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Anjali referred to the script she’d written, the paper damp and wrinkly in a late October Paris mist. Then she hoisted the portable camera to her eye again. Her arms ached with the weight. She thought, thank God that, as a film student, I don’t have to rent the camera and sound equipment, or my budget would be aching, too.
“Make sure you keep the umbrella over the camera,” she told the production assistant, a fellow student, at her elbow.
They were in a far corner of Cimetière du Père Lachaise, trying to get away with not having a permit to film a short. The tombs were creepy, the skies dark, the oak trees bare and mournful. A crow cawed high in the trees. She checked the camera’s settings. Yes! She’d captured the tormented sound. She’d make sure it got into her story.
They were moving through her script as quickly as possible, hoping that a groundskeeper didn’t go by on the cobbled street that wove through this somber village of tombs. If he did come by and ended their shoot, they’d just have to creep back the next day, but the light would inevitably be different. Then again, Anjali thought, at the end of October the light is gray every day in Paris.
The two actors were cooperating with her fast pace, hoping for more roles in her next production. The break-up scene was going well. Anjali had used everything she’d learned from her Ravi romance in this script. But the weather was against her—the mist was thickening toward rain. For now, the actors’ hair was capped by a halo of tiny droplets. Great for mood. But their clothes would be soaked through and turn dark, and that would look weird on film.
“Action,” Anjali said. She realized she had mumbled it, she was so absorbed in operating the camera. “Action,” she said clearly, and the cast sprang to life.
She had a new day job, assistant to Mr. Chaigne, rich as Croesus, unlike John, who had disbanded his office. Mr. Chaigne knew how to print out for himself. But Anjali looked for every opportunity to do it for him, to make herself indispensible. Then she hurried home to write shorts, using the formatting program she’d bought with the sale of the péniche article. On weekends she filmed the shorts.
She was free to write. She was lonely. C’est la vie.
Her parents had given her the money for the film course. They were arriving for a visit next week. They’d probably complain about pressure from the Mumbai aunties for her to marry. But she’d show them her collection of short films, all posted online.
And she’d hide the blouse that was a little décolleté, maybe behind the six-inch-wide bulk of the English unabridged edition of Les Miserables.
