And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  Feeling self-congratulatory after a performance was not new to me, I was usually very pleased with myself regardless of how I’d done, but for the first time since The Lesson I knew that this performance hadn’t happened by chance or because of ‘my natural talent’; it had happened because I’d worked like a demon on it, I had been in control of what I was doing, it had not gone by like a blur. I kind of knew now what was good and what was not good about it and kind of knew why. The heady thought occurred that I may be making progress at last, I may at last be learning how to act. Over the next few years I performed the same play several times and was gradually able to tone down the ‘emotional muscularity’ as Bajju bhai had called it, of the first performance, and was able to find the ‘great weariness’ the writer asks for. Also present at the first performance, apart from Mr Lawrence, to my surprise and delight were Alkazi and Girish Karnad, both of whom complimented me effusively. I wallowed in this euphoria for a few days before heading back to Pune. The Institute had reopened.

  Two pleasant surprises awaited me on arrival in Pune with a third bigger one on its way. The first was that the Guru Dutt scholarship I had been awarded at the end of the first year had finally come through and I was suddenly rolling in money as the previous year’s backlog also, 200 rupees a month for the last eighteen months, had been added to my hastily opened bank account; and further, I would receive 200 rupees a month for the remainder of my stay at FTII. The second surprise was a letter from R informing me that her course had given over and she, abandoning plans of looking for employment in the US, was returning and would probably come to Bombay for that purpose. I wondered what kind of work she would get; she was good at neither acting nor directing. She was very good-looking but I couldn’t really see her acting in Hindi films, still less see her being an assistant director—she was way too opinionated for that, and I knew she was incapable of roughing it out the way I was going to have to. She sounded somewhat downcast, but said she would visit me in Pune. My heart sang at the possibility. I sent off three letters right away, two to both Zs thanking them for their generosity and faith in me and telling them that now the skies had opened I was no longer on the dole. The third letter was to R.

  The Institute administration was now no longer bothering to negotiate with the acting course; in any case we had been trounced. Work resumed and the status quo was restored; the directors were free to cast who they pleased and some actors began giving in to the lure of the offer of a film or two and blithely reneged on our agreement to not act in any diploma films at all. As consolation, the actors not cast in diploma films were told they’d each be given 1000 feet of raw stock which any four of them could pool together to shoot and edit into a 20-minute short and they could get anyone at all, including non-students, to direct it. Despite the fact that it would be practically impossible to find willing and capable film-makers for our needs, most actors promptly accepted this arrangement but to me it was the death knell of any chance of a rapprochement with the students of direction, with whom we were supposed to share training, work and growth; and it certainly was the final nail in the coffin of isolation into which the acting students were to be henceforth confined, away from the rest of the student body.

  Surprise Number 3 was a summons to Girish’s office whence I proceeded with some trepidation, to be informed by him that he had been sufficiently moved by my performance in Zoo Story to mention it to Shyam Benegal who right then was casting for his second film to be shot the next month. I daresay he also warned Shyam that casting me would be at his own peril; I was trouble, unreasonable, opinionated, hotheaded, and a dope-smoker, something verified by others later, all of whom I imagine also verified that I was no chump as far as acting went. Anyway, the upshot of it was that I was to go to Bombay to meet him as soon as I could.

  I got a seat on an early-morning bus to Bombay the next day and arrived at Shyam Benegal’s Pedder Road residence much earlier than he or his wife Nira had expected me to. She was on the balcony reading a newspaper when I showed up and I encountered Nira’s legendary ‘frosty glare’ for the first time. It took a while for me to see beyond that facade before which better men than me have wilted, and to recognize the tremendous warmth and affection she is capable of. But that morning, boy, did the frosty glare do its bit. Seeing a bedraggled stranger enter her home at this hour, she swept resignedly out of the room and it occurred to me that this must be tough to deal with, and that this must happen to film people all the time. Trying to keep my voice from shaking and my knees from knocking I mumbled an apology, which was ignored. To my great relief I was left alone until my breathing returned to normal.

  In a minute or two I sensed that I was being watched and turned to see Mr Benegal himself, freshly bathed and dressed, smiling down at me from his bedroom doorway. His smile I later learned was as famous as Nira’s ice-lady look. His relaxed demeanour, his gentle baritone, his firm warm handshake immediately put me at ease. He asked me a few things about myself, all the while looking closely at me and glancing without disapproval at my custom-made (from Aligarh) cowboy boots and corduroy denim jacket. The character he was considering me for, he told me, was that of a dhoti-kurta wearing young brother of an Andhra village landlord, quite different from the way I looked. I had recently rid myself of my beard or else I may not have got the part—my face with a beard looks drastically different from my face without it. He assured me that I seemed right for the part age-wise, besides Girish thought highly of me and he felt more or less certain about me. I asked if I would need to do a screen test or if he wanted to see some acting but he waved all that away and as the conversation progressed it began to feel like a sure thing. He narrated the script in brief and my part in some detail: a rather simple-minded younger sibling to three tyrannical village landlords. The character, though married, gets badly smitten by a village schoolmaster’s wife who his brothers then kidnap to do him a favour.

  Among the other actors were Girish himself playing the schoolmaster, the central part; and Shabana Azmi, whose performance in Ankur I had greatly admired, playing the female lead. Then there were to be Amrish Puri and Mohan Agashe, both of whom I had seen on the stage several times, and amongst all these tigers I had so far beheld from much below, my part was in fact the second lead! My euphoria hit the ceiling when Shyam told me I should come back the next week to sign the contract. Things had gone so fast my head was reeling. As I left his house I was tempted to pinch myself, I knew I was really awake but if I was dreaming then, hell, I’d rather stay asleep, this was too good a dream. Even though there had been no mention of money yet, it was a given that apart from getting the job I would be paid real money to do it. I didn’t dare dwell on how much but there were sure to be quite a few zeroes in the sum. I kept telling myself something would happen to fuck it up, he would probably find someone better-looking to do the part, and I began steeling myself for the disappointment to hit me but for the moment I had been told the part was mine. I returned to Pune astride a cloud.

  If I could have hired a rickshaw fitted with a loudspeaker I would have driven into the Institute blaring forth the news. I thanked Girish warmly but he only advised me against talking about it yet to anyone at all, ‘Many a slip ...’ I asked if my taking two months off for the shoot if I was chosen would be all right, he with a nudge and a wink assured me he would be taking the two months off as well. Ignoring Girish’s advice, I dashed off a letter giving the joyous news to R and practically making plans to live with her when she came to Bombay; I would actually be earning good money from now on. Her reply was unenthusiastic; in any case she was never a dreamer. Hard as nails in her pragmatism she could probably visualize the kind of poky life I would actually end up living in Bombay better than I could and she didn’t fancy it.

  I was self-righteously furious that she planned to look for work in the hospitality business and not in the theatre. ‘There’s no future in the theatre,’ quoth she. After having lived on theatre scholarships for five years, having taken up a
place and received a stipend which another aspiring enthusiast wishing to contribute to theatre could have put to better use, she was now ready to throw it all away, wanting to be a damn lobby-manager or receptionist. It made no sense to me. Severely tempted though I was to dish out Alkazi’s ‘betrayal’ lecture to her verbatim, I desisted for I could see that theatre and acting and everything that was my life’s blood had been for her, and in truth for most other NSD girls then, a means of merely hanging around there until a suitable boy, marriage proposal in hand, appeared on the horizon. She was not coming to Bombay to be with me but to shop for a husband. I decided I would try to woo her back nonetheless and make her believe that nothing could stop my career now. She had always told me she loved me but had also always told me she couldn’t foresee a future together and she was intelligent and honest enough with herself to recognize that I was at that time incapable of giving her the kind of life she craved. I realized later she was right in believing this; she wanted to marry, settle down, have children; I was still in the process of building my career and of course ‘in films there is no guarantee of regular work’. She believed love could not withstand an empty stomach, I believed it could withstand anything.

  The following Friday I returned to Bombay to meet Shyam and was told that the colossal sum of 10, 000 rupees would be mine in return for working in this film. I had a thought then which is still with me and it is this: actors who gain employment have to be fortune’s favoured children. You are not only asked to do the work you would be willing to pay people to let you do, you are actually paid to do it. My eyes had never ever alighted on an amount like this and the thought that I was kind of a rich man now was really heady though it didn’t feel terribly different from when I wasn’t. The only thought in my head was whether I would be able to get a home in Bombay for that amount. If that happened the rest would be a breeze, I assured myself. I was also given an air ticket from Bombay to Hyderabad, where we were to shoot, and told to guard it with my life. Never having seen an air ticket before, much less having travelled by air, the fear of losing the damn thing, as thick as a cheque book, made me lodge it in my underpants for the journey back to Pune, then safely in my cupboard under the newspaper lining on the shelf containing my other pair of undies. I wrote to Baba and the two Zs about this winning streak I seemed to be suddenly hitting and received cautious congratulations. All of them were vastly relieved that I was capable of actually earning money with my obsession. They had no idea of the kind of films that were starting to be made by Mr Benegal in Hindi and which would soon flower into a mini movement; they had never heard of Satyajit Ray, but had seen some of the regular commercial Hindi films and I didn’t blame them for feeling uneasy at the thought of where I could possibly fit into one of those. Ammi wrote me a letter advising me to be thrifty with the money I would earn. Word of my great good fortune had spread in the Institute by now. Jaspal said nothing but smiled cynically every time we met and another close friend, a student of direction, who during the strike had secretly sided with the actors but lacked the courage then, or even now, to openly speak up explained to me why: Jaspal believed I had got the part as reward for having sold out the acting students. What was more, he said he too believed it and what is even more, he still believes it after all these years.

  I suppose such people are actually convinced that selling out is all that is required to get a start in life. I do not know and do not care who else believes my getting the part in Nishant, as it was later titled, was a reward for betraying my classmates. In what way I betrayed them, however, I do not know and if someone is paranoid enough to believe that I engineered the entire strike in order to get a role in a film, then he certainly imagines me capable of Machiavellian collusions and I am not unflattered. I know for sure that no one was betrayed, the decisions conveyed to the administration were made by all acting students present, and on behalf of those not present, and what ultimately transpired was that I was the only one who continued, while a student, to refuse to be part of any diploma film.

  And introducing...

  I ignored Ammi’s dictum right away. I felt like celebrating and got a seat in a taxi instead of a bus this time for the journey to Bombay to catch a flight to Hyderabad. Not willing to risk being late, I set off from Pune at midnight. Bombay being a four-hour drive from there, I was at Santa Cruz airport by 4. 45 a. m. with a little over four hours to kill before my flight took off. I really savoured this part, and I needed time to check out a real airport as a passenger. The closest I’d come to one before this was seeing off Asha K. at Palam a few years ago, in a different lifetime. This was 1975, the pre- hijacks and bombings and terror-in-the-skies days, anyone could come and go at any time, no policemen everywhere, no metal detectors, no scrutiny of tickets or IDs at that hour or at any other.

  Bottling my feverish excitement I sauntered in trying to look as if I was accustomed to all this. There were some dead neon signs, a few shuttered kiosks and abandoned check-in counters. Even without a soul in sight the place still looked grand compared to what I’d experienced in the name of travel so far. The concept of plastic bucket seats hadn’t been imported yet; there were Rexine sofas with foam cushioning, on one of which I reclined in great style, lighting a cigarette and foreseeing a future where like Hugh Hefner I would have airports and airplanes to myself. Not difficult to imagine as that morning I actually had the airport to myself. I instructed imaginary staff to wake me when it was time and stretched out on the sofa, my suitcase under my head—no point taking a chance with all one’s worldly possessions, and infinitely better than sitting on one’s luggage on a railway platform. I liked travelling in comfort, I decided. I nodded off and awoke to see an enticing pair of legs clad in skintight white jeans walking past a few feet away from me and exactly in my line of sight. I realized on rubbing the sleep away that they belonged to a slightly known film star whose name I now struggle to recall, and she was headed to the check-in counter. Vikram Mehrotra who had travelled by air before had earlier briefed me thoroughly on the protocol, so I nervously approached the counter displaying ‘Hyderabad’, all the while reassuring myself that there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with my ticket. There wasn’t, so I then sat clutching my boarding pass and worrying if my battered suitcase would also get to Hyderabad safely. By and by the other cast members who seemed to know their way around also assembled, and after introducing myself I tagged along and my suitcase and I both got to our destination without incident.

  Being introduced to the cast and crew of the film was like entering a who’s who of Indian theatre. First off there was Satyadev Dubey, enfant terrible and apart from IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association) sole practitioner of Hindi theatre in Bombay for decades. Normally an obdurate and exasperating autodidact Dubeyji, who it transpired later had been hoping for the part I got and ended up playing the priest instead, was dismissive when I first met him, ‘Alkazi’s pupil’ he sneered; even though he himself never failed to acknowledge Alkazi as a guru, being Alkazi’s pupil was my shortcoming apparently. He and Alkazi shared a history which he happily divulged some time later, and in fact many times again in the course of working with him in the years that followed. Everyone interested in Dubeyji knows that story so I needn’t go into it here. Apart from acting in the film, Dubeyji had written the dialogue, and I got to work with him right away on the spoken pieces and the dialect. Then of course there was Girish Karnad, Rhodes scholar, towering intellectual, pioneer of the art film movement in Karnataka, committed theatre worker, the author of two authentic contemporary Indian theatre masterpieces, Tughlak and Hayavadana, and all round Cool-Cat more known for his writing than his acting. The screenplay was by Vijay Tendulkar, another heavyweight whose incendiary and hugely popular writing greatly offended the right-wing in Maharashtra, caused a massive furore and irrevocably impacted the future of playwriting in that state. The costumes and art direction were by Shama Zaidi, an active member of the modern IPTA and daughter of Begum Qudsia Zaidi, one of the
founding figures of the movement in the thirties. Playing central parts were the widely respected, gravel-voiced Amrish Puri who had trained under Dubeyji and in partnership with him had run their company Theatre Unit for many years; Mohan Agashe whose performance in Tendulkar’s Ghasiram Kotwal I still consider one of the most perfect pieces of actor-blending-into-role that I have ever seen; Kulbhushan Kharbanda from Delhi whom I had not seen perform but who carried a big reputation in Delhi theatre circles. There was also Sadhu Meher, so convincing in Shyam’s first film Ankur as the drunken husband to Shabana Azmi, who herself had achieved great success in it and was indisputably the star of this one as well. And the ebony-hued Smita Patil was cast as my neglected wife.

  The only other time I had visited Hyderabad was some four years previously on tour with NSD. We had stayed five to a room in a crummy place in the old city called Shree Venkateswara Lodge. As the van transporting us all entered a vaguely familiar area, I had a sickening feeling that we were headed for the same lodge, with all those memories, hell! To my enormous relief we drove past it and alighted at a slightly more upmarket one, Annapurna Lodge, in which air-conditioned rooms awaited us. I was to share a room with Kulbhushan K and so blissful was I about actually working on a feature film and staying in a hotel room that for the first week or so even KBK’s snoring didn’t disturb me. I’d pore over the script at night and within a few days had all my scenes memorized, not that any of them contained much dialogue. There was a drunken scene I was terrified of and could not think of how to perform except by resorting to the conventional way, of which I had seen so much in Hindi cinema. Dubeyji came to my rescue by telling me that when drunk it was not how you stumbled but how you recovered that conveyed the convincingly drunken quality I was after. He also pointed out the difference between being stoned (to which I was much too accustomed) and being drunk (to which I was not), and to help me understand the latter shared a few drinks with me, encouraging me to get hammered, but I could never consume enough of the vile stuff he imbibed. In any case I had resolved not to smoke dope at all for the duration of the shoot, I was taking no chances. I knew this could be the last opportunity I would ever have: if I blew this there would not be another.