Actress
I. The actress.
I remember Madhuri Dixit, she says. And I want to be like her. The man across the table from her seems to make a mental note: she’s young, but not as young as she used to be, not out-of-shape by any means, but not svelte, taller than Madhuri Dixit, but also darker-skinned; doesn’t matter. There’s never going to be another Madhuri Dixit, he says. She agrees. Yes, but I want to be a real actress. She’s got a London accent; like someone off of EastEnders, but less shouty. I come to India, and you tell me there won’t be another Madhuri Dixit, I bet she’s thinking.
Besides, the man across her is odd; I find it hard to think she could ever take him seriously. Portly, awkward, Maggi-haired. See, I’m a director, he says. In Marathi cinema. I want to make an English movie. He reconsiders the final sentence. It’s a multilingual movie, he says. It’ll be shot in Pune and Scandinavia, he says. So there she’ll speak in a local language, he says. In Norway, Denmark, Sweden.
She’s nodding silently.
She’s got ideas, you know? She’d written a script once, when she was younger: much. She’d written a script when she was in University. She had planned to pitch it to the BBC or ITV or Channel 4 or something. But the portly director doesn’t care about that, she’s sure. Besides he’s a creep. Can’t know for sure, but he looks it. She’s heard stories about this industry. I want to leave those conversations open, he says. To make them seem more natural. That’s interesting, she replies, then pauses. I have some ideas, she says. Why don’t you send me a synopsis, I’ll see if I can incorporate them. Sure, she smiles. Through Reena, of course, he says. She nods.
II. The fixer.
An older woman, probably in her mid-forties, joins the table. Her body language screams ‘advisor’. She looks like the sort of person who could get your movie seen by production houses. She looks like a fixer. Hi Fatima, she says, embracing the young actress. She extends a knowing hand to the director and asks, how are you? A young assistant follows her, sans handshakes. Is she her daughter? Unlikely. The fixer’s too cold, the assistant’s too old. Or maybe the fixer was a young mother, and that’s how she really is minus persona — curt. Who knows?
She asks the assistant to fetch them various sorts of coffee, and hands her a two-thousand rupee note. The assistant walks away, blank-faced, taking a detour through another table ten feet away to place her things — a laptop bag, from which emerges a ThinkPad, a handbag, and a bottle of water. She’s attractive, I think. I imagine she’s trying to make it in the industry herself, and doing the industry’s ancillary roles to be close to the action. I imagine this to be the sort of industry in which that sort of thing works. Work with agents, casting directors, and producers to eventually make it big. I know nothing about this industry, but this is how I imagine it works.
For the next hour, the fixer establishes herself as Starbucks’s inoffensive jazz playlist in human form. She drains all conversation of substance, rounds every edge, levels everything. She is Blue Rondo a la Turk, followed by Almost Blue, followed by It Could Happen To You. Ostensibly, she’s saying words, and certainly, those words form sentences, and those sentences probably coalesce to represent coherent ideas. But ideas about what? She talks about film revenues as they relate to filming locations. She talks about state subsidies for the arts, and the rules movies must follow to receive them. She talks about casting requirements, and the roles they’re looking to fill.
The actress nods blankly. These are probably really important to somebody, she’s probably thinking, but how are they important to me? Why does this concern me? Here I am, miles away from home. I don’t care about Maharashtra’s state subsidies for the arts, and I’m already filming in a foreign location, as far as I’m concerned. She nods absently.
III. And me.
Two years ago, I remember asking a special somebody, “when did Powai become Oshiwara¹?” Right around then, I remember there being a proliferation of words like ‘lighting technician’, ‘spot boy’, and ‘DOP’. I was always aware of there being a couple of television studios here, but somehow the culture of Powai was untouched by them, remaining decidedly white-collar service class. That isn’t true anymore. Powai is now more diverse, even if some say only superficially — most are still members of the upper middle class. And it’s quite the place to party, even if it seems to some like a poor imitation of more substantial party centres — very few indigenously developed establishments that’ve stood the test of time, they’ll say snootily. It doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems like a great place to be a party animal, or even a social animal. But here I am, at a café, listening to Chet Baker. Again.
¹ Context for those without it: Oshiwara is Mumbai’s struggling actors district.
