It’s those feverish dawn dreams that rip you out of sleep, the psychedelic ones in puce and lime, orange and gold, with dancing girls and fat blokes who are always trying to catch you as you try to fly away, the ones where everything is over-lit and over-fed, neon-nausea bright. This sweaty Technicolor hallucination, this spinning core of Hindi film—it’s in your face in every curve of flesh as thick and soft as warm figs, spilling onto hungry chins with the ripeness of it all, figments-on-sea, flesh-on-Arabian Sea.

Bombay-Mumbai, the studio city and fantasy fodder factory of the Subcontinent, an industry that pumps out twice as many pictures a year as Hollywood to satisfy the cravings of its billion strong audience. Welcome to Bollywood, the celluloid city that hides it alchemy among the alleys of rotting flesh and star jasmine.

Shubash Ghai, showman, director, purveyor of high voltage phantasmagoria in puce and lime, latex and Lycra, sits before me in a director’s chair on the set of his latest designer label dancerama, his mobile in his hand, his chubby fingers pumping the digits at Gameboy speed as he speaks.

‘Do not call it Bollywood. This is a very wrong thing to call it. We are not trying to copy Hollywood. We are making films for an audience of a billion people. Over 80 percent of these people don’t have enough food in their bellies. Our country does not provide its people with pool halls, basketball courts and video parlours, so we make films for them that will let them forget their lives for three hours. We create total fantasy, not the polished reality that Hollywood portrays. Never forget that, never forget that we are making films that allow people to believe for three hours that they are not poor and hungry.’ Ghai closes his eyes to end his speech and the chubby fingers begin to pump again.

And across town in a cell another movie-dream broker is awaiting trial. When Bharat Shah was arrested in January 2001 a significant number of the films in production in and around Bombay went on hold. He was financing them. Shah is a diamond merchant of Koh-i-noor proportions who has crossed over into movies, or to be more precise into movie finance. He was arrested for having direct links with underworld characters that reap rewards from the filmi world of Bombay: filmi, of Hindi film, of the fantasy fodder factory. The filmi dons collect their dues in foreign film rights and distribution deals in return for backing given, and favours done, Sicilian-style but with darker glasses and worse lapels. If the directors and actors don’t pay they get shot. Very simple. Very final. Bharat Shah is still being held without bail under the state’s anti-organised crime act.

Fantasy and dirty money, fluffy stuff and real live hit men, all hooked up with the Boy meets Girl formula and Hindi ditties danced around trees in wet saris. Adolescent boys jostle in the cheap seats, hot and hard, their necks craned back as fountains spurt forth when Girl arches away from Boy’s lingering touch up there on the silver screen. Secret sex sold in song and dance routines to about 23 million people a day who are hungry for romance, or just plain hungry. The dons go home with the big haul while so many of the men and women of India go home to hollow arranged marriages with love in their hearts and irritation at the beggars on the road. And all this comes at just 50 rupees (about 74 pence) a shot.
So, we laugh at the movies that are pumped out like so many gallons per minute from a mass-sucking milking machine. Or rather we were laughing at the biceps in neoprene, and sprayed-on and upon sari routines, until it was decided that Karma kitsch was bindas-cool. A year ago faces went blank as I raved about the sculptured rarity of the hottest new star Hrithik Roshan’s upper arms, and the flick of his hip as the bhangra music ramped up for the semi