Numbercaste by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Author:Yudhanjaya Wijeratne [Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Published: 2017-07-24T20:00:00+00:00

By January, we were casting. Both Arundati Khatri and I wanted talent that nobody else had seen before. Fortunately – and this is the great thing about India – talent was never in short supply. We wrote and wrote; and when she stepped in to polish the lines, I would step back and send everything we had to Julius, to Ezra, to Wurth and Monard. They would ping back, sometimes asking for clarification, sometimes pointing out that such-and-such a feature was patently impossible. Someone from Algorithm would get on a call with us, and we’d hastily rewrite. Sometimes this happened just hours before shooting.

At this stage, if this was a network show, I’d still have been jumping over hoops. But this was NumberCorp, and by February, Wurth had spun off Number Imaging as an entirely separate sub-division, with me as the COO and Julius as the CEO; and I was rolling out the cameras, making the actors rehearse their lines, my eyes split among feeds from six DeepRed drones with every single ounce of visual finesse I could muster, half-stoned on the Nootonium and Lucile mix all the image people use when controlling cameras for extended periods. Ibrahim pitched in as the producer: he knew how to make people keep their deadlines.

“Bloody hell,” I remember Wurth saying once. “How many people do you have working for you?”

I waved a hand distractedly. “Fifty maybe, if you count the actors.”

In truth, that was a small number: we had the advantage of tech on our side. We shot an entire season’s worth in the British style with those fifty people: six hour-long episodes, with a dozen smaller, 20-minute shorts around them, filling in pieces of the background. We edited for days on end; Ibrahim and a team retrained a cheaper version of Minerva to do the first-pass editing; it would pick up the choicest cuts, and then I would carefully tease them together. I researched. I read. I called people. Parvati and the Nootonium injections kept me sane; I worked more, and harder than I ever had in my life. And as things inside NumberCorp got more and more frantic, I had the luxury of settling down on this one project. It would consume the next couple of years of my life, but it was my break: my magnum opus: my one big thing. Everyone has to have one.

Julius came to see me again on set, this time with a strange man in tow. I gestured for one of my assistants to see to them. We were wrapping up some replacement scenes and it was about twenty minutes before I could unplug myself and go see them.

“This is Heng,” he said.

“Liu Heng,” the man said, shaking my hand.

Heng was Chinese. The first thing that struck me was the similarity between the two men. Heng was tall, taller than all of us, but he had his hair cropped short, like Julius, and I almost thought he was Julius’s Chinese twin. But the impression vanished the moment it formed.

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