Slumdog Directors

For several years, Aslam Siddiqui used to visit a film and television studio in a distant north-eastern suburb in Mumbai, armed with a comb in his trousers’ back pocket and a tube of Fair & Lovely skin lightening cream in the front.

The then 18-year-old, unknown to his family, would leave the small factory that produced embroidery work, and which had recently been put under his charge, unattended to impress upon the authorities on the set to hire him as an actor. He got a portfolio of photographs made, began to take small loans, and even started frequently paying someone who claimed to be a casting agent. Before every audition, he would wash his face, comb his long curly hair that he had styled like the Bollywood actor Bobby Deol’s, and apply generous amounts of fairness cream on his face.

But when the agent disappeared, the family-owned factory shut down, and since his daily visits to the studio had not fructified in any work, one day he finally decided to take matters into his own hands. He combed his hair around his ears, applied the fairness cream, and prostrated, as he describes it, at the feet of the producer of the show under production, Chi and Me.

When he refused to let go of her feet, she said, “Kuch kar ke dikha (Show me something).” And then without a minute’s hesitation, he was ready. A line from the Sunny Deol-starring action film Ghayal (1990) he had practiced over and over again for a moment just like this.

“Utaar ke phenk doh ye wardi aur pehen lo Balwant Rai ke naam ka patta apne gale mein,” he shouted like Sunny Deol, pointing at her, channelling the action hero’s fury at corrupt policemen in the film, “Balwant Rai ke kutton.” (Remove your police uniform and wear Balwant Rai’s— the villain—leash around your necks, you dogs of his.)

She laughed so much, he says, he wasn’t sure if she was impressed with him or ridiculing him. After a few days, he got a brief role of a building watchman in an episode of that show. He got another small part in another show.

And then nothing. Even though he continued visiting the sets of various TV shows and taking part in auditions, even as the thick mop of curly long hair disappeared into one that needed a comb- over, even as he got married, had two children, and found employment as a peon in an office—Siddiqui never quite got another opportunity.

One afternoon, after failing yet another audition, he asked Afzal Razvi, a friend from his neighbourhood in Govandi who had recently completed a course on television and film scriptwriting at a local institute, to help him become an actor.

“Chal,” Razvi told him. “Khud kuch karenge. CID banaaenge.” (We’ll do something on our own. Let’s remake CID, the popular TV crime show by that name.)

With a borrowed video camera, and work that would be edited on a laptop, Razvi, Siddiqui, and a few friends from the neighbourhood began to create a two-minute-long spoof of the popular Hindi TV show CID—a show that’s been on air for almost two decades. Except that the location, the mystery (a body found in the Deonar dumping ground), the motive (killed over a squabble for access to water) and the gumshoes were intrinsically about the Govandi slum and its dwellers.

Razvi realised the video he uploaded on YouTube was getting several views. “It was all from Govandi,” he says. “Everyone in the area was watching it.” The video that they had shared with friends, Razvi claims, had now been downloaded onto strangers’ cell phones. “Wherever we went [in Govandi], people were calling us ‘Govandi CID’.”

They collected money from friends and family, and fleshed out the plot across two 13-minute-long episodes. They made another two-episode-long CID show, this time edited at a dingy studio in another part of the city. They got the local MLA to promote and hold a premier for their show. They made music videos, many of which began to be used during festivals and weddings in the area. The boys are currently in the process of making another film.

“This is our way of saying [expletive] to Bollywood,” Siddiqui says. “We are making our own Gollywood, by us and for our people.”

Govandi, which lies at the edge of Mumbai’s north-east, is considered to be the city’s poorest locality. Having sprung up entirely at the base of the city’s Deonar dumping ground, it is, according to some estimates, larger than the Dharavi slum and thus, Asia’s largest human sprawl. But unlike Dharavi, which finds frequent representation in popular culture and is viewed as an entrepreneurial hub where several factories and businesses exist, Govandi is in the news for malnutrition deaths and for dragging down the city’s Human Development Index. It is made up of poor migrants, several of them illegal; the entire area, its residents complain, has been blacklisted by banks—for loans and credit cards; it has school dropouts, plenty of drugs, and a whole lot of crime.

But what it also has is residents, many of whom have migrated from smaller Indian towns and cities, with an unusual delirium about acting in Bollywood. Every day, several youths from the area participate in auditions, and many of them get small acting roles in crime shows like Savdhaan India, Gumrah and Crime Patrol, one of the most popular genres on television today. Most of the other aspirants, after having failed to become actors, find employment as spotboys or hands on TV and film sets.

A large fire at the Deonar dumping ground that broke out one recent night and has had sporadic re-eruptions since, has covered much of the city in a thick smog of ash and dust. But it is here, at the base of the dumping ground, in the Shivaji Nagar slum cluster in Govandi, where it is most dense and foul smelling.

Tonight, amid the putrid smell of burning trash and under the envelope of the night’s darkness, seven youths are gathered in a small open field. They have been meeting every night of the week at 7 pm, after having spent the day in their colleges or at work and after having completed their household chores, to rehearse scenes for their next film, tentatively titled Soch.

Some of them enact scenes with loud booming voices and exaggerated hand movements—much like the original CID. Others recite dialogues, their eyes pointed to the sky and their nervous hands behind their backs, as though they are recalling something they have memorised for an examination. Every few minutes, Siddiqui—who is doubling up for this project as both its villain and its director, and who has been recording the rehearsal on his cellphone so as to critique the performances later—emerges with his comments: “Natural. Natural. Bhool jao ki camera hai. (Act natural. Forget there’s a camera here).”

Behind him, another actor in this project, Arman Khan—a portly young college boy who recently enacted a small role in an episode of the crime show Gumrah—is standing with a bound script (in broken Hindi and English dialogues) checking if the actors have memorised the scripts. Whenever anyone fumbles, Khan expresses his dissatisfaction with an expletive. During those moments, a small gathering of undernourished children from the area, who have gathered around this motley crew of aspiring actors and filmmakers, titters with glee.

The following evening, we sit in a dingy restaurant in Govandi, eight of us packing in on two small benches, as Siddiqui lords over us like a dissatisfied director. In his right hand is a small rolled-up notebook with several points underlined in red. These are points of criticism he has made after reviewing the footage from last night’s rehearsals at home.

“Aur feeling lana padega (you will have to get in more feeling),” he says to this gathering of college students, masons, and office peons. And then twirling the rolled-up notebook as though it were a baton, he says, “Varna nahin bana paaenge (otherwise we won’t be able to make it.)”

At some point, the writer and lead actor of the film, a young mason named Roman Ali, expresses his disgruntlement about the short length of many of his dialogues. To which Siddiqui replies, “Tu ghabra mat. Action kam karenege. Aur dialogue daalenge. (Don’t worry. We will reduce the action scenes and increase the length of the dialogues).”

After about another two weeks, in which time the actors will have perfected their parts and collected a substantial amount of money from amongst themselves, Siddiqui says he will hire a wedding photographer from the locality to begin shooting for the film.

With shooting, as they describe it, just about anything goes. Plastic toy guns will be used for real guns. Spools of threads will be used for microscopes, like it was in their Govandi CID shows; borrowed ill-fitting clothes for outfits; and permissions for shooting in some locations—for instance a medical store or a small eatery— will be gotten in lieu of their sign board’s coverage in the film. For scenes where actors need to be shot stepping out of police jeeps, they usually request the local police to lend them vehicles for a few minutes. But when permissions can’t be got, like it happened with CID shows where an actor needed to search empty buses in bus depots, they simply hide and shoot.

“Sab jugaad se karte hain (we make do with what we have),” Ali says.

Some days later, when they meet again for rehearsals, it is for a scene featuring Siddiqui. Even though it is only being shot on a cellphone, peeping out of the pocket on the right side of his trousers is the outline of a comb and a tube of fairness cream.

“Old habits,” he explains in English later, “die very very hard.”

About The Author

Lhendup G Bhutia

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