It’s not often that it takes one year to get one interview. But that’s how long it took British scribe Justine Hardy to track down Hindi cinema’s latest golden boy Hrithik Roshan.
During that yearlong chase in Mumbai (which Hardy calls by its old name, Bombay), the 31-year-old journalist and documentary filmmaker discovered glitz, glamour and also the gory underbelly of Bombay and Bollywood.
Her book “Bollywood Boy,” published by Penguin, then, is about Roshan, the Bollywood Boy. But also about Bollywood, “the celluloid city that hides its alchemy among the alleys that smell of rotting flesh and star jasmine.”
It’s a sniggering saga, sometimes salivating, sometimes solemn, but never servile, never fan-like.
The chapters take you through the contours of a typical Hindi film. They are named - Infatuation, Flirtation (Meet our Hero), Turmoil (Bring on the Baddies), Adulation (Meet a Heroine) up till the Happy Ever After ending.
It’s about Hardy’s deliberation on Bombay. “She has a woman’s body in recline, her hips, buttocks and breasts rising above a belly of water,” she writes about the island metropolis that is capital to the Hindi film.
"Those breasts are surmounted by nipples of wealth, the higher reaches where the smooth rich folk live behind tall walls. And on the curves that swoop down to her belly the shore meets land that has been pulled back from the sea…
“This is the body of Bombay, and Bombay is a city of bodies.”
It’s also about the discovery of the new flesh trade. In the high city societal circuits, amid dark discos and sunlit cafes, middle class colonies and make belief sets.
“…skin pressing on skin, offering itself up from Malabar Hill to Back Bay, from Kemp’s Corner to the salt-singed arch of the Gateway of India…,” writes Hardy.
As she traverses through the repackaged air of Bombay pubs and discotheques, where the perfume “mingles with Malboro Light smoke,” Hardy discovers the new India. Of black spayed-on Capri pants, silk shirts knotted under cantilevered Wonder-Bra cleavages and oodles of hair gel falling over big-priced beers.
She also bumps into stardom. Like in the first sighting of Roshan with another top star, Salman Khan. Khan is part of what Hardy calls the “testosterone triumvirate, three good Muslim boys who hold the Hindi film industry in thrall.”
Enthralled is what Hardy feels when she first sees Roshan: “Then the green-eyed boy lifted his head, turned and looked straight at me. I am looking into film-star eyes. I am in the movies.”
But make no mistake. This book is not a star-struck romp across Indian tinsel town.
Rather it’s a rippling tale from the author whose earlier work includes “Scoop-wallah: Life on a Delhi Daily,” which was short listed for the Thomas Cook Travel Award in 1999 and “Goat: A Story of Kashmir and Notting Hill.”
Rippling with sardonic wit it discovers sensuous dancers-turned-sex-workers; forks out ageing choreographer-turned-personal trainers with sagging breasts and too much make up and generally plucks out the grey hairs amid the imported hair dyed manes.
From Kamathipura, the reddest of Bombay’s red light districts to the sets of “Snip,” a post-modern, dark, fusion comedy in half-English, half-Hindi - Hardy does the whole Bollywood jig.
She sees venereal disease clinics offering Rs. 500 abortions beside glossy film posters “offering up a few hours of escape from the poverty and humiliation of Bombay’s back streets”.
And also some shooting on the location with “Snip” - “So there’s this fat man, a huge black afro-wig and a dildo, and they are bouncing up and down on this big bed…together…”
The search for Hrithik carries on as he continues his meteoric rise through the celluloid firmament. And a million unanswered calls and false leads later, during which Hardy constantly bumps into ageing actors and failed and failing directors, Hrithik is reached.
“He looked straight at me. I was staring into the face of a beautiful boy behind a mask of film makeup,” recalls Hardy.
“I was staring into those eyes. Everyone describes them as green. They are not. They are soft hazel melting to dark brown, flecked with light, wide open and vulnerable.”
Then Roshan, acclaimed as the sexiest dancer in Bollywood, tells Hardy he isn’t really that nimble. “I am going to get caught soon… everyone is going to see soon that I am just not so hot at all, that maybe I am just a really ordinary dancer.”
And then it’s all over. The interview, the book, and it’s time again to "bring on the dancing girls. Swell the music over an alpine slope, just one more time, one more wiggle, a final twirl. A lingering gaze. Lips to neck. Just a boy.
“Welcome to Bollywood.”