You
have always loved me. No matter what you say, no matter how you convince
yourself otherwise; I do not care. I used to care a long time back. Time flies
and how. People change too, you know. I am a different person today. I was a different
person that day in 2008 when I saw you and my mouth was left agape; staring
surprisingly at what had become of you, the transformation that hung on you.
From every word you spoke to every glance that you stole.
You
still steal glances; don’t you? I still shed tears; don’t I? How times change
and how some things within us still are the same. It’s a pity and a wonder how
we live and keep living with such conflicts, thoughts and words. Words can scar
very heavily you know. Words that people just fling aside, making up for
silences that are uncalled for. Must we keep speaking? Must we keep affirming
that indeed we have changed, when in reality; we are just shallower, diluted, less
intense shadows of our own past.
They
call it “growing up”; but do we really grow “up”? I think we grow down.
Stooping down low below all kinds of depths; resurfacing with might, strength
and an added scorn to throw light on the ironies and humiliations that our
lives throw at us.
They
call it life; yet we die every day, maybe an inch closer towards what we like
to think of as goals. Slowly but surely we keep killing our hope as we go to
replace it bit by bit with despair and loathing. The years pass us by, we lose
track of time. We forget so many little details about things that make us happy
or sad.
It
is very difficult for me to forget you know. I don’t have to make an effort to
remember. That is because I feel. I feel so much that sometimes these feelings
overpower my present tense. They cast their tall shadows on my everyday life
you know. They threaten to eat me up from within, these feelings so fierce.
They do not make me forget. They make me remember all things of the past. They
haunt me night and day, reminding me so much of the things that I have said or
heard or done or felt.
They
say there is no use dwelling in the past. But the past is what tells you things
about everything. You throw some light in retrospect and you are handed an
objectivity that lands you in just about the right perspective. Plus you have
grown right? Down or up, you might have changed, might not have refused to
change, but surely you have grown a year, a month or a day older. That cannot
be denied. Change is the only constant and the only things that keep changing
are the years and the numbers and the seasons; yet everything is almost always
the same, just like people.
There
is nothing that I should feel bad about. I should not feel about the bad person
that I might have made people to believe is me. I should not feel bad about the
things that I think I have done wrong. I should, surely, keep on believing that
since I cried those real tears for my father when he was alive, I should not,
after his death, feel bad about anything that I did wrong. Whatever happened,
whichever way I behaved, I should keep reminding myself about all those real
tears that I shed on my own. I had nobody by my side right? I did not feel
alone. I felt pain. The same pain that was dwelling in my father; within his
body and mind, a disease that was eating him up from within, and I was here to
witness that and feel his pain. Why should I beat myself up about the kind of
things that I have said or done, losing people and projects and
“professionalism” on the way? For all I know, I witnessed my father howling and
crying like a child because he was feeling his mother’s pain from the same
disease that took her away. I have seen him squirming from the fear of death
and the pain in agony right before his heart failed. I showed him pictures. I
showed him photographs the night he passed away. That is the last remembrance
of a communication with my father that I chose for myself. Nobody told me what
to do. I did that myself.
I
did not know that he was going to die. I was praying to God for that. I was
praying that he should die and escape the pain. I know what pain is. I have
felt that. I felt his pain. Whatever I did for him were the right things. I
played music for him. I told him stories. I tried to make him laugh. Pretty
much everything that he has done for me during the most crucial formative early
years of my life; he exposed me to music. Pandit Jasraj, Hemanta Mukhapadhyay
and Pancham and Raag Malkosh are my earliest memories of music. I knew about
Van Gogh biting off his ear before I turned ten. All thanks to my father.
Yes
I behaved all batshit crazy. Yes I behaved unprofessionally. Yes I said and did
the kind of things I could never imagine or associate myself with, I should
remember that I have done things like help my father urinate, I have helped him
walk, I have helped him read a newspaper when he was helpless. I cannot be a
bad person. I feel for others. Sometimes I feel so much that I cry for salesmen
and cry thinking about my own death or cry while cooking up some story inside
my head.
I
was always like that right? Cooking up stories inside my head? Stories that
made me cry? I was always a wee bit
different from others around right? And this has nothing to do with my sister.
I was that, different, a long before she was even conceived.
I
would fight with my mother for scolding my father whenever he would want to lie
down after fifteen minutes of sitting on a chair. I felt that if he wants to
lie face up on his bed all day long, he should do that, just because he feels
like it. I of course wasn't there for half the battle that my mother fought alone.
Why? Because of that same “professionalism” that I so shamefully lost on the 3rd
of April; the person who recommended my name to hire me as her assistant had no
idea what was going on inside my head. She does not know, they do not know what
I went through, they have no idea how very fucked up I was. I looked okay. I
behaved aptly from the 27th of March to the 3rd of April.
I know EXACTLY where I went wrong. I know exactly why I went wrong. I was a
mess. I was thinking and feeling, as usual, too much about the past and
introspecting about myself, my being and the kind of person I was becoming. In
the process, I was losing out on money, 20,000 bucks, and a sparkling clean
reputation for a clear-headed “sorted” hard worker that I have always made sure
that my employers maintain with regard to my work; I was losing out on a career
prospect. I was compromising on work.
But
they do not know what I went through, they are not aware that during the past
few months of the last bygone year, I used to smoke grass only to realize that
it had started making me cry as opposed to making me smile; like always. They
had no way of knowing that I was not on the project because I wanted money or I
was running after a career, as used to be usual, but to distract myself from
the invariable thoughts about my father’s “condition”. They surely did not know that “BB” was for
me, a project, like the last one, “Hijli”, some kind of work to waver my mind
away from the situation at home.
It
was never about me. Therefore I reacted. I NEVER work for money. Yes I know
that earning money is important. But hey!! I chose my profession when I was 21
years old. I was NOT thinking at that time about things like financial security
or the fact that in the next five years I will keep being the broke girl who
has to think thrice before buying herself a 100 rupee t.shirt or a 300 rupee
eye-liner, forget about buying a car or a flat.
I
was going with the flow and drowning deep into something I happily referred to
as “my calling” inside my mind. What is this profession? This occupation I had
so smilingly chosen for myself by simply going with the flow and doing things
that made me feel like as if I was doing the right thing by choosing this so
called profession.
What
is my profession? What do I do for a living? I work for TV shows is a simple
answer. Would have loved to work for films but then I needed a certain fixed
“job” paying me a monthly fixed income so that I got to stay in the city of
Bombay while chasing after some kind of a dream. What is that dream? What is
the answer to a simple question that people ask themselves in the wake of
choosing a profession – “five years down the line where do you see yourself??”
– The answer is quite simple and ready-at-hand. I don’t know.
I
do know one thing. I have some memories. The first project that I ever worked
for, after passing out from college, I came to know a person who was Ram Gopal
Verma’s assistant; he was the chief assistant director for that particular
project, a short film with a budget of an estimated Rupees 1 Crore. He was an extremely nice person, a Bengali, a
person with a good sense of humour, he who had a lot of stories about RGV up
his sleeve which he, like a very quintessential Bengali loved to regale people
around him with. I, being an ardent RGV fan, lapped up his stories.
I
remember one particular story which made me think about RGV the director. The
story went something like, during the shoot of the film “D”, the crew was tense
about a sunset shot. Sunset shots are very tricky that way. You have only about
five minutes of actual roll-time because you have to shoot the sun, a natural
element in all its glory; you have to make sure that the shot is ready at a
precise particular time so as to assure a smooth shot-taking. So, this
particular shot was a jimmy jib shot, therefore a lot of people had to work
their nerves off trying to get the shot ready on time for the obvious things
and also because nobody wants to piss off a director at any given point of
time.
Ultimately
what happened was, the chief assistant was shouted at and called a “bhenchod”
and a “bhosdi ke” etc by the great RGV himself because this shot was not ready
in time.
I
was working as a production assistant in this short film. It was my first time
ever as a “professional”. My job was to take care of film stock and to prepare
reports for the producer of the film after each day of shoot stating what went
wrong and why. It was very simple. I was not being paid for the job that was a
seven day shoot that saw me grow seven shades darker just like a fair and
lovely ad gone reverse. A veteran production boy showed me the film stock and
told me that one can of stock contains some few feet of film roll which is four
and half minutes and costs some 12,000 bucks. He also imparted this jewel of an
information to me “always keep pai pai ka hisaab about the stock” because after
all four and a half minutes cost a lot of money. He taught me how to pull out
stickers and label the used cans. He taught me how to keep an account of how
much stock is being used up in a day; feet-wise and rupees-wise.
Every
time the cinematography team ran out of stock, I would have to run from the
shoot spot to the vanity van and fetch the particular kind of stock that they
had run out of and they wanted.
I
remember this incident when while sweating profusely I had entered the vanity
van to collect a can of stock so that I could run back to the shoot spot ASAP,
I found that person, the chief AD and the producer chatting inside that
particular van. Both of them looked at me and smilingly told me “have a look,
please check yourself out in the mirror adorned with many a light-bulbs,
please, here! We are switching on the bulbs to give you a full-blown actress
treatment!”
What
had happened was, I had while rubbing my face with a much used tissue paper not
taken into account that the paper was tearing up and my whole face was marked
with tiny bits of tissue paper that were stuck on my face with sweat. The
person I am talking about, I remember clearly, after having a good laugh at my
expense, told me “Here, have some ice-cold water, sit in the AC, clean your
face, there is some time in hand, take a break from wildly running around
helter-skelter in the scorching sun”.
After
I cleaned my face and everything, he smiled at me and looked at the producer
and told her “there! Now she looks pretty”.
After
around one year, when I was working for a TV show, I got the news. That person
had committed suicide by hanging himself from a ceiling fan. I remember having
got this news from a friend over the phone, when, ironically I was inside a
vanity van checking myself out in the glamorous mirror with the light-bulbs.
