Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

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As it turned out, Sartaj and Kamble were able to get out to Film City that evening, well before the end of Zoya Mirza's afternoon shift. They drove up past AdLabs, and up the hill to a huge palace. Zoya was the main lead in a multi-star period movie, one of the first big-scale swordfighting and swinging-from-chandeliers extravaganzas to be made in decades. Vivek the make-up man sat them down on fold-out chairs behind the palace and gave them cutting-chais and told them about the project. 'It's very different, this film. It's like Dharamveer , only it's fully up to date and modern. Huge special effects. This whole palace is going to lift into the air and then fly and be seen in the middle of a lake. They have huge battle scenes planned, they are going to have them all generated by computer. The hero has a big fight with a giant cobra with a hundred heads.'

'And what is Zoya playing?' Sartaj said.

'Madam is a princess,' Vivek said. 'But her parents, the Maharaja and Maharani, are murdered when she's young, and she grows up in the jungle with a chieftain's family. Nobody knows who she is.'

Kamble took a noisy sip of tea. 'A jungli princess?' he said. 'Very good. What does she wear?'

Vivek was bespectacled and thin and very serious, and he was now made distinctly uncomfortable by Kamble's frank leering. Of course he couldn't tell a policeman that he was a lewd gaandu, so he shrank a little and said, 'The costumes are very good, Manish Malhotra is doing them.'

Sartaj patted Vivek on the forearm. 'Manish Malhotra is the best. I'm sure Madam looks wonderful. How is it to work for her?'

'She is a very good person.'

'Is she? She seems so,' Sartaj said. Vivek regarded Sartaj through his very stylish blue-framed glasses, and Sartaj smiled innocently back at him. 'Of course she's beautiful. But I always thought that in her roles you could tell that she's a good woman.'

Vivek's wariness ebbed, and he sat up. 'Yes. She's very generous, you know.'

'She helped you?'

'She gave me a chance. We met when she was doing an ad film. When she became a star she didn't forget me.'

'You've been with her a long time, then.'

'Yes.'

'You have a good job, travelling all over the world with a movie star. I've never been out of the country.'

'Thirty-two countries till now,' Vivek said, bright and eager. 'Next week we go to South Africa.'

Kamble asked softly, 'You spent a lot of time in Singapore?'

'Yes, yes, Madam has done a lot of shooting there.' The question brought up no fear, no anxiety to mar Vivek's devotion to his Madam. 'It is a very beautiful place. We did a lot of fashion shoots there. Madam liked it very much, it's so clean and neat. We stayed for holidays also, sometimes.'

Sartaj finished his tea, and stretched. 'She must have friends there, then.'

Vivek was puzzled. 'I don't know. She and I didn't stay in the same hotel. What do you mean?'

Sartaj thumped his knee. 'Nothing, yaar. I go to Pune sometimes, so I have friends there. Do you think she can see us now?'

'I think her interview is still going on. But the shot is almost ready. I'll go and see.'

Sartaj kept up his expression of enthusiastic gratitude until Vivek disappeared round a corner of the palace wall. Three workmen were painting a portion of that wall an even gold. A dozen men sprawled on the grass next to them, and some women sat in a circle in the shade of a large van. Sartaj couldn't tell that a shot was being prepared for, much less that it might be almost ready.

'That chashmu bastard doesn't know anything,' Kamble said. 'He talked too easily about Singapore.'

'Yes. They would have been very careful, Gaitonde and her.'

Kamble scratched at his chest. On his wrist he had a copper bracelet. 'Gaitonde the great Hindu don,' he said. 'Of course he had to be careful about his Muslim girlfriend. Lying maderchod.'

'Having a Muslim girl doesn't hurt your reputation. And Suleiman Isa, he's had girls from every religion. They aren't marrying these girls, right? So maybe Gaitonde was trying to protect this Zoya. You can't become Miss India if your boyfriend is a bhai.'

'They're all chutiya liars, hiding here and hiding there,' Kamble said. 'I had a Muslim chavvi, you know, two years ago. We didn't hide anything from anybody. Yaar, she was beautiful. I would've married her.'

'What happened?'

'I didn't have the money to get married. A girl like that, she needs an apartment, good clothes, a good life. Her family found some chutiya who worked for a company in Bahrain. She's there now. One daughter.'

'She's happy?'

'Yes.' Kamble leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees, and looked out across the small valley to the rising hills. He was suddenly melancholy, lost in the memory of his lost girl.

'Eh, Devdas,' Sartaj said. 'You wouldn't have married her anyway. You had about a hundred other chavvis to get through.'

But Kamble refused to cheer up, and Sartaj thought he might break into a sad song at any moment. If you edited out the knocking carpenters, and the piles of wooden slats next to the palace, and the gossiping women, it was a landscape suitable for song, coloured a gentle saffron by the falling sun. There was grass, and trees, and hills that had been shot quite often to substitute for Himalayan peaks. Sartaj tried to think of a sad song suitable for Kamble, but could remember only lilting Dev Anand numbers: Main zindagi ka saath nibhaata chala gaya . He had the fear around him again, the fright from the bomb, it lurked somewhere under the palace wall. Maybe it was just the subterranean anxiety brought on by being in Film City, not so far from where a number of adults and children had been killed and eaten by the park's industrious complement of very wild leopards. Those were real leopards, yes, not filmi ones. Maybe that was why he was afraid. But he was also unaccountably cheerful. It was all rather curious.

'Come, come, please.' Vivek was waving to them from the gate. 'Madam will be on the set in a minute. You want to see the shot?'

Inside the palace, there was a buzzing stir of activity. Under the vaults and high-arched windows, men milled about and hammered and sawed. Sartaj stepped over nests of cables, and around thickets of metal stands. He had to bend low to step under a sheet of canvas, and a loudspeakered voice called 'Full lights,' and Sartaj came into a pillared audience hall ablaze with gold and green. There were life-size statues of warriors and maidens under the pillars, and the half-ceiling was covered with a dense latticework of sparkling crystal. There were two immense chandeliers, a crowd of satiny courtiers and a throne. Sartaj wound his way through yet another crowd of crew to a row of folding chairs, and then Vivek motioned: wait.

'That's Johnny Singh,' Kamble said.

'Who?'

'The director.' He meant a portly man who now sat in one of the chairs and peered intently into a monitor. 'And that's the cinematographer, Ashim Dasgupta.'

'You're a movie expert,' Sartaj said.

'The girls want to get into films, a lot of them.'

Yes, Kamble's bar balas would have wanted, many of them, to become Zoya Mirza. They would have done anything, risked everything to be here. Now that the glare of the lights had left his eyes a little, Sartaj could see that the statues were painted plaster, not stone. The gold paint on the pillars was thick, congealed. The crystal on the ceiling was probably some kind of cheap glass, or plastic. Above it, among the ranks of lights hanging from rickety catwalks, there were dangling legs, and peering faces. And yet, on the screen this would all crystallize into an unearthly glow, a perfect palace. Sartaj thought, Katekar would have loved this, he would have liked the dirty floor, and the cheap-looking diamonds on the noblemen's turbans.