And Then One Day: A Memoir (3 page)

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 why 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.

1
955 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.

T
he 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 fascination 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.

Every time I ever saw a play, and this dates back to
Mr Fixit,
I would, while waiting for the curtain to rise, be intensely intrigued by exactly what was going on behind it. As the years flew past, I learnt it’s a welter of confusion, especially in school plays. But at that time I wanted nothing more than to be privy to what was brewing on the other side. And my opportunity came with this skit which our class put up for the Principal’s feast. This was Class 8, the year 1961, and I was twelve or eleven, depending on my mood. After being rapidly rejected by Brother Foran for one of the main parts, I was cast as a guy who, having mistaken the matrimonial agency for a pet shop, comes in and says, ‘I want one who will bark all day, bite people’s noses off, and guard my house from any intruder!’ When I was asked, not for the first time in my life, to speak up so everyone could hear, I found myself receding into the depths of the same black despair I had felt when I was five, and afflicted with a stammer which I finally overcame by speaking as fast as I could. Get the thought out before the damn stammer hits, you know ... Speaking in a rush had become a habit, and though I could, even then, deliver ‘if you have tears prepare to shed them now—’ quite magnificently to myself, if anyone else were around, bewildered squeaks emerged instead of the beautiful waterfall of a voice I imagined I had. But I held on to the role, mainly by virtue of no one else being available; and after being goaded to ‘speak up, speak clear, not so nasal, not so fast!’ I found, with a bit of practice, I could actually do that in front of people too. It was a monumental discovery.

Now I was actually standing behind the curtain. I was there! I took a long while savouring the feeling that there were people out there who were curious about what we were doing, about what I was doing. I kicked the hem of the curtain to make it billow and make them wonder even more. That’s what the inside of a mother’s womb must feel like. Warm, safe, comfortable. You have no weight, no cares. The outside world is outside. It can get to you only when you let it. Then the curtain opened. Suddenly, the womb was gone and I was staring into a black void. Never having been onstage before, I was blinded by the intensity of the lighting, but then I felt the boards under my feet, and I took a breath. In the dazzling blackness, dim shapes of heads gradually began to identify themselves. They looked expectant, receptive, not hostile and judgemental, as in life. And every one of them seemed to be looking at me. I had one of the first lines. After, for a few brief seconds, almost submitting to the most intense fear I’ve ever known, I finally spoke and got it out loud and clear and not garbled and not nasal at all, and they laughed. They had listened and they had responded! And I discovered that no one in the cosmos is more desirous of loving you, for that moment, than an audience is.

I have sometimes tried to explain the sheer alchemy of this moment to indifferent journalists waiting for the ‘apt line’, or to other actors not so diffident as I was, people who’ve had no problem being listened to or responded to, and I guess it’s not that they can’t understand, but that I can’t explain it any better. It was the defining moment of my life and made me feel I was of some worth after all. Acceptance and appreciation were things I was not familiar with. And vain though it may sound, it is absolutely true that never again while stepping on to the stage have I ever felt the slightest anxiety. All I have felt is impatience. I can’t wait to be up there. And being up there, for the most part I have known only joy, even when subjected to hostile audiences. Because it’s not you they are responding to but what you are providing. A ‘bad’ audience can be turned into a ‘good’ one by a good performance and vice versa. I have always wondered if it isn’t something of an aberration to want people to respond to you and yet to not want it. Anyway, that is also why meeting the audience after a performance is not my favourite activity. The audience often mixes you up with the part you’ve just played.

The arrival of the December vacation in school was heralded by icy winds and the appearance of our trunks in the quadrangle. These had lain since March, when we’d all arrived, in the box room, a huge mysterious room below the study hall, which was kept locked through the year. The day of departure was a day of celebration. ‘No more Hindi, no more French, no more sitting on the hard old bench!’ Till next March, that is. Then the bus ride down to Kathgodam, the nearest railway station, catch the train to Bareli (then spelt ‘Bareilly’ like ‘Cawnpore’), change at Bareli for Delhi. An overnight journey, and finally chugging in over the Jamuna bridge past the ramparts of the Old Fort and into Old Delhi station and parental embraces, followed by warm toast and tea in a pot in the station refreshment room. And then the final leg of the journey to Ajmer, arriving there normally in the dead of night; and the tonga ride home, perched precariously on our trunks all the while. The horse would invariably crap on the way (an ability I’ve always envied, to be able to do that while running full pelt) and the smell of horse dung is inextricably woven in my mind with the feeling of coming home. I love the smell, and it is definitely responsible for my love of horses.

There wasn’t a whole lot to do in Ajmer during the hols. The Sunday morning English matinee was allowed us but other outings were uncommon, and with Baba being the kind of person he was, so was socializing. We visited and were visited by maybe one family, the Capoors, Mrs Capoor being the most beautiful vision of a woman I have ever seen in my life, but even them we saw only on festivals or weddings or suchlike. Spotting Mrs Capoor taking a walk while we were cycling past would make our respective day. Playing cricket was our only pastime, and our most, and only, prized possessions were a bat, a ball and a set of stumps. None of us ever became terribly proficient at the game despite playing it every day in every vacation. There was, however, always one thing to look forward to apart from the Sunday movie in Prabhat Talkies, and that was the annual visit to Sardhana, which Baba abhorred, but which Ammi insisted on, and generally with good reason, as one or other of her sisters and/or brothers would be getting married.

These weddings were monumental affairs. Uncles, aunts and cousins of all varieties from all over the country, from Pakistan and even further, would descend, the celebrations were unending, and the feasts and the flare-ups massive. I don’t remember dancing girls but qawwalis went on into the night, and the wind-up gramophone (my introduction to Hindi film music) would blare non-stop. Guns and fireworks went off and antique swords flashed about. Presiding over all this would be Ammi’s parents, Agha Habib Shah and Naushaba Begum. Until later stricken by paralysis and heartbreak at his warring sons and getting reduced to a pathetic sideshow, he was a gargantuan figure, his great quilted coat engulfing all three of us. She was a tall, slim, elegantly turned out hard- faced lady with twinkling eyes, who smoked asthma cigarettes. The lands they owned were still to be divided and fought over by their children, so the estates were still enormous, but the picnics and shikars and mango-eating contests were to be among the last indulged in. Habib Shah owned the Meerut- Sardhana Roadways, a fleet of three buses which plied the sixteen miles between these two places, and brought bagfuls of loose change every evening. Sardhana still does not have a railway station and Nana’s fleet of buses is long gone, like the lands and the houses, all gradually sold or lying around in states of dilapidation. The last useful function any of the buses performed was to provide us children with a great space to play in, in its remains. The Meerut-Sardhana route today has scores of buses going up and down, but the Shahs blew their chance to control it long ago.

Ammi had four brothers, two of whom left at Partition and two (the eldest and the youngest) stayed behind. The eldest, Agha Mohiuddin (Agha Mamu) by now a Superintendent of Police, was a trained lawyer, a ‘Hafiz-e-Quran’ and had served in the navy before joining the police. The youngest, Shahabuddin Babar (Shah Mamu), was a lovable rogue who was never to amount to anything, but has stayed my idol always. Of the two who went to Pakistan one, Saeeduddin Khalid (Chand Mamu), later returned in order to manage the lands, as the old man was now losing interest in all that, and wanted to conserve all his energy exclusively for ‘shikar’. I’ve seen him come home with a bag of ten blackbuck, an endangered species today. ‘Shikar’ in fact was to figure very prominently in my definition of Ammi’s three siblings (the fourth I never met) and these three tigers for me were the personification of manhood, so when the dazzle of their personalities later faded, their fallibility and fall from grace was sobering to see. But at that time these square-jawed studs walked among the stars for me; all three of them handsome, humorous, hot-tempered, tall, tough and temperamental, quick to take offence, crack shots with a gun, fast and effective with their fists, seemingly invincible, indestructible people, with an unending capacity for enjoyment.

Though Agha Mamu the cop always felt he had to live up to his reputation of ‘Dacoit killer of UP’ and very consciously assumed the kind of awesome personality you’d find it tough to feel affection for—in fact who you’d wet your pants at the approach of—the other two when they were young were real cool creatures who laughed and loved a lot. I’ve seen Chand Mamu drop two flying partridges with two shots in succession, and I’ve seen Shah Mamu wrestle a wounded blackbuck to the ground single-handed. They couldn’t do a thing wrong, even if they had the hideously arrogant habit of reaching out and backhanding any unwary pedestrian or cyclist who dared block the path of their jeep or tractor, both rarely seen in Sardhana before then. It was this very attitude, I guess, which took Shah Mamu to a grisly death not too long after, Chand Mamu to the complete disintegration of property and family reputation, and Agha Mamu into an imaginary shell of his own making, where he dwelt to the end in extreme bitterness, his days of power and charisma a distant memory.

But in his salad days Agha Mamu who, I suspect, modelled himself on Clark Gable, upstaged his siblings completely. He was the third of (at a rough count) twenty children Naushaba Begum bore, of whom eleven survived, which means she must have done precious little but bear children for close to thirty years. Though there was almost a quarter-century of difference in age between him and the other two, it had more to do with the confidence quotient actually, as was visible one evening when Agha Mamu, who had arrived a few days later than the others, and Chand Mamu were seated side by side on modha chairs in the courtyard of Habib Manzil, with all us adoring children sitting around. Shah Mamu seldom appeared when Agha Mamu was holding forth as he was now, his arms expansively spread on the armrest; and never before had I seen Chand Mamu look so small, though he in fact possessed a remarkable personality himself. Ratna in fact ranks him among the most heart-stoppingly handsome men she has ever seen, but that evening this man who so far had lit up the gathering with his presence was almost unrecognizable, sitting with arms stuck meekly to his sides inside the armrests. This I suppose was my very first lesson in acting.

Before we’d know it, however, March would be upon us, and it would be time to return to school. Shirt and trouser cuffs were rearranged; toiletries, one new pair of shoes, and a few new clothes each were acquired, along with many instructions about looking after them and studying harder this year, ‘as now you are in Class—.’ Parting hugs from Ammi, prayers blown over our heads, a perfunctory peck from Baba and then the return journey overnight to Delhi, joining up with the ‘Delhi party’, meeting friends, swapping news, warm toast in the refreshment room if we were lucky, then upwards on to Bareli and thence to Kathgodam and Nainital. Back to the twin towers and the strap, the cold fried eggs at breakfast and Brother Burke’s knuckles rapping on your unsuspecting head. BUT a wondrous new store of movies as well. Titles of movies to be shown through the year would be published in the school diary at beginning of term, and I salivated copiously reading the list. I wasn’t particularly happy in that school, it was for the movies I wanted to return every year, and as I got older and grew away from both parents, I couldn’t wait for vacations to end, because home was no longer the happy, carefree place I wished it could remain. I was no longer a child, I was told, and disapproval abounded. It became worse than school could possibly be. I suppose I could live with the disapproval of the teachers. I cared not a whit for them, and even after all these years I have to struggle a bit to suppress the aggrieved feeling that, in all my years there, not one teacher in that school ever made the slightest attempt to reach out to me. But I suppose that’s what I was sent there for, to learn to live by myself. And I guess I did.