get angry with my mother? My mother with me? I think now that she did. Perhaps she didn't have as much anger as I do, or maybe she had more control over herself, but it was there."
• "Is motherhood like the story about Maruti's umbilicus then, something that everybody knows the truth about, but no one will say it aloud?"

That's one of my favourite authors at her candid best. Whether it was motherhood, womanhood, marriage, relationships or life itself, Gauri Deshpande had the ability to be brutally honest, much to the chagrin of the male establishment of the time. In this, her most autobiographical story, she examines her difficult relationship with her daughters, not sparing herself or them and in the process, filtering her own experiences into evocative literature -- the hallmark of many a great woman writer. 

Interestingly, her daughter Urmilla Deshpande followed in her footsteps by exploring the same relationship from her point-of-view in her novel A Pack of Lies a couple of years ago. Gauri would have been proud even though her daughter's portrait of her was far from flattering. In fact, reading both these stories as companion pieces makes for an interesting study of how differently two people can look at the same situation from different vantage points. 

The mother finds parenting a burden, the daughter is embarrassed, hurt and shocked by her mother's dereliction of duty. Both agree that the mother hadn't the time or the patience to tend to her daughters through their growing years and was self-absorbed to a fault. While Gauri's book, ruthless as it is, still leaves an opening for us to judge the mother kindly, Urmilla is unsparing in her indictment, not allowing her parent's accomplishments as writer to buffer her inherent inadequacies as a mother whose love she so longed for and who was not just neglectful, but cold, cruel and graceless. She also holds the privilege of ascribing her own aimless wanderings and experiments with sex and drugs to her mother's negligence. Gauri's book on the other hand, struggles to make sense of why her daughter picked out an artist with deformed limbs to be her husband -- is this her way of getting back me, she wonders? 

Perhaps the most disturbing contrast is the episode of the daughter's troubled relationship with the step father. In Deliverance, she develops a crush on him and her concerned mother sends her to a psychiatrist to help her cope with her feelings. Shockingly, in A Pack of Lies, the daughter claims the same step father sneaked into her room at night and when she ran to her mother, the woman refused to believe her allegation and dismissed it as another attention-seeking stunt.

It would be unwise to presume that all these incidents are indeed autobiographical, given that both books are after all, works of fiction. At the same time, because both writers have narrated similar incidents from their individual perspectives, it may in fact leave some room for speculation about what may or may not have transpired and perhaps Urmilla's version is her way of putting the truth out one more time for people to judge, or then, as her mother suspects, another expression of jealousy or childish defiance. 

Ultimately, reading both Deliverance and A Pack Of Lies helps to demystify motherhood. This isn't the pretty picture of doting, self-sacrificing mothers we are fed in popular culture, but the uncompromising story of an individual with a keen intellect and sharp analytical skills who had the courage to look herself in the mirror and not baulk at the imperfection that stared back at her.

THE DREAM MERCHANTS

Of all the stories in this delectable collection edited by Jerry Pinto, Pritish Nandy's interview of the late Kishore Kumar in a 1985 issue of the Illustrated Weekly of India has to be the craziest. Ranging from anecdotes of his eccentric ideas for refashioning his bungalow (he wanted little boats floating around his living room and monkeys farting from the ceiling instead of fans!), to how much he hated the film world — "I muffed my lines, pretended to be crazy, shaved my head off, played difficult, began yodelling in the midst of tragic scenes, told Meena Kumari what I was supposed to tell Bina Rai in some other film but they still wouldn't let me go" — it's one surreal piece.

Pinto's love for the movies and their makers is evident in his inspired introduction (brief but vivid descriptions from films like Krishna Shah's Shalimar are side-splitting funny), his selection of writing goes from serious analysis like Mukul Kesavan's essay on the Islamicate roots of Hindi cinema to a gratifying chapter from Madhu Jain's book on the Kapoors which speaks of the Showman in love. "Raj Kapoor has famously — and rather callously — said that his wife was the mother of his children and Nargis the mother of his films."

Thirty seven essays, most of them extracted from previous publications, are divided into six parts and offer a taster's menu of Bollywood. Anecdotes and experiences of the stars themselves, the making of iconic films, film music, gossip, ringside views and finally, fiction, this truly is the stuff our cinematic spectacles are made of, with a little bit of everything; authentic entertainment that makes you laugh and cry as you breeze through its pages.

Everyone's sure to have their pick depending on their biases and mine has to be Vinod Mehta's ode to Meena Kumari and Chhoti Bahu. Referring to her as "my heroine", "my tragedienne" he traces her journey from playing the iconic character in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam to, tragically, embodying it in real life. Ashraf Aziz's erudite piece on the female voice in Hindustani film songs comes a close second, where he analyses how Lata Mangeshkar infantilized (his italics) the female voice thus breaking the magic spell of the femmes fatales who held sway over film music in pre-Partition India. "Whereas the voices of the earlier singers were imbued with daunting sensuality (indeed, passion), Lata's voice had a 'neutered' sound. Hers was (and is) a desexed voice -- she sounded like a prepubertal adolescent." Amen.

Still on the nightingale, Dada Kondke recalls how, during the course of his relationship with Asha Bhosle, he would flit between both sisters' houses and each of them would grill him about what the other said of her! 

But there's some semi-serious trivia too. Like how Sholay 'flopped' on its release as critics and trade pundits made doomsday predictions for what was then the most expensive film ever made in India (The Fall And The Rise of Sholay, Anupama Chopra). Two Views Of Guide has Dev Anand and R K Narayan recounting varying, nay contradictory accounts of the same episode, leaving the reader to judge who to believe.

And for the seamier side of Bollywood, turn to Suketu Mehta's The Struggler And The Goddess about his encounter with a youth who gave up his family's flourishing cloth business in Dubai to come to Bombay to become a star and ultimately, after years of knocking around, had one landmark film to show for it — Jai Mata Shakumbhari Devi. Poignant and witty at once, it finds its protagonist vacillating between hope and despair as he is humiliated on a routine basis, turns overly superstitious and neglects his health and well—being in pursuit of his dream.  

The pick of the fiction is, without doubt, an extract from Ismat Chughtai's A Very Strange Man, a thinly veiled reproduction of the Guru Dutt-Waheeda Rehman affair. But facts are sometimes even stranger as Ram Kamal Mukherjee's Marrying Hema (extracted from Hema Malini: Diva Unveiled) proves. So for those uninitiated in film gossip of the '70s, you'll now have a chance to find out how Hema Malini almost married Jeetendra, and how Dharmendra gate-crashed the wedding and stole his bride away!

WHAT LIES BENEATH

Meenal Baghel's crisp book about the sensational Neeraj Grover murder of May 2008 is everything that Ramgopal Varma's salacious film Not A Love Story based on the same incident was not — intelligent, emotive and penetrating. Varma himself, along with television honcho Ekta Kapoor, gets the special treatment from Ms Baghel (deservedly so) for their minor but crucial roles on the fringes of this drama.

Death In Mumbai is an astute sociological study of the changing face of Mumbai more than a clinical (or cynical) analysis of a gruesome murder and cover-up as the author delves into the yearnings of young men and women who flock to the city from all parts of the country in search of fame, fortune and love (or something like it).

Grover, a young 25-year-old television executive, was brutally murdered in the Malad flat of aspiring actress Maria Susairaj four years ago. Susairaj and her fiance, naval officer Emile Jerome, were charged and convicted for the heinous crime under different sections of the IPC and sentenced to three and 10 years respectively. But more than the killing itself, it was their actions in the aftermath that shocked the nation following a media frenzy around the case. The hacking of the body and disposing of it in the jungles of Manor, going back to their lives without a hint of regret or remorse and trying to fabricate alibis to cover their tracks are chilling for their sheer audacity.

Twice during the course of the book, Ms Baghel refers to the infamous Nanavati case of 1959 when a naval officer, KM Nanavati, shot his wife's lover at point blank range. Perhaps those were more innocent times, or just that Nanavati was a different man, but he went straight to his superiors and then turned himself in to the police. Nanavati's crime of passion too became the subject of a controversial film (Yeh Raaste Hain Pyaar Ke, 1963) and another (Achanak, 1973) drew inspiration from it, apart from a fictionalised account in Indra Sinha's brilliant The Death of Mr Love.

Retracing the footsteps of the principal players, Death In Mumbai journeys through the city's suburbs, specifically Versova and Oshiwara, where the film and television industry draws thousands of aspirants whose quest for 15 minutes of stardom drives them to desperation (the chapter on starlet Moon Das is particularly educative). Life revolves around coffee shops and gyms and running around for auditions or trying to make the right connections. People live as paying guests or in small 'sub' sub-let apartments, with friends or lovers, flitting between relationships with astonishing frequency. 

But she also travels to Kanpur (where Grover hailed from) and Mysore (home town to Susairaj and Jerome) to try and understand why smaller cities are unable to contain the blinding ambition of youth. Once in Mumbai, the ties with home and family become mere asides in days and nights spent negotiating the bump and grind of the glamour industry. Yet, Neeraj called his mother twice a day. She didn't know her son had the reputation of being a 'stud'. Nor does Maria's family claim any knowledge of her various liaisons or the nature of her relationship with Neeraj—although they did know of her 'engagement' with Emile, which his family disapproved of.

Neeraj had the brashness of youth, Maria was flirtatious and manipulative while Emile's temper was legendary. Their respective weaknesses fuelled a grand tragedy (though none of the characters displayed much heroism) and became a symbol of deprivation and inhumanity in a city that prides its restless spirit. What Ms Baghel's book perhaps makes painfully evident is that Mumbai has in fact, bartered its soul to the chase and inconstancy, insecurity and duplicity have sunk roots too deep to blossom into anything life-affirming. 

HUES AND REFLECTIONS

If Deepti Naval wasn't an acclaimed actress, perhaps her first collection of short stories The Mad Tibetan: Stories from Then And Now, would have received more attention for its content than the book release function. A compilation of 11 pieces – a mix of fiction, autobiography and travel writing — it's a deft tapestry of musings on the human condition.

You may not marvel at the writer’s flourish with the English language –although simplicity of expression is in fact, a highly underrated virtue — but are likely to be disarmed by her keen observation of life and empathetic world-view which embraces loners, madmen, prostitutes, tortured childhoods and birds, all in equal measure of concern. An ageing, Parkinson’s-afflicted piano tuner in Mumbai, struggling to make ends meet and keep his notes together — even as they “scuttled across the room, corner to corner, through the ceiling, against the damp walls and back”—sets the introspective tone of the compilation while Ruth Mayberry the screenplay writer in New York who “spoke slowly… and with grace, the one thing she never let go of”, completes the circle of life.

Perhaps the finest story in the book is Birds. It is also amongst the shortest. But none speaks of the cruelty of human life and an individual’s capacity for tenderness as passionately. Narrated in the first person, the story spans a few days when the protagonist is getting her house painted and instructs the workmen to ensure they let out the birds who have made a nest in the ceiling of her study before cementing the roof. She leaves town and returns to a spanking house, only to be woken up early the next morning to the sound of birds hitting against the glass panes of her study. It’s enough to unleash despair in the heart of the woman who, in her rush of sentimental panic, is even willing to smash the new ceiling to let out the poor fledglings who must surely be trapped underneath.

Bunny and Ginny the little Sisters of Joginder Nagar are no less vulnerable than those trapped birds. Their alcoholic father has dragged them to the local barber to shave off their heads to contain the spread of the lice that have caused abrasions on their scalps. The description of their silent revolt at the barber shop and the subsequent shame of “a few nicks and cuts at the self-esteem of two pretty little pahari girls” is horrifying. That, and the old woman of Falkland Road in Mumbai from Thulli, “her face painted a stale dead-white” sitting “on the edge of her caged world” are amongst the most poignant images in a book suffused with humanity.

Thulli seems to have its roots in Ms. Naval’s own experiences researching for the role of a prostitute. Her eagerness to look for ‘material’ in the most sordid of surroundings is palpable in the vivid description of her journey through the seediest part of town late one rainy night. Her acknowledgement of her own foolish innocence about the lot of ‘fallen’ women is refreshing. But eventually she meets Thulli and finds herself “face to face with a distorted version of myself in the huge mirror tilted against the green wall” in a dingy room. “I looked about the room, the girls on the floor, all nine of them, the way they slept, coiled into each other as if tied together by an invisible umbilical cord…”

The book derives its title from a story about a man with “a clear disarming smile, like the tinny waters of the river” whom the protagonist encounters in the middle of nowhere on a trek to Ladakh. He dances and poses for her–“performing, peacock-like, strutting about, showing off all his colours; the flashing of his dark narrow eyes… his bewitching smile!” They call him ‘Nyonba’, the Tibetan word for ‘mad’. There is an element of insanity in everyday life too. As young Jatin discovers in Bombay Central when a stranger gives him refuge in his house on his first night in Mumbai and the lad lands himself in a bizarre situation that educates him on the intricacies of relationships.

The only false note is The Morning After—too simplistic and filmi in tenor, it mistakes melodrama for emotional depth as Lily’s trip to the house of a mysterious woman called Dolma leaves the reader unmoved. I'd trade this mush any day for the tale of a random encounter with a long-forgotten friend in D, far more enjoyable for its candour and the writer’s ability to pluck out the drama from ordinary events. Equally charming is her encounter with Balraj Sahni as a little girl seeking an autograph from her favourite movie star.

The invisible thread that ties these diverse vignettes together is an acceptance of life with all its quirks and complexities, never discounting oddity as a vice. It is at once a celebration of and a lament on human existence, expressed most overtly in Premonition, a tale of love and longing, stolen glances, irrational fears and inexplicable loss, oscillating between the promise of life and the inevitability of death.