Decade & half to this Black Beauty

Pawan Malhotra as Mushtaq Tiger Memon in a scene from Black Friday

Who plays Yakub Memon, brother of Tiger (Pawan Malhotra), mastermind of 1993 serial Bombay blasts, in Anurag Kashyap's film Black Friday, on the same subject? Director Imtiaz Ali.

Kashyap never acted in Ali's films. Which is ironic, once you consider, as Ali told me once, the first time he ever saw an actor's portfolio - basically a bunch of photographs of an actor in multiple poses/dresses - it was Kashyap's!

Back in Delhi, in the early '90s, when Ali was scouting for talents for a TV show around Delhi University, Kashyap was an aspiring actor. Kashyap himself makes a split-second cameo in Black Friday, you'll notice, as a Pak agent passing on terror consignment, mid-sea.

After getting picked up by the CBI from Kathmandu, Yakub was let free, and then rearrested from New Delhi railway station. Subsequently he claimed, on the video-magazine Newstrack, that no one from his family, besides Tiger, had any role in what was clearly the world's first terror attack of this scale (7/7, 9/11, 26/11, etc. happened years later).

Black Friday was based on S Hussain Zaidi's non-fiction book of the same name. Which, in turn, was culled from a 10,000-page Bombay Police chargesheet, besides personal interviews and case papers lodged at a ministerial bungalow in Nariman Point, that CBI gave him access to.

During the book's writing, trials of around 200 blasts accused were on, between 10.30 am and 5 pm, at a special court inside Arthur Road Jail. (These prime suspects later stalled the release of Black Friday in 2004, until they were convicted anyway).

This is where, during recess hours in the jail canteen, Hussain met several accused, including Yakub and Asgar Mukadam, played by who in Black Friday?

An unknown actor, at the time, Nawazuddin Siddiqui. In fact, Nawaz's lone, stellar interrogation scene - with DCP Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay Menon) and his cop crew - has developed a life of its own on YouTube since.

The interrogation room is lit in red. As with all such sequences in Black Friday. There is a distinctive blue tint during most scenes involving the blasts' conspiracy itself. It's the usual white light, otherwise. Never asked Kashyap if this was some sorta film-buffery homage to Kieslowski's Colours (Red, Blue, White) trilogy!

The other sequence on repeat, online, is the six-minute chase between cops and a character called Imtiaz Ghavate - who's decidedly wearing red (shirt) here, for audiences to easily spot him, as the camera captures the hunt through multiple angles/shots, over gullies, gutters and general gunk across North Bombay.

It's the first time we see characters heavily losing breath while on the run. Which should be the case, unless it's Bachchan in a '70s potboiler. Amar Akbar Anthony is referenced in this scene.

Unsuspecting crowds fill up the frame, just as they were in the edges of the Satya-Bhiku-Guru Narayan, railway overbridge chase, in Ram Gopal Varma's Satya (1998).

The intro sequence in Danny Boyle's solid entertainer Slumdog Millionaire (2008) similarly captures Mumbai's lower deck through a kinetic chase. Here, you can draw a straight line between Satya, Black Friday and Slumdog.

Divided into chapters - what we now associate with OTT shows - Black Friday, produced by Arindam Mitra from mid-day (newspaper), was commissioned as a mini-series for Aaj Tak news channel, written by Kashyap, directed by Aditya Bhattacharya.

Folks at Aaj Tak backed out reading the first episode, I'm told - too brave/edgy for them, I guess; naming names, seldom shying away from the politics.

Kashyap saw in the deeply researched case files, a heavily factual, documentary-like feature film. Shorn of the usual three-act screenplay structure. Inherently lazy, mass/theatrical audiences perhaps find it hard to instantly immerse into docu-dramas. As it appears from the more recent, Kabir Khan's 83 (2021).

Ram Gopal Varma told me he was approached to direct Black Friday. He saw in the film a rather bombastic opening scene of mafia-don, chief conspirator Dawood Ibrahim in Dubai, receiving broken bangles from women in his Bombay neighbourhood, Dongri - for having failed to protect his lot during the 1992 riots. Introduction sets the tone. Varma was out.

That Dawood scene is there in Black Friday. But Kashyap opens with a guy called Gullu (Gul Noor Shaikh), a riot accused, who actually informed Bombay cops of the blasts a few days before it. This scene as a starting point is similar to the snitch, who sets the ball rolling in the seminal, docu-like civil-war drama, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966), that lenses on-location Algiers, but from a decade ago.

As with Black Friday, shot guerilla-style in the early 2000s, with top angle shots and tele lens on the streets of Bombay - concealing cell phones, satellite TV hoardings and snazzier vehicles, not there in 1993.

It was Kashyap's first theatrical release (after a couple of aborted attempts). I remember watching it, overhearing him from the row behind me at the premiere, joking with his friends, "Now everybody will know I'm a fraud!"

It's been exactly 15 years since. Odd how fans on social media, during landmark anniversaries of films, wish that the picture celebrates 50/100 years! Of course it will. It's not a person. And a staggeringly faithful document like Black Friday, I suspect, will live on forever.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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