Arunoday Singh

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.

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