“None of my stories really happened, of course. But there’s always something, some element, something said to me or that I witnessed, that may be the starting place… Stories long or short don’t just come out of thin air.”
Raymond Carver, The Paris Review, 1983
There was a starting place. There is always one somewhere deep inside our memories that urges us to find stories that resemble those we have encountered, even briefly. My grandfather had a cameo in a film that nobody remembers the name of but it was a story often told and retold in the family. He played a waiter and placed a few cups on a table in that film. A nameless person in a scene he helped complete. That’s a good memory. My grandfather as an everyday person, a server who passed away and yet he will be somewhere in some film. Frozen in time.
I have witnessed the shaft of light that came from a room somewhere and transformed into stories. In those days, there would be a projectionist operating these giant machines. We thought then that he was a magician, a storyteller, a person who understood loneliness and provided us with worlds to which we could escape. Perhaps he understood that longing is beyond the idea of time. That’s how we learned to imagine.
I called my aunt, the keeper of memories, to ask about my grandfather.
“Was he a junior artist?”
“He was an actor. It takes a lot to become someone else even if it lasts only for a few seconds,” she said.
My aunt went on to talk about her love for cinema. There used to be a magazine called Screen then, which they brought home. My father and uncles took a train to Varanasi to watch the first show of new releases. They fashioned their clothes after the actors. My aunt fell in love with Rajesh Khanna, even slashed her wrists when she came to know he had married. That was some love. It takes a lot to be in love with someone you only see on screen who is never himself and always someone else.
Cinema was real and unreal. Before the multiplex world order came in with all its class and other hierarchies, single-screen theatres were social spaces where everyone sat next to each other and let themselves be moved by the story on the screen. In 2011, digital came in. Endings, when they come, are brutal. But memory with all its deceptions is a counterforce. Like cinema.
I was an outsider who had only seen the stars on the screen. I was one of those who learned late in life to not walk out of the theatre before reading the entire film credits. I often wondered who these people were and if there were others who were out of the privileged space of the marquee. Was my grandfather mentioned? His name is Rajendra Prasad. Just for the record. Just so that even though I don’t know the film he was in for a few seconds, I have vindicated myself with this.
When I first met Aradhana Seth, I was in awe of the scale of work that goes into building a world that we, as audience, enter. There must be intrigue and familiarity. And then, there was the invisibility clause and the question of ego.
I remember her showing me her notes for the 2010 film, West is West. There was a picture of a blue wall with its peeling paint and a jaali (mesh). It contained another room with an orange wall and the second room held another, with green walls. I have been inside such rooms. My maternal grandfather’s house had walls painted in green. I remember the text from her West is West House Book.
“1975 Pakistan. Looking for an ideal location.
Looking for an ideal house. One that is falling apart. No bogs. Just the fields. Buffalo shed. Hand pump. Chicken coop. Thresher. The
Khan Compound.
A new house is built.
Does it become a home? or it may be interesting to list the tools and materials used.”
Homes aren’t easy to build. I saw the workers, the painters, the hands, building the house in a story. All these nameless people who are the real cinema-makers. The ones whose labour is the most important contribution. They could conjure storms, floods and other planets, entire galaxies and even aliens and unicorns.
In Bombay, Gautam Pemmaraju, our guest editor for the anniversary issue along with Aradhana Seth, told me about the unions, the strugglers, the foley artists and others. That’s when we decided to find the many people who work in cinema and are tagged as below-the-line workers and ask them about their lives.
Lines are drawn to divide, to segregate. Sometimes they can become bridges, too.
This dedication isn’t enough because a few pages can’t fit that universe of dreams, longings, reconciliations and struggles. It can’t fit all the names. At best, a dedication is a reminder that beyond the line, there is an ecosystem without which everything that cinema is on the screen won’t exist.
There is always a strange delight in meeting people you’d otherwise never meet. They let us into their world and they told us about their dreams and struggles. They gave us their time for which we remain grateful. We weren’t able to acknowledge everyone. There’s always the limitations of time and space. But we tried.
Aradhana and Gautam led us through this landscape, held our hands as we took upon this project.
This issue is about people, about seeing, about listening and about cinema’s other side, the side that remains outside the credit list mostly.
We have tried to tell some of these stories of people. Like a filmmaker who remembers his old friendship with a projectionist in a small town where he was fascinated by light, the memory of which became stories and the stories became films. By 2012, most projectionists fell through the cracks as digital came in. There is a story about an old gaffer who built an empire but his daughter doesn’t want to inherit that legacy because she has her own Bollywood dreams. There is a story of a young man who spent ten years doing construction jobs to pay off a debt and then ended up as a propmaster in the films where he must rely always on memory. There is the story of a taxi driver who knew Bombay by heart and ended up as a locations person in the film unit and there is a story of a body double who never wanted to be a stuntman because he had witnessed his father ending up as a sad man after he wasn’t able to find work.
In this world where the ephemerality of the physical collides with the eternality of the reel, a casting director told me that nothing lasts forever here.
“Neither love, nor hatred,” she said.
But stories last. This is for the people who build that road from the written word to a physical one. When it is demolished, they move on to other worlds. This is for them and for us. A fragment from a poem called ‘What Work Is’ by Philip Levine:
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
The poet once said in an interview that he felt the workers weren’t being heard.
“Nobody was speaking for them. And as young people will, you know, I took this foolish vow that I would speak for them and that’s what my life would be. And sure enough I’ve gone and done it. Or I’ve tried anyway,” he said.
We have tried to speak for them. I, for my grandfather—an extra, a junior artist in a film. A worker and a person.
