The Outsider, page 26
I always say: Find yourself someone who looks at you the way your pet looks at you. But then you’d have to be sixteen bloody feet tall, which is kind of what you are to pets. No matter how tired you are, you’ll dance around the room, make silly noises, sing songs, run around like a fool… for them. If we did that with each other, maybe this whole place would be a little better. If you can go through life remembering someone is waiting for you with the love you deserve, that you’re never too silly for them, that your accomplishments or failures mean nothing to them, all they care about is your heart, maybe you’ll be okay.
Get a pet. Even better, adopt one. Sign the contract. It hurts, but, man, it’s worth it.
Now, whenever I do a show, I write B.W.D. on my wrist: Be Watson’s Dad. On the other wrist, I write what I want the show to be about: Focus or Play or Improvising. It reminds me what the vibe should be. B.W.D. is my reminder that this isn’t all my life is. I may be a comedian, but at the end of the day, I will always be Watson’s dad.
Like I said, that well-traveled photo of Watson is hidden just off camera on every Netflix special I’ve done. I keep it onstage in my line of sight, like a little easter egg for me. He’s gone, but he defines how I hope to make people feel, which is how he made me feel. That feeling is hard to articulate, but I see the best in my audience, and I’m able to do that now because I know what it feels like to have someone see the best in me. Everybody deserves someone that thinks the world of them, and I hope comedy makes you feel that. When you come to a show, I hope you feel that I think the world of you.
I didn’t make it back to Goa until late spring. Shivani buried Watson on a friend’s property, in a beautiful, sunny spot with statues and Tibetan flags. It’s a lovely place to be. The first thing we did when I got home was to go there and see Watson. Now, once a month we visit him and clean and rake and garden the place.
A week after Watson passed, a stray dog named Stupid—whom we didn’t name, that’s just what they called him on the street; we’ve changed that to Stooopeee anyway—wandered into the house. Stupid is a street dog, this raggedy black Doberman-looking mix. He wandered in one day when Shivani was heartbroken, and he started spending more and more time with her. By the time I got back, Stupid would spend five hours a day with her. He truly is a stupid dog. It’s a “the lights are on but nobody’s home” kind of situation. We kept him at a distance for a while because our hearts were not ready to accept a dog so soon after Watson had died. A few months later, a dog named Lucy, who’d been abandoned by a neighbor during the pandemic, started stealing Stupid’s dog biscuits, and she moved in with us too. The moment Lucy felt safe with us, she slept in our house for three days straight. I think she was exhausted from living on the streets for two years. Now Stupid and Lucy are part of our family. They’re our dogs. They’re tough and independent, completely different from Watson. These dogs lived on the streets; they’re agile and will eat anything. They kill snakes and go to the bathroom in the jungle. They’re ruffians, and they’re in no way inconvenient. But what I wouldn’t give for the inconvenience of Watson again.
Watson bit me, he was completely dependent, he was flatulent, and he snored like a tractor engine. But he also loved us fiercely. At home with Watson, I wasn’t thinking about jokes or selling out shows; I was dancing around the house and throwing bones for him to fetch. I’m very socially awkward in real life, but with Watson, I was completely myself.
I mentioned this before: I’m not afraid of death anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I love life, I’m grateful for each day I get to wake up in the morning. But when it’s my time to go, I’m going to go happily, because I know he’s coming to get me, and I have unfinished business with him.
At the time of writing this, Shivani, Stupid, Lucy, and I have just moved back to Mumbai. After almost four years away. What I love about Goa is that time physically moves more slowly than in the rest of the world. So slowly that if you stay more than ten days, it forces you to confront whatever you’re escaping from. It’s also full of people escaping, who don’t judge. I never imagined myself living there, and now I cannot imagine staying there in a hotel. A rented private residence in the tiny village of Parra was our home. Where Watson, Stupid, and Lucy stood on the terrace and looked out at the paddy fields. Where you could be woken by peacocks singing to each other in the rain. Mumbai is a constant chase. When you stop chasing, when you become okay with slow time, you find out who you really are. And when you truly do, the universe chases you. Goa does that for you; it certainly did for me. I will always be grateful for the people I met there, and for the time, as slow as it was.
We came back to Mumbai because we missed being part of the world. It was time to engage with it again, like people our age do, to climb, to get our hands dirty again. The day before we left, we went to Watson’s spot in the sun. We performed our monthly ritual, where we cleaned the place up. Cut the brambles, dusted off the flags; there are crystals and stones, and we rearranged them. We never talked when we did it, we just quietly divided up the labor. Raking, chopping, watering, and then… standing. We always just stood there in silence for a bit. Then we drove back in silence. Our house in Goa is about forty-five minutes away from where he is, so about twenty minutes into the drive home, I would put on some music and then we’d both feel ready to talk again.
The last time we went there, it felt different. The nature surrounding Watson had reclaimed the spot more than I had ever seen before. Thicker brambles, more moss, more grass. For a second it felt like he wasn’t there anymore. It was like he was telling us to go, that he had moved on.
Now Stupid and Lucy are adjusting to Mumbai. We tried to get them a place with a terrace, so they don’t miss their wild gallivants in the streets of Goa. Strangely enough, the day we arrived in Mumbai, it was like they both went, “Oh, we’re safe now? We don’t have to be on constant watch?” They relaxed. They now know where we go, they go.
They say that love takes your breath away, and so does grief. The only way I can describe grief is an inability to breathe. No matter how hard you try you just can’t seem to get enough air in your lungs. It’s because there’s less space in there now. It’s because someone or something that used to live outside of you now lives in you. Watson’s not in the spot in the sun anymore, he’s underneath my chest bone. To anyone dealing with grief of any kind and reading this, that’s all I can say. I know a life was lost, but your heart grew. That’s what’s pressing up against your lungs, that’s what’s making you fight for each breath. Your heart, where they now reside. If I’m being honest, I haven’t taken a full breath since he passed. I know I will when I see him again. I’m not hard on myself about it, I’m proud of the love he left me with.
Which is why I remind myself: B.W.D.
As I write this, I am on a plane to a gig. In my bag is a note from Shivani. It reads, “Go, be present, go rest, go get inspired. I love you and I’m proud of you.” If you told me when we were in Mumbai during lockdown that I would one day be getting handwritten notes like this, I would have told you that you were insane. It’s all because of Watson.
A SHORT DOSE OF GROUNDING
I’m dyslexic and I keep a journal every morning. I can’t write cursive or understand anything I’ve written, ever. This is a photo of one of my journals:
So journaling has shown me zero fucking benefit. I still keep doing it, and I have no idea why.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN I NEED YOU TO KNOW One MORE THING
Vir with his Emmy for Best Comedy. REG TIGERMAN. Vir and Kavi directing an actor on the set of Happy Patel. It ain’t up or down, it’s all a circle.
It’s 2008. I’m sitting in a tent on the set of Delhi Belly, telling my friend Kavi about my idea for a spy comedy about an Indian baby named Happy Patel who is adopted by two gay British MI-5 agents. I love slapstick, over-the-top comedies like Spy Hard, Johnny English, and Airplane!, and I wanted this movie to be like that, even though there were no spy movies, let alone spy comedies, in India at the time.
I spent two years writing the script. In America, you typically send your script to agents or producers and wait for feedback, but in India, you narrate. So, I went around to producers and filmmakers, narrating this story, acting it out, doing voices, and giving stage directions as if I was performing a one-man show. In five years, I did about thirty different narrations of this fucking movie, and every single person stared at me as if I were out of my mind. Their stares were blank, their eyes did not shine with laughter, and their checkbooks did not open up to finance the epic story of Happy Patel. Occasionally, if the listener was up to speed on films like the zombie parody Shaun of the Dead, they’d get it and laugh, but not enough to come on board. Eventually I put the script away and went on with my life.
Almost fifteen years after I put that script away, I started having strange dreams.
During about a week-long period, I had three separate dreams about Happy Patel. That’s when I know that something is about to shift in my life. When I dream about it multiple times. I pulled the script out and reread it. It’s about this character trying desperately to fit in and coming to understand that the only way to belong is to be yourself. And it struck me—the first movie I ever wrote was about being an outsider.
Unlike back in 2008, spy movies had become a thing in India. They weren’t comedies, they were action movies about an Indian spy taking on Pakistan or the entire Arab world. They were ultrapatriotic and took themselves very seriously, so it was finally time to parody them. I reworked the old script, put it away for a few months, won an Emmy for my Netflix special, and then thought, I’m back! Who can I narrate this story to? Who can I call? I hadn’t spoken to Aamir Khan in a decade, but what did I have to lose by calling one of the most powerful people in India? Just my dignity!
“Hey, Aamir sir, it’s Vir. Das?”
“Hello, Vir.”
“So, I have this movie I want to make, and if you don’t produce it, it’ll never get made.”
“That’s a lot of pressure,” he said.
And then he asked me to come narrate it to him. So, I did. I don’t get intimidated often, but I do get intimidated by him. Every single time he calls and I see his name flash on the screen, I stand up. If I tell my friends that I spoke to Aamir on the phone, their first question is, “Did you stand up?” Fuck yes, I stood up. So, I narrated the movie, and he told me he’d give me some money to shoot a few scenes, as a test.
“Shoot them on an iPhone with no lighting, I don’t care,” he said.
Off I went. I called a director I knew who had been subjected to this same test by Aamir.
“I’m going to just shoot it on my iPhone with no lights and no locations,” I told the director.
“Are you insane?” he said. “You need to produce the shit out of it.”
So, I used a comedy club as a location and turned different areas of the club into sets—a bedroom in one corner, a living room in another. We had lights, and a crew. People volunteered their time because they heard that Bollywood powerhouse actor-producer-choreographer Aamir Khan was involved. I had directed my Netflix specials, but this was something different. The minute I walked on set and called “action,” I felt the exact same way I did the first time I performed stand-up and got a laugh: Why haven’t I been doing this all along?
Because life is a series of belonging, not belonging, fucking up, and making things right. It’s a long and winding path to something unexpected, or something you dreamed about that felt totally out of reach.
Aamir saw our test scenes and told us to go make the movie. The night I got the news, I went out and got smashed to celebrate, and that was the last time I had a decent night’s sleep for a year.
Over the three months of making the movie, I broke a finger, cracked a rib, and injured my cricoid cartilage. I had footprints on my back from being kicked, and I pulled a muscle in my hip. My sciatic nerve was totally out of whack. It was terrible and glorious and amazing. The main character tries so hard to fit in, and horrible things keep happening to him, so by the end enough horrible stuff has happened that people just accept him for who he is. But he has to get the shit beat out of him, literally and metaphorically, to understand that. What that means for the lead actor is A LOT of physical punishment if you’re doing your own stunts and fight scenes.
Making a movie is a completely surreal experience. You’re living in a bubble where time doesn’t exist, with a group of people who become your family for a brief period. There are emotional breakdowns, fights, and utter chaos. In one scene, my character gets a finger chopped off and blood spurts everywhere, so we had to test a prosthetic finger with a tube that shot out blood to make sure it worked. I stood there with an assistant director, a girl from a small town in India, as we threw fake chunks of flesh at each other’s faces to see if it would stick, and this was important work. At least, it was to us.
After months of night shoots, action sequences, stunts, explosions, and chases, the final shot was an insert of a single teacup. It was the most boring shot you could imagine, and it took forty-five minutes to light. When we finished, the whole crew erupted into applause and brought out a cake that said LET’S MAKE A MOVIE, which was something I said all the time during the shoot. “Okay, people, let’s make a fucking movie!” And we did. After we ate the cake and broke down the set and said our goodbyes, I went home and slept for three days.
I’m going to direct and act in three more projects in the next two years. Where the fuck is this sleep going to come from? It’s weird to have eyes with bags underneath them because you’re making movies, but a bright light in them because you are GETTING TO MAKE MOVIES!!!
I always dreamt cinematically. My dreams always had shots and angles and light changes and even soundtracks. Every single movie I have written has been about a dream I had. I’ve directed a few shows and a feature film by now and I hand-drew every shot I ever took, filling pages and pages of storyboard books. It never occurred to me that stand-up and direction can give you the same high. Not once, not until I did it.
Kavi Shastri and I, who met on Love Aaj Kal, two complete and utter outsiders who were background extras on a movie, just codirected for Aamir Khan Productions. Sink or swim, that’s a cool story. I just don’t know how it ends.
One thing I know from doing stand-up is that if I sink or swim, it’s on me. By the time you read this, we’ll know whether I made something amazing and all our lives changed, or I made something terrible and nothing changed. Or maybe I made something in the middle. I can’t control the reaction. None of us can. But I do know that on the Friday it comes out, I’ll be at Gaiety Galaxy, sitting with the crowd. Part of them, but not. On the outside, taking it all in.
One could argue I’m right back where I started. Like I said… it’s a circle.
EPILOGUE
Vir at NSCI Dome in Mumbai, shooting Fool Volume for Netflix. OCTOBER 2024, MUMBAI
It’s 9:30 p.m. on October 19, 2024, and I’m breathing heavily. My heart is jumping out of my chest. Some sort of music is playing in the darkness. I touch my fingers to my wrist and feel my heart beat faster than it ever has before. I am going to have a fucking heart attack. How do I not have a heart attack? Wasn’t there some sort of breathing thing I had heard of on an Andrew Huberman podcast or something?
Five counts in and six counts out?
Was it seven?
There is a stadium screaming all around me. Shivani is five feet away from me in the darkness, and Heeya, our chief AD, comes over and says, “Vir, it’s time.”
Heeya holds me by the hand and starts to guide me through the utter darkness. There is radium tape on the floor, and she has mapped the route to the stage.
My heart is going to fucking explode.
I wonder if people can see how ridiculous this looks. A man in his forties being led by the hand by some twenty-something, five-foot-nothing kid. Like a child in the parking lot of his school. Not gonna lie, it feels good to have someone helping me. I have spent the last eight weeks of my life feeling weak and sick and every kind of terrible emotion that you can imagine.
* * *
I know what the song is now. It’s “Twist” from Love Aaj Kal, the movie I was a background extra in. Some moron thought it would be a good idea to use it as an entry song for the biggest gig of my life in this city. Some ironic nod to how far we have all come. The audience seems to be buying it.
Oh yeah… I’m the moron. Why the fuck is my heart beating so fast?
There are four massive LED screens above the tiny little stage. Facing all around the stadium so that no matter where you are sitting you get to see me in close-up. There is writing on them now… blue font on black background.
The screen says LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.
I kneel in the darkness. Heeya leaves me there. My knee is on the ground. The ground starts to shake. I can feel a vibration going through my entire body. People start to scream. There are twelve thousand of them.
I have a single clear thought: “Get your head together or you are going to fuck this up. Calm down. Make this about them. You have a job to do.”
It helps. I start to think about how many of these people were stuck in traffic, got a babysitter, bought tickets in the twenty minutes we sold this show out. Some of them are thrilled with their seats, some of them are unhappy with theirs. We opened the doors late, so they’ve been standing in the heat. Are they pissed? I am told we shut down the Bandra-Worli Sea Link bridge in Mumbai. That is insane. People sent me screenshots of their Google maps, where there’s a clear red line across the bridge with the caption “You did this!” There are videos of people just abandoning their cabs and running toward a stadium. People. That’s what this gig is about. People. Not one person.
