These days, every time a famous deadpan Hindi comedian unleashes another dry punchline on his TV screen back home in Rajasthan, Gulshan must fight the impulse to clap and hoot too loudly. Trained by the applause cues of TV shows in Mumbai’s Film City for four whole months before the Coronavirus lockdown, cheering is muscle memory for Gulshan, a 25-year-old Bollywood hopeful who had been working as a paid TV audience member since December 2019 to afford both his Rs 4,000-per-month paying guest rent in Borivli and his “struggle”.

“My mother knows about my acting dreams but not about this,” says Gulshan, referring to the job that required sitting all day, controlling your bladder through prolonged shoots and screaming hoarse at opportune moments in the hope that the capricious cameras glimpse your aspiring-model face. At Rs 300-odd-plus-meals-aday, this daily grind hardly felt like showbiz but it assured enough sustenance and “inspirational” star-gazing to make him hunger for the old normal after he fled home to Rajasthan penniless following lockdown. “Clapping with family around feels weird,” says Gulshan, now eager to book a return ticket to professional invisibility in Mumbai next month.

It seems the cautiously-reopening floors of TV shows are their own applause cue for these faceless extras of reality TV, whose livelihood comes from feigning high spirits and who found themselves temporarily replaced by non-hungry cardboard cutouts and video standees onscreen. Desperate, these fleetingly-acknowledged audiences on the fringes of the entertainment industry have been doing odd jobs through Unlock, all the while texting audience co-ordinators and crowd suppliers for work.

Among the floating 150 to 200 faces that appear in each show are middle-aged housewives and retirees too but chiefly college students who pay their fees this way. “Some do it for time pass or pocket money but a majority of them are underprivileged people who depend on it for survival,” says Nitu Kothari, an audience coordinator who has been avoiding several calls and text messages with the same question: “Didi, kuch kaam hai?”

While TV embraces all age groups in its seats, it follows its own hierarchy--seating the “fair and good-looking types” in the front, reserving the “aunties and uncles” for serious talk shows. After the pandemic stole their seats, some returned to their hometowns and turned salesmen while some others have been coasting along on what model coordinator Tarif K calls their “balance”. Zoheb—another model coordinator who himself started out as a prolific applauder for Rs 125 per day 16 years ago—has been undertaking catering and driving jobs to live up to his earlier standard of Rs 30,000 a month.

Fighting even deeper facelessness in Kalwa is 23-year-old background artiste Shubham Tiwari, the breadwinner of his three-member home and a full-time fan of choreographer Ganesh Acharya. The lockdown intensified Shubham’s camouflage further when he donned gloves over his former clapping hands and spritzed local offices with disinfectants clad in a PPE kit. Today, Shubham works as an errand boy in a local guest house, treasures a selfie with Acharya from a pre-Covid shoot and, unable to afford dance classes, practices the dance moves of reality shows in private.

Besides the dal, chicken, roti, papad and omelette staples, Shubham misses the glittery, air-conditioned, buzzy TV ambience that paid his electricity and water bills. Even though he never got to sit in the prized front row and screamed several times to seduce the camera in vain, that one time he appeared behind a dance contestant in a rickshaw driver’s garb was its own high. “I had to borrow Rs 20,000-Rs 30,000 from my uncle to survive six months of lockdown,” says Shubham, adding that he will go back to clapping for a living in a heartbeat. But won’t that train-less commute from Kalwa to Goregaon cost him almost Rs 400 more each way? “I’ll ask them for conveyance,” Shubham says, cueing neither for applause nor for laughter.