Q & A

I have been arrested. For winning a quiz show.

They came for me late last night, when even the stray dogs had gone off to sleep. They broke open my door, handcuffed me and marched me off to the waiting jeep with a flashing red light.

Salim loves Armaan. Or, more accurately, he worships Armaan. His tiny room in the chawl is a shrine. It is lined with posters of all kinds depicting the hero in various poses. Armaan in a leather jacket. Armaan on a motorbike. Armaan with his shirt off, baring his hairy chest. Armaan with a gun. Armaan on a horse. Armaan in a pool surrounded by a bevy of beauties.

Armaan Ali, his hero, has died.

Why Father John puts talcum powder into his nose I don’t know. But then I am just an idiot orphan boy.

Drunkards in Hindi films are invariably funny characters. Think of Keshto Mukherjee with a bottle and you cannot help bursting out laughing. But drunkards in real life are not funny, they are frightening. Whenever Shantaram comes home in a stupor, we don’t need listening devices. He hurls abuses at the top of his voice and Salim and I quiver with fear in our room as if we are the ones being shouted at. His swearing becomes such a ritual that we actually wait for the sound of his snoring before falling asleep ourselves. We come to dread the interval between Shantaram’s return from work and his crashing out in bed. This interval is, for us, the zone of fear.

“I will never allow this to happen,” I tell her. “This is a brother’s promise.” Salim gives me a dirty look, as if I have committed a criminal act by making this promise. But I am beyond right and wrong. I feel Gudiya’s bony fingers, the flesh on her hands, and know that we are both hunted animals, partners in crime. My crime was that I, an orphan boy, had dared to make other people’s troubles my own. But what was Gudiya’s crime? Simply that she was born a girl and Shantaram was her father.

The fact that Salim is Muslim is of little consequence to Masterji as he teaches him Hindu bhajans. Salim himself is hardly bothered. If Amitabh Bachchan can play the role of a Muslim coolie and if Salman Khan can act as a Hindu emperor, Salim Ilyasi can sing Thumaki Chalat Ram Chandra Baajat Painjaniya with as much gusto as a temple priest.

As the empty-handed singer is about to pass our side, Salim takes something from his front pocket. He holds it in a clenched fist and looks guiltily at me. I nod silently. With a pained expression, Salim opens his fist over the singer’s outstretched hand. A crumpled, hundred-rupee note drifts into the beggar’s bowl.

I take an instant dislike to Jai. He has shifty eyes. He smokes secretly in the room (smoking in the Taylors’ residence is prohibited). And he treats me like a servant.

“Julie turned my life upside-down. She had been a poor cleaning woman, but now she wanted to be a part of high society. She forgot that she was married to the brother of a rich industrialist, not the industrialist himself. She wanted money all the time. Money which I couldn’t give her because it didn’t belong to me. It belonged to my brother, to the company.”

The man twists his hand and points his gun at the baby’s face, but today the baby is blessed with superhuman powers. With tiny fingers he pushes at the barrel of the gun, reversing its direction.[…] The man is about to press the trigger, but at the last moment the baby manages to twist the gun away from himself and towards the man’s own chest.[…]

The dacoit is lying on the floor, inches from the door, and I have a pistol in my hand, from which a thin plume of smoke is drifting upwards.

They wheel out his body on a stretcher, covered in a crisp white sheet. The residents of the chawl stand in hushed silence. Putul and Dhyanesh and Salim and I peer diffidently from behind their backs. We stare opaquely at the dead man’s body and nod, in fear and sorrow and guilt, as a liquid understanding spreads slowly through our numbed minds. Those of us for whom this was our first war, we knew then. That war was a very serious business. It took lives.

“Satta is organized by powerful underworld syndicates in Mumbai with a daily turnover of millions of rupees. Millions are bet on every cricket match, thousands on every ball. I am one of the biggest punters. This house that you see, this expensive TV, the microwave in the kitchen, the air conditioner in the bedroom, are all due to my winnings from satta. Three years ago, I made a killing in the India–Australia match.”

I did what I had to do. I immediately went to Rizvi and told him about the contract on him. He didn’t believe me, so I showed him the picture and the address which had come by courier. Once he saw the photo in my hand, all his doubts vanished. He told me he would run away to Dubai and lie low for a year or so. He was now so indebted to me, he promised that on his return he would make me a hero in his next film and till then he would get me trained. So that is why he is funding my acting course and why I am counting the days till I turn eighteen.

So I got the job, and only then did I discover that life with a movie star is not as glamorous as it appears from the outside. When you get to see them without make-up you find that they are exactly like you and me, with the same anxieties and insecurities. The only difference is that we are mainly concerned with money, or lack of it, and they are mainly concerned with fame. Or lack of it.

It is easy to pick up a loaded gun and point it in someone’s face. But when you know that a real bullet will strike a real heart and that the scarlet liquid will be blood and not tomato ketchup, you are forced to think twice. It is not easy to kill a man. You need to first switch off from your brain. Drinking can do that. And so can anger.

“Why did you throw away your lucky coin?”

“I don’t need it any more. Because luck comes from within.”