The Non-Conformist

by Parikshat Sahni

  Life is full of ironies. Some of my films ‘clicked’, and at one stage I was flooded with offers. Dad had passed away by then and I was on my own. I did not understand how an actor can act in more than one of two films at a time, but for many actors that was the norm those days. Even Amitabh, I remember, was doing two or three shifts a day. Dad was no longer alive and I had no one to advise me.

  I met Shashi Kapoor Saheb one day and asked his advice. He suggested, ‘Sign as many films as you can, my friend, and make hay while the sun shines. God knows which film will click! Here film-making is a hit and run affair. Audiences are unpredictable. One never knows what will appeal to them. That is what I do. I do two or three shifts a day. I enjoy it!’ I thought about what he had said, and since I was sure I would soon do what I was cut out for—film direction—I decided to follow his advice and take the plunge. I signed six or seven films at the same time. In one of them (a film called Duniyadaari), I found out to my utter surprise that I was cast opposite Nutan-ji!

  Usually, I never feel self-conscious or nervous while acting with anyone, be it the biggest name in the film industry. That is because I don’t lay much store on being an actor. At the back of my mind I always feel that this is a part-time job and my main vocation (and passion) are writing and direction. But during my school days, I was a stand-in or an understudy for other actors when a play was being put up by the Juhu Art Theatre, so I had a rudimentary knowledge about the craft. I had faced live audiences before, so the camera didn’t scare me much, nor did the presence of an actor of renown if I had to do a scene with him.

  Even today, I feel that the real medium for an actor is the stage and not the screen. The cinema is primarily the medium of the director. He is a god in his own universe and an actor just has to carry out his commands. So usually I am at ease doing a scene with my co-actors. I have a tendency to scrutinise their performance with a magnifying glass to see what they are doing rather than think about what I am doing. I have been trained as a director. So, I tend to look at my co-artists through the eyes of a director. And, I must add, like almost all directors, I have an immense love and respect for my fellow actors. Acting is one of the toughest jobs on earth! It requires tremendous concentration, imagination and discipline to enact a character that is alien to one. It is also the most insecure profession in the world.

  However, I digress. We were talking about Nutan-ji. She is the only actor in whose presence I have felt overawed and nervous. That is partly because she had done some great films with Dad and because he held her in such high esteem. So, when I had my first scene with her, I stuttered and stammered and made a hash of my lines, and looked like the ‘rooky’ I was. This was also partly because she was reserved, silent and uncommunicative and looked like an unapproachable Goddess.

  I had worked with her younger sister, Tanuja, in a film called Pavitra Paapi, a film I was supposed to direct. Tanuja is a great actress—immensely versatile and talented. When I worked with her, she was a big star and I was a newcomer. She was so good at her job that she intimidated me on the screen by her sheer presence. But she was different. She was fun-loving and full of life. She talked incessantly, and she was, what we call in Mumbai parlance, ‘bindaas’, a carefree soul who didn’t care about people’s opinion and did whatever she felt like doing. She put me at ease from the word go.

  But Nutan-ji was different. I had first seen her when I was still in school and Dad’s words rang in my ears when I faced her for the first time. ‘She is great actress, one of the best!’ he said, and she had proved her mettle over the past decade or more she had been in films. Nutan-ji had received several Filmfare awards.

  I literally trembled during my first shot with her. The director didn’t look too happy and suggested a retake, which made me even more nervous and self-conscious, but Nutan-ji came to my rescue. She came up to me and shook my hand and said, ‘That was a great shot!’ Then, looking around she said out aloud, ‘Akhir beta kiska hai!’ To my surprise, everyone nodded in assent and the director didn’t have the courage to contradict her. There was no retake. And after that things were different!

  Duniyadaari did pretty well at the box office and then there were more offers to do films with Nutan-ji. One of them was a film called Kasturi, a low-budget NFDC film that was to be shot in the jungles of Bastar, a tribal area in Madhya Pradesh. The film had a good cast. Apart from Nutan-ji, there were Sriram Lagoo, Mithun Chakraborty (one of his earliest films), and Sulabha Deshpande-ji and her husband Arvind Deshpande, both truly accomplished actors whom Dad admired. He always held Marathi and Bengali actors in high esteem because their film industries had a great theatrical tradition. So he felt they were extremely accomplished actors. Dad considered stage acting vital for developing what he called one’s ‘acting muscles’.

  Bastar was quite an astonishing place for us town-dwellers. It was thickly jungled in those days (many decades ago) and there were hardly any vestiges of civilization there. The local people, men and women, went around without any clothes except for a small loincloth. The women were also bare-bodied and not at all self-conscious about their nakedness.

  The men carried small bows and arrows with which they hunted small and big animals. In those days, one barely saw any policeman and the only place that had electricity was the Dak Bungalow in which we stayed. Living conditions were quite primitive, of course, there were no showers or proper bathrooms and we had to make do with rather primitive sanitary facilities!

  I would have my morning bath in a nearby rivulet, along with the local tribesmen. It was fun. I felt Nutan-ji might feel out of place in such surroundings, but I was mistaken. She had no special demands, no objection to the inconveniences of living in a hundred-year-old Dak Bungalow of the British days. And she ate, as usual, along with the unit and was quite satisfied with the plain fare served to us.

  I commented on this one day while shooting and said that I was surprised that she felt at home in such primitive surroundings. ‘I learnt this from your father. He believed in simple living and high thinking. He lived and ate frugally and said that the most important thing for an actor was to keep his feet on the ground and stay close to the masses.’ Evidently working with Dad had left its mark on her and she had many good things to say about him. ‘He was,’ as she told me, ‘a very conscientious actor, never satisfied till he had given the best shot he could, and a wonderful co-artiste who made everyone feel at ease and at home in his company.’

  The film was completed in a month and we moved back to Mumbai, and I started working on other projects. But I was told that one of the scenes we had shot in Bastar needed to be re-shot. The Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a thickly forested area, had been chosen for the purpose. We couldn’t go back to Bastar to shoot just one scene. A date was fixed. The director wanted to start shooting at seven in the morning as he needed the early morning light for the scene.

  I took the liberty of coming an hour late because leading ladies usually take a long time doing their makeup and getting ready, and setting up the camera and lighting also takes a while. But when I reached at 8 o’clock, I got the shock of my life! Nutan-ji was sitting in her chair on the set, ready with make-up and dress, and was going over her lines. The camera had also been set up. I was late.

  The director upbraided me for coming late and I apologized profusely. Then went up to Nutan-ji and also apologized, confessing that I was surprised that she had come all the way from Thane so early in the morning. It was then then that the director told me that she had, in fact, come before time. She had arrived at six thirty in the morning, ready with makeup! Nutan-ji drove a huge, eight-cylinder car (a convertible) and did not have a driver or a makeup man with her!

  Thane is beyond city limits and to come to the fairly distant shooting location so early in the morning was quite a feat! I suggested to her that it wouldn’t be a bad idea if she kept a driver as I did. What she said was a slap across my face. ‘Parikshat-ji, you are a star. You need to keep a driver, a makeup man and a spot
boy with you when you come for shooting. I was following your father’s footsteps. He drove his Ambassador himself, never kept a driver and, did his own make-up, and as a rule, made it a point to be always punctual.’ All I could do was to mumble a few apologies. My face had turned red from shame and I shuffled away to get dressed for the shot and go over the scene.

  Those were the days when boozing and gormandizing was the norm for me. I had put on a colossal amount of weight. I exercised like mad and tried to control my diet, but had no control over the booze. I looked like a miniature sumo wrestler. I had a colossal double chin and a spectacular paunch, which I tried to hide with a thick belt, but not to much avail. In contrast, Nutan-ji had not put on an ounce since I had first set eyes on her in my school days.

  One day I asked her about how she kept so fit. Once again, what she said was a gentle but palpable upper-cut that made my face turn red. ‘I do a lot of manual work, Parikshat-ji. I scrub the tub, I scrub the floor and the walls, and I do the sweeping and swabbing in the house.’ ‘Don’t you have servants to do that?’ I asked. ‘Yes, I do. But I do the manual work to keep fit. It is the best exercise. My example again was your Dad. I don’t remember him at any stage of his life developing a paunch. He was true to his profession of an actor! It is an actor’s job to keep fit.’ Again, my face turned beetroot red and I walked away, making a lame excuse.

  I understood how swabbing and scrubbing kept her so fit when my wife and I visited her house. She had invited us over for dinner one evening. Her house in Thane was atop a steep cliff on a mountainside. It was a steep climb in the car to reach it. And it was a stunning house! If I remember correctly (for it has been many years), it was built in split levels, full of curves and corners and ornately decorated. One could easily make out that it was the house of avid hunters.

  Every time one turned a corner one got a jolt. There would be a ferocious-looking stuffed panther, leopard or a tiger staring at us. Aruna, my wife, looked bewildered. So did I. It seems Nutan-ji herself was a keen hunter and had shot a leopard or two. It was a huge house carved out of the mountainside. I had never seen anything like it before. And it was a colossal place to swab and sweep! No wonder she kept so fit.

  One day, during the shooting, she was a little late. I gently pointed that out to her. I thought she may have been stuck in traffic. It was a long way to her house. ‘I am sorry to be late,’ she said, ‘I had to kill two snakes in my bathtub when I was about to have a bath!’ I was shocked. ‘Snakes in the bathtub?’ ‘Yes, there are a lot of snakes in the area, Very disconcerting!” she said nonchalantly. Like Dad, she was also one of a kind. An extraordinary woman and an extraordinary actor!

  A ferocious-looking fellow called Tiger had latched on to me during the shooting of Duniyadaari. He was dark, of medium height and built like a wrestler. He had a shaggy, unkempt beard and enormous, piercing eyes, and with his khaki uniform was the closest to the image I had in my mind of a dacoit. Without my requesting him, he took on the role of a ‘spot boy’ of sorts, came along with me when I went for shooting, carried my bags and my make-up box, and attended on me when I was shooting, bringing me tea and refreshments in the breaks. He glared at me in such an intimidating manner that I was a little scared to tell him that I really didn’t need anyone to attend to me during shootings and that I could very well look after myself. But he was adamant. I had no choice but to put up with him. I was new to the film industry and was scared of the man.

  We were put up in a hotel in Nashik for the outdoor stint. On the first day of shooting, our location was on the banks of the Godavari River. I was not aware that ‘Tiger’, without my knowledge, had brought along special food for me from the hotel, which he laid out with great finesse on a portable table during the lunch break. It was a sumptuous meal including Tandoori Chicken with some exotic salads thrown in. I asked him to bring another plate and place another chair at the table as I intended to call Nutan-ji to share lunch with me.

  I was sure she had brought her own lunch from the hotel. But that was not the case. I went looking for her to invite her, but found her sitting in line on the ground with the workers and technicians and eating out of a banana leaf.

  I went up to her and asked her to sit at my table and have a ‘proper’ lunch with me.

  ‘This is as “proper” a lunch as any!’ she said.

  ‘We have laid out a table, Nutan-ji! And sitting on the ground and eating like this from a banana leaf . . . surely this is uncomfortable!’ I said.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘And I have bottled water too. You should not drink anything here. It is dangerous!’

  ‘I am drinking water from the Godavari River. If my unit members can drink it, so can I. You have come from Russia. You are delicate. Being close to the workers and technicians is something I learnt from your father!’

  I had no answer to that. Hanging my head in shame, I quietly sat down at the end of the line and asked for a banana leaf.

  Dilip Kumar

  Yusuf Saheb, alias Dilip Kumar or Yusuf Lale, as we often called him, was another extraordinary person it was my good fortune to meet thanks to Dad. Dad was a close friend of his family. His close friend, the man he loved very much, was Dilip Saheb’s elder brother Ayoob Saheb. The two families were very close. I think it was because they came from the same area before Partition, spoke the same language in an alien city, ate the same food and followed, like most people from India’s North West, more or less the same customs and traditions. I think Ayoob Saheb was suffering from tuberculosis and died early, but the families remained close as ever.

  Dilip Saheb had a huge family. His sisters Fauzia, Farida and Sayeeda were more or less the same age as Shabnam and me. His brother Ehsan was a little older as was Aslam Bhai. I have a faint memory that Aslam Bhai studied in the school to which I was sent in Mumbai (St. Andrews) before I began my peregrinations from one boarding school to another, one college to another, and left the city for long interludes and only met them during holidays.

  Then there was Nasir Khan Saheb, an actor, and last of all the eldest sister, a spinster, and a old lady whom we called Appan-ji, who was cultured, affectionate and deeply religious. She always had beads in her hands and prayed five times a day. Shabnam and I often spent many days in their house below Pali Hill, close to where the market is now, and Dilip Saheb’s three sisters often came and spent a few days with us, playing with us on the beach and swimming in the sea. We were like one big family. The fact that we belonged to different religions did not even occur to us.

  Professionally, Dad was in bad shape those days. He had just taken his first steps in the film industry and was very unsure of himself or his future. And to top it all, being a ‘refugee’ from the Frontier Province, he was without money and sustenance. I think it was Ayoob Saheb who got him a role in a film called Hulchul in which I was cast as the young Dilip Kumar. I have spoken of these strange days earlier. Dad was in prison and had to be brought in a police van for shooting, escorted by an Inspector, to play the role of an inspector in the film! I rarely got to meet him, but Dilip Saheb did and I got to know him quite well.

  This was my first taste of the film industry and I rather liked the world of make-believe. After this there was another film in which I played a similar role (of a young Dilip Kumar). It was during the shooting of Hulchul that I met some other film luminaries. They were Nargis-ji and Murad Saheb (Raza Murad’s father), a man with a booming voice—tall and fair and with blue eyes. A very loving and affectionate man, he was very kind to me on the sets. He was soft-spoken off the screen, but metamorphosed into a devil incarnate when he got into his role.

  The director was K. Asif, a perfectionist who usually led the troops like an army commander, brooked no indiscipline and expected the artists to follow his instructions to the ‘T.’ In one scene, the chap who was playing Murad Saheb’s son, a boy a little older than me and eight inches taller, by the name of Kabir, had to slap me across the face and I was supposed to start crying.<
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  He was very friendly during the breaks. We became good friends and he always treated me well. During the shot, he did not really slap me, but merely touched me on the cheek. It was a gentle tap. I was supposed to start bawling. I didn’t. Asif Saheb was not satisfied with the shot. His assistant came up to me and asked me to use some glycerine and start crying after being slapped, but I refused to do this. I did not know what the liquid in a small bottle was all about, so I told the man not to worry and that I would cry as was required of me. What I didn’t know was that without letting me know, Asif Saheb had told Kabir to slap me harder. So this time the slap came as a shock to me and rather than intimidating me it made me angry. I stared back at Kabir defiantly and wanted to slap him back. The director was beginning to lose patience. He suggested I use glycerine and cry, but again, I refused. The next slap was harder. And the next even harder. My cheek became red. But far from making me cry, it made me more and more angry. Finally, the director came up to me and explained that he knew that I was a tough boy, but my role required me to cry. ‘So, please, please, please cry!’

  But the tears just wouldn’t come. There were innumerable retakes and every time poor Kabir was asked to slap me harder. He was feeling bad about it and so was Murad Saheb who would come up to me after every shot and pat me fondly on my head, saying ‘Good boy . . .’, but it had no effect on me. I wanted to hit Kabir back, but the script didn’t allow me to do this. This was my first film and I still couldn’t differentiate between real life and reel life. So, every time Kabir, tall and hefty, slapped me, I would go somewhere behind the set where I was alone and cry my heart out in frustration, and then come out dry-eyed for the next slap. I didn’t want anyone to see me crying!

  Soon my cheek was swollen and red and that created a problem for the director for the shots to come. The entire shooting schedule was going haywire due to my obstinacy. Finally, glycerine was forced on me and I was made to cry, which I did not do because I was amenable to the suggestion, but because everyone on the set begged me to complete the shot and be done with it. After the shot was over Kabir came to me and apologized profusely, but I was angry and turned my back on him.