“Come,” Amrish Puri said, “give me company.”
Prem blinked several times and, heart pounding and dizzy with anxiety, walked across the courtyard; this was his first brush with a genuine movie star, and he had embarrassed himself with mangled words in the presence of far lesser individuals. He wiped his hand down his pant leg and extended it to the actor. “There are so many villains,” Prem began, “you know, Goga Kapoor, Prem Chopra, Ranjeet, Amjad Khan, well, actually Amjad Khan is quite good, but, you know, I think you are the best one.” Immediately, as always, Prem was horrified by his own ineloquence. Amrish Puri—who had made a recent Hollywood turn as the evil priest in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which was temporarily banned in India due to its insinuation that Hindus eat monkey brains—was physically daunting, just as in his films, but also a nice guy, and Prem soon found himself in easy conversation about Samundar, the Sunny Deol–starrer being shot on Stages Four and Five of whose largely respectable supporting cast Amrish Puri was a part. Then the conversation turned to Prem’s own project.
“Wonderful to see young people joining the industry,” Amrish Puri said. “Tell me, what is your movie about?”
Prem could hardly believe that the dreaded, wickedly mustachioed gangster from Shakti was asking about his film. He felt his palms growing damp again and he stuffed them in his pockets before relating the story of star-crossed BCom students. “There is this boy and this girl,” he began. When he was done, Amrish Puri thwacked him on the back, which, as if dislodging a too big chunk of potato from his throat, caused Prem to spew forth all of his fears about entering Soundstage One that day. “I should have come sooner, but the art director and set designer make a hopeless team and I was scared to see the mess they made, and also, the whole production is in a sorry condition. What if my film is a flop? What if I never even finish it?” Breathless and embarrassed, Prem became aware that he was unburdening himself to a movie star who had not asked to be unburdened to. “Sorry, Amrish Puri,” Prem said.
“Have a deep breath,” the actor said. “Go in, look around, then come immediately out. This way, if it is bad, we can discuss the forward steps.”
Prem took the suggested breath. So what if the set is a disaster? He would come back outside to the loving embrace of Amrish Puri and figure out a plan. He crossed the courtyard and entered the building.
It was a disaster. Instead of the mansion he had requested, the stage looked like a stage. An ornate purple couch stood in the center of the floor and some unmistakably fake flowers were arranged poorly in a vase on a brass coffee table. The crates, coils, planks, and rubbish had merely been shifted to the other end of the room; even the cat had returned and was napping on the couch. Some effort had been made to erect a sweeping staircase, but the job was apparently abandoned because the stairs ended halfway down, leaving a kind of cliffhanger in the middle of Soundstage One. Prem was dejected. The set was a disgrace to the memory of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, who fell in love while filming there even though she played his mother. The room was void of people; it seemed the construction workers had left for the day though it was barely two o’clock. Maybe they could make the scenery look nicer in editing, he thought, although, as of now, there was no editor. Still, Prem remained calm, hopeful even, until he went to a far corner of the stage to investigate a fetid odor and discovered, in a paint can, a heap of human excrement. He burst out into the courtyard where Amrish Puri handed him the giant bowl.
Three days later, Prem waited to begin. It was 9:00 a.m., and though they were all meant to report at six, the only crewmember present was a scrawny boy who helped with lighting. The lack of written contracts—no one in the industry seemed to sign anything—caused Prem to worry about the others turning up at all. They must want to be paid, he reasoned, so he paced and waited. The set showed slight improvement: the stairs had been completed and the can of feces removed, along with the cat. When, at last, the actors and crew trickled in, it was noon and they required lunch. Prem had not made arrangements for meals, so he ran out into the street in search of a bulk quantity of pav bhaji.
Once everyone was fed and substantially drowsy, Prem scraped together some courage and stepped up on a dirty tire. It was unclear to him what a dirty tire was doing on set, but that mystery would have to wait. “Listen,” he said, almost to himself. “Listen. Listen! LISTEN! Okay, thanks.” The ragtag assembly, out of a mixture of confusion and mild curiosity borne of boredom, decided to give their attention to their producer, who proceeded to read a speech: “Mehboob Khan,” Prem began, “never fired his workers.” Someone turned a page of a newspaper. Prem cleared his throat and began again louder. “Mehboob Khan never fired his workers. He came from a humble background and was aware of the struggles that the working people faced. He made the symbol for Mehboob Studios the hammer and sickle.”
“Sir?” came a voice from the back.
“The symbol of Russia’s communism,” Prem said. “It means he cared about common people, little people.” Prem shook a palm at his audience as if trying to erase his words from a chalkboard. “I do not mean you are little people,” he said, struggling to maintain his balance on the tire. “You are big. What I am saying is, in his footsteps, I want to take care of my workers, all of you, so we become a family. And together we can make a super hit!” When no one reacted to the culmination of his inspirational address, Prem raised one fist in the air belatedly. Yashika yawned and the director batted at a fly. The head makeup artist examined something she had extracted from her teeth. Prem decided it was time to break a coconut.
He would have liked to break the coconut and perform the Hindu rites in a proper mahurat weeks ago, but he couldn’t manage it. These days, he’d heard, mahurats were no longer simple inaugurations held on auspicious, priest-approved days, but rather lavish affairs at five-star hotels in which a token scene was enacted and filmed for potential distributors to consider. Without a major hero or a big-name director with which to showcase his project, however, there was no point. They would just have to perform a small aarti ceremony here and bless the camera and hope for the best. Afterward, the priest—an avid watcher of Hindi movies, particularly ones with excessive violence—decided to stay for the start of shooting.
The first scene in the schedule was a simple one that would figure toward the beginning of the film: The hero enters the drawing room and touches his father’s feet. The father, played by a theater performer whose extravagant acting style caused Prem some concern, wearing an oversized, crumpled suit, no tie, pours himself a drink and proceeds to question his son about his plans for the future. The hero collapses onto the couch, puts his feet up on the table, hands behind his head, and says: “Aare, Papa, relax. No need for so much worrying!” It was a short but crucial scene, elucidating the father-son dynamic and, Prem thought, an uncomplicated one with which to ease into filming.
In the first take, the father collapsed onto the couch and put his feet up on the table instead of the son, who forgot to do this altogether. In takes two through nine, Brijesh went through a series of permutations of his two lines, and in the tenth take, when at last he recited his lines correctly, he kicked a vase off the table. At the end of the fourteenth take, the priest stood up. “I am going to watch the shooting in the other building,” he said. “I think Amrish Puri is there.”
It turned out Brijesh was not the only one who could not remember his lines. In the weeks that followed, Prem learned that the heroine, both of her parents, the hero’s brother, the neighbor, and the college headmaster were all incapable of delivering their lines without multiple attempts. Additionally, nobody could dance. Not the hero and heroine, nor the supporting dancers; even the dance director seemed to lack grace and the essential elements of rhythm. On the day they were to shoot the climactic scene in which the young man defies his father and marries his love, the director arrived late and drunk. By the end of the second month, they were so far behind they had to throw the schedule in the garbage. Prem, utterly discouraged, tried to keep morale high on set, mostly through food. The camera crew enjoyed his frequent orders of samosa and chai, and the actors adored him for providing unlimited butter chicken. And everyone looked forward to the biweekly trays of steaming hot dhokla.
It was a terrible time for Prem but also a wonderful one. Though he was struck with terror whenever he considered that it would take him ten years to produce an awful movie, he was, nonetheless, producing a movie. So when this was disrupted by visits from gang members, Prem felt it like a punch, not just to his wallet but to his sense of wellbeing in the world. In retrospect, Prem would question how he did not recognize that they were goondas immediately; they could easily have been cast as such in a film, with their king-size aviators, their flashy rings, their showing-much-chest-hair fashions. Three weeks later, he was back in Delhi on the couch in front of the TV.
* * *
When he left the Kumar Group Towers on Barakhamba Road to meet Prem at home in the afternoon, Ashok was doubtful that his son had returned from Bombay mid-shooting to report that the project was going exceedingly well.
From the start, Ashok Ratan Kumar had been uneasy about financing Prem’s passion project, a full-blown feature film about two university students who fall in love despite their families’ rivalry, working title Mein Apne Baap ko Chhod Sakta Hoon Tere Liye (I Could Leave My Father for You). It just wasn’t the sort of thing his company did. The Kumar Group was the ninth largest company in India and its market value was steadily rising. They were leading the way in taking advantage of recent governmental reforms in the telecom sector, at the same time becoming the first Indian company to export active ingredients for pharmaceuticals to Europe while also making beer. Ashok was a pioneer, revered among heads of prominent business families not only for his shrewd dealings and appalling wealth but also for the way he structured the management of his company. He delineated clear lines of succession within the family based on performance, he counted his daughter as equal to her brothers, and he left no question as to who was in charge of what. No room for infighting or feuds after he was gone. The whole configuration had an undeniable elegance, he felt, like atoms arranged in a rabeprazole sodium molecule as found in his new ulcer and reflux esophagitis medication, Kumarizine. The system would have been flawless but for the waywardness of his youngest son, who chose to forgo a spot at the helm of one of the most successful companies in the world in favor of producing a movie with too many songs and practically no murders.
His driver Baidyanath took his briefcase and opened the door of the Mercedes, the white one, and Ashok got in. He laid his head back and closed his eyes. The morning had been a long one and he could no longer work the way he had as a young man building his empire. He remained an imposing figure, though, which gave him solace, towering and intimidating in business casual. The Delhi traffic was not especially Delhi-ish that day, and this served to improve his dismal outlook on his meeting with Prem. Perhaps the abandoning-your-father movie was ahead of schedule and turning out splendidly. Could he have been wrong? he wondered. Could it become a smash hit and win one of those movie prizes?
When he entered the main drawing room and caught sight of his youngest offspring’s appearance, however, he knew there would be no prize. Slumped on the couch, unshaven and untidy, Prem was watching a movie. His jeans had a violent tear in one knee, and he looked five kgs thinner. All of this could have been attributed to the rigors of artistic production, but when his son looked up, his eyes gave it away: the movie venture was a flop.
Prem leaped from his seat to touch his father’s feet, and Ashok patted him on the shoulder as his son stood back up. Though Prem was the only Kumar child who was as tall as Ashok, he seemed suddenly little in Ashok’s view, a frightened child, though he was twenty-three.
“Come, come, sit,” Ashok said. “What news of your picture?”
“Ya, you know, it’s good, it’s good,” Prem began, returning to his place in front of the television. His mother had always said Prem was the most beautiful of their children: puffy lips, long lashes, enviable cheekbones, and a robust nose that kept him firmly in the category of handsome rather than pretty. But it was a transparent face, she had said, which couldn’t hide a thing. “The dance numbers were fantastic, Yashika and Brijesh learned the steps very fast, that’s what the dance director said. Did I tell you we got the best dance director in the industry? She said Yashika was quite graceful, even with no training. I tell you, Yashika is going to be a megastar. The director is not bad. He is slightly lazy and comes late every day, but once he is there he is quite good.”
Prem was not telling him the whole story, avoiding eye contact through the entire bewildering speech, instead watching two men sipping tea on TV. He was leaning forward and his knee, the one with the tear, was bouncing uncontrollably.
“Prem Kumar,” Ashok said, “tell me.”
“I had to stop production because the mafia came.”
“Oh.” Ashok’s heart sank, and he felt it would stop altogether if he did not have to stay alive to watch over Prem. “Which gang?”
“T-Company.”
Ashok exhaled loudly from his nose. “That is the worst one.”
“This goonda came to the studio one day during the shooting. He was small and had nice manners. He said his boss wants to invest four crores in my film. I thought, you know, that’s a lot. But I don’t need it, I told him. The next day he came again, this time with two other normal-size goondas. Again he said his boss wanted to invest, and I sent him away. Two more times he came, and finally I said, ‘Who is your boss?’ and he said, “‘Tiger Nayak.’”
“Then?”
“Then I told him, ‘Sorry, sorry, I did not know,’ and gave him chai and made him sit. I explained nicely that I did not need more money.”
“Good, you talked to him nicely. You do not want to make these thugs angry.”
“The next day the goonda came and said Tiger was very angry. He said Tiger no longer wants to invest in a third-rate film and instead wanted the money I had for making the film or they would break Yashika’s nose and jaw.”
“So you gave him money to save Yashika’s nose?”
“And jaw.”
Ashok rose from his seat. He clasped an elbow behind his back and paced in front of the TV. The two men in the film had finished their tea, and suddenly one of them was on a dock talking to a buxom woman. “How much did you give?”
“Five crores.”
“So all of it.”
