All Grown Up

Now look at the other pictures. Whom do you see? Just two women. Nameless. Faceless. Your eyes do not rest at their eyes. They slide down their length,all bare skin and upthrust parts. They have faces that are interchangeable. Morph with another body,and no one will even notice.

The first is a digital representation of a leading Bollywood actor,giving us a glimpse of her new film. And the other is an old poster of the kind of movie that used to play in city theatres in morning shows. With all the press The Dirty Picture,a biopic on the legendary Silk Smitha,has gathered around that first look,its pedigreed leading lady has made sure that we know that she is dressing down. That she was apprehensive,but then she was convinced that her costumes fit the part of the dusky seductress who blazed briefly through the movies till her early,untimely death.

That other woman,in that poster,never had a chance at dressing up. Her whole purpose was to be revealed in ways that leading ladies of the time never could,to pleasure her patrons in ways they could not mention in polite company.

Ive spent a fruitless weekend trying to rustle up someone who would talk to me about that great,now practically defunct,movie-going institution the morning show. Not a soul agreed to go on record,even though these are film folks Ive known for a long time. The impetus came from my determinedly tracking down a first-of-its-kind exhibition of adult film posters in one of those genuinely hard-to-find galleries that have sprung up in south Delhi. But once at the lovely leafy environs of the WK WeidenKennedy advertising agency in Sheikh Sarai,where the gallery is located,standing in front of those posters which filled the large,airy wall space,I was yanked back to the time when adult films were such a thing.

These were real posters,painstakingly hand-crafted. Not the easily reproduced,much more accurate but entirely soulless xeroxes that we see outside our multiplexes these days. And these are only a fraction of what V Sunil,WK honcho,and passionate poster collector,has. His personal collection is much bigger,started at the time when he began an agency called A. It was a time when such posters were lucrative business,used by theatres to lure both the first time punter,there to pass off as adult with a fake mooch,as well as hardened veterans.

My one and only foray into a morning show was of a piece with my solo visit to a cabaret. In a Connaught Place family restaurant,which miraculously shed all its genteelness as soon as dusk fell,I was the only female in a place full of men. I still remember the shiftiness and the uneasiness I caused by my presence. By the time the performer was getting seriously into her groove,I had to leave,and it was with relief: sadness and tawdriness mingled with the strobe lights.

It was quite the same at one of those morning shows in a southern language I dont quite remember if it was Tamil or Telugu. Going up in the cage-like lift to the balcony,I was stared at. My companion grew restive. The heaving and the panting on the screen which began as soon as the film began and continued as it went along,matched with equivalent sounds in the rows ahead and behind.

As a grizzled film PRO put it,the then flourishing adult film business splashed out on this line sex has no language. Distributors would pick up the films for about Rs 30,000-Rs 40,000,and make about Rs 3-4 lakh. It used to be called the bit business the bit was the sexy stuff inserted here and there in the film and everyone was in on it: the exhibitors,the staff,the beat cops,who turned a blind eye,and got an eyeful,when it suited them.

It was all one big happy family,says my man,till this damn internet showed up. Ab toh aap ghar baith kar sab kar sakte hain. Ek daur tha,bahut chali,logon ne bahut kamaya. Ab sab khatam.

Those posters hark back to a more innocent time,when all this ganda dhanda was peddled in bits and pieces. Now the movies are all grown up. And full of it. Bonanza,Boom Boom Balan-style.

shubhra.gupta expressindia.com