A Horrible First Impression to Make at an Audition
I went for an audition last Sunday. Expecting a long journey and a long wait, I had a heavy lunch, followed by a tall glass of cold coffee to bolster myself up. I took bus number 459 to Mulund. It was a hot day – the rains hadn’t started then – so I had a glass of nimbu pani at the bus depot.
My final destination was a short auto trip away, but within barely a minute of sitting in the auto, nature started calling – to its destination number two. This sometimes happens to me if I drink a significant amount of coffee or tea without having submitted my full daily quota to Mr Commode in the morning.
The pressure started increasing, and so did my sense of consternation. Why, God, why now, of all the times? Just when I’m about to reach my audition. I wondered what I’d look like to the casting folks if the first thing I did on getting there was ask for the bathroom. And what if they didn’t have one? God no! What a horrible thought! I wondered if I’d be able to finish the audition, get back home, and then make my donation. Immediately, the pressure went up a notch, condemning any such thought as utterly stupid, because it would take me at least one and a half hours to get home. I’d be a gone case long before then. I’d seen a Sulabh Shauchalay somewhere on the way, but where?
And how the hell was I to give a proper audition with something else pounding away at the back of my mind, or rather, at the back of something else? I do a good act of someone in urgent need of a commode, but what about acting when I myself would be in dire need of one? I’d be putting pauses and stresses in my lines at all the wrong places, dictated not by the character but by certain back offices in my body.
With extreme unease I alighted from the auto. The audition was on the 13th floor. Not a good sign, I thought. I reached the office; the friend who’d called me led me in. The hall wasn’t furnished; it was being used for the auditions. But it looked promising – it was built as a flat, so surely there would be a bathroom.
“Hi Kenny. Kaisa hai? Chal, yeh le dialogues, aur ready ho ja.”
“Pehle bathroom ja sakta hoon?”
I’m pretty sure this was the second line that came out of my mouth. My friend looked at me, looked around, then said sure, and showed me the door. The bathroom door, I mean.
So I went in. Good; it was clean. I tried the taps. Yep, no problem with water – thank God!
There was one more slight obstacle, the camera was placed just outside the bathroom door, so I had to try to keep things as quiet as possible – all right, all right, I won’t go into any more detail, in case you think this is going to start resembling an American teen movie.
There are some simple, free pleasures in the world that bring a spontaneous smile to one’s face. For me, relief after twenty minutes of extreme stress is one of them.
After matters were settled, everything went smoothly. Thankfully, I think the casting director and the other crew members were too busy to notice where I’d been. I mugged my lines and delivered them verbatim. In my 70-odd days of shooting, I don’t think I’ve bungled up my lines on more than 5 or 6 occasions. Shameless self-promotion, eh?
I’d like this story to have a happy ending, but I don’t know yet if I’ll get the part, although my friend, who works with the production team, says I will.
While this story doesn’t have an end, what it does have is a surprise second climax, something like Aliens and Terminator 2 and The Ring. Read on.
I took an AC bus to Andheri, intending to go to either Juhu or back home to Malad, depending on the time by which I reached Andheri. The traffic was terrible, and it took nearly an hour and a half to reach the bus depot.
I was thirsty, so I had another nimbu pani. Guess what started within the next couple of minutes.
More pressure!
Oh Gawd no! This couldn’t be happening to me! Twice on the same day! In public places! Why, God, why? I certainly didn’t know the Andheri East area like the back of my hand, and I didn’t want to experiment with the sanitary conditions of the bus depot and train station, so I wondered whether I should try to dash back home. Again, the increase in pressure vigorously shook its head – I wouldn’t make in one piece.
Infinity mall! Yes, that’s close enough and that’s one place I know will have commodes and will be clean. Chalo infinity!
I took an auto and promptly got stuck in a traffic jam!
It was horrible. Rush hour. Bumper to bumper. Einstein compared the theory of relativity to sitting with a nice girl for an hour vis-à-vis sitting on a hot stove for a minute. I wasn’t sitting on a hot stove, but you can well imagine I was sitting on a time bomb, and the auto was probably traveling at about 20 feet per minute.
I tried to distract my mind. I tried to read the book I’d brought with me, but it wasn’t a Frederick Forsyth or Wodehouse or Dan Brown that I’d be completely lost in its world. And to top it all, the autowallah stank! I mean, he positively reeked! I tried sitting in different contortions to ease the pressure building up down there, but it was impossible to keep my nose anywhere but in the extreme corners of the auto. I don’t know whether the blighter hadn’t washed his clothes or had done the washing but instead of drying them in the sun, had blow-dried them with his mouth before brushing his teeth in the morning. Yuck!
Open road! Open road at last! Thank the lord! Please now, no more traffic jams or bottlenecks.
Ah, Infinity mall at last. After an agonizing twenty minutes.
I don’t know if it’s just me or if it happens to everyone, but the closer you get to your destination, the more your excitement builds, if you get my drift. As I climbed the steps, it was all I could do to keep myself from breaking into a run. Dignity, beta, dignity. Once past the guards, my pace turned into a really fast walk, even though what I actually wanted to do was to make a dash towards the washrooms at Olympic speed.
Well, I finally got there, and there were no nasty surprise twist endings like finding all the commodes occupied or there being no water because of plumbing maintenance. Phew! Twice in a day!
Epilogue: That day it was nimbu pani that triggered the dam on both the occasions, but it’d never happened before. So a few days ago, I experimented and again had nimbu pani, this time in safe territory – right opposite Infinity mall just in case the inverted volcano was activated again. But this time nothing happened. I went to Landmark book store and peacefully read the approximately 150-200 page Superman: Birthright and Batman: Tower of Babel graphic novels without any untoward incidents.
Tags: real life comedy
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
That was funny! Glad you made it in one piece! It must have been such a relief ;)
All the best for the part though.
-Sachin
LOL Kenny
keep postin man
all the best !!
AWESOME POST KENNY …. welcome to pfc….
ROFL !!!
keep writing about ur adventures and mis-adventures …
Loved ur short films on pfc ..refreshing …
P.S – dude i had mailed u some time back hoping to catch u for a beer …. didnt know if u got my mail or not …
let’s do catch up ..mail me
And here’s hoping u do get the part !!!
Cheers
bad experience for u but
good reading experience for reader,
actualy u should be a writter brother.
Haha..this was hillarious…geez..
“I don’t know if it’s just me or if it happens to everyone, but the closer you get to your destination, the more your excitement builds, if you get my drift”
Me too..and the eruption after you sit..is the most powerful and serene plus peaceful…yeh kaisa eruption hain yaaro..
Welcome Kenny..awesome first post
extremely funny!. enjoyed lot. don’t worry most of us must have paased through these type of situation.
btw, funny to thik hai. jis par gujarti hai usko pata chalta hai ki us waqt pe kitna funny tha?
@spinnerr
I just became a member of the Film Writers’ Association last month.
Thanks for the welcome, folks. The trouble with life is, misadventures are always the ones that are funnier and worth writing about. So the honest truth is, I hope such crap (ahem ahem) doesn’t happen to me again and I’ll have happier things to write about.
well..u shud go to hollywood…nd not bollywood, there sanitation at bus depot will be good and Autowallah not stink….
Hahhahahha…that was a fun read for me
All the best n do saty away frm nimbu pani on the days u go for an audition or something…
Hey, all the best for the part.
Mr. Kenny! My mom literally came out of the kitchen wondering what was wrong with me for laughing so hard. You crazy!!!!