There were five missed calls. By the time I got around to calling Asghar back, it was past midnight but he wouldn’t mind, I was certain. We often talked into the wee hours even on weekdays. He never said a word about having to be up at six in the morning and dropping the kids off at school at a quarter to eight. My own brother might say something like, some of us have real jobs, you know? Not Asghar.
I used to get drunk a few times a year and call him, raving and ranting about how I was passed over yet again, the injustice of it, and how I was sick of everyone, mostly myself. Asghar would get me through the night and into the pale dawn of a new day. Me pouring myself cheap gins, him rooting about in the fridge for a midnight snack. He didn’t get fat, no matter how many kebabs and cream rolls he ate, and his eyes never failed to crinkle when I called him a good-looking bastard with his head of curls, hazel eyes, and lanky frame. If he spent any time at all in the gym, he’d have the kind of torso that sells business suits. He could sing and I bet he could dance, too, if he took lessons. I, on the other hand, with my short legs, big nose, and square jaw, would never turn any heads. Yet, I had ended up the actor and Asghar, the bank manager.
It could so easily have been the other way around. Asghar had a better grip on literature and stagecraft. I had a better head for math. But then, I cleared high school with less than 80 per cent marks and all hopes of getting into engineering college died. Not that I especially minded. I didn’t particularly want to be an engineer, or, for that matter, a banker. Because my own father was a banker, I had signed up for a Bachelor’s in commerce but my first week on campus, I ran into Asghar and I never attended a lecture again. Asghar and his group of friends had founded an undergraduate theatre club in Baansa and I had started acting only because he picked me to play the lead in the club’s first production. That’s all I had been trying to say in the Buzz interview that set off a storm and blew all our boats off course.
For over fifteen years, I had hung about on the fringes of Bollywood. While I waited for my big break, I did whatever jobs came to hand. Plays, theatre lighting, bit parts on television, radio jingles, audiobooks. Fifteen long years of auditioning for meaty roles but, zilch. Then a film producer happened to listen to a Hindi novel that I had narrated. He didn’t just buy the adaptation rights, he insisted I play the narrator’s role in the film. This character was supposed to be an unattractive guy, fortyish, and with a mean streak, and the producer thought that I looked and sounded the part. The film was shot on a low budget. I was paid peanuts but the day I was invited to see the rough cut, I knew, from now on, things were going to be different for me. And they were.
The week the film released in theatres, Buzz called about doing a profile. Now, a profile is already different from merely being interviewed. First, the magazine sent a photographer who shot my face with some love, bringing light to its creases, gouging the hollows under my eyes even deeper. There I sat, holding a book under a lamp, cast into shadows that made me look like a man of obscure and dangerous origins. There I was again, leaning against a balcony railing in a rumpled night suit. Unwashed, unbrushed, almost sexy.
Then a journalist came over to interview me. She insisted on visiting me at home because, she said, she was looking for texture. So I made her a cup of tea and talked about growing up in a small town called Baansa, north of Lucknow but south of Bareilly. How I’d cut classes to meet girls, how swirls of dust rose up in the first week of June and how they filled your nostrils and throat until you felt as if you’d choke to death, and how December brought a sort of rolling fog that blinded you and made you jump at the sound of footsteps so that you started to believe in ghosts. That sort of thing.
The journalist sat cross-legged on my carpet, her eyes twinkling. She said, “Reeally?” so often that I began to warm up to the texture of my own life. I told her about a skinny river that bends at a forty-five-degree angle, and about the townsfolk who affectionately call it Burhiya: the old woman. I talked about bicycle rides through bamboo groves, and a fledgling drama club at a mofussil university. I told her about my best buddy, Asghar, and how he had prepared me for the stage, and how, in the final year of college, I had climbed up a drainpipe to stand on a window ledge and help Asghar during his Economics exam. Oh, that profile was going to sparkle with gravelly detail. They’ll put all that stuff in my obituary someday, I thought.
The day the Buzz profile was published, my phone was ringing non-stop. I was on the cover of the magazine. Casting directors were calling to ask about my schedule and would I mind auditioning? Of course, they already knew I was perfect for the role, but would I mind reading some lines and filming myself on my cell phone? I got offered an advertisement for ginger cookies. Sejal, my ex-wife, sent champagne. There were calls from theatre friends, uncles, journalists wanting more anecdotes about my long years of “struggle”. Asghar’s five missed calls were part of that mix and I didn’t answer because I wanted to talk to him at length and with no interruptions.
When at last I did call back, he didn’t answer. Could he be asleep? Quite likely, I thought, for it was the middle of the week. I went to bed and woke up late the next morning and was promptly distracted by more calls from industry folk. At the end of the day, my brother Aun sent me a text, asking if I had spoken to Asghar. So, I tried calling again, before midnight this time.
Asghar answered after several rings but he didn’t say a word. Not even hello. I kept saying, “Hello? Are you there? Can you hear me?”
At last he spoke. “I can hear.”
His voice was so quiet, I knew at once that something was wrong. Still, I strutted about for a couple of minutes, wanting to talk of my own triumph first.
Excerpted with permission from The Comeback, Annie Zaidi, Aleph Book Company.
