And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  There was a ‘no girlfriends visiting’ rule in Martinville which Mrs Martin, the near-sighted and friendly landlady, did not rigorously enforce in my case—my picture had appeared in a couple of magazines, her niece had happened to see Nishant, and by now I had been classified as ‘a decent boy’ so I was not chastised about having deceived her by posing as a journalist nor was I asked to leave. Old Mrs Martin was actually quite thrilled that she now knew a film actor in real life and I got somewhat special treatment after that. Ratna and I met every day either at her place or mine, depending on whether her parents were home or not. Tika would tactfully disappear when she arrived, usually around lunchtime, straight from college, and we would then just hang around together. I loved going to the movies, she didn’t mind. She loved going to art galleries, I hated it but would tag along. She loved wandering around and looking at things in shops while I talked to her incessantly mostly about acting and about my past, which took a while to relate in full. She made me feel great, listening intently, already sharing my enthusiasm for cinema and theatre and later learning to tolerate my love for tennis and cricket as well. She wasn’t quite as obsessed with acting as I was, but wanted to be an actor and was pretty good too, her clarity of voice and her diction were particularly impressive. I had always found her terribly attractive and now a deeper friendship, a mutual admiration and fondness, began to grow. Despite Dina’s vociferous objections, and the more subdued ones of her father Baldev, pretty soon we both knew for certain that we wished to spend the rest of our lives together. One evening at Juhu beach when she and I had strolled off, much to the consternation of Shishir and Sunil who feared we might have been mugged, I asked her if she would marry me when it was feasible to do so and she accepted without a moment’s hesitation. I wonder if she was brave or foolhardy: I had no work, very little money, not many prospects, nothing even dimly on the horizon and she agreed to share my life. That faith was one of the major battery-chargers through the stress and uncertainty of the extremely fallow succeeding year or two in which, though big-league players like Manoj Kumar, Yash Chopra, Javed Akhtar called me to meet them, I again received no offer of solid work.

  During all this time Ratna had been fighting off her parents to keep the relationship going; and even though we had by now reached the stage of ferocious arguments neither of us, I am pretty sure, even once considered severing ties. With no inkling of what the future had in store, we were both at the moment happy enough to have found our ‘missing halves’. After trying for a while to wean me off my hashish habit she realized it was hardly a threat to her and gave up. Dina’s problem with my smoking though continued right to the end; her nose would scrunch up almost on its own accord and her first reflex was ‘something is burning’ every time I lit up. I tried many times to persuade her to have a puff or two, arguing it would make her less uptight, and I was only half- joking.

  Ratna’s home had a television set and so I got the perfect excuse to spend all my time there if a Test match or Wimbledon was on; those were the days of the two-channel black-and- white Doordarshan in India, on which a Wimbledon final was once stopped near match point for a telecast of ‘Parliament News’. She shared my fascination for Borg and McEnroe but could not quite comprehend what could be so engrossing about every single delivery in a five-day cricket match. She had never played the game, so I couldn’t explain, but to her credit she tolerated my cricket mania and would watch with me most of the time. Even though I could never successfully explain to her the difference between off and leg, she eventually developed an interest in the game, maybe because of the Pakistani hunks or maybe because, years later, she saw me help my sons with their addition, multiplication and division sums, not to mention averages and percentages (rest in peace Miss Perry) using cricket scores.

  But at that time, college was ending in a few months for her and she had to decide what to do—marriage for us was still very far away, the resident rodent in the poorest church had more put away than I had, and she didn’t fancy acting in the Gujarati theatre or commercial Hindi cinema. Her dad’s stylish tailoring establishment ‘Shriman’ which had once catered to the biggest stars had fallen from favour, there was no point trying to run that, and in any case she was keener on theatre than on designing men’s clothing. She began to consider the possibility of going to study at NSD and so we thought we would fatten her résumé by attempting some plays on our own.

  There were two problems with that though: we had no director and nowhere to perform. Though there were many Western plays that I hoped to do in the future, nearly all of them were impossible to attempt at that point, so we decided to start small. Prithvi Theatre would take another five years to come into our lives, and the NCPA’s sixty-seater Little Theatre was rarely made available to beginners. The only venue that the ‘un-commercial’ Hindi and Marathi theatre workers could afford was located in a very downmarket middle-class Marathi-medium school Chhabildas, tucked away in one of the by-lanes that snake around all sides of Dadar station. Persuaded by the wonderfully persistent theatre couple Sulabha and Arvind Deshpande, the management of this school agreed to grant use of the school hall to theatre companies to perform in, charging a rent so minimal it was practically a gift. The Deshpandes were convinced there was an audience for serious theatre in that area and pioneered the crazy scheme of performing there with their company Aavishkar helmed by the indefatigable Arun Kakde kaka. Dubeyji quickly joined forces with them, as did some others, and for almost two decades Chhabildas enjoyed, among the vernacular intelligentsia, a smallish cult status as the haven of experimental theatre in Marathi and Hindi. Audiences were small and losses were invariably incurred at every show but the few intrepid souls who had made Chhabildas’s reputation persevered until Arvind suddenly passed away, Dubeyji started exploring newer venues and many of the actors and directors who had worked there had to move on when the school management decided it was more profitable to let the hall out for wedding receptions.

  No one had attempted an English play at Chhabildas, there was no audience for English in that neighbourhood we were told, so though even that venue seemed closed to us we decided to go ahead and perform there. It was the only place we could afford and I somewhat neatly resolved the ‘director’ dilemma by deciding on two pieces I had done before, Ionesco’s The Lesson which, not knowing French, I had been itching to do in English; and a stunning 10-minute piece by Jorge Diaz on US war atrocities, called Man Does Not Die by Bread Alone. I directed the latter and Ketan Mehta directed The Lesson. The show, with Ratna as the Pupil, opened in a hall at the Alliance Franfaise, courtesy Asha Kasbekar, who played the maid, then did more than one performance at Chhabildas, sometimes with audiences of ten or twelve. We later went on to revive Zoo Story and staged it with Chekhov’s The Bear, again two pieces I had done before—I was obviously dying to show off. The performances happened in all sorts of places apart from Chhabildas: in the open air at various institutes, in hotels, in friends’ drawing rooms or terraces, once even on a badminton court. All this time I cadged as many meals as I could at Ratna’s home. Babi bai, her cook, had taken to me when I first met her and by now had made it her responsibility to stuff me thoroughly every time I ate there. Things seemed to be glancing upwards ever so slightly at last. Dina who had been dialect consultant on the dubbing of Manthan, and who despite herself was impressed with my work, had begun to tolerate my presence, Baldev was seldom home and Shyam Benegal’s next film, a biopic on the Marathi star Hansa Wadkar, had taken shape and I had been told I would be featuring in it.

  Of admen and film-makers

  I hadn’t ever heard of Hansa Wadkar who was in her prime i n the forties. The only Maharashtrian actors I knew were those who had worked in Hindi cinema as well. Shyam, greatly obsessed with the idea of filming Wadkar’s life, often talked of it as his dream project. His reputation as an auteur whose films also made money was now firm, and Manthan, when finally released commercially, further consolidated his standing as one of India’s most exc
iting film-makers so he had no trouble at all raising funds for this somewhat ambitious and not really ‘saleable’ project set in the film world of the forties.

  A superstition still exists in the film industry that films about films do not run, just as there was the equally absurd notion that films on cricket do not run, though until Lagaan no one who knew anything about the game had bothered to make a film about it. Films about films still do not run. I will leave you to ponder the question why. What was particularly admired about Shyam was his handling of actors, so the project even in its nascent stage aroused great curiosity in the acting fraternity; and the question of who would play the tour-deforce central part must surely have created many swirls of anxiety, even though Shyam had long since decided upon Smita. I was to play a film-maker who seduces and abandons the lady, a brief part requiring just a week’s work, and I would be paid more than I had ever been paid before!

  Bhumika was produced by Blaze, the company that had made big profits and an even bigger reputation backing Shyam’s first two films, so this time round he was not as strapped as he used to be, and to compensate for the small payments we’d received on Manthan was extremely generous. All the stalwarts of Shyam’s stable were to be there: Amrish, Kulbhushan, Mohan Agashe, Anant Nag, along with prize catch Amol Palekar who had graduated to stardom much before any of the others. It was a heavyweight cast, and for trivia-lovers the film also features Om Puri under heavy make-up in a tiny part, his very first in cinema. Happy as I was at the prospect of more work and more earning, I was not overly thrilled about this film. I don’t think there’s been a single film made on Indian movies which rings true. They are all either determinedly arcane or thickly sugar-coated, and most of them end up pandering to the industry’s own self-congratulatory image of itself. If a truthful, cutting-edge film were to be made about the Indian film industry it would out-Fellini Fellini. But I daresay it is futile hoping for that to happen.

  Shyam’s office in Jyoti Studios at Grant Road was a place I had by now visited several times. It was the very studio where the first Indian talkie Alam Ara was filmed, though the Shooting Lot was now decrepit and almost never used. Half its compound housed a car-repair garage but the place was redolent with history. I loved it. Actors I had seen in fleeting parts would drift by, there was evidence everywhere of an age long gone; the chairs had accommodated a thousand bums, the equipment looked like it should be in a museum, the architecture of the place, the decor, the banisters, the worn wooden steps, had been neither maintained nor replaced. A myriad ghosts hid in the nooks and crannies of the editing rooms. If I remember right the first scene of Bhumika was shot in this studio, at least my first scene was. Smita and I, having just been mutually smitten in a Holi celebration, go roaring out of the studio, doubling as a studio, in an antique Bugatti Thunderbird.

  Shyam’s only instruction to me for this part was that I should ‘look dapper and cool’ so to that end I had neatly trimmed my beard, which he approved of, then added a pair of rimless glasses and a crisp kurta-pyjama outfit. The effect was not un-dapper except that my driving skills not being the best I looked anything but cool as we zigzagged off in a cloud of dust, leaving the Parsi owner of the car in real life looking mighty worried. Luckily my expression of terror at the prospect of totaling an obviously very expensive antique car does not quite register. Except for a couple of steamy scenes with the gorgeous Smita and the perk of having Shyam take Kulbhushan and myself along for the schedule in Goa even though neither of us was required, I didn’t enjoy acting in this film too much. And soon enough something, apart from having to be rescued by Rekha Sabnis from an air mattress that had drifted too far into the sea at the deserted Anjuna Beach, was to happen that would further mess up my head.

  I had finally been able to afford a room to myself just across the road from Martinville in an apartment owned by a Mrs Remedios, a large and formidable-looking lady until you noticed the merry look in her eyes. She too initially laid down the no-girlfriends rule, then met Ratna, got bowled over and the rule was amended to ‘okay, but no locking the door hunh?’ Jaspal, Paddy, Tika and Om were still staying at Martinville.

  About a hundred metres from the front ofKhar West station was a little place called Sindh Punjab Dhaba where all of us often ate dinner. It was a reasonably priced eatery where dal was served free if you ordered another dish, usually vegetarian, and chapattis. A totally satisfying meal in Sindh Punjab cost about four rupees, a sumptuous one cost a little more and the taste of the food belied the ridiculously low pricing.

  While the Bhumika shooting was on, Om and I were in the middle of dinner when Jaspal, whom I had kept well away from for some time now, also entered and greeted Om. We ignored each other but, eyes fixed on me, he passed to sit at another table behind me, so I thought. I was by now accustomed to this menacing attitude and muttered threats every time I was anywhere around and continued eating. After a while I was reminded of his presence by what felt like a short sharp punch in the middle of my back. I started to rise, wearily preparing myself for another free-for-all. Before I could move, Om, with a strangled cry, lunged at something behind me. I turned to see Jaspal holding a small knife, its point dripping blood, his hand raised to strike again, and Om and two others grappling to subdue him. The strength suddenly seemed to leave my legs but a desperate attempt to get out of range caused me to lurch forward, upsetting the table, sending plates and their contents flying. On the floor I was aware of feet running past, shouting, and sounds of violence behind. Someone was helping me to my feet as I heard the manager of the place telephonically informing the police that there had been a fight and one man had been stabbed. Om returned to inform me that Jaspal had been taken to the kitchen and was being given the treatment. He wanted to take me to a doctor, but was thwarted by the restaurant staff refusing to let us move till the police arrived. A sizeable crowd had collected by now, the muscles in my back were beginning to go into spasm, blood was soaking my shirt-back and had begun its progress down my trouser seat. I was breathless and desperately thirsty, I wanted to lie down but Om didn’t think that a good idea, and the gaping crowd had gotten thicker.

  Two constables on a bicycle stopped and after making some off-hand enquiries one of them escorted Jaspal away in a taxi. I wonder if that cabbie ever got paid. These cops in any case had gotten unwittingly co-opted—they were not responding to the phone call, they seemed to just be passing by, and pretty soon a Black Maria carrying a whole posse with its siren at full blast came screeching around the corner, making the crowd disappear like smoke. The constabulary swarming out of the van hungry for action, nightsticks at the ready, were somewhat deflated when pointed in my direction: one injured guy sitting there looking pretty helpless. Before anyone could explain anything to them I was hauled up by my scruff, a hard hand or two landing on the back of my head along with admonitions about fighting in the street; the morals of my sister and mother were questioned and I was not exactly kicked into the van but just about. Om made the cardinal error of climbing in as well without permission and managed to rile the boss-man there by asking the cops to be gentle with me. He was ordered to get off and after considerable pleading with the goon in charge was allowed to stay. Neither of us had any idea where we were headed but I prayed it was not to the police station. The bleeding hadn’t ceased, the pain was getting intense and these cops obviously hadn’t quite understood the situation. After a few cursory questions to us and some garbled transmissions over the radio in Marathi, we arrived at Cooper Hospital in Juhu, by which time all those present had been apprised of what had happened and I was not unsympathetically helped by the cops to alight, finally laid on a stretcher and taken in to be stitched up. It has taken years for my visceral hatred of the khaki uniform to subside.

  I was supposed to shoot in the morning so obviously Shyam had to be the first to be informed. It was almost midnight and I didn’t know if it was possible for Om to take the liberty of calling his residence at that time, so Govind Nihalani who liv
ed nearby was asked to tell Shyam the news and also to lend me a shirt. Sunil Shanbag informed Ratna and the whole lot turned up early next morning, with Shyam deciding I should shift to Jaslok Hospital at his expense. The shoot naturally was suspended for a while.

  While recuperating I learnt that Jaspal, after spending two nights in custody, had been bailed out by Saeed Mirza in whose film Arvind Desai he had replaced me when I was unable to find the time for it. Saeed had always been hugely biased towards Jaspal since our FTII days and was now sheltering him in his own home; I hoped he knew what he was doing. After a luxurious three days, my first stay in a five- star hospital, Nira and Shyam took me to their home, where I was tended to by these foster parents.

  I wasn’t famous enough for the news to make it to the papers and there was no relentless TV coverage of every fart, burp and nose-pick by actors, so Baba who I think quite enjoyed having more things to worry about, didn’t get wind of the incident and he and Ammi were spared this time. It was a day after I moved back to my pad in New Light building on SV Road that the full impact of what had occurred began to sink in. The sonofabitch had tried to kill me and I suppose I should thank my guardian angel yet again that Om had been there and that Jaspal didn’t know a thing about handling a knife. If he had, he would have gone for my throat from behind; as it happened the knife entered an inch into what are probably the most resilient muscles in the back, and the X-rays showed it had missed my spine by a whisker.