Bits of Paper

‘Hello, Pappa, they have sent a dabba unit Qualis to pick me up. You know I don’t want to make a fuss first thing in the morning and spoil my mood. The whole day is then just filled with retakes. Please talk to the production manager. Apparently, the costume designer will also be picked up somewhere along the way. Tell them I won’t come to the location from tomorrow if they don’t send a decent AC car for me. The role I have is also nothing much to speak of. Sorry … I cannot hear you … I’m on the NICE road. The signal is weak … hello … hello.’ Indignantly throwing her smartphone on the empty seat next to her, Subhadra looked out. No matter how far you came from the city, cleaving the ground and rising up from the slopes of hills and dried lakes were scattered skeletons of multistorey buildings looking like the outstretched, straining, massive hands of the city. Like a dog giving chase upon sighting you, the city was in relentless hot pursuit. The road ahead went on and on like a never-ending, long, dull welcome speech.

‘Madam, are we picking up Soni madam? We have to go to Kengeri from here, then. If not, we could directly carry on from here,’ Bhujanga, who was driving, body still as a statue, said seriously, his intention to cover up the crime of having inadvertently heard her conversation. Subhadra responded, ‘Oh, I don’t know, pa. Do as you have been told.’

‘Well, one nice passenger train this has become! And she’ll have those costume suitcases with her too,’ Subhadra added. ‘That is why I asked, Madam, if we should just go? We will also get time to make a quick stop at Maddur for some thatte idlis.’

Saying, ‘If Soni is late then everything will run late. There’s no need for fresh trouble now,’ Subhadra picked up her phone again, and compulsively scanned through WhatsApp and other apps. She binned messages that seemed like spam without opening them. She felt a sort of excitement when she deleted anything. She seethed when she received ready-made forwarded messages. People who forwarded environmentally concerned messages like ‘Sparrows do not have water, keep a glass of water on the windowsill, let the sparrows live’, and did not put a glass of water out themselves but only forward messages to a hundred people, puffing under the illusion of having done a big eco-friendly act, seemed to her laughable and inexcusable. Subhadra stayed tuned to her phone primarily because it was indispensable for work-related exchanges – a dialogue sheet would be sent or a photo forwarded across to convey an idea of continuity with the previous scene.

Bhujanga’s phone rang. ‘Stop the car when you talk,’ she told him.

‘Hello … I am on duty …call me later … what? I am on duty … hello … where did it happen? Is there a police station close by? Did I not tell you to take the silver Indica? Why did you take that one? Yeah, say that you did not see the hump … hello … what? No, no … no case … how many people are there? Say sorry … hello … it won’t hurt you to say sorry! Okay, fine then! It’s on your head! Compensate for the damage…’ ending his call in agitation, throwing the phone into the slot next to the gearbox, he gulped down water from a worn-out plastic bottle. He picked up the phone again and tried to call back. The line was engaged. ‘Che,’ he exclaimed. ‘Is it urgent? Has somebody been hurt?’ Subhadra asked softly. ‘These boys don’t listen, madam. After finishing his degree in our hometown, my nephew has come here to look for a job. We run taxis. I said he could drive one till he found a good job. Look, now he has taken a new car and rammed it into the vehicle in front of him near Mandya. The guy in the front braked because of a hump … my nephew didn’t see, he says. What can I do from here? Arrogance … sheer arrogance. Does he listen to what I say? No…’

As it happened, Subhadra had many ready platitudes for such situations. Playing parts over and over in a handful of serials, easy, context-appropriate comments came to her effortlessly. A glance at the dialogue sheet, a sense of the circumstance was all it took, and plop plop the words dropped from her mouth. This would happen even at home. She would then abruptly stop talking, feeling even life had turned into a serial. Sometimes she was taken aback that there was no background music to existence. In serials, certainly hundreds of feeble lines appeared without any intensity. And it seemed that people who heard them also felt only a habitual, weak relief.

Even if she began to speak of the costume designer Soni now, she would be making habitual comments like these, coming close to tasteless gossip that would probably bore Bhujanga and her, and end by triggering a mutual disgust. Then again, nobody has as much access to the kaccha maal of gossip as drivers do. For people like Bhujanga, it wasn’t unusual to see, in the flow of trashing somebody, people getting carried away without realising the driver may be listening in, then suddenly enlightened of the fact of the driver’s presence, falling silent ekdum, signalling towards him with their eyes, and going into weather-talk and saying things like ‘Isn’t the greenery lovely’. This applied to phone conversations, too. Therefore, whatever it may be, thinking it best to let Bhujanga start the conversation, Subhadra remained quiet. If, of his own volition, Bhujanga had wound her up and said, ‘They could have sent Soni madam in another car, right Madam? She is a slightly kirik party…’, Subhadra would not have hesitated to wholeheartedly join in. And to temper the backbiting of the comments, if either of them had tried saying, ‘Poor Soni, has to work and raise the children single-handedly…’, the other would have been ready with, ‘Oh, no need to pity her, she’s not that simple…’ to flip a spread dosa closed, as it were. In this manner, talk like bits of paper in the air would have swirled and flown about in no particular hurry and without reason. Despite all this, being unable to witness Bhujanga’s distress and remain quiet, Subhadra said, ‘You could have signed up your nephew to work in the shooting unit … so many cabs are needed here.’

Meanwhile, up ahead, the NICE road branched into four or five roads, which stood in many dancing postures. On one such winding road, Bhujanga began to drive the car downhill. While coming down these massive flyovers, vehicles looked like toys somebody had let loose. At the end of a big bend, when they were about to join the main road, on the side, looking like a Goan woman in a skirt and loose t-shirt, Soni waved her hand for them to stop, while continuing to talk on the phone. Saying, ‘Our madam is here,’ Bhujanga stopped the car. While still on the phone, signalling with her hands to Bhujanga to put the suitcases in the back, smiling at Subhadra as she continued to speak, saying on the phone, ‘Okay, okay, that is your problem…’ Soni got in through the door on the driver’s side and sat next to Subhadra. It seemed like she had brought a whole different world in with her. Her body was quavering in various ways and responding in agitation to what only she could hear over the phone. Her body was present but her mind, along with her senses, had migrated to the other world. In the midst of her agitation, she turned her head and mimed a request, as if to say, ‘Would you lower the window?’ Soni did not notice that Bhujanga, having put the suitcases in the back, had returned to his seat and started the car. But after they moved a little ahead, she suddenly spun back and waved tata bye-bye, and then again saying, ‘Haan hmm’, started paying attention to the gush of talk coming from the phone. Curious as to who she might have waved to, when Subhadra turned to look, she did not spot anybody. Soni might have waved out of a force of habit, Subhadra thought to herself.

A strange quiet began to envelope the space. They passed by puncture repair shops, coconut water shops, resorts with odd names like Golden Super. Soni had now stopped ‘hmming’ and was listening intently. Subhdra wondered if the person on the other end of the call might be reading out something. Just then, Soni burst out declaring, ‘Khata is done … it’s done … B Khata,’ then said, ‘I’m on location now … I’ll call you in the evening,’ and slipped her phone into her purse. She covered her face with both hands and sighed as if all her five senses had returned. Subhadra, too, was a little relieved. Because Soni, who had split from her husband, had begun her separate journey with her children. If she had fought with him or the lawyer had read the divorce papers, there was a chance that its echoes would continue here. For now, it looked like this was about either a site she had bought or was considering buying. Subhadra wished her well silently and patted her on the shoulder. Her shirt was unironed, soft. It had the natural look of home clothes. Soni, who ironed all the time and prepared everybody’s clothes at the shooting spot, was like that elder sister who, after organising everything at the wedding home, and scolding everybody, haphazardly wraps a sari around herself at the last minute and waits for the muhurta standing on her tiptoes to bless the newlywed couple with rice grains.

‘The character should emerge from within. Not from the clothing; clothes are only a pretext,’ was Soni’s philosophy. Yet, Deepika’s skirt with a thousand bouncing pleats, her blouse, and her overall style in ‘Bajirao Mastani’ always stunned her. Tantrums by some actors maddened her just as much. She felt like rudely saying, ‘Take a good look at your face in the mirror first, man!’ A slightly short hero, the other day, had made a big fuss and insisted that he certainly would not wear the vertical-lined shirt. In truth, short people looked tall-bodied in vertical, long-lined clothes. They looked squat and round if they wore horizontally lined t-shirts. But who was listening to her? In the end, Soni would get over her anger through the ironing she did. Her fury was such that she would ideally have liked to lay these actors flat and run the hot, hot istri on them. When the people in the unit looked at her with false sympathy as if to say, ‘There is some trouble in her personal life, which is why, poor thing, she gets so irritated like this,’ her annoyance would grow more. This was a deluded game of imagining her personal life as they pleased, deforming it into ugliness, and thinking that their life was better. Soni understood this and pitied them. Even in real life, everybody was performing as if in a daily serial. She would laugh to herself, thinking, thank god, at least the job of ironing everybody’s clothes in these day-to-day domestic serials hadn’t been assigned to her. If she spotted clothes hung to dry on lines in the backyard or balcony of some house, they all seemed to her to be the costumes of their respective serials. These clothes, as a whole, narrated the domestic tales of these houses. If you tried a little hard, you could almost hear the background music of the scene.

A kind of silence began to envelope the space slowly, unbearably. ‘Is there a charger?’ Subhadra asked. Saying, ‘I have one but it’s not working,’ Bhujanga continued, ‘Weren’t you asking something, Madam? What was it?’ At that moment, nothing occurred to Subhadra. Bhujanga prodded, ‘About my nephew…’ Whatever it was that she had asked, Subhadra seemed to have deleted it from her mind. Bhujanga himself continued, ‘You had asked why I didn’t tell him to join the shooting unit. We have struggled enough, madam. He is educated, not like us. Here in the unit, we come across some people’s arrogance and nakhras that are difficult to put up with even for us. But somehow, we bear it. He wouldn’t be able to; he can’t stand lies. And our world of shooting is one big false world, no? I’m not talking about you. Well, it’s a different matter for you. But in the whole unit, people like us, drivers, spot boys, tea boys, touch-up boys … watch them all sometime … then, one day, when you find them by themselves, ask them. You will find each one of them has left their village behind to come here to become a hero or an artist … like your ‘Bhatru’ writes in his songs. They’ve caught a lorry on the highway and come here, believing that if not today, then tomorrow, things will be better, they will surely be better; you don’t even realise when the whole script changes. We remain forever on this side of the camera. Unit meals … overtime … unit meals … overtime … once you fall into that grinding mill, there is no going back. And the hopeless film isn’t even worth watching. People from our village will not even be able to read our names on the picture title card, that’s how fast they roll it in the end. Tell me, who’d want to be in this field? He took a gulp of water and asked, ‘Madam, are you paid per day basis or is it a full-picture package?’

Soni and Subhadra stared at each other. ‘Please don’t take it to heart. I’m just stating things as they are. There are some people in the passenger seat, who think this idiot driver might not have gotten much sleep at night, and in the anxiety that he might fall asleep at the wheel, they pelt some random question at him, and go on looking at their WhatsApp and keep messaging, saying ‘ah?’ from time to time. I’ve driven passengers to call centres, to Electronic City. We couldn’t utter even a word, while they would say whatever they wanted, however they wanted, and cackle. I can’t bear it. I press hard on the horn. The angrier I am, the more I press. They blink blankly and shut up and complain later, saying he honks a lot. Are we mad to honk without a reason? It’s our anguish, our siren,’ As he was saying this, he was honking loudly. ‘People hesitate even to bring us marriage proposals,’ he added for good measure. Soni immediately patted his shoulder and said, ‘No, trust me, you are lucky there.’ Suddenly, it seemed like even the vehicles around them were wailing as they passed by.

Soni attempted to sleep, leaning her head on the window. She wasn’t comfortable; then suddenly, as if she had remembered somebody’s dialogue, she turned to Subhadra and said, ‘Don’t be stubborn about doing only movies, if you get roles in serials, keep doing them. People watch these serials. The other day, you were shouting at somebody on the phone, saying you would not do serial-gerials. If you go only for movies, you will not even be on the poster – only the hero, heroine, and villain are part of it. While on tv, people watch you engrossed. No need for an attitude, I think. You are so sweet. Soft colours will suit you. It becomes evident: you have a mind; that you have a personality. The soft costumes will highlight that even more. Hero-heroines that look like dolls don’t know that the more jigimigi bling they wear, the blander they look. Dumb idiots. Heroes that obsess over only body, body, body, and six-packs look like tractors or bikes. It does not feel like they have a mind. It’s useless to decorate only the body. The mind does not need adornment. These are the basics of costume designing. Subhadra, wherever you get good roles, do them,’ she said encouragingly.

‘Spring rolls I’d still get, Soni. Where would I find good roles, tell me? If we score a good role in an award-winning-film for our peace of mind, we ourselves don’t get to see it,’ said Subhadra and lovingly stroking the soft arm of Soni’s t-shirt, added, ‘thanks’. As if softening suddenly at her touch, Soni said, ‘You know, my children, they are gems, gems. They want to trouble me as little as possible, they try to do all their work on their own…’ She choked as she said it, and stopped. Careful not to let the empty talk of ‘which class, which school’ slip in, Subhadra just patted Soni on the arm.

A precious atmosphere filled that moving vehicle, quite separated from the places the three of them had left behind, and the place they were all going to. Like that absurd moment when you forget where you put the chocolate you hid to eat out of everybody’s sight. This atmosphere bore no relationship to the heaps and heaps of different clothes in the suitcases at the back. There was no relation to it and the information and numbers on the phone. But there was a relation between it and the back of Bhujanga’s neck, that sweated slowly. There was a relation between it and Soni’s palm, slightly loose from sleep and tilted on the seat, like a secret left open. And this atmosphere was like the peace that can only be found at the edge of a certain kind of penury. It looked as though Bhujanga was slowing down the car. He was in a dilemma about whether to stop for thatte idlis. If they stopped, everything would again turn false. They had to guard it – this atmosphere – for as long as they could. If upset even a little bit, they wouldn’t find it again. Tapping Bhujanga’s back, Subhadra softly said, ‘Don’t stop. Soni is sleeping. Let’s keep going.’ Bhujanga changed gears and pressed on the accelerator.

All three of them simultaneously started receiving calls from the staff at the shooting. None of them picked up the phone. One after another, the calls stopped. Subhadra scooted a little ahead and, as if only in this moment, only with this person was asking this question possible. ‘Bhujanga, this director and one or two of my friends are insisting that it would be good if I changed my name. I have said, definitely not. But somehow now I feel – all our troubles and struggles stem from taking our names too seriously. Isn’t a new name just like a new dress or a new chappal of a different colour? You can wear it, roam about, and come back. No? Instead of Subhadra, if I were called Yamini, how would it sound? Good, no?’ She asked him this with enthusiasm, her tone the same as that of small children asking in a toy store, ‘Shall I take this one?’ With one hand on the steering wheel, drinking water with the other, staring intently at the road ahead, Bhujanga said, like a spiritual guru, ‘No harm,’ and shook his head. Any moment now, they’d be near the tree on the left, and once they turned onto that mud road, they would reach the shooting spot in about five minutes. Slowing down, their vehicle approached the turn. If you were to look down from the sky, the car would look like a slow-moving orphan satellite. As the turn neared, its horn grew louder and sounded like a child’s angry cry that escalates as the school approaches.