The past, his abandoned past on the storied hill. The hill had always been a magical place ever since Ram’s brother Lakshman shot an arrow into the earth and brought the faraway Ganges here to quench their thirst. An underground spring burst through the ground and they drank. There was still fresh water in the Banganga Tank. Baan, an arrow in Sanskrit, and Ganga of course the mother river. They lived among the living stories of the gods.
And after the gods, the British, and in particular the Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone, governor of the city between 1819 and 1827, who built the first bungalow on the hill and all the city’s grandees followed his example. Nero remembered the hill of his childhood, a place of many trees and some low elegant mansions with their red tiled roofs visible among the foliage. He walked in memory through the Hanging Gardens and watched his sons play in the Old Woman’s Shoe in Kamala Nehru Park. The first tower block was built on the hill in the 1950s and people laughed at it. Matchbox House they called it because it looked like a giant matchbox standing on its end. Who would want to live there, people jeered, look, how ugly. But the machis buildings went up and the bungalows came down. That was progress. But this was not the story he wanted to tell. He wanted to finish the story he began to tell me that day in the Russian Tea Room.
(He let Riya in himself. They went to his darkened study and sat in darkness. She said nothing, or almost nothing. He had a long story to tell.)
He first met the man he started calling Don Corleone around the same time as the theatrical release of The Godfather, back when he was getting his feet wet for the first time in the world of film production. At that time everyone else called the don Sultan Ameer. His crime family was S-Company, “S for Sultan, Super and Style,” as the don liked to boast. He was a big-time criminal, master smuggler, but people loved him because he allowed nobody to be killed and he was a sort of social worker at heart. Helped the poor in the slums and the petty shopkeepers also. Prostitution he did, it’s true; brothels in Kamathipura, yes, he ran them. Bank robberies, also. Nobody’s perfect. So, yes, on the whole, give or take, a Robin Hood type, you could say. Not true, not really, operating on that mega scale is not to be compared to a bunch of small-operator bow-and-arrow bandits in Sherwood Forest, UK, but people thought him a good guy, more good than rotten. He was the first celebrity gangster. Knew everybody, was seen everywhere. Police, judges, politicians, all in his pocket. Walked the city freely, without fear. And without gangsters like him half the movies people loved would not have been made. Major investors, the mafia dons. You could ask any big filmmaker. Sooner or later the mafia came to call, with bags of money in its hands.
He trained the next generation, all local boys nurtured by him. What did Zamzama Alankar know about smuggling that Sultan Ameer didn’t teach him? He trained Zamzama (a.k.a. KG, for “Kim’s Gun,” or just the Cannon), he trained Little Feet, he trained Short Fingers, he trained Big Head, all the top guys. They, all five of them, loved movies, and Sultan Ameer had a film-star lover—this was the girl called Goldie, he poured money into dud movies trying to make her an icon—so naturally they went into the motion picture business. Nobody called it Bollywood then, that was a much later invention. Bombay film industry. Bombay talkies. It was just called that.
(Bombay Talkie, if I may briefly interject, was and remains my favorite Merchant-Ivory movie, especially the song-and-dance number “Typewriter Tip Tip Tip” in which dancers pirouette on the keys of the giant “fate machine,” and the director explains, “As we human beings dance on them we press down the keys and the story that is written is the story of our fate.” Yes, we are all dancing out our stories on the Typewriter of Life.)
So. Don Corleone in the Bombay talkies helped some falling stars regain their footing, Parveen Babi for example, also Helen. He was friends with Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar. His smugglers smuggled and his thieves thieved and his whores whored and his judges and politicos and cops did as they were told but up there on the silver screen at Maratha Mandir his movie Kuch Nahin Kahin Nahin Kabhi Nahin Koi Nahin, “Nothing Nowhere Never Nobody,” held the record for most consecutive weeks screened until of course that other bloody movie, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, came on and broke every damn record in sight. But KN4, as people called his biggest hit, Sultan Ameer / Don Corleone was proud of that, his proudest achievement, he used to say, and he had his own name for it, “Everything Everywhere Everytime Everyone,” or “E4All,” because that’s what it was, all things to all people. And it was true his beloved Goldie never made it to the top, was never above-the-title as Hollywood types say, but she was happy, he bought her a big house in Juhu next door to the great Dev Anand and she could invite that living god over for samosas and cups of tea.
And Nero: he was just a businessman, putting most of his energy into the construction business, going up in the world like his buildings, and also like everyone else in that starry-eyed city obsessed with the movies. He met the don at so-and-so’s beach house in Juhu, or maybe such-and-such’s, it wasn’t important. One of the two or three great hostesses who dominated the city’s glittering nightlife, let’s say that. They hit it off immediately and at the end of the night Sultan Ameer said, “Tomorrow I’m going to see Smita to narrate my new picture, why not come along?” With those words he seduced Nero forever and the businessman’s life started to move down a new path.
Superstars—ultrastars!—didn’t read scripts. One went to them and narrated the picture, told its story, and made sure in the telling that the superstar’s role came across as the indispensable central element of the project. Smita was one of the most beloved actresses of her time, not just a beauty or a sex symbol but a wonderful, powerful actor. She led an outrageous life by local standards, carrying on openly with a famous star who was also a married man. In the end puritanism and vilification would drive her out of the business and she became a wounded recluse, but that was later, right now she was the highest of the high, on the pinnacle of Mount Kailash, a goddess of goddesses, the top. For Nero his meeting with her was one of the great events of his life, even though the narration didn’t go well, because the part required Smita to age, during the course of the film, from seventeen to maybe fifty-five. “You see,” the immortal personage said to the don, “I am so grateful you came to me with this, because most parts are not stretching, isn’t it, and what I want to do as an artist is to stretch, to expand, so this picture, I love it. I just love it. There are just one-two things, okay, I want to put them right out in the open, right on the table, because everything should be hundred percent agreed before we start shooting, isn’t it, when we are on set we should all be hundred percent pulling in the same direction, so can I say?” Of course, Sultan Ameer replied, this is why we are here, please. She frowned and looked in Nero’s direction. “And he is who?” she wanted to know. Sultan Ameer clucked his tongue and made a dismissive gesture. “Not to mind him,” he said. “He is just like that.” This diminished the frown. Then the celestial entity turned back to the don and said, “You see, as you narrated, the character becomes the mother of a nineteen-year-old girl. Now I have never—never in my life!—played the mother of a teenage child. This is my difficulty. You understand that the choices I make, the pictures I choose, seriously affect the annual box office performance of our whole beloved industry, so I must be careful, isn’t it? I hear a voice speaking, from the public that loves me!—from the star that I am!—and the voice is saying—” Sultan Ameer interrupted her. “Storyline can be changed,” he said. “Tell your voice to stop speaking.”—But it was too late. “ ‘No,’ the voice is saying. ‘You owe it to the world.’ ”