A Very Strange Man
Ismat Chughtai
Translated by Tahira Naqvi,
Women Unlimited, Rs 250

Reading ismat chughtai is like drinking a glass of Moet and Chandon: it is bubbly, invigorating, makes you laugh and yet when you set the glass down, you realise life is still serious business. She grabs your attention with her poker-sharp words — in which sometimes an entire world of experience is buried in a single sentence. Where did she get that amazing observation, that acerbic wit, that dry sense of humour? And why can’t we have more writers like her?

A Very Strange Man is a delightful, bold and no-holds-barred novel that rips off several saris and dhotis as it twirls us around the cinema industry of the 1940s and ’50s. It takes us straight from the studio floor into the bedroom when the famed love affair of a “well known director”, who makes a Kaagaz Ke Phool-like film, with a newly arrived “Telugu film dancer” whom he calls “Chandni”, is scorching several lives.

But Chughtai is no passive observer — she is an experienced scriptwriter and filmmaker. She comments, without the stench of a moral preacher, on sexuality, as unhappy men and women find and lose partners. Long before Shobhaa De stumbled on naked bodies in Bollywood, Chughtai was writing about drunken orgies and cocaine parties. This is an under-the-bedsheets view of Bollywood and honest in its assessment of men and women.

The Guru Dutt-type Dharam Dev creates and destroys careers (including his own), while his wife Mangala, quite obviously based on the tragic Geeta Dutt, succumbs to the combined balm of a young lover and alcohol. Zarina or “Chandni” is a fascinating woman — a willing victim, ready for exploitation so long as she can further her own career. Her in-built survival instinct finally defeats the besotted Dharamji who finds her impervious to his blandishments.

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