LEELA Page 7

  The moustachioed man saw that I was not very happy. That didn’t stop him from sketching but when he had finished, he came up to my table, twirled one of his ridiculous moustaches a little and said, ‘You are going to be my next Madonna.’

  That was when I recognised Salvador Dali. He invited me to a vernissage, a private showing, of his pen and ink sketches of don Quixote. ‘Come to Avenue Wagram at seven,’ he said, ‘and wear a sari.’

  When I left the Hotel, the Garde Républicaine was on horseback, blocking the traffic so that I could arrive safely. Since the Garde wear brass helmets from which horsetail-like plumes hang to go with their black and red uniforms, I was beginning to feel a little, how shall one say it, conspicuous? I tried to protest but I was told: ‘we have our orders.’

  Dali was waiting for me, beaming. He took me through the gallery, showing me each of the pictures. He explained his processes which seemed to me to be more about the dramaturgy of the artist than the works of art. He told me how he dipped sea urchins in squid ink and threw them at the easel to achieve certain effects. He insisted on inviting me to a private dinner party but I declined politely.

  The next day Dali left for Spain. And somewhere in a mural in Spain, I became a holy mother too.

  SIX

  THREE RUBBER BRAS AND

  A YELLOW NOSE

  The first sign of trouble was a shoe box. Inside it, I found three bras with rubber baggies tucked inside them. They were equipped with little nozzles so that they could be blown up to the appropriate size.

  Since I had never shot a Hindi film before, I wondered who blew them up and who decided the appropriate size. Perhaps the heroine herself blew them up and then came out of her dressing room.

  ‘No, Madamji, in this film, you are a 38B Cup, remember?’ An assistant director might say to her perhaps.

  ‘Oops,’ she’d say and go back to the nozzle again, to deflate or inflate her measurements.

  I couldn’t see myself doing any such thing so I returned the shoe box and almost ended my career in Hindi films, before it had started. I don’t think this would have worried me much.

  I did have an intense relationship with cinema from the time I had gone with my father to see The Fall of Stalingrad. I must have been about five years old, but I found myself completely drawn into the story. At one point, when it seems that the mother and child who were fleeing from Nazi soldiers are about to be caught, I could not restrain myself. ‘Watch out,’ I squeaked in terror.

  My father took me out of the theatre and gave me a short, sharp lecture on film-watching etiquette. Then we went back to the theatre and I watched the rest of the film with a hankie stuffed inside my mouth. It still gives me goose-bumps to think about that film.

  But I did not see myself as an actress. I enjoyed cinema and loved it, but I enjoyed music and dance too and was even said to have some little skill there. One of my earlier encounters with films was an abstract film made by a young man, George Salomon. He was an alumnus of L’Ecole Internationale in Geneva. He got hold of my number and called. Perhaps he had seen me in one of the amateur plays that we performed in the school or at the ballets that the ballet teacher staged from time to time. He said he was making an experimental film and would like me to play a part in it. We worked on the script together although, as a thirteen-year-old, I was not sure whether I made any contribution or whether he was just being kind when he listened to what I had to say.

  It was called ‘Leela où la fille qui veut égaler les dieux’ or ‘Leela or the girl who wanted to equal the gods’. There was no script. All I had was a framework and I was supposed to improvise movement around the five ideas that would animate the five scenes of the film, all set to a montage of stravinsky music. George asked me to design my own costumes and so I put together a white tulle skirt and a white apron with black musical notes pinned diagonally across it. We shot the film on the weekends in the antechamber to the Salomon dining room with as many lights as George could beg, borrow or steal.

  I do not know whether the film still exists so I shall try and describe it as best as I can.

  The first scene had empty frames hanging from the ceiling of the room around which I move.

  The first frame was me looking at a landscape, at this point I am only an observer. In the second frame I begin to sense that someone is looking at me. This frightens me. In the third frame I decide not to be frightened. By the fourth frame I am in attack mode. I shall confront whatever it is. In the fifth frame it’s a game of chess into which I am invited. I play against a masked man, a stocking over his face. I am defeated. He strangles me on the chessboard since I am now part of the frame, victim of my hubris. My world goes up in flames.

  Thinking about it now, I can see the film was rather heavy on symbolism. The frames were supposed to symbolise innocence, the tabula rasa of the young. The film’s trajectory was also traditional, moving along the lines of the doomed hero, condemned by a fatal flaw in his make-up. But Salomon did a good enough job to impress the jury at the Amateur Abstract Section of the Cannes Festival and he won the first prize there.

  I did not do the film as a first step to a career. I acted in it out of joy, out of the desire to experiment with movement and out of the desire to know what it felt like to move in a film as opposed to performing for a live audience.

  My film career began with three frames that remained on a roll of photographic film. Kamala Chakraborty, the widow of Ameya Chakraborty, had been shooting textiles or handicrafts as part of the work she did with Pupul Jaykar. Then she came to visit us at Sujan Singh Park and since she had three frames left, she used them to take pictures of me.

  And those were the prints that were lying on the table when Hrishikesh Mukherjee went to visit her. He took one look at them, so she told me, and said, ‘She is my Anuradha.’

  Then he asked, ‘Who is she?’

  Kamala told him that I was married to Tikki Oberoi.

  ‘Oh God, not another socialite,’ he said.

  Kamala roundly castigated him for making generalisations. Perhaps that was why he had to work on her a little before she would give him any further details. When she called me to prepare me, she told me she had tried to dissuade him, telling him that I was not really interested in Hindi films. That set him back a bit. For like all inhabitants of hermetic, self-involved worlds, the denizens of Hindi cinema cannot believe that there can be others unmoved by its tinsel attractions.

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked.

  ‘She turned down Raj Kapoor and he wanted to sign her for four films.’

  That was true.

  In 1955, when we returned to India from Europe, we lived in Bombay as the guests of Dr and Mrs Baliga. During our stay, the good doctor asked me if I would like to accompany them to a wedding. I agreed because he assured me there would be jalebis. (Hot jalebis without chemical dyes in them were one of my favourites.)

  ‘Wear a sari,’ I was told. Doctors can be quite autocratic. But then most men can, given half the chance. I got into an orange Benaresi silk sari with delicate zari on it and put my hair up in a bun and got into the car that whisked us off to Matunga. It was only when I got down from the car that I realised that it was a filmi wedding. I did my namastés to a series of portly gentlemen. Later, Mrs Baliga told me that I had smiled politely and walked past two generations of Hindi cinema aristocracy: Prithviraj Kapoor and Raj Kapoor were at the doors, welcoming guests to Shammi Kapoor’s wedding. That was where Raj Kapoor saw me the first time. He later made enquiries with the Baligas and was told that I was in Delhi.

  And so one morning, when I was having my hair washed at Roy and James in Connaught Place, a tremulous little man came up bearing a card. It said. ‘To a peeping face in a moving car. Would you and your father care to join me at the Imperial Hotel to discuss a project?’ It was signed, Raj Kapoor.

  I showed the card to my father when he got back from UNESCO. He knew even less about Hindi cinema than I did. But he did recognise the name Kapoor. ‘
I know one Kapoor. His name is Prithviraj Kapoor and he’s a Member of Parliament.’ Perhaps that was why my father and I agreed to go, because he knew a Kapoor but did not know how common Kapoor is as a surname in India.

  Raj Kapoor turned out to be all perfume-scented (Worth’s Je Reviens) politesse. He wanted to make Mulk Raj Anand’s story, The Goddess and the Tractor, into a film. He had already spoken to Mulk who, as one of Daddy’s oldest friends from their days in London as Fabian Socialists, was ecstatic. His prophecy seemed to have come true.

  ‘I would like to prepare for the part by living in a village for a month or two,’ I said to Raj Kapoor, who looked a little green.

  ‘It will be hot … and there will be mosquitoes,’ he murmured. But I did not think I could sit in a Delhi house and turn into a villager overnight. So I insisted as politely as I could. Kapoor looked at Daddy for help. Surely Dr Naidu could not wish his daughter to live in a village …

  Surely Dr Naidu could. ‘I do not see how a couple of weeks in a village could help Leela turn into a tractor or a goddess,’ he said poker-faced, ‘But we should let her try.’

  ‘Right then,’ sighed Raj Kapoor and we went away.

  A few days thereafter, I went to Agra with some friends of the family. I had not seen the Taj Mahal and I wanted to. The friends did not turn out to be convivial companions. Their first response to that great illusion of immortal love, that perfectly proportioned dream in white marble, was to try and work out how much it would cost if it were to be built now. I was young enough to be sickened by this commercialism—perhaps I would still be but I think I might understand it a little better—so I wandered away from the group.

  Outside the Taj Mahal there was an old man with a tonga who was feeding his horse and drinking some water. He offered me some of his water chestnuts, in a gesture that was so courteous, so simple and so full of old world charm, that to refuse would have been impolite. I paid for it, of course, with a bout of jaundice so severe that I was in bed for six months.

  It was only after I recovered that I went to RK Studios. I had been warned by Janki Ganju of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. He said, ‘Raj Kapoor is a fine director but he has a regrettable tendency to fall in love with his leading ladies.’

  Evidence of this regrettable tendency was present at RK Studios. Nargis supervised the entire shoot, producing clothes from the wardrobe for me to try on. Radhu Karmarkar prowled around, taking random shots. Some of the outfits I thought were a little slinky for a Goddess (or a tractor!) but I did as I was told.

  Finally, as I got into a black satin pantsuit, I could not stop myself. ‘Why am I wearing this if I’m being screen-tested as a villager?’ I asked.

  That was when Raj Kapoor told me that he wanted me to do four films with him. I was supposed to sign a contract and I would be the next RK discovery. I said that I would think about it and I did think about it. At that time, I was set on going to Oxford. So I wrote a nice note to Raj Kapoor, turning him down.

  Mrs Chakraborty told Hrishikesh Mukherjee all this but he persisted and came to Delhi with a script. It was in Devanagari, assuming perhaps that this would put me off reading it. But I had studied Devanagari and am comfortable in it. (In fact, I prefer my scripts to be in Devanagari if it is a Hindi film. It just seems to make more sense that way.) It was incomplete but I liked what I read and I knew the story of the film.

  Today, almost every film is available in some format. All you need is the equipment and you can sit down to a video compact disc of a Satyajit Ray or a digital video disc of a John Ford. But in the 1950s, it was not so easy to see a director’s work. However, a friend pointed out that Musafir, one of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s earlier films, was showing somewhere and I went off to see it. I did not think it an exceptional film but I did like the restraint. The film was about a guest house to which a series of people come and I remember thinking, ‘Well, his heart is in the right place.’

  Besides, Hrishida didn’t just ask me; he practically asked my parents as well. Since he had studied mathematics, he got along well with Daddy.

  Before I signed the film, my father announced that he wanted to talk to me. ‘I have heard,’ he said, ‘that there is something called black money as opposed to white money. I trust that you will take your money in cheques and that you will pay your taxes. This is a poor country, you know.’ I was a little surprised and a little hurt that he should think he would have to tell me that. But I was to fight many a battle with producers who approached me about the mode of payment.

  ‘Madamji,’ one of them expostulated, ‘it is more expensive for us to pay you by cheque.’

  ‘But Madamji,’ said another, ‘you will end up paying forty-six per cent tax.’

  ‘Then I shall pay it,’ I said.

  I did not talk to Daddy for a fortnight after his warning. I don’t think he noticed. Anyway, the upshot was that I signed Anuradha and found myself with a shoe box. I sent it back of course and refused to wear three satin petticoats. Mohan Studios had no air conditioning and three layers of satin? ‘Madam, I am very sorry to do this to you,’ said Mr Lulla, the producer, ‘but the audience will think you have tuberculosis.’ I did not think they would and I told him so in no uncertain terms.

  Then came a struggle over the make-up. ‘Why is the bridge of my nose yellow and my nostrils blue?’ I asked.

  ‘Your nose is too thin. This will make it look better,’ I was told.

  ‘I quite like my nose,’ I said.

  Then they wanted to extend my eyes with kaajal. It was a fashion called ‘teer maaro teer’ then and it was an attempt to emulate the Bani Thani painting of Kishangarh. I wiped it off. Next came a tray with two caterpillars. ‘False eyelashes? On a country doctor’s wife?’

  Anuradha is the simple story of a musician who falls in love with a dedicated country doctor. She follows him to the village where he works, giving up her music and her creativity. Then a friend of hers comes to the village and catalyses a crisis in her marriage. The false eyelashes would have been what she would never have worn even as a performer and certainly not as a housewife in the middle of rural India. But in an industry dominated by tradition and a disregard for realism, my objections must have seemed a little odd.

  But once I had managed to avoid being painted to resemble a clown, being stuffed to resemble a potato, we began work.

  Hrishida did not direct; he suggested. He offered a few comments and then he left me to it. Once he did ask, after a shot, ‘Do you rehearse in front of a mirror?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said indignantly and he left it at that. In his own quiet way, he did seem fond of me. He invented a nickname for me: ‘mukhpuri’. I once asked him what it meant. ‘Rotten face,’ he said.

  I tried to look amused. ‘To ward off the evil eye,’ he said. I could have wished for a more polite way of doing that but I got used to the name and even enjoyed it after a while.

  I do not remember my first day of shooting perhaps because I did not suffer from stage fright. According to me, stage fright is about waffling. It happens when an actor will not stay in the moment. When you begin to worry about your past—I’ve messed it up before—or your future—I may look stupid doing this—you aren’t in the moment. And either you are in the moment, in the skin of the character, in the world you have created for that character or you’re out. Either you believe in the myth that you are helping to create or you do not. There are no halfway measures.

  I also earned the reputation of being a communist. One might think that on a Bengali set this would not be a problem, but I have always found that people are much more comfortable with isms in the abstract. Once any principle is put into action, everyone gets a little uncomfortable.

  On the sets of Anuradha, a spot boy fell from the gangplank high above us and fractured both his legs. The crew seemed willing to continue as if nothing much had happened. I was appalled at this and went on strike. I refused to shoot until the poor man was taken to the hospital. They bundled him o
ff the sets but I wanted to see the case paper and I wanted an assurance from the producer that he would pay the medical bills before I would start again.

  While we were shooting the dance sequences at the beginning, I was surrounded by a host of twinkly ladies who were described to me as ‘extras’, a word I thought insulting and offensive. If anyone or anything is extra, it should be removed. If however, the people or props are needed, they cannot be called extras. But they were treated as if they were expendable. For instance, I was horrified to discover that only I had been assigned a chair, that there was nowhere for them to sit. They were all in costumes and could not sit on the floor for fear of dirtying or tearing the costumes for which they would have to pay. So I refused to sit on my chair. Perhaps they were afraid I would collapse so an assistant director was assigned to follow me around bleating, ‘Please Madam, sit down Madam.’ I told him that I would sit down only when everyone else could sit down.

  ‘But that is difficult, Madam,’ he protested.

  ‘If you can get one chair, you can get thirty.’

  He tried another tack. ‘They are used to standing, Madam.’

  ‘I see no reason why they can’t get used to sitting down too,’ I said and finally, after much grumbling, they arranged the chairs.

  One of the major problems at the studios was the toilet. It was nothing short of a tragedy, so I asked one of the other dancers where they went. She pointed to the back of the studio where there were a huge number of stucco boards lying around.

  ‘Go behind one of them,’ she said, ‘but be careful of the snakes.’ If that was the only way to go, I decided I was going to hold on till I got home.

  I think it would be unwise of me to comment on Balraj Sahni as an actor. He was obviously extremely good at his work. I loved him in Do Bigha Zameen (and later in Garam Hawa) which made me cry and cry. But he also did seem to lend his gravitas to many films that did not seem worthy settings for his talent.