And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  Heeba, gift of God

  The bus fare from Delhi to Aligarh was about seven rupees, and the rickshaw fare from the bus stop to the hospital Purveen was in was half a rupee, eight annas. I alighted right in front of her room as her mother emerged with the news that ‘it’s a girl, at about six in the morning’. Evidently a successive telegram had already been sent informing me of this. Until that moment, I didn’t realize how fervently I had wished it would be a boy. I am far enough removed from the day now to confess to the sense of crushing disappointment that seized me at that moment and didn’t let go for a long time. ‘A daughter!’ My adolescent virility had convinced me that true men had sons. My friends would mock and sure enough, led by JR, later did. A daughter? How would I deal with this?? In my head I had already been arm-wrestling with my imaginary son and teaching him about guns and cricket—when I had a moment to spare from myself to think of his impending arrival, that is. A daughter demolished all those dreams. The rickshaw puller, overhearing the conversation, smilingly tucked away the rupee note I had given him, presuming he was to keep the change on this joyous day. I insisted on my eight annas back and a most inauspicious argument over the sad little amount I should have let him keep in the first place followed before I had even seen my child.

  The reality of it hit me when I first saw Heeba (Purveen had decided on the name if it were a girl; a boy’s name I hadn’t thought of, funnily). She was a tiny apparition asleep in a crib covered by a mosquito net. I didn’t have the nerve to touch her. When she later awoke and I heard her voice for the first time something stirred in me, but I had never held a baby before. In fact I didn’t like them, they were noisy and messy; it was a challenge holding her in my arms. And later when she was being fed and I was being ignored I, like all immature fathers, experienced the most intense jealousy which only men ever feel, jealousy of their own child.

  Through the period of her pregnancy, Purveen had turned really moody, and my utter incomprehension of the miracle occurring within her and total oblivion to what was expected of me didn’t help. Many serious arguments, which I always got the worst of, were the result. Priapic twenty-one-year-old that I was, hopelessly self-absorbed, incapable of contributing in any way at all to making her feel good about herself, I found the bar on sex not easy to handle either. My attentions had already begun to wander and were beginning to zero in on R, a rather good-looking second-year student who as a whore in the NSD production of Three-Penny Opera had earlier caught my fancy, and now the two of us began spending a little more time together than was absolutely necessary.

  My entering the drama school had coincided with the final month of the pregnancy, always a difficult one, and for Purveen now in her mid thirties, not the best time to bear a child. As for me, without a clue of the responsibilities it entailed, the trouble that’s part of the whole deal, and then the indescribable joy it brings, I had no time to spare for the life I was helping bring into the world; only my own gratification took priority, nothing else mattered. I took no part in the building of the baby crib Purveen was fashioning out of an old basket and some sawn- off bamboos—a beautiful piece of work finally, in which Heeba spent her first few months. I did occasionally steal some roses from the university garden and bring them to Purveen in my cycle basket. That pleased her, but apart from that I played the part of the obnoxious adolescent to perfection. The role of father was way beyond my ken. After a dressing-down from Mother-in-law I started helping with the dishes but that was as far as it went. I slowly began to resent this child who was coming between me and the only woman who had ever given me any attention; and when the baby finally arrived, the neglect I displayed still shames me deeply all these decades later.

  Four days after her birth Heeba was brought home, but in the interim I had had to rush back to the school to attend classes—being absent from class was rewarded with a further deduction from one’s scholarship and I could scarce afford that. The following Saturday I returned to Aligarh to accompany mother and baby home in a rickshaw. It was a bumpy ride and I held Heeba in my arms. Mercifully no one I knew spotted us and we made it home without mortification. Heeba was laid in her crib, and I caught the next bus back to Delhi.

  I wrote home about Heeba and not so astonishingly Baba immediately made his way to Aligarh to see her. A few days later I got a deliriously happy letter from him saying that he had just seen ‘that lovely little thing, I have named her Attia’. His desire for a girl in the family was to find more sublimation than he had hoped for; Heeba was to be followed by four more girls in both my brothers’ families. I informed Purveen of Baba’s choice of name but he didn’t exactly figure in the list of her favourite people and the name Heeba stuck. Heeba was the first of Baba’s (now) ten grandchildren and when both the Zs later had their daughters, he ecstatically dubbed them all with archaic double-barrelled appellations which, to the girls’ massive relief, were never employed. Heeba’s arrival actually caused Baba and me to be civil to each other for a while, but now the gulf with Purveen had widened.

  Her whole life now revolved around Heeba and she and I had precious little to say to each other any more and even less to share. The stimulation of being on the cusp of a life of professional acting ensured that I didn’t miss her at all, and she seemed to lose whatever interest she had had in my obsession. The physical distance too began to grow. I was no longer this amusing little chap for her; I was now cast in a role which seemed like a hugely unpleasant chore and which I was ill-equipped to play: father of a child. It filled me with unease and inadequacy. The weekly visits to Aligarh became monthly visits and the stay there successively shorter. Now it was all milk bottles and diapers and suckling and cleaning and burping the baby, I couldn’t be bothered with any of it. While I had absolutely no interest in baby care, Purveen was consumed by it—she had to be, this was something she had waited a long time for. My indifference to Heeba can only be explained, though not condoned, by the fact that I myself was then an insecure, ill-adjusted twenty-one-year-old with absolutely no conception of what it took to rear a newborn, and I completely shirked my share of the duties, while idiotically attempting at the same time to assert my rights as a husband. The only way of dealing with a wife, in the world according to the Shahs, was with firmness and authority. Not unaware that I was thoroughly incapable of either, I retreated into a resentful shell. It hurt to know I was no longer the most important thing in Purveen’s life. There was no telephone in Aligarh and her replies to my letters got more infrequent and finally ceased altogether, as then did my visits there.

  In Alkazi I had at last found an inspiring teacher—one who liked and appreciated me and didn’t make me feel like a fool, one who was interested in helping improve my mind, and pushed hard to make me realize the potential he perceived in me. Purveen’s family had already had that positive influence marginally, but now I was under the wing of someone who could show me the way; he tried to teach us art appreciation, introduced us to classical music, to the myriad Indian theatrical forms, to serious cinema; he goaded us to read, to wake up early, to work on our instruments. I learnt that Eugene Ionesco and Anton Chekhov were not the only great playwrights apart from Shaw and Shakespeare. Reading things I could actually understand was a tremendous high. The fascination and admiration I’d had for Purveen got transferred many times magnified to Ebrahim Alkazi.

  I have no idea in what sort of light I will appear if I say that for an unconscionably long time I felt nothing whatsoever for the child Heeba, but it is necessary that I confess it. She didn’t figure at all, it was almost as if she didn’t even exist. When I did visit her in Aligarh she’d look at me as at a stranger, she seldom came near me and neither of us was comfortable when she did.

  School of drama, tragedy and heartbreak

  In the opening class on modern Indian drama the kindly Mr Nemichand Jain, professor of that subject, after his introductory talk enquired from us about the number of Hindi plays each student had read. Most rattled off a number of names I ha
dn’t ever heard before and everyone had read at least a couple if not more of what seemed to be very well- known works of Indian playwrights in Hindi. Everyone, that is, except me. I hadn’t heard of any of these plays and the only extra-curricular Hindi I had ever read was film magazines or Must Ram’s porn. An astonished Jain saab had to ask me thrice over whether I was absolutely sure I ‘hadn’t read a single Hindi play ever??’ I assured him that such was indeed the case. Thereafter he always treated me as somewhat special and perhaps somewhat challenged.

  The very first play I acted in at NSD, a children’s play The Little Blue Horse, gained me a mention in the only review of it that appeared, and that made my head swivel a little further. I was then cast as Brabantio in Othello, Mathew the gangster in Three-Penny Opera, and to my astonishment as Barot, the court poet, in a production of a folk play Jasma Odan, a singing role! This last was probably Alkazi’s attempt to get me to train my singing voice, a venture in which he failed completely. Despite the singing instructor’s relentless coaxing I just could not hit the notes. Being told to shut up any time I tried singing at home and being laughed out of every trial for the musicals in Sem had come home to roost. I was convinced I could never sing, and no amount of encouragement now was any help.

  I had no realization then that my voice was a thing under my control if I bothered to listen to it, and all I had to do was recognize the habits I had accumulated along the way, and THEN work my butt off to rid myself of them. But I faltered at the first step. Far from being able to free my voice, I just could not tell a false note from a pure one, and it was maddening to constantly be told ‘No! No! Try again’ when I had no clue what I should be trying for. Fortunately for me, most of the other singers were only marginally better and so I didn’t suffer too much in comparison. And after all, Rex Harrison had ‘speechified’ all his songs in My Fair Lady, hadn’t he? That performance for me had been one of seminal influence. I decided to do the same and found my escape route through sheer laziness: I spoke the songs to rhythm, even receiving moderate praise for my diction. But sing I did not. The writer and director of Jasma Odan, the dynamic Shanta Gandhi, then no longer with the school and thus having no hand in my landing the part, after watching a performance of the play was aghast at why I had been cast. I did not blame her. As if having to sing in one play was not bad enough, fate had yet another trick up its sleeve.

  A month-long winter tour to Bombay, Poona, Hyderabad and Bangalore was announced. All three productions would be travelling, and it was whispered that accompanying them would be a revival of Caucasian Chalk Circle with the role of Azdak up for grabs as Shashikant Nikte, the original Azdak, had left. Something like a premonition began to gather. I no longer visited Aligarh any more and even though it was unheard of for a first-year student to be cast in a lead role, I had a feeling that this time the impossible would happen, as Purveen had predicted it would. I wished equally fervently that she would come to see me in it. Relations with her were now practically non-existent and she did not reply to my letter telling her that the role was practically mine, though that was far from being true. There were not a few aspirants in line and at least one gent with a very strong claim, a third-year acting student who was not unsuitable. What went in my favour was that he was likely to leave after his course was done and I would be around for another two years; besides he couldn’t sing any better than me and Azdak had not one but two solo numbers.

  Alkazi saab, the ferociously dedicated ‘padrone’ of the theatre, liked to personally set an example, asking no less of himself than he asked of anyone. Blessed with impeccable taste, and acutely aware of his place in history, he bestowed a sense of aesthetics and sophistication and, more important, organization and discipline on Indian theatre. His productions were examples of what ‘finish’ in theatre design actually meant. A designer by training and by temperament, widely travelled and formidably well read, Alkazi’s compelling theatre presentations had, in the context of Indian theatre then, no equal.

  I had to wrench myself away from being around this dazzling personification of charisma and the other-worldly bliss of living, eating, sleeping theatre in order to pay to Heeba’s existence the attention it needed. Thoughts of my infant daughter were non-existent in my mind. A total disconnect with my life in Aligarh had happened, it all seemed like another time altogether. As my fascination with city life and theatre work grew, my connection with what I suppose were my roots began to shrivel. One of the things left behind was my relationship with Purveen. My relationship with Heeba had ossified before it began.

  I got the Azdak part. My sessions with the singing instructor started anew, bearing as little fruit as before. Luckily for me the songs in Brecht’s plays are dramatic set pieces where the clear rendition of the words is of prime importance. Brecht himself even demanded a somewhat ‘unmusical’ quality from his singers; so that listeners are not lulled by the melody but pay heed to the content. Alkazi made the mistake of explaining this to me one day during rehearsal and of course I thought in that case I’m doing it right, and abandoned any further attempt to sing well. Laziness again hindered me, I was unable to rectify a shortcoming that only grew with time. And to top it all off: on our Bombay leg (my first revisit to the city I somehow knew I would spend my life in), all the plays performed to jam-packed houses. Chalk Circle was specially commended and I got a mention in the Times of India.

  The morning after the show I was woken by Rajendra Jaspal, a classmate and close friend by now, showing me the review. We shared a great big laugh and a celebratory joint first thing in the morning. Jaspal was a small-town guy like me though older by a couple of years. He didn’t speak English too well, was somewhat embarrassed about his lower- middle-class upbringing and the fact that he’d worked in a bank before coming to the drama school. With a marvellous singing voice he was as good an actor as I was and yet had to be content with playing the chorus while I, the star of the show, got to strut my off-key stuff. We seemed to have a lot in common apart from the feverish desire to succeed. Because of my English and my general air I guess he took me to be from a very well-to-do family and often stated that he wished to be like me. I admired his talents and he admired mine; we always got cast as buddies and became inseparable in real life as well, to the extent that we began to be referred to as one person: ‘Jaspal/Shah’. We did everything together, we seemed to have similar tastes, and our careers at the school followed similar trajectories, until Chalk Circle, that is. It escaped me completely that he may have aspired to the part as well. I just felt that getting it was my prerogative and he had seemed genuinely to share my happiness. I was incapable of reading between the lines then, and I had not a clue of the involvedness of the relationship that was forming and of the tragic (for him and nearly for me) consequences that would follow in a few years.

  After triumphant turns in the first two cities, we began a show of Jasma Odan in Hyderabad with the forty-five-strong cast prancing on to the stage in celebration at the beginning of the play, only to be faced by row upon row of empty seats. There were, literally, fewer people in the auditorium than there were onstage. Some sponsor somewhere had messed up along the line and Hyderabad was a blip in an otherwise totally intoxicating, nay inebriating, tour for me. Even though I struggled with a strained voice (never once attempting to give up smoking though) my performance received favourable attention everywhere we went. R and I also broke off and patched up several times but became extremely close in the course of the tour, and despite her strong disapproval, I discovered the magic of marijuana.

  Purveen never ever saw me play Azdak even though we performed the play several times in Delhi after the tour. I made a few feeble attempts to get through to Heeba, going to Aligarh and trying to spend time with her but we would both be tongue-tied on meeting. She was now two, walking and talking but had nothing to say to me and probably didn’t want to go anywhere with me. I think she must have been somewhat confused as to who I was and how she should behave with me. I was in a simila
r predicament. I didn’t know how to deal with children, I didn’t even know how she would respond if I tried to hug or hold her, and the reception from Purveen was always so unfailingly hostile that I finally decided to cease performing this onerous duty and in fact didn’t see Heeba again for another twelve years.

  In my first year at NSD I was involved in more plays than I had done in my life thus far and I had got my picture in the papers for the first time. The prospect of doing this always just seemed too good to be true, until with the year-end exams done and Jaspal/Shah having secured first and second place respectively, Alkazi announced to both of us that he expected us to study direction instead of acting, saying that intelligent students like us would be more suited to study direction. What he was probably trying to do was shelter us from the abysmally inept acting teachers, and take us under his wing. We both initially resisted but couldn’t hold out; when Alkazi set out to persuade he succeeded. He was obsessive about many things, mainly order and cleanliness, about not neglecting the smallest detail, even seeing to the maintenance of the toilets, not infrequently doing a clean-up himself. Costumes not respectfully folded and kept in their proper place after a show would bring the wrath of God down on the transgressor. Everything he said was said with complete conviction, he seemed to have the right take on everything, he always made sense. We both agreed to enter the second year as students of direction and took one more step towards confusing our identities with each other. In the two-month summer break neither of us went home. Getting permission to stay on in the hostel we both acted in a production of three one-act pieces, attempted by a couple of (then) enterprising young men, Rajendra Gupta and Devendra Ankur. The production was staged in a theatre in as professional a way as we could manage. Alkazi saw it and pronounced himself ‘pleased, but not with the noisy backstage’.