Asian horror rocks: Reviews of Shutters, Tell Me Something, and more

If you haven’t yet discovered Asian cinema, I urge you, do.

Not only because the culture of countries like Thailand, Malayasia, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Japan, etc, is so much more like our own desi culture than the western world, but because Asian cinema has truly come of age now.

Take even the most reviled genre, horror.

You’d think that horror films are the tackiest, most tawdry, exploitative, button-pushing, gimmicky, gore-splashing things around. And most of the time, you’d be right.

But Asian cinema has effectively made this genre its own.

While western film makers continue to recycle the tame tired plots and ideas, Asian movie makers have gone into their cultural well to dig out new tropes and concepts – or, at least, new variations on very old cultural tropes.

I’ve been a fan of Asian cinema in general, and horror in particular, for a long time. Long before the recent Ringu craze.

And I’m the least surprised to see that America is the quickest off the block to ‘go Asian’ with remakes coming out of Hollywood studios faster than speeding bullets.

To be fair, the remakes are pretty good too. The Ring, Ring 2, and The Grudge, are all decent rehashes, partly because Hollywood was smart enough to involve the original Japanese creators in the remakes (in the case of The Grudge, the same writer-director helmed the American version as well, bringing interesting changes to his own story).

And, after all, film being what it is, even the Japanese ‘originals’ (if there is such a thing) deviated quite sharply from their own sources, namely the novels on which they based the film versions.

So, for instance, you can read the true original Ring stories in the novels by Koji Suzuki.

The novels are much richer and very different from the film adaptations. Definitely better, in my opinion.

Suzuki’s novel Spiral, not yet adapted into film, is also a brilliant spine-tingler, a must-read for fans of horror fiction looking for something different but good.

In fact, Suzuki’s innovative and daring publishers, Viz Inc., are one of the most dynamic publishers to enter the international market of late.

Dedicated to translations of Japanese fiction, they set up shop in New York a few years ago, and are working hard to overcome the dominance of western fiction in prose novels as well as graphic novels.

I wish them the very best. In fact, I wish an Indian publisher/entrepreneur had the balls to do the same for Indian translated fiction. If not New York, at least set up shop in London and try to balance the lot of Indian ethnic fiction there.

But I digress.

Coming back to Asian horror films, I saw a couple of new ones recently that are worth mentioning.

One was a Korean flick titled ‘Tell me Something’.

It’s a serial killer/cop murder mystery that’s probably the best of its genre I’ve seen in a long while.

And when I saw ‘genre’, I don’t just mean Korean cinema, although that’s doing great things right now too, I mean the thriller film genre in general, be it American, British or any other nationality.

Tell me Something is genuinely hair-raising. The film is about a string of gruesome murders around Seoul.

The murders, which are shown in all their gruesome gory detail, involve cutting off the limbs of victims and mismatching limbs with torsos.

The killer then dumps each mismatched set of body parts in black garbage bags (double strength double-large, I presume!) and delivers them to a place where they’re likely to be found by…the next victim.

The cop assigned to investigate the killings finds a common link: a woman who was involved with each of the dead men (yes, the victims are all male, for a change) at some point.

The woman in question is exceptionally beautiful (really) and very enigmatic.

What follows is a fairly typical cop noir tale, beautifully shot scenarios, much brooding, angst, on the part of the cop, much introverted silence on the part of the woman.

Also predictably, the cop develops an attraction to the woman.

But nothing else about the film is as predictable as you might think.

Sure, there are the usual red herrings, twists and turns, and a shocker of a twist at the end.

But it’s all done with great panache and style.

Beautifully filmed, edited, with a terrific music track – some of the best use of Western Classical music (of all things) in a film I’ve seen of late, let alone an Asian film! – and very well acted by all the leads.

It’s a murder mystery that’ll keep you on your toes for its entire length.

So why do I call it ‘horror’? Well, I don’t. It’s labelled horror because of the extreme gore depicted, which is definitely not meant for your run-of-the-mill murder mystery afficianado.

But if you can stomach those occasional scenes of blood-buckets, this is a tense, gripping, emotionally involving murder thriller that really delivers the goods.

If you’re looking for more supernatural horror, then you can’t do worse than the Thai smash hit, Shutters.

Recommended to me by my old friend and fellow movie addict Madan Lakhani, proprietor of Sai Baba DVD Club, one of the several libraries I’m a member of, it’s a more typical Asian horror flick.

There’s the now-cliche female ghost, complete with chalk-white face, hair streaming over her eyes, and clutching claw-like hands reaching out.

But apart from that cliche, this is a very, very good ghost story/thriller.

What sets Shutters apart from the usual Hollywood product – or even the usual Asian horror product, because there’s plenty of trash in our backyard as well, guys – is its careful, painstaking attention to detail and quality.

The script is brilliantly structured, with chills and thrills coming at you right from the first two minutes, all through to the shocking twist at the end.

The cinematography is terrific, with some really daring shots and set-ups that push the boundary and make the whole experience a pleasure.

The direction, editing, acting are all A-grade, comparable to the best that Hollywood can offer.

And it’s also a very, very good relationship drama, about a young couple trying to hold on to one another through a terribly traumatic series of events.

Shutters is a must-see for anyone who likes a good scare as well as good cinema.

In comparison, the Robert De Niro starrer Hide And Seek was such a major waste of time.

The film is a total rip-off of Hollywood films like Secret Window and The Shining.

De Niro, as always, is watchable. And young Dakota Fanning is exceptional.

Everything else is on par too.

But somehow the film just doesn’t get you the way it should.

I can’t really explain what I mean.

Perform this experiment: See Shutters, and then see Hide And Seek.

And you’ll see what I mean.

Asian horror rocks.

Except, of course, when it’s a desi rip-off of a Korean film, which is what the Urmila Matondkar starrer Naina is.

It’s not a copy of Ju-on as some reviewers mistakenly assumed (only the poster is copied from Ju-on’s poster).

It’s a copy of a Korean film called The Eye. Almost a frame by frame copy.

As for how the desi version compares to the original, the less said the better.

See The Eye too, and The Eye 2! They’re both ten times as good as Naina. And even that’s giving Naina too much credit.

And this is from an Urmila fan.

Apr 29, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Flesh Songs: A Sheila Ray story

Way back in another lifetime, in a galaxy far far away, before I began writing my Ramayana retelling, and my Mahabharata retelling, and even my Devi stories, I used to write contemporary fiction.

Flesh Songs
by Ashok Banker

A Sheila Ray story

The police gave her a bitch of a time. They wanted answers. She didn’t like the questions, and the way they asked them.

There were a half dozen of them in the lock-up, constables and a couple of sub-inspectors. One man stood behind her and when she didn’t answer, he boxed her ears like a man in a band clashing cymbals together.

She’d been expecting it, had clenched her jaw tight and her lungs emptied of air, but it still drew trickles of blood that dripped from her earlobes. Later, they handcuffed her hands over her head, tied her feet together and someone punch-jabbed her kidneys from behind. Flashes of red lightning exploded behind her eyelids. She knew she would piss blood for days.

Then one of them mauled her breasts, and that got them started. A constable with a gut like a sumo wrestler started to unbutton his khaki shorts. The others whistled and egged him on in guttural Marathi. The sub-inspectors didn’t give a damn.

She turned her face away. She had no doubt what would happen next: Either she would play along and they would use her brutally, leaving her bleeding and mauled. Or she would fight them, as she knew she would, and they would punch, gouge, claw and flay her within an inch of death. They wouldn’t kill her–not deliberately, at least–because while a gang-rape in custody was one thing, murder was a tad more difficult to brush away. Just a tad.

But it never went that far. Just then the door slammed open for a new arrival. A khaki uniform again, but the epaulets and sleeve-stripes were way beyond any of the ranks already in the interrogation room.

It was the Assistant Commissioner, Crime Branch, D Ward. At the sight of his rank, all the other cops scrambled to attention. The hawaldar mauling her breasts, his other hand unbuttoning his shorts, muttered a familiar abuse and stepped away from her. The ACP scanned the room. He didn’t seem to care about what had happened, or what had been about to happen. He gave a terse order, turned and left the room, leaving the doors open.

~

When she was brought in, dressed again, he offered her coffee. Her clothes were ripped and without the tampon, she could feel the wetness oozing through her panty and soaking her jeans. Everything hurt. She sat in the high-backed wooden chair and waited.

“Sheila Ray,” he said, reading from a file. “Ashok Ray’s daughter.” He glanced up at her, as if trying to compare his memory of Ashok Ray with this battered slut who sat before him.

“Your father was a very good policeman,” he said.

She waited for him to get to the point. She had to pee– again. Though they had let her pee before bringing her to the ACP, she had been unable to relax enough to let her sphincter open.
Now, she felt like she would burst at any moment.

He sipped coffee. She drank down the glass of water before picking up hers, Indian style. Her hand didn’t tremble, but her forearm was so taut, she had difficulty bending the elbow and relaxing the muscles enough to hoist the cup to her lips. Her lips blazed where she had been bitten by the fat hawaldar.

“A child has been kidnapped,” he said at last. “An important man’s child.” He named an industrialist, a name she had read in the newspapers in connection with a billion dollar power project, an Indo-US joint venture.

Her forearm was so taut she had difficulty bending the elbow and relaxing the muscles enough to hoist the cup to her lips. She had lived with a venture capitalist once, for two brief months: satin sheets and Baskin Robbins, a laptop or Palm-held always within reach, room service and lots and lots of sex, especially when the Nasdaq closed high, at 6 a.m. Indian Time. She remembered the name from those days, from pink-sheeted financial papers and glossy American magazines with pompous single-word names.

The ACP explained the deal. The kidnapper had been caught and killed in a police encounter when he tried to retrieve the ransom. They knew the address where the child was being held. An apartment in a chawl, a windowless two-room apartment with only one door. But somebody was there with her, an accomplice. And he would kill her if they tried to break in. They needed someone who could talk him out.

She didn’t ask the obvious question. The coffee was too sweet and too strong, made with chicory, South Indian style. She drank it all down. She hadn’t eaten a morsel for a day and a night, had no idea when she might eat again, and the sugar, milk and caffeine would bolster her for a couple of hours.

He answered the unspoken question. “You know the man, the accomplice.” He had left his coffee too long on the desk and when he sipped it, a skin of cream came onto his lip, hanging like cobwebs. He exclaimed in irritation and dabbed it away with a tissue from a box on the desk, rubbing hard.

“His name is Bhasker,” he went on after he had wiped away the cream. He now had flecks of tissue on his lips, but didn’t know it. It was evident what he expected her to do. He didn’t specify what she would get in exchange; they both knew what it would be. She had done this before.

She said she would need one thing before she agreed to do it.

“What?” he asked suspiciously.

“A sanitary pad,” she said.

His clean-shaven face twitched reflexively. She realized then that he didn’t have a moustache.

~

The chawl was one of the many vast, sprawling Government-built monstrosities that festered like leprosy sores across the suburbs, built to provide accommodation to relocated slum dwellers and homeless paupers, back in the Eighties when saving the poor was still fashionable in Bombay high society and political circles.

The slum dwellers and homeless, brought in garbage trucks by the hundreds of thousands, had stayed long enough to sell the tenements for hard cash. In less than six months, they had all moved back into the inner city, raising new plastic-and-tinfoil lean-tos and huts to replace the old. After three tries and three changes of Government, the project had been shelved. Now, the tenement structures were worse than slums.

She made her way around a paved area occupied by dozens of little children, some nearly infants, others almost teenagers, squatting for their daily business. Some younger ones squatted on the highway, boldly sticking out their tongues at the passing truckers and motorists who slowed or swerved to avoid them. This was the route to the international airport. A happy sight to greet foreigners arriving in the city for the first time.

The chawl was dark, filthy and stank of the usual assortment of Bombay chawl smells: all the fluids and solids the human body could possibly produce lay on the stairs and in the hallways. The apartment she was seeking–kholi, they called it here–was on the third floor.

On the top step, a gangly young boy with a large goiter lump on his neck, sat studying a school textbook. It was probably the best light in the place to read. She had to step over him and she glanced down at the book. It was a history book, opened to a page on Clive of India.

She ignored the Marathi women sitting on the floor in the hallway, churning a grinding stone in tandem as they jawed tobacco and occasionally spat out onto the veranda.

Like most Government-built tenements, the building was a giant cube, with verandas running around the perimeter of every floor. The tenements were grouped in a cube within the cube, clustered right next to each other as close as cells in a hive.
This meant that no room could have access to light and fresh air, and the ones on the extreme inside didn’t even have ventilation, except for a central chute down the length of the structure that was used as a refuse dump. Windows that opened into this central tube had to be kept closed to keep out the stench and the rats. It was worse than not having any windows at all.

She found the number she wanted and knocked on the door, softly. There was no response.

Further down the hallway, the sound of a tape recorder playing a Hindi film song blared through an open door, and a baby’s crying was punctuated by the angry voices of a man and a woman.

The song was an oldie by Mukesh, a dead singer with a nasal voice that made the soul twist in delicious agony. He sang about time and how it changed everything, even the face of love. The same song was also playing somewhere else, more softly. Radio then, not tape. In yet another kholi, a TV tuned to MTV was blaring out a nauseatingly familiar Indipop hit, a direct rip-off of “In The Summertime”.

She focussed on the low, mournful lyrics, shutting out the louder music and the other chawl sounds. Seeking a small, momentary envelope of privacy, Mukesh’s spine-creeping voice and the tortured songs of her own silent flesh.

From within the apartment, she heard voices. A man’s low tones. And a little girl’s whining complaint. They were muffled by another door. She knocked again, much harder.

“Bhasker,” she said, putting her mouth to the metal-framed mail slot… “Mee aahe, Sheila.” It’s me, Sheila.

There was absolute silence from inside. The Mukesh song ended and a radio deejay’s low silky voice spoke inaudibly for a moment. Then, as another song began–Geeta Bali, not her favorite, but an oldie at least–she heard the faint scuff of cautious feet as they approached the door.

“Kashasaati Sheila,” he said softly in Marathi. “Tuzha aiicha janam diwas kai?” If you’re Sheila, then tell me your mother’s birthday.

A memory flashed like a television screen switched on and then off: Her mother in a brand new red saree, laughing, for once unconcerned about her teeth showing, Sheila’s father on her left, Bhasker on her right. “Thirty-first August, Nineteen Forty Six,” she said.

There was a pause, as if he experienced a flash of memory too. Then he said quietly, switching to Hindi. “Sapnon mein bhi nahi socha tha ke tumko bhejenge.” You’re the last person I expected them to send.

She glanced at her watch. She had less than half an hour left. “Open the door,” she said. “I have a deal for you.”

She heard the child cry from inside the apartment. It sounded muffled, as if she had been gagged.

He opened the door.

~

They sat on the floor in a room that was completely bare, but clean. A ridiculously small fan–each span barely six inches long–spun like a dirty CD on the ceiling.

The girl was in the corner, gagged and tied, eyes bulging with curiosity but otherwise unharmed.
There was nobody else in the place. A peculiar odor hung in the air, something undefinable but vaguely familiar. It seemed to come from the direction of the little toilet, so she paid it no attention.

“It’s a set-up,” he said. “We were assigned to guard the girl from a kidnapping attempt. The ACP told me to take her away and keep her in a safe place for two days, where nobody would think to look for her.”

He gestured at the empty room. “This was my kholi, until I shifted to the police quarters in Worli after the promotion.”

She noticed the sub-inspector’s stripes on the sleeve of his uniform. “We brought her here on Monday morning, and were told to wait for further instructions. The next thing I knew, Vardhe and Sahu had some argument about how much ransom to demand, and then they shot it out. Vardhe’s body is still in the toilet. Then Sahu said he was going to collect the ransom and we would split it 70-30 when he returned, and he never came back.”

He glanced at the girl and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He looked older and wearier than she remembered, his hair shockingly more grey. Plus he had lost a lot of weight.

“I never intended to take the ransom, but I thought I’d have it out with him when he came and then take the girl over to HQ and explain everything…”

She spread her palms.

He nodded. “I know, I know. They won’t believe a word. Because the ACP set us all up. He lured Sahu and Vardhe with the promise of money, and me…” he paused, flicking at a fly that was trying to sit on his ear, “with me, he knew money wouldn’t work, so he used duty to get me to help. I was an idiot not to see through him in the first place.”

His face had a keening, desperate look, and he gazed at her as if he felt she had the answer to everything in her head and might tell him at any moment.

“So what to do now?” he asked.

She stood up. “Get up,” she said. “They’ll be here any minute. To kill all three of us. That’s the plan, obviously. Let’s go.”

He blinked and stared. “All three of us?”
His eyes went to the child.

“She’s a witness,” she said. “Besides, they’ve got what they wanted, the money. No point keeping her alive.”

An expression of utter darkness came over his face, like a cloud blotting out an already weak yellow sun. “But then why send you?” he asked. “Why not just come and kill me.”

She sighed. “I was supposed to kill you and save the girl. In exchange for my being released of all charges.” She showed him the blade hidden in the lining of her jeans. He blanched, and looked up at her face. She smiled and shook her head.

He started towards the front door. She stopped him. “This way,” she said, and led him to the toilet.

~

It took them several minutes to break through the bathroom ventilator. And even then, it would be a tight squeeze for Bhasker’s wide shoulders. She hammered at the crumbly concrete on the sides, trying to widen the hole. Then she heard them banging on the front door. Bhasker flinched, his sweat-washed face quivering. He stood astride the body of the dead inspector, Vardhe, his shoes squishing in the sticky pool of dried blood.

“Okay,” she said. “You go first, I’ll hand you the child.”

“No,” he said, pointing at the hole. “No room for me. You go. I’ll hand her up to you.”

She hesitated. The sounds at the front door stopped, replaced by ominous silence.

“Go!” he urged.

She went. The girl whimpered in fear as Bhasker handed her up, and when she saw the three-floor drop, she moaned softly, and started to cry. Sheila went out the hole backwards, the girl followed and clung to her neck, almost choking her.

Gunshots rang out at the front door. They were shooting the lock. But there was still one more door, the one to the inner room, to get through.

Bhasker called out to her as she was about to dip out of sight. “The blade,” he said.

She hesitated again, knowing what he meant to do, then pulled it out with one hand and threw it at him. It stuck in the thigh of the corpse, and the last sight she had of Bhasker was as he bent to pull it out. She climbed down the water pipe, praying it would hold her weight and the kid’s, and gunshots rang out at the door of the inner room.

She hid in a latrine on the ground floor, keeping the child quiet for the two hours it took them to search the chawl. She narrowly missed being found at least thrice. Finally, they assumed she had escaped–there were many entrances and approaches–and went away.

~

The industrialist was grateful but somehow resentful, as if he had already accepted his daughter’s death and couldn’t deal with the fact that she was alive. Or maybe it was just the fact that she was covered in excrement that prevented him from hugging her on sight.

But he paid a hefty reward. Sitting in an office on the ground floor of the bungalow–the girl had been taken away by servants to be bathed and cleaned and sterilized and fumigated presumably–he counted out crisp new bundles of 500-rupee notes. She shoved them carelessly into her duffel bag and zipped it up.

“It’s all politics,” he said, evidently feeling the need for some explanation. “To do with bureaucratic corruption. I didn’t pay the right people the bribes they wanted at the right time, so they thought they could shake me down this way. It’s all politics in the end, everything is politics.”

“I know,” she said, sliding out the gun she had deliberately not shown Bhasker. “So is this.”

She shot him twice in the head, and then once more in the groin. That was for not hugging his daughter.

~

The ACP banged his knee against a chair in the darkness and cursed in English. She had deliberately set the chair in the way. He fumbled for the light and switched it on, putting on the desk-lamp instead of the overhead tubelight by mistake, then stood there, swaying drunkenly.
She had heard about his drinking problem: He liked to drink Scotch in five star hotels. In exchange, he turned a blind eye to certain irregularities–like prostituition. Once in a while, he made use of those same irregularities himself; she had heard it all from an old friend who was now a prostitute.

When he saw her and the gun, he jerked back, startled. The chair caught him in the backs of his knees and he sat down heavily, grunting.

“Bitch,” he said. “Took all my money.”

She shook her head. “He paid me the money, as a reward for bringing the girl back.”

He snorted, letting her know how much he believed of that.

“Anyway,” he said. “You did good job with Bhasker. He looked like someone had tried to cut his throat three times to find the vein.”

“Artery,” she corrected automatically, then was silent, trying to picture Bhasker’s last seconds in that toilet with the rotting corpse, trying to slice through his own neck, having to do it again, and then yet again, hands growing slick and slippery with his own blood, collapsing to the floor as the corrupt cops came in with their guns ready to shoot anything that moved.

He was wagging a finger at her admonishingly. “But you were not supposed to kill Singh. That was not part of your brief. Now there is going to be big trouble for you.”

She raised the gun. It gleamed faintly in the dull yellow light of the desk lamp.

He started to laugh. “You will shoot me? You bitch, the day you shoot an Assistant Commissioner of Police, your life will be worth two-kaudi. You understand? Two pennies!”

She shot him in the teeth. His mouth shattered and turned red, half his face disappearing. He slumped in the chair, his shattered head falling onto the desk. Perfect.

She wiped the gun clean of her prints, put it in his right hand, fired it once into the wall as if his first shot had gone drunkenly awry–now he had the powder burns on his hand–and then dropped the bagful of cash beside him. There was no need for a suicide note: The industrialist’s visiting card was inside the bag. The afternoon tabloids had already speculated on a possible ‘inside link’ in the police department to the kidnapping.

“You’re the do-kaudi ka bastard,” she said as she walked away. “But this time you earned your two pennies.”

~

She drove all that night, the next day, and the next night, stopping only to relieve herself by the roadside and to snatch occasional naps in the back seat. She knew no search would be made for the stolen car for at least a week, if ever, but to be on the safe side, she switched license plates at a trucker’s diner–a dhaaba–outside the Rajasthan border.

When she reached Pokharan, the tiny desert village where the Indian Government had tested their nuclear devices, she stopped and slept for two straight days in the car.

A month later, she was in Delhi, and heard from a local blackmarketeer that she was accused of the kidnapping as well as the murder. Luckily, the Delhi police had bigger fish to fry, what with protests over nuclear testing and the national and state elections. She wasn’t afraid of being recognized.

Sometimes, when she soaked in the whirlpool tub in the Delhi Regency’s Princess Suite, sipping cold beer, and listening to old sad Mukesh songs on the brand new CD player, drifting in that dream-state between sleep and sobriety, she thought, not of Bhasker, although that last sight of him bending to pick up the blade in the toilet was mixed up in the memory too, but of the industrialist’s daughter.

And then, for some reason, she remembered the goiter-neck boy she had passed on the chawl staircase. She wondered which of those two would grow up less twisted, better able to resist the seductive warped lusts of the body, those luring siren songs of the flesh.

She was betting on the goiter-neck. He had less to lose to begin with anyway.

(c) Ashok Banker 2005. All rights reserved.

Apr 28, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Talking about Thrillers: A word from Thomas Abraham, CEO, Penguin Books India

Interesting development resulting from yesterday’s post It’s a Crime.

I had a call from Thomas Abraham, CEO of Penguin Books India.

Incidentally, he happens to be my publisher, but we haven’t had the pleasure of actually meeting.

Which is not as uncommon as you’d think, since authors very rarely meet the people who bring out their books. And the one occasion when we might have corrected that lacuna, during the launch of Prince of Ayodhya in New Delhi in 2003, he was out of Delhi.

Anyway, the reason he called was to correct the misimpression created by his interview in the Indian Express.

If you read yesterday’s post, you’ll recall my mentioning his comments about crime fiction authors in India and my being surprised that I was even mentioned, twelve years after my last (and only) crime novels were published.

Well, it turns out that he was misquoted in the interview.

What he actually intended to say was that while Ashok Banker had pioneered Indian English crime writing in India, and Aniruddha Bahal had most recently come out with a fairly decent thriller (in Abraham’s opinion, not mine – I haven’t read Bunker 13), there was still a huge void in the genre locally.

It’s a sign that India still awaits the kind of multiple-choices readers have in a mature publishing market such as, for example, the USA, where you have a Nelson De Mille, a John Grisham, a Tom Clancy, and five hundred and fifty other authors, all producing different sub-genres of crime or thriller fiction.

All of it selling in considerable numbers.

The part about “intellectual pretensions” was quite likely the interviewer’s own masala addition.

In any case, I found it interesting that Penguin is so positive about crime and thriller writing. Frankly I always felt it didn’t have much scope in India.

Crime has never sold very well here, barring the exceptional Agatha Christie or James Hadley Chase, or now, Grisham, et al. My reasoning is (still) that it’s because the readers who read those authors in such large numbers are actually seeking fantasy, not realistic crime writing.

So the firang settings, characters, etc are what they want. The moment you write an Indian thriller, it becomes too close to home for comfort. The fantasy-comfort factor is lost completely.

That’s my opinion, of course.

What I like is that Thomas Abraham, and the publishing house he manages, are still so open to testing the waters.

As I said before, if there are talented crime authors out there with zinger manuscripts, they should run, not walk, to the nearest post office and send off their mss to Penguin.

(And no, I’m not being paid to say this, just as I didn’t get my royalties cut for criticizing them yesterday!)

If Indian English crime fiction can produce a local De Mille, Grisham, Clancy, or whomever, hell, I’ll be one of the first to read those books!

Although my personal choices would veer more towards a desi Greg Iles, or Michael Connelly, or John Sandford.

But the point is still valid.

Indian English crime fiction can rock.

Given the right talent.

Apr 28, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

It’s a Crime: Book Review of The Srinagar Conspiracy by Vikram A. Chandra

This book review first appeared in India Today some years ago.

Now, for those of you who don’t know this, I began my career as a published author with three crime thrillers.

They were billed as “India’s first crime novels in English” and I was lauded by the media for apparently pioneering a genre.

(At the time I wrote the books, I had no idea I was doing anything of the sort: I loved reading crime fiction and it was only inevitable that one day I would try my hand at writing crime. Incidentally, I still write crime fiction, and continue to write a novel every year or two. The only difference is that now I don’t offer them for publication – more about that later.)

They also sold reasonably well for those times – back in those days, selling 2,000 copies of a book qualified as a major Indian bestseller.

But later, I allowed the books to go out of print.

The reason? Well, while I enjoyed reading and, briefly, writing crime, I had no intention of becoming a professional crime novelist for the rest of my life. I’m sorry, but no matter how much it pays, I don’t think I can spend my entire life writing just one genre. It would be like boxing my mind in and saying, Do Only This, And Nothing Else.

And the problem was that I became a bit too famous as “India’s crime novelist”.

A.k.a. “Indian James Hadley Chase,” “desi Agatha Christie,” “local Ludlum” and so on. (John Grisham wasn’t yet known here back then.)

Even after “quitting” crime, the label clung to me for a horrifyingly long time.

Why, as recently as last week, I happened to read a comment by Thomas Abraham, CEO of Penguin Books India, referring to Penguin’s search for an Indian crime novel that could become a potential bestseller.

And immediately, the journalist clarifies, they’re not looking for someone of the “Banker or Bahal” variety.

Bahal, of course, refers to Aniruddha Bahal, author of Bunker 13.

And Banker, apparently, refers to me.

Why Banker? Why mention me at all? I produced three slender thrillers that were in print for less than a year, over 12 years ago.

You’d think everyone would have forgotten about them by now, especially since my subsequent books have since sold several lakhs of copies more than those three slim volumes of crime.

Apparently not.

But even more puzzling was the comment by Abraham, who, I have to add here, happens to be my publisher and the publisher of the Ramayana novels and Vertigo in India (as well as all my books in India, for that matter). Abraham clarified that they were not looking for authors like Banker or Bahal because, “they weren’t able to entirely leave their literary pretensions behind”.

He goes on to say that what they’re seeking is an Indian John Grisham. By which I assume he means someone who has absolutely no literary pretensions and just wants to produce one crowd-pleasing entertainer after another, year after year.

Which is fine by me.

(Although I wonder what literary pretensions Abraham found in a novel like The Iron Bra. That actually left me scratching my head for a moment.)

But I have to question their intentions.

If Indian publishers – and readers, for that matter – were really searching for the Great Indian Crime Thriller, then, frankly, mere yaar, they would have found it by now.

The reason they haven’t found such a book, or such an author, is because nobody really wants it.

It takes more than a single book contract to build a John Grisham. It takes editorial nurturing, promotion, marketing, and reader demand.

Why do you think Shobha De hasn’t produced a bestselling book of fiction for so many years?

After all, her books were among the top sellers in the country, weren’t they? (Although, it seems, her non-fiction is much better selling, and much better appreciated too.)

Could it be because, even though she was the bestselling Indian author of her time (and still is), her sales pale in comparison to Grisham’s in India?

If my figures are correct, then the sales ratio of Grisham to De is something on the order of 5:1.

Which begs the question: Maybe Indian readers don’t want an Indian Grisham at all.

Maybe the whole charm of the thriller genre is that American or firang setting, those firang characters and lifestyle, that whole ‘other world’ that one loses oneself in for a few entertaining hours.

Maybe by bringing it down, thud, to Indian everyday reality, it robs the whole motivation of reading a thriller.

Maybe what Indian readers want from Indian authors is one thing – ambitious, literary prose poems that win awards and accolades worldwide, doing us proud, while what they want from thrillers is an entirely different thing – exotic firang lifestyles and ‘those crazy American’ behaviorial quirks’ and serial killers and madcap courtroom dramas, et al.

And never the twain shall meet.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m entirely wrong. Maybe the market has changed and matured of late.

But I’ll believe it when I see it.

Meanwhile, the whole issue also reminded me of this review which I’d written for India Today back when Penguin were not my publishers, and which was for a book that seemed very much to be Penguin’s attempt (desperate attempt?) to produce that ‘desi John Grisham’ by any means.

The book in question sank without a trace, although it got a lot of press at that time – quite natural, considering the author was a famous newsreader.

On a more trivial note, I happened to meet Vikram A. Chandra, the author of the book reviewed below, when I went to NDTV to do my own interview (on Barkha Dutt’s show) during the launch of Prince of Ayodhya in New Delhi.

He was everything I’d expected him to be from his television appearances – very decent, nice, gentle. He mentioned the review, wistfully, and how I’d “torn him apart”. And he did it without leaping at me and trying to strange me, which is proof of how nice a person he really is.

But I’ll still let the review stand as it was first written and published.

Also, now, of course, Penguin are my publishers. And I dish it out to them fairly harshly in this review.

But I’ll let that stand as well.

As for my growing pile of unsubmitted crime thrillers, well, that’s simple: I write first because I love to write.

Correction: live to write.

Publication is something I do only because I need to make a living out of it.

(Although the appreciation of genuine readers is definitely a big motivation too.)

And the other reason is that I’ve barely managed to shrug off the heavy saddle of being “India’s desi Ludlum, Chase, Christie” all rolled into one.

I don’t want to start it up all over again!

So, enjoy the review, and if you have any hidden aspirations to be the Indian Grisham, well, good luck to you!

THE SRINAGAR CONSPIRACY
By Vikram A. Chandra
Penguin India
292 pages paperback; Rs 295

Hubris must be working overtime.

How else do you explain two writers with the same name both producing thrillers set in Kashmir at the same time?

Fortunately for bewildered readers, one Vikram Chandra chose to tell his story in script form in the forthcoming Mission: Kashmir, while this Vikram A. Chandra tells it as a novel.

To clarify the differences further, the first Vikram is the son of a filmi family while the author of the book at hand is the News Editor of NDTV and a familiar face on the nightly Star News broadcasts.

Recently, a fellow Rediff.com columnist Nilanjana S. Roy wrote about Satyajit Ray’s excellent Feluda stories which have been recently collected in a new edition.

She lamented the lack of good crime writers in India, citing the first Chandra mentioned here (the one from the filmi family, not the newsreader) and one other obscure writer as examples.

Well, there have certainly been several Indian crime novelists writing in English that I can think of, including one pioneering chap who produced three in quick succession early in the Nineties.

This novel under review once again raises the question why more Indian crime novels aren’t being written or published.

The answer is that they are being written, they just aren’t being published.

In fact, some very fine crime novels authored by Indian writers are languishing for want of publishers. Perhaps languishing is the wrong word – ignored is more apt.

Because the authors in question, rather than sit on their piles of talent, are simply mailing their manuscripts abroad to agents and publishers, and are finding a far more encouraging response from British and American publishers.

Typical of India, to suffer a brain drain before it realizes the worth of its own local talent.

Why, you wonder? The reason is as old as the history of Indian publishing:

Most Indian editors read only two words of any manuscript submitted. The first and last name of the author.

And if the name is a celebrity, regardless of the profession, then that manuscript is assured a reading and a contract.

That’s why a socialite diva like Shobha De can get her laundry list published in book form – and probably has, for all I know – while a talented yet relatively unknown professional writer can’t even get his or her manuscript read by a commissioning editor.

For that matter, even a reasonably well known writer would have an uphill task getting his or her manuscript read by a major house like HarperCollins or Penguin, simply because the editors there are far too busy reading the creative output of film stars, television stars, models, corporate wives and assorted celebs.

That’s why even a consistent crime novelist like Shashi Warrier is forced to keep shifting publishers with each new crime novel.

If Satyajit Ray were alive and just a young Bengali writer(as he was when he penned the first Feluda stories), instead of being a late, legendary film maker and international celebrity, I’d wager that Indian editors would return his manuscripts unread with the comment: “Try a Bengali publisher”.

On the other hand, a television newsreader with no writing experience or notable talent for the form can pen a novel and expect it to be published as a top-of-the-list book by a major publisher like Penguin. This is the hypocrisy that plagues India publishing.

But Chandra himself (the newsreader not the filmi bloke turned author) can’t be blamed for the childish biases of desi editors.

And who knows, perhaps his endearingly sincere personality did produce a good book after all.

So, to be fair, let’s look at Chandra the newsreader’s novel and give it an honest read.

The Srinagar Conspiracy tells the story of a small group of fictional characters caught up in the historic turmoil of Kashmir.

The bracketing plot is a suspense thriller set in present-day Srinagar – the conspiracy of the title – and aims for the die-hard political-action-suspense genre that Tom Clancy excels in.

While the suspense revolves around the enactment of the present-day conspiracy, the bulk of the novel spans the period from Partition to the present day, at times dipping even further into the past for brief history lessons.

The fictional protagonists are, predictably, a young Kashmiri Pundit, Vijay Kaul, and his Muslim friend Habib Shah.

Their idyllic growing up years and friendship end suddenly in a blaze of flames when the ugly spectre of militancy rears its head.

There’s romance in the form of a beautiful Muslim girl Yasmin.

And sympathetic villainry in the form of Jalauddin, an Afghan mujahideen weaned on the outrages of the Soviet army in his native land.

Jalauddin is the negative force that impels the narrative forward, and the parts where he isn’t on the page seem to suffer from his absence.

Throughout the book, the real plays out alongside the fictional. Chandra recreates events like the Rubaiya Syed kidnapping, Char-e-Sharief occupation, and several others with a methodical professionalism that almost suggests a publisher’s outline listing ‘historical events to be included in the novel’.

Chandra’s writing is professional to a fault; like that other desi thriller writer Shashi Warrier, his style is cut-and-dried to the point of sterility. Neither does he involve us emotionally in the lives of the people affected by the militancy, nor does he make us care enough for the militants themselves.

The result is a curiously detached and objective tone of voice, almost like a business news report on a dull day at the Sensex. You could almost visualize Chandra reading the entire narrative out on the news at nine, with accompanying visual clips and comments by experts.

Having said that, The Srinagar Conspiracy is a clean, professionally written thriller. There’s no excess of anything in this book, neither violence nor sex, nor suspense nor thrills.

This isn’t one that’ll keep you up at nights, nor does it come close to capturing the trauma, angst and terror of contemporary Kashmir.

But if you’re looking at a potted history of militancy in Kashmir – clearly taken in great dollops from books like Manoj Joshi’s The Lost Rebellion and Tavleen Singh’s Kashmir: A Tragedy of Errors, then you’ll find this a painless history pill to swallow.

If that’s what Penguin Books and Chandra had in mind when producing this book, it works well enough.

If they thought they were creating a gripping, nail-biting, edge-of-the-seat suspense thriller, they clearly don’t know their genre.

Or their job.

Apr 27, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

A (Good) Picture is worth Hazaar Words, a Bad One isn’t Worth One Bad Word: Hazaaron Khwaishon Aisi v/s Waqt reviews

Sudhir Mishra outdoes himself with Hazaaron Khwaishon Aisi.

I suspect the reason is that, for once, he has a producer with no financial limitation, and who has the sense to know where to spend the money and where not to.

From the very first frame, the film is the product of a cinematically mature mind, an Indian intellectual who doesn’t believe that life and art should be partitioned, and who’s willing to tell a story without a damn for the commercial pundits who decree what can and can’t be done in a Hindi film.

This is a beautiful, heart-breaking love story set against the backdrop of the late Sixties and early Seventies – including the Emergency years.

It’s about three people from a Delhi uppercrust college – presumably St. Stephen’s, but wisely, director Mishra (or is it producer Nandy) decide not to name names throughout the film, which, interestingly enough, doesn’t detract one bit from the realism.

After all, anyone who goes to see a film of this calibre either knows what happened and who did what during those historical years, or was brain-dead, or is functionally illiterate and ill-informed about his or her own country’s history.

The love triangle takes center stage, and that’s the first thing Mishra gets right.

Brilliant casting – KayKay Menon, Shiny Ahuja and debutante Chitrangada Singh are so marvelous in their characters, they inhabit that cinematic space the way only really committed actors can do.

The production design is just right – combining the tawdry with the elegant in a mix that’s uniquely Indian. The cinematography, music, all other departments are just right as well.

In short, this is that most amazing of accomplishments, a serious Hindi film that manages to tell a reasonably entertaining love story too, and has a couple of good songs in it as well – although no gratuitous ‘dream sequence’ song-and-dances, thankfully.

I loved it. I’m going to see it again. And yet again.

This one’s a real treasure, a national treasure. If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t listen to a word anyone else says, just see it.

As for the other movie I saw last week, the less said the better.

Waqt was a waste of my waqt. Skip it.

I also caught a couple on DVD.

Suspect Zero featured Ben Kingsley in one of the menacing, screen-stealing performances that he seems to have become typecast in of late.

It wasn’t a patch on his brilliant, brutal turnout in the Brit indie flick Sexy Beast of a few years ago, but the story on the whole was interesting and original, if a bit convoluted.

At first, you wonder what the hell is happening – and whether anything is happening at all – but in the end everything resolves itself quite neatly.

It’s a film about a serial killer who is targetting other serial killers, and about yet another serial killer who is on the most ambitious killing spree in serial killer history.

Yes, it’s a few too many serial killers, but it’s still engrossing stuff for a couple of hours. Worth a dekho but that’s it.

And now, as my movie binge (hopefully) winds down, I need to catch up on my reading.

I’ve barely managed ten or twelve books the past three weeks, which is less than half my usual number. And those are mostly research/work-related, not for pleasure.

This week, I have about two dozen research books to get through, to prep me for my writing schedule starting May first week.

And I have some absolutely terrific new novels and anthologies (incl. one of poetry) just crying out to be picked up.

Time to hit the books!

Apr 25, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Devi Darshan: A ‘Devi’ story

This is another story from my ‘Devi’ series.

It’s quite different from the other one I posted here some weeks ago, In the Shadow of Her Wings.

But as you’ll see, they both share a similar obsession: avatars of the ‘Devi’, which, for those of you firangs who happen to be surfing through our desi waters, is the ur-mother Goddess responsible for birthing all creation, including the devas (hindu gods) themselves. She is known either simply as Devi (Goddess) or Sri.

Devi Darshan first appeared in the online horror zine, GothicNet. It also appeared in the famous American dark fantasy magazine, Weird Tales.

I seem to recall getting paid for translation rights in either German and French, or Spanish/Catalan, but all my records from that time were lost in a hard disk crash a few years ago, so can’t confirm where and when. If you’re reading this and have seen it anywhere other than GothicNet and Weird Tales, drop me a line.

Devi Darshan is also part of the series of stories on which my screenplay ‘Devi’ is loosely based – in that the film is based on the underlying concept of gods (devas and devis) omnipresent in contemporary India, while the actual plot of the film script is completely different from any of these stories.

‘Devi’, the film, was commissioned by Pritish Nandy, who’s since become one of the best known – and better – producers in the country.

The rest is, quite literally, in Her hands.

And now, onto the story. The usual caveat applies, about not copying any part or all of the following without written permission, etc.

And as always, feedback is not just solicited, it’s most welcome.

Devi Darshan
by Ashok Banker

He took a wrong turn on P.M. Road and found himself face to face with it.

“Hai Ram,” he said, touching his forehead in reverence.

And took a step back. Then another. It was a small temple. A shrine really. Perhaps seven feet high and five feet broad.Built, like most temples in India, at the base of a tree. Two tiny marble archs framed the front portal. An elaborately carved bunting ran around the top of the roughly squareish structure.

The top sloped upwards in a much sharper dome than was usual; concluding in a spire-like tip almostChristian in its sternness. But that was blasphemous, to invoke comparisonwith those heathen invaders. More likely, it was the Christian architects themselves who had been inspired by such early Hindu constructions as this,and hence the apparent similarity.

He took a step forward, still unable to believe he had fulfilled his life’s greatest quest so unexpectedly. He looked around, reassuring himself that he was still in downtown Bombay, in this narrow alley just off SirPhirozeshah Mehta Road, the heart of the city’s business district.

Barely five metres away, traffic rushed past on the crowded boulevard, carrying home commuters at the end of another hectic weekday. Car horns blared, London-style BEST buses roared and farted, Hindi pop music blasted from a street vendor’s stall.

ANY 4 TAPES, RS 100 ONLY.

The city breathed and lived, sinned and fornicated, worked and pleasured around him. But here, in the presence of the least known of India’s 5,000 gods, he felt coccooned,secluded. It was as if a glass door had been lowered slowly into place, separating him from the street behind, from the city. Sealing him off. As if he had stepped momentarily out of Bombay, and into another realm.

He smiled nervously, brushing aside these imaginative thoughts. It was due to the excitement of the discovery, he told himself. And the general sensory overload of the past week, the exhaustion of coping with India after a lifetime spent in the relative luxury of Connecticut, USA.

The anxiety of being home again, yet not being able to truly accept this filthy, overcrowded, polluted island as the place that had birthed him and his lineage. He stepped forward, toward the shrine and examined it more closely. The portal itself consisted of two intricately designed gold-plated doors, with a central latch and bolt. The deity lay behind those doors, naturally. And from the distinctive markings on the pillars and the sides of the shrine, it was clearly a temple of the Fisher Queen.

He had seen the markings and design often enough on ancient texts to besure. And thirty one years of searching had only sharpened his senses further.

Overcoming the initial sense of anxiety–probably a reaction to finding what he had sought for over three decades–he made himself walk carefully around the perimeter of the shrine, confirming his first recognition through a dozen different details. The tiny fresco carved on the bunting, depicting an oceanic scene: a boat setting sail from shore, women and children waving goodbye. The boat drifting on an empty ocean, the fishermen pulling up empty nets. The men praying to the Fisher Queen, she who ruled over all life on the ocean. The Goddess rising up from the deep, terrible and towering as a kraken, glowing with the haloed light that Hindu Gods had in common with their Christian counterparts. Then the fishermen hauling in huge catches, returning home rich with the bounty of the Devi. Then a marking to indicate the passage of time, generations actually.

The fresco continued around the third and fourth sides of the shrine, taking him around the tree itself, stepping carefully in the dull gloom of the alley to avoid tripping over the overgrown roots of the banyan tree, rising out of the concret of the street itself like the coils of agargantuan sea-serpeant. The last part of the fresco depicted the rise to riches and power of the tiny fishing hamlet on the West coast, one of the seven village – islands that made up the original seven islands of Bombay.

And then the tragic, inevitable fall from grace as the villagers failed to honour their patron goddess, and she wreaked a terrible vengeance on them, destroying the village-island itself and washing all its denizens into theocean, back to the womb of their creator.

He was back at the front portal again. And by now, eager to see the Devi.To do puja. Offer his penitent homage. But all that faced him were the bolted doors. He looked around again, although there was nobody there. Slapped at some insect, probably a mosquito, that nibbled briefly at his ear. This was puzzling, and frustrating. What purpose did the doors serve?It was true, most Hindu temples were barred at night. But that was to keep out bandits who sought to plunder the day’s charitable takings. And at least one junior acolyte of the main pujari always slept on the premises in the event of an untimely worshipper’s visit.

Harry looked around once again, making sure that there really was nobody around. No pujari, temple priest, or even a sadhu performing sanyas. After all, this was the shrine of the Mumba Naag Devi, the sacred Sea Goddess or Fisher Queen, or Serpeant Mother, to use just a few of her many names.

There should have been lines of devout worshippers, brahmins to supervise the maintenance and upkeep of the shrine, flower and incense vendors to sell the paraphernalia needed to pay homage, old women squatting on the ground to watch your shoes and slippers for a rupee while you performed your puja, altar boys in their dhotis and brahmin threads to prepare and offer you the puja thali as you stepped up to the altar, a whole support system earning a living and providing services to the followers of theDevi.

Especially in these confusing millennial times, when India seemed to be swept by a religous resurgence of epic proportions, every temple thronged by mile-long queues, raking in millions in charity, feeding small townships of brahmins.

But there was nobody here. Not a soul in sight. Just a dead-end wall at the far end, marked with obscene grafitti, a Bombay Municipal Corporation rubbish bin overflowing with aromatic refuse, a few discarded cans of Pepsi, a Domino’s Pizza Box (12 inches, with the plastic packet of Oregano seeds still Scotch-taped to the top, a shrivelled-up used condom, a pile of corrugated cardboard boxes that had once contained some household durable. And this amazing shrine. It didn’t make sense. It just didn’t.

His hands were reaching out. Toward the portal gates. Just a few inches more, and he could unlatch them himself, and take darshan of the deity. He was a devout Hindu, a brahmin no less, and despite his life spent across the ocean, still a stout devotee of the Goddess.

What else was this shrine built for, if not for people like himself?

“Baba?”

The voice startled him, almost caused him to pitch forward, fall into the shrine. He tottered, stumbled forward, then regained his balance.

He turned around, and at first saw nobody.

“Ikde, baba. Khalee bagaa.”

Here, son. Look down.

Then he saw her,squatting in the familiar posture of Maharashtrian women since time immemorial, on her haunches on the pavement. A round tokri of woven-straw before her, filled with some produce. A street vendor. Had she been there when he entered the alley? Through his examination of the shrine’s markings?

How could he have failed to notice her earlier? Well, of course. She was crouched down beside the corrugated cardboard boxes. Sitting almost stone-still, probably chawing her tobacco, waiting for customers to stop and purchase her wares. He had overlooked her completely.

“Ikde ye, baba.Bugh, mee kai sangeetho.” Come here, son. Listen to me.

He went toward her. As he approached, he could see her more clearly in the light streaming from the P M Road side of the alley. She was ancient, older than her voice suggested, face wrinkled in that parchment-like map of ages that was peculiar to Konkan women. And she was chawing on tobacco, like they all did.

He glanced into her tokri as he reached her. The basket had probably contained a load of seafood at first. Now, the only remnant was a pair of bombeel. Bombay Duck. A flat ocean fish that could skinned, rolled in breadcrumbs and fried to a crisp, then eaten like an omlette, bones and all. Deliciciously crunchy. He preferred pompfret. Or bangda even.

“Tuzha naav kai?” she asked in Marathi. What’s your name?

“Hari Prasad Rathod,” he replied.

Not adding: But everybody back in Connecticut calls me Harry.

She nodded slowly. Her glass bangles jangled on her forearms. An old tattoo, almost faded now, marked the backs of her hands.

She poked a finger in the direction of the shrine. “Tumhi devicha darshanla aale?” You came to worship the goddess?

“Ho,” he said, surprised at how naturally his native language rolled off his tongue, even if it was a single word. Yes.

She took out a small aluminium canister, the kind most Maharashtrians of a certain class carried, and began to make herself another wad of tobacco, supari and lime. She patted the mixture together in her left palm, using her right thumb to rub it together with practised ease.

Harry had seen even Bombay policemen, semi-automatic machine guns slung over their shoulders, taking time out to mix this traditional Marathi mixture. It had taken city authorities crores of rupees and decades of advertising to convince people not to spit the blood-red betel-and-tobacco juice at every available wall. Even now, he could see the telltale stains on the wall beside the old woman, spread out in a map-like pattern that resembled the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.

“Bassa,” she said, indicating the ground in front of her. Sit.

Harry suppressed a smile. The old woman probably had bad eye-sight. Imagine expecting him, an NRI, to squat on his haunches on the street, like a cart-puller or a peon!

He spoke to the old woman in Marathi, framing his words carefully. Surprisingly, the words, grammar, syntax all rolled easily off his tongue and palette. Thirty one years since he had spoken more than a sentence, and yet he spoke as fluently as if it was yesterday. Like riding a bicycle.

“This shrine,” he said. “Why isn’t there any pujari or pundit here? Is there a particular day or time for worshippers to come for darshan of the devi?”

She finished making her wad of timepass, raised her palm, transferring the entire mass from hand to mouth, using her thumb to stuff it into her left cheek.

He asked his question again, rephrasing it marginally in case she hadn’t understood it the first time.

“You have been away,” she said in Marathi. But in the old dialect, the fisher-people’s tongue, Koli. “Across the ocean. A brahmin should not cross the ocean, you know that.”

He was surprised to find himself feeling embarrassed at the admonition. “Ho, bai,” he admitted. Yes, mother. “I was a child when my father took me. He had a good opportunity, we had to go.”

He felt the curious need to explain further, to justify. “We live a good life there. Honest, hard work. Follow all the rituals and traditions, just like at home. Even in America, we live like Mumba Devi’s children.”

She nodded. Her cheek was swollen from the tambaccu, her lips barely moving to form the words. But he could understand every syllable.

She picked up the two fish from her tokri, wrapping them in newspaper, tied the bundle with twine from a roll mounted on a stick. She handed him the bundle.

“This is one thing you could not have found on foreign shores,” she said.”Here. Taste Mumba Devi’s bounty. Taste it and remember who you are, where you belong.”

He hesitated. But felt a peculiar pressure to take the fish. Without allowing himself time to object, he put his hand in his pocket and pulledout the first currency note he touched. It was a 100-Rs note. He handed it to the old woman. It disappeared into the folds of her choli, the fisherwoman’s traditional low-cut cotton blouse. He took the bundle offish, finding it heavier than expected. He saw that it contained a pair of pomfret, not bombeel. He must have been mistaken earlier when he thought he saw Bombay Duck. The old woman was rising to her feet, raising the tokri to her head, arranging the coiled pad of cloth on her skull. He helped her place the tokri on her head and watched her shuffled down the alley. The wrong way.

“Bai,” he said uncertainly. “That way is a dead-end.”

He turned to indicate the street, PM Road, down the other way.

“That’s the way to go out.”

He barely turned his head for an instant.

When he turned back she was gone.

* * *

Aarti sounded concerned on the phone. “But, Harry, you don’t speak Koli.”

“That’s the point, Art,” he replied, excited. “My parents used to speak it. I must have retained memories. Just enough to converse with the oldfisher-woman.”

“Johnny’s getting tired of managing the store all day,” she said. “Labour Day weekend’s coming up. He wants to go with the rock-climbing group. He asked if you’d be back by then.”

“He’s spoilt,” Harry said. “Just because you and I have managed the store on our own till now, he thinks he’s too good for it. It’s decent work, Art. Do him good to spend a few hours at the register. Maybe he can learn a bit about the business while he’s at it.”

“I thought we talked about this. He’s going to college next year. He’s already applied to Boston, you know that.”

Harry didn’t want to talk about his children. “Okay, okay. I’ll be back in time for Labour weekend. He can go on his rock-climbing campout. But, Art, listen. Those fish the old woman gave me were the best. Finger-lickin’ good! I wish you were here to share them with me.”

She snorted. “You mean you wish I was there to fry them for you. How didyou manage to cook them up anyway? Sunita-Bua must have done it.”

“What, you think I can’t fry a couple of fish? Sunita-Maasi’s maid ground the masala, and I did the rest. Both Sunita and Kishore said the same thing, that it was the best pomfret they’d ever had.” Aarti sniffed.

He realized suddenly that she was feeling neglected. For twenty five years she had cooked every meal for him after all.

“Of course,” he added hastily, “not as tasty as the way you cook them. But the masalas here, Art. Even the top-of-the-line imports in Connecticut just don’t have the same flavour.”

She sounded a little mollified. But he had to promise to return by Labour Day weekend or else.

She was missing him. Even though she couldn’t come right out and say it. Three decades in America and sometimes she still behaved like a bashful new bride.

* * *

He had a few minor chores to take care of the next day, looking up old schoolfriends, a dearly loved teacher, other old faces from the distant past. And of course, the property matter for which he’d come down in the first place. It was just a broken-down shack and a few acres of infertile land. But it was ocean-front property, on Kashid Beach in Alibag. And Sunita and Kishore said that droves of rich Malabar Hill-types were buying property in Alibag and building cottages and bungalows for weekend holidays. If he put it up for sale through a good downtown real estate agent, he’d get a good price. Enough to pay off the rest of the mortgage on the new house back in Connecticut, and to put Johnny through college. Maybe even a little left over to upgrade from the Ford pick-up to the GM van Aarti had been eyeing so wistfully.

The trip out to Alibag and back took half a day each way, what with the ferry service being so irregular, and the ocean being choppy at this time of year. And then the long, bone-banging ride by auto-rickshaw to the village.

Before leaving India 43 years ago, he had lived in Bombay city, in the same house where his sister Sunita and her husband Kishore still stayed. Duringthe 9 short years of his life before migrating to the US of A, he had visited his village perhaps twice in all, once when he was barely an infant.

So he had grown up with an idealized, romantic image of his family’s village, and was disappointed to find Pepsi billboards by the roadside, empty packs of Lays Chicken Tandoori flavour and Kellogs Chocos clogging the monsoon-swollen gutters, and satellite dishes sprouting from the roofs of ugly, concrete-block bungalows.

But as the auto-rickshaw bumped its way past these modern outgrowths into the more remote heart of the district, he found the vista closer to his memory: red-tiled sloping roofs and mud-and-brick houses for the upper castes, thatched huts and cowdung-cake walls and roofs for the lower castes; an open patch lined with coconut and palm trees where children played gilli-danda, marbles, and yes, of course, cricket too.

But even that colonial game seemed homegrown somehow, the brown-stained bat and tattered rubber ball seeming more Maharashtrian Indian than English in this rustic setting. The property was a mess. It took all of the first day just to get it cleaned up. But afterwards, when he sat on the verandah of the old cottage and looked out at the Arabian Ocean, at the sunlight glinting offthe fish-rich nets of the village boats out in Kashid Bay, he smiled in satisfaction. Perhaps he wouldn’t sell after all.

For a brief moment, a vision of himself and the kids, still small enough to be dependent on him and Aarti, frolicking on the white-blonde sandy beach, flashed in his mind.But of course, that was impossible now. The kids were grown and on their way out. If only he had come back sooner. Why hadn’t he? He had certainly wanted to badly enough. But there had always been the store, sucking up his days from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., weekends and holidays too in those early years of the first mortgage. Sammy’s illness, his long, expensive hospitalization, and subsequent death.

The gap of six years before he and Aarti dared to try again.

Then Sanaya, and then Johnny.

The post-Gulf War recession. Etc, etc, etc. And the years had just rolled by.

In the vision he had glimpsed, Sammy had been there too, a little brown hairball about the same age as Johnny–which was patently impossible–leaping through the surf in pursuit of a large
coconut husk-ball. Dream on, you foolish dreamer. Destiny sniggers in the wings.

Later that same evening, he was walking on the beach, the soughing surf and gentle salty breeze relaxing him more thoroughly than the palm liquor he’d drunk a little of in the village earlier, when he saw the woman.

She was walking away from him, hand on one hip, a bundle poised on herother hip. She seemed younger, more shapely, but he had no doubt it was her. She paused at the top of a dune and looked back. In the serendipitous light of the setting sun, he was certain she smiled at him. A very sexy, inviting smile.

Then she went over the dune and disappeared from sight. He sprinted as fast as he could over the sand, his lungi, unfamiliar folds of cloth between his legs, slowing him down. And the weight of time, all those 52 years, the majority of them spent standing behind the counter of the superstore. Age turns desire to molasses in the veins.

When he reached the top of the dune, there was no sign of anyone for several hundred metres in either direction.

* * *

He was drinking with the village headman, Surpanch Joshi, late that night, munching on koliwada-style batter-fried prawns that brought out the full flavour of the potent palm liquor–and broke out a sweat on his forehead.

He told the Surpanch about the shrine in the alley off P.M. Road. The Surpanch had never heard of P.M. Road, and showed only a passing interest in Harry’s description of the little temple with its elaborate fresco but when he reached the part about the old woman, he stopped short.

He turned large, red-streaked eyes on Harry. His long, lustrous moustaches–oiled every morning with shark-fin oil, his famous idiosyncracy–twitched visibly as he stared at the Non Resident Indian.

“You must not speak of her to me,” he said, glancing around nervously. “Or to anyone. Her words are for you only.”

Harry frowned. “But she was just an old woman, a fisherwoman. It’s just that she knew the old dialect. So I thought perhaps–”

“No, no,” the Surpanch replied, flapping his hand vigorously in a fly-away gesture. “Say not a word more. It is only for you, her darshan. She chose to appear to you.”

Harry couldn’t understand head or tail of this. He tried to tell theSurpanch about the other young woman he’d seen earlier in the evening onthe beach.

“I thought maybe she’s a relative. There’s a strong family resemblance.”

But the Surpanch was rising, apologizing profusely, making some excuse about having to rise early the next morning. He thrust the bottle of feni into Harry’s hand, and added an earthern container of curried fish andrice, for dinner. And all but pushed Harry out the door of his house.

* * *

That night, after he finished the bottle of feni, Harry had a dream. Well, not quite a dream, because he was awake when it happened, but he had drunk enough to doubt if maybe he was asleep dreaming he was awake when it happened.

He was sitting on the verandah on the old khaat, the wooden cot. He had finished the alcohol, and knew he should eat something, but lacked the will to get up and go inside to fetch the pot of rice and curry. The kerosene lantern had gone out a while ago, and he didn’t have the energy to re-fuel and relight that either.

So he was sitting in the dark. With a little lightcoming from the crescent moon low in the Western sky. Even the crickets had stopped chirrupping, so he knew it was late. When she spoke, he thought fora moment it was Art. That he was back home in Connecticut, in the old clapboard house with noisy plumbing and the squeaky fourth stair. That he had passed out on the old recliner in the living room after watching a ballgame. And Aarti was trying to wake him up to go to bed. Because that’s what she was saying to him: “Come to bed.” Just like Aarti, Art, his wife, the only woman he had ever slept with in his entire life.

But she was speaking in the village dialect. Which Aarti didn’t know, had never known. Because Aarti’s people had come from a village in the ghats, the ridge mountains North of Bombay, where they spoke a different Marathi from this ancient dialect.

Then he listened more closely as she said it again. And realized she wasn’t actually saying ‘come to bed’. She wassaying those words, so yes that was a literal translation. But what she really meant was the other meaning of ‘come to bed’.

And her tone left no room for doubt, soft and sibillant, undulating a coiled desire in his groin. He found himself on his feet and stared down for a moment, unable to understand how he had stood up so fast. His feet began to take him toward the voice. Into the darkness of the hut’s inner room where the light of the moon didn’t penetrate at all. Toward the coconut-husk mat on the floor where someone sat who was not Aarti, nor any other woman he knew.

The scent of freshly applied coconut oil came to him, and he sensed rather than saw her hands moving, winding and braiding her long black hair, lustrous with oil. The scent of mogra, nightqueen blossom, which she had sprinkled across the mat. It was used for bridal beds on the first night. Suhaag raat.

And below these two powerful, evocatively familiar scents, as redolent of memories as a flashback in a film, was the smell of something older,stronger, so firmly embedded in her flesh that even the potent mogra and sweet-smelling coconut oil could not hide.

The smell of the ocean, of millennia spent in the arms of the brine-king, the pungent aroma of his salty seed, fish and plant, moss and crab, the broth of creation itself whence all life had originated. Her father and lover. Her ruler.

He moved a step closer, unable to resist the lure of that powerful and ancient aroma,more irresistible than any synthetic perfume, and felt his erection rise strong and true, drawn to the source of the smell: Her yoni. Splayed between parted thighs, inviting, waiting.

He felt the aching grow intolerable, the pounding in his head threatening to drown out all reason and consciousness, and had all but succumbed to her power.

When she touched him. Reached out and placed her palm on his bare thigh, beneath the hitched-up lungi. Causing his flesh to tremble terribly, melting with desire.

And she said: I have waited for you for so long, why didn’t you come home to me sooner?

And he turned and ran from the cottage. Ran, ran out into the aangan of the house, toward the partly cleared pathway to the beach, still rough and tangled. Through bamboo and banana-leaf, papaya tree and palm trunk. Stumbling, slapped, colliding, falling, yet getting up and running on, ignoring pain, bruises, scratches.

He spent the night on the steps of the village temple. Beneath the watchful gaze of Hanuman, the Monkey-God, protector of the brave and strong.

* * *

Harry returned to Bombay the next day. The estate agent had called to leave two messages. He had a buyer for the Alibag property, offering a good price.

“You should sell, bhaiya,” Sunita said. “The rates have never been this high ever.”

“Yes, yes,” Harry replied, promising to call the agent and discuss theoffer. And seemed to be thinking about it. But in fact he was deciding whether to take a slow BEST bus or a fast overcrowded local train to get to P.M. Road. Finally, he took a quick expensive taxi.

He got out in front of the old brownstone which housed the departmentstore. Walking along the pavement, avoiding the electronic vendors with their wares stacked enticing on plywood-shelved stalls. The video porn vendor selling VCDs which all seemed to have the word ‘Night’ in the title–’Night Eyes’, ‘Night Moves’, ‘Night And The Maiden’, ‘Night ofNights’–the cellphone stall right in front of the stationery store, the music store.

He stopped.

He had gone past it. It was between the stationery store and the electronics showroom. He remembered looking at a window display of Oxford Notebooks and Parker Pens and then turning left, and coming face to facewith it.

He went back a few metres. The stationery show window was still there.Displaying the complete range of Faber-Castell colours, pastels, crayons, pencils, paints. He walked forward again, looking left, certain the alley was right here. And came to the music store.

Staring at a poster of a new Hindi film, featuring that wolfish-looking new male star everybody was raving about, he felt a moment of overwhelming panic.

He regained control of himself and retraced his steps, going all the way around the block and returning to the exact same spot. Then he went the other way around, the D.N. Road side. And met with the same results.

He crossed the street to get a different perspective and paced up and down the length of P.M. Road, all the way from Smoker’s Corner Bookstall at the Fort Market end to the Citibank ATM at the D.N. Road end.

There was no dead-end alley at all. Every lane crossing P.M. Road led to another lane, in the Manhattan-like grid-like pattern of downtown Bombay.The store owners he asked, the street vendors, the restaurant manager, the traffic cop at the signal, even the magazine vendor at the corner, everybody agreed that there was no dead-end lane leading off SirPhirozeshah Mehta Road, had never been such a lane, couldn’t possibly be one for obvious reasons.

On his fourth circuit, he stopped asking about the dead-end lane and tried asking about the temple of the Devi instead. This time, he met with strange looks, irritated reactions, hostile stares, even an outright stream of Hindi abuse, colourfully inventive phrases and insults he’d never heard before.

Finally, an old watch-maker, his eyepiece still clutched in one eye, shook his head grimly. “Meri
baat mano, bhai, apne ghar chale jaao. Uss Devi ki talaash mein arbo mard barbaad ho gaye.”

Take my advice, brother, go home. Countless men like you have ruined their lives questing for that Devi.

Harry tried to probe further, but the old man wouldn’t say another word.

When he came back on his fifth circuit, the shop was closed, although he thought he could make out a glimmer of light from beneath the rolldown shutters.

Brother, go home.

He couldn’t go home. Not just yet. Home was 3,000 kilometres away and therewere questions he wanted answered first.

He went instead to the place where all men go when they fail to find what they seek. A bar.

* * *

When he staggered home in the early hours of the next morning, the lights were on in his sister’s house. Sunita was sobbing on the sofa in the living room. Kishore was sitting with his head in his hands, staring at the black television set.

They looked up at the sight of Harry, swaying drunkenly in the doorway.

“Kai zaala?” he asked, understanding that something was seriously wrong. What happened?

It was Johnny.

“Janardan was locking up for the night,” Aarti said on the phone, revertin gto their son’s Hindu name in this moment of crisis. “These three men came in, the police say they were probably some kind of naval cadets, marines or something. They had some kind of argument, I
don’t know about what, I was in the backroom at the time, taking inventory. I think they asked
him to empty out the cash register. He did that. Gave them every cent. Didn’t talk back or make any sudden movements, just like you taught him.”

She paused. “He did everything right, Hari,” she cried. Yes, yes, yes, I know he must have, he thought silently, maudlin with booze and shock, waiting for the punchline to this awful unfunny cosmic joke. “But they shot him anyway.”

She began to lose it, sniffing uncontrollably.

“T…t…twice in the head, once in the chest.”

He leaned weaky against the wall, the cracked plaster flaking andpowdering his right shoulder. Like dandruff.

* * *

The ferry was closed. A storm was expected, the operators at Gateway said. A cyclone, headed toward Gujarat. Perhaps after a few days, the service would resume. A large sign posted beneath the monument, at the jetty, announced that the motorboat launches were officially barred from taking passengers until further notice, by order of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. Water swirled well over the jetty, right up to the top of the pier, washing over toward the monument itself.

As he argued with the sullen launch operators standing in the shadow of the Gateway, he heard a guide explaining to a group of tourists that this was apparently the worst storm in the region in 28 years.

“No, you don’t understand,” Harry said. “I have to go today. Now. Quickly.Laukar!” He struck his palm with the edge of the other hand, karate-chopstyle. “Laukar!”

He found an operator willing to take him for a fee that was probably more than the resale value of the rickety old launch. Harry didn’t bargain. He paid the man cash up front, keeping half of the agreed sum in abeyance till they crossed.

The ocean was furious, raging with an intensity Harry had never seen outside of films and television. The clusters of yachts, playthings of rich Bombayites, rocked violently in the bay like plastic ducks in a bathtub into which Homer Simpson had just dropped anchor. He was the only passenger on board: even the villagers huddled in the shelter of the Gateway had watched him leap aboard without asking to come along. They preferred to squat five days on the street until the storm cleared and regular services began. As fisherfolk, they understood and feared the sea’s wrath more than anything else.

He clung to the railing at first, staring out at the foggy, rain-smeared horizon, an ageing, slightly overweight Cortez awaiting first sight of land. The launch was buffeted by waves that reared over his head. Spray drenched him from head to toe; he had to keep wiping his eyes to be able to see clearly. The owner was pilotting the launch himself.

Two workers had come aboard with him, reluctantly. But as they passed the stolid grey eminence of INS Vikrant, aircraft carrier-turned-museum, they began a heated argument with their employer.

It ended with both of them leaping overboard at the point closest to the neck of land jutting out from the naval pier and swimming out vigorously,as if their lives depended on it. Which it did, Harry realized. As the launch pulled him out of sight, he saw one of them clamber slowly onto shore and throw himself face down, the other one probably following right after; but they might as easily have been caught in the riptide and taken out to sea. Obviously, they feared the voyage more than that risk.

Harry watched the skyline of South Bombay disappear into the foggy obscurity. The simplistic block of the new Taj Hotel faded into the swirling spray and rain like the last frame of an Impressionistic Italian film. After they left the Elephanta Island buoy behind, the ocean grew worse. The sky, already clouded over with curdled grey madness, darkened as suddenly as if a light had been dimmed. Thunder boomed frighteningly close; lightning crackled somewhere high up, blanketed in the clouds. The wooden bones ofthe battered launch moaned and screamed as the ocean intensified its assault.

Harry gripped the railing hard enough to numb his hands. The water flailingacross his face and body was cold now, Atlantic-cold, as frigid as a splashof exposed water on a winter’s day in Wisconsin. A succession of giant waves reared toward him, approaching with grim determination. One, two, three…a dozen more followed. Until he lost count, and measured time only by the steady throbbing of his pulse in his throat, the desperate chug-chugging of the diesel engine, the frantically shouted prayers of the petrified Muslim owner at the wheel, the roaring of the ocean, and the Dolby-enhancedboom-crack of thunder. Lightning illuminated the night, limning his hands with ghastly fluorescence. He felt old, at the end of his tether.

And that was when he saw it. Her.

It was a wave, yet another in the countless succession that battered the boat. But unlike the others, it reared up to above his eye-level…and stayed.

It took his beleagured senses a moment or two to realize that the wave hadnot struck, was not going to lash him with icy spray. He raised his head slowly.

And looked full into the face of the Devi.

She was the wave and the wave was her. Undululating, twisting sinuously, her form merged with the ocean,half-morphed somewhere between woman and water, eyes flashing green as burning jade, hair black and streaming the length of her body like a darkfin. And he smelt her once more. Not the same mixture of mogra, oil and ocean he had smelt that night in the cottage. There was no attempt to anoint herself with perfume now, just a raw sewage-strong stench that he knew at once was her true odour. She was grinning at him, yellow, cracked teeth bared in a shark-like grimace.

He heard her speak, although she did not use words. She spoke with the wind and the rain and the waves and the thunder and the mouths of fish teeming in the waters around her.

Are you pleased with what you have wrought, Hari Prasad Rathod? You see the price of spurning me? You should have accepted my grace that night. Now, you suffer the pain of a father bereaved yet again.

He felt his anger rise like bile in his throat. Screamed back at her across the raging cyclone. In an all-too human voice. “How dare you harm my son! Iwas your loyal devotee all my life. Prayed to you even when I could not find your shrine. Long after others of my tribe had forgotten you or turned to other gods. And this is how you repay my loyalty and penitence?”

Her eyes burned brighter with anger, turning from green to blue.

It was necessary, to prove to you my power. Even halfway across the circle of waters, you and your seed still belong to me. If you had accepted my grace, I would have showered you with blessings unimaginable. But you spurned me. Me, the Daughter of the Ocean! You had to pay the price.

He laughed then. Knowing that he had overestimated her from the verybeginning.

“Just a girl,” he said bitterly. “Countless millennia old, but still a girl in your own mind, unable to accept rejection.”

The ocean roared and thundered, enfuriated by his scorn. A wave lashed the railing with a razor-sharp finger, sending a chip of wood into his shoulder with the force of a knife-throw. He ignored the pain and the tiny trickle of blood seeping down his kurta. It was just a small splinter and Devi always demanded a blood-sacrifice, however small.

“I know how alone you are,” he said. “How abandoned you feel by my race. Nobody has paid homage to you for years, perhaps almost a whole generation.Yet when I came across your bed of brine to seek you out, you caused my own son to suffer? How cruel and thoughtless of you, my goddess. I command you to restore my son at once. Return him to his former healthful state this very instant.”

The howl of wind that followed was almost petulant.

Why should I help you? What do I care if your son dies?

“Because I am the last believer. If my son dies, I will leave this land and never think or speak of you again. But if he lives, I will worship you forever. I will see to it that your glory reaches across to other shores. I will devote my life to your service.”

And in return all you wish is the life of your son back?

“Of course not,” he said, smiling in pride, knowing he had won. “I have other wishes. But first you must promise never to harm my loved ones. Next time, I will not relent as easily, my Devi.”

There was a long break, and the storm seemed to pause briefly, as if frozen momentarily by a finger on a remote control unit. Out the corner of hiseye, Harry sensed the launch owner emerge from the pilot-house, stare incredulously at the sight before him–his passenger talking to a Goddess in a wave–and return hastily to his steering again, muttering an audible appeal to his own god for sanity and safe return.

“Very well,” she said, speaking aloud in the same voice she had used that first day as an old fishmonger, the same weary accent. “But you must pledge that your seed and the seed of your seed will always be mine.”

Harry was prepared for this. “Yes,” he replied calmly. “I swear allegiance.” He raised his hands in a namaskara touching his forehead and said with fervent sincereity, “Jai Mumbai Aii.”

For though he knew she had a thousand faces and forms, countless avatars, at this moment, she appeared to him as Mumba Aii, the avatar of Devi after whom the city of Mumbai itself had been named, corrupted by the Angrez to Bombay.

And the storm vanished, leaving them in a clear blue ocean beneath an azure, sunlit sky.

* * *

He returned to Connecticut a week later, bearing bags of gifts. Johnny and Aarti were both at the airport to recieve him, Johnny looking just the way he’d looked when Harry had left. Harry hugged his son with caution, afraid to hug too hard. “Feeling okay?” he asked, rubbing his son’s shoulders through the windcheater.

“Never better,” Johnny replied.

Aarti turned limpid, luminous eyes up at him. “The doctors said it was nothing short of a miracle. Complete recovery and regression. Never seen anything like it before.”

He kissed her on the forehead, then directly on the lips, surprising her and causing Johnny to raise his eyebrows. In all the years they had been together, they had never kissed on the lips in public. She looked surprised, but pleasantly so.

“There will be some changes,” he said to her quietly as they walked to the truck. Johnny was ahead, carrying Harry’s overstuffed bags with the ease of a WWF wrestler carrying a welterweight. He tossed them into the back of the Ford. Harry and Aarti stopped. He felt her eyes on him, questioning,w ondering. He hoped she couldn’t smell the ocean on his breath, in his pores, the roots of his hair. He could smell nothing else.

“What kind of changes?” she asked, staring wide-eyed at him now. Then, softer, almost unsurely: “You seem different. The trip was good for you.”

“Yes,” he said. And felt the onset of unexpected tears. “It was very, very good for me. For all of us.”

She glanced at him, surprised at the sudden release of emotion.

He grinned, blinking away the tears. “Come,” he said to both of them,throwing out his hands.

“Let’s go home. I’m famished. What’s for dinner?”

“Fish,” Johnny replied, with no trace of sarcasm.

Apr 20, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Summer Movie Mania: Hitch, Mumbai Xpress, Khamosh, Lemony Snicket reviews

I didn’t really know what to expect from Mumbai Xpress.

I mean, Kamal Haasan has seen better days.

He’s always been one of India’s finest actors, and I was watching his films since way back since my advertising days, when a bunch of us used to rent Tamil/Telegu/Kannada/Malayalam movies on VHS and watch them.

They were un-subtitled, but it didn’t matter because we enjoyed the films so much. I still remember watching Mani Ratnam’s Agninakhsatram and being blown away by his very cool style and song picturization.

Since then, of course, both Mani Ratnam and Kamal Haasan have made a lot of Hindi films, and these days most multiplexes in Mumbai screen at least one new South Indian film every week. But sometimes I still miss the thrill of ‘discovery’ we shared watching these relatively unknown (to the rest of India) films on VHS on smokey beer-drowsy Sunday afternoons.

Mumbai Xpress definitely isn’t a great film. For that you need to go seek out Kamal Haasan’s earlier movies – there are just too many to even list here. But it’s probably the most fun you can have at the movies this weekend.

I won’t rehash the plot here, and I won’t discount the possibility of it being ripped off from some Hollywood (or even Indian) film, but the thing about MX is that it comes off the screen with a bang, hitting you squarely between the eyes, and giving you a guffaw a second for its entire duration.

In short, it’s a laugh-riot. The acting is super, and I don’t just mean Mr Haasan himself but his trusty group of supporting actors – Vijay Raaz in particular is brilliant as ever. That guy’s a real gem.

The film is shot on digital format which means it looks awful. This has something to do with Kamalhaasan’s financial crisis, I suspect, and it’s sad to see a film maker of his calibre reduced to churning out such a sorry-looking production – in the technical sense only – but the script and terrific content more than make up for it. And that’s saying something coming from a guy whose obsession is visual aesthetics – my secret ambition is to become a cinematographer someday, not a director or a producer or even a scriptwriter, but a cameraman!

Seriously, Mumbai Xpress is a terrific entertainer. Even Manisha Koirala looks great in it, which almost makes up for the horrible digital look of the film – to be fair, digital looks absolutely perfect on the small screen, and since I noticed Sahara One was one of the financiers of the film, I suspect that even Haasan knew that the movie was more likely to be seen on TV rather than on the big screen, which is a shame because it’s actually more fun than almost all the other films released last weekend.

The less said about Khamosh: Khauff ki raat, the better. Let’s just say that it’s a total rip-off of a film named Identity, almost a frame-by-frame remake, except for the item numbers. Having said that, though, it’s not a total wash-out. The ‘copied’ story is still interesting enough to make for a half-hour’s TP. But remember I said ‘half-hour’ not two hours. So, surf in and surf out if you have nothing else to watch, otherwise give this one a full-miss.

(Incidentally, it never ceases to amaze me how ignorant the media is: don’t they notice when a Hindi films is copied from a Hollywood one? Of course they do! Then why do they do ‘mention not’? Simple, yaar: Movie journalism is the life-blood of the media today. You can rip a book apart, ignore an author altogether, shunt serious theatre, classical music, art to the inside pages, but movie gossip is what a journo needs to survive and grow, so the last thing they’ll do is give any new film or producer a negative write-up, unless, of course, they have a common grudge against a producer or star or director, in which case they’ll all gang-up and thrash him/her together, and truth be damned.)

In fact, if you must, go see Zeher again. The film isn’t much better in terms of film making, but it’s at least based on a much more entertaining original: In case you didn’t know it, Zeher is a total rip-off of a very fun crime caper named Out of Time starring Denzel Washington. Although Emraan Hashmi is no Denzel, the Bhatts at least know how to pull off a ‘copy’ passably. And that hit song, Yeh Lamhe, isn’t bad either.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is definitely not the ideal title for a movie when you’re trying to do an SMS booking, which is what I do at multiplexes for movies these days. The film’s based on the series of books of the same name, which, frankly, didn’t do much for me.

The real reason I watched the movie was for Jim Carrey. I absolutely dig the guy’s performances. Yes, he gets on your nerves, under your skin, gives you the creeps, whatever – which is exactly the point! That’s why he’s so effective as an actor, because he gets you to feel so strongly about the characters he plays – or, okay, just about the actor playing those characters, which, frankly, is not that different in the kind of TP entertainers he usually makes. I absolutely enjoyed his Liar Liar, Dumb and Dumber, and which was the one with the foul-mouthed wife-stealing dwarf? Terrific stuff.

He’s also a brilliant serious actor. Don’t take my word for it: Go see a movie called Man On The Moon based on a true story. Brilliant performance by Carrey, Oscar-worthy.

(I don’t like him as much in the semi-serious movies like The Truman Show, though he’s watchable even there, because they’re neither here nor there. The whole point of Carrey is excess. Holding him back is okay, but it’s sort of a waste. But then again, his very emotionally withholding role in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was so powerfully moving too – and if you haven’t seen that wonderful film, then run, don’t walk, and get it on DVD now, man, it’s a real winner.)

If you hate Carrey, there’s lots of him to hate in Lemony Snicket. He plays, like, half a dozen roles. And all brilliantly, camping it up totally, with get-ups and costumes and stuff. I mean, he IS the film. Except for that adorable ‘biter’ baby, he walks away with the whole shebang.

It’s also a reasonably entertaining fantasy thriller, but it can be a bit down at times. I mean, the whole “here’s the bad news, and here’s the worse news” style of the storytelling actually succeeds and gets really depressing at times, which is not exactly what you want from a children’s fantasy flick – give me Harry Potter’s emotional realism anyday – but the production is so sumptuous, the tricks and twists and SFX so inventive, you can do worse than pass your afternoon with this cupcake.

Hitch is about what you’d expect from a Hollywood romantic comedy. But for once, I actually liked Will Smith. He pulls off a very genuine, sincere turn in this predictable by-the-numbers, but still-entertaining, chick flick.

Of course, in the end, the fat guy (the Albert Brennerman character played by Kevin James) steals the show. Man, that guy is a hoot!

It’s a movie you’d want to take your boyfriend to, or your girlfriend, depending on what sexual role you’re occupying right now.

:~)

Apr 19, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Nine Books, and such a long journey

For those of you who asked, here’s a list of the nine books in my Mahabharata series.

1. the seeds of war
2. as the blind king watched
3. the forest of stories
4. while warlords speak of peace
5. when the blue god awakens
6. tear this mighty land asunder
7. bathed in the blood of brothers
8. bid the dead return
9. a thin line between heaven and hell

As you know, there were 18 parvas (sections) in the original Mahabharata.

These 9 books don’t correspond exactly to two parvas apiece, as some parvas were very long, and others very short. This is entirely my restructuring.

As you can see from the prologue which I’ve posted on this blog, my Mahabharata begins, briefly, with Bhishma-pitama lying on the bed of arrows on the field of Kurukshetra. That moment actually comes towards the very end of the Mahabharata.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m telling the story backwards. Or cutting up the timeline like Quentin Tarantino. It just gives you an idea that I’m restructuring according to character and history, sticking to the spirit but certainly not the letter of the original Vyasa Mahabharata.

Those of you who have read the original Vyasa Mahabharata – the edition I recommend most is the Ganguli translation, which is available in four massive paperback volumes in Indian bookstores – would know that even in densely packed pages, a straightforward prose translation comes to nothing less than around 5,000 large printed pages.

Or around 3 million words.

I’m still not exactly sure how long my retelling will be. But it will certainly be longer than that, as I’m attempting a much more dramatic style, more along the lines of the best Indian historical fiction, rather than the condensed abridgements that are more usual.

Incidentally, for those of you interested in such minor (but significant) details, the section headings in my Mahabharata are taken from famous books once again.

If you recall, in my Ramayana, I’d taken the titles of famous science fiction novels as my section headings: E.g. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Childhood’s End, etc.

In my Mahabharata, I’m paying homage to Indian English authors.

So, for instance, in Book 1: the seeds of war, the section headings are:

1. the last burden
2. the enigma of arrival
3. midnight’s children

There’s lots more to tell, and as and when I find a moment, I’ll be glad to post more updates here and share with you whatever news I can.

Meanwhile, do keep your emails and comments coming in, either through the Feedback page on Epic India, or by posting a comment here on the Blog.

In case you don’t know it already, it’s that steady stream of encouragement from you that gives me the shakti to go on.

This is a collaboration, my friends. For no one person can tell a story that belongs to an entire nation, unless that entire nation supports him as well.

Support me with your emails and comments, even if it is to nitpick or to point out a mistake, or just speak your mind freely.

Unlike certain other self-declared champions of freedom who go to war to enforce peace, India is truly a free country. Because we enjoy freedom of the spirit, and that is true freedom.

And now, I’m going back to work.

Hopefully, once I’m done, this will stand as a Mahabharata every Indian will be proud to have read, and to possess.

After all, it is the greatest story in the world.

And only incidentally, the longest as well.

Wish me luck and send me your prayers. I’ll need them to complete such a long journey.

Apr 14, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Bhishma On The Bed Of Arrows: An exclusive excerpt from Ashok K. Banker’s Mahabharata

An exclusive excerpt from The Seeds of War: Book 1 of The Mahabharata by Ashok K. Banker. (c) Ashok K. Banker 2005. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce, copy, email, or quote any or all of the following text, unless you have written permission from the author.



//om ganesha namaha//

//jaya jaya jaya jaya hai//

//prologue//

the last burden

And so it ends.

Upon this battlefield strewn with the butchered corpses of princes and kings, peasants and priests, shepherds and warlords, bloody limbs intertwined in the grotesque intimacy that makes all men brothers and equal as the gods intended us to be, and as we staunchly refused to be in life.

This is where I shall die today.

For it is given unto me to choose the time and place of my own death, and no power in all the worlds known and unknown could cause me to release my hold upon life’s warm hilt until I chose to do so.

I shall choose so today.

It is time to end this mad dance of days and nights, snuff out the sputtering torches, and pull close the drapes across the windows of my soul. I am done playing the dice game of flesh and fever some call living. I seek emancipation. The cool soft touch of an eternal pillow to replace this bed of arrows on which I lie now, placed at my own request that I may not touch the earth until my time of passing. My soul’s release from the endless cycle of births and rebirths, unshackling these invisible chains of dharma that bind me and you and us all to the eternal wheel of time.

Dwaipayana, my friend.

Hear my last words, wise one. Chronicler of the sacred Vedic texts. Most gifted of poets.

Someday, you will write the chronicle of these days at the end of one age and the start of another. This bitter cusp of history which birthed one era from the blood-spattered womb of another dying one. The Age of Kali has begun. As predicted, it began with great bloodshed and the most terrible war ever waged. This battle of brothers on the field of Kurukshetra that pitted a once-united land against itself and sundered the proud heart of the Bharata nation as nothing else ever did before, nor will again.

You will tell this tale. For it is the bloodsmirched foundation upon which the future of this great people shall rest forever and even the loftiest tower that kisses the sky must acknowledge the firm earth upon which its proud eminence stands. It is the history of the Bharata nation and its people. It is the chronicle of our days and our lives. Within its pages, you will tell everything worth telling about life and love, and everything else that matters. What is not to be found within its pages, will not be found anywhere else.

It will be the fifth Veda, recorded, studied, debated, and retold endlessly from now to the end of days. I have no doubt it will be your greatest achievement.

Perhaps you will call it simply Bharata. Or, as scribes are wont to do, embellish that simple title with some flowery flourish of grandeur. Add a suitable prefix or suffix. History of the Bharata nation. Battle of Bharata perhaps. Great War of Bharata even.

For after all, at the heart of the story, there is a great battle, a terrible war. The mother of all wars ever fought in the history of the world, now and forevermore, comparable to no other war, past or future. Though countless scribes shall wrack their feverish minds to attempt to match the grisly glory of this true historical tale, none shall succeed. For truth is always fiercer than fiction. And this fiction is truth itself.

And so, if it pleases you, if it does not offend your artistic sensibility, then I would ask of you that you pen a title that conveys not just the bloodshed and the suffering, the agony and misery at the end, the pain and the conflict.

That you give it a name such that conveys that ultimate meaning, the secret kernel that lies at the journey’s end. That pot of gold at the end of that very long rainbow. Dwaipayana, name it such that you convey the glory as well as the grist. The pride as well as the pomposity. The majesty as well as the muck. The regal splendour as well as the offal-spattered reality. The beauty and the darkness. The nobility and the deceit. The passion and the poison. The sacrifices and the betrayals.

Portray both sides with equal vigour. For there is no right or wrong in this history of the mother of all wars. No good and no evil. The best of them did the worst of things to achieve their righteous goals, the worst of them sometimes behaved nobly when it mattered most. Here, you will find no mindless evils or secret villains lurking behind the scenes, nor will you find pristine heroes with unsullied hands – when war erupts, all involved must equally shoulder the heavy burden of blame, the way that four shoulders shall equally carry the weight of my corpse, the last burden.

In war, there are no heroes, not even those who count themselves among the gods. War makes wretches of us all. Participation itself is a crime against nature; condoning the crime is participation. Not even blind kings who sit in distant palaces, hearing rumours of battlefield tales from their faithful heralds are blameless; and even the deva who watches the carnage from his heavenly chariot shares in the immortal shame of this splendid blasphemy.

Give it a name that conveys the terror and pride and unending sorrow of that as well. Better yet, a name that mocks the fleeting triumph while commenting on the irony that all are losers here in the end.

Call it Jaya.

Victory.

After all, it is a tale about the victory of the spirit over the frailties of flesh. The triumph of dharma over a-dharma. The joy of winning the just fight, the true cause.

A victory of truth and justice. The greatest triumph ever won by any mortal being.

And yet, victory itself is such a paltry prize for the decimation of entire bloodlines and the murder of brother nations. A lewd license for misguided fools who would slaughter their neighbours in the name of granting them freedom: Ha! Freedom? Yes. The ultimate freedom – freedom from life! In the thicket of such lies nestles the seed of mankind’s demise: burn the bush, and you will truly be free. Free of war. That is the only freedom that matters.

I know this now at the end, I who have waged more wars than any president of decadent plutocracies.

The only true Jaya is victory over war itself.

An end to violence.

If it pleases you, call it by that ironic, self-effasive title. Jaya. It will please a dying man’s vanity.

And now, Dwaipayana, it is time.

These are my last breaths. I prepare myself to go across the river. Across my mother’s breast.

I hear her voice calling me now. If you listen closely, you may hear it too, sussurating like the ocean, like a mother’s lullaby at bedtime.

She does not call me by the name you know me by. Not Bhishma. Or Bhishma-pitama. That was a title given to me for the vow I took. Bhishma: He Of The Terrible Vow. Pitama, for I was a forebear to all of them. (Even though–chuckle–you, my friend Dwaipayana, you were their forebear in truth.) Bhishma-pitama they called me, out of love and respect. And I bore that title with honour until now.

But it is time to reclaim my true name.

Devavrata.

I have waited a lifetime to hear that name called. To hear my mother the river take human form once more and call out my name. Summon me back to her warm motherly embrace. The cool welcoming waters of Ganga await me.

I go now, Dwaipayana. There. I have drawn my final breath. Hear now my last word and your first…

Jaya.

Apr 14, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Now Showing: Miss Congeniality 2, Phantom of the Opera, Lucky: No Time For Love

Movie-packed weekend. Making the most of a little downtime I had before getting back to another bout of hard writing.

There’s also something happening on the movie front in my own career that I can’t talk about in detail right here and now, but which has kindled the film flame in me again – not that it ever died out, but it sort of smouldered in embers for a while.

More about the personal film thingie when I can – sorry, guys, but I really can’t say much more than that.

All I can say for now is that yes, to answer some of the queries put to me by curious fans and a journalist or two recently, there has been interest in a Ramayana film adaptation, a Vertigo film adaptation, a film related to my Mahabharata – even before it’s published! – and two other film projects that are not based on any book by me.

Well, one’s based on a series of short stories published a few years ago, one of which you read right here on this blog a few days ago, but the film being discussed is a story unto itself, essentially based on an original script.

The script in question is more or less written in rough draft, and it only remains to see whether the producer is serious enough to put his money where his heart is. If it doesn’t work out, as movie thingies often don’t, well, I think the ’script’ is publishable in itself.

Only time will tell, and so will this blog…

Check back regularly and you’ll be the first to know, when I know.

Coming back to last week’s releases.

Miss Congeniality 2 wasn’t a patch on the first film.

That one, for those of you who saw it, was a pleasant slap in the face. After a series of forgettable films that did nothing for her career – and trust me, however big a star you may be, a few bad films can really trash your rep in Hollywood: look at what happened to Winona Ryder, or Alicia Silverstone, and too many others to count on all your fingers and toes – Sandra Bullock bounced back big-time with that charming character comedy.

Where Miss Congeniality worked was in its irreverence toward beauty pageants, now akin to holy papal massess to some people. I still remember writing a column for Bombay Times (I was their very first columnist, can you believe it?) within a few months of its bewildered birthing, in which I roundly lashed out at beauty contests.

The editorial staff in Times of India was (allegedly) so outraged at my criticism of the beauty biz, there was a one-day pen-down protest strike. They demanded that I rewrite the column, taking back my criticism of the pageant.

I refused to rewrite the column and resigned from it instead. It was one of my prouder moments in an otherwise unremarkable career churning out hackwork with my picture over the byline.

Anyway, so Miss Con2 tries hard to revive the magic of the original, but fails quite miserably. Oh, it has a few nice moments, the cast is wonderfully watchable, the whole thing is enjoyable TP, but at the end you wonder what the heck you were thinking.

I mean, it’s not even a good date film.

I also made the mistake of seeing it at Suburbia, at Shopper’s Stop, Bandra. Which happens to be part of the Movietime chain of theatres in Mumbai. These guys routinely ’shuffle’ prints.

Now, for those of you who don’t know about the backdoor intricacies of the film exhibition biz, ’shuffling’ is what used to be done back in the old glory days of Rajesh Khanna megahits, when anything more than a hundred prints was considered enormously risky in the film distribution biz, and even when a film shot through the roof in ticket sales and exhibitors (theatre owners to you) began clamouring for more prints, the film labs couldn’t cope with the demand and deliver prints fast enough.

(There were really only two or three film labs worth their rep back then, Famous at Tardeo, Adlabs at Dadar, and Prasad down in Chennai.)

So, when a film unexpectedly went through the roof in sales, what smart exhibitors did was time the number of shows so that the same film was scheduled to start at, say, 7 a.m. in one theatre (yes, that’s ‘a.m.’, people would come in their lungees, with neem ke daathun clenched between their teeth), and at 7.30 in another nearby theatre.

They would start the film at the first theatre, then, when the first reel got over, a peon on a cycle (or scooter or bike) would rush it to the second theatre. And so on, the whole day long.

I still remember hearing from one CP (Central/UP) territory distributor about how, for one Amitabh Bachchan film, the last reel was delayed when the peon had an accident en route. So the theatre owner actually went up on stage and narrated the last reel, sound effects and all, to the impatient audience!

Movietime group in Mumbai must be especially nostalgic about those halcyon days of Hindi cinema, because they still follow the ’shuffling’ practise. Except that they don’t shuffle reels one by one, they shuffle the whole print.

Even so, as usually happens sooner or later, there’s a delay, usually because of Mumbai traffic.

That happened on Friday, and so Miss Con2 started half an hour late.

But the amazing thing was that the theatre was almost empty when we went in at showtime, viz. 8.15 p.m.

But by 8.40 when the movie finally started, it had actually got full!

If I hadn’t heard the staff arguing bitterly over a cellphone about the delayed ’shuffle’ print, I’d have thought they actually planned the delay to sell more tickets.

Phantom of the Opera was a much better outing. And INOX doesn’t shuffle prints, god forbid. The holy grail of movie going in Mumbai – Rs 180 per ticket, guys, what do you expect?! – emphasizes perfection in the movie going experience, and delivers it too.

The movie was sumptuously produced. The score was the old Andrew Lloyd Webber schmaltz, which I’d heard a hundred times before – I went through a Broadway phase during which I could sing any of a hundred Broadway hits and even starred in an amateur production of King & I at Sophia. Got some great reviews too – but the money and artistry thrown on the screen more than made up for the kitschy score and storyline.

It was an entertaining experience if not as good an adaptation (or as good a play to begin with) as Weber’s Evita, which was a true pop masterpiece, in my opinion.

The last lucky movie to get my patronage was the new Salman Khan starrer, Lucky. As you can imagine, I’m not exactly the Salman Khan fan club president, but I don’t dislike the guy either.

At least the film had no pretensions to intellectualism or even to being good cinema. It just set out to entertain, foolishly, ludicruously, incongruously, but entertain it did.

At least in the first half. The second half meandered into utter stupidity, redeemed only by the wonderful Russian locations.

But the surprise package of the movie was Sneha Ullal. Better known to the local media as Miss Aishwarya Rai 2.

Forget the obvious resemblance to Hash Ash.

Ullal is actually a very charming actor. She has an innocence and delicacy that made her turnout as an waiflike schoolgirl believable and endearing.

And she has the whole package. Can dance beautifully, looks good in every kind of outfit (including a tartan schoolgirl mini of course, mercifully with thick leggings, god save us from the Deepal Shaw showshah). Can actually act decently. And pulls off an entire film in which she’s onscreen for every single important scene, barring a few minor asides.

In fact, she actually outshines Salman, despite his die hard efforts to pour on the rafish charm and sly humour in the first half. Which is saying something.

First-time directors Radhika Rao and Vinay Sapru also did a decent job at their pacing. Their dance numbers were marvelously designed, with the production design itself providing more eye candy than a dozen blonde strippers. Lovely looking scenarios. If only they’d spent as much talent and time on their script, they might have had a film that made sense and touched more than just the peripheral rims of our hearts.

As it was, Lucky was an incomplete film. A two-act story that desperately needed a third act, you still came away heaving a sigh of relief. There’s something about Salman at 40 romancing a 17-year sweetie (who looks 17 years old or less) that’s vaguely discomfiting.

Maybe Rao and Sapru knew that, or maybe they forgot that a Hindi film needs to do more than set up a story and have a few thrills – the climax, guys, you need a real climax, about emotional drama and character arcs, not just Dr. Zhivagoish races through the Russian countryside and “I love you’s” at the end.

I enjoyed the film in parts, and then forgot about it the moment I was out of the theatre.

Which is about all you can expect of most Hindi films, sadly.

We can do better, guys. We should.

Apr 11, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

In The Shadow of Her Wings: A short story

(This story originally appeared in Interzone in 2000; it was later reprinted in Year’s Best Fantasy 2 edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn S. Cramer, in the prestigious French anthology L’Atalante, and online on Infinity Plus. Is it science fiction, fantasy, political fiction, socio-sexual fiction, or…just a short story? I’ll leave that to you to decide.

PS: As always, you’re free to link to this page, but no copying, in part or whole, please. (c) Ashok K. Banker 2005. All rights reserved.)

In The Shadow of Her Wings
by Ashok Banker

Dravid expected Kali border security to be much tighter than it was. All he got was a body search that was routinely thorough, and a few old-fashioned tests and checks. It reminded him of a visit he had made as a young rightwing Hindu activist to an Indian nuclear weapon testing facility back in 1998, after the Pokhran atomic tests. His briefings had been correct in this respect: Kali did not seem to have much use for 21st century safe-care.

The Border guards finished with him in a few minutes then led him down into the basement of the Border Post and on through a concrete corridor that was at least a kilometre long in his estimation. Although there were far too many turns to be certain: It could be twice as long, or half. He was surprised at the absence of defenses. After all the build-up, it was an anti-climactic letdown. Could the disputed area truly be this easy to infilterate? A single platoon of Black Cat commandoes armed with nominal safe-care weaponry could take this border post and entrance in a few minutes, he estimated. The dozen-odd border guards he had seen above ground had borne no visible weapons. Ridiculously easy.

Then he remembered the first and longest of his briefings.

Shalinitai, the renegade Kaliite-turned-consultant to the Disputed Territories Task Force (DTTF) had commented on this very fact during her lecture on Kali’s political history: “Do not be fooled by Kali’s apparent lack of defenses. Like the Goddess after whom it is named, the disputed region that aspires to nation status under the name of Kali is armed with something far more dangerous than physical weaponry. She is armed with the power of the spirit. The power of faith.”

Dravid had resisted the urge to yawn. He had heard this kind of “empty-hand-spirit-power” mania too many times to even give it credence by mocking it. He had also seen any number of similarly deluded cults and spiritual blindfaithers walk like fools into the trajectory of safe-care weapons, only to have their very real physical bodies torn to shreds by unspiritual projectiles and explosives that needed no faith in invisible deities to perform their lethal function. Faith might move mountains; but lasers cut flesh. And without flesh to sustain it, there was nothing left to harbour faith.

Sensing his bored skepticism, the renegade had paused and sighed softly. Almost resigned to his indifference, she had added, “Kali exists only because the people support its existence and because India is still a democracy. That is a far more formidable defence than any safe-care arsenal.”

This he found more acceptable. It was a political argument, one of the classic cornerstones of every nationwide cult that was allowed to fester in the armpit of a republic under the guise of freedom of faith and right to political dissension. There had been an adversarial gleam in her dark eyes as if challenging him to challenge this statement. But Dravid was too much of a cynic to waste time on political arguments either. As far as he was concerned, they could dispense with the briefings and motivational lectures. He didn’t need the comfort of political conviction to help him do his job.

Assassination was murder no matter what the justification. The only motivation he needed was the paycheck. As if sensing this from his lack of risibility, Shalinitai had paused in her briefing. Deviating unexpectedly from her subject, she had poured herself a glass of plain water and said,

“You will find no resistance when you go to assassinate Durga Maa. It will be the easiest assassination you have ever committed.”

Dravid had waited for the punchline he knew was coming. Moral lectures always had a punchline.

“It’s living with the knowledge of your act that will make the rest of your life unbearable,” she said.

He hadn’t smiled. He hadn’t needed to. She knew the smile was there, behind his inscrutable face. He read the awareness in her eyes and sought the inevitable frustration she must feel after having made her strongest argument and failed. There was none. Only a faint glimmer of sympathy.

“I pity your task, assassin,” she had said. He hadn’t smiled at that either. He had been pitied before too. It was one of the most predictable responses, apart from self-righteous rage.

The corridor curved one final time and ended abruptly in the entrance to a very narrow stairwell. Dravid drew his large frame in to accomodate the inconveniently low ceilings and close walls. As they climbed, their footfalls echoed jarringly in the confined space. The short lithe, smaller-built female guards moved easily upwards, setting a hard pace for him to match. He had visited enough ancient Indian fortresses to understand the principle: Invaders would be forced to attack in single file, crouched awkwardly low. A single guard could defend the stairwell, and the piled bodies of the wounded and dead would make progress even more tortuous.

It was a virtually unimpregnable defense – a thousand years ago. He glimpsed tiny slits in the wall and ceilings, and recalled similar apertures all along the corridor. He had taken them for air vents at first but now understood that they were in fact guard posts. The corridor was lit from above, illuminating him and the guards as they climbed endlessly, but effectively concealing the watching guards stationed behind the walls.

Dravid wasn’t impressed. Medieval subterfuge and manual defenses were no match for modern safe-care. A single safe-care biogas capsule, delivered by any number of methods into the corridor, could wipe out the entire garrison of unseen defenders. The self-consuming bio-gases would take barely three seconds to render the air safe again and that would be the end of Kali’s stupidly outdated defense system. He had climbed more than a thousand steps and was suffering from the bent posture and elbow-and-shoulder-bruising closeness of the concrete walls when the stairwell finally widened and rose high enough for him to straighten up. The alcove resembled a small circular chamber in a stone tower, again of obviously medieval design.

It was ironic in a way, he thought as the guards led him through a series of corridors and transitional chambers. Whatever little he had seen of Kali so far was clearly modelled on the architecture of medieval India. Yet Kali itself went to great pains to insist it was not part of India. Not according to the 700,000-odd renegades who had taken refuge in this tiny pocket of disputed territory, defying Indian national laws and international sanctions to declare its independence as a sovereign nation in its own right.

To these cultist fanatics, this little area of Central India bordering the legitimate Indian states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa was the nation of Kali, a concept as fiercely independent as the concept of Israel had become after the Nazi pogroms of World War II, almost three quarters of a century earlier. The world’s only all-woman nation. To the Indian Government, though, this was simply Disputed Territory, just as areas of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir had once been designated before the ReMerger with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal ten years ago. United India could not afford to sanction a Kali, let alone acknowledge its legimitacy. That was why he was here now. To end the problem by rooting out the source.

Destroy the brood-mother and the species dies out.

The guards fell back, surprising him. He could not conceive of a reason why he should be allowed to proceed unescorted. Yet when he turned to look at them questioningly, the one who had led the detail, a short, darkskinned muscular woman with scar tissue obscuring her left cheek and neck, pointed unmistakeably down the corridor. He was to proceed alone.

Dravid shrugged, amused at yet another ludicruously amateurish security lapse, and walked on. He had gone several hundred paces before he realized what was odd about this particular corridor. His footfalls made no echoes. The reason for this became clear when he reached the end of the corridor, another circular chamber.

A slit in the wall revealed not the darkness of the subterranean passage or the diffused top lighting. Instead it exposed a slice of brilliant blue sky. He was undoubtedly in a tower. He realized with a start that this was the very same edifice that he had seen on various sat-images during his briefings. One of several hundred such towers positioned at regular intervals along the border of the besieged territory, ringing the entire disputed territory like giant stone sentinels. They were believed to be guardian outposts constructed to watch over the Line of Control that demarcated Kali’s disputed landspace from the surrounding Indian territory.

“Envoy Dravid,” said the woman who was waiting in the sunlit tower chamber. “Please be seated.” She indicated a thin woven mat on the ground, identical to the one on which she was seated cross-legged in the yogic lotus posture. Dravid scanned the room and surrounding area and couldn’t believe his luck. No guards, no weapons, no defenses. In short, no Safe Care at all.

Dravid was unable to believe that his mission could be this easy to accomplish. He looked at the woman who was watching him calmly.

“I am Durga Maa,” she said. “The one you seek to assassinate. Tell me, Envoy, would you like to kill me at once, or would you like to maintain the pretence of a diplomatic debate for awhile?”

Dravid blinked rapidly.

She smiled. “I suggest that we get the assassination over with first. That way, your mind will be free to discuss the larger issues at stake here, without distraction.”

And she opened her arms in the universal Hindu gesture of greeting. “Sva-swagatam, Mrityudaata.” Welcome, Angel of Death.

Even if was a trap, as every meg of data in his mental archives said it must be, Dravid could not let the opportunity pass. His not to question why. His but to kill and fly. He hesitated only long enough to run one final scan-check. The result was the same as the previous three times. It was an ID-OK, confirmed through half a dozen cross-checks including a perfect DNA match. This woman seated before him was Durga Maa, the founder and leader of Kali. She was his target.

He used his thumbnail to circumscribe a tiny crescent-shaped incision in his left wrist and withdrew the reinforced silicon needle from his forearm. It was barely ten millimetres in diameter and he had to grip firmly. He drew it across his palm, wiping it clean of the tiny flecks of blood and gristle that coated it. Tinted to resemble a prominent vein, it was a translucent green that caught the sunlight as he moved across the chamber. He was at full alert now, his keenly honed senses prepared for any resistance or ambush. There was none. She smiled as he inserted the lethal tip of the needle between her ribs. Her breast was yielding and warm against his hand.

He pressed hard, brutally, and the entire 9-inch length entered her chest, sliding in easily. He pictured it puncturing her left lower chamber, spilling precious life-fluid. In her eyes, he watched the look of serenity flicker and fade. “Kali be with you,” she said. And then she was gone, her body slumped sideways, legs still locked in the yogic position. He kicked at her thighs, releasing their grip, and she sprawled out more naturally. Darkness pooled beneath her body.

He stood and looked around, unable to believe it had been this easy. He felt a qualm of unease. Her attitude, the knowledge that he was to assassinate her, her serene acceptance of her death, these were not things he was equipped to deal with. Even with the most fanatical of cult leaders, there was always the final struggle for survival, the organism’s instinct for self-preservation. But she had been truly ready. He pushed these thoughts from his head. The most difficult part still lay ahead. Escape. He had analyzed the possible options and they were all negative-rated. The least likely to fail (12.67%) was by blasting a hole in the wall of this tower and speed-climbing down the outside. But that was assuming the guards were armed and prepared for violent retaliation, which they didn’t seem to be. A circular stairway ran around the perimeter of the chamber.

Dravid went down the stone stairs quickly and silently, alert for the first sign of armed response. He descended to the next level, and found himself in an almost identical chamber. It was as sparsely furnished, with the same chick mats on the floor.

And a woman.

He stopped short at the sight of the woman. She was younger than Durga Maa, but premature greyness made her seem older at first glance. She was dressed similarly but not precisely the same way. He found no match for her in his records. She was also very beautiful.

She looked up as if she had been expecting him and indicated a bowl of steaming tea and two earthen cups. “Greetings, Envoy Dravid. With the demise of our beloved sister, I am now Durga Maa. Would you like to kill me at once, or will you partake of some refreshment first?”

And she opened her arms in that same gesture of acceptance.

Dravid thought it was a ploy at first. A delaying tactic intended to stall him until the guards arrived. But his internal systems showed nobody else approaching within a hundred-metre radius. No safe-care weaponry in the chamber. Nothing capable of doing him any physical harm. His system announced an ID match for the woman seated before him. With a rising sense of unease, Dravid checked and rechecked the scan results until he could no longer doubt them.

Somehow, in the space of a few seconds, she had changed her DNA structure internally, although her physical appearance remained the same. To all intents and purposes, she had become exactly what she claimed she was: Durga Maa, leader of Kali, down to the smallest twisted strand of genetic composition.

She poured tea for him. “You cannot comprehend how two women could possess the same identity. It is a scientific impossibility, you think.” She held the clay cup out to him. He made no move to take it. He was still running checks and rechecks to examine every variant possible, tapping into the orbital systems to access greater processing power and other archives. She set the cup down before the mat intended for him. “You are right,” she said. “Science cannot explain it. But faith can. There is only one Durga Maa – at a given point in time. But on her demise, her entire personality and being, what we like to call her aatma, passes to a successor. That is I.”

“Aatma,” he repeated scornfully. “You mean, soul?”

She poured tea for herself. Her movements were delicate, assured, and very pleasing to watch. She had a fine bone structure that would have been considered beautiful among North Indians, but far too Aryan and brahminical to South Indian eyes. “It does exist,” she said. “No matter that science cannot prove it does. I now possess Durga Maa’s soul, which makes me Durga Maa.” She gestured at herself.

“This physical shell is immaterial. It is the person within that matters. I am the avatar of Kali, just as Durga Maa herself was while she lived.”

Dravid chuckled softly. “Avatars and aatma. What is this? A TriNet Fiction? Save the spiritual rant for blindfaithers.”

She held the bowl up in both hands, Asian style. “You are sceptical,” she said. sipping tea. “It is to be expected. But I can establish this as a scientific fact which your technology can verify beyond doubt.”

She set the tea down on the floor and spread her arms in the same universal gesture of acceptance. “Assassinate me too. And see for yourself.”

He hesitated for barely a fraction of a second. Then decided he had nothing to lose. This time, he used the instrument at hand, smashing the tea cup and drawing the jagged clay edge across her jugular, severing it on the first try. He watched her bleed to death, spraying her life across the stone floor. The beam of sunlight shining through the jetting arc turned vermillion briefly.

Because he was curious and because it was the easiest option, he proceeded to the next lower level. There was another woman waiting in another chamber. This one was much older, with the wizened semi-oriental features of a North-Eastern Indian. A Mizo or a Naga. Descendant of the head-hunting tribes of the Indo-Burmese hills that had been converted to Christianity by relentless American Baptist missionaries a few generations ago. She did not speak as much the earlier one. But his scans showed once again that impossible change in DNA even while her physical appearance remained the same. He killed her with vicious efficiency, snapping her neck with a fierce twist of his powerful arms. This time, he observed the change after death closely.

His scans showed a change to another DNA structure. Not a change, he realized. A reversion to the woman’s original identity before she became the avatar of the Goddess. A rage swept through him, replacing the initial sense of bewilderment. This could not be happening. It was not part of the plan. It was a scientific impossibility. He took the stairs with athletic speed, reaching the next level an instant before the change occurred, and through the ‘eyes’ of his system he watched the conversion in progress, the very molecular structure of the ribonucleic strands altering. Then he killed the fourth avatar – for want of a better term – before she could even speak. She had a mole on her left eyebrow and the darkened skin and sallow features of a Malayalee. There was coconut oil on her hair and it smeared on his fingers as he held her skull and smashed it against the stone wall repeatedly. This went on for several more levels. Chasing the ‘aatma’ as it flew from woman to woman. Assassinating each new avatar of Durga Maa as she was genetically rebirthed.

By the twenty-third level, he found himself tiring. His clothes and body were soiled with blood and gristle as well as traces of each woman’s individual identity. Tea, coconut oil, sweater yarn, pooja threads, rangoli powder…. His systems showed that the tower was precisely one hundred stories high. Seventy seven more levels to go. And the sat scans had analyzed his first batch of data transmission: One hundred such towers ringed the perimeter of the disputed territory, each with a hundred levels. Assuming that each housed a successor, that meant a sum total of 10,100 women to be assassinated. He stopped and re-examined his options.

“It will be easier if you accept it,” said the 23rd avatar. A very diminutive young woman, barely more than a girl. A Maharashtrian, with the dark skin and black pupils of the Dalits of the Deccan Plain, descendants of the ostracized scheduled castes of the 20th century, the ‘untouchables’ that Mahatma Gandhi had renamed ‘harijans, children of God’ and whom Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar had renamed Dalits. She was weaving a shawl on a charkha, using her feet to grip the wooden spinney, and working steadily as she spoke. “The more you fight it, the harder it will be for you later.”

He spoke with barely concealed anger, his frustration getting the better of his legendary self-control. “How do you do it? You transmit the genetic coding through orbitals? But then how do you effect the morphing? This kind of technology doesn’t exist! It has to be some kind of illusion.” But no illusion could deceive the massive processing power that he had accessed to check and recheck the 22 ‘impossible’ transformations.

She worked the spinney, weaving the red, white and saffron strands of wool expertly as she spoke. “Is it so hard to accept, Envoy? You are Indian, like us. Not a Westerner with a mind fogged by science. You know that some things cannot be explained, only accepted.” He sat down wearily, his blood-splashed feet staining a pile of spotless white wool, not caring. She clucked her tongue and moved the wool aside, picking out the stained strands and putting them in a separate pile for cleaning later.

“All right,” he said, deciding there would be no harm in a brief theoretical discussion while his systems sought a more scientific explanation.. “Assume for the moment that you are all avatars of the Devi. But-”

“Nako re, baba,” she said. “No, my brother. We are only women. Ordinary mortal women. Only when the living avatar of the Devi dies, then the next of us in line takes her place. Samjhe? Understood now?”

She reminded him irritatingly of his mausi, a paternal aunt who was always completely self-assured and unplacable.

He gritted his teeth in frustration. “But how many times can it possibly happen? There has to be a limit!”

“Kashasaati limit?” she asked him in the matter-of-fact Maharashtrian way. “You know your religious mythology. A Goddess can be reborn infinite times, because a Goddess on the mortal plane is aatma, pure spirit. And an aatma cannot be killed. Read your Bhagwad Gita again. Weapons cannot cleave it, wind cannot blow it away, fire cannot burn it, water cannot dissolve it, earth cannot consume it, it is the soul immortal.”

He was silent. The very same mausi had taught him this exact same verse from the Gita, in the original Sanskrit. With very little effort he could recall her sitting cross-legged before the wooden chaupat propping up the oversize hand-calligraphed copy of the Bhagwad Gita, chanting the Sanskrit slokas in that maddening, unforgettable singsong manner.

“Then there is only one solution,” he said at last.

And stood up. She looked at him over the rims of her spectacles, pausing in her weaving. “I have to nuke you all. Wipe out the whole of Kali in one shot. That way, there won’t be any more bodies left for your damned Goddess to take refuge in.” He walked away from her then paused. He really should kill her. He had said too much. Perhaps she had some way of informing her compatriots, of mounting a defence against the genocide he proposed. But for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He consoled himself with the thought that he would be killing them all anyway in a few moments. As he walked away, the sound of the charka whirring began again behind him.

It took surprisingly long for him to secure the necessary permission to “salinate” the disputed territory. It was a final alternative listed in his command menu, and as the official Envoy to the rebels, he had the authority to take the decision. Kali had become a sore on the belly of United India over the last decade. The noises of commisseration from overseas had begun to sound more like rumbles of discontent, especially after so many American and European women had emigrated to the renegade ‘nation’. His superiors had anticipated the need for a final solution and had sent him in with all the necessary preparations in place. They wanted this problem solved now, one way or the other, before the tri-annual summit of Non-Aligned Independent Nuclear Nations the following week in New Delhi. He filed a charge of discovery of nuclear weapons and testing on Kali territory, proof of the renegades’ terrorist intentions and capacity. He initiated a program that simulated a crisis situation developing on his arrival in the disputed territory.

Reviewed later by the inevitable Human Rights panel, it would perfectly simulate a series of events in which all his accompanying officers and staffers were successively tortured and brutally killed by Kali terrorist troops and then he himself was taken on a tour of their formidable nuclear facility in order to inform and warn the world of Kali’s intention to strike blind at India. There would be holes unfilled, and gaps, but they would only add to the authenticity of the whole charade. The nuclear orbitals were positioned and armed, ready for release on his command. He had retreated through the tunnel by this time, almost at the peripheral guard base from which he had entered. The guards had offered no resistance at all, not even an attempt to stop him. He smiled at the absurdity of these people. And felt a rush of joy at their imminent destruction.

He triggered the nuclear orbital the moment he reached MSCD (minimum safe-care distance).

In an instant, the guady afternoon sky over the flatlands was obscured by the familiar blinding flash and then the rising mushroom cloud. He whistled as he walked to the Rimmer he had left parked on the Indian side of the Line of Control. There was a welcoming committee waiting to greet him, to shake the hand of the man who had finally ’solved’ the Kali problem.

He allowed himself a smug smile of triumph and was about to offer his hand in greeting when the change took him.

“Agent Dravid?” said the PM-General, his smile wavering as he saw his most celebrated safe-care executive stagger and raise a hand to his forehead. “Are you feeling quite well?”

Dravid swung around, staring at the billowing cloud that marked the 230 square kilometres of land that had housed 700,000 renegade women until a few seconds ago. He raised his fist and shook it, his mouth opening in the rictus of a soundless scream.

“Damn you,” he managed to choke out. And then the Change was done.

When he turned back to the PM-General, the anger and hate was replaced by an expression of such calm serenity that it startled the supreme leader of United India far more than any act or gesture of violence would have done.

“I am Durga Maa,” said the man formerly known as Envoy Dravid.

(c)Ashok Banker 2005. All rights reserved.

Apr 10, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Songs of Pain and Longing: Reviews of Closer, Damien Rice’s ‘O’, Jeff Buckley, Midival Punditz

My no. 1 fave track right now is Blower’s Daughter by Damien Rice. My other no. 1 (ha, get it? two no. 1’s!) is Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley. And my third no. 1 (whew! I must have flunked math for sure) is Dark Escape by Midival Punditz.

I’d play these three songs back to back all day long – if only my daughter didn’t insist on doing the same with Yeh Lamhe, and my son with, hmm, Yeh Lamhe.

Anyway, speaking of the first no. 1, Blower’s Daughter. It’s a mindblowing ballad with some of the most beautiful lyrics ever.

You’d expect that from Damien Rice, the Irish singer-songwriter who used to front Radiohead. But in this song, indeed, the whole album, ‘O’, he exceeds himself.

‘O’ is the album he wrote, produced, mixed, and performed all on his own, when his band and music company both refused to go the way he chose, which was more acoustic, more real, less ‘arranged’, less of the typical ‘alt rock’ formula sound – which is solid, filled-in arrangements with strong percussion and simpler rifts, changes and harmonies.

You can almost see why the label and his other bandmembers parted ways over his choice: ‘O’ is a very idiosyncratic album by commercial music standards (and despite its categorization, ‘alt rock’ today is just as commercial as mainstream ‘poprock’, the same way that lit-fic is as commercial a category as thrillers or fantasy).

The tracks are more about loss, longing, expressing inner feelings, baring the soul, rather than entertaining, enlightening. It’s a collection of raw, honest songs, sort of like the musical version of open heart surgery.

Its very personal sound comes partly from Rice’s own style, which is very Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, Lisa Hannigan (a fellow Irish singer who also features on some of the tracks on ‘O’), even 10,000 maniacs (remember them?), Natalie Imbruglia.

As my daughter put it, “a male Dido but with wierder music.”

Well put actually. Better than Dido (though I love Dido on a rainy day and a long drive – I mean her music, not her) and yes, the music can get a bit weird at times. Rice even uses disharmonies deliberately, to underscore the themes of disharmony between people, I guess. The results aren’t always successful, in my opinion, but they’re always worth listening to, and often, like with Blower’s Daughter, Cold Water, Cannonball, Lonelily, Sweet Avenue, Amie, and Perfume – hell, virtually all the album’s tracks – they’re truly memorable.

Give ‘O’ a chance, it’ll grow on you.

Or you’ll hate it the first time, and the tenth time you’ll hate it ten times more. In which case, move on, sister (or brother). There’s always Backstreet Boys.

Incidentally, when Rice’s label and band disagreed with him on the type of songs he wanted to do, he just walked away from Radiohead, bought some recording equipment home, and did the whole album in his bedroom, even mixing it right there on his comp.

You can hear the simplicity and purity in every song. I think it’s that stripped down purity that gives ‘O’ its uniqueness.

It’s an album that hasn’t been ’studiofied’, or over-produced. It reminds me so much of the first Tracy Chapman album, or Youssou N’Dour, and so many other great acts who could have soared like Johnny Livingstone Skygull if only they’d been allowed to roam free and wild as their talent required.

He was vindicated when the album went on to stay on the Irish music charts for a full solid year.
About Jeff Buckley, well, he’s more of the same, viz, soulful voice, heartrending melodies, and songs of loss and longing.

I don’t like everything he’s done. But Hallelujah ranks now as one of my all-time fave tracks. Despite the title, it has nothing to do with religion, unless it’s the religion of love and humanity we’re talking about.

But it’s a great, great song. Epic.

It’s used as the background track during the bowout sequence of the season finale of Season 1 of The O.C., the hot new TV series on DVD I was telling you about.

It’s one of those songs I can’t live without. It just makes the world more bearable, somehow, if you know what I mean.

It’s everything I want to say but can’t find the words for.

It does to me what Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne did when I first heard it – which was played by a guy named Cedric Serpes, a fellow copywriter in an ad agency named Chaitra back in, oh, I don’t know, 1985? – blew my mind and shot my spark plugs and made me see stars and the sun and the planets all aligned in a row all at once.

Other Jeff Buckley tracks you might like are Grace, Last Goodbye, Striptease, and Everybody Here Wants You. There are plenty more, so if you like his sound, you’re in for a real treat.

As for Midival Punditz, Dark Escape, well it’s a house music number, very evocative, moody, mildly erotic. Which is probably why I heard it first as background in a scene in a strip’s club.

I’m going to check out more by these guys, but even as a one-off, this is pretty cool.

It’s got a real mujra hall feel. And I say that even though I’ve been exactly once to a mujra hall (well, that’s one night, during which I toured a half-dozen mujra halls/dance bars across Bombay for an article on them). The article appeared in Gladrags (commissioned by them) and it was later reprinted in a certain, ahem, New York magazine which shall remain nameless.

Nope, I wasn’t in the strip club, haven’t ever been in one, not sorry to say. Though I’ve nothing against them. Just never been that desperate for work, frankly. And I really don’t know if people would actually pay money to see me take my clothes off – my wife sees me do it every night and she never throws so much as a five-rupee note!

Just kidding…

Seriously, though, the Midival Punditz track is used as background in a key scene in the new film Closer.

In fact, that’s where I heard Damien Rice properly for the first time too.

Blower’s Daughter plays over the opening sequence (and the ending sequence) of Closer, and from the very first sounds of that bluesy acoustic guitar, I was hooked.

The mood it sets for the film is so perfect, you’d think it was composed for the film. Those key lines, ‘Can’t take my eyes off of you…can’t take my mind off of you…’ capture the film’s primary theme – obsessive love – so beautifully.

Closer is the film that the Indian Censor Board has allegedly refused to certify. Which means that, without a certificate, even an ‘A’ (for Adults) label, the film won’t see release in India.

The strange thing is that Closer doesn’t have any real nudity or simulated sex. Sure, there’s this sequence in a strip club where we see a few topless dancers. But not much else.

Almost every sexual act is cut away, so we see the characters talking about having sex, or talking after having had sex (and both times with all their clothes on), and that’s it.

But where Closer does become potentially offensive for our Censor Board types is with its brutal honesty. It’s a film that’s about love shown raw, real, brutally true.

It’s about emotional nakedness, not physical nakedness. And that can be far more shocking and unsettling than just a pair of tits onscreen or a bare bum wagging.

The film is a heartbreaking love/hate story. Hate, because all love stories have to be about hate as well, haven’t they?

It’s based on the play of the same name, basically a four-actor piece. So most of the scenes are fairly stagey, with two people standing or walking about talking.

Talking about each other, sex, love, death, obsession, life…the things two attractive people of the opposite sex usually talk about in their most honest moments.

It’s about how we love, then screw it up, then try to unscrew-it up, and succeed, or fail.

About how we manipulate each other, use one another, deceive, betray – all for love. For need.

Because sex is greed. And greed is good. As well as bad.

It’s a beautiful, tragic film. Breaks your heart, especially when that Damien Rice song comes on again at the end and you realize that it’s over, that these four fools have gone round in the merry go round of love and come back to square one, and what the eff do they have to show for it?

Older and wiser. And sadder.

Beautiful. Brutal. True. Naked. In your face.

Brilliantly written – you’ll laugh at some of the lines, even though the things being said are so awful. You’ll want to cry even though the people onscreen are making such buffoons of themselves.

See it. You’ll think twice before hurting someone you love after you do.

And if you don’t, well, hey, at least you’ll know why it got banned in India.

Because we can take sex, we can take violence, we can even take sleaze in the name of entertainment.

What we can’t take, is honesty.

Apr 08, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Musings on new movies: Garden State, Be Cool, After the Sunset, and more

So the movie binge continues.

After the Sunset, on DVD, turned out to be a fun caper flick. Pierce Brosnan keeps a stubble (more grey than black, which is reassuring for us over-40’s) throughout the film but still manages to look cool and act sharp – or is it the other way around?

Don’t confuse it with the other film of (almost) the same title, After Sunset, which is the Ethan Hawke starrer sequel to Before Sunrise and is a lousy watch.

The Pierce Brosnan starrer is a crime caper about a diamond stealing couple, played by the Welshman and a very sexy Salma Hayek (who, mercifully, didn’t use her Frida eyebrow extensions) who are trying to retire.

They pull off one last caper, making a complete fool out of an FBI agent in the process, played by a very funny Woody Harrelson, and disappear into the sunset to enjoy their hard-stolen fortune on a tropical island, to enjoy each other’s company (in various states of undress) with plenty of umbrella drinks on glorious beachfronts.

But the FBI agent, or ‘feeb’ as their detractors like to call them, is determined to avenge the insult to his reputation and career. He tracks them down and confronts Brosnan with the allegation that he intends to steal the last of the famous Napolean diamonds from a luxury cruiser that’s about to dock at the island resort for a week.

Whether Brosnan actually intended to steal the diamond or not is irrelevant. He’s hooked now and the FBI agent dogs his every step, intending to wait till he makes a try for the stone, and then nab him in the act. It’s a cat-and-mouse game and the script throws in plenty of twists and turns, including a corrupt mayor who wants the diamond for himself.

The film is a fun watch, mainly because it never takes itself seriously, isn’t afraid to mix comedy with style, and delivers a glamorous and hilarious couple of hours worth of entertainment. Brosnan is terrific fun and Harrelson’s character and he have some really whacky moments. Hayek is eye-candy but then so is Brosnan, so who’s complaining?

Be Cool isn’t quite as cool or as fun as After the Sunset, but it’s a TP watch. For once, Travolta doesn’t take himself seriously (something he tends to do much more often than Brosnan, since we were just talking about the ex-Bond), and has a ball.

Be Cool is a sequel to Get Shorty, the very watchable movie based on the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name. If you haven’t read Leonard’s comic crime novels, you should know that he’s famous for his snappy, realistic dialogue.

There’s snappy dialogue on display in Be Cool. Oodles of it. And not all spewing from Travolta’s lips. There are at least two other characters who literally steal the show from under his feet. One’s the dude who plays the amateur-gangsta-rapper character. His performance and role itself is worth the price of the film. Watch his every move and if you don’t love it, sue The Blog.

Be Cool’s a fun movie too with a very trendy soundtrack, and at least three live performances: by Black Eyed Peas, Aerosmith and the movie character whose career Travolta is launching in the film. It’s a fun, leave-your-brains-at-home movie, and to prove it, Travolta and Uma Thurman even do a reprise of their famous samba from Pulp Fiction – and yes, the dude can still dance.

Garden State is on DVD and it’s well worth watching. This isn’t a TP movie though, and don’t be fooled by the teen-romance premise. It’s a film with serious intentions about the existentialism of American life – which, these days, has become a metaphor for human life, it seems.

Without getting into a rehash of the plot, I’d place it in the category of Donnie Darko, one of the better US movies I’ve seen in the past several years. Dark, brooding at times, and unafraid to make big philosophical statements about life, love and death.

The first two minutes should give you an idea of how different and dramatically serious the film is: It starts with the protagonist on a passenger airliner filled with screaming people, which is about to crash, and on the soundtrack we have a Sanskrit mantra praising Vakratundya, which is Ganesha.

How cool is that? Check it out. Popcorn is nice but sometimes you need a little fibre to round out your movie diet. I do.

Apr 04, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »