Part 64:Then the doorbell rang.

Then the doorbell rang.

A man stood outside. Lanky beyond belief. He wanted to narrate a story to me. Upfront he claimed that he had been to every top hero in the state and they had all tuned him down. They didn’t like the story. They thought it was too gloomy. Too dark. Many didn’t have the kind of dates he wanted.

His name was Bala.

I knew him. He had worked on one movie that didn’t complete. I’d met him long back at the time of ‘Raman Abdulla’ photo shoot. He was ex-assistant to veteran director Balu Mahendra. So whenever we met later we used to wish each other .Those days he had said, “We’ll do a movie together.” I thought he is also another say! Thereafter we did not meet each other for many days. That’s what cinema is!

I heard that hero was fixed for the movie but every time I heard the name was keep changing. Sometimes it was Vignesh and the other time it was Charan, next time it would be Murali or Selva.

Bala and I spoke to each other once while sitting in a car and then he said, “It’s just a rumour, not true.” Camera man Rathanavelu suggested my name to him.

I said, “Okay.”

But that time I was not really serious. That’s it.

Thereafter now I was meeting him.

His only claim to fame thus far?

I couldn’t believe it at all. It was real and the pooja was fixed. I asked him for the narration for the second time. Once he finished the narration of his movie, I could fell butterflies flying inside my being. I knew. This was it!! This was what I had been waiting for! It set the fire within.

I accepted immediately.

Bala and I decided together that there would be no more Malayalam and Telugu flicks even to keep my home fires burning. A break for the pocket money too.

That time I had just completed ‘Ullasam’ as second hero and I was plumpy, you see.

After fifteen years on the fringes he wanted to capture my ‘freshness’ and present me as a ‘newcomer’. I was not to sign any other movie. Not that there was a queue outside my home, but I agreed anyway! And why not? It was the role of a lifetime and I saw that this guy had fire in his eyes. His eyes had some madness that I had seen in my life only once before. In Mani Ratnam’s eyes. I could tell he would go places. And soon. I agreed. To the film. And to his myriad demands. Instead of a Malayalam heroine Abitha stepped in.

And thus was born Sethu.