Pinto - Helen the life and times of an H-bomb

Congratulations on 5th-century score! Hazel-Eyed-Chic-Sleek- Gorgeously glamorous twinkle-toed Charmer of the Silver Screen has finished the 500th film of her career in Dil Daulat Duniya... a record all over the world for any film artiste.

Publicity material for Dil Daulat Duniya (1972), quoted in James Ivorys film Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls

T he first indication of trouble is a pair of stocking-clad legs, rubbing languorously against each other.

The camera travels up a svelte body dressed in red and black for a rousing flamenco. It stops to linger on a pretty, dark head slumped against a bar, a half-filled wine glass next to it. The woman raises her head, in slow motion, and looks into the camera, her eyes filled with frank longing, her mouth a moue of challenge. It is a beautiful face, even if the eyes have been picked out with huge quantities of blue eyeshadow, and the orange crescents in her ears rest almost on her shoulders.

The camera draws back to show us a cityscape. Couples dance in a dimly-lit outdoor cafe, men in suits, women in dressesan evocation of a public square somewhere in Europe if there is a square in Europe equipped with plastic flamingos in military formation and a life-sized golden birdcage, from which, tongue-like, a slide emerges.

The clock strikes twelve, and the couples leave, middle-class Cinderellas all. Alone now, a creature of the night at its darkest, the woman drains her glass and begins to sing, softly:

Piya tu...ab to aa ja...

(At least come to me now, my love.)

A voice answers her offstage in a musical shout: Monica!

She snaps out of her languor, speaks: Woh aa gaya. Dekho, woh aa gaya! (Hes here; look, hes here!) She begins to pant, her torso heaving in our faces. The drunkenness, the apathy of the betrayed, falls away.

The call comes again: Monica, Monica!

Now she is electrified. She whirls and runs, arms outstretched, pushing at imaginary obstacles, towards the golden cage. She races up the steps to the cage, slides down the other side, and resumes her song, faster this time:

Piya tu, ab to aa ja/ Shola-sa man deheke/ Aake bhujaja/ Tan ki jwala thandi ho jaaye/ Aise gale laga ja/ Aa-aa-aa-aha.

(Come to me now, my love. Come, put out these fires. Come hold me, cool this volcano within me.)

However, she must still wait for her lover, for another verse and a refrain, during which she has offered her body to the camera in a frenzy of longing, squirming and thrashing about on the floor and the tables. The absence of any audience in the sequence, of the lover even, implicates us as the real audience. This is a soliloquy, a declaration of the characters innermost thoughts. And since it is about love, we know that this is a woman who lives in her senses.

Dressed as a matador, the lover comes running up over the edge of the square and into the golden cage. As she runs to him, her skirt gets caught in a metal strip on the bar and in her impatience she rips it off. Halfway to him, she divests herself of the rest of the flamenco costume, using her hands and teeth, so that she is left in a gold half-skirt and halter blouse. When they finally make it into each others arms, the bartender puts off the lights and the lovers slump to the floor in a series of syncopated jerks.

Ladies and Gentlemen: the queen of the nautch girls, the Bollywood sensation, the H-bombHelen Richardson, now Helen Khan, but always, Helen.

When Penguin asked me who could write a book about Helen, I said, Me. I said it instinctively, without thought. But the more I considered it later, the more the idea worked for me. First, I was pretty sure that Helen would not cooperate. Others before me had come up against a wall of perfectly civil non-cooperation. But that was not important. In fact, it would be liberating: I had read interviews and suspected that Helen had no idea what she meant to Hindi cinema, and that with age, she might be keen to put the past behind her. My greatest high is spirituality now, she had said to a journalist some years ago.

Second, I was convinced that Helen is important. Although she is technically of Franco-Burmese descent, she was perceived as a white woman. She entered a world dominated by North Indian men who had very definite notions about how women should look and behave on-screen and she managed to redefine those requirements.

Third, she was no ordinary phenomenon, no flash in the pan of male lust. As a dancer, she should have had a short shelf life. Younger women with firmer flesh and deeper cleavages should have usurped her position. It isnt as if they didnt try. Without thinking too much, I can name Padma Khanna, Aruna Irani, Komilla Wirk, Jayshree T., Meena T. and Bindu. They came, they were seen in hot pants and bikinis and without body stockings, and time conquered them all. But from Shabistan (1951) to Bulundi (1981), Helen was dancing. She was there while the studio mastodons were shivering in the Ice Age; she was there when the triumvirate of Raj Kapoor-Dev Anand-Dilip Kumar dominated the box office; she sashayed through much of the Bachchan era.

This means that she defied the rules of gender. It is a truism that Hindi commercial cinema has no place for the mature woman. Women must either excite the front-benchers with their youth or bring tears to their eyes portraying suffering maternity. Men play by other rules. Jeetendra, for instance, has danced his way through four generations of heroines. Amitabh Bachchan played Raakhees younger brother-in-law (Reshma aur Shera), then her lover (Bemisaal, Jurmaana, Kabhi Kabhi, Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Barsaat Ki Ek Raat), before turning into her cinematic son (Shakti). And Helen? She vamped three generations of menPrithviraj Kapoor (Harishchandra Taramati), Raj Kapoor (Anari) and Rishi Kapoor (Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan). Thats a sublime feat of gender reversal, even if by the end of it her admirers wanted to avert their eyes from the ageing coquette.

And then, when it should have been curtains, a final bedraggled last bouquet: another Helen was born. She resurfaced as a star mother and grandmother, performing only when her stepson Salman Khan or the son of an old friend (Amitabh Bachchans son Abhishek) needed her presence to lend a special something to the cast.