Payal Rohatgi was a former computer engineer who won the 2001 Miss Tourism World pageant before moving to Bombay and on to film. She strutted through her moves flanked by two lines of Caucasian dancers, then froze, as they did, when the music stopped. Between takes Rohatgi uttered not one word to the Russians; just stood there as her makeup artist applied lip gloss. During one of these intervals, I sidled up to the director. "Can you use a Westerner here?" I asked as he lit a cigarette. He stared at me, smiling, nonplussed. "You know, an extra, hanging around the bar," I continued, waving at the drinks. "It's a disco-"
"No," he said.
"What about later, tomorrow?" He turned away.
I walked outside between the hangars, among the squatters and parrots. The fug of Bombay had stretched its tentacles deeper into the hills. The dreadlocked girl-wrangler trailed behind me, barking into his cell phone. "No, Annabel's in Goa," he said. "You need four girls, but they are busy here." I asked him if he represented Western actors. He gave me the curious figure-eight head bobble that Indians often use. "I'll talk to Annabel," he said. "She's the cousin of my wife. You'll get something " for sure."
W'hen I first arrived in Bombay, I , roomed at the Sea Green Hotel, a dank,
pea-colored concrete cube facing the Arabian Sea. But I read in the Times of India that the Sea Green was where the team of Hindu extremists who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi stayed prior to carrying out their plot in New Delhi. I changed hotels. My new hotel was a Victorian mansion of rotting stucco. Crows cawed in the banyan trees and in the bougainvilleas outside; cats and rats ambled companionably in the courtyard. But these lodgings were in Colaba, the tourist center of Bombay. And where Westerners visit, Bollywood fixers flock.
I was in cell-phone contact with one of these street agents, a guy named Darwesh. He plied his trade next to the Regal Cinema at the northern end of the Colaba Causeway, rounding up tourists when the studios needed white people for a shoot. Darwesh gave me the number of his associate, [esse. Over the phone Jesse sounded young, American, catastrophically hungover. He was too tired to see me but assured me there was always work. "I'll let you know if I hear of a job," he said. Warren, another contact, advised me to call Kiran. I haunted Leopold Cafe, a traditional Parsi restaurant that ordinarily would be dark and full of old men drinking chai and smoking except that the owners had dressed it up with waiters in uniform and posters of James Dean to attract the kind of foreign clientele that is wary of dark smoky places full of old men drinking chai, Standing there, I overheard Raja, a California-born Indian with a bindi dot and a pure Encino accent, talk a young Australian into a tour of "Bollywood studios." I asked if he found work for extras. "Yeah, that's what I do, man, for ,2,000 rupees," he said. "I'm an actor
too, I've worked in L.A, but I'll be up front with you, it's a business for me." I bought him a beer and agreed to pay him his agent's fee, about $50, if he secured me a part. He introduced me to Iman, another agent. Iman identified himself as a dancer, actor, choreographer, and yoga adept who said he would be anchoring a Hindi show on British cable next year. "Your broadness is huge," Raja said admiringly to Iman when we met.
Every day I telephoned Madhur Bhandarkar, the director who was due to start shooting; each time I triggered
his voice mail. Yet the touts remained optimistic. There was a shoot coming up at the airport, Kiran told me. I
should be able to work on that.
ary Richardson, the American actor, invited me to the release party for a pop CD by a second-string actress named Sarika. Gary is tall, blond, in his fifties, handsome in an Eagle Scout sort of way. He told me he was proud of the many roles he had played in Indian films-prouder still of his theater work and of a locally published novel. Gary wanted me to like this city he had adopted, so he was keen for me to get a movie part. We rickshawed to 11 Echoes, a trendy club on [uhu Beach. [uhu is the Malibu of Bombay, and 11 Echoes looked Californian, with pickled beams and Spanish-style stucco. A terrace faced the sea. Bouncers screened us at the entrance, cameras flashed at Gary, even at me on the off chance I was newsworthy. "You see," Gary said, clapping me on the shoulder, "you're famous already."
I watched Gary as he made the rounds at the party. He draped an arm around the smaller, darker film people, smiled into the cameras tracking him. People seemed to like and respect him. But Gary's relationship to Bollvwood was complicated. In one film he played a British general: a character, he said, who in an Indian movie was "the equivalent of Hitler." Gary believed white actors in Bollywood now occupied the same position blacks did in American movies in the 1960s. The analogy was not totally off. Gora roles in Bollywood have always been fraught with racial tension. The first significant white presence in Hindi film was female. Hindu culture before the Second World War considered acting an indecent job for women, and Europeans, along with a few Pars is, took up the slack. Patience Cooper, an Angle-Indian from Calcutta, started in forty films from 1921 to 1944. A half-Greek, half-Brirish circus rider named Mary Evans became the Subcontinent's first female superstar. She was blonde and blue-eyed, wore skimpy clothes and a mask-a cross between Lara Croft and Zorro-and went by the moniker "Fearless Nadia." Nadia's success in the.Thirties and Forties was in part attributable to her close ties
to two Parsi producers but was also a function of India's desire to escape the strains of nationalism and war. When she tried her hand at more realistic drama, criticism was harsh. Continued >>>
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