A letter to the girl at the Mumbai screen test

You were nineteen and you had borrowed a kurta from your roommate because the producer had said "wear something Indian" on the phone, and you didn't know what that meant, and you didn't want to ask.

You took the local from Bandra and you got off at Andheri and you walked the rest because you had given your last hundred rupees to the auto driver who took you to the wrong building the day before. Your hair was a mess. Your kohl was wrong. You were sweating into the kurta which was not yours.

Here is what I want you to know.

The casting director will not remember your face. She will not remember your name. She will be on the phone for most of the take. You will think this is because you are not good. You will be wrong. She is on the phone because there are sixty of you that day and because her sister-in-law is in the hospital and she is trying to find someone to drive her brother home.

You will not get the part. You were never going to get the part. The part is for someone whose father knows the producer.

But here is the thing — and you cannot believe me yet — the audition is not a thing that happens to you. It is a thing you do. You walk in. You read the lines. You leave. The decision is made about other people, about other rooms, about a script that doesn't exist yet. None of it is about you.

Walk slowly. Drink water. Don't apologize.

You will work. It will not look like the work you imagined. It will be slower and stranger and more beautiful, and one day you will be in a kiln courtyard in Jaipur at four in the morning and you will think about that girl in the borrowed kurta and you will want to tell her to walk slowly and drink water.

So I am telling you now.