Haraam Bombay

In how many ways can you do it with a eunuch? And then, why kill the eunuch? Because a Western musical based on an Indian theme cannot handle a third dimension. The West End production of Bombay Dreams is premiering on Broadway on the April 29 and the uni-dimensional version of the dream will be flattened into a lifeless collage. Like blood dripping from walls. What the Andrew Lloyd Webber-A.R.Rahman team has produced cannot even be dignified as kitsch, for to make the already outlandish into something even more bizarre requires a nuanced understanding of the subject. Clearly Bombay Dreams is compressing a Jacuzzi into a hot water bottle and forcing guffaws out of its stiff upper lip.

In the Broadway version, they are bringing in some new elements. Two white American tourists will be used to explain the mysteries of Bombay to the audience. If anything, Americans would be able to understand the Bombay dream far better. The mechanisation of creativity and the creativity in mechanisation is generic to both, Hollywood and Bollywood – they have cut through the swathe of art-house to transmogrify into fart-house with seamless ease. So much so that one begins to wonder as to where the real hot air comes from.

Meera Syal, the writer, has talked about the changes that were necessary because, “British audiences, and we take this for granted, now know a huge amount about Indian culture compared to the average American. Our presence here is much more visible. There has been a genuine cultural exchange between the Asian community in Britain and the host community.”

What does Britain know about Bombay? Balti cuisine was started by a Bangladeshi and dignified for the British as Indian because it was their largest colony. ‘Bombay Brasserie’ is a tony Indian restaurant run by the Taj group of hotels where the Brits try fingering their Punjabi/ S.Indian food. ‘East is East’? That was Pakistani. ‘Bend it like Beckham’ was about a young woman who preferred to dribble a large round ball rather than make round-round chapattis. Southall is Karol Bagh, Delhi; Wembley is Rajkot, Gujarat. Nothing is Bombay. Nothing can ever be.

I shall skip the mandatory review (and ignore the atrocious mish-mash of accents -Queen’s, Bradford, Birmingham, Indian pidgin) and tell you how it wrenched my heart to see the city of my dreams and my life look like a pathetic wax work. Being a Mumbai resident all my life, I know every aspect the musical is trying to highlight quite well. I ask the question again: why did the eunuch have to be killed? For me, Bombay is a eunuch city – dressed to conceal, its voice loud, its smile coquettish. The producers have talked about the ‘third sex’ and its special place in our society. I see the Bombay eunuch in several metaphorical ways.

Financially, it is the resounding clap and slap and also the outstretched palm that is less beggar and more demanding.

Socially, the distinctions may be very severely demarcated, but there is the blurred (conveyed here in genderlessness) area where the common denominator does exist.

Emotionally, it feels but cannot express.

I have met enough eunuchs to know that no true-blue one would call herself Sweetie. They usually take film star names and that too in full. “Urmila Matondkar,” one enunciated, when I had met them in their colony in a grubby part of the city. I was introduced to Shabnam, Chitra, Asha and even a Sapna, but no Sweetie, Pinky, Honey.

The only thing the musical has taken from Bollywood is item numbers…there is no originality, no insights and no cinema verite. One is not looking for authenticity vis-à-vis the reality; but there is not even a shred of authenticity towards the dreams. What ought to be integral become mere props, and that includes the characters.

The hero: A struggler from the slums who dreams of making it big. I have met many such strugglers; Bombay is full of them. In the musical they start with a Lagaan-esque rallying round the hero tableaux. But he is not conquering enemies, not even attempting to get a better life for those around. He cannot be called a struggler at all for he gets lucky. And he lacks the fire of a struggler. His is only a pipe dream, in this case quite literally, where he purportedly dreams in the pipe he lives in. Now the pipe here is not even sufficiently romanticised.

It is just there, a helpful device for the songs. The water pipe, a large cylindrical monstrosity, is home to many in Bombay; it is here that you see young boys rolling joints or sorting out things picked up on their rag-collection rounds; it is here that the poor are protected from inclement weather and the children play.

When Akaash leaves the slum, he does not seem to have made it any big. The hero of the slums becomes a villain of celluloid shattering the dreams of those who were a part of him. When he turns away from his people, it is not the tragic moment it ought to have been. It is just a collective dream gone sour, for you cannot dream with others. Of course, the production does not possess the perspicuity to convey this point; you have to look for it yourself to understand the Bombay pathos and patois.

The real hero is the eunuch whose dreams are larger: about acceptance and a better society. That Sweetie is killed for wanting the dream factory to save the dream of the slum-dwellers’ basic need – to retain their homes – shows that this martyrdom has the resilience of true idealism.

The heroine: Is it Priya, who Akaash loves, or is it Rani, the diva of the star cast, who he was besotted with? Anyone who is familiar with Bollywood would know that top stars do not behave like two-bit extras who feel secure by showing off their top-heaviness. In the musical, they talk about tits as though Bombay does not know about them. Here every starlet gets an uplift, flaunts it on magazine covers like a new toy. Rani lacks the necessary heat to even quality as a bitch. A Bombay starlet recently said, “Men talk to my breasts.” This will be her only claim to fame. Such women do not go on to become stars. Once a person has reached star status, as Rani is supposed to have, they in fact take on an almost puritanical edge.

Rani indulges in a verbal joust with a gossip columnist and comes across as a yowling mongrel. Her seductive moves on Akaash are just so jejune. Stars don’t take men; they have them.

Being a shameless lover of well-made masala movies, the tiny attempts at ‘breaking new ground’ were frankly pathetic. And you find it in the character of Priya, the daughter of the commercial film producer, who wants to make a social statement. She comes across as vapid, making use of her papa’s wealth to hope to create consciousness, but does not have the courage to raise her voice against her wily lawyer fiancé. Why does she not revolt against her immediate environment? And isn’t it precious that when she resists Akaash it comes across as subversive, especially since she is ‘committed’ to a partner who is all things evil?

Again Sweetie, the eunuch, becomes a true heroine when she participates with a group of women protesting against a beauty pageant. Her blurred gender serves to underscore the obviousness of having a standardised form of beauty where the winner is decided in advance; one apple is chosen from a basket of apples, a snake having bitten off the Mother Teresa bit. The one who really stands for dignity and nurturing is Sweetie with the little chit of paper that would expose the dark side of the moon, the one over which they, poor cows, fly over. In her is the death of the battlefield of a status-conscious society.

The villain: Is it the lawyer, who readily agrees to bulldoze the slums while pretending to protect its inhabitants? Is it the film producer who is captive of the mafia but has for years been playing godfather himself? Is it the underworld don, JK? Or it is Kitty, the gossip columnist/TV anchor? It is so obvious that these elements are added to convey a token verisimilitude.

I have watched as slums have been bulldozed and people have stood around collecting their utensils, children holding on to the plastic sheets covering the huts. They don’t have time to discuss or to curse. And no one comes to them with a ‘deal’. They can be trampled upon too easily.

Film producers rarely resist the lure of filthy lucre, even if it comes from questionable sources. Godfather vs. godfather…good vs. evil are swappable. When producer Madan takes Akaash under his wings, is it a genuine eye for talent or to sacrifice a poor man to the evil forces? I have heard and known of many stories where strugglers have managed to hit pay dirt, but these belong to a different era. Today Bombay does not offer respite for such dreams, but it offers respite from such dreams. The slum-dweller now wants to become the middle-class with buying power and a water connection; he does not dream of a castle in the air. This is contemporary reality.

The mafiaso is not such a caricature, even if you make room for some allowances. Earlier a Haji Mastan (whom I have met) was very much a part of the film world and became fairly respected. They needed his money. Today, you find small-time ganglords in Dharavi, the ones who collect the extortion money, and their filmic lives in fact add to the surrealism of their interaction with the film world. Ironically, the jobless strugglers now become a part of the underworld, not of cinema.

The gossip columnist is rarely a vulture, because s/he does not have the independence of an earlier age to stick their necks out. Today, they are fed stories and work in tandem with film stars to create scoops.

In many ways, the musical is just that – an exotic scoop. A blubbery pale-faced angrez, Lloyd-Webber; a Tamilian sufi, A. R.Rahman; a diasporic Delhified Meera Syal; and a ‘global’ Indian (again originally from Dilli), Shekhar Kapur, trying to understand Bombay. He is credited with being “co-author original concept”. Perhaps they have not heard of ‘Rangeela’, ‘Satya’, ‘Company’ and even the old ‘Bambai Raat ki Baahon Mein’.

What ‘Bombay Dreams’ has done to my city is akin to screwing a eunuch. It would be hard put to find a wetter blanket over a drier dream.