And Then One Day: A Memoir (2 page)

A
mmi 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 Initially aloof and withdrawn, always addressing Ammi as ‘Apa bi’ and Baba as ‘Dulha bhai’, it took us some time getting used to having him around.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 pioneering 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.

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.