Arunoday Singh

The wind reminds me that change is coming.  The moon whispers goodbye and the clamor of the street hates me tonight, but I refuse to cry.  I spoke many words today, each one was a lie.  When I tried to tell the truth, she began to cry.  I couldn’t stand her pain, knowing it was my only gift to her.  And all I could think about was the way she smiled at the other man today.  The way she laughed, and touched her hair, and made excuses to reach out and touch him.  She knew I was watching.  She was testing me.  But she didn’t expect this, now, here, with the windows open and the cacophony of the devout dancing in the streets below us and blowing their ridiculous pipes and horns and shouting “Morya” with more rage and anger than devotion.  I wonder if they realize that their god cannot hear them tonight.  Tonight is when he’s turned away.  That was unworthy of me.  This day was unworthy of me.  Rather I am unworthy of this day, and all the ones that came before this.

“You don’t love me?” she whispers, standing under the windchime and the flicker of the lights from across the street spying on us from between the swaying fronds of the palm trees.

“I never did.”

“Yes you did.  You said so.”

“A man will say anything to get what he wants.”

“And did you get what you wanted?”

“No.  I got disappointment, and this night.  That’s what I got.”

“Why are you saying these things to me?”  She shouts this, not because she’s angry at me.  But because she knows I’m angry at her, and I have reason.  She wants another.  I hate for that.  But I hate her more for wanting me to be angry at her for it.  I refuse.  He can have her.

I turn away to make some tea.  She follows me into the kitchen.  I say nothing, she says less.  Just stands there under the disgusting white light in my kitchen wall, the one that makes me look like a ghoul in the reflections, but somehow she still looks like an angel.  That, I hate her for, deeply.

She stands there, looking like something cast down from heaven, with my heart at her feet which she’s trying to put together again and she starts to cry.  They say there’s nothing that can withstand the force of a woman’s tears.  I want to disagree, and I try, but I can’t.  Neither can I give in.  I rip open the tea bags and stir the leaves into a gentle vortex.  She sobs, I stir, she sniffs, I stir, she stifles, and I keep stirring.  She stops.

When I turn around she is no longer the weeping angel.  When I turn around she is smiling.  And that is what finally lances through my pain, and my hurt, and my insecurities, right into my bleeding heart.  It’s how she trapped me that first time.  But her first smile was an invitation.  This one is for malice.  This is the smile that says she’s leaving me.

I’m left standing in my kitchen, under the white light besieged by moths, and two cups of tea in my hands.  She doesn’t bother to shut the door behind her.

This will be my last post here as an aspiring actor.  The next time I write shall be after “Sikandar” has released and all the reactions are in and the weekend over and done with and my life altered forever.  I wonder how I’ll deal with the anticlimactic Saturday morning.  Because it’s always an anticlimax, isn’t it?  The axis mundi of the world hasn’t suddenly shifted to make me the center of the world, Aphrodite’s handmaidens aren’t hidden in the billowing curtains of my bedchamber, the song “Crawl” by Kings of Leon doesn’t play out loud everytime I walk into a room in fantastic slow motion.

But for all the banality of that Saturday morning, for all that the coffee will taste the same, and the number of times I hit the snooze button on my alarm will be the same, and that old familiar series of twinges that run down my body reminding me of all the bones I’ve sprained/strained/broken, I will have been projected onto a widescreen in cinematic technicolor for the first time in front of a paying audience.  I will have achieved the thing I have desired most in my life, and I’m a little moist in the corners of my eyes just thinking about that.

I honestly wondered whether this week would ever come.  I think of all the times I walked out of an audition with the callous insults of the auditioners still heaving against my breast, I think of all the ten thousand lonely nights I’ve spent in tiny little apartments whispering to the gods, begging for a sign, an intervention, a bigger ration of faith, I think of all the times I had to hide the pain in my voice during the weekly calls my parents made to check up on their only son, stumbling around in a city more than a thousand miles away, and for the first time in my life - I feel a deep and satisfying sense of accomplishment.

I cannot say whether people will like my work or not.  I cannot know whether “Sikandar” will capture your minds and your hearts like Piyush hopes it will.

All I do know, is that I’m here to stay now.  I’m here to work.  I’m here to give this profession every single shred of me in the hopes of becoming a worthy actor.  The first step shall be before your eyes the day-after tomorrow.  Thank you, to all of you who have been reading and responding to my blog.  Know that I shall not be disappearing after “Sikandar”.  This may have started as ‘their’ idea, but this is MY blog now.  I plan to keep posting my incoherent, inconsistent, incomparable thoughts here until BIG has no choice but to cut me off.

The premiere of the film is tomorrow.  I’ve got a killer suit, an admantine will, and a smile the likes of which these here actresses haven’t seen in a long while.  Like a rapper said - “Blind eyes can look at me and see the Truth.”  Hello, world, I’m Arunoday, I hear you’ve been waiting for me…

This is the last Sunday before my first film release.  Cynicism and hope, the outrageous expectations and the crippling fear war within me.  Even as I brushed my teeth, or relieved myself at four in the morning before that, when I’m usually not thinking of anything at all except getting back under the sheets with my face buried in the pillow, I was thinking about what my life will be like after the twenty-first of August.

Not that I’m expecting that all of a sudden I shall be the cynosure of all eyes, with the men grilling and the women thrilling, and my phone trin-trinning with directors.  That’s absurd, although if I’m honest, some part of me is hoping for exactly that.  But that’s just the overinflated ego I’ve never been able to shush for long.  But I’m grateful to that part of me, the unreasonably proud and confident part of me that got me up some mornings when there was no work and no chance of any, that gave me the courage to walk into audition rooms where there were twenty other men better than me.

And next Sunday after will be much the same as this one.  The morning coffee will taste the same, the smell of my oats as they bubble and thicken will be the same, as will the crow that always come to the window when he smells them.  The morning paper will have the same mixture of amusing and appaling news.  There’ll be a piece then that will give me as much horror as the one I read today about the new Afghan law that permits husbands to starve their wives if they refuse to perform their conjugal duties.  I’ll curse the world with the same words, and then I’ll thank the Goddess for my life.  That Sunday will be the same as this one, and yet nothing shall be the same.  Bloody hell, I wish the week would just get over already so that the verdict is out and I know for sure.  But the waiting is quite an exquisitely complex torment.

I’m interested in monitoring how my body and mind react to the impending release, and how they twist and surge with anticipation and fear.  Being an actor for me is partly learning to recognize all that occurs within me and then being able to artificially induce that reaction when required.  And nothing in my life has filled me with such hope and anxiousness as the thought of that Friday.

Theatre is an immediate experience.  The tension and the release, the fear and the release, they are all over in a night.  And the applause is physically received, you can see the smiles, you can feel the laughter and the wind escaping all those clapping hands push against you ever so imperceptibly.  “Sikandar” was done for almost a year before this August and we’ve been waiting for this Friday with great and sometimes manic patience.  We’ve stopped and started, hoped and despaired, for a long time now.

We are terrified, we are excited, we are elated, we are huddled together like abandoned puppies, we are strutting around, not like kings, but like we couldn’t care less who is the king, but more than all of that - we hope you see our film, and we hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it.

Less than two weeks to go for “Sikandar” to release.  The hoardings and the publicity started in earnest from today.  Driving to and from my daily appointments I saw a few bus banner ads and a few big hoardings around town.  Felt fantastic, felt like our dream is finally coalescing into a tangible reality, an expectant lover reaching out for a touch.  Then I noticed something that filled me with my own personal, familiar cocktail of anger and amusement - I”m not on any of the hoardings!

Anger, disgust, self-loathing, ironic amusement, tear-jerking mirth, homicidal rage, dejection, resignation, and finally quiet introspection.  I started to consider whether I should even bother getting so impassioned over what seemed to me a simple marketing decision.  What’s more important to me?  My own individual success and some pedestrian, egocentric need to be famous, or the success of the picture I’m a big part of.  And I know I’m a big part of the film.  The fact that I’m not on the hoardings shouldn’t matter, right?

But for a burning few minutes, it did.  Any actor, or model, or performer, has within them a desire to be noticed, applauded, acknowledged.  Sure we do, we shouldn’t hide it or deny it.  We all love our crafts and are fulfilled by them, at least I hope “we” are, I know I am - but there is certainly a sprinkling of self-aggrandizement in the mix.  When Dustin Hoffman asked Laurence Olivier why he thought they were actors, why anyone would want to be an actor, Olivier asked, “You want to know, boy?  You really want to know why we do what we do?”  Whereupon he stood up and leaned over the table, putting his face inches away from Hoffman’s and hissed, “Look at me, look at me, look at me.”

Truth be told, a few minutes later, I was quite disgusted with myself.   I thought I had, long ago, wrestled my artistic ego to the ground and told it to behave.  I thought I had convinced myself that the most important thing about being an actor, is the work itself - the becoming, the delving, the search.  It was humbling to see just how far from that I am.  But I refuse to give up the travail to reach that ideal, otherwise I am not in service to the craft of acting, I’m expecting the craft to be in service to me.  And that is not how actors achieve that rare, thrilling resonance on screen.  Someone said on a comment that an actor needs to connect with the audience.  I disagree - an actor needs to connect with their own humanity, their own imperfections, and through that connection, help the audience connect with their own.  A great actor makes you feel WITH him, not necessarily for.  And to become that kind of actor, is my heart’s truest desire.  My ego is just an impediment in the way, like a desert I have to cross to reach my ocean.

It’s amazing how easily the ego gets bruised, or offended, or affronted.  What’s important, for me, is to learn to move forward despite it’s tantrums.  No matter that I’m not on the hoardings - hoardings get taken down.  I’m IN the film, and that can never be taken away, by anyone.

The prophecies must come true now, the dark demented ones, that promised our race nothing but pain and heartbreak.  The world watches in horror as pig’s fly across borders.  India as usual wakes up too late, makes a lot of noise and beats it’s chest, but it’s a hollow posturing, the contagion is already here.  Panic’s first strains shiver through the air, as civilization peels back it’s civilized face to show the animal beneath.  Dear Goddess, have mercy on my country.  Show us how to be proud, prepared, and pro-active.

I run to escape the cigarette smoke that follows me like a stray cat I made the mistake of feeding once.  Wherever I go now, there’s she is, rubbing against my legs, mewling to be scratched.  The morning papers make my lips snarl, and my brows furrow.  No wonder so many of us have mature lines and hollows in our youthful faces.  How much weight can we continue to bear?  We are not Titans, we were never meant to be.  Where are the gods?  Perhaps where they’ve always been, behind us, only now we’re too proud to turn around.

The snake has returned to me.  It stretches and slithers around in the hollow of my hip, making it painful to even sit and write these days.  Every so often it twists up my spine and licks the underside of my thoughts, hissing it’s sibilant seductions, commanding me to indulge it’s thirst for my self-loathing.  But I refuse tonight.

Saw Johnny Depp become John Dillinger yesterday night and for two something hours I was reminded of just how great my profession can be when done by a master.  Spirits were lifted, smiles were cured of their amnesia and reminded that they must come out and play more often, and coffee was had, sweet and black, so hot it burned the tongue and ached the teeth.  But it went with the night, and the breeze that came in clean and soft, all it’s burdens cast aside, running free until the morning tide.

I was alone again, but once more reminded that often I prefer it that way.  It does me good to hear no other voices but those in my head.  I keeps me from getting confused, or at odds with myself.  This city is a wonderfully diverting one, it can show you too good a time, and make you forget all that keeps you grounded and true.  And though I like losing myself in it’s slow whirlwinds now and then, I always need to come back to the quiet corners and soft, patient moments, where there is nothing to prove and no one to impress.  No masks to don, no conversation topics to avoid.  No need for speech, no need for thought, just the breathing in and out, and the tasting, and the smell of the salt in the air, and the shadows cavorting on the walls like the dearest lovers.

I hear Billie Holiday sing over the speakers…

No one here can love or understand me,
Oh, what hard luck stories they all hand me,
Make my bed and light the light,
I’ll be home late tonight,
Blackbird bye bye.

And I tell her I understand, and I tell her it’ll be alright.  Because the poets of the nighttime sky haven’t lost their gifts just yet.  And she puts her arms around me and sings me to sleep, and makes sure I don’t dream at all…

I used to be terrified of the idea of working in the Indian film industry (I mislike the term Bollywood, too pretentious, too desperate, and far too eager to be noticed).  Since I was six years old, I’ve been in an International school in Kodaikanal, India, where the language of both everyday life and the classroom was English.  And rather than pick up Hindi as my second language, I opted to learn French.  I wanted to be  a citizen of the world.  All my initial contact with cinema and literature were Western.  I became a stranger to my own cultural history.  A foreigner in local skin.

Then came the American years, the university, the first taste of a theatre as a career, the great loves, the great nights, the city of New York walking beside me, closer than love, closer than my own breath, telling me how long it’s been waiting for me.  Those midnight slices of pizza when I was on the way to work, the early morning coffees at Moonshine diner with the remains of the previous night still stinging our happy eyes, sitting in Washington Square Park and watching all the people rush hither thither with their dogs and their children on leashes, shopping for old records in the Village…

They took all that away from me.  I felt abandoned, exiled, discarded.  That’s what I was when I limped into Bombay.  Had nowhere to go where visa hassles for an actor struggling to find work wouldn’t plague me constantly, nowhere except where I’m from.

But going around Bombay, meeting the people I’ve met, restored little by little my confidence that there was work worth doing here, alongside people that love Cinema as much if not more than me.  That here were some people I could talk with, share so many coffees with we could be declared toxic hazards.  Work that may not be popularly successful, but that we enjoyed doing and believed in.  Work that made us proud to be who we were and all the reasons we got to be that way in the first place.

That’s why I’ll forever be grateful to Piyush Jha and “Sikandar”.  They brought me home, they told me that it might be a jungle out there, where everyone’s a cannibal and even the rabbits have teeth, but we are not alone.  So I go around town and the Internet promoting this film of ours, in an effort to let the others like us know - you are not alone.  We are all here, together, and we may stumble, or get it wrong, or fail, but we will never stop trying to be better, trying to become worthy of being called artists.

“Sikandar” releases in two weeks.  There’s very little publicity and quite a lot of apprehension.  It’s the first feature film I’ve ever been a part of and it’s the first acting gig I’ve done in India.  Needless to say the personal stake I have in the film is quite substantial.  But I feel that there is something greater on the line - the soul of Indian Cinema.  I know that’s a grandiose statement to make, but I feel that from my limited though perspicacious perspective, cinema and the culture of cinema teeters on a edge of a precipice, one that yawns deep and bottomless.

There shall always be a need in a country like ours, where the average living conditions are so poor and the lack of infrastructure and the ambition to become a world power while ignoring the very real issues that plague the nation abound, for popcorn, “feel good” movies.  Just because I have not enjoyed the majority of the films that have released recently, and from Hollywood too, before anyone can claim that I’m biased towards the West, doesn’t mean I don’t understand the hold they have over the mass consciousness.

What I’m concerned about, is that attitude of the producers and the distributors and the media towards films that aren’t packed tight with glistening, perfect bodies, or stunning women (the kind only India can make) gyrating to catchy music, et all.  Someone (I’m sadly learning the art of vagary) said “Sikandar” that it would be easy to market the film had there been a major star in the cast.  Really?  That’s the reason you can’t market the film, there’s no super-stars involved in it?

Where does this attitude come from?  It’s one thing to refuse to produce a quirky film, or one that has no “starpower”.  That’s a legitimate stand to make.  Making films is after-all a business, and a business requires returns and profit to be viable.  Fine.  But after producing the movie, after investing in it, endorsing it, to refuse to do absolutely everything possible to ensure that people at least know about the film and consequently, go to check it out, is unforgivable.

Then there’s the people that ask me why I haven’t opted for a conventional launch vehicle, rather than do a small (but substantial) role in a film like “Sikandar”.  Is a launch the only way for an actor to get noticed?  Does being launched guarantee your becoming a superstar, or even mildly successful?  Does being launched mean you can even carry a role?  And I’m not one of those people that pretends to support independent cinema while I’m getting work in it, only to run away and dance in a Yash Raj film the minute they notice me.  I believe in what I do, and where I work.  I believe in “Sikandar”, I believed when I read the script that this was a special film written by a unique mind, with a setting and a premise that was as far from the popular norm as possible.

Now what we need is for people to go see the film.  Love it, hate it, be indifferent to it, but watch it.  Talk about it, because I guarantee it’ll worm its way into your conversations long after the credits roll.  That’s how you market such a film, you highlight it’s heart, it’s desire to inform, it’s shining a spotlight on the plight of children in strife-torn regions.  You don’t need Aamir Khan or a Shah Rukh Khan or any other super-luminary to tell people to go see a film that’s about people like them, that’s about children like theirs.  We have an engaging story, a suspenseful and thrilling story, we have a group of actors who tried hard to not only act but inhabit their characters.  We have Kashmir like you’ve never seen it before. 

I don’t know how many people read my blog, really.  I’m grateful anyone does.  But don’t read it if you aren’t going to see the film.  Because the person that can enjoy my writing will enjoy the film.  The person that doesn’t enjoy my writing, will enjoy the film too.

We need you.  But in a way, you need us too.  You need people like us, to show you the other side of the coin, the tarnished, notched side.  The side that mirrors your situations, your turmoil, your fears.  One cannot subsist on popcorn alone.