Stars from Another Sky

"Before he became a celebrated short story writer, Manto was the ultimate Bollywood struggler. He wrote scripts for Hindi movies which hardly anyone has seen. Actually, I suspect he wanted to be in the movies and write movie scripts just as much as he wanted to write short stories. When people from small towns come to Bombay, they love it like ‘stars from another sky’. They love that starriness of Bombay city. This is the first of that kind of writing, where he is wanting to mingle with the movie stars. He’s making friends with them. He’s talking about their life. He wanted to make it in Bollywood more than anything. So he’s talking about Bombay of that period. It seems to be more progressive than Bombay of today’s period, which is what I love about this book. “There is that sense of possibility that I could be somewhere, that I could be someone” He talks in this book about some real-life incidents. How when Partition happened, he had to leave. He was having a conversation with one of his friends who was a Hindi movie star, and Manto said, ‘If the rioters come won’t you save me?’ And the movie star, who was a Hindu, didn’t say anything. Manto was heartbroken and he ended up taking the steamer and moving to Pakistan. After leaving Bombay he lived a truncated, difficult and unhappy life in Pakistan. He died in 1955, when he was pretty young, 42. He became increasingly alcoholic. He has written, ‘I’m a walking talking Bombay, I exist because Bombay exists’. It lived on in his memories, and in the form of this book. He wrote it when he was totally broke and needed to drink. He would land up at the offices of newspapers and say, ‘Hey, I knew so-and-so Bollywood star, I can write about them’. He would sit there and write on a typewriter, write stories about movie stars, they would pay him and he would buy alcohol and get drunk again. That’s what Stars from Another Sky is about. It is these beautiful, real-life portraits of what the city was like at that time: progressive, glamorous, forward-looking, colourful, completely outsized. I feel Bollywood was more colourful then than it is now. That is what I found very interesting. People are eloping, coming back, beginning to shoot movies again. All kinds of things are going on and you can see why he’s completely enraptured by the city. He was from a Kashmiri who grew up in Amritsar. I was a big fan of Manto and I actually went and searched for his Bombay house, where some of these stories are written, where movie stars came to meet him. You see these portraits of them as shining Bollywood stars that he is enraptured by, but you also see them as people who he’s hanging out with, whom he’s trying to understand as a writer. He’s giving us these beautiful character portraits of people we’ve known and loved on-screen. Yes, it does. Like I said, even the waste pickers said they came with dreams in their eyes. And they were making a living by collecting what was left over by the city. Everyone can hope to have some place in this tiny city. Yes, certainly. For the purposes of this book, I got many writing residences, and I traveled in many parts of the world. I would say that Bombay is one city where women can still take public transport or walk around the city, at any point of the day or night. I live by a sea-facing promenade, and I see women alone walking along it at two o’clock in the morning. There’ll be tea vendors serving them tea, there’ll be masseurs giving foot massages. I never felt unsafe. There is someplace for everyone, and I think that gives people that confidence. Cities like Mumbai give you the feeling that you can remake yourself as you would like. You came here as someone, but you don’t have to just stay in that place. You could end up in a very different place. Which is also the dream of the Ambanis, right? Even most taxi drivers will tell you, ‘Did you know the father started out in a gas station in Yemen? See now he owns that house.’ As I said, it is a somewhat unreal dream, but there are lots of people selling tea and driving cabs in this city looking up at that house. I found the book hugely readable. There is this feeling that policy and all the workings of an almost non-working city should be so boring, but both with Kalpana Sharma’s book as well as this book they make it so interesting. One of the lessons for me as a writer was that we should not be afraid to talk about policy and think ‘oh the reader is not going to read if we talk about this.’ They are, and Lisa Björkman shows how. What she did with her book helped me with my book because I was talking about waste and looking at the city through its waste. She’s looking at the city through its water supply, as Kalpana Sharma is looking at city planning through Dharavi. Pipe Politics is about the city’s water supply from colonial times to now. There are some incidents that are like movies just etched in my mind from the book. Nobody has a map of the water pipes, but Lisa Björkman gets one somehow and she has it in her house. One day, a BMC engineer comes to her house and rings the bell. She asks him what he wants, and he says, ‘Do you have that map?’ She says she does, and he asks if he can have it. She says yes, but that she’ll need some time to look for it. And he says, ‘No, no, we need it now!’ Then she looks out of her window and sees there’s a whole bunch of municipal engineers waiting outside. There’s a water pipe burst in the city and a stretch of street is flooding and they don’t have a map. Without it, they don’t know how to fix it. No, we always have water in Bombay and we always have power. But she’s shown us how tenuous that is, the policy—how it all works, but almost doesn’t work, or doesn’t work, but almost works. ———————"