THE young Indian gets off his exer-bike and picks at his health food breakfast, as sparse as his chic penthouse in New York Citys well-heeled Upper West Side.
He is not one of your Delhi or Bombay hip crows. Nor is he the jhola-toting Calcutta intellectual producing black-and-white "art statements" on remote villages. Or a bejewelled Bombay pasha, churning out films in technicolour and minting it in black. New York-based filmmaker Tirlok Malik is, in fact, your archetypal East Delhi boy-next-door. Except that now, his neigh-bours include the likes of Michael J. Fox, Sigourney Weaver and Dustin Hoffman.
Television audiences in India, plagued by DDs pedagogical productions, were taken aback when the humourless network did a surprise turnabout a few years ago and screened Maliks debut production, Lonely in America. The film is about Arun, a sensitive young Indian who arrives in New York all set to tackle gloss, high-tech and all else in the Big Apple, head on.
He enrols for a course in computers, hastily exits from the news-stand owned by his uncle, played with a delicious Louisiana-Ludhiana accent by Malik himself. He strikes one of those quicksilver "youre zany so youre hired" deals with the boss of a computer firm. There he befriends Carlos, an outspoken mail delivery boy, who unfailingly greets him with a "Yo, India". At work Arun meets Faye, successful, blonde and pretty. Faye dreams of a man with passion and sensitivity and falls for, you guessed it right, the small and kinda cute Aroon. Malik and his director Barry Alexander Brown have made a film which does a funny take-off on overseas Indian communities with all their warts, zari, gajras, temples of papier mache and horoscope-matched marriages. Lonely... is racy, funny and insightful and one of the best films made on the immigrant experience, because it pokes gentle fun not only at others but at its own makers as well.
Maliks own success story is one that in many ways snubs any fellow Indian who assumes that his choice of subjects could have come only from a cityslicker armed with experience and impressive degrees. Malik is relatively new to the trade and self-admittedly lacked the business savvy to do a more successful marketing job in India for his first movie, but hopes to do better with his second venture, Love, Lust and Marriage.
Starring Deepti Naval , Samia Shoaib and Malik, Love, Lust and Marriage premiered as a US entry at the Bombay film festival in January and will be available on video and cable networks in India later this year. The film is a plucky attempt to answer a question often posed by foreigners who arrive in India armed with a Lonely Planet guide and a copy of the unabridged Kamasutra, only to find that eroticism died ages ago in this country and has been replaced by vulgarity. Producer, screenplay writer and chief actor Maliks inquiry is not about where love went but where good, old-fashioned lust did. Especially in the immigrant context where work and anxiety to survive in the urban jungle only puts additional pressure on relationships.
Both films have no outstanding production values, no scintillating cinematography, and no landmark histrionic performances. But Malik has the knack of choosing subjects that are relevant, even crucial, especially to the overseas Indian. And any combination of sensitivity, insightand the ability to laugh can only be a fortunate one.
He, however, bemoans the lack of support among his own community in the US. "Look at how Spike Lee changed the face of Afro-American cinema. Even Chinese films enjoy more support from their community than we do."
And though Malik is making tentative forays into Bollywood, his area of interest remains the immigrant population. Summing up his experience as an actor in American productions, he says: "I could have taken on a lot more but I absolutely refuse to play the stereotypical role of a bumbling Indian that most of these films portray. It's just too demeaning."
The man who came to New York 15 years ago as a businessman and who bummed around in a camper for the first two years is today a thoroughbred New Yorker. "I have melted into the pot, this is my homeyou can do all that without losing your identity. But you have to let go of that traditional way of thinking." Yet, he still misses India and what he calls the mysterious "awareness that hangs heavy in the air in those hot, dusty plains".
Meanwhile, he has learnt to wear his Attitude on his sleeve, speaks English with an unpretentious accent and has learnt to be anything but lonely in America,if the names in the credits of all the friends who helped out in his films are anything to go by. And they were not all Indian.
