A Burning(48)

This night, I am sleeping in shame, and I am waking in shame, and still shame is weaker than the other thing.



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    SUNDAY MORNING! Time to go to acting class. Fast fast, I am walking down the lane with my hips going like this and like that, past the small bank where the manager was demanding my birth certificate for opening an account. “I was telling him, ‘Keep your account,’?” I am saying to the camera which is following me. “I was telling him, ‘Birth certificate! Am I a princess?’?”

The interviewer who is walking beside me is laughing. She is brushing her glossy hair out of her eyes, and saying, “Tell me, how did you start going to this acting class?”

“Well,” I am starting. “It was happening like this—”

This time we are together walking past the guava seller in his corner. Usually he is acting like I am invisible, but today he is looking at me with big eyes.

“Here, TV!” he is calling, flapping his hand. “Come take a guava. For free!”

“Brother,” I am saying to him, “please to have some dignity. Every other day you are ignoring me, and today you are my best friend?”

The interviewer is laughing again. Many things I am doing are making her laugh. That is fine. Why not to laugh? This TV channel is paying me eighty thousand rupees just for letting them follow me to the acting class. Other TV channels were calling me and offering me money also, but I was choosing this channel because this channel is the most popular. My turn to laugh.

    On the train, I am presenting my good profile to the camera.

“A train,” I am saying thoughtfully, like a university professor, “is like a film. You see, on the train we can be observing behaviors, arguments, voices. How people are looking happy or upset. How they are speaking with their mother, and with their fellow passengers, and with a pen seller.”

The interviewer is looking at me like I am a National Film Award winner. What wisdom is coming out of my mouth! She is nodding and nodding, her eyes shining with the thought of the hundred thousand viewers who will be watching this tonight.



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IN ACTING CLASS, Mr. Debnath is feeling flustered. Now he is looking like somebody who is never even seeing a camera.

“What is that red light?” he is asking, pointing with a shaking finger at the main camera. “You want me to be looking there?”

“Please just relax, Mr. Debnath,” the interviewer is telling him. “You have been teaching this class for years and years. You are the expert. Pretend that we are not even here!”

But that is impossible. Outside the windows of the living room, a crowd is gathering to watch what is going on. “That acting class is taking place here!” someone on the street is shouting. One smart fellow is even putting his hand in and moving the curtains so they can all be seeing better.

    Inside, the maid is looking suspiciously dressed up, in a shiny sari, with a hibiscus flower in her hair. To the interviewer, she is saying, “Madam, I am watching your show always! And I have been the local cleaner for this class for, oh don’t ask me, years. I have seen some things. I am available for any show.”

While the interviewer is managing her, smiling politely and saying, okay, thank you, Brijesh is coming up to me and mumbling, “Lovely, I am getting”—here he is giggling, hee-hee—“I am getting an offer to do an ad! Detergent ad. They saw me in your video!”



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THE TV PEOPLE ARE bringing their own overhead lights, making this small living room a land of a thousand suns. Every pimple and scar on my face, you can see, except a professional makeup man put high-quality foundation and concealer. Mr. Debnath’s deceased mother and father on the wall, please to pray for them, are looking like their eyes are popping out. Never were they seeing this much glamour in their living days.

For so long I am dreaming of delivering dialogue in front of a real camera, and now I am in front of three! For hours the TV crew are filming us doing practice scenes. In front of them, we are turning up the drama. We are dying patients, supermodels on a runway, mothers cooking food for our husbands. In different scenes, we are having everything from indigestion to love affairs.

    In the end, the interviewer is asking me some of my thoughts.

“Society is telling me that I cannot be dreaming this dream,” I am telling her. “Society is having no room for people like me”—and inside I am thinking, forgive me, Jivan, I must be leaving you out of this—“because we are poor, and we may not be speaking perfect English. But is that meaning we are not having dreams?”

Now I am confessing, on this show, that many times I was walking in front of the Film and Television Institute, just to see how it was. Just to be a little close to the success of the rich acting students. They were getting casting directors, not just casting agents and coordinators, coming to their classes. They were getting special classes from directors, actors, stuntmen, producers, choreographers.

One crazy day I was even thinking, what if I am giving up this rented room? What if I am just sleeping in the train station and spending my rent money on the big acting school?

I am laughing after I am saying that.

“Ha-ha-ha!” I am laughing. “Can you believe?”