An Ordinary Life

by Nawazuddin Siddiqui

  It was only about three or four years later that I stopped being stuck and finally crossed those mountains. They looked different the moment I crossed them. You could not call them snow-capped. They were shiny with a sprawling whiteness that can only happen in a dream world. I could feel the nippy weather there. I could feel the joy.

  In my waking life at the time, I did not know what I wanted to do. There was an aching desire to do something though. There would be newspaper snippets littered on the street, flying around in the wind at the level of the feet and ankles, as is the fate of rubbish. But I picked them up and read them ravenously as if hunting for something in them. This earned me a mild reputation as a nutcase in Budhana.

  I was about sixteen at the time of this recurring dream and I had failed in the all-important tenth-standard exams. I was so disturbed that I ran away to Meerut and sought refuge at a friend’s house there. Meanwhile, everyone at home, especially Ammi, cried away in worry wondering where I had disappeared.

  Fifteen days later, I returned home. ‘Why did you run away, Nawaz? Why?’ everyone asked in chorus. But I had no answer for them. ‘I want to leave Budhana. I want to leave.’ That’s all I told Ammi, almost weeping. I somehow finished my twelfth standard and soon went to Haridwar. But my heart was not in anything I did. This went on for seven, eight, nine years. I did not know what I wanted and went on living in a state of dazed search. And then, I happened to see a play in Delhi. I don’t remember the play, but something stirred inside me.

  Later, I went to Baroda, Gujarat, to work in a petrochemical factory. During those months I watched a lot of plays and was even part of a crowd scene in one of the plays. That’s when somebody suggested that I go to Delhi since I loved plays so much. It was then that I stopped searching and figured that this would be what I would do with my life. But the thought of cinema never struck me. I thought I would only do theatre acting.

  PART II

  YOUTH

  11

  Accidental Meanderings into Chemistry, Theatre and BNA

  You know how those years are when you’re just exiting your teens and entering your twenties. Your friends are your world. You wear whatever they wear. You do whatever they do. Many of my friends were studying science. Therefore, I thought I might as well follow suit. Anyway, it was about time I left Budhana. Back then, Gurukul Kangri Vishwavidyalaya in Haridwar was among the few institutes in India that offered a degree in microbiology. My idea was to first study chemistry, then microbiology, and eventually become a pathologist.

  Abbu visited me often at my university, mostly carrying a lot of stuff. Sometimes he brought a quintal of wheat or lentils, sometimes sacks of luscious mangoes or the choicest of other fruits that were in season. Anybody else might have considered lugging such heavy loads along such a long way laborious but not a parent. For Abbu, these were treasures for his child, so he carried them with joy. He travelled by bus; we all did those days as that was the only option for us. He carried the heavy sacks on his head as well as bags weighing around 10 kg on his shoulders and arms. In Budhana, of course, some young chap would load it into the bus for him. He was a big man in Budhana and there was simply no way the villagers would let him touch, leave alone carry, any luggage. Then, when he had to change buses at the depot in Muzaffarnagar, Abbu picked all of it up by himself and walked.

  I had that arrogant ignorance of the young. I was too young to realize just how hard he had worked to bring these treats all the way from Budhana. I lived in Kankhal, a posh part of Haridwar, and did not want Abbu to come there because, in my young, arrogant eyes, he did not look presentable in that milieu. He looked like a villager; I was slightly ashamed. What if my friends or others saw him and mocked me? I greeted him at the threshold of the house itself, not letting him enter inside for fear of what others might say. He would unload his goodies with a smile, showing no signs of fatigue, and ask how I was, how my studies were. Then we would say our goodbyes and he would leave.

  (It took me many years, almost eight years, to realize how awfully I had behaved with my father. How disgusting I was! Then I would want him to be next to me all the time. And I did keep him near me later, well until his death in 2015. By then the left side of his body had become paralysed as a result of a fall in the bathroom. A man that active, who could lug treasures to the remotest of places for the sake of his children, was unable to move for six to seven months until he finally called it quits.)

  I got my bachelor’s degree in science (chemistry) from there. But it was not so simple. I did study, but I wanted something else out of life. I had no clue what it was. For several foggy years, I navigated through those fumes of confusion. I was lost, I did not know what my path was.

  Nevertheless, just like jeeps drive through blinding mountain fog and then suddenly the fog lifts with the elegant ease of a veil without anybody having to do anything, so did my confusion. But even when I was engulfed by the fog, I had not sat still. I was doing what I had to do, just like the jeep drivers. I put my brand-new degree to use. I got a job in Baroda as a chemist at a petrochemical factory. Then somebody casually mentioned that there was a dramatics school there at Maharaja Sayajirao University. Something about it resonated and I applied. When, how, where and what my confusion evaporated into, I have no idea. I did not realize then that this would become my life’s path.

  My experience in theatre was zero but somehow I got admission. I held my day job and in the evenings, I did plays. All the plays were in Gujarati. I barely knew the language, and picked up whatever was needed for my dialogues. Somebody then suggested that since I was most comfortable in Hindi, perhaps I should move to the National School of Drama in Delhi. But NSD required you to have done a certain number of plays already. I believe it was a dozen. Then somebody else suggested—you see, many of my life’s critical decisions have been made due to ‘somebody’s’ suggestions—that I try Bhartendu Natya Akademi (BNA) in Lucknow instead. It was a stellar institute as well and accepted theatre virgins.

  I was fortunate to get accepted in the first attempt itself. In Lucknow, I found a place to live with fellow actors and spent one and a half years there for my diploma, during which time my blank acting résumé had been filled with ten to twelve impressive plays and that met NSD’s requirements. I still remember the first play I performed in front of an audience. It was Khamosh! Adalat Jari Hai, the Hindi version of the renowned Marathi courtroom drama Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe (Silence! The Court Is in Session) by Vijay Tendulkar.

  * * *

  I was about twenty-six when I saw this famous play which changed my life—it changed the way I viewed life, the way I lived life. It was called Galileo and directed by a German director named Fritz Bennewitz. I did not even know what I was looking for but then I found this epiphany and realized that this was all I had been looking for my whole life and did not even know it.

  Both BNA and NSD have two wings—one that houses the academy or the school where dramatics is taught, and the other, the repertory wherein professional actors, most of whom have graduated from the adjacent school, perform professional theatre, which is viewed by the public by buying tickets. Bennewitz, who was among our several brilliant visiting faculty, would come down and teach us about the techniques and plays of masters like Shakespeare, Jerzi Grotowski, Chekhov, Russian styles, and so on.

  At the time, he was working with senior actors at the repertory for the play. One actor, who was extremely boring and not even a great actor, was given the role of Galileo. One expects an actor to be able to make people laugh, cry, and extract emotions out of them. Bennewitz gave the role to this actor, much to the annoyance of everyone else, because he was a poor actor. During the rehearsals, the director realized that the actor was not able to understand the role. People kept asking him to change the cast, but Bennewitz stayed adamant and declared that if anybody would play Galileo, it would be this guy. He worked very, very hard with this actor. And somehow he managed to explain the complexities of the character of Galileo to
the actor. Like in the scene when the pope banishes Galileo from the city because he says he can prove there is no such thing as God, Galileo leaves and goes to his mother and sister. They are crying profusely and he is telling them he has to leave or he may have to drink poison like Socrates did. He narrates what happened with the pope in a simple, matter-of-fact way. And says he sticks to his thesis that God does not exist. The entire city is crying for him. But he is leaving. And the weaknesses, the neutrality of the actor, his lack of emotions completely blended with the character of Galileo. Because Galileo too was a man of logic, not emotions. So this casting worked splendidly; the audience was moved and the play was a huge hit. However, very few people understood that it was the subtlety of the performance that made it so powerful. But I did. I understood the director’s thought process and the enormity, the brilliance, the might of what he was exploring.

  When we look at the universe, all the planets simply are. All of them are doing their jobs, without emotions; they are neutral. When we look at trees, they are doing their jobs staying rooted through storms, without emotions. This is the goal of life. We come, we leave. That’s it. All this laughter, crying, anger, all of these emotions we have created for our sukoon (peace). Some people come, touch and inspire our lives. They give like trees. While they are alive, they don’t achieve anything, but once they leave, people realize their greatness. That play gave me that, the essence of which cannot be put into words.

  Seven or eight years later, some of my batchmates from BNA went to London. London became their second home, while they also travelled to Germany frequently. Several of them had his number and they called Bennewitz from a phone booth at the airport. He did not answer the phone. But curiously, moments later, some policemen came and arrested them. It turned out that the director was a VVIP in London and if anybody called him unexpectedly, he would get stressed. He then intervened and got them released.

  When he was at BNA, the academy had given Bennewitz lodging on campus. After his plays and classes were over, he would tuck a polythene bag under an arm and walk to the local market for provisions. But he would be in no rush. He would be gallivanting, sitting on roadsides, etc. I wondered at his behaviour, something that we had not seen in our regular teachers. It was only after the London episode did it strike us that he was a big shot. But given his humility, his nonchalance, nobody could have guessed his stature.

  Nobody should have hubris, especially scientists and artists. The moment hubris strikes, you are finished. As an actor, you have to realize that even in a simple craft like acting, one lifetime is just not enough to do complete justice to it. We are all dwarves in the face of creation. I am hardly a star. Are you kidding me! There are so, so, so many oceans of challenges, but time is limited.

  Acting, writing, these are all magic. The actor, the writer, they are magicians. They can enter a person’s mind and make them travel from nowhere at all to such unknown lands, undiscovered worlds and bring them back. How many blessings, how much love s/he will bestow upon you once you have touched that person! He wants you to be transported; he is coming to you with a wish that he himself does not really know. When your grandmother told you stories, you travelled even though you did not move from your place. It is exactly like that.

  * * *

  Among the amazing faculty at BNA was one teacher who once gave us a unique assignment: meet all the people who live around you not as yourself, but as an assortment of characters. See if you can convince them or not. At the market nearby was a subziwali from whom I used to buy vegetables. With a walking stick in my hand and wearing dark glasses, I went to her pretending to be a blind customer, wondering if she would believe me or not. She treated me with extra kindness, extra gentleness, even though she was busy. So yes, she was convinced.

  Then I acted mute with some of these people, like my barber. Eventually, it so happened that a bunch of people thought I could not see, while another lot thought I was mute. I carried on with my disguises for nearly eight months. In this period, I mastered guises, so much so that if I am ever offered the role of a blind person, I should be able to do it easily. After all, I lived that character for so many months! And because I had to live the character for so many months, I realized early on to steer clear of caricature and walk towards ‘realness’, because otherwise the subziwali, the nai and others would catch me. This realness entered my pores and stayed; it helps me even today in my acting.

  I rented a room located a stone’s throw from the academy. Those days, Gomti Nagar was a developing part of Lucknow, sort of like Gurgaon, buzzing with the construction of posh, shiny buildings. Next to this colony of glass towers was an ancient little village, perhaps 200 years old, with its traditional houses. I lived in one of them. It was a magnificent little time warp of a place to live in. You just had to look at the nubile girls there or other people to know that they had all belonged to major nawabi families at one point. The splendour was gone, but royalty oozed out of them. I was fascinated by their lifestyles: the young people were not used to working for a living, nor were they inclined to do so. Instead, they happily lived off whatever income came in from their inheritance of lands, mango orchards, etc. They would simply hang out for hours doing nothing; they had turned hanging out into a profession and a lifestyle. While their aristocracy had faded and their grandeur had died, the bloated egos that came with being blue bloods lived on.

  One of our teachers asked us to study their lifestyles, as it would come in handy for a play in the future. I did as I was told. I went to the house of a chota-mota (small-time) nawab. But you could tell from his demeanour that in all likelihood his ancestry was of a powerful nobility. I clanged the heavy latch on the huge door of his haveli. A big, well-built, tall guy wearing a white kurta-pyjama opened the door, nursing a toothpick in his teeth, in archetypal nawabi manner. (They had a habit of clearing titbits of gosht (meat, especially of goat) from between their teeth. The idea was to show off that they were so prosperous that they ate such lavish meals every day.) This dude was obviously pretending. The reality was that he had eaten dal, the common man’s pulse. Apparently, he could not afford meat or poultry, he had to stick to plant protein. But he could still afford toothpicks and pull off a facade.

  These tiny nuances are what I noticed. Soon after, I happened to watch Satyajit Ray’s spectacular Shatranj ke Khiladi (The Chess Players). The protagonists, Mirza Sajjad Ali (played by Sanjeev Kumar) and Mir Roshan Ali (Saeed Jaffrey) are typical Lucknawi nawabs who do nothing but play chess all day while smoking their pipes and munching on their paans. Their king, Wajid Ali Shah (Amjad Khan), is a gentle, vulnerable poet, a patron of the arts but a dedicated sybarite as well. The addiction of the two noblemen to chess seems utterly charming, though it is also sheer madness. As the world around them falls apart, they don’t give a damn about anything but their game. How marvellously has Ray captured the nuances of the nawabs! And what correct nuances he chose! Beautiful! That was when I knew that the world may go anywhere, even to hell, but the nawabs of Lucknow, even the crumbling ones I saw myself, would remain nawabs in their own little worlds with their large egos.

  Anamika Haksar was among our illustrious teachers. She came from a prominent family; her father, I believe, was behind the Haksar Committee report on culture. She had studied at the renowned Moscow Art Theatre in Russia, an institute idolized by theatre folk all over the world. As if this achievement was not luminous enough, she had also studied from the grandmaster Konstantin Stanislavski himself. She had done a play based on Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat. While she was explaining it to us, her craft showed us St Petersburg and Moscow as if we were really there. With her performance, for the very first time in my life I became aware of Russian culture: of the houses snowed in, of samovars, but most of all the piercing cold. She had a very visual art form. Her own work and her teaching were about strong visual performances with very little dialogue. She made close to half a dozen people play the same character as an experiment. After learning from suc
h masters I too was beginning to understand a little bit about acting.

  One of her favourite exercises was to give us something meagre, like two lines, which we had to deliver within a relatively lengthy time period of, say, ten minutes. How you did it was up to you. Perhaps you could start with one line, hold a long pause and then say the second line at the very end. How to connect the two lines through this lengthy silence was something we had to figure out ourselves. Or you could create and hold on to an elongated silence and say both the lines together at the end. The meaning, the subtexts, and all that was going on between the two lines were of paramount importance. And that is how I learnt for the very first time about ‘essence’, from such teachers who were masters of their craft.

  Anamika Haksar came to India after spending eight years in Russia. Her complexion, which was already very fair, seemed to have lightened even further during those years. I had never seen anybody that fair before. She pretty much looked Caucasian. She was beautiful and chubby, the latter quality not something that boys tend to stereotypically fall for. I had a massive crush on her. She did like me, but strictly in the way a teacher likes a good student.

  Several years later, she married a random guy who was a few years my senior. I was completely baffled. Here, I had put her on a pedestal; she was the Anamika Haksar. The one who had studied at the Moscow Arts Theatre. The one who had studied under Stanislavski. The one who made us do these mind-blowing exercises. The teacher who was so intelligent that often I could not comprehend all that she taught. How could this brilliant woman marry this good-for-nothing guy? It was none of my business and yet, I was deeply disappointed with the man. I was deeply disappointed with her choice. I was deeply disappointed with the match. Perhaps she should have married somebody who was just as intelligent as her, or someone who matched at least half her genius. In my eyes, it was a tragic mismatch.