G to the C

Just sitting here on a lazy afternoon… doing what I do best, watching a movie on the telly, ‘The Producers’, all about producing a broadway play!

 

I remembered the time when I acted on a stage in a play.  The venue was my school, class XI and the occasion was a farewell party to the final year students.

 

The entertainment program was completely organized by Class XI students… which would be us. So, a great idea was to put up a stage show, a bollywood style play with a dashing story line of romance, action, drama .. emotions.. you name it, we had it… even had a song with hero-heroine dancing around a fake paper tree ..

 

The story was simple, girl meets boy, both like each other, villain likes girl and takes her away, boy fights and they live happily ever after.

 

The story even had a Muneem ji… if you ask me, who would that be, I highly recommend watching a Hindi movie from 70s and 80s era, pick any movie with your eyes closed and look for a character with bent back, a black/white Gandhi cap, a pair of glasses barely sitting on the nose and tied to a string going around his neck, a black vest with white dhoti and an umbrella in his hand… just in case if it is too hot or rainy.. and we had just the right person to do it.. Ashish!

 

Asif, a buddy of mine wrote the script and I got a role of the hero… yup, I always knew I had it in me…, found a villain in Faisal, another buddy of mine… and the talent hunt started for the heroine…. After all, I needed someone who would be as dashing as I was to act with me (Ahem!)… so we couldn’t find anyone… Finally, we got a girl to agree to act after lot of convincing (read begging), now forgetting her name very conveniently…. And the practice began…we practiced for 15 days every day.

 

Now acting and dancing was one thing, singing…. while acting and dancing was another. Especially in the age when a boy’s voice box is trying to decide if it wants to be a heavy-voice voice-box or if it wants to sound like a girl.. so every now and then there were these sudden slip of the pitch from Flat G to the E… in other words, like someone just hit a donkey and it shrieked… so we decided to use the ‘tape recorded’ song from the movie and not actually sing it live …. Good move!

 

After 15 days of practicing, we felt pretty comfortable with the dialogs, the action scenes and the dancing… two days left from the D day and we started working on the props…. I still remember the moment when this happened. We were in a class room with all the chairs pushed aside and trying to figure out how to keep that fake tree precariously balanced on a small wooden chair… quite a task in itself, if you ask me…. Walks in the girl, the heroine, and says, “I can’t do it!”. It suddenly felt like that earth stopped revolving and there was no air in the room (later we realized the fan was off!) and the sweat came rolling down right by the ear… Asif, started getting angry and but was kept under control by brute force by the rest…. The tension in the room was such that if it was loaded on a spring and shot up, we might as well have landed on Moon.

 

I don’t remember exactly what happened for next 30 – 45 minutes, but when we walked out of that class room, there were few changes in the casting…. For some reason, when we walked out of room, Asif was playing the hero and I ………… ended up being the heroine! I still don’t know how it happened… (Was it my shrieking voice during singing? Or was it Asif’s heavier moustache than mine?) Nevertheless, it happened!

 

Now, the script was not a problem, Asif was the director, so remembered all the dialog, and so did I as I made everyone to learn their parts and memorized everything myself too.

 

Then came a question about costume… I was scrounging for a girl costume to my sisters, and when she didn’t agree, ‘borrowed’ a skirt and a top from her closet (It’s still borrowing if you return it back). I dressed up as a girl, vehemently denied to shave my legs and my freshly seeing its first-few-days-of-life moustache (A Rajput’s moustache is his Respect; well it was that until I went to college and shaved them off), even when my friends begged me to do it.

 

Finally, the D day arrived…. Faisal brought me a hat from somewhere and asked me to hide my face as much as possible behind it on the stage…. I really didn’t see the point how that’s going to help in people not noticing that the heroine is actually a guy… if not my moustache, then my hairy legs would have given it away… the skirt only came down to the mid-calves, didn’t have any stockings (didn’t think about that until the last moment) and socks didn’t really do the job to cover those babies on which I proudly stand. And even if that went unnoticed, for few could have confused me still with the non-male species of this planet (I humbly apologize for mentioning this, but in my college years we believed that if the girls (non-males) in our college were sent off from planet earth, the average beauty of earth would increase exponentially)… as soon as I’d have opened my mouth, it was all over.. I mean… one would have to be blind and deaf to not know that I was a guy wearing girl’s costume… and I was really hoping that at least one person in the audience would be just that!

 

The play began, and we already knew the result… the audience looked like just want to see when we ran leaving the stage so they can laugh on us… but we waited them out, once we started, we didn’t stop… and the time came when the heroine (I) entered the stage. I still remembered that moment, I stepped up on the stage from one end and I was supposed to walk to the other end and say ‘Pitaji main college ja rahi hoon’ to my play-dad. I wore the hat at an agle so that my face was hidden and walked across looking away from the audience into the back wall. I looked like a Victorian woman with the big summer hat, top and this long skirt (with my shoes.. couldn’t get my wide feet in anything else), and I am sure eurpoean as well (thanks to my hairy legs). My heart was beating at a pace that even Stuart Little would say, eh! Take it easy…. woman!’. While walking across the stage, I heard a whistle from somewhere in the back of the audience.. poor guy didn’t know what was going on.. or may be I found the blind guy I was looking for… but Alas! the silence prevailed as soon as I spoke…. One can’t get everything in life I guess, I was really hoping him to turn out deaf.

 

Rest of the play I don’t remember, but when the ordeal was over and the audience completely forgot about the play when they saw the dance program that followed.. we were sitting backstage contemplating what just happened.. No one ever talked about the play again who took part in it, but some of our ‘good’ friends never let us forget it too!

After all these years, when I really thought about it.. I think it was Asif who planned all this… he could have just asked me … I would’ve gladly given the role to him. And now that I think about it… the whole play!!!

 

Nonetheless, that was the end of my acting career and I moved on to bigger better things in life… playing harmonium and singing qawwali on stage.. which lasted …. Once!