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ONCE UPON A TIME IN KABUL:

FACT, FICTION, AND AN UNLIKELY FRIENDSHIP DURING THE PANDEMIC

Selina Sheth

Kabul, September 1996. The men attack after dark, moving with stealth and purpose, breaking locks and smashing windows, their shadowy beards and flowing tunics barely visible under the silvery moonlight. Tonight, their target is the Shah M. Book Company, a large bookstore in the heart of the Afghan capital. Here, they will shred and burn more than half of its 10,000 titles. They will leave behind broken shelves, walls blackened with soot, and a warning to its owner, Shah Muhammed Rais, that there will be worse to come if he continues to stock ‘anti-Islamist’ literature.

*

Mumbai, July 2021. It’s one a.m. on a Tuesday, but I am wide awake. Earlier today, a text from Shah Muhammed Rais made it clear that this is the only time he is available to talk to journalists. I don’t mind. I haven’t had a semblance of routine ever since Covid-19 hit sixteen months ago, and now, locked down in my apartment at the peak of a virulent Second Wave, insomnia has set in. So has anxiety, and a peculiar lack of motivation. I’ve swapped work on the First Draft of my novel for doomscrolling on Facebook and binge-watching Netflix. I’m also down to the last of my savings, so when the editor of Current magazine called last week, offering to pay me for a profile on the famed ‘Bookseller of Kabul’, I instantly agreed to the job.

I check that my I-phone is fully charged, then tap out Afghanistan’s country code and Rais’s cell number. I wait, feeling restless as I listen to the long hollow beeps that echo in my ear. I’m already regretting this assignment. What reporting can I do without physical access to Rais, without a single source or contact in Kabul? All I have in my ‘research file’ are a few dated articles printed off the Internet, a Google Maps image of a crumbling bookstore on a dusty downtown street, and a single picture of Rais: a cheerful man in his mid-sixties with dark twinkling eyes and an inscrutable smile.

I disconnect the unanswered call. Tomorrow, I’ll tell my editor that the story won’t work out. Decision made, I feel a rush of relief as I switch off my desk lamp. In the morning, I’ll go back to my novel-in-progress, rewrite the dialogue in the prologue, maybe tighten the tail of Chapter Four …

… My phone shrieks, disrupting the stillness of the night. A foreign number flashes on my screen, a glow of neon green in the darkness. I scramble to answer, and hear an affable ‘Hello’ in a Pashto accent.

‘Selina? So sorry I miss your call. I was resting … back pain, you know? We talk now?’

‘Of course,’ I stammer. Finding my voice, I thank Rais for calling me back. Attempting small-talk, I introduce myself as a ‘writer-for-hire by day, aspiring novelist by night,’ and ask how Rais is coping in the pandemic. (According to figures released by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health this summer, a third of the country’s thirty million population is infected by the novel coronavirus.)

Rais chuckles. ‘I’ve lived through decades of civil war and censorship, done time in prison, fought a vicious battle in court against someone I trusted like family! Easy for me to handle a pandemic, no?’

I can’t help but smile into the phone.

*

Shah Muhammed Rais was born to a middle-class family in Kabul in the spring of 1954. The seeds of his daring Arian nature began to sprout as early as middle school. When young Rais learnt, in a Geography class, that three quarters of the earth was covered by water, he resolved to get out of landlocked Afghanistan and see the ocean for himself. The year Rais turned fifteen, he jumped on a bus with only a few hundred afghanis in his pocket. He spent three weeks travelling solo: through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan, across the cities of Peshawar, Multan and Lahore, and into Karachi, a glamorous port on the Arabian Sea coast. When he returned to Kabul, Rais was treated like a hero at school. ‘I told tales of my adventures over and over again,’ he says. ‘The next year, I set off for Iran, this time to see the Black Sea.’

But soon after Rais arrived in the vibrant, cosmopolitan Tehran of the late 1960s, he lost all interest in hitting the beaches on the Caspian coast. ‘I discovered a city of fashionable young women in mini-skirts, a city brimming with art, culture, literature,’ he recalls. Rais spent his days exploring Tehran’s bookstores, where he became infatuated with a series of local college girls, and the poetry of Farsi greats like Firdausi and Jalal-ad-Din Rumi. He was also captivated by Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth, which he read in Persian. When Rais went home after his summer abroad, he carried with him the start of a personal library: three crates of books, which included the works of Tolstoy, Hemingway and Balzac. ‘Books are like seas. You have to dive in to get the pearl of knowledge,’ he says.

Unfortunately, Rais didn’t see how he could make a living from books. After graduating from high school, he took his father’s advice and went on to earn a degree in Civil Engineering from Kabul University. ‘I was young, restless, and employed by the Ministry of Power and Energy at a salary equivalent to $50 a month. I mean, I couldn’t have quit fast enough. Then my uncle suggested I join the family’s construction business. But that job involved greasing the palms of government officials. I didn’t want any of that.’

What Rais did want, more than anything, was to open his own bookstore in Kabul.

By now, the young man had expanded his collection to almost 1,000 books in Farsi, Dari, Pashto, and English. Some he’d purchased while travelling, while a few were donations from friends in the Ministry of Culture and Education. The bulk of Rais’s novels, short stories and poetry were faded paperbacks that he picked up from Kabul’s crowded book bazaars. With a nose for business, and a flair for entrepreneurship, Rais sniffed out interesting titles, and bought up unsold stocks from local booksellers at a throwaway price.

When Rais made a ‘working trip’ to India in the early 1970s, he was awed by the literary treasures he unearthed on the streets of Old Delhi. ‘I found rare couplets by the eighteenth-century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnette an Orpheus in German. And a secondhand copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. These books sold for a mere 100 rupees a piece, which back then was just about three US dollars,’ he says.

In 1975, Rais hired shop space in Kabul’s commercial CharahiSadarat district. This was a stone’s throw from the city’s administrative and diplomatic enclaves, and the perfect location for the Shah M. Book Company. On opening day, four large trucks pulled up to the store carrying every single book that Rais owned, and within hours, every shelf and nook was filled. Those who walked past the gleaming glass store-front could see Rais’s prized multi-volume boxed set of The Anglo-Afghan Wars propped on a red velvet ledge.

Rais’s venture birthed its share of critics, with some accusing him of being particularly creative at overestimating the value of his product. New and second-hand books were displayed with inflated price tags, and some titles were marked at five or ten times their original rates. ‘I had to make a living,’ Rais says, adding that he has always seen himself as ‘more of a scientist than a businessman actually.’

Even then, nothing could stop Kabul’s elite from showing up at the only international bookstore in the city. A few years later, Rais opened a second outlet in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, a move that attracted a regular stream of foreign tourists and expats. But even as the Shah M. Book Company became a hotspot in Kabul’s literary and cultural landscape, the political climate of the country was fast approaching boiling point.

*

In April 1978, a left-wing military coup overthrew the centrist Afghan government. Under the new Soviet Union-backed communist establishment, Rais found himself charged with ‘distributing imperialist books and anti-regime newspapers.’ Self-assured as ever, Rais argued that his bookstore was ‘a place not for the distribution of material, but for the collection and preservation of books for future generations.’ Rais’s claims fell flat. He was arrested by the government, and incarcerated in a Kabul prison for two years.

Rais did his time behind bars, getting through the experience with an attitude of defiance and humor. ‘Kabul’s jails were full of regular people, from working-class taxi drivers to university professors, all of whom had been labeled “enemies of the state” for protesting against authoritarianism. The charges against us were a joke. It was all smoke and mirrors, a way for the state to harass powerless citizens.’

Rais’s voice has an edge to it, and I decide not to push for details. After a beat of silence, he quips: ‘When I got out, I reopened my bookstore and it was business as usual.’

We’ve been talking for more than two hours, but Rais is no hurry to hang up.

Things got worse, he tells me, with the dawn of the 1980s. First came the rise of the country’s pro-Islamic militancy, known as the ‘Mujahideen’, and then, the birth of a radical splinter group, the Taliban. By the mid-1990s, Soviet troops had withdrawn from Afghanistan, and the Taliban had full control of the land. There were frequent and public episodes of insurgency and violence, and ordinary, peace-loving civilians suffered the most. Education in schools and colleges was disrupted, unemployment was at an all-time high, and women were excluded from public life. Many families fled the country to become refugees in other parts of the world. ‘I stayed right here, in Kabul,’ Rais says, with more than a hint of bravado. Soon after, the Taliban attacked his bookstore.

‘The Taliban burnt more than half my books, but I was prepared. I had already made multiple copies of each book, and stashed them in two secret warehouses on the outskirts of the city.’ What Rais could not bounce back from, he says, was the tyranny and destruction that the Taliban had wrought on Afghan society and culture. Rais felt a ‘moral obligation’ to keep Kabul’s primary schools afloat, and he did this by donating a tenth of his personal annual income to a charity for education. ‘My company spent $3,000 a year on free textbooks and stationery. We helped students in more than sixty inner city schools.’

In the wake of the terror attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, US troops invaded Afghanistan, starting a fierce and persistent war against the Taliban that would continue for over twenty years. But even as the new millennium seethed with geo-political tension, Rais found himself embroiled in a different kind of battle – a deeply personal one.

*

Fall 2001. Rais was in his bookstore at the Intercontinental when a young blonde woman dropped by for a casual visit. This was Asne Seierstad, a journalist from Norway known for her intrepid reporting from war zones. Now, she told Rais, she was keen to write about Kabul’s famed book merchant. Rais was flattered, and even more so, when Seierstad described her book as ‘a study of Afghan culture’ and ‘one family’s experience of surviving the tragedy of Civil War.’ Rais graciously invited Seierstad to dinner at his home, a modest house he shared with two wives and nine children. Soon after, Seierstad moved in with the family. While researching her book, she wore a burka so that she could experience life firsthand as a woman in Afghanistan. ‘She was with us for three months,’ Rais says. ‘I treated her with the honor and respect reserved for a family member. I came to trust her like my own. And she betrayed me.’

When The Bookseller of Kabul was published in 2002, Rais was catapulted into the global literary spotlight. This didn’t bother him as much as the fact that the book was ‘a shameless hit job, full of lies.’ Rais had expected a heroic rendition of his life. But Seierstad’s narrative, he claimed, portrayed him as a ‘medieval patriarch, a bigamist, and a flowery-tongued buffoon.’ In a 2003 statement to the press titled ‘A Matter of Honor and Truth’, an enraged Rais denounced The Bookseller of Kabul as a ‘worthless collection of invented incidents’, some of which made inferences to his male power and privilege, to the sexual lives of his female relatives, and to the secrecy that surrounded his finances. Rais, along with his second wife Suraiya and various other family members, sued Seierstad for libel in an Oslo court, claiming that Seierstad had defamed his character, violated his hospitality, and used a ‘western colonial gaze’ to mock the Afghan way of life.

The case raised an important issue: How ethical was it for writers to hijack other people’s lives for their stories? In July 2010, the court ordered Seierstad to pay close to $50,000 in damages to Rais and his family. But Rais’s victory was short-lived. Seierstad appealed, and in 2012, Norway’s higher courts overturned the previous ruling. Seierstad and her publisher, Cappelen Damm, were cleared of liability when the judge deemed The Bookseller of Kabul an ‘accurate portrayal of people and events.’

‘The book was a fabrication masquerading as fact,’ Rais says. When I ask why Rais rejected Seierstad’s offer of compensation – a sum of $100,000, which Rais could have donated to a charity for poor Afghans – he is silent. ‘I didn’t want her money. I wanted an apology. This fight was about honor. My honor, my family’s honor, and the truth.’

As of today, The Bookseller of Kabul has been translated into thirty languages and has sold more than a million copies worldwide.

Rais insists that he is no longer bitter. ‘I believe in God. I respect women. I’ve always acted in good faith. Betrayals happen. One has to accept that life is a gamble. One has to let go.’

*

Rais found a way to move on by writing his own book – a 96-page self-published memoir that has nothing in common with Seierstad’s version of his life. According to Rais, Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul is a metaphysical fantasy about ‘the horrors of war, the misunderstandings between cultures, and the tragedy of modern Afghanistan.’ Full of djinns, magic lanterns and flying carpets, Once Upon a Time follows the traditional storytelling style, or qissah, of Afghan culture. ‘Everyone these days is crazy about vampires. So, I thought, why not offer something similar, but better?’ he asks. Local internet critics gave the book a thumbs down, pointing out Rais’s puerile language and shoddy ‘Harry Potter meets 1,001 Arabian Nights’ plot. Still, no number of bad reviews could dampen Rais’s pride. ‘Once Upon a Time was translated into Portuguese and sold 400,000 copies in Brazil,’ he claims. ‘Why should I care for critics?’

It’s close to dawn, and Rais and I decide to continue our conversation the following night. A few minutes later, just as I’m about to fall asleep, my phone buzzes. I scroll through a series of incoming WhatsApp images. The first shows Rais holding a copy of Once Upon a Time and smiling at the camera. He texts: It’s still available on Amazon. Do read and review!

Another picture. Rais is standing beside a female Afghan writer whose ‘underground anti-regime memoir’ has just been launched in his bookstore. Another text: Perhaps one day your novel will be on my shelves? I champion all lady authors!

Next, a photograph of Rais on holiday at a beach resort in Albania. He sits amidst his large clan of adult children and grandchildren. A text: Family is everything.

And then, a final image, from happier times: A smiling Rais, flanked by his second wife and a tall European woman. ‘I know you will not let me down like Asne did,’ he texts. ‘Something tells me that you are worthy of my trust.’ What follows is a couplet from Firdausi’s tenth century magnum opus, Shah Nameh: The Book of Kings:

“… But all this world is like a tale we hear; Men’s evil, and their glory, disappear.”

*

In the summer of 2015, the Shah M. Book Company turned forty. It had grown into a successful family business, one in which Rais’s oldest son and daughter managed day-to-day operations. The Intercontinental Hotel branch no longer existed, but the flagship store in CharahiSadarat was thriving. It held over 100,000 titles in Pashto, Dari, Farsi, Persian, English, German, French and Russian, and included novels and verse, tomes on history and politics, coffee-table books on spirituality and mysticism, children’s picture books, and a collection of rare Afghan stamps, maps and postcards. A quarter of the store’s shelves were made up of medical, engineering and social science text books, most of which were imported from Iran and Pakistan.

But Rais was, as usual, impatient to do more. The country’s broken education system rankled him, as did the lack of access that students in rural Afghanistan had to reading material. So Rais conceived of the Book Mobile. This was a silver fourteen-meter-long Mercedes Benz omnibus, bought with Rais’s own money, and large enough to hold 20,000 books. Rais’s plan was to take road trips across Afghanistan’s rural provinces, and sell textbooks in Pashto and English at a substantial discount.

In March 2016, Rais and five of his staff travelled to the small towns of Mazer Sharif and Takhar. They laid out stacks of books on folding tables, set up a loudspeaker, and announced that people were welcome to ‘browse and buy.’ The event was a success. But a few days later, just as the Book Mobile rolled out of a village near Kunduz, a bomb exploded in the impoverished district. Had Rais and his team been just a few miles further north, they would have been dead. Rais knew a warning when he came across one, and canceled the rest of his tour.

Today, Rais admits that the Book Mobile was a failure. The lack of safety and security bothered him, he says, but even more shocking was the sudden withdrawal of support from key non-profit organizations which, he says, ‘only pretended to be working for the education of the underprivileged.’

A news report at the time accused Rais of selling books not at a discount, but at double the market price. This, it stated, was why Kabul’s reputed Goethe Institute had wanted nothing to do with the Book Mobile project. When I confront Rais with this claim, he hits back. ‘Rubbish. ‘I don’t know why the media makes these insinuations. We didn’t make a profit. We sold only a fraction of our stock in these places. I lost 10,000 US dollars of my own money, and even risked my life! But I didn’t care! Do you know, our team gifted hundreds of books to schools, sometimes we put them directly into the hands of poor children. The happiness on their faces … that alone made our efforts worthwhile.’

I press on. Why, then, were the books in Rais’s Kabul store so expensive? Rais’s response is belligerent. ‘I have been very open with my international customers. My books cost double than they would in Europe because whatever extra money I make from foreign buyers goes to subsidize local students and readers. What’s wrong with that?’

*

Two days later, Rais sends me a text. ‘Kabul is a mess. Poverty. Unemployment. More and more young men addicted to opium and heroin. There are almost no educational opportunities for girls. The religion taught in schools is not Islam, but crude Taliban-sponsored ideology. This is what you should write about.’

*

Our next conversation is brief, but buoyant. ‘Despite Afghanistan’s problems,’ Rais says, ‘people are still reading.’ He adds that many of the country’s leading scholars, writers and poets have become ‘voices-in-exile’ abroad, who publish their experiences of war, oppression and censorship for a global audience. Among them, Rais says, is Franco-Afghan filmmaker Atiq Rahimi, bestselling author of The Kite Runner Khalid Hosseini, and the Sweden-based Azizollah Nahofteh, who writes on religion and women in contemporary Afghan society.

‘The Shah M. Book Company has been integral to Afghanistan’s literary renaissance,’ Rais says, and to prove this, he sends me recent pictures of eminent clients visiting his bookstore. Among them, I recognize Turkish diplomat Huseyin Avni Botsali, Afghan-American historian Nancy Hatch Dupree, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll.

‘The last decade was a stable one for us,’ Rais says. ‘But now, with this virus, we’re fighting an enemy that is almost as deadly as the Taliban.’

*

Spring 2020. When the pandemic hit, Afghanistan had already been weakened by four decades of war, a less-than-optimal healthcare system, and poor infrastructure. It was no surprise that the government lacked the resources to contain the spread of Covid-19. Kabul, a city with a densely-packed population of 4.2 million, locked down completely. Rais had no choice but to shut down the Shah M. Book Company for three whole months.

Today, Rais sees the pandemic as less of a crisis and more of an opportunity. He tells me that he had ‘envisioned’ a digital future for the world as early as 2008 – the year in which he ‘went fully international’ with his business. At the time, Rais launched an English-language website, a digital catalogue of more than 15,000 titles, and a credit card facility. By 2019, he had more than a hundred online customers a day, and was making shipments to 190 countries.

Extended lockdowns derailed Afghanistan’s long-awaited transition to peace, and this, combined with a broken economy, saw a fresh demand for books that reflected the tense mood in the country. In late 2020, the Shah M. Book Company launched 300 new e-titles – giving readers access to books like James Dobbins’ After the Taliban, Anis Ahmed’s Gender, Law and Society in Islam, Fariduddin Attar’s Memoirs of Saints, and David McDonald’s magnum opus Drugs in Afghanistan. Rais used a third of his profits to, once again. focus on the spread of education. ‘Even though the Book Mobile project had failed, I wanted to serve students. With the pandemic, the youth outside Kabul have no access to physical bookstores, nor can they travel,’ he says.

Last winter, Rais devised a system by which students in remote, snow-bound areas could order subsidized books online, and had them delivered to their homes by privately-run buses that he paid for.

*

In our final conversation, Rais tells me that despite the travails of age, and recurring bouts of back pain, he has no interest in retiring and ‘sitting idle’. He’s just finished developing plans for a new website dedicated to books and manuscripts from Afghanistan and the Middle East. ‘I see this becoming the Amazon of Asia,’ he says. Rais sends me a video featuring the project’s mascot, and I watch as an animated character tears through the streets of Kabul with a basket of books on his head and a wide grin on his face. He looks like a miniature version of Rais.

*

August 1, 2021. My profile on Rais, titled Once Upon a Time in Kabul, is published. I’m disappointed that my editor has chopped it down to 800 words, mainly to supplement a larger report on how independent bookstores in South Asia are fighting to stay in business. I would have liked my piece to run as it was written: a three-dimensional portrait of a colorful and daring entrepreneur. Our conversations have revealed an enigma, a man of contradiction and chutzpah, a poet and a hustler. Who is Shah Muhammed Rais? Shrewd and emotional, vulnerable and manipulative, complex and childlike, feminist and sexist, warrior and drama queen, and above all, a storyteller. He refuses to surrender control of the narrative that is his life, even if he liberally blurs the lines between truth and invention. He is also inspiring. At a time when corrupt government middlemen in India were capitalizing on Covid-19 infections by selling oxygen cylinders on the black market, Rais was transporting free books to poor Afghan students and campaigning for the rights of women and girls.

When my editor sends me a cheque, I donate the money to Pandemic Relief India. I send Rais a link to my published piece, and when he texts me a day later, he is philosophical about its brevity. ‘These things happen. I’ve enjoyed talking to you. My advice to you is this: Time is precious. Don’t waste it. Write your novel and get it out into the world.’

*

August 15, 2021. Independence Day in India marks the Fall of Kabul in Afghanistan. As US troops prepare to officially withdraw from the country, the Taliban seizes control of the capital. Images on the news and social media show thousands of ordinary Afghanis attempting to flee their homeland. At Kabul Airport, desperate men and women cling to a departing US Air Force plane, only to fall to their deaths. Broken bodies line the tarmac, the streets, the fields.

I think about Rais, and pray that he and his family are safe. When I call him, there are no hollow beeps echoing in my ear. Rais’s number has been disconnected.

*

December 2025. Between finishing the Final Draft of my novel, querying literary agents, and dealing with long silences and multiple rejections, I haven’t had the time to think of Rais. But then, while googling a British publisher, I come across a recent article by The Guardian with the headline: “‘I wanted to end my life’: ‘Bookseller of Kabul’ rebuilds destroyed business.”

I learn that Rais and his family have been refugees in the United Kingdom since 2022. Soon after Rais left Kabul for London, the Taliban once again targeted and vandalized his bookstore. This time, it destroyed the extensive archive of books that Rais had maintained for almost half a century. When Rais got the news, he fell into severe depression, and even contemplated suicide. But then, his irrepressible survival instinct kicked in.

Rais decided to fight back, to set up his business from scratch, and to continue to find ways to distribute books in his home country. In 2024, Rais partnered with an Indian firm to create The Indo-Aryana Book Company – an online website that ‘allows for books banned by the Taliban to be printed in India and mailed into Afghanistan.’

Now past seventy, Rais is slower, weaker, and reportedly losing his sight. But his vision for a better future hasn’t waned. ‘Books are the only weapons we have to fight extremism’, he tells The Guardian. His message to his oppressors? ‘Even if you destroy my bookstore a hundred times, I will rebuild it.’

I think: Good for Rais. In his words, I sense a lesson for my own life: Nothing is ever won by giving up. I turn my attention back to my novel, more determined than ever to finish it.

*

On Monsoons, Murakami, and a Boy Named Mahala

Selina Sheth

“Rain has the power to hypnotize,” writes Haruki Murakami in his dream-like novel South of the Border, West of the Sun. “Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality.” So feels Murakami’s protagonist Hajime, who at first is indifferent to Japan’s magical season of cool showers. But then one summer, the rain rekindles an old flame and complicated feelings of regret and desire in the thirty-something narrator. On a wet, stormy night in the late 1980s, in a moment that could put Casablanca to shame, a mysterious woman from Hajime’s past appears in his life and unsettles his orderly present. This is Hajime’s childhood love Shimamoto, who he last saw at elementary school two decades before.

*

The early 1960s. In a small town near Tokyo, pre-teen schoolboy Hajime makes friends with a new classmate, Shimamoto. She walks with a slight limp but to Hajime, this handicap only serves to make Shimamoto more alluring. They spend rainy afternoons listening to Nat King Cole records on Shimamoto’s father’s LP player. As the crooner of South of the Border imagines Mexico, Hajime fantasizes about what lies under Shimamoto’s skirt even though they never go beyond holding hands.

In time, Hajime casually – and by his own admission, cruelly – abandons Shimamoto. He moves to another suburb, makes new friends at his new school, has sex with a string of attractive girls, attends college in Tokyo, struggles for a while and eventually marries a wealthy young woman whose father bankrolls Hajime’s dream of opening a bar. Hajime transforms into a prosperous entrepreneur and the father of two girls. He has it all, he believes, until a grown-up Shimamoto, “bringing with her the scent of the rain,” walks into his establishment one night and into a spot in his heart that has never quite been filled over the years.

Hajime’s story, with its tender, haunting texture of romance, fantasy, loss and heartbreak, unnerves me. Can the rain be a thing of beauty? In Mumbai, where I live, the monsoon is as synonymous with destruction as it is with poetry; and famed for its annual legacy of flooded tenements, clogged drains, sunken cars and uprooted trees. In Delhi, where I grew up, the rain is soft and humid, a sensation I will forever associate with back-to-school nerves, itchy clothes and flat hair. In the western cities I’ve visited – Munich, London, Paris, New York – what falls from the sky feels like a million icy crystals piercing my skin, a symbol of cold endings rather than new beginnings.

But this year, after months of pandemic-induced social isolation, I welcome the rain lashing against my windows. Perhaps my newfound romanticism is linked to the adult reunion of Hajime and Shimamoto and the atmospheric rhythm of Murakami’s words. Or maybe, like a female version of Hajime, I am again that twelve-year old sixth grader at New Delhi’s International School who on a wet July morning encountered a new classmate: a boy named Mahala.

*

The monsoon term of 1984 began with a thunderstorm, a volley of rain and the smell of damp naphthalene. Our grey classroom walls matched the overcast clouds outside; from our desks by the bay windows, we could see the sodden football field on one side and the dripping nets of the basketball court on the other. Our young class teacher Ms. Khosla smiled as she introduced us to the lanky boy beside her. Almost regal in his posture, his skin the color of roasted coffee, his blue jeans and Bob Marley T-shirt giving him an instant stamp of coolness: this was Mahala, from Lusaka, the Republic of Zambia. He would be joining us for a few months, maybe longer. His English was a bit weak but he could catch up quickly enough if one of us volunteered to help. Ms. Khosla added that Mahala was an ace athlete who had offered to coach the girls’ basketball team. Then somebody whistled, causing Mahala to grin broadly, mime a dribble down the aisle, and smoothly plonk himself down on the empty chair at the end, right next to me.

As July washed into August and then September, Mahala and I bonded naturally. On days it wasn’t raining, he joined my friend Annika and I while we practiced lay-up shots during recess. After school, we shared a double-seat on the South Route school bus and an umbrella for the short walk from the Vasant Vihar C-Block bus stop to my house in D Block. If it was a Friday, we headed to Mahala’s in E, where we raced through lunch and the hour of English conjugation that I’d been assigned to tutor him in. Sometimes Mahala’s grandmother, who he called Ibo, made us sticky rice pudding. Ibo was a vision in her flowing kaftans and the striking necklace of ivory and copper that she always wore. The piece was a family heirloom, said Ibo, who told us that she was a descendant of the Bantu tribe: her forefathers had come to Zambia through the Eastern sea-route via the African Great Lakes. Mahala rolled his eyes at Ibo’s stories. Ibo whacked him when he did this, telling her grandson that just because he was learning English, he was not to forget his own language, Nyanja, or to have respect for his elders.

When the rain stopped mid-afternoon, Mahala and I climbed up to the roof deck to hear mixed tapes: Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’, Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ and Mahala’s stash of Zambezi rock, a mix of African beats and guitar riffs that was all the rage in Lusaka’s youth clubs. Mahala missed home, but he thought New Delhi was pretty exciting too.

Some days we rode our bikes around the neighborhood. We pedaled over the chaotic ‘colony’ streets, expertly dodging cars and autorickshaws, and on weekends, made stops at the main market to check out the new comics at Sardarji’s general store. Mahala loved Sardarji’s turban, which reminded him of the one his long-dead grandfather liked to wear in cool weather. After hearing this, Sardarji gave Mahala a free Commando every Saturday morning.

On weekdays, Mahala had to be back home at sharp 6 p.m. That was when his mother returned from her job at the Zambian High Commission. Mrs. Irene Muziya, the newly-appointed Second Secretary of Accounts in New Delhi, was pretty, quiet, shy; the antithesis of fierce, dramatic Ibo.

By October, the monsoon was over and Mahala and I found ourselves bored of our usual haunts. One Tuesday afternoon, as we lolled about in the park opposite my house, Mahala asked what lay beyond the park’s barbed wire boundary wall. I mumbled that it was just a jungle, the kind of overgrown forest area that dotted many of the city’s suburbs. I didn’t add that my parents had warned me never to enter it. But with Mahala I felt reckless, in the mood for adventure; besides, I’d always wanted to know what mysteries the jungle held, and what other places it led to.

And so Mahala and I jumped over the boundary wall, a feat that gave us scratchy elbows and bleeding knees. Not that we cared. Once within the cool dark forest, we followed a sandy-orange trail through thick trees and thorny shrubs – moving silently at first, then talking of school, of Ms. Khosla’s boyfriend Samir who played in a hippie band called Raga Fusion, and of Annika’s crush on Mahala. My Zambian friend always shrugged when the subject of Annika’s one-sided love came up, and more than once, had implied that he preferred girls like me.

We had been walking and talking for more than an hour when we realized that we’d drifted onto another path and that all paths looked the same. Now, a few steps away from us, was a baoli, a large stone reservoir that looked like it had been carved out of the earth. Mahala peered over it, intrigued at how the baoli plunged deep into thick, mossy-green water. Its walls bore intricate sculptures of dancing girls, animals and birds. We were studying Humayun’s reign in History, and wondered if this could be a Mughal-era royal bath? The kind that might have existed if this jungle were a kingdom filled with palaces and emperors? Could the reservoir have been a pit for wild animals? Or a watery dungeon for drowning robbers and bandits?

That’s when it started to rain. Within seconds, a light drizzle turned into cascading torrents of water. It’s a freak shower, I told Mahala, the kind that could happen after the monsoon at this time of year, just before the cold Delhi winter set in. We heard a roar of thunder, and jumped as the grey sky split with the zigzag of lightning. Oily water started to swirl in the depths of the reservoir. Mahala and I found shelter under a thick low clump of bushes, and huddled together under an abandoned plastic sheet. It was dark and the wind howled. I stammered aloud my mother’s warning – that the jungle held roving groups of thieves, and worse, maybe even jackals, jackals who howled like the wind.

Mahala wasn’t worried at all. He smiled as the rain crashed around us and told me how, in the southern parts of Africa, the wet season arrived between November and April and sometimes, far more violently. Two years earlier, at the peak of the monsoon in February, Mahala and his father visited Victoria Falls and watched in awe as sheets of water smashed into the Zambezi river. The Muziyas’ divorce had just been finalized, and this was the first outing father and son had taken together. A few weeks later, Mahala’s father remarried and soon had another boy, Mahala’s half-brother. Mahala had not seen his father after their day at Victoria Falls because Dad was busy with his new family; besides, Mahala’s mother didn’t really like it when Mahala asked to see his father. It made her sad.

Mahala spoke of how the divorce was the reason Mahala’s mother had taken a short-term posting in India: she was tired of Lusaka. Irene Muziya had applied for a US work permit and wanted to emigrate to midwestern America, where she had a cousin and where she believed Mahala would have a better life than in Zambia.

I didn’t want to think about the possibility of Mahala leaving Delhi. But before I could reply, Mahala stood up, looked around and then yelled triumphantly. The rain was gentler now and Mahala pointed to a glow of light in the distance that we could follow. A low throb of sound – music, voices – seemed to be coming from that direction. Perhaps it was a village.

We began to walk. I trailed Mahala as he strode through haphazard paths, a thick branch in his right hand to swipe away thorns and leaves.

And then we were there. The light was no village; what we had stumbled upon was the National Highway. It gleamed before us like the Promised Land. Trucks and vans whizzed past, their headlights a blurry yellow against the rain. Across the highway, looming over a cluster of ramshackle mechanic shops, hardware stores and a dhaba, an electric signboard flashed that Palam Airport lay just 1.5 kilometers ahead.

*

From the dhaba, I dialed home from a clunky metal pay phone. (I’d found a one-rupee coin whilst fishing in my drenched pockets, but I feared this stroke of good luck would not extend to my father being in a good mood.)Mahala joked that we could always board an airplane at Palam and fly far away. We laughed hysterically, at the absurdity of the day and where it had brought us. The dhaba owner brushed past us then – his gaze lingering on my sodden clothes, on Mahala who still held his weapon-like branch – and muttered ‘kaala’ at him in a low, crude tone. Mahala stopped laughing and inched closer to me by the phone. I prayed he hadn’t understood, but Mahala’s face had clouded over in that split second, as if he had always understood.

*

Twenty minutes later, my father picked us up in his blue ambassador. Accompanying him was a grim-faced Ibo. We drove home to Vasant Vihar; Mahala and I hunched on the backseat like two newly-arrested prisoners on their way to incarceration. It was raining again and the windshield wipers moved furiously back and forth. To lighten the tension, my father slipped an old Beatles tape into his cranky Phillips car stereo. Ibo cracked a faint smile despite herself, but Mahala was expressionless. Maybe he was worried about what his mother would say. Or maybe the magic of this afternoon had been tainted for other reasons.

*

Mahala and I got the mandatory punishment: we were grounded for two weeks which meant No Going Anywhere But School. The next morning, Mahala was not in class. I assumed he was late and that we’d talk at recess, but that day there was no recess. Mid-morning, an announcement was made that we were all to go home immediately. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been shot.

I didn’t see Mahala again. School stayed shut as the capital plunged into street violence and strict curfew. I heard my parents talking about the Prime Minister’s assassination, and then about Sardarji, whose brother had been killed in an anti-Sikh riot near Old Delhi’s Kashmiri Gate.

When school reopened in early December, Mahala, his mother and Ibo had already left India. At Christmas, I received a letter with a US postal stamp. Mahala wrote that he liked Ohio and was finding school easy thanks to the English skills he’d picked up in Delhi. Enclosed in the envelope was a polaroid photo of us eating Ibo’s rice pudding on Mahala’s roof, and taped to it was a single ivory and copper bead. I wondered if Mahala had stolen it from Ibo’s jewelry box, and imagined the look on Ibo’s face if that were true. It was only later that I noticed Mahala’s letter offered no return address.

In the spring of 1985, I turned thirteen. By the next monsoon, I thought less of Mahala and more of another boy from my Chemistry class. We were now allowed to attend school dances, which was more exciting than riding bicycles or exploring jungles. Since then, many monsoons have come and gone.

*

Unlike Hajime and Shimamoto, I doubt Mahala and I are destined to meet again. I have tried to find him – sporadically, and out of curiosity, every five years or so – using Google Search on the internet but there is no online or social media for Mahala. Maybe he has changed his name. I wonder if he stayed in America or eventually returned to Zambia; and if Ibo and his mother are still alive; or if one or both have passed, like my father did three years ago. It was raining on that September day when we immersed Papa’s ashes in flowing river water so that they would be taken out to sea, and where perhaps they might have evaporated, become cloud, and burst forth again as teardrops of rain.

I put the story of Hajime and Shimamoto aside and stand by the open window. It’s evening and a fresh shower of Mumbai’s notorious rain turns my terrace plants into electric green; in the distance, the Arabian Sea churns into a mass of indigo blue. The earth, parched by summer heat and the misery of Covid-19, will rejuvenate.

I start to understand the rain as Murakami does. Rain as the recycler of memory. Rain as the silent witness of every moment. Rain as the holder of every secret. Rain with its power to hypnotize. As Hajime wonders whether Shimamoto was ever real or only a figment of his imagination, I remember the day Mahala and I walked through a wet, dark forest, and how the city airport suddenly appeared before us like a spaceship, a neon illusion. Today, that moment feels like the last chapter of our innocence – an innocence that I have since lost completely – and it is as Hajime describes when he recalls Shimamoto: “The two of us alone, beneath a glimmer of light, our hands clasped tightly together, for a fleeting ten seconds of time.”

*

EXPERIMENTS

Selina Sheth

(Excerpt 1)

“Post-Audition Voice Notes That ‘X’ Sends Zee”

VN #1

Hey beautiful!

What luck to run into you, the head writer of no less than West Side Story: A Bollywood Musical! That too, just as I was prepping my audition for Bernardo. Did you really mean what you said? That I have the intensity of a South Asian George Chakiris? I guess great things happen when opportunity meets preparation. Right?

Okay, okay, I know that your phone status reads NO CALLS PLEASE but babe, a tiny favor? Could you, just this once, call me back? Give me a heads up on who made the cut? I would never ask, but when we met, I felt this connection. Remember how we discussed self-doubt? And you said, I’m quoting you here, that Writers Fear Rejection just as much as Actors.

So, I know you understand. Hugs. Have an amazing day!

VN #2.

Hey doll! It’s been a week and no call from you. Is everything okay? Any news?

VN #3.

Finally! A text from you! Okay, I get that writers don’t get involved in casting decisions, but you must be having some info, right? Help me out here? Just a little? Please?

VN #4.

Hey, this is just to say that I picked up on a strange vibe earlier. Your text came off as kind of curt. I’m concerned. Listen, exercise is a great stress buster. You should go for a run. If you want, I’ll come with. Just give me a call!

VN #5.

Just to let you know … I stopped by the production office and dropped off a copy of my new showreel. Could you ask Tanya (from Casting) to check it out? Is she in town? She’s never available and she never calls back. What is it with you girls? Just kidding – take no offence!

Anyway. In case you want to take a look: At timecode:00:01:23, I appear as Ward Boy. That’s from Episode Seven of Heartline. I have five words – Nurse! The patient is fading! – but they’re crucial to the plot. Then, at 00:02:43, you can see me in the new Asian Paints commercial. Shirtless. Eight-pack abs. I’ve never trained harder!

FYI: I’m also smooth with Zumba, Taekwondo and horse-back riding.

Hugs. Have a great evening!

VN #6.

Babe. It’s been seventeen days. Still nothing? No news from Tanya? I’ve just sent her my left profile pix. That’s because on tape you only see my right. Not my good side. Why is hindsight always 20/20?

VN #7.

Still waiting! Is it possible Casting misplaced my contact info? Please tell Tanya: I’m available 24/7 on 989-342-3018. I repeat: 989-342-3018.

VN #8.

Wow. Just WOW.

Sad that you lot have such disrespect for artists. Also, considering we’re well acquainted by now: You’re not quite what we’re looking for in Bernardo 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 Heartline. So good things are on the way. Oh, and someday, when you need a favor from me? Be worried. Karma is a real thing. Blocking you now.

VN #9.

Hi. I’ve decided to unblock you, just, you know, in case you need to reach me.

VN #10.

What happened? No, really. I need to know. Why am I not right for Bernardo? You said I had intensity!

Wait. Did I do something to put Tanya off? Can we talk about this?

VN #11.

No reply from you. You women these days are all the same. Unreliable. Unreachable. Unapologetic

VN #12.

Uh, it’s me again. I want my showreel back. Those things cost. Tell Tanya she 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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2.

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3.

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In the meantime, we’re delighted to announce Sam S. Patel’s upcoming webinar: “How AI can help you increase traffic and conversions” scheduled for November 5.

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4.

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5.

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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?

*

BLUE

Selina Sheth

(For J.)

Blue. For Jamal, it is the sound of confusion, the taste of fear, the touch of doubt, a kaleidoscope of numb memories. A cobalt-stained hospital wall, that time he’d smashed his toe and waited for a doctor, any doctor, to arrive. An ink-smudged high school test paper that he knew he’d fail, even before looking at the questions. A borrowed navy-painted Scout that broke down on the Western Express, and cost him his first job interview. And Roxy’s strapless Maxi – pure ’80s camp! – with its sapphire hue and sequined bustier. In their final year at Bombay Polytech, Roxy came upon Jamal in his dorm, took one look at his muscled chest straining through the delicate fabric, and broke things off then and there. Jamal had felt a jab of panic. And an avalanche of relief that Roxy didn’t want the dress back.

*

A new decade begins; and then, a new millennium. Adrift and alone, disowned by family, temple and community, Jamal 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 Jamal’s days of employment as a clerk in a stock brokerage company, his pale cerulean uniform of shirt and trousers unobtrusive in the swarm of downtown office-goers. And it bursts into full bloom at night, when Jamal transforms into Jamila, a dancer at the Topaz Bar. Friday nights, she shimmers on stage, a sparkly indigo boa draped over the fading Maxi, her body swaying to raunchy Bollywood lyrics. On Saturdays, at the end of her shift, she leaves with the man who tips her the most, and rewards herself with punishing sex in the deserted bus depot down the street.

Jamal freefalls, carried by the currents of his bewilderment, seduced by the thrill and throb of infinite duality. Jamila has her lovers. There is always a replacement when one gets married, or leaves town, or loses interest. Recently, there was a brief but passionate fling with a traffic cop near Churchgate Station, so the police haven’t harassed her in weeks, and breathing has gotten that little bit easier.

*

But today, after a short absence, Blue is back. Ominous and rumbling, Blue is right here and everywhere. This morning, while getting out of the cab at the curb before the clinic, Jamal looked up and saw miles of it in the cloudless expanse of sky, and splashes of it all around: on the shirts of shopkeepers, on the scarves of women, on the dancing waves of the pre-monsoon Arabian Sea.

Blue. Familiar anxiety, familiar despair.

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

*

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.

*

SELINA SHETH

SELINA SHETH

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