“Hey, do you want to be in a Bollywood movie?” asked a pot-bellied guy reclined on a motorcycle as we passed him on a street in downtown Mumbai. “I’m recruiting for extras who can work tonight.”
The offer was enticing, but Claire and I needed to catch a flight out of Mumbai at 6 a.m. So the man, Imran, said he’d let us skip out early to get to the airport in time.
“We’ll even drop you off at the airport,” the man said.
“What’s the pay?” I asked, expecting something in the range of $100 per person for a full night’s work.
“5,000 rupees,” Imran said.
“Ten bucks!” I said.
“Hey man, this is your chance to be in a film starring Salman Khan, the biggest name in Bollywood. You’re only in Mumbai once and Mumbai is Bollywood,” he noted, in a pitch that sounded practiced.
“Who’s Salman Khan? I thought Amitabh Bachchan was Bollywood’s biggest star,” I said. “I want to be in his film!” I’d seen Bachchan on numerous billboards around Mumbai, on the latest cover of the magazine GQ, and also the previous day in the film Aladin at one of Mumbai’s big, air-conditioned cinemas—the perfect respite from this city’s oppressive midday humidity.
“Bachchan used to be biggest, but now, well, he’s like the Sean Connery of Bollywood,” said Imran. “Salman Khan is like Brad Pitt—he’s the biggest star of today.” If we met Imran in an hour, he said, he’d drive us to the set, feed us, and drop us off at the airport before our flight in the morning.
We decided to go for it. Mumbai produces more films annually than anywhere else in the world, and seeing Bollywood in action seemed the perfect way to end our month in India. We grabbed our bags and loaded them onto a bus carrying a handful of Westerners.
The bus rounded the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, where we ate brunch to celebrate Claire’s 26th birthday the morning of our arrival to Mumbai four days earlier. As the site of the 2008 terrorist bombings, portions of the Taj’s ground floor remain boarded up and chained off. Nevertheless, the lobby retained a five-star atmosphere, with well-dressed businesspeople and shops featuring the latest Louis Vuitton luggage.
After weeks of cold showers and sleeping on trains, I felt urbane as we sat in the periwinkle-blue Sea Lounge restaurant and drank excellent coffee and dined on overpriced, Western fare. Out the colonial windows, the iconic Gateway of India loomed over the harbor, dotted with fishing vessels and huge tankers. I wanted to feel guilty (but didn’t) about dropping $50 on brunch, which is our normal weekly food budget and the monthly salary of many Indians.
Although many other Indians dine in opulence regularly and enjoy more discretionary spending than I can imagine. Eighty percent of India’s wealth is concentrated in greater Mumbai. While our guidebook and Slumdog Millionaire had me anticipating a crowded, poor city, I found much the opposite. Both New Delhi and Mumbai have sprawling poverty, but Mumbai is a distant runner up to Delhi’s unparalleled chaos. Mumbai is set on a peninsula full of waterfront esplanades, skyscrapers, ivy-covered buildings, and tree-lined boulevards.
Claire noted to me, half-joking, that maybe British colonialism wasn’t so bad after all. It gave us Mumbai, for one, along with a countrywide train system.
But Mumbai’s wealth is self-made, and credited much to Bollywood and its offshoots including the city’s lively arts scene. Time Out Mumbai magazine had a chart flagging the city’s hundreds of multilingual theatres, and we saw an Indian production of the play Shirley Valentine, about a 48-year-old British housewife who sneaks out of the kitchen for a vacation in Greece. I love the play. So we went.
“Marriage is like the Middle East,” Shirley says in the one-woman play, “there’s no solution. We just duck our heads and hope the ceasefire holds.”
The Indian production of Shirley Valentine was so-so. But it put us side-by-side with a group of acting students who later invited us to drinks. We went to an upscale bar was decorated with Halloween balloons, staff wore light-up devil’s horns, and Western music pumped deafeningly loud. I imbibed overpriced Indian whisky and Hoegarten beer, and a young IT worker insisted on picking up our tab. Mumbai’s middle class is unlike we’ve seen anywhere in Asia.
Our final night in Mumbai, as Imran’s bus drove us out to Bollywood, it seemed that appearing in India’s next blockbuster provided the perfect bookend to our time here—as long as we made it to the airport in time to catch our flight. On the side of the highway were several billboards for the latest Bollywood film, London Dreams, starring our man Salman Khan.
The bus pulled up beside Salman Khan’s brightly lit production set. A grassy courtyard spread in front of a fake mansion, with Roman columns and nude statues, catchall indicators that the film takes place in the past and its characters are rich. Several dozen white foreigners dressed in 1940s garb loitered on the set. Ushered into changing rooms, I pulled on a white dress shirt and pants while Claire squeezed into a bright blue dress made of synthetic satin, with a fake corset waist, puffy sleeves, a lacy collar, and layer upon layer of puffy tulle under the skirt. We were then told to report to the set.
Claire was instructed to walk through a lawn filled with tables of foreigners, while I was told to merely stand still, when the director yelled “Action!” Second later he yelled “Cut!” This repeated for several hours. Our presence seemed superfluous, with the camera pointed at Mr. Khan and other stars standing on the mansion’s “balcony.”
My mind turned to more pressing matters—it was 9 p.m. and I hadn’t eaten dinner. “What time do we eat?” I asked a set manager. “11:30,” she said. The film set’s tables were decorated with stale cookies and browning vegetable cuts. Hunger quickly became more important than hygiene, and I nibbled on the food. Claire and I then started to play 20 Questions, utterly unaware of the director’s irrelevant yells of “action!” and “cut!”
When we finally saw two of the other extras with plates of food, we stood up from our table in the middle of a scene and walked off to find dinner. I scarfed down a heaping plate of rice, fatty chicken and meatballs, then felt disgusted with my gluttony and laid down on the grass at the foot of the mansion, on the now-unlit film set.
The set manager found us and ordered us back to the changing rooms, as the director’s assistant was about to choose the extras for a more important scene. Claire and I were the first chosen to appear as a young couple in a high school hallway. This was my big break, I thought, I was going to break into Bollywood, I was going to be discovered!
“These two can’t be in the scene,” said Imran, walking up to the director’s assistant. “They need to leave early to catch a flight.”
“Stand over there,” the director’s assistant ordered, relegating us, once again, to the pile of Bollywood rejects, and it was in this dejected state, delirious from lack of sleep, that we headed for the airport and boarded a plane out of Mumbai.
