THIS chicken is half-dead," the walkie-talkie crackles. A hiccup in the shooting of the film Such A Long Journey, based on the Rohinton Mistry novel. "Water for the chicken, please," the voice shouts. The crisis of the half-dead chicken is averted. But another one starts.
The noon-shift sweepers at Mumbai's sprawling Film City are clanking their bins and whacking their brooms, unmindful of the walkie-talkie's hysterical call for "Silence, please". For Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson this has indeed been a long journey of similar crises. But this week the Indo-Canadian-British crew, shooting at a feverish pace since last June, will pack up the cameras. Before the editing room grapple begins, readying for a September release.
Roshan Seth, in the fulcrum role as Gustad Noble, ambles out of the cardboard-recreation of Khodadad building, where Mistry's human drama plays itself out. He flops into a chair, warily eyeing the canteen-prepared chai, settling for a bottled Pepsi. A wan Dastoor, his hair trussed under a 'bald' wig and nostrils bristling with hair, looks so much the part of sickly Dinshawji, that a crew hand hovers about anxiously.
The shooting of the crucial 'chicken scene' is on, where Noble's son Sohrab rebels against his father's expectations and his IIT refrain. Getting the emotive moment just right is making him cranky, Gunnarsson confesses. But the frown smoothens out as he eulogises his immensely satisfying cast. The redoubtable Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri play Jimmy Billimoria and Ghulam Mohammed respectively, Sam Dastoor is Dinshawji with his carious mouth and crass jokes, Soni Razdan is the pivotal Dilnavaz (Noble's wife), Pearl Padamsee acts as the witch-like Miss Kutputia, Dinyar Contractor is the carping Rabadi, tiny Shazneen Damania (Whirlpool ad child-model) plays Noble's adorable daughter Roshan and Persis Khambhatta enacts Noble's mother in flashbacks. The rest of the list is preponderantly Parsi, to underline the idiom of Mistry's novel.
"Not type-casting, but quality casting," Seth qualifies casting director Dolly Thakore's choice. Razdan is outside this Parsi milieu. But, she says, "I did not want to do a caricature."
Soni was intuitive as Dilnavaz, the axle of so many relationships in the script, raves Gunnarsson, adding, "There is something sexy in the Gustad-Dilnavaz relationship. Something left over even after procreation is over. Getting that across on screen is essential." Scriptwriter Sooni Taraporevala, who has worked on Salaam Bombay and Dr Ambedkar, has been loyal to the Booker-nominated novel, working on the fourth and final draft with the Toronto-based Mistry. "Unlike other scriptwriters who retain the spiritual essence of a novel, I retain the literal. Its humour, too, adapts excellently to the cinematic medium."
The novel discusses the tribulations of a middle-class Parsi family, against the social text of India's wars with China and Pakistan, having as its taut spine the Nagarwala episode which rocked the Indira Gandhi government. In 1971, Nagarwala, a State Bank chief accountant, withdrew Rs 60 lakh on the orders of someone over the phone. Nagarwala claimed it was Mrs Gandhi. Another theory says Nagarwala, playing a prankster, pretended he was calling from the PM's office and withdrew the money himself. The novel swerves from reality, since the mystery remains unsolved. The fictionalised Nagarwala (Capt. Billimoria) is a RAW agent who reroutes Rs 10 lakh from embezzled funds, since he believes Mrs Gandhi has betrayed him and the Mukti Bahini cause. But references to the scandal as the film's plot kindle verbal circumambulations. But, explains Gunnarsson, the humanity is more important than the novel's social context.
In the novel, the heated father-son exchanges are spiked with Sohrab's disgust over Indira Gandhi's nepotism, digs at her son Sanjay Gandhi's Maruti experiment, Swiss bank accounts, Gustad's tirade on the Hitler-worshipping Sena, while his friend Malcolm Saldanha's take-off on beef-eaters' economics graze other such holy-cow topics. Tricky when translating into screen, with the censor's shadow lingering by.
"How do you mean, tricky?" barks Seth. A friendly bark, yet a warning. "Every civilisation will be judged by its social satire. We Indians are unable to laugh at ourselves, but will brush under the carpet what we cannot swallow, using censorship to do it."
Taraporevala emphatically shoos away the spectre of censorship. "I did not censor myself, but when one translates a novel into a 120-page film script, one examines the weights and balances." Detailed political references were dropped—like an overwrought public's guesswork on Lal Bahadur Shastri's death, Noble's reflections on Nehru's distrust of son-in-law Feroze Gandhi, his ranting against saffron rowdy-ism and the 'Palung-tode' Paanwalla's public caricature of war-mongering Pakistani leaders as Drunkard and Butcher. But not in anticipation of censorship. To underscore, rather than detract from the emotional relationships more vital to the story's fabric.
"Mistry himself departed from the Nagarwala episode, with Billimoria extracting Rs 10 lakh for himself. Nagarwala never did that. Mistry has only fiction-alised events, exploiting his liberty as an author. It is a work of fiction, not a comment on events," vouches Taraporevala.
In another digression while transcribing, the character of Malcolm Saldanha has been dropped. For Gunnarsson, whose films Gerrie and Louise, Diary of Evelyn Law, Diplomatic Immunity, After the Axe and Final Offer dealt with scripts with limited characters, his experience with Mistry's novel was unique with its offer of a larger canvas with its interspersed relationships. "For Roshan and I, Mistry's novel has been a bible. The issues central to it like family, friendships, loyalty, humour even in tragedy, betrayals, disillusionment and the humanity arising above social chaos are so universal. We decided to focus on two relationships, Gustad's with son Sohrab and with friend Billimoria.The film is structured around this dramatic spine. We had to sacrifice Saldanha," explains Gunnarsson.
The climactic riot scene, where the municipality bulldozes the wall of painted gods, turning a peaceful protest into a free-for-all that kills Gustad's adopted son, the mentally retarded Tehmul, and returns his prodigal son Sohrab are saturated with emotion.
The limping Seth (playing Gustad) picks up the blood-bathed body of Tehmul (played by K. Deboo), ceremonially placing by his side the doll that Tehmul violated after stealing it from his daughter. Gustad had long forgiven Tehmul that violation, moved by the plight of a "child's mind with a man's urges". As he sits, weeping not only over Tehmul's death but the snuffing out of illusions of family and friends, his estranged Sohrab (enacted by Vrajesh Hirjee) returns to him. "That is the film's most moving scene. As he embraces Sohrab, saying, 'Yes', 'Yes'. A fitting end," recalls Gunnarsson.
The film, as the novel, weaves such poignant moments with rib-tickling shots. Miss Kutputia with her lizard-tail recipe for the evil eye, neighbour Rabadi with his overfed dog and daughter, Dinshawji with his 'liquor-marinated liver', his wife Alamai's histrionics at his funeral, the staple Parsi jokes and their legendary eccentricities.
The film-making, too, left the crew not knowing "whether we were laughing or crying". Three nationalities, brought together by joint funding by Canada's Telefilm and CBC, India's UTV, Britain's British Screen and BSkyB, worked under one umbrella. Scheduling was a nightmare, since Indian artistes sign up for too many films and cannot provide bulk dates. The Mumbai-centric novel needed to be shot primarily on-location. Faithful reproduction of Mistry's House of Cages means setting it in the red-light area of Kamathipura. The mohalla ambience was captured in Navjivan Society. Other locations included Chor Bazaar and the topsy-turvy Crawford Market from where Gustad buys that fateful chicken that, instead of celebrating Roshan's birthday and Sohrab's IIT admission, leaves a bad taste all around.
Despite Gunnarsson's complete identification with his other novel-based films, working on Mistry's book has been special. Its social context may be foreign but its human context is not: "I am doing the film because the book reaffirms my belief that each of us is on a similar journey. The quest to be a moral person in a moral world."
