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Out of the pen: Unleashed
When we heard that TV’s funny man Cyrus Broacha had written a novel, we were so alarmed by the prospect of literary lunacy, that we just hid.
When we heard that TV’s funny man Cyrus Broacha had written a novel, we were so alarmed by the prospect of literary lunacy, that we just hid. Luckily, Cyrus agreed to interview himself. So here’s Cyrus on Cyrus and an exclusive look at his hilarious debut novel.
When I arrived to interview Cyrus Broacha, I was naturally rather apprehensive. Sure, his visiting card said, ‘Cyrus Broacha, Professional Idiot’. But it’s not like the old days, and one can’t quite judge a book by a card anymore. President Obama’s card reads ‘Nobel Peace Prize winner’, and Tiger Woods’ card says that he’s a ‘married’ man. So I just couldn’t set store by the darned visiting card.
Nonetheless, when I entered Cyrus’s home, I was somewhat surprised to see him reclining with his wife’s left foot placed delicately atop his head.
Cyrus: Do you mind if we do the interview lying down? As you can see, I’ve been punished.
Myself: No problem. You’ve done theatre, radio, television, stage shows, the odd newspaper column, and films. What prompted you to write a book?
Cyrus: You forgot to include graffiti, flossing, dog walking and handstands. In fact, the last four are what I’m much prouder of.
Myself: Okay. Alright. Let’s focus on the book for now. Who was the inspiration behind Karl, Aaj aur Kal?
Cyrus: Oh, a variety of writers. Chekhov in Russian, Balzac in French, Oscar Wilde in English, Mark Twain in American... the list is endless.
Myself: Wow, quite the linguist! Did you actually read all these great authors in the original languages?
Cyrus: Who said anything about reading them? Your question was about the inspiration and so yes, these guys did inspire me.
Myself: Okay, tell us first… Why a book?
Cyrus: Books are written for three reasons. First, you intend to change society. Second, to send a sublime message to a certain someone, and third to utilise the reverse side of paper notices, which otherwise tend to lie unused and wasted.
Myself: And your reason is?
Cyrus: Mine is a more noble reason: the pursuit of happiness.
Myself: You mean the reader’s happiness?
Cyrus: No sir, mine. My happiness. You see, by writing a book, I got to spend roughly three hours a day alone in my room. That’s three hours less than I would normally have had to spend with my wife and kids. After eight years of marriage and two kids, believe me, three hours a day to yourself is as good as half a lifetime.
Myself: I see. Well, tell us a little about the story.
Cyrus: It starts as one man’s journey through the first half of his life. But then he’s joined by another man, and another, and the odd woman. Frankly, the book is quite crowded by the time you reach page 36.
Myself: As I understand it, it’s a travelogue.
Cyrus: No, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s an odyssey of sorts. Yes, an odyssey in which thankfully no one is called Ulysses, or any other name that Indian tongues might find unpronounceable.
Myself: Who are the main characters then?
Cyrus: Well there’s a guy, his guy-friend, his parents, girlfriends, a benefactor or two, many dances, lots of traffic lights and guest appearances by Delhi, New York, and Paris, but not necessarily in that order. Of course, like all good novels it has its dark moments.
Myself: Dark moments?
Cyrus: Yes. I haven’t read too many other novels where a protagonist is forced to travel from south Mumbai to Andheri. But in my book this happens on three separate occasions. I dared not allow that number to creep to four as that would have caused a change of genre.
Myself: A change to what genre?
Cyrus: Homer.
Myself: I’m afraid I don’t understand, Cyrus. Is there any book you can think of that yours resembles?
Cyrus: In height, perhaps Thomas Hobbes’s The Leviathan. But its time frame comes closest to Callisthenes’s Deeds of Alexander or Chairman Mao.
Myself: What is your target audience?
Cyrus: My newspaper column, I’m told, has a readership of seven million, or maybe that’s one obsessed reader reading it seven million times. We need to surpass these figures. In terms of demographics, middle class women from eastern India, between the ages of 37 and 43½, constitute our primary market.
Myself: Thank you for your time Cyrus, and all the best for your debut book. Is there anything else – any last thing – you’d like to share with readers?
Cyrus: Aargh ooheyearouool ouch stooop!
As I left the Broacha residence, two things were clear. For more information,
I needed to read Cyrus’s book. But more urgently, Cyrus Broacha needs HELP.
Best known to us as MTV India’s funniest VJ (and now a judge in the channel’s latest VJ hunt), Cyrus Broacha’s first novel, Karl, Aaj aur Kal is about two ordinary Mumbai boys, Karl and Kunal, who want to be film stars. They’re losers, but somehow manage to become superstars. But Karl knows that no great actor has really arrived until he becomes a politician. So he signs up with the Pajama Party.
In this extract from the book published by Random House India, Karl and Kunal make their Bollywood debut.
Disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm shown by friends and family, the two boys were soon caught in the whirlpool of pre-production activity for the film.
At the very outset, they were introduced to one of Bollywood’s legendary characters, The Tailor. The Tailor went by the highly respected title of ‘Masterji’. This is like addressing your building manager with the title ‘Your Eminence’. Masterji’s headquarters were a hole in the wall in Colaba. Masterji himself was 10,500 years old, completely blind, and worse still, clearly suffering from Parkinson’s. This made his efforts with a measuring tape quite an uphill task.
Karl and Kunal soon came to understand the peculiar working habits of the filmi tailor. Masterji started measuring the body parts shoulder downwards, at the speed of a dying ember. This was okay on the shoulders but definitely a no-no on the inner thighs. As Masterji’s old, wiry, bony fingers wrapped around his thigh, Karl started grunting like a pig. Oblivious to Karl’s awkwardness, Masterji proceeded even more slowly, and a half hour later, he finally wound the tape around Karl’s thigh, only to break suddenly into conversation with his junior staff about some heroine’s unfinished choli. Meanwhile, a wiser Kunal started taking his own measurements and writing them down. When it was actually his turn, he offered the measurements to Masterji. At this point, Karl and Kunal were made privy to a truly life-altering miracle.
The blind 10,500-year-old, Parkinson-ridden dying ember of a tailor sprang to life like the steroid-pumped Ben Johnson. Screaming himself hoarse, he tore Kunal’s paper to shreds. He then began flinging things at Kunal – first the torn pieces of paper, then the tape, then his slippers, and then a steel mug. By the time he flung the iron, the boys had done a little Ben Johnson act of their own. Masterji came screaming down the alley behind them with a pantsuit and a hanger dangling from his extended arms, to be used as weapons to subdue Kunal.
It took thousands of phone calls and messages to soothe Masterji’s bruised ego, and effect some sort of reconciliation. Even so, he refused to measure Kunal himself, and asked one of his lowly female assistants to do the needful. That day, the boys learnt a very important lesson about the hierarchy in tinsel town. The character actor was at the bottom, the director one step above, then came the hero, and finally the producer occupied the highest position. Yet, above all of them was a two-bit untalented tailor known as ‘Masterji’.
'Text on the boys’ agenda was what separated the men from the boys. This was what made an actor, and made a person a screen legend – dance rehearsals. The latter are unique to the Indian film industry. Often films enter production with unfinished scripts and plots, not all the actors may have been signed on, finances may not be available, and technicians and locations may remain undecided; but what shines bright and constant through the chaos is the dance rehearsal. Every Indian actor, young or old, male or female, gifted or otherwise, has had to undergo the grind of dance rehearsals. Also, this is one aspect of the film that never seems to be affected by budgets: all films have a dance routine, in a big budget film the heroine wears fewer clothes, in a small budget film everyone wears fewer clothes.
Karl and Kunal hadn’t much idea about the plot of the movie, no clue about their characters, or any news about the rest of the cast. All they knew was that they had been fitted for costumes and that their attendance at dance rehearsals was compulsory. There was only one problem. The rehearsals were in Andheri, and Andheri, as Pink Floyd once pointed out, was on the dark side of the moon. Living as they did in south Mumbai, close to the Colaba tip, while Andheri was in the north and much nearer Scotland, the two boys found themselves in a quandary.
Karl: Five days in a row to Andheri and back will kill us.
Kunal: We’ll need five more days just to recover.
Karl: Forget the damn dance rehearsals, what if they shoot the whole film in Andheri?
Kunal: You think we can return the money?
Karl: (Expletive that rhymes with an edible water bird) No amount of money can compensate us for travelling to Andheri and back.
Kunal: I’d rather go to hell, man!
Karl: Yes, it’ll be much shorter!
Filled with misgivings and dread, the boys started on their long journey. Yogesh Shetty had two things going for him; he was an extremely athletic and gifted dancer/choreographer, and was already an established name in Bollywood with dance classes all over the city. He was also the man with the smallest waist in the world.
Karl: It couldn’t be more than four inches.
Kunal: His belt is exactly half the size of my shoelace.
Yogesh Shetty was very articulate, well mannered, and extremely effete. Rumour had it, though it was difficult to authenticate, that Yogesh was a practising man lover.
Seated by his side at all times was a young, rough, hirsute lad called Dipesh. Dipesh, whose bloodline included the British Bulldog, had a muscular frame and a pug-like face. When Yogesh spoke to Dipesh, he always addressed him as ‘Dipooo’.
Yogesh: What are your names?
Karl: I’m Karl. The good-looking one is Kunal.
Yogesh: Whatever, have you ever danced before?
Karl: No.
Kunal: Thousands of times.
Karl: Did you say thousands of times?
Kunal: Yeah, you know, at birthday parties, weddings, sangeets, navjots… er, building events.
Karl (interrupting): You idiot, that’s not what he means… Karl started whacking the back of Kunal’s head like a woodpecker to a tree trunk.
Kunal: It’s hurting... just stop.
Yogesh: Dipooo! Who are these jokers? Why are they here? Are we making an animal picture? I mean even I can’t teach bears to dance. I’m only human, there’s only so much I can do. Why can’t they ever, ever, ever send me someone who can actually DANCE?
Dipooo immediately did what he always did. He led the newcomers away from Yogesh to the safe confines of a dark corner, and started working on them with a little less emotion than Arnold Schwarzenegger showed in Terminator. For the next six hours, the boys underwent their first filmi dance rehearsal. It was far worse than theatre. Six hours were spent dancing to just four lines. The English translation went roughly like this:
Your cheeks are extremely white/pale,
Your jaw is extremely soft/stale,
Your hair is falling, may I pat it back?
Your hands are so pure, may I get a slap?
Hour after hour of dancing to the same line can break down a hardened criminal, as evidenced by the work of the Mossad in the Yom Kippur War. Karl and Kunal came away broken.
Karl: What the hell have we done?
Kunal: It must be punishment, penance for our sins.
Karl: Exactly my point, what the hell have we done?
How they got through those initial rehearsals is a question only their diaries and spurious drugs may reveal.
The next month found them in New Delhi to shoot the first part of the film The Gaonwallah, The Britisher, and The Ugly… er, that’s still a tentative title.
Since the boys weren’t stars, they were put up in a guesthouse called Sherwani. Delhi is riddled with guesthouses, most of them built over 700 years ago during the days of the Tughlaq dynasty. These guesthouses have a unique feature – they either have electricity or water but never both. Sherwani, however, was a more upmarket guesthouse. The boys’ room had an air-conditioner. Unfortunately, just above the AC was a large window without a pane. Thus exposed to the elements, the AC was for all practical purposes, completely redundant. Sherwani’s most promising feature was its menu card. Nine dishes were mentioned on the menu; and next to seven, the bold letters ‘NA’ were marked. This stood for ‘Not Available’. The two dishes that were available were yellow dal and white rice. But again, the letters ‘CWK’ (Check with Kitchen) were prominently placed beside those.
Karl and Kunal thought Delhi was absurd. First, the sing-song rhythm when people spoke took some getting used to. Then, the third word of every sentence had to be rhymed nonsensically. For instance, a Delhiite would say, ‘Are you hungry-shungry? Want some food-shood? Let’s go to hotel-shotel for some khana-wana.’ The boys found the next feature both peculiar and disturbing. ‘Proximity violation’, that is, violation of personal space, was always a huge irritant for both Karl and Kunal. Unfortunately, in New Delhi, creating and maintaining a personal space was generally thought unacceptable. None proved this better than the fourth assistant director, a sixteen-year-old boy called Vikramjeet.
The first day of the shoot was outside the famous Qutub Minar garden.
Vikramjeet: You boys have to walk-shalk from the rock-cock to here. Don’t look at each other-shutter, walk like normal-shormal. Got it?
Kunal: Got it…er, one thing…
Vikramjeet: Haah. Bolo, tell me.
Kunal: Can you let go of my hand?
The boys had an amazing first day. All the secondary characters had a couple of shots each. Karl and Kunal had to do a brief walk, after which they got a five-hour break.
This was followed by a second shot in which Kunal’s character, Gagan, got to say a line to Karl’s character, predictably called Magan.
Gagan: Arrey yaar. (Pushes)
Magan: Aahhah!! (Falls)
Why did their characters behave in this way? Who were they? Why were they called Gagan and Magan? These questions were met with the same answer from Vikramjeet – Khalid says everything will become clear-shear when you see the movie… twice.
In Indian society, a leading film hero’s position is just above God’s. The whole of Delhi will attend a film shoot to try and see the hero, or God, or both, preferably sans make-up. It is also interesting to note that nowhere else in the world is a film hero known as ‘hero’. For example, in America, Sylvester Stallone is commonly known as Sylvester Stallone. On the film set, a typical conversation between spectators would go like this:
‘When is the hero coming?’
‘He’s arrived, he’s on the set.’
‘He’s arrived. I better tell everyone. Everyone, the hero has come. Everyone, the hero has come.’
This last line is then repeated 344 times till the entire city of Delhi, nay, the whole of the tri-state area, nay, the whole of India, is completely aware that the hero has indeed arrived and will shortly do something heroic, like a dance sequence involving two somersaults, one backward and one forward.
The unit had been shooting for roughly two weeks before the hero arrived. His name was Yusuf Khan. He was one of the biggest stars in the country although physically he was one of the smallest. Yusuf was known as the King of the College Romance. This sobriquet was fine for the first nineteen years of his career, but now at 46 years of age, it was getting more and more difficult to convince people. In fact, in his last two movies, screenwriters had gone to great pains to have his character mention repeatedly that he was in his last year of college and clearly a senior.
The last two years had been hell for Yusuf personally. He’d had three hair transplants, the last of which was the most humiliating as hair from his ears was transplanted on to his head. His tummy tuck had not gone unnoticed, and that blasted Cine-High magazine had broken a story on the inner shoe heels he wore, thus challenging his stated height of five feet three inches. Cine-High put it at five feet one inch at best, and gave irrefutable evidence that Yusuf Khan never acted with a child in the same frame, in a clear bid not to expose his height or rather the lack of it.
Yusuf was also very fond of rings and chains. He wore no less than 33 bracelets, rings, and trinkets. It didn’t matter if his character was a rich brat or an absolute pauper, the bling remained the same. Yusuf also insisted that in all his films, his character must be called Rohit. Things came to a head when he had to play the title role in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Finally, a compromise was reached. Rohit was used as the character’s first name and Ali Baba made up the surname.
Yusuf had another demand. He had to be allowed to sing at least one song in every film. This was fine except for the fact that Rohit had a terrible voice. Behind his back, producers called him the man with the voice of a dying donkey.
On the day of Yusuf’s arrival in Delhi, Karl and Kunal were invited to his trailer for a briefing. As they entered the huge trailer, they bumped into a giant egg, which turned out to be Yusuf’s head. Obviously, the transplants hadn’t been too effective, and to keep up with the character – a 23-year-old called Rohit – Yusuf had been compelled to wear a wig. A wig that he thought had come from the famous British wig makers Haig and Beacon, but had actually been pilfered from his heroine Sujatha’s mother by Yusuf’s cunning make-up man, Shirishbhai. So eventually The Gaonwallah, The Britisher, and The Ugly would star Sujatha in the female lead, and someone who looked exactly like Sujatha’s mother, only perhaps shorter, in the male lead.
Interestingly, Yusuf took an instant liking to Kunal and Karl. He insisted they spend all their free time in his trailer. Yusuf discriminated among the other character actors on grounds of class. Karl and Kunal were different. Yusuf missed people from his own background and adopted the boys immediately.
Now, the moment a leading hero adopts you, your status changes. You become the most important and wanted member of the production. Since you have the King’s ear, you are the glue that can bind all disparate elements into a successful shooting schedule.
As they grew closer to Yusuf, Karl and Kunal were slightly corrupted by their sense of power. They might hint to Yusuf that today was not a great day to work and should instead be used for some active rest and recreation. The shoot would then be unceremoniously cancelled, leaving Jani exasperated. Then Yusuf, Sujatha, Karl, and Kunal would go over to Yusuf’s hotel where they’d all play games like dumb charades, during the course of which Karl and Kunal were convinced that Yusuf was a terrible actor and that Sujatha was actually worse.
Yusuf was working on seventeen different films simultaneously. He couldn’t remember most of the titles, but he did know his character’s name in each… Rohit. The King of the College Romance now decided to push his two friends into some of these films. When he asked the producer of 7 Ladies (in which an all-female cast supported Yusuf) to create roles for Karl and Kunal in that film, he met with some resistance.
Producer: But Yusuf sir, the whole idea is to have you as the only male character, surrounded by females. It is every man’s fantasy, first time in India. I can’t put these two boys anywhere. You see, we’ve already cast for the waiters, drivers, and dead bodies.
Yusuf: See Pandey, you always see problems. There are no problems, only solutions. You say all-girl cast? You don’t want any males, right?
Producer: Yes sir, I’ve even got permission from my wife to make this film. Only females. Only females. It’s the greatest idea in cinema.
Yusuf: Okay, then Karl and Kunal will play females. Change the title to 9 Ladies, okay?
Producer: Er… er, 9 Ladies… er, Plus Two?
And so Karl and Kunal were suddenly making appearances in eight different productions, and in one of them they would debut as part of an all-female cast!
The films had interesting names, ranging from the Curse of the Black Python to Marine Drive to Chinghiz Khan. The last was a biopic of the life of Chinghiz Khan, with Yusuf in the lead. The only problem of course was Yusuf’s insistence that Chinghiz Khan’s character be given the pet name ‘Rohit’, which historian/director Saeed Ali would not allow under any circumstances. Saeed Ali already had allowed two pivotal roles to go to two unknown boys. Now to allow history’s greatest conqueror to answer occasionally to the name ‘Rohit’ was utterly preposterous. Saeed Ali’s artistic temperament was about to snap. When Yusuf said he’d confine the use of ‘Rohit’ to the love scenes, Saeed snapped, ‘What love scenes? There are rapes, which I will show in their stark brutality. During one of these rapes, if you like, I’ll send your boys in with the line, “Excuse me, Rohit, there’s a phone call for you”!’
Yusuf was a sensitive man, and was hurt by Ali’s sarcasm. Saeed Ali eventually had his way, but only on condition that the credits would read ‘Chinghiz Khan/Rohit – Yusuf Khan’.
