#my zaidy used to like to say that he had a friend on his street named shemini atzeret

[qaraxuanzenith]

listen, it's perfectly simple.

it's the 8th day of the 7-day holiday of sukkot. it is not a part of sukkot.

it's a completely separate holiday from the weeklong holiday taking place on the immediately preceding 7 days consecutive to it.

it's when we stop celebrating that other holiday, to celebrate this holiday instead.

it's the culmination of hoshana rabba, which is a special part of the completely separate holiday before it that also happens to be the day before. it's the second day of hoshana rabba for the diaspora. it has nothing to do with hoshana rabba. it's when we pray for rain, not to be confused with hoshana rabba, when we pray for rain.

you're not allowed to sit in the sukkah on shemini atzeret. you have to sit in the sukkah on shemini atzeret. you're allowed to sit in the sukkah on shemini atzeret but you'll feel kind of awkward about it. you're not allowed to put the sukkah away until after shemini atzeret.

Gentile: What’s Shmini Atzeret?

Me, Jewish: That’s a great question!

Gentile:

Me:

Gentile: Are you planning to … answer it?

Me: Haha! No.

[tetrakys]

Five Songs - Chapter 4: Quit Playing

I looked around the place trying to decide where to start first. Luckily, food had been cooked elsewhere by the catering service so the kitchen was clean and all the dirty dishes had been taken away once they left. What I had to do was to collect the garbage lying around the room and clean the floor. I could have easily done it in the morning I guessed, but I knew that the moment my head was on a pillow I was going to sleep for the next 12 hours straight.

I came back from the kitchen with a big rubbish bag and a broom. I paused for a moment and looked at my phone, cleaning up was always easier with some background music. I accessed my music app and selected a random playlist. 

I had just started swapping the floor when a thought crossed my mind. I was very visible from the outside, with all the lights on in the café at this hour of the night, anyone could see me being alone in here. I went to the light switches and turned off all the lights in the room except for the ones in the kitchen and the lamps that Nina had lent us. The room was now lit enough that I could see the furniture and avoid tripping every two seconds, but it would have been almost impossible to spot me from the street.  

I started collecting all the rubbish I could find. Someone had lost an earring, I put it in a drawer by the till in case they came back looking for it. There I also found my keys lying on the floor, thank god I hadn’t gone back to campus, I would have ended up spending the night on the floor locked out of my room.

I had been cleaning for an hour or so when one of my favourite songs came up on the playlist. I started singing along while brushing the floor pretending the broom was a microphone. I got really into it headbanging and twirling around the room when, suddenly, I caught something in the corner of my eye. I stopped immediately with a frightened cry, there was someone sitting in the darkest corner of the room, someone who… was laughing his ass off!

“I’m sorry Candy” Hyun said with tears in his eyes “I didn’t want to frighten you” he kept laughing “you didn’t hear me coming in and I thought I might just…”

“You thought you could just sit and enjoy the show, right?” I said annoyed, ashamed but also a little bemused.

“I’m sorry, really. It was just too funny!” he went on “I swear I have only been for like… well… most of it.”

I was mortified, that really wasn’t the image I wanted popping in his head whenever he thought about me. “What are you doing here, anyway? You left ages ago.”

“Yeah, sorry about that, my parents sent me a text asking me to call them. I was worried but I shouldn’t have, it was nothing serious. I was just about to go to bed when I had the terrible thought that Clemence might have ‘asked’ you to stay and clean the place. I came back to make sure it wasn’t the case but, apparently, I was right.” He looked around the room “You are basically done, sorry for being late. At least it seemed like you were having fun” and he started laughing again.

“Hyun!” I cried stomping my feet on the floor and puffing my cheeks like a child.

“Sorry, sorry!” He raised his hands looking at me apologetically “It’s just that… you are just too cute.”

I felt myself starting to blush a little when I noticed that he was still grinning like an idiot and realised that he was just trying to appease me, as if I was a child or a puppy. I knew in my heart that it wasn’t exactly the case, I knew that he liked me, at least a little. We had been flirting every now and then for a while now, but he had never stepped up. Could that be because he only saw me as a girl and not as a woman? He had seen me being a klutz at the café many times, and even though he was also a bit of a dork sometimes, I really didn’t want that to be the only impression he had of me. Suddenly an idea came to my mind, it was risky and could totally backfire but I was willing to try, he had just seen me at my lamest so I had nothing to lose.

“You know what Hyun” I said with fake confidence crossing my arms “since you apparently like to watch, you can give me your opinion on something. A while ago a friend and I prepared a small choreography for a contest which we never ended up performing, she broke her leg a week before. I have always wondered what people would have thought of it.”

That really got his attention, he sat straight on the chair and looked at me intently. “I’m not an expert but I can definitely give you an honest opinion.” He said blushing a little.

“Thanks” I replied and pulled a chair in the middle of the room. “Please sit here.”

He complied while I headed to my phone and selected the song I was looking for. During my third year I became good friend with a girl who was a huge K-pop fan. She was so passionate about it, that she begged me to enter a contest together to attend a famous boy band concert in Seoul. She was devastated when she fell from her bike right before we could perform. The first notes of “Quit Playing” from U-Kiss started and I headed towards the centre of the room, a few feet in front of Hyun. I saw a surprised and somewhat embarrassed look crossing his face, he must have recognised the song. K-pop was usually more cute than sexy, but this song… it really hit it out of the park, it had an upbeat but sensual rhythm and the MV showed a 2 boys/1 girl threesome… between other things. I briefly pictured myself squeezed between Hyun and another man who looked suspiciously like Mr Zaidi… Nope, nope… it was not the time to go there… I came back to the present and let the music lead me.

The choreography was purposefully as sensual as the music, I raised my hands and let them slowly run down along the curves of my body. I turned around and let my hips swirl while I slightly bended on a side. I looked him right in the eyes and I saw him quite affected by the show. He was staring at me with a hunger I had never seen him display before. He looked at me from top to bottom, and I felt his gaze caressing my skin, my calves and the length of my legs. I was still wearing my Charleston dress, which proved to be quite fitting in these circumstances as the fringes jumped around at the smallest movement of my hips, leaving my thighs mostly bare. He seemed to be painfully aware of this since, even though he looked at me all over, his gaze kept slipping back to that particular spot.

Once the song reached its peak I slowly started heading towards him. I bent down leaning on the back of his chair while looking at him straight in the eyes. I saw him swallow, appearing completely bewitched. Once my lips where just an inch away from his I smirked, got up again and moved at his back. I hugged him from behind and run my nose along his neck leaving a small kiss on his chin. Stop messing with my mind said the song, I twirled again and landed on his legs, straddling him. On the last notes of the song I put my hands on the back of his chair so that he had to tilt his head up to see me and I let my lips hover over his, just a few inches away and… stopped. Panting heavily just a breath away from his lips.

“So?” I asked once I caught my breath “What do you think?”

He looked at me pensively “That I am really glad you ended up not performing” then he added “Do you know the meaning of the lyrics” I only had a general idea so I shook my head to say no. “The guy is basically pleading the girl not to mess with his head because men are simple minded and easily bewitched” he stared me straight in my eyes and added “Is this what you are doing?”

I cocked my head on the side “I don’t know… is it working? I can’t tell.”

At those words he put his hands on my hips and pushed my lower half closer to his and a breath escaped my lips. Oh, it was working indeed… “I’m not that cute then…” was the first thing that came to my mind.

He smiled timidly and raised his head leaving a feather-like kiss on my lips “Always.” I felt his hands moving slowly along my thighs while he added “You are cute, sexy, funny, smart and passionate��� and I am simply crazy about you.” I looked at him surprised, had he just… confessed? I quickly got up from his lap and pretended to straighten my dress from some invisible wrinkle. How could I feel shy… now? When two seconds ago I was grinding on him with my ass basically in his hands? We started rearranging chairs and tables. The atmosphere was now heavy and I didn’t know what to do or say. I like you too? No, too ordinary… and he hadn’t exactly say that, had he? I was going to spend the next several days analysing his words and reactions, God… I was trying to act like a femme fatale but I really was a klutz! Once we were done, we turned on the alarm, locked the door and headed towards the campus. I tried unsuccessfully to make same small talk but we were still really embarrassed.

Once we reached the dorms entrance I said goodnight and tried to quickly run towards my room.

“Candy wait” he said. I turned around and saw him stopping in front of me. “I know you were playing and I freaked you out, but…”

“No, Hyun” I tried to explain but he stopped me.

“Let me finish, please.” He said, looking at me sweetly. “I really do like you. A lot. I wasn’t kidding.” He put a hand on my cheek “One day soon I am going to ask you out, and I really hope you say yes.” He leaned and left a sweet kiss me on my forehead. “Goodnight” he said smiling, and headed towards his room.

I stayed there looking at him walking away, a smile also on my lips.

Soon.

[unhinged-diaries-blog]

Down another pound!

I don’t know what I’m doing but I really seem to have turned a corner. I woke up this morning and weighed myself and I lost another pound. I know what I’m doing by not watching what I eat but at the same time watching what I eat but not necessarily counting the calories just winging it is not the healthiest.

Currently with my schedule I will wake up in the morning, get a ride to the bus stop at stop for Starbucks. I will usually have a Venti acai strawberry refresher, depending if I’m hungry or not I may have a breakfast sandwich and I go with the lowest calorie count which is about 200 give or take for a egg whites, bacon sandwich and that will get me through until 2 PM.

After I eat I wait at least 30 minutes before I start drinking water again but now I still eat so slow that really I drink water in our later. I haven’t had a protein shake in a week and a half and I know we need to get back on the wagon. This is the first time all week i’ve had coffee made it home and I added not creamer but cashew protein milk and sugar because even though I do have Splenda fuck that splenda is gross.

For lunch I packed 2 1/2 ounces of Turkey pastrami, and ounce of strawberries and a cookie because I’m definitely going to need sugar and in the office I’m at I don’t have a car and there’s no way I’m gonna be walking 10 minutes away just to get something to drink and then 10 minutes back so basically a lunch.

When in reality I have lunch in the office. I know I’m going to get to work early and as long as I do my job he really doesn’t care he’s so relaxed and that’s what I love most about this job. I skip school today because I was exhausted. I did not fall asleep until 23:59 last night but I think in reality I didn’t fall asleep until 1 o’clock because all I heard was my dog whining because she was in her kennel, one of my cats trying to get into a closet which was pissing me off

I think I eventually fell back asleep until 630 were my husband kept asking me if I wanted a ride or if I was going to school and I’ve actually said fuck it I’m so tired I’m not going and I know I’m going to get docked off attendance points but at this point I really don’t give a fuck because I’m doing what I need to needs to be done, I’m taking photos and I will turn in the project that was due yesterday turned in today. A lot of the students didn’t take the photos needed for yesterday‘s Photo essay I took my photos on Sunday and I realize that a lot of students didn’t because who’s going to want to shoot with their camera for an hour when it’s 115° heat?

I sure shit will not do it and my professor is so relaxed about it that he is like basically we’re going to have to wait till it’s cooler which is awesome minutes south but I mean at the end of the day it sucks when you’re really needing shoot and certain students schedules like myself are so fucked up that the only time they didn’t have time to shoot is during sunset or early in the morning and I know for a fact I’m not gonna be shooting early in the morning waking up an hour heading to where I need to shoot for an hour and a half and then somehow catching a bus that will take me down the street to go to class for an hour and then having to go to work for five

that’s feasibly not possible especially after 730 is when the sun starts to rise and it gets extremely hot. I’m just really shocked over all with the sleeve it’s finally working the way I want it to work that I’m losing weight faster than when I was stalling over the last 3 1/2 months. I’m not upset by any means I’m just excited that my luck has finally really fucking tired because I needed this break so hard. Got a email from my boss last week my old boss and she asked me is there anything we can do to change your mind I’ve been sitting on it for days and I don’t even know what to say to her. What do you say to someone who treat you like a number in a place you work?

Do you say that pay per performance is bullshit and because of how you are in sales you get to go down to minimum wage? Do you say not thenwork itself it’s hard it’s the fact that you treated like we don’t matter, when we have legit questions and email the entire staff the entire coaching team no one gives us a fucking answer, when we have several terrible days are performance get stocked and are paid get stocked and the fact that I got dad to minimum wage is absolute bullshit and after three months of working there that’s when everything changed I went down from $10 an hour due to my performance and bad calls and the audit etc. to minimum-wage

that is not a living fucking wait especially when they know I’m a student, they know my schedule, and they know my limits. The email itself my boss said she didn’t want to lose me and I’m just thinking if you don’t want to lose people you should treat them better. If you don’t want to lose people management should be better and the entire structure should be better instead of going to the cycle that’s wrong did I did that wrong this is how I fix it

I wouldn’t say all that many call centers are you’re a number they won’t work with your schedule they don’t give a shit if you breathe or die as long as you keep the money coming in and follow their rules you basically get a keep your job but if you have a voice and say what we’re doing it wrong you’re the asshole and eventually get reprimanded for it this job is no future this job is a job you take when you have nothing else and you were forced to take this job to make money

I’ll probably sit in the email a couple more days before I really give her an email back. Things are great in the first three weeks I like this job, things were good until I saw the in tire Spectre my back. I saw how my buddy, R got fucked up his check and they took out almost $400 they over charged him, they don’t necessarily answer all emails and they are completely overwhelmed to where where we stand donors to validation nine times out of 10 we lose those donors

they’re tired of waiting and validation is taking so long that at one time I was waiting six minutes to get a pledge and to have a flight finished and who the fuck wants to wait six minutes on the phone trying to basically finish this transaction I fucking doubt I can see why donors are pissed and how you tell him multiple times not to call and they still won’t take you off the list but I guess at the game when it comes to donating anywhere

I think I just finally got tired of it so I talk to my friend and she had received my resume and sent it over to my current boss and he basically save me out of a bad position. I would’ve stayed with my old job until I just couldn’t take it anymore. It got to the point where after work I would be counting down the hours until I went to bed, and wondering how was going to make it through another day when I’m waking up early, and getting bad sleep, and I am hoping I get hit by a car because I feel my life is so bad at this point but that she dropped and things are a lot better

Now the next thing I’m waiting on is if I get excepted into this internship and I should know by this week. I really hope this goes through because I need this more than anything I have one more year of this and I am done with school for now I just need to keep on pushing and realize this is it going to last forever at least suck right now but you were so close to the fucking finish line it’s not funny and that’s what keeps going and that’s what keeps me going knowing I’m so close to finishing after seven years and struggling and death and toxic families and moving I’m finally here getting my bachelors and nobody can take that away from me. No one in my mediate family has her bachelors and I’m going to be the first want to do it and it’s not because I’m a woman but because I chose to put my career first had to take shit jobs and she keep going when I wanted to absolutely quit. I wanted to quit when my brother died being here all alone in Vegas with Noel family I wanted to in my life when my dad died because I thought my future but nothing without him, and now six years later I have a finally I finally have a future to look forward to and no one can take that away from me out of the bad days no matter things Zaidi no matter the depression I have a future in life I’m finally looking forward to

Happy Wednesday

[classyfoxdestiny]

Excerpt: Regrets, None by Dolly Thakore

Excerpt: Regrets, None by Dolly Thakore

In July 1979, Rani Dube passed through Bombay. She’d brought Richard Attenborough with her. Richard’s long-cherished dream project, Gandhi, was close to realization. Rani was the co-producer, and she had brokered a meeting between Richard and Indira Gandhi. Mrs Gandhi had given the project her blessing and introduced the two of them to the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC)…

375pp, ₹599; HarperCollins

On the 25th of July, Rani brought Richard over to my apartment at around 3 in the afternoon. I was breastfeeding Quasar. We chatted for a while. The walls of our home, as ever, were covered with photographs from plays Alyque had directed. Talk turned to the theatre, to the BBC, to children and life. At half five, I rang Alyque to say, “Ahem, Richard Attenborough is here, and would you come home and we can all have dinner, because, you know, Richard Attenborough?”

I remember we went to Copper Chimney and had Kakori kebabs. But the moment Alyque walked in through the door, Richard turned to me and said, “That’s my Jinnah.”

Two days later, he rang me up.

“Dolly, it’s Richard,” he began. “We’re starting work on Gandhi, as you know. And I was wondering if you’d like to be the casting director?”

It was on the strength of the photographs and the long chat we had that day, about my years in the theatre and my work as a model coordinator and as a host. But mostly, I suspect, it was just a hunch.

I jumped at it. Although no one I knew really knew what ‘casting’ entailed. So, it was just like every other job I ever had.

By November of 1979, Quasar and I moved to the Ashoka Hotel in Delhi. We lived there for the next six months. I was casting director for Gandhi, but I was also the unit publicist and PR liaison.

Richard had already decided on his Gandhi: Ben Kingsley. He was going to cast all the white parts from Britain (and in the case of Martin Sheen and Candice Bergen, the US). I had to find all the Indian actors.

I also worked as a theatre critic at the time, and I watched almost every play on the boards, across the city. I spotted Rohini Hattangadi and called Richard in Delhi.

“There’s a young actress I want you to see,” I said.

“Kasturba?” he asked.

“Kasturba,” I agreed.

Richard was leaving Delhi for London that night. But he would stop in Bombay if he could meet this actress. Would I be able to take a room at the Airport Centaur? He’d nip out, see her and then go back across the street for his flight to London. International flights operated from the same terminal.

Rohini had a show that night. It was past 11.30 before she made it to the Centaur. Richard and I were sitting on the couch, and the moment Rohini walked in through the door, he clutched my thigh.

“This is it, Doll!” he whispered.

Richard had seen something intangible – a quality, an essence. He had a hunch about Rohini. She’d fit into his vision and further it. He could see her on screen. That was what casting was about. That was what one half of filmmaking was.

…”If she can lose about eleven kilos, that’s my Kasturba.”

This, then, was the other half of filmmaking: the journey from casting to the shoot. I rang Rohini the next day. Together, we went to see a Dr Vishnu Khakkar at Kemp’s Corner. He was a dietician…He examined Rohini, heard the brief and then told her that she could eat two chapattis and a bowl of dal for lunch and dinner, and nothing in between. And she had to walk for an hour and a half every day.

Rohini lived in Wadala at the time. Right or wrong, I was convinced that she might follow the dal-roti diet but, left to her own devices, there was no way she was going to take a walk every day. So she’d come to mine, we’d go to Vishnu’s office and lock ourselves into the second room. I’d sit in the chair and she’d walk around the table for an hour and a half. We did this every day for three weeks. She lost five kilos, and I called Richard with a progress report.

“Send her,” he said.

The delegation to London comprised Rohini, Smita Patil, Bhakti Barve and Naseeruddin Shah.

Smita Patil was very much the trendy pick. She was quite a big star by then. She was critically acclaimed and shared, in particular, a wonderful creative relationship with Shyam Benegal. But she wasn’t right for the role. She was too sultry, too aware, had too much spark for that version of that story. It would’ve been bad casting.

My pick – so much water under the bridge now – was actually Bhakti Barve. She was a fine actress. And I felt that she looked like Kasturba. That was enough to seal the deal in my mind.

Naseer’s trip was a political move. He’d made it clear that he was only interested in playing Gandhi. And Richard was set on Ben. But Naseer was a star, a name in the Bombay film industry, and Richard wanted to pitch a host of other parts to him – Nehru, in particular. Which shows how well he knew Naseer. Because that was never going to happen.

Money wasn’t a problem. We put this group of actors on a flight to London to shoot some tests. In fact Gandhi, as my first film, was a bit of a ruinous experience. The producers allowed – “empowered”, I think, is the right word – me to take decisions and paid for them without asking any questions. In other words, they trusted me to do the job they’d hired me to do. They delegated and left it at that; if I screwed up, that was completely my responsibility. No other job has come close.

Richard said ‘no’ to Naseer playing Gandhi. Naseer, in turn, said ‘no’ to Nehru. He wasn’t part of the film which – to this day – feels odd, given that I cast 498 Indian actors. A lot of people remember him being in the film! They’ve ghosted him in, because it feels logical that he would’ve been there. Naseer would have to wait about two decades to play Gandhi in Feroze Khan’s stage production.

Richard called from London to say that Rohini was his Kasturba. He loved her simplicity and naivety – things that are difficult to fake on screen.

The next step was to better her English. I got Kusum Haider to be her teacher in Delhi. I suppose that would be her ‘dialect coach’ in this day and age. Rohini was a model pupil. She maintained her diet and her exercise routine, and she was serious about her English lessons and the spinning class she took with Ben.

Wait. What I mean is that both Rohini and Ben learnt how to weave cotton. They weren’t on exercise bikes, peddling madly.

One of the major criticisms at the time was that Ben Kingsley was too ‘muscular’ to play Gandhi. Ben did all he could to remedy that. He was on a strict diet, and he did a lot of yoga. When he arrived in India, we removed all the furniture from his hotel room so he had to sit and sleep on the floor. The walls were covered with pictures of the Mahatma.

The backlash to the casting decision was inevitable. We were always going to have to confront the question: How could a foreigner play Gandhi? Bizarrely, the makers of ‘parallel cinema’ were the only ones who raised the issue. They showed up on the first day of shoot, waving black flags. I spotted my friend Shama Zaidi amongst the picketers. On our side of the fence was Govind Nihalani, one of the leading lights of the parallel movement but also our second unit cameraman. The protests were orderly. No one ran around breaking things; there were a number of write-ups and opinion pieces. Richard was polite, but firm – Ben Kingsley was his Gandhi. All said and done, Ben was of Indian stock. His grandfather had migrated from India. I mean, we were really straining the boundaries of credibility with his Indian ancestry, and everyone knew it. But we had Mrs Gandhi’s backing. Doors opened for us, trains ran on time and locations were a cinch. Gandhiji’s contemporaries, Ramkrishna Bajaj and Bharat Ram, were closely involved. The NFDC had given us nine crores.

The protests made it to the newspapers and were duly praised; the film rumbled on.

At the pre-shoot party for the Indo-British unit, Roy Button turned to Kamal Swaroop, both third ADs, and asked for a glass of water. Kamal replied, “The Raj went a long time ago.” That was about it for on-set strife.

Would we get to make it the same way again? Today? With a British director and a British lead? I don’t know. That’s dinnertime conversation. Would they get to make Apocalypse Now the same way?

We rolled on the 26th of November 1979. And it really was an army on the move. It had taken Richard decades to get to that moment, and you could see how much it meant to him, because every single minute on that production had been accounted for. People knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing.

Amal and Nissar Allana worked as set decorators. Their universe ranged from trains to cars to jewellery, costumes, shoes. Every detail had a separate team, and all roads led back to Richard – casting meetings, production meetings, lighting meetings, script meetings. And somewhere within that maelstrom, Richard found time to concentrate on the performances, to create a work of great integrity and beauty that has stood the test of time.

We shot in Porbandar, Bombay, Pune. Never Ahmedabad. The scenes set in South Africa were shot in Okhla. The shot of Gandhi silently giving a poor woman his safa by letting it drift across to her in the river was shot in Udaipur.

…In a strange way, I became the doorkeeper for the production. The outside world had to get through me before they got to the film, for anything. The requests ranged from the routine to the ridiculous. Everyone wanted a slice of the pie: producers, hangers-on, friends, politicians. People wanted to visit the set. People wanted to meet the actors. People wanted a say on the screenplay.

We were lucky that Richard had been dealing directly with Mrs Gandhi. That meant we could be firm. Sometimes, we just had to buy peace. Ben occasionally wanted a beer at the end of a day’s work, and we had to ensure he wasn’t seen by the press. We’d already had one headline: ‘Ben Kingsley, Gandhi, drinking beer.’ He was also an attractive man in the middle of a career-defining performance, so we had to shield him from the ladies. If he did stop to speak to someone, the press couldn’t get wind of it. For a while, I was his minder in the modern sense – the advance party, the bodyguard, the person pulling strings, just out of shot.

It was an exhilarating time, but it was bloody hard work. Luckily, Richard and I had found our wavelength early with Kasturba, and I had a strong sense of what he was looking for.

My old friend Roshan Seth played Nehru. We’d tested Victor Banerjee as well but Roshan had the sophistication of Nehru and won hands down.

…

Dolly Thakore with her son Quasar Thakore-Padamsee (L) and Alyque Padamsee (Courtesy the publisher)

Richard cast Saeed Jaffrey as Sardar Patel. I didn’t agree with that call. I still don’t. He just wasn’t right for the role. Harsh Nayyar played Godse. He was another Indian actor from the West (America or England, I forget) who wrote to Richard and won the part.

I had a hand in everything else. From Supriya Pathak to Neena Gupta, and Om Puri (God rest his soul, that brilliant, brilliant man) to Shekhar Chatterjee, who played Suhrawardy and whom I’d spotted in Calcutta. I mostly cast actors from the theatre. I mentioned Bhanu Athaiya to Richard, and she went on to win the Academy Award for costume design. She was a very well-established designer before Gandhi. What I loved, though, was her mumbled complaint at one point, “All I’m making is kurta pyjamas.” But then, that’s all the Congress leaders wore at that time, with the sole exception of Jinnah, who had some rather excellent suits. Alyque was hopeful that he’d get to keep his clothes from the shoot and was most disappointed when they were on the next flight to England.

Of course, when Bhanu won the Oscar, it was all “… yes, Jodhpuri pyjamas but, you know, I had to cut them in a very specific way.” Ah, show-business.

…The Indian premier was at Regal. I can confirm that Indira Gandhi did not, in fact, attend. At the time, I thought it the most exhilarating moment of my life, the crowning glory. With the passage of years, I’ve gained a little perspective. But that film taught me so much and gave me a set of memories I’ll never forget, some of them the proudest of my career. …And that funeral scene – one of the greatest ever filmed.

It went to the Oscars and won so many awards. But, by then, it was a British film, Richard’s film, and seemed very far away indeed.

Richard and I remained friends until his death in 2014. Ben Kingsley visited India again in 1990, and I had everyone over for a meal at my house. It was lovely. He’s now a Knight of the Realm. And I hear he prefers to be called ‘Sir Ben’.

I’m glad I was there; I’m glad I was part of it.

. Source link