Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (23 page)

‘Oh.’ Sampath remained brooding. ‘Well, I’m going to have different establishments. I’m doing nothing illegal, to feel apologetic. After all, our religion permits us to marry many wives.’

‘Yes, no law forbids you to have more than one head, so why not try and grow as many as you can?’ asked Srinivas. ‘Let me be frank: I’m convinced that you are merely succumbing to a little piece of georgette, powder and curves. You have no right to cause any unhappiness to your wife and children.’

‘Well, sir,’ Sampath said with mock humility. ‘Here goes my solemn declaration that my wife and children shall lack nothing in life, either in affection or comfort. Will this satisfy you? If I buy Shanti a car my wife shall have another; if I give her a house I will give the other also a house; it will really be a little expensive duplicating everything this way, but I won’t mind it. Later on, when they see how much it is costing me, I’m sure they will bury the hatchet and become friends again …’

It was the great day of shooting the dance act. They were determined to complete the act in about twelve hours of continuous shooting, starting at six in the evening. The studio was stirring into tremendous activity.

On the floor of Stage A a gorgeous Kailas was standing – the background of ice peaks was painted by the art department. All the previous night and throughout the day Ravi had sat up there and painted it; foliage, cut and propped up, stood around. Shiva, with his matted hair and a cobra around his neck, sat there in the shade of a tree in meditation. De Mello, script in hand, was roving about giving instructions. The sound-van outside was all ready to record. Assistants stood around, fingering switches and pushing up screens and running to and fro. The makeup assistant constantly ran forward and patted the cheeks of the artists. De Mello stepped on the trolley, put his eye to the camera and cried: ‘Light – four – seven – baby – seventeen.’ As Shiva sat there in the full glare of several lights, Parvathi came up to him from a side wing. Sampath grew excited at the sight of her. Sohan Lal, Somu and Sampath sat up in their canvas chairs and viewed her critically. Sampath cried: ‘Shanti, move on a little more gradually,’ and she adjusted her steps. He ordered a makeup assistant: ‘Push away that lock of hair on her forehead, so that it doesn’t dangle right in the centre.’ He tilted his head to one side and surveyed her as the assistant went up to carry out the instruction. Somu murmured: ‘Yes, you are right. If the hair is too artificially made up it spoils the effect.’ Sampath went to the camera and applied his eye to the view-finder. He stood there, looking for a long time at Shanti, and murmured: ‘I think you had better remove the foliage behind her.’ He took his eye from the finder so as to enable De Mello to view her. He stood there for a long time and said: ‘It’s O.K. now’,
making some adjustment with the camera. He went up the stage to readjust the branch of a tree. ‘Yes, we shall have a final rehearsal now,’ said Sampath, ‘Ready!’ he cried. Lights were wheeled about. He looked at them with bored indifference. As they were getting into position he went over and spoke a few words to Shanti, while she remained standing at her post. ‘Do you want a chair?’ he asked her, and carried a chair for her. ‘How long am I to keep like this?’ she asked complainingly, and he said: ‘This is the final rehearsal. We will take it; just one more rehearsal.’ She made a wry face and sat down. Beads of perspiration stood on her pink painted face. Sampath beckoned to an assistant and had her face dabbed as she sat motionless like a piece of lumber.

‘Can I have an iced drink?’

‘Oh, no!’ He threw up his arms in alarm. ‘No ice for you till this is over – not for the entire season.’

She looked agonized on hearing it and made a wry face again and grumbled: ‘You never give me anything I want – never.’ Into their banter came the voice of Lord Shiva, who had been asked to sit rigid in a corner and who had been left neglected by everyone. ‘I want to go out for a moment,’ he said. His face was streaming with perspiration; his matted locks and beard were fierce, no doubt, but his eyes were bloodshot with fatigue. He tried to move in his seat. ‘Don’t move,’ Sampath commanded him. You have another rehearsal; it’s going to be difficult to focus your place again.’

‘My legs are cramped, and I can’t sit any more.’

‘Don’t talk back,’ commanded Sampath. All the others looked at each other in consternation. ‘I’m not only talking back, but I’m going out – out of this.’ Shiva got up. Somu felt that he must smooth out the situation, and so said: ‘Don’t get excited, please; let no one get excited. We must all pull together.’ Shiva’s eyes (real ones, and not the third one on the forehead) blazed with anger as he said: ‘I’ve borne this with patience: five or six days of continuous rehearsals. Do you want to kill us with rehearsals? And yet you are not satisfied.’

‘Be calm, my dear fellow,’ said Somu, patting his back, and De Mello on the other side tried to pacify him.

‘Leave me alone!’ cried Shiva in rage. ‘All this sequence has already been shot, and yet you want to retake it – why?’

‘We’re not prepared to explain,’ said Sampath. ‘You had better read again your contract, particularly with reference to retakes and rehearsals. Our agreement is clear on that point. If you talk any further about it, it will go against you, remember.’

Shiva was not to be cowed so easily. He said, almost grinding his teeth: ‘Yes, but an ordinary retake is different: now you have included two songs and a full-scale dance act. It’s not in our agreement.’

Sohan Lal tried to pacify the fighters now in his own way. ‘We must not quarrel over such small matters. Of course, you take a lot of trouble, we all appreciate it. Every film is a co-operative effort.’ Shiva, who tried to follow this conversation in order to find any useful suggestion, was more enraged when he found on analysis that there was nothing in it. He lost his head completely. He came towards the camera and said: ‘If you pay me another five thousand rupees I’m prepared to go through this act, rehearsals and all, otherwise no.’

‘Why should you ask for extra pay, mister? You must not,’ said Sohan Lal.

‘Why not? I’m labouring for it!’ cried Shiva passionately. ‘And I am entitled to it.’

‘It is unthinkable!’ cried Sampath and Somu in one voice.

‘Not unthinkable in her case, I suppose?’ Shiva cried, pointing at Parvathi, sitting on her chair and fanning herself. ‘Aren’t you giving her five thousand extra? Do you think I don’t know all that?’ He came towards the producers menacingly. Somu shrank back a little; Sampath stepped forward, rolling up his sleeve. ‘What are you up to?’ The other checked himself. Sampath asked in a tone of finality: ‘Are you going through this or not?’

‘I have said my say. Are you going to revise my contract?’

‘I don’t want conditions. We may give you more or we may not. Leave all that to our discretion. At the moment I won’t have you talk of any such things on the set. Are you going to your place or not?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Very well, get out of here,’ he thundered.

‘Give me my salary; I will go,’ said Shiva, descending from Kailas defiantly.

‘That’ll be settled in a court of law. You have violated a contract, and you will have to face the consequences.’

‘What injustice is this!’ cried Shiva, completely losing his head.

Sampath told De Mello: ‘De Mello, take him out of the studio. I don’t want any further indiscipline in this studio,’ and De Mello assigned a couple of assistants to lead Shiva out. Sampath subsided in his chair, exhausted by the effort. There remained a strained silence as everybody waited, and top-light boys looked down from their platforms, and assistants stood hushed at their posts. Somu was the first to break the uncomfortable silence. He said timidly: ‘Well, Mr Sampath, what shall we do now?’

‘Leave that to me,’ Sampath said grandly. ‘We need not be at the mercy of these mercenaries. I will do Shiva myself. I’ve been an actor once.’

He looked up at the makeup artist and asked: ‘You can make me up for Shiva?’ The artist looked at him critically and said: Yes, sir.’

‘But the dance, sir?’ Somu said.

‘We’ve bothered our heads with it for four days. I always felt that we might do it ourselves, save all trouble instead of trying to teach it to these fools. What do you say, Dance Master?’

‘Yes, sir, they do not easily learn.’

Sohan Lal said: ‘We must always be ready to do many things.’ And then he spoke for a long while with Sampath in his western Indian dialect, and Sampath smiled and said something in reply. Sohan Lal was perhaps recounting a reminiscence of a similar nature. Sampath went over to Shanti and said: ‘So sorry. Further delay. Forgive us, dear. I’ll be ready in a moment. You can relax for half an hour in your room, while they make me up.’

Some time later when Srinivas came into the studio he was surprised at being greeted by the familiar voice: ‘Hallo, Editor, don’t be shocked!’ But it came from within a heavy beard and matted locks. ‘Sampath! What is the matter?’ He wore a tiger’s skin at his loins.

‘Well, people do not realize that no one is indispensable in this world,’ he said and explained the position. Sampath’s versatility took his breath away.

‘We are determined to finish this scene today, even if it is going to mean twenty-four hours of continuous shooting.’

‘You have to wear a cobra around your neck.’

‘Yes, yes, I know; we’ve got that tame one, I tried it: it is not bad, though it feels unearthly cold at the first touch.’

‘Play back! Play back!’ Sampath shouted presently. ‘Sound!’ He went over and gave instructions to De Mello, who stood at the camera, and then went to Shiva’s seat on Kailas. A song blared forth from the loud-speaker – a song with a sentimental lilt, and drums producing a kind of hot-air rhythm. The music department fully realizing the need of the hour had produced a brand-new tune by adapting a couple of tunes born in Hollywood from a South American theme. Srinivas despaired on hearing it. It produced anything but the holy-of-holies feeling that he had hoped would be the essence of the scene. As he saw Somu and Lal tapping their feet instinctively to the music he was filled with a desperation which he could not easily place or classify. Other feet picked up the rhythm, and presently he saw Sampath slowly stirring in his meditation. He rose to his feet. He twisted and wriggled his body and assumed the pose of a dance-carving one saw on temple walls. He moved step by step and approached the chair, which marked Parvathi’s place.

‘Cut!’ rang out De Mello’s voice. ‘This will be the first cut,’ he explained. Shiva relaxed his rigid pose. ‘Call Parvathi!’ he ordered.

People went out and returned, followed by Parvathi, with her anklets jingling and very modern ear-drops swinging on her ear-lobes and a crown scintillating on her brow. She stood there in her place. Once again the cry ‘Music!’ and All lights’ and ‘Final rehearsals’; and lights shot up all around, and Srinivas noted how cunningly they had managed to make her clothes unnecessary by the No. IO light, which shot up a beam of illumination from behind her at ground level. ‘What ingenuity!’ he commented to himself. Her body stood out as if X-rayed, her necklace and diadem glittered and shone and seemed to be the only apparel she wore. Everyone, the principals in canvas chairs, went over to the camera to look through the view-finder and shake their heads with academic approval. There was suddenly a small discussion on the same academic level.

‘Will the censors pass this?’

‘Censors! What have they to object to? It’s only artistic. At that rate they should stop all dances and Bharata Natya; while professors and ministers are clamouring everywhere that we should revive our classical art –’ another said.

‘Lights off!’ rang the voice, and switches pit-patted.

‘We will have a final rehearsal and take the first shot afterwards.’

‘Music!’

Music – the South American tune – started once again. Shiva got up from his trance and executed his slow rhythmic steps, but Parvathi stood still, and when they questioned her about it pleaded: ‘No rehearsals are necessary for me. Don’t tire me, please.’ Shiva opened his eyes for a moment to say: ‘Yes, don’t tire her out.’

‘Yes, yes, it is better that you don’t tire her out,’ repeated three more voices, catching the contagion. Everybody seemed to be saying the same thing and feeling the same way. And then they sounded a buzzer and stopped the music. Shiva returned to his place and sat under the tree once again in meditation. He said: ‘De Mello, get ready to shoot. Call in the extras, Parvathi’s companions. Fetch the cobra.’

Lights were once again wheeled about, with their little wheels creaking, porters moved hither and thither, assistants took out their long entry-books and made notes, makeup assistants dashed backward and forward: the cameraman and his assistants disposed themselves around the camera like sentries on duty. Someone went up with a tape and measured, someone else held up an exposure guide over Parvathi’s nose – elaborate rites of a very curious tribe, with their own high priests and medicine men. ‘This is really an anthropological specimen,’ Srinivas thought. His reflections were interrupted by the entry of Ravi at this stage. He came in bearing a portfolio in his hand and was waiting for an opportunity to catch the eye of the art director, who was busy on the set, making some final readjustment to the heavenly background. Seeing Srinivas, Ravi edged up to him and whispered: ‘I have to get his approval for a design and send it up for block-making immediately.’

‘He seems reluctant to get down from yonder heaven,’ whispered Srinivas, but found no response. Ravi’s eye was caught by the figure of Parvathi, and he looked hypnotized. Srinivas wanted to jerk him back to his normal state and asked: ‘What is that thing in your file?’ Ravi answered absently: ‘Design and lettering.’

‘Is it urgent?’

‘Yes – yes,’ replied Ravi, without looking at him, with his eye still on Parvathi, who was now fanning herself. He stood transfixed. ‘That is Sampath,’ he whispered. ‘See the cobra around his neck!’ A live cobra was coiled about his throat, where he formerly wore his scarf, and it was making imperceptible gliding movements. Srinivas felt that he must say something to draw away Ravi’s attention, searched about for a remark, and could only say: ‘What a dangerous thing!’

‘It has no fang, unfortunately!’ remarked Ravi. Srinivas felt that he had made a blunder, and hastened to repair it with some other remark, but all to no purpose. Ravi stood as if transfixed, with his eyes on Parvathi and answering in monosyllables. Srinivas: ‘Shall we go to the canteen for something? I feel rather parched.’

‘No. I’ve got to get that fellow’s approval.’

‘Ready!’ went up a cry. A whistle rang out. The extras lined up behind Parvathi and Shiva. ‘Silence!’ rang out another cry. ‘Lights! All lights.’ The lights flashed out, X-raying the dancer once again. ‘Music!’ Music started. ‘Start! Silence.’ The camera was switched on. Each man was at his post. The music squeezed all sense out of people and only made them want to gyrate with arms around one another. Shiva went forward, step by step; Parvathi advanced, step by step: he was still in a trance with his eyes shut, but his arms were open to receive her. Shanti’s brassière could be seen straining under her thin clothes. She bent back to fit herself into the other’s arms. The Mexican melody worked up a terrific tempo. All lights poured down their brilliance. Scores of people stood outside the scene, watching it with open-mouthed wonder.