And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  And Ajmer and vacations only meant Baba’s gimlet eyes boring through me from over his reading glasses, questions on whether or not I’d given any thought to the future, me weakly justifying an even shabbier academic performance this year, and having to endure unending tuition classes, which he decided I needed. So apart from the Maulvi saheb who tried to teach us Arabic and Urdu, there was a procession of tutors on whom my poor misguided father spent another good portion of his salary, and who I hoped would be devoured by Zulu, our crossbred German shepherd, on their way in. (One almost was, but got away with ripped trousers and a sprained wrist, but no blood. ) Holidays, in fact life, had become a monumental drag. The cricket field, the scene of so much gloriously sweaty laughter, lay abandoned. Now there was only the occasional tonga ride, the cricket commentary on the radio, and Zulu to play with and, of course, the Sunday morning English movie at Prabhat Talkies.

  Back at Sem, Miss Perry was succeeded as class teacher by John Lefevre, a dapper, affable bachelor who had a rumbling baritone, rolled his cigarettes and always smelt of tobacco. Certainly not intending to stay celibate like the Brothers, he’d often have lengthy consultations with various lady teachers who’d go giggling by while he was in our class. He’d also often, during class hours, put his head on his desk after admonishing us to ‘do anything, but don’t make a noise’ and stay oblivious to us through the hour. He was kind and much loved. But though my association with him did not help me learn any more than Miss Perry’s cruelty had, it did help my collection of cricket pictures.

  Cricket was trying to force itself to the forefront of my awareness, and was grappling with movies for the honour. Apart from the literature stories and the odd poem worth memorizing, I found nothing of the slightest interest in any of the books I was made to read in class. Cricket was interesting. I was up on the details of every score of every Test match being played; there weren’t one-hundredth the number of matches being played then as there are now. I played too and briefly dreamt of a career in cricket, but gave it up as no one ever told me whether or not I was any good, and I couldn’t figure it out on my own. The last-straw thing happened when I was the third victim bowled round my legs in a hat-trick pulled by one Prabhat Kapil. I continue however to sustain a passion for the game, which at that time was aflame. I had a vast collection of pictures of cricketers past and present which, when I left school, I just left behind. Those pictures would be priceless today. Half my weekly pocket money of one rupee went religiously into buying Sport & Pastime, a fabulous magazine, now defunct, which I’d read from cover to cover, then cut up and stick the cricketers’ pictures in my physics practicals notebook. What useful purpose I hoped that’d serve I don’t know and didn’t know then, but I did become known as the guy with the most cricket pictures.

  I didn’t linger long on the horns of the cricket-versus- movies dilemma. Cricketers were godlike creatures blessed with special gifts; besides, there were so few. There were many more actors, so I plumped for the easier alternative. Cricket is a heartless mistress and much tougher than acting. It’s not as if I’d always watch a film instead of a cricket match but cricket, though it comes pretty close, didn’t for me compare then, and does not now, with the magic of what appears on the screen, which is probably why it has become such a TV- friendly game. The actors in those exclusively American or British films we saw then didn’t look like real people to me but this world looked safe. In cricket one mistake could be the difference between humiliation and glory. In the movies, everything always turned out all right. You could put your faith in a superhero and rest your own head on your pillow and sleep. This magical world didn’t exist yet you could escape into it whenever you wished.

  The few Hindi movies I saw as a child, however, didn’t grab me. They seemed silly and have never stopped seeming so. The actors didn’t seem so much unreal as fake. The back- projections looked like back-projections. I actually remember an actor wearing a wristwatch in some period costume drama. Everything in those movies seemed tatty and in poor taste; watching one I never felt convinced that this was actually happening. Sometimes decades later, at work on the sets of a Hindi movie or while listening to the script narration of one, this same thought has recurred, ‘This cannot actually be happening!’ Yet Hindi movies continue to enthral (and generate) billions every day all over the world. So I guess there is something the matter with my perception. Be that as it may, Hindi movies and their actors have never held much fascination for me; a role model in the Hindi film industry has been hard to find except perhaps for the eccentric Mr Raaj Kumar, and he not for his acting which was dreadful but for the way he safeguarded his interests, prolonged his career, and sent all Follywood on a flying fuck to the moon whenever he felt like it.

  Nazrul Haque, a classmate, introduced me to cigarettes and found a willing pupil, a fascination for the smell of burning tobacco and the manner of people who smoked it being not uncommon among young boys. The remains of a cigarette were actually found by the dorm matron once in the pocket of one of my shirts going to the laundry. The punishment for smoking was expulsion and no questions asked. While I vigorously protested my innocence in the face of undeniable proof, it did seem for a while that my trunk would emerge shortly from the box room on its own. But on pondering the question, the matrons decided not to bring the matter to the Principal’s notice, the common consensus among them being that I was too much of an idiot to pull off something like this. It was common knowledge that many senior boys smoked, and it was concluded that the cigarettes had been planted in my pocket; some senior was shifting evidence that might have damned him.

  The suspicion that I was a complete idiot began to grow into a conviction, and I had not a clue what to do about it. In spite of my falling grades my father continued to remind me that I was ‘basically an intelligent boy’. This belief must have made it even tougher for him to swallow my increasingly dismal performance. I think he did believe it, and wanted me to believe it too, but it was a little while before that happened, and in the most unexpected way. My utter disinterest in learning anything except cricket scores and the speeches in Julius Caesar had now reached the proportions of an ailment. Zaheer, the brains of the family, was deputed by Baba to coach me in maths, and he valiantly tried, sacrificing his own precious study hours trying to drill some mathematical sense into me. In vain, I’m afraid. My mind would not sit still long enough to assimilate the solution of one problem, and then it would be time to move on to the next! I’d pretend to understand, and I guess I didn’t do a convincing enough job, because Zaheer would sigh and move on. Sometimes he’d grind his teeth. I could hear them go ‘Grinnnd! Grriiind!! Grrriiiiinnnnnnnd!!!’

  I think I know what the ability to lie convincingly as a child is symptomatic of: children who were convincing liars become good actors, but to what I owe the complete inability to concentrate on anything that doesn’t interest me I have no idea. It is a tendency I’ve always had. If a conversation doesn’t interest me I can go so far away as to actually not hear what is being said. It has often been a boon too in later life while having to sit through the narration of a script one has given up on in the first five minutes. Anyway, academic rock-bottom was hit when in the final exams of Class 9 I fared abysmally and actually gave in my trigonometry paper empty, with an inscription that I hoped would amuse the examiner: ‘If you know the answers, why ask me? And if you don’t, how do you expect me to?’ The old stiff obviously had no sense of humour and awarded me a zero for my wit. I averaged about 30 per cent, not enough to get me through. But when we went home, I told the parents I’d done all right, and the vacations that year started to go past as usual, with complete amnesia on my part about the exams—until the results arrived.

  Baba went to work on his gleaming Hercules bicycle kept in tip-top condition always, not like the orderlies’ rickety cycles on which we all learnt to ride. We’d hear the bell when he returned and there’d be a race to grab and park the cycle, because whoever got to it got to ride it round the
house once, otherwise we were forbidden to touch it except maybe to clean it. That day I got to it first. When I saw Baba, steam seemed to be coming out of his ears, but then he often looked like that. He handed me the cycle without a word and entered the house. Completely unaware of what was coming, I merrily rode the bike around to the back of the house to find Baba, face black with rage, standing there like the wrath of God. He flung at me a folded piece of very official-looking paper which got me bang in the chest and, just like in the movies, fell right into my hand. I didn’t need a second glance to recognize the report card; the words ‘has failed the examination’ jumped out and hit me between the eyes. I knew how I’d fared in the exams so it shouldn’t have been a shock but it was. I couldn’t hide my head in the sand any longer. However, instead of the remorse and regret that should have been flooding my heart, I began to have visions of all the movies that would be screened at Sem that year and that I’d now miss.

  Preparations to admit me into a school in Ajmer began, the only hitch being that all schools in Ajmer were almost at the end of their own academic terms, with barely three months to go before final exams. Even though term-end was close, Baba managed to prevail upon the Principal of a Jesuit school called St Anselm’s to admit me into Class 9 and to let me appear for the exams. In those days the term ‘capitation fee’ hadn’t been coined but doing favours for schools was appreciated, and Baba was not without influence in Ajmer. It was a brilliant plan, designed to see that I lost only a few months, and not a whole year. But I managed to foil it as well. Even with the additional three months of attention, tuitions and the very same curriculum I’d had the year before, I failed again. Though the teachers at St Anselm’s were angels compared to those at Sem, their kindness did no more for me than the Christian Brothers’ cruelty had done. And as I write this, the disquieting thought creeps into my mind that, for younger actors who may be reading this, I am hardly an example worthy of emulation, and I begin to wonder why I am writing it at all. Is this a story worth telling?

  No matter. I invoke the venerated music critic and cricket lover Neville Cardus who in his wonderful book titled simply Autobiography puckishly observes that no one was ‘under any compulsion to read it and is under no compulsion to read further’. For me it’s an exorcism of sorts, and it’s for my children if they wish to understand me better. But whatever they do, I doubt if they can (rather, I pray that they don’t) ever match the complete apathy I displayed towards just about everything in my life at this stage, but I daresay they have inherited some of my qualities.

  Having received my second ‘failed’ report card for Class 9, I went for as long a bicycle ride as I could to avoid going home and breaking the news. I wasn’t terribly distressed, didn’t contemplate suicide or anything, I just rode and rode and rode, with a completely empty head, until I couldn’t put off the inevitable any longer. But I had managed to delay it. Turning my cycle homeward at last, I frantically searched my mind for what lie I could possibly tell this time. It still gives me a twinge when I recall Baba’s worried but hopeful face when I returned, a good three hours or so after I should have, and the way it crumpled when he got the news accompanied by my weak protestations about how the marks for the half-yearly exams which I hadn’t appeared for at this school, naturally, had been included in our aggregates and that’s why I had failed. He didn’t say anything. Just quietly told me to go eat. I must confess that on this day I actually felt sorry for him.

  Through the looking glass, sort of

  And so I went into Class 9 at St Anselm’s with a third set of classmates. But before I go into this, for me, totally momentous year, I must first go a little further into what my years in Sem did for me, and to talk of the only other friend I had there, apart from Pearly and KC—the mirror. No one ever passes a mirror without glancing into it. If there isn’t one, there’s always a windowpane or rear-view mirror or someone’s dark glasses or a desktop or some reflecting surface to look at oneself in. In Sem, there were a number of rather large mirrors all over our locker rooms. On one occasion, tardy in dressing, I got locked in there for the duration of morning prep. I was delighted, I’d missed bloody prep and I was alone. I went around the locker room looking at myself in every mirror there. The most fun was looking into the mirrors in the senior section, which we weren’t supposed to go anywhere near.

  Like anyone else I really wanted to know what I looked like. Try as I might, however, and no matter how long or hard I looked, I couldn’t get a proper picture. I couldn’t see myself sideways, for example, and though I liked to believe I had a profile like John Barrymore’s there my reflection was, a mousy-looking guy with a very small chin and a very big nose, unruly curly hair growing almost into his eyebrows, small, crinkled, frightened eyes. Not even any sign of a moustache. I’d try painting one on with pencil, and when that didn’t work, I’d use my imagination. I’d try a heroic look, an angry look, a sorrowful look. I’d examine my smile. These sessions with the mirror would leave me terribly unsatisfied yet they never stopped. I could see I looked nothing like an actor should, and felt discriminated against by nature. Why did I have only Clark Gable’s ears? Watching impossibly handsome film stars playing larger-than-life figures in the movies, I became convinced that these people were photographic tricks. How could anyone look so perfect, not a hair out of place all the time? Hell no, these people did not exist, it was futile dreaming of being one of them, and if they were real I wasn’t anywhere near them physically. A foreboding of defeat was accompanied by a complete loss of interest in academics, and in life. The mirror ceased to be my friend for a while.

  Then one day we were shown a film called The Old Man and the Sea. It had two central characters, a fisherman played by Spencer Tracy, and a large fish he catches and tries to bring home. The fact that it was a classic of literature was not something I knew or would have cared about at that time. But being introduced to this old man, who was a photographic trick of course, was a revelation. He looked so real, he almost smelt of the sea. The sunburnt face, the tattered clothes, the bare feet, the calloused hands. He looked like he had spent his life on this boat. And this was an actor?!! He looked like old Habib Shah at moments and he looked as real. The travails he endured in the movie looked real, the way he rowed his boat looked real, when he hauled in the fish it looked real. His strength and his suffering, even his sweat, looked real.

  I nowjust had to know whether I at least had these qualities, or nothing at all. At the first opportunity, I re-established contact with my old friend and carefully examined my own face to see if twenty-thirty years from now I could maybe play a part like the Old Man. If it was going to take that long I was prepared to wait. I ended the session somewhat satisfied that I could. I had no problem seeing myself, hat at a rakish angle, fag in mouth, gun-belt dangling at my waist, strolling down a deserted street and languidly turning to knock down half a dozen bad guys with unerring aim, but evidently no one else could. So I tried visualizing myself as the Old Man walking home exhausted, oar in hand, dragging his nets behind him. A hockey stick served very well as the oar and my sports jersey as the nets. It was a not unconvincing effort, I have to say. I saw the same Mr Tracy later play some really heroic parts (The Mountain, Bad Day at Black Rock) and my joy was uncontained. ‘Hey, this old guy’s not really a fisherman, he does the pistol-packin’ stuff as well.’ That meant that maybe I could too. My dreamworld, now slowly enlarging itself, was becoming an almost tangible reality and beginning to engulf me. I retreated completely into it and was, as I realize now, in very real peril of getting lost.

  But.

  The fisherman was an actor! And he was real. When absolutely alone, and I guess this was where I unconsciously started to train myself, I began to will myself to believe I was actually trudging up a snowy cliff as I ascended the stairs to the dormitory, and I found that I could. I could believe, as I lay in my bed, that I was in a boat adrift in the sea. I believed I was searching for lost treasure and evading snipers’ bullets while w
alking down the school corridor. I believed I was stranded in a desert as I stood alone on the First field with my towel wrapped around my head. I was the avenger and the thin green bamboo in my hand was a flashing blade. I was the war-weary veteran returning to his family, I was the shadowy killer, I was the clown, I was the wicked sorcerer, I was the wronged lover, the righteous hero, the infuriated father, the ruthless gangster... I was everything I wanted to be. This imaginary world, compared to which the real one was downright drudgery, was where I constantly dwelt.

  Enjoying my own company most, even though I considered myself pretty stupid, may have cost me my supposed childhood when one should be happy and joyous and revelling in friendships, and learning, but it was the path I took, and I have not regretted it for an instant. I started then and have not stopped. This role-playing thing was great fun then and it has stayed great fun. The marvellous Stellan Skarsgard with whom I once acted, in an utterly unmemorable film, had remarked to me at the time, ‘Isn’t being an actor wonderful? You are paid to stay a child.’ Chafing as I was to grow up, I actually didn’t much enjoy being a child but have certainly enjoyed staying one as a grown-up!

  The weekly letters home had become a chore, I had absolutely nothing to say to either of my parents. Nothing exciting ever happened to me. There were no achievements to report. No joys to share. No troubles to unburden myself of. I once tried writing a long letter to Baba about The Old Man but got a curt reply telling me to concentrate on my studies and that was what he wanted to hear about. He was ‘not interested in stories of pictures which you write to me’. As for his letters to us, seldom more than two or three sentences long, they’d be typed on his office stationery, always ending with his signature in full and his name typed in brackets below it. The only paternal touch in those letters would be ‘your mother sends her love to you’ and the ‘yours affectionately’ at the end. None of us could write Urdu legibly or read it at more than a snail’s pace, so communication with Ammi would be nonexistent when we were away at Sem, or it was via Baba. Not good enough. She always complained that he never read out our letters properly to her. They’d visit us once a year, normally in June, and these meetings, though enjoyable to a degree because we could go out of the school with them, would quickly turn into sharp interrogations about my progress in studies. Displeasure would be expressed, I would be reminded of the enormous expense going into my education, threats to pull me out of this ‘expensive’ school would be issued and tears invariably followed.