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My mother and I: An intensely personal note by Ashok Banker on his film project Beautiful Ugly (Expanded and Revised by Ashok on 22 June)

(This is a much longer and detailed version of the blogpost that appeared here earlier, expanded and revised at the request of so many of you. Thanks for your support – please keep the comments and emails coming. – Ashok.)

My mother married when she was 17.

A year later, she was left with a newborn son, namely me, without a husband, namely my father, and with the dreaded letter D forever affixed to her name. As in, ‘oh, that’s Sheila, she’s Divorced’ – the last two words always mouthed silently, as if speaking the dread word aloud might invoke the lord of doomed marriages.

A few years later, she was remarried, this time to a man closer to her sensibility, and with whom she shared a genuinely loving relationship, the character actor Bhagwandas Mulchand Luthria who was (and still is) better known by his Bollywood screen name Sudhir.

They enjoyed a few good years together, and she finally began to emerge from the shroud of darkness that had threatened to engulf her earlier.

I was a young boy at that time and some of the happiest memories of my childhood are from that period – correction, my only happy memories.

She was a fairly successful model with a very wide circle of high-society friends, several of whom went on to become big names in the film world. Some like Dev Anand and Sunil Dutt were already stars.

Others, like close friend Vinod Khanna, Feroz Khan and his brothers, Vinod Mehra, the Ramsey brothers, and several more, went from strength to strength before her eyes.

It was a wonderful time, filled with parties, socializing, friends galore, and our house at Worli as well as my grandmother’s house at Sankli Street, Byculla where we often went, were always bustling with people and fun.

Those of you who have read my 1994 novel Byculla Boy will have read about this very period in my and my mother’s life.

Sometimes, I think about what it might have been like, had things gone on that way. I think they would have been pretty good in the long run. Sure, my mother and my foster-father Sudhir would have fought a lot, but they would also have cared a lot, and somehow they would have worked things out. I think we would all still be together, one small, mostly happy family.

But two things happened that changed things forever.

Dangerous Liaision

The first was a relationship my mother had with another man, a struggling film director. I don’t know how and where and when it happened, I just know it did because my grandmother (maternal) told me about it later, and my mother acknowledged it. My mother conceived a child by that illegitimate relationship and it being illegitimate, she had to get rid of it.

Now, some sections of the media have chosen to highlight that affair and the man involved. In retrospect, I can see why they chose to do so: the struggling film maker that my mother encountered almost thirty years ago is today one of the biggest names in Bollywood, Mahesh Bhatt.

But the truth is, the fact that she was involved with Bhatt or with some other completely unknown person is totally irrelevant.

To me, looking back, it wasn’t the liaision itself that damaged her, but the unwanted pregnancy that unwittingly resulted – a pregnancy that my mother told me, even the man responsible had no clue about. (It was my grandmother who confirmed the identity of the man, by the way, and only then did my mother admit it was he.)

You see, my mother had been born a Roman Catholic. (Her birth name was Sheila Margaret D’Souza, she used the name ‘Sheila Ray’ as her professional modelling name.) And in the RC faith, abortion is considered a mortal sin, akin to murder.

Despite her vices, my mother couldn’t bear to commit that final transgression and take a human life. In the end, ironically, it was my grandmother who prevailed upon her. How could she give birth to one man’s child while married to another man? Bad enough she was a divorcee already.

The argument that finally convinced her: ‘Think about Ashok-baba, what will people say about him? And about the child itself? It will be a bastard, no?’ or words to that effect, in my grandmother’s colourful Anglo-Indian idiom.

And so she aborted the child. Or tried to. My grandmother, practising nurse of several decades experience, told me later that the child was removed alive, and in a ‘viable state’. It was given away to a fisherman and his wife. Incredible as that sounds, it was what she told me, and I believe it to be the truth to this day, because she had simply no reason to lie. If you knew my grandmother, as many people still remember her, she never lied or feared to speak the truth.

“They Shoved Me Out of A Black Car�

Perhaps my foster-father suspected that she had had an illicit affair, because I recall their fights grew really bad around that time. But then something happened that made an affair seem utterly insignificant.

I’ve written about and talked about this any number of times now, but that doesn’t diminish the pain of saying it: At a high-society party in a posh Mumbai highrise apartment, in the Carmichael Road skyscraper Usha Kiran, my mother was drugged, raped by four men and photographed in the act, and afterwards the rapists attempted to blackmail my foster-father.

A strong woman with the physical ability to resist as effectively as any man, even my foster-father later agreed, seething with rage, that “only powerful drugs could have forced her to succumb to such abuse�.

She was driven home in the early hours of the next morning, and shoved out of a black car onto the street in front of our then-home, G Block of Venus Apartments on Worli Seaface.

Her life ended that night. She suffered a total mental breakdown, and never really recovered. When she recovered a little, she took to alchohol in a manner that was clearly suicidal. In time, my foster-father went his separate way, and my mother’s family grew apart from us, and in the end, my mother and I were left to fend for ourselves. She was written off as a drunk, mad woman.

And I, as her barely teenage son, was laughed at to my face. Family members would look at me and click their tongues sympathetically and say to one another, ‘Poor bugger.’ In their eyes, I was doomed.

Road to Reparation

After years of struggling with doctors and alcohol clinics and home therapies, my mother finally passed away in 1990. I was driven by a powerful urge to write down a part of her story, and my own, in the form of two semi-fictional novels called Vertigo and Byculla Boy.

In those days, writing novels hardly paid anything, but writing the books gave me a great sense of relief. Because I had recorded it, and by recording it, I had proved it had happened. That my mother had existed. That we had endured those things.

Now, 15 years after my mother’s death, I’m making a film. In a sense, it’s a sequel of sorts to both Vertigo and Byculla Boy. It’s titled Beautiful Ugly and it tells the story of a film maker named Ashok Banker who sets out to make a film about his mother and the traumatic rape that destroyed her life, as well as his own story of survival.

I’m that film maker, of course, and the film is about me making the film. In the film, Ashok is asked the question: “But how can you make such a film? How can you tell the world about such things? What would your mother think?�

My mother? She was labelled an alcoholic, a madwoman, a slut. Nobody acknowledged what had happened to her, nobody attempted to track down the culprits, bring them to justice, nobody even tried to help her, or her teenaged son. Not even my birth-father, who wouldn’t even pay my school fees in my last two years of school (he had never supported my mother and me financially) or help defray her funeral expenses.

Yesterday, while I was writing this piece, I got a call from one Guiseppe Rodricks. He was the priest who had given extreme unction (last rites) on my mother. Though no longer a priest now, he offered to help me in any way in the film I was making.

“She was a very troubled soul,� he said. “By telling her story you will bring closure to yourself and grant her soul peace. I will do anything to help you make this film.� He is one of several dozen people, known and unknown, famous and ordinary, who have made similar offers of support and assitance. Their help is going to be invaluable, for I making this film with my own resources, and am not following any of the traditional methods for financing or producing films that are normally used in this country. Let’s be blunt: this is not only NOT a Bollywood movie, it’s not a commercial film either.

I don’t know whether the film I make will even be worth watching. What I do know is that I must make it. Not to achieve justice because that would be pointless now.

Not to achieve revenge, because I don’t believe in vengeance.

But simply to tell the world that this wonderful, intelligent, witty, beautiful, charming woman once lived, she loved, she filled the world with her crooked-teeth smile (always meaning to have them fixed), with her loud horsey laugh, her never-ending bad-puns and pj’s, and a few terrible men did something to her that broke her spirit and destroyed her mind.

And men like that are still around, still attacking women even in the highest echelons of urban society, and getting away scot-free because of the unwritten code of silence that shrouds such things.
That code of silence that was responsible for condemning my mother after the rape to an alcohol wasteland that no number of AA meetings could rectify, no amount of catechisms could cure. By ignoring her pleas for help, by refusing to talk about what had been done to her or even acknowledge it – for as most rape victims know all too well, nobody really wants to hear about it – and by subtly or overtly blaming her for somehow bringing it upon herself, even the people around her were a party to her destruction too.

With this film, I intend to shatter that code of silence. To show that these things happen, and this is how they happen, and this is how we gloss it over, or ignore it, and pretend it doesn’t exist.

It exists. I’m living proof of it. Despite the odds, despite those tongue-clicking relatives who wrote me off, I survived, and I lived to tell the tale, as they say. And now it’s time to tell it.

Because, if I don’t, then who will?

Media Madness: A Footnote

One of the things that have happened in the past few days since I began talking about Beautiful Ugly and the events it covers, is the huge amount of nationwide and (now) international publicity that has sprung up about the story.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of goodwill messages have been coming to me by email, phone, sms, and personally. The overall consensus is overwhelming: ‘Make the film, show the truth, you’re doing a very brave thing, you will put your mother’s soul at peace.’

There are detractors too, inevitably. A few cynics who wonder, ‘Why is he doing this now? Why is so hyped up? Why is it timed to coincide with the book launch of Armies of Hanuman? Why is he slinging names like Mahesh Bhatt around?’

To which I answer thus: I’m doing this now, because, with my father passing away in February this year, nothing I reveal can cause hurt or pain to anyone who was part of the original story. (My wife and children have known all along about these events and have come to terms with my past a long time ago.)

It’s hyped up because how often does anyone come out in the open and talk about such things? It does make a great news story, I’ll admit. So what? I think the more people talk about it, the more it will encourage other high-society rape victims (and/or their loved ones) to come out in the open and talk about it as well.

It’s timed to coincide with the launch of my new book simply because I don’t give interviews or do PR all year round. I haven’t promoted my last three books, and may not be coming out to talk to the press for at least another year, maybe two.

Besides, it happens to be my book, and I happen to be the author and this is also part of my oeuvre and life, so what else should I be talking about? Your life and work?

In the end, I admit openly: Yes, the hype is good. Because I want you to know that I’m not afraid to talk about it, to confront the ugliest demons from my past. And I refuse to cloak them with sugar-coated beautiful pretenses. I’ve thought this through carefully and am well-prepared to take this step, both facing the media and making the film.

The only question is: Are you ready to face the ugly truth as well?

If you’re a professional working in Mumbai’s film, modelling, fashion, advertising or high-society circles, you probably aren’t.

Whether you are or not, as actor-filmmaker Feroz Khan put it very eloquently when asked this very question by a news channel: “Sach hameshaa saamne aathi hain.�

The truth will always come out in the end.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005 at 9:47 am. It is filed under Ashok. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.