LEELA Page 17

  ‘Because I think of the whole magazine as one editorial,’ I said.

  He seemed rather dumbfounded by that. When I did introduce a note to the reader, he didn’t like that either.

  ‘What do you mean by this line, “We hope you will be difficult to please. Please send in your views to us”?’ he asked.

  I didn’t know how to explain that one, but fortunately he was off on another of his hobby-horses and I listened with only half an ear.

  A friend of mine asked me recently, after looking through some of the old issues, how we had managed to be so left-of-centre.

  ‘If carrying articles on children working in dangerous situations, and how retirement benefits are rarely enough to allow the old to live with dignity is left-of-centre, then I suppose we were,’ I replied.

  But in reality, I think, the ideological biases were an accident of the time and the people involved. It was not as if we sought to position ourselves in a particular space. We ended up there because we shared the same kind of values and because the intelligent in those days did seem to be on the pinker side of the spectrum. But if we carried articles about India’s tribals or the marginalisation of the poor in cities or even the atrophy of Sanskrit, it was because no one else seemed to be doing it at the time.

  Ruskin Bond heard about the magazine, read it and wrote to me, saying that he would like to contribute. I had always enjoyed his gentle prose and his effortless style and so I sent him a welcoming letter. (This was in the days before email, and when telephones did not fit into the back-pocket of your jeans. And Ruskin, always a bit of a Luddite, didn’t have a telephone anyway.) Adil Jussawalla, the poet, was a regular columnist too. His column was always on time, always funny and never entirely comprehensible.

  We were at work on the seventh issue, already putting it to bed, when we discovered that the printers, Mandelia’s distant relatives, had not been paid, not even for the first issue. When Mandelia found out we knew, he locked us out. Then David, tall and short-tempered, rang me up one morning. His message was crisp, ‘Don’t come to the office. I’ve broken down the door.’

  He cleared the office of his books and then came over to chat. He didn’t think to clear mine as well or else I might not have lost several books to which I was sentimentally attached.

  And so Keynote folded. The staff would visit me every day for the next months or so—hanging on to the hope that Mad Mandy might pay his bills, the doors might open and the magazine be started again. But as time went by, they all went on to other jobs.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘HAVE YOU STOPPED ACTING?’

  I cannot remember how many times I have been asked, ‘Have you stopped acting?’

  I have never worked out a good enough reply. I wanted something witty like that famous exchange in Sunset Boulevard where william Holden as Joe Gillis says, ‘You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.’ Swanson, as Norma Desmond retorts, without missing a beat, ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’

  But does an actor stop acting? Or do they stop getting roles? Had I stopped getting roles? And how could anyone ask that? Perhaps they were being polite, but it always seemed like a somewhat dangerous question so I always gave a tame answer.

  But then, I don’t blame the film Industry. Directors would have to see me around to cast me. Cinema works on the principle of ‘Out of sight, out of mind’. Dom and I left India for Hong Kong in 1971 and we returned to Mumbai a decade later.

  But one evening at Habiba and Mario Miranda’s Colaba home, I found myself sitting next to Shyam Benegal, who asked me if I had stopped acting. I had seen some of his films and thought he was an interesting director. I had also featured in two of his commercials.

  I told him that I had not turned my back on acting.

  He said, ‘I have a role for you.’

  I raised an eyebrow, only because I did not know whether he had discovered the role there and then or he had thought about it earlier and was suggesting it because we had met by serendipity at a friend’s house.

  ‘I know you will want to read the script and you will only take it if you like it,’ he said. My reputation was alive and well, I could see.

  Much later, I heard the inside story. The role was supposed to be played by Madhur Jaffrey. Negotiations had broken down over the pounds and the pence. Like almost every film I have been involved in, this one too was a low-budget one and there were no pounds for Madhur, only pence. I was paid something that looked like an honorarium for the three months that I was on the sets. I wish some day someone would ring me up to say, ‘We have a huge budget and we would love to pay you a huge amount of money so name your price.’ Of course, that would probably be the kind of film that I wouldn’t want to do anyway, but it is nice to think of it happening.

  A few days later, Nira Benegal called up to say that she was going to send me the scene synopses. I had rather hoped for a script, but of course, that wasn’t ready. As in all the other films I had worked on, it would be served to the actors, piping hot, every morning, by Shama Zaidi who wrote many of Shyam’s films. But the scene synopses did at least allow me to see how the character of Dona Maria Souza-Soares developed. I liked what I read, the odd mix between the history of the times and the magical realism that Shyam enjoyed so much. Besides—or should the word be beneath?—this story was both a subaltern narrative of family and a grand narrative involving Kushtoba, the Robin Hood-like figure who had defied the Portuguese colonisers of Goa and the family that had given him up to the Portuguese: the Miranda family in whose home we were shooting.

  Trikaal (Past, Present, Future) was written in chust Urdu. Of course, there is a little coda in the beginning of the film where Naseeruddin Shah as ruiz Pereira, the narrator who now lives in the modern world of Bombay, says that it would be easier for the audience to understand if everyone in the film spoke Hindi instead of Portuguese but I was not convinced by that. I didn’t think many people were. It’s a part of the whole pretence of cinema that people speak a language we understand. But that was probably another experiment in pointing up the difference between reality and spectacle. I didn’t mind the Urdu; I have always liked to have my lines in Devanagri because it helps me immerse myself in the script, in the culture. Only here, I was immersing myself in a Lusitanian—Indian hybrid culture—best illustrated in the moment in which Dona Maria refuses a co-religionist as a match for her daughter on caste grounds—while reading chaste Urdu written in Devanagri.

  At one point, an assistant director came to me with my lines. It might have been Aditya Bhattacharya, the grandson of Bimal Roy and a nice young man. I began reading a long line that I had to say. It had to do with the notion of Time as a plank placed over a well. The plank, in this metaphor, does not reach the other side of the well and yet we were all walking on it. In my head, I began to visualise the words to be able to get a better hold of what they meant. But it soon became clear that if one tried to walk on planks balanced on one side of a well, one would soon fall in. Perhaps it was something deeper but I did not quite understand. So I went to Shyam and asked him if he could explain it to me. He dug his spectacles out of his pocket and surveyed the lines.

  ‘I’m not sure what they mean either,’ he said for he was and is an honest man. Then he looked at me quizzically and smiled.

  The assistant director came back about half an hour later and told me that the shoot had been cancelled since the dialogue wasn’t ready. Shama continued to be perfectly civil to me but I couldn’t help feeling that there was something a little, how shall I say this, a little acidic about her smile.

  The set was well-stocked with women. There was Shama who seemed to have a proprietary interest in Shyam. There was Neena Gupta who had a problem playing my maid; she felt that it was not a role suited to her dignity and her knowledge of Sanskrit. There was Ila Arun, with whom Neena Gupta would gossip. And there was poor Sushma Prakash who was a newcomer and seemed bewildered by all this sorority.

&n
bsp; Before shooting could start, Saba Zaidi, who was related to Shama in some way, came to visit me. She was the costume designer of the film and wanted to look at ‘my French clothes’. I could see the point of that. This was a rich Portuguese family that we were playing and it would never do for them to be dressed in the tacky maxis that costume designers think screen Catholics wear. The Souza-Soareses would have been the comprador class and they would have been up to every fashion trick Paris could dish out, if they were to be invited to the houses of their colonial overlords.

  When she left, I was sitting in a welter of tissue paper and had promised to carry a good many of the sartorial relics of my youth with me. They were all in perfect condition because they were exquisite clothes, made by people who cared about perfection and because my mother had put them away with love.

  My mother was a woman who liked her hats so I took some of them including four metres of black Chantilly lace that she had bought many years earlier in Paris. This was cut up to make my widow’s weeds. There was my Lanvin Castillo, a pink hand-stitched dentelle, iridescent with sequins which Sushma wore. The lace was made by marescot, one of the greatest lace-makers of France. I had a moiré silk by Dior with flowers delicately woven into it, which Anita Kanwar wore. Sabira Merchant wore my yellow Chanel suit with its amber-coloured buttons. I took bags and gloves too but the way they were treated made me swear never to try and help again. Claire Booth Luce once said that no good deed ever goes unpunished and when Anita Kanwar stepped backwards like a great galoot and tore the hem; when I found the Lanvin on the floor of the dressing room, when the whole lot were returned to me without the benefit of dry-cleaning, when I was not even given a token hiring charge, I decided that Clare knew what she was talking about. To add a final delicate touch of irony, Saba Zaidi got the National Award for Costume Design.

  In addition, Shyam wanted me to lose weight as we went along so that my clothes should hang upon my frame. I have never been overweight, but he was the director. So I began a diet that I knew would help me lose weight steadily and healthily. There’s no secret to it. It involves eating less, no meat, no wheat, no sweet. Just grilled fish and lots of salads, which you wash yourself in pinky water. For those who do not know what pinky water is, it’s the name for a solution of potassium permanganate which oxidises the germs. The diet worked.

  But in the end, when I watched it, I was glad I did the film. Shyam seemed at ease in the milieu, one of ease and privilege. I found the film itself a little diffused in that Shyam seemed to have many ideas and he wanted to put all of them in at once. Some of them, I thought, didn’t go anywhere but many of my upper-caste Goan Catholic friends have said that it rang several bells in their heads. There was no electricity in Loutolim, where we were shooting, and so the director of photography, Ashok Mehta, the perfectionist who slaved over each shot despite a bleeding ulcer, had to make do with natural light and candlelight and no doubt the reflection of all those lights in the sweat on our faces.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE BRITISH ON A HUNGER STRIKE IN

  THE LAND OF THE MAHATMA

  Five thirty in the morning in Pachmarhi, a small hill station in Madhya Pradesh, shooting for Electric Moon. I wake up and I am as cold as when I went to bed the night before. I wonder whether I am getting that old. My bones creak as I get out of bed. Even a bucket of boiling water for my bath leaves no dent in the cold in my bones. The air outside was beyond crisp, beyond cold. Central India is always cold during the winter and up in the hills it is cooler but in 1990-91, it was a genuine bona fide cold spell that had even sent cool fingers down Mumbai’s over-heated spine. We often awoke to frozen pipes in the cars that were ferrying us around the small town that had once been the summer capital of the Central Provinces. Shivering, I made my way to the green room where I would find my costume, beautiful mulmul kaftans designed by the art director, Arundhati Roy, and open Kolhapuri slippers, which were later to give me hypothermia.

  ‘The show must go on,’ I would mumble to myself as my teeth chattered with the cold. ‘The show must go on and I am going to turn into an icicle.’ On my way from the green room, clad inadequately but elegantly, I glanced out and beheld a red elephant.

  An imp of mischief, never too far from the surface, made me knock on producer Bobby Bedi’s office door. ‘Rani,’ I told him, when he opened the door, ‘is red.’

  That International tribe that is known as ‘film people’, see the world through the lens of their own involvement in it. A flower is not a flower; it is of questionable value if it is to be used in a scene. Who can be sure it will look as fresh tomorrow, if the scene has to be re-shot? Who can be sure another flower will be found that will be a proper match? And a flowering branch of a tree, often used to establish perspective, can drive the continuity persons to distraction and they in turn can drive the director of photography round the bend. A change in the sun will change its shadow. And there is always the possibility that the arrangement of leaves, today such a perfect pattern of light and shade, can suddenly vanish.

  Old film wisdom has it that shooting with children and animals is always difficult so Bobby must have been ready for some trouble from the elephants in the cast. But among the many things that animals do not do to make life difficult for producers is changing colour.

  Bobby Bedi, the continuity person and I went out to my friend Rani, a one-and-a-half-year-old pachyderm with perfect manners. She was one of two elephants—the other, a male, was called predictably enough, Raja—on loan to us from Gemini Studios. Whenever she saw me, she would amble over and carefully lift up the flap of the pocket on my safari shirt, if I was wearing one, or send her trunk investigating discreetly down from the side of my blouse. She was looking for the wild guavas I would pluck for her in the evening when the shoot was over.

  One day, when I was sitting under the shamiana in the middle of a shot, the director of photography called a halt. ‘Leela,’ he said quietly, ‘Look behind you.’

  I turned and there was Rani. She had sneaked up behind me and her trunk had eased its way around under the pink georgette of my sari and around my tummy. All this so delicately that I hadn’t felt a thing.

  That morning Rani looked a little sheepish, if it is possible for several tonnes of elephant to look sheepish. On her way to the shoot, she had obviously stopped at a fallow field and given herself a mud bath. The red was only temporary and would wash off.

  Electric Moon was about the royalty of India, after the lapse of the privy purses. Gerson da Cunha played a former maharaja called bubbles and I played Sukanya or Socks, his sister. Our third sibling Ranveer, played by Roshan Seth, has the charm and the drive that it takes to build a tourist Industry out of an illusion. I think the film was supposed to be a comedy. I think it was supposed to be a critique of a certain kind of cultural colonialism, a counterpoint to the British Raj, but I can’t be sure.

  I suppose I could have asked Pradip Kishen. He was supposed to be the director but it was quite clear to me, at least, who was in charge. So I asked Arundhati Roy about a scene. ‘Think about dosas,’ she said.

  I didn’t ask for much help with direction after that. I tried to think my way into Sukanya’s character for myself. I was determined to play her straight because I had been told that the film was a comedy. According to me, the best way to play a comic character is to forget that it is a comic character. The funniest people are those who are doing stupid things in an extremely serious way. But Arundhati was having none of that. She got into it with Simon Tytherleigh, the make-up man on the set.

  ‘She looks too glamorous,’ she complained. ‘Make her lips into a square.’

  He refused to do any such thing. I tried to stay out of it. Finally, after they had been at it for a while, he said, ‘I can paint her lips right up to her nostrils and she will still look the same.’

  Ms Roy retired defeated and Simon and I shared a conspiratorial wink.

  I must say I admire the way that Arundhati Roy has turned her status as celeb
rity author into a catalyst for the causes she cares about, but there was very little of the caring Ms Roy on the set of Electric Moon. one of the first shots was supposed to be a spoof of the dance sequences of Indian cinema from Chandralekha to Jhanak Jhanak Paayal Baaje. As Socks, I was seated under a shamiana with the Tamil producer and supposed to be making conversation. Easy enough for us, but the dancers were having a tough time of it since they were out in the open, under the sun. No lunch had been organised for them, there was no place where they could rest in the shade in between shots, and the pace was gruelling. Finally, Giles Nuttgens, the director of photography, signalled that it was time to pack up because the sunlight was fading. The lead dancer and I walked back to the hunting lodge where I was staying and I could see that she was stumbling with fatigue. I put my arm around her to steady her because the winding path ran next to a steep drop hundreds of feet down, when a familiar voice spoke.

  ‘Why are you doing that, Leela?’ Asked Arundhati, ‘She’s supposed to be a dancer. She should have some sense of balance.’

  The girl gulped.

  ‘She terrifies me,’ she whispered.

  One of the strangest things that happened on the set was the affair of the china plates. The meals were a mess, swimming in oil and oddly mixed spices. But to make matters worse, we were served in plates made of sal leaves, stitched together with pieces of stick or thorn. The china plates, with their fussy decorative designs, were used for the gardeners, carpenters and cleaners and the like, whom Arundhati depended on.

  On the first day, everyone noticed but not a word was said. The British tried to pretend that this was part of the Great Indian Experience, even as thick red oil slipped from between the cracks in the leaves and dropped between their legs. The maalis and the cleaners ate awkwardly, as if afraid their nails might hurt the designs on the plates. Or at least, when we saw them eating since they were served first. As the poor and the disenfranchised will do, they would heap their plates and leave very little for the cast and the crew. This was rather amusing for a day or two but in a few days, the rumblings—some of which came from British bellies unaccustomed to oil and spice in such degrees—grew into a storm. Then Giles Nuttgens decided that he had had enough. One day, he walked up to the buffet and surveyed the remains of the feast. Then he put down his sal leaf plate and announced that he was not going to eat. The rest of the cast followed suit, gratefully. The humour of this situation struck me: the British on a hunger strike in the land of the Mahatma? Somewhere the jug-eared man I had met once with a bunch of gladioli and some fine chocolates must be laughing.