Bollywood or Bust

Article by: Michaela Gordon, December 2005

We had just spent six months traversing tourist-laden Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, roaming across southwest China, hitchhiking across Tibet and, finally, had slung smaller packs on our backs for three weeks trekking around the Annapurna mountain range in Nepal. Mumbai is a seductress. She is a city of dreams, despair, drama and dazzle; heartbreaking poverty amongst staggering grandness. Our first sight of Mumbai came when we stepped out of the illustrious and overcrowded Victoria Terminus. The city sparkled with promise. The sun shone down on queues of 50s-style black and yellow taxis. The dizzying array of shops, advertising, cinemas and streets in all directions reminded me of the treats ahead – haircuts, pedicures, western food and wine, shopping, cleanliness, English everywhere... From our first meeting I knew Mumbai and me would get on pretty well. And of course, I couldn't forget the idea of Bollywood glamour and the stories I'd heard about the clamour for foreigners to work in the industry. I had no time restraints on my stay there, but did have some pressing money worries, so Bollywood stardom sounded just right for me.

Our first call up to stardom occurred when I met Nasir ordering kebabs outside our guesthouse. He was a 'foreigners coordinator', keenly looking for tourists to work for him. The job: A Coca-Cola advert (or Pepsi? I was never quite sure and I never saw the boxes of free soft drink I was expecting). We were to be part of a foreign paparazzi crowd pretending to take photos of the stunning and ever-so-Bollywood-glam, former Ms. World, Aishwarya Rai.

'Wear anything you want, the wardrobe department will sort you out' were Nasir's last words to us that night. And, of course, the first words of the wardrobe department the next morning were: 'Why aren't you wearing black? Look at those shoes! What are you wearing?' It then took ten people two hours to organise black shoes and clothes for the twenty foreigner backpackers who had turned up in scuffed-up jandals and shorts. And so we were introduced to the two mainstays of life as a Bollywood extra: disorganisation and waiting. We made 500 rupees each that day (around NZ$16), hardly enough for a nights accommodation in this the most expensive town in India, but we had made a contact – a real Agent. We were quietly confident that fame was just around the corner.

Mumbai is the city of dreams, and it is also the city of big talkers, false promises, and people that want to pay foreigners to do strange things.

Mumbai is the city of dreams, and it is also the city of big talkers, false promises, and people that want to pay foreigners to do strange things. It's all the rage to have a foreigner at your event – promoting products, dancing, waitressing, bartending, greeting guests and generally adding an 'international feel'. On New Years Eve we got many of the dancing-type offers, all of which we politely turned down. Then at 7pm, whilst sitting in our hotel room sipping on chardonnay on which the days budget had been blown, Ahmjad came knocking on our door with an offer too good to refuse: waitressing for three hours at the swanky, star-studded Taj Mahal Hotel's New Years Eve private party, with free drinks for us from 1:30am. Of course, all is never as it seems. After two hours with our jandal-trained feet crammed into high heels, and the sight of gorgeous celebrities in bejeweled saris changing from stunning to standard practice, things weren't all that great. But by 5am when the shoes were off, many free drinks consumed and the dance floor ours, we felt ready to call the night a success.

We were background dancers clad in pink polyester for a music video

The next month was punctuated by jobs that ran from the incredibly bizarre to the extraordinarily mundane. I was flown to a town 30 minutes away to be part of a new cigarette launch – Force Ten: Strikingly British; we were background dancers clad in pink polyester for a music video; decked out in saris for a calendar shoot on the beach; jogging and waving a tennis racquet around in a hotel conference suite full of 100 Indian businessmen for Lotto Shoes; stars of an elaborate surprise birthday trick for the General Manager of a prestigious hotel; we were 'passers-by' at an International Airport for a TV series (anyone looking closely would have noticed the same two tourists passing back and forth in the background of every shot, with highly confused expressions due to the whole show being in Hindi); and we were the silent but gorgeous–in-polyester-again Mafia Don's girls for a few scenes in another soap opera.

Our days off were spent fervently exploring and investigating the city. 'Malabar Hill', 'Chowpatty Beach' – all the names we'd read about through Salman Rushdie, John Irving and Clive James – and here we were amongst it all! We learnt how to read Hindi numbers, catching buses all over town. We became fast friends with our local Internet and Juice Bar owners, cricket talk being the natural bonding force, and discovered that Astle and Cairns are the undisputed favourites of New Zealand cricket. We stepped over and on the hunks of spat out paan (betel nut, lime paste and spices rolled up in a leaf and chewed, as a kind of After Dinner Mint). We caught crowded local trains, at first terrified of the always-wide-open doors, and the sweaty groping hordes of men inside (four million people use the trains per day in Mumbai!). Then we delighted in discovering the Ladies Carriage – places of calm, sweet smelling women clad in gorgeous colored saris - and we sat there triumphantly watching men's arms turn patchwork-patterned as they were pushed up against the dividing grill.

We became fast friends with our local Internet and Juice Bar owners, cricket talk being the natural bonding force

Our evenings were spent exploring the Mumbai nightlife. We met Irish and Kiwi guys who were our much-needed escorts into a seedy smoky drinking den called Gokul. Beer here was 65 rupees ($2) per large bottle, half the price of anywhere nearby, and so made up for the constant stares and leers we received from the other patrons. We also chanced upon meeting Tourism New Zealand's Manager for India. Kiran was only to happy to show us around, share his New Zealand chardonnay and lend his New Zealand magazines, and we were only to happy to accept! Through Kiran and his friends we experienced the other side of Mumbai nightlife – lavish five course dinners at the Hilton Towers and the Taj, overlooking the majestic Gateway of India – and were not stared at once.

And then, as the heat in the city rose and our Kiwi beach-loving natures cried out for salty respite, we decided to escape Mumbai. The city of dreams had almost seduced us into staying long-term, but our Bollywood careers had ground to a plateau of $10 background jobs, and sunrises over Chowpatty Beach reminded us that Goa was only a train ride away. We returned to our arrival point: Victoria Terminus - this time more familiar, but still unflinchingly grand and slightly menacing in the 11pm moonlight. And with slightly relieved but heavy hearts, fabulous haircuts, polished nails and bottles of wine snuggled cosily in our packs, we shunted away into the night.

Posted 19 May 2005