Should have known better than to trust a friend. Last week, he recommended the Hindi film Heyy Babyy. I said I did not like the look of the extra ‘y’s, but he said that they were a tongue-in-cheek comment on the standard practice of the day, “post-colonial really”, and the film was a laugh riot. I succumbed.

The film started with three young Indian men in Sydney — actors Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh and Fardeen Khan — who are successful NRI professionals, realising another Great Indian Fantasy. They are having one white woman after another, night after night after night. They have more bikini-clad women around them than the man in the Axe ad. Only Vijay Mallya is missing from the frame.

Enter into this perpetual Baywatch paradise, bad karma. In the shape of a cot with a baby girl in it and also the message that she is the fruit of the bad seed of one of the three men. From this moment, the film even surpasses all post-colonial expectations. All resemblance between Heyy Babyy and the Hollywood film Three Men and a Baby also ceases, for the Indian film turns into a full-fledged horror show.

First, the men despair, because their girlfriends disappear on seeing the baby, which leads one of them to wail who will now wash his clothes (or was it his undies?). One of them attempts to strangle the baby. But they decide to keep it for a few days, only to find out who the mother is, and thereby, the father.

Now the film finds its true calling. As the men learn the language of baby-rearing, a whole new world of double entendres involving female body parts opens up. But the high point of the film involves a yet more juvenile obsession.

It is one long sequence shot lingeringly like the great romantic number in a Yash Chopra film. The baby soils her nappy. The men can’t guess at first where the smell is coming from. They point at each other. After much discussion they locate its source and Riteish Deshmukh is coaxed into removing the nappie, which he does with the extreme unhurried caution of a bomb-squad member defusing a bomb. He detaches the nappy, holds it up, displaying its bold contents and shaking his head, indicating his inability to deal with it — does he throw it somewhere, or does he just drop it? Hamlet’s dilemma may have pained him less, and this man’s two friends are facing him and shaking their heads too, and our friend lets the nappy go, and it glides slowly and surely like a missile through the air and lands on Akshay Kumar’s face. Close shot of his face painted yellow.

This is the most that probably has been extracted from a baby’s nappy without cleaning it. The sequence may have lasted no more than 15 minutes!! but the bad smell would not go. (Then the men abandon the baby and it gets soaked in the rain, when they take it to a hospital to dry, when they have a change of heart.)

I would have let the movie pass, really, but for two things. One, it is made by TV personality Sajid Khan, who otherwise has a respectable sense of humour. Two, the film is on its way to becoming one of the biggest grossers this year. Which goes on to say that multiplexes may have their own “processed” films and Shakti Kapoor may be out of work, but on the Indian screen, nothing still succeeds like excess. Especially if it stinks.

Heyy Babyy upholds another great Indian filmi tradition. It is revealed that the baby’s mother is Vidya Balan, who had fallen for Akshay Kumar as he was masquerading as the ideal Indian man: shy of cleavages, speaking shuddh Hindi, probably vegetarian.

Strange. Or is it, in a country where the most ideal of men, Ram, has been declared a historical figure by the Centre, overturning the Archaeological Survey of India statement that he was not? Ram was also shy of women, we are told, but I want to know from the Centre: did he speak Hindi too? Was he vegetarian?

Anyway, I shall avoid films with extra ‘y’s. They lead to demented thoughts. And I shall seek revenge on my friend. I shall call him “uncle”.

chandrima@abpmail.com