Opening Night

by Diksha Basu

  OPENING NIGHT

  Diksha Basu

  HarperCollins Publishers India

  New Delhi

  For Ma, Baba, and Dada

  Contents

  Dedication

  Naiya Kapur is breaking into Bollywood. on Thursday x

  Naiya Kapur is moving to Manhattan! on Tuesday x

  Naiya Kapur is falling in love. With Bombay. on Sunday x

  Naiya Kapur is watching metaphorical sex on stage. on Friday x

  Naiya Kapur is a German philosophizing queen. on Wednesday x

  Naiya Kapur is swimming in her fancy fishbowl. on Friday x

  Naiya Kapur promises to laugh at all your jokes if you’re handsome, on Monday x

  Naiya Kapur could use a little spark in her life. on Tuesday x

  Naiya Kapur is swimming in the swirling seas. on Thursday x

  Naiya Kapur is turning into a quite the fashionista. on Wednesday x

  Naiya Kapur is off for a weekend in the Hamptons of Bombay. on Friday x

  Naiya Kapur wishes certain people had been scooped away instead of born. on Wednesday x

  Naiya Kapur needs to step out of her glass house. Or at least stop throwing rocks. on Sunday x

  Naiya Kapur will never enjoy gardening. on Monday x

  Naiya Kapur is plotting plotting. on Tuesday x

  Naiya Kapur should be a columnist for Cosmo. on Saturday x

  Naiya Kapur has had enough of bachelors. on Thursday x

  Naiya Kapur will be off Facebook. on Saturday x

  Naiya Kapur is on the brink of something scary. on Wednesday x

  Naiya Kapur is breaking into Bollywood. on Thursday x

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Naiya Kapur is breaking into Bollywood. on Thursday x

  ‘There are rumours that you were very close to Jay Gupta up until quite … well, quite recently. How would you comment on that?’ I am jolted out of my red-carpet reverie by a young, prettyish, disturbingly familiar journalist who shoves a microphone towards me.

  It is as if someone has punched the air out of me in one swift blow. This can’t be happening. Not here, not now. Not on my opening night. I was under the impression that I had managed to escape unscathed; but standing here, frozen, I realize I was wrong all along. It is all coming back to me in a rush. A year and a half – eighteen months – feels like a lifetime in this city.

  I had certainly not seen this coming tonight. I had expected and been prepared for it earlier. But then I had spent months telling myself to move on, to not let it constantly be at the back of my mind. I hadn’t let it defeat me. I had hardly even heard Jay’s name in the six months past. Maybe even more. Certainly nobody except my closest friends had ever explicitly asked me about him. The newspapers and gossip rags have very short memories; and my friends, some out of courtesy, most out of a lack of interest, had stopped mentioning him as soon as I had. I thought I was home free, and that the past was fully exorcised.

  Until just now. I take a deep breath, excruciatingly aware of the camera’s red light shining, recording my every move. I suddenly realize why she looks familiar. She was the one, at the beginning of all the madness, at the fashion launch, who had asked Jay if he had grown up in Malabar Hill. I wonder if she remembers me. We had locked eyes that night. She has to be asking this for a reason. She waits for me to answer while I search her face for a hint of recognition.

  She knows. I can sense it. She recognizes me and I’m about to be charged for all the crimes I had convinced myself I hadn’t committed. Everything I worked and manipulated and lied and cried for could come undone in the next few moments. This is supposed to be my night and now, with this one simple question, I feel like they claim you feel when you’re about to die. The last two years of my life are flashing before my eyes and I’m worried that my castle in the sky is about to come crashing down just as I’m finally stepping into it.

  Naiya Kapur is moving to Manhattan! on Tuesday x

  After college, I had settled down on the sidelines of excitement. My cubicle at Bock and Teuk was in a lovely building right off 5th Avenue, at the corner of 42nd Street, in the centre of the world … New York City. I was one of the scores of Ivy League graduates sitting pretty in our three-foot by three-foot cubicles scattered all over Manhattan. But I was one of the lucky few with a view of the world beyond. Well, sort of. If I lowered my head five inches, moved three inches to the right of my computer, squinted and stared through the glass panel of the senior executive’s cubicle in front of me, there it was … Broadway!

  I had just graduated from Princeton with a double major in communications and German philosophy. It had seemed like an ‘artsy’ degree at the time. Artsy and easy, and with the potential for a steady income since the degree was vague enough for me to be able to deceive employers into believing that I was employable. Communications is basically garbage and the easiest way to get a luxuriously inflated GPA. And German philosophy? How hip did that sound! I was confused throughout college. I hardly studied and I certainly didn’t excel. I hated coursework and couldn’t think of anything I wanted to devote my life to. I picked my courses so I could spend more time at the bars than at the libraries. I played tennis, had a fun part-time job at a trendy café, made friends, ran student organizations, dated, drank, danced and worked extremely hard at finding ways to avoid studying. I dressed in khakis and polo shirts, wore thick-rimmed glasses and carried Nietzsche with me. I never really read it – when the time came to write final papers, I found it all available online. I listened to jazz, drank wine and discussed the dangers of post-feminist sexism. I had perfected my first performance … preppy Princetonian.

  And then, towards the end of a hazy four years of books, banter and booze, I found life staring me in the face. Fall semester, senior year, misery set in.

  They were everywhere. The corporates. Aegis Group, Morgan Stanley, Ogilvy, UBS, Bain & Co., McKinsey, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers, AIG – all pomp and glory, bloated with sub-prime profits. All my friends had traded in their sweatpants and T-shirts for suits and pencil skirts, and were briskly marching to and from Career Services giving interviews. I followed suit. My head whirled as I went through a seemingly unending series of identical interviews. ‘Where do you see yourself in ten years?’ ‘… Best and worst qualities?’ ‘Solve this case study.’ ‘What makes a good leader?’ I knew the answers by heart, knew how to sound excited about filling in mindless excel sheets, and how to modestly look down, shake my head regretfully and talk about my negative traits. I waxed eloquent about how I worried that I may be too ambitious. I went through the rigmarole because that’s what I was supposed to do, but something kept tugging at my heart. I never believed any of the answers I gave.

  At twenty, it wasn’t easy to allow myself to think outside the small box. The path well trodden seemed to be the only one that existed. Corporate America, graduate school, more corporate America, an NRI husband who had travelled a similar path as me, and then beautiful children who would travel the same path as us. And so I sat through the interviews, waited nervously for the responses, mourned the rejections and celebrated the acceptances. As the time came to finalize decisions, the least painful of the handful of offers I had received was that of executive assistant at Bock and Teuk, a prominent mid-sized advertising firm in Manhattan. The hours would be long, the work dull, the co-workers annoying, the cubicle stifling, the regulations numbing, and I was supposed to be excited. Supposedly, the job would allow ‘motivated individuals great scope for advancement’. The problem was that I wasn’t all that motivated. But at least I’d get to wear cute corporate outfits and strut around Manhattan looking like all those glamorous sitcom stars.

  The job not withstanding, I fell in love with
Manhattan the minute I settled in. I had visited it often enough while at Princeton, but living there was different. I suddenly found myself wearing high heels all the time and walking briskly even if just stepping out to buy milk. In my mind, I was Carrie Bradshaw. Except, I was a Carrie who worked twelve-hour days every day, weekends included. Sex and the City really misrepresented NYC. Those people hardly worked and had beautiful apartments and designer clothes. My job left me deader than I had anticipated. The first few weeks, I felt incredibly fancy in my Zara pencil skirts and Nine West pumps, checking my Blackberry while I rode the subway into midtown. Most of the emails on my Blackberry were from friends who were starting similar jobs in similar offices all over the city. But within a few short weeks, all that changed. I was exhausted. The emails were no longer from friends. They were work-related and constant. I never looked quite as chic again, because I simply didn’t have the time. I didn’t have time to get my hair or my nails done, or to buy new clothes, though I had a steadily growing bank account. I woke up too sleepy to do anything more than apply a quick sweep of mascara before racing out of the door. Carrie Bradshaw was nowhere to be seen.

  I knew I had to do something to preserve my sanity. The job, my cubicle, seeing nobody except my co-workers and the Starbucks employees day in and day out – it was all slowly driving me insane. I heard about a group of professionals who got together on Sunday evenings to do theatre. I knew I had to join, do something, or I’d burn out by the time I hit twenty-six. So I joined the group that very Sunday. I loved it. We rehearsed a short, twenty-page one-act play that one of the members had written. The script was awful but I was so impressed that a banker had managed to write anything that I participated enthusiastically. We rehearsed with great sincerity for eight weeks, and were finally ready to perform.

  I had butterflies in my stomach so I sexily smoked a cigarette outside the gay cabaret bar where my first play was to be performed, then coughed – unsexily. I wasn’t really a smoker. I was an actor in New York City, and smoking cigarettes outside gay cabaret bars was what actors in New York City did. I made my way backstage and peered out at the rather small audience. Almost twenty people there to see me! The lights dimmed, the music began, the excitement charged through my veins and I was on stage. I loved it! The whole process of performance! I felt myself soaring. I had discovered my calling. I had been, as they say, bitten. The forty-five minutes rushed past in what felt like a minute, but the euphoria didn’t die. I didn’t sleep that night. I lay awake happily blinded by memories of the bright lights of the stage. The adrenalin didn’t stop pumping and the world looked like a better place.

  The show ran for just one week. It was terrible. Shows that are performed in gay cabaret bars to audiences of less than twenty are not usually Tony Award winning pieces. But I knew what I had to do, the decisions that had to be made, where I had to make life take me. I had to quit advertising, tell my father, family, friends, and co-workers that I was going to give up a steady income and guaranteed course to pursue a career on stage and in front of the camera. I was ready to deal with having next to no money, no stability, and potentially no future. I was ready for Broadway.

  And so I quit. Just like that. I didn’t think about the future, the money or the exorbitant rents in Manhattan. I just quit. Colleagues and friends smirked and looked at me with pity. They smugly offered to pay for my drinks since I no longer had an income. The perks of quitting quickly became evident.

  The weeks after I quit were pure bliss. I had never really understood just how fantastic Manhattan was, especially when your savings from a pretty high-paying job were still sitting in your bank account. The first few weeks I just walked. I walked north, I walked south, I walked east, and I walked west. I made friends on the stoops of Harlem, spent hours in the crazy sex shops in Chelsea, spotted Jerry Seinfeld on the Upper West Side and Sarah Jessica Parker in TriBeCa. I laughed at the suited, trained monkeys in the Financial District, shopped on the Upper East Side, ate dim sum and drank bubble tea in China Town. I brunched at 7A in Alphabet City and fell in love with Manhattan. Everywhere I walked, I pictured my life as a movie. The location being Manhattan, the camera always had to be positioned far above and behind me so it could perfectly capture me walking briskly down the streets in my knee-high boots with the gorgeous buildings on both sides. Occasionally, the camera would have to, of course, pan down and zoom in to watch me enter Saks Fifth Avenue or Sephora, but it usually stayed above. I did more in those few weeks in NYC than I had in the past year. I realized how much I had missed out on while being in a job.

  I actually got to enjoy the apartment I paid enormous amounts for. I had a small studio apartment on 23rd Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. I had a single bed that doubled as a seating area, and those days I actually got time to wake up and make the bed in the mornings. My studio had a tiny but cute terrace attached to it, which I shared with my neighbours. Of course, this being NYC, I had never once even seen the people who lived next door. When I first signed my lease, I had imagined myself sitting on the terrace, sipping a cup of coffee while browsing the NY Times, and maybe sharing a laugh or two with the impossibly good-looking couple next door. Perhaps he would be a musician and she a writer, and they’d invite me over to meet their friends, and we’d all drink wine and be beautiful together. In reality, I had spent almost every morning chugging coffee from Starbucks on the train while reading about Kim Kardashian in the NY Post over someone’s shoulder. But ever since my days had freed up, I actually made use of my apartment. I would sip my coffee, look out at … the next building, and attempt to make lunch and have a few friends over for drinks and such. It was nice. I actually bought cushion covers, a martini shaker, and a DVD player. I even got a $200 knife set, but that went unused. Oh, and I still never drank wine with the neighbours.

  I went for auditions and signed up with an agency, Whittle and Reade. My bank account was not as reassuring as earlier, but it was not yet empty enough for me to begin worrying. My agency was fantastic and very protective of me. It wasn’t too small, and I was their only Indian actor, so at least I knew they wouldn’t shelve me and give the meaty auditions to other Indians on their list. Some agencies are notorious for taking on clients who fit the same demographic so that they can control their own competition. Whittle and Reade really spoiled me. Auditioning in New York was so no-nonsense. They would send me the lines in advance, I’d walk in, interact with a few friendly people, deliver my lines, and get back to walking around the city until they called me with the news. I didn’t book much work in those weeks. I had expected to be flooded with offers, but it wasn’t quite that. It wasn’t completely dry either, though. I made a few thousand dollars one afternoon by doing an ad for Microsoft. It had a Chinese man and me as computer whizzes. It took quite a few takes, though, because I’m a painfully slow typist and I had to look like I was typing away efficiently, not randomly jabbing at the keyboard with two fingers.

  One audition was particularly depressing. I went all the way out to the Chelsea Piers to audition for the role of a glorified extra in one of those popular courtroom dramas. I was running late, and it was so far out, there was no train access; so I had to take the bus all the way across town. For no particular reason, I’ve always disliked the buses in Manhattan and loved the trains. Anyway, I made it all the way across town and then searched around the Chelsea Piers for a while before I found the audition room. The Piers were weird. I felt like I’d been transported to Queens every time I went to the Chelsea Piers. In any case, the audition room had a sign-up sheet outside, so I signed up and stepped into the room. There were about six South Asian men, four South Asian women, three African American men, and two East Asian women sitting in a tiny, badly ventilated room. The South Asian men and one of the women were all in their late thirties, perhaps even early forties. I recognized one of them. He had played the lead in a big off-Broadway production a few years ago and was being touted as the next big thing. India Abroad sang his praises and all the Indian
s who read India Abroad talked about him in the same breath as Brad Pitt.

  I quickly grabbed the seat next to him. Not only did he have perfect cheekbones, but he was also likely to help me make some contacts. I really needed to know more about how this whole South Asian acting scene in the US worked. I at least needed someone who was willing to put me in touch with Mira Nair, and he seemed the likeliest candidate. That, and my love life was rather dry, so I really had nothing to lose.

  I sat down next to him, smiled seductively and said, ‘Hi.’ It was meant to be a sexy whisper, but I had something stuck in my throat and hadn’t spoken in a while, so it came out sounding guttural and wet. He nodded. I nodded back. I decided I had to grab the reins.

  ‘What role are you auditioning for?’ I asked him innocently.

  ‘The same one everyone here is auditioning for. One of the jury members. Isn’t that what you’re here for?’

  ‘Yes, yes it is. I’m so excited. I’ve just started acting.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘I’ve only done one play so far. But, it’s going really well! What are you working on? I didn’t catch your last show. I was still studying … at Princeton. Not theatre … but anyway, I heard really good things about it.’

  ‘Yeah, it was fun,’ he answered without even a flicker of interest.

  ‘So what are you working on these days?’

  ‘What? Nothing. I’m helping my boyfriend decorate his apartment.’

  Damn it. Gay? It was time to change tactics. He clearly wasn’t going to ask me on a date, but I could still get Mira Nair’s contact information. I continued talking.

  ‘Oh, it’s nice that you’re taking a break. What agency are you working with?’

  ‘Look, shouldn’t you be studying your lines?’

  ‘I already have them memorized.’

  ‘Okay, good for you.’