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Filming features a set of real and fictional characters associated with the Bombay film industry and tells a number of interlinked stories, starting with a travelling cinema in the hinterlands of Bihar in the 1920s and ending in a film studio outside Bombay in 1948. It is partly an exploration of the power of dreams in troubled times, and the dangers thereof, and hence it engages obliquely with both the Independence of India and Partition. The extract below features two of the main characters in the 1920s: a Muslim prostitute in a Calcutta brothel, who later assumes the name ‘Durga,’ and Harihar, the owner of a small travelling cinema. The entire narrative is ‘recovered’ from various sources in the novel, including an interview with an Urdu scriptwriter, whose words and comments have been placed in italics.




   Her mother had reacted differently from Harihar to her pregnancy. Or indifferently: she had hardly reacted at all. She had exhaled the smoke from the hookah slowly and given Durga a sharp but fleeting look. In that look Durga had read contempt and calculation, for Durga was the youngest of the women in the house and still well under 16, which was the age when, as her mother had often told them, ‘the hole of a girl loosens and she becomes a woman,’ less attractive to a certain type of man. It had not surprised Durga when her mother had gone away for a day the very next week and come back with a scared 12 or 13-year-old, who had been introduced to them as ‘a cousin from the village.’ Relieved at being spared the ranting and raving that she had feared, Durga had welcomed the girl with more warmth than she felt for any of her own sisters. She had thought that the matter of her pregnancy had blown over.

   But the matter had come to a head in her fifth month of pregnancy, when Durga could no longer bring herself to have sex with the men her mother sent to her. She had tried to explain it to her mother. But her mother would not listen. I did it well into my last month when I was carrying you, and look at you, you are fine and well, limb and voice intact, arguing blithely with your very own mother, she had said. There are men who pay extra for it, she had added.

   She had known her mother would never let her marry Harihar: Marry a Hindu! she would have exclaimed, suddenly becoming a thorough Muslim. Though if Harihar had the money, she would have allowed him to take sole possession of her and maintain her as his mistress. But he did not have the money to keep her as a mistress. He did not even have the money to see her as often as he did, handing over his hard-earned profits to her mother whenever he could. That very afternoon, while her mother slept, Durga had left the house with her bundle of jewellery and all the money — not much — she could find in her mother’s box.

   She was perhaps fifteen.

   It had been difficult to get to the part of Howrah where Harihar had taken his show. The pontoon bridge across the river Hoogly had been sealed by the police for almost four hours. River traffic and road traffic piled up on all sides of the bridge, waiting for the police to wave them through.

   The year was 1922. The date was 13th February.

   It was an inconsequential day. A day earlier and Durga’s decision would have coincided with history: with the withdrawal of the call for non-cooperation by the Congress and Gandhi, well on his way to becoming the legendary Sant of Sabarmati, on 12th February, 1922. Protests against the Rowlatt Act, the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the First World War when India had contributed 1.4 million forgotten soldiers to fight another people’s battles, the Khilafat movement, the call for non-cooperation: it had been a turbulent period and the British were still jittery when, the day after 12th February, on 13th February, 1922 to be exact, the day when things ought to have officially returned to normality, the day after the day when (according to reliable historians) the Congress revoked the Non Cooperation Movement and the British heaved a sigh of relief, on 13th February, 1922, that inconsequential day, an unidentified young man had climbed the highest building next to the pontoon bridge and, after shouting his protests against the Congress and the British for almost an hour, he had sent himself plummeting 50 metres down to the asphalt below. His last wild words, which have not entered any history book, had
been: You like determination, Montagu? This is determination. This is determination.

   The young man, whose scattered pieces were being scraped off the asphalt by the police, had been referring to Montagu and Birkenhead’s warning that Indians should not dare to challenge “the most determined people in the world.” He had meditated all night over the withdrawal of the call for non-cooperation by the Congress, and he had shed bitter tears of shame.

   Very few in the crowd understood the young man or what he had experienced, but many were strangely moved by the sight of a human being plunging to certain death in protest. It was not the protest that moved them, for most of those standing by never heard the man shouting, they were too far away or arrived too late, and some would not have agreed. It was the desperate concentration of the act that fascinated them. They half-realised that the young man had brought all to bear on this one senseless plunge: he had achieved an intensity of action that had nothing to do with what was or was not achieved, a fullness of intention that is within the grasp of only those who are possessed. He had launched himself against the barbed wire of colonial authority, the hard ground of reality, achieving fantastic fatal mobility at the very end of his life. But many in the crowd also felt a faint scepticism, a vague doubting in the face of such an end, which is after all necessary for life to continue, as it does, in spite of human weaknesses and inhuman monstrosities, betrayal and oppression, knife and barbed wire, murder and genocide.

   The police took no chances. They sealed the pontoon bridge — putting up wooden posts with barbed wire on both sides — until every tendon and tooth of the crushed man had been picked up and the blood washed off with water jetted by a fire engine drawn by two impatient, heavyhoofed horses.

   It was this that had delayed Durga on her way to Harihar, her mind made up.

   ‘Yes, young man, this is a story about what happens in the mind just as much as it is a story about what happens to the body. Look at me. Look at my body. See, see, the skin fails to contract when I pinch it. See. Look at me, my potbelly, my hair. But once I was considered handsome. There were people who thought I was an actor, not a writer. And look at what has happened to this body, this face. But the mind, ah, the mind, how can anyone your age know what happens in the mind . . .’