I was instructed to shave daily, something I had never done, and on Day One the village barber gave us all appropriate haircuts. My unruly curly mop was sheared into a mushroom- head, I was fitted out in kurta-dhoti, and a wormlike moustache which I would much rather have grown had I been told to, was glued on to my upper lip. The very same moustache despite being used every single day of the shoot constantly caused some overhelpful type or other to inform me that ‘today the mooch is looking little different’.
I was required on sets that very day. The first shot taken was from a scene in the first half of the film. Already attracted to the schoolmaster’s wife I am trying to slink off to get another look at her when Amrish Puri, his muscles a-glisten at the well, calls out to me and asks what the matter is. In the conversation, unknown to me, the plot to kidnap the woman for me is laid. Despite being with an actor I had long admired I was not intimidated in the least, mainly because of Puri saab’s kindly generous nature; but in any case I have never understood why actors get butterflies in the stomach when they act, particularly when it’s with someone they look up to. I personally have always relished the thought of working with a superior actor; after all, acting is not a boxing match where one or the other has to be outdone, it’s a game two people play together and both can and should win. It was easy transferring the feelings of awe and admiration I had for Agha Mamu on to Amrish Puri who, physically at least, was of the same personality mould, and being the slightly foolish youngest sibling and the butt of ridicule was also a feeling I was thoroughly familiar with. I had no trouble at all believing I was this person. On reflection, I know for sure that of all the parts I have done in cinema this is the one I have felt closest to. This character and I had many common qualities, I thought I knew this person well. I still consider it one of my more successful performances on film. I left nothing to chance, I knew what I was doing; no longer flailing in the dark, I was learning that giving a good performance has absolutely nothing to do with luck, and giving a good performance in a film was not dependent on the actor’s skill alone but on the truth of the writing and the imaginativeness of the staging and the proper orchestration by the director of the actor’s abilities. In short, if in cinema the director doesn’t know his job, there is absolutely nothing a mere actor can do to salvage the situation. It seemed to explain why actors of universally acclaimed greatness have sometimes fared abysmally in poorly directed or poorly written films.
I submitted totally to Shyam; if for a shot he told me to stay still and do nothing then I did exactly that, sometimes I have to admit a bit resentfully, but observing those shots later I found them among the most effective in the film and it made me realize that an actor ‘feeling right’ about a shot cannot be trusted. A good performance in cinema can be assembled piece by piece in the same way as a carpenter cuts, then joins different pieces of wood to create a coherent aesthetic shape.
And Shyam came through for me in every way. His guidance was gentle, firm and caring, his craft at his fingertips and his knowledge of the milieu impeccable, but what affected me most was the trust he reposed in the actors, the assurance in dealing with them and his compassion for every character. I felt like a slightly spoilt child when, after a few days of shooting, one of the assistants informed me I was fast becoming Shyam’s favourite on the sets. I resolved to make it stay that way, keeping away from the dope and giving a miss to the nightly post-shoot tippling, de rigueur on any outdoor shoot. I stayed in my room, practised my scenes for the next day, ate an early dinner and tried to get to sleep before KBK—once I was asleep even his snores couldn’t wake me. A friendly rapport had by now been established with Dubeyji, I had obviously been forgiven, and he confessed to being pleasantly taken aback one day on overhearing me recite Professor Higgins’s speeches from My Fair Lady, which I had thoroughly memorized years ago after having seen the film in college. This incident was fortuitous because it moved Dubeyji some years later to direct Don Juan in Hell, a piece by his idol G. B. Shaw, his first ever English-language production. But I am getting ahead of myself.
That month and a half of filming went by like the monsoon in Pune. Much too soon we were at the end. I had through those forty-five days abstained from all sorts of intoxicants except acting, and that has proved through my life to be not only the greatest high, but the cure for all ills as well. Not that I have continuously stayed away from other intoxicants! The staying away from being stoned I could bear, but after a month of tolerating the Vesuvian snores KBK produced in his sleep I cracked, and begged Shyam to transfer me to another room, any other room. He did, and I finally managed to sleep undisturbed through the remaining nights. There were, in the future, to be three more location shoots in which I would have the company and the dubious pleasure of KBK snoring the night away in the neighbouring bed. Once on a film by Girish Karnad, I was stranded in a room with not only KBK but two other thunderous snorers, Om Puri and Bajju bhai as well, and had had to shift my bedding to the corridor. Stroke of good fortune, therefore, that for the rest of that shoot we stayed in tents on location and I made sure my tent was as far from the others’ as it could possibly be.
In the course of the filming of Nishant, staying much too unsure of my people skills and in any case never having been able to initiate friendships, I found only the sound technician Hitendra Ghosh and the chief assistants Deepak Parasher and Girish Ghanekar (both now sadly deceased) going out of their way to befriend me. I was a poor conversationalist as well and still carried the massive chip on my shoulder with regard to the world. Ill at ease in the company of almost anyone, I now had the feeling I was on probation and my every move was being observed with great interest. I was not far wrong in feeling that and I feel very gratified, even now, to report that I did not put a foot wrong all the way. Girish whose charismatic sex appeal had vanished behind a pair of full-moon spectacles, a pencil-thin moustache and a severe haircut was too preoccupied with his own performance to pay me much attention but the other senior actors Amrish, Shabana, Kulbhushan and Mohan were all encouraging and supportive and I ended the shoot in optimistic spirits and with full pockets. When the schedule wrapped I had my second taste of flying, I was beginning to enjoy it and was already getting better at the ‘blasé flyer’ act. We all went our separate ways, with Shyam expressing happiness at my contribution. Dubeyji as a parting present handed me two tabs of Purple Haze, hugged me warmly and told me to stay in touch. To get back to Pune, this time I hired a taxi to myself instead of just a seat and lolled in the back all the way. It didn’t bother me that I was splurging—hell, it was my hard-earned money, I was capable of earning my living as an actor, I had just acted in my first film!
During the shoot there had been some talk of my perhaps adopting another name for the screen, my own being somewhat long and a trifle difficult to pronounce for some people; but I resolved that the one my parents had given me was good enough and finally it was Nira who made the definitive announcement that she ‘liked the name Naseeruddin very much’. That settled the matter then and there. When the film came out six months or so later, Baba taking his daily constitutional along the Mall in Mussoorie caught sight of a poster with my name on it. Going straight to the Rialto he caught the first available show, then went home joyously to tell Ammi I had not changed my name. She was livid he had seen the film by himself, so he had to watch Nishant again when Ammi insisted on seeing it too; probably the only film in his life he ever saw twice. His relief that I had finally made good and was part of this unreal world made him write me the longest letter I ever got from him, saying he was ‘happy’ when he saw the title ‘and Introducing Naseeruddin Shah’, that he thought it was a good film but wondered if ‘these were the sort of films nowadays and would they continue to be made’? Though after this, the relationship with Baba stayed somewhat more peaceful, we still never found an equation that would let us be ourselves when together. With no more chastisement in store for me, our discomfort in each other’s company should have diminished but it did
n’t. Perhaps telling me off had by then become his only way of communicating with me.
R had arrived in Bombay by the time I returned from the shoot, still drunk on my luck. She was staying, she wrote, with friends in Cumballa Hill, a rather swish part of town. I didn’t know she had any friends in the city. I then made one of the biggest mistakes of my life, arriving at this mansion-like place she was staying in sometime after dark without informing her. She must have stumbled upon a jackpot or something, I thought. My heart was breakdancing against my ribs as I walked up to the second floor and rang the bell. We were going to be together again. A friendly young man opened the door and informed me she hadn’t returned but I could come in and wait for her. Somewhat puzzled as to who he could possibly be I demurred but left a note and was about to trudge away when she appeared, back from work—she had moved fast since landing in Bombay, had already managed a job and a cushy place to live in. Of all the scenarios of ‘meeting again’ my imagination had painted over the last two years, meeting her in my travel-soiled clothes, on the landing of the stairs to her fancy residence, was the most improbable. She didn’t seem exactly overjoyed to see me, we didn’t fly into each other’s arms after all these years either; there was only a limp handshake before she produced a bunch of keys and let me into an apartment larger than any I had seen before. It had ornate Parsi furniture, a long hallway and spacious rooms on either side. There were about half a dozen thoroughly decent- looking young men present, all strangers to me but with all of whom she seemed to share an easy familiarity. What the fuck was going on here???
I suggested we go out somewhere instead but she didn’t seem keen on that. I was mortified at the prospect of having to hobnob with a lot of people I didn’t know at all, more so because all of them, though my age more or less, were total aliens with their nice haircuts, their polite conversation, their well-ironed shirts, their confident worldly air, and their banter about stocks and shares and people and things I had no inkling about. They were all in fact employees of Bank of America, I discovered later, and the apartment was company accommodation, where they all lived. There being a plethora of rooms, she was camping in one of them, and WITH one of them as well? I must have been a very sore thumb in that company, with nothing to contribute to the conversation. I wanted to be alone with her, something she didn’t seem to reciprocate, and after a while my ardour was completely deflated by her pointed enquiry whether I was in Bombay for the weekend—the question put so obviously to establish that I was no one special, that all I could do was mumble a reply, feeling like I was swallowing a bag full of pointed screws. I got up to leave, she didn’t stop me. I said my goodbyes, determined to return to Pune right away, I saw no point in staying. Outside the door as I was leaving she made me promise to come and meet her the next day, she would be free in the morning and she had something to tell me. Of course I immediately scrapped the plan of returning to Pune that night.
Next stop Colaba Causeway and Stiffles Hotel, the hippie hangout in those days, to score myself a tab of acid and survive till morning which, when it came, found my head still buzzing with paranoid visions. I picked up my bag and the two Pochampalli saris I’d brought for her from Hyderabad, and arrived once again at that forbidding doorstep. No one else was present, the other occupants presumably being at work. The opulence I had been so impressed by the night before now felt stifling. In the two or so jaw-clenching hours we spent together and during which I kept hallucinating looking at the curtains in the room, she didn’t once enquire about the film I had just done, or about the Institute but explained at length that she now wanted to marry and raise a family. I was in no position, she reiterated, to give her the life she desired and she couldn’t wait for things to improve for me. I agreed that I had no idea how long that might take. She was approaching her thirties, was concerned she would soon be past childbearing age, and was very keen on having children. She confirmed my suspicion that she had in fact met someone else with whom she reckoned it could go the distance. I listened, having to strongly hold back a totally unreasonable but irresistible urge to laugh, gave her the saris which she reluctantly accepted, and in a catatonic state caught a taxi back to Pune. I resolved I would never see her again though she had declared with certainty that she still considered me her dearest friend and if ever I needed anything... blah blah blah.
I managed to circumvent getting completely bogged down because when I got back to Pune there were more pressing matters to attend to: I had to act in my acting course short film and then find digs for myself in Bombay. There were about two months remaining before the Institute would no longer be home to us. In the interim, the diploma films had been shot and I was not in any of them. No skin off my nose, though, as I would soon have an entire feature film as my portfolio. Shyam was good enough to offer to come to Pune and direct the film which four of us had been allotted. He and Shama cobbled together a rather unfunny screenplay based on an Ismat Chughtai story. He shot, dubbed and edited it in three days flat.
Jaspal had already managed a room for himself in Bombay. Actors looking for accommodation in Bombay those days found it difficult to secure any, and for many good reasons: the unreliability of the profession, delays in paying the rent, odd hours, disreputable friends, noisy parties and women in their lives. Jaspal had therefore invented an alternative profession for himself—teacher in a municipal school—and secured paying guest accommodation, sharing with ‘Paddy’ A. M. Padmanabhan, a graduate in sound engineering passing off as an engineer. I decided I would be a journalist and Om who joined us later would run a small business manufacturing plastic toys. Dissembling thus, we all managed to find shelter over our heads in this mother of all cities. Now all we had to do was become movie stars.
To that end we decided to see some of the kind of films we should shortly be starring in and I decided to start with Sholay, then in its second week. I can confirm first-hand the many apocryphal stories of this film meeting with jeering and catcalls in its initial weeks. The nearest theatre showing it was the Ambar-Oscar complex in Andheri. Jaspal and I got delayed, bought tickets at the window, an achievement not many can claim, and entered a half-empty theatre. We missed the first scene or two and the ones that followed seemed to conform strictly to the abysmal pattern of so-called Indian action movies. The guns no doubt were real and the clothes the two heroes and the villain wore didn’t look as if they had just been laundered; some of the one-liners had the zinging wit one encounters not infrequently in UP. But I could identify the source of almost every single scene—not only Spaghetti Westerns this time but blithe borrowings from Hollywood classics as well, even Mr Chaplin was not spared. The action scenes were competent but by no means breathtaking, I had seen stunts of surpassing excellence in many a second-grade Hollywood Western.
Now of course much is made of the impact of this ‘cinematic masterpiece’, books are written about it, there are sociological studies about it and deep meanings are being read into how it and other equally shallow films reflected the ‘mood of the times’. The mood of the times in that case must have been to greatly appreciate things that aspired Hollywoodwards. What someone should research is what it was that caused this failure to become the most successful Hindi movie of all time. The cost of its making and the pre-release hype were both unprecedented at that time and the poor initial reception it got obviously sent tremors through the industry; there was so much riding on it they couldn’t afford to let it fail. A convenient scapegoat was found: the newcomer who had played Gabbar Singh the dacoit, in a manner the audiences were unfamiliar with. Apparently the writers had wanted another actor who was not available, so overriding their protests the director cast the then unknown Amjad Khan, who was blessed with enough confidence to fill a room by himself. I believe it was Amjad bhai’s contribution, and his gargantuan personality, that helped shape the character as it finally appeared on screen. I thought he was absolutely marvellous and yet the entire industry was holding him to blame: his girth, his voice, all came in for
flak.
It is supremely ironic that even today just the name of the film immediately evokes the reaction ‘Gabbar Singh!’, probably followed by ‘Kitne aadmi thhe?’ in almost anyone, but that day I saw with my own eyes the rejection by an audience of an effective actor in a movie because he was upstaging the ones they identified with. His later applause-inducing non sequiturs (‘claptrap dialogue’ in Hindi cinema parlance) were that day being greeted with stony silence or hostile rejection by the majority of the Dharmendra/Bachchan fan club present. It took a week or two for the audiences to cotton on to the fact that, hey, they had been rooting for the wrong guys all along. Gabbar was their man. And as if to atone for this judgemental lapse they went overboard in their worship of this new god. Gabbar Singh, though modelled closely on a couple of Sergio Leone villains, was suddenly hailed as ‘the first of his kind’ and the theatres running the movie began packing them in (with some ‘feeding’ by the producers, I daresay), and continued to do so, one actually for two years. With time the film’s other virtues—the cinematography, the songs, the cool attitude of the heroes, the sharp dialogue—started becoming apparent and it seemed to become a habit with the audience to see the film every few weeks, there was so much bang for the buck in it, they realized.
And Then One Day: A Memoir Page 18