“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it,” wrote Paulo Coelho in The Alchemist. I doubted it till an incident happened to me. Ever since the advent of TV, I have nurtured the fantasy of acting in a serial or a film. I had day-dreamed often of someone serendipitously stopping me at an airport or mall with an offer of a role.
Just so, my wish did come true when I went to watch a play at Rangashankara in Bengaluru. A young man smiled at me, approached me and asked me if I was an actor. “I wish I were one,” I replied.
After small talk, he asked me if I would be interested in acting as an old woman in an unnamed OTT film. Wasn’t I? The surrealistic nature of the happening disoriented me quite a bit.
He took my contact number and sent me the files of the scenes I was to audition for. He asked me to meet him at a studio at 10 a.m. the next day. He said he was the assistant director of a famous Bollywood movie.
During the night I remembered my earlier attempts at stardom. The first was on school day. I was eight. Dressed as the angel in Abou Ben Adhem, I looked perfect with diaphanous wings and the Book of Gold but when the time came, I just did not open my mouth to respond to the protagonist. Ben Adhem was aghast and so was I. As I stood with pursed lips, the teacher tried to prompt me. At the end, everybody clapped as I left the stage. My second attempt in college, by which time I got over my stage fright, was as an abusive mother-in-law. It was a runaway success. In my third attempt, I donned the role of a cook and received a standing ovation and the best actress award.
It was exactly 10 a.m. as I walked demurely into a dingy one-room studio in an off-white cotton sari, as required, looking exactly like a Malayali grandma. When the assistant asked me if I was ready, I gawked as I had not learnt my lines. He kindly gave me time to practice. I was to be the mistress of a big farm in Kerala. The locale was a barnyard and I had to walk through bossily and say a few words in Hindi. Humility prevents me to claim that the first scene went off with aplomb. For the second scene, I had to learn 10 sentences in Hindi. Unused to rote-learning, I could not. Everybody egged me on, but there were more pauses than clauses. The assistant director looked a tad sad.
I guess the universe did its bit, perhaps I didn’t do, mine.
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