Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Bhai, we have to have a mother. It's a basic requirement. Otherwise, who is this hero? Where does he come from? He won't make any sense then.'

'I don't know a thing about your mother. But you make sense to me, bastard. Why do we have to show her? A mother is implied.'

'For the sympathy, bhai, for the sympathy. A hero without a mother, and without love between them, feels incomplete. A good mother makes him good, even if he's bad.'

'And if he's got a bad mother? Does that make him better?'

Manu grinned. 'In films, bhai, there are no bad mothers. Only evil stepmothers.'

There were bad mothers in the world, but I couldn't argue with the fact that there were no bad mothers in films, so this one stayed in the film. She had two scenes at the beginning, one immediately after the interval, and then she appeared in the closing shot, smiling benignly in the background as the boy and girl sped away to happiness in a speedboat. This much I could live with.

Once the screenplay was finished, complete with dialogue, we did a full reading. We did it in the early morning, off Patong. In the calm of the morning Manu told us the story, from the hero's introduction as he robbed a diamond store, and his betrayal by his underworld partners, to his discovery of a terrorist plot, and his falling in love with the girl who was his link to the terrorists, and his discovery of his own patriotism through his love for the girl, and his struggle with the terrorists and the traitor bhais, and then the climax. It took three hours, and the sun came up flaming hot on our backs, but none of us noticed. We were caught up in Manu's storytelling, in his expressions and his acting-out of the scenes, and his descriptions through which he made us see the boy and the girl and their desperate run through India and Europe. When he finished, we all sat back drained and happy, almost as if we had actually seen the film.

'That is good,' Arvind said. He had flown in two days early from Singapore especially for the story session, leaving behind the precious Suhasini. 'I think that works. I think that will make a great film. It is very exciting but also very sensitively written.'

'And who are you, Basu Bhattacharya?' I said amidst general laughter. But I was grinning. The story was good, and all the major objections I had raised earlier had been addressed. I knew exactly what was going to happen in the story, but still it had made my stomach tighten, and the scene where the boy said goodbye to his mother and went off to fight his war had brought forth a painful constriction of my throat. I turned to Manu. 'Okay,' I said. 'I think we're ready to shoot.'

He pumped his fists and jumped up and down three times and then clasped my hands. 'Yes,' he said. 'I agree, bhai. We are ready. Let's start. Let's begin.'

I was impatient to start shooting, and Zoya was more than ready. She had gone to the Miss Universe contest in Argentina, and had come in as fourth runner-up. We had been certain that she would win, that she would be occupied with Miss Universe duties for a year, but the judges had made their inexplicable decision, and she was now free and impatient. 'We will start immediately,' I said to Manu. 'But today I want you all to celebrate. I'm giving you two nights. And everyone gets a bonus. Take the launch and go. You can stay at the bungalow.'

I gave them each twenty thousand baht and sent them away. I kept back only Arvind and a skeleton crew of three, and the screenplay. I read the whole thing over, I pored over Manu Tewari's fanatically neat handwriting, his orderly lines in which he had contained so much shooting and kissing and car crashes and tears and torn hearts. I read it all twice, and then I called Jojo and read the whole thing to her. I intoned, 'Fade to black,' and then I asked, 'Does it work?'

'Yes,' she said.

'Yes and what?'

'Arre, what do you mean, what? I said it works.'

'I know you, saali. You can say yes, and have it mean exactly no. So, tell me.'

'I did tell you. It works for what it is.'

'What is it exactly?'

She took a dragging breath. 'Gaitonde,' she said, 'I didn't mean anything. It's a great script. It'll be a hit.'

I breathed in myself, and took a moment to press down my anger, and said in as reasonable a voice as I could, 'No, no, Jojo. We have to know if anyone has any doubts. We have to know now so we can fix it.'

She knew I wasn't going to let her retreat, so she gathered herself and came forward. 'Fine. What I was saying was, that it is good enough for what it is. And what it is…It's one of those movies in which men blow up things and fight a lot and cry over each other.'

'My boys and I fight and cry on this boat. What's wrong with that?'

'Nothing. I told you, your film is going to be a hit.'

'But?'

'But nothing. It's just not the kind of film I enjoy too much myself.'

'You're saying that women won't come? You wait, with the stars we have, and the way we shoot the songs, every woman will come with her children and her grandmother. And they'll all want to see Zoya.'

'Baba, I said it'll be a hit, no? All I'm saying is that it's a certain kind of film.'

'Yes, it's not the kind where you have three women jabbering at each other about how sad and put-down they are for one and a half hours, and then another two women ranting about how bad men are for another hour. Gaandu, you make a dozen television shows like that if you want, but you're not going to shove my film down that smelly path.'

The slow ripples of her laughter calmed me down. 'Gaitonde,' she said, 'I'm not trying to shove your maderchod film into anything. You are going to stuff it down the whole of India's throat anyway, including the women. We won't escape. So don't worry. Just tell me, what are you calling this bastard?'

'Don't abuse my film,' I said. 'You abuse me relentlessly, but don't you dare call my film names.' I was smiling. 'I was thinking of calling it Barood .'

'That was used in the seventies.'

'I know. But I still like it. You don't?'

'Not too much. It doesn't suggest the international angle.'

'So, you want to call it International Barood ?'

I lay back on the bed and waited for her to stop laughing. I was laughing a little myself. 'Be serious. This is important, a title can really help a film's sales.'

'Yes, yes. It's too bad International Khilari has been used. That would've been perfect.'

That would indeed have been perfect. But it had been used, and not too long ago, so we went on to other ideas, from Love in London to Hamari Dharti, Unki Dharti . It was quite a pleasure, to cast about in old, half-remembered titles, and to find words and little pieces of language, and play with them and put them together like pieces of a puzzle, trying to find the words that would express the feeling of the screenplay, of life itself. But then my pleasure was interrupted by my own band of international khilaris. A phone call came in on the local line: Manu Tewari and three of the others had been arrested.

'What? Where? How?' I snarled at Arvind. The boys had clear instructions to keep a low profile, to stay out of trouble, to be invisible. All of us had come into Thailand by sea, and had never gone through any kind of immigration, and as far as the Thai authorities knew, we did not exist.

'It's that bastard writer, bhai,' Arvind said. 'He got into a fight with an American sailor at the Typhoon bar.'

'That little chodu?' I was amazed. Manu wrote good violence, but he wasn't a fighter. He watched, and waited, and considered, and then usually wrote. 'He fought over what?'

'There's a girl at the Typhoon bar he likes.'

'So?'

'She was with an American sailor from the carrier.' There was an American aircraft carrier at the head of the bay, accompanied by two smaller ships. The carrier was grey and vast as a mountain, and had two days ago disgorged three thousand sailors on to Patong beach. 'This sailor had bought her out of the bar for the last two nights. She was sitting on his lap. The sailor was saying rude things about her in English to his friends, how she sucked his lauda. The girl didn't understand, but Manu did. He said something to the sailor. The sailor said something back. Manu broke a Heineken bottle over his head.'