Sunday 9th November 2008

“You will wear very small dress,” says Viki. He hold the sides of his palms against the bottom of his jeans pocket, and then mimes a cropped boob tube on his chest. His teeth are stained red with paan and his breath stinks of whisky, even though it’s ten o’clock in the morning.

We met Viki yesterday while pounding the pavements for the story we’ve come to report: tourists are picked up on the streets of Bombay by casting touts, and paid to work as extras in Bollywood movies. It’s a well-known phenomena to backpackers, who are left to wait for hours in ridiculous costumes, as Bollywood divas pass by, and normally spend two weeks hovering over the toilet bowl thanks to the pakoras they ate on set. But to the average Indian, the whole phenomenon is an hilarious quirk.

We spent the day lurking outside hotels and in the tourist bars and cafes, around India Gateway and in marketplaces, waiting to be talent-spotted. We were told by friends who had gone before us that we would hardly be able to breathe for all the scouts offering us work. We tried to be as authentic a pair of tourists as we could, snapping photographs of everything from market sellers to our lunch, bartering badly for jewellery, waving our Lonely Planets and even wearing a red sandalwood spot on our white foreheads, but will it wasn’t until 6 hours in the scorching sun that we finally met Viki, who took our phone numbers annd promised, in broken English, to pick us up from our house at 8am the next morning. We would get paid 500 rupees (£6) for the entire day. The other details would be worked out later.

As the mist rolled over our neighbourhood of Pali Hill this morning, we trudged to our designated meeting point, bought a copy of the Sunday newspaper and waited. And waited some more. We read the matrimonial advertising section, choosing ourselves husbands from the array of Brahmin soldiers, American-educated lawyers and half-crippled divorcees. An hour passed. We called Viki and a woman answered the phone, shrieking something in Hindi. Eventually a man’s voice, which wasn’t Viki’s, told us to meet him at a location that was ninety minutes away by bus. From there, he said, we’d be taken to the studio.

When we arrived on the street corner, we were not met by Viki and his promised steed, but instead were ferried from a cinema to a designated café by someone we hadn’t met before, and never would again.

And here we are, having worked our way through the matromonial section of the paper and now trying to decipher the cricket reporting. It is almost ten o’clock. Someone comes in, claiming to be Viki’s ‘brother’, and tells us Viki will be here in five minutes. Just past eleven o’clock, he turns up, in the same dishevelled football shirt he’d worn yesterday, his hair slicked back with grease.

“You’re late,” he says, smiling, and showing a row of half-rotten teeth. When I explain that he, not we, were three hours tardy, he shrugs and giggles, explaining in stuttered English that he had drunk too much whisky last night and forgotten to wake up. When I explain that it wasn’t really an acceptable excuse (not least because we’d been our clubbing that night until 4am) his smirk disappears and he apologises. He hops along the road with us for another four blocks and leaves us on a pavement, promising that he is just going to find his boss. Twenty minutes passes. He comes back, smelling conspicuously of vodka.

“Married?” he says, pulling open a foil packet of paan and popping the huge wad into one mouth cheek. “Yes,” I said. I might have slammed my fist a little too hard on the bench. “Is she married?” He pointed to Elsa. “Yes,” I said again. He hadn’t bothered to check for a wedding ring but it didn’t seem to matter. Viki leant over me, huffing boozy breath into my face, his hand resting on my knee. I remove it.

“When are we leaving?” I ask. It’s nearing twelve. Four hours away from the agreed time, and more than forty kilometers from the agreed place. “Soon,” he says, spitting part of his red smile out onto the street. Two boys come along asking Elsa and I to be in their photo. They disappear after a few refusals. “Fucking bastards,” says Viki. It’s the most coherent piece of English he’s spoken all morning. He offers us a cigarette, waving a golden packet of Benson and Hedges under our noses. It would have been a harmless gesture, except that today happens to be the first day of my drive to quit smoking. My gittery nerves are ready to break, and he doesn’t seem to be able to take no for an answer.

“You want Wodka?” he asks. We stare incredulously at him. “Is nice,” he says. He disappears again, allegedly to ‘look for his boss’ again. His boss must he quite lost, I say when he returns, the odour of alcohol a little more pungent than before. He brings with him a toothy old man in a driver’s uniform, who sits with us for twenty minutes, bringing with him the hope that we might soon get in a car. But eventually, in just as random a fashion as he arrived, he leaves again. It is now that Viki makes reference to my outfit.

I ask exactly what it is we are supposed to be doing in this film. “You dance,” he grins, and puts his hand on my knee again. I yank it off. I really need a cigarette now. “I in film too.” We are both beginning to wonder exactly what genre this Bollywood flick might be. Viki’s eyes flash. I ask him again how long we’ll be waiting. He deflects attention with another question.

“What is this?” he says, pointing to Elsa. “This is Elsa,” I say. He nods. Elsa looks up dejectedly from her newspaper and nods in his direction. It’s the third time I’ve introduced her to him in ten minutes.

Eventually, after an hour or so of dodging time-related questions, Viki announces that he has had a call from his boss who is waiting at McDonald’s for us. When we arrive, we are greeted by yet another old toothy driver – perhaps they are all brothers in the business – who informs us that he has been waiting for us since 8am. He has no idea who Viki is, or indeed who his fabled boss might be. The shoot is off.

By this point, my brain cells are shreiking like tightened violin strings. We have been waiting for five hours. I need caffiene, and water, and I need to get out of the sun. Shouting and pointing at Viki, I tell him that he is lazy, he is rude, he is drunk. And he is definitely not going to be my husband. A German couple who were previously poring over some elephant carvings look up. I realise that I am unleashing not only a chemical imbalance, but over a month of pent up anger at India: the India that rips us off, yanks at our arms at stoplights, gropes us in the marketplaces, stares at us in the street. I shout at the India that keeps us waiting for hours, and keeps telling us that it is looking for a good wife. And most of all I shout at the India that won’t really let us hate it at all, before agreeing that yes, we will see Viki same time same place tomorrow.