Amarleen balked. “Have some respect! Prem has turned out to be the least useless of all of you,” she said, then deposited herself next to Prem on his mattress. “Now, tell me about Sunny Deol’s muscles.”
“Uh, they were very big,” Prem said. Ordinarily, he shied away from too much attention, but today and for the rest of that week, he relished the much-needed boost to his reputation. People actually applauded when he walked around King’s Court. He was no longer just the awkward Pumpwalla; now he was someone who knew the stars and organized a first-class show. They wanted to know what Salman Khan and Madhuri Dixit were like and who was coming for the next one. Suddenly, uncles wanted to talk business with him or, rather, give him unsolicited and unhelpful advice, such as “You should get more stars to come,” and “Next time, try adding some animals.”
Midweek, he received a note from his chief backer, written neatly on the peel of an unopened banana and delivered mysteriously; he found it sitting atop a pile of pears and apples in the apartment’s fruit bowl. “Tiger Nayak congratulates you on a fine show,” the banana read. Prem chose not to think about how this was achieved or how Wristwatch knew he was the only one there who ate bananas and was the first to approach the bowl every morning. Instead, he focused on the surprising patience and magnanimity of his Bombay underworld financier who understood the logic of waiting for a big payout.
Financially, there was also still the goal of the million and one dollars, which Prem had decided he would keep to prove to himself—and perhaps also to Hemant, a man he had developed a hatred for but whose approval he still craved—that he was not the loser they all thought he was. He was already thinking about the next show, which he hoped would be early the following year. He would soon begin scouting locations and contacting vendors. He was in an atypically happy moment in his life, proud of himself for the first time. He even thought of calling his father to share the news of his success. But in the end, he decided against it; his achievement was still too minor to make up for the hurt he had caused him. He would just forge ahead, trying not to think about his family in India, or about Leena, who had sat next to her doctor fiancée at the show.
* * *
To make the time pass more easily during those next few years of hard work and loneliness, he spent an increasing amount of time with his unattached lady friends watching every new Hindi movie, good or lousy, that found its way to America, thus finding some everyday enjoyment for himself.
It was in Sayali’s apartment that he viewed Dil fifteen times on fifteen consecutive evenings, until finally she declared it was time to move on. They moved on to another Aamir Khan blockbuster, Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin, which they watched just seven times because, while it was quite good, it was no Dil. Nineteen ninety-one brought the movie Hum and Amitabh’s entirely respectable comeback, which Prem relished at Suchitra’s place along with her mother, who made some wonderfully spicy bhel. The other landmark movie of that year was Lamhe, which, though it did poorly at the Indian box office, enchanted Prem when he saw it one afternoon with Anamika. Sridevi mesmerized in her double role as mother and daughter, Pallavi and Pooja, and the songs were top-of-the-line, he thought. The next day, Anamika purchased the movie soundtrack for Prem, who was touched by the gesture and delighted to own his first CD, though he had nothing on which to play it.
It should have been a peaceful time—an intermission or interval, a time to rest and eat samosas until the next part of the story began—but in real, unscripted life, at the end of May, on the third night of an Anil Kapoor marathon, Lucky heard something outside. “Hey guys, did you hear that?” he said. Apartment 3D was awake much later than usual, finishing up Kishen Kanhaiya, a double-role, twins-separated-at-birth movie whose conclusion they could not go to sleep without seeing.
“I can tell you what I did not hear,” Mohan said. “The last dialogue, because of you talking.” They continued to watch the climactic fight scene, in which the long-lost brothers reunite and beat up the bad guys. After two solid minutes of top-notch movie bloodshed, there was a violent smashing sound outside, the high-pitched crackle of breaking glass. Prem pressed pause. From the window they saw five cars, some of them high-end, circling the parking lot. One car stopped in front of Building 3 and four beefy young men emerged. One was holding a baseball bat and another held a broken beer bottle. A third screamed, “Dots die!”
“Finally,” Deepak said, polishing off the end of a cheeseburger. “I was thinking maybe we in King’s Court were not good enough for getting harassed.”
They had all heard the stories about Indian Americans being terrorized lately, windows broken, dead animals laid at doorsteps. When an Oak Tree travel agency was vandalized, the police’s response was to suggest calling the insurance company. “If they are so jealous of the success of the Indians,” Lucky had said, “maybe they should try being successful themselves. We saved half of New Jersey from rotting.”
“You did not save anything,” Mohan said.
Lucky sulked. “Fine, I didn’t. But some other Indians did.” The following week, the Lost Boys, as the gang called themselves, beat a twenty-year-old Indian boy with baseball bats, sticks, and rocks behind a convenience store, surrounding him and repeatedly striking his head, leaving a segment of New Jersey terrified and panicked.
Amarleen locked the door. “Prem, protect me, I am feeling so scared,” she said, pressing herself against him at the window.
“Woman, do you not see me standing here?” Iqbal said.
Prem tugged the window shades down, but a few of the roommates continued to peek out from the sides. Outside the gang members were yelling, at times incoherently, calling on all Dotheads to come out of their homes so they could be killed. One of them, a short, dark-haired man with an incongruously thick neck, called to a man in front of another car at the far end of the property. “Yo, you didn’t say anything about killing anyone. Maybe we just beat them up a little?”
“Donny’s right,” a guy from a third car yelled, “maybe we should just beat them until they’re unconscious.”
“I’m tired. Can we just tie some of them up and spit on them?”
“I don’t think we have any rope!”
“Really?” Mohan said inside. “These are the duffers everyone is worried about?”
Unexpectedly, from one building over, Snigdha and Falguni hurled some filthy words from the window while one flight up Nathan Kothari lobbed a handful of cricket balls out at the young men and threatened to call the police. Suddenly, the gang members jumped in their cars and drove off. The tenants of King’s Court pulled their curtains and returned to what they were doing, only a few of them noticing Beena Joshi standing in the grass in her nightgown pointing a gun.
It was all on the Channel 7 News the next evening, to which most of King’s Court tuned in hoping to catch a glimpse of themselves. Paul Goldenberg, head of the state attorney general’s Office of Bias Crime and Community Relations, said that fifteen of the Lost Boys’ members, including an auxiliary police officer, had been arrested on various charges. When Goldenberg had asked them for a motive, they said they did it for “a thrill.” The segment ended on a note of optimism, however, with an interview with “prominent community organizer” Hemant Engineer: “Isolated incidents happen,” he said, “but this is still the best country to live in.”
As if in defiance of the attackers, the Swaminarayan organization presented the Cultural Festival of India in Edison over four weeks that summer. Well over one million Americans, Indian and non, attended the events on the campus of Middlesex County College, where they encountered folk dances, lectures, food stands, cultural exhibits, puppet shows, daily parades, four full-size temples, and five enormous archway displays; a fifty-seven-foot-high Five Pinnacled Monument featuring three domes and twenty-two pillars topped by dancing statuettes; a five-story-tall Four-Faced Monument depicting the four faces of Brahma; an assortment of other equally colossal monuments; and a recreation of an Indian village. The diaspora put its best, most nostalgic foot forward, exhibiting a dazzling spectacle of its romanticized homeland. Prem attended three times, with three different women, each time hoping to see Leena.
The first visit, he went with Anamika, who was unimpressed. “Why do I need to see this diorama about being vegetarian? I can see that in my kitchen,” she said. The next time, he took Suchitra, who was troubled by the wedding ceremonies being performed live on Saturdays and Sundays from noon to five. “Why would anyone have a wedding like this? Are they crazy?” she wondered aloud. “Anyway, it is thirty-one degrees today. Let’s go back.” The third time, he went with a sixty-plus-year-old widow seeking a travel companion, Usha, whose ad he answered in India Abroad. Though she was older than the others and had a braying laugh, she was also much more lighthearted and fun. She asked him to take a picture of her with a thirty-two-foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty rather than one of the Indian displays. “Why would relatives in India want to see me standing next to a giant Natraj?” she explained.
After the excitement of the festival and the horror of the racist gang wore off, Prem returned to movies, along with his ongoing work for Superstar Entertainment and Exxon, as his primary pastime. His life fell into a gentle rhythm that went on for years, and in this time of work and heartache, he was grateful for the movies that sustained him. He welcomed, in 1992, the eminently watchable Beta and Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar and the offbeat Roja, which marked the mainstream debut of composer A. R. Rahman and his haunting soundtracks. Nineteen ninety-three was significant filmically for two reasons: Madhuri Dixit created an uproar with her dance to the song “Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai” (“What is Behind the Sari Blouse”), which for several solid months played on an endless loop in apartment 3D; and Shah Rukh Khan burst onto the scene in Baazigar and Darr and changed the face of Indian cinema forever. Shah Rukh, a.k.a. King Khan and SRK, named one of the fifty most powerful people in the world by Newsweek, one of the wealthiest people in the world by Forbes, and the world’s biggest movie star by the Los Angeles Times, began his movie career as a villain but moved quickly to romantic hero. He became known as a gentle soul, in touch with his emotions, ready to help others, a global citizen who declared, “I sell dreams and peddle love,” in his eventual, inevitable TED talk. Prem found that he related to Shah Rukh’s characters, many of whom were named Rahul, more so even than Amitabh’s characters, who were often named Vijay, and to Shah Rukh’s mushy young man more so than Amitabh’s angry young one. As Shah Rukh’s stardom skyrocketed over the years, so too did Prem’s affinity for him. The significance of SRK in Prem’s life and in the world cannot be overestimated.
During this period, on Saturday mornings, Cinema Cinema was joined by the Asian Variety Show and Namaste America to provide several solid hours of Hindi movie-musical entertainment, which Prem usually enjoyed with Beena Joshi in her apartment. She was quite taken by 1994’s Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! the villain-less, drama-less, violence-less surprise smash hit that centered around a shockingly happy, well-to-do extended family enjoying a family wedding without killing each other, and that in the process set the tone for Hindi films for the duration of the decade. Prem bought the VHS tape of it for Beena and spent many hours by her side watching it. These years of movies were punctuated by sightings of Leena—some enchanting, some devastating—and by productions of his own magnificent stage shows, for which he always found a way to give her front-row seats.
25
The New York Times
In New Jersey, an Importer of Indian Stars
By ALEX STEVENSON JUNE 11, 1994
Some weeks ago, Prem Kumar was trying to find a place to hold a meeting with some of the organizers of his upcoming show. Their usual meeting room at Dosa Dream Palace was booked, so someone suggested convening at Kumar’s house. “I just laughed,” he said. “How could I fit 10 people on one twin mattress?”
The mattress Kumar, 31, was referencing is on the floor of an apartment in Edison, N.J., where he lives as a paying guest along with four other men. “People think because I produce these big shows, I must be living in a big house,” he said, taking a sip of chai at Dimple restaurant in Edison. He added, “I am happy on my mattress.”
This is not the lifestyle people expect from a highly successful show-business entrepreneur whose company, Superstar Entertainment, has been putting on elaborate stage productions featuring Indian film stars since 1990. The flashy, Vegas-esque shows play to sold-out audiences at increasingly grand venues, the latest of which will take place on June 25 at the Nassau Coliseum.
The “Temptation Beyond Borders” show, which almost immediately sold out its 18,000 tickets, will be a four-hour song-and-dance spectacle in which the actors, along with background dancers, reenact musical sequences from their films. Also along for the ride are comedic actors, musicians, and playback singers, the largely hidden talent that supply the vocals to which the actors lip-synch.
So how will this performance distinguish itself from its predecessors? The show’s organizers believe the answer lies in the addition of one major star to the lineup. “The participation of Anil Kapoor is nothing short of a miracle,” said Jagan Bose, the show’s director. “He brings a star power we have rarely seen.”
At a recent rehearsal, Kapoor, a veteran actor with a long list of box office hits behind him, leaped off of a staircase and went straight into a 10-minute dance routine. “It will be better on the day of the show. There will be flames erupting on both sides when I jump,” he said.
By all accounts, Superstar Entertainment’s productions have never been short of spectacular. The first show, at the State Theatre New Jersey, wowed audiences with its array of movie stars emerging from within simulated fog. The 1991 show at the Paramount Theater (formerly the Felt Forum) and the ’92 and ’93 shows at the Trump Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City all drew audiences of up to 5,000 people and featured laser lights and showers of confetti.
Interspersed with these extravagant shows have been smaller, non–movie star shows centered around singers from various genres: classical, Sufi, playback, ghazal. A server at Dimple interjected on this subject, addressing a visibly embarrassed Kumar: “Excuse me? Sir? Your Kumar Sanu, Anuradha Paudwal singing program was first-class.”
But it is the big shows, the ones with A-listers such as Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukerji, Hrithik Roshan, and Preity Zinta, that have captured the hearts of an entire immigrant population. Kumar’s timing for launching his company could not have been better; with the U.S. government’s 1990 establishment of the H1-B visa, which allowed highly skilled workers from other countries to come to America temporarily, India experienced a “brain drain” as many people in the tech and software industries emigrated, precipitating a huge growth in the Indian American population and, therefore, in audiences for Kumar’s shows, in New York and New Jersey.
