Pancake and the make-up men

'Poets and Pancakes' is taken from Asokamitran's book 'My Years with Boss'. He worked at Gemini Studios in Madras (now Chennai), one of the most famous film studios of the 1940s, and here he remembers it with gentle humour.

Pancake was the brand of make-up material that Gemini Studios bought in truck-loads: a thick base, like a heavy foundation, laid on so that faces would look good under the strong studio lights. Up close, the painted actors could look almost ghostly. The make-up department was upstairs in a building said to have once been Robert Clive's stables. It looked like a barber's shop, with big mirrors and very bright incandescent lights all round them. For anyone sitting in front of those mirrors, it was a 'fiery misery'.

The make-up team came from all over India. The head was a Bengali, followed by a Maharashtrian; he was helped by a Kannadiga from Dharwar, an Andhra, a Madras Indian Christian, an Anglo-Burmese and the local Tamils. The author jokes that this was national integration, long before radio and TV began talking about it. Together they could turn any decent-looking person into a hideous, crimson-hued monster.

The heavy make-up of the main players was done by the head make-up man and his senior assistants. The crowd players were left to the 'office boy' of the department. He was not a boy at all, but a man in his forties. He had come to the studio years ago hoping to become a star actor, a top screenwriter, a director or a lyric writer. He was a bit of a poet, but he had ended up slapping paint on the faces of the crowd.

He felt his talent was wasted, and he blamed Subbu for all his troubles. The author's own job was cutting out newspaper clippings and filing them, so most people thought he was doing nothing. The office boy would come to him and give him long lectures on how great literary talent was being buried at Gemini, while the author hid behind his paper-cutting work.