[With the Ittefaq remake coming out this week, here's a piece I did for Film Companion about Yash Chopra's 1969 film]
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“Har paagal kabhi na kabhi akalmandi ki baat karta hai” (“Every madman has moments of sanity”)
– chuckling psychiatrist in the 1969 thriller Ittefaq
Yash Chopra’s Ittefaq centres on a “paagal”, a word repeatedly used to denote any sort of strange behaviour, and bandied about (even by senior doctors and cops) with the merry disregard for political correctness that we see in so many old films about mental illness.
It is fitting, then, that parts of Ittefaq play like scenes from a madman’s dream. Consider the cornucopia of bright colours and geometric designs that fill the screen for two minutes before the opening credits even appear. The influence of Saul Bass’s famous title designs for Hitchcock and other filmmakers is obvious, but it 
also feels a bit random, like some Rubik’s Cubes were tossed into a sabzi tray, chopped or grated, and the resulting fragments shot through a kaleidoscope. Anyway, no one would mistake the cheery background tune for one of Bernard Herrmann’s ominous compositions.
In its time, Ittefaq got much publicity for being a song-less Hindi film – but this doesn’t mean it was shorn of the other elements of our mainstream cinema. Unlike its relentlessly dark and gritty Western counterpart, the “Hindi-film noir” of the 1950s and 1960s was part of a tradition where many emotions and registers had to be mixed together. So there are tonal variations here, much juxtaposing of melodrama and studied restraint.
For instance, the opening sequence has a long, handheld-camera tracking shot from the POV of an artist named Dilip (Rajesh Khanna) as he enters his house. All very cinema-verite-like at this point, but then a zoom-in – accompanied by dramatic music – reveals the strangled corpse of Dilip’s wife, whereupon the camera whirls like a dervish and there is a spectacularly over-the-top, caterwauling performance by Khanna.
But in a suspense narrative like this, even theatrics do serve a purpose – we have to be on our guard, prepared that anything may be part of a subterfuge. The first thought that occurred to me was that the hysterical Dilip and his almost-equally-hysterical sister-in-law – who accuses him of murder – were putting on an act together. But there are other possibilities: Dilip is guilty and trying too hard to feign innocence; he killed his wife because he was mentally unstable (“paagal hai!”); he is innocent of murder but guilty of loving his art more than partying with his wife (“paagal hai!”); he killed her but then forgot about it because he had to finish a painting (“paagal! paagal! paagal!”).
Shortly afterwards, he escapes from a paagal-khana and breaks into a house where Rekha (Nanda) is alone, her husband away on a business trip. And now something intriguing happens. Even as the storm of a police pursuit rages outside, Ittefaq briefly becomes a two-person chamber drama of sorts.
After the initial wariness, Rekha and Dilip are soon chatting away like a married couple. There is a slow building of trust. “Bhaag toh nahin jaogi?” he asks her. “Abhi tak bharosa nahin?” she replies. They settle into a form of domesticity, bickering and making up; at one point, sounding like a hurt wife, she moans, “Maine tumhein kya takleef di?” Making a bed together at night, she playfully tosses a mattress at him. We are offered a vision of husbands and wives as jailers and qaidis to each other, shifting roles in turn.
And they confide in each other. Speaking of her (actual) husband, she says plaintively that there was a time when he was her dashing prince on horseback, but that the prince vanished within a few days. By the film’s end, this moment can be viewed as a red herring – diverting the viewer’s attention from what is really going on – but I prefer to take it at face value and to trust the genuineness of Rekha’s emotions.
There are, of course other things going on, including a bunch of elderly men sauntering about at 1 AM and laughing patronizingly when someone expresses fear of the “paagal” on the run. Despite the loophole-filled plot (and one delightful moment – for those of us who grew up making distasteful jokes about the large backsides of 1960s heroines – where Nanda’s sari-covered posterior becomes an important plot point, since it prevents a character from seeing something through a keyhole), the film manages to be gripping when it needs to be.
Ittefaq hasn’t aged too well if you’re a viewer who prefers the technical finesse and understatement of today’s multiplex Hindi film, so it is ripe for an updating – though the remake is likely to be very far in tone from the film Yash Chopra made. There will almost certainly be an extra twist or two, they will probably tone down the sentimental moral coda of the original, and “paagal” will be replaced by terms like “dopamine imbalance”. The doctors won’t openly laugh at their patients.
Plus, there will be no Rajesh Khanna, which means no subtextual analysis centred around one of our most popular screen personas. In the 1980 Red Rose, made long after he had lost most of his appeal as a romantic hero, Khanna was wittily cast as a serial killer-cum-playboy from whom no woman was safe. Ittefaq is in some ways the inverse of that film, with the young, boy-faced star as a pure-as-driven-snow victim of fate and coincidence, whose only crime may be overacting.
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[Earlier posts on Rajesh Khanna: Red Rose; Shaitani Anand]
[this is the second entry in my Scroll series about crime fiction. Previous piece here]
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In a key passage in Helen McCloy’s 1949 suspense novel Through a Glass, Darkly, a psychiatrist-detective is speaking with a young lady who is at the centre of a storm. Faustina Crayle has been dismissed from her teaching position in a girls’ school under a veil of secrecy, and Dr Basil Willing has discovered the reason: many terrified people believe that Faustina has unearthly powers; specifically, that she has a silent, ghostly double – or a doppelganger, to use the old German word. Whether Faustina herself is complicit in these spectral sightings – whether she is innocent or malicious – is beside the point for the school’s management. She can’t be allowed to stay on.
Now Basil and Faustina are talking, the former probing gently, the latter trying to make sense of all the disquiet she has caused. And she says:
“Have you any idea what all this is like for me? How desperately I keep asking myself all the old unanswered questions. What is life for? Why were human beings made? Why do we assume so confidently that God is good, when He is so much more likely to be evil? Are we an accident of chemistry, without beginning or end or purpose? Super-colloids, acting out a heartless comedy? Are we a dream of God’s, as the Buddhists believe? Is that why, in early childhood, you stare at your face in the mirror and look at your hands and feet and say to yourself: I am me. I am Faustina Crayle. I am not anyone else. Yet, no matter how hard you try to realise your identity, something inside you goes on feeling that it’s not quite true…”
Out of context, this might sound like a bit of faux-philosophy inserted into a slim, fast-paced mystery. But when you read Through a Glass, Darkly from the beginning, slowly coming to inhabit the world of its characters, the conversation between Faustina and Basil is compelling, poignant, and feels central to the narrative (and not just because it occurs exactly at the book’s midpoint). Cards are placed on the table, a measure of clarity brought to what has so far been a mystifying story. (It is unsurprising that this happens when Basil Willing begins his 
investigation: he is Helen McCloy’s series detective.) A woman who is an object of suspicion for many of the characters is revealed as a sympathetic, sensitive and weary presence (though of course, we can’t yet be sure that Faustina isn’t other things as well). And then, after the man of science has reassured Faustina that she isn’t in mortal danger from a ghostly double, he walks out into the street, shivers, looks up at the night sky and says to himself: “Who am I to say what cannot happen in this unknowable world?”
At the very end of the book, someone else (I won’t reveal who) will make a similar gesture and pronouncement, and Willing himself will again be faced with self-doubt – even as he plays his role of the detective glibly winding things up.
******
Some months ago, when I began rekindling an old passion for crime writing, I found I hadn’t read several authors or books that were celebrated, even regarded as canonical, by serious genre buffs. It’s the sort of thing that can happen when, based on your familiarity with, say, Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler and a few others – authors who tend to be well known to readers splashing about on the shores of the genre rather than plunging fully into it – you think you know almost everything there is to know about Anglophone crime writing of a certain vintage.
High on this list of neglected classics was McCloy’s affecting novel – a book I had never even heard of until I saw it had been ranked at number 12 on a famous 1981 poll of best impossible-crime novels. The four words that make up its title were for me mainly associated with Ingmar Bergman’s great film, which is concerned with the theological implications of the Biblical phrase: the idea that human knowledge is necessarily imperfect, that we will acquire complete vision – with the grace of a higher power – only in the fullness of time.
In a subtly different way, McCloy’s novel also touches on the theme of how limited human knowledge is – how little we yet know about the workings of the human mind, and about the possible links between the corporeal and the non-material worlds.
Consider how a school principal named Mrs Lightfoot tries hesitantly to make sense of the doppelganger phenomenon: “Suppose that an unconscious mind could gather unto itself enough vital energy to project some purely visual image or reflection of itself on the air? Perhaps through some form of refracted radiation? A dream-form that was visible to others as well as to the dreamer – visible but not material [like] reflections in a mirror […] rainbows and mirages.”
Here, a self-described modern woman is struggling to transcend the usual paranoid-sounding language about ghosts or witchcraft and to instead explore the possibility that whatever is going on has an explanation that might make more sense to us once our scientific knowledge has progressed to a certain point.
In my previous piece in this series, I mentioned books that seemed to be imbued with supernatural occurrences but ended with a logical explanation. Through a Glass, Darkly broadly appears to fit in that category, but to me it felt more like the converse (or a mirror image?). In this case, most of the main characters are devoutly rational, well-educated people whose gut instinct is to be cautious and “sensible”, and the book ends with Basil Willing putting forth his theory, a plausible one. Yet there are still unanswered questions, and little details that one can’t shrug off. For instance, if one attributes the goings-on to a cruel human agency, how does one explain that some of the appearances and actions of Faustina’s “double” play out like her own unrealized impulses?
Perhaps this is McCloy’s major achievement: there is something so viscerally creepy about both her premise and her presentation of it (notably in one scene where two schoolgirls watch Faustina painting in a lawn, her hand moving languidly as if in a slow-motion film; and in another, later scene set in a seaside cottage) that even the most secure reader might not be able to help looking over his shoulder. As with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (and its superb 1961 film adaptation The Innocents), about a governess wondering if her young charges are possessed, a sense of claustrophobic unease is created, ensuring that the rational mind is never allowed full control.
The result is that however persuasive Willing’s explanation is, we can’t place ourselves completely in his hands. The lingering impression at the end is not just of a supposed criminal protesting innocence, but also of Faustina herself – a character we have come to feel for – frightened not by an earthly antagonist but by the terror of coming face to face with her own immaterial other-self.
No wonder this is a book that will make you steer clear of reflective surfaces when you’re alone late at night.
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[An earlier piece about books with the doppelganger theme is here]
[did this for Mint Lounge. An earlier tribute to Kundan Shah is here]
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On the memorable afternoon I spent at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune earlier this month – I was there for a tribute to Hrishikesh Mukherjee – two moments stood out. One was chatting under the FTII’s beloved Wisdom Tree with the director Kundan Shah, just a few days before he passed away.
Kundan, with whom I had been acquainted ever since I worked on a book about his Jaane bhi do Yaaro in 2009, had looked quite fit for his 69 years, and the news was shocking. But with hindsight, I wonder if he seemed so spry, alert and youthful that day because he had entered a time machine and been transported back to the campus where he had once spent many happy times. The years seemed to fall off his face and voice when, over cups of evening tea, he gesticulated and theorised with the zest of the 21-year-old film student who imagines he will change the world through Cinema.
The other moment was a split-second one. I was sitting in the front row in the main auditorium when Jaya Bachchan, walking up on to the stage just in front of me, bent down quickly to touch the steps in obeisance. Most of us are, understandably, sceptical of the things celebrities say and do in public arenas, but I didn’t get the impression that Bachchan was doing something for effect; it was an almost imperceptible, matter-of-fact gesture, and felt like a private communion between an artiste and a space that was sacred to her. Later, during her session, she referred to the FTII as her matrubhoomi (motherland) and called the years she had spent there the happiest of her life.
This discussion, featuring her and the filmmaker Vishnu Mathur, was delightful because it didn’t seem in the least bit rehearsed: they contradicted each other when it came to a specific reminiscence, there were little detours and unselfconscious pauses, the way you’d expect in a private nostalgia conversation between two friends. They recalled persuading the celebrated archivist PK Nair to let them attend the screenings he held for himself at night, spoke of the awe they felt when giants like Satyajit Ray visited the institute – and how deflated a group of wannabe directors became when they earnestly asked the great man why he had used so many trolley shots in Charulata, and he replied in his sonorous voice: “Well, I had just bought a new trolley.” Bachchan mentioned hearing about a new film Hrishikesh Mukherjee was making, being intrigued by the title (Guddi), deciding she wanted to do it, and sulking when she heard another young actress had been cast. “Moushumi Chatterjee ko le liya! I know I can do better!” she said, mimicking her child-voice of ages past, and puckering her lips in the manner so familiar from her more impish roles.
It all felt so egalitarian. Kundan Shah was part of what we call the Cinema of Struggle of the 1970s and 1980s, making a small film on a budget of Rs 7 lakh, taking favours from friends, relying on the cooperation of former classmates who were struggling just as hard to keep their heads above water. Jaya Bachchan, on the other hand – notwithstanding her association with grounded, middle-class movies of the 1970s – is for obvious reasons a member of a more exalted circle in Bombay filmdom, and a higher-profile personality. Yet, at FTII, there was not the slightest gap between the two. You saw them as they must have been as students, long before those twinned imposters Success and Failure, Triumph and Disillusionment, came to define their lives.
Later, I wandered around the campus, gaped at the legendary Prabhat Studios and the ancient equipment housed in it, and saw the – now dry – Shantaram Pond where scenes from films such as Sant Tukaram had been shot. For a critic, accustomed to watching films as finished products, to be assessed from a cool distance, the experience of coming face to face with the mechanics of the process – seeing the rusty raw materials and deserted settings up close – is always a little humbling, and melancholia-inducing too.
Researching Jaane bhi do Yaaro years ago, I had collected plenty of fun anecdotes about the making of the film; the conversations with the crew made me feel like I had been there when it all came together. But there was something much more immediate about being at the place where the seeds of these careers – and so many others – had been sown, and to wander around the shaded woods where Kundan had filmed a few scenes of his zany, dialogue-less diploma short Bonga. Or the part of the campus where the opening scene of Guddi was shot, simply because Jaya Bhaduri – after she got the role she coveted – had requested “Hrishi-da” to shoot just one scene in her matrubhoomi.
[This is the first of a few pieces I will be writing for Scroll.in about the workings of crime fiction, with an emphasis on neglected or under-read classics]
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A spirited, self-absorbed young actor sits on a window-ledge posing for a photograph, and is then seemingly pushed to his death… with more than one witness independently swearing there was no one there to push him; that he appeared to have been “propelled forward”. The sense of menace builds when investigators realise that a very similar death had occurred 50 years earlier in the same old house, and that – more recently – a young girl fell off a nearby cliff after being pushed by an “invisible man”.
All this is happening in the misty Devon moors in the 1930s, and there is much talk of ancient legends, including a story about the Devil’s playing cards being scattered around a crime scene, and a headless horseman who may have been seen on one of the murder nights.
With such a premise and setting, it’s easy to think that Paul Halter’s 1993 novel Le Diable de Dartmoor – translated into English by John Pugmire as The Demon of Dartmoor – has supernatural underpinnings. Reading the story, we find that even the more level-headed residents of Stapleford village – among them a doctor and a teacher – think mystical forces could be at work.
But as it turns out, the solution to these mysteries is a wholly rational one, rooted in the human capacity for crime. And by the time the novel ends, most aficionados of the “locked-room” or “impossible-crime” tale will agree that the Frenchman Halter (not all of whose books are available in translation) merits his reputation as a successor to the celebrated John Dickson Carr, who specialized in this tricky subgenre of crime fiction.
****
The term “locked-room mystery” was once used in its most literal sense, to describe a crime – usually a murder – that takes place in a room bolted from the inside, so that there is no way for the killer to have got out, or even to have been there at all: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is usually seen as the first major example of this form. Over time, though, the term has become a more general descriptor for any sort of seemingly impossible crime where “howdunnit” is more important than “whodunit”. Take Agatha Christie’s widely read classic And Then There Were None (or Ten Little Niggers) – here, the “locked room” is a whole island cut off from the shore, where ten people die one by one, leaving the baffled police with multiple victims and no killer. Another favourite premise involves an open field where footprints can be seen in the snow, or sand, leading up to a crime scene, but none leading away. (One of my very favourite short stories in this vein is Fredric Brown’s “The Laughing Butcher”, about which another time.)
Naturally, plotting and executing such stories with any success requires an author to be highly skilled at the art of misdirection: at strewing red herrings about for us to slip on, using intriguing but ultimately irrelevant details to divert us while crucial information is consigned to the background or falls out of sight.
There are countless examples of such misdirection – almost as many as there are such novels or stories – and it’s fascinating to see how many different tricks the genre’s most prolific and inventive writers have up their sleeve. But one widely used technique is to use the possibility of the supernatural to confuse the reader, so that you’re not sure if what you’re reading is a ghost story – belonging to the realm of fantasy – or a mystery with a plausible, real-world explanation.
Take the oeuvre of Carr, who wrote so many novels and short stories both under his own name and as “Carter Dickson” that it won’t hurt to give away the denouement of just one of his stories (without naming it). This one centres on a young woman who dies after being savagely blinded – her eyes torn out – even though she is alone in a room with only one entrance and a single barred window set in the wall.
The final explanation lies in a pair of diabolically engineered binoculars which “stab” anyone who puts them to their eyes and tries to bring the lens into focus. Yet, throughout the story, Carr builds atmosphere by creating an almost gothic world of family curses, sooty stone towers, gallant swains and headstrong (or vulnerable) women; there are references to sinister black ravens, which signal death for someone who has transgressed. All this combines to create an effect that could easily have come from one of the great haunted-house tales.
In The Demon of Dartmoor (don’t worry, no spoilers here), Halter does something similar by mining our uncertainty about the nature of the mystery. Part of the trick is this: the multiple murders seem confounding when we look at them as a whole. If an apparently invisible antagonist is responsible for the deaths of three girls and one man in the present day, as well as another murder half a century earlier, surely something otherworldly must be afoot. But when you break the crimes down, treat them on individual terms, and allow for the possibility that just one of the witnesses might be mistaken (or lying) about a specific detail, a different picture emerges.
This is not to say that Halter cheats the reader – he is scrupulous throughout. The method by which Nigel the actor is killed while posing for a photo is clever and plausible, and also so obvious – after it has been explained – that you might want to smack yourself on the head. And we are given one important clue. But to figure out the solution, it is important for the reader to focus on the details of this one incident – including the witnesses’ description of the victim’s body language at the crucial moment – rather than get lost in a tangled forest where we are constantly thinking about invisible men, misty moorlands and ancient spells.
Halter’s prose, at least as one experiences it in translation, is only functional – nothing polished or literary about it – but there are a few clever decisions he makes at the level of sentence-phrasing. Consider the end of the chapter leading up to the actor’s death, after he has jumped up on the window sill for the picture, for an example of how an author can hoodwink a reader even while playing completely fair. (And I won’t say more.)
*****
If supernatural allusions can be used to give a reader the chills, or create uncertainty about what direction the story is going in, occasionally they can provide a light touch too. In the delightful 
short story “The Problem of the Old Oak Tree”, written by Edward D Hoch (another astonishingly prolific master of the impossible-mystery form), a country doctor named Sam Hawthorne relates a stumper he became involved with in 1927. During the shooting of one of the first sound films, a stuntman parachuting off a small biplane landed in an oak tree – with a reputation for being haunted – and was then found to have been strangled to death. How could this have happened?
In this case, the oak tree adds colour to the story – it certainly makes a visual picture of the death more striking and vivid – and some humour too. (“Even a haunted tree doesn’t strangle people with a piece of wire!”) But Hoch never encourages us to think that the tree might really have something to do with the killing: the story unfolds like a regular investigation, with little clues and conjectures piling up slowly, until Dr Hawthorne solves the murder.
And then, at the very end, having completed his narrative, he casually informs his listeners that the oak tree was around only for another year or so – it toppled over after struck by lightning. Much the same way that a supernatural-seeming tale might be felled by the thunderbolt of cold reason.
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[If that sounds like I am coming down too heavily on the side of rationality, my next piece will centre on a terrific 1949 thriller that contains a practical explanation – and is full of characters who are sceptical and well-educated – but still doesn’t allow its smugly rationalist detective the final word]
[Did this little tribute to Kundan Shah – whom I met just last week at the FTII – for Film Companion. More about Kundan in my book Jaane bhi do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983]
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“I’m doing well,” Kundan Shah said when I asked about his health at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune just last week. “There are ups and downs, of course. But I walk a lot, and as long as I can do that, I’ll be okay.” We were at the FTII to participate in a Hrishikesh Mukherjee tribute, and when I heard the shocking news yesterday about Kundan passing away in his sleep, my first reaction was to be grateful that I had those few minutes with him in Pune.
It was our last, and warmest, meeting. When I came down from the stage after a session, he was kind enough to greet me from the front row and say he enjoyed the talk. I played fly on the wall during a tea session as he chatted with old friends and colleagues about their institute days, discussing the difference between Bimal Roy’s and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s approach to shot-taking, or Guru Dutt’s and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s use of melodrama. And beneath the FTII’s famous Wisdom Tree, we posed for this photo alongside Amit Tyagi, the dean of films who had, in another lifetime, played the small part of the bearded reporter asking Tarneja hard questions in Jaane bhi do Yaaro’s press conference scene.
Posting the picture on Facebook last week, I was presumptuous enough to call it “a mini-gathering of Jaane bhi do Yaaro people”. But then Kundan himself had told me, after my book about his film came out in 2010, that I was now officially “part of the team” – among the sweetest words I have heard as a writer-journalist, and it was unsurprising that they came from a lovely, down-to-earth man. A man whom I had come to think of as a friend, despite the 30-year age gap between us.
It hadn’t been like this in March 2009, when I rang the bell of his Bandra office for the first time. If I wanted his inputs for a book about Jaane bhi do Yaaro, he had said curtly on the phone, I must come to Bombay and meet him so he could gauge firsthand if I was the right person to do this. The initial few exchanges (“Arre, why do you want to write about this film? Who will read such a book?”) made me feel like I was in a job interview and had to speak in platitudes to prove my worth. But gradually, the ice melted. We began talking, and kept talking for another week – followed by another long series of conversations two months later.
Even once a rapport was struck, there was quite a bit of parrying: with him as the artist who could get evasive about his work, or just be uncomfortable about discussing it in too much detail; and me, the chronicler who probed, speculated, asked inconvenient questions or even said uneducated things. At the time, my experience of old Hindi cinema was limited, and Kundan sometimes got annoyed when I didn’t get one of his specific references, or when it turned out I hadn’t seen a film like Teen Bahuraniyan or Paigham, which had been a formative influence on his sense of comedy. You should have researched much better before coming here and trying to write a book about JBDY, he said in one of his sourer moments – though the crankiness never lasted more than a couple of minutes, and he lightened up on realizing that I knew Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
The overriding impression was of a very regular-looking man – a civil servant in a checked shirt, diligently keeping 9 to 5 hours (much like the Common Man Wagle from the TV show he directed in the 1980s) – whose head was full of zany ideas. So full of them that I have wondered at times if this didn’t become a kind of roadblock for him: he seemed to flit from one thought process to the next, he was constantly revising and tweaking, and this can sometimes prevent you from concentrating on one thing and getting it finished. I have a draft – one of many he wrote – of the mythical JBDY sequel which never got made, and it’s great fun to read (emerging after 25 years in jail, Vinod and Sudhir now find themselves in such an unapologetically corrupt India that they can only cope by growing little devils’ horns on their heads!) – but it is also all over the place, uneven and fragmentary, often incoherent and non-sequiturish.
But then, this would have been just as true for the original JBDY script, and look how that turned out.
We watched Jaane bhi do Yaaro together on his laptop. He laughed quite a bit, but more AT the film than WITH it – pointing out lapses in editing or an awkward moment in the acting or writing, shaking his head at continuity errors such as in the scene where Ahuja’s henchman becomes a different actor from one shot to the next. “If this film is being seen as the ultimate satire in Hindi cinema, all it tells me is that Hindi cinema hasn’t achieved much.” At other times, he remembered the background to each scene, or the many trials that the crew had undergone.
He was often self-effacing, talking about how he made his diploma film Bonga as a tribute to Godard’s Bande Part even though he hadn’t seen the latter at the time. “But I vaguely knew what it was about, and I had seen the famous dance scene.” And he used the word “fluke” a great deal, whether discussing his life or his professional arc. He always emphasized the randomness of things … all of it leading up to the observation about how his iconic film “just happened somehow, nobody could have planned for something like this to be a success”.
****
What happened to his career after JBDY? Many who knew him feel that the set of factors that came together for him in 1982 – a youthful crew with just the right sensibility, their expectations for success set to zero but still hungry to do something they believed in; the NFDC financing a bizarre script and keeping an eye on things without interfering too much – never came together in the same way again. That he wasn’t temperamentally suited to the demands of a commercial industry, he was too much his own person.
He certainly experienced his share of disappointments (and it can’t be pleasant for a creative person to repeatedly hear himself described, in semi-pitying terms, as someone who did something brilliant 30-odd years earlier and then never achieved on a comparable level again), but my gut feeling is that he wasn’t the stereotype of the depressed artist who brooded for days about the things that hadn’t worked out. Coincidentally, the last time I met him, he was discussing the “cliché of the misunderstood poet” and how Guru Dutt had handled it in Pyaasa. But he was smiling and gesticulating and speaking excitedly, like a film student, not like someone who felt the theme could in any way apply to his own career. My dominant memory of him is of someone who was always alert and active and curious, even when simply working by himself in his office.
I have a few recordings of our 2009 conversations. I’ll be listening to them again soon, listening in particular for the traces of irritability in an otherwise genial, inclusive voice. I also look forward to watching the video of his last public talk – a session about film comedy at the FTII, which I am told went wonderfully well. And then there is the last, forever-to-be-treasured email, which he sent me on October 3. “Many thanks for the photos. Really enjoyed meeting you. Next time you’re in Mumbai, please call. Love and regards, Kundan.”
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[Scroll.in has an excerpt about Kundan from my book here. And here's a little more in The Hindu]
[my latest Mint Lounge column]
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“What kind of scary-ass clowns came to YOUR birthday parties?” Chandler caustically asks Joey in a Friends episode, as the live audience guffaws. It’s the punchline for a scene where the dim-witted Joey seems to be under the impression that clowns don’t have heads. But it’s also one of the rare times when I haven’t found one of Chandler’s ripostes funny.
Because, well, what’s so odd about suggesting that a clown might be scary? As a child I was terrified by a man in baggy pants and whiteface, holding out a balloon at a party – and this was years before I had encountered any horror films or books about predatory clowns. (On that occasion, I stayed convinced that the clown was meant to be part of a fright-game, like a haunted-house ride at an entertainment park.) Later, the cover illustrations on Enid Blyton’s circus books gave me the chills, and so did the mysterious clown in the classic DeMille film The Greatest Show on Earth – never mind that one of the most genial of actors, James Stewart, was under the costume.
Given all this, it was a surprise that I was underwhelmed by the new adaptation of Stephen King’s mammoth novel It. The film is wonderfully well-performed by a cast of young adolescents – as small-town kids in the late 1980s, confronting unthinkable evil – but I just didn’t find its main antagonist, Pennywise the clown, scary. Even though plenty of menace and atmosphere is injected into his first appearance: he peers out of a sewer on a rainy day, speaks cajolingly to a little boy who has lost his paper boat – and then, baring multiple rows of serrated teeth, chomps the kid’s arm off before pulling him into the drain.
That scene is gruesome all right, in the best King style, and it has a visceral effect, but for me the film’s creepiest moment didn’t involve the hyper-active Pennywise; it came when one of the kids finds himself alone in a room, surrounded by regular clown figures – plastic toys, stuffed dolls with faces frozen into immobile grins.
At this point the penny, so to speak, dropped. The problem wasn’t that I had suddenly lost my fear of clowns. It was that Pennywise was too expressive, too talkative – and therefore, too close to seeming human, the grotesque makeup notwithstanding. His lips move, he snarls and dances and chortles, and even if he does these things exaggeratedly, at least he seems relatable.
In a recent article titled “A Theory of Creepiness”, David Livingstone Smith refers to the hypothesis of the Uncanny Valley – put in very simple terms, this is the idea that close replicas of human beings can produce intense feelings of discomfort in us, because they stand on the border between familiarity and weirdness; our brains aren’t quite sure what to make of them.
Any horror-movie buff would understand. Throughout its history, the genre has made extensive use of both the replica and the human-like creature whose behaviour is somewhat off – from the sallow-faced sleepwalker in the silent classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari to the ventriloquist’s sinister dummy in the chilling anthology film Dead of Night to the countless slasher movies about possessed dolls. Not to mention the antagonistic clowns and jokers with painted smiles (the new It film even makes a fleeting reference to the 1989 Batman, in which Jack Nicholson played The Joker).
But as Smith also observes, one of the most terrifying uncertainties involves the question of whether something is animate or inanimate. This put me in mind of the creepy waxworks in the 1933 film The Mystery of the Wax Museum and its 1953 remake House of Wax, about sculptors who create wax statues out of murdered people. The madmen played in those films by Lionel Atwill and Vincent Price (not to mention a similar character played by Sunil Dutt, of all people, in the 1974 Geeta Mera Naam!) could glower or psycho-laugh all they wanted, but there was no ambiguity about their nature. On the other hand, the blank-faced wax figures were truly unsettling – a case of the victims being creepier than the villains who had knocked them off.
Thinking further, could the animate-inanimate phenomenon be linked to actors who are so inept that they barely seem like real people? Might every Suniel Shetty film be subtextually a horror film too? Less flippantly, there certainly have been cases in very low-budget horror movies where terrible acting has made the project more otherworldly – and therefore creepier – than anyone could have intended it to be. For one among many examples, check out the underground classic Shaitani Dracula on YouTube, especially the scene where the portly and harmless-looking actor-director Harinam Singh looks straight at the camera and introduces himself as the titular villain.
While leaving these matters for you to ponder, I should mention my one truly creepy experience on the night I watched It. Returning 
from the multiplex very late, I had to pass a McDonald’s in a deserted community centre. Watching old Ronald sitting there on his bench out of a corner of my eye, I thought again for the umpteenth time how odd it is that children line up to have photos taken with this silent fiend. And how I’d rather have the gregarious Pennywise walking and chattering alongside me than a clown just sitting a distance away, regarding me with an unblinking, plastic grin.
also feels a bit random, like some Rubik’s Cubes were tossed into a sabzi tray, chopped or grated, and the resulting fragments shot through a kaleidoscope. Anyway, no one would mistake the cheery background tune for one of Bernard Herrmann’s ominous compositions. 
After the initial wariness, Rekha and Dilip are soon chatting away like a married couple. There is a slow building of trust. “Bhaag toh nahin jaogi?” he asks her. “Abhi tak bharosa nahin?” she replies. They settle into a form of domesticity, bickering and making up; at one point, sounding like a hurt wife, she moans, “Maine tumhein kya takleef di?” Making a bed together at night, she playfully tosses a mattress at him. We are offered a vision of husbands and wives as jailers and qaidis to each other, shifting roles in turn. 
