Every time I ever saw a play, and this dates back to Mr Fixit, I would, while waiting for the curtain to rise, be intensely intrigued by exactly what was going on behind it. As the years flew past, I learnt it’s a welter of confusion, especially in school plays. But at that time I wanted nothing more than to be privy to what was brewing on the other side. And my opportunity came with this skit which our class put up for the Principal’s feast. This was Class 8, the year 1961, and I was twelve or eleven, depending on my mood. After being rapidly rejected by Brother Foran for one of the main parts, I was cast as a guy who, having mistaken the matrimonial agency for a pet shop, comes in and says, ‘I want one who will bark all day, bite people’s noses off, and guard my house from any intruder!’ When I was asked, not for the first time in my life, to speak up so everyone could hear, I found myself receding into the depths of the same black despair I had felt when I was five, and afflicted with a stammer which I finally overcame by speaking as fast as I could. Get the thought out before the damn stammer hits, you know ... Speaking in a rush had become a habit, and though I could, even then, deliver ‘if you have tears prepare to shed them now—’ quite magnificently to myself, if anyone else were around, bewildered squeaks emerged instead of the beautiful waterfall of a voice I imagined I had. But I held on to the role, mainly by virtue of no one else being available; and after being goaded to ‘speak up, speak clear, not so nasal, not so fast!’ I found, with a bit of practice, I could actually do that in front of people too. It was a monumental discovery.
Now I was actually standing behind the curtain. I was there! I took a long while savouring the feeling that there were people out there who were curious about what we were doing, about what I was doing. I kicked the hem of the curtain to make it billow and make them wonder even more. That’s what the inside of a mother’s womb must feel like. Warm, safe, comfortable. You have no weight, no cares. The outside world is outside. It can get to you only when you let it. Then the curtain opened. Suddenly, the womb was gone and I was staring into a black void. Never having been onstage before, I was blinded by the intensity of the lighting, but then I felt the boards under my feet, and I took a breath. In the dazzling blackness, dim shapes of heads gradually began to identify themselves. They looked expectant, receptive, not hostile and judgemental, as in life. And every one of them seemed to be looking at me. I had one of the first lines. After, for a few brief seconds, almost submitting to the most intense fear I’ve ever known, I finally spoke and got it out loud and clear and not garbled and not nasal at all, and they laughed. They had listened and they had responded! And I discovered that no one in the cosmos is more desirous of loving you, for that moment, than an audience is.
I have sometimes tried to explain the sheer alchemy of this moment to indifferent journalists waiting for the ‘apt line’, or to other actors not so diffident as I was, people who’ve had no problem being listened to or responded to, and I guess it’s not that they can’t understand, but that I can’t explain it any better. It was the defining moment of my life and made me feel I was of some worth after all. Acceptance and appreciation were things I was not familiar with. And vain though it may sound, it is absolutely true that never again while stepping on to the stage have I ever felt the slightest anxiety. All I have felt is impatience. I can’t wait to be up there. And being up there, for the most part I have known only joy, even when subjected to hostile audiences. Because it’s not you they are responding to but what you are providing. A ‘bad’ audience can be turned into a ‘good’ one by a good performance and vice versa. I have always wondered if it isn’t something of an aberration to want people to respond to you and yet to not want it. Anyway, that is also why meeting the audience after a performance is not my favourite activity. The audience often mixes you up with the part you’ve just played.
The arrival of the December vacation in school was heralded by icy winds and the appearance of our trunks in the quadrangle. These had lain since March, when we’d all arrived, in the box room, a huge mysterious room below the study hall, which was kept locked through the year. The day of departure was a day of celebration. ‘No more Hindi, no more French, no more sitting on the hard old bench!’ Till next March, that is. Then the bus ride down to Kathgodam, the nearest railway station, catch the train to Bareli (then spelt ‘Bareilly’ like ‘Cawnpore’), change at Bareli for Delhi. An overnight journey, and finally chugging in over the Jamuna bridge past the ramparts of the Old Fort and into Old Delhi station and parental embraces, followed by warm toast and tea in a pot in the station refreshment room. And then the final leg of the journey to Ajmer, arriving there normally in the dead of night; and the tonga ride home, perched precariously on our trunks all the while. The horse would invariably crap on the way (an ability I’ve always envied, to be able to do that while running full pelt) and the smell of horse dung is inextricably woven in my mind with the feeling of coming home. I love the smell, and it is definitely responsible for my love of horses.
There wasn’t a whole lot to do in Ajmer during the hols. The Sunday morning English matinee was allowed us but other outings were uncommon, and with Baba being the kind of person he was, so was socializing. We visited and were visited by maybe one family, the Capoors, Mrs Capoor being the most beautiful vision of a woman I have ever seen in my life, but even them we saw only on festivals or weddings or suchlike. Spotting Mrs Capoor taking a walk while we were cycling past would make our respective day. Playing cricket was our only pastime, and our most, and only, prized possessions were a bat, a ball and a set of stumps. None of us ever became terribly proficient at the game despite playing it every day in every vacation. There was, however, always one thing to look forward to apart from the Sunday movie in Prabhat Talkies, and that was the annual visit to Sardhana, which Baba abhorred, but which Ammi insisted on, and generally with good reason, as one or other of her sisters and/or brothers would be getting married.
These weddings were monumental affairs. Uncles, aunts and cousins of all varieties from all over the country, from Pakistan and even further, would descend, the celebrations were unending, and the feasts and the flare-ups massive. I don’t remember dancing girls but qawwalis went on into the night, and the wind-up gramophone (my introduction to Hindi film music) would blare non-stop. Guns and fireworks went off and antique swords flashed about. Presiding over all this would be Ammi’s parents, Agha Habib Shah and Naushaba Begum. Until later stricken by paralysis and heartbreak at his warring sons and getting reduced to a pathetic sideshow, he was a gargantuan figure, his great quilted coat engulfing all three of us. She was a tall, slim, elegantly turned out hard- faced lady with twinkling eyes, who smoked asthma cigarettes. The lands they owned were still to be divided and fought over by their children, so the estates were still enormous, but the picnics and shikars and mango-eating contests were to be among the last indulged in. Habib Shah owned the Meerut- Sardhana Roadways, a fleet of three buses which plied the sixteen miles between these two places, and brought bagfuls of loose change every evening. Sardhana still does not have a railway station and Nana’s fleet of buses is long gone, like the lands and the houses, all gradually sold or lying around in states of dilapidation. The last useful function any of the buses performed was to provide us children with a great space to play in, in its remains. The Meerut-Sardhana route today has scores of buses going up and down, but the Shahs blew their chance to control it long ago.
Ammi had four brothers, two of whom left at Partition and two (the eldest and the youngest) stayed behind. The eldest, Agha Mohiuddin (Agha Mamu) by now a Superintendent of Police, was a trained lawyer, a ‘Hafiz-e-Quran’ and had served in the navy before joining the police. The youngest, Shahabuddin Babar (Shah Mamu), was a lovable rogue who was never to amount to anything, but has stayed my idol always. Of the two who went to Pakistan one, Saeeduddin Khalid (Chand Mamu), later returned in order to manage the lands, as the old man was now losing interest in all that, and wanted to conserve all his energy exclusively for ‘shikar’. I
’ve seen him come home with a bag of ten blackbuck, an endangered species today. ‘Shikar’ in fact was to figure very prominently in my definition of Ammi’s three siblings (the fourth I never met) and these three tigers for me were the personification of manhood, so when the dazzle of their personalities later faded, their fallibility and fall from grace was sobering to see. But at that time these square-jawed studs walked among the stars for me; all three of them handsome, humorous, hot-tempered, tall, tough and temperamental, quick to take offence, crack shots with a gun, fast and effective with their fists, seemingly invincible, indestructible people, with an unending capacity for enjoyment.
Though Agha Mamu the cop always felt he had to live up to his reputation of ‘Dacoit killer of UP’ and very consciously assumed the kind of awesome personality you’d find it tough to feel affection for—in fact who you’d wet your pants at the approach of—the other two when they were young were real cool creatures who laughed and loved a lot. I’ve seen Chand Mamu drop two flying partridges with two shots in succession, and I’ve seen Shah Mamu wrestle a wounded blackbuck to the ground single-handed. They couldn’t do a thing wrong, even if they had the hideously arrogant habit of reaching out and backhanding any unwary pedestrian or cyclist who dared block the path of their jeep or tractor, both rarely seen in Sardhana before then. It was this very attitude, I guess, which took Shah Mamu to a grisly death not too long after, Chand Mamu to the complete disintegration of property and family reputation, and Agha Mamu into an imaginary shell of his own making, where he dwelt to the end in extreme bitterness, his days of power and charisma a distant memory.
But in his salad days Agha Mamu who, I suspect, modelled himself on Clark Gable, upstaged his siblings completely. He was the third of (at a rough count) twenty children Naushaba Begum bore, of whom eleven survived, which means she must have done precious little but bear children for close to thirty years. Though there was almost a quarter-century of difference in age between him and the other two, it had more to do with the confidence quotient actually, as was visible one evening when Agha Mamu, who had arrived a few days later than the others, and Chand Mamu were seated side by side on modha chairs in the courtyard of Habib Manzil, with all us adoring children sitting around. Shah Mamu seldom appeared when Agha Mamu was holding forth as he was now, his arms expansively spread on the armrest; and never before had I seen Chand Mamu look so small, though he in fact possessed a remarkable personality himself. Ratna in fact ranks him among the most heart-stoppingly handsome men she has ever seen, but that evening this man who so far had lit up the gathering with his presence was almost unrecognizable, sitting with arms stuck meekly to his sides inside the armrests. This I suppose was my very first lesson in acting.
Before we’d know it, however, March would be upon us, and it would be time to return to school. Shirt and trouser cuffs were rearranged; toiletries, one new pair of shoes, and a few new clothes each were acquired, along with many instructions about looking after them and studying harder this year, ‘as now you are in Class—.’ Parting hugs from Ammi, prayers blown over our heads, a perfunctory peck from Baba and then the return journey overnight to Delhi, joining up with the ‘Delhi party’, meeting friends, swapping news, warm toast in the refreshment room if we were lucky, then upwards on to Bareli and thence to Kathgodam and Nainital. Back to the twin towers and the strap, the cold fried eggs at breakfast and Brother Burke’s knuckles rapping on your unsuspecting head. BUT a wondrous new store of movies as well. Titles of movies to be shown through the year would be published in the school diary at beginning of term, and I salivated copiously reading the list. I wasn’t particularly happy in that school, it was for the movies I wanted to return every year, and as I got older and grew away from both parents, I couldn’t wait for vacations to end, because home was no longer the happy, carefree place I wished it could remain. I was no longer a child, I was told, and disapproval abounded. It became worse than school could possibly be. I suppose I could live with the disapproval of the teachers. I cared not a whit for them, and even after all these years I have to struggle a bit to suppress the aggrieved feeling that, in all my years there, not one teacher in that school ever made the slightest attempt to reach out to me. But I suppose that’s what I was sent there for, to learn to live by myself. And I guess I did.
My class teacher in Classes 4 and 5, after the pretty Miss Brendish and the kindly Miss D’Silva, who wore rimless glasses like my mother, was Miss Winnie Perry. If you were to ask any junior student of fifties Sem about Miss Perry it’s an even bet she still figures in his nightmares. I drove her to despair, she always said, but she never gave up on me. If I hadn’t been so petrified of figures and of her I might have become the world’s greatest mathematician, considering the time Ma Perry spent on me. She would gleefully play along with our whispered suspicions that she went home on a broomstick, and when in really severe mode she used the handle of a feather duster for chastisement.
In later life after having been roused to fury by something my own children did, I often, on calmer reflection, realized that it was my own insecurities and failings in something completely unrelated that had made me bully them thus, and I did it only because I could. When I’ve struck any of them or felt the urge to do so, my own frustrations have always been the cause. I sometimes wonder how many disappointments and failures poor Miss Perry or Brother Burke must have lived with to relish being so relentlessly cruel to the children in their care.
Shah Mamu had a dramatic face-off with Miss Perry one Sunday when he came to take us all ‘out’. Going out of school on Sunday was a big thing but Miss Perry would always keep some student or the other ‘in’ probably because she couldn’t bear to be alone, and on this and many another weekend I was the one chosen to get some maths drilled into my unwilling head. Shah Mamu the handsome dog’s grand arrival obviously made an impact on the old maid but he was told to wait. After standing around politely for a while, not his style at all, he barged straight into the drawing room where the extra class was on, and brazenly demanded that she let me off. Miss Perry held her ground until something sounding suspiciously like profanity to her ears was said. She blanched and weakly threatened to send him to the Principal. My hair stood on end when I heard him snarl, ‘What the damn Principal will do? He’ll hang me?’ And to my utter astonishment, instead of pulling his ears for his atrocious grammar and taking the ‘skin off his back’ with her feather duster after disabling him with one of her roundhouse forehands, or much worse, putting a hex on him and turning him to stone, she actually caved in and turned quite mild before letting me off the hook. Valiant valiant Shah Mamu! To Ma Perry’s credit, she did not hold the incident against me, I guess she didn’t need to, I gave her plenty of other reasons anyway and I didn’t dare defy her. But one day in the grip of a fit of insanity, which I suspect was inspired by Shah Mamu’s sparring session with Miss Perry, I started imitating Brother Burke’s nasal drawl right under his nose. I leave it to your imagination, dear reader, to visualize what happened to me. A real sight for the gods would have been a run-in between Brother Burke and Shah Mamu.
Old Burke, after continuing to terrorize (and according to many, also teach) students rather well for many more years, went back to Ireland in the mid nineties, and finally mingled with his own earth. My prayer for him is that in the big projection room in the sky he has the most comfortable seat and an unending store of his favourite movies for all eternity. That, and I also hope he keeps getting rapped on the head with a hard knuckle every now and then when he least expects it.
As for Miss Perry, sometime in the mid nineties I learnt she was in a home for the aged in Lucknow. I wrote her a letter, I don’t know why, and she replied saying she remembered me, but I doubt if she did. I heard later that she’d suffered a brutal death at the hands of an intruder. I don’t suspect it was one of her students.
Cricket, my second, er... third love
My grades continued to slip, my tonsils were removed, my pubic hair began to grow, a
hundred ‘naya paisa’ replaced the sixteen annas in a rupee, kilometres replaced miles and the unsatiated curiosity about the opposite sex began its torment, causing me to sink deeper and deeper into myself. I still never got a chance to act on the stage, and the gulf between my parents and me began to widen. Through my time in Sem I was befriended by two people, Karan Chand Raj (‘KC’) Singh who was the prince, not that I would ever have believed it then, and is now the raja of an estate called Kashipur, and Satvinder (‘Pearly’) Dhingra. Both from privileged homes, they were kind and generous and didn’t consider me inferior; both unselfish, undemanding friends who liked me for what I was and wanted to share their affection. I have had only fleeting contact with both over the succeeding years but can never forget how they made me feel.
Going home for the vacations was now drudgery worse than school. Most maternal uncles and aunts were long married, and the assemblages at Sardhana were for funerals rather than festivities. Habib Manzil was losing its grandeur, it looked kind of washed-up now. The old walls were starting to crumble and new walls were coming up with succeeding generations laying claim to their share of the houses and the lands. The divisions had begun. The antique Model-T Ford was sold and replaced by a tonga, which didn’t last long, a horse being more trouble to maintain than a car. Ammunition had become prohibitively expensive, and blackbucks were disappearing from the face of the earth, so that was more or less the end of shikar as well. Expensive luxuries were now being done without. The gramophone was catching rust with neither the stock of records nor the stock of needles being replenished. The cousins were all growing up and getting on with their lives. Sardhana was becoming a bore. No one even saw ghosts there any more.
And Then One Day: A Memoir Page 3