My So-Called Bollywood Life Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Nisha Sharma

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Aaron Sacco

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780553523256 (trade) — ISBN 9780553523263 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780553523270

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Queen

  Chapter 2: What’s Your Raashee? / What’s Your Horoscope?

  Chapter 3: Student of the Year

  Chapter 4: Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania / Humpty Sharma’s Bride

  Chapter 5: Ram Lakhan

  Chapter 6: Namastey London

  Chapter 7: Delhi-6

  Chapter 8: Aaina / Mirror

  Chapter 9: Bombay

  Chapter 10: Chennai Express

  Chapter 11: Dangal / Wrestling

  Chapter 12: Yaadein / Memories

  Chapter 13: Aisha

  Chapter 14: Goliyon Ki Raasleela: Ram-Leela

  Chapter 15: Hum Dil de Chuke Sanam / I Gave My Heart Away, Darling

  Chapter 16: Kuch Kuch Hota Hai / Something Happens

  Chapter 17: Main Hoon Na / I’m Here for You

  Chapter 18: Khamoshi / Silenced

  Chapter 19: Dostana / Friendship

  Chapter 20: Amar Akbar Anthony

  Chapter 21: Satte Pe Satta / Seven on Seven

  Chapter 22: Rang de Basanti / Color It Saffron

  Chapter 23: Kapoor and Sons

  Chapter 24: A Break from Normal Movie Reviews…

  Four Months Later…

  Acknowledgments

  Winnie Mehta’s Bollywood Movie References in Order of Appearance

  More Bollywood Movies Ranked Four Stars and Higher

  About the Author

  This book is dedicated to my mother, Neeta Sharma. Thank you for buying me my first copy of Pride and Prejudice, showing me that laughter is the best kind of medicine, and teaching me that kitchen dancing is the only dancing I need. This is what I’ve been working on instead of getting married and giving you grandchildren. I think you’ll like it.

  Three years ago…

  MY SO-CALLED BOLLYWOOD LIFE: A BLOG ABOUT THE HINDI LANGUAGE FILM INDUSTRY

  Hello, blogging world! I’m starting high school this fall, where I’ll be studying film, and I wanted to document the Bollywood movies that I’ll be watching over the next four years. I’ll be reviewing both old and new movies, but I’ll focus on the New Bollywood era, which is the late ’80s through the early 2000s. I love that period in Bollywood cinema.

  Anyway.

  Each blog entry will be a separate movie review, and because my best friend, Bridget, says she has a hard time keeping track of all the movies I talk about, I’ll be translating the titles into English. I know, I know, they shouldn’t be translated, but I doubt Bridget will pick up the language until an app offers it for free. (Hey, Bridget…if I can learn three languages, you can pick up freaking Hindi, dude.)

  Reviews are totally my opinion, yada yada yada.

  I can’t WAIT to share my love of drama with all you guys. I don’t have any drama in my own life, so this is the perfect way to get my fix.

  1

  From Winnie Mehta’s Bollywood Review Blog:

  QUEEN

  ★★★★★

  Kangana Ranaut’s blockbuster included all the elements needed to create a money-making masterpiece: a strong woman, a stupid man, and tons of girl power.

  According to Google, a grave was supposed to be six feet deep, but Winnie Mehta didn’t want to put that much effort into digging. Besides, it wasn’t as if she was dumping an actual body or anything.

  She stopped and surveyed the burial site she’d chosen in the woods behind her house. After dragging three boxes and a shovel up the hiking path, Winnie had already built up a layer of sweat, but she had a lot to do before she could go home.

  As she marked the hole, her phone began vibrating in her pocket. She sent the call to voice mail when she saw her best friend’s face flash across the screen. That was Bridget’s seventh call in the last hour. Winnie wanted—no, needed—this moment, in which she stuck it to her stupid destiny, the wasted years she believed in true love, and, most importantly, to Raj, her cheating ex who’d hooked up with someone else while she was away at film camp. There was nothing Bridget could say that would change her mind.

  It had been two months since Winnie had told Raj they needed a “break,” which wasn’t the same thing as a “breakup.” And even if they had broken up, a relationship blossoming from a childhood romance that became official when they were fourteen deserved more than three weeks of mourning before one party moved on to someone else. Even celebrities waited longer than that.

  The thought caused her hands to tighten on her shovel. She rolled her shoulders, and with a warrior’s grunt, she started digging.

  Stupid love story, stupid prophecy, stupid everything, she thought as she scooped up heaps of thick black soil. Since she was a kid, her family’s astrologer had predicted that Winnie’s soul mate would meet three unique criteria: his name would start with an R, he’d give her a silver bracelet as a sign of his love, and he’d cross paths with Winnie before her eighteenth birthday.

  Identifying Raj as the man of her dreams wasn’t too farfetched, since they went to the same school and had grown up in the same community. Not to mention, he’d pulled out all the stops to get her to notice him when they were freshmen. For Winnie, accepting her destiny as truth and believing that her high school boyfriend was her soul mate for life was as easy as rattling off the top ten grossing Bollywood films per decade.

  But then Raj changed. A lot. Three years later he wasn’t her hipster in shining armor anymore. He’d traded in his collection of graphic T-shirts for polos and his love of movie nights for the tennis team and STEM club.

  She felt her chest constrict and her heart pound from the exercise and from remembering that moment when Raj had told her he wanted to go to school in Boston instead of New York. He’d followed that truth bomb by asking her to give up her dreams and move to Boston, too.

  “Winnie! Winnie, are you out here?” Bridget’s voice echoed through the rustling trees and the sound of chirping birds. “I saw the drag marks from your car and across your backyard.”

  “Shit,” she muttered. She started digging a little faster, tossing dirt in every direction.

  “Okay, this is nuts,” Bridget yelled. “Where the hell are you?”

  Winnie tried to block the sounds of branches snapping as she continued to create her movie grave. Out of
the corner of her eye, she saw Bridget step into the clearing. Her blond hair was tied in a high ponytail, and her shorts and tank were streaked with dirt, as if she’d wrestled her way through the rain forest instead of a small wooded area in Princeton, New Jersey.

  “Oh. My. God,” Bridget said as she pointed to the boxes. “Are those Raj’s movies? You can’t be serious! I get that I should’ve told you before you got back from camp this morning. It’s just that I wanted to talk to you about this whole thing in person. I know it’s a huge betrayal—”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “And you’re probably pissed—”

  Winnie froze. “ ‘Probably pissed’? Are you freakin’ kidding me?” She tossed the shovel to the ground and faced her friend. “No, I’d probably be pissed if I got a B in film class this year. I’d probably be pissed if I gained ten pounds and couldn’t fit into my prom dress. I’m murderous right now because my boyfriend broke up with me online while basically announcing that he cheated! Did you know that he even wrote a Facebook post? My parents and their friends are the only ones who check Facebook. It’s humiliating when your mother tells you that she saw the news on her feed. There are more people throwing me a pity party than extras in the movie Gandhi.”

  Bridget put up her hands in surrender. “I totally didn’t know he was going to do that, but to be fair, I did warn you that he was hanging out with Jenny Dickens.”

  The second she heard Jenny’s name, Winnie hocked a loogie. Well, she tried, but she ended up choking and coughing on her own spit.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I can’t hear that man-stealing backstabber’s name without spitting,” Winnie said, pressing a fist to her chest. “It’s a demonstration of how I feel about her.”

  Bridget snorted. “What movie did you see that one in?”

  “It’s not funny, Bridget! Damn it, it wasn’t supposed to end like this.” To her horror, tears started to fill her eyes.

  “Oh crap,” Bridget said, and scrambled forward. The second Winnie felt her friend’s tight hug, a sob broke through her throat. Then another followed, and another, until she couldn’t stop.

  Bridget held her while she cried for the first time since she’d realized her love story was finally over. Memories circled in her mind like vultures. First kiss, themed dates, Bollywood marathons, film festivals, passionate arguments over movies. She knew that Raj believed in her prophecy because of all the effort that he’d invested in their relationship. Just when she’d started thinking that maybe Raj really was the answer to her family astrologer’s prediction for a happily-ever-after, he changed. Now their relationship was a short caption in a yearbook. They were the cliché high school romance.

  What a joke.

  Winnie pulled away and wiped her face with the hem of her tank top. “I should’ve known that Pandit Ohmi was wrong,” she said, sniffling. “What was I thinking? I was brainwashed. This proves it.”

  “Just because Raj isn’t the soul mate doesn’t mean that your soul mate doesn’t exist,” Bridget said. “There are tons of guys out there whose names start with R and who’ll give you a silver bracelet.”

  Winnie stepped to the edge of the hole and sat down in the fresh dirt. “You and I both know I’m not going to find someone else who fits Pandit Ohmi’s prediction—not before I’m eighteen, at any rate. The way my parents have crammed it down my throat all these years, it’s as if Raj’s name is practically written in with the prophecy.”

  “Obviously that’s not true,” Bridget said as she sat down next to Winnie.

  Whoever coined the phrase “truth hurts” was probably a smug jackass, Winnie thought.

  “If he was really the guy for me,” she said between sniffles, “then we should’ve been able to work past this, right? Like a growing pain. We were great for the first two years, but junior year was so hard, and I needed some space, some time to breathe and think about what he wanted from me. So, like an idiot, I spent the summer thinking, and he spent the summer forgetting. It sucks, but we’re too different now to work things out. Cheating puts the last nail in our relationship’s coffin…which is why I’m digging a grave.” She motioned to the shallow hole at her feet. “To bury my coffin.”

  “If you know you two aren’t going to work anymore, then why are you so mad at him for hooking up with Jenny? You should be happy that it’s over.”

  “Because I stayed faithful,” Winnie said as she dug her sneakered toe into the dirt. Her heart ached a little as she said the words. “He moved on to someone else without a second thought. Plus, he wasn’t honest. We were friends before we dated, Bridge. I thought maybe we could go back to that if things didn’t work out. But now? I’ve lost a friend, too.”

  “Well, screw him,” Bridget said. “He sucks.”

  Winnie wiped her nose. “I can confidently say that soul mates are for the movies.”

  “I don’t know why you trusted the whole prophecy thing,” she said. “We’re talking about a prediction a psychic made.”

  “He’s not a psychic. He’s an astrologer. A priest. A pandit.”

  Bridget stood up and walked over to one of the boxes piled high with DVDs. She kicked the side of it, and the contents rattled. “Sounds like a psychic to the blonde here.”

  “He’s pretty accurate, Bridge. He reads charts based on star alignments that were in the sky when someone was born. It’s a religious thing. Or is it a cultural thing? Either way, it’s something important.”

  “That you don’t believe in anymore,” she said.

  Winnie winced. “Yeah, I guess not.” But a part of her wished that it was still true. Maybe a part of her still wanted it to happen. But to what end? She was going to be disappointed if she kept hoping that Raj would change back into the guy she remembered.

  “Forget about the prophecy and how much it sucks that you believed it,” Bridget said. “Eat ice cream and pizza, and watch your favorite movies. We’ll get frappes and binge on some new show. You know, the normal coping things.”

  Winnie stood and brushed the dirt off the seat of her pants. “I’ve never been dumped before. This blows.”

  “Welcome to my life.”

  Winnie should’ve never ignored Bridget’s calls. She needed her bestie more than she needed revenge. “Thanks for being my best freaking friend for life, Bridge.”

  “You know I’m here. Ugh, I hate that you don’t get all red and blotchy-eyed. I can’t even tell that you’ve been crying.”

  Winnie laughed for the first time all day and squeezed Bridget in a death grip. “I hate that your hair doesn’t get frizzy in the humidity.”

  “Touché,” Bridget said. “Come on, let’s get these back to Raj.”

  “Um, no.” Winnie pulled away and circled the hole she’d started. “I dug my grave. I now have to live with it. Besides, it’s not really his stuff. It’s just whatever I bought for him during the time we were together. I never realized how many movies I gave him until I was taking them out of his house.”

  Bridget picked up one of the external hard drives. She waved it in front of Winnie’s face. “You did not buy him this.”

  “No, that’s actually mine that he was borrowing. It’s been tainted by his cheating hands, so I’m burying it, too.”

  “Wow, you actually mean that. Okay, I know where you’re coming from, but you’re going to end up screwing yourself over. Can’t you put this in a post online and delete it later? You have to face facts. Everyone at school loves Raj, even if he’s the one who broke up with you.”

  “I don’t get how I could possibly be the bad guy,” Winnie grumbled.

  “Duh. He’s the film nerd who became captain of the tennis team and won a mathlete competition on the same day he worked the film festival. He’s the golden boy who’s taking the STEM track and the arts track. He’s one of the few double-track students in our history that everyone loves.”

  “I don’t care. I have to do this,” Winnie said. “It’s like I’m burying the
hatchet or something. I don’t even know what a hatchet is, but it applies here.”

  “You gave this stuff to him. It belongs to Raj now. If people found out you broke into his house and took his things after you were the one who asked for space, it makes you look like the guilty person, not him.”

  “If you don’t like what I’m doing, then you can leave. Or you can stay and help me with all of this.” She motioned to the mounds of dirt she’d already displaced. “But I’m warning you, I may bury my copy of Pride and Prejudice that I loaned to Raj last summer.”

  Bridget froze. “Which version?”

  “BBC.”

  She went ashen. “You’d bury Colin? You’ve lost your mind! This is blackmail.”

  “And it works. Listen, I’m not exactly enjoying this new criminal lifestyle. I know taking Raj’s movies wasn’t my best moment, but doing this matters to me. I’ll have to deal with the consequences later, but right now, I’m going to dig.”

  Bridget’s face morphed from anger to panic and finally resolve. Winnie felt a shining silver lining appear on her rain cloud.

  “Fine. You win.” She waited a beat before pointing to Winnie’s bare wrist. “On one condition. Did you get rid of the bracelet?”

  Winnie ignored the feel of the jewelry in her pocket. She knew it wasn’t right to keep it, but she needed some more time before she buried that final piece of her past. If she told Bridget her reasoning, her best friend wouldn’t understand. So she kept both the truth and the bracelet tucked away. “Yeah, it’s gone already.”

  “Good. I didn’t say it when he gave it to you, but I never really liked that thing. Totally not your style.” Bridget sighed before she gestured. “But that still leaves this stuff to deal with. How did you get it all?”

  “Raj gave me the code to the garage a year ago or so. His family was at temple, so the timing was great. Their schedule is always the same on weekends.”