May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (35 page)

“I think you are a great artiste,” she told one actor. “How do you find me as an actress?”

“Good,” the actor responded. “Very good. Except sometimes, of course, when you are asked to do scenes that you have never experienced, you go off the mark.”

Somaya, the editor of
Movie
, was an unlikely candidate for the gossip trade. After graduating from college with a degree in psychology, she fell into a job with a film magazine, much to her mother’s dismay. At first, Somaya was aghast when she saw the liquor, cigarettes and carryings-on at a film party, and she told her editor she would not do interviews after dark. By the time I met her, eight years later, she was a veteran. “It’s like a bad marriage,” she said. “I keep telling myself that I should do more serious writing. I go through months of hating it. And then I walk into a studio, and that studio smell gets in my nostrils, and I feel this is where I belong.”
Movie
always reported with great relish and detail, yet the magazine retained a mothering approach toward the foibles of the stars. “I don’t want to say that what they do is right, but I don’t want to pass moral judgments,” Somaya said.

“What they’re looking for is their own happiness, however short-term it is.”

Nari Hira’s
Stardust
, on the other hand, gave Bombay’s actresses no such allowance.
Stardust
was the number-one film magazine, with a circulation in English, Hindi and Gujarati of 250,000, second only to
India Today
in magazine readership. It had a wicked, catty tone, best
personified in “Neeta’s Natter,” the widely read gossip column. Every month Neeta sharpened her claws on such stars as Kimi Katkar, who was famous for “revealing” her body in modest bikinis, but who had caused a stir on one recent occasion when she shooed away still photographers who were trying to get shots of her cleavage during a swimming-pool scene. “I wonder why Kimi Katkar makes such a big noise about being photographed in a swimming costume, considering she wears them in her films for the entire population of India to see,” Neeta meowed. “Well, excuse me, Kimi darling, apart from the fact that the photographers were only doing their job, there is hardly anything left to be shown in your case.” The column was jointly written by the
Stardust
staff, and “Neeta” did not actually exist. But she was a creation of Nari Hira, the gossipy magazine mogul, who was responsible for much of her tone. “We came in with a kind of frivolous irreverence,” he said of the first issue of
Stardust
in 1972. “We wrote about the stars as human beings. We were like the Hedda Hoppers of the fifties in Hollywood.”

In person, Hira turned out to be an elegant, rather formal bachelor in a well-pressed dark business suit. Because of his busy Bombay schedule, we talked at his residence in Delhi. Hira had multiple homes: a house and a beach house in Bombay, an apartment in New York, Michael Caine’s former townhouse in London. His house in Delhi was, disappointingly, a standard suburban box, dark and gloomy. It might have been a way station for a traveling businessman—which was, in fact, what Hira was. Besides
Stardust
, he owned two other glossy magazines, a travel agency, a video film production unit, a cosmetics company and a suburban Bombay country club. But above all, Hira was known as the
Stardust
man, and the reason was readily apparent when he opened his mouth. More than anything else, Hira loved gossip, which he delivered in a rapid-fire tumble of words. I would throw him a name, a movie, a subject—and he was off.
“Shahenshah?”
he said, repeating my reference to Amitabh Bachchan’s recent film with the actress Meenakshi Seshadri. “Didn’t do that well. Amitabh will be okay, though. It’s Meenakshi who has to pay. She didn’t get a hit with Amitabh; therefore she won’t be paired with Amitabh in the future. Now she’s being written off. But just wait.”

Hira was pleased that in seventeen years his magazine had been the subject of only six libel suits, four of which he had won. One was pending, and one he had lost. That was when
Stardust
printed that a certain married actress was pregnant with her lover’s baby. Incredibly,
Stardust
’s source was her husband’s doctor, who informed the magazine that the husband was impotent. “Since she didn’t deny she was having the affair,” Hira reasoned, “we thought that two plus two made four.” The actress saw the arithmetic somewhat differently. She threw a fit and, as a Muslim, swore on a stack of Korans that the child was her husband’s. Then she called her lawyer. “It was our biggest mistake,” said Hira, who nonetheless chuckled as he recalled the episode. “I’m not convinced that we were wrong,” Hira said. “I’m convinced that we should not have published it.” For Hira, a certain amount of friction with the stars was inevitable. “Sure we fight with them,” he said. “But then we make up. We’re never mad at anybody for more than three months.”

Hira counted among his friends many of the people found on the pages of
Stardust
, including Bombay’s flamboyant society decorator and hostess to the stars, Parmeshwar Godrej. The last time I was in Bombay, I was invited to a small party to celebrate the opening of Khyber, a tony new restaurant that Parmeshwar had recently finished decorating with marble columns, arches, mirrors and potted palms. Khyber served mutton kebabs, heavy meat curries and other Moghul-style favorites, but the real attraction was Parmeshwar’s two dozen guests gathered around tables laden with imported cheeses, Chivas Regal and champagne. Aside from the usual members of the famous Godrej clan, an industrial family whose business kept India supplied with soap and shaving cream, there were plenty of film stars, male and female, all of whom were dressed in either all white or all black. Pritish Nandy, the editor of the racy and politically hip
Illustrated Weekly of India
and a fixture on the Bombay social circuit, wore tight black pants and a body-hugging black shirt unbuttoned to his sternum. So did a famous director who first made a name for himself directing Amitabh Bachchan in a “tandoori Western,” as the genre was called in Bombay. The talk was about new films, the box office and marital splits. In New Delhi, such an evening would have been dominated by gossip about who was in and who was out of Rajiv Gandhi’s ruling circle, but at Parmeshwar’s, the subject barely came up. The hostess was in a tight-fitting black minidress and had that thin, brassy and hyperactive international-socialite look. “I was just in Beverly Hills staying with some good friends,” she told me when I was introduced to her, mentioning the name of a well-known Hollywood studio executive. The hostess spent the rest of her evening circling animatedly among her guests, taking time out at one point to curl up in the lap of Vinod Khanna,
the square-jawed, dimple-chinned leading man, who was dressed all in white. After hours of drinking, dinner was finally brought in by a small army of waiters at Bombay’s typical dinner hour, midnight.

ONE ACTRESS WHO KEPT SOME DISTANCE FROM THE PARMESHWAR SCENE
was Shabana Azmi, the winner of more acting awards than any other female star and, in my mind, the reigning feminist conscience of Hindi films. More than most others, she had the ability to look at the curious world of the Indian actress with a degree of perspective and irony. Azmi was a serious artist who began her career in India’s highbrow art films, then crossed over into the commercial cinema because, she said, “I saw it as something that would get me stardom.” That it did, and her fees increased, although Azmi could never command the prices of Sridevi. Instead she shuttled between the serious cinema and shlock and argued that the name she made for herself in her popular movies brought more attention to the small-budget films in which she played strong women who fought back. In recent years, Azmi had worked much less than the other actresses, but her few well-chosen roles helped spread her reputation in the West, where she was a favorite choice of directors who needed Indian women in their films. Azmi was cast in
Bengali Nights,
a French film shot outside Calcutta, and played the doting mother of a brilliant young piano student in
Madame Souzatska
, which starred Shirley MacLaine. Azmi also had the time, and inclination, for using her status as an actress to further her political interests. Although the press sometimes criticized her for trifling with serious political causes as a hobby, in some instances she had the influence to make a difference. In 1986, for example, Azmi went on a hunger strike that moved the Maharashtra state government to make some concessions to find housing for slum dwellers whose paper shacks and hovels had been callously razed by Bombay authorities. “I knew there was absolutely no way they were going to let me die,” she said of the strike, which lasted only a few days.

I first met Azmi at her beach cottage, a small house of dark wood that was decorated not in the usual Bombay style of gilt and chrome but with Indian textiles and other folk crafts. Azmi was thirty-four and had an intelligent face, striking but not classically beautiful. She was in many ways India’s version of Meryl Streep, and Meryl Streep was in fact her favorite actress. Her status as an “artist,” however, had
not made her insufferable, and she turned out to be lively, gossipy and no more narcissistic than anyone else.

Azmi, like so many others, had fallen in love with a married man. But because she was a “serious” actress who espoused feminism, the gossip press made more of the affair than usual. Some fans even called her a hypocrite. “Here is a woman,” Azmi said of herself, “who believes in liberation and women’s rights, and then she just goes and snatches a man away from his wife?” Her case was more convoluted than most. The man, one of the industry’s top screenwriters, was a lifelong Muslim who ended his first marriage by making the simple unilateral declaration prescribed by Muslim law. As a feminist, Azmi said, she found it difficult to accept his divorce because she felt Muslim religious law was unfair to women. But love triumphed and she married him anyway. “I went through hell,” she said. “It was only in the final analysis that I felt that nothing was worth giving up my man for.” Azmi had been able to ignore social conventions because of the unique culture in which she lived. “Actresses come into power, and then they have the ability to make choices, which most women in India don’t,” she said. This was the real advantage of being an actress in India, I thought, and Azmi was one of the few with a star’s status who had the intelligence to articulate it. “An actress is treated like a real person,” she went on. “She’s handling her finances, she’s employing people. In a sense, she’s totally equal to a man. And you realize you have this in you, despite your sheltered existence and your cultural heritage. And you say, ‘All right, if men have the freedom, why can’t we?’ ”

A year later I ran into Azmi again, this time in a remote corner of the state of West Bengal, where she was on location for
Sati
, a film set in a village 150 years ago.
Sati
was an art film, and Azmi had a role that even for her provided an unusual challenge: that of a mute nineteen-year-old rural Brahmin girl who is forced by her family to “marry” a tree. The family feels it has no other choice, because an astrologer has told them that any man the girl might marry will die. This kind of “tree marriage” really used to occur during the last century in rural parts of western Bengal.
Sati
was written and directed by another favorite of the feminists, Aparna Sen, a former actress who had become one of India’s leading film directors. She had taken the title from a sati that occurred at the beginning of the film, and also from a more mystical kind of “sati” at the end.

I was there on the day the wedding scene was shot, a torturously hot afternoon in mid-May. The film unit had set up under an enormous
banyan tree on the banks of the Ganges, in a village that was a seven-hour drive north of Calcutta. A knob of the tree had been draped, like a groom, with a garland of hibiscus flowers. Azmi wore a red-and-white wedding sari as she was led around the tree seven times and then sat down in the shade by its trunk for the marriage ceremony, led by a Brahmin priest. In front of him, on a large banana leaf, were offerings: flowers, papayas, chilies, coconuts, cucumbers, potatoes. The scene was bizarre, but Sen and Azmi were working hard to make it both credible and tragic. I stood transfixed, as did more than five hundred present-day villagers, roped off behind police lines. A scorching wind and an intermittent sun made filming difficult, so there were long breaks between shots when I could talk to Azmi about her feminism, her career and her family. Like Amitabh Bachchan, she had come from a privileged background. Her father, like Bachchan’s, was a poet, and both her parents had been active in India’s Communist party.

“When my mother came to Bombay,” Azmi said, “she was told that a Communist wife didn’t just hang around but went out and got some work. So she went out and got a job with All India Radio. I come from a house where there were no great cries of feminism, although it was certainly practiced. But, you know, women, particularly in India, feel very guilty about being successful. There’s the feeling that somewhere you’re losing out on your femininity, so the woman tries to compensate in the home by playing second fiddle to everybody, because she’s guilty of being successful. It was my husband who pointed that out to me. Now the feminists will say that even that had to come from a man.” After another scene the conversation continued, this time on the subject of motherhood. “I want to have a baby immediately,” Azmi said, “but I want to get this film over with first.” She would be thirty-six in a few months. “I don’t feel like an incomplete woman because I haven’t had a child,” she said. “But everybody keeps pushing it into my head.” Smita Patil, the pregnant actress of
Dance Dance
, had told me much the same thing. “This is a very hypocritical society,” Patil said when I interviewed her in Bombay. “For centuries we’ve been told that to be a good woman you must be a good mother.”