And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  Purveen and I became friends very quickly. She encouraged me to dream and convinced me I was moving in the right direction, boosting my confidence by speaking of my being a good actor, not as a compliment any more but as a fact. She always said I had no option but to make good, mine was not the ‘personality type to fail’. She even tried to make me think; she spoke perceptively about the meaning of The Chairs and tried to explain it to me a couple of times, then realizing I was doing well enough not bothering my head with all that, she let me be and became through the period of rehearsal a most wonderfully supportive audience, besides taking charge of the costumes and sound effects. On show days we had a make-up man, and we got ready in an actual dressing room with huge mirrors, with which I thoroughly enjoyed renewing my friendship. These mirrors had light bulbs all around them and their blinding brightness reminded me of the stage. Those bulbs felt reassuring—almost as if they were preparing me to go on again. I couldn’t keep my eyes off myself, something she’d remark on, wondering if I was trying to hypnotize myself, as she’d sit there watching my make-up being done. Whether I was hypnotizing myself or not, it has since become a habit which I find also to be an extremely enjoyable way of concentrating before a stage performance. She smoked and laughed a great deal, her eyes crinkled in a lovely way when she smiled, she seemed to enjoy my company, would seek me out to spend time with me and I needed no encouragement at all to comply. Before long we were seeing each other every evening, my visits to the Uncles’ home ceased, being with her was much more fun.

  Aligarhians are notorious for minding other people’s business and there was furiously whispered gossip generated by the sight of the two of us holding hands in public or seeing movies together. I was oblivious to it all. I had found someone to love and look up to and I was being loved in return at last, that was all that mattered. She participated backstage in every play I did in Aligarh after that, and once even acted (disastrously) with me in Tagore’s Chitra directed by Dr Munibur Rahman, a professor in the Islamic Studies department. Dr Rahman’s son Asif introduced me to Jasdev Singh Rehncy, an East African Sikh. With both of them, who now live outside India, I forged a lifelong friendship.

  The plays Zahida apa wished to stage were invariably woman-centric, and so naturally she was unable to produce anything at all, but meanwhile, having shifted hostels from SS to VM Hall, I found in Dr Rahman, the drama-loving provost there, another wing to nestle under. His wife Elizabeth (Zeba apa to all) was Swiss-born and the two had met in Oxford, married and lived a blissful twenty-five-odd years in Aligarh. She was immediately recognizable driving her black Fiat; he equally so, cycling around contemplatively, lanky legs almost at right angles to his body, frizzy hair curling out from both sides of his head. When I met him he asked me what I read and receiving no answer other than ‘P. G. Wodehouse’ he sort of chuckled, cleared his throat, reached into his desk and producing a copy of Luigi Pirandello’s Right You Are if You Think You Are told me to read that. A week later he handed me a copy of the Dialogues of Plato. Never once did he later enquire whether or not I had read the two books, nor did he ask for them back, but he did in my final year put me onstage as Socrates in a series of selections from the latter, calling it Apology and Crito. These were the most obtuse passages I have ever spoken onstage, but memorizing the dialogue, an activity involving many pleasurable hours with Purveen giving me my cues, was not a strain. Absolutely without self-doubt as I was at the time, the job was quickly done. Asif, also cast in the play as Crito, proved to be as terribly uncomfortable onstage in this one as he was in his dad’s later production of Shaw’s How He Lied to Her Husband, events about which he now has complete amnesia. Zahida apa meanwhile had decided not to do a play for a while but her attempts to educate me continued. I accompanied her to Delhi on a couple of occasions to watch plays done by the National School of Drama. I couldn’t believe that there were people who actually shared my dream and were pushing me to grab at it. It all seemed to be coming together at last. Not getting into any other university but this one, having chosen literature and not science, the shift to VM Hall, all now began to seem as if the universe had indeed conspired.

  Watching the NSD productions blew me away as much as anything else had. Here was first-class theatre work, with the kind of polish and technical excellence that existed in Indian theatre solely in that institution, then under the supervision of Ebrahim Alkazi, the director. The thought of being in this place seemed impossibly perfect and I wondered if there was a catch. Could it really be true that if I got in I’d be acting in several plays at one time and THAT’S ALL I would be doing? It seemed unreal, but I had met the students there; they were striplings like me, not star-sons or from privileged classes or from other countries, and probably with the same dreams I had. It did indeed turn out that if I was chosen for the acting course, acting was in fact mostly what I would be doing, apart from occasionally trying to learn how to draw a ground plan of the stage and fixing a barn door on a light and, wonder of wonders, I would be paid a monthly stipend of 200 rupees.

  By now I was practically living in Purveen’s mother’s home. I seldom went to the hostel. Probably satisfied somewhat with my decent performance in the first two years there, Baba had ceased his surprise visits to my hostel room. For the first time I felt part of a family, something I’d never felt before, least of all in my parents’ home. I felt wanted and appreciated and loved. The experience of being in a home with more than one woman in it was novel for me and they all actively encouraged me to pursue my dreams. Had it not been for the belief they had in me, I would perhaps not have taken the first step towards doing so: applying for admission to the NSD. But not before another event of staggering import had taken place in my life, one that astounded the entire university community and left my parents in deep depression for quite a while.

  My feelings for Purveen were reaching obsessive proportions now and it had become normal for us to meet every evening— if I hadn’t stayed over, that is. I had had fleeting contact with female attentions before but had never actually been on intimate terms with a woman. She was known to have had boyfriends before me and to have been pretty uninhibited about them, though of course the topic was never discussed between us. We both had our paternal progenitors to unload about. She would tell me about a traumatic childhood in Karachi where she’d been spirited away against her mother’s wishes and kept for almost fifteen years, and I would continuously dump on her about my father’s lack of sympathy for my dreams, his harsh judgemental nature and his inflexible temperament.

  Fascinated by her energy and constant good cheer, her vast learning and varied life experience, her interest in almost everything, her skill with her hands, her compassion towards life and the attentions she bestowed on me, I began to feel a deep gratitude for her friendship and an overwhelming love for her. Here at last was someone in whose life I mattered. Someone who belonged to me, someone to whom I belonged. I could at that time see nothing beyond living my life with her always; that she made me happy was all I knew. Whether I had the capacity to make and keep her happy is something that hadn’t occurred to me but, hell, I was nineteen at the time, my own happiness was all that mattered.

  We soon became an ‘item’, in Aligarh parlance. Wherever she was present it was taken for granted I would be too. JR had been admitted into the university the previous year, and he and my Aligarh cousins, who all their lives had been thoroughly marinated in that town’s vicious gossip about single women, tried to warn me about the pitfalls of this liaison and that proved to be the end, more or less, of my relationship with all of them. JR in any case had been suspicious of the reasons for my jaunt to Bombay and resented it deeply but never mentioned it. He later visited me when I was at the drama school in Delhi but the only thing he seemed interested in was whether or not I had screwed all the girls in my class and he kept referring contemptuously to my work as ‘Bhandela- giri’. I decided to have nothing further to do with him.

  Zahida apa, in a fit of gene
rosity she was to later regret, once lent me her car so that Purveen and I could go to Delhi to watch the NSD production of Bertolt Brecht’s (a somewhat familiar name for me by then) Caucasian Chalk Circle directed by the East German Karl Weber. The production was breathtaking and I knew that there was definitely nothing else I felt like doing now but coming to the NSD. I had no idea what kind of career prospects there would be, and despite having heard bleak stories of how all the graduates of that place ended up ‘going back to where they came from’ and how the two most celebrated NSD alumni, the husband-wife team of Om and Sudha Shivpuri, were just about ‘eking out an existence’ on radio and a bit of TV, I was not at all discouraged. A lead role in a radio play got one a payment of 50 rupees and of course I would be the lead! Four or five jobs a month should see me through, and now there was TV as well. This was 1969, there was only one TV channel then in black-and-white, the Doordarshan channel, which showed mind-numbing stuff most of the time but on which plays were also sometimes telecast.

  Watching Chalk Circle it struck me that when I did come to this place I would have to be content initially with being one of the crowd or the guard or the messenger, and simultaneously felt convinced that I would be perfectly content to do anything in such a production. Just the thought of being part of the team creating this stupendous effect would be achievement enough for the moment. Purveen, of course, was of the opinion that I would and should get a better deal than that.

  Playing the drunken judge Azdak, the absolute winner in the play, was one Shashikant Nikte whose impeccable comic timing, lithe graceful carriage and resonant voice made a big impression. He sang beautifully, something I have never even come close to doing, and I greatly envied this actor and the opportunity he was getting to display his wares, and I had a feeling which has returned every time while watching truly great acting—the feeling that ‘I wouldn’t have been able to do this’. Purveen didn’t think so and insisted that ‘this is the role I want to see you play’. My head full of how I would play Azdak, we were driving back to Aligarh after dark and had just gone past a railway crossing when two things happened simultaneously. I suddenly remembered that I had neglected to appear for my theology exams for the last two years. Not having attended any of the classes, my knowledge of the subject was hardly sharp and so I had been putting these off, taking advantage of the ‘semester system’ that permitted you to collect your credits at any time in the three years. ‘Why bother my head now, I’ll clear them all at the end, ‘ was my reasoning. Well, the end was nigh, and before I got anywhere near to playing Azdak, I had three sets of theology exams to clear in the approaching finals. The second thing that happened was that I rammed the nose of Zahida apa’s precious Standard Herald into the back of a truck parked on the side of the road. Luckily it was a glancing collision and the car suffered no major damage except to a headlight which then kept directing its beam into the fields adjoining the road as I drove back alone. Alone, because Purveen refused to sit any longer in a car I was driving. Brushing away my entreaties, she hitched a ride in the very truck into which I had collided. I followed as close behind as I could. It was the most useful driving lesson I have ever had.

  One morning, answering the door at Purveen’s I saw two gents whose white bush shirts, khaki trousers and brown shoes instantly announced their identity. ‘CID,’ said the one in front. ‘Miss Morad lives here?’ Purveen went even higher in my estimation. What an interesting life she leads, thought I, and had a quick vision of myself in mackintosh and felt hat, smoke curling from my cigarette, flashing my identity card at a terrified wrongdoer. Turned out that they hadn’t come to dispatch her or me on a guns-and-gals mission, they had come to check if she was still in India and to remind her that her visa was due to expire soon. Those were days of frosty relations and mutual suspicion between the neighbours. The Bangladesh conflict was beginning to fester and the explosion was round the corner. Pakistanis visiting India had to register themselves and report weekly to a police station, and in some cases they were even kept under surveillance through their stay. I have no idea if she too was, but she had stayed on long enough to warrant notice. A lengthy meeting with the two gents followed, from which I was excluded, and when they had left, both Purveen and her mother were silent for a longish while. A couple of days later I was taken into confidence. She was on the verge of overstaying in India and the penalty for that would be deportation and a ban from ever visiting again. She had to return to Pakistan within the month. There was no way for her to stay on but to seek Indian citizenship which, considering the existing situation, would be far from expeditious. There was one way, however, by which she could stay and that was to marry an Indian citizen. To me there didn’t appear to be any hitch at all. Here I was, a bona fide Indian citizen, madly in love with her; all I had to do was wait for my big break and I’d be marrying her anyway, sooner or later.

  I think there is nothing more about that episode that I need go into except that we were married on the 1st of November 1969 with no one except her mother and Asif’s mother Mrs Zeba Rahman as witnesses. My poor parents, completely oblivious to these developments and perhaps finally beginning to feel some easing of their anxieties—for to all appearances I was showing signs of straightening myself out—were now to be hit by another thunderbolt.

  We had resolved to keep the marriage completely secret but should have known better. Within a couple of days it was common knowledge throughout the university. Aligarh is not far from Meerut and people go back and forth so the news quickly got there as well. I have no idea who broke it to my parents, nor how they reacted; and I have felt too ashamed of myself to even try and imagine it. But their heartbeats must have gone faint in disbelief. This surely was beyond even Baba’s paranoid imaginings about me. I received a stunned letter from him telling me I was ‘a gullible fool’. Ammi too wrote in Urdu, asking why I’d kept it from them. ‘If you’d told us would we have refused?’ she asked rhetorically. Baba informed me he’d had quite enough and my life was my own to live now, the way I pleased. Poor soul never knew that that was exactly what I’d been doing all along. I guess it’s an indication of how far from them I’d travelled that all I did was mock their response.

  In a misguided attempt, a couple of months later, to repair what was now becoming an impassable breach, I suggested to Purveen that she accompany me to Sardhana on Eid to meet them. She had travelled to Delhi on other occasions but now the anxiety of meeting them probably caused her to protest about being restricted from travelling to places for which she didn’t have a visa. She was adamant that leaving Aligarh even for a day was risky. It took a couple of hours of persuasion before she finally consented, lying supine in the back of a cousin’s car in case the CID was hiding in the bushes all the way there. I had miscalculated the time the drive would take, and hadn’t factored in her opposition to my hare-brained scheme so we made it to Sardhana a good four hours later than I had planned, around ten thirty, dead of night for that one-jeep town. In my enthusiasm to persuade her to come I had painted a picture of hordes of carousing relatives awaiting the new bahu. My parents, I assured her, would be delighted, in fact would be the first to welcome her. I may even have promised a brass band and an all-night revel, I don’t recall. Whatever she was expecting, it certainly wasn’t what we got.

  We arrived to the sound of deep silence; both Baba and Ammi had eaten and were struggling to stay awake. The greetings were edgy, almost curt. Neither the two of us nor the two of them knew quite how to handle this. Some food and strained conversation between Baba and Purveen followed, Ammi and I stayed silent. We informed them we’d be leaving before daylight, they didn’t insist we stay. Ammi presented Purveen a necklace and a pair of earrings, kissed the top of her head and went to bed. Baba, never loquacious at the best of times, sat squirming for a while then also retired. At five in the morning we departed without saying goodbye, and got back to Aligarh before the CID could notice we were gone. Both the Zs, neither of them married yet, later came to visi
t us in Aligarh bringing gifts, and presumably went away baffled. Some decades having passed between then and now, I think I can understand why.

  Some weeks before the wedding I had already shifted out of the hostel and was now ensconced at 2 Diggi Road with Purveen and her mother. Everything was going swimmingly, and then one day Purveen, who not too long ago had had to educate me on the menstrual cycle, informed me there would be no more ‘chums’—she was expecting a baby. This possibility hadn’t even occurred to me. At that age I had no fondness whatsoever for children, no fondness in fact for anything but myself. The enormity of bringing new life into the world escaped me entirely, and I don’t suppose any amount of contrition later could compensate for my utterly insensitive treatment of the child when she was born, and when all she needed from me was to be hugged and comforted.

  Meanwhile, I was admitted to the National School of Drama as a first-year student, and left for Delhi at the end of my final year at Aligarh. Moving into its unique common-for- both-sexes hostel was unbelievably liberating after Aligarh, as was living in a big city again though Delhi seemed positively tame after Bombay, the mother-in-law of all Indian cities. The scholarship stipend we received after fees and hostel charges were deducted saw me quite comfortably through the month. I didn’t have to ask Baba for money—in any case the tap had been shut off a while ago—but better still, I didn’t need to ask his permission any more. This feeling of independence was heady. What slipped my mind was that a child was on its way and that I was not equipped either financially or emotionally to handle the situation that would ensue. I had been in Delhi a little over a month, and one Monday morning I discovered a telegram a day old, stating that Purveen’s ‘confinement has begun’. Having taken a few seconds to decipher the message, I caught the first bus to Aligarh. It was around noon by the time I got there. Early that morning, some hours before I arrived, Heeba had already been born.