And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  Ramesh Konar, a Bachchan devotee who came into my household first to cook for me, then graduated to driver, then to Jeeves and has been a devoted family member for four decades now hated it at first, but being pressured by friends saw it again. Knowing what to expect this time he liked it a little and, deciding to give it one more chance, took some friends along for a third viewing and loved it this time. He has probably seen it more than once since, as have I in fact, and my initial opinion about it is still unchanged. While I do not dismiss for a moment the effort and time that went into it, I bristle every time it is included among the great Indian movies. Popular Hindi cinema is like a huge meal in which there is such a variety of food that the audience cannot and must not be able to devour every dish at one go, they must come back to taste what they missed out or couldn’t fully savour the last time. That I suppose is what makes people see the same movie over and over again, even though the first time they saw it they knew exactly what would happen next and even though they may not even have liked it. And that, I suppose is what makes a hit.

  Very soon after, I went looking for Dubeyji, never for a moment suspecting that meeting him was to result in the most serendipitous happening of my life. I needed to work and he was sure to be producing some play or other—he always was—and I thought I might land a part. I found out he would be at St Columba School in South Bombay, reading a new play. I immediately went to this address, for many years a rehearsal haven for Dubeyji and other practitioners of experimental Hindi and Marathi theatre, to learn he was not in town. But I did bump into Amol Palekar who was then on an upward trajectory to major stardom. Amol said he had heard complimentary things about me, and he probably meant Dubeyji who was not due to turn up that day. I wrote him a note, and asked Amol to give it to him. I was also informed that Dubeyji these days rehearsed in Bandra in the lobby of the Balgandharva Rangmandir, a monstrously huge, seldom used open-air auditorium (now razed, but immortalized on film in Waqt and my own Jaane bhi do Yaaron). The place was a stone’s throw from Pamposh, my haunt of ten years ago, and I was on my way there the next day when Dubeyji spotted me and treated me to a cold sugarcane juice at a roadside stall very near a bus stop outside National College where I had once spent a few nights years ago. He hadn’t got my note but was in fact starting on a play he himself had written, called Sambhog se Sanyas Tak, translating roughly as ‘From Fornication to Salvation’, and there was a part in it for me.

  This news was going down extremely well with the sugarcane juice when, to brighten my day further, a striking-looking girl who henceforth I could not keep my eyes off came up to Dubeyji and handed him a note, informing him it was ‘from Amol Palekar’. It was the note I had written for Dubeyji! I took to her the moment I saw her, and really felt I’d like to get to know her. I even at once considered the possibility of spending my life with her, though after all these years she still refuses to believe that, but I did and it seemed like a jolly good idea, being on the rebound be damned. We had not yet spoken to each other and I knew nothing about her but somehow I felt certain that she was my kind of person. She looked flushed with the heat just then and her flawless complexion seemed to glow. I found her absolutely delicious. Dubeyji who had just had all his teeth surgically removed introduced us; his clarity of speech not being at its best she misheard my name as Shivendra Sinha, then a serious film-maker of some repute. My beard having grown back, I daresay I was once again looking like anything but an actor, an art-film maker possibly. I only later discovered her name was Ratna and she was the daughter of the formidable Dina Pathak, once a huge star on the Gujarati stage and screen and now a much-loved elder in Hindi movies.

  Ratna was playing the central part in the play, an apsara who while doing whatever apsaras do in heaven, is unfaithful to her husband (me). Sparks and curses fly back and forth and after being reborn on earth we are now labouring under the weight of our own lives, she as maid to a sex-starved princess and I as a poetry-spouting misogynist lout. I can only dimly recall what else happens in this abstruse nonsense but the plot was secondary to Dubeyji’s chief intention in writing and staging it: to deliver overwrought arguments against conventional moralities and air his pet obsessions— rebirth syndrome, reversal of sexual roles, woman fated to be abandoned, hopeless man-woman-man-woman-man daisy- chain, confusion of identities, sexual freedom. And there were two recurring motifs, the menstrual cycle and women writhing on the floor, in every play Dubey wrote and many he directed.

  Shishir Sharma and Sunil Shanbag, two close friends of Ratna’s, were also in the cast along with a whole lot of very pretty girls. Jaspal also after a while was cast in it and ended up doing a marvellous comic turn as the mad king. It was stimulating to have found something apart from moping and dreaming to do right away. The second half of every day was thus taken care of. I in any case had no intentions of making the rounds of producers’ offices seeking work. I knew that the only way work would generate itself would be if I grabbed every opportunity I got and wrung it out till it screamed for mercy. Work would come only if I could demonstrably deliver the goods. If I couldn’t, even being the son of the biggest gun in Bombay wouldn’t help.

  Sambhog se Sanyas Tak was being produced by the IPTA, by now a rather strait-laced company, its revolutionary fervour a thing of the past. In a fit of misguided philanthropy the IPTA people had entrusted Dubeyji with directing a play of his choice for them; he promised them a comedy and came up with this wicked parody of one. The scenes were set in forests or palaces or the netherworld or nowhere, the characters often just seemed to be there for the heck of it, and try as I might, all my efforts at empathizing with the part came to naught during the rehearsals of this play. If the scene was set in Heaven, it didn’t do much good trying to imagine the geography of the place or where I was coming from or where I was going. There wasn’t even any sort of intention this character had apart from just not wanting the woman. He could not be made believable by delving into what he had for breakfast and so forth.

  Dubey enjoyed knocking my ideas of ‘truthful acting’ and advised me to find a voice and a walk for the character instead of trying to ‘become’ him. Caught between two half- digested techniques of acting, I floundered badly in this role, trying to bring believability to something that was patently a fairy tale. It took me many more years, and many more unsuccessful performances, before the very limiting nature of ‘realistic acting’ began to sink in. But at that point in time I had burnt most of my bridges with the NSD kind of acting and rebuilding them was a tough task I am still engaged in.

  When this ‘comedy’ with its muddled sexual identities, a magical sex-changing pill, nubile maidens aching for sex, lusty men slavering for the same, heavenly apsaras reincarnated as humans, duelling nobles, a princess with a raging desire to lose her virginity, a king driven insane by satyriasis, a ghost guarding the virtue of the maidens and characters humping each other all over the place offstage of course, was finally staged, it was watched in apoplectic silence by the IPTA elders who, after staying in shock for a few days, promptly pulled the plug. Dubeyji, undeterred, took the production into his Theatre Unit stable and continued to perform it sporadically for a while, sometimes touring with it and reviving it much later with younger sets of actors whenever he was at a loss for something to stage. Ratna and I were thus able to stay in touch at that time and further our friendship. I had found a haven to cadge free meals from and I was introduced to the joys of pure vegetarian food.

  Nishant was being dubbed when Shyam asked if I knew an actor who could voice Sadhu Meher, who was not available and who in any case had delivered a sub-par performance this time. I suggested Jaspal and he, no surprise but to his credit and to Shyam’s great delight, brought an indifferent performance alive. Another thing I pride myself on, apart from my acting in the film, is the sound effects creatively and dutifully executed by Kulbhushan and myself. We’d sit at the microphone surrounded by small blocks of different surfaces and using various shoes and sandals would synchr
onically dub the sound of the various characters’ footsteps—for bare feet we used our palms. Other instruments in our little orchestra were buckets empty and full, mugs, pots, plates, pans, spoons, cups, saucers, glasses, bottles, bangles, yards of cloth—every conceivable thing that would match the incidental sounds in the movie. We got paid a little extra for this job, it being above and beyond the call of duty, and it gave the sound effects firm of Kharbanda/Shah extra employment all the way till Shyam’s sixth film, Junoon; by which time, having become somewhat well known (as actors not foley artists), both of us proved to be more of a distraction. But with our expert help Nishant was finally mixed and ready to release in September of that year, a month away. Even though Shabana Azmi in one of her moments of generosity had predicted that I would ‘surely become a star after this film’, I wasn’t about to wager any money on that possibility. I had performed as well as I possibly could but knew only too well that this film world of Bombay had ever appreciated truth less than artifice. I wondered what kind of roles would come my way, looking as I did in the film.

  As it happened, after its release I received not a single offer of work despite my performance being good and the film doing reasonable business at the box office. Every actor in the film, except yours truly, emerged with reputation enhanced and further employment gained. Shabana, already a star, reinforced her standing as a powerhouse performer, Smita was acclaimed the discovery of the decade, Amrish with his menacing mien and beautifully toned physique started making big money as the heavy in popular films, as did Girish who went on to play the lead in many he has now probably forgotten. Kulbhushan, Mohan Agashe, even Savita Bajaj all subsequently got cast in featured parts, but the only thing that came my way was a handful of glowing reviews. I can’t say I had anticipated being deluged with offers but getting absolutely nothing was hard to take. The only money I made in the next year was for acting in a commercial, never seen, for a product (Gulab agarbatti) which in real life I hadn’t ever and still haven’t encountered, and in the shooting of which I greatly regretted not having attended the playback classes at FTII; and a comic one for Britannia Delite biscuits which ran very successfully in theatres for a couple of years, making me an object of great amusement when travelling by bus or local train. The earnings from these at least guaranteed two meals a day for a while because I had by now spent whatever remained of my Nishant earnings on a pretty humiliating haemorrhoid surgery I had needed for some time.

  Ashok Ahuja, then in the final year of the direction course and preparing to make his diploma film, asked me if I would act in it. I had appeared in every one of Ashok’s films made at FTII, and thought it fitting that if at all I did a diploma film it should be his. Besides, I was bowled over by the concept: two days in the life of an employment-seeking youth, in which, after meeting the girl he loves, he appears for an interview which is not shown, nor its outcome known when he phones the girl and asks her to marry him. She delightedly enquires if that means he has got the job. He replies he doesn’t know but wants an answer to his question now. The film ends indeterminately, leaving the rest of the conversation and resultantly the relationship ambiguous, a common escape route for FTII direction students who seldom got down and dirty when it came to dealing with relationships. Instead of seeing people as people they tended to see them only as symbols of something (usually pretty arcane) that they were trying to convey. All they should have been doing was getting the nuts and bolts of film-making right, but instead they were hell-bent on making films of cosmic significance and conveniently resorting to ambiguity or abstraction when what was required was representation in truthful human terms. Ashok’s film, called The Proposal, also suffered massively from this flaw but for the most obvious reasons I felt drawn to the story and I had always greatly enjoyed working with Ashok, so I went back to FTII for a week to act in my only diploma film.

  The heavy-duty Mitchell movie cameras of those days were far from silent and every grain of the ‘whirr’ seemed to me to be costing money. As a student actor facing one of them, the sound would stiffen and immobilize my sinews. No live audience has ever had the effect on me that the sound of that camera had. Today’s generation, whose every sound and action is recorded from the time of their birth, and for whom the camera is part of the family, will find it hard to understand how just being photographed was such a big deal for us but it was, and for me in particular, desperate as I was to see what I really looked like, a curiosity that was not stilled till I saw my screen test for admission to FTII. Getting a picture taken when we were children was an event: everyone dressed up and posed stiffly, there was the delicious wait for the negatives to develop and then the bliss of seeing the pictures. Baba had a Kodak Brownie box camera he never used. The time I shelved my cricket dreams also coincided with Sport & Pastime folding up, so I started spending my pocket money on film rolls instead. Babar Mamu was an avid amateur photographer and had an Asahi Pentax 35mm camera which I was sometimes allowed to use after he had explained the principles of exposure and shutter speed, but I found the good old Brownie fascinating. It worked on the periscopic principle and you could see the subject being photographed, upside down on two little viewfinders on the sides, it only had to be aimed and clicked. The results, including one I took of myself in a mirror, would turn out really good but every botched picture was so much money down the drain, so film stock for me had always been synonymous with my life’s entire fortune. This feeling had not left me through the shooting of whatever films I had done professionally either. I just had to crack this paradox actors face, of being simultaneously totally oblivious and completely aware of the observers; the observer in film work being the camera.

  Before shooting Nishant Shyam had given me the most valuable piece of advice regarding film acting I have ever received: ‘The camera is the eye of everyone watching the film, ‘ he had said while explaining to me that it was essential to connect with the camera in the same way as one connects with a live audience. My terror of that camera sound, even after doing an entire feature film, had diluted but not disappeared, I discovered, when we started shooting Ashok’s film at the Institute and the old anxiety about wasted footage started returning. Perhaps shooting on the same floor where the camera sound had given me such nightmares in the past provoked this Pavlovian response, but it bothered me that this should happen; the camera and I would have to coexist for the rest of my life, and I couldn’t afford to stay thus terror- stricken. The last three days of the shoot were to be in one of the rooms in the hostel, not my old room but the one where I had been temporarily lodged. On the second day, we shot late into the night and when the unit wrapped up they decided to just leave the camera where it was, as we were to continue the scene early the next morning. I didn’t notice the camera was pointing straight at the bed when I lay down to sleep, and being roused by one of those mid-sleep bladder protests I found myself nose to nose with Mr Mitchell who had been silently watching over me while I slept. I went back to sleep feeling comforted and not alone. In the morning when I woke up old Mitch and I were the best of friends and have stayed so; the still camera I continue to have problems with.

  Just before Nishant premiered I got in touch with R and, not only for sentimental reasons but also wishing she should witness my day of glory asked her to attend it with me. I fished out and ironed the old suit, by now about as shiny with age as my polished cowboy boots. Dubeyji gallantly escorted Ratna and all the girls in the play to the premiere as well but our paths didn’t cross that evening. R was really ill at ease by the time we got to Liberty cinema; matters were not helped by the blowout we’d had on the way, and she drifted away from me when we spotted the solitary photographer recording the event even though he didn’t even know who I was and didn’t bother photographing us. She either couldn’t stomach my getting more attention than her or, because she also declined to be introduced to any of the team, she didn’t want it to appear as if we were together. I was too high on what was about to happen to feel upset that she cou
ldn’t put such piffling considerations aside and share my happiness. I think I didn’t really care for her any longer, I was just vindictively determined to prove my point and savour my victory. We watched the film; she said she liked my performance and the movie, but her hackles started rising again when after the show I got separated from her for a minute or two, being held back by the few people who had recognized me, even though now with a bushy beard I looked nothing like the character I had played. I wanted to hang around and gloat but she was in a desperate hurry to leave, so I didn’t attend the after-celebration and dropped her to where she was staying. I did not look back as the taxi pulled away, and have never looked back at that relationship again. It was finally over, I was still alive, I had a future that didn’t look at all bleak any more. I was not feeling quite as shell-shocked as the earlier time I had visited that place.

  I had no further contact with her except for receiving an invitation to her wedding, which I did not attend; and we didn’t in fact see each other again till the shooting of the film Masoom in Delhi many years later. She was by then happily married to one of the nice young men I had met that nightmarish evening at the bankers’ residence and had two little daughters.

  The churning

  After the Nishant release I spent most of the time licking my various wounds so to say, including the most recent one of being rejected as newsreader in both Hindi and English on Doordarshan, where Smita who had made something of a name for herself in Marathi suggested I audition. Shishir and Sunil, both then living with their parents at walking distance from my pad, often generously welcomed me into their homes. I give thanks very often for the times such undemanding friendships and unselfish affection have come my way as with these two, and earlier with KC and Pearly in Sem, then with Asif and Jasdev in Aligarh.