Kundrathur Raji is going to turn a bit crazy these coming few days. Rajinikanth is back, Raji can't sit still, the thrill of the return of Rajini another time is coursing through his veins. It won't cease at the end of the first, pre-dawn screening of Kabali in Chennai, an exclusively Rajini-fanclub affair. Then will come the hotfooting to other towns and cities, to farther locales of the Rajini empire. There will be notes to take, images to capture, moments and memories to make an inventory of. At some point, all of that will become a book, or so Raji hopes.
Raji works in a manufacturing company, earns a modest income, and lives with wife, Anasuya, in suburban Chennai. "He does not know what marks our sons (the couple have two) got in Class XII, or how they got into engineering. I had to do everything," Anasuya says, long resigned to her husband's single-minded obsession. Raji sits across from her in their living room, impenetrably protected from Anasuya's accusatory tone by Rajini memorabilia - posters, photographs, news-clips. Rajini has claimed Raji the way his family may have hoped to. Kabali's release and Raji's celebrations around it are perhaps little cause of comfort to them. "Kabali" has mixed associations for Tamilians: it is one of the names of Shiva, but in olden Tamil films it also used to be the name of the villain's sidekick. Those meanings matter not to Rajinikanth fans, though. Hence, "Kabali" would connote just one thing: Rajinikanth, God.
Raji isn't alone, of course. There's Royal Raj from Tiruchy who has stuck 12 knives into different parts of his body as some talismanic rite to ensure the success of Kabali. Vellore's N. Ravi climbed 1,305 steps of a temple, on his knees, to seduce divine help when Rajinikanth was taken ill in 2011. That's Rajini fever for you - impassioned, beyond logic, larger than life.
P. Vasu, who directed Rajinikanth's Chandramukhi, believes the star is bizarrely blessed: "When we shoot, his dialogue delivery seems normal. On screen, it gets transformed. The way he curls his lips and delivers his Kabali punchline Neruppu da (like fire), it seems fire is coming out from his mouth." Vasu recalls how a Tiruchy collector once revealed how his 20-year-old son would carry his mother to bed every night after dinner with utmost devotion, just as Rajinikanth's character did in Vasu's film Manna. "I was stunned."
The story of Raji's obsessive love and worship for the southern matinee idol goes back to the 1970s when Raji was a teenager.
Kundrathur, a village near Chennai (then Madras), where Raji lived with his grandfather, was a favourite shooting spot for filmmakers because of its scenic landscape. One day, Rajinikanth landed there. Raji would leave no opportunity to get close. As the star was changing his clothes, Raji sidled up to help others cover the actor with a cloth screen (there were no make-up vans then). "Rajinikanth turned around and admonished me for wasting my time around film shoots."
That admonishment turned Raji a fan for life.
In the beginning, a young Raji used to collect small change from schoolmates, buy sweets and distribute them whenever a Rajinikanth movie would show at the village theatre. Later, he turned to collecting clippings of the actor's photographs and dialogues published in newspapers, paste them on chart paper, trek to Chennai to get his official seal on them and then put them on display at the village theatre. Raji and his friends would also spend hours at the picturesque Chembarambakkam Dam that feeds Chennai, composing passionate letters to the superstar. "When I received my first fan letter from him, I went wild with joy."
Gradually, Raji came to weave his entire life around his idol. When he got married, he dragged the new (reluctant) bride to get the superstar's blessings. He named his son Baasha, after the star's 1995 film in which he played an autodriver. Over the years, from donating blood, to fasting, to eating from the mud floor of temples when the actor fell ill, to celebrating his birthdays, wedding anniversaries, movie releases, to organising charity functions and releasing commemorative monographs, to donating food in his name, Raji has pulled out all stops in the name of his god. To date he manages a biggish fan club, dipping into his already stretched household budget. His family may complain but he has supporters in, guess what, other Rajini fans.
Royal Raj knows that the Thalaivar does not approve excessive expenditure in his name. But he isn't listening either. "I am a Rajini bhakt. He often advises us not to spend money or time on him and to look after our families first, we just don't listen," says Royal Raj. An almost obdurate loyalty bearing intimations of that doppelganger fan Shah Rukh Khan had in Fan.