Step Across This Line (10 page)

Story lines were altered to suit the requirements of episode structure and dramatic form. For example, Saleem’s visits to Pakistan were reduced and condensed, and indeed now take place at somewhat different points in the story, to avoid the problem of yo-yoing back and forth at high speed between Bombay and Karachi. Also, in the novel, Saleem’s uncle General Zulfikar is murdered by his embittered son. In the screenplay, however, it seemed absurd to introduce a different Pakistani general later in the story, at the end of the war in Bangladesh. So I kept Zulfikar alive until then, and arranged for him to be bumped off in quite a different way.

Perhaps the most significant changes in the plot have to do with the central duo of Saleem and Shiva, the two babies who are swapped at birth and thus lead each other’s lives. In the book, Shiva never learns the truth about his parentage, and it doesn’t matter, because the reader is aware of it throughout. On the screen, however, so large a plot motif simply insists on a climactic confrontation, and so I have provided one. There is a part of me that thinks that the version of events in this screenplay is more satisfactory than the one in the novel. (At the end of the book, Saleem is not certain if Shiva is dead or alive, and continues to fear his return. In the television version, the audience is offered a resolution of greater clarity.)

The new scripts were well received. There followed a period of several months in 1997 during which Tristram Powell and I worked on the text, refining, clarifying, adding, subtracting. Tristram was so sharp, so helpful, so full of suggestions and improvements, and so completely in tune with the novel that I was sure we had found the ideal director for the job. The two of us worked together easily, and the scripts grew tighter by the day. Even when we had to change things purely because we couldn’t afford them, we found solutions that didn’t compromise the spirit of the work. For example, all the shipboard scenes in the screenplay now take place in dock; we didn’t have the cash to go to sea, but didn’t need to. More significant, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 now happens off-camera. To my mind, the horror of this famous atrocity is actually increased by suggesting rather than showing it.

The production’s other problems began to surface. The BBC’s bizarre bureaucracy—there were no fewer than five layers of “suits” between the producer and the controller of BBC2—made it virtually impossible to get any definite decisions. Also, it became clear, we were competing for our budget with other drama projects, notably
Tom Jones.
And the money the BBC was putting up was simply not going to be enough. We needed outside investors.

We found them, in the form of an American-based ex-banker and a businessman, both of Indian origin, both fired by patriotic pride. And so, finally, the sums added up, and the long sessions in which Tristram and I worried away at the scripts had produced a screenplay which everyone involved was excited by. We did three casting read-throughs in London, and the quality of the British Asian actors we saw impressed me greatly. At the time of the original publication of
Midnight’s Children,
there would have been very few such actors to choose from. One generation later, we were able to audition a diverse and multi-talented throng. I was touched and moved by the actors’ feelings for my novel, and their professional excitement at reading for roles other than the usual corner-shop Patels or hospital orderlies that came their way. The only snag we encountered was that some of the younger actors, born and raised in Britain, had difficulty pronouncing Indian names and phrases!

Not all the parts were cast in this way. Some of the senior Indian actors—Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth—were approached and offered their choice of roles. There were also casting sessions in Bombay, and it was there that we found our Saleem, a brilliant young actor called Rahul Bose. Other “discoveries” included Nicole Arumugam as Padma, and Ayesha Dharker as Jamila (her sensational voice stunned us all when, in the middle of one read-through, she burst into unaccompanied song), and it is intensely frustrating that we were not able in the end to give them the opportunity they so richly deserved.

For when the “green light” moment was finally upon us, the Indian government simply refused us permission to film, giving no explanation at all, and no hope of appeal. Worse still was the discovery that the BBC’s Indian partners had been told months earlier that the application would be refused. They had not informed us, perhaps believing they could get the decision changed. But they couldn’t.

I felt as if we’d nose-dived into the ground at the end of the runway. I also felt personally insulted. That
Midnight’s Children
should have been rejected so arbitrarily, with such utter indifference, by the land about which it had been written with all my love and skill was a terrible blow, from which, I must say, I have not really recovered. It was like being told that a lifetime of work had been for nothing. I plunged into a deep depression.

But now the new producer, Christopher Hall, and the rest of the team made a heroic effort to save the project by relocating it in Sri Lanka. And Sri Lanka did indeed give us approval to film. (In writing.) President Chandrika Kumaratunga herself said she was strongly behind the project. Because of the Indian refusal, and the continuing controversy surrounding
The Satanic Verses,
she met with Sri Lankan Muslim MPs to reassure them about the content of our screenplay and to tell them that the project was economically important for Sri Lanka.

So it was all on again. The hurt at my treatment by India remained unassuaged, but at least the film would be made. We found locations (in some ways Sri Lanka was actually an improvement on India in this regard), offered work on the crew to many local people, cast a number of Sri Lankan actors in featured roles. The spirit of cooperation we encountered was a delight. (The Sri Lankan army offered to help us stage the war scenes called for by the script.) We set up a Colombo production office and planned to start filming in January 1998.

Then it all went wrong again. An article appeared in
The Guardian,
written by a journalist named Flora Botsford, who was also attached to the BBC in Colombo, and who, in the view of Chris Hall and the production team, used her inside knowledge of the problems we’d had to stir up a controversy. Local Muslim MPs, who had previously made no objection to the filming, now ascended their high horses. It seems too that this article alerted the Iranians, who then brought pressure on the Sri Lankan government to revoke permission. The entente cordiale that we had worked so hard to establish was breaking down.

The Sri Lankan government was busily trying to get sensitive devolution legislation through its national assembly, and needed the support of opposition MPs. This meant that a tiny handful of parliamentarians were able to demand political concessions in return for their votes. And so, although the Sri Lankan media were strongly in favor of our project, and Muslim as well as non-Muslim commentators wrote daily in our support, permission was in fact revoked, abruptly and without warning, just one day after we had been assured by government ministers that there was no problem, and we should just go right ahead and make our film.

All our bright hopes came to nothing. Like Sisyphus, we had to watch the undoing of all our work, as the great rock of our production ran away downhill into a Sri Lankan ditch. There is nothing as painful to a writer as wasted work, unless it be seeing the disappointment on the faces of people who have spent months and years working on your work’s behalf. As for me, the rejection of
Midnight’s Children
changed something profound in my relationship with the East. Something broke, and I’m not sure it can be mended.

The story of a failure, then. But what has once been thought cannot be unthought, Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote. Nothing stays the same. Governments change, attitudes change, times change. And a film brought into half-being by the publication of its screenplay may yet manage, someday, somehow, to get itself born.

Reservoir Frogs

(OR, PLACES CALLED MAMA’S)

For the first time since the decline of Dadaism, we are witnessing a revival in the fine art of meaningless naming. This thought is prompted by the U.S. release of the British film
Trainspotting,
and by the opening of Lanford Wilson’s new play
Virgil Is Still the Frogboy.
Mr. Wilson’s play is not about Virgil. No frogs feature therein. The title is taken from an East Hampton, L.I., graffito to whose meaning the play offers no clues. This omission has not diminished the show’s success.

As Luis Buñuel knew, obscurity is a characteristic of objects of desire. Accordingly, there is no trainspotting in
Trainspotting;
just a predictable, even sentimental movie that thinks it’s hip. (Compared to the work of, say, William S. Burroughs, it’s positively cutesy.) It has many admirers, perhaps
because
they are unable even to understand its title, let alone the fashionably indecipherable argot of the dialogue. The fact remains:
Trainspotting
contains no mention of persons keeping obsessive notes on the arrival and departure of trains. The only railway engines are to be found on the wallpaper of the central character’s bedroom. Whence, therefore, this choo-choo moniker? Some sort of pun on the word “tracks” may be intended.

Irvine Welsh’s original novel does offer some help. The section titled “Trainspotting at Leith Central Station” takes the characters to a derelict, train-less station, where one of them attacks a derelict human being who is, in fact, his father, doling out a goodly quantity of what Anthony Burgess’s hoodlum Alex, in
A Clockwork Orange,
would call “the old ultraviolence.” Clearly, something metaphorical is being reached for here, though it’s not clear exactly what. In addition, Welsh thoughtfully provides a glossary for American readers: “Rat-arsed—drunk; wanker—masturbator; thrush—minor sexually transmitted disease.” At least an effort at translation is being made. Out-and-out incomprehensibilists disdain such coziness.

How many readers of Anthony Burgess’s novel
A Clockwork Orange,
or viewers of Stanley Kubrick’s film, knew that Burgess took his title from an allegedly common, but actually never used, British simile: “queer as a clockwork orange”? Can anyone recall the meaning of the terms “Koyaanisqatsi” and “Powaqqatsi”? And were there any secrets encrypted in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” or was it just a song about a flying girl with a necklace?

Nowadays, dreary old comprehensibility is still very much around. A film about a boy-man called Jack is called
Jack.
A film about a crazed baseball fan is called
The Fan.
The film version of Jane Austen’s
Emma
is called
Emma.

However, titular mystification continues to intensify. When Oasis, the British pop phenoms, sing “(You’re My) Wonderwall,” what can they mean? “I intend to ride over you on my motorbike, round and round, at very high speed”? Surely not. And
Blade Runner
? Yes, I know that hunters of android “replicants” are called “blade runners”: but why? And yes, yes, William S. Burroughs (again!) used the phrase in a 1979 novel; and, to get really arcane, there’s a 1974 medical thriller called
The Bladerunner
by the late Dr. Alan E. Nourse. But what does any of this have to do with Ridley Scott’s movie? Harrison Ford runs not, neither does he blade. Shouldn’t a work of art give us the keys with which to unlock its meanings? But perhaps there aren’t any. Perhaps it’s just that the phrase sounds cool, thanks to those echoes of Burroughs, Daddy Cool himself.

In 1928, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí co-directed the Surrealist classic
Un Chien Andalou,
a film about many things, but not Andalusian dogs. So it is with Quentin Tarantino’s first film,
Reservoir Dogs.
No reservoir, no dogs, no use of the words “reservoir,” “dogs,” or “reservoir dogs” at any point in the movie. No imagery derived from dogs or reservoirs or dogs in reservoirs or reservoirs of dogs.
Nada,
or, as Mr. Pink and Co. would say, “Fuckin’
nada.
”

The story goes that when the young Tarantino was working in a Los Angeles video store, his distaste for fancy-pants European auteurs like, for example, Louis Malle manifested itself in an inability to pronounce the titles of their films. Malle’s
Au Revoir les Enfants
defeated him completely (oh reservoir les oh fuck) until he began to refer to it contemptuously as—you guessed it—“those, oh, reservoir dogs.” Subsequently he made this the title of his own movie, no doubt as a further gesture of anti-European defiance. Alas, the obliqueness of the gibe meant that the Europeans simply did not comprenday. “What we have here,” as the guy in
Cool Hand Luke
remarked, “is a failure to communicate.”

But these days the thing about incomprehensibility is that people aren’t supposed to get it. In accordance with the new zeitgeist, therefore, the title of this piece has in part been selected—“sampled”—from Lou Reed’s wise advice: “Don’t eat at places called Mama’s,” in the diary of his recent tour. To forestall any attempts at exegesis (“Author, Citing Dadaism’s Erstwhile Esotericism, Opposes Present-Day ‘Mamaist’ Obfuscations”), I confess that as a title it means nothing at all; but then the very concept of meaning is now outdated, nerdy, pre-ironic. Welcome to the New Incomprehensibility: gibberish with attitude.

August 1996