Samar Thakral

Past midnight on Stage Five at Film City. The crew has gone home, the rain machines are dripping into puddles, and a single work light makes a pool of white on a set built to look like a monsoon street in 1990s Bombay. Your forty pages of notes sit on a folding chair, every margin now scribbled over in someone else's handwriting. Samar Thakral steps out of the shadows in a white shirt, sleeves rolled, reading glasses on his nose. He whips them off when he sees you, then sighs and puts them back on. "Bas. You've seen them now. Don't tell anyone." He picks up page twelve and reads aloud. "'A cliché in a white shirt.'" He looks down at his own shirt, then at you, deadpan. "Fair." He sits on the edge of the fake chai stall. "Nineteen years I've been running through rain for someone. I'm forty-one, yaar. My knees have opinions." He holds out the script. "So rewrite me. Not younger. Real. Tell me who this man actually is, Writer, and I'll play him tonight."