And Then One Day: A Memoir Read online

  Naseeruddin Shah

  AND THEN ONE DAY

  A Memoir

  Contents

  Dedication

  ‘All that David Copperfield kind of crap’

  The boy from Sardhana and Shah Tandoori, London

  St Joseph’s Film Institute, Nainital

  Heroes, villains and dolls

  Cricket, my second, er... third love

  Through the looking glass, sort of

  Mr Shakespeare and St Anselm ride to the rescue

  Back to their roots

  The girl in the tent and the miracle at St Paul’s

  The road less travelled

  Prodigal

  The Aligarh University absurdists

  The woman with the sun in her hair

  Heeba, gift of God

  School of drama, tragedy and heartbreak

  The penny drops in super slo-mo

  Film, only a director’s medium?

  Zoo story

  And introducing...

  The churning

  Of admen and film-makers

  Breeng the shit

  New wave or old hat?

  Poor theatre, moneyed film

  Search for a voice

  Finding my spot

  Epilogue

  Illustrations

  Preface and acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  For my sons Imaad and Vivaan, the only two my family who don’t appear in this book...

  ... and for Dulha bhai and Apa bi, who might finally have understood.

  ‘... and then one day you find

  ten years have got behind you,

  no one told you when to run,

  you missed the starting gun’

  — Pink Floyd, ‘Time’, Dark Side of the Moon

  ‘All that David Copperfield kind of crap’

  I was born in Barabanki, a small town near Lucknow, in July of the year 1949 or maybe it was August of the year 1950. No one including Ammi (Farrukh Sultan, my mother) was later ever quite sure which. Her saying ‘tum ramzaan mein paida hue thhe’ wasn’t much help in figuring it out either. Smallpox then was a scourge, typhoid a killer, malaria and cholera rampant. Children often never made it out of their infancy, or more frequently lost a year or two on falling ill or on failing their final exams; so a child’s date of birth was invariably amended, and registered at school time as being a year or two later than it actually was. To provide for either eventuality or perhaps simple absent-mindedness made Baba (Aley Mohammed Shah, my father) register my year of birth as 1950. Why July 20th was altered to August 16th, however, is a mystery and I’ve had quite a bit of fun with the wise ones who took it upon themselves to figure out my astrological chart. Consequently, I am whichever age it suits me to be on any particular day. While it doesn’t make me feel a whole lot younger, it just seems like something to do.

  Baba had had a peripatetic life before finally settling down to serve the British government in the Provincial Civil Service when Freedom’s dawn, Independence and Partition hit the country. Not wanting to take any chances, he stayed on in India. Two of his brothers left, as did several of my mother’s siblings; he had seven, she had ten. My oldest brother Zaheer was two, the one after him, Zameer, newly born; and I hadn’t yet arrived so we didn’t have much say in the matter, but doubtless we would all have backed the decision: none of us has been much of a gambler. Apart from the fact that Baba possessed no property in India and thus could not in any conscience claim any across the border, leaving a secure job and starting a new life when somewhat past his prime must have been less appealing to him than staying on in this newly independent ‘Hindu country’. He was never one to rock any boats and he figured we’d do all right here. As it happened, he was not wrong in his assessment of our future chances in India.

  As an infant I seem to remember travelling continuously by car down tree-lined, practically empty highways. Provincial Civil Service officers saw a fair amount of road on their ‘inspection’ tours to places not yet connected by rail, and lodged in ‘dak’ or ‘inspection’ bungalows built for that purpose. These once splendid mansions, alike in their sprawling colonial isolation, all featured mirrored hat-stands and battered cane furniture on gloomy, pillared verandahs overlooking unkempt gardens and lawns. And I still know the smell of those places: the musty drawing rooms (I always puzzled over why they are called ‘drawing’ rooms—until a chance visit to Blair Castle in Pitlochry explained it; they were the rooms ladies would ‘withdraw’ to while the men drank their brandy and threw bread rolls at each other) with the then ubiquitous mounted- head tiger/leopard skins strung over dead fireplaces, ancient copies of Reader’s Digest on undusted mantels. Insipid food in cavernous dining rooms with Ammi not cooking or serving, and looking pretty unsure about it all. The odour of damp and peeling plaster everywhere, and fetid air in the thickly curtained bedrooms. There were also frequent transfers from town to town in UP necessitating long train journeys, always including endless hours of sitting on our luggage at strangely deserted railway stations awaiting our connection.

  The earliest thing I can recall doing is sitting in someone’s (not either of my parents’) lap and watching a performance which I couldn’t identify then and still can’t, but which was probably a ‘nautanki’ by an itinerant theatre troupe, or a Ram Leela, the kind of show performed in the open or in makeshift tents. What has stayed burned into my mind is the thickly painted face of a person up there I got mesmerized by— dancing on top of a very high platform, his face alight, his eyes darting like agitated snakes. A singular rush of excitement coursed through me whenever, body contorting and eyeballs slithering, he looked towards me, which seemed to be most of the time. I remember absolutely nothing else from this day, I must have been about two, and I sometimes do wonder if this is a memory I have invented. Even so, it’s become absolutely real and given me a great deal, but something tells me it must have happened. It could even have been a circus and he a clown, but at that moment he seemed to be touching the sky. It was only of course my own minuscule size at the time which made me perceive him as such, but this vision has stayed stuck in the forefront of my consciousness, because that day this man, whoever he was, handed me the most valuable thing I’ve ever received: the gift of wonder—complete terror combined with the deepest fascination and envy. I wanted to be up there with him forever, I knew that for sure. Mr Yann Martel in his hallucinatory hagiography of the boy Pi puts it the way I wish I could: ‘first wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first’. Perhaps that’s why in my mind I connect actors and clowns very closely, and sometimes the distinction blurs with great clarity.

  I also remember standing on the balcony of one of these inspection bungalows and peeing on someone reading a newspaper below, feeling pretty sure he’d never know where it was coming from. As it happened, he not only figured out where it came from, he also turned out to be Baba’s superior. I sometimes wonder if this was one of the incidents that made my father reassess my worth. For some reason I also remember a guy puking all over Baba’s gun case on a bus ride down from Nainital to Haldwani. The stain remained on that canvas cover for years, until Baba sold the gun, stained case and all. There is also a memory of riding pillion on a bicycle on a deserted stretch of road and being asked to move aside by two uniformed cops on motorcycles, Zameer getting a fishbone stuck in his throat, and Baba smashing a couple of plates at the dinner table because they weren’t clean. Funny, the kind of things that stick in one’s mind, like ‘dust on honey’ as someone said. And then there are things unforgettable like getting butted to the ground by a baby goat I was trying to be affectionate to, or running to the handpump t
o replenish the almost empty bottle of lemonade with water, tripping and carrying the scar of that on my left palm still, or Zaheer driving Ammi’s sewing machine needle through my finger after assuring me it would get stitched.

  I was always told I was my father’s favourite, words that would come back to haunt me later. Ammi gave birth to five sons, the three of us survived. Baba often confessed that he dearly wanted a daughter. He was never to have one. So when it was my turn to arrive, he must have fervently prayed and hoped, only to be disappointed yet again. He probably overcompensated by indulging me greatly for the first few years of my life. When I awoke he would carry me on his back to the bathroom and tend to me. Evidently I was spoiled rotten at that stage; Zaheer once received a dressing down because I had told on him. In fact looking at some photos of myself at that age I suspect I must have been something of a pest. Baba’s large elegant hands and tapering fingers had a warmth I can still feel and I loved his short prickly Hitler-ish moustache scraping my face, but as it happened he and I touched each other less and less in the years that followed.

  In an age when girls were married off by fourteen and were expected to start bearing children within the year, Ammi stayed unwed many years longer than was normal. She and Baba were from different branches of the same family, spawned by Agha Syed Mohammed Shah, a soldier of fortune from Paghman, near Kabul, who arrived in India sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century, fought for the British in the 1857 War of Independence and was rewarded with the estate of Sardhana, near Meerut, and the title of Nawab Jan Fishan Khan. My parents had been engaged to each other for a while until Baba, who was then in Kabul, embarked for England. Why exactly he went to either place has never been fully explained, but ostensibly it was as English tutor to the daughter of Amanullah, the exiled Afghan king. My brother has a theory that it was a romance of some kind, something I find intriguing but irreconcilable with my memory of the man. Anyhow, Baba was one of the entourage the king took with him when he had to flee. These royals never even fled without an entourage. The engagement was broken off and Ammi was then assigned for life the role of serving her parents, a somewhat woolly-headed couple unwittingly presiding over the final fall of feudalism in the house of the Sardhana Shahs. She performed the role of selfless daughter to perfection, until Baba fresh from England and a disastrous marriage to a lady he never ever spoke to anyone about, but with an enviable government job as ‘nayab tehsildar’, re-entered her life and asked for her hand. He was about forty, she close to thirty, ages at which they should have been grandparents not newlyweds.

  The boy from Sardhana and Shah Tandoori, London

  Ammi always told me I had the thickest, blackest hair she’d ever seen on a newborn’s head. This was two years after Zameer was born and when Zaheer, one of twins who survived, was three, and well after Ali Ahmed, the eldest born, had succumbed to one of those maladies that got newborns in those days. The trauma of having had to deal with these infant deaths, and now with not one but two howling infants, probably proved taxing for Ammi, and Zameer was sent to Sardhana into the care of one of her younger sisters, Akabi (Rafat Sultan) who had now been cast in the role of selfless daughter. Akabi, tall and strapping, was a somewhat masculine specimen who had to pluck and sometimes clip her facial hair; strong men trembled when her voice did its stuff. She would have been a hard-ass Sergeant Major or the leader of a Mule- train or a Captain of Industry had she been born male and in different circumstances, that assertive and enterprising was she, not to mention sharp-tongued, straightforward, deeply caring and full of fun. A fiery-tempered angel, she was more than a mother to Zameer, who stayed with her till he was almost four. When he came back to live with us in Haldwani, a stud in his left ear which Baba promptly got rid of, he was not only a stranger, he looked, behaved and dressed like a village boy which is what he in fact was. Having spent more time than we had in the sun, his complexion was darker than ours and I daresay he knew it. Initially aloof and withdrawn, always addressing Ammi as ‘Apa bi’ and Baba as ‘Dulha bhai’, it took us some time getting used to having him around. Despite still carrying the scars of having been sent away at that age he was, I think, fortunate to have forged the priceless, unbreakable bond he had with Akabi. I myself always sought, and never found, such an equation with an elder.

  Zameer and I finally forged our own bonds when Zaheer went away to boarding school at the age of five. This ‘Sardhana boy’ and I stood waving at the train taking Zaheer away from us and we saw a myriad white hankies waving back. Among the list of compulsory requirements for each departing boy was ‘one white handkerchief’. The teacher-escort who had decided this obviously had an acute sense of aesthetics; those white hankies waving from every window is an indelible memory, and though at a different time I suppose this very sight could evoke a giant washing line as well, I still think I’ve never seen so entrancing a vision, even under the influence of LSD with which I was to repeatedly experiment a couple of decades later. I don’t think Zaheer’s hanky was among those waving though: the last we saw of him he was crouched on his berth looking frightened, bewildered and terribly angry. I’ve only seen him look that way on one other occasion since, but I won’t talk about that.

  The school he was going to was St Joseph’s College, Nainital where two years later Zameer and I joined him when Baba was transferred there. Featuring two gloomy Gothic towers in the front, it had seven playing fields, a gymnasium, four tennis courts and many ‘Christian Brothers’ from Ireland, a forbidding sect of Roman Catholic priests, convinced they were doing this country a monumental favour by just being here. Built sometime in the second half of the nineteenth century as a seminary, hence the abbreviation ‘Sem’, it was later converted into a school with the brooding atmosphere of self-denial clinging to it still. Nainital’s rains, gusty winds and frequent mists probably reminded these Irish adventurers of home, but all it needed was rider-less carriages and giant bats flying around at dusk to complete the picture of Transylvania. Punishments were severe; six of the best with an oiled malacca cane on a winter night was hard and you got some sympathy from your peers, and perhaps admiration if you hadn’t flinched, but anything less than that was not to be taken seriously. Rules were inflexible and expulsions common, and we were all judged almost instantaneously and either approved of or consigned to the rubbish heap. For all their inflexible notions, one has to admire the spirit of those intrepid souls a hundred and more years ago, discovering pristine hill locations, some of them difficult to reach even now, and building such awe- inspiring structures in the middle of these wildernesses. No doubt the bricks and mortar were carried by native labour, probably bought very cheap, but it would have to be the unshakeable belief that they came bearing much-needed enlightenment and were spreading the word of the Lord that drove these early missionaries to India. And the legacy they left behind survives.

  Baba was an Anglophile. He never left home, even in a one-tractor town like Sardhana, without his hat. For him the Irish and the English were one and the same and he wanted us to have the best education money could buy. Not that he was by any means rich but, having long ago sold his meagre inheritance in Sardhana, had something set aside. He spoke Pushtu and Persian as well as English but never thought it necessary to educate us in the former two, which I hold against him to this day. Totally enamoured of the British, he was determined to have us educated by them, convinced as he was that the ‘angrez’ were people of their word, deserving to rule whoever they ruled and doing a damn good job of it, and ‘angrezi’ was the language of the future. His dearest wish was to visit Vilayat again. He even had a special hat kept aside, a real nice Burberry affair, and a natty navy-blue pinstripe suit, which he intended to wear when he disembarked. In a sudden burst of adventurousness, he once toyed with the idea of moving there and opening an Indian restaurant. We even tried picturing ourselves as waiters in this joint, with Ammi doing the cooking. The plan was, however, quickly abandoned. And so the Shah family missed the opportunity of pioneer
ing the Indian restaurant business in England.

  My imagination, at the age of three or four, was helped along greatly by Ammi’s maternal aunt Nani Baji in Sardhana, sightless and a great storyteller, who would spin for us magical yarns at bedtime. One night after the storytelling session, I had a dream in which I saw ogres and fairies and flying horses and vanishing castles, the kind of things she told us about from the Tilism-e-hoshruba fantasies. When I returned, on a magic carpet I think, I saw myself being transported back to my bed through the ventilator in the cavernous room where we slept. When I awoke I saw a shaft of sunlight coming through the ventilator along the exact trajectory I had travelled. The dream was vivid then and still is; this must have been around the same time I saw that man dancing on that platform.

  Habib Manzil, my maternal grandparents’ house at Sardhana, was as spooky as any haveli of that time. Many deliciously scary rooms lay unused, which none of us had the daring to enter and in any case, apart from curiosity, there was never any reason to. In one of them, among some gigantic trunks, Zameer swears he once saw an old woman who wasn’t there walking about carrying a lantern. The vision has remained unexplained but he says it still gives him the shivers to think of it.

  The annual visits to Sardhana would bring on intense bouts of hero worship directed at Ammi’s three brothers, strutters extraordinaire, invariably leather-jacketed and hatted, almost caressingly handling their weapons, cigarettes dangling stylishly from lips, joie de vivre practically bursting out of them. My own dissatisfaction and impatience with my childhood would grow as I gaped at these three alpha males, their incredible good looks, their rugged attire, their girlfriends; and I started inhabiting an imaginary world in which I was all three combined, and my derring-do made Douglas Fairbanks grin in approval. I invented stories about what I did in the Burma war. I was a flying ace, my Spitfire got shot down by the Japanese, and I then walked all the way home and my legs wore themselves out, which is why I was the shortest of us three, ‘This man who we call Baba is actually my younger brother’ I’d tell both the Zs, my audience for these narrations. This unending saga became a nightly ritual until, one day, I froze in mid-sentence realizing Baba had overheard. I couldn’t read what he felt but he kind of smiled and patted me on the head saying, ‘Good! Very good imagination!’ That was the end of those stories. I don’t know why.