Who you weep for when you weep for Yakub
No one loves a plot as much as a Mumbaikar. We each played cameos in our own action sequences that March day in 1993. Yakub Memon, successful young CA gone wrong, financing a terror scheme, realising too late what he had done, and abandoning his brother to return to surrender to the authorities was a plot that brought several people to cinematic fame. From the sardonic and suave Rakesh Maria, then traffic DCP to current CP played by everyone from KK Menon to Nana Patekar in their careers; to the bright-eyed emotional crime reporter S Hussain Zaidi, to Anurag Kashyap, whose debut blocked docu-drama Black Friday propelled him to celluloid grit and angst.
More than Tiger, Yakub symbolised the formula for progress liberal India likes to weave for the Muslim community. He was English-medium educated. He was the most successful. He was a CA as well as an exporter, and he was reaping the rewards, evident in that ultimate Mumbai stamp of success - houses. He owned half of the Hussaini building in centrally located Mahim. He was good-looking enough to be played by the only dreamy poet-like director Bollywood owns - Imtiaz Ali - in the screen version. This was Olbos: the first stage of a classic Greek tragedy - the hero's happy beginning.
So much of the outcry you see by voyeurs to a simple cause and effect playing out today is an investment in that outcome. The formula needed to work. Poetic justice needed to be served. It played out to formula. Hubris, the pride, the money so hard earned and well won, funding the terror plot. Phthonis, the jealousy of the gods. Ate, the god's warnings the hero ignores. Its base in the Cain and Abel myth of two estranged brothers fighting for justice gave it an almost biblical tone. The high drama of the tonnes of RDX, the most used anywhere in the world since World War II, the blast sequences, the high body count, the manhunt. Betrayal, repentance and penance, the shaking of fists at the judge and media, the high drama court scenes. It was a script that wrote itself right down to the last minute appeals and the unprecedented Supreme Court action of constituting a midnight bench. As a potboiler, it kept audiences on the edge of their seats and hoping for a twist to the tale at the very end. But with it also came its inevitable outcome - the Nemesis: the vengeance of the gods, most dramatically symbolised in the date of birth coinciding with the date of hanging. There is pretty much no more neatly wrapped ending than that.
Black Friday just sparked a release that ran for 22 years and made a protagonist of the anti-hero. The only audiences who expected a different ending are those who lost the plot. The romance was next door.