The Perils of Being Moderately Famous

by Soha Ali Khan

  Hold the salute, I need to fix my hair

  I think I’ve established by now that I have properly famous parents, and grandparents, and great-great-great- grand-uncles. My brother Saif, who I call Bhai, is also a famous movie star and he is married to Kareena Kapoor, one of Bollywood’s most popular and successful actresses. Their son Taimur was trending on Twitter before he had even opened his eyes. Has all this celebrity had any impact on my life? I went to the same college as my father and saw his name in brass in the locker room of the Oxford University Parks Cricket Ground, right next to my grandfather’s. I joined the same industry as my mother and brother and have fought hard to carve my own identity within it. I am surrounded by my family’s achievements. I am immensely proud of my heritage; I feel special to belong to this family that has so much history, so much talent and virtuosity running through its generations. I have benefited from my family connections—they have opened doors and facilitated introductions, provided me with a security and respect that I would otherwise have spent many years earning, given me recognition which brings a power that is not insignificant and afforded me financial security (that I try to keep at arm’s length—like the boy you know you can depend on to take you to the ball when all else fails, but really you want Timothy to ask you. Timothy in this case is my own hard-earned money).

  Like father like son

  I remember going out for lunch with my family in Delhi as a child. Bhai had recently started working in films and his song ‘Ole Ole’ from Yeh Dillagi had become a big hit. Throughout the meal people kept coming to our table to ask for autographs—from my father, my mother and my brother. My sister and I could continue to eat our food undisturbed, which we rather enjoyed, feeling bad for the other three. I don’t recall ever wanting to be as famous as them, wanting to sign autographs or having my hand shaken. I saw so much of it growing up that it didn’t seem to retain much lustre.

  My big sis

  I suspect the same is true of my sister, Saba. She has always been more comfortable behind the camera, taking beautiful pictures, than in front of it. Being of an artistic inclination, she chose to get her undergraduate degree from Delhi College of Arts, and then went to the Gemological Institute of America in Carlsbad, California, to study jewellery designing.

  I chose to be a film actor, not for the fame or the money—I don’t mean to sound arrogant when I say I had need of neither—but for the job, the creative fulfilment I get from walking in the shoes of another person. It was not, as many people assume, the easy choice to be an actor. In fact it was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. Since my first film in 2004 I have tried to carve out my own path, forge my own identity. I have achieved a level of success and fame that I can comfortably call my own, but that level is moderate in comparison to the accomplishments of my various family members. And therein lie the perils. Perils which, if you were made of flimsier stuff, would nibble away at you and leave you feeling less than whole.

  As I said earlier, this book is my tribute to my family without whom I would not be here. Without whom I would not be who I am. With whom I have laughed and cried, opposed and obeyed, mourned and celebrated. With whom I have found the strength and support to grow, to discover who I am and who I am not. And with and without whom I am pursuing my happiness on my terms.

  3

  All Roads Lead to Saifeena

  I was still lying in bed, scrolling through my Twitter feed, sipping coffee, more asleep than awake, when I saw the headline: Soha reveals major secret about Kareena Kapoor Khan’s pregnancy.

  What? When? Where? Who?

  I couldn’t answer any of the four basic questions journalists are taught to ask but I was already panicking—the coffee had turned to mud in my mouth and I was finding it difficult to breathe.

  I am usually so careful, I never say anything about Amman, Bhai and Kareena—and especially nothing about the baby. Had I inadvertently let something slip?

  I sat up and scanned the rest of the article and the more I read the more I relaxed. The major secret was that Bhai and Kareena, or Saifeena as they are together referred to, were not planning to have their child in London as far as I knew.

  I remembered the interview. I remember answering the obligatory question about how I was feeling about becoming a bua again, dismissing the one about what preparations we were making, expressing vitriol over the one about whether I wanted a girl or a boy for them.

  ‘Will they have the baby in London?’ The question had come out of the blue and I was bemused.

  ‘Why would they have the baby in London?’ There was some furious scribbling and a furtive exchange of glances and I hastily added, ‘I have no idea what they are planning and as far as I know they aren’t planning to have the baby in London.’ I ended with my most convincing but-what-would-I-know shrug.

  So the fact that the baby would not be born in London—or Bolivia or Zimbabwe or Mars for that matter—was major news. Any tiny detail or non-detail is major news. And some journalists will come up with the most ingenious ways to uncover these titbits, as illustrated below by the line of questioning I am often subjected to:

  Whilst premiering the first episode of The Great Indian Home Makeover—a televised show on interior redecorating that I host—

  Q: Tell us about the show.

  A: It’s a home makeover show where we surprise a homeowner and make over one room in the space of forty-eight hours.

  Q: Speaking of redecorating how are you doing up the baby’s room in Saifeena’s house?

  Whilst at a press conference for Balmain watches—

  Q: Tell us what you like about Balmain watches.

  A: They are stylish, elegant and feminine. A woman’s watch is more than just a timepiece, it’s a piece of jewellery, a style accessory.

  Q: Speaking of time, it’s a happy time in the family with the baby coming. When is it due?

  Whilst at a store inauguration for a jewellery brand—

  Q: What is your favourite piece of jewellery?

  A: My engagement ring, for obvious reasons.

  Q: Speaking of rings, you will be ringing in the new year with a new family member, how will all of you spend New Year’s Eve?

  Whilst promoting the film 31st October—

  Q: Tell us about the film and your role in it.

  A: It’s a real-life story about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and I play a Sardarni. I have three children in the film.

  Q: Speaking of children . . . (Okay, this one I can forgive.)

  Whilst at a Femina Diva style contest—

  Q: What does style mean to you?

  A: Wearing your personality on your sleeve, being comfortable, confident and carrying yourself in a way that makes you stand out.

  Q: Speaking of standing out, isn’t Kareena setting new fashion trends with her baby bump?

  During a lifestyle interview—

  Q: Where do you see yourself five years from now?

  A: I don’t plan ahead much—I try not to live in the past or plan for the future, I live in the present.

  Q: Speaking of presents, what are you going to give the baby, have you decided?

  During a press conference to announce Kunal and my production company Renegade Films—

  Q: Why did you choose to name your company Renegade Films?

  A: Renegade means rebel. We liked that it stands for going against the grain, doing things differently.

  Q: Speaking of names, is it true they are naming the baby Saifeena?

  You get the drift.

  I calculated that the damage done in this instance was minimal, so I tossed my phone aside, took another sip of my coffee and turned to the less alarming headlines of the national press.

  4

  A Coming of Age

  ‘Where are you going to college, Beta?’ I remember an overly inquisitive aunty I didn’t like very much asking me once. ‘Balliol, Aunty,’ was my somewhat pointed reply. She looked at me with obvious non-recognition and patted me on the
head dismissively.

  Balliol College, Oxford University. That would have impressed her, but I had decided by then that her opinion of me did not matter.

  Balliol was founded in 1263 by John I de Balliol. It is one of the oldest colleges in Oxford, and in the English-speaking world. It also has the Lindsay Bar, the only fully student-run bar in the university, or at least it did when I was there. Among the college’s alumni are three former British prime ministers—H.H. Asquith, Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath, five Nobel laureates, and a number of literary figures and philosophers, including Adam Smith, Robert Browning, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene.

  My personal favourites are evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and journalist Christopher Hitchens, otherwise known as ‘The Hitch’ who wrote a tell-all by that name: Hitch-22. If you look up Balliol College’s notable alumni you will see a gallery of all these famous people, and among them, deservedly, my father’s image. You will also see a colour photo, one of only ten colour photos, of a girl, the only girl: Me!! From an event to launch Ariel’s new instamatic washing powder. I’m pretty sure the person to my left in the gallery won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

  (From L to R): Aldous Huxley, HH Asquith, Graham Greene, Me, Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

  Conjure up an image of an Oxford student. You’ll be forgiven if the hapless soul you have envisioned in your mind’s eye is a pale and pimply chap with glasses as thick as double-glazed windows, stumbling about nose-deep in a book. I was under the same impression when I applied to Balliol, hoping to continue what had become a bit of a family tradition—my father and grandfather both having read there.

  Balliol College: home away from home, 1996–99

  When I told Abba I was going to try to get into Oxford on the basis of academic merit he was nonplussed. I would have to apply to St Hilda’s, he told me, the all-women’s college founded in 1893 for those of the weaker sex who dared to think big. I had to break it to him gently that women had been allowed to study at Balliol since 1979. Luckily, by the time I was applying the rules had changed somewhat and you didn’t have to sit the dreaded one-word entrance exam, described as the hardest in the world. Applicants were required to write a 3000-word essay on a single word—for instance, ‘What is evil?’ or ‘What is patience?’ There is a legendary story of the year when it was ‘What is courage?’ when one student famously wrote ‘This is’ and left the rest of the paper blank. No one seems to know what became of said student so it could very possibly be an urban myth or more likely that the professor failed him with the accompanying comment, ‘No, this is stupidity.’

  I was not so brave. When Mrs Prabhu, the principal of the British School where I had been a student for twelve years, called me to her office early one morning in the summer of 1996, I knew the A-level results were out and my fate had been decided. The offer from Balliol was two A’s and a B, not an impossible ask, but my mock exams earlier that year had been a bit of a disaster—an A in history, as predicted, a B in economics and a Dreadful D in literature!

  Mrs Narula, my literature teacher, told me my answers lacked empathy and feeling and I should do more theatre to help me relate better. That is how I landed the star role of Blanche du Bois in the twelfth standard’s rendition of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire. It was my shining moment—my whole family was coming to see me perform, including my father who had set foot in school a grand total of one time before this—to play a parent–child cricket match in which he scored 250 not out against a bunch of eleven-year-olds and nobody spoke to me for a week.

  Before the play there was a small ten-minute skit where we were enacting a scene from The Merchant of Venice. My father thought that was it—my star moment as ‘one of Portia’s servants’—and left after the skit, before the main play had even begun!

  ‘So what will it be?’ Mrs Prabhu’s expression was inscrutable as she handed me an envelope that seemed bizarrely thin given the weight of its contents. I opened it slowly, postponing the finality of a result, holding on to the comforting embrace of ambiguity. I forced myself to focus on the letters swimming drunkenly before my restless eyes. I had got three A’s. I tried to understand my feelings. There was jubilation, of course. I had topped the class. My parents would be so proud. But there was also a nagging queasiness in the pit of my stomach. I would be going away to university. I would be going away from my home, my family, my country for the first time. And I would no longer be the smartest girl in the class; I would be a small fish in a very very big pond—a pond where all the fish wore thick glasses and quoted Descartes and made jokes like: Jean-Paul Sartre walks into a bar and says to the bartender, ‘I’d like a cup of coffee please, with no cream.’ The bartender replies, ‘I’m so sorry but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?’

  All good actors do theatre

  Eh.

  We left Delhi for London a week before my eighteenth birthday. Abba, Amman and I. In 1952, when he got admission into the college, Abba’s journey had taken two weeks by ship. The same 6000-odd kilometres took us a mere nine hours on a plane but I am sure I felt the same trepidation he had. The night before our departure I remember sitting on my bed, deciding whether or not to pack Jamun, my purple bunny, when Amman knocked on the door.

  ‘Abba doesn’t think it’s a good idea but I want you to have this,’ she said, placing a small red object in my hands. My first mobile phone.

  Until then we had only had the one landline with an infinitely long extension cord which you could follow through corridors, across landings, until you reached the inevitable dead end that it was snaked under—Apa’s locked door. And then you had to knock beseechingly for what seemed an eternity whilst she chattered on with Laila about who was cuter, Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt. Abba had a mobile phone but it was always switched off.

  ‘I’ll turn it on when I want to call someone,’ he would say. ‘It’s to make other people available to me, not to make me available to other people.’

  Mobile phones were also very expensive then, and the calls made from them exorbitant. The first commercial Motorola mobile phone offered thirty minutes of talk time, six hours standby, could store thirty numbers and cost close to 4000 USD (do the conversion to Indian rupees and you’ll know just how expensive that was!). But that was way back in 1983.

  In 1996 my Nokia 2110 cost close to Rs 50,000 and had only basic functions like calling and sending/receiving messages but it wasn’t the expense my father objected to. It was the inverse snobbery he feared I would be subjected to at Balliol which was known to be more left-leaning in thought than the other colleges. Signs of unearned affluence were judged harshly there and my mother made me promise to keep this scarlet symbol of substance well hidden from censorious eyes.

  And then, suddenly, the day was upon us. I remember them dropping me to my room, unloading my luggage, taking me to lunch and then saying goodbye. I didn’t want them to go but I couldn’t let them know how terrified I was. Abba was feeling nostalgic—he pointed out the drainpipe he and his friends would scale to sneak back into college once the gates were locked at midnight.

  ‘Make sure you’re back in time,’ he told me.

  ‘Abba, they give us a key now,’ I told him gently.

  I could tell he was having trouble processing the steely march of progress even in this little bastion of tradition. The quad was littered with families embracing their children—cheerful waves and slaps on the back. I refused to cry. When your life flashes before your eyes there are a few images that you know will make the cut and this was one of them: The navy blue rented sedan kicking up dust as it drove away, carrying my parents further and further away from me, and with them my childhood.

  I forced myself to turn away from the receding car and walk towards the common room where freshers were already congregating—all of them seemed self-assured and effortlessly cool. There was a willowy girl with flaming red spikes for hair who was sitting on a trunk and regaling the others in a thick northern Irish accent. Ther
e was a pale boy with astonishingly blue eyes in a floor-length dark coat rolling a cigarette in the corner. Boisterous laughter emanated from a group of beefy boys in rugby shirts play wrestling by the window. Where were all the bespectacled geeks? I had been to one school my whole life and consequently I had forgotten how to make friends. How was I supposed to approach these people?

  I will be forever grateful to one girl with a warm maternal vibe who understood my plight and came to my rescue. Let’s call her Cathy, because that was her name. She thrust a mug of sugary tea at me to fortify the nerves and hustled me into a non-threatening circle of average-looking people exchanging notes on what subject they had enrolled for, where they were from, what school they had been to, etc. My conversation was desperate. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be accepted. I didn’t want to be friendless. But I soon realized that even though I was the only ‘fresh-off-the-boat’ Indian, we were all more or less in the same boat. A few of us arranged to meet up for dinner in the hall at 7 p.m. and I went off to settle into my room, hide my mobile phone, and work up an appetite for such an unreasonably early dinner.

  It took me three whole months to settle in at Oxford. I was bitterly cold. Sure, Delhi winters could be harsh but our beds back home were pre-warmed with hot-water bottles every night and our bathwater heated in buckets to an ideal temperature. We all had dinner huddled together by a fire, sitting on mattresses around a low, square table with a quilt draped over it covering our legs, toasty from the angithi burning underneath. My room at Balliol on the other hand was built in the thirteenth century and had escaped even a hint of renovation since. There was a single bed, a desk and a chair, one slim cupboard, a basin with two faucets—one yielding numbingly cold water and the other scalding—and an electric heater. You had to climb on to the desk to peer out of the one window that overlooked the cheery vista of Martyrs’ Memorial which commemorated three Protestants burnt at the stake in the sixteenth century for heresy. The electric heater was my best friend my first few weeks there. I would wear a sweater and two pairs of socks, wrap myself in my 16.5 tog duvet and basically hibernate, coming out only to forage for food (giant bars of Twix, pot noodle and Diet Coke). One night, in a feat that would put Icarus to shame, I fell asleep too close to the heater and managed to set my duvet on fire. Fortunately the ultra-sensitive fire alarm went off, causing me crushing embarrassment but saving my life. That was when I decided enough was enough. The heater could warm my fingers and toes, but I needed to make friends to melt the ice around my homesick heart.