The Perils of Being Moderately Famous

by Soha Ali Khan

  To Rohan. Rohan who was sitting outside waiting for me. I almost dropped the phone in horror as my heart started to pound in my chest. I was rooted to the floor. Well, there was no option: I was not going out there, I would just stay in the bathroom cubicle all night.

  After about ten minutes I decided I had to face the music and stepped out hoping he had left the restaurant in disgust. But no, there he was at the table reading the menu. He didn’t look offended or upset in the least.

  I sat down across from him and something compelled me to ask, ‘Could I borrow your phone?’

  He reached into his jacket pocket took out his mobile and stopped to switch it on before handing it over to me. He had turned it off during the play! I quickly opened the message inbox, found the new message from me and deleted it—all cool as a cucumber, might I add. Although I was grateful to the restaurant’s dim lighting because I’m sure my face was as red as a lobster!

  There must have been a cricket or tennis match going on somewhere because Rohan asked me, ‘Are you checking the score?’, a little puzzled as I continued to punch furiously at his phone. I can’t actually remember what I said or how I explained myself to him—the crisis had been averted and I could breathe again. Rohan and I went on to become good friends and we remain so even today, although that may change if he happens to read this book.

  Discomfited by variation but quick to adjust, the months passed without further incident and I fell into a routine. I made three friends at work—Soma, Kyle and Ashwin—who thankfully didn’t judge me or treat me any differently because of who I was. I stopped flying home to Delhi every other weekend and started to explore Mumbai.

  We are all familiar with the abiding battle over the age-old question of which is a better city to live in: Delhi or Mumbai? Wives have left husbands over this issue; families have been torn asunder. I was actually born in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was called then, but we moved to Delhi when I was four to live with Badi Amman when her health started to deteriorate. Having spent fifteen years in Delhi and an equal number of years (from 2002 to the present) in Mumbai, I think I am well positioned to offer some insights on the debate.

  Delhi is the political capital, bursting with history, culture, lush green gardens and beautiful heritage monuments. The seasons actually change in Delhi and you can enjoy a proper winter complete with a luxurious wardrobe of coats, shawls and lined boots.

  Unfortunately, to appreciate this you need to breathe in smog-filled air equivalent to smoking fourteen cigarettes a day and vogmasks have become a must-have style accessory.

  Who wore it better?

  Mumbai has seasons too: summer followed by the monsoon followed by—wait for it—a second summer. October is the hottest month of the year here but even though the heat is clement compared to a scorching Delhi summer, the humidity dampens a newly coiffed hairdo as much as it does the effervescent human spirit. As for cultural colouring, all hail Prithvi Theatre, the National Centre for the Performing Arts and Jehangir Art Gallery which stand as glittering oases in an otherwise largely unedifying wasteland.

  Having said all this, as a single working woman in India, which I was until very recently, Mumbai is the city to be in. It has been said of Mumbai that it is the city of dreams and dreamers—people come here to make something of their lives and even though many fail, few starve; the city welcomes hard workers and rewards them with opportunity. It is also universally hailed as a safer place to live in. Big egos and spoilt sons with presumably poor memories (Why else do they repeatedly feel compelled to ask if you know who their father is? ‘Tu jaanta hai mera baap kaun hai?’) own the streets of Delhi, instilling in others a sense of fear and insecurity. You think twice before taking on someone lacking in good manners or driving etiquette in the very real fear of a violent reprisal.

  In Mumbai bumper-to-bumper traffic jams are a daily inconvenience but miraculously discipline still prevails. People stay in the correct lanes and wait patiently at zebra crossings. Once, I even saw a dog standing at a traffic signal cooling its heels until the lights turned red!

  Ironically, the only time I have been a victim of crime has been in Mumbai when my flat was broken into by a thief in the dead of night. It was a beautiful bachelorette pad on the first floor of a very tastefully designed building and it was love at first sight. It was also the first flat I had seen. Common practice entails that you don’t buy the very first property you see. At least that is what I was given to understand when I left school to go to university in England. My boyfriend at the time was going to study in the States and I had assumed we would attempt to survive the distance, at least for a while, but he was a very practical boy. He wrote me a letter which read: ‘Relationships are like buying a house; you don’t buy the first one you see. You shop around a bit to see what else is available. And yes, you may realize that the first one was the best and by that time it may be off the market, but that’s a reasonable risk to take.’ It took me a while to comprehend that I was being dumped for the plentiful fish in the sea across the seas. The metaphor was lost on me at the time, but years later, in 2008, when I was looking to buy my first house, his words came back to me, and they rang as hollow then as they had in 1996.

  When you see something, or someone, special—and it’s a rare and beautiful thing—don’t take it for granted. Grab it and hold on tight. That’s what I did.

  First-floor flats are often avoided by single women because of the security implications of being so close to the road and therefore accessible to intruders. The typical first line of defence against this is the unsightly window grill, a common eyesore in the city. I was dead set against installing grills on my windows and the French doors that led to the bedroom balcony. I enjoyed an unfettered view of a rare tree-lined road outside and I felt completely safe in swanky suburban Bandra with buildings and people all around me. I lived happily grill-free and without incident for four whole years until one night in 2011.

  It was December and I had gone to a party in South Mumbai, returning home at 2.30 a.m. Kunal had been away in Goa on a five-week outdoor, shooting for Go Goa Gone and this was his first night back. He had gone to a film screening in Bandra which ended late and so he decided to spend the night at my flat instead of driving back to his place in Versova. We chatted for a while and finally decided to turn in at 3.30 a.m.

  That is why, at close to 4 a.m., when we heard a noise we were both instantly awake (although Kunal’s version of the story is that I was fast asleep until he shook me awake, but as this is my book we’ll go with my version). When you live in an apartment it is not unusual to hear thumps and bumps through the night and so I was not worried at first. Then I heard a soft thud from the balcony outside. I looked to Kunal for confirmation but he had already gotten out of bed and was crouching by the French windows, peering through the glass. Now, my mother, who wanted to create the illusion of a garden for me, had filled the balcony with a variety of differently sized plants, making it impossible for Kunal to distinguish felon from foliage.

  I was about to ask him if he could see someone when he suddenly leapt up, yanked the curtain aside and revealed a lanky man, face covered with a handkerchief who had pried open the lock and had one foot in the door already! Kunal had the element of surprise which he used to his full advantage, kicking the intruder back on to the balcony. Kunal’s right arm was in a cast at the time because he had torn some ligaments in an accident a few weeks prior to this and so he only had the use of his left hand.

  I jumped out of bed, wringing both my good hands together in a singularly unhelpful fashion, for which I will never forgive myself. I couldn’t see what was happening on the balcony but I heard them scuffling for a few seconds and then there was a shout and a thud. Kunal reappeared on the threshold with a haunted look in his eyes saying, ‘I think he’s dead.’ The man had tried to escape, half-jumping half-falling from the balcony. Kunal says he saw it as if in slow motion—the man falling backwards, eyes staring up in alarm, and the crack of what we late
r discovered was his back breaking followed by silence.

  We rushed down, stopping to wake the security guard (he had, of course, slept through all of this) who unlocked the main gate to the road where the man lay. Thankfully, he stirred. That was all I wanted to see, and once I knew he was alive I went back inside. I didn’t want to see his face and be haunted by it in my dreams, or maybe I didn’t want him to see mine. I called 100 for the first and only time in my life. The police van came within ten minutes and took him, Kunal and the security guard to the station to file charges and to get the man medical aid. It was only when I was back in my flat that the magnitude of what had happened, and what could have happened had Kunal not been there, as he had not been every night for the past five weeks, hit me.

  When Kunal returned at 7 a.m. he told me the police had showed him the ‘most-wanted’ list on the noticeboard and pointed out our intruder’s name at number two. They had even slapped him on the back and thanked him for doing their job but I could tell he was more than a little spooked by the fact that he had fought and nabbed a hardened criminal.

  All in all it was the best possible outcome to the situation—nobody was hurt (except the neighbourhood thief who had a hairline fracture), nothing had been stolen, the thief had been apprehended and Kunal had proved himself a real-life hero in the fight or flight response test. Needless to say the following day window grills with sturdy locks were installed throughout the house. You never think it’s going to happen to you until it does. I continue to feel safe in Mumbai in a way that I don’t in Delhi but I don’t feel invincible any more—at home and on the streets; I am a little bit more wary of things that go bump in the night.

  If Mumbai is the city that has given me my only run-in with crime, it is also the city that came to my rescue in 2005 when thousands of people were killed and the city came to a three-day standstill because of the floods. Torrential rain lashed Maharashtra on 26 July—it was the eighth ever twenty-four-hour recorded rainfall figure of 944 mm.

  Like many others that day I found myself stranded, after my car stalled on S.V. Road, 8 kilometres from home (Lokhandwala at the time). I couldn’t get through to anyone, I didn’t know how to get home and it was pouring relentlessly. I abandoned my car with a note taped to the inside of the windscreen saying I would be back to pick it up the following day and tried to follow the spontaneous human chain that had formed in the middle of the road but my flimsy chappals made it difficult to get a firm footing. The water was rising and had reached my waist and I could feel the insistent pull of an invisible current tugging at me. The side roads looked like small rivers leading off to a dark, watery grave; the odd animal carcass floated by every now and then. It was a bizarre and grotesque scene. I should have been terrified but what I remember is how warm and friendly complete strangers were to me, stopping in their tracks to direct me, offer me drinking water and the use of their phones.

  I finally managed to get through to my mother in Delhi who called my colleague in Khar (for some reason I couldn’t get through to anyone in the city) and asked him to find me while I sat shivering on a stationary BEST bus (I confess that that is the only time I have sat on a public bus), my sole refuge from the punishing rain. I remember being acutely conscious of my bedraggled appearance—I was sopping wet, hair plastered to my head, mascara streaking my face—and hoping fervently that I was unrecognizable to the others on the bus.

  Two women sitting across the aisle glanced at me a few times and whispered to each other. I considered getting off the bus and melting away into the nameless crowd but the absurdity of being vain in this situation hit me. I turned to face them, inviting them to see me, the real me, not an actor or a face on a billboard, but just a girl stranded in the rain, much like themselves.

  ‘It has to stop sometime, don’t worry,’ the one closer to me said and the simple logic of that was immensely comforting. I realized that they were not judging me; it was I who was judging them. Having been perennially sized up and ogled at during my years in Delhi, I feared a gigantic metropolis like Mumbai with its teeming crowds would eat me alive, and there I was, totally defenceless, without even a basic protective layer of make-up! I couldn’t have been more wrong. I ended up chatting away amiably with the two women—we knew it would not be an enduring friendship but for those two hours we were comfortable companions of circumstance.

  I will be forever grateful to Shawn, my colleague, for leaving the safety and security of his house to scour all the stalled buses on S.V. Road in search of me, someone he really didn’t know all that well. When he finally found me, we sought shelter in Santa Cruz at the home of his friend who gave me a change of clothes and a hot meal. At daybreak I decided to continue the journey home on foot.

  The streets were full of people serving tea, biscuits, water and bananas to those who had been marooned through the night. In all it took me twenty-three hours to get back to my flat, but that day, as I trudged through waterlogged lanes, I felt a bond form with the city and its people, their resilience and compassion. I felt proud to have chosen to settle down here, to call Mumbai my home. I think it was this experience that made me so keen to do Tum Mile, the 2009 love story film set against the backdrop of this very deluge.

  On the sets of Tum Mile—bringing back a flood of memories

  Why else would one choose to spend forty days in stagnant waist-deep water, under powerful ceiling rain machines on a 100x250-feet studio floor in Bhandup, one of the oldest suburbs in Mumbai—hardly the most glamorous of settings!

  Our director Kunal Deshmukh actually wore a scuba-diving suit to work each day and at one point I heard him announce on the mic, ‘Yahan pe koi thukega nahin, koi pishaab nahin karega!’ ‘Nobody will spit in the water, nobody will urinate here.’ ‘Yahan’ being the water we were all working in. He was looking pointedly at a light man who had not taken a bathroom break in eight hours, when the rest of us had taken at least two each!

  Did someone say there’s soup?

  How I feel without coffee? Depresso.

  The flooding may have proved that Delhi has better social and economic facilities than Mumbai, but what it lacks in infrastructure Mumbai more than makes up for with civilization. My faith in this city has been reaffirmed time and time again—be it during the suburban train blasts of July 2006 or the terror attacks of November 2008. The city refuses to be brought to its knees. Call it an undying spirit or just plain necessity, even the hardened cynic would have to accept that there exists a humanity here that prompts people to rescue strangers, makes crowds throng to blood donation camps and helping hands to disaster relief.

  I was about to book my ticket back to Delhi when Amman told me to give Mumbai three months. That was fifteen years ago. Since then I have put down roots here—this is my place of residence, my place of work, where I met and married my husband. I may have spent my growing-up years in Delhi but I grew up in Mumbai—this is where I finally found the courage to radically overhaul my carefully constructed career plan, to turn my back on life in London, to forsake my cushy corporate job and with it the approval of my parents, to embark on a shaky career in the very industry I had assiduously steered clear of. This is where I entered Bollywood.

  6

  A Working Actor

  I had a friend in school who could make a map of the world from memory in under ten minutes. I thought it was a skill worth learning—especially useful for when you pick the Person/Place/Animal category in Pictionary—but, when I looked at references to copy from, I found that every map was different. The most common map, the one hanging in your school’s geography classroom for instance, is the Mercator projection map drawn way back in 1596 to help sailors navigate the world. It has all the land masses with their particular shapes—the horn of Africa, boot-shaped Italy—but the sizes are all wrong.

  North America is made to look as vast as Africa, the Scandinavian countries bigger than India, and China smaller than Greenland. In reality, India is three times the size of all the Scandinavian countr
ies put together, China is four times larger than Greenland and you could fit three North Americas into Africa.

  So why did this happen?

  Gerardus Mercator, the map-maker, was German and when deciding where to centre his projection of the earth, he arbitrarily chose his own country, Germany. As a result the equator was placed not halfway down as it should be but two-thirds of the way down and sizes were distorted in favour of the wealthier lands of the north.

  Unlike other great scholars of the age, Mercator opted not to travel and acquired his knowledge of geography from a vast library of books and interactions with visiting travellers, merchants and statesmen instead. Had he ventured out more, perhaps his work would have been a more accurate reflection of fact.

  But it’s not just his map, any flat map of the earth is a lie because the earth itself is not flat. You simply cannot show the entire surface of a spherical-ish earth on a flat surface. The centre of this representation of the earth then becomes an ideological one guided by national pride, as in the case of Mercator, or religious persuasion with some Muslims choosing Mecca to be the centre of their world and some Christians, Jerusalem.

  So the only map you can trust is a globe, and even a cursory glance at one will reveal a deep truth—there is no surface centre of the earth, only an inner core 6000-kilometres deep, a solid sphere made of iron with a temperature close to that of the surface of the sun. By now you must be wondering why I am subjecting you to an obtuse lesson in cartography so I’ll stop circumambulating the globe and get to the point.

  If Mercator, hailed for his erudition as the foremost mathematician of his time, thought Germany acceptable as the fulcrum around which the world revolves, then the quintessential Hindi movie actor can be easily forgiven for thinking that Bollywood is the centre of the world and that the only lives worth noting are those of the stars who fill the print, electronic and online media. In fact most people—even the non-celestial—tend to live life merely on the surface. They get caught up in the daily grind of work, chores and bills, and before they know it their lives, or at least the part that’s worth living, is over.