Selina Sheth

EXPERIMENTS

Selina Sheth

(Excerpt 1)

“Emails and Texts an Actor Sent Me Post-Audition” *

* email subject line and WhatsApp status update:

When Opportunity Meets Preparation, Great Things Happen!

Email #1. Hey beautiful!

Such a pleasure to test for the part of Kareem in West Side Story: Bollywood Goes Global. And even better to have met you! For a screenwriter in Mumbai to tell me, a community theatre actor born and raised in Wolverhampton, that I have the intensity of Bernardo – Bernardo in the 1961 original, not the 2021 remake – I mean, WOW! (You know what’s funny? My mother feels the same way. Not that I’m comparing myself to the great George Chakiris – I could never.)

Babe, a tiny favor? Could you give me a heads up on the shortlist for Kareem? I feel I can ask because we have this connection. Actors and writers have the same sensitivity (and fear of rejection). No?

Hugs. Have an amazing day!

Email #2. Hey doll! Any news?

I just dropped off a copy of my new showreel. Check it out and then maybe pass it on to Tanya in Casting? (Is she in town? She never calls back.)

Anyway. At time code: 00:01:23 I play Silent Ward Boy in Episode 72 of ITV’s Lifeline. (I have three words, but they’re super impactful.) At 00:02:43 you can see my abs (eight-pack, shirtless) in the new Asian Paints commercial.

FYI: I’m also trained in stunt action, Zumba and horse-back riding.

Hugs. Have a great evening!

Text #3. Babe. Still nothing?

Just sent across my (left) side-profile pix. (On tape I’ve only exposed my right. Why is hindsight always 20/20?)

Text #9. Dear, are you okay? Why no response? Is something wrong with your phone? Any updates?

Text #14. Still waiting! Is it possible Casting misplaced my contact info? I’m available 24/7 on 0091 – ***** *****

Email #6. Wow. Just WOW.

Sad that you have such disrespect for a fellow artist. I thought you were on my side! Also, “just missed the cut” is something I’d have appreciated hearing from you rather than from one of Tanya’s imbecilic sidekicks.

Just because I choose to be humble, doesn’t mean I’m nobody. In case you haven’t heard, I’ve been bumped up to ‘Series Regular’ on Lifeline. (Better than being in some lame adaptation of West Side Story, no? Haha. Just kidding about the lame bit. Not.)

Oh, and someday, when you need a favor from me? Be worried. Karma is a real thing.

Text #19. What happened? No, really, I need to know.

Text #22. Was Mum right? Is sincerity dead? Why are all you women the same?!

Text #23. I want my showreel back. Those things cost. You can keep the profile pix. Not that I’d ever work with you guys, not in a million years.

*

(Excerpt 2)

Bait

From: Sarai-S.showrunner@bait.the.series.com
To: Aliyah-F@the.writers.room; Samir-T@the.writers.room
Subject: Feedback Notes from Digiflix!

Dear Writers,

Yesterday, the commissioning team at Digiflix tested our pilot on a focus group. I’ve combined what the network calls “initial thoughts” with a checklist culled from Blake Snyder’s ‘Six Immutable Laws of Screenplay Physics.’

Warning: Rewrites need to happen this week for Episodes #1– #4. But these tips should help!

One. Always circle back to the Show Logline.

Romance/Comedy: “An online love scammer baits a woman on Tinder only to realize she is the woman of his dreams.”

(Romance. I met X on Facebook when he sent me a Friend Request. I accepted because he complimented my ‘protest blog’ against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Like superglue, we bonded instantly.

Comedy? Things came unstuck in ways more tragic than funny. At least for me.)

Two. Save The Cat or Positive First Impressions.

“The Hero should make us want to root for him somehow.”

(In his profile picture, X smiled in a way that made his eyes dance. A sign of sincerity, I thought. And despite grueling twelve-hour shifts in the OT, he glowed with charisma. Like a bona fide rockstar in scrubs.)

Three. The Pope in the Pool.

“Show, Don’t Tell. Drop the exposition. Character Is as Character Does.”

(X didn’t work in a fancy private hospital. I know this because I watched a video posted on his page. The video showed X on a medical mission in war-torn Kyiv, rehabilitating patients who lay on makeshift cots in a dark bombed-out building. X’s back was always to the camera. The narrator said this was because X wanted his viewers to focus on the bravery of the injured Ukrainian soldiers, and not on him.)

Four. Watch out for that Glacier.

“When something appears too good to be true, then it probably is. In drama, remember to drop hints of potential danger right from the start.”

(With X, there were no weekly cliffhangers or suspense-ridden soundtracks. Not even when he, after two months of relentlessly love-bombing me on Messenger, asked if I could make a donation to the Kharkiv Orphans Fund. X requested $1,000. That’s a lot of money for a screenwriter who earns in rupees – that is, if she gets paid at all. But thinking this way made me feel petty and ashamed. Which is why I sent the money, in cash, to a PO Box address X dictated to me on the phone. His voice was raspy and very sexy.)

Five. The Covenant of the Arc.

“Characters must change through their experiences.”

(People don’t change. But there is always something to be learnt:

Catfishing is a thing. Especially in Albania, Nigeria and India.
According to the Mumbai Cyber Crime Unit – I made a contact at the Bandra PD last year when I was researching the ‘Unsolved Murders’ series for Star TV – there are gangs across the city who create fake profiles which specifically target women. Single, older women because, the Officer says, “you’d be surprised at how easy they are to reel in.”
Which is why most victims don’t report. It’s too embarrassing.)

Six. Keep the Press Out.

“It’s cliched to have reporters turn up in the denouement.”

(Also avoid social media. When I posted – anonymously – about the X scam, how I was baited and hooked and then agonizingly ghosted, the response was: “Girl, you really should have known better!” Sure. I mean, who can argue with that?)

So. Back to our series Bait.

Here’s a couple of things for us to chew on before we meet in the Writers Room tomorrow:

Romantic Fantasy, not reality, is what sells on TV. (Think: Happy End variations, with our love scammer repentant and reformed.)
Comedy = Tragedy + Time. (That’s according to the Marx Brothers, or was it Mark Twain? The point is: someday I’ll stop feeling angry/sad/dumb and laugh about X.)

(Why am I still thinking of someone who doesn’t exist?)

*

(Excerpt 3)

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*

PRISON YOGA: FREEDOM BEHIND BARS?

Selina Sheth

San Quentin prison in California is home to 4,000 male inmates out of which 700 are on the dreaded Death Row. But here, every morning, groups of convicts gather in a nondescript room for an intense thirty-minute yoga session. They practice in a semi-circle, so that nobody is standing behind another’s back – in prison, this can cause fear and tension. In fact in these yoga classes, all body contact is avoided, teachers refrain from making physical adjustments during the session, and each individual is given ample physical space to practice freely. The overall emphasis is on calming the nervous system with freestyle asanas to create a sense of balance and a better attunement with the harsh environs of prison life.

Unlike yoga classes out in the world, a mild frisson of fear runs in this one. The slightest misunderstanding over a word or a gesture can result in mayhem. An armed guard is therefore always present.

When I think about yoga and my own daily practice, I think of an open, bright room, concentrated but smiling faces, the strong collective sound of breath, and finally, the burst of physical and creative energy that engulfs me and peaks once I’m done with the very last pose – a restful Shavasana. I leave the shala as if I’m walking on air and with the day ahead full of possibility. Sure, I have writing deadlines, calls to make, the odd muscular pain in my shoulder after rigorous twists and bends, stuff to sort out.

But I feel a deep surge of freedom, an “it’ll all work out” sensation of hope.

This freedom, this sense of hope and mindfulness, is precisely what yoga practitioner James Fox felt was lacking for prisoners across American jails. In 2002, he founded the Prison Yoga project, aimed at inmates who lived with varying degrees of Complex Trauma or past experiences of abandonment, assault or abuse.

Fox has the unflinching belief that yoga reduces the “aggressive-reactive” elements of the brain and makes for calmer, more empathetic responses when interacting with others. He is often confronted with a fundamental question. How do yoga and prison reconcile with one another? One represents freedom in the highest spiritual realm while the other stands for captivity in the basest physical sense. How can they possibly work together? The answer lies in the writing of teacher Eric Paskel. Eric argues that they are meant to work together if you begin thinking of yoga as more than just poses. Yoga is about getting out of the “jail of the mind” even as the body remains confined.

In 2009, Mike Higgins, an MBA from Wharton and a successful corporate executive, found himself pleading guilty to a financial misdemeanor. His life changed with his nine-month sentence. Mike went from being a successful, socially prominent businessman to a nameless, faceless prison serial number. The worst part was the shame and the guilt he felt.

Mike had been familiar with a few yoga postures in his youth, and now he started practicing them again in his cramped cell. It gave him something to do and made him feel calmer, and soon, with permission, he gathered a small group together in the communal yard. There was resistance at first; most of the other inmates – many of them violent felons – scoffed at yoga, made catcalls during sessions and could not bring themselves to concentrate at all. But Mike encouraged them, and over time, learnt that regular practice tamed the violent and snap impulses that governed many a criminal mind. When Mike was released in 2012, he launched the Transformation Yoga Project which today offers yoga therapy and meditation to recovering addicts, war veterans and people with criminal records looking to restart their lives. The emphasis is on awareness and self-reflection so that people may make wiser choices in the future.

“With women,” says yoga teacher, therapist and dancer Josefin Wikstrom, “the issues are somewhat different, but equally challenging.” Wikstrom has taught at Sweden’s largest prison for women for the last six years. Most of the inmates have experienced rape and sexual abuse. Wikstrom avers that regular modified yoga has greatly benefited these women by bringing about physical and mental calm, hormonal balance, less anxiety and aggression, and better sleep. She herself has learnt a great deal as a teacher. “We avoid the Happy Baby pose, for example,” Wikstrom says, “because many women in prison are separated from their children and the pose can cause sadness and painful memories.”

Two of India’s largest prisons – Tihar in Delhi and Arthur Road in Mumbai – are overcrowded, dirty and violent. Most inmates are undertrials: poor, uneducated and without legal support. Self-reflection, in their case, is of little use in the face of mounting despair. And trained teachers willing to volunteer time and effort are hard to come by.

But Mohan Kumar’s story is one of triumph over the odds. Mohan had served twelve years at Bangalore Central Jail when he became one of thirty inmates taking part in a special project. This was a ninety-day yoga and meditation course introduced by the Art of Living Foundation. Mohan, an aggressive young male, found himself in a calm and positive state of mind by the end of the course. He went on to train as a Yuvacharya, a “prison teacher” who spread what he had learnt to other inmates. Using Mohan as a positive case study and role model, the AOL Foundation has since launched its programs in seven major prisons in Karnataka state, thereby impacting more than 2,500 prisoners.

I am skeptical of what I call new-age spiritual quick fixes. And while I consider a day without yoga incomplete, I don’t believe that yoga alone can mend broken lives. For that one needs emotional and social support, family, friends, meaningful work – and that’s hard to come by for prisoners with tough pasts and shaky futures.

And then I come across powerful testimonies like those of S.L., an inmate of San Quentin who is serving a lifeterm for murder. As part of Jamie Fox’s Prison Yoga project, S.L. has a stunning perspective of how yoga practice can make the worst offenders face themselves, take responsibility for their crimes, and move forward. He says:

“We cannot change our reality or our environment. But we can work towards spiritual freedom. Yoga and its emphasis on prana, the vital force, has given me a new respect for life, for the power of a single breath. And I have grown to understand that I extinguished the breath of another human being. Forever.”

*

LOVE, AMRITA

Selina Sheth

“Marriage is for the birds. Concentrate on finding love…”

One day in August 1997, I found myself outside a nondescript cottage in a leafy bylane of South Delhi’s Hauz Khas. I was twenty-four, a high-strung TV news reporter who’d just been commissioned to make a feature documentary on one of India’s most respected authors. The place looked deserted, the garden a tangled mass of shrubs and weeds, the gate rusty and forbidding. Did I even have the right address for my subject? Where was the bell? There it stuck out – almost hidden by the address plate that read K-25 in a floral script.

Back then, I didn’t know who Amrita Pritam was. I knew even less about Punjabi literature. I was dizzy from the urban Indian English zeitgeist novel of that time, English August. Upamanyú Chatterjee’s displaced, angst-ridden, fantasizing and pot-smoking Agastya was my literary hero and kindred spirit. I didn’t have time or interest in Pritam’s nostalgic stories of a sepia-toned, bygone India. Her autobiography Rasidi Ticket (The Revenue Stamp), lay at the bottom of my grubby backpack, a slim, faded pocketbook that I’d flipped through with minimal interest.

I was determined not to make an uninspired Doordarshan-style film on Amrita’s life but feared that’s what would emerge. Bored, disenchanted, and cursing my decision to take on this project, I sighed and waited for someone – anyone – to open the door.

A slim, white-haired man with bright eyes suddenly leapt out from the garden behind the house. He looked like an artist, and was dressed in a paint-splattered kurta and jeans, a scarf thrown casually over one shoulder. “Hi”, he said good-naturedly in Hindi, “I’m Imroz. Come, Amrita’s waiting, but I’m warning you, today she’s in a cranky mood.”

Imroz, Amrita’s live-in partner of the forty or so years, was sweet, funny and clearly protective of the woman who meant the world to him. He led me into the house and up the stairs to Amrita’s bedroom on the first floor. I was nervous of meeting the lady, and fully prepared to be admonished for ruining her afternoon nap. But the petite woman I saw sitting upright on a chair was alert and smiling. Amrita admitted that at seventy-six, she no longer had the energy to do media interviews or even thought she was interesting enough to be featured in any kind of film. While saying this, she fished in a desk drawer crammed with notes, pens, writing pads and jumbled medications, and rummaged for her Rothmans. “A smoke is one of the few pleasures of life,” she laughed gently, finding a crumpled packet and lighting up. Her eyes danced. And I fell in love with Amrita at that precise moment.

She offhandedly blamed her smoking habit on Sahir Ludhianvi – a romantic poet who went on to become a famous lyricist in the Bombay movie industry of the 1940s and 1950s. This was the eccentric genius who was Amrita’s “first true love.” As a young girl growing up in pre-Partition Lahore, Amrita told me coyly, she remembered Sahir often visiting her family home, and whenever he left, she’d puff on his discarded cigarette butts, just to “touch my lips to the place where he had touched his.” Amrita and Sahir’s youthful romance would end abruptly but they shared a close and very volatile bond right upto his death in 1980.

Amrita’s childhood was lonely, and she wrote poetry and stories to fill the void created by her mother’s early death. At sixteen, Amrita had an arranged marriage to a man called Pritam. She soon had children (a son and a daughter) but domestic life – and a passionless union with a husband who could not understand or appreciate her creative temperament– filled Amrita with dull and increasing frustration.

Amrita’s outlet was the Progressive Writers Movement, of which she became a member in the early 1940s. Discussions had begun to echo the rumblings of national Independence and the violence that would follow. When bloody communal massacres took place over the division of India and the creation of Pakistan, Amrita expressed her anguish and pain through a long verse that has become a literary classic: Aj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu (Ode to Waris Shah).

By 1950, Amrita had moved to Delhi and joined the All India Radio. Within the next decade, much would happen to this extraordinarily strong-willed writer. She would produce a body of work including more than a hundred poems, short stories, novels and folk songs in Hindi and Punjabi, for which she would receive a Fellowship from the Sahitya Akademi, a Padma Shri and a Padma Vibushan. She would become increasingly more feminist, by expressing revolt at violence against women (as in her popular novel Pinjar) and on a personal level, by abandoning her unfulfilling marriage.

In the early 1960s, Amrita found her soulmate, the painter Imroz, and they began a life together. “We’ve been here at K-25, for all these years, no one understands me like Imroz does,” murmured Amrita, gazing out the window through her misty spectacles. “See…marriage and all its…you know, false conventions…forget all that, concentrate on finding love.”

It was evening already. Amrita was tired, and Imroz appeared to gently shoo me off.

Over the next few weeks, I read all that I could of Amrita’s work. Rasidi Ticket was a revelation, bursting with anecdotes of a moody young Sahir, the colors of Gujranwala, Punjab (where Amrita was born in 1919), her eventual disillusionment with the state of matrimony, and the political and personal influences that would shape her best writing. I then devoured the love letters she and Imroz had exchanged throughout their relationship, most of which are published in the volume Amrita – Imroz: A Love Story.

I felt right then that Amrita Pritam was the writer – and the woman – I wanted to be. Her work was bold, revolutionary, compassionate and emotionally honest; and her personal life showed a courage and conviction rare for women of her time. But that was the beauty of Amrita. There was no hypocrisy in her, no duality whatsoever, just a pure truth that she owed to her own self. The views she expressed in her writing were the same beliefs by which she lived and loved.

Amrita – to my joyful discovery – was in no mood herself for a staid documentary on her life. Together we came up with something new. Amrita would be filmed reading select poems (including Waris Shah) in a spot-lit studio. This would be intercut with languid, abstract visuals photographed by my cameraman Anil Senior and set to haunting vocals by the well-known singer Madan Bala Sidhu. The half-hour film would be titled The Red Thread Zens, in homage to one of Amrita’s early philosophical essays.

A day after I sent a copy of the edited film to Amrita, Imroz called. “Come for tea!” he yelled cheerfully. I was trembling. I wasn’t concerned whether the film would air on commercial television – I didn’t expect it to and Amrita couldn’t have cared less either. All I wanted was to have done justice to Amrita’s vision and persona. I desperately craved her approval.

And so I found myself at K-25, this time in the garden, sitting opposite Amrita. She was very quiet. I was school-girlishly anxious as hell. Imroz brought out the tea. He beamed at me. And then Amrita stood, small and fragile as always, walked over to me, asked me to stand, and reached up like a child to hug me tightly.

“You are an artist,” she whispered. “A true artiste. I am so glad we met and made this film. I wanted to call you yesterday after watching it but I was so moved I couldn’t speak.”

Amrita’s words have stayed with me. And they’ve given me hope and sustenance through a writing career of my own and across many of life’s absurdities.

And yet that magical October afternoon would be the last time I saw Amrita. She became seriously ill over the next few years and couldn’t have visitors. When she died in 2005, at the age of eighty-six, I was living and working in Mumbai. I called Imroz to offer my condolences but he was heartbroken and we only spoke for a few seconds. “There can never be another Amrita,” he said, choking back tears.

While researching this piece, I found myself thinking of Imroz. It has been a decade since Amrita’s death. K-25 Hauz Khas no longer exists; a cruel irony, given Amrita’s famed poem Mera Pataa (My Address). Or perhaps her lines are prophetic, for the verse ends with “…wherever the glimpse of a free spirit exists, that will be my home.”

Last week, I came across a news clipping of Imroz on the internet. He is in his late seventies today. He lives by himself in a small flat in central Delhi, with nothing but memories of the Amrita he knew and worshipped for most of his life. But he is as brave and devoted a lover as ever. Imroz, his eyes still twinkling, is pictured holding up a faded address plate. It reads K-25, in floral script, and I recognized it immediately. Good for you, Imroz, I said to myself, and I sensed Amrita was somewhere around, looking on and grinning. “Main tenu phir milangi,” she softly says with conviction. I will meet you yet again.

*

THE DEATH OF PLAYBOY AND INTELLEROTICA

Selina Sheth

Back in the late 1960s, my then-young parents (one German, the other Indian) lived and worked briefly in the eastern US state of Virginia. They witnessed Woodstock, took a lot of blue-jeaned road trips, hung out with peace-loving beatnik friends and colleagues and came to love the dynamism of an inclusive, meritocratic nation of immigrants.

They also subscribed religiously to a certain publication called Playboy, a faded stack of which I discovered one night, years later in 1987, shoved to the back of a cabinet in the spare-room of our home in India.

I was fifteen and captivated. Not being a hormonally-charged boy, I wasn’t interested in cover girl Bonnie Drucilla Hunter, Miss Playmate of September 1968. (Although I loved her long fringe and obsessed for years over her thigh-high shiny white platform boots.)

Budding writer that I was, what set me on fire was the sheer literary quality of Playboy. The content was both sensual and cerebral, earthy but not low-brow, witty and wise and sardonic and teasing. The “Questions” segment was a provocative delight. Here was an army soldier asking for technical advice on foreplay that would pleasure his girl. There, was a naïve college jock wondering about the benefits of tantra. “Letters to the Editor” contained anecdotes about moisture-resistant LP players, four-wheeled Sedans, the latest Hendrix album, and how a newly-divorced man with unfortunate “disco hair” might succeed on a date with a lady without scaring her off. Playboy’s quirky, inventive language turned me on, especially when I came across its iconic publisher Hugh Hefner’s interview with Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor described as the “prophet of LSD” who lovingly narrated what exactly made for a “good psychedelic trip.”

Sure, Playboy back then was full of outrageous gender biases and double standards. But for those who saw below the surface innuendo, it was also a rare and genuine tribute to womanhood. It loved the female form, worshipped the female mystery, and sometimes – many times – it applauded the wonders of the female mind.

Take for instance, the 1964 Playboy Interview with author Ayn Rand, a tough, complex woman to deconstruct in those pre-feminist times. Countless gems followed, written with intensity and sharp turns of phrase. Mick Jagger talked about the Stones and a volatile star groupie called Marianne Faithfull. Bob Dylan rapped on free love and the politics of the Vietnam War. Stanley Kubrick was awed by certain women in cinema. Martin Luther King keenly explained the Civil Rights movement and his memory of being kicked off a bus as a boy. These profiles were smart, bold, and intimate.

There was also crackling fiction by award-winning as well as little-known authors. Interspersed with photographs of stark bare breasts and soft-lit curved butts, lay a short story by Saul Bellow, a novella by Joyce Carol Oates, an essay by Doris Lessing, Germaine Greer, or Erica Jong.

This, even to my young mind, was a true marriage of art and life. With its smooth and natural balance of sex and intellect, Playboy managed that near-impossible feat of combining rather than separating the two. It enticed the brain as much as the libido, and it’s no surprise that while the majority of its readers were male, many – my mother included – were women.

That’s how Playboy, at first derided as mere “porn” by the moral brigade, quickly became known within more urbane circles for its high standards of content and aesthetics. Sadly, in the decades since the magazine’s peak, never has the divide between sexuality and intellect become wider in popular culture. Most voyeurs of internet porn today – let’s face it – aren’t readers. And in the same vein, the dwindling number of readers who define their taste as literary, are exposed to very little quality within the realm of unabashed sex and erotica. From that point of view, Playboy did the world a whole lot of good.

For me, it performed a miracle. As I grew up, I knew I wanted to write to the high standard of the folks at Playboy. And I knew I would always see the beauty and aesthetics of female nudity, the celebration of what it is rather than the manipulated “let it all hang out” vulgarity it has become.

My parents received Playboy though international subscription until a spring day in 1973, when the Indian Government sent them a sternly-worded court order. No more importing “obscene literature.” Or Else. With that, Playboy, like my Mum’s embroidered bell-bottoms and our cranky Ambassador car, began its slow fade out to family history.

I can only laugh now at the pointlessness and irony of the court order. By the mid-1980s, our local market would be flooded with cheaply dubbed Scandinavian “blue films.” By the end of the 1990s, unadulterated porn could enter every Indian home through the democratic miracle of cyberspace. Miss Playmate was almost virginal when one saw what thrills buxom Malayali aunties, C-grade Bollywood extras and Greek-Armenian pole dancers had to offer on YouTube and YouCumHere. Porn – soft porn, hard porn, triple XXX porn, orgy porn, bestial porn – was everywhere.

With this has come the death of Playboy’s unique brand of “intellerotica” – which first blazed across newsstands in 1953 and shook up the conservative heartland of America. It may have horrified some, but for many others it represented anew wave of sexy, sophisticated classy pleasure – a wave that has crashed in these post-modern times.

In 2015, Playboy decided to stop featuring frontal nudity; a wise decision, considering the competition from explicit easy-to-access porn today. What remains unrivalled, however, are Playboy’s trademarks – controversial opinion, searing socio-political debate and culturally diverse profiles of extraordinary talents.

But who’s reading?

*

Cyanide Mallika: In Search Of India’s First Female Serial Killer

Selina Sheth

On December 31, 2007, the police arrested a middle-aged woman loitering near the Bangalore Interstate Bus Terminus. She was dressed in a traditional kanjeevaram sari, had flowers in her hair and a sweet smile. K.D. Kempamma, forty-five, appeared to be selling second-hand cell phones. The police had received an anonymous tipoff that there was something amiss about the woman’s background and identity.

Indeed there was. K.D. Kempamma had several aliases: Jayamma, Lakshmi, Santramma and the most commonly used, Mallika. She was also a cold-blooded criminal who had committed six murders by poisoning her victims with cyanide and then robbing them of their valuables.

This was, as the police dubbed her, Cyanide Mallika.

India’s first “official” female serial killer.

She sits today in an anonymous jail cell in the women’s barracks near Mysore, Karnataka after a court ruling in 2012 commuted her death sentence to life imprisonment.

I’m a writer and the character of Cyanide Mallika fascinates me. It compels me more than those of countless male criminals in India who routinely kill out of desperation, sexual perversion, vengeance or deranged machismo.

Criminality, of course, is not gender-specific. But Cyanide Mallika’s story and the reactions of disbelief that it throws up uncover a larger myth within our social and popular culture: the myth that Women Do Not Kill. Unless they’ve been violated or abused or are trying to protect themselves or their children, they just don’t take lives.

And cinema upholds this fiction.

Remember the once-soft-but-now-angry-and-self-righteous Zakhmi Aurat of the 1980s? The pitiful gang-raped Phoolan Devi who had no choice but to become the big screen’s Bandit Queen in the 1990s? Sure, these were good films with a strong message, but there had to be a reason for the audience to empathize with the female protagonist. She was never evil for the sake of being evil. She was a goddess, channeling her inner Devi/Kali for some sense of justice, and in this way, the audience always rooted for her victory. Think of a de-glam Charlize Theron as lesbian murderer Aileen Wuornos in the Oscar-winning Monster. Wuornos killed seven men between 1989 and 1990 and was executed by lethal injection in Florida State Prison in 2002. She claimed, right up to her end, that she’d been a victim of rape and sexual abuse and that the killings were all in rage and self-defense. Somewhere, somehow, Monster Wuornos is justified. Right?

In her youth, Mallika had been married to Devraj, a working-class tailor in a village in Karnataka. She bore three children. According to her confession, domestic life was not for Mallika, who was always ambitious for “a better life and material wealth.” After she was accused of fraud in a local chit fund scheme, Mallika abandoned her home and family. She worked a series of low-paying jobs as a maid, then became an assistant to a goldsmith, and finally realized that robbery and murder would be a lot more lucrative.

Mallika took to dressing piously and hanging around the temple complexes of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Her modus operandi was to befriend the women devotees who came there, all of whom had problems: childlessness, trouble at home, depression, illness. Mallika would convince each of these women to undergo a religious “cleansing” to ward off bad energies. For this ritual, the “target” would come dressed in all her finery and would have to eat a special holy prasad. This prasad was laced with cyanide, and a few minutes later, the victim would pass out and die. Then, Mallika would take off with her cash, expensive clothes and gold jewelry.

Mallika’s sixth and final victim was a rich woman called Nagaveni, and her disappearance (and death) led to the police opening an investigation into the mystery temple killer. Upon Mallika’s arrest, Dr. Rajni, a prison psychiatrist in Karnataka state, made the conventional observation: “Most women who commit murder in India have been married before the age of 18, and have endured bad marriages, sexual abuse, violence and poverty.”

And yet this is only a half truth. Cyanide Mallika admitted that she’d endured none of the above. Robbery and killing her victims was simply an easy way to get rich.

In 1999, I co-directed a television crime series called Agnichakra. Our first story was on the infamous child murders of Pune, Maharashtra, masterminded by two of India’s most chilling female criminals, the Gavit sisters. The Gavits would abduct orphaned children between the ages of one and four, use them for begging, and then casually kill them when they stopped being productive. In this way, the Gavits murdered nine children, most of them babies.

The Gavits received the death sentence in 2001. The Kolhapur district judge pronounced the crimes as “most heinous” and added, “the sisters seemed to have enjoyed killing the children.” It seemed particularly shocking to the judge that these two women – themselves mothers – could go against their natural instincts of nurturing and protecting life, and be so brutal.

And yet, the Cyanide Mallikas and the Gavit sisters of the world are real, not fantasy, and it’s ironic that they exist in life, but do not become characters on celluloid.

As a writer, I’m often told to make my characters more “likeable” – even the characters that are “bad” and that do wrong. This applies particularly to female characters. There always has to be a reason – any reason – for empathy.

Roxane Gay makes this point in her collection of essays Bad Feminist. She writes: “The rules are different for girls. There are many instances in which an unlikeable man is billed as an antihero…he is interesting, dark, tormented, even when he does distasteful things…but when women are unlikeable, it becomes a point of obsession in critical conversations. We need to uncover life, in all its possibilities. An unlikeable woman may or may not arouse empathy, but the question should be: Likeable or not, is this character alive? Is she real?”

To hell with the rules being different for girls. They should make a movie on Badass Cyanide Mallika. Exactly as she is, or was. I’ll be the first one in line for a ticket.

*

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT SYLVIA

Selina Sheth

Some years ago, I was commissioned by director Soni Razdan and producer Pooja Bhatt to write the story of a film called Love Affair. Like the recently released Rustom, the script of Love Affair is based on what is known today as the Nanavati scandal, an infamous love triangle-cum-murder trial that shocked the nation in 1959.

The facts are public knowledge. On April 27 of that year, Naval Commander Kawas Nanavati came home from months of offshore duty to find his wife Sylvia in the throes of a passionate affair with a local businessman and playboy, Prem Ahuja. Nanavati confronted Ahuja, demanding that the latter marry Sylvia and take responsibility for the Nanavatis’ three young children. Ahuja scoffed: “I don’t have to marry every woman I sleep with!” That’s when Nanavati lost his officer-like cool and fatally shot Ahuja thrice in cold blood. The courtroom drama that followed was nothing short of sensational, with salacious reporting by the tabloid Blitz, and a jury that was so swayed by emotion that Nanavati found himself acquitted of first-degree murder. (Needless to mention, this turned out to be the last trial by jury in India.)

Subsequently, Nanavati was found guilty by a higher court and served three years in prison. Upon his release, he, Sylvia and their children left India for a life in Canada.

At first, I wasn’t excited about turning this story into celluloid saga. It had been done before (in potboilers like Yeh Raaste Hain Pyaar Ke and Achanak) and the narrative treatment in both these films was saccharine and sanctimonious. Nanavati was a man of honor, holier than the Pope, more patriotic than Gandhi. The villainous, leery Ahuja was a sleazebag who deserved the fate of being shot to death in his bedroom with nothing but a towel around his waist.

And Sylvia? She interested me least of all – appearing as the repentant wife in a light sari, doe-eyes downcast and awash with tears, a distressed damsel begging for a second chance at marriage and forgiveness for the cardinal sin of adultery.

Still, I started my research.

In the late 1940s, Sylvia was a mere teenager in England when she met the handsome Kawas Nanavati. They fell in love, returned to India to marry and settle down, and child bride Sylvia soon became a mother of three. Nanavati, it appeared, was a loyal husband, but he was away for long periods of time on naval duty, and the young and sensuous Sylvia felt neglected, older than her twenty-eight years and an outsider in a foreign country. She was far away from home, saddled by babies and the demands of an aging mother-in-law, and found it hard to make friends in the clique culture that was elite south Bombay.

A chance encounter with socialite Mamie Ahuja would breathe fresh air into Sylvia’s stale life. Mamie introduced Sylvia to her brother Prem, a charismatic and sexy bachelor, and there was instant chemistry. Prem wooed Sylvia, with invitations to parties and soulful conversations undertaken on long, intimate drives. Soon, Sylvia and Prem became lovers. Despite her attachment to her husband and children, Sylvia went against the grain of conventional women of the time; she gave in to the natural desire she felt for her attentive suitor, unleashing rather than suppressing the sexual fire within her.

Kawas Nanavati discovered the affair months later. By then, Sylvia sensed that Prem was a philanderer, and that the affair was doomed. But Sylvia, honest and genuinely conflicted by the situation, confessed to her husband that she’d fallen in love with Prem. Nothing could have prepared her for what was to come next: Prem’s murder at the hands of a stoic but rage-fueled Kawas.

How would Sylvia have felt? Surely the idea of her husband killing her lover would have left Sylvia just a little bit more than shell-shocked? Perhaps even angry and betrayed? For it appeared that when Kawas Nanavati took fate into his hands and confronted Prem Ahuja with a loaded gun, Sylvia became a mere pawn in a power game between two male egos.

In the hysteria that followed Nanavati’s arrest, in the public media frenzy that was building up to the trial, Sylvia remained a silent spectator. All that we know of her during this time is convenient presumption: that she felt afraid, guilty and remorseful for her “mistake.” On the first day of the trial of K.M. Nanavati vs the State of Maharashtra for the murder of Prem Ahuja, Sylvia’s persona was fragile and shaky whereas Kawas strode into court, a man of steel principle, a hero to millions of romance-starved ladies who wished their own husbands had the guts to kill for them.

But it was here that Sylvia’s story took an interesting turn. Instead of dissolving into pitiful tears, she found her own iron resolve. Sylvia stood by Kawas. Her lover was dead, but Sylvia decided to make herself responsible for her husband’s predicament, and the survivor in her rallied for the sake of their marriage, family and future.

For me, this is where the character of Sylvia comes to life, and starts to shift shape from a pampered, protected wife to the proverbial pillar of strength. It was Sylvia who had to keep things going now. The Nanavatis were outcasts. Kawas’s navy career was an uncertain mess, the children were taunted at school, and daily headlines got more lurid by the day:

“Three Shots That Shook The Nation!”

“Love, Sex and Betrayal!”

“Buy Your Very Own Prem Ahuja Bath Towel and Nanavati Revolver!”

There were no more parties and invitations – Sylvia was broke and a social pariah. In the midst of all the drama, Kawas’s mother died and the family, it seemed, could not have been more shattered.

But somehow Sylvia, a tough English girl, kept her head above water. She survived on borrowed funds, nurtured her bewildered children, and supported a shaken Kawas in court. Whatever turmoil she felt within, she kept her outer demeanor intact. Not only did she fully back her husband’s character, she also told the truth about her feelings of lust for Prem – in this way, she did not present herself as a naïve, passive victim of a manipulative playboy, but as a woman who had made the choice to have an affair.

When the High Court sentenced Kawas Nanavati to life in prison in 1960, Sylvia was bruised but not beaten. It was now that she chose to actively campaign for her husband’s release.

Sylvia and defense lawyer Rajni Patel approached the young, rising lawyer for the prosecution, Ram Jethmalani. It appeared as though Kawas could get a Presidential pardon and be freed, if a deal could be struck. This involved the simultaneous release of a minor criminal, a Sindhi called Bhai Pratap. By now, the case had become a political hot potato between the Parsi (Nanavati) and Sindhi (Ahuja) community, and a move like this would appease both sides.

But Nanavati’s release also depended on Mamie Ahuja’s consent. As Ram Jethmalani remembers today, it was Sylvia, Mamie’s one-time friend, who ultimately convinced a hostile Mamie to let “bygones be bygones.”

Sylvia’s substantial role in the proceedings have never been shown on film or in the countless pulp fiction tales that have been spun from the scandal. But when Kawas Nanavati walked out of jail on a summer day in 1965, the Sylvia by his side was no longer a dependent wife. She was a true partner who had fought to save her husband – and succeeded.

In Love Affair, I wanted to present Sylvia as the active protagonist that she was, and not the decorative fluff that she is in macho, jingoistic Rustom, which I watched with some disbelief.

For Sylvia is the Story, the key to the interlocked destinies of both the men in her life, the destroyer and the sustainer in equal measure, the character who embarked on the deepest emotional journey and bore the hardest life lesson.

But with Rustom in theatres, and the script of Love Affair in a vault, Sylvia will remain, in public consciousness, at best a meek, hazy enigma. At worst, she is a spineless, sobbing shadow, eclipsed by the blinding white purity of her husband’s image. Modern Bollywood, for all its talk of evolving strong female characters, has managed to overlook yet another one.

*

AN ADDICT FOR LIFE

Selina Sheth

I’ve been an addict all my life and will die as one.

At fifteen, I am dependent on blue eyeliner and boys for approval. At twenty-eight, I’m obsessed with my job as a television writer and proving to the entertainment industry that I’m the voice of my generation. At thirty-two, I consume four books a week and make infinite notes for a novel that I will write one day. And at forty-three, I have a neurotic need to work out, to get lean and flexible, to sweat from every pore and clear my mind of every doubt while I’m at it.

An hour and a half of punishing, acrobatic ashtanga vinyasa yoga is a part of my daily morning fix. It is like bathing or changing underwear – it has to be done, or I won’t be able to breathe and actually get on with life or any kind of real work.

Having an addictive personality can be a positive thing; that little X factor that marks a zealous achiever rather than a ‘going with the flow’ idler.

Sure, there’s a downside to extreme compulsion, a danger zone that’s as innocuous as an unmarked landmine. Somewhere between my years of thirty-five and thirty-nine, lies my very own Half Decade of Lost Time, my customized Female Pre-Midlife Crisis, a shadowy blur of people and events that I cannot recall thanks to my drug of choice at this point: Riviera White. A bottle a day, maybe another at night. Preferably alone. Actually, make that definitely alone. It’s a ritual that stretches from an hour into one day or two; a dull, hazy liberation from the shackles of tiresome social pretences and the boredom of churning out corny soap opera scripts. I knock back a glass, pour another. That’s better. Now I can start to relax and really, really talk to myself. Pick my topic and go on and on, there’s no one to stop me. When I am flying high on drunk, evangelical righteousness, I make a series of aggressive phone calls and rant my opinions to friends, colleagues, ex-lovers, producers of cheques that have bounced, next door neighbors that have pissed me off. I tell them exactly what I think of them until they hang up on me or I hang upon them, whichever comes first. I pass out, wake up a few hours later. Oops. A wave of embarrassment. Did I go too far last night? Or was it this afternoon? More irritating than a hangover is the obligation to make amends. So I don’t. Instead, I draw the curtains, talk some more to myself, imbibe some more of the Sula in the fridge. This time, I safety-lock my phone.

Two hours later, nicely buzzed, the familiar feeling of invincibility kicks in. The Force is with me and I can achieve anything, be anyone, in this state. And so I vow that starting tomorrow/this weekend/next Tuesday, it will all be different. No to booze. Yes to clean living, a sharp mind, a toned body. I make a schedule for the New Me to follow. Half way through Day Two, I give up, cave in, call the guy at Princess Wines. He always delivers; he is my only anchor in an uncertain world.

In the life of every drinker, thinker, seeker or occasional manic depressive (and I have been all these), there is a high that lasts for about twenty-seven minutes a day. What comes – without warning, like a sharp turn on a mountain road – is a crashing wave of despair, loneliness and utter panic. This is when Reality pays you a visit, showing up like a snotty cousin. It says: Hello. You know you’ve lost your way. You’ve missed family get-togethers, reunions, new trends, work deadlines. Most importantly, don’t you miss your own self? Once smoking hot, now a sluggish mess. You look fifty and you’re not even forty yet.

I tell Reality to fuck off. I haven’t hit Rock Bottom. Yet.

Known Fact: Addicts talk of hitting Rock Bottom as a turning point in their story. Many a drunk has been Reborn after waking up on a crowded street in broad daylight, with the realization that they could have been run over by a truck but have been spared instead for better things. For others, the process of self-realization is slower, less dramatic, more rational. The dull fear of losing family, health, a relationship, a job they are good at, self-respect. They are tired of suffocating under a blanket of social disgrace, sick of the pain that comes with avoiding mirrors and staircases.

In my case, it is none of the above. One day I merely forget about wine because a new addiction rings my doorbell one morning, moves in and devours me. Before I know it, I’m celebrating four years of sobriety and an anniversary with my new soul mate: Fitness.

Fitness. It starts as an experiment. One workout only, because the flyer that sails in through the grills on my window promises me a Free Trial class. Three months later, I’m clocking two hours of cardio yoga a day. No alcohol, no junk food. Empty bottles evicted and recycled. No more Princess Wines on speed dial – I’ve deleted the number. Only fruit after 6 pm. I run up four flights of stairs, glide through 108 Surya Namaskars. Everywhere I go, I sip benignly, smugly from a flask of hot water. The Sula leaves me frigid. The Riviera is like an ex-boyfriend I can’t be bothered with anymore because my new lover has me on fire.

One day, I discover the Ashtanga Primary Series, and it’s like graduating from mere addiction to Meta Religion. I fall into worship, like a New Age Scientologist. Group “ashtangi” discussions on WhatsApp and Facebook revolve around castor oil baths, Mandukamats and Kino videos. There are forty-two postures in Primary, and some people get stuck somewhere around the fourteenth one, from where on it will take them years more, or no time at all because they give up. But I am an addict. I don’t give up. I crack the gateway posture – Marichyasana D – in two months. Ego soars. Then I get stuck in the pinnacle pose that is Supta Kurmasana. Ego crashes. But wait, Garba Pindasana is getting better, and after that Primary is easy, I’m told, but only until drop-backs begin, and then after that there’s the whole Intermediate Series, and my target is to get there, by next year, or in roughly twenty years. Practice, practice, practice, all is coming.

The best thing about me, says my teacher one day, is my willpower. Yes. I am a relentless machine. I push myself, because there is so much to learn, and it is as if I know nothing, as if I have been in a coma right upto this point. Go Slow. Learn Patience. But the symptoms of the old virus are back, the virus of addiction. Only this time it is pure and clean, in an avatar that is hardened and determined and constructive instead of weak and helpless and shivering. I am a Take No Excuses type of person and it’s a good thrill, a cool feeling, like, well, an addiction.

I don’t miss wine. Ashtanga is a drug more potent than cocaine, more exhilarating than heroin, more lethal than first love.

It’s a high to have a jutting clavicle, sharp cheekbones, size eight jeans, the constant rush of adolescent stamina, the ability to bare headstand on a beach. It’s even better to have all that with the underlying, long-term benefits of yoga: an iron discipline, the ability to deal with pressure without helpless anxiety, that power to not have to justify yourself constantly.

I finally embrace addiction as a Good Thing. It has led me to freedom, in a way that moderation and balance never would have. Moderation is not my key; balance is not in my lexicon. These are oxymorons, mistaken assumptions like “social drinking” and “gentle exercise.” The truth is you have to Go Rogue. Make addiction your friend, your inspiration. Because for an addict it can only be All or Nothing.

The addict always makes that one choice: the extremity of electric success (or black-out failure) over the low-wattage bulb of routine mediocrity.

All I pray for is that the next obsession – if or when it hits – is an even greater high.

I am an addict and will die as one and now that I’ve made my peace with this, I can get on with life. There is much to do.

Like bringing out that novel that is inside me.

*

WORKING TITLE

Selina Sheth

INT. PRODUCER’S OFFICE. DAY

Karan Kamal, known as KK, sits on a brown and silver throne in his brown and gold production office. Papers are strewn around his heavy desk. On the wall behind is a large, platinum-framed picture of a beaming KK with Hollywood star Goldie Hawn. The photograph was taken on her last spiritual trip to India, KK beams, his fingers splayed excitedly. He adds that they “really hit it awwfff” and now Goldie has sent feelers (“not those kinds of feelers, haha!”) about co-producing a venture involving a charismatic Mumbai gangster, a Hawaiian porn starlet, a talking cow and the Holy Ganges as scenic backdrop. Shah Rukh Khan is interested.

Background noise continues – the camera pulls out to reveal LILA, a nervous woman in her 30s, sitting opposite KK’s desk. His iPhone shrieks. KK clicks it off with a nervous, braying laugh, goes silent, sighs, then turns to his desk and contemplates the open script with a deep expression.

LILA (silent): He probably hates it. He’s not into indie cinema. He’s more into that whole Blowing Up Bridges thing. What the hell was I thinking? OK, stay calm. Take your script. Say thank you. Leave. Dignity is everything.

A sharp SNAP as KK cracks the spine of the script. He leans back, throwing a stoned expression at Lila.

KK (emphatically): I LOVE IT. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. This has…this has…today’s vibe. Edge. Humor. It tells it like it really, really is.

Lila’s pupils dilate in shock.

FADE TO BLACK.

*

January 10, 2011

No, that entry was not a scene from my screenplay. This exchange happened for real a few hours ago, at nine a.m. to be precise. I was hungover and cranky but dragged myself to KK’s production “suite” in the heart of Film City. KK quit drinking in 1998. He claims he woke up one morning on a sidewalk in Bandra, dazed after a night of vodka-rum-whiskey-lime juice, and that was it for him. Besides, now he rises early to pay obeisance to the Mother at Siddhivinayak temple. Today, he was twenty minutes late (“stuck in Mumbai traff, what can you do?”), during which time he checked the trades on his latest App, read the opening and ending pages of my script, charged into his office, ignored me in an amiable kind of way, got on the phone to “Goldie’s guy in LA,” then told me he loved my work, and finally showed me out, with a “Let’s do this thing!” This, I think, was more for the benefit of KK’s beaming memoirist who arrived just then, a former film journalist whose stint in rehab KK has sponsored thrice in the past. KK proclaimed loudly that he has the perfect title for his proposed self-help best-selling extravaganza: How Gut Decisions Connect You to the Heart and Pulse of the Audience – A Guide to Breaking Into 21st Century Bollywood. Tagline: Because if I can make it, so can You!

Harper Collins is publishing.

*

I’ve known KK for years and have always resisted the urge to make fun of him – this self-styled wunderkind producer, who drops showbiz names in every other sentence and chooses to be called only by his initials on the advice of his personal numerologist. But I’ve had this screenplay in my drawer for months now. And I decided it was time to get over my writerly aloofness, my general disdain for the tacky machine that is Bollywood extravaganza. Come on, I’m as guilty of tackiness as anyone else, since my bills get paid courtesy of being Head Writer on Star Plus’s Mothers & Daughters. I got this appointment with KK last week through a colleague on the soap. But I decided to actually keep it when I heard the latest rumor in B-ville. KK is looking for a change of image. No more weepy family dramas, no testosterone-filled action lollapaloozas. He’s been wanting to produce a smart, independent flick on a modest budget, a slice of life of 2000s urban Indian angst.

Enter Lila. Me, with my ten-odd years of churning out hackneyed soap plots and subbing Bollywood Tonight copy. Me, who yearns for that one lucky break. It takes just one film, one credit as screenwriter, and you’re on the map. Or so they say.

If I don’t sound too excited right now, it’s because I can’t believe my project is ON. That it’s all happening so…easily.

*

January 17, 2011

KK and I celebrate our new collaboration today. Four martinis down, I pitch the idea all over again, forgetting that he’s read the whole script just this week. In a nutshell, I think it’s brilliant. A down and out hack – with a failing heart and a penchant for alcohol – wants to leave the world with a swansong of his genuine talent. He pens a screenplay full of pain and sordidness, of the sleazy underbelly of the movie industry that’s masked by the magic arc lights of cinema. His only companion – a drunk just like himself – is his girlfriend, a spectacularly failed actress. The hack creates a script of depth and meaning, which of course, never sees the light of day. And then he dies…of a failing heart? Heartbreak? Or plain cirrhosis of his abused liver?

As of now, there isn’t a working title. But KK and I decide that it should be something in the range of Barfly or Leaving Las Vegas. Indianized, of course, with a weeping widowed mother or a disabled sister. No, not disabled. The sister could be really pretty, innocent, maybe a dancer at a bar? Our hero hates the way she is exploited; this angle gives him a moral center, feels KK. I agree. Ours is a Hindi movie after all, the hero can’t be drunk just for the sake of being drunk.

I’m drunk now on more than the free-flowing booze. I’m high on the fact that KK is a kindred spirit, who, despite his gold chains, actually knows who Ingmar Bergman is. KK tells me that before he decided that he needed to buy a house and feed his family and own a car and a suit and Be Someone, he’d hitch it down to the Pune Film Institute on weekends and devour every indie film that came out of France, Korea, Iran. Those were the days, he sighs, the glint of a tear reflecting on his Rolex.

Then KK mentions the M word. MONEY. He can’t pay me just yet, but he says this very apologetically. What I will get is my script turned into a film, my name in the opening credits. That’s traction. “For you writers,” he says earnestly, “it’s about the art after all. How many people get a shot at that?” And with these words, he speed-dials Maria, his tortured Girl Friday-cum-secretary-cum-general slave and rattles off a list of names she needs to set up meetings with pronto. I choke on my fifth apple mojito when I hear KK mention Nagarajan, the Bruce Willis of Bombay, the one big name who can make this really happen if he decides to star in it.

Joy. Thank you, God.

*

January 30, 2011

Nagarajan (“Call me Nag, babe!”) lives in a mansion that is crumbling heritage on the outside and pure kitsch within. KK and I arrive at noon. A cuckoo clock with a blue bird sent out electrifying squawks every thirty minutes. I see a zebra-skin covered bar in one corner of the living room which chimes out “Jingle Bells” every time Nag pours himself a drink, which is every thirty seconds. Or so it seems.

At first, legendary superstar Nagarajan is as shy as a kitten. He leaves the talking to Rahul, his Personal Assistant. Despite my anxiety, I like Rahul on sight. He’s got wavy dark hair and intelligent eyes. He looks at me with warmth and appreciation. “Good Job,” he whispers. And then Nag sighs dramatically and announces that yes, he’s read my screenplay, and yes, we’ll discuss it. But first he wants to rant about Guns of Revenge, the last action flick he did that was panned by the critics. He whines about the lousy marketing, bitches out the director (a young kid just back from UCLA and clearly not in touch with the native mass audience) and trashes the cheap costume and makeup department that made him look fifty (his real age) instead of thirty-two (which he believes his war-hero character to be).

Mid rant, Yamini joins us. Nag’s current squeeze, a dancer I recognize vaguely from MTV India’s So You Think You Can Groove? She is in yellow shorts and a tiny bustier and holds the ugliest little dog I’ve ever seen. Without a word, or even a glance at us, Yamini flops down on the electric pink sofa and snakes her naked legs over Nag’s lap. Nag carries on talking. Suki, the grotesque canine that she is, licks Nag’s chin and this makes Nag – six feet four, bald and built like a tank – lapse into absurd baby talk. Rahul grins at me covertly. I blush, pull myself together and look away.

More drinks. Nag rolls a joint, shares it with Yamini. Suki starts yapping. KK, who can’t stand cigarette smoke or dogs, for that matter, is so overwhelmed by the company he is in that he shrieks with orgasmic pleasure every time Nag grunts out half a word. Finally, three and a half hours into the meeting – after discussing diets, wigs, former lovers and 9/11 conspiracy theories – Nag goes quiet and fixes me with an intense “I’m actually a serious artist” look.

In a nutshell: Nag loves the screenplay, he just wants a bit of a rewrite. Actually, a ninety-nine per cent rewrite. The protagonist is a writer by day, but at night he trawls the streets, saving the homeless. His girlfriend is rich and is being forced by her family to marry someone else. In his despair, the sensitive writer befriends a lonely baboon at the local zoo. SUBPLOT A: An evil force is planning to blow up the building the heroine works in. SUBPLOT B: The hero’s heart is failing. CLIMAX: The hero gets to know about the plot to blow up the building but his heart is giving out. His friend the baboon makes the ultimate sacrifice. The hero gets the baboon’s heart in a nail-biting transplant operation. Armed with a new heart, the hero storms the building, kills the evil attackers, saves his girl and they live happily ever after.

Working Title: Something like Die Hard – but with a Humanitarian Twist. Or, better, more like Brave Heart sounding. That’s clever! A pun on Heart, get it? Oh, yeah, and Yamini as the girl. She deserves a role of substance after all the C-grade glam gal sidekicks she’s portrayed. So feels the great Nagarajan.

KK jumps up and down, his face flushed with excitement: “This is KILLER! This is a WINNER. What would we do without the genius input of Nagji?”

By then I’m too deep in shock to notice Rahul’s sympathetic, commiserating smile.

*

January 31, 2011

2 am

I’ve drained the last of the second bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. The day’s events seem far away now. The wine warms my blood and frees the shackles on my mind. I feel brave and belligerent. I will Not Back Down. What good is a writer without conviction? And so I decide to give KK a piece of my mind. How can he put us both through this absurdity?

Drunk dialing. Always a bad idea. But what the hell. Oops, wrong number. So I try again. KK answers on the eighth ring.

“Ye-llo! KK here.’’ A pause. Then I hear him again, talking to someone else.

“Tanu, stop that. STOP THAT!” Hysterical giggling followed. Then KK in his straight voice again. “Sorry. She’s…just…Babe, I SAID NO! Laila…sorry, Lila… OK, shoot.”

It all comes tumbling out in a haze of alcohol and indignant pride. I’m an educated person, come on now…I can’t stoop so low as to write this level of tripe. I want to have written a good script, not…

KK cuts me off then. I think I now understand how KK – despite being only on the fringes of this murky town – has survived for as long as he has.

“Here’s what I want, Lila. I want a film that goes from being on paper to reality. OK? Nagarajan can make it happen because he has star power. Clout. Audience pull. That’s what matters in the movies made in this country.”

I go silent. KK took a deep breath.

“So now, I have three bits of real good advice for you. Free of charge. So listen up, if you want to have a career writing movies. One. Forget these notions of high art and sensibility. Two. Never, ever complicate your life by drunk-dialing your producer. Three. Get. On. With. The. Rewrite.”

He clicks off. I feel the beginning of another hangover from hell.

*

March 14, 2011

The rewrite is done. KK is pleased when I go to see him; he tells me what a Good Girl I am and how this work will pay off. I smile and tell him I expect payment for the time I’ve put in rewriting. He stretches languidly and says we’ll discuss terms after meeting today with Nag. I notice for the first time that KK has teeth shaped almost like that Twilight guy’s – that vampire character that pre-teens are all so crazy about these days.

The sharp buzz of an intercom deflates the tension between us. KK answers with a beam and an energetic “Ye…llo!” And then he lapses into his usual silence. “Hmmm…yes…are you sure it can’t happen today? In the evening? Any time you say…Rahulji, I know you can’t help it…but, come on…OK, OK. I understand.”

KK hangs up. The meeting is off. Postponed indefinitely. Suki had a stroke this morning. She flopped down weakly, then got up, ran wildly around the room, had a heart attack, and dropped dead.

Nag is apparently hysterical with grief and has gone into mourning. He won’t see anybody. Not even Yamini.

And so, as I write, the future flutters uncertainly in the air, like the pages of this unbound – and now very mutilated – draft of my script.

*

April 12, 2011

Rahul is incredible. Gorgeous. Principled. Professional. And kind. He’s gotten us a meeting with Nag – the first meeting Nag is having “after the tragedy.”

It’s a different Nag we sit before today. No cuckoo clock. No chiming bar. No haze of marijuana. No Yamini. Zed explains that he’s taking a sabbatical from the movies. He needs to find his spiritual path in order to heal. He’s off to Tibet with his ex-wife, who very kindly called to pay her condolences on dear, departed Suki.

KK and I shuffle out, dazed and confused all over again. But KK being KK is optimistic. As we get into his car, he tells me: “We have a script. We’ll go to someone else. Forget Nagarajan. He’s an old hag now anyway!” he thunders, pounding the wheel of his new Audi.

Rahul joins us as we pull out of Nag’s runway-sized drive. He mutters his apologies and then offers to drive me home. Don’t I live near Versova Beach? That’s where he is headed too.

And so I find myself alone with Rahul in his second-hand Maruti. We drive to the sounds of Junoon, and I feel light-headed. I tell Rahul everything. About the half-hearted rewrite I forced myself to do, and how Nag has actually solved my dilemma by pulling out. I tell Rahul that I have my original screenplay, that I’ll just wait for a better opportunity. That in the meantime, I will add all these new twists to it, really hone the scenes. With the right star-actor and producer, I know it can work. Rahul is wonderful and such a great listener.

He comes up to my apartment. No more industry talk, he says.

A brief bio on Rahul: A talented, but overlooked middle child. Small town, silent dreams of “making it.” No strait-laced engineering or accountant career for him, thank you. Arrived in Mumbai at nineteen with a suitcase and a few bucks (from doting Mum; Dad wasn’t talking to him), put himself through a film production course by night, worked with film crews by day, temped for Nag, became his Golden Boy after smoothly handling an incident involving Yamini, the police, a furious ex-wife, a pusher in drag, and a gram of coke. Today, Rahul is all of twenty-six, but he’s already paying off installments on his very own bachelor pad, and when his proud folks visit (Dad too), he organizes tours to film sets and photo-ops with Nag. But he says it all drily, like he knows he’s meant for better and purer, and he’s going to get there.

A brief bio on me: A talented, but neurotic first-born. A comfortable, big-city life in Delhi, where my teenage room is twice the size of my entire current digs; a hard worker but prone to meltdowns that inevitably cause me to quit good writing gigs “on principle.” Today, at thirty-five, I’m stretching the last of my TV savings. Also, my last relationship ended with my slacker lover choosing to marry a “stable” girl from his hometown and feeling so good about it, that he invited me to the wedding. Worse, I would have gone, except I had nothing suitable to wear.

Bygones. It’s all about the moment, the present, the reason why we – over and over again – choose a life of mercurial adventure over the dull thump of routine. Rahul and I kiss and then make love. For the first time in months, I feel truly alive.

*

April 22, 2011

It’s been a week, and I’m like a cat caught on the proverbial hot tin roof. There’s been no phone call from Rahul. I call him at his office at Nag’s, but he’s quit that job and no one knows where he is. Leaving my cell phone free, should he ring, I use my landline phone to make calls at twenty-second intervals to KK. There’s no film – but I want to be paid something at least for the rewrite. And I’m antsy as hell because there’s never been any kind of contract between us.

KK is out all day. Yesterday morning he was with his wife at a Vipassana Mindfulness Retreat. Then he was in a meeting, followed by another meeting. Today is Tuesday, so he was at the ISKCON temple, after which he went to pick up his son from school. (He is due to give a lecture there on Fathers and Family Values next week.) Maria sounded frazzled each time. (“KK’s cell phone is switched off…sorry dear, KK is driving through a tunnel and can’t take calls…KK has mild tinnitus in his left ear and can’t handle cellular vibration anymore…!”) Etcetera. Etceteraceteraceteracetera.

So I show up at KK’s office, and literally barge my way past the shoebox reception into his grungy cabin. There he is, laughing away with Rahul.

KK politely tells me that there is a check for my efforts with Maria. He’s paying me approximately five thousand rupees for the painstaking rewrite I did. Fair of him, no? Because he has principles, he says. He’s not the sort to cheat anyone, least of all writers. And then he and Rahul get up and slime out to their next meeting.

I stare after them in blind horror. I remember Rahul coming up to my apartment, his eyes locked in mine, his ears primed for all the ideas I had that day that came tumbling out of my passionately, just-kissed lips.

Like a beggar, I sign for my cheque. I debate ripping it up, but then I get practical. It’ll pay the phone bill this month, if nothing else. Maria smiles gently and lets on that Rahul is writing KK’s next script. She suspects that it’s a revised version of my original screenplay. But with fresh twists. And with the assurance that Samar Singh, a rising TV star with a movie future, is going to act in it. He and Rahul were college buddies, so he agreed to a meeting instantly. That’s where Rahul and KK are headed right now.

I stagger out into the glaring sunshine. Drag myself home, draw the curtains, strip off my clothes, drop into bed, pull the covers around me and descend into a deep, dreamless sleep.

*

September 15, 2011

I haven’t had the energy to write an entry in months. I’ve been busy – I got my old job back on Mothers & Daughters (luckily, I didn’t have to grovel for it) and have just been offered a script consultancy gig on a new series, a Hindi remake of Heartbreak Hospital titled Sanjivani. Good old television, the ultimate safety net. There’s also drudge work. Website text work for an oil corporate, and a set of company flyers to type up for my landlord who let me stay on in the apartment despite my rent cheque bouncing back in June.

The buzz is that my erstwhile script is actually being made, though no one knows when production will start. I’m in touch with Maria who tells me Samar Singh is on board to star, but he doesn’t want to play a writer. “It’s boring,” he reportedly told Rahul, “it’s too passive. All writers do is sit in a room and type. Why can’t he be a body builder or a boxer instead? This way he gets to show off his eight-pack abs. Very important for a rising movie star.”

KK of course, fully agrees. So Rahul is rewriting yet again, and now that there’s talk of a British financier entering the picture, further buzz is that the setting will change too. None of this urban angst stuff. This is India, and India sells abroad only when there is poverty and suffering in every frame. Rewrite number twenty-seven coming up. Good luck with that, Rahul.

Still no working title, but it’ll be something on the lines of Slumdog Millionaire. Or if Samar gets his way, Body Builder Billionaire? Whatever sells.

As for the esteemed Nagarajan, I saw him on Spirit TV last week. He’s got a beard now, and looks skinny after a bout of food poisoning that he caught up in the hills of Uttarkashi. But even so, Nag appears to be at peace. He says it’s because he’s quit acting, taken up carpentry and reunited with his former wife and kids.

Yamini – after her unceremonious exit from Nag’s life – has reinvented herself as a reality show star on Sky TV’s Women Who Get Dumped By Famous Men. People think she’s naïve, the classic bimbo with a heart of gold. Her on-screen innocence is as fake as her reconstructed nose, but I don’t grudge her. She’s just another woman trying to survive, I guess.

As for me, I’m doing alright. Plugging along. I’m writing, I’m working. Maybe someday I’ll write another film. It’s important not to get too cynical about things. Keep writing. Keep working. Keep the Faith. What else can you do?

*

ACADEMY GIRL

(Excerpt)

Selina Sheth

I sort of get why Sonya hates me. I would hate me too – or, for that matter, anyone who played a role in having their best friend expelled; that too from a prestigious institute like the Frankfinn Academy for Flight Attendants. To be honest, Sonya and I weren’t that close, but we got along well when we roomed together during our first year. At the time, Sonya liked me because I didn’t ask for much attention and focused all of mine on her. This was necessary because Sonya talked non-stop about her life – an adventurous childhood spent in foreign cities (her parents were diplomats), international schools at which she excelled (especially in math and basketball), languages she’d effortlessly picked up (French, Chinese and a smattering of Swahili), and a parade of boy-men, all of whom were besotted by her.

In our second year, we drifted apart. I continued to attend the Academy’s training classes, but moved out of the women’s dorm to live at home with my father who was recovering from heart surgery. By then Sonya had a new boyfriend Aman, who had already graduated with top honors and was flying for Jet Wings. She didn’t have much time for me anymore, but I understand these things.

Then Sonya got into trouble with the Review Committee for sneaking Aman into her dorm room at night; apparently this had gone on all through summer term. Along with a few others, I, as a friend and former roomie, was called upon to “testify to Sonya Irani’s character.” I suppose I could have mentioned Sonya’s kindnesses – the silk sari she once lent me for an interview, the thick roll of cash she pressed into my hand when my father was admitted to the emergency unit – but I didn’t. I said that Sonya had a cavalier attitude towards the Academy’s strict rules. That she was talented in many ways, but also reckless. That her impulses often led to embarrassing “situations” – for herself and for everyone involved. (This was the thing about Sonya: for all her charisma and worldliness, she wasn’t very smart.)

The Review Committee deliberated for a week. When the term ended, Sonya left the Academy and I got bonus credits in my Evaluation Report for showing “maturity and integrity.”

This will help when I apply to Jet Wings next year.

I’m not sorry. I see what happened as a life lesson for Sonya. She isn’t cut out for this line of work. For Sonya, flying is just a way to make social contacts, a chance to land herself some rich tycoon type, an opportunity to revisit places that she already knows so well. (I should mention here that I’ve never been abroad.) I mean, flying was never going to be a serious job for Sonya, much less her livelihood, and maybe that’s what pissed me off about her.

I want a lot of things but what I don’t want is to end up like my father, with his meagre government pension and shoulders that are hunched from a lifetime of subservience.

So I worked really hard to get into Frankfinn. I had to get two after-school jobs – answering phones at a call center and selling MAC lip-liner to rich teen mall rats – because this was the only way I could afford voice coaching classes. (Vernacular accents are not welcome in the high skies.) Anyway, that’s all in the past.

The Frankfinn tagline reads: “Giving a new generation the wings to fly.”

It’s time I did.

*

BLUE

Selina Sheth

Blue is the color of anxiety, the smell of despair, the sound of confusion, the taste of fear, the touch of doubt. For Jamshed, it brings back jumbled flashes of long-buried images and emotions. A cobalt-stained hospital wall at age five, the time he’d smashed his knee and waited endlessly for a doctor to arrive. An inky high school test paper that he knew he’d fail even before looking at the questions. A joyride on his cousin’s navy-painted Scout that broke down on the Western Express Highway in peak traffic.

And then there was the dress. Niharika’s strapless maxi – that fashion debacle that defined the early 1980s – with its purple hue and sapphire bustier. Jamshed first laid eyes on it the same week of his Class of ‘82 graduation party. During his final year at Mumbai University, Jamshed had fancied himself in love with Niharika, but now, he realized he loved the dress a lot more – and not on her, but on himself. When Niharika caught Jamshed modelling the gown – his hairy chest and arms bursting through the delicate fabric – she’d broken things off there and then. Jamshed had felt an avalanche of relief. And gratitude that he’d been able to keep the dress since Niharika didn’t want it back.

*

It’s a whole new decade now. Disowned by Ma and Pa, and shunned by all but one of the aunties that make up his large Parsi family, Jamshed marvels at the one constant that refuses to abandon him. Blue continues to weave its strange magic of truth and untruth, peace and disharmony. It tinges Jamshed’s days of employment as a clerk in a stock brokerage company, his pale cerulean uniform of trousers and shirt making him unobtrusive to the swarming office crowds in downtown Churchgate. And it bursts into full bloom at night, when Jamshed transforms into Jamila, a part-time dancer at Gokul’s Bar who, at the end of her shift, cruises in parks and bus stations for rough sex with men. That’s when Jamila wears the old blue dress with an indigo boa to match; both these items hang, faded but still elegant, in the rusty Godrej of her one-room rental. There are those cold moments when all Jamshed can hear in his head is a cacophony, like metal nails on a blackboard; all he can taste is numbing bewilderment; all he sees is a future of freakish dual sexuality and no hope. But there is the thrill and throb of this life too.

Jamila has her lovers. There is always a ready replacement when one gets married, or leaves town, or loses interest. Recently, there was a short and passionate fling with a traffic cop near Gamdevi station, so the police haven’t harassed her in months and breathing has gotten that little bit easier.

*

But today, after a long absence, Blue is back. Ominous and rumbling, Blue is right here and everywhere. This morning, before getting out of the cab at the curb before the clinic, Jamshed looked up and saw miles of it in the cloudless expanse of azure sky, and splashes of it everywhere else – on the shirts of shopkeepers, on the dupattas of women, on the dancing waves of the pre-monsoon Arabian sea. Blue. Familiar anxiety, familiar despair.

Jamshed knows the signs, recognizes the inevitability of the outcome, but even so, as he sits this afternoon in the reception of the Holy Angels Auxilium Pathology Lab and waits for his test results, he finds himself praying.

*

SELINA SHETH

SELINA SHETH