Can I have my wig back, please?

Sushmita Sen and the crew of Dulha Mil Gaya had a long wait at Trinidad and Tobago, as their wigs were sent to Bolivia by mistake, by their airline

Sandipan Dalal

A month-long schedule in Trinidad and Tobago has left the cast and crew members of Dulha Mil Gaya more efficient at crisis management. Firstly, the freight comprising cameras, cranes, production props and costumes landed up at Barbados instead of the location. Secondly, Sushmita's make-up box and a bag of wigs reached Grenada and Bolivia respectively. Producer Vivek Vaswani literally looked around for every lose piece of luggage that went missing. "We transported 81 trunks that weighed 30,000 kilos from Mumbai. The luggage literally travelled around the world before reaching our sets," he says.

Vaswani blames it on the freight company who transported their equipment and costumes. The misplaced trunks delayed the shooting schedule as Trinidad and Tobago hardly have any studios. "That schedule was a nightmare. We used to wake up to new problems every morning. We had to wait for our equipments as there are no studios there, forget professional technicians," he says.

Sushmita Sen had a long wait before her make-up arrived and the rest of the cast just could not start filming as their handpicked wigs didn't reach the location. The story goes that Heathrow airport authorities marked the luggage as 'Trinidad' instead of 'Port of Spain, Trinidad'. The wigs were subsequently sent to a small town in Bolivia also called Trinidad. "It cannot get funnier than this. The wigs reached a small town, Trinidad in Bolivia. All the characters have a specific looks and hairstyles in the film and we just couldn't do away with the wigs. So, we had to wait before we got our stuff back," adds Vivek.

As if that wasn't enough, after the trunk-trouble a storm in Tobago ruined a make-shift set on a jetty. The crew had to reconstruct the set as no labourers were available. Director Mudassar Aziz painted the set all by himself while the art director hammered the floors. "Trinidad and Tobago is not at all a film friendly nation. The storm completely destroyed this particular set and we had to start afresh," says Vivek.