And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  I was dozing one afternoon when the doorbell rang. Opening the door to find Jaspal standing there with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes I froze, too scared to do or say anything. He entered, stretched out his hand to shake, helped himself to a cigarette and made himself comfortable as I stood there gaping. He didn’t enquire after my well-being, nor did he make an apologetic sound. Instead, with a slightly hysterical chuckle he explained that what had happened was ‘nothing personal’ (he had earlier been deeply affected by Al Pacino’s Godfather performance), ‘it’s a class war, Saeed has explained it all to me’. Saeed Mirza had always been the high priest of Marxism at FTII; ‘Marx-Pravachans’ as they were cynically called regularly took place in his room there, and though I was not actually surprised at Saeed holding this opinion, it could easily have been an invention of Jaspal’s fevered brain as well. An extremely tense five or ten minutes followed, during which I kept standing at the ready in case he went for me again, though I would have been far from able to defend myself. Eventually, when I asked him to leave, he seemed genuinely astonished but didn’t protest and got up mumbling something about ‘no need to still be angry yaar, I haven’t been well’, before I shut the door in his face and continued to hear him calling out from the window for a while before he left. A week or so later we met again at the petty-crimes court, I did not press charges and the judge declared the matter closed as Jaspal stood grinning in the dock.

  The shooting of Bhumika was barely done when Girish Karnad turned up in town, invited Om and me to breakfast at the Sun ‘n’ Sand Hotel and told us he was casting us both in a film he was planning to make in Bangalore. Based on the celebrated novel Tabbaliyu Neenade Magane by S. L. Bhyrappa, it was to be in both Kannada and Hindi, with the two of us in the Hindi version. I was to play a pedantic Brahmin priest and Girish asked if for the part I would shave my head to which I instantly agreed, and if I could put on a bit of a paunch which proved an utter impossibility. Bajju bhai too was to be closely involved in the Hindi version as an adviser.

  Manthan was about to be released and Ratna and I were seeing each other daily. She had been around all the time I was recuperating from the stab, and her parents started getting seriously worried that things were getting out of hand. It was time for them to take action and make her lose this drug- addled mongrel she was becoming increasingly fond of and for whom, on the odd occasion, she had even defied them. A plan was hatched to send her to London, ostensibly as reward for having successfully graduated from university but actually to get her out of my clutches and in the hope that she might develop some interest in a good Wembley-based Gujarati boy. Turned out her visit to London was to coincide exactly with my shoot in Bangalore, so off she went to England’s freezing winter while I made my way, now with complete assurance by air, to Bangalore and thence to Mahimapura, a village just off the Mysore highway, to act in my fourth film. After spending two days in a hotel in Bangalore (the encounter with the three fearsome snorers together occurred here) and having my head shaved, we were driving to the location when Girish informed me that the actor playing the priest in the Kannada version had suddenly made himself unavailable and would I do the Kannada version as well? Not knowing a word of the language I baulked but was reassured by the promise of extra payment, and this time I stayed awake many a night not because of Kulbhushan’s snoring but in trying with Bajju bhai’s help to memorize my Kannada dialogue. The Hindi version of this film Godhuli seems to have vanished without a trace but the Kannada version still exists. My pathetic pronunciation in it, however, necessitated my voice being dubbed by a Kannada- speaking actor.

  Both versions were shot simultaneously and directed by Girish and B. V. Karanth. The two, after making a couple of films in tandem, had made one each on their own and probably to affirm their commitment to each other went into this, their final effort together which in fact was Karanth’s last at filmmaking. The lead was played by Kulbhushan, cast against type as a suave ‘England return’ toting a white wife (Paula Lindsay) whose ideas prove too modern for his village; in the Kannada version the part was being played by another actor Manappa who later died tragically in a road accident. Paula and Laxmi Krishnamurthy playing the mother were also common to both versions and neither of them spoke Kannada either; but since the former had to speak only English and the latter, a deaf mute character, nothing at all, neither of these ladies had to undergo the kind of nightmares I had memorizing words I hadn’t heard before and whose meaning I barely understood. I had to resort to mnemonics to remember the lines most of the time, but I muddled through. Many years later, doing a Malayalam film and realizing that Kannada had been a cakewalk in comparison, I completely abandoned any attempt to speak it after a while and resorted to reciting numbers instead of dialogue. I had also by then somewhat lost the burning enthusiasm I had at the time of Godhuli, to believe in myself as the character, to stay in costume, to sleep on an iron cot in a tent, to be served a boiled egg for breakfast with my name in pencil on it, to be paid a pittance, but at that time it hadn’t seemed so bad.

  In fact one morning I got a reminder that my lot could actually have been much worse. After having jogged up to the temple that was our main location, I was somewhat impatiently awaiting the arrival of breakfast, when I heard a clanking, huffing sound emerging from the direction of the roughly two hundred steep and uneven stone steps leading up the hill. The sound got closer before I realized it was a spotboy, maybe sixteen years old, ascending the slope I had laboured up carrying only myself. Half a dozen chairs were piled on his head, he had a kettle of tea in one hand and some cups in the other. Though the glaring disparity between the various echelons of workers who comprise the film industry has been illustrated to me many times over in the course of forty years, it has never manifested itself in so affecting a sight as this.

  After a twenty-five-day schedule we had a fortnight’s break and returned to the city. Initially terribly self-conscious of the shaved head I took to wearing a cap, but then decided what the hell, it looked rather enigmatic. I threw away the cap and began to enjoy flaunting it. In this break I was summoned by Alyque Padamsee who, the rumours now confirmed, was planning to film Girish Karnad’s play based on the life of Mohammad bin Tughlaq, the eccentric fourteenth-century Sultan of Delhi, who assassinated his father, introduced copper currency and ended his reign in despair after unsuccessfully trying to shift his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad. Mr Padamsee had earlier produced Tughlaq in English on the Bombay stage to massive acclaim. I had seen it and had not come away impressed. Kabir Bedi played the title part and the production seemed more interested in flaunting his oily beefcake than focusing on the issues in the play. The mincing diva playing the stepmother seemed to be drooling so over those gorgeous pectorals, at times I wasn’t quite sure this wasn’t Oedipus Rex I was watching. At NSD I had acted in Alkazi’s Urdu version of Tughlaq, playing two or three minor parts and feeling terribly cheated that I wasn’t considered for the title role—I felt I could play it as no one had. The possibility of getting it in a movie I had fantasized about, but I assumed Mr Bedi had already been cast. However, I told myself there were plenty of other good parts in it and maybe Alyque had seen Manthan by now.

  Mr Padamsee, at that time head honcho of Lintas, the advertising concern, had a secretary called Miss Pope, the better I suppose to savour the appellation ‘God’ by which he was referred to in ad circles, and she ushered me into God’s presence right away, the first sign that things were going to go terribly right at this meeting. I had never met the man, only seen some of his theatre productions, which seemed impressive until I saw the original versions later when I started travelling abroad. He said he liked the ‘raw-boned’ quality of my face and that he was looking for an actor with my kind of intensity. He had just seen Manthan and after hemming and hawing for quite a while he finally said he thought I was ‘right for the part of [it seemed an eternity before he said it] Tughlaq’. My heart by then was hammering so hard I could barely hear him speak. Swall
owing resolutely a couple of times I refocused on God. I needed to grow a beard, start pumping up and learn to ride, he was saying. Apparently he wanted me to look as much like Kabir Bedi as I could; I didn’t waste time wondering why Mr Bedi himself hadn’t been cast. I was given money to obtain membership in the Amateur Riding Club at Mahalaxmi and enrol in a gymnasium. Even though my excitement was practically bursting out of my ears, I knew by now that talking about a film before it is actually released is foolishness, and in any case there was no one, apart from Ratna, to whom this news would matter, and she was on her way back from London, not having met the good Gujarati boy of Dina’s dreams.

  The future now had a distinctly rosier glow. I had landed the eponymous role in what promised to be a seriously high- profile project. It was to be in Urdu but ‘on an international scale’ so Alyque promised, was to be shot on location in Rajasthan and Gwalior, and was to have a massive budget— until my fee was discussed that is, when it would suddenly become a ‘small film’. Simi Garewal evidently had been signed to play Tughlaq’s stepmother and Jalal Agha was to play the other protagonist, Aziz.

  By the time I ended my work on Godhuli and returned to Bombay, Manthan had garnered not only great praise but healthy box office returns as well. A message awaited me from Rajshri Productions, the producers from another lifetime of the film Dosti, asking for a meeting. It transpired that one of the clutch of film-makers they had on their roster had seen Hero (my acting course film made at FTII by Shyam) and had got it into his head to remake Chaplin’s City Lights with me as the tramp. The script was being worked on, they said, and would I be agreeable? Since it was put that way I decided to lay down a stipulation—only if it was to be shot in one stretch, something they promptly agreed to. But first I had Tughlaq on my brain. Before my hair started growing back I was religiously working out in the gymnasium every morning, and every alternate afternoon brushing up on the rudimentary riding abilities I had picked up in Aligarh.

  Even though I never received a monetary advance for Tughlaq, I no longer had to scrounge meals, I could now even pay the bills when Ratna and I lunched together. The workouts were severe and the brain-dead trainers at the gym advised me on diet but not about the need worked- out muscles have for rest on alternate days. So my regimen consisted of pumping all muscles every day in a two-and- a-half-hour session that would leave me feeling limp. Fortunately my body was young enough to take that sort of punishment. Soon my shirts started going tight around the shoulders and my trousers at the thighs. I was quickly able to recover my not quite forgotten riding abilities, got promoted out of the circle of beginners and was allowed to venture round the race track on my own, resulting in my turning a little more confident than was good for me and taking a tumble at full gallop that resulted in a shifted vertebra and forty-five days flat on my back, not allowed to rise or even turn over. As I was falling, all I thought was, ‘Hell! There goes Tughlaq, and here comes the bedpan.’ It had in any case been almost six months since I had come on board and there had been absolutely no movement on that project except that I was expected to turn up at God’s office whenever called and he, after leaning back in his chair, scratching his goatee, examining my by now not unmuscular body, would nod ever so slowly and inform me of a further postponement in the schedule.

  Now that the fractured vertebra had put paid to my workouts and pushed the film further away, I considered going into a depression but decided not to. Govind Nihalani who was to be director of photography on Tughlaq, told me not to lose any sleep, the project was still pretty far off, even though Alyque kept insisting it would happen soon. A cyclostyled schedule was actually distributed, detailing every shooting location with exact dates right up to the day the film would be re-recorded and the date, time and location of the first screening for the cast and crew! I was within that year to become educated on the vast gulf between good advertising and actual film-making. I also made the monumental discovery while in hospital that there is one position in which it is impossible to roll a joint—flat on your back. Ratna and Om who visited frequently were closely instructed on how to do this essential job for me.

  Bobby, now a major in the Armoured Corps and in town for some military matter, unexpectedly visited me in hospital, bearing the news that he and his long-time sweetheart Sabeeha were planning to tie the knot soon and I was expected to attend. Ratna had already met my brothers and their wives and won them all over completely, so naturally she was included in the invite. Agha Mamu, who had chosen another girl for Bobby and had without consulting anyone at all given his word to her family, was furious at the prospect of egg on his face. He threatened to not only boycott the event but to cut Bobby off without a cent if he went ahead. If it had been held in Meerut he might even have disrupted it, guns blazing; so Bobby and Sabeeha’s family had decided Bombay was the safest recourse. An uncle of hers made available a picturesque cottage his company owned at Madh Island and there the banns were to be held. Agha Mamu stayed away but Bobby and I were convinced that with time the old man would come round, after all even my father had; and Bobby had always shared a much closer relationship with his father than I had with mine. Besides he had been a dutiful son, always toeing the line, always obedient, always compliant; now for the first time in his life he had defied a diktat and asserted himself. Agha Mamu, if he truly wished to ‘make Bobby a man’ as he claimed, should have been proud of the new backbone his son had grown but his ego was too huge to allow that. Through the remainder of his life not once did he ever come close to melting, never forgiving Bobby’s solitary act of defiance, nursing his imaginary wound, even refusing to acknowledge his grandsons when they were taken to seek his blessings. I, who according to him had always been a ‘bad influence’ on Bobby, now having made a bit of a name for myself had, not so surprisingly, risen in his esteem. I received a letter from him telling me to advise Bobby against ‘this rash and unwise step’, which I did not bother to do; and Ratna and I happily attended the wedding held with no one present except us, Bobby’s sister Mohib and Sabeeha’s parents. It was the loveliest wedding I have ever been to, on a gorgeous day by the sea, devoid of the heartburn, backbiting and stress always present on such occasions. The beard and long hair I now sported got me mistaken for the ‘qazi’ when we arrived at the wedding location, and Ratna and I that day decided that when we wed it had to be by the sea.

  Shooting on the Tughlaq project had been postponed so often it was becoming a bit of a joke; the bulk I had put on preparing for the part now became an impediment in the rehabilitation of my injured back. All form of exercise except lower-back therapy being forbidden for the time being, I could only look on in wonder at the bulges around my waist that hadn’t been there before. Tughlaq was looking more and more like a mirage but Shyam had decided upon his next, based on a Ruskin Bond short story called A Flight of Pigeons set around the 1857 War of Independence and I was cast in the part of a mutineer. The riding skills I had picked up came in useful for this film instead of for the other on which, tiring of Alyque’s constant procrastination, the producers ultimately pulled the plug.

  Mrs Remedios came into my room one morning to wake me, something she never did, waving a telegram. She stood by as I tore it open; it was from Zaheer and it said ‘Baba died stop burial in Sardhana today.’

  Breeng the shit

  The word hijack had by now fully entered the lexicon: the first mid-air incidents had occurred, planes had been blown up and security screens were being tightened at airports the world over. I borrowed the airfare to Delhi (then around 500 rupees) from Ratna, and went to the airport hoping to get on a late morning flight and catch a bus to Sardhana before evening. There were no seats available, I was informed in the not-so-incomprehensibly rude manner in which Indian Airlines ground staff treated passengers those days. Ratna had told me I would get a seat if I showed them the telegram to confirm that my need for a ticket was genuine and urgent, but because of new security rules she couldn’t accompany me into the airport to do the ta
lking; and the desk clerk’s dismissiveness so incensed me that far from telling him about my father’s death and pleading for a seat I felt like slamming him in the face. Besides, if there was no seat available how on earth could he have got me one? So I didn’t plead or produce the telegram and I didn’t get on the flight and I wasn’t present when Baba joined his ancestors that evening. His body had been brought to Sardhana by truck from Allahabad where, staying with Zaheer, his ulcer—a source of trouble for him always—finally got him. Zameer, posted in the North-East, had not managed to turn up in time either. Though all present knew Baba’s condition was grave, he instructed them not to inform me so I had no news until the telegram arrived. He either felt my time would not be my own or he didn’t want me to see him in that condition. On hearing later of the physical agony he went through, I feel thankful I was spared from witnessing his loss of dignity.

  Ammi was remarkably composed when I met her—her last thirty years had gone by sharing his life and serving him ceaselessly; now the pivot of her existence was gone, the three of us were able to spare less and less time for her, she hadn’t another involvement she could immerse herself in, yet she was holding back on the lamentation. We knew though how deeply grieved she actually was and that suppressing one’s grief is not always good. We feared she wouldn’t last long after him but the old girl had more spunk than any of us gave her credit for. She not only squared her frail little shoulders and tackled life on her own terms, she outlived him by almost twenty years and had the time of her life revelling in her children’s successes.