I’m not sure which one of them is right.
I pack up my things and then walk to the train station through the late afternoon heat. The city looks golden up the hills, the sand dunes rippling behind it, and it all makes me feel wistful, nostalgic already.
The train gets me into Jaipur at six the next morning. My flight to Mumbai is at ten. I haven’t had a chance to set up a new email, and Mukesh has texted nothing about a ride from the airport. I text Prateek. He hasn’t replied to any of my texts in the last two days. So I try ringing him.
He answers, distracted.
“Prateek, hey it’s Willem.”
“Willem, where are you?”
“On a train. I’ve got your tapestry here.” I rattle the package.
“Oh, good.” For all his manic enthusiasm about this latest venture, he seems oddly blasé.
“Everything okay?”
“Better than okay. Very good. My cousin Rahul, he is sick with influenza.”
“That’s terrible. Is he okay?”
“Fine. Fine. But bed rest for him,” Prateek says cheerfully. “I am helping him out.” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “With the movies.”
“The movies?”
“Yes! I find the goreh to act in the movies. If I can get ten, they will put my name in the credits. Assistant to assistant director of casting.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” he says formally. “But only if I find four more. Tomorrow, I return to Salvation Army and maybe to the airport.”
“Actually, if you’re coming to the airport, that’s perfect. I need a ride.”
“You return on Saturday, I thought.”
“Change of plans. I’m coming back tomorrow now.”
There’s a silence, during which Prateek and I have the same idea. “Do you want to be in?” he asks at the same time I offer, “Would you want me to be in . . . ?”
The line echoes with our laughter. I give him my flight information and hang up. Outside, the sun is setting; a bright flame behind the train, and darkness in front of us. A short while later, it’s all dark.
Mukesh has booked me a sleeper seat in an air-conditioned car, which India Rail chills like a meat locker. The bed has nothing but a sheet. I shiver, and then think of the tapestry, thick and warm. I unwrap the paper; out tumbles something small and hard.
It’s a small statue of Ganesha, holding his ax and his lotus, smiling his smile, like he knows something the rest of us haven’t figured out yet.
Twenty-five
Mumbai
The movie is called Heera Ki Tamanna, which translates, roughly, as Wishing for a Diamond. It is a romance starring Billy Devali—big star—and Amisha Rai—big, big star—and is directed by Faruk Khan, who apparently is so big, he needs no further description. Prateek tells me all this in a breathless monologue; he has hardly stopped talking since he swooped me out of the arrivals hall and rushed me to the car, barely glancing at the various Rajasthani goods I painstakingly shopped and bargained for over the past three weeks.
“Oh, Willem, that was the last plan,” he says, shaking his head, dismayed that he must explain such things. “I am working in Bollywood now.” Then he tells me that yesterday, Amisha Rai swept by him so close that the edge of her sari brushed his arm. “Can I tell you what it felt like?” he asks, not waiting for me to answer. “It felt like a caress from the gods. Can I tell you what she smelled like?” He closes his eyes and inhales. Apparently, her odor defies words.
“What exactly do I do?”
“Do you remember in Dil Mera Golmaal, the scene after the shootout?”
I nod. It was like Reservoir Dogs, but on a ship. With dancing.
“Where do you think all those white people came from?”
“From the same magical place as the go-go dancers?”
“From casting directors like me.” He pounds his chest.
“Casting director? So it’s official. You’re up to ten?”
“You make eight. But I will get there. You are so tall and handsome and . . . white.”
“Maybe I can count for two?” I joke.
Prateek looks at me like I’m an idiot. “No, you count for one. You are only one man.”
We arrive in Film City, the suburb that houses many of the studios, and then we pull into the complex and then into what looks like a large airplane hangar.
“Oh, by the way, the payment,” Prateek says nonchalantly. “I must tell you, it’s ten dollars a day.”
I don’t answer. I hadn’t planned on being paid anything.
He mistakes my silence. “I know for Westerners it is not much,” he explains. “But you get meals, and also lodging so you do not need to commute back to Colaba each night. Please, please tell me you’ll agree to it.”
“Of course. I’m not in it for the money.” Which is exactly what Tor used to say about Guerrilla Will. We’re not in it for the money. But half the time she would say this as she was carefully counting the night’s take or checking weather reports in the International Herald Tribune to determine the sunniest—and most lucrative—places to hit next.
Back then, I was very much in it for the money. Even the little I earned from Guerrilla Will kept me from having to return to an unwelcoming home.
Funny that, how little things have changed.
On the set, Prateek introduces me to Arun, the assistant casting director, who takes a brief pause from his mobile phone conversation to appraise me. He says something to Prateek in Hindi and then nods at me and barks, “Costume.”
Prateek squeezes my arm, as he leads me to the costume room, which is a series of rolling racks full of suits and dresses, tended to by a harried woman with glasses. “Find something that fits,” she orders.
Everything is at least a head too short for me. Which is about the amount by which I tower over most Indians. Prateek looks worried. “Do you have a suit?” he asks.
The last time I wore a suit was to Bram’s funeral. No, I don’t have a suit.
“What seems to be the problem?” Neema, the wardrobe lady snaps.
Prateek grovels, apologizing for my height, as if it were a personality defect.
She sighs impatiently. “Wait here.”
Prateek looks at me in alarm. “I hope they do not send you back. Arun just told me that one of the ashram people left this morning and now I am back down to seven.”
I slouch, make myself shorter. “Does that help?”
“The suit still will not fit,” he says, shaking his head as if I’m an imbecile.
Neema returns with a garment bag. Inside is a suit, freshly pressed, shiny blue, sharkskin. “This is from the actors’ wardrobe, so don’t mess it,” she warns, shoving me into a curtained area to try it on.
The suit fits. When Prateek sees me, he grins. “You look so first-class,” he says, amazed. “Come, walk by Arun. Casual, casual. Oh, yes, he sees. Very good. I think I am almost assured a spot in the credits. To think, one day, I might be like Arun.”
“Dare to dream.”
I’m teasing, but I keep forgetting that Prateek takes everything literally. “Oh, yes. To dream is the ultimate dare, is it not?”
The film set is a faux cocktail lounge, with a grand piano right in the middle. The Indian stars circle the area around the bar, and then deeper into the set mill the fifty or so extras. The majority of them are Indians, but there are about fifteen or twenty Westerners. I go stand next to an Indian in a tux, but he narrows his eyes at me and scoots away.
“They’re such snobs!” a skinny, tan girl in a sparkly blue dress says, laughing. “They won’t talk to us.”
“It’s like reverse colonialism or something,” says a guy with dreadlocks tied back into a band. “Nash,” he says, sticking out a hand.
“Tasha,” says the girl.
“Willem.”
“Willem,” they repeat, dreamily. “You at the ashram?”
“No.”
“Oh. We didn’t think so. We’d have recognized you,” Tasha says. “You’re so tall. Like Jules.”
Nash nods his head. I do too. We all nod at this Jules’s height.
“What brings you to India?” I ask, slipping easily back into Postcard Language.
“We are refugees,” Tasha says. “From the fame-and-celebrity-obsessed materialistic world in the States. We are here to cleanse ourselves.”
“Here?” I gesture to the set.
Nash laughs. “Enlightenment ain’t free. It’s kind of expensive, actually. So we’re here trying to buy some more time. What about you, dude? Why brings you to Bollywoodland?”
“The fame, of course.”
They both laugh. Then Nash asks, “Wanna go get baked? They aren’t doing anything except making us wait.” He pulls out a fat joint. “I wait just as well stoned.”
I shrug. “Why not?”
We sneak off outside where half of the extras seem to be smoking cigarettes in the shade of the overhang. Nash lights up and takes a hit, passes it to Tasha, who takes a long, deep drag and passes it to me. The hash is strong and it’s been a while, so it hits me immediately. We pass the joint around a few more times.
“You’re really . . . tall, Willem,” Tasha says.
“Yes, I think you mentioned that.”
“We really have to introduce him to Jules,” Tasha drawls. “She’s tall. And Canadian.”
“Totally,” Nash says. “Righteous idea.”
The world’s gone a bit washed out, overbright and spinny. “Who’s Jules?” I ask.
“She’s a girl,” Nash answers. “Cute. Ginger hair. She’s at the ashram but she might come out in a day or two. She’s tall. Oh, Tasha already said that. Shit, here comes the assistant director dude. Hide the joint.”
Tasha pinches the joint between her fingers just as a birdlike man comes and looks at us. Even though Tasha is holding the joint, it’s me he focuses on. He takes out his phone and snaps a picture, and then disappears without saying a word.
“Oh. Shit,” Tasha says, giggling. “We got caught.”
“He got caught,” Nash says. “They only took his picture.” He sounds a bit insulted.
“If there’s hash, you always blame the Dutchman,” I say.
“Oh, right,” Nash says, nodding.
“I’m paranoid now,” Tasha says.
“Let’s get back. Save the rest of that for later,” Nash says.
With the hash buzzing around my head, the waiting on set goes slower, not faster. I spend a few minutes twirling a rupee coin across my hand but I keep dropping it. I turn on my phone to play some solitaire, but then, on a strange stoned whim, use my phone for its intended purpose. I make a call.
“Hello . . . this is Willem,” I say when she picks up.
“I know who this is.” I can hear fury in her voice. Even calling her gets me in trouble? “Where are you?” she asks.
“I’m on a film set. I’m acting in a Bollywood movie for the next few days.”
Silence. Yael never had much patience for “low” culture, outside of the cheesy Israeli pop music she couldn’t resist. She didn’t like movies or TV shows. She surely thinks all this is a waste of time.
“And when did you decide to do this?” she says at last. Her voice is flinty enough to spark a fire.
“Yesterday. This morning officially.”
“And when did you think to tell me?”
Maybe it’s the hash, but I actually laugh out loud. Because it’s just funny—in the way that absurd things are.
Yael doesn’t think so. “What’s so amusing?”
“What’s so amusing?” I ask. “You wanting to know my itinerary, that’s pretty amusing. When you haven’t given a thought to my whereabouts, my well-being for the last three years. When you brought me over to India and then a week later shipped me right back off again and didn’t bother to call once. You couldn’t even be bothered to come to the airport to pick me up. Oh, I know there was an emergency, something more important, but there always is, isn’t there? So why would you need to know that I was acting in a Bollywood movie?”