Shining Hero (33 page)

‘What? Is something the matter?’ he was saying. His voice seemed to come from far away as though she was recovering from an anaesthetic …

‘No, nothing. I am glad for you.’ The words came out strangled, as though she had something tight round her throat. Later she would wonder how she had managed to get those words out at all.

She leant back shakily and rested her head against the wall. It felt cool and rough and eased the dizziness a little. Avoiding Bhima’s gaze she stared across the dingy café and instead of seeing chatting, laughing people, saw hope, happiness and expectation rush away like the dark current of a monsoon river. She wanted to wake Vishnu and end the dream but did not know how.

Karna’s profits from his Bangladesh venture had earned him enough to rent a little Bombay flat which he had furnished with the kind of things he’d wanted for so long. It was new, bright, modern and showy. He would go round his lovely little home and explore his new possessions. His portrait, in which he stared rather glaringly, took up half a wall. He would run his fingers round the rim of his shocking pink Mellaware cups while he waited for his green electric kettle, that was shaped like an egret, to come to the boil. He would caress his telephone with its curled cable and big black numbers as though it was a pony, and anticipate, with shivers of joy, the moment it might ring. He would hold his cut glass tumblers to the light to make rainbows on the walls. He would walk with bare feet over the carpets till his feet tingled with nylon electricity. He would peer and stroke and sniff and hold in the way of someone who has a lifetime of deprivation to make up for. He would move from one piece of furniture to another, sitting on a plastic folding chair one moment, then the next sinking onto a polystyrene pouf,
then jumping up and trying out his new sofa. He had arranged his collection of dolls around the rooms. They stood on mantelpieces and in glass-fronted cupboards. They sat on the coffee table and along the kitchen shelf, on the bedside table and leant against the walls. Karna did not mind that the dolls looked cheap and shabby compared to the pristine newness of the other things around them. The dolls were a celebration of his mother because no one had painted her portrait or even taken a photo of her. He had had his posters of Poopay Patalya put in golden frames and they covered almost all his walls. He had bought himself a music centre and in the evenings would sit listening to his favourite song, ‘Papa kehte hain,’ ‘My father is talking,’ the theme tune from the film ‘Quayamat Se Quayamat Tak,’ about a father and son who enjoyed a loving relationship. As Karna listened he would imagine himself enjoying such a relationship with his father, Dilip Baswani.

When Karna got the phone call he could not, at first, make any sense out of it. Thrill and disbelief turned him deaf and stupid while he listened to words that sounded like the talking of angels.

Dilip Baswani wanted Karna to act with Poopay Patalya in a chewing-gum advert. ‘You will have to show her some Karate moves,’ he said. ‘The scene is only half a minute long but I want it to look convincing.’

The night before his session with the young actress, Karna felt so dazed with bliss that he did not sleep. It took him three hours to get ready the following morning and by the time he was dressed his room was scattered with rejected garments. By the time he set off for the studio he had squirted and sprayed himself with so many aftershave lotions and toilet waters that he staggered and felt gassed. He started up his car, trying to control his trembling and slow his breathing. As he reversed out he realised that the blue jeans and T-shirt he had ultimately decided on were quite wrong and wished he had bought a brand-new outfit before meeting the woman of his dreams.

He had seen Poopay Patalya from a distance a few times since the meeting in Dilip Baswani’s house, but had never been close to her again. He drove carefully to the studio, praying all the way that
he would not faint at the sight of her, or fall down in a stupor at her touch.

The film studio was busy when Karna arrived. Cameramen were balanced on step-ladders or crouched down low. A scriptwriter was working rapidly, his papers laid out before him on the floor. Engineers and electricians darted from one side to another, hauling machinery, swathing cables, arranging lights. A carpenter was finishing off a large piece of scaffolding and scene painters were wildly daubing. A group of dancers were performing in one part of the vast shabby hall and a love scene was being acted in another, while make-up people dashed from actor to actor dabbing on powder and wiping away sweat.

Again dizziness passed over Karna’s sight for a moment and he had to lean against the wall to steady himself, when he saw Poopay Patalya. She was sitting in a canvas chair and reading a film magazine. She glanced up as he approached and a look of disapproval clouded her beautiful face. He felt a flush of horror all over again because her frown confirmed that he had put on the wrong clothes.

‘I am Karna,’ he said. He had to fight hard with his throat so as to keep his voice steady. And when she looked blank he added, ‘Karate.’

‘Oh, yes. You are late,’ she said. ‘I am making three films at once this week and am due at the next studio in an hour.’

‘This is when I was told to be here.’

Poopay frowned again, said, ‘No one has the least sense of time in this place,’ then waving a hand she called out, ‘The Karate person has arrived.’ As people came running from various parts of the studio she told Karna, as though as an afterthought, ‘I am Poopay Patalya.’

‘I know,’ said Karna, forcing his legs to stop quaking. ‘We have met before, actually.’

She raised her eyebrows questioningly, ‘Oh, really? Where?’

How could she not remember when to him it had been the defining moment of his life?

‘In Dilip Baswani’s house,’ said Karna. He was going to add that he was Dilip’s son, but already she was looking bored.

The choreographer appeared out of a flurry of glittering dancers
and said to Karna impatiently, ‘Come on, let’s get started. I expected you yesterday. I was on the verge of finding someone else.’

Karna’s heart felt touched with chill at the words.

The choreographer waved a camera into line and told Karna, ‘You only get one take so get it right first time.’ He told them swiftly what was required then said to Karna, ‘Now get on with it.’

‘We’ll start with the
shudo
chop,’ said Karna to Poopay Patalya. ‘Get up and copy me.’ His voice was cold and his throat tight. He was grateful to his body for remaining steady. Shivarani’s tutors had taught him to slow his heartbeat and pierce his body so that it did not bleed or feel pain. These skills were coming in very useful now.

As Karna crouched before Poopay Patalya, showing her the moves, and the cameraman kept the film turning, he tried not to be dazed by the strange and wonderful smell of her.

Karna’s lunges, feints and strikes became glorified because of the beauty that was mingling with him, his very essence reacting to the experience that was love. Love can make some men gauche and stumble. It can make them inarticulate and foolish. Karna became sharpened and speeded up by it. His body seemed to move with the swift whistling of a passing arrow. His brain was as still and clear as the water of a deep and pristine Kashmir lake. Poopay Patalya soared through his arms like the wild gander passing through akash. She poured over his neck as light and fluid as the running of river water. He swung and dipped and flipped, turned and rounded her as though he was being whirled, for a second time, in the current of a holy river.

‘Shabash,’ approved the choreographer.

After half an hour Poopay said she was tired and collapsed back into her chair, panting a little. There were beads of sweat on her upper lip. Her hair gave off the smell of foreign perfume. Karna stood waiting for her to get her breath back, pretending to watch the dancers, but really seeing her out of the corner of his eye. Her hair was thick thick thick and black black black. He wanted to bury his face in it.

A plump lady loomed up with a glass of water but Poopay waved
her away and the actress’s spot boy poured her cold nimbu pani from a flask, then wiped her forehead with a towel.

Karna could hardly bear to look.

‘You are good,’ she said to Karna out of the folds of the towel. ‘I’m glad Papa suggested you for the act.’

Karna winced. How he wished Poopay would not call Dilip that name.

At the end of his second karate session with the actress, Karna asked her, ‘What does “Poopay” mean?’ He had often speculated on this and thought it might mean Glory, Greatness, Wonder. She was sitting before her mirror, and her ayah was brushing her hair. She said, laughing, ‘Come on, you dope. Don’t you know any French?’

Karna did not reply.

‘Poupée. They spell it silly here, but I quite like it. Doll. It means “Doll”. Can you imagine? I don’t look much like a Dolly, do I?’

He felt winded, as though something had punched him in the stomach.

She teased, ‘Your silence means you think I do look like a dolly?’

He shook his head mutely and realised he could no longer bring up his mother’s face into his mind. Poopay’s had got muddled there instead.

Poopay Patalya was intrigued by Karna. She had never met anyone like him. He was so cool, so efficient and her seductive presence did not seem to throw him as it did other men. She got the feeling that he did not like her much and this she found enchanting because all the other men liked her too much. She had grown accustomed to men who melted at her touch, who gasped and could not draw their eyes away when she looked into them. Karna seemed indifferent to her. As she followed the moves he demonstrated, she tried to charm him. She flirted with him and he remained brisk, businesslike and bossy. She was attracted to him because he was cool but also because he was funny-looking and she had grown bored of handsome men who all looked the same.

At the end of the karate session a pair of manicurists came and, resting Poopay’s hands on their napkin-covered knees, one on either side, began to work on her nails.

Sitting with her hands held out, she told Karna, ‘Bring me a Pepsi, darling. There’s a fridge over there.’

Karna came back with the chilled bottle and then stood, uncertain.

‘Come on, come on. I’m dying of thirst,’ she laughed. Her hands were still trapped by the manicurists. ‘Hold it to my mouth.’

The other Karna, the son of the Sun God, had been born wearing shining magic earrings and armour, which he had been warned he must never give away, or disaster would befall him. In that moment, as modern-day Karna raised the bottle to Poopay Patalya’s holy lips, he reflected that he would have given them away and more in exchange for this shining glory moment and would not have cared at all about the suffering that such an action would later cause him. He held the bottle as devoutly as a priest would offer milk for the Lord Ganesh and through the thick, magnifying glass he could see Poopay’s wide red lips puckering. She drank like a thirsty calf, with a childish gulping sound that made her throat quiver. Then, withdrawing her face she gasped, ‘There, that’s enough.’ Her lips were wet and jutting out her chin she said, ‘Wipe it off, darling, would you. There’s a tissue there.’ She indicated the box with a nod of her head.

Wrapping the tissue round the tip of his forefinger Karna gently dabbed the smudge from the goddess’ skin with the unemotional efficiency of a doctor treating a patient.

Poopay felt a little piqued and wondered if Karna was gay for this was the first man who had touched her glorious lips without trying to follow it up with a kiss.

Poopay did not kiss. She thought the act was both boring and unhygienic. So wet and sticky. So utterly pointless. If you wanted to please your mouth eat a gulab jaman. But all the same she felt challenged by Karna’s indifference to her and as she sat at her dressing table she could call, ‘Hey, Karna, look here. Have I got a spot? No, no, look closely.’

‘Your skin is perfect,’ he told her briskly and turned his face away, unable to endure the closeness of her wonderful perfumed heartaching presence.

To Karna, Poopay was without flaw. He did not have to fight a temptation to kiss or make love to her. Other women were for kissing, for fucking. This one was Karna’s perfect goddess. It did not even occur to him to try to kiss her or to tell her that he loved her. Perhaps even her name was hindering him from seeing her as anyone with whom he could have a sexual relationship. In some strange and lovely way Poopay and his mother were becoming entwined. This beautiful film star was filling the dry hurting gap that had been left ever since Dolly died.

Poopay began to take Karna with her when she met her friends, young actors, actresses and other movie people who came from all over the country and talked English interspersed with swathes of Hindi or the other way round. They met in each other’s houses because it was difficult for most of them and in particular Poopay, to go out without being recognised.

To the people of India, Poopay Patalya was a goddess, no less. And there is no way that a goddess can walk the streets like an ordinary mortal. Her face was known by every man, woman and child in the land. Even if there was anyone who had not seen her in a film, there she was on the hoardings, thirty feet high and twenty feet wide. Poopay Patalya was the most famous person in the sub-continent and when she moved about the countryside she had to wear dark glasses and travel in a car with darkened windows, because she would be mobbed if she was recognised.