Shashi Tharoor - Show Business

“Me? But what have I done to deserve that?” he asks.

Mehnaz laughs. “Always teasing me, aren’t you, Ashok?”

“Am I?” But before Ashok can pursue this line of inquiry much further, a roll of drums indicates the music will be hard to compete against. “Let’s dance,” he says, and before she can protest he has swept Miss Alternative Universe 1975 onto the floor.

The band establishes the music director’s modernity by wielding a number of electric guitars in addition to more traditional, indigenous equipment. The band members also sing the first line of each verse in what they believe to be English:

I–I-I–I-I–I luff you,

Don’t you know that’s really true,

That’s why I wanna hold you tight,

Sweetielet’s dance tonight.

I–I-I–I-I–I luff you,

Don’t you feel that I really do,

Can’t you see that it feels right,

Sweetie let’s dance tonight.

I–I-I–I-I–I luff you,

Don’t you see it just like new,

It’s the moment to see the light,

Sweetie let’s dance tonight.

Ashok and Mehnaz are proficient dancers, although dancing is an unusual skill to have acquired in a factory worker’s hutment and a chawl, respectively; the extras soon gather around them and applaud, just in case the audience itself is not so inclined.

Outside it is dark. Ashok and Mehnaz emerge from under the banner, still masked and gowned.

“How are you going home?” Ashok asks.

“You’re taking me, silly,” Mehnaz replies. “Except I thought you said you’d come after the show and wait for me outside.”

“Listen,” Ashok begins, “we’ve got something to sort out here. Look at me properly.” He reaches for his mask, but on the way his hands stop at her face, and he cannot resist cupping her chin in his hands.

“Take your hands off my sister,” says a voice from the shadows.

Both Ashok and Mehnaz whirl around toward the voice. The face is half hidden in the darkness so Inspector Ashok cannot see it, but Mehnaz recognizes her brother and brings a hand up to her mouth. “Ashok!” she gasps. “But then who is —?”

There is no time to complete the question as her brother, schooled in the rough-and-ready social norms of the chawl, which neither permit a stranger to fondle your sister nor encourage you to forgo the advantage of surprise, leaps out of the shadows and administers a swift blow to the inspectors solar plexus. Police training, however, is not to be sneezed at because the cop, while still doubled over in pain, brings his knee up into the advancing assailant’s groin. A few more blows are traded, dishoom, dishoom, with the man in the kathakali mask getting somewhat the worse of the exchange (for by this point the actor playing him is a double, of course). Then Ashok, whose face has still not been fully visible to his fellow-combatant throughout the encounter, twists the inspector’s arm behind him. The kathakali cop groans with pain. Suddenly — just as the chawl pugilist, standing behind (and therefore completely outside the view of) his rival, is about to apply the final ounce of pressure that will break his twin’s arm — a shaft of moonlight falls on their vein-popping wrists, and Mehnaz sees the two identical talismans glistening in the penumbra.

The background music slams into everyone’s deafened consciousness. Mehnaz’s look requires no interpretation: at last she understands what has been happening.

“ Bhaiya!” she screams, running to separate them for now, and to unite them forever. “Stop! Look!”

Ashok heeds these admonitions. He stops. He looks. His eyebrows rise, his jaw drops, and his fingers release their pressure. The inspector takes advantage of this to turn around, fist ready — and then freezes in astonishment as he finally sees the full face of his attacker.

As the two men, immobile, stare at each other, Mehnaz reaches up and slips off the inspector’s mask.

“Ashok,” she says simply, “meet Ashok.”

The brothers stretch a hand to each other, touching the other’s talisman and silently comparing it to his own. Then they embrace, and Mehnaz smiles blissfully.

Fortunately, this time the mutual explanations are delivered offscreen.

“Thakur-sahib.” Kalia isn’t noticeably older now than at the start of the film, but when you have no hair it is difficult to find something to whiten for the desired effect.

“Yes?” Pranay is just as cruel, his eyes just as bloodshot, his mustache just as evil, but paint streaks his temples and more sinister lines have deepened the evil cast of his face.

“Thakur-sahib, we have just heard that Ramkumar has escaped from prison.”

“Hmm.” Pranay s voice has acquired the richness so necessary in a convincing major villain; even his hmms resonate on the sound track, sending shudders down the spines of the children in the audience. “That is disturbing.”

“He is an old man, Thakur,” Kalia suggests.

“And a weak one,” Pranay laughs. “He was easy meat for us when we wanted him out of the way, wasn’t he? I was so shocked when I discovered my father had left everything to Abha and him, rather than me. But when we hung that murder of yours on him, they didn’t stay around to claim their inheritance, did they? Heh-heh. No, I don’t think we need worry too much about Ramkumar.”

“Sir, our contact man at the prison says that a few days before the escape, a woman and a man claiming to be Ramkumar’s wife and son came to the prison and asked for him.”

“What? How can it be? You told me, Kalia, that you saw them drown with your own eyes.”

“I did, Thakur-sahib. But the current carried them away and it is possible, though,” he adds hastily, “not very likely, of course, that your sister and one of the babies survived.”

“Then why have they waited all these years to reappear? No, I don’t believe it.” Pranay waves a dismissive whip. “But to be safe, Kalia, we must be a little more careful. At least until the police re-arrest Ramkumar.”

“I’m afraid that will not happen, Thakur.” Kalia looks down at the floor. “You see, with time off for good behavior, Ramkumar was to have been released two years ago. I had been paying our friend at the prison to — er — misplace the file. I am afraid this omission has now been discovered. No one guesses our involvement, of course, but I believe some inspector established that Ramkumar should not have been in prison at all. Everyone is so embarrassed they have quietly decided to forget the matter of the jailbreak.”

“Are you sure no one suspects us?”

“Positive, Thakur.”

But neither of them notices, high up on the rafters of the chandeliered hall, that a monkey has been eavesdropping on their conversation. A monkey holding, in its long, firm fingers, a small and powerful miniature tape recorder.

It is evening. Dressed in the brocaded raiments of debauchery, Pranay sprawls comfortably on a dhurrie, leaning against stuffed cotton bolsters and pulling on a hookah. By his side, on a brass tray and beside an elegantly curved brass jug, stands a bottle of Vat 69, the Hindi film villains favorite tipple. Pranay establishes his villainy by periodically removing the pipe of the hookah from his mouth and inserting the top of the whiskey bottle in its place. He gulps it down as if it were colored water, which of course is precisely what it is.

“Let the nautch commence.” Kalia claps his hands, and with a tinkle of anklets the dancer enters the hall, raising a half-cupped palm to her forehead in a courteous adaab. Pranay nods appreciatively, as does the bulk of the audience in the theater. It is, of course, Mehnaz, accompanied by one of the Ashoks (complete with false handlebar mustache) and Ramkumar (his beard topped off with the additional disguise of a turban). The girl is covered from neck to ankle in finery, from glittering jewelry to billowing skirt atop calf-hugging silk pantaloons, yet each step she takes radiates more sex appeal than the shimmer of seven veils. The allure of what is left visible is heightened by traditional artifice. Her bare feet are painted red along the sides of the soles and her ankles are caressed by silver payals. Her hennaed hands and kohl-lined eyes transmit messages more eloquent than the lyrics of the conventional, euphemism-laden song to which she now performs: