Bollywood or bust

My sister and I arrived in Mumbai on Boxing Day, stepping out from a 45-hour train ride during which we'd experienced a dismal and depressing Christmas Day sipping on over-stewed chai tea and trying to remember childhood Christmas carols. We were travel weary and dreaming of big city comforts.

We had just spent six months traversing tourist-laden Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, roaming across southwest China, hitchhiking across Tibet and, finally, had slung smaller packs on our backs for three weeks trekking around the Annapurna mountain range in Nepal. Mumbai is a seductress. She is a city of dreams, despair, drama and dazzle; heartbreaking poverty amongst staggering grandness. Our first sight of Mumbai came when we stepped out of the illustrious and overcrowded Victoria Terminus. The city sparkled with promise. The sun shone down on queues of 50s-style black and yellow taxis. The dizzying array of shops, advertising, cinemas and streets in all directions reminded me of the treats ahead – haircuts, pedicures, western food and wine, shopping, cleanliness, English everywhere... From our first meeting I knew Mumbai and me would get on pretty well. And of course, I couldn't forget the idea of Bollywood glamour and the stories I'd heard about the clamour for foreigners to work in the industry. I had no time restraints on my stay there, but did have some pressing money worries, so Bollywood stardom sounded just right for me.

Our first call up to stardom occurred when I met Nasir ordering kebabs outside our guesthouse. He was a 'foreigners coordinator', keenly looking for tourists to work for him. The job: A Coca-Cola advert (or Pepsi? I was never quite sure and I never saw the boxes of free soft drink I was expecting). We were to be part of a foreign paparazzi crowd pretending to take photos of the stunning and ever-so-Bollywood-glam, former Ms. World, Aishwarya Rai.

Mumbai is the city of dreams, and it is also the city of big talkers, false promises, and people that want to pay foreigners to do strange things. It's all the rage to have a foreigner at your event – promoting products, dancing, waitressing, bartending, greeting guests and generally adding an 'international feel'. On New Years Eve we got many of the dancing-type offers, all of which we politely turned down. Then at 7pm, whilst sitting in our hotel room sipping on chardonnay on which the days budget had been blown, Ahmjad came knocking on our door with an offer too good to refuse: waitressing for three hours at the swanky, star-studded Taj Mahal Hotel's New Years Eve private party, with free drinks for us from 1:30am. Of course, all is never as it seems. After two hours with our jandal-trained feet crammed into high heels, and the sight of gorgeous celebrities in bejeweled saris changing from stunning to standard practice, things weren't all that great. But by 5am when the shoes were off, many free drinks consumed and the dance floor ours, we felt ready to call the night a success.

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