As it turned out, Sartaj and Kamble were able to get out to Film City that evening, well before the end of Zoya Mirza’s afternoon shift. They drove up past AdLabs, and up the hill to a huge palace. Zoya was the main lead in a multi-star period movie, one of the first big-scale swordfighting and swinging-from-chandeliers extravaganzas to be made in decades. Vivek the make-up man sat them down on fold-out chairs behind the palace and gave them cutting-chais and told them about the project. “It’s very different, this film. It’s like Dharamveer, only it’s fully up to date and modern. Huge special effects. This whole palace is going to lift into the air and then fly and be seen in the middle of a lake. They have huge battle scenes planned, they are going to have them all generated by computer. The hero has a big fight with a giant cobra with a hundred heads.”

“And what is Zoya playing?” Sartaj said.

“Madam is a princess,” Vivek said. “But her parents, the Maharaja and Maharani, are murdered when she’s young, and she grows up in the jungle with a chieftain’s family. Nobody knows who she is.”

Kamble took a noisy sip of tea. “A jungli princess?” he said. “Very good. What does she wear?”

Vivek was bespectacled and thin and very serious, and he was now made distinctly uncomfortable by Kamble’s frank leering. Of course he couldn’t tell a policeman that he was a lewd g****u, so he shrank a little and said, “The costumes are very good, Manish Malhotra is doing them.”

Sartaj patted Vivek on the forearm. “Manish Malhotra is the best. I’m sure Madam looks wonderful. How is it to work for her?”

“She is a very good person.”

“Is she? She seems so,” Sartaj said. Vivek regarded Sartaj through his very stylish blue-framed glasses, and Sartaj smiled innocently back at him. “Of course she’s beautiful. But I always thought that in her roles you could tell that she’s a good woman.”

Vivek’s wariness ebbed, and he sat up. “Yes. She’s very generous, you know.”

….....................

But Kamble refused to cheer up, and Sartaj thought he might break into a sad song at the moment. If you edited out the knocking carpenters, and the piles of wooden slats next to the palace, and the gossiping women, it was a landscape suitable for song, coloured a gentle saffron by the falling sun. There was grass, and trees, and hills that had been shot quite often to substitute for Himalayan peaks. Sartaj tried to think of a sad song suitable for Kamble, but could remember only lilting Dev Anand numbers: Main zindagi ka saath nibhaata chala gaya.

………………

“Come, come, please.” Vivek was waving to them from the gate. “Madam will be on the set in a minute. You want to see the shot?”

Inside the palace, there was a buzzing stir of activity. Under the vaults and high-arched windows men milled about and hammered and sawed. Sartaj stepped over nests of cables, and around thickets of metal stands. He had to bend low to step under a sheet of canvas, and a loudspeakered voice called “Full lights,” and Sartaj came into a pillared audience hall ablaze with gold and green. There were life-size statues of warriors and maidens under the pillars, and the half-ceiling was covered with a dense latticework of sparkling crystal. There were two immense chandeliers, a crowd of satiny courtiers and a throne. Sartaj wound his way through yet another crowd of crew to a row of folding chairs, and then Vivek motioned: wait.

“That’s Johnny Singh,” Kamble said.

“Who?”

“The director.” He meant a portly man who now sat in one of the chairs and peered intently into a monitor. “And that’s the cinematographer, Ashim Dasgupta.”

“You’re a movie expert,” Sartaj said.

“The girls want to get into films, a lot of them.”

Yes, Kamble’s bar balas would have wanted, many of them, to become Zoya Mirza. They would have done anything, risked everything to be here. Now that the glare of the lights had left his eyes a little, Sartaj could see that the statues were painted plaster, not stone. The gold paint on the pillars was thick, congealed. The crystal on the ceiling was probably some kind of cheap glass, or plastic. Above it, among the rank of lights hanging from the rickety catwalks, there were dangling legs, and peering faces. And yet, on the screen this would all crystallise into an unearthly glow, a perfect palace. Sartaj thought, Katekar would have loved this, he would have like the dirty floor, and the cheap-looking diamonds on the noblemen’s turbans.

“Silence! Silence!” the loudspeaker roared, and in the abrupt hush Zoya Mirza descended on the set. She strode in, actually, from the left, but she may as well have floated down from the Technicolor heavens in a rain of fragrant blossoms. She was very tall, slim and strong, but hidden in a shimmering gold wrap, and her hair was loose and very long, and the long sweep of her neck made Sartaj breathless.

“Baap re,” Kamble whispered. “Mai re.”

Ye, Sartaj believed in the enchantment of cinema all over again. They watched as Zoya talked to the director and two assistants, as Vivek fussed over her hair and face. A woman knelt and did something to the lower edge of Zoya’s skirt, which reached just half-way to the knee. Another pair of actors came up, and older couple in royal robes, and the director spoke to them and Zoya, making angular gestures with his hands. Kamble was whispering their names, the name of the actors and their pedigrees, their performances and their successes. Then Zoya shrugged off her wrap, and Kamble ceased altogether. It was the kind of jungli-princess outfit that Sartaj remembered seeing on calendars in his childhood, with a bikini top in some soft fawn leather held together by strings at the back, and a matching skirt which dipped far below her navel in front and swept back over her hips, really quite tight. The Maharaja and Maharani took up positions by the throne, and Zoya turned towards them and walked, and the endless curvature of her hip squeezed at Sartaj’s throat. Yes. The set was fake, But Zoya Mirza wasn’t. Of course Mary and Jana were right about the multiple procedures, the miracles of technology that had achieved her wondrous world-class beauty, but Sartaj didn’t care. Zoya Mirza was artificial, and her lie was more true than nature itself. She was real.

………….

“Didi, they are big fans,” Vivek said. “They came to me through Stephanie, you remember her? All because they wanted to meet you.”

Zoya wore the kind of smile that people used to attention and power put on to indicate humbleness. Sartaj had seen it on a lot of politicians. “I’m going to play a police officer next year,” she said, “in Ghai-sahib’s new movie. I am a fan of the police also. I appeared at a charity premiere for the Policeman’s Association when I was Miss India.”

“I remember. We need your help again.”

“Of course I will try to help in any way possible. But I am very busy over the next six months…”

“We’re not here to ask for a personal appearance,” Kamble said, very quietly. He didn’t move at all, but his shoulders seemed to swell up a bit, and he was suddenly dangerous. It was all in the dull flat of his eyes, in the rigidity of his jaw. “Or for a donation.”

Zoya caught the change of mood instantly, but Vivek laughed through it. “They just want autographs, Didi,” he said.

Sartaj put a hand on Vivek’s forearm, pulling himself up. “We just want to ask you a question or two,” he said to Zoya, taking a step up to her. She didn’t like him coming closer to her, but she refused to flinch. He whispered into her ear, “About Ganesh Gaitonde.”

“Vivek,” she said crisply, “wait outside.”

“Didi?”

“Wait outside. And I don’t want to be disturbed.”

 

Excerpted from Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra;
Viking (Penguin India); Rs 650; Excerpts in arrangement with Penguin India