The ghosts who walk

Mumbai> Bombay Yatra Sunday , February 04, 2007





BOMBAY YATRA


The ghosts who walk

The author of Black Friday updates his history book

Express Feature Service

A week before Black Friday’s release a couple of stray thoughts and a few general observations, (with due apologies to Busybee of course).

Like I always wonder about the grit and courage of the common man who goes about picking up the pieces of his life after a tragedy, without much help from the society or the government.



Like so many 7/11 widows or the Sorte children from Bhandup who were in their teens when their parents were killed in the Air India blast in March 1993. The firstborn got his father’s job in the BMC and is now married, living in his parents’ house. The girl, Namrata, has got her mother’s job in the customs department while the youngest, now in her 20s, was barely 11 when she was orphaned, is psychologically scarred and is still to find her vocation.

And my thoughts go to all those small players of Black Friday who unwittingly wrote off a good part of their life and reputation and peace of mind because they didn’t know that they were carting the deadly putty, RDX, and not some smuggled goods.

Like Sanjay Dutt’s friends who went through hell but refused to lay the blame on Sanjay Dutt’s door. In fickle Bollywood, Sanjay Dutt should thank God for gifting him such friends from all communities. Rusi Mulla is a Parsi, Yusuf Nulwalla a Bohra Muslim and Ajay Marwah a Hindu.

That probably Yusuf Nulwalla in his enthusiasm to save his friend, Sanjay Dutt, is probably the first Bohra to have been booked as a terrorist in India.

Like when I saw communal card-whipping in the civic elections in Mumbai where the saffron players spoke to the public not about development but about the lynching of cops in Bhiwandi, I am afraid that Black Friday is not going to be the last in its series.

That it took tremendous guts and courage for Mid-Day and Arindam Mitra to dare to make a movie on an incident that changed the profile of a city forever. It was an explosive topic and true-to-form, the movie got stuck in a quagmire of legal wrangles, but they stuck to their guns. Books are timeless but movies bring them to life and I salute Anurag Kashyap for his story-telling.

My father, a first-release-first-show man who has never missed a single movie in his life is my benchmark to judge the movie, even if I may say so. He was moved, he said, “something happened in my guts”.


(S Hussain Zaidi is Senior Editor, The Indian Express)