Arunoday Singh

Dwelling  by Li-Young Lee

As though touching her

might make him known to himself

as though his hand moving

over her body might find who

he is, as though he lay inside her, a country

his hand’s traveling uncovered,

as though such a country arose

continually up out of her

to meet his hand’s setting forth and setting forth.

And the places on her body have no names.

And she is what’s immense about the night.

And their clothes on the floor are arranged

for forgetfulness.

Too many thoughts swirling around in me.  Bobbing on a whirlpool of coffee and green tea.  The day’s gone by so fast, and I did nothing  to make it memorable.  I wandered a bit, to remind myself I still know how.  But soon, I was searching for a destination again.  Bombay has started to change me.  It screams at me to find a direction.  But I enjoy stumbling through the woods.

Friends don’t call anymore.  They wait for you to call them.  This is how the world is.  Everyone’s waiting for someone to call them.  They stare at the phone staring back at them.

I went out for some coffee and watched people.  I like doing that.  I like coming with entire conversations as I watch them laugh, and joke, and whisper, and cry.  It connects me to them, somehow, that I can imagine what they’re saying to each other.

There’s a serious lack of good coffee shops in the Juhu area.  The Baristas, and the Coffee Days all serve this mutated soup that they dare call coffee.  Met with a director I have recently worked with.  Sweet man.  Full of warmth and kindness.  Likes to make tea for everyone.  Gets slightly offended if you don’t have tea with him.  I try to have extra cups.

He wanted to know my thoughts on some ideas he had for how we could improve some of the scenes we shot.  But soon we were talking about the people we knew, and whether I was meeting any nice people in Bombay.  He meant had I met any nice girls.  I smiled and said yes.  He smiled, but I knew he didn’t believe me either.  I feel there are no nice girls in Bombay.  There are those that used to be nice.  And there are those that are nice, but know they can never reveal it.

And so it goes.  The waiting for my next project to begin.  I’m most alive when I’m working.  When I’m not, I hibernate like a bear in perpetual winter.

Writing for this blog has become a nice exercise for me.  I’m stretching my literary muscles again.  I had thought them atrophied a long time ago.  Nice to know I still can find my way around a pen and paper.  Planning to read Hemingway again.  He always make me feel I should write more often.  I wish I could have known him.  Stood side by side with him on his five foot high desk, and wrote for four hours straight like he used to do everyday, before his wife and the dogs called us outside into the Cuban sunshine.

There are no thoughts here,

Lingering amidst the warm ashes of my forgotten cigarette.

There are no thoughts here,

Swimming in the cooling pool of my sugar-sweet coffee.

There is only the numbness, the old familiar throb of it.

Creeping up my legs, slithering up, slowly up, into the back

of my spine, coming to rest behind my neck.  Flicking,

Flicking my throat with it’s forked tongue.

Testing me.  Teasing me.  Reminding me,

I can never escape it, and I never want to.

I drop the cigarette into the coffee, and I leave.

When I get home, I remember,

I forgot to pay.  I drive back.

They don’t remember me.

I drive home.  I go to sleep, listening to the snake in my spine,

hissing it’s long lullaby…

There’s never a reason for loneliness, rather, it comes with a sense of bewilderment.  How can one be lonely in a city as overflowing with humanity as Bombay?  Very easily.

But shouldn’t that be a good thing?  We waste so much energy trying to find friends, lovers, compatriots, that we very rarely spend any time searching for all the wonderful things we carry within ourselves.  In an industry so obsessed with vanity and appearance, it is very easy to get lost in feelings of inadequacy or insecurity.  One doesn’t realize how desperately unattractive vanity makes a person.  Forget what you look like!  Focus on the person you are!  There is more to life than hair, and skin, and six-packs.  Where is any talk of soul, or talent, or fortitude?  Where are the accolades for going through life without loosing sanity and goodness?

We revere and reward the wrong things in today’s India (in the world, really).  We have all started to become brittle mirrors of the people we were created to be.  I see it in my own reflection, and in the eyes of so many that I meet.  It breaks my heart.

We are complete in ourselves.  We are exactly who we need to be.  We carry all the strength, the passion, and the focus we need to attain the only thing worth attaining in this life - joy.  Everything else is ephemeral and weightless.  The ability to be joyful and bring joy to others - these are the true measures of a person deserving to be gifted life.

Forgive this blogger, he has been sick this week, and all this came to me as I fought with my old familiar demons.  But I’m finally starting to get the upper hand.  I will be the joy in my life.  For only then will I be able to bring it into another’s.

Sir Michael Parkinson, one of the true luminaries of BBC, has hit out against the media recently for the truly horrid attention they’ve given Jade Goody saying :  “Goody has her own place in the history of television and, while it’s significant, it’s nothing to be proud of. Her death is as sad as the death of any young person, but it’s not the passing of a martyr or a saint or, God help us, Princess Di.

“When we clear the media smoke screen from around her death, what we’re left with is a woman who came to represent all that’s paltry and wretched about Britain today.

“She was brought up on a sink estate, as a child came to know drugs and crime, was barely educated, ignorant and puerile. Then she was projected to celebrity by Big Brother and became a media chattel to be exploited till the day she died”

Why are people so desperate for media attention?  I was arguing the Jade Goody example with a friend and she said “At least she got some money for her kid’s education.”  I almost choked on my coffee.  Really?  That’s the best defense we can come up with for her tawdry, attention-starved televised demise?  She got some money for her kids?

If your mother behaved in such a manner, would you be proud or in need of a large number of prescription pills?

I don’t understand this world anymore.  Truly, I don’t. 

India, too is under serious seige, with reality shows.  Some are interesting enough in that they promote the search and discovery of new talent (which is sorely needed), but the rest??  Do we fucking care about Rakhee Sawant’s desire to get married on national television?

There is nothing quite like this woman on earth.  For those of you who haven’t been blessed with the knowledge of who this paragon of talent, beauty, grace, and charisma is - keep it that way!  You really don’t want to/need to know.  They’re calling this show (a blatant rip-off of the equally horrid/culture raping “Jodie Marsh : Who’ll Take Her Up the Aisle“) Rakhee ka Swayamvara.  Really? Swayamvara? For Rakhee Sawant?

God save this country.  For we don’t seem to want to.

A little closer to Heaven

When I auditioned for the part of ‘Zahgeer’ in Piyush Jha’s thriller “Sikandar”, I had a very vague idea of Kashmir.  An idea gleaned primarily from news clippings, documentaries, news reports, and that idea wasn’t a very positive one.  But being an actor in desperate need of work, I wasn’t about to let something as trivial as strife get in the way of my first movie role now was I?

The moment I landed at the airport was the beginning of my education into how complex a place Kashmir was.  At the baggage carousel, I was asked by a army officer to step aside and show them some papers.  Now I have been mistaken for Spanish/Italian/Whatever before, but always by a foreigner.  Never has an Indian refused to believe I was Indian.  I don’t know what threw the man - my height (which is a few inches north of average), my accent (which is more Brooklyn boy than Mumbai munda).  Regardless, after a rapid exchange in Hindi, my Indianness established, he clapped me on the back and let me collect my baggage.

The taxi ride up to Pahalgam, the hill station where we would be staying and shooting for the next month, was awkward by the fact that my legs didn’t fit, the taxi driver refused to smile, and the sheer volume of army personnel we saw standing by the roadside or in convoys around us.  I was feeling increasingly claustrophobic.  I would have to spend a month here!

But all my anxiousness and tightness of chest vanished as we drove out of Srinagar and up into the mountains.  Winding up the Pahalgam River, snowcapped mountains on side and verdant, forbidding forest on the other, with that almost overwhelmingly clean air caressing my face, I grinned like a starving man at a banquet all the way up.

I have been swimming in Mediterranean Sea, I have dived in the islands of Lakshwadeep, strolled the streets of Vienna and Venice at sunset, kissed a girl on top of the Empire State Building with New York City sparkling below us, and seen the Golden Gate Bridge loom out of the morning mist in the San Franscisco Bay.  And I have never - never, seen a place as beautiful as that hill-station in Kashmir.

Actor Hard at Work

I hiked for hours, picked apples off trees and shared them with goat herders, walked with a caravan of gypsies from Pahalgam to Aru, which is about twelve kilometers further up the mountains, shared many cups of Kahwa with the warmest, kindest fellows, with eyes that had seen years of struggle and pain, yet still crinkled with laugh lines at all my stupid jokes, and I loved every day of it.  The sun shines like a goddess during her wedding, the air charges you with a vitality that makes you feel like Clark Kent, and you can fill a bottle from a stream and drink water that tastes so good you want to cry.

Somedays I still wake up in the morning and wish it was the Himalayas outside my window instead of Juhu.

One of the things they never teach you in theatre school or tell you about in those magazines that glamorize this profession, is how much time you’re going to have to spend waiting, mostly alone, in a room.  Waiting for the phone to ring.  Sometimes you stare it with all the concentration and will it would take someone who believed in telekenesis.  You wait for other people to get their shit together, you wait for other people to remember you whilst they’re putting their shit together, you wait so much you forget to put your own shit together.

I wonder how many truly gifted, intuitive, natural actors the profession lost simply because it made them wait interminably?  How many faces we’ll never see on the screen because they just couldn’t handle this crippling inertia.   The ones that are around either got lucky or were too stubborn to say “Enough!”.  I’m hoping to slot myself into the first category but am comfortably already a member of the second.

It truly amazes me how long it takes to start a project that’s you’re already cleared for, signed the contract for.  You’re in!  Then the delays kick in, first one month for this, then two weeks for that, and on and on…Till you want to leap into the office and pummell everybody in sight in frustration.

And forget about going and trying to get a life.  The minute they find out you left town on a road trip, or just to get away or are busy with something else, they’ll start calling you all the time.  “Kahaan hai tu?” “Kya kar raha hai?” “Office jaldi aa!”  So you rush over because, naturally you think, something’s about to happen.  We’re off!  We’re ready to shoot! Thank you gods!

But…no.  You talk about the weather, the industry, the women, the last couple of (always bad) films you just saw.  And you drink over-sweetened, over boiled tea, and you leave.

I hope I don’t go mad before my first film “Sikandar” even releases.  Maybe I’m already nuts and don’t know.  Hmmm….