THE MANY FAILED ATTEMPTS TO FILM THE BOYFRIEND – 3

The third attempt to film The Boyfriend cannot strictly be called a failure; at least not yet. This is because director Ashim Ahluwalia who has acquired the rights to film the book from the publishers Penguin India shortly after the year 2010 still holds the rights, and, to the best of my knowledge, still intends to make a movie of the work. To the extent that Ahluwalia actually took the trouble to approach my publishers to purchase the novel’s filming rights, for which I was paid a couple of lakhs, his attempt is a clear development over the abortive intentions of the late Vanraj Bhatia, Adam Clapham and John Palmer. But it is anybody’s guess when the script and the cast will be finalized, and the shoot will actually begin.

I cannot remember the exact year when Ahluwalia first approached me, but, as I said, it was somewhere after 2010. He said the late Riyad Wadia had introduced us after he made BomGay, based on six short poems written by me; a meeting, which for some reason, I have no memory of. Memories, after all, are fallible and are known to play tricks with us. Ahluwalia asked me who held the filming rights to the novel, and, re-reading the agreement I signed with Penguin, I realized that the rights were with the publisher. Penguin also held the translation rights to the novel, which they had sold to the French publisher Le Cherche Midi and the Italian publisher Metropoli d’Asia, which got me all-expense paid trips to Paris in France and Milan in Italy for the release of the translated versions.

When Ahluwalia mailed Penguin for the rights to film the book, they quoted an astronomical figure of Rs 15 lakhs. Ahluwalia asked me to intervene; pointing out that fifteen lakhs was way unaffordable to him. I wrote to Penguin, explaining to them that Ahluwalia was an independent filmmaker, not really a part of the multi-trillion Bollywood film industry, and so they should lower the amount they had asked for. Ahluwalia, I said, was no Karan Johar. Luckily, Penguin readily complied, bringing the figure down to just three lakhs or so.

I was really proud that Ahluwalia had decided to film my novel. Although he had made just a few films earlier, he had an impressive track record, what with his film Miss Lovely being the official entry at the Cannes Film Festival, and his other film John and Jane receiving rave reviews. Thomas Waugh had seen both films and he told me that I was lucky to be in really good hands.

Ahluwalia took his time to work on the screenplay. He managed to rope in some highly accomplished screen writers from countries like Canada to assist him in the task. All of us even had a couple of meetings in Bombay at places like the West End Hotel’s swanky dim-lit bar. Matters seemed to be progressing well.

In the year 2015 I was at the Goa Arts and Literature Festival as a speaker, and I remember Ashim Ahluwalia’s mother joyfully coming up to me to say, “My son is making your film.” Write-ups that spoke of Ahluwalia all set to film India’s first gay novel begin to appear in newspapers and magazines.  I was in the seventh heaven. I even invited Ahluwalia to release my 2015 novel Lady Lolita’s Lover in Bombay.

Films, however, are expensive affairs, and one roadblock that Ahluwalia seemed to face that delayed commencement of the project was finance. As I understand it, his proposal made it to some highly prestigious funding sources like the Jerusalem Screen Lab in Tel Aviv. Yet, that golden moment when shooting began seemed to elude us.

Another couple of years went by. Ahluwalia got busy with his feature film Daddy, a bio-pic on the life of gangster Arun Gawli, financed apparently by actor Arjun Rampal who played Gawli.

Then came the notorious 2020 lockdown and everything had to be put on hold, put on the backburner, as it were.

Now the lockdown is over, but Ahluwalia has gone silent on his intentions to film The Boyfriend. He has gotten busy instead with web shows like Class for OTT platforms like Netflix. A random Google search reveals that while Ahluwalia is saying to inquisitive news reporters that apart from shows like Class he is busy with a “few film projects”, he is reluctant to bell the cat and actually mention The Boyfriend. I wonder why. Has he shelved plans to make the film?

Ahluwalia’s Hamletesque predicament vis-a-vis The Boyfriend is, in my analysis, owing to two factors. One, Ahluwalia, who isn’t gay himself, does not want The Boyfriend to be seen as yet another run-of-the-mill gay film, of which there seems to be no dearth in the aftermath of the decriminalization of Section 377 by the Supreme Court in September 2018. Everyone and their uncle seem to opportunistically want to join the bandwagon and make an LGBTQIA+ film. But, at the end of the day, The Boyfriend IS a gay novel, and there is no running away from this fact.

Two, while The Boyfriend is set in the 1990s, and refers to things like the Bombay riots caused by the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, Ahluwalia wants to give the film a contemporary look, set in the twenty-first century. I’m not sure how this is possible without radically altering the script, so that it no longer resembles the original, or resembles it in very tangential ways.

There is an autobiographical element to The Boyfriend, as there is to my other novels, Hostel Room 131 and Lady Lolita’s Lover, and my short story “Crocodile Tears.” The Yudi-Milind love affair, with Gauri as kabab-mein-haddi, takes place in the 1990s, when there is no internet, and homosexuality is a crime in India. No internet means no dating apps like Grindr, making washroom sex virtually the only source of networking for gay men. Yudi and Milind thus meet in the gent’s loo of Churchgate station. This, in fact, is the novel’s USP, and frankly, I wouldn’t want it to be omitted from the film. Gay life may be very different today from what it was in the past, but the history of its representation by pioneers like me mustn’t be swept under the rug.

That said I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I do want to see the film made. And I’m not that fussy to say, either make a film that is completely faithful to my novel, or don’t make it at all. Besides, Ahluwalia has paid good money to acquire the novel’s rights, so the product now belongs to him unless he decides to sell it to someone else.