Chasing Fame

Posted on November 24, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

They rushed into the house, excited and smiling, like two little boys who had discovered that big girls didn’t yell at them if they peeked under their mini skirts. Anahita immediately wanted to know what they had been up to but they were content to keep grinning at each other like happy confidantes too afraid to give up their secret for fear that it might not exist in reality. But she kept asking so they looked at each other one last time and blurted out, almost in unison, “We have an idea on how we could all be famous.”

That had been a long-standing fantasy of all those that walked through the door of 2B and called it home. Three girls, two guys and a never-ending dream to see their names in lights and themselves heralded as unfading stars. All of them were models and actors and playwrights and directors. Each and every one of them. It was like a microcosm of creativity that hadn’t borne fruit up until that moment the two guys walked in with happier-than-good-drugs grins pasted to their faces. Anahita was suddenly not the only person interested. Karen and Rukhsaar joined them around the round table that had served as their meal and dream sharing space as well as an impromptu platform for unbearably passionate and ill-advised sex for three of the house’s five inhabitants. Akhil had given it good to a girl whose name he still couldn’t remember even though she had stalked him via text message and emails for close to six months. Rukhsaar swore never to drink tequila again after the muscular testosterone-junkie she barely knew bruised her left breast so thoroughly she missed three auditions that required the wearer to appear in swimwear, in a single month. Atop that table was also where Anahita figured out that she wasn’t actually bisexual.

That afternoon however, the table was simply a piece of furniture on which the boys rested their elbows before grinningly letting everyone else know that they had settled upon the idea of a no-budget semi-reality show about five really attractive people living together in a house. They would pool their resources and webcast the series to a global audience of millions as their ticket to fame, possibly fortune, and a guaranteed career on the big and small screens.

It didn’t matter that they lived outside Delhi. It didn’t matter that two of them worked at call centres, one of them was a Montessori teacher, another one of them worked part-time as a bartender and Anahita was between jobs. They lit up at the idea of actually giving each other screen time. At some point during their conversation the girls brought pen and paper to the discussion and Manjit powered up his battered old laptop. They worked out a vague plan for what they would do. They talked long into the night and the boys sprung for pizza and Anahita offered to repay them for as soon as she found work and they told her not to worry, they were all going to be rich and famous soon.

Their ideas for what the show should be did the circuit of every show they had ever watched on TV or cable or DVDs borrowed from the only library in their neighbourhood. So for the longest time, as long as their energy was up, their show was a hybrid of 24 and Prison Break and Lost and Knight Rider and CSI…and when one of them finally figured out that they needed the budget of several major Hollywood blockbusters to be able to make this show, a show they had initially envisioned as a breakout for all of them, they scaled back their plans and decided that they really needed a pithily-worded, exquisitely-acted drama that was funny-sad, happy-mad and full of the crazy things that made life both a joke and a burden. And then little drowsy, always-horny Manjit said the magic words, “This is a web show bloody! There must be sex!”

Everybody froze and Anahita and Akhil couldn’t meet each other’s eyes because they had once managed to find themselves in a situation where no one else was at home and she was a little vulnerable and he was a little horny and they had tumbled into bed together and though it had been good they had sworn not to go down that road ever again, or tell anybody about what had happened. Instead Rukshaar said, “Oi horny Sardarji, why do we need sex? TV serials never have sex but their stars are very famous!”

So Manjit got to his feet and swayed like he was drunk before sinking back onto the lumpy sofa and muttering, “They have advertising budgets! Our advertising comes from our boldness. We give the public what they want and they will make us stars!”

The girls weren’t convinced but the boys were determined to see this through and since they only planned on including material of a sexual nature if ‘the story requires it’ the girls were mollified and convinced to stay involved in the project.

In all they webcast sixty-one episodes. Forty-three of which featured a sexually explicit situation and eighteen episodes actually featured on screen sex. No one ever figured out if the sex was real or simulated but around episode fifty-six, viewers in the Delhi region began to figure out where the show was being shot. Not too long after that, the police knocked on their door one fine afternoon and arrested the lot of them for willfully participating in online pornography.

None of the residents of 2B ever made a single rupee off their online infamy. Less than a week after they were arrested, pirated DVDs featuring each and every one of the sex scenes from their show were selling on the streets of every major and minor metropolis in the country. The various scenes of carnal excess also turned up on online file sharing sites and though no one ever heard from any one of them again, Akhil, Anahita, Karen, Manjit and Rukhsaar became anonymous superstars with their own cult following that grew to accommodate people from all over the world. It was not the way any of them would have written their own stories but they would all have appreciated the cinematic value in a tale like theirs.

Less than a year later, the material they had put up online was like a children’s fairy tale compared with the stuff that sought online and real-world popularity. Unfortunately for the residents of 2B they were destined to become a historical footnote, not unlike Napster or KaZaa. Since nobody knew where they were, it was hard to tell if any of them appreciated the irony within the situation.

  

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