Author: Sia Rawat, Class XII D
“Not quite my tempo.”
My dad said it all the time. Says it still. Ever since I was six. I didn’t understand what it meant back then.
One summer, I went with him to an audition. I wasn’t supposed to be there for anything except moral support. But while we waited, the casting director noticed me. He smiled, handed me a script, and said, “Let’s just try something.” Suddenly I was in front of a camera, lights glaring, reading lines I’d never seen before. I was eight, nervous, unsure what to do with my hands.
I read the lines. Stumbled a little. They smiled, thanked me, and that was that. I never heard about it again, but sometimes I wonder if that clip—my first and only audition—still exists somewhere. Maybe no one saw it. Maybe it was deleted minutes later. But to me, that moment was everything.
That’s when I started to understand my father. The man who left for Mumbai when I was six, not out of anger or escape, but out of love for a dream that wouldn’t let him sleep. He was chasing the Bollywood dream—a kind of dream that asks everything of you and gives almost nothing back.
At first, I didn’t know how to explain why my dad lived in another city. Our home in Indore was quieter after he left. My mother kept things moving, but I could sense the silence between her smiles.
Between the calls and goodbyes, I grew up faster than I realized. I learned to tell when my mom was tired, to make sense of emotions I didn’t yet have words for. That’s when I began noticing details: expressions, pauses, tones.
Some nights, when my mom’s phone rang, I’d stay awake just to hear his voice through the faint speaker, full of the chaos of the city. He’d tell us about rejections, callbacks, and that one perfect take. He never sounded bitter or tired. Just in love.
That’s what struck me most as I grew older. How could someone love something that didn’t always love him back?
He wasn’t a movie star or signing autographs. He was building a life within the unpredictability of art. A small rented apartment stacked with scripts, clothes, and hope. He’d play scenes from his favorite films, pausing mid-frame to explain what made them work.
“This,” he’d say, pointing to Colonel Slade from Scent of a Woman, “isn’t about what he’s saying. It’s about what he’s feeling.”
He taught me that even a two-second role can move you if it’s honest. “Cinema kahani kehne ka dhanda hai aur yakeen dilane ki qala hai”—cinema is the business of storytelling and the art of making people believe.
When I missed him, and I often did, I’d return to those lessons. I started noticing stories everywhere: the woman waiting at the bus stop in the rain, my mother’s silence when she missed him but didn’t say so. I began seeing life as scenes, waiting to be understood. In a strange way, my father’s absence gave me presence.
Years later, I watched Whiplash. When Fletcher said, “Not quite my tempo,” I finally understood. It wasn’t about rejection. It was about trying again, believing something could always be better.
Movies stopped being just something I loved, they became the way I understood love. When my father taught me how to analyze a scene, he was really teaching me how to see people, to notice the flicker of emotion before words form.
Now, when I sit in a dark theater and the lights fade, I feel closest to him. It’s as if every story on screen is a conversation we never finished. And I realize he never really left. He just found another way to teach me how to see the world. I think about that eight-year-old in front of the camera and she says to me: “Not quite my tempo.”
