Sideways on a Scooter by Miranda Kennedy

Khan,” though Geeta preferred to refer to him by the less obsequious nickname “SRK.” He’s produced a stunning five dozen films over his career of almost twenty years. When he was named one of
Newsweek
’s fifty most powerful people in the world, the Indian media treated it like a national accomplishment; when he was invited to present a Golden Globe Award, Indian announcers said it spoke to the country’s growing might; when he was detained at Newark airport in 2009, presumably because of his Muslim last name, the TV channels called it a “national humiliation.”
    The Bollywood phenomenon puzzled me at first: Hindi films have very little of the stuff Westerners expect from movies—realism, cynicism, sex. They are medieval morality plays made entertaining through melodrama, song, and spectacle. The villains are always villainous, and goodness almost always triumphs. “Pageants for peasants” is how the early Indian filmmaker S. S. Vasan described his movies. But watching Bollywood helped me come to terms with Indian culture. It also helped me understand Geeta, which made things easier for both of us: Instead of having to explain her parents’ expectations, she could use film plots as shorthand. Bollywood has three archetypes for its heroines, she informed me: the beautiful pious virgin, the pure Indianwife, and the seductress-vamp. Until very recently, an actress who was typecast as the latter would have been shut out from mainstream success.
    Geeta acknowledged that SRK’s films were overblown and fantastical, but that didn’t make her any less of a Bollywood-ringtone-downloading fan. If I scoffed that Bollywood’s lavish houses and pristine streets looked nothing like the India around us, she’d get defensive.
    “You have to simplify things to get people into theaters, Miranda. That’s how it works here. Why would some poor rickshaw driver want to go and see his slum on the big screen? People go to the movies to escape reality.”
    The 2008 film
Slumdog Millionaire
garnered eight Oscars in the United States, but its gritty portrayal of poverty led to angry protests in India. In fact, the industry’s most famous actor, Amitabh Bachchan—universally known in India as “the Big B”—disparaged the film for projecting India as a “third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation.” This caused “pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots,” he said.
    This evening, after channel surfing a while, Nanima begged us to watch part of an old film with her. Even today, almost all Bollywood films are musicals; but in the 1940s and ’50s, the songs were the focus, and sometimes as many as forty of them interrupted the plot. When Geeta reluctantly agreed, Nanima clapped her hands with a joy matched only by her response to my space-heater toast. She scooted forward to the edge of the sofa as the first love scene got going. This one had a long buildup in a wheat field, the stalks quivering in the wind. The carefully groomed, fair-skinned hero gazed soulfully at his plump heroine, her eyes darkly lined with kohl, which has been used in India for centuries. The music crescendoed. They leaned closer in the soft-focus light, and the music peaked again. Nanima was holding her breath. Just when it seemed certain that the lovers would kiss, the camera darted away to focus on a wildly shaking tree branch, a classic Bollywood substitute for an on-screen kiss; a bee pollinating a flower is another one. Whenthe camera cut back to the lovers, their lips were parted, their hair was tousled, and they were about to sing.
    Geeta and I cracked up laughing: “We missed all the action, Nanima.”
    “No, no. We had the passion, only, and none of the bad parts,” she said primly.
    Until the late 1990s, the sexiest Bollywood scenes featured the heroine “caught” under a spontaneous spray of water in a clinging wet sari. Even today, on-screen nudity is banned by the Indian Censor Board. Although kissing on-screen is not