Bollywood comes to Binghamton

Peace. Some people are born great, some people have friends who are great, and all others are shit-type zeros who have graduated from Lady Shriram College (and the like).

A few days ago, the up-and-coming director Arijit Mullick (a good friend from IIT-KGP days) called me personally to invite me to the sets of his new movie Keno Baba Keno? (Why Oh Why? in Bengali), for which he is shooting a few important scenes in upstate New York. I immediately dropped everything and braved the riff-raff on the Peter Pan bus to Binghamton to observe him in his element.

The film is loosely adapted from one of the short stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies”. The original story is a piece of utter rot, but Arijit has cleverly breathed new life into it and made it much more appealing to real Indians. I believe this is a superhit in the making.

When I arrived, Arijit was involved in shooting a critical scene. The female protagonist, Anindita (played with great panache by the young tinsel-town starlet Bidisha Kurup), has just arrived in Binghamton following her (arranged) marriage to a Gujju 7-11 owner. He is off at work, and she has unpacked her suitcase and headed to the shower. In vain, she searches for a bar of soap, but is unable to find one. In her haste, she begins applying a product called Fantom Xtreme Bubbles (an extremely concentrated bath product), but realizes the mistake only when the product starts foaming uncontrollably. She is then forced to spend 45 minutes in the shower trying to get the soap off her body. This causes her to miss a job interview at the local Taco Bell and her whole life is downhill from there onwards.

In the hands of a lesser director, this could have turned into a porno. But Arijit is a master of his craft: the camera pans like a pendulum from Anindita in the shower to the clock on the bathroom wall. The cleavage shots are very tasteful and kept to the artistic minimum (but there is quite a bit of scrubbing), and the clock adds to the build-up of the dramatic tension.

It took a lot of scrubbing and an entire bottle of Fantom Xtreme Bubbles before Arijit was finally satisfied (personally, I was in no hurry for the scene to end, LOL). Being the impatient genius that he is, he sat down to edit the scene straightaway and I joined him, excited to see the artistic process at first-hand. As he was doing so, it turned out that Bidisha’s frustrated cries could barely be heard over the sound of the running shower. Unfortunately, Bidisha had already returned to her motel and because she was being paid by the hour, Arijit decided that he would improvise.

While he and his crew set up the sound system, I sat in a corner and practiced a few high-pitched exclamations: “Oof!”, “Arre!”, “What is this!”, “What a nonsense!”, “Eeeek!”, “Why I came to the US???”, etc. that I thought would fit the situation. My voice was then recorded and added to the soundtrack. I am now on the brink of world-fame. Sumon will die of jealousy when I tell him. As reward, I requested one of the leftover bottles of Fantom Xtreme, I felt I had earned myself a luxurious bath. Perhaps Shil will invite Bidisha to join him. Not that she needs any more cleaning, of course, this time it'll be pleasure only.