The temperature had been comfortable, in the 80s, but now it climbed to well over 90 degrees, and the humidity shot up too. I spent more time in my room, lying under the ceiling fan, listening to the crows beyond my balcony. Shiv Sena had won almost all of Bombay's wards. It was as if upstate New Yorkers-white, conservative Christians suspicious of immigrants had taken over Queens. I finally got through to Madhur Bhandarkar, the director the Bollywood-beat reporter had put me in touch with. Bhandarkar told me to talk to his publicist. His publicist said he couldn't see me, ever.
One morning my cell phone rang. It was Amjad, the agent. He sounded excited. "There's a shoot," he said. "They need someone thi morning." The pathetic excitement started up. "George," Amjad asked, "are you tall?" "Six foot two," I answered breathlessly. "George," Amjad continued, almost lovingly, "do you have blue eyes?" Blue-green, basically, I said. "Are you blond?" No, but with a wig- "George," Amjad interrupted, "how old are you?" This was no time for truth in advertising. "Thirty-eight," I answered firmly, lopping off a good decade. "Oh," he said, disappointed. 'They want someone young, to be with a girl. Young, blond-heldy."
"What?" .
"Heldy."
"What do you mean, 'heldy'?" "Heldy." Amjad became impatient. "Do you know a blond heldy guy, maybe twenty-five? Can you ask him?" I didn't know anyone heldy, I replied bitterly. Amjad asked me to look on the Colaba Causeway. He would give me a cut of his commission. He couldn't find work for me, but he wanted me to be a tout. I agreed. I thought that if I called back in an hour without having located a young, blond, heldv guy, he'd have
to settle for this middle-aged, brownhairedgom.
I read newspaper for an hour and rang back. The studio had found someone else. I threw myself on the bed. When Mark
Twain stayed in Bombay, he wrote that its crows sounded like "a low comedian, a dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a blackguard, a scoffer, a liar, a thief, a spy." To me, it sounded
as if they were jeering,
"Go-re, go-ra."
In Colaba people start to recognize the Westerner who sticks around. The souvenir sellers stopped hassling me. A sixteen-year-old named Dinesh quit begging me to buy his maps of India. One day, outside Leopold Cafe, Dinesh confessed that he had traveled to Bombay, after running away from a drunkard father in ]aipur, to be in Bollywood movies. "That is my dream," he said, as we were jostled by other boys peddling cheap telescopes, Tvshirts, flashing figurines of Ganesh; "I can be an actor." That week I met an Australian, Harry Key, who lived at a hotel down the street. He was twenty-four, light-haired, blue-eyed. Heldy. Harry, through one of the street agents, had secured a contract to act in a film. His girlfriend was dancing in a shoot at the Kamalistan Studios outside Jogeshwari, just south of Goregaon. A British woman, who did the hula as a Hawaiian girl in the same movie, told me that India's film industry wasn't for every foreigner. "You either hate it or you fall in love with the madness," she said. "You handle it or go home straight away." She loved Bollywood. Already she had appeared in a
handful of films and settled in a village outside Goa with her husband and two children.
A few days later I traveled by train and rickshaw to Sahara Studios, in Andheri, to see the television shoot Anant Mahadevan had invited me to watch. I arrived at the studio an hour early. Near the compound half-naked children played in the dirt while rh ir mother cooked rice beside their leanto. One thing Bombay never lets you forget: amid all the speed and glamour, 6 million people-half the population-live in slums, in shanty towns, or on the street. A spot boy led me around back. AD. old dog licked her
dugs in the shade. I waited in a corridor full of ironing boards and wardrobe trunks, wishing I'd brought a book. Finally the spot boy returned. "Come," he said. "Come."
"No," I told him. "I'm early." Ma-' hadevan appeared behind him. He was an affable man of forty-nine, with longish
hair and thick-framed hipster glasses.
"Come, George," he said, placing a hand on my shoulder. "I want to use you." Great, I thought. My skills were finally in demand-for another TV shoot. I wanted to tell him I could play the movie part he had offered to Gary:
I could force myself on helpless women with the best of them. He led me to a soundstage set up to look like a TV news show, a glassed-off studio with two standard video cameras and another, bigger camera. I smiled indulgently. TV ads, current-events shows:
Foy could do it all with ease. A wellgroomed man in his forties sat at a news anchor's console on the soundstage; a logo to one side read "The RKB Show." Mahadevan introduced the anchor as Rajiv K. Bajaj, the Indian equivalent of Jay Leno. Rajiv would interview me prior to a news segment. What was he interviewing me about? I asked. Hands reached around me, adjusting my clothes, fitting me with a lavalier mic. "Anything you want," Mahadevan replied, checking the cameras. "You can say anything."
"Look," the Indian Jay Leno suggested, "your name is French, right? I will ask you about your connection to that general at Quebec." Huh? But already Mahadevan and his crew had retreated behind the cameras. Lights glared. Rajiv was straightening his tie, clearing his throat, staring at the lens. "George, look at the camera on the right," he instructed, and then Mahadevan was calling, "Three, two, one, and-action."
It's strange how those words work to silence noise, throttle up attention, rev the nerves. They're the password to story, of whatever nature, and a story always imposes respect. Although, as stories go, this one was pedestrian. Rajiv launched into his talk-show spiel. He introduced "our famous visitor from New York City." Then Rajiv turned to face me. "Your name is French, you are a relation to
that famous French general from the battle of the Plains of Abraham?" he asked. What? Montcalm? 1 stammered a reply, trying to appear relaxed before the blankness of the lenses despite what suddenly seemed weirdness on a Rod Serling level.
"1 mean, there are two branches of my name, but one was, well, French mercenaries 'who went to Ireland to fight the British. I mean, my family stayed in France." I was warming to my genealogy, but in that second an aide hustled up to Rajiv and slipped him a note. Rajiv read it, then turned toward the biggest camera, his expressiongrim.
"We interrupt this show to bring you an urgent news bulletin."
"Cut!" Mahadevan yelled. "Let's do it over," Rajiv said. Mahadevan agreed. "Give George some more lines," Rajiv suggested. I watched them both carefully, wondering what "urgent news bulletin" could turn up in what was clearly no live segment.
ICY ou see," Mahadevan explained, walking over to me, "after this, Raj iv appears on the screen at the airport. He says the killer has been spotted there. The killer sees this, and he flees." I stared at him. My mouth hung open; I might have been drooling.
"You-you mean," I stuttered. "This isn't really a TV show?"
"Of course not," Mahadevan said.
"This is Aggar."
"The film," I whispered. "This is a film."
"Of course," Mahadevan repeated, turning away now. "The noir film I told you about."
"That was good," Rajiv told me, fiddling with his tie once more. "I'll ask you about your family again, and you tell me about them."
"Montcalm," I whispered. Already I was planning how to liven it up. Was I a smooth habitue of the interview circuit, the kind who trades quips with "Jay" and mentions the new book at least three times? And my motivation, after all: was it just to sell myself, or was there at the core some fear of not belonging; of being, in the end, irrelevant? I pasted on my cheeks the kind of confident smile such a character would wear. I looked straight on-camera, as he would. "Three, two, one," Mahadevan called. "And-action." • |
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