The daily grind: Sanam Saeed

The wonderful actor, Sanam Saeed, takes us to her set for a day, lists the number of touch-ups required, remembers her torn khussay, and makes the best of Mauritius on the sets of ‘Bachaana’

3 am:

Wake up! There is a toss up every morning as to who will wake up first, Madiha, my make-up artist, or me. We have a little competition going on amongst ourselves.

4 am:

I have half my hair tonged and have a spoon in one hand and a sponge in the other while feeding Madiha yoghurt as she tongs the rest of my hair.



5 am:

After hair and make-up, we rush to the dining hall to make a doggy bag to eat in the van on our way to the location.

6 am:

Naptime! We are headed to a forest with a waterfall to shoot the underwater scenes and the location is about an hour away. Mohib is having palpitations thinking about the shoot because he cannot swim and the water is freezing.



7-11 am:

Once we reach the location and get ready to shoot, there is a lot of running, falling, rehearsing and some more running. The funniest thing that keeps happening is that I run into walls, because instead of slowing down I speed up when I am close to the finish line. It is quite funny and ridiculous at the same time. As I mentioned before, Mohib gets nervous about doing underwater shoots, so I dive in to give him support but end up with borderline hypothermia! I literally have to be dragged out in the sun to defrost.



12 pm:

Touching up make-up, and fixing hair. Due to the nature of the film, we need constant touch ups.

1-2 pm:

This is the toughest hour because we have to figure out our lunch. We have a Nepali cook who can only cook Nepali food, even his Chinese food tastes Nepali. Throughout the shoot we overdose on French baguettes and these local pakora type snacks! We sit in the van and blast Indian music to pump up our energy levels.



3-6 pm:

We are now headed to the citadel, where we have to shoot the action scenes. Most of the action shots are done here. There is a lot of waiting around and running into tourists and it’s surprising how many Pakistanis live there! They all want to take us out or have us over.

7 pm:

The shoot is over and we are ready to go back to the resort, but a friendly Pakistani family invites us over for tea and feeds us these bright pink-coloured cakes. I can never forget these cakes!

8 pm:

Lights out! We are passed out in the van and on our way back to the hotel. The scene could have been part of a zombie movie because that’s how dead we are.



9 pm:

We get to the hotel; eat, hang out, unwind and talk about the next day.

10 pm:

Shower, fixing/mending torn clothes. My khussay always need to be taped together because they are destroyed by the end of each day.

11 pm:

Hang out for a little bit and by 11:30pm lights out. Four hours of sleep and then back to the grind.