LEELA Read online

  The film was called Bombay: A City At Stake. when we gave it to the Films Division, they asked for another ninety prints because they wanted to show it in other metros as well. Since the funds allocated by the Tatas would not cover the cost of replication, Films Division made two other copies and ran those ragged.

  There’s a moral hidden there somewhere, but these days I am not sure a moral is going to do this city much good.

  I would have loved to make more documentaries, even in India. I remember meeting the imposing Lady Ranu Mukherjee whose family ran the Asansol coal mines. I had heard something of the dreadful conditions of the coal miners there and I wanted to go and take a look. So in the middle of Calcutta’s creamy bhadralok, I asked her if I could visit.

  She fixed me with a gimlet eye. I tried my best to look demure. I think she knew I meant trouble but she gave me a letter saying I was to be given all possible assistance and armed with it, I set off for asansol.

  At the mines, I told the superintendent that I intended going down a shaft. He looked like he was going to lay an egg at the thought of a friend of Lady Mukherjee descending where only expendable labour went. But I insisted so he gave me a yellow helmet and we got into a glorified bucket. We went down into the mine where the men worked at the coalface and the women worked as a kind of human conveyor belt, carrying the coal that came up from the shafts. I began to understand why the ancients put hell underground. I began to understand the notion of the Stygian depths, which I had read about in Greek mythology. Even if it wasn’t for the claustrophobic dark lit only by dim lamps, even if it wasn’t for the peculiar smell of a grave that was everywhere, even if it wasn’t for the thin black dust that got into everything and would eventually kill each one of these men, there was something inhuman and dreadful about the scene. Art, I thought, cannot get anywhere near reality. Nothing, not even the great savagery of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, had come close to this kind of horror.

  Thanks to Lady Mukherjee’s letter, I was allowed to go everywhere and talk to everyone. I sat with the women and we talked about their lives. I tried to dress as simply as possible, in Bengali cotton saris but I knew that it was not enough camouflage. Across a huge gap of cultures and expectations, we sat in the coal-scented, lampblack dusk and talked about their lives. In the background, there was the constant cough of men suffering from emphysema, men grown prematurely old from spending their lives underground; in the foreground, these women cooking dinner, still at work. And in their eyes, hope.

  ‘Can your film get us a dispensary?’ one of them asked me.

  ‘Where do you go when you are sick?’ I asked.

  The nearest dispensary was miles away. The sick man had to be loaded on to a bullock cart and taken there. Often there was no money for the cart and so husband and wife would walk, slowly, for nearly a day …

  I returned to my dharmashala every night and I wept. And I wrote my script and I searched for money but none was coming. I try not to think of those fire-lit faces in the coal gloom and the hope that my film might bring change. I try very hard not to think about it. I try and I fail.

  ELEVEN

  AMONG THE NAXALITES

  The idea must have seemed good on paper. Dom Moraes, the young poet who had won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize, would return to his city and the BBC would follow him around with a camera. It was to be called Return of a Stranger and it was to be produced by one of the BBC’s senior-most producers, Tony de Lotbinière. At the same time, they would be shooting a film called The Bewildered Giant, which represented their view of India in 1969.

  As they drove through Bombay, Tony outlined his ideas to Dom. Dom would revisit his childhood friends …

  A look of consternation must have spread over Dom’s face.

  ‘You do have childhood friends, do you not?’ I can imagine Tony asking. He was not what you might call a terribly patient man. He smoked Kerala cheroots as if he were committing the acts of violence that he was not allowing himself. But when they did not suffice … Dom told me that Tony had once kicked his butt, actually, literally, kicked his butt when, in a scene set on the sands of Goa, Dom hadn’t risen as quickly as Tony wanted.

  Their car, Dom told me later, was just then passing the Opera House. And across the road from it, there was a huge poster of me in profile.

  ‘I know her,’ he said, relieved.

  And indeed he did. My father and Dom’s father, Frank Moraes, had been friends. We had known each other since I was two and he, four. Dom was a quiet and introverted child. But we got along quite well.

  I remember, for instance, my fourth birthday party. I had invited Dom because he was the only little boy I considered a friend. Aunt Beryl, his mother, explained that Dom would not come to my birthday party but he would like to celebrate it with chocolate cake on the next day at his house. And so I dutifully went over the next day with chocolate cake. Dom ate it and then settled down to read.

  ‘Talk to me,’ I insisted, making an early start.

  But he wouldn’t. There was a gramophone in his nursery and so I suggested, ‘why don’t we play musical chairs?’

  Dom looked up, ‘you have to pay if you lose.’

  I wasn’t preparing to lose. Dom wasn’t a physical child. I was. I danced, I rode, I played sports. Dom spent all his time reading. So I agreed that there would be a penalty and when Dom lost, I told him that he would have to carry all his books on his head and that I would get to order something I wanted to eat, for a change.

  He threw a nasty little-boy sulk but I insisted on the penalty. I was a little more forceful then, for I have a vivid recollection of Dom trying to carry a pile of books on his head and failing.

  Now he was back but our friendship had not been going well. In 1959, when he had come back to write Gone Away, the first volume of his autobiography, he had called me up.

  ‘It’s Dom here,’ he said.

  ‘Dommie,’ I exclaimed. ‘What’s happened to your voice?’

  ‘Nothing is the matter with my voice,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you sound like you have a hot potato in your mouth,’ I said.

  There was a moment of silence. Then he decided to ignore my forthright comments.

  ‘I want you to help me to research the film Industry in India.’

  I would have been delighted to help, but there was no way I could manage since I was shooting a film. We were then living in Bandra, my mother and I, in the ground floor of a rented villa with a maid to look after us and a hen devoted to my mother. To get to Mohan Studio on time, I had to get up at five o’clock. And since the shot was never ready when I arrived—my idea of punctuality differed radically from the Hindi film Industry’s notion of it—I spent much of my day waiting. The rule of all shoots anywhere in the world: if shooting starts late, it will end late. And I was lucky if I returned home by eight o’clock, drained and fit for nothing except a light dinner and bed.

  Dom was not very happy when I refused. But now I was the only friend he could latch on to, the only one who had any memories of him in the city of his birth. And fortunately, at that point, I did have some time.

  Tony asked him about me and the more he heard about me, the more excited he got.

  ‘She’s half-Indian and half-French. You’re an Indian genetically, but you seem like a brown Englishman,’ he said to him. So his lead question to me, on camera, was, ‘How do you position yourself?’

  This was many years before identity politics became such an important issue and the notion of belonging became so public. I suppose refugees have always known how important it is to be able to belong somewhere, but the larger world at that time seemed to be less concerned about such matters. So I answered as best as I could.

  ‘I’m between two stools,’ I said. ‘But I am not falling. I can understand the Europeans and I am at home in India. I can grow roots anywhere.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Dom and shut up.

  Tony was a bit flummoxed. This was supposed to be a conversation in which D
om would explore what it meant to him to be brown, to be Indian, to be living in England. He was supposed to offer something more than that.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘I agree with Leela,’ he said. Tony ground his cheroot between his teeth but nothing more could be got out of Dom. It was always that way with Dom. He was uncomfortable with self-revelation when it was direct. He could write it, he could shape it into his poetry, but he could not talk about himself. Obviously, the film was going to be a lot more difficult than he had thought but that was none of my concern. I was going to see my children in Delhi so I called frank who would have been hurt if I didn’t call.

  ‘Dom is here,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell him to meet you.’

  I was staying at the India International Centre so he came and sat there with his shy, mumbling face. I offered him a cup of tea and promised myself I would make no teasing remarks.

  ‘I have no clothes,’ he said after clearing his throat. ‘I have one brown shoe and one black shoe. I have three shirts but none of them have buttons. My tweed coat doesn’t match my trousers.’

  ‘I’ll do your shopping for you,’ I said.

  ‘I have twenty pounds,’ he said.

  ‘Please forget it. I’ll do it for you because you’re my friend. You can pay me later.’

  ‘It’s not about shopping. Will you marry me?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, feeling sorry for him.

  He told Frank who wept, happily. Or so Dom told me.

  ‘I suppose I must ask your father,’ he said. I couldn’t believe that a Bohemian poet with a Soho past could be so old-fashioned.

  ‘You do not have to do any such thing. It’s my business and yours,’ I told him.

  But as a pucca Brit, he felt he had to make it right. Later one evening, my father told me about it as he played a chess game against himself. I could play, he had taught me, but he found me unsatisfying as an opponent. ‘You never attack,’ he said to me once, ‘you are always on the defensive.’

  Prescient words, perhaps.

  As he considered his next move, he told me what had happened when Dom had taken him to the Harbour bar at the Taj Mahal Hotel.

  ‘He actually asked for your hand in marriage,’ said my father.

  ‘Well, that was rather the point.’

  ‘Yes, but I thought he might be a little more experimental in his use of the language,’ said my father, claiming a white pawn.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him that I would not let my daughter marry a man who mumbled,’ said my father, claiming a black pawn.

  ‘Daddy!’

  ‘Of course, I said that he was welcome to have you if he wanted you.’

  ‘Daddy!’

  ‘I said it was your life and we had always let you decide for yourself.’

  This was true.

  ‘And I said that if you wanted to marry someone who was so scruffy …’

  ‘He has always been a little scruffy’ I replied loftily. ‘It has to do with the life of the mind …’

  I could feel my father’s eyes on me. He had a way of looking at you that punctured any pomposity. And it occurred to me that he was a man who had, as much as Dom, lived the life of the mind and yet he wasn’t scruffy. Not flashy, of course, but never scruffy either.

  ‘Scruffy is as scruffy does,’ I said.

  ‘It is always good to be loyal,’ said my father, checkmating himself, ‘But it is no good trying to defend the indefensible.’

  The BBC team with which Dom was working then went on to Calcutta to shoot some sequences with the naxalites. Dom called up a little later.

  ‘Come and join us,’ he said, affable and friendly. I suppose I should have smelt a rat. I suppose I should have smelt a huge decomposing rat. There was Dom with a whole bunch of men, all booze buddies together, and suddenly he remembers his fiancée, Leela?

  When I arrived, it became apparent that the team was expecting Dom to be their local guide, their informant, their line producer, everything rolled into one. I don’t know whether this was part of their agreement but the general feeling I got was that Dom had let down the side. The clock was ticking and the crew was beginning to get restive.

  The first thing they wanted was a real live Naxalite. I was told that the crew had spent several bootless days chasing Monodeep Sen, supposed to be one of the most charismatic leaders. I have always believed that if you ask as many people as possible, someone will know a way to help you. And so I talked to as many people as I could. I even called Police Commissioner Mitra. The crew laughed at me. ‘If they knew where the Naxalites were, surely they would have gone and arrested them,’ they said. But I have always felt that the police in India know a lot more than they let on and it was worth taking a chance.

  Finally, someone told me that Monodeep Sen was always holding court at the Calcutta University canteen. I went there and began asking around. On the general principle that charismatic political figures generally attract the best-looking girls, I asked a doe-eyed Bengali tigress where I could find Monodeep.

  ‘Behind that bush,’ she said.

  I thought she was being facetious but when I went around the bush, there was a figure in a huge swathe of shawl.

  ‘Monodeep Sen?’ I asked.

  He inclined his head. I explained that I was there on behalf of the BBC, which would like to interview him. I thought he would swear at me for being the lackey of an imperialist corporation or something like that but he looked quite flattered.

  ‘I shall be in the canteen tomorrow at ten,’ he said.

  And so we betook ourselves, camera and crew to a typical college canteen which smelt of over-brewed tea and oil that had been abused by repeated use. There was graffiti on the walls but it wasn’t quite the standard-issue scribbles of adolescents. ‘Death to the zamindar’ read one. ‘Power to the peasant’ read another and of course, ‘Power flows through the barrel of the gun’ all in red, dripping ersatz blood.

  When Monodeep saw the camera crew arrive, he leapt on to the table and made an impassioned speech. I couldn’t help thinking of Franz fanon’s acute observation, ‘Fervour is the weapon of choice of the impotent,’ as he rattled on and on. When he had finished, he leapt off the table and threw himself into a chair. He shot up again with a sharp yelp of agony.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘My piles,’ said the brave revolutionary, clutching his derrière.

  ‘A sacrifice for the cause?’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, I have spent hours sitting on rocks while my comrades went about killing the enemies of the farmer and the worker,’ he said.

  After the interview, Monodeep said that he would like a fruit juice at the Grand Hotel. He thought that if he sat between Dom and me in the car, he would be seen by the police and arrested. Just as we were leaving, a horde of students arrived, chanting slogans. They did not want Monodeep to talk to the imperialist lackey dogs and they wanted to smash the equipment, which was in the dicky of the car. But we got out of there just in time with Monodeep on the floor of the Ambassador. We smuggled him through the back door of the Hotel. But as Monodeep drank his orange juice, there was a knock on the door.

  I opened it to find the Police Commissioner outside.

  ‘Ah, Monodeep,’ he said quite politely.

  The brave revolutionary paled.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said the Police Commissioner, still polite, ‘I’m not here to arrest you.’

  ‘I think I shall leave,’ said the brave revolutionary and began to creep out.

  ‘You can leave by the front door, you know,’ said Mitra. ‘Or would your Naxalite friends be horrified at the thought that you were dining in the hotels of reactionary elements?’

  Monodeep scuttled off.

  ‘I know his father, you see,’ said the Police Commissioner later. ‘Monodeep is quite harmless. He does not kill. He only keeps watch.’

  Several years later, the New York Times Sunday Magazine commissioned Dom to
do a series on the Naxalites. I rounded up some local journalists to help him. I was keen on meeting a real Naxalite this time, not just a speech-making stone-sitter. And so it was arranged that we meet a young man trained in chemistry and the making of explosives.

  ‘He will only meet you because he has heard of your father,’ said the man who made contact. And so we went off into the middle of old Calcutta to meet a maker of bombs.

  I introduced Dom to the young scientist.

  ‘Lal Salaam,’ he said, waving his fist.

  ‘How d’ye do.’ asked Dom, proffering a British paw.

  ‘He is an imperialist dog, I will not talk to him,’ snarled the anarchist. ‘But I will talk to you for Dr Naidu is a true communist.’

  I could have told him that my father had never been a member of the communist party but it was not the time for fine distinctions. The young man began to talk. He had made many bombs, he told us. He had no idea how many people he had killed. But each bomb came back to haunt him. Every dream he had, he said, ended with people exploding. ‘Whatever kind of dream it is, they explode,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you stop?’

  ‘Because I cannot. If I stop, then the faces of the peasants haunt me.’

  ‘Is there no other way?’

  ‘Other ways have been tried for hundreds of years and they have failed,’ he said but I thought I could hear his despair. This was supposed to have been the ultimate solution. Power was supposed to flow from the barrel of their guns. But killing people had not empowered many villagers. It had simply brought the wrath of the state down upon them. I do not hold with all the easy rhetoric about the finest flower of that generation and all the rest of it. But I believe I saw honesty in that young man’s eyes. Like all terrorists, he believed in what he was doing. Like all terrorists, he had no future and so he substituted his faith for his future. But he could not control his dreams.

  We went next to the police station to see the work of the young man’s hands. In a bucket of water lay something that looked a bit like a bowling ball.