Almost three years went by this way. Then the invisible genie bestowed its generosity again, this time through the veteran actor Piyush Mishra. A person he knew was directing plays with students at the Delhi Public School in Faridabad. He needed an assistant director. ‘Would you want to assist him?’ Piyush asked me. I said yes instantly. It was a fun gig. I forget the exact amount but I think I got Rs 8000 at the end of it. This was a pretty big amount for me, especially at the time—it was the late ’90s.
I thought this was the best opportunity to go to Bombay to try my luck. Going to what had by then become Mumbai seemed to be the most obvious progression. It seemed that a whole bunch of our seniors had made the shift from theatre to film simply by moving to Mumbai. Apparently, there was more work in cinema. The money gave me confidence. Because, if nothing else, it would arm me with the ability to last in the city of dreams for at least a month.
PART IIIMUMBAI
13The Dark Night
And so just like that, I decided to pack my bags and leave for Mumbai, certain that I would be given a red-carpet welcome because I was from NSD. I went to my batchmate’s house in Goregaon East, near the Western Express Highway, paid him rent for a few months as well as a deposit and began to stay with him. Almost immediately, reality slapped its icy water on my starry-eyed face and cut my dreamy wings. I came crashing to the ground and realized what a jackass I had been. Forget the red carpet, work seemed as scarce as drizzle in drought-prone lands. All struggling actors spend hours running from audition to audition in the brutal heat, sweating buckets while standing in endless queues and facing a thousand rejections. If you are not seasoned in the ways of Mumbai and spot some of them, you might mistake their desperation as that of someone’s who is hunting for a blood group that matches with what their ailing one needs. That is how bad it is! No work means no income. And there begins a vicious cycle which wraps around this breed like a python’s ever-tightening grip, threatening to crush them from the inside and the outside simultaneously. Without money trickling in, affording rent, affording food, affording cigarettes, affording girlfriends, affording even transport to get to those auditions, becomes a series of battles. Cheap luxuries like bananas and dry roasted channa kept me going. Very soon, I had to give up on them as well. Then came the days when my friend and roommate, Vijay Raaz, and I went on a strict diet: we had Parle-G (glucose) biscuits and tea for breakfast; we had Parle-G biscuits and tea for lunch; we had Parle-G biscuits and tea for dinner. You see, I had no money left to even refill my gas cylinder to power up the kitchen stove and cook the humblest meal possible. Soon, even the Parle-G diet ended. I had no money left to eat or even to afford the cheap fares of buses or local trains. So I used to walk for fifteen kilometres on some days, twenty on some others. I’d walk from Goregaon East, where I was living with half a dozen other actors, in the peak afternoon heat all the way to a friend’s house at Yari Road in Andheri. Being roasted was nothing in the face of greed, greed for the scrumptious meal the friend would cook and greed for the divine cigarette he would offer afterwards. It was the most beautiful thing in the world. For those few golden minutes, my chain of struggles would evaporate into the smoke created by the Wills Navy Cut, and my bloodshot eyes would be dreamy again.
Finally, I began to get some roles. A lot of them—like Sarfarosh and Munna Bhai M.B.B.S.—involved getting beaten up. My reel life became a reflection of my real life. I was getting beaten from all corners. I was being rejected from all corners. Women rejected me, casting directors rejected me. Bare necessities like food rejected me. Between 2005 and 2007, I was secretly homeless. I would sleep at one friend’s house, have breakfast at another friend’s, lunch at yet another friend’s house. Like my life, my belongings too were scattered across these friends’ houses. I did not want to become a burden on only one person. So if somebody was cooking, which they palpably were at mealtimes, then I would show up. Out of courtesy, they would ask me if I would like to join them, expecting me to refuse out of courtesy as well. But I would immediately say yes, thank you. My towel was at Abhay’s house, I’d show up for lunch at Rajpal’s (Rajpal Yadav) house and I would eat dinner at my buddy Ghannu’s (Ghanshyam Garg) house. They lived all over Goregaon, so I would walk all over Goregaon, first from Goregaon East to Goregaon West and then back to Goregaon East.
My hair began to fall out in clumps due to the stress. I had literally become a skeleton as there was little separating my bones and my carbon paper-like skin.
I was so weak that I fainted out of hunger on the streets more than a few times. I felt that I would die soon. It was not
