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Bollywood Boy
Extract - Part 3
Infatuation Continued...
On that particular night I was doing the floaty wafty look in white. Dusky and tight was the Spring 2000 season’s black in Colaba. Dusky and tight I was not. But the perfect face next to me was. She was about as dusky, tiny and tight as you can get, in black sprayed-on Capri pants, a silk shirt knotted under her cantilevered Wonder-Bra cleavage, and heels that teetered sufficiently to pump her up to the correct angle-at-bar height.
‘Hey, Raju, heard your new track at the studio. Shit, man, really cool.’ Perfect Face swung her hair and purred as she propped, her comment directed at a gang of gawky young men sporting large amounts of hair gel and almost identical square-toed shoes.
The boy gang ignored her and continued to smoke and talk loudly over their big-price beers. Perfect Face looked around to see if there was anyone else worth talking to. She had been trying to ignore me.
‘Hello,’ I offered limply.
Perfect Face looked at me, momentarily frozen in social horror. Then she seemed to change her mind, as though she had decided to be a hip-chick angel of mercy who would initiate a desperate outsider into the cult inner circle of Bollywood nights.
‘It’s too cool here,’ she said compassionately. ‘See the girl over there?’ She pointed to a Lolita with green eyes and a face
and body as perfectly and surreally proportioned as those of a doll. ‘That’s Simmy, she’s a friend of Shah Rukh’s.’ Perfect Face smiled at me magnificently as if she had just given me the key to the gates of heaven.
Shah Rukh Khan is one of a testosterone triumvirate, the Khans, three good Muslim boys who hold the Hindi film industry in thrall. Shah Rukh generally plays the moody lover type and, though not conventionally good-looking, he is a killer at the box office. Salman Khan has a six-pack of stomach muscles with enough ripples to front a steroid campaign, and he likes them to be seen, a lot. Aamir Khan is the actor of the trio and is likely to outlast the others.
Perfect Face was examining her pearly fingernails.
‘Chitty-chat is that Simmy is going to one of the big award ceremonies with SRK.’ She ran her tongue under one of her talons.
The barman looked on in awe.
‘Is she his girlfriend?’ I asked.
Perfect Face furrowed her perfect brow.
‘What is this girlfriend-shurlfriend? He is married, very very married. Everyone knows that.’ She pouted her perfectly matching pearly lips.
Of course I knew. But since when had Bollywood stars been exclusive to their wives?
‘Hey, Simmy,’ Perfect Face called out to the doll with the green eyes. ‘All the chitty-chat is that you’re going to the awards with SRK’s gang.’
Simmy swung around from her gaggle of friends to see where the barb had come from.
‘Nothing doing, she hissed, her pouting dolly mouth the same pearly shade as that of Perfect Face.
‘Oh, oh, this is not what I’m hearing,’ shot back Perfect face.
Simmy narrowed her green eyes but smiled a smile rehearsed a thousand times in front of as many mirrors. She put her tiny hand on her tiny hip and cocked it at Perfect Face in a posture of cosmetically constructed defiance.
‘Nothing doing,’ she repeated, pointedly turning back to her gang of networkers and naked midriffs.
Perfect Face sulked at her reflection in the shiny bar.
‘This is so much of bullshit, she thinks she’s so great, yaar. If he came in here now he wouldn’t even stop to say “Hi” to her.’ Perfect Face was scanning the crowd. She had given me enough of her time.
‘Who wouldn’t say “Hi”? I was lost.
‘Shah Rukh, of course.’ She started to roll her eyes, but they froze halfway and a shudder ran through her perfect little body.
I tried to follow her transfixed expression but the crowd was too dense. Perfect Face was clutching at her chest and panting.
‘Bullshit, man, it’s Hrithik!’ she said as she finally managed to form real words.
I hopped up onto the bar to get a better view.
A young man was swinging up the steps away from the back of a very long, very low, very black car. He stopped outside the bar and turned back for a moment, waiting. He was wearing a light blue leather T-shirt sprayed onto a landscape of muscle, curved and polished like the bonnets of the cars in the street below. His long legs were wrapped in black jeans. Everything clung. He stood on the step, animal shy, animal sprung, his gym-honed body poised for flight.
‘Is that . . . ?’ I put my hand on Perfect Face’s arm to try and get her attention.
She cut me off with a wild-eyed expression. It’s Hrithik!’
‘Is he really that hot?’
‘You’re kidding me,’ she gasped. ‘Hrithik’s It!’ And the silence of the church fell on the hottest bar in Colaba as Hrithik Roshan, Bollywood’s newest and brightest, a one-film wonder, the first real box-office challenge to the heart-throb hero stranglehold of the Khan boys, waited outside, not quite sure how to make his entrance.
‘Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, it’s Salman,’ Perfect Face screeched.
Her wands were in front of her face, her pearly talons fluttering near her mouth as if she was trying to dry her nail polish at high speed.
Another body emerged from behind Hrithik.
‘I’m fainting,’ Perfect Face announced, though she remained resolutely upright.
Salman Khan, Khan Number Two, The Khan, was right there, right outside Bar Indigo. Salman, famous for his six-pack and his sex life but now proving that he had a nose for a winner. He had picked Hrithik Roshan as his friend when Hrithik was just a tall, skinny boy with a moderately successful director for a father, and enough ambition to aim as high as the Himalayas. Salman had introduced his new friend to the six-pack diet of protein shakes and a pumping-iron regime that would create shapes that bulge nicely in leather, rubber, neoprene or anything else that clings. He told the green-eyed boy that he would be a sensation and watched him grow out of his college jeans and T-shirts and into his spray-on wardrobe.
In contrast to Hrithik’s slicked-on look, Salman Khan was wearing a pair of baggy linen trousers and a loose, pale linen shirt, very demure, very Giorgio Armani, very unusual for the king of tight and taut. He bounded up the steps to where Hrithik was waiting, and as he bounded his shirt flew open for all to see. Hrithik looked at the ground in front of him. Salman kept full eye contact with everyone in the bar. His chest rippled, his torso gleamed and a smile spread across his face. He was flirting all the way.
‘I’m dying. This is too much. What to do?’ Perfect Face, still standing, still living, clutched my arm in a moment of sisterly bonding.
Salman put his hand on Hrithik’s shoulder. He had to reach up a little. Hrithik is tall.
Then the green-eyed boy lifted his head, turned and looked straight at me.
Welcome to Bollywood, city of dreams and dance routines. I am looking into film-star eyes. I am in the movies.
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