And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  The laryngeal problem I’d had all these years still bothered me, and the stress of mounting a seventy-strong production and playing Brutus in it as well (Benjamin was a wonderfully wily Cassius and Aakash a rotund Caesar), and seeing it not only collapse on its face but be thoroughly roasted, resulted from the second show onward in a forced intake of steroids to restore my vocal chords to normal. After performing Lear in school my voice had taken a week to mend; the same had happened after shows of The Chairs in Aligarh and Chalk Circle at NSD and in almost every play I’d done since, and no one so far had been able to offer anything close to a reason as to why it happened or a solution to remedy it. All they said was ‘stop smoking’ as if that was a magical panacea. Every performance onstage ended with my voice in a whisper. While shooting and dubbing both Manthan and Junoon I had suffered greatly from this malady and schedules had sometimes to be rearranged. I dwelt much on the thought that my voice would get in the way of performing every night when I went to London to act on the West End, as I surely would some day.

  While performing Don Juan which had some hair-raisingly wordy passages, the old demon began to reappear. Dubeyji advised me not to speak excitedly in life to start with, to relax and try to discover my own voice, then went further with his analogies to Shaw’s words: ‘They are musical notes,’ he said, ‘you have to hit the right key. In order to discover how a piece should be broken up when spoken, first of all one must respect the punctuation, the right key will follow.’ My desire to overpower audiences with sheer volume had bred in me the habit of straining too hard in performance; that had to be checked. He told me to speak at the pitch the words demanded; it was only necessary for the character you were speaking to to hear you really—that was as loud as you needed to go. And he kept reminding me that I had a breathing problem, but it was only after Julius Caesar that I encountered another person who actually suggested concrete steps to help. Till then I hadn’t suspected that one had to learn how to breathe.

  I have always had doubts about the existence of God but I do believe in the power of prayer; praying not as in grovelling for something but exuding positive energy, and the prayer is answered by receiving it in return. This person, a Dr Raj Kumar, I sincerely believe, appeared in answer to my prayer and after curing my voice vanished without a trace like the Lone Ranger. A voice and speech therapist who witnessed my whispered performance as Brutus, he came backstage after the show, introduced himself and warned me that my vocal chords would be in serious trouble if I went on thus misusing them. Seeing I could do with help, he offered it. The next morning he was at my house at seven on the dot, and with absolutely no mention of fees commenced the exercises that I had the benefit of for the next six months. Turning up every alternate day, he patiently took me through the technique of breathing with the help of the diaphragm, exhaling in a way to relax the vocal equipment and then, with the exhalation, trying to produce the softest sound the voice is capable of and slowly, painstakingly, enlarging that sound while staying on the right note. The NSD acting teacher’s exhortations to ‘speak from here!’ while slapping her ample midriff had only confused me further; how can one speak from there and so on. She, poor misguided soul, though herself a singer, had never so much as mentioned the words ‘diaphragm’ or ‘resonators’ or even ‘lungs’, and was probably one of those lucky ones who never had the kind of trouble I had. I have met many such actors, who instinctively knew how to use their voices. I, however, had to learn.

  It was Dr Raj Kumar who helped me lose my colossal hang-up about not being able to hold a note and persuaded me that there is no such thing as a bad or unmusical voice; every sound box, unless it has a physical disability, is and should be capable of every sound. All of us are born with the ability to sing, most of us lose it as we grow, but it can be recovered. There can be no voice that is by nature off- key. Practising the basic notes on the harmonium, part of the therapy, helped me begin to understand the importance of listening closely to my voice and understanding its mechanics. And now the face of the poor, defeated singing instructor at NSD started flashing before my eyes—I wished I could telepathically reach him. To my unending delight, I can now not only manage to stay in key through the basic notes, and actually travel through three scales, I can tell when I’ve lost the key but continue to grope till it’s found again. I have also, while acting, not lost my voice again in these years—and I’ve had to do plenty of shouting. ‘Listen to the involuntary way your voice sounds when you sneeze or yawn,’ Dr Raj Kumar said, ‘that is your natural timbre. ‘ He insisted that clearing the throat, as people mistakenly keep doing, is actually damaging to the voice if it has gone hoarse; it does not clear anything, it only makes the vocal equipment clash against itself and worsens the condition. What the vocal chords need, then, is the equivalent of a massage and that has everything to do with breath control, which no one in either of the two acting courses I had undergone had even talked about.

  His prognosis of my problem was simple actually: I was neglecting to breathe in when the resonant voice which I hoped to constantly produce demanded full lungs, which I did not have, and the technique to control the outflow of breath, which I had to learn. Dying to make an immediate impact onstage the moment I opened my mouth I was exhausting my breath in the first few words of a sentence. Being unable to replenish my lungs while speaking, my body’s backup system was kicking in to help me continue speaking with the precious reserves of breath remaining, and sometimes without any at all. Since voice, as I learnt, is nothing but breath brushing past and vibrating the vocal chords, the backup system too without any breath at all has to give up sooner or later. I had no choice but to keep performing with a bad voice and thus I’d strain harder, not only inflicting further damage but also at times experiencing strange sharp twinges of pain in my ribs and around my kidneys, which I should have known were warning signs that I was doing something wrong. And sure enough, I had been doing it wrong all this time, as the good doctor pointed out on the first day after asking me to demonstrate how I breathed onstage. Having performed this rescue Dr Raj Kumar made me promise I’d continue the exercises on my own and vanished from my life. I was unable to reach him at the only number he left.

  Some five years later he reappeared in the green room of a theatre in Boston where I had just performed the part of Mahatma Gandhi in a play, he congratulated me on the progress I had made, and gave me another number on which again I was never able to reach him. But then the ways of guardian angels must never be subjected to human scrutiny, I suppose.

  My reputation as a theatre worker and an actor in ‘serious’ movies was growing, though earnings from both were negligible. It was the ‘non-serious’ movies, as I suppose I should call them, which came my way that kept the kitchen fires alight. My bank account was now pretty respectable. I tried very hard to do only one film at a time but without the clout of stardom which makes such conditions acceptable to others and feasible for oneself, I had to give in. What I did manage though was never doing double shifts again and not getting stuck in the same kind of part in movie after movie. Nature played a strong hand in that by not granting me a single box office hit either as hero or as villain or as anything else, so the industry, not knowing where to slot me, continued to offer me roles that no other actor either would or could play.

  This part of my plan too was turning out as I had foreseen: I was getting work in films not because I was ‘saleable’ or popular but because it was thought I could deliver the goods; but in ‘story pitcher’ only of course. Hindi cinema, according to its core audience (the stalls), comes in three varieties: the aforementioned ‘story pitcher’, ‘faiting pitcher’ and ‘famly pitcher’. I was never considered for ‘faiting pitchers’, but got more than my due in the other kinds, though none of them made any impression at all, and I thus escaped what I imagine must be the utterly nightmarish situation of losing sleep over next week’s box office collections, which if healthy create the equally traumatic scenario of upping one’s fee for t
he next project. I never felt any need to do that, I was earning enough to keep me happy; and hell, an alphonso or an ice cream wasn’t going to taste any better if I had a few more zeroes pickling away in the bank. I had always desired only as much money as I would need and that was happening now. Nature perhaps did a favour by saving me from stardom and the kind of pressures those who achieve it have to navigate through, I could not have handled them. Moreover, not being a star allowed me to persevere with the things I always loved or have grown to love doing: acting in the theatre or a film I connect with, workshopping with actors, playing tennis or cricket and watching them on TV, revelling in my children as they grow, going to the movies or simply doing nothing at all. It was very good fortune also that I have never needed to do a film only for the money; though the money was not a small consideration, I did only the films I felt like doing. Sometimes, though, after a few days of shooting, I did wonder WHY I had felt like doing this particular film but since I had chosen to do it of my own free will, and had no one to blame, would hold my peace as long as I could, which according to many was not long at all.

  I think I had also unwittingly acquired the reputation of a snob and a troublesome actor, which didn’t bother me unnecessarily. I began to realize that being so appallingly bad in my early commercial movies was not entirely my fault. The only two who could make the schmaltzy Hindi film dialogue and ersatz situations believable were Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan and I was nowhere in their league. Being effective in popular movies requires a certain kind of sensibility and an unshakeable belief in them, neither of which I possessed. While it is true that what I was offered was hardly the cream of the crop—that went to the actors who could ensure bums on seats—it is also true that my reputation as a crabby bitch on the sets was acquired because of my dissatisfaction with what I was asked to do and my futile insistence on trying to do it my way. So I found myself turning increasingly cynical, having to learn to act while ‘facing’, once actually having a director testily tell me, ‘Naseerji this is not an art film, here you have to ACT!’ It was also because of being frustrated in most suggestions I made, about having sometimes to rewrite the unspeakable dialogue I was given and at other times encountering directors who wouldn’t stand even a ‘yes’ being changed to a ‘hmm’, about having to enact totally superfluous scenes of great passion, simply because I supposedly did such scenes well, and invariably finding they had to be left on the editing room floor. Scarcely ever was I convinced, but trying to do the scenes the way I imagined they should be done often meant a total overhaul even of the conception of the scene and resulted in worse confusion. And in any case I was not at all equipped to think in Hindi film terms, so I sometimes suffered silently and sometimes not silently at all.

  I had by now quite digested the bitter pill that I was not really cut out for mainstream cinema, but since I was continuously offered work in it, and having always been circumspect about the stock parts that in both Hollywood and Bombay invariably go to ‘respected’ actors from the theatre, I tried to carefully choose the projects I thought might be fun to do. The tragedy of great thespians like Shreeram Lagoo and Nilu Phule being remembered only for their performances in films thoroughly unworthy of them was a guide as to the kind of parts I should definitely avoid. I was grateful I didn’t have to work for the money and I was determined that my career would not meet with such a fate. The happy thought that some of the films I’d already done would surely ensure that was punctured on remembering that both Dr Lagoo and Nilu bhau had done significant work in the serious Marathi cinema as well, yet the rest of the country knew them only as the kind of excessive character actors they were compelled to be in popular Hindi cinema. People unfamiliar with the output of these two theatre giants would be unable to imagine what they were capable of and had done on the stage.

  Luckily, as an actor seeking employment I had been at the right place at the right time and been greatly aided by the momentum ofthe other kind ofcinema with which I continued to be identified, and which first gained me something of a reputation. These films seemed to be flourishing and the offers to act in them were plentiful as well, so I now found myself in a whirl of shootings. It seemed I had the best of two worlds and the opportunity to make a mark in both, so despite being chary about my chances I thought I’d continue to have a crack at mainstream movies as well. Earning the kind of money they brought certainly didn’t hurt and how long could the odds continue to be stacked against me? I began to feel I had a good thing going which would take a lot of doing to blow, but I almost managed it.

  Finding my spot

  If it is true that ‘an actor’s talent lies in his choices’, I must confess I had absolutely no talent at all. I did not choose to begin my career in art-house films, I was lucky enough to be offered a leading part by a reputed director in a great script, at a time when I would have accepted the part of the third dead body in a film by I. S. Johar. I just happened to be around when actors like me were needed in Shyam’s films and I claim no credit for choosing that kind of cinema—it chose me. But for some reason I could never quite fathom, I continued to be needed in the ‘popular’ films as well, and my choices there were mostly nothing short of disastrous. I turned down some which went on to be huge and chose some that were dogs, including one made by a pair of dilettante brothers, with a small reputation as screenplay writers. The theme of their film, titled Misaal, sounded really novel to me, there was tons of the usual masala to balance it, and I thought I’d finally bust the box office with this one. I was to play a meek young man who flees, leaving his girl at the mercy of rapists who always in Hindi films go about their job in the most unlikely spots and with unabashed glee. He later sings a few songs, joins the police force, redeems himself, inspires a younger man, played by one of the director brothers, and they then go about doing the usual heroics. I had done some ‘faiting’ for the first time in a film called Hum Paanch and sprained my back on the very first day trying to make it look real. The action choreographer had not been impressed. When Ratna saw the film she pointed out that I seemed to be trying too hard to create the effect of actually being in a brawl when effortless haymakers and an easy attitude of ‘Is that all you got?’ were required of a Hindi film hero. This role seemed like a chance to get that right at last. There was to be ‘lots of faiting’, and I was also tempted by the prospect of being the ‘solo hero’ in a film in which I thought I stood a chance of being noticed and this time I was.

  Early in its very brief run I sneaked into a theatre showing it, to see mostly empty seats and the silhouettes of a few heads in the stalls, either unresponsive or hooting derisively every time I appeared on screen. I also discovered that instead of playing the main character, I was in fact part of a subplot, while one of the brothers-duo had promoted himself to central protagonist. In the interval, attempting to sneak out unnoticed, I was accosted by an audience member who slapped me on the back and asked why I’d kept my hair so short in the film, I told him I was playing a police officer and he laughed and said, ‘Chhodo yaar, hero hero jaisa dikhna chahiye. ‘ This was not the first time a script had turned out not at all as narrated nor indeed would it be the last, but seeing this film created in me sufficient suspicion about mainstream cinema to turn me totally paranoid and quite ruin the experience of the next few films I did including one with big-name stars, Ghulami, about which, despite for the first time getting paid in six figures, I remained cynical through the shoot. It actually turned out pretty good, a big success at the box office as well, and undid some of the harm inflicted by Misaal which had gained me really imaginative profanities wherever I was spotted by the ‘common man’ who blows his precious money every Friday in the hope of being transported to paradise for a few hours.

  Unnerving as it was hearing taunts of ‘O bhadwe!’ and much worse at the cinema itself, from passers-by, from beggars at traffic lights in response to what I considered a sincere performance, for the only time in my life I regretted having become an actor when, in a tr
affic jam under the Khar subway, Ratna and I returning from our wedding celebration and still in our wedding clothes had our car surrounded by a dozen guys who for at least ten minutes filled our ears with the most surreal invective I have ever heard. It was a reminder of how seriously the Hindi film audience takes their dreams, and what piffling dreams these actually are, and how deeply they have bought into the sham world these movies create.