Sacred Games (100 page)

‘We're not going to make a maderchod art film,' I growled. I was going to spend thirty crores on this film. We had two big heroes signed up already, and Dheeraj had an appointment with Amitabh Bachchan's secretary the coming Tuesday. I had told Dheeraj also that I wanted fultu special effects, and first-class costumes and locations. I wanted the film to look glossy and big, it was going to be huge. And huge costs money, lots of it. I was doing this for Zoya, but I wanted my money back, at least that. ‘You forget art,' I told Manu. ‘You write one fast-moving thriller. Put something in every scene that makes this public feel like it has an electric wire connected to its golis. Keep them awake and excited. Give it to them, hard and fast.'

He nodded, up and down, fast. ‘Yes, yes, bhai. I understand. Action and spectacle and big-big glamour.' He held his arms out wide. ‘The emotion of
Mother India
, the scale of
Sholay
, the speed of
Amar Akbar Anthony
. That's what we want.'

That's what we wanted all right. So we got to work.

 

I continued my work for Mr Kumar's people. Mr Kumar had retired the year before, despite my protests. ‘Saab, why do you have to go?' I'd said. ‘In our business, there is no retirement except going upstairs.'

‘Ganesh, my business is not your business.'

He was always like that, short and blunt. But he was not unkind, this
wily old bowler who had played the game for so long. We were not friends, but over the years we had come to understand each other, and our mutual need. He needed me to extract threads of information from Kathmandu, and Karachi, and Dubai, and sometimes make certain people disappear, and I needed him to put pressure on policemen in Delhi and Mumbai, and supply me with information in turn, and help occasionally with logistics and resources. We had no illusions about each other, but we were comfortable, like neighbours who had grown older together. And I tried to tell him he was not old enough yet to take sanyas. ‘Saab, if the government makes you retire just when you are at the top of your form, a fabulous khiladi like you, then the government is mad.'

‘It's not just the government, Ganesh, I also want to sit and rest.'

‘All right, saab, then sit in one place, and talk to me on the phone. Like a consultant, you know.'

He said, ‘Work for you?' I could tell he was amused.

‘Work with me.'

‘No, Ganesh. I have done enough, and I am feeling tired.'

He was not being rude, and I did not feel insulted. ‘But what will you do?'

‘Read. Think. As I said, sit in one place.'

I knew from long experience that he would not be persuaded by arguments or temptations, and so the discussion was closed. ‘All right,' I said. ‘It has been good to work with you, Mr K.D. Yadav.' I wanted to let him know that I knew his real name, but I had respected him enough to call him Mr Kumar, as he wanted, for all the time we had co-operated.

‘Very good, Ganesh. I had no doubt you would investigate me, and find out.'

‘I learnt from you, saab.'

And so he passed from my life, this faraway teacher of mine. He introduced me to his successor, a Mr Joshi, and for about a month he stayed in touch, to help with the transition. I soon knew this Mr Joshi's real name – Dinesh Kulkarni – and I told Mr Kumar exactly what I thought of him. ‘This man's a fool, saab. He sits in Delhi and wants to tell me where to send money, and how much, and how many men to send on an operation. He doubts me and my sources, and speaks to me as if I'm his servant.'

‘Be patient, Ganesh,' Mr Kumar said. ‘You will take time to adjust to each other.'

So I was patient, but that bastard Kulkarni did not adjust to me or to anything else. It was amazing to me that the country's security was being
handled by such a gaandu, but then I had seen gaandus rise to the top in every profession. I had to deal with this particular gaandu. Meanwhile, Mr Kumar finally slipped away into his retirement. I worked on.

 

We wrote the screenplay for my film between Ko Samui and Patong. I preferred the long quiet of Samui, but the boys wanted the jostling chaos of Patong. I let them have one week out of every three in the bars and on the beaches, and then turned our bows again towards peace. With Manu Tewari on board, they had something else besides endless card-playing to occupy their hours, even on the sea runs. It was exciting for them to see a story form, to feel it take on contours and characters. They discussed the narrative endlessly, badgered Manu for new scenes, and offered opinions and suggestions, and told him their own adventures. They were passionately involved with the hero of the film, and each sulked in turn when Manu refused to incorporate some turn or twist which he had thought up for this hero. A few times I had to intervene and put down a final veto on a suggestion before Manu got beaten up, or thrown off the boat. Of course our normal work and play went on as usual: I talked to Kulkarni every week, and ran his intelligence operations, found information and killed a bastard here and there for my country; I consulted Guru-ji and moved his shipments; I spoke to Jojo and laughed with her; I met Zoya and took her. But in those six months, no matter what else we did, that story threaded through our brains and bodies and obsessed each one of us. We talked about it morning and evening and night, and discussed the casting, and listened avidly to the songs as they came in from the recording studios. And we hovered over Manu Tewari.

He was middling in size, and not hard at all, but that Manu was stubborn. He would eat whatever you put on his plate, and not complain at all if you changed television channels while he was watching the news, but if you tried to interfere with his scenes, he was fierce as a yellow-toothed sow with her threatened piglets. I was his financier, and his paymaster, and after all I was Ganesh Gaitonde, but even with me he argued back and defended his decisions and debated. Sometimes the boys winced when our story sessions heated up, and our voices rose, and Manu Tewari risked rudeness. But I tolerated him, because he was a good writer. He was writing me a strong story. And besides, I was learning from him. As the weeks passed, as I argued with Manu Tewari, I began to see what he was talking about. He taught me about cinema, how a simple cut from a blown-out matchstick to a blazing desert could explode in
your chest and rock you back in your seat. We watched DVDs with him, and learnt the language of extreme close-up and long shot, the release of space and the compression of time, how the simple movement of a camera down a pair of fixed tracks could say more than a thousand books. I learnt these tools, and I watched
Mughal-e-Azam
, and
Kagaz ke Phool
, and I watched them dozens of times, and I learnt how a small group of master craftsmen, a gang of purposeful madmen, could wield light and sound and space to make shimmering monuments that materialized on cloth screens, on dirty village walls, on a yacht in the southern seas. I could start to see how a good story had a certain geometry, a succession of curves, a billowing rise of crests and plateaux that led to the final explosion, and satisfaction. If you made a story that was lopsided, that was blemished, this ugliness would bring only boredom and emptiness. In beauty there was bliss.

‘Exactly,' Guru-ji said to me one afternoon. ‘But not only bliss. Also terror.' He had taken an unexpected delight in the slow birth of our story. I had expected he would think the whole project too cheap and childish, but yet again he surprised me. He listened to our ideas and innovations attentively, and gave advice without being domineering. And here he was, finding not only beauty but also terror in our half-finished script.

‘Terror, Guru-ji?' I said. ‘How?'

‘Anything that is truly beautiful is also terrifying.'

I thought about that. Was Zoya terrifying? No. I felt a craving for her, and sometimes a flutter of disquiet at how strong this longing was, but I was not scared of her. Of course not. But I wouldn't argue with Guru-ji. Instead, I said, ‘Guru-ji, but you said the world is beautiful because it is ordered and symmetrical. Does that mean it is frightening?'

‘Yes, it is. For the ordinary person, who sees only randomness, the world is just depressing. When you move along a little, you start to see its real loveliness. Then you realize that this exquisite perfection is terrible, it is frightening. When you conquer this fear, you know that beauty and terror are the same thing, and this is as it should be. There is no need for fear. For the world to be beautiful, it must finish. For every beginning, there is an end. And for every end, there is a beginning.'

‘Symmetry?'

‘Yes, Ganesh. Precisely that.'

It started to make sense to me. This is why the screenplay had to move in its cycles of sequences, but inevitably towards a climax, after which there would be nothing. Or, as Guru-ji was implying, maybe something,
but only after the world of the screenplay had vanished. But I was still grasping – as I often did – at the entirety of his meaning. ‘I don't fully understand, Guru-ji, sorry. I see the necessity of order. But I like beauty, I don't fear it.'

He laughed, but kindly. ‘Don't worry, Ganesh. You are a vira. You will climb to the top of the peak, and see the abyss. You will see both beauty and terror. But for now, what you are doing is very good. You will seduce the audience, and make lots of money.'

Yes, there was the money. And cash was what Manu argued with the boys about. He worked in the most money-minded business in the world, but he wanted the rich to give their money to the poor. He believed in state ownership of essential industries, high taxes on the middle classes and even higher taxes on the upper classes, and protection for Indian industries against multinationals and imports. The boys all came from low-income families, but every last one of them was a diehard capitalist. ‘You think I'm a chutiya to give my money to the poor?' Amit said. ‘You know how many bastards I had to kill to get it?' And Nitin said, ‘Fifty years of state control and what do you get? Cottage industries that have been making straight losses for fifty years, a population that spends all its time and energy trying to get around the stupid rules, and massive corruption.' And Suresh said, ‘Where is your precious Soviet Union now, sala? Tell me where?' And Manu Tewari argued back, and told them that capitalism would collapse because of its internal contradictions, that the march of history was inevitable, and that they were an ignorant lot who didn't and couldn't see the forces working under the surface of events. ‘Our story can only have one end,' Manu said. ‘The proletariat will finally rule.' To which Amit said, ‘Exactly. Boss, I am the proletariat. And what I want is three Mercedes cars, three lund-lasoons a day, and lots of good butter chicken. When I get all this, who will I be? The ruler of some poor proletarian bastards.'

So Manu Tewari's political lectures didn't gain him a following of fierce comrades on my yacht. But we all listened attentively to his rules for making a good movie story, and there were a lot of rules. The boys began to call him Manu the Rule-giver. He had a rule for every occasion, for every scene and situation, and examples for support. He told us the villain must be stronger than the hero, and also somehow attractive. And that two songs must never be put next to each other, except when Sooraj Barjatya does it. And the heroine must be very sexy, but she can never have sex. And the first one or two scenes after the interval must be unimportant
throwaway scenes, because your viewers take a few minutes to come back in from the lobby, with their samosas and drinks. And once you're at the climax, move it along fast, because the audience is going to get up and start leaving so that they can beat the traffic jam outside. And the hero's mother must be introduced early, and our love for her must be total. At this last one, I had to object. ‘Why do we have to have a mother cluttering up the film?' I said. ‘The screenplay's too long anyway, and we have to cut scenes. She'll just eat up screen-time.'

‘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.'