A three-year-old child walked with her mother and brother from Burma to Assam one winter in the early 1940s, “virtually reduced to skeletons” by the time they reached Dibrugarh. Her mother miscarried a baby girl on the way, and her brother died of smallpox in Calcutta. Who would have imagined that this unfortunate little girl would grow up to become the Hindi film phenomenon known as Helen?On screen, Helen always looked as if she was dancing her troubles away — and she was. She was dancing away the unhappy, impoverished childhood in which she made her own toys out of broomsticks, and carried an umbrella to the outhouse to prevent the cockroaches from falling on her head. Even dancing was a hard task in those days: like every little girl, she wanted to play with her friends, but the cane in her mother’s hand kept her mind on the long hours of practice that dancing demanded. In 1952, at the age of thirteen, Helen entered films as a chorus girl.“No one comes to Bombay to become an extra or a character artiste,” says Jerry Pinto in this fascinating book about Helen. She did play the female lead in about fifteen films — well, as against the 1000 or so films in which she danced.But then, as Pinto says, “She was a dancer and there was no one like her.” Who, other than Helen, can you imagine waiting for a man dressed as a matador to come to her, calling “Monicaaaa — oh my darling!” Or who could have introduced herself to Ashok Kumar so unforgettably: “Mera Naam Chin-Chin-Choo! Chin-Chin-Choo baba Chin-Chin-Choo! Raat chandni main aur tu! Hullo Mister how do you do?”What makes Pinto’s book so readable is that he’s (mercifully) not obsessive. Like all of us who grew up on the seventies with rationed film and television, he knows the importance of choice when working on the Hindi film factory. “While I am an addict,” he writes in his introduction, “I am not into mainlining the stuff.” Working with the 500 or so films that he can track down, he picks the most relevant films from every decade, films for which she is still remembered (such as Howrah Bridge and Don), films in which she played the heroine, films made on her, and films that helped construct the Helen figure.I like the way in which he tells the Helen story, with much back-and-forthing across films and phases, a comfortably flexible thematic structure, and reflections on a wide variety of elements, from the floating worlds of hotels to “the mangalsutra vs the jewel in the navel”. Most compelling of all are the relaxed, personal, often laugh-out-loud remarks that punctuate this narrative about Helen and about the Helen decades of Hindi cinema. “While she dances well, you know you’re watching a last-ditch attempt to get some life into a dead film,” he says about Sunehri Naagin (1963). “This may be only guesswork but it is often possible to spot Helen dancing when the heroine was unable to,” he contends about her role as “replacement heroine”. And finally, to give a healthy sense of proportion to the entire exercise, he never really loses sight of the fact that “most of Hindi commercial cinema is B-grade trash”.Pinto never talks to Helen. It doesn’t matter, because the book is about what Helen means to those who’re crazy about the movies. A white woman on the brown screen; a confident woman who was up there not only “while the studio mastodons were shivering in the Ice Age” but who also “sashayed through much of the Bachchan era”. Most of all, she stood for a celebration that was never vulgar but always warm, friendly and humorous. The best chapter in the book, entitled “The Cult of Helen”, tells of a cab driver who still prays for Helen, a retired railways officer who wanted to whistle during her performances, a woman film-maker for whom Helen is all about the good kind of pleasure. About fun.Pinto has retained that sense of fun while writing this enormously readable book.
