And Then One Day: A Memoir (23 page)

Manthan
however is a unique film, in that it had 5, 00, 000 financiers, all of them members of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation who paid two rupees each, to amass a figure of 10, 00, 000 rupees—more than enough at that time to make a film of that kind with a large cast, on location. In later years of course there were films I acted in, shot in Bombay, on starvation budgets like 3, 50, 000 rupees, but
Manthan
was probably the first Indian film to be financed by a cooperative. When it was released after quite a delay— ‘a film about milk farmers?? Who the hell will see it??’—it astounded everybody by running to full houses in Gemini, Bandra and other ‘single screen’ theatres—there were no multiplexes then—for a good ten weeks, and was considered one of the sleeper successes of the year. By that time of course Shyam, indefatigable as ever, had already embarked on his next film.

Getting back to the city and once again being able to cadge meals at Ratna’s or Sunil’s or Shishir’s homes felt very good. Dubeyji promised me one of the central roles in Vijay Tendulkar’s new play,
Baby,
a rather morbid piece about a film extra, opposite Bhakti Barve who I still consider the finest female theatre actor I have seen in my life. But he reneged and did the part himself. Shama Zaidi, then embarking on a Hindi translation of the new Satish Alekar play
Maha- Nirvan,
asked me if I would act in it. I readily agreed and didn’t object when she cast Jaspal in the central singing role. I still hoped the relationship could repair itself and figured it might be therapeutic for him to do a part where he could really shine. Shama during the shoot had been sympathetic to Jaspal’s situation and so, despite Dubeyji’s strong reservations, went ahead with this ill-fated enterprise which fell apart within three weeks of rehearsal. Jaspal, instead of appreciating the opportunity to be the star, in fact started behaving like one: swaggering around telling us all what we should do, directing by proxy when Shama was not around which was often. Shama, unable in any case to handle the situation, was present when another ugly situation developed one day between us, resulting in Jaspal being asked to leave the project. He was hurriedly replaced and in another week this shoddy production was staged and closed after one performance. Dubeyji came to see it and all he said was, ‘I told you so.’

The lodging I had managed was a room with three others in Martinville, an ancient Ango-Indian bungalow in Santa Cruz, the very house where Jaspal had earlier found accommodation. I then graduated, with an increase in rent of course, to a room with two others; and finally with a further rent hike to a room with only Tika Singh, a Nepali classmate from FTII, who after an unhappy and fruitless time trying to get acting jobs in Bombay later went home. There was no question of waiting for the phone to ring in Martinville, there was no telephone there, but summonses of any kind were also not forthcoming. In any case, the telephone had not ceased to be an object of some wonder for me ever since the Ajmer days where when it rang, which was seldom, there would be a race between the three of us to get to it first. None of us dared make a call to anyone though, because you had to deal with a no-nonsense operator enquiring, ‘Number please?’ and we were scared she would tell on us. I still had a phobia about phones and Ratna could not understand why I didn’t call her up more often. I would ask what I should call up about and she didn’t seem to understand how difficult it is saying sweet nothings on a public phone with people waiting in a queue breathing down your neck.

The one summons that did come was from a big production house for a multi-starrer in which I was being offered a tiny part. Big production house I thought, so big money too, and promptly went to the meeting. I had earlier been narrated the part and didn’t really feel like doing it but the thought of the money got me. And so to the big man behind the desk I daringly quoted a sum the like of which I had not dreamt of receiving so far. ‘Fifty,’ said I. There was a short pause during which he smilingly doodled on a pad, then looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Thousand?’ I nodded, holding back another stronger response that was on the tip of my tongue. He doodled some more for what seemed like an interminable while, then looked back at me and pointedly drew a cross on the pad. Not another word was going to be spoken, it seemed, so I took my leave, much to the consternation of the director of the film who had told me he ‘really wanted’ me in the part.

Ratna was then in her second year of college. There was a seven-year difference in our ages and our backgrounds were as different from each other’s as they could possibly be. We made no attempt to hide the relationship when it developed, and I had to manfully ignore the snide whispers of ‘cradle snatcher’. Dina, her mother, who seemed to have a special antenna for these things, was uneasy about me from the start but was charming and diplomatic when I was around. Little sis Supriya however was staunchly on my side and Ratna’s friends, most of them Parsi, thought I looked just like one of them so I was happily taken into the fold. It was some years though, after successfully portraying a number of Parsi characters in various films, before I actually became an honorary Parsi (Nazru Dinshaw).

There was a ‘no girlfriends visiting’ rule in Martinville which Mrs Martin, the near-sighted and friendly landlady, did not rigorously enforce in my case—my picture had appeared in a couple of magazines, her niece had happened to see
Nishant,
and by now I had been classified as ‘a decent boy’ so I was not chastised about having deceived her by posing as a journalist nor was I asked to leave. Old Mrs Martin was actually quite thrilled that she now knew a film actor in real life and I got somewhat special treatment after that. Ratna and I met every day either at her place or mine, depending on whether her parents were home or not. Tika would tactfully disappear when she arrived, usually around lunchtime, straight from college, and we would then just hang around together. I loved going to the movies, she didn’t mind. She loved going to art galleries, I hated it but would tag along. She loved wandering around and looking at things in shops while I talked to her incessantly mostly about acting and about my past, which took a while to relate in full. She made me feel great, listening intently, already sharing my enthusiasm for cinema and theatre and later learning to tolerate my love for tennis and cricket as well. She wasn’t quite as obsessed with acting as I was, but wanted to be an actor and was pretty good too, her clarity of voice and her diction were particularly impressive. I had always found her terribly attractive and now a deeper friendship, a mutual admiration and fondness, began to grow. Despite Dina’s vociferous objections, and the more subdued ones of her father Baldev, pretty soon we both knew for certain that we wished to spend the rest of our lives together. One evening at Juhu beach when she and I had strolled off, much to the consternation of Shishir and Sunil who feared we might have been mugged, I asked her if she would marry me when it was feasible to do so and she accepted without a moment’s hesitation. I wonder if she was brave or foolhardy: I had no work, very little money, not many prospects, nothing even dimly on the horizon and she agreed to share my life. That faith was one of the major battery-chargers through the stress and uncertainty of the extremely fallow succeeding year or two in which, though big-league players like Manoj Kumar, Yash Chopra, Javed Akhtar called me to meet them, I again received no offer of solid work.

During all this time Ratna had been fighting off her parents to keep the relationship going; and even though we had by now reached the stage of ferocious arguments neither of us, I am pretty sure, even once considered severing ties. With no inkling of what the future had in store, we were both at the moment happy enough to have found our ‘missing halves’. After trying for a while to wean me off my hashish habit she realized it was hardly a threat to her and gave up. Dina’s problem with my smoking though continued right to the end; her nose would scrunch up almost on its own accord and her first reflex was ‘something is burning’ every time I lit up. I tried many times to persuade her to have a puff or two, arguing it would make her less uptight, and I was only half- joking.

Ratna’s home had a television set and so I got the perfect excuse to spend all my time there if a Test match or Wimbledon was on; those were the days of the two-channel black-and- white Doordarshan in India, on which a Wimbledon final was once stopped near match point for a telecast of ‘Parliament News’. She shared my fascination for Borg and McEnroe but could not quite comprehend what could be so engrossing about every single delivery in a five-day cricket match. She had never played the game, so I couldn’t explain, but to her credit she tolerated my cricket mania and would watch with me most of the time. Even though I could never successfully explain to her the difference between off and leg, she eventually developed an interest in the game, maybe because of the Pakistani hunks or maybe because, years later, she saw me help my sons with their addition, multiplication and division sums, not to mention averages and percentages (rest in peace Miss Perry) using cricket scores.

But at that time, college was ending in a few months for her and she had to decide what to do—marriage for us was still very far away, the resident rodent in the poorest church had more put away than I had, and she didn’t fancy acting in the Gujarati theatre or commercial Hindi cinema. Her dad’s stylish tailoring establishment ‘Shriman’ which had once catered to the biggest stars had fallen from favour, there was no point trying to run that, and in any case she was keener on theatre than on designing men’s clothing. She began to consider the possibility of going to study at NSD and so we thought we would fatten her résumé by attempting some plays on our own.

There were two problems with that though: we had no director and nowhere to perform. Though there were many Western plays that I hoped to do in the future, nearly all of them were impossible to attempt at that point, so we decided to start small. Prithvi Theatre would take another five years to come into our lives, and the NCPA’s sixty-seater Little Theatre was rarely made available to beginners. The only venue that the ‘un-commercial’ Hindi and Marathi theatre workers could afford was located in a very downmarket middle-class Marathi-medium school Chhabildas, tucked away in one of the by-lanes that snake around all sides of Dadar station. Persuaded by the wonderfully persistent theatre couple Sulabha and Arvind Deshpande, the management of this school agreed to grant use of the school hall to theatre companies to perform in, charging a rent so minimal it was practically a gift. The Deshpandes were convinced there was an audience for serious theatre in that area and pioneered the crazy scheme of performing there with their company Aavishkar helmed by the indefatigable Arun Kakde kaka. Dubeyji quickly joined forces with them, as did some others, and for almost two decades Chhabildas enjoyed, among the vernacular intelligentsia, a smallish cult status as the haven of experimental theatre in Marathi and Hindi. Audiences were small and losses were invariably incurred at every show but the few intrepid souls who had made Chhabildas’s reputation persevered until Arvind suddenly passed away, Dubeyji started exploring newer venues and many of the actors and directors who had worked there had to move on when the school management decided it was more profitable to let the hall out for wedding receptions.

No one had attempted an English play at Chhabildas, there was no audience for English in that neighbourhood we were told, so though even that venue seemed closed to us we decided to go ahead and perform there. It was the only place we could afford and I somewhat neatly resolved the ‘director’ dilemma by deciding on two pieces I had done before, Ionesco’s
The Lesson
which, not knowing French, I had been itching to do in English; and a stunning 10-minute piece by Jorge Diaz on US war atrocities, called
Man Does Not Die by Bread Alone.
I directed the latter and Ketan Mehta directed
The Lesson.
The show, with Ratna as the Pupil, opened in a hall at the Alliance Franfaise, courtesy Asha Kasbekar, who played the maid, then did more than one performance at Chhabildas, sometimes with audiences of ten or twelve. We later went on to revive
Zoo Story
and staged it with Chekhov’s
The Bear,
again two pieces I had done before—I was obviously dying to show off. The performances happened in all sorts of places apart from Chhabildas: in the open air at various institutes, in hotels, in friends’ drawing rooms or terraces, once even on a badminton court. All this time I cadged as many meals as I could at Ratna’s home. Babi bai, her cook, had taken to me when I first met her and by now had made it her responsibility to stuff me thoroughly every time I ate there. Things seemed to be glancing upwards ever so slightly at last. Dina who had been dialect consultant on the dubbing of
Manthan,
and who despite herself was impressed with my work, had begun to tolerate my presence, Baldev was seldom home and Shyam Benegal’s next film, a biopic on the Marathi star Hansa Wadkar, had taken shape and I had been told I would be featuring in it.