Extract – Part 1

Infatuation

‘Highly entertaining and neatly structured … a surprising and thoughtful travel book.’
Daily Telegraph

She has a woman’s body in recline, her hips, buttocks and breasts rising above a belly of water.  Those breasts are surmounted by nipples of wealth, the higher reaches where smooth rich folk live behind tall walls.  And on the curves that swoop down to her belly the shore meets land that has been pulled back from the sea, reclaimed to erect a business skyline out of murky wetness where once only the fishermen plied their trade.  This is the body of Bombay, and Bombay is a city of bodies.

There is flesh everywhere, skin pressing on skin, offering itself up from Malabar Hill to Back Bay, from Kemp’s Corner to the salt-singed arch of the Gateway of India through which a limping empire retreated over half a century ago, back into the sea from whence it had come.  Sweat runs off the juice-wallah’sarms, dotting the pavement on the corner of Breach Candy as he beheads carrots beside the Arabian Sea.  It splashes on to a shopper’s powdered neck and Morning Glory sari outside the Heera Panna Shopping Bazaar, and it flies from the straining forehead of a boy carrying a pile of boxes almost as high as himself.  It pricks the backs of businessmen’s necks in the air- conditioned cars that idle at traffic lights, agitating them on their way to high-rise meetings in big bank buildings.  It slides down the wiry torsos of coolies carrying baskets of cabbages in and out of the crush of limbs in Crawford Market, across town from where the juice-wallah drips besides the sea.

Crawford Market has every kind of flesh, alive or dead.  Dark blood drips from drawn and quartered cadavers.  Rats roam the margins, feeding on whatever they can find, dodging in and out of the cages crammed with poultry and livestock.  Green parrots from the Cardamom Hills tug out their flight feathers in paranoid boredom.  Once-crested canaries rub their heads raw on their prison bars.  Turtle doves in battered braces neither coo nor bill but pine and starve.  Roaming pi-dogs piss against the cages of rumpled puppies, litters that will be sold by the dozen and that will end up back on the streets when they get too big to be toys.  And a group of excited boys poke at the bloated belly of a rat with sharpened sticks.  The rat is too sated to do anything more than bare its yellowed teeth.

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Extract – Part 2

Infatuation Continued…

Sweat and blood run together down the arms of the butchers who cut and fold, strip and rip.  Necks of chickens, throats of goats, mutton anuses, eyeballs and ears, nothing can be spared, every inch can be eaten, every sinew chopped and bargained for, sliced and packaged.

In Crawford Market the air smells of the shit of dead and dying things, but there is sweeter stuff to breathe up on Pali Hill, high above the stink of downtown sweat.  Mercedes and BMWs glide around the streets where bougainvillaea grows in pretty bright pinkness over the tall walls of big houses.  Every bonnet is buffed to a crorepati’s shine, a millionaire’s gloss, each almost as shiny and polished as the expensive hair on the sleek heads of the women who recline behind darkened back-seat windows on their way in and out of large driveways.  Shopping is the local sport in the hills of Bombay, but it is not the sort of shopping that takes place in Crawford Market’s bloody brawl.

From high up in the sweet hills Bombay falls back down to the water, to the old arch beside the sea.  Here hundreds of honeymoon couples gather as the sun sets out on the water, a crowd of brand-new saris in fruit-pastille colours, armfuls of wedding bangles, nervous bowed heads beside proud boys in tight jeans and cheap jackets.  The scent of jasmine garlands, wound into oiled plaits and knots, floats out with the dreams of young brides over the spangled water, while beside them their new husbands wait to pull the delicate flowers from fine threads, to unwind saris from nervous bodies, to touch fresh, warm skin, voluptuous as fig flesh.  Just like in the movies.

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

Down those alleys, past where Mrs Nirmal throws stones at the pi-dogs to keep them away from her husband’s bhelpuri cart while her snack man sleeps under a rain tree, beyond the relentlessly tatty tourist shops on The Causeway, is Colaba, named after the original inhabitants, the Koli fishermen, who were plying the waters before records began.  A few of them still remain, clinging with the determination of ancient limpets to their pockets of inner city land, to their boats, their nets and their gutting knives.  But all around them rise up the symbols of the modern city, skyscrapers etching their jagged silhouette over the harbour, throwing their mirrored images into the water where the Kolis cast their nets in the reflections of modern might and asset management-on-sea.

Right in the thick of this newly risen cool quarter is heat street, Battery Road, the one downtown spot where the stars from the high hills sometimes come out to play.  The cars that line up along its length give it away, low-slung, sleek, squatting on fat tyres, shiny boot to glossy bonnet.  A tourist carriage rolls past on clattering wheels, its flea-bitten grey horse and driver nodding in time with each slow step.  The happy loving honeymoon couple behind the driver stare up at the steps beyond the line of cars and into Bar Indigo – white-hot Mumbai-Bombay, the thrust and grind of the cutting edge, a sea of gym-honed, belly-ringed midriffs that sway as the boys go by.  As the carriage clatters on past, the happy loving couple take in each detail and store it away for the moment when, back home over family chai, they can wow Mummy/Daddy with their brush with Bollywood.

Inside Bar Indigo the hot stagnant street air is chilled and repackaged.  Here the air is designer-scented, courtesy of the perfume houses, courtesy of a hundred Non-Resident-Indian stopovers at Dubai Duty Free, and here it mingles with Marlboro Light smoke over a sea of gleaming heads, cut in London, set in LA and now swinging on Friday night in Colaba.  The bar itself is long and low, longer and lower than most bars I know.  In London I am average to short.  In India I am tall, and bars seem perfectly constructed so that I can prop myself at just that beautiful-people angle.  Even so I am still about as wrong as you can get for Bar Indigo.  I am over thirty, the wrong colour, the wrong type and definitely in the wrong clothes.

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Extract – Part 3

Infatuation Continued…

On that particular night I was doing the floaty wafty look in white.  Dusky and tight was the Spring 2000 season’s black in Colaba.  Dusky and tight I was not.  But the perfect face next to me was.  She was about as dusky, tiny and tight as you can get, in black sprayed-on Capri pants, a silk shirt knotted under her cantilevered Wonder-Bra cleavage, and heels that teetered sufficiently to pump her up to the correct angle-at-bar height.

‘Hey, Raju, heard your new track at the studio.  Shit, man, really cool.’  Perfect Face swung her hair and purred as she propped, her comment directed at a gang of gawky young men sporting large amounts of hair gel and almost identical square-toed shoes.

The boy gang ignored her and continued to smoke and talk loudly over their big-price beers.  Perfect Face looked around to see if there was anyone else worth talking to.  She had been trying to ignore me.

‘Hello,’ I offered limply.

Perfect Face looked at me, momentarily frozen in social horror.  Then she seemed to change her mind, as though she had decided to be a hip-chick angel of mercy who would initiate a desperate outsider into the cult inner circle of Bollywood nights.

‘It’s too cool here,’ she said compassionately.  ‘See the girl over there?’  She pointed to a Lolita with green eyes and a face and body as perfectly and surreally proportioned as those of a doll.  ‘That’s Simmy, she’s a friend of Shah Rukh’s.’  Perfect Face smiled at me magnificently as if she had just given me the key to the gates of heaven.

Shah Rukh Khan is one of a testosterone triumvirate, the Khans, three good Muslim boys who hold the Hindi film industry in thrall.  Shah Rukh generally plays the moody lover type and, though not conventionally good-looking, he is a killer at the box office.  Salman Khan has a six-pack of stomach muscles with enough ripples to front a steroid campaign, and he likes them to be seen, a lot.  Aamir Khan is the actor of the trio and is likely to outlast the others.

Perfect Face was examining her pearly fingernails.

‘Chitty-chat is that Simmy is going to one of the big award ceremonies with SRK.’  She ran her tongue under one of her talons.

The barman looked on in awe.

‘Is she his girlfriend?’ I asked.

Perfect Face furrowed her perfect brow.

‘What is this girlfriend-shurlfriend?  He is married, very very married.  Everyone knows that.’  She pouted her perfectly matching pearly lips.

Of course I knew.  But since when had Bollywood stars been exclusive to their wives?

‘Hey, Simmy,’ Perfect Face called out to the doll with the green eyes.  ‘All the chitty-chat is that you’re going to the awards with SRK’s gang.’

Simmy swung around from her gaggle of friends to see where the barb had come from.

‘Nothing doing, she hissed, her pouting dolly mouth the same pearly shade as that of Perfect Face.

‘Oh, oh, this is not what I’m hearing,’ shot back Perfect face.

Simmy narrowed her green eyes but smiled a smile rehearsed a thousand times in front of as many mirrors.  She put her tiny hand on her tiny hip and cocked it at Perfect Face in a posture of cosmetically constructed defiance.

‘Nothing doing,’ she repeated, pointedly turning back to her gang of networkers and naked midriffs.

Perfect Face sulked at her reflection in the shiny bar.

‘This is so much of bullshit, she thinks she’s so great, yaar.  If he came in here now he wouldn’t even stop to say “Hi” to her.’  Perfect Face was scanning the crowd.  She had given me enough of her time.

‘Who wouldn’t say “Hi”?  I was lost.

‘Shah Rukh, of course.’  She started to roll her eyes, but they froze halfway and a shudder ran through her perfect little body.

I tried to follow her transfixed expression but the crowd was too dense.  Perfect Face was clutching at her chest and panting.

‘Bullshit, man, it’s Hrithik!’ she said as she finally managed to form real words.

I hopped up onto the bar to get a better view.

A young man was swinging up the steps away from the back of a very long, very low, very black car.  He stopped outside the bar and turned back for a moment, waiting.  He was wearing a light blue leather T-shirt sprayed onto a landscape of muscle, curved and polished like the bonnets of the cars in the street below.  His long legs were wrapped in black jeans.  Everything clung. He stood on the step, animal shy, animal sprung, his gym-honed body poised for flight.

‘Is that . . . ?’  I put my hand on Perfect Face’s arm to try and get her attention.

She cut me off with a wild-eyed expression.  It’s Hrithik!’

‘Is he really that hot?’

‘You’re kidding me,’ she gasped.  ‘Hrithik’s It!’  And the silence of the church fell on the hottest bar in Colaba as Hrithik Roshan, Bollywood’s newest and brightest, a one-film wonder, the first real box-office challenge to the heart-throb hero stranglehold of the Khan boys, waited outside, not quite sure how to make his entrance.

‘Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, it’s Salman,’ Perfect Face screeched.

Her wands were in front of her face, her pearly talons fluttering near her mouth as if she was trying to dry her nail polish at high speed.

Another body emerged from behind Hrithik.

‘I’m fainting,’ Perfect Face announced, though she remained resolutely upright.

Salman Khan, Khan Number Two, The Khan, was right there, right outside Bar Indigo.  Salman, famous for his six-pack and his sex life but now proving that he had a nose for a winner.  He had picked Hrithik Roshan as his friend when Hrithik was just a tall, skinny boy with a moderately successful director for a father, and enough ambition to aim as high as the Himalayas.  Salman had introduced his new friend to the six-pack diet of protein shakes and a pumping-iron regime that would create shapes that bulge nicely in leather, rubber, neoprene or anything else that clings.  He told the green-eyed boy that he would be a sensation and watched him grow out of his college jeans and T-shirts and into his spray-on wardrobe.

In contrast to Hrithik’s slicked-on look, Salman Khan was wearing a pair of baggy linen trousers and a loose, pale linen shirt, very demure, very Giorgio Armani, very unusual for the king of tight and taut.  He bounded up the steps to where Hrithik was waiting, and as he bounded his shirt flew open for all to see.  Hrithik looked at the ground in front of him.  Salman kept full eye contact with everyone in the bar.  His chest rippled, his torso gleamed and a smile spread across his face.  He was flirting all the way.

‘I’m dying.  This is too much.  What to do?’ Perfect Face, still standing, still living, clutched my arm in a moment of sisterly bonding.

Salman put his hand on Hrithik’s shoulder.  He had to reach up a little.  Hrithik is tall.

Then the green-eyed boy lifted his head, turned and looked straight at me.

Welcome to Bollywood, city of dreams and dance routines.  I am looking into film-star eyes.  I am in the movies.

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Interviews

Justine Hardy’s book Bollywood Boys is the outcome of the West’s interest in Indian films. SUCHITRA BEHAL speaks to the author.

SUCHITRA BEHAL: What made you want to write a book on Bollywood in particular?

JUSTINE HARDY: I come from an acting family. So right through childhood I’d been exposed to stardom. I had no romantic delusions about it and have seen its good and bad sides. Bollywood represents an extreme case to me. But I must point out here that this book is written for a western audience. There is suddenly a huge interest in the West in Bollywood and Indian films. There are two ideas behind the book. One, I wanted to write about modern India — Bollywood symbolises the richness of a certain life. Its story reads like the front page of a newspaper. It’s a great story.
Read the full Interview…
The Hindu

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