With great care, Anwar bent forward and adjusted the ear-ring on her left ear. He hoped she would smile at him, but she didn’t. Instead she kept staring ahead, a cold expression in her eyes, lips set in a tight line.
He gazed admiringly at her pink cheeks, the full lips and the dark eyelashes which gave her face that dreamy, just-been-kissed look. Then, after a couple of idle minutes, suddenly conscious of the task at hand, he dabbed deftly below her chin and under the ears, smoothening the layers of face-paint. And as he moved his cotton sponge over her lips, he felt the admiring eyes of the crowd on him.
The pride swelled within him. After all, who wouldn’t admire him, who wouldn’t envy him – painting the lips of Divya Malini, the goddess of the South Indian film industry?
His mind started to wander. Even as his hands moved adeptly in their trained trajectories, he slowly became engrossed in his own thoughts and memories…
It was around ten years ago, he remembered, though not entirely sure of it. An entire film crew had landed in his village in Ottappalam. The news had trickled down to his school, on a sleepy summer afternoon, the air pregnant with ennui. The news suddenly transformed the day; he dashed across the school compound, jumped over the wall to escape the blue-suited, betel-chewing school-peon, scurried through the lush green paddy-fields and reached the Panchayat president’s huge bungalow where the shooting was planned.
There were two remnant memories of the day…
The first – he had had a bloody shoulder, the result of jumping over a barbed fence. He had cut himself badly. Anwar stopped applying the make-up and felt the scar on his right shoulder. It was still there, just above his polio injection mark, the skin there having hardened with time.
The second – there was a half-sari clad, debutante girl of fourteen who was playing the heroine’s childhood. She hadn’t become Divya Malini yet; she was some young girl, whose only claim to fame was a photograph of her which had appeared on the cover page of a local daily, which, fortunately for her, the director had found time to peruse through.
Few had expected her to be christened Divya Malini in five to six years (after the runaway success as a heroine, she was named after the yesteryear super-heroine of the same name), fewer had expected her to become the highest paid heroine in the whole of South India. Anwar hadn’t too.
Neither had he imagined these, nor had he imagined that he would be brushing her cheeks with his fingers on a similar hot summer afternoon, ten years later.
He could still remember the pangs of envy which he had felt towards the boy, of his same age, who played the childhood of the hero. They had a song together, in which they ran across the paddy fields, chased each other around trees and most irritatingly, the guy would sit with her on a swing and lip-sync for a song which blared away in the background.
For one month, he had kept on skipping school with more regularity than he had ever attended it, bribing his sister with stolen ice-candy so as to not tell his misdeeds to their mother. He loitered around the shooting premises, stealing furtive glances at the girl in the arc lights, fruitlessly imagining that she was doing the same at him too. While at the same time, his classmates at school were busy submitting their tenth standard exam applications and devouring their text-books like crazy.
As for Anwar, he was bitten by the film bug. He wasn’t sure whether it was the arc lights or whether it was Divya Malini, but he was bitten alright.
He didn’t write the exams that year. And for that matter, he didn’t ever since.
Anwar looked at her face again. She still had the same expression on her face, though her cheeks were slightly more illuminated by the sun which was now at its highest and hottest. With his sponge, Anwar carefully brushed away the specks of dust which had gathered on her forehead.
It could be nothing but a coincidence of the extreme degree; Anwar thought to himself, that at all the critical junctures in his life, this girl should always be present.
After his skipped tenth-standard examination which effectively dashed the dreams of his mother that her son would acquire a good education and would relieve her of the hardships of her labor, he had spent two worthless years as a painter and makeup man in a drama troupe, which spent much more than it earned. A born artist, he perfected his craft at the troupe.
But, the troupe-owner went absconding one fine morning, leaving his employees and money-lenders alike, agape in dismay.
Then he had boarded a train to Chennai, loitered around Kodambakkam, the Tamil film hub, doing this job and that, for quite some time. He had work on one day, and none on the next two, but something, maybe the proximity to the film world, kept him afloat. Life had been going on in this fashion when the shooting of the movie “Kondayil Thazhampoo” commenced in Kodambakkam. The movie starred the reigning super-star with a new face as the heroine. His heart jumped into his mouth when he saw the heroine; the girl had now become a woman, a far cry from the starry eyed fourteen-year old who had come to his village years back.
His heart had fluttered a bit more than normal, maybe because of the habitual drinks he took that morning – there was a scuffle as he tried to break the ring (for what, Anwar couldn’t comprehend later, in hindsight). The end result was that one of the security guards sustained a flat nose and a black-eye. It didn’t end there; Anwar landed four months in jail for assault with intent to murder. The law enforcement wasn’t as strict as it would usually be, because of the timely intervention of a priest whom Anwar had earlier befriended at a drama in the city.
What it eventually did was that, no one was interested in employing him anymore. The once in three days work cycle dwindled to once in a month or even less, and it was a miracle that he kept himself alive.
It must be third-time-lucky, Anwar now thought to himself, as he neatly touched up her hair, done up into a parrot-shape at the back of her head, the eyes of the parrot adorned with golden beads. This new job was the courtesy of an old time friend from his village who had struck gold in Kodambakkam, who had a major share in a film production company and even owned the franchisee of the biggest jewelry group in the state. He had hired him, on the promise of no further misbehavior. After a few minor touch-up works, this was the first stand-alone assignment that he got his hands on.
He had done a neat job, he reckoned, but the persistent dissatisfaction on her face kept on rankling him. He looked askance at her, with a critical eye, and then with a sudden glitter in his eyes, picked up his brush and sponge. Bending down on his knees, by her side, he did a sudden, expert waft at the sides of her either cheek. He stood up victoriously – Divya Malini was smiling now, though haughtily, her eyes affixed far away.
Then, turning back, Anwar nodded at two lean, dark men who had been standing impatiently beside him all the time, smoking.
As they came near, Anwar backed away, and, as he watched, Divya Malini slowly rose upwards, steadily, towards the sky.
Packing up his tools, and slinging them over his shoulder in a grey duffel bag, Anwar walked back slowly, pocketed his fees – five hundred rupees – which was the highest that he had received in quite some time.
The two men on the ground, who were standing beside him all this while, looked upwards questioningly, the muscles on their forearms straining as they tugged at the ropes which hoisted a blue billboard upwards, as two men from the top of the scaffolding shouted back – “Enough, Enough.” Then they affixed the billboard with ropes, on top of the scaffolding.
A wistful smile played on Anwar’s lips as he looked upwards over his shoulders at his just-completed painting – Divya Malini, smiling, sitting smugly atop a blue billboard, which advertised “Lakshmana Jewellers”, the biggest jewelry group in the state.
I dedicate this to: All the underachieving artists out there…
(Originally posted in www.passionforcinema.com)
