our original item girl

it’s an intriguing image. that of a tallish, middle-aged man in glasses staying up into the late hours, watching movie after movie, eyes taking in every movement of a particular woman on screen. the woman in question shakes like a dervish, gliding across polished floors, bright dresses and fiery tassels glittering. at times, the men on screen call her lilly. at other times, she plays a kitty or suzie. what’s undeniable, however, is that the screen loves her. that and the fact that the men wooing her onscreen don’t have to act too hard.

and who can blame them? or the man in glasses, for that matter? once you get a peek at helen, eternal diva of the indian film industry, it’s hard to take your eyes off her.

jerry pinto, man in glasses, is the latest to kneel before helen and acknowledge her mastery over her art. he does it with his latest book, helen: the life and times of an h-bomb (penguin india) – an entertaining, yet thorough guide to the actress’ colourful oeuvre.

pinto’s role as chronicler is, in a sense, apt, given he is as much an outsider to bollywood as his subject once was. helen often served as a ready stereotype. she was usually present to depict the immorality of a western or, more often than not, a christian woman. is that what attracted you to her story, i ask him. “as a roman catholic boy who watched hindi cinema, i think i could always see that catholics of any description were seen as outsiders in commercial hindi cinema,” he replies. “in the book, i argue that this was simply a question of who went to see hindi cinema and who didn’t. while bollywood was willing to make secular gestures by representing muslims as positive characters, parsis and catholics could easily be caricatured because they were ‘westernised’ i.e. they did not watch hindi cinema. in that sense, therefore, yes, i felt i was an outsider looking at another outsider.”

like helen, pinto has taken a long, circuitous route to get to where he is today. from freelancing as a journalist to teaching mathematics and journalism, he has written tv scripts, edited a travel dotcom, dabbled in corporate communications, published a book of poems (asylum), written an entertaining book (surviving women), and is now executive editor of a magazine called man’s world.

see what i mean about a circuitous path?

interestingly, the book came about despite helen denying all requests for an interview. was she averse to the idea of someone telling her story? “i suspect helen has probably had enough of people asking her inane questions about her life and times,” says pinto. “if you think about it, there have been four films made on her. she did not participate in the last two. quite possibly, she simply did not feel that she had much to say. or perhaps she simply did not know who i was, where i was coming from and how i was going to write about her. so, in the end, i gave up. but not without a heartfelt sigh…”

so, he gamely plodded on, going through a career spanning little over 30 years with a fine-toothed comb. the fun part, says pinto, was watching the movies. “the difficult part was reading some 200,000 words of notes and trying to figure out what should stay and what should go. how does one sum up in a paragraph the huge grab-all narrative so as to contextualise helen?” it was a question that took him three years to answer.

the result is an extremely enjoyable book. it neither bores you with detailed analyses, nor does it lose its sense of playfulness – rare when compared to most ponderous works on hindi cinema hitting shelves these days. jerry pinto obviously adores helen, and his enthusiasm is contagious. i ask him about gauging the impact she had on the evolution of the film industry, and he points out that the best of hindi commercial cinema uses melodrama as its central theme. “she offered a range of dangerous women, effortlessly reinventing herself as dancer, gang moll, faithless lover, chinese spy, spanish countess. if there were no helen, we would have had to invent her.”

i tell him that, agreed, she was pretty and she could dance, but so could so many others. how did she succeed where so many failed? he believes that even though helen herself has attributed her success to a combination of good genes (french father, burmese mother, spanish grandfather) and discipline, it goes beyond that. “i think the reason can only be sought (and therefore never found) in the peculiar alchemy of the interaction between audience and actor that turns some into stars and allows others to fade.”

there’s more to it, of course. without helen playing a foil, and without her fall from grace in a majority of her films, the hero’s victory wouldn’t be half as convincing. pinto agrees. he says that, even when the comic comes courting, “and helen was wooed on screen by every joker from rajendranath to mehmood,” his questionable masculinity throws the hero’s virility into clearer focus. without helen, the heroine wouldn’t be as pure, or the hero as good.

“in no other cinema anywhere in the world has a dancer worked for 30 years, vamping three generations of hindi film stars,” pinto points out. “in general, it is the men who last long and the women who fade. here is the first woman who reversed that trend, who defied the gender bias.” he says he found it surprising that a large number of women were as fond of helen as men were. i ask him if anyone among the current crop of actors is capable of playing her, if her story ever makes it to film. “no,” says the writer.

as for the majestic helen, she says little these days, resting her feet after decades of shaking them in gay abandon. jerry pinto believes she has withdrawn a little from the world of cinema. “i believe the process of iconisation has happened without her consent or connivance. she just did what she did and left it to everyone else to figure it out…”