The Silver Castle: Clive James

Sanjay is a Bombay street child who scales the dizzying heights of the "Silver Castle" - the Indian film world - to stand at the parapet of success. Unfortunately for Sanjay, he is required to jump. In his astonishing odyssey from the gutter to the sound stages and salons of Bollywood, Sanjay meets up with every variant of sinner and would-be savior, and along the way he trades on his physical beauty and canny lingual facility to grab at luck wherever it may be had - anywhere, from in the pocket of a tourist, to the bed of a past-her-prime cinema princess. It is a true vision of an utterly false reality, the source of Sanjay's subsequent triumphs and of his ultimate
misfortune.