India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (14 page)

His last phrase takes me back to the evening class earlier in the week. ‘Make as many mistakes as you want here. Do your worst,’ Mr Vyas had said as he dismissed his class. ‘But don’t make mistakes out there. You won’t get a second chance.’ I’d heard the words as a caution. Naval, I suspect, had interpreted them as a promise. An opportunity would come knocking for all of them. One chance: sure, sealed, guaranteed.

He breathes deep, steeling his resolve.

‘Will I go home, you ask? No, never.’ His bottom lip quivers at the enormity of the statement. And then he mutters: ‘Well, maybe I go back when I am a famous director. I will have success when I go there. And when I go, I will open an academy in my village.’

The glow in his eyes begins to dim. He suddenly looks worn. We switch topics to more immediate matters. He is working on a new script, he tells me. He cannot tell me much about it. The topic centres on preparing for the Indian Administrative Service. It’s not a comedy, he assures me. ‘It is very serious.’

As for money, he has one thousand rupees left. It will not last him long. But then he knows his path is not an easy one. He believes he will suffer. He also believes in God and ‘self-spirit’. For a second, the shine returns to his eyes. ‘God tells me, “You are winner. You will win your target and goals.”’

It sounds like a business management version of the Upanishads. There is no doubt that Naval believes every word. With the end of the course beckoning and no job on the horizon, it’s as well that he has trust in the divine.

I lay down my pen and take another biscuit. For a couple of minutes we do nothing but munch and clean the resulting
wallpaper paste from our gums. I ask if we could meet again after the course has finished. Sure, he replies. ‘I should have time.’

I pick up my bag, stretch the aches out of my back and see myself out. I venture towards the stairs and the urine, my nose bracing for the onslaught.

Over the coming weeks, I venture back to Actor Prepares several times. The school occupies the top three floors of the Film Institute Welfare Trust. The weather-beaten building is hidden from the road, set back behind a conference hall.

One time I arrive late and find the narrow access road laid with a red carpet. At the end stands the silken arch of a colourful marquee. An energetic wedding band is working up a sweat beneath the gilded canopy. Beside them, a welcome committee busies itself fixing a collective smile into place. Every so often, a camera bulb flashes. Suddenly the scene becomes suspended in an explosive blast of blinding white. I watch the students file past to the school beyond. Few could resist an impromptu strut, imagining themselves as the feted debutants at the annual International Indian Film Academy awards. This was their fifteen yards of fame. Then the bridal car draws up and their dream disappears into the hall with the trumpeters.

Inside the Welfare building, the hallways fill with the divergent sounds of Hindi dance music and voice-projection exercises. Young people, all of them athletic and buoyant, hop joyfully down the corridors. It reminds me of the opening sequence of
Fame
, the hit US television series from the 1980s. I half-expect people to start launching themselves into an aerial swirls and proclaiming they want to live for ever. No one does.

Instead, I occupy myself popping into the various classrooms. In one, I happen upon gym-clad bodies contorting themselves to the beat of A. R. Rahman’s chart-topping soundtracks. In another, faces twist and crocodile tears fall as the students work through the navarasa, nine primary emotions. In yet another, I see Mr Vyas putting his class through their paces with the all-seeing, ever-taxing Mr Sony.

I head upstairs to meet with Hernan, the school’s marketing
manager. An orderly, goateed man, he is hidden away at a cubby-hole desk. Newspapers pile up beside him. A set of postcard-size photos, an inch or so thick, sits in front of him. He is leafing through them slowly. The school runs a small talent agency, which it falls to Hernan to manage. His most sought-after graduates glare out from larger prints on a cork pinboard behind him. Each is holding a deadpan, rock-star pose. Their names are splashed across the corner of their photographs in white print: Mohit Israni, Parvenn Yadav, Puja Ballutia, Rima Lamba. There is a slot for their age, as well as hair and eye colour. Height details are not so mandatory, with the shorter candidates choosing to omit specifics. As for the lighting, make-up and costumes, all are bold and gaudy. In Bollywood, bling sells. Not bashfulness.

I mention to Hernan my meeting with Naval and ask if he can introduce me to some recent graduates. I’m interested to know what lies in store for the high-visioner from the hinterlands.

Hernan makes a few calls and later in the week I’m invited back to the same studio in which Naval had previously withered before the camera. The room is empty. A dozen theatre lights are trained onto the low-rise stage, where two chairs and a small table sit like pensioners at a picnic. I take a seat in one and wonder if this is how it feels to be a chat-show host.

I am due to meet Arya Banerjee, who Hernan describes as an up-and-coming actress. Other than this salient fact, I know nothing about her. Only that it’s the end of a long day and she’s late. I kill ten minutes jotting down some questions, and another five toying with my camera and voice recorder. The next forty minutes are kept busy trying to stem my growing impatience.

When the door eventually opens and Arya wafts in, my mood has grown sour and surly. She apologises and smiles a melting smile. A standard excuse about the traffic follows. ‘Of course,’ I hear myself mumbling, my hard-won ill temper evaporating in a blink. ‘Totally understand. Absolutely no problem.’ I’m such a sop, my harsher half is saying. Not that I can really hear him. The ringing in my ears is too thunderous.

To put it crudely, Arya is hot. Steamingly, sizzlingly,
blisteringly hot, she is all feline curves and silky, sculpted limbs. The whole svelte package is squeezed into a classy black evening dress that ends mid-thigh and clings to her body with the enviable tightness of cellophane. Gold brocade drips from each shoulder. A fragile silver watch hangs loosely from a delicate wrist. Beneath, two long lustrous legs fold out towards me. One black high-heeled toe points provocatively up towards the heavens, a Michelangelo digit communing directly with the divine. I hear her speak, but find myself too distracted to take in the words. Eyes of almond chocolates and lips like cherry plums, she has the kind of face that for centuries has driven men to art or war.

My reaction is less heroic and manifests itself in an attack of nerves. I feel acutely aware of my own unkempt appearance. I try writing and notice that my palms are wet with sweat. My voice is wavering. For some reason, my tongue has grown leaden. What’s happening? I have the odd sensation that someone has swapped the tables; that it is me on tape and not her.

The next day, I rather reluctantly play back the recording of our conversation. The interview is not as inane as I’d initially feared. The questions I’d jotted down had helped me keep the discussion more or less on track. All the same, my voice sounds strangely tremulous, like an upset child on the point of tears. Arya, on the other hand, is composure itself. Her accent has the horsey twang of British aristocracy, a mirror of the posh London education she received as a young child.

As the recording runs, I try and glean some pertinent lessons for Naval. These will, as my memory now vaguely confirms, be scant. The two young actors could not be more different. Born and raised in the cultured confines of Kolkata, Arya is the daughter of a renowned (though long-deceased) sitar player. After a degree in classical music and a stint as a model, she joined Anupam Kher’s acting school. ‘To learn the craft,’ as she puts it. She didn’t have long to practise. Even before the course had finished, she’d bagged her first break. Her debut role in director Dibakar Banerjee’s provocatively entitled
Love, Sex aur Dhokha
won her the critics’ praise – and the paparazzi’s lenses. Jettisoned
onto the Bollywood map, she talks of the difficulties of success (long hours, constant travel, sycophantic acquaintances) and the secret buzz of seeing her photo in the morning paper. ‘No one admits it, but we all look.’

With the interview nearing an end, Arya begins addressing the changes in Hindi cinema: how the actors are improving, how the scripts are becoming more international, and how she (as ‘part of the new generation of Indian’) wants to see realistic films and ‘not just farmers and people below the poverty line’.

Then my voice breaks in. Prompted by thoughts of Naval, I hear myself asking about the other students in her class.

A cadence of clipped Kensington consonants and extended Chelsea vowels responds. Most came from smaller towns and ‘weren’t terribly well-educated’, the ex-model hums. Not that background represents as big a barrier as before. Screen presence and talent are ‘background enough’ for young actors to get their chance. I push a little further. Her fellow students? What’s become of them? No, about her batch, she wouldn’t be able to say exactly.

Next, I heard myself asking her advice for the school’s current group of hopefuls. The question had been meant as a personal request for Naval. I fully intended to pass on to him the response. ‘Arya Banerjee says you should . . .’

Now, I’m not so sure. The advice might work for a beautiful girl of artistic pedigree. But is it wise to advise Naval never to give up on his dreams? Is it fair to tell him that it’s only his aspirations that keep him alive?

I’d mulled over the dilemma as my conversation with Arya wound up. The request for advice has obviously left her in a philosophical frame of mind. She won’t be good-looking for ever, she admits. Glamour won’t always be on her side. ‘Hopefully that’s a long way off though.’ The thought disappears into the sweet melody of a girlish chuckle.

Then the upper-class voice in the sultry dress is suggesting we call it a day. She has an evening event. It’s across town. The traffic, as we both know, is terrible.

Hernan gives me a knowing look when I next pass through his
office. My hunt for other graduates need go no further, he presumes. Is he right? I guess he is. I’d like to meet with some of those that haven’t yet made it, those that are still lugging themselves around town from audition to audition. I’d like to know what advice they might have for Naval. Yet I suspect that he would rather I stick to the success stories. As Chief Talent Scout, I doubt he’s even kept the contact numbers of the also-rans.

‘So when would you be available to see Mr Kher?’ he asks. ‘He has availability next Tuesday morning.’

‘Uhhh, sure, Tuesday should be fine,’ I respond, temporarily wrong-footed.

I’d been pestering Hernan for weeks to speak with the academy’s founder and general advocate at large. But the one-man publicity machine was forever travelling or busy on set or otherwise tied up.

As a stopgap, Hernan had kindly arranged a seat for me at Mr Kher’s autobiographical play entitled
Kucch Bitto Sakta Hai
(‘He will do anything to succeed – even fail’). I’d resolved that a back-row seat at Juhu’s Privthi Theatre might be as close as I could hope to get to B-Town’s character actor extraordinaire. Unfortunately, bad traffic – predictably – caused me to miss the first half. By the second act, most of Mr Kher’s failures already lay in the past. So I sat and watched him play out cameos from his career and project snapshots from his films.

Entering his office the following Tuesday, I’m ushered into a waiting room. A pretty girl in her early twenties, dressed in trousers and floral blouse, is waiting on a bench. Her mother sits beside her, holding her hand. The school is auditioning for its next intake. Across the room sits another prospective student. Clothed in a figure-hugging T-shirt with his hair slicked back, the gym-sharp adolescent is concentrating on filling out his application form. Next to him, three glum fish are looking out from a green tank. They too, I suspect, are dreaming of being someone else.

When Mr Kher’s secretary directs me through to his office, I find that I recognise the balding actor at once. Not because of the posters and cuttings pasted throughout the building. These are
flat and lifeless. I mean, I recognise him, the person not the face. It’s Mr Bhamra, without the turban. From
Bend it Like Beckham
. The strict (but ultimately soft-hearted) Punjabi Sikh who lives huddled under the Heathrow flight path, barricading himself and his family against the cultural onslaught of modern Britain. Yes, it’s him. I’m sure of it.

For a second, I stand there stunned. The school’s principal reaches out to shake my hand. Robotically, I offer mine in response. Inside, however, a small epiphany is unfolding. I suddenly understand Nawal’s personal connection with Salman Khan. Well, an inkling of it at any rate. Before, Naval’s sense of intimacy with his on-screen idol had struck me as touching but ultimately fatuous. I’d stacked it up as further evidence of the young man’s febrile state of mind. Now, I find myself wanting to tell Mr Kher to forget the racists who barred him from the local cricket club. I bite back the words. It is, I realise, a ludicrous impulse. All the same, it dawns on me that I have underestimated the chimerical power of the silver screen.

I probably owe Naval an apology. That will have to wait. A more pressing concern is upon me. My voice: I must keep it from quavering.

‘So, where do you want to start?’ Mr Kher asks.

He is seated behind his desk, surrounded by walls of books on art, cinema and literature. His manner is relaxed and disarmingly friendly. Any nerves I have on meeting Mr Bhamra are thankfully put to rest.

‘How about from the beginning?’ I suggest, seizing at the opportunity to make up for my late arrival at his one-man show.

The tale that unfolds over the next hour or so has an uncanny ring to it. As a film synopsis, it would read something like this:

Baby Kher, born into a lower-middle-class family from Shimla, the hill-station capital of Himachal Pradesh. ‘Queen of Hills’, the Britishers called it. The town in the skies has four cinema halls. Our youthful protagonist spends much of his early days dodging between one or other of them. He watches classics on repeat like
Pyaasa
and
Mughal-e-Azam
, and dreams of one day ‘becoming
somebody’. His father, the villain of the piece, harbours ‘rigid ambitions’ for him to follow his footsteps into government service. The teenage Kher ignores him. Instead, he robs money from his mother’s shrine and secretly steals away to the city of Chandigarh. There he auditions for drama school. His acceptance is confirmed later by post. The letter reveals the source of the theft, as well as news of a scholarship. The standard paternal histrionics ensue. (It’s Mr Bhamra again, railing against his daughter’s wish to play football.) He packs his bags all the same. So the journey to becoming a trained actor commences.