Mussoorie had its share of drudgery, and it didn’t end at vegetable shopping. Both the houses, in respective states of disrepair, needed considerable work. Doors had to be removed or installed, windowpanes replaced, sofas upholstered, roofs repaired. After the peaceful division came the discovery that all five bathrooms in the house were on one side, theirs; so washbasins and commodes were acquired and plumbing laid, stuff had to be carried back and forth, bricks and rubble cleared. Bobby, now a cadet at the NDA, and I were instructed to help in these tasks and were paid two rupees a day each. Since work continued for quite a few days we made a considerable killing. With my earnings I would head every evening to the Hakman’s Hotel to play tombola, hoping for a windfall. I always ended up losing, which actually is a pattern that has repeated itself in my life many times over, whenever I have attempted to get something for nothing. It’s almost as if nature is redressing the balance of having looked after the massive gamble that my life has turned out to be, and in which I have had moderate but highly satisfying winnings most of the time.
Bobby, though younger than me, was considered grownup and responsible now and since Sapnon ka Saudagar was showing at the Rialto he and I could, without permission, go see it. It would be a while before Aman hit the screens and I HAD to know what I looked like up there. Despite sitting through the ghastly thing twice and keeping a virtual magnifying glass on my nose to spot myself, I had no luck. I was completely and absolutely missing from the film, not a trace anywhere at all. The leading man had done it to me again. I was ‘if not disgruntled, certainly far from gruntled’. I don’t know if I was relieved or embarrassed that my debut on screen had been delayed, but delayed it had been. Bobby patiently heard me out, clucking sympathetically at appropriate moments, and assuring me that my ‘time too would come but wasn’t that Hema Malini delicious?!’ The one whose time did come with this film was the teenaged nymphet who went on to become and long remain the country’s sweetheart. Some twenty-five years later, in one of those ‘hard-hitting feminist’ films, I was paired with this extremely dignified, utterly charming and still lovely-looking lady in a film where I seduce and abandon her. At our first meeting, I told her how our careers had begun almost together, and that I was in fact a film older. She’d probably heard similar stories several times, smiled indulgently and we then proceeded to enact a scene in which I untie the drawstring of her blouse and do sexy things to her back. She was married to Mr Dharmendra Deol, he of the formidable forearms, and it was with not very confident fingers that I did the needful.
The Aligarh University absurdists
The dreaded A word was cropping up all the time now, and in good time I found myself once more Aligarh-bound, having gained admission this time in the arts programme. Three of my paternal uncles lived in Aligarh, two others having gone to Pakistan at Partition and thence Westward. These gents, Baba’s half-brothers, his own mother having died in childbirth, were all eccentric in varying degrees; two were confirmed bachelors and all three kind and affectionate. Unlike Baba, they were fond of talking, listening and laughing and were not at all averse to films or music on the radio. The house they lived in, a rambling place with spacious grounds, part- haveli part-bungalow, had been built by Baba’s father. Baba had long ago relinquished his claim to it, so great harmony existed between the brothers. I never saw Baba look as happy anywhere else as he did with them. When he wasn’t around I too felt free and uninhibited in this house, always receiving the attention I craved and being always ‘on’. I would turn talkative, even gregarious, and needed very little persuasion to show off my Shakespeare. I had no idea why this personality hid itself behind a dark cloud whenever I went home and to this day I have not quite figured out which one is the real me, and after a point I stopped trying.
Anyway, accommodation secured in a five-seater room in Sir Syed Hall (Osmania Hostel, Room 64b), I had barely unpacked my things before being summoned for namaaz by the senior students. There is a mosque attached to every hostel in the university, so tardiness with prayers comes to be quickly noticed. I wondered if this would be the constant drill while I was here, and felt miffed at being compelled to pray when at the moment I had nothing to pray for.
Aligarh Muslim University already boasted a heavyweight history department, which later of course developed into the Institute for Advanced Studies, headed by the illustrious Professor Irfan Habib, son of the equally celebrated Professor Mohammad Habib. Intimidated by the prospect of memorizing dates, I wanted to duck history but the other alternative, economics, sounded nightmarish, as did Hindi. Geography I had always dreaded, and civics, social studies, psychology, linguistics were just words. I settled for what I thought was the simplest combination, English literature major with political science and history as subsidiary subjects. Theology study was compulsory for Muslim students. The ‘semester’ system had just been introduced in the university: one had a certain number of credits to clear in each subject by the end of six semesters, you didn’t necessarily have to appear for the credit at the end of each, you could clear all the credits at the end all at once if you chose to do so. I chose to do so and of course it caught up with me in good time.
Though the ‘ragging’ was not half as vicious as it is known to be in some other institutions, there were some pretty arbitrary sartorial customs. For example, one could not go to the common washroom without a kurta or a shirt on; you could not go out of the hostel in only a kurta and trousers, it had to be a sherwani or ‘pant-shirt’. With the sherwani, a cap was mandatory. ‘Salaam-ale-kum’ was the greeting everywhere. Those who did not yell it out at the top of their voices and did not make a great show of attending namaaz were frowned upon, and quickly labelled ‘communist’. Being one of the few English-speaking students there, I was immediately categorized as ‘East India Company’ along with the handful of foreign students there—Mauritian, Thai and Indonesian (all Muslim).
Shaw’s Arms and the Man was in our literature syllabus, and having seen it performed more than once by Shakespeareana, I was off to la-la land on my dream-scooter right away. I managed to persuade the lecturer to distribute roles and let us read it aloud. Picking myself as ‘the Man’ of course, I decided upon three of my classmates for the other three male parts. An all-male cast reading was a bore and so the four of us set to work on the teacher to get some girls in with us and do a proper play-read. No question of putting it onstage, of course, as AMU has in its constitution a puzzling stricture prohibiting male and female students from appearing onstage together; not so puzzling of course once you’ve witnessed the reaction of the students there to an attractive female presence onstage. Only post-grad classes are actually co-ed, and intermingling of the sexes in public is rare and duly noted and much remarked upon. Luckily, in charge of proceedings was a feisty lady teacher who took the initiative and this fantasy actually materialized. I couldn’t believe my ears when we were told that we would actually be going to the girls’ college for a read-through.
The Abdullah Girls’ College is, to male students in Aligarh, a mysterious erogenous zone they can venture nowhere near without a sibling studying there, and even then, no further than the front gate. To meet the sibling, or the one pretending to be, you must confront a formidably moustachioed gateman who takes the piece of paper on which your name is scribbled to the warden, who compares it with a list of permitted visitors supplied by the girl’s parents. Only then is the girl allowed to coyly step out of a side entrance while the huge gates remain determinedly shut. To my knowledge no male undergrad had ever been privy to what lay beyond them. I took a while to decide what to wear, though my choices were limited to three or four sets of rather plain shirts and trousers. Deciding on something carefully careless, not wanting to seem too eager and adopting a casual swagger though my heart was jumping into my mouth, we entered that forbidden ground to be greeted by the same rather drab buildings as everywhere on the campus, except—they were all populated by the female sex. Trying to appear like the coolest creatures in
the cosmos we strolled into one of the classrooms and met our co-actors—the girls. One more dream in my grasp, thought I. So far all the acting I’d done had been with bewigged or long-haired Sikh boys playing the female roles. Having the female characters played by actual females was aphrodisiacal in the extreme.
That first rehearsal was at least a few hours shorter than it should have been. I was playing the chocolate cream soldier and now actually speaking those lines I’d always felt I could deliver, and was doing it in front of a group that was appreciative. More important, I was able to perform more or less the way I did when alone. It wasn’t particularly challenging, I’d done these lines so many times on my own anyway. The acclaim that came my way when we finally did a public reading went a long way towards making me somewhat known in the girls’ college. I also briefly renewed my acquaintance with cricket, and learnt to play tennis on one of the half-dozen or so grass courts adjoining the swimming pool, the ‘Meston swimming bath’ as an ancient brass sign proclaims it to be. I daresay Mr Meston, whoever he was, would not have been amused by the shrine bearing his name now also carrying a curt handwritten sign, more recent, stating ‘soap not allowed’.
The university had a 1200-seater auditorium with a huge mural by M. F. Husain, no less, on the facade. It was called Kennedy House because it had evidently been built with American funding. There was a cavernous stage, the largest I had ever seen, with a revolving mechanism; the machinery for that purpose catching rust since it had been deposited in a godown some ten years before and never installed. At the time of my last visit to Aligarh in 2007 it had still not been. There was and still is nothing on that stage—no backdrop, no proscenium, no wings, no sound system, no arrangements for lights. Performing there after well-nigh forty years I had the distinct feeling that the only thing that had changed, and that not for the better, was the audience.
AMU had a Riding Club as well. Horse riding being one of the sports Baba didn’t disapprove of, I was enlisted as a member and equipped with the essentials: a pair of khaki breeches and a sola topi in which I looked faintly ridiculous walking down the road to the riding school since I had no bicycle of my own any longer, nor could I afford a pair of boots. I don’t have the greatest legs in the world and in my breeches and Keds sneakers didn’t exactly evoke Clint Eastwood, and imagining myself as the world’s greatest tent-pegger living incognito didn’t offer too many possibilities. So I carried the hat, imitations of Baba not being in my repertoire, and persevered with the riding for as long as was reasonable, getting to the cross-stirrup trot, at times actually feeling a few fleeting moments of bliss with the animal completely under control. But another play reading was in the offing, this time Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer and I was to be Tony Lumpkin, yet another character I had seen Mr Kendal play. Reading a play aloud was much more fun than getting sorebum trotting around in a circle on hot afternoons, and in any case the couple of female members in the club never showed. In rehearsal, now normally at one or other of the teachers’ houses, there was always tea and cake and cucumber sandwiches and girls.
The feisty lady in the English department was Zahida Zaidi, known as ‘lady in the car’ because she drove around the campus, puffing furiously on a cigarette, in a white Standard Herald. She was, in Aligarh parlance, a very ‘forward’ person. Whisper abounded about her, and the gossip was far from kind. She was, of course, a ‘communist’ and worse. Zahida apa cared not a whit about such talk. Soon after presiding over the Goldsmith play, she did a reading of a play called The Lesson written by someone called Eugene Ionesco. I was not cast. Not only had I never heard of the play or the writer, I hadn’t seen or read anything like it before. I found myself in complete empathy with the absurdity of the situation it was lampooning. The pupil’s utter bewilderment at what she is being taught in maths or logic had always been my very own. I didn’t understand the play but watching it enacted, the experience was almost tactile.
I was to be introduced soon after to more absurdism, Edward Albee’s Zoo Story to begin with, a play which was to figure very importantly in my life some five years later. Ms Zaidi had got together a proper performance this time, not just a read of this play, and performed it in an open space, a lawn outside the Kennedy auditorium. The play went completely over my head, but the thought of performing in an actual space, not on a stage masquerading as that space, was invigorating. I was deeply envious of these actors and so duly went to meet the lady to ask to be considered for a part in the next one (for a few fleeting moments I had visions of being asked to now play the role of Jerry, the Father Cedric miracle repeating itself). Instead she gave me another Ionesco play called The Chairs which I read in utter bewilderment. I told her so, and stammeringly mentioned Mr WS but was rewarded with a hard look, a copy of Waiting for Godot to read and the mystifying observation that she would love to stage this one ‘if there was another actor’.
Finding both plays equally incomprehensible I asked her to decide, and she promptly cast me to play the ninety-five-year- old man in a production of The Chairs to be staged along with a one-act farce by Anton Chekhov, A Proposal. The restriction about female students acting onstage was neatly sidestepped by casting two female research scholars who, strictly speaking, were not students. I was nineteen at the time. I wonder if Zahida apa believed I was capable of comprehending so scarily dense a piece of writing as The Chairs but I knew for sure I was not. Knowing how to create the impression that I understood it, however, was another matter and on that score I had little doubt. After all I had barely understood what King Lear and Shylock were saying when I had masqueraded as them, hadn’t I? All one had to do was learn the lines and not bump into the furniture, but in The Chairs there were about fifty chairs onstage to not bump into. For the most part I succeeded, at least in managing to manoeuvre between them; and the audience in Kennedy Hall, consisting mostly of the teaching staff and a not inconsiderable number of Abdullah College girls, sat through our efforts.
The Chairs and A Proposal had been performed thrice when one of the ladies in it, engaged to be married, announced that she would no longer be available. Simultaneously the actor in A Proposal decided he’d had enough and pulled out as well. Without blinking an eyelid Zahida apa decided to play the old woman herself and asked me if I would mind also playing the suitor in A Proposal in case we had more performances. I didn’t need any persuasion at all and we did actually have two more shows in which I played both parts back to back. Pure Heaven. Zahida apa’s perceptiveness and intellectual capacity notwithstanding, her acting prowess and actor- handling ability was limited, but she proved to be a benefactor in many ways. Apart of course from the tremendous high of being onstage and wowing so many people, and the immense gratification of being trusted and treated with some regard instead of condescension, she introduced me to literature I might not otherwise have read, I learnt how to drive in her Standard Herald and I met Purveen Morad who would figure emotionally in my life in a huge way.
The woman with the sun in her hair
Purveen was thirty-four years old and a final year MBBS student specializing in ophthalmology when we met. She was well known in the university, as much for her free- thinking as for having been around a long time. She’d first done a BSc then a postgrad in education and now having completed the fifth year of her medical studies was in intern training. Not a serial degree-gatherer, she had enrolled in these classes in order to prolong her stay in India. A Pakistani national, she had stayed in Karachi with her father (estranged from her mother) since the age of five, and had now come to live in Aligarh with her mother, a much-loved teacher in the university. Experiencing maternal attention for the first time and liking the life there she took advantage of her student visa to extend her stay, doing one course after another. Not on the greatest of terms with her father, she had absolutely no wish to return to him but the bell had begun to toll, her medical studies were coming to an end now and there weren’t too many other courses she could pursue.
She had
been an object of some fascination for me from the time I first set eyes on her which, incidentally, had been at Tasveer Mahal movie house, while I was hanging around staring at the posters as I often did. She was obviously awaiting someone and seemed bothered. I do not know what it was about her that drew my attention; she wasn’t particularly good- looking but I liked the way she was dressed, she was visibly much older than me (by fourteen years in fact) and at that moment far from cheerful, but I found her quite fascinating. I think it was the way her hair shone in the sun. I would have loved to make her acquaintance, but in Aligarh you don’t just go up to a female and talk to her. When she came into a rehearsal of The Chairs one day, we hit it off right away though we were never actually introduced. She turned out to have two extremely attractive half-sisters. The elder one, Surekha, was a graduate of the National School of Drama (A school for drama??? Those words were music to my ears. ) and was now married and settled in Delhi; the younger, Phulmani, was a postgraduate student of literature in Aligarh.
And Then One Day: A Memoir Page 10