LIV

jigged her way AROUND INDIA

“We have a job in India.”

“I’ll take it.”

Just like that and Liv was on route to India with her name signed to a Bollywood contract. A quick YouTube search after the phone call being her first encounter with the sumptuous, brightly coloured industry.

Upon arriving in Mumbai, Liv was whizzed off in a tuk-tuk to Andheri West where six girls (also dancing their way around India) welcomed her in. The next day she jumped right into costume in the hodgepodge of action, romance, comedy and musical numbers. She danced on shows like Big Boss (Big Brother) and Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and laughed all the while at the silliness of it all.

“You think they’re taking the piss, but they’re not. And really, neither are we with our entertainment industry. That’s what’s funny. Both Hollywood and Bollywood are just as unrealistic as each other. Only in India, they jazz everything up with dancers.”

Because of the colour of her skin, Liv was treated like a superstar. Pampered, painted, and praised everywhere she went. Early in the trip when she still had her Australian glow, she was sent to get a pedicure before filming for a shoe commercial. The girl rubbed some lotion on her legs and said,

“Be back in 5 minutes.”

Seconds later Liv’s legs were burning. She started to scream and slap her legs. Soon enough the lady walked back in, not even slightly swayed by her reaction.

“What did you put on me?” Liv asked.

The lady held up a bottle, “to make your legs whiter.”

It was bleach.

With or without the “lotion”, Liv’s skin caught people’s attention all over India. Between dancing at weddings on giant martini glasses, on live television, at weddings on giant martini glasses, on commercials, at weddings on giant martini glasses, parties, at weddings on giant martini glasses—Liv returned to her little house in Andheri, a little queasy about it all.

“It was a hard thing to make peace with… that privilege they treat you with,” she said. “We’re not any better than them.”

Along the way she and her housemates started to feel the insignificance of what they were doing while looking around at the state of the place they were in.

Given their situation and their feelings towards it, the Andheri girls started cooking extra food to give to the people in their village and made sure their leftovers went to the stray animals. They stayed loyal to the locals, going first and foremost to their fruit guy, their samosa guy, their street kart curry guy, their medicine guy. While they tried to do more, they found many shook their hands at their help.

“We forget that’s their normal. Doesn’t mean it’s fair, or right. Of course you want to take them to a dream world where those conditions don’t exist. But you just can’t. A lot of them are happy living the way they do. And when you think about it, we do some pretty wild things to entertain and satisfy ourselves.”

She realised that whether dancing or dishing out food, what it came down to was how she treated the people she was around. And so she looked for moments to be a friend. She realised that while she couldn’t always help in a tangible way, she could at least change how she treated people.

As I left our conversation, Liv walked off with a bounce in the step of her denim flares.

“Don’t be a stranger now,” she called out to me with a smile and a wave.

I know she meant it. Because if her stories of India have told me anything, it’s that Liv lives by the line “a stranger is a friend I haven’t met yet.”

And so she gets a badge, not only for frolicking her way around India - because that is undoubtedly cool - but for being a friend to each person she met along the way.