And Then One Day: A Memoir (13 page)

I
n the opening class on modern Indian drama the kindly Mr Nemichand Jain, professor of that subject, after his introductory talk enquired from us about the number of Hindi plays each student had read. Most rattled off a number of names I hadn’t ever heard before and everyone had read at least a couple if not more of what seemed to be very well- known works of Indian playwrights in Hindi. Everyone, that is, except me. I hadn’t heard of any of these plays and the only extra-curricular Hindi I had ever read was film magazines or Must Ram’s porn. An astonished Jain saab had to ask me thrice over whether I was absolutely sure I ‘hadn’t read a single Hindi play ever??’ I assured him that such was indeed the case. Thereafter he always treated me as somewhat special and perhaps somewhat challenged.

The very first play I acted in at NSD, a children’s play
The Little Blue Horse,
gained me a mention in the only review of it that appeared, and that made my head swivel a little further. I was then cast as Brabantio in
Othello,
Mathew the gangster in
Three-Penny Opera,
and to my astonishment as Barot, the court poet, in a production of a folk play
Jasma Odan,
a singing role! This last was probably Alkazi’s attempt to get me to train my singing voice, a venture in which he failed completely. Despite the singing instructor’s relentless coaxing I just could not hit the notes. Being told to shut up any time I tried singing at home and being laughed out of every trial for the musicals in Sem had come home to roost. I was convinced I could never sing, and no amount of encouragement now was any help.

I had no realization then that my voice was a thing under my control if I bothered to listen to it, and all I had to do was recognize the habits I had accumulated along the way, and THEN work my butt off to rid myself of them. But I faltered at the first step. Far from being able to free my voice, I just could not tell a false note from a pure one, and it was maddening to constantly be told ‘No! No! Try again’ when I had no clue what I should be trying for. Fortunately for me, most of the other singers were only marginally better and so I didn’t suffer too much in comparison. And after all, Rex Harrison had ‘speechified’ all his songs in
My Fair Lady,
hadn’t he? That performance for me had been one of seminal influence. I decided to do the same and found my escape route through sheer laziness: I spoke the songs to rhythm, even receiving moderate praise for my diction. But sing I did not. The writer and director of
Jasma Odan,
the dynamic Shanta Gandhi, then no longer with the school and thus having no hand in my landing the part, after watching a performance of the play was aghast at why I had been cast. I did not blame her. As if having to sing in one play was not bad enough, fate had yet another trick up its sleeve.

A month-long winter tour to Bombay, Poona, Hyderabad and Bangalore was announced. All three productions would be travelling, and it was whispered that accompanying them would be a revival of
Caucasian Chalk Circle
with the role of Azdak up for grabs as Shashikant Nikte, the original Azdak, had left. Something like a premonition began to gather. I no longer visited Aligarh any more and even though it was unheard of for a first-year student to be cast in a lead role, I had a feeling that this time the impossible would happen, as Purveen had predicted it would. I wished equally fervently that she would come to see me in it. Relations with her were now practically non-existent and she did not reply to my letter telling her that the role was practically mine, though that was far from being true. There were not a few aspirants in line and at least one gent with a very strong claim, a third-year acting student who was not unsuitable. What went in my favour was that he was likely to leave after his course was done and I would be around for another two years; besides he couldn’t sing any better than me and Azdak had not one but two solo numbers.

Alkazi saab, the ferociously dedicated ‘padrone’ of the theatre, liked to personally set an example, asking no less of himself than he asked of anyone. Blessed with impeccable taste, and acutely aware of his place in history, he bestowed a sense of aesthetics and sophistication and, more important, organization and discipline on Indian theatre. His productions were examples of what ‘finish’ in theatre design actually meant. A designer by training and by temperament, widely travelled and formidably well read, Alkazi’s compelling theatre presentations had, in the context of Indian theatre then, no equal.

I had to wrench myself away from being around this dazzling personification of charisma and the other-worldly bliss of living, eating, sleeping theatre in order to pay to Heeba’s existence the attention it needed. Thoughts of my infant daughter were non-existent in my mind. A total disconnect with my life in Aligarh had happened, it all seemed like another time altogether. As my fascination with city life and theatre work grew, my connection with what I suppose were my roots began to shrivel. One of the things left behind was my relationship with Purveen. My relationship with Heeba had ossified before it began.

I got the Azdak part. My sessions with the singing instructor started anew, bearing as little fruit as before. Luckily for me the songs in Brecht’s plays are dramatic set pieces where the clear rendition of the words is of prime importance. Brecht himself even demanded a somewhat ‘unmusical’ quality from his singers; so that listeners are not lulled by the melody but pay heed to the content. Alkazi made the mistake of explaining this to me one day during rehearsal and of course I thought in that case I’m doing it right, and abandoned any further attempt to sing well. Laziness again hindered me, I was unable to rectify a shortcoming that only grew with time. And to top it all off: on our Bombay leg (my first revisit to the city I somehow knew I would spend my life in), all the plays performed to jam-packed houses.
Chalk Circle
was specially commended and I got a mention in the
Times of India.

The morning after the show I was woken by Rajendra Jaspal, a classmate and close friend by now, showing me the review. We shared a great big laugh and a celebratory joint first thing in the morning. Jaspal was a small-town guy like me though older by a couple of years. He didn’t speak English too well, was somewhat embarrassed about his lower- middle-class upbringing and the fact that he’d worked in a bank before coming to the drama school. With a marvellous singing voice he was as good an actor as I was and yet had to be content with playing the chorus while I, the star of the show, got to strut my off-key stuff. We seemed to have a lot in common apart from the feverish desire to succeed. Because of my English and my general air I guess he took me to be from a very well-to-do family and often stated that he wished to be like me. I admired his talents and he admired mine; we always got cast as buddies and became inseparable in real life as well, to the extent that we began to be referred to as one person: ‘Jaspal/Shah’. We did everything together, we seemed to have similar tastes, and our careers at the school followed similar trajectories, until
Chalk Circle,
that is. It escaped me completely that he may have aspired to the part as well. I just felt that getting it was my prerogative and he had seemed genuinely to share my happiness. I was incapable of reading between the lines then, and I had not a clue of the involvedness of the relationship that was forming and of the tragic (for him and nearly for me) consequences that would follow in a few years.

After triumphant turns in the first two cities, we began a show of
Jasma Odan
in Hyderabad with the forty-five-strong cast prancing on to the stage in celebration at the beginning of the play, only to be faced by row upon row of empty seats. There were, literally, fewer people in the auditorium than there were onstage. Some sponsor somewhere had messed up along the line and Hyderabad was a blip in an otherwise totally intoxicating, nay inebriating, tour for me. Even though I struggled with a strained voice (never once attempting to give up smoking though) my performance received favourable attention everywhere we went. R and I also broke off and patched up several times but became extremely close in the course of the tour, and despite her strong disapproval, I discovered the magic of marijuana.

Purveen never ever saw me play Azdak even though we performed the play several times in Delhi after the tour. I made a few feeble attempts to get through to Heeba, going to Aligarh and trying to spend time with her but we would both be tongue-tied on meeting. She was now two, walking and talking but had nothing to say to me and probably didn’t want to go anywhere with me. I think she must have been somewhat confused as to who I was and how she should behave with me. I was in a similar predicament. I didn’t know how to deal with children, I didn’t even know how she would respond if I tried to hug or hold her, and the reception from Purveen was always so unfailingly hostile that I finally decided to cease performing this onerous duty and in fact didn’t see Heeba again for another twelve years.

In my first year at NSD I was involved in more plays than I had done in my life thus far and I had got my picture in the papers for the first time. The prospect of doing this always just seemed too good to be true, until with the year-end exams done and Jaspal/Shah having secured first and second place respectively, Alkazi announced to both of us that he expected us to study direction instead of acting, saying that intelligent students like us would be more suited to study direction. What he was probably trying to do was shelter us from the abysmally inept acting teachers, and take us under his wing. We both initially resisted but couldn’t hold out; when Alkazi set out to persuade he succeeded. He was obsessive about many things, mainly order and cleanliness, about not neglecting the smallest detail, even seeing to the maintenance of the toilets, not infrequently doing a clean-up himself. Costumes not respectfully folded and kept in their proper place after a show would bring the wrath of God down on the transgressor. Everything he said was said with complete conviction, he seemed to have the right take on everything, he always made sense. We both agreed to enter the second year as students of direction and took one more step towards confusing our identities with each other. In the two-month summer break neither of us went home. Getting permission to stay on in the hostel we both acted in a production of three one-act pieces, attempted by a couple of (then) enterprising young men, Rajendra Gupta and Devendra Ankur. The production was staged in a theatre in as professional a way as we could manage. Alkazi saw it and pronounced himself ‘pleased, but not with the noisy backstage’.

Sometime during the vacations I received a letter from R ending our relationship; something she tried to do repeatedly in the two years we knew each other; maybe she sensed we were wrongly matched, but I was just too smitten to see it. I went off to Aligarh for a few days to be with Asif and Jasdev. Asif’s parents had migrated to the US and he was due to follow as soon as his medical studies were done, Jasdev was to join his family in London after his commerce course. Luckily for me, these events were still a couple of years away and I had the solace of their friendship for a little longer. They both goaded me to visit Heeba but I didn’t. It was impossible for me to face my own inadequacies.

Meanwhile the report cards for our first-year exam had been sent home, mine resulting in yet another furious tirade from Baba. Unable to find anything to berate me about now that I was no longer wasting his money, he had probably been stewing for a while, and then like manna from heaven my report card arrived. Disregarding totally my tremendous achievement of for the first time in my life not being among the last few but the top two, he decided to pick upon a bit of criticism by Alkazi regarding my diction and habit of speaking nasally. How did I ‘hope to become an actor with such hopelessly bad speech’ though Alkazi had made no such observation. I ignored the letter, but set about correcting my habit of gabbling my dialogue and speaking through my nose.

In my second year at NSD an uneasy feeling that I hadn’t really learnt anything new about acting began to gnaw at me. I was fascinated by the theatre history we were taught; and reading new plays, even if they were completely incomprehensible, was stimulating, as was watching Alkazi breathe life into a comatose scene. But as far as learning acting went, the classes made absolutely no sense. It was the curse that has always beset the training of actors: only the failures come back to teach, and most have failed because quite simply they didn’t know their job. And in any case most student actors are only too happy to listen for hours to esotericisms spouted by acting teachers and are obsessed only with getting employment, not with understanding the mechanics of their work, which in any case the mountebanks who teach are not equipped to help them with. Thus the completely erroneous belief that ‘some can act and others can’t’ continues to hold sway. Students of acting in most places, instead of being made aware of their work as a craft, are pushed to recall past incidents and manipulate themselves to laugh or cry or rage, all resulting in great cathartic releases of emotion but giving the actor nothing except a momentary high of wallowing in memories. The actor is asked simply to recall, there is no guidance on how to sift these experiences and use them while working; no breakdown of the process of expressing. The notion that great acting ‘just happens’ is encouraged; the purpose of an actor’s job and his place in the scheme of things seems nebulous to everyone; meaningless words like ‘talent’, ‘inspiration’, ‘involvement’ are tossed about and most actors feel their job is done by merely mouthing these, bowing to the stage when someone is watching, sitting nervously alone before performing, and learning how to spell Stanislavsky.

Alkazi himself was a designer and had little patience with actors. He never bothered with the dynamics behind the action, for him it was all composition. His vast knowledge of painting, sculpture, music, literature and theatre had so honed his instincts that he knew the effect a particular composition could create. It was up to the actors to find their own truth, if they could, within that composition; it was never spelt out for them. He himself had been an actor once, had in fact played Hamlet and Tartuffe and Lucky (somewhat showily I suspect!) but his reputation rested chiefly on his impeccable productions in which the opening lights coming up on an elaborate empty setting could garner applause, but in which the acting was somewhat soulless, never less than competent but far from inspiring.