The Billionaire’s Sleep

Well the blog has veered towards a travellers personal experiences but I haven’t forgotten I cae here to research and write a screenplay. I’ve been plugging away at the screenplay and my ideas and thought I should probably put a few down here since that was the original idea of having a blog in the first place.

Characters:

Rajiv Malhotra is a billionaire who inherited an Indian steel empire and turned it into a trans-national concern with a focus on India’s ability to provide outsourcing services to the rest of the world. For him every moment of every day in every timezone is an opportunity to provide efficient services. His obsession with utilising every second of the day means he has never been able to sleep. This inability to sleep has also meant he is infertile and has not been able to produce an heir to his empire. His decision to have a ‘perfect son’ made for him through the use of genetic technologies is the inciting moment of the story. From that moment powers beyond his control come into play.

Sapna is his unexpected daughter, when his wife gives birth to twins, a girl and a boy, Rajiv finds he has a daughter who sleeps beautifully. That sleep is so powerful that as she approaches puberty Sapna’s fertility when she dreams brings organic objects back to life. Her bedhead grows branches and a perfect white flower. The spores in the carpet burst into life over night filling the air with floating tendrils, her clothes basket grows into a thicket of bamboo. This exhuberant fertility frightens Rajiv and he does everything within his power to have this excess of organic material removed from his sight.

Sapna is the emotional heart of the story. It is through her that her father is finally redeemed and it is her that the audience feels most strongly for. Her twin brother Imran is cast out of the Malhotra family home as he is born deformed with a head shaped like that of a cow. He grows up in a poor Shia part of Bombay, scorned and laughed at by other children for his deformities he is accepted into the illegal underworld that provides a living for many of Bombay’s residents. He is a fixer, he knows who can solve a problem. He is a trickster character, he tells stories and recites poems in tea houses through the city’s slums. He pops up wherever he is needed, travelling without bringing attention to himself. However, something is missing from his life and it is that negative space that he seeks to fillful by travelling to Delhi home of the father and sister he doesn’t know he has.

There are plenty of other characters (including one more core character) but that would be giving away too much of the story and I want you all to come and see the film. More detailed thoughts to be posted when I’m sitting in Singapore twiddling my thumbs.

I’ve been thinking about Sapna and how she is the analyst and theorist of the story. One of my ideas is to use a sequence of her creating a musical notation that captures the importance of time to the music. I’m thinking of the serial music notation and greek modal notation I’ve seen and how that can be mapped against each second of a 24 hour clock.

Rana and I have also been talking about Imran as a lizard who travels through the electrical networks. I keep thinking of fire salamanders. The salamander is pretty interesting as it can live its life in an adolecent state, only maturing into an adult if very specific conditions occur.

Each of the main characters in The Billionaire’s Sleep is connected to their community/world/dominion by an activity or manner. For Rajiv Malhotra his call centre represents his relationship to time, he is permanently ‘outsourced’ to the demands of consumers across the globe.

For Imran (Rajiv’s deformed and abandoned son) he is connected to the underground world of the bazaar through illegal electricity connections. The chaotic nests of wiring helping him travel through the slums unnoticed.

As Sapna (Rajiv’s daughter) is imprisoned in a tower her dominion is time and creativity. She discovers that each second of the 24 hour clock has a sequence of musical notes most suited to that moment. She develops a serial notation that connects her to the world of time that she cannot even observe (her tower has no windows).

Each of these devices, a call centre in Rajiv’s navel, a network of pirate energy traversed by Imran and an intricate system of musical notation devised by Sapna link the characters to one another.

Rajiv’s second son needs some work. Right now he’s a Bollywood cliche, SUV, expensive shirt and a gun.

Rajiv Malhotra is fully connected to the twenty four hour beat of capitalism. From his Gurgaon call centre workers recite decision tree sutras to supplicants in GMT, PST and AEDT.