The beginning

Chapter 6

The shoot began on the Monday after the screening and it was exhilarating. The colours, the scale, but most of all, seeing a completely new side of each other. Every day Ranveer and Deepika spent together seemed to give them new reasons to like each other. 

Deepika admired Ranveer's ability to talk to anyone, his liveliness and charm. She saw how he paid attention even to the most junior technicians on the team and made them feel appreciated and happy with his jokes and banter. Ranveer was impressed by how hard-working and organised Deepika was. She had to do double shifts to accommodate her schedules for Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani and Ram Leela, but he never once saw her complain or be anything less than gracious and patient, even when her back was hurt and her feet peeling from dancing barefoot on the hard stone floors. 

The shoot began with the song they'd rehearsed, Lahu Munh Lag Gaya. The whole first minute of the song was actually a scene between Ram and Leela - their first meeting. Sanjay sir, being the musical director that he was, had made them block out the movements to the beats of the song in rehearsal. There was no set instruction for what they needed to do, but he'd given them the brief. 

"It should be a visible instant attraction, with an edge of something deeper. Like love at first sight," he'd told them. Ranveer didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the coincidence. Art, it seemed, was set to imitate life.

Accordingly they'd practiced and improvised playing with the Holi colours. Watching Deepika stroke her slim fingers down her long silky neck, Ranveer didn't have to feign the look of desire in his eyes. When acting, he was stunned to find, she lost all her inhibitions. She became Leela, with Leela's fearlessness and lust for life. He found himself playing off her in new and unexpected ways that excited him as an actor. 

She held back nothing, giving him the same reactions whether the focus was on him or on her. She was experimental and intuitive and he could see the subtle changes in expression in her eyes and body language with each iteration. For someone who was still new to the profession, it was very exciting to work with a co-actor who had such a grasp of the method of acting. And Sanjay sir pushed them, never satisfied with something that was fine. He wanted magic, and that happened, Ranveer realised slowly, when he immersed himself completely in the moment. The best was when she was completely with him. 

The line between Ram falling for Leela and Ranveer falling for Deepika began to blur. He never had to act his fascination with her. It was already there, and growing stronger every day. It seemed like the lines from the song, Lahu Munh Lag Gaya, the screenplay and lyrics both, echoed his own feelings. 

Deepika was nervous. The script called for her to kiss Ranveer. She'd kissed many others in many movies and after her initial awkwardness, it became routine, just another scene to figure out the psychology of. But something about this time was different. 

Over the course of the last few weeks she and Ranveer had become friends and had grown comfortable in each other's company but there was always an undercurrent of sexual energy flowing between them. That was a good thing for the film, she supposed, but as a person, not an actor, she was apprehensive about what she would feel. Her body and mind lit up in his presence and it wasn't something she could control, no matter how she tried. That in itself made her uneasy. 

Playing Leela also freed a side of her that she normally kept suppressed - the sensual, spontaneous wild child that she'd tapped into for Veronica, though in that role she had been more destructive and carefree rather than lusty and romantic as in Ram Leela. As an actor she tended to go with the flow in scenes and that was what made her nervous here. They'd carefully shied away from all but the most casual, innocent touches, and even those, the evening at the theatre proved, were enough to set her on fire. She was afraid of what might happen if she let go of that tightly held control.