No Land's Man (15 page)

The question made me smile.

“Do you want to get a drink?” I asked as I handed the program back to him.

“Really?” He asked. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I don’t have to be anywhere and I’d like to tell you a story.”

“Sounds cool,” he said, falling in step beside me. “What’s it about?”

“It’s a story I call
Patanking.”

H
E WAS HAVING SEX ON MY CHAIR
and he broke it,” screamed Ismail Merchant as he picked up the two pieces of wood that just moments before had comprised his priceless antique piece of furniture.

The entire dinner party turned to me, horrified. The same people that had been congratulating me for being picked to be the star of Ismail’s new movie were now looking at me with confusion and disgust, as if I was some kind of ungrateful sex addict. The kind of person who would have the audacity to stay as a guest in someone’s home and then repay them by having sex on—and breaking—their antique dining room chair. I stood in stunned silence staring at Ismail, not knowing quite how to respond.

I had met Ismail Merchant almost two years before, in 1998, during the run of my one-man show
Sakina’s Restaurant
.

Several weeks into the run, the
New York Times
gave the play a superbly generous review. That night the manager of the theater ran excitedly down from her office while I was doing my vocal warmups.

“Guess who is coming to the show tonight, to see YOU?” she exclaimed.

My heart stopped for a minute. I had already been reeling all day from the review that had in twenty minutes that morning caused my answering machine to fill up with messages of congratulations.

“I don’t know if I really want to know,” I said. “Not right now, since I am about to perf—”

“Ismail Merchant!” she screamed. Then very fast and in one breath, “He’scastingamovieandhe’slookingfortheleadandheiscomingtosee YOUOhmyGodRemainsoftheDayismyfavouritemoviebutldon’twant todisturbyousol’msorrymaybeyoucanjustpretendlikeyouneverheard thatandbreakalegtonight . . . by the way it’s sold out!”

Then she disappeared.

I looked in the dressing room mirror and remembered that eight years earlier I had attached on my bedroom wall a poster board on which I had written, in blue marker, that I would be a movie star by the year 2002. I felt nauseous.

Ismail introduced himself after the show. I was in the middle of a conversation with a couple of audience members when he interrupted with his signature bombastic post-colonial Indian lilt.

“My name is Ismail Merchant,” he said with arms outstretched as if he were Moses triumphantly parting a very small group of people, “and I would like to take you to dinner.”

A few days later I met him at an Indian restaurant he claimed he owned, although none of the waiters seemed to recognize him. As we finished eating he gave me a copy of a book called
The Mystic Masseur
.

“V. S. Naipaul,” he said, “Trinidad’s greatest author. This was his first book, set in Trinidad in the late fifties. Have you read it?”

I told him I had not.

“Well,” he said, “you must absolutely read it immediately, because you are going to play the lead in the film I am making of this book.”

Simple as that? I thought. Wow. I really should have written more stuff on that poster board.

“Now you really have to try the gulab jamun in this place,” he said as he called the waiter over. “Manish, please tell the chef to bring us some gulab jamun.”

Manish went to put in the order for our desserts after explaining that his name was actually Suvir. Meanwhile I stared at the glossy paperback cover of a book that I would read and finish that very night.

After that dinner, I did not hear from Ismail Merchant for a year. I eventually concluded that I had been taken out to dinner and offered the lead role in a movie as a practical joke by an incredible impersonator.

However, the following summer, after my show had closed and I was back to doing my most interesting work in acting class, I got a call from Ismail Merchant’s secretary.

“Ismail would like you to go down to Twenty-Eighth Street and Lexington tomorrow and get fitted for a turban,” she said.

“Excuse me?” I replied.

“They will see you tomorrow at 6
P.M
.”

“A turban?” I asked, infuriated. “No, I will not.”

I had left Ismail many messages, none of which he had bothered to return, and I was not about to jump at his beck and call.

“I won’t go,” I continued, “unless I can speak with Mr. Merchant himself.”

Before I could even finish the sentence, Ismail was on the line, speaking to me as if we had had dinner just the day before.

“Aasif, how are you?” he exclaimed. He sounded cheery and enthused. “Now you will be wearing a turban in the film for some of the scenes, so you must go down to this wonderful sari shop on the east side and they will fit you. The owner is expecting you.”

“But are we even doing this film?” I asked. “The last time we spoke was a year ago and you’ve never even showed me a script.”

“Are we still making the film?” he asked, seeming genuinely hurt by my lack of faith. “Of course we are making the film and you will have a script as soon as it’s ready.”

“Okay,” I said, flustered. “It’s just, I thought maybe the whole thing had fallen through.”

The disappointment in my voice must have been evident because he reassured me that nothing had fallen through and principal photography would start in no time. I smiled with relief like I was speaking to an absent girlfriend who had told me she still loved me.

“Okay, so if this is happening then I am going to mentally prepare myself. I am going to invest,” I said. I wanted to add, “So please don’t fuck with me,” but I didn’t. Ismail’s voice came through loud and clear in response.

“Invest! Invest! Invest!” he said.

I seem to remember the conversation trailing off, probably because I was so giddy that I don’t actually remember hanging up.

After that conversation I did not hear from Ismail Merchant again for another six months. However, a script arrived by messenger a week later. For an actor who had mostly done theater or played the occasional shopkeeper or medical expert on shows like
Law & Order
, I still could not fathom that I would be the star of a Merchant/Ivory film. As I read the script for the first time I don’t think I even comprehended it. Turning the pages I found myself constantly distracted by the
MANDVI
watermark and simply marveling at the fact that my character continued to have more lines.

To calm my anxiety about having to carry a film and working with such Academy Award—winning talent right out of the gate, I decided my course of action was to become the consummate professional. I would access all that I had learned in school, all that I had learned from Wynn Handman, all the speech and vocal exercises I had ever done and hated doing. This was my moment and I could not afford to fail. I would become a master instrument.

I began by adopting a technique that Anthony Hopkins had said he used when approaching a role. He would read the script a hundred times before the first day of shooting; that way he knew the character inside and out. I made it to eighteen before rationalizing that Sir Anthony must have very little else to do in his life. I worked on various scenes in my acting class with Wynn, who did some character interviews with me, which is an exercise where an actor is interviewed while in character. Working on the role with Wynn made me realize a few things: I needed to spend more time listening to the dialect tape that Ismail had sent over to master the exact idiosyncratic specificity of the dialect; I needed to know a lot more about Trinidad’s culture, its food, and its people; and I also probably needed to sign some kind of contract.

In my excitement and because Ismail only seemed to talk to me once a year I had never mentioned this project to my manager, Mike. Mike didn’t have many clients. Actually, he had only one. He was the kind of manager who called me more than I called him.
So when I told him that I had been offered the lead in a movie, Mike was thrilled. Ismail was not.

“Ismail wants you to come to his office, right now,” said Mike when he called a few days later. I had never been to the Merchant/Ivory offices and felt a pang of excitement at the prospect, but I also knew this was the result of nearly fourteen phone calls that had been made in three days between him and Mike regarding my per diem. Ismail had called and wanted me to fly to London for the weekend to be fitted for costumes but for some reason was refusing to pay for any food or lodging.

“What did you say to him?” I asked.

“The same thing I have been saying all week.” said Mike, “If he wants you to go to London for a costume fitting, you need a place to stay and money for food. It’s a reasonable request. I don’t know why we are being met with such unimaginable resistance. You don’t even have a fucking contract. I can’t in good faith let you fly to London without food and lodging to be fitted for costumes for a movie that may not even happen.”

My heart sank as I looked at the color-coordinated flowchart on my wall that tracked the emotional journey of my character in the course of the one-hundred-and-fifty-page script. The film spanned thirty years in the life of my character, Ganesh Ransumair. I had noted that there were nine major emotional turning points and seven extensive gaps in time, which I had filled in with my own imagination, and there were three scenes where I was really going to have to “bring it” and cry.

“So why do I need to go to his office?” I asked.

“I don’t know, just go see what he wants,” said Mike.

“I hate the son of a bitch,” he added before he hung up.

As I walked into Ismail’s office he gestured for me to sit in one of the two plush leather chairs on the other side of his giant desk. The desk overflowed with papers, fountain pens, exotic paperweights, and a stack of several copies of his most recent cookbook, hot off the presses, as if guests were obliged to buy one before leaving. He was on the phone arguing with James Ivory about the appropriateness of calling Harvey Weinstein an uncultured oaf.

“You can’t say that to him, Ismail,” I could hear James saying on the speaker phone, with a quiet fatigue in his voice that seemed borne from years of conversations just like this.

“I don’t bloody care!” Ismail screamed. “The man is a pig. He’s an uncouth animal. How dare he say that Merchant/Ivory only makes costume dramas.
A Room with a View, Howards End, Remains of the Day, Heat and Dust, Mr and Mrs Bridge:
They are films about character and story. If he is interested in costumes, he can jolly well go down to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at costumes all day long.”

I glanced around as he spoke. The office was like a gallery of accolades with BAFTAs, Oscars, and Golden Globes placed conspicuously throughout the bookshelves behind me. The walls were decorated with pictures of himself and Jim in younger days with the likes of Madhur Jaffrey, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Christie, Shashi Kapoor, and Anthony Hopkins. I sat in silence for almost fifteen minutes while he screamed and gesticulated. Finally he hung up and, without missing a beat, looked at me with an expression of genuine affection and vulnerability.

“This bloody manager you have is useless,” he said. “He keeps bothering me about providing you money in London so that you can eat
food and stay in a hotel.” He spat out the words “eat food and stay in a hotel” as if they were synonymous with “buy drugs and visit brothels.”

“I know,” I said, apologetically, “but if you are sending me to London for the weekend, I am going to need a place to stay.”

He stood up and walked to the outer office and returned with a crisp white envelope and a blank sheet of paper. He sat down, took a fountain pen out of the inkwell next to him, and began to write.

“Now, this is what I am proposing. You will stay in my flat while you are in London. I will already be there so I will greet you and I will cook you breakfast. You may tell your bloody manager that the great Ismail Merchant made you omelets every morning as if he was your own personal chef. Secondly, as far as the rest of your food goes, there is a wonderful Indian restaurant down the street from my flat whose owner is my dear friend Mr. Khan.”

He read aloud as he wrote, “Dear Mr. Khan, please let my colleague Aasif Mandvi order anything off your menu, and feel free to put it on my tab. Yours sincerely, Ismail Merchant.”

He then put the letter into the envelope, sealed it, and gave it to me.

“Remember,” he said, “when Mr. Khan presents you with the bill, make sure he is giving me a fifty percent discount.”

London was cold, damp, and gray, but Ismail’s flat was impeccably decorated with bright colors and fabrics from all over the world. Every piece of furniture seemed to have been brought over from the maharaja’s palace in Jaipur or Christie’s auction house. Ismail was already there when I arrived and gave me a brief tour of his home. He lingered over many artifacts and paintings, describing their origins in loving detail, but it was clear that his prized possession was
the set of antique dining room chairs that he claimed were handmade in Rajasthan in the 1600s.

After the tour, Ismail departed and for most of the two days I stayed in his flat, I hardly saw him. The dining chairs were incredibly uncomfortable but there was nowhere else to sit while eating my takeout from Mr. Khan’s. Also, the dining room was the only room with a television, under which was a collection of DVDs, mostly of his own films with a few by Fellini and Satyajit Ray thrown into the mix. While eating samosas, watching
A Room with a View
(which I realized I had never seen), and enjoying the meta experience of watching the Merchant/Ivory aesthetic onscreen while literally sitting in the midst of the Merchant/Ivory aesthetic, I leaned back and felt the seat of the chair come loose from the frame. I had broken his priceless chair.

Shit! In a panic I found some Super Glue in a box in a cupboard down the hall, and attempted to glue it back together. With a few well-placed dollops the chair seemed to be back to its original form and I hoped no would be the wiser. Ismail was flying to Mumbai and I was flying back to New York the next day, so as long as he didn’t sit in it, the damaged chair would hopefully go unnoticed until I was long gone.