Mithila Joshi
 |
| Bachchan’s weekly appearance to the public is an established ritual |
Edited by Roman Gautam | The Caravan
At around 6pm on
Sundays, whenever he is home, the Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan makes a
fleeting appearance, timed to less than a minute, at the wooden gate of Jalsa,
his two-storey bungalow in the Mumbai suburb of Juhu. Hundreds of fans gather
from across the city and country for the decades-old ritual, and wait through
the late afternoon in febrile anticipation.
As evening approached on
the first Sunday of the year, constable Nirmala Bhosale, alone and wielding a
baton, herded the crowd out of the driveway before the compound, and people
stood to the sides, eyes, cameras and smartphones glued to the gate. One man,
not content with a mere glimpse of his idol, demanded a one-on-one meeting, and
threatened immediate suicide if denied. “Not here. Not in my duty hours,”
Bhosale told him, and whisked him away to the local police station, a few
hundred metres away, before returning to her post.
Sunitadevi Jaiswal had
arrived at about 4 pm, with her husband and daughter. It was the Jaiswals’
maiden visit to Mumbai, from their native Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, and their
second time at Jalsa. On their first trip, three Sundays ago, they left
disappointed—Bachchan was at a shoot in Goa. But this time, he was in town. The
crowd kept swelling as 6 pm approached, and cries of “Aaya, aaya!”—He’s come!—rose and fell every time the gate opened to
let through employees or guests. Private guards kept people out, and off the
adjacent walls and trees. Jaiswal noticed a particular man hovering around her.
More police appeared. An officer spotted the gold chain around Jaiswal’s neck,
and told her to cover herself.
The gates opened again,
revealing Bachchan atop a stepladder in a red tracksuit, waving and smiling
widely. The crowd squealed, spilled forward. Jaiswal pulled her sari tight
around her shoulders and rose up on her toes for a better look. Then Bachchan
was gone. And so was Jaiswal’s chain.
Over the years, the weekly darshan at Jalsa has become a hotbed of petty
theft. Pickpocketing and chain-snatching are routine, much to the chagrin of the police,
whose efforts to keep the crowd calm and cautious are undone as soon as the
star appears.
I joined Jaiswal, bereft
and with her family and a police officer in tow, as she marched to the police
station to register the theft. There, she gave her name, said she was fifty-six
years old, and described a suspect—the “short, bearded man” she had noted
earlier. She was led away to look through pictures of history-sheeters.
The Juhu police station
has registered three First Information Reports of theft at the darshan in 2013,
one more in 2014, and another so far this year. On a follow-up visit, I asked
to see the station’s Missing Objects Register, and discovered fifteen records from
2014 of wallets or mobile phones that had gone “missing” at Jalsa between 5 pm
and 6.30 pm on Sundays. On condition of anonymity, an officer told me, the
police preferred to list objects as missing rather than register FIRs of theft
so as to play down Jalsa’s reputation as a crime hotspot. This, I was informed,
was to protect the image of the bungalow’s famous resident. Also, in cases
without an FIR, the police are not required to conduct any investigation.
But even adding up the
number of stolen and “missing” items doesn’t reveal the full scale of the problem.
“On many occasions, the victims don’t even come to us to register complaints of
theft,” inspector Pandit Thakre from Juhu police admitted. “Our attention is
divided between making way for vehicles, regulating the crowd and ensuring
safety of the VIP. Knowing this, criminals take advantage of the chaos.”
“People come to see the
actor on their own. From our end, we try our best to control them and tell them
to be careful,” Thakre said, adding that there was little they could do beyond
that. He went on to state that there are two options that can be explored to
control the crime: making announcements and displaying boards about the theft
potential. “These initiatives need to be taken from by them [the Bachchans]. We
will definitely give them the requisite permissions if they approach us,” he
said.
As we waited for his
wife to come back, I struck up a conversation with Jaiswal’s husband, Sudama, a
seventy-one-year-old retired employee of Tata Motors. For more than forty
years, he had been meaning to come to Mumbai to meet Bachchan. He realised on
his first visit to Jalsa that a personal meeting was impossible, and fallen
back on the hope of simply seeing the actor in the flesh. I asked if he would
come to a darshan again, in spite of the theft. “If I manage to make it for a
few more years, I will,” he said.
Jaiswal was unimpressed.
“I didn’t even want to see him,” she rued. “It was my husband who
insisted.”
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