Show Business by Shashi Tharoor Page A

shooting of that third film, Radha Sabnis broke the news in Showbiz:
    Â Â Â  Darlings, brace yourself for a shocker from Bollywood! Your Cheetah has learned that Ashok Banjara, the common man’s superstar, the actor whose success gave hope to every garage mechanic in the country, is about to wed! And who is the brave and noble woman prepared to make Saddy Longlegs the happiest ham in Vers ova? That’s the shock, little jungle creatures: it’s none other than the nation’s sweetheart, Maya Kumari! Is it true? Can it really be? I’m afraid it is, darlings. When the bombshell bursts, don’t say Cheetah didn’t warn you! Grrrowl …
    I grrowled a few times myself, in between tears of impotent rage. I drank myself silly for a week. And then I went back to Sunita, not for the last time, and pushed her against the wall. I closed my eyes and imagined it was Maya. It didn’t work, and I wept my drunkenness and shame into the sink, not knowing who I hated more, myself or you.
    What you did was a crime, Ashok Banjara. You deprived India of its most cherished celluloid daughter, you deprived the Hindi film industry of its finest actress, and you deprived me. You deprived me not of hope, because by then I had none for myself, but of that last vestige of pride left to a man who has not been rejected for someone else. Once she agreed to marry you, having refused to marry me, I could no longer take solace in telling myself she had given me up for her career. Instead, she gave up her career for you.
    You made her do it, of course. All those interviews about “I wouldn’t want my wife to feel she needs to work” — disingenuous bastard. And then you got her to tell the press, “I’m giving up films of my own free will because I want to be the ideal wife and daughter-in-law.” Did anyone believe those words weren’t scripted for her, and rather badly at that? “Ideal wife and daughter-in-law”: does anyone ever talk like that, outside the movies? Come on, Ashok, you could have done better. Couldn’t you for once have had the courage of your characterless convictions and simply announced, “No wife of mine is going to be pawed and chased and hugged in public, not even by me. Maya is being instructed to retire from films to preserve my exaggerated sense of self-esteem.” But no, you weren’t capable of that kind of honesty, were you. I know what you’re going to say: how can I blame you — every single Indian actress has “retired” after marriage, from Babita to Mumtaz, from Jaya to Dimple, who only came back to films when her marriage was over. Why these intelligent and resourceful women should all behave as if the acting profession were incompatible with married respectability, I don’t know. But they’ve set the pattern, and that lets the slimy hypocrites like you off the hook.
    Even if you’d stopped at that I’d have found it impossible to forgive you. But you then spent the next five years making it much worse.

 
    Interior: Day
    I can’t believe I’m doing this.
    Me, Ashok Banjara, leading superstar of the Indian cinema, commander of fees in the range of several lakhs (can’t be too precise, you know how these income tax chaps are), not to mention son of the general secretary of New Delhi’s ruling party, wooing an aging gossip columnist over pink champagne, lip-synching the obligatory inanities that an invisible tape in my head plays back to me from a dozen remembered screenplays. But it is me, it’s my mouth that’s saying these improbable things, it’s my hand that is placed, with exaggerated lightness, on her gnarled and painted claw. Radha Sabnis, the dreaded Cheetah of Showbiz magazine, sits in her lounge, flattered by my attentions, while I pour on the butter that wouldn’t normally melt in my mouth. I have come to make peace.
    Cheetah sits in an imitation leopard-skin