Bollywood Extras: A Novel From Mumbai

By Dr D. Bruno Starrs

"Bollywood Extras" is a bold exercise in literary post-modernism and has been described as being like Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" (1955) meets Nathanael West's "Day of the Locust" (1939). Unlike those two classics, however, this novel by Dr D. Bruno Starrs is set in 21st Century India's Hindi-language film industry epicenter otherwise known as 'Bollywood', Mumbai's answer to America's 'Hollywood'.
And there is another major difference: the story-line of "Bollywood Extras" (i.e. the tense, narrative interaction between an American 'extras' casting agent, 'Dr Arden Pyle', an under-age wannabe Bollywood starlet, 'Chandy', and the despicable but wealthy Indian man who stalks her, 'Ishmail'), is all staged against a backdrop of rabid religious terrorism: the 2008 Islamic terrorist attacks on Mumbai, which have been described as "India's 9/11".
Written with the uniquely black comedic and provocatively literary flair Dr D. Bruno Starrs is renown for, this, his third full-length novel, boldly captures the feel of Mumbai and the small-time players in its big-time film industry, with style, humor and originality.
Tom Flood, winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and founder of "Flood Manuscripts", said this of the novel's second last draft:
"What is best about 'Bollywood Extras' will likely be its albatross in the sliced bread world of mainstream publishing. Three strengths that make the work what it is - the length, the style, the intellectual capital - will be three strikes against it when it comes to the money. While I delight in rich language and agile invention, I've given you the reasons the trade ('legit') presses won't take 'Bollywood Extras'. Do I think you should change it? No. I like it. Why ruin an interesting work for money?"
As a professional assessor, Tom Flood did, of course, offer many suggestions and these were duly implemented in the final version of the novel, although the author steadfastly adhered to the style he had already cemented, thus not changing in anyway what Flood refers to as its three strengths. And with this 'Thumbs Up' from the best manuscript assessor in Australia, the author knew that Bollywood Extras was ready to be birthed. So, here it is: Dr Starrs has self-delivered his third baby and 'christened' it "Bollywood Extras"!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr D. Bruno Starrs
• Release date: Sep 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301669219

Dr D. Bruno Starrs

Dr D. Bruno Starrs was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in a hospital. It was a year he cannot remember very well. He is a mongrel of a human: his ancestry is a mix of Irish, Maltese and Indigenous Australian.Bruno's qualifications include two Masters degrees and a PhD from highly reputable Australian universities. Despite such a thorough education his verbal diarrhea has yet to be cured.

Book preview

A Critic’s Notes.

"What is best about Bollywood Extras will likely be its albatross in the sliced white bread world of mainstream publishing. Three strengths that make the work what it is - the [undersized] length, the style, the intellectual capital - will be three strikes against it when it comes to the money. While I delight in rich language and agile invention, I’ve given you the reasons the trade (‘legit’) presses won’t take Bollywood Extras. Do I think you should you change it? No. I like it. Why ruin an interesting work for money?"

- Tom Flood of ‘Flood Manuscripts’ (www.manuscripts.com.au), former winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Sydney, Australia.

Copyright Notes.

Written and published by Starrs Above Productions via smashwords.com.

Copyright Dr D. Bruno Starrs 2020.

All images in Bollywood Extras: A Novel from Mumbai are sourced from the Public Domain.

ISBN: 9781301669219.

Legal and Social Notes.

This ebook entitled Bollywood Extras: A Novel from Mumbai - written, published and copyrighted by its author Dr D. Bruno Starrs in 2020 - is licensed for the individual buyer’s use and enjoyment only. It may not without permission be resold to or copied for any other person/s in any form, electronic or hard copy, whatsoever. To do so is an act of theft.

And please remember to post a review - if not where you bought it then somewhere - anywhere: online, hard copy, your local Alcoholics Anonomous notice board … Or go and write it in the sand at Juhu Beach in Old Bombay! And if you think Bollywood Extras: A Novel of Mumbai is a good read, then please tell your equally discerning and intelligent friends about it!

PROLOGUE.

The Bhagavad Gita advises the studious reader: As a man can drink water from any side of a full tank, so the skilled theologian can wrest from any scripture that which will serve his purpose (Vyasa et al, circa 200 BCE to 200 CE).

Twenty-three-year-old Ajmal Amir, like many Pakistanis, had no real last name. He disdainfully considered surnames to be a decadent Western conceit, as he had been tutored (indoctrinated?) to believe. Thus, he dutifully viewed the tradition with scorn as he simultaneously noted its importance for most weak and pathetic Westerners.

And just as simultaneously he knew, from his clandestine surfing of Internet celebrity websites, that in show business the birth name of an entertainer is often changed (for what are usually commercially oriented reasons). Indeed, the good-looking young man harbored a secret fascination with celebrity, and he had heard there was a statistical tendency for screen idols to have stage identities consisting of two first names. Or that just one name was sufficient for some actors and singers.

So, he pondered ... what about: ‘Amir Amir’?

Or: ‘Ajmal Ajmal’?

Or just: ‘The Ajmal’?

Yo, dude! Look who’s coming! It’s The Ajmal!

These were the delicious, forbidden fantasies and daydreams he cultivated for no more than the rarest, most self-indulgent periods of his limited free time. And he had only ever performed his audition monologues before the fly-spotted mirror in the back room of his parent’s modest, mud-brick home. He had never actually been on a stage let alone in front of a camera.

Certainly, Ajmal Amir had yet to realize that, as Shakespeare warned, All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. He struggled with the intricacies of English enough as it was and had never read any of the Bard’s plays or sonnets. He didn’t realize he was about to deliver a performance.

His strict religion had set events in motion for the next 24 to 36 hours would inevitably put him centre-stage for the rest of his life, in a character role the media would - by itself and without prompting - decide what and how to name.

As it happened, the infidel newspaper journalists didn’t have to rack their brains for a catchy moniker for The Ajmal. Like many Pakistanis, his caste was frequently used to identify his kith and kin, and although Ajmal Amir’s father was, in reality, a humble vendor of vegetarian Dahi puri snacks in the markets and on the streets of Faridkot village in Pakistani Punjab, Ajmal Amir’s family caste was certainly not vegetarian. His people were ‘Kasab’, from the ‘butcher’ caste, and that is why he eventually became known in the international media as: Ajmal Kasab.

Thus, on the night of November 26th, 2008, the devout young Muslim fundamentalist with hair like a pomaded rockabilly (and who day-dreamed about landing an acting role in a Bollywood film) was well on his way to honoring his family’s caste with his eager involvement in Lashkar-e-Taiba’s finely orchestrated acts of slaughter and terrorism. These outlandish, murderous feats of theatrical butchery were to be so in-human and yet so spectacular; a cynic might even describe Ajmal as a post-modern, 21st Century performance artist.

Waves slapped up at Ajmal Kasab, like blows from grinning, godless, schoolyard bullies. They threatened to spill at his feet his cargo of almost transparent thoughts, while the light from the city of Mumbai ahead rose in all its garish, neon wantonness. As he and his fellow jihadists approached the southernmost shores of what was formerly known as Bombay, he felt butterflies turn cartwheels in his stomach. Crumbling wing fragments, like bristles of doubt, caught in the thick mucus of his esophagus. He wondered if this was what the celebrity websites called ‘stage fright’.

Beneath him the black swell of the Arabian Sea kicked, sluicing and slewing relentlessly. The A-grade methamphetamine coursing through his bloodstream caused his brown, soft-skinned jaws to grind, making him look older than he was and he gripped the side of the inflatable speedboat hard with one hand and his AK-47 hard with the other.

CHAPTER ONE.

The Bhagavad Gita advises the studious reader that: Action is greater than inaction. Perform therefore thy task in life. Even the life of the body could not be if there were no action (Vyasa et al, circa 200 BCE to 200 CE).

The Mumbai air was as hot and as sticky as blood. Arden Pyle stirred from his torpor of inaction with reluctance. No longer was the office working American’s lethargic mind held captive by the strobing, chopping, mesmerizing thrall of the ceiling fan spinning directly above him. Unfazed, nevertheless, the rusty edged appliance rotated away. Rhythmically, it throbbed and throbbed and throbbed like an un-musical metronome, in its feeble but unstoppable quest to dissipate the choking heat of afternoon India. Arden hated the machine.

Had the ceiling fan, in any reality, been the slightest bit sentient, the fan might have registered some surprise, for at that listless time of day it’d normally have kept Dr Pyle hypnotized quite easily, soothing his overworked brain like a draught of Chinese opium.

Instead, as Arden serenely slumped over his desk, his consciousness clambered back into being the way a drowning man in a well (who had peacefully resolved himself to eternal oblivion) suddenly and unexpectedly finds footholds in the green, slippery walls of that well. In that enviable, near-exquisite state of daydreaming, Arden was feeling more than a little ambivalent about the task of waking up. Part of him rather liked that dark, wet well, no matter how green and slimy it was. The strands of algae always seemed to be wave at him in a friendly and non-threatening manner. His sub-conscious struggled stoically for homeostasis, querying the real benefits, the actual payoff in rising.

A thin rivulet of sweat broke free from his relatively fair-skinned, relatively un-creased forehead and dripped not unto the waters of his existential green-watered well but onto the hand-written foolscap papers he was sprawled across.

The escaped perspiration blotted and blurred the blue-inked letters of the third paragraph on the thirteenth page of what the recently graduated Dr Pyle believed would one day be his Magnum Opus. Its title frequently changed, but the latest two drafts of his creation were both still cleverly labeled Sub-Continental Soup.

Performed, published and moderately acclaimed as a playwright already in his native America, his India-based current work was yet another stage play. Cinematic notes were also kept for the play’s subsequent film adaptation (which he was quietly certain would follow), through which he would undoubtedly gain literary immortality. ‘Like … like … Beckett. Or maybe Shepherd ... No, probably more like Kane. Now, that British chick, she knew all about how to break the play writing rules and become fully famous: The trick is to ‘top’ yourself just as your weirdest and most baffling play opens in London’s Royal Court. Play openings rarely make the front page of the mass media news, but the suicide of the author helped her final play achieve just that. Sarah Kane probably idolized Virginia Woolf’, he thought to himself, in a last resort bid to stay asleep.

His internal monologue continued: ‘But neither Hollywood nor Bollywood had ever made a film - or, indeed, probably never could make a film - based on Sarah Kane’s weirdly brilliant 4.48 Psychosis play and most playwrights would confess a less than enthusiastic attitude to replicating her mode of success. Suicide sux – even if one’s literary greatness might only be duly recognized posthumously,’ he sighed.

This auteuristic nihilism perhaps explained Arden’s disinclination to return to full vigilance that hot, sticky afternoon, his subconscious desire to sink further into that green well, to slowly expire and thus become that most famous of all career clichés:

The Uncelebrated Artist Taken Too Soon.

(Although on this particular day, it must be conceded, the effects of the previous night’s partying were also to be considered a causative factor in his unwillingness to shine, for Arden had himself a Killer Hangover).

Ah, dear reader, the poetics of artistic suicide! The usual debates about self-murder aside, however, all the reader really needs to know is that Arden’s day was stalled in the afternoon doldrums and that he was annoyed. He was really annoyed. He was really, really annoyed to realize that the unusual little sound in the back of his head was growing into a very loud affront, having filtered through a miniature attic window at the top of his skull which some servant of his intellect had carelessly left ajar.

Through this tiny cranial casement the dull clanging of steel battle saber against tin-lined scabbard had become distinct and grating, whereas before it had been a mere murmur of no import, arising from some indeterminate location of equal unimportance. What at first seemed to be miles and miles away from the solid, bony housing of Arden’s brain, now sounded as if about to burst through the office doors and fatally deafen him and his co-workers with audio-hyper bombs, or at the very least afflict them all with debilitating tinnitus.

Without opening his eyes, Arden made a brushing motion with his hand through the thick, sweaty air but the sound obstinately refused to go away.

As with the noise of clattering steel weaponry, the duller sound from the slap of heel against leather sandal had grown in volume too, but the worst of all the aural intrusions came from the babble of a dozen different dialects of Indian speak, being exercised in many full, crudely un-censored, masculine voices and which had all become noisily coherent to him even there in his cramped upstairs cubicle. In short, there was a magnificent din coming from outside Arden’s office.

He had learnt - and now was automatically familiar with - some choice Bambaiya local street slang and it was these curse words which flexed their polyglot muscles, finally prizing open Arden’s sleep-encrusted eyelids with their multicultural strength.

Thus, Arden surfaced from his green well like a swimmer beating a dumper of a nasty big Pacific sea wave, precipitously eager for the oxygen of meaning, suddenly gasping for the clean air of an explanation. What was that racket outside?

Gritting his remarkably healthy teeth, he craned his remarkably healthy neck and peered through the limp curtains. He was awake at last, having forced himself to gain those footholds in his psyche’s stairway to full consciousness. Arden had exited that dark, comforting well, and although he felt ready for a flourishing good finish to his working day with perhaps two or three hundred more words straining to be written, there was some displeasure in his mood also, as he set about satisfying his curiosity regarding the noise. So he leant over to the window, focused his bloodshot eyes and gazed down upon the scene materializing in the dusty street outside. With that gaze came instant comprehension. The visual axe blow of sudden understanding hit. And his injury? Complete and absolute fascination.

Arden’s annoyed face accidentally folded into a smile for below him glittered an image he had travelled quite a distance from his home country to witness, and he conceded, with a silent shrug, that such a postcard picture was the kind of one only this extraordinary city of Mumbai could provide him. It was one of a slide show he had imagined in his mind’s eye many times, and it was one of many mental screenshots he had yearned for.

Passing beneath Arden’s grime-streaked first floor window was a 150-year-old Indian army.

And it was not just any 150-year-old army: For one thing, it was real, and not a product of Arden’s flamboyant imagination. This was an army of young, uniformed, 19th Century Indian infantrymen. They preceded - with native insouciance - a convoy of armored Asiatic war elephants. Astride each horrible specimen of Elephas maximus indicus sat a half-dozen, half-naked Indian archers armed with double crossbows. Quivers were all fully loaded. Chainmail was wired into place. Anachronistically, some soldiers sent text messages or tweeted. Others, holding their cellphone at arm’s length, sent video messages too.

The massive be-jeweled pachyderms with their curlicue-painted faces, their heavy leather strapping and brass-riveted breastplates, possessed no phones. Instead, their probing, prehensile trunks asked the questions, found the answers and would soon be lumbering by at his first-floor eye-level.

Arden knew his world-changing play writing would have to wait some more: As it had patiently been doing while he dozed there at his cheap plywood desk, self-indulgent and unproductive. He almost leant out the window.

In the middle distance, maybe one hundred and twenty yards behind the first of the garrulous foot soldiers, he observed a slender young Maharashtra-ian woman, attractive to be sure (but not sensationally photogenic enough to secure the industry breakthrough she really hankered after), and she was gaining on the melee from behind.

The girl was dressed in pale lemon (the blouse) and pastel pink (the pants): a Salwar Kameez outfit, the national dress of Pakistan (although worn most parts Indian or Asian), and she had belled, golden anklets above her delicately embossed, leather Chappals. A braided rope of glistening, coconut-oiled, blue-black hair hung to her lower back - ‘Just like the ladder a worthy man might climb to his own private paradise’, Arden thought - and fashionable black-framed eyeglasses above a simple nose-ring adorned the serious features of her lean, soot-dark, near-perfect face.

The frowning maiden intensified Arden’s interest with her dusky good looks. Her refined attractiveness and confidence almost got him calling out in Marathi through the open window in order to learn her identity, for Arden was still of an age when dainty young women commanded his attention easily, but he thought it better not to distract the girl from her obviously important work and decided to simply let the Bollywood careerist get her job done.

Stage Three - You sister-fucking idiots - Stage Three! the evidently not so dainty young woman screamed in ruthless, fearless (ah, but never godless) Hindi, through a megaphone far too small for her un-feminine purpose, as the crowd of approximately two hundred Sepoy warriors and exactly three bored elephants surged on, seemingly oblivious.

But hear her they did, and ignore her they did not, and the columns of Queen Victoria’s British Indian Army reformed, as if they’d been waiting for such advice from a female General all along. Gratefully assuming an orderly direction, the cast of background actors fell into a slightly more orderly formation. Thus, the three elephant extras and two hundred human extras needed for the opening battle scene of the very big budget, historical epic Royal Utsav, haphazardly headed for Bollywood’s Film City Sound Stage Number Three.

***

Arden watched until each and all of the magnificent extras - animal and human - had marched past the adjoining Parisian cafe scene set. He watched until they had filed beyond its attendant maze of trailers, portable toilet cubicles, dangerously exposed electrical cables and precariously propped up lighting equipment. He watched until the stragglers of the regiment - as if sensing they were at last exiting their American audience’s field of view - had then playfully goose-stepped out of his sight altogether.

Around the corner they went to where he knew was the aircraft hangar-sized Film City Sound Stage Number Three, which housed several desert scenes complete with towering sand dunes, ancient stone fortresses and luxurious palm and date tree fringed oases. Like all the Sound Stages at Film City, it was a place of instant magic. With the scripted flick of up to a dozen switches in this particular Sound Stage’s Bio Box, cinematic dust-storms could be mechanically generated, in gradations from gentle to blinding. Sunrises could be painted. Nightfall could be scored.

Arden had yet to poke around inside Sound Stage Number Three, but suspected from the parade he had just witnessed that it was to be the set for a bloody battle scene, with many ‘wounded and dying’ mannequins already placed in the extreme corners of the set and where a centrally positioned group of earnest-looking extras was probably already patiently standing, waiting for the Second Assistant Director’s instructions on … ‘How to Act’. Nodding their heads attentively, they would most likely be told, Arden imagined, the following sage words of advice:

Extras, you are all mortally wounded. By all means, show your suffering, but please to be doing your moaning and dying as noiselessly as possible! Your job is to be silent!

Such un-expected visions as that afternoon’s fake army procession beneath his office window were part of the web of reasons contributing to why he loved his still relatively new job in this new (but so very old) country which would always be capable of delivering such delightful surprises. Even if he ended up living his entire life in India. Even if he survived into his nineties. Even if he was eventually confined to a wheelchair with an assortment of catheter tubes and body fluid bags, India would always occasionally surprise, as his daydreams finally fled from the atonal overtures of reality.

He thought all this through - as he finished contemplating the long-gone March of the Glorious Extras - before turning his attention to a slightly more pressing matter: coffee.

Arden was trying to decide if he should take his coffee break then (which was the time it was actually needed, that dull afternoon siesta time when any central nervous system stimulant would be productive in completing one’s waking-up process), or later (when he had the much better chance of bumping into the frequent subject of his daydreams, the fifteen going on thirty-year-old Chandy).

He glanced at the wastepaper bin at his feet and felt a sliver of guilt at such high levels of caffeine consumption. It was half full of waxed and pleated paper coffee cups the company’s machine and its coin-operated convenience had persuaded him to buy.

He thought some more. It was something which, in his opinion, he did rather well. But maybe, Arden pondered, he thought ... a ... little ... too ... much