Black Friday: In search of truth

The movie is a peek into the plotting of the 1993 Mumbai blasts. Thanks to the censors and courts, it has not yet seen the light of the day in any film theatre, writes Shakuntala Rao

Anurag Kashyap

Black Friday. Many people have not heard of this movie, completed in 2004, since it has not yet seen the light of the day in any film theatre. What audiences don’t know is that this movie is a peek into the plotting of the 1993 Mumbai blasts, giving viewers a blow-by-blow account of why and how the blasts took place and how the Mumbai police unearthed the entire plot.

This was supposed to be director Anurag Kashyap’s first movie. Luck, however, was not on the side of this talented director who also wrote Satya and Shool and directed Paanch (which was produced after Black Friday but preceded in its release).

I found a DVD of Black Friday tucked away in the back shelves of an Indian grocery store in Canada. The next thing I heard was that the release of the movie had been stayed by the Indian High Court in response to an appeal by 36 undertrials who had feared that the movie could prejudice the outcome of their cases, which are underway in a TADA court.

Black Friday starts predictably in a police custody cell on March 9, 1993, where a co-conspirator is seen confessing to police interrogations. What follows is the story of the massive investigation that was launched. In the film we meet continuum of finely etched characters of whom the main ones are police inspector Rakesh Maria (played by the brilliant Kay Kay Menon) and Tiger Memon (played by Pawan Malhotra).

The two characters— Maria (who has since gained some international recognition as the top cop in Suketu Mehta’s best-seller, Maximum City) and Menon—tend to be men whose commitment to their professions, whether as police officer or murderer, becomes an all-consuming, almost operatic, passion. Their devotion to their work is irrational, risky, and extravagant: you might even say crazy. Black Friday starts and ends with a vision, not only for good cinema but also for the search of truth.

The movie based on journalist S. Hussain Zaidi’s engrossing book by the same name took four painstaking years to write. Zaidi used police records to reconstruct the investigations. The irony is that the book has long been released. But when it came to the film, the censors and courts reacted swiftly and did what, in my opinion, was a blatant suppression of the director’s freedom of speech and creative expression.

I belong among the lucky few who have had the privilege of watching this superb and passionate piece of cinema (it has been seen by a few film festival audiences and is available on DVD in Canada and Australia), and anyone who has seen it would agree that the film deserves to be released in India.

The details of the 7/11 Mumbai attacks seem all too familiar: coordinated strikes across the nation’s financial and cultural capital; zealots possessed by a lethal intensity of purpose; security agencies that fail to detect signs of danger beforehand. And, behind it all, shadowy bosses beyond the reach of law, with connections to Pakistan’s secret service and vast personal fortunes.

Black Friday has charted this terrain cinematically by giving us an account of why such blasts continue to happen. It is time the audiences are allowed to watch the film.