Turbulence Read Free Page B

have horror stories.”
    “I’ve heard a lot of that too,” Uzma says. “But you know what? I think it’s all made up by people to scare newcomers away. Discourage competition. I think if anyone comes in with the right attitude and the right kind of talent Bollywood’s much more warm and welcoming than anything back home. Andpeople who haven’t landed an acting gig after spending years here? They should probably just quit.”
    Saheli flinches and scans the room, half expecting all the other actresses there to fly screaming at Uzma and tear her limb from limb in a frenzy of manicured nails and strategically applied stilettos. But no, they’re just sitting there listening to her, and none of the women, several of whom have clearly been auditioning unsuccessfully for at least a decade, even seem angry — though some look extremely depressed.
    Uzma does cut a fairly formidable figure: tall, toned, dark, smouldering, impeccably dressed, and a rich Oxford accent to boot — essential for those romantic blockbusters where the hero, in between foiling international terrorist plots in Sydney and dancing in Macau, pauses to play American football for Oxford. But while Saheli has spent most of her life instantly disliking women like Uzma — and, it must be said, Uzma herself, during their days together at St Hilda’s — she’s becoming accustomed, slowly, to the fact that she’s become really fond of Uzma now. Her initial dismay on reading that email about Uzma’s planned visit to Mumbai — Just a week, darling, until I find digs of my own. It is my first time in your city and I haven’t seen you in SO long — disappeared the moment she saw her former classmate step out of the airport.
    A pure Bollywood moment: the crowd parted like the Red Sea as Uzma sashayed out, effortlessly performing the Heroine Time-Slowing Effect, her hair unfurling, cascading, shining, a smile of pure delight spreading across her face as she saw Saheli goggling at her. Unmindful of the jaw-dropping eye-popping handbag-flopping effect she had on the crowd, Uzma raced across the tarmac and swept Saheli up in an enthusiasticembrace. Several men in the crowd burst into spontaneous applause. Babies gurgled. Aunties wept joyously. As far as Mumbai was concerned, Uzma Abidi couldn’t have made a better entrance.
    “Uzma Abidi?” a dishevelled assistant director calls, entering the lobby. “Come in, please.”
    Uzma is ushered through the door. It shuts, and the large Warhol-style portrait of the leering henchman from Bollywood’s most famous epic resumes its gap-toothed observation of the assembled ladies. A disgruntled murmur fills the lobby.
    A tiny model-type in a tinier dress taps Saheli on the shoulder and voices everyone’s concern: “Who is that?”
    “Her name’s Uzma. She’s new in town,” Saheli says, wondering exactly when she had signed up to play a supporting character in Uzma’s biopic. That Uzma is in Mumbai now, looking to become the next Aishwarya Rai, is mostly Saheli’s fault.
    Uzma had been exposed to Bollywood a little while growing up in England, mainly videos of blockbusters from the seventies and eighties, a time when Indian men had hairy chests and unrepentant paunches, wore cravats and bell-bottoms and were social chameleons equally at ease in tribal villages surrounded by feather-duster-sporting dancers and in underground lairs full of metal drums, collapsible henchmen and chained virgins.
    Saheli had introduced her to the New Bollywood, the in-your-face, slick, Armani-enabled imperial-ambitions, global Bollywood, the dream machine that had spawned hundreds of enterprises like Daku Samba Entertainment. Told her stories of hip, edgy companies with producers flaunting designer eyewear and customised iPhones, swanky offices with intentionally ironic decor and voluptuous receptionists with call-centre New York accents. Of a new generation of actors who had come from nowhere and were currently staring back at the