Shashi Tharoor - Show Business

We start, but Mehnaz falls headlong into my arms and the whistle is blown almost immediately. In getting her grip and pace right, Mehnaz failed to notice her feet and tripped on an inconvenient plant. Lawrence now decides, much to my resentment, since I have done nothing wrong, to dance with her himself in order to show her how it should feel. I watch Mehnaz, blouse bouncing, in his arms and feel a twinge of possessiveness. A makeup man comes up with a dirty handkerchief to clean the current mixture of rainwater and sweat off my face, but I wave him away angrily.

At last, we continue:

Let me hold you ’gainst my chest,

Feel the pressure of your breast,

Hug, caress you and the rest —

Let me wrap you up and keep you near my heart.

I wrap the pallav around both of us. I can feel Mehnaz’s heartbeat through the syncopations of the sound track. I imagine it is her own voice, and not that of the pockmarked fifty-six-year-old playback-singing veteran, that is breathing huskily at me:

Let me go, dearest, please,

I must plead for my release,

Your importunings must cease,

Let me save myself and hold myself apart.

The whistle sounds again. This time Mehnaz’s lips were out of sync with the sound track. She flushes, but I move my lips to indicate, “Don’t worry.” We resume, and a dhoti-clad delivery man bearing a tiffin-carrier walks into one of the reflectors, sending Mohanlal’s hands skyward and the cameraman into paroxysms of choice Punjabi invective. At last we catch up to the bit where Lawrence gets really bold: I push Mehnaz back from the waist as we dance, my face dangerously close to hers, my hands shimmering on her torso, and intone:

Let me taste your shining lips,

Place my hands upon your hips,

Feel your rises and your dips,

Let us travel to the heights of paradise.

Mehnaz is obviously aflame. She wants me, she wants me here and now, but the script and the situation leave her no choice:

Let me be, precious one,

I am burning like the sun,

I’m afraid I have to run,

Let us only speak the language of our eyes.

“Cut it!” Mohanlal shouts in triumph. “Thank you, Ashokji, thank you, Mehnazji. We’ll use that one.”

“Sorry, boss.” The cameraman is lugubrious. “We can’t.”

“What d’you mean?” Mehnaz, already beginning to turn toward the dressing room, is apoplectic.

“Look, Madam.” The cameraman points into the distance. Well in the background, unnoticed by all of us but certain to show up on the screen, a uniformed security guard sits placidly on a stool, surveying the scene with indifference.

“I don’t believe it,” I say, but secretly I am happy to cavort once more with Mehnaz for the camera. Strange: with Maya, the moment I realized I loved her and wanted her to be mine, I desired nothing so much as to lock her away from prying eyes, to protect her from the cheapening gaze of the public. But with Mehnaz, I can resist no opportunity to flaunt her in front of everyone. I enjoy being with her in public, and I enjoy being watched enjoying her. “Let’s do it again,” I say decisively.

Mehnaz acquiesces, as she always does with any of my suggestions. I begin to look forward to making a few more suggestions, of a more intimate nature, after the shooting.

The rain falls, my enthusiasm rises, her blouse falls and rises, and we sing-dance to the throbbing climax:

ME:

Let me taste your shining lips,

Place my hands upon your hips,

Feel your rises and your dips,

Let us travel to the heights of paradise.

MEHNAZ:

Let me be, precious one,

I am burning like the sun,

I’m afraid I have to run,

Let us only speak the language of our eyes.

I am still holding her when the whistle blows. As the lights are switched off, I take her face in my hands, and in full view of the entire unit, kiss her full-bloodedly on the mouth. She does not pull away from me; I can feel her nipples harden against my shirt. Her tongue darts between my teeth, and my hands caress the small of her back, pressing her body into mine. Our need is so urgent we might have gone on, but the uncharacteristic silence of the unit, which ought to be busy making dismantling noises, reminds us of our audience. Mohanlal’s eyes are almost bulging through his glasses. We laugh and trip and stumble toward her dressing room. The shocked silence follows us, as I imagine its authors would have liked to.

I unhook her blouse even before her startled Chinese dresser has fled the room. Her breasts fill my hands like prasad from a generous temple, and I take them in worship, ritually putting them to my mouth, my eyes, my forehead. Her moans are chanted slokas of desire, invoking heavenly pleasures. No man may wear a stitched garment in the sanctum sanctorum of the divine; I bare myself in reverence. In turn, I pull at the coil of her earthly attachment, the knot of her sari. It collapses wetly at her feet, followed by her drenched petticoat. Liberated from these worldly shackles, she circles me seven times, her fingers tracing mystical patterns on my torso. My own hands light the lamp of her womanhood and move in a rite of oblation. She kneels, her mouth closing on the object of her veneration, upright symbol of procreative divinity. Her prayer is bilingual. Our fingers pour ghee on the flames of our need. Rising, the flames unite us with the sacred thread of desire and we are as one in the lower depths of our higher selves.

I have no idea why I’m suddenly turning all religious about Mehnaz. After all, the girls a Muslim, for Christ’s sake. And we usually prefer the missionary position.

Money is becoming a bit of a problem. I don’t mean the lack of it, but as Maya pointed out, what to do with what I have.

The problem is, basically, that Subramanyam keeps asking producers for ever more outrageous amounts of money, and the producers then astonish us by paying what we ask for. They come to me in shabby dhotis and stained kurtas, clutching synthetic briefcases that, when opened, turn out to contain bundles of incredibly crisp notes of whose existence the Department of Revenue is blissfully unaware. These notes change hands, with sometimes the briefcase thrown in as well, and no receipt is ever issued. Over the years I have had to think of increasingly ingenious places to cache the stuff, and it is beginning to — if the verb can be pardoned — tax my imagination.

The small portion of my cinematic remuneration that comes by check is, of course, dutifully banked and the proceeds recorded by Subramanyam in his neat, precise hand in a register that is available for inspection whenever officialdom so desires. Actually, officialdom has never yet so desired, possibly because my father’s party has never yet been out of power. Not that my father has consciously tried to protect me. He would never raise a finger to protect me, but he doesn’t have to: that is the beauty of being important and influential in India, the number of things you get without having to ask for them. Yet I cannot entirely overlook the possibility that some over-zealous tax official will try to prove his integrity by raiding the son of a senior congressman, and if that happens it is obvious I cannot afford to have my briefcases lying about.

What does one do? At first I made some discreet inquiries of my more successful peers, but I found my colleagues disappointingly closemouthed, perhaps because of my paternal antecedents. The best I could elicit was from Radha Sabnis. “Why, false ceilings, darling, but of course,” she said, as if every actor’s home came equipped with them. I debated whether to install such a ceiling in my house, despite its actual low ceilings, with the attendant possibility that if Amitabh Bachhan came to visit in the summer he might be decapitated by the ceiling fan. However, even the prospect of eliminating my principal rival in the box office stakes lost its attraction when the next tax raid reported in newspapers involved the unearthing of currency notes and gold bars from an actress’s false ceiling.