Arunoday Singh

I feel the weather changing.  There was a promise of relief in the wind, just the barest brush of better times ahead.  Bombay never really gets cold, but the wind tonight seemed to promise some respite in the future.  I hope so.  I am not a man suited to this humidity and dust.  It’s been only a week since we all came down from Rishikesh, and every morning I wake, I can feel the siren call of the mountains throbbing against my eyes just after they open.  In that half moment betwixt slumber and when I toss aside the sheets, I can almost taste the thickness of the mountain air in my mouth.

It’s strange how I’m always wishing to be somewhere other than I am.  I wonder if it’s my own personal purgatory, or do others have a similar ache in their hearts now and then.  When they look around a room, or stop at a red light and stare outside their cars, do they long to be anywhere but in their present circumstances.  I’ve been working at not being so disconnected with my present, and am proud to say that there have been mostly successes on that front.  But my rambunctious mind and it’s endless, bounding energy to skip and twirl and disappear into fantasy, like a pup chasing into a thicket after a rabbit, it always takes me by surprise and snap!  I’m away in another world.

I found myself doing that very strongly this last Thursday night.  I was invited to attend the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image’s Eleventh Film Festival.  Truth be told, I went more because the opening film was going to be Soderberg’s “The Informant”, a film I’d been jonesing to see ever since I saw the trailer earlier this year.  But before the screening, there was a long drawn-out introduction and opening ceremony, with many speeches and many moments of applause.  It was very well done, heartfelt, a bit sloppily staged, but sincere.  And yet for the life of me, I couldn’t bring myself to actually pay attention to my surroundings.

Thankfully the movie started and gripped me from the first moment.  Matt Damon who, after watching him in the “Talented Mr. Ripley”, I have come to greatly admire, was unbelievable in “The Informant”.  The man altered everything about himself, body-language, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies, tics, speech pattern, even his body shape.  It was a humbling experience watching an actor inhabit his role so completely.  Realized I have a long, long way to go before I can even claim to be an actor worth the mentioning.  If you get a chance, watch this film.  Aside from “Frost/Nixon” it’s probably the best film I’ve seen this year.

After the screening was a dinner, but everybody seemed to only want to head home.  So I peeled away too, took in a nice quiet meal at a nearby restaurant.  Something very relaxing about eating alone in a dimly lit joint, with smiling waiters and perfectly decanted port sparkling crimson in a glass.  There’s definitely something in the air these days.  I don’t quite know what it is, only it fills me with the oddest surge of hope.  As if something’s coming, or has already arrived.  I keep walking into rooms hoping to find IT there, or turning corners hoping to glimpse it.

Now to be away.  Brand new book sitting on my bedside, and a steaming cup of kahwa.  My apartment smells like champa, and the wind’s tapping softly on the windows, asking to be let in.  I think I’ll oblige.  Excuse me…

She told me that her favorite song was “Again” by Lenny Kravitz. Her voice was a soft whisper in my ear, and her body a softer one beside mine, separated only by the arm of one chair and every fear that glistened in her eyes.  We were both high on more than weed, and we were both exhausted, and we weren’t alone, but we might as well have been.  The laughter of the other’s around us, their jokes and their back-slapping camaraderie merely added to our isolation.  They were no different than the moon flitting in and out of the swaying branches of the trees above, and the moths and the candles locked in their deadly tango.  The night it seemed, and all its children were there for us, and for us alone.
Or at least, it was so in my mind.
Now it’s the following day and I’m listening to the song, again and again.  “All of my life, where have you been? I wonder if I’ll, ever see you again.  And if that day comes, I know we could win.  I wonder if I’ll, ever see you again.”  And I wonder about a girl who could love those lines so much.  Where every pleasure was deferred, every wish was killed by negativity before it could ever take flesh.  The search for the perfect love, the finding of it, only to cast it back into the wind hoping life and destiny and chance bring it back into your arms again.  It’s a great song, but a sad one.  How you can meet someone completely amazing and yet you can let them pass you by without saying…anything.  Then you wonder why you never meet anyone truly amazing.  How could I have let last night pass me by without fulfilling it’s promise?  How could I have been so stupid?
I wanted her that night, from mind to body, follicle to toenail, but I did nothing.  And she wanted me, inexplicably to her and to me, and hesitantly for sure because she didn’t trust that part of herself that was drawn to me, and she trusted the world not at all.  So she pushed herself away from me, from the table full of kindly laughing faces, and away from that night of seductive shadows.  She pushed herself away with a snapped “Good night” and fled down the hallway.  The moths flitted after her, drawn by the dying heat between her and me.  She pushed herself away, and locked herself away in her room, alone and wondering.  And I sat outside, with my laughing happy friends and felt myself seized by the oddest mixture of rage and sadness and lust and loneliness.
I remember us, and our canted postures, our breaths doing what our mouths wished to, our hands finding reasons to brush up against each other.  It was our last chance for a dance; our last night together before the world intruded and work took us away.  And we did nothing.  I sit alone now, drinking teas of regret, while she walks through her streets, surrounded by friends.  I wonder if her thoughts are straying, stumbling their way towards me.  I know they are not, why would they?  She is a woman that ever will ask “Why”, never “Why ever not?”
But what galls me is my restraint, my petulant insistence that the next move be hers.  The things I could have said, the things I should have done, all carefully and brightly wrapped in my mind, of no use now.  Just extra clutter in that room we all have in our heads, the room full of things we never said.  Mine’s more a mansion than a room now.
It amazes me how much we think we’ve matured, become scarred veterans of this bloody war of the sexes.  Then lightning strikes and we’re left just as blind and scared as we were the first time it struck.  How pathetic this must sound?  How weak and despondent?  I’m writing now to turn my face away from the mirror.  I don’t need seven years of bad luck.  I’m writing because my disgust must not be allowed to ruin the fragile castle of patience and faith I have erected.  I’m writing because out in the real world, I feel like a coward of words.

                Almost exactly one year after we made “Sikandar” in Kashmir, I find myself once again under the ageless gaze of the Himalayas.  This time it’s Hrishikesh that’s playing host to this wandering soul.  The undying Mountains and the undying fires of faith being assailed daily by the polluted river of humanity, that crash against it without pause, without pity, and completely without thought.  It hurts me to see the garbage heaps we’ve turned our holiest and most beautiful places into.  But that’s what we do, I guess.  I might as well try to change the Sun into a gentler watcher, than tell my species to stop befouling their surroundings.  Probably have more luck with the Sun.

                Been shooting for a new project for about a month now, and have been quite underwhelmed by work.  Not been working as often as I would like.  And nothing saps my energy quite like inactivity.  Pathetic excuse for the lack of any blogs I could have posted, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

                I’m just grateful to be working again, even if it’s a relatively small part.  I’ve had a great time working on this one.  The crew and the directorial team are all oddballs and fun spirits.  And a truly blessedly wacko bunch of co-actors which always is preferable to the stuffy, stiff-shirts that one can across.  This bunch is all young and funny, and uninhibited and chilled.  It’s a great atmosphere for work and contemplation of nothing much at all, just sitting in the evening light on wicker and plastic chair circles with laughter and coffee fumes floating up and startling the birds sitting overhead in the temple trees.

                I went white-water rafting today for the first time and had myself a big, bloody blast.  Half way down the trip the guide told me that I could jump out of the raft and body-surf the next bunch of rapids.  My companion hit the water wrong and swallowed a rather unpleasant mouthful of the Ganges and then panicked in the water.  But I reached him in time and propped him upright, after which he laughed and got the hang of it.  So barring that first terrifying minute until the smile reappeared on his face, the rest of the body-surfing section was the about the most fun I’ve had in a long, long while.  I highly recommend it to all of you.

                This is what I love so much about my job.  To go routinely travel and stay in all these places, the nomadic life, the life of new faces, strange tasting waters, odd-smelling rooms, and the bonds I make with all the people.  Some which will last only until the filming lasts, and some a ways longer, but all dear and all interesting.  Life is grand.

                The only thing I miss from the city is the cinemas.  I’m craving a dark auditorium and a bucket of popcorn.  I was hoping to be able to catch the new Tarantino flick in the cinema adjacent to our hotel in Delhi on the last free day before we travelled to the mountains, but there was a party and there was tequila and pretty girls dancing, and much Mary, Mary, Mary…  So yeah, that plan didn’t get executed quite as smoothly as I had anticipated.

                I feel strangely blessed to be where I am right now.  It’s not a deep or moving feeling, simply a quiet satisfaction with my present.  I’m coming closer and closer to living in the moment only.  I still manage to stray from it, but I’m gaining my stillness.  The more I wander, the more I work, the more calm I seem to become.  Bless you Lords and Ladies for blessing this unworthy fellow.