Shashi Tharoor - Show Business

Not even that worked, hanh? Poor thing, you must be really bad. The doctor says he can’t understand it. Did I tell you I telephoned the doctor? He was absolutely thrilled to be speaking with me, I tell you. “Miss Mehnaz Yelahi, yis it yactually?” He was practically gurgling with pleasure. But when I asked him what was the problem he sounded really troubled. “There yis no yapparent medical reason why He cannot talk,” the doctor said in that all-knowing Tamil way. They’re all very concerned about you, Ashokji. Not just me. But look, isn’t being India’s Number One Superstar enough for you? Must you try to be India’s Number One Medical Mystery as well?

I’m sorry if I’m sounding so flippant. It’s not easy for me, really. When I first heard about the accident I thought I would kill myself. “Why Him, O Lord?” I asked the heavens. “Why not me?” I’ve been simply frantic with worry ever since, Ashokji, really I have. But my Guru tells me to be calm. He says there is no use worrying about what has happened and what might happen, because it is already willed. “Why shed tears about the workings of destiny?” he asked. “Does the river weep because it must flow to the sea?” I was really impressed by that. But I don’t find it all that easy to be calm about destiny when there is a chance it might take you away from me. Even more completely than you’ve taken yourself away.

Stupid of me to say that, I’m sorry. You’ll be all right, everyone says so. The whole country is praying for you, Ashokji. Really. There are open-air prayers in mosques and temples and gurudwaras and churches and fire temples and jamaatkhanas and wherever else it is that people get together to ask their Maker for favors. I even hear the Prime Minister is planning to break an official journey tomorrow to visit you in the hospital. I know your father is a politician and all, and you were even in Parliament for a while, but the Prime Minister just doesn’t do that for everyone, you know. You’re special. Not just to me — you’re special to the whole country, to India. You’ll be all right. Everyone wants you to be well.

Even my Guru. You must meet Guruji one day. I think you’ll really like him, Ashokji. He’s got this marvelous smile: suddenly his lips part wide, revealing two rows of brilliant white teeth lighting up a gap in his brilliant white beard. And his eyes, Ashokji — you ought to appreciate them. Where yours are so clear and transparent, his pupils are black and deep, so deep they contain the wisdom of the world and you feel you could drown in them. He speaks in a quiet voice, not a particularly remarkable one, but what he says, Ashokji, what he says! I’ll try to bring him here sometime. Actually people go to him, you know, he doesn’t come anywhere, but perhaps for you, in your condition — I’m sorry, I’m making you sound as if you were pregnant or something, isn’t it? No, I think he’ll come. If I can get Mr. Horatio Bannerji to let us in.

Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing with a Guru? Me, a good, convent-educated Muslim girl from a nawabi family? No, I don’t suppose you are going to ask me anything today. Salma did. At her most pompous. “You’re betraying both your religion and your class,” she said stuffily. “Not to mention your education. But then that’s never mattered to you, has it?” And the truth is, it hasn’t. Nothing has. The only thing that’s mattered to me since I joined Hindi films is you.

My joining the movies was a betrayal too. My parents had forbidden me even to see Hindi films. They were only made, they said, for the servant class. So of course I had to go. And I loved them! The glamour, the clothes, the dazzle — I wanted so much to be a part of that world, to escape the boring old prison my parents kept me in. I didn’t think of acting first. I mean, how could I, I hadn’t even acted in kindergarten. And if I had even tried to get a role in a local play, my parents would have flipped. When I entered the Miss India contest, just to spite them, and I won, they practically disowned me. Their daughter, being stared at by strangers! But what really made them go bananas was when I stayed on in Bombay after the contest and accepted all those modeling offers. I mean, what else does a Miss India do, right? And I enjoyed it. I think I particularly enjoyed their hysterics about it. My father even came to Bombay to take me home. But I’ve told you about all that, I think. Anyway, when I did the soap ad, the one that showed me in the shower, they really disowned me. My father said, “I have no daughter,” and he went into mourning. Just like that! My uncle sent me a telegram telling me not to come back home, ever. Can you imagine?

I still remember my first day as an actress. My crash course at Roshan Taneja’s acting school didn’t count. I was the beauty queen who’d done the soap and towel ads; that’s all the producer knew or cared about when he signed me. I had visions of stardom, fame, glamour. The movie was about, what else, a beauty queen who sold herself on the side. It was called Call Girl. Really subtle stuff, hanh? Lots of bikinis and leather microskirts that none of the established actresses would wear. Or could wear.

They sent a car for me, I remember, and that was my first disappointment. I’d expected a swank foreign car like the ones the stars drive around in Malabar Hill, but it wasn’t even an Impala, let alone a Cadillac convertible. Just a scratched, black, rattling Ambassador with holes in the upholstery and rusty springs poking through. We drove into a ramshackle shed in some grimy suburb, which turned out to be the studio. I got out, still expecting air-conditioning and gloss. What I got was a bunch of stinky studio sidekicks pushing me this way and that, change this, wear that, wiping their brows and their noses and shouting at each other and at me, with an occasional “ji” thrown in as an afterthought. This went on for hours and hours and then I found myself stumbling into a dingy room. “Makeup, madam,” they said, and a thin, slimy man with the hands of a skeleton plastered all sorts of evil-smelling white and pink muck on my face, neck and, most enthusiastically, my cleavage. His nails were black and chipped; a cockroach ran out of his powder case. After all this they wanted me to stand before the shining spotlights and smile seductively.

“Ya Khuda,” I groaned to the director, “this is supposed to be glamorous?”

“No, madam,” he replied, pawing me with his eyes. “You are.”

And you know what? I was. Because none of that mattered.

What matters to you, Ashokji? Anything? Me? No, I’d only be fooling myself. Your wife? I don’t think so. As a woman I can say that if she mattered to you, you couldn’t treat her the way you do. Or treat me the way you did. Your children? You hardly talk about them. I think that what matters to you is your image. The way you see yourself is the way others see you. It doesn’t matter what kind of husband or father you are, the important thing is that you’re seen as a husband and father. You are all those roles you play on the screen, aren’t you, Ashokji? Because there’s nothing else, is there, nothing else underneath — no other character competing with the character of the role. Maybe that’s what makes you so good: you are the role each time, or maybe the role is you. But what that “you” is nobody knows. I wonder sometimes about those scriptwriters who write roles “for” you — what “you” do they base it on? The screen “you,” or course; they write a part that is as much as possible like the other parts they’ve seen you play. And so you are what you’ve been on the screen, and the screen continues to let you be you, and no one knows the difference, if there is one.