We Spent Six Hours At A Cop Station Because They Said We Were Making Porn

A regular editorial shoot turned into a sleaze fest. It felt like I was on an episode of 'Banged Up'.

It was Friday, the 13th. And if trashy movies have taught me anything, it’s that bad things happen to good people on this date.

I’m a photographer and I was shooting a story about Mumbai’s party animals. I was with two of the wildest: Jeet and his Dutch girlfriend, Jane (Name & Nationality changed). The shot was simple: Jane’s bare shoulder, shot from behind, with Jeet looking at her seductively.

All of this was being shot in his dingy two room flat in the 'burbs.



Behind the scenes.

Just as everything was sailing smoothly, there was a knock on the door. It was the cops!

Mind = Blown.

Before I knew it they had confiscated my camera, an internet dongle they insisted was a hard drive and a pair of toy handcuffs which they thought were standard issue. I began to explain the difference but shut up quickly.

As they were doing this, an old hag from a nearby window started screaming, “YEHI LADKA HAI, WHITE WOMAN LOG KA DHANDA KARTA HAI, DRUGS BECHTA HAI"

5 minutes later I was taking a selfie in a cop van. Jeet was in his boxer shorts and Jane was just dazed & confused.

When we reached the police station the lady cop in charge made us feel like we were on top of Interpol’s Most Wanted: After all, what could be more immoral than a man with a nose ring, a foreign woman with one bare shoulder and a plump, bearded kid with a zoom lens.

We were summoned by the main inspector; he was wearing his finest scowl. He made Amrish Puri in Indiana Jones look like a fluffy wabbit.

“Cameraman?” he bellowed.

I timidly raised my hand. He asked me to show him the images. I scrolled through them and with every passing photograph his face fell further. “Obscene, Obscene!” he barked in succession. “Yeh sabh India mein nahin chalega - you cannot do these things in India” he told Jane disparagingly.



Rosh's toy handcuff was used as evidence.

It soon became clear that her bare shoulder had scaled new heights of depravity in the cops’ mind and we would suffer for importing this vile scapula to our innocent shores.

None of us knew WTF was going on. We were surrounded by cops and mosquitoes, in equal measure. The charge being discussed was “Filming Porn!!”. It was so ridiculous it became funny. I tried to point out that the pictures were stills and that films were usually made of moving images but The Scowler was not listening.

A Porn Film maker? Wow! This was great for my street cred! I started imagining names for my porn film: “A Shoulder’s Story”, “Nangi Baazoo" or “Ganda Kandha” - the world’s first porn film made of still images.



Exhibit A: Jane’s Shoulder.

My amusement soon ended when things escalated and we had a fresh set of potential charges: “Illegal immigration”. Jane and Jeet were sent to go fetch their passports and threatened with deportation until the brightest button there realized that Jeet was Indian. So we moved to an "illegal tenancy/unregistered stay" threat instead!

We thought there might be a TADA charge soon and thought of gangsta names for ourselves but Chotta Jeet wasn’t a good name for a porn star!

5 hours, no water, 47,000 dirty looks, two passport verifications and many heated debates between the cops and the people who turned up to support us, slowly made them realize that this was not going to be easy for them: Jane’s shoulder would make its last stand.

I laugh about this now but the entire episode did make me realize how easy it is to get stuck in a bullshit case, how quickly things can escalate, how narrow minded and intolerant we have become and how many different Indias live in one.

We weren’t making a porn film but we did get screwed.

Words: Karan Khosla