And Then One Day: A Memoir Read online

  Ammi knew only how to read and write Arabic and thus Urdu. She spoke a little Persian, which Baba spoke fluently, but mostly she’d been conditioned to serve. She always addressed Baba as ‘Shah’; he, at least in my hearing, never called her by her name. Cooking, sewing and reciting the Quran were her chief skills but in these departments did she deliver! Her voice, humming-bird soft when she recited aloud, invariably early in the morning when we were struggling to wake up under our quilts or mosquito nets, somehow made waking up easier. The same voice, however, could change into a tearing hurricane when she was worked up, which was seldom, but there was no mistaking it when it happened. Even Baba would retreat when she was in full swing, because her ire was invariably directed at him, never at any of us; she left that to him.

  Till the end, even though she took enormous pride in my work and the fact that I took her abroad and even to Rashtrapati Bhavan with me, and that I would be recognized in most places, she never really figured me out and after a while stopped trying. For a long time through my adolescence, when communication with Baba was at a complete standstill, she would be my only confidante and comfort. I still keep in my cupboard one of her dupattas and it carries her smell. The most soothing sensation I have ever felt in my life is the touch of the breath-warmed corner of her dupatta on my eyelids. And of course her cooking was the best in the world. Strangely, she had never learnt to knit, but countless were the woollen socks she darned and the trouser seats she reinforced, and the shirt cuffs she either extended or shortened to suit whoever was to be the recipient of the hand- me-downs. It was generally myself since I was last in the line and for a long time the smallest in size. I never got around to inheriting any of Baba’s clothes, though, until he died. Then I rummaged among his things and took back to Bombay with me every garment of his that I could lay my hands on. There weren’t many. Through his days of retirement he’d generally wear only khaki trousers and white shirt, and hat, of course. The trousers and shirts were too large for me, he was a portly man, but I and some other actors have worn them often onstage along with a pair of his shoes, which fitted me perfectly. I couldn’t find the Burberry hat and the pinstripe suit, I suspect they were taken away by one of the Zs.

  For a couple of years after ‘51, we shifted from Lucknow to Bareli to Haldwani and finally to Nainital. Poor Zaheer went into boarding school in ‘53, and in ‘54 Zameer and I were put into the nursery in a ‘sister’ school, St Mary’s (Ramnee) Convent, as day scholars, which meant we went home after school.

  At Ramnee I was cast as a cobbler in a play called, I think, The Shoemaker’s Shop. I had to sit on a stool with a little awl before me and go tap-tap-tap in time to a song, ‘In the shoemaker’s shop, where a tapping never stops tra la la la LAAAAA’ and so forth. I fell ill on show day, and so my debut onstage was delayed by quite a few years. I don’t remember being particularly broken up about it, but I must have been and maybe what I felt then, though lost in the smoke rings of time, somewhere unknowingly fed the desire to act. I mean, Zameer played a sailor that night in On the Good Ship Lollipop and he never felt a similar urge.

  The same year I watched a play for the first time, in the Sem concert hall. It was called Mr Fixit and has faded from my memory almost entirely but while watching it the only thing I wanted was to be up there with those people. When a long limousine, which I later discovered to be a plywood cutout on wheels, came gliding on to the stage, I was back in the same universe of wonder where I had watched ‘that man’ dancing on that stage a hundred feet high. And I have since steadfastly believed that the only magic that happens in this world happens on the stage. Films take you captive, they feed you everything on a plate, the legerdemain they create transports you into a state where you may as well be dreaming, but theatre takes you into a world where your imagination is stimulated, your judgement is unimpaired, and thus your enjoyment heightened. It is only in the theatre that there can be this kind of exchange of energies between actor and audience. The finest definition of theatre that I have come across is ‘one actor-one audience’. Implying of course that any meaningful interaction between two people anywhere fits the definition of ideal theatre, with the same qualities needed of both participants as are required from them in an actual theatre. Theatre really is a one-on-one experience.

  The time to attend real school was approaching; playing with plasticine and singing songs and drawing all day in Ramnee couldn’t go on forever. At the year-ending annual function we were given mementoes. I got a book, Farm Fun, Zameer got one called A Name for Kitty, and we began to gird our loins for this business of living and learning which had now to begin. St Joseph’s had always looked ominous, and now we were to enter into its bowels. Zameer being a year ahead of me even in Ramnee was admitted into Class 1, and myself into the higher kindergarten. Zaheer was no longer a boarder this year but reverted to day-scholarship, which was to last only a year for all three of us.

  Perhaps Classes 1 and 2 started their term a day or two earlier than the KG did, because I recall Baba enclosing my hand in his, and taking me to my first day in school by myself. It was a cold rainy day, the mist was deep, I was bundled into a Duckback raincoat and rubber cap and I was carrying my bag in my other hand. I’ve always had ambivalent feelings about mist since. Beautiful yes, but also chilling; and there’s nothing ambivalent about my feeling for school bags—I still hate the damn things. The sensation of setting off from home seemed final. I’m not sure if I cried; I don’t think I did, I was too terrified. Walking uphill to the school, a mean climb, I don’t remember if Baba and I talked, but he must have said something to me. Even though he was a man of very few words, there must have been a time when we talked to each other.

  Our teacher in kindergarten was a Miss Brendish who left the next year. My idea of the perfect teacher has always been in the image of Miss Brendish, really kind and really pretty. I think that somewhere in my wife Ratna’s collection of memorabilia there exists my report card for this year (1955). It’s a very good one and I’m among the achievers. That did not continue to be the case, however; the decline in academic achievement was to be steady. The days of coming and going to and from school that year I don’t recall except for having daily to check with Ammi which my left shoe was and which my right; constantly watching my shadow while walking uphill, to check if my hair still looked combed, something it has consistently refused to be for more than one minute even now; and picking up little bits of gravel to compare with the size of my front (‘milk’) teeth which I was told would fall out and be replaced by ‘teeth of stone’.

  I also remember flying on one occasion. It was the annual Sports Day prize distribution, and I was applauding listlessly with the others for the unending row of winners filing up to receive their prizes. I don’t think I’d taken part in any event, much less won it, when to my astonishment I was suddenly pushed towards the dais by someone behind me who said ‘Hey, Shah! Your name—.’ Before I knew how or why, I was shaking hands with the chief guest and being handed a gleaming little trophy, which I still have. I have no idea why I got it, and it still bothers me that maybe it was intended for someone else who also didn’t hear his name called. I try to go back in time and invent excuses like ‘Well, it was probably the sack race or the egg and spoon race. I must have come third or something!’ But the niggling doubt persists that I got that cup for doing nothing.

  All this reasoning has happened since I turned fortyish; and after being bored to death at the few film award ceremonies I did attend and becoming privy to the machinations that go on behind the scenes, I began to loathe all competitive awards, particularly those which are an excuse for the film industry to indulge in its annual orgy of mutual jerking-off. The feeling turns even stronger when I look at that cup now. But then, it made me walk on air for a few brief minutes. I was one with the wind, flying down the steep path that led from the school building to the gate, to the cottage nearby where we lived. My feet were not touching the ground, and I didn’t need to figure out w
hy this wondrous thing had happened to me. The feeling of being worthwhile and being rewarded was enough. I didn’t need to know whether I deserved it or not. That sensation has repeated itself once more since: twenty years later, after my first meeting with Shyam Benegal, when he told me I’d gotten the part in Nishant, my first film.

  St Joseph’s Film Institute, Nainital

  1955 ended, and with it memorizing ‘Sing Ann sing. Can Ann sing? Ann can sing’ and two-ones-are-twos and spending the post-lunch ‘siesta hour’ ogling Miss Brendish’s legs. Education began in the year 1956. But another blow awaited me before the year was out. Baba was nearing the end of his tenure as a government servant, retirement age being fifty then, and had been posted to Ajmer, a scenic town in Rajasthan ringed by the gentle Aravalis, for the remainder of his working life, which actually had ended but now would extend for another ten years. I came to love and look upon Ajmer as the place I belong to; it was where the three of us went after nine months in school. The hallowed tomb of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, a Sufi saint from the twelfth-thirteenth century, is in Ajmer and falls under the jurisdiction of the home ministry. Baba was appointed administrator of the shrine with a substantial increase in salary and he celebrated by buying a small two-band Philips radio and putting the three of us into boarding at St Joseph’s. I don’t remember being too excited at the prospect. It would mean a cold thorny bed by oneself in an enormous dormitory; no more cuddling with Ammi. It would mean polishing one’s own shoes and, impossibility of impossibilities, combing one’s own hair. I didn’t think I’d survive it. As it turned out, I not only survived St Joseph’s, I even got the best education money could buy, though not quite in the way Baba had hoped.

  We saw a movie or two every week, possibly the only indulgence, apart from walloping the kids, that the Christian Brothers permitted themselves. The movies were generally on Wednesday, and whoever selected the movies really knew his onions. When I catch an old movie on TV now, it is only the really obscure ones I cannot immediately identify. I’d seen them all in school, or I made it my business to find out about them. The selection took in everything from Mickey Mouse to Orson Welles, from the synchronized swimsuits of Esther Williams to the incomprehensible singing of Mario Lanza, from On the Waterfront to Zorro Rides Again. I’d wake up at night chortling at the memory of Norman Wisdom tripping over his own big feet or Jerry Lewis quite astoundingly going from one state of imbalance into another without falling. I was mesmerized as Spencer Tracy fought off the sharks and brought his big fish home, and cheered when Gary Cooper took on the baddies single-handed. I loved Frank Capra’s and Chaplin’s whimsical wonders; Laurel & Hardy, though, I never found the least bit amusing. In Elia Kazan’s dramas, everyone shouted and cried way too much, I thought; it was decades before I revisited Mr Kazan’s work, but there were the John Ford Westerns and the Tarzan films and the Three Stooges. The jaw-dropping special effects of Tom Thumb (from the early fifties) I think have never been replicated even with the great god computer, nor have there ever been in movies other deadpan acrobatic enigmas like Buster Keaton, inspired lunatics like The Marx Brothers, or dancers with the panache and skill of Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly/Cyd Charysse. St Joseph’s got me irrevocably hooked on movies, and even though my time there was not the happiest in my life, I can never stop being grateful to whoever chose those movies, and I suspect it was one Brother D. F. Burke, whose fondness for doling out physical punishment was legend, and who I still hate with a passion.

  There are only a few other memories not of movies. Moments learning to row on the lake in Nainital; Babar (Shah) Mamu, Ammi’s youngest brother and ever my hero in real life, scoring a century in a match at the ‘flats’ and bringing home a huge cup from which he and his teammates drank something, while shouting and laughing a great deal; the spectacle of the Himalayan range from Cheena Peak on a clear winter day; running around the Government grounds, probably one of the most exquisite golf courses in the world, a castle straight out of Robin Hood prosaically called Government House looming over it; watching a huge oak struck by lightning cleave right through its middle into two flaming halves right before our astonished eyes; refusing on one of my low days to copy from the blackboard the weekly letter home which always began ‘Dear Mum and Dad, I am well and happy’, telling the teacher I wanted to write ‘I am not well and not happy’, and finally settling for ‘I am well and not happy’; stealing a box of matches to eat the unburnt match heads, and being caught before I could eat them all.

  Hindi movies were taboo, as was talking in Hindi— sometimes, comically enough, even in Hindi class. In my ten tears at Sem, we saw just one Hindi movie there, Schoolmaster., which was in fact a Tamil film with Sivaji Ganesan, dubbed into Hindi. Over three hours in length, it felt much longer and actually took two evenings to screen, but we were mercilessly subjected to its plodding story and its semaphoric acting to the bitter end. The film-maker had probably emptied his cavernous pockets into the school coffers, provided the students were compelled to sit through his masterwork. There could NOT possibly be another explanation. The gasp of disbelief that greeted the legend ‘INTERVAL’ when we were expecting the film to end, in fact feeling it should have ended long ago, would, if the film-maker were present, have discouraged him from ever again testing this particular audience for a reaction. But Schoolmaster was a small road-bump on a mesmeric journey that St Joseph’s and Brother Burke helped me embark on.

  And as if this feast of cinema was not enough we were not infrequently allowed a movie in town (ticket prices deducted from our pocket money) if the movie was one of those ‘must- sees’. Usually the biblical epics qualified for this category—The Ten Commandments., Ben-Hur, King of Kings—but there were also the then new movies, in ‘Cinemascope’ which couldn’t be screened in school: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Spartacus, The Guns of Navarone, Witness for the Prosecution, all of which I gratefully devoured. Thus my film education was in very good shape by the time I left Sem in shame, having failed in Class 9, a cathartic event that was to shape the rest of my life—but of that later.

  While Baba had put his money on St Joseph’s improving my mind and preparing me to be a good citizen, I was beginning to realize that watching movies was what I enjoyed more than any other activity, and when not watching one, pretending to be in one. That’s all I understood of acting at that time, and deeply unsatisfied as I was with being an unremarkable, unattractive, unintelligent, unfriendly type, there was great solace to be found in pretending to be other people. Of course I never ever ‘pretended’ in public, never even confessed to anyone about it, and conducted all my ‘pretending’ on my own, but the virus just continued to grow. I have been grappling for years with the question of whether experiencing difficulty dealing with real life is what drives people to become actors. Though it is far from resolved in my head, looking back at some very worthwhile actors I have known closely, almost every one of them seems to conform to this pattern. It does seem like an aberration of behaviour to want to be someone else all the time, and I think it happens to people who, like me, can find no self-worth early in life and thus find fulfilment in hiding behind make-believe.

  So while unknown to him, my father’s dreams for me were being slowly demolished, I was beginning to zero in on dreams of my own. There was one problem however: no one else thought I had any ability in any field, least of all in acting, and although dramatic activity was plentiful and the school did marvellous annual theatre productions every year, I never so much as got a look-in at any of these events. The teachers’ pets got all the parts. I did not even have the satisfaction of being rejected.

  Heroes, villains and dolls

  The early years at Sem went by uneventfully except that I gradually managed to slip to the bottom of the class, and learnt how to smoke by the time I was in Class 8. I still have the report card for that year too, which proclaims that I stand 50th in a class of 50. I don’t know to what I can attribute this decline in academia except that my fascinat
ion for Miss Brendish was now replaced with a fascination for Mrs Ludwig, the art teacher who, while seated at her desk, would dangle her shoe ever so tantalizingly on her foot through the class, without ever letting it fall off. Listening to the teachers’ intonations, watching the way they gesticulated, the way they dressed, the way some of them tugged at their cuffs, the way they wiped the blackboard, was far more interesting than what they were trying to teach. I excelled in English at times, but that was all. Maths was totally beyond me as were physics and chemistry, and as for trigonometry ... ! It’s kind of bemusing to wonder how come it never occurred to any of my teachers to investigate the curious case of this child who always got the highest marks in the class in English literature and composition, yet failed in grammar.

  Much to my envy, both the Zs featured in the school plays. Zaheer, who actually is pretty good and gave me one of my earliest lessons in acting, won ‘best actor’ a couple of times while the largest part I had was one line in a play called Matrimonial Agency. I loved the school plays, sometimes Gilbert and Sullivan operas, The Gondoliers and The Mikado, and at other times stuff concocted by Brother Greene: Aladdin & Out! and Alibaba & the 40 Black Sheep. I’d have given my soul to be onstage in these, but Mephistopheles did not turn up to tempt me and in any case singing, even in a chorus, was quite beyond me. And that, coupled with having no handle at all on the art of ‘selling myself’, made sure I was left out in the cold. My one line in Matrimonial Agency, however, vindicated for me the feeling I’d always had that I wouldn’t be a complete disaster as an actor. This needs some recounting.