Colourful, raucous and full of vitality, the Hindi film industry has always attracted foreigners. You had “Hunterwali” Nadia in the 1930s, an Australian with a Scots father and Greek mother, and later Helen, of French-Burmese descent. Lately, there’s been a flood of them: Katrina Kaif, Jacqueline Fernandez, Barbara Mori, Negar Khan, Yana Gupta, and so on. Note that all of these foreigners are women; it’s easier to fit exotic-looking foreigners in the marginal spaces Hindi films give women but, of course, when it comes to the “hero”, a Caucasian-looking male (or even Mongoloid) will not do.
Which is why all Bob Christo got to do in the 234-odd Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada films in which he “acted” was get beaten up by the hero — all half his size. In many of them, he wasn’t even credited with a name, but you couldn’t miss him — the big, bad and bald gora with the deadpan dialogue, the most memorable being Mr India’s “Indian god marta hai”.
But the Bob Christo of this autobiography is a surprise package, a maverick adventurer who packed many countries, many occupations and many women into his life. It comes posthumously since Mr Christo died of cardiac arrest in March this year.
The good thing about this book is that Mr Christo is an instinctive story-teller. He has a good memory for people, places and events that took place decades ago, which ensures that his account has immediacy. And, finally, much of Mr Christo’s life was lived under the shadow of important events – World War II, the Vietnam war, the oil crisis of 1973 and the apartheid politics of Africa – which gives to these distant, but epochal events a human dimension. In fact, his life in Mumbai and his career in Bollywood seem drab in comparison — despite all their obvious glamour.
Mr Christo was born in Australia in 1938. His parents were German and when he was five, his father took him to live with his mother and sister in a tiny village near Dresden, which set him right in the middle of the crossfire. “I remember, one whole night of terrible attacks on Dresden by thousands of Allied aircraft,” he writes. “In the night, looking out of the air-raid shelter, I could see elephants [from the Dresden Zoo, where his aunt had taken him just that morning] running past, trumpeting in misery because they were getting burnt from the fire of the bombs; they ran into the river Elbe nearby to douse the fire on their bodies...” The passage has the surreal imagination only a child can possess.
Until his thirties, Mr Christo had a fairly conventional life — a wife, three children, and a successful business in construction. And so it would have continued on its humdrum train had not his wife died suddenly in a road accident. Distraught, Mr Christo left his children with a friend and his wife and set off for Saigon, working for a company that helped the South Vietnam army maintain its military supply routes.
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The main problem with this book is that Mr Christo doesn’t follow a linear timeline, going back and forth so much that it’s difficult to reconstruct the sequence of events. And he doesn’t give dates either.
The book begins in Singapore, sometime in 1976, and you know this only because Mr Christo says he left Vietnam a day before Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City. He was nearly 40, flush with money he had earned in the war, and not a thought of getting back his three children from California where they were being fostered by his friends.
In Singapore, then Hong Kong and Manila, Mr Christo bummed around modelling, buying damaged Jaguars in Hong Kong, getting them repaired in Manila where labour was cheap and selling them, etc. A qualified civil engineer, he also built the sets for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which was shot in the Philippines, and chipped in with a few stunts too since he was trained in the Japanese martial arts form of Goju Kai, having learnt it from Oshiro, who was also Bruce Lee’s teacher. All along, he was having an affair with two women, Kisa, a Polynesian student, and Maria Antoinette, a Philippino beauty to whom he promised marriage, and by whom he even fathered twin daughters.
It’s perhaps to escape Maria that Mr Christo embarked on his next hairbrained scheme — to recover an American spy ship that had disappeared in the Mediterranean, not far from the African coast, with the help of manpower and weapons from Rhodesia! He became a mercenary in South Rhodesia’s elite SAS corps and for a while went on operations against the Northern “terrs” and protected white farmers in the African bush.
From Salisbury to Cape Town was a day’s train ride and Mr Christo escaped because he found he was being paid in Rhodesian dollars and not, as had been promised, in American ones. In South Africa, Mr Christo at various times, ran a modelling and escort agency, smuggled shellfish and, rather intriguingly, did shady assignments for Paul Getty II.
Mr Christo’s interest in India was sparked off around this time with a Time magazine article on the film industry here and Parveen Babi on the cover. It was seeing the beauteous Babi and wanting to meet her that brought him to India, as Mr Christo loved to tell incredulous journalists. It was a good line, but not quite true, because he finally arrived here because he needed a work permit for Muscat and had to leave Oman for as long as it took to be processed. And Mumbai was very near. And then the rest followed...
FLASHBACK
My life and times in Bollywood and beyond
Bob Christo
Penguin
280 pages; Rs 399