And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  The day I arrived in Sardhana I visited the mound of earth that was Baba now and we had the first of the many easy conversations I was later to have with him. That day I talked to him about the film I had just done, felt his amusement at my playing a shaven-headed Hindu priest. I told him about the one I was going to do, playing Sarfaraz the mutineer, and that I was modelling the way I would look in the film on portraits of Dada Jan Fishan Khan, my Afghan ancestor. I could virtually hear him chuckle. I told him about my dreams and my doubts, about Ratna whom he had never met, about how much I was now earning, anything that came into my head. I knew he was listening and responding. This was an actual conversation in which I took the initiative. I suddenly began to feel the weight of all I had lost out on and would never regain and I was surprised by how much I suddenly missed him. A few years later, I had a dream in which I see myself seated as for a job interview, at a long, polished table. Seated on the other side of the table is the interviewer, Baba looking beatifically happy, and he says to me, ‘Tell me about your father.’ I proceed to enumerate the ways he had failed me, how I had never felt loved or appreciated by him, how I never got what I wanted, how I hated his judgemental nature, his narrow worldview, his negativity, etc. etc. As I, quite unemotionally, poured out in a steady stream all I had in life never been foolhardy enough to say to him, he quietly listened, not saying a word and looking unflinchingly into my eyes, as if understanding perfectly what I was talking about. Through his life he had never seemed so much himself, so approachable, as he was in that dream. When I awoke I felt as if my troubled relationship with Baba had achieved closure to some extent.

  When I returned to sin-city after the burial, Zaheer insisted on taking Ammi with him to Allahabad and she complied, but only for a couple of weeks before heading back to Mussoorie where she continued to live perfectly content for the next fifteen or so years, only coming down to Sardhana or to one of our homes if the cold got troublesome. If one of us compelled her to leave Mussoorie she’d often angrily acquiesce, and though we all really tried to keep her happy, she was never at peace anywhere except in those two places, in her ‘own home’. Many a rainy night in Bombay did I wonder how she was managing in Mussoorie. She was always desirous of being sociable, loved meeting people, but with Baba being the way he was she had always had to put that desire on hold. Through her remaining days she spent much time in Mussoorie alone or with people she liked, or with one of the three of us alternately and as briefly as she could, though she seldom had much to say.

  I wanted to lose the beard and hair I had grown for Tughlaq but was told they would be required in Shyam’s new film, and the longer the better. This one was to have a much bigger budget than any of his earlier ones and I would be paid twice as much as I was for my first film. Mr Shashi Kapoor, tasting major commercial success those days, had not only decided with his wife Jennifer Kendal’s goading to build a theatre in his late father Mr Prithviraj Kapoor’s memory, he had also formed Film-valas to produce what he hoped would be memorable popular films, and to that end had signed up nearly every ‘different’ film-maker of those days. Shyam was the first to be taken on and his next two films (the first one Junoon was the first of four such ventures) were to launch the company. Mr Kapoor was in huge demand in the popular cinema, so common sense dictated that his coming on board as an actor as well would open up a whole new audience for Shyam. He was cast, much to my chagrin, as the lovelorn Pathan reluctant to join the war. I had read the original story and had always fancied myself in the part. Shyam, knowing I was feeling short-changed, gave me a stern talking to about how ‘the film was more important than individual parts’, and I should enter into it with the same spirit I had so far displayed. He also assured me the part he had created for me was pivotal and the most dramatic of all. I naturally assumed that in that case my job was to outdo everyone in the movie and proceeded to attempt to do that instead of playing as a team man.

  The film was to be shot in Kakori and Malihabad near Lucknow, and we repaired thence. Staying at the Clark’s Awadh, the city’s only five-star hotel, I got a room to myself and so, glory be, did Kulbhushan at the other end of the corridor. Ratna, now at NSD, came down to Lucknow for a few days and amusedly witnessed my frantic efforts to stay in character all the time. I very slowly recovered my confidence with horses, and began once more to love it so much, I would have ridden back to the hotel every day if I could. It didn’t occur to me that less could be more and I went through this film straining every nerve and every sinew carrying a banner proclaiming how hard I was working at becoming the character. All totally unnecessary, but hell, it was fun being that guy, red-bearded and turbaned, muzzle-loader slung over shoulder, gunpowder pouch at waist, sword in hand, charging at the British soldiers like a messenger from Hades.

  The film viewed now, despite the excellence of its making, appears like an acting contest and the only one who emerges with any laurels at all is a non-actor in a tiny part, Ismat Chughtai the celebrated writer, and that’s because she’s the only one of us not trying to ACT everyone else under the table.

  The third day of the shoot, whom should I see standing in the lobby of the hotel with Jennifer but Mr and Mrs Kendal. This should not have been surprising considering they were her parents, but they were there because English actors were going to be needed for the film—somehow I just hadn’t joined the dots. Jennifer, who knew of my fascination with Shakespeareana, introduced me to them and I shook hands with ‘him’ for the second time. My twenty-year dream of acting with him was about to come true.

  He was playing a priest delivering a sermon in a church when it is attacked. I am the leader of the attackers. After waiting one score years for this day, the only acting I get to do with him is to walk up to him and cut him down with a sword. But in the few days he was in Lucknow, finding him actually very approachable, I did corner him and talk to him. I soon eliminated the compliments—he would embarrassedly brush them aside anyway. I asked him one day if he didn’t feel regret at not having stayed on in England and becoming a Knight or Lord; I considered him no less than any of those actors who had. ‘Regret?’ he growled. ‘I did what I chose to do. I’m not an actor, I’m a missionary and my mission is to spread Shakespeare.’

  A few years later, pungent irony, he and I were simultaneous recipients of the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for services rendered to Indian theatre. I was seated next to him at the ceremony and could not help wondering how much all this really mattered to him. This recognition by the Indian government was too damn late. But surely he felt honoured. I don’t think any Indian has done half as much to spread theatre awareness among schoolchildren in Asia as the Kendals.

  I was able finally to tell Mr Kendal about my dream of joining Shakespeareana and in return he asked me if I would act in a production of Gaslight he was planning for the Prithvi. But three things conspired against it: a) he himself was not going to act, only direct, b) I was not free at the time he needed to rehearse, and c) I thought the rest of the cast totally unsuitable. The production was staged sometime later and I have to say I didn’t care for it.

  The Filmfare awards were announced while we were in Lucknow, Ratna called me up from Delhi to tell me that she’d heard I had won something. I had no idea I had even been nominated. I imagined it might be for ‘best supporting actor’ and felt pretty pleased—my picture would start appearing in Filmfare at last and the next fortnight it did. I had been awarded a special prize for my performance in Manthan. Dr Shriram Lagoo won Best Supporting Actor that year, something I didn’t at all resent. What had happened was that the jury members, probably wanting to reward my efforts but not being able to find a category, had decided to curtsy to the fact that Manthan had succeeded critically and commercially, both factors being essential criteria in winning one of those ridiculous statuettes which Smita, while smiling straight at the cameras, presented to me at the function. Except that it felt exactly as heavy as the ones in Mr Dilip Kumar’s drawing room, the whole affair was a frant
ic letdown.

  Barabanki had always been just a word for me. It had no memories or associations at all since I had spent only the first six months or so of my life there. But during the shoot, with Ammi deciding to visit Lucknow to meet her youngest sister Nikhat, and with Ratna discovering that Barabanki was barely an hour’s drive from Lucknow, we undertook a visit there. Ammi who normally could get lost in a phone booth was as sharp as I have ever seen her and guided the car unerringly through the by-lanes of Barabanki to the gate of Jahangirabad House where they lived when I was born. ‘The old house’, as Mr Tom Jones once sang, was ‘still standing, though the paint is cracked and dry’. The bungalow stood forlorn in a large unkempt compound which, knowing Baba’s fondness for roses, must once have had a garden in it. There weren’t many other dwellings around. It had a small gate of the kind one used to see at railway crossings and a short driveway leading up to a low, pillared veranda. The place was locked and looked uninhabited so we walked around; Ammi pointed out the room where my eyes first opened to the world. I didn’t have a camera so we took no pictures but I revisited Jahangirabad House some thirty-five years later to find it completely hidden from view amidst a teeming colony. All around where it stood, alone and somewhat grand, were clusters of newly built shops and houses for miles around. Half the house had fallen down, including ‘my room’; and there were some people, presumably squatting, in the remaining section. We were welcomed in and I saw a smallish drawing room, walls now stripped of plaster, and a tiny fireplace. I tried imagining Baba lighting the fire or Ammi sitting by it while I lay in my crib but it didn’t work. We were soon surrounded by a mob of gawking onlookers. But I now think of that house very often, surely it being the very first place I set eyes on has had some effect.

  Rajshri Films, the makers of small, clean family entertainers, had been assiduously wooing me for a while, and with some misgivings I agreed to do their film Sunaina, a reworking of City Lights, even though the script when I heard it gave me a dyspeptic attack. I was to play the Chaplin part and an FTII classmate and friend, Rameshwari, who had always generously bailed me out with small loans and who despite being the unlikeliest of candidates had hit pay dirt with her first film, was to play the blind flower girl. Shooting was to commence the day I finished Junoon, but they gave in to my request for two weeks off before starting. Rajshri Films was nothing if not polite. Vastly relieved to exorcise the demons of 1857 I got a shave and haircut, stopped glowering at the world and started practising the ‘churmeeng ismaaile’ that the Bengali director of Sunaina, Mr Hiren Nag, wanted me to employ in almost every scene. Whatever little excitement I had felt about getting to reprise a part created by the greatest actor ever vanished the day we started shooting, and the little fact that Mr Chaplin himself would not be writing and directing this film really sank in.

  The ghosts who passed off as the writers of this film obviously had been dissatisfied with Mr Chaplin’s effort and instead of just copying faithfully were intent on improving upon his mastery and control over every aspect of everything in his films: the tenderest subtlety and the broadest pratfall; his ability to manipulate the audience’s feelings in a flash, from the quiet smile to the belly laugh to the silent tear. Chaplin’s worldview, his spare elegant wit, had transmogrified into unfunny situations labouring for laughs or lachrymose self- pitying nonsense. There were endless pages of turgid dialogue instead of the silences or just the looks that say volumes in Chaplin’s work. Worst of all, his somewhat grotesque but deeply perceptive characterizations had become boring prudes, and a self-congratulatory morality had replaced the master’s frequently bawdy sense of fun.

  All this, needless to say, is par for the course in Hindi cinema, which seems to pride itself on churning out ghastly adaptations of much-loved Hollywood movies. I feared a bad trip coming on but foolhardily believed that I could surmount it by bringing authenticity to my performance. Besides, I was committed and had received a signing amount. There was no escape.

  Rajshri Productions was vegetarian in the strictest sense: not only would there be nothing non-veg on the daily menu, the characters in their films could not consume meat even as part of a shot. Evil characters smoked and drank of course but the actual showing of either on screen was a taboo placed by the wonderfully old-fashioned paterfamilias, Mr Tarachand Barjatya, who had created and nurtured the company. I wondered what the suicidal drunk in the film would be consuming before throwing himself off the pier—grief, I reckoned, probably accompanied by a song. Then I heard the songs, both solos I had to perform to but mercifully not sing myself. They were not bad as Hindi film songs go, one of them is still heard occasionally, but the thought of being cast in the lead in a commercial film, singing those songs, probably dancing around trees, didn’t exactly thrill me because I didn’t know the first thing about how to do a song and a tree can’t make its partner look good.

  The bravado that had carried me through actually singing on the stage in NSD was no longer part of my personality and I was now having trouble even faking the singing. All I thought I had to do was lip-synch perfectly, I felt it would be passable if it seemed like I was actually singing and that was all I practised. What in fact I should have done was study the songs in Shammi Kapoor’s movies and attempt to get somewhere remotely close to what he did. It’s what every male actor and every choreographer in Bombay post-Shammi has done—with varying degrees of success, of course. It took me years before I learnt the difference between merely singing a song and ‘performing’ it. But I was always slow.

  One of the mistakes I had made in the preceding five years had been giving up on popular Hindi movies, both as audience and acting aspirant. I was convinced that there was absolutely nothing to be gained by seeing them and futile hoping to act in them—I just was not that kind of actor. Besides, there were no more Dara Singh films and the stars I had grown up loving—Dilip K, Shammi K, Dev Anand—all were way past their sell-by date as leading men and were being replaced by another less charismatic and infinitely shallower generation. I did attempt to see the odd so-called classics—Reshma aur Shera, Upkaar, Mera Naam Joker, Abhimaan—but none of them really blew me away. My attitude to Hindi cinema turned even more condescending, possibly because I couldn’t see myself fitting in in it. I was resentful in advance of being cast in roles it would hurt my ego to have to play. So I gave Hindi cinema a very wide berth even at FTII, quite seriously believing that I’d never have to act in such movies and that I’d get my due in the newer kind of cinema now being made, films like Ankur. Though I have to say the thought that I was not qualified to be the lead in popular movies pinched greatly, so this reaction was very possibly my defence mechanism working in advance to counter the rejection I anticipated. And now here I was, having to deliver the goods in the kind of movie wild horses could not have dragged me to see.

  I was dimly aware that there would be a difference of approach in the acting in such movies but just not being able to zero in on what it was, decided to give it my usual kitchen-sink treatment. In retrospect I could probably have done this part without breaking a sweat when I was twenty and had my brief fling with Hindi cinema. But a decade and more later I was thrashing in the dark to find my own way of expressing, and I was also hampered by the hang-up that I could never be a popular star (even the girl who loved me had been cynical about my chances). I could no longer appreciate the kind of narcissistic, scenery-chewing, upstaging approach to performing required by popular films.

  Since studying at FTII, I had worked assiduously at removing all that I began to consider as ‘larger-than- life’ nonsense from my performances and indeed from my personality, and the task of trying to recover it now was not only offensive to my newly acquired sensibility, it felt unachievable.

  I tried misguidedly to apply the method as I understood it: insisting, much to the director’s disapproval, on wearing my own used clothes, the same set for the entire movie, and looking unshaven and sloppy throughout—after all, that’s what Chaplin did, I figured.
Instead of drawing on the equivalent of the music-hall tradition from which the great man had devised his act, I just tried to be real in a film where everything—the characters, the story, the settings, the costumes, the situations—was screaming out its falseness in neon hues.

  Not only did Sunaina fail to break new ground in the depiction of the Hindi film hero as I had hoped it would, it was dead on arrival. Taher Bahadur Khan, who had by now attached himself to me as manager, kept insisting ‘Hit hai Naseer bhai!’ but in actuality nobody went to see it from the day it came out. One critic described me as being ‘unfortunately no Amol Palekar’ and my performance, which in any case I had hated when I saw the film in a trial show, was completely underwhelming. I looked wrong even to myself, I found myself wondering what a guy who looked like that was doing in a film of this kind, and I feared the majority of the audience would share this view, so I didn’t gather the gumption to check it out in the theatre. Having heckled actors on screen several times myself, I was terrified at what I would hear from the audience about my shambling efforts to be real which, it was now confirmed, had only resulted in my looking grimy, unappetizing and out of place; fatal for a Hindi film hero who must always be clean cut, honourable and wholesome. I had not yet encountered the priceless gem ‘even the ugly character has to be handsome ugly’, passed on to me sometime later by Mr Subhash Ghai.

  In addition to looking simply ugly there was nothing I did in the film that was heroic or even remotely funny. The director’s sense of humour was stuck in a time warp somewhere in the forties, and my suggestions were received with bewilderment. I just didn’t feel that I was getting through to anyone at all. Through the shoot, and particularly while performing the songs, I was a child in a new school finding everything unfamiliar and ominous and being asked questions the answers to which he has not the faintest clue about. My confidence during this seemingly unending shoot was not exactly spilling over and almost reached depletion point when one day, at the door to the set, dressed in full costume, I was refused entry by the doorman. The only diverting moment came when Mr Nag, greatly hassled and in need of the dialogue sheet, was yelling at his assistant to ‘Breeng the shit! Phor habben sak breeng the shit so I ken bhwark in piss!!’