I pause, trying to do the conversions.
Faruk takes my silence for bargaining. “Okay,” he counters. “Forty thousand rupees.”
“How long would I have to stay?”
“Shoot starts Monday, should last three days,” Faruk says.
Monday is when I’m meant to fly back to Amsterdam. Do I want to stay three more days? But then Faruk continues. “We would put you up in the cast hotel. It’s on Juhu Beach.”
“Juhu Beach is very nice,” Billy says.
“I’m meant to leave on Monday. I have a flight.”
“Can’t you change your flight?” Faruk asks.
I’m sure Mukesh can. And if they’re putting me up in a hotel, it would keep me from having to go back to the Bombay Royale.
“Fifty thousand,” Faruk says. “But that’s my final offer.
“That’s more than a thousand dollars, Mr. de Ruiter,” Amisha informs me with a husky laugh and a billowing exhale of cigarette smoke. “Too good to turn down, I think.”
Twenty-eight
The production immediately relocates me to a posh hotel in Juhu Beach. The first thing I do is shower. Then I plug in my phone, which has been dead for the past day. I half expect a text or call from Yael, but there isn’t one. I consider telling her I’m staying longer, but after our last conversation, after the last three weeks—three years—I feel like she has no right to this information. Instead, I text Mukesh, asking him to bump my departure date by another three days.
Immediately, he calls back. “You’ve decided to stay with us longer!” he says. He sounds delighted.
“Just a few days.” I explain to him about being an extra and now being cast in a small part.
“Oh, that is most exciting,” he says. “Mummy must be thrilled.”
“Mummy doesn’t know, actually.”
“Doesn’t know?”
“I haven’t seen her. I’ve been staying out by the studios, and now I’m in a hotel in Juhu Beach.”
“Juhu Beach. Very classy,” Mukesh says. “But you haven’t seen Mummy since you came back from Rajasthan? I thought she picked you up at the airport.”
“Change of plans.”
“Oh. I see.” There’s a pause. “When do you want to leave?”
“I’m supposed to start shooting on Monday, and it’s meant to take three days.”
“Safer to assume it’ll take double,” Mukesh says. “I’ll see what I can do.”
We hang up and I pick up my script. Faruk has written English translations above the Hindi and someone has made me a tape recording of the Hindi. I spend the afternoon repeating the lines.
When I’m done, I pace the room for a bit. It’s all modern and posh, with a bathtub and a shower and a wide double bed. I haven’t slept somewhere this nice in ages, and it’s a little too quiet, a little too pristine. I sit on the bed, watch Hindi TV just to have some company. I order dinner in my room. That night when I go to bed, I find I can’t sleep. The bed is too soft, too big, after so many years of sleeping on trains, in cars, on bunkbeds, sofas, futons, Ana Lucia’s cramped bed. Now I’m like one of those rescued shipwrecked men who, once rescued and back in civilization, can only sleep on the floor.
Friday I wake up and practice my lines again. The shoot doesn’t start for three more days, and they stretch in front of me, endlessly, like the gray blue sea out my window. When my phone rings, I am embarrassed by my relief.
“Willem, Mukesh here. I have news about your flights.”
“Great.”