Mad maane mother: on Jerry Pinto's Em and the Big Hoom

[Did a version of this review for The Hindustan Times. There’s a longer, more personal piece I’d like to write about this book sometime – about the chord it struck for me both as a son and as a writer – but I’m not quite ready for it yet. Some other time, hopefully]

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The easy way to describe Jerry Pinto’s autobiographical novel Em and the Big Hoom is to say that it is a son’s account of life with a mentally unstable mother. Imelda Mendes is called “Em” by her two children, the unnamed narrator and his elder sister Susan. Their father Augustine – affectionate, dependable but taciturn – is “the Big Hoom”, and they all live together in a one-BHK flat in Mahim. Imelda has always been an energetic woman, but at some point after her children were born “someone turned on a tap” and a crippling depression set in - she has a few good days, but on the many bad ones even the trenches dug by the municipal corporation outside the house might seem like part of a threatening conspiracy. (“We never knew when the weather would change dramatically with Em.”) The family rallies around her and each other; the narrator describes their lives with a heartbreaking mix of tenderness and humour.

Mad is an everyday, ordinary word. It is compact. It fits into songs. As the old Hindi film song has it, M-A-D, mad maane paagal. It can become a phrase - "Maddaw-what?" which began life as "Are you mad or what?". It can be everything you choose it to be: a mad whirl, a mad idea, a mad March day, a mad heiress, a mad mad mad mad world, a mad passion, a mad dog. But it is different when you have a mad mother. Then the world wakes up from time to time and blinks at you, eyes of fire.

That makes this sound like a very particular story about a very particular person, but Em and the Big Hoom is much more universal in its appeal. Read carefully and you might agree that it isn’t just about a “special” mother, it is about parents in a more general sense – parents as the looking glasses that we sometimes recoil from because in their aging faces and increasingly erratic behaviour we see our future selves – as well as a reminder that “normalcy” and “madness” are not airtight categories. Anyone who has ever experienced the fading of a parent should feel a shudder of recognition when the narrator mulls living in a world that “continues to be idyllic and inviting for you but your mother is being sucked into the centre of the earth [...]The imperium of the world’s timetable will allow you to break step and fall out for a while, but it will abandon you too if you linger too long”.

This gentle, multi-layered narrative is many other things. It is a remembrance of the long courtship between Imelda and Augustine, and a son's attempt to understand what two people he takes for granted (“if you would just get that familiarity thing out of your eyes...” his mother tells him) might have been like in a very distant time, the Mumbai of the 50s and 60s (when Imelda worked as a stenotypist in an engineering-goods company, one of the few options available to a girl from her community and background). It is a story about four people living in a small house where privacy is not an option, a litany of very candid conversations (not all of them occurring beneath a facade of mental illness) and delightful pen-portraits: consider Em’s mother, who speaks in elisions, omitting important words in every sentence so that one has to infer what a question like “Where do you thissing?” might mean.
 
And this is also, in a strange but illuminating way, a book about writers and writing. Much of our understanding of Em’s state of mind comes from her journal entries, reproduced throughout the narrative, and letters such as the meandering one in which she acknowledges the seriousness of her relationship with Augustine (and her realisation that she was no longer just an “I” but part of a “we”). We are told that she was a seemingly effortless writer – one who might have made a career out of it in another lifetime – but also that compulsive writing may be a manifestation of her condition. “She was free associating, gliding through language.”

Given this, it is notable that the narrator himself tries to fight his genes by seeking refuge in the rigours of writing. “One of the defences I had devised against the possibility of madness was that I would explain every feeling I had to myself, track everything down to its source [...] I worked it out on a piece of paper...” And at another point: “I felt, instinctively, that when you had enough words ... you would be able to deal with the world.” The writer in him reaches for ways to convey his feelings about his mother, but also recognises the impossibility of the task; after writing half a page of elegant prose about dark towers and their residents, he concedes that “as all analogies must, this one breaks down too”.

This may help one understand why Pinto – a prolific, busy writer-journalist known for juggling projects with ease – took more than two decades to complete this very personal book (which, he has said in interviews, was originally 10 times its current length). And this brings me to my one quibble about Em and the Big Hoom: the fact that it is presented as a work of fiction. While it works as a novel on its own terms (the writing is consistently vivid and moving enough to appeal to the reader who approaches it as a purely made-up story), I think it works even better if you know who the narrator is, and a little more about his own writing life.

I don’t usually spend time thinking about how “autobiographical” a novel is (any book, even one set in an imagined fantasy landscape, is in some sense autobiography) or how "exaggerated" a memoir is, but reading Em and the Big Hoom, I felt – for the first time in a long while – that it mattered. At least it matters to me because, speaking as a reader-writer envious of the quality and range of Pinto’s work, this book seems to reveal much about his own imperatives. Trivial though this might sound (and unconnected with the very high quality of the writing), I wish it had “Memoir” printed on its jacket flap.

On Bollywood's Top 20: a collection of oddly impersonal essays

[Did this review of Bollywood’s Top 20: Superstars of Indian Cinema (edited by Bhaichand Patel) for Business Standard. It’s another example of a book I would prefer not to have written about - and the exasperation and lack of interest probably comes through in the piece]

To begin with a small quibble, the “Indian” in this book’s sub-title is slightly misleading: this is a collection of essays – by different writers – on iconic Hindi-movie performers. But there are larger problems with this anthology. Given that its subjects are screen legends who have had an immeasurably complex influence (for better and for worse) on the lives of countless fans over decades, it would have been reasonable to expect some personal, passionate writing. Instead, much of it lacks warmth and has a mechanically journalistic tone.

Some of the pieces do begin in a way that suggests they will be firsthand accounts of a writer’s interest in a movie-star. (“When I was invited to write about Madhubala, I was delighted,” says Urmila Lanba, “Madhubala is one of my favourite actresses; my sister and I were only allowed to watch one movie a month and I recall we never missed her films...”) What usually follows, though, is a mix of gossip, second-hand reporting (with long quotes taken from various sources) and throwaway remarks on films that deserve to be written about with much more enthusiasm. Here, from S Theodore Baskaran’s essay on Nargis, is one example of what I mean:

In the Middle East [Awaara] played to packed houses. T J S George, Nargis’s biographer, points out that the duet in the boat scene was one of the best love scenes of her career. Her appearance in a bathing costume was pointed out as one of the highlights of the film. Apart from Prithviraj Kapoor, other cast members included Leela Chitnis and Shashi Kapoor. Helen, then an unknown junior artiste, made an uncredited appearance.

The paragraph is stilted and dull in ways that are too obvious to mention, but as a reader I would also have been interested in knowing what Baskaran himself thought of Nargis in those two scenes rather than learn what other people have “pointed out”.

It’s possible that I’m falling into the old trap of reviewing the book I wish had been written instead of the one that actually was. But my main objection is unevenness of tone: many of these essays veer between being chatty and casual and also trying to be comprehensive in a by-the-numbers, encyclopaedic way. In the Wikipedia age, I’m unsure what value there is in listing most of a performer’s movies with two or three trite sentences about each of them. And when you do commit yourself to providing such information, the fact-checking should be exemplary. Instead there are many careless errors. To mention just two, we are told that by 1954 “a whole new generation of actresses like Asha Parekh, Sadhana and Saira Banu had appeared on the scene and the era of colour films was also ushered in” (this is off by roughly a decade) and that Prithviraj Kapoor was over 30 years senior to Suraiya (22, actually).

That might sound like nitpicking, but when many similar instances of indifferent writing and editing pile up in a book, it’s a reminder that film literature in India is often treated flippantly even by those who engage deeply with cinema. I sometimes hear the defence that essays about mainstream Hindi films should be as accessible and egalitarian as the films themselves are. But in the same way as there are good Manmohan Desai films and bad Manmohan Desai films (how many movie buffs would put Ganga Jamuna Saraswati in the same league as Amar Akbar Anthony?), there are good and bad ways of writing accessibly about popular movies and movie-stars. (For a sample of intelligent, engaged writing in this vein, see Mukul Kesavan’s essay on Dharmendra.)

Of course, it would be silly to claim that there are no high points in such a varied collection. The pieces on K L Saigal and Devika Rani (by Vikram Sampath and Cary Rajinder Sawhney respectively) read smoothly because they make at least a perfunctory effort at a narrative structure. Jerry Pinto’s Waheeda Rehman essay characteristically combines thoughtful analysis with lightness of touch. Shefalee Vasudev’s piece on Madhuri Dixit, though overwritten in places (“Madhubala was mesmerising, Waheeda Rehman engrossingly attractive, Hema Malini the ultimate dream girl and Rekha sensational, but Madhuri – oh, she was something else. An incidental sum total of desirable parts of moh [allure] and maya [illusion]”), does take the trouble to examine the evolution of a star persona against the background of a changing movie-going culture.

The writers whose subjects had relatively short careers are at an advantage, since their pieces lend themselves to more focused analysis (in writing about Meena Kumari, for example, Pavan Varma can devote a generous amount of space to her key role as Chhoti Bahu in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam), but I didn’t envy the task of those saddled with a really big superstar whose career has played out – wholly or partly – during the media explosion of the past two decades: what more is there to say about Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, for instance? Still, Sidharth Bhatia and Namrata Joshi manage a decent, professional job on these two subjects. Bhatia covers well-trodden ground (including Bachchan’s much-analysed shift from the Angry Young Man battling the system to “the settled establishment man” over the past decade), but his observation that the young Amitabh “was an angular personality”, easily cast in edgy or villainous roles, led me to contemplate an alternate universe where the actor might have made an adequate career playing intense second leads like he did in the early films Gehri Chaal and Parwana. And Joshi’s piece on Shah Rukh includes some intriguing thoughts on the private persona versus the public one, and on the cracks that have been appearing in a once-secure image (the essay was written before SRK’s much-publicised brawl with Shirish Kunder).

Also enjoyable is Avijit Ghosh’s wry dissection of Hindi cinema’s headiest, most enigmatic superstar phase – Rajesh Khanna’s dominance in the early 1970s. At one point, Ghosh writes of Khanna’s decline: “With half Rajesh’s acting ability, one-third his waistline and four times the discipline, Jeetendra comfortably ensconced himself as the director’s favourite for weepy socials or mindless entertainers made down South. Rajesh could only watch the water flow.”

This is a sample of the irreverence that comes with being a fan (the attitude that goes “these stars belong to us, we can say what we like about them”). One also sees it in the cheeky ending to Bhaichand Patel’s own (otherwise unremarkable) essay on Ashok Kumar – a reference to Kumar’s affair with Nalini Jaywant and the speculation that they “might have bumped into each other on their evening walks” in their old age.

More of this sort of thing could have made Bollywood’s Top 20 a better, more intimate book. More typical, alas, is the last paragraph of the Madhubala piece – of all things, a quote from Manoj Kumar in 2008, when the long-deceased actress had a stamp issued in her honour. “There can only be one Madhubala in one century,” Kumar said, “Every time I would see her, my heart would start singing ghazals.” This would be a moderately acceptable way to end the essay, but the quote continues thus: “I am happy and want to thank the department for their initiative.”

Yes, THAT is the closing sentence of a piece about one of Hindi cinema’s loveliest performers. Manoj Kumar is happy! He congratulates the postal department! It says something about the peculiarly distant tone of this collection and the sloppiness of its editing.

P.S. the accompanying CD of songs helps make up for some of the uninspired writing, but given this book’s cover price I thought it was naughty of Patel to describe it as “a free disc” in his Introduction.

The Greatest Show on Earth - on all-inclusive, opportunistic Bollywood

When you’re reading the Introduction to an anthology, certain words can set off alarm bells. For instance, an editor’s claim that he wanted his collection to be “eclectic” is sometimes shorthand for “I didn’t want to spend much time on a careful selection process. Pretty much anything I found went in.” If you merely flip through the Contents pages of The Greatest Show on Earth: Writings on Bollywood – with 37 pieces divided under such headings as “The Stars”, “The Music and the Music-Makers” and “Ringside Views” – you might be tempted to level this charge at Jerry Pinto.

Once you get down to reading these excerpts, though, you're reminded that few people know the pulse of the true Hindi-movie enthusiast better than Pinto does; there’s little arguing with his claim that these pieces jointly reflect Bollywood’s “all-inclusive, opportunistic, outward-looking” identity. Were the subject of this book anything else, it would be difficult to imagine a reader who would be equally interested in two essays as tonally different as Susmita Dasgupta’s scholarly “The Birth of Tragedy” (in which Amitabh Bachchan’s career arc from rebellious anti-hero to symbol of order is discussed in terms of Dionysian and Apollonian values) and Ram Kamal Mukherjee’s shabbily written and edited trifle “Marrying Hema” (sample sentence: “This was the time when Dharmendra went out of his way to explain it to the industrywallahs, that people was reading more than they are expected to”). But a full-blooded lover of Hindi cinema can embrace both these pieces, and the many others that fall somewhere in between.

This assortment of previously published writings includes Kishore Kumar’s brilliantly surreal 1985 interview to Pritish Nandy (“I tried to dig a canal all around my bungalow so we could sail gondolas there...Why can’t I hang live crows on my wall?”) and R K Narayan’s almost equally surreal account of his experience as an irrelevant onlooker during the filming of his novel The Guide (“I began to realise that monologue is the privilege of the filmmaker, and that it was futile to try butting in with my own observations”). Mukul Kesavan’s essay on the “Islamicate” roots of Bollywood (“Urdu didn’t simply give utterance to the narratives characteristic of Hindi cinema, it actually helped create them”) rubs shoulders with Naresh Fernandes’ poignant journalistic feature about a real-life Anthony Gonsalves and other Goan musicians who had an impact on Hindi-film music. Javed Akhtar discusses screenplay-writing in an engrossing interview with Nasreen Munni Kabir, and in a short story by Salman Rushdie we meet a rickshaw-wallah with Bombay dreams. Khushwant Singh is mildly haughty about Bollywood stars while Bhisham Sahni describes his brother Balraj (today acclaimed as one of Hindi cinema’s first great actors) having to shake off his stiffness before the camera.

Most of the pieces mentioned above are very well written, but in other cases literary quality is beside the point. And on at least one occasion, banal writing is the point: the “Fiction” section includes a dreary excerpt from Khwaja Ahmed Abbas’s novelisation of Raj Kapoor’s film Bobby, which (going by Pinto’s note accompanying the piece) seems to have been included to demonstrate how flat such an endeavour can be compared to the actual experience of watching the movie. Reading the excerpt, I couldn't help recall Rishi Kapoor's expressive face register embarrassment, mild alarm and anticipation in turn during the birthday-party scene, and the words on the page seemed clunky and inadequate in comparison.

It’s natural to read such a collection in fragments rather than linearly, and this allows one to discover, in quick succession, essays that provide contrasting takes on the same person or incident. Thus Madhu Jain notes that “people forget Lata Mangeshkar was a sensual being and not just a disembodied, ethereal voice” (and that “she was the only woman to make Raj Kapoor dance to her tunes”), but Ashraf Aziz in “The Female Voice in Hindustani Film Songs” suggests that “Lata’s laundered voice appeals to the spirit rather than the senses – she infantilized the female voice”. And as if that weren't enough, Dada Kondke presents a pleasingly improbable view of the singer as Annie Oakley. (“Placing the gun on her shoulder and looking at the reflection in the mirror, she started drilling more holes into the tin can”.) But what the pieces reveal about their authors is often equally striking: note how a respected writer like Saadat Hasan Manto can display a bitchy and voyeuristic side when writing about a Bollywood figure (in this case Sitara Devi, portrayed as a sexual predator constantly sucking the life-blood out of the men who came under her spell).

Some of the excerpts are from high-profile publications such as Anupama Chopra’s Sholay book (the chapter that begins with the frisson-creating “Sholay flopped”), but there are also little treasures that you’d be hard-pressed to find in print these days. One of my favourite inclusions is from Vinod Mehta’s 1972 biography of (and unabashed fanboy ode to) Meena Kumari, which suggests a rare form of intelligent yet personal writing on popular Hindi cinema that I had little idea existed at the time; it made me want to rush to a rendezvous with Mumbai’s raddiwallahs (which is where Pinto got the book from). I particularly enjoyed the way Mehta refers to the deceased actress as “my tragedienne” and “my heroine”. Anyone who has ever had similarly proprietary feelings about a Bollywood star or film will find The Greatest Show on Earth hard to resist.

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review. An old post about Pinto's book on Helen is here]

The face that launched a thousand gyrations

I miss the films of the seventies…When I watch an item number now, so much more glossy, so much better choreographed, the women with bodies honed to reptilian perfection and dressed in much better clothes, the men all gloss and muscle, I miss the old dances in which Helen performed…The item numbers of the ’00s take themselves very seriously. In the moue that is the standard sexualized challenge on every female dancer’s face, I do not find the laughing invitation to naughtiness that I remember in Helen’s. You would not dare laugh at – no, not even with - these women…They’re never out of step but they’re not having fun.

(from Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb)

Jerry Pinto’s Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb is enjoyable on many counts, starting with the author’s infectious enthusiasm for Hindi movies of the past - familiar to those of us who have read his columns and articles on the subject. Pinto is precise, passionate and insightful, which is very welcome given the general lack of intelligent personal writing on Bollywood.

He is also ambivalent about the films, which is something any mainstream Hindi-movie buff can understand. Those of us who grew up on Bollywood (even those who eventually grew out of it) still struggle to come to terms with the experience; with the influence it had on us during those vital formative years. We enjoy making fun of all the kitsch ourselves, but we bristle when someone else does it (especially if it’s someone who hasn’t grown up with those films and never had a personal compact with them). We get defensive about things that are difficult to defend, we don’t find it convenient to accept that while growing up we took these movies quite seriously – that we didn’t merely give them our approval on the grounds that they were kitschy (which is now the preferred approach to Hindi movies of the 1970s and 1980s). Consequently, while this book is a fine examination of Helen’s screen persona and the role she played in the peculiar moral universe defined by Bollywood, it works at another level too.

Pinto makes it clear early on that this isn’t a biography of Helen (he never even succeeded in speaking to her, though he tried) – the subtitle “The Life and Times of an H-Bomb” is slightly misleading. What the book is, is a well-researched, intensive study of a dancing career that spanned over three decades and over 500 films (though Helen herself claimed the figure was closer to 1,000!), and which tells us a lot about the way Bollywood functioned during that time.

It is, for example, a reminder of how shamelessly, cheerfully racist (and sexist) Hindi cinema has been over the decades. Some of the specifics are quite shocking if you don’t have a strong memory of films from the 1960s and 1970s. As Pinto notes:

“Contrasting the white woman and the black or tribal man was a way of maintaining an ambiguity about the lust lives of Indians. As Aryans (our way of distancing ourselves from the more uncomfortable term ‘brown’), Indians could be seen as representing a civilised mid-point between the lust of primitives and the degenerate liberation of white people.”

(As an aside: anyone remember those buffoons who played “Chinese” soldiers in films made around the time of the 1962 war? The ones who would run around screaming “Chin choo chou chou chou chou”?)

During Helen’s heyday in the 1960s, her principal function was to represent the depravity of the Anglo-Indian/Catholic/westernised woman – she served as a contrast to the chaste heroine and, on occasion, a marker of the hero’s descent into vice. Within this broad role, there were other functions she performed (as White Goddess, as Moll, as Skeleton in the Closet, even as Second Lead being wooed by the bumbling comedian), and Pinto illuminates them all by providing synopses of (and commentary on) dozens of films from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Even independently of what they tell us about Helen’s career, these descriptions are worth the price of admission. They are brilliantly tongue-in-cheek and make for an entertaining journey down memory lane for the movie buff. I love the way a simple exclamation mark is used, for instance, while describing a film where Moushumi Chatterjee plays a feminist(!) while Shabana Azmi is the traditional Indian doormat(!). And while there are too many examples to quote here, I can’t resist setting one down:

[In Aap Beeti] rich boy Ranjit (Shashi Kapoor) falls in love with poor girl Geeta (Hema Malini). At one point he brings ‘Rita darling’ (Helen) to the shoe store at which Geeta works. Rita is wearing a hat and very little blouse and very little skirt. Ranjit then tells Geeta that Rita darling and he are getting married on Sunday.

“Is this your girlfriend?” Rita asks, an odd question for a fiancée.

“I’m a rich man’s son so poor women always try to befriend me,” he says.

“Where do we go for a honeymoon?” asks Rita, mistress of the non sequitur, stroking his arm.

“From Liverpool to swimming pool, wherever you want,” he replies, to her strange delight. Geeta stalks off in a rage – she has already expressed her disbelief in his love in a song on a surreal set populated by humongous shoes and sandals in primary colours.

Pinto succeeds in showing why Hindi cinema needed a Helen figure to validate its beliefs and principles (“she almost always failed, which was perhaps the secret of her success. In failing she kept the moral universe intact”), but he never really provides an understanding of why this particular performer was so successful for so long, while many other wannabe vamps fell by the wayside. This is perhaps inevitable, for beyond a point star quality is analysis-resistant. It’s possible to say that Helen had an expressive face, that her abhinaya was more deeply felt than that of most other dancers. It’s possible to point out also that she somehow managed to do the silliest things in the most tasteless contexts without coming across as vulgar herself. But it isn’t possible to precisely define how all this adds up to make one of Hindi cinema’s most enduring screen personae. That secret must remain hidden between the performer and the audience.

The book's description of Helen’s transition from cabaret dancer to Hindi-film legend without ever having been a star (no one ever went to see a film specifically because she was in it) is noteworthy too – it shows the strange ways in which the celebrity machinery works. In fact, the belated conferring of respectability on Helen (with the lifetime achievement Filmfare award, her progression to a maternal figure in recent movies and even her brief self-referential dances in films like Mohabbatein) says some interesting things about Bollywood's relationship with its own past.

Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb is a very personal work; in places it reads almost like a movie-buff’s private journal, and the film book it most reminds me of is Peter Conrad’s excellent The Hitchcock Murders. What’s common to the two books is that neither of them is too concerned with making definite, structured arguments or belaboring a point – they are freewheeling, conversational and fuelled entirely by the author’s childlike enthusiasm for his subject. Conrad, with seeming randomness, suddenly picks up an aspect of Hitchcock’s work that he finds interesting and then elaborates on it by examining scenes from different movies. Pinto’s approach is slightly more structured (each chapter has subheads, examining a different aspect of Helen’s roles), but the overall effect of his book is similar. You feel like you’re part of an intense coffee-shop conversation. About Bollywood Gold.