And Then One Day: A Memoir (6 page)

But to return to the red jeep, lent to them by the legendary Principal of Mayo College Mr Gibson: its load also consisted of a pair of familiar-looking folding arches, a throne-like chair and a small stool—usually all the setting they ever used. Flinging my bicycle aside I sprinted up to the jeep, heart pounding in anticipation of a conversation with HIM. He didn’t exactly seem delighted at my offer to help them unload, but before he could refuse, I was at it. Somewhat disappointed at how little stuff there was, I deposited it in the auditorium and hung around for as long as I was allowed to. There was no sign of a rehearsal about to begin and I was obviously overstaying my welcome. After a brusque ‘That’ll be all, thank you very much’ and a brief handshake, I reluctantly departed. But I had shaken hands with this great actor. He was real too! I had actually touched him. I resolved that at the first opportunity I would pour my heart out, beg him to let me join his troupe and come away with him. The ‘To bait fish withal... ‘ speech he would doubtless ask for as audition had long been performance-ready anyway. He couldn’t turn me down, he’d be getting another actor cheap and I would and could do any part he asked me to. Certain that I would knock him over, I commenced fantasizing about travelling and performing with Shakespeareana while my classmates were slogging over physics and maths. Poor benighted souls, my heart bled for them. There was of course the small matter of breaking it to the parents but surely Mr Kendal would take care of all that. Baba was partial to the English anyway. And now that there were only four in the troupe surely they could do with an extra hand.

When Shakespeareana visited Sem, it was an occasion. Usually ten to fifteen strong, they were the toast of the school. Some then youthful Indian aspirants who later moved on to greener pastures were also among them. Their very presence among us whether in the dining hall, on the playing field or onstage was invigorating. They were a very cool bunch of people all playing many parts, all having a grand time. The productions themselves were basic in design. The costumes were functional but the authenticity of the acting and the intonation of their voices—I reiterate I have never heard Shakespeare spoken better—made these straightforward uncomplicated presentations appear more splendid than anything I had seen on the stage till then or have seen since. The troupe over the years shrank in size, most of the members having taken what I can only hope were their own directions in life. But the Kendals’ spirit and their conviction in the path they had chosen were strong as ever. In the mid eighties when there were just Geoffrey and Laura left, I witnessed what would prove to be their final performance in India, and not only had they not wearied of their mission, they were in a state of thanksgiving for having had the opportunity to lead their lives the way they had chosen to. Seldom have I encountered such contentment in people at the end of the road; the complete satisfaction of knowing you have done whatever you could with your life.

Watching them perform was to know what it is to be one with the spoken word, and the verve and joy with which those two septuagenarians still approached their work gave me a final lesson in what it is to love and serve the theatre. I have continued to feel hugely indebted to the Kendals despite the fact that that day, after they had performed their ‘Gems from Shakespeare’in St Anselm’s, Mr Kendal, probably tired, sweaty, too preoccupied to deal with a star-struck young follower and in no mood to say or hear anything at all, was changing out of his costume when I managed to get into the green room. My carefully rehearsed speeches flew out of my head as I stood before this giant glowering down at me in his half-costume. He didn’t say a word, just took the autograph book from my hand, signed it and continued undressing. I sneaked out with my back to the door, having received my life’s first and last autograph. I did not hear of or see Mr Kendal again for another dozen or so years but this encounter was, I daresay, the one which really lit the spark, and made me resolve to take control of my life and actually DO something.

In St Anselm’s, students had a choice of subjects they could opt for. One didn’t, as in Sem, have to study everything. You could opt for arts or maths or bio. Sensing a heaven-sent opportunity to escape the maths monster, I thought I’d do the arts course. Studying only English lit and history and social studies seemed like a breeze. Plan was duly nipped in the bud by Baba who still nursed dreams of a ‘respectable’ profession for me, possibly medicine, and so biology was thrust down my unwilling throat. Well at least I’d escaped maths! All I retain of the biology I was taught are the words di-cotyledonous and Paramecium Caudatum, and I’m reasonably sure what they mean, but I make no further claim to any knowledge at all in either botany or zoology.

And then one day a play competition was announced in the school. Each class was supposed to produce a half-hour piece with the best ones to be staged on Annual Day. The students themselves were supposed to take the initiative in devising the show. I knew instantly what I thought our class should do, and since no one else displayed any enthusiasm about it my vote carried. With Kendal/Shylock fresh in my mind, a newly acquired friend J. R. Khan, and of course the ever-willing Girish T in tow, we ransacked the mouldy, long-unused costume cupboard and came away with a mean-looking dagger, a brown cassock, probably donated to the school by some Franciscan monk (the cassock, I mean, not the dagger), also what I thought would pass off as a ‘lawyerly’ gown, and some velvety, vaguely Venetian-looking pantaloons and jackets for Bassanio and Antonio; the idea being to do scenes from
The Merchant of Venice
with me as Shylock naturally, and, as Portia in man’s garb, the best frog-dissector in class C. P. S. Shastri, now a psychiatrist in Chicago, not that his playing the role necessarily had anything to do with that. JR promised he could stick on me the best beard ever: he produced a bundle of crepe hair and a tube of rubber solution to prove it, so I got rid of the ‘hooked on to the ears’ beard but retained the skullcap I had purchased from the Dargah bazaar. The voluminous copy of Shakespeare’s
Collected Works
which had been gathering dust ever since Zaheer had received it as a ‘Best Actor’ trophy in Sem some years ago was retrieved and the sections to be performed marked out—all Shylock’s juiciest speeches of course. My own performance had been ready for some time; all that remained was to get the others to learn their lines and take them through the paces.

Out of our motley group of four, the only one with ‘experience of the stage’, as I missed no opportunity to remind the others, was myself. So what I said went. And amazingly, for me, I seemed instinctively to know what I should do. The stage, I really did feel, was where I belonged. It was the only place apart from the cricket field where I felt happy in my skin. During this time, coincidentally, I also got called to a try-out for the school cricket team, and so cricket now became my alibi for going to rehearsals. The cramping inhibitions that had so beset me in Sem and the nervous twitches I’d always had began to erase themselves. The crushing feeling of bewildered incompetence about myself, the conviction that I was extremely stupid, diminished but didn’t go away. It still hasn’t fully. However, in this new school where the extent of my idiocy had not yet been noticed, I could operate with a degree of confidence I had not known before. In real life too, people began to listen and they sometimes approved. I had not known that before either.

The day arrived. I had a feeling we couldn’t lose.

Among the top contenders were something called
The Ugly Duckling
and
The Referee,
both farces being done by Classes 10 and 11. In the former, a guy called Ashok Wahi delivered a pretty competent performance as the Queen, and the latter, a play about mistaken identity, had cricket captain Arvind Ahluwalia in a double role. We preceded these two with our
Merchant.
Being on that stage was like being submerged in warm rose water, I didn’t want to ever get off. Our performance followed the juniors and seemed to be over in a flash. Everything had gone by in a sort of daze; I can’t say I felt satiated or relieved or anything, I just felt it was all over too bloody soon. I wanted more, I could happily have stayed on that stage forever, and in a sense I have. Whether I’d done well or badly was of no consequence. As an imitation of Mr Kendal it wasn’t too far off the mark, but the real revelation for me was the charge of energy I felt that day, and have continued to feel whenever I am onstage. I found myself doing things I hadn’t planned and doing them with complete certainty and to the approval of the audience. It was as if another hand was guiding me. This feeling has stayed with me till today; and therefore, though I am grateful for compliments, I never take full responsibility for either my successes or failures but do try to make sure that the ‘theatre god’ does not turn his back on me. The heady euphoria of acceptance I felt then I can still recall and savour, despite the fact that we lost out for Annual Day to
The Referee.

BUT next morning the Reverend Cedric Fernandes who had directed
The Referee
came to our classroom, took me aside saying, ‘So... You’re a very good actor eh!’ I treasure the moment not only because the Rev. Cedric went on to be my first mentor but because for the first time in my life I was being told I was good at anything. Rev. Cedric had in his hand what looked like a few typed pages. He fiddled with them a little, this was obviously proving difficult for him, then, ‘I want you to replace Ahluwalia on Annual Day, ‘ he said and quickly handed me the pages. ‘Can you stay after class to attend rehearsal?’ What I didn’t tell him was that I would have walked on fire and chewed broken glass to attend rehearsal. It never occurred to me to consult or commiserate with Ahluwalia, I felt no sympathy for him. He later went into the army I think, so he probably wasn’t devastated about losing the part to a junior. My self-esteem took a gigantic leap upwards and it was days before it stopped soaring. Annual Day came and went, my parents didn’t turn up. At the end, two special prizes were announced: Ashok Wahi ‘Best Actress’ and myself’Best Actor’. We were handed an envelope each, which on being torn open turned out to be empty. Sure that there was some mistake I opened and examined it repeatedly; maybe I’d missed a trick somewhere, maybe the hundred buck note had gotten stuck to the side. No, it was well and truly empty, but even that did not dampen my spirits, and in the time it took me to cycle home and eat a cold solitary dinner, I had decided that acting was what I was born to do. No way was anything going to keep me from doing it for the rest of my life. Even the prospect of some day having to share this conviction with Baba didn’t appear too daunting, given the strength of my belief. Life suddenly seemed worthwhile. I had trouble getting to sleep that night, and still do every night after a theatre performance.

L
ife went on apace, new Dilip Kumar films now appeared only once every few years instead of annually, much-loved Jawaharlal Nehru died, youthful John Kennedy got shot and Cassius Clay became King of the World by destroying mean old Sonny Liston. All this while my stock in the school was growing. I began to be known as ‘that actor’. People were actually taking the initiative to befriend me. I played a few cricket matches (actual ones) on the school team without doing anything spectacular. I started finding a leggy athlete from St Mary’s very attractive, she began smiling at me and we exchanged letters. Word quickly spread ‘Shah has a girlfriend yaar!’ I had not so much as brushed her hand with the back of mine but I was well and truly on the way to acquiring the ‘cat’ status I had so long yearned for.

Debating was another field in which I found I could participate, and mostly bullshit my way through. My speeches, peppered with quotes from Shakespeare, were well memorized, thoroughly rehearsed and delivered with all the panache I had acquired at the feet of Mr Kendal. I invariably blustered my way to some prize or other but seldom did I know what I was talking about. Far from taking on the opponents over what they had said and providing a rebuttal I would just wittily, so I thought, mock ‘the worthy gentlemen on the other side’. While it all obviously went down very well with the judges because it made them laugh, it was not debate, it was elocution. This served me extremely well at the school, and later college, level but I was finally caught out a few years later in a national level debate at Baroda where, representing Aligarh University, I came away empty-handed despite having had the audience eating out of my hand. Neither acting nor debating would I have discovered had I stayed on in Sem. What a fortuitous coming together of energies this was: in a school founded in the memory of an eleventh-century monk who opposed William Rufus in Britain, in a town blessed by a Sufi saint from Iran, I was shown the right path by an Indian Jesuit priest who later quit the order. Before the year was out, Rev. Cedric had also done
The Bishop’s Candlesticks
in which I played the convict and a Christmas pageant where I was Pontius Pilate. I attempted coaxing him to try
Julius Caesar
next. He was reluctant.

Even my relationship with the parents was somewhat on an even keel. Ammi, in any case, was always unconditionally supportive. She regarded me with a kind of detached amusement, making no attempt to get into my head apart from occasionally enquiring what was going on inside it. She never criticized, never chastised, I think that deep down somewhere she instinctively understood. Baba thought I was applying myself better, when all that had happened was that I was at last doing that which made sense to me. The tutors kept coming and going and receiving some credit for their efforts though all I remember of them was one smelt of horses, another had huge muscles and one had his name tattooed on his forearm.

These were radio days. The Philips two-band Baba had bought in 1955 continued to serve him till his death, and on it he would listen to the news on the BBC or the Voice of America. He seemed to abhor music and wouldn’t tolerate any of us, except Babar Mamu who he doted on and had practically adopted, tuning in to Radio Ceylon or Vividh Bharati. Cricket commentaries were permitted but within tolerable limits. So of course, the moment he pedalled off to work at 8. 30 a. m. on the dot, wearing his hat (a sola topi for summers and a brown trilby for winters), I, already in school uniform and breakfasted, would wallow in film songs for the next half hour till it was time to go to school. Ammi never reacted to this infringement of the rules on my part, nor did she ever tell on me, maybe she secretly enjoyed the music too. Only once did I feel I was testing her patience when she caught me practising my dialogue in front of the mirror.

I began to feel that it might be possible to be a professional actor. In spite of the face I had, why not I reasoned. If I was good at it why should it be a lottery any more than going into the army or studying medicine would be a lottery? If my peers could decide what they were going to do, and many of them had and were readying themselves, what was there to prevent me from deciding what I wanted to do and prepare for it as well? The only hitch being I hadn’t a clue what an actor does to prepare, and there was no one to seek guidance from. The only confidants, my brothers, were both bemused at the idea, but the elder Z did actively encourage me to dream the impossible dream and even showed me how Shylock should be played. Both were, however, sceptical about my chances. They had by this time embarked on the course of their future lives, and were well on the way to doing the family proud. The elder Z, among the toppers in his Senior Cambridge class, had been admitted to an Indian Institute of Technology. The younger Z, somewhat wilder, a prefect, athletics champ and all-round Cool-Cat in school, went into the National Defence Academy and straightened himself out. As for me, having nowhere to go for the time being, I kept my dreams for the future to myself, trying to not aggravate the ulcer that later was to take Baba’s life.

The only thing that interested me about life, I remember, was watching how people behaved. If I had been blessed with any ‘gift’ at all, it was an ear for the spoken word. I can still actually recall the grains in a voice I have heard fifty years ago. Oblivious to the strides I was taking in learning to be happy in my own skin, Baba would think up an alternative profession for me nearly every week. He and I both saw quite clearly by now that I hadn’t the brains to study engineering or medicine, I wasn’t gritty enough for the armed forces, nor well informed enough for the Administrative Service. That exhausted almost every possibility that then existed for a young man to plan his future around. In desperation Baba would then talk of the Foreign Service or law (‘you are a good debater so...’) then the police (Shah Mamu had recently become a cop), the tea gardens, then an agricultural college, a polytechnic institute. I suppose I shouldn’t blame him that no kind of training in the arts ever occurred to him; I don’t suppose he knew that such a thing existed. None of his ideas worked for me. I was set on what I wanted to do but the screws had begun to be tightened. Baba’s tenure in Ajmer was coming to an end and I would be back in a hostel from Class 10. They would be moving to Sardhana to try to reclaim Baba’s father’s portion of the old house from the relatives who had squatted in it for ages and made it their own, never expecting us to need it. It was the only place Baba and Ammi could afford to now live in, and rather than settle in an alien town or in Ajmer which was beyond their means, they settled for the known devil.

The section of the house that was Baba’s share was the centre portion of a haveli built by his grandfather Nawab Bahadur Shah. The old Nawab probably left no clear will when he passed, and the haveli was apportioned off to the various claimants, and divided even further by succeeding generations. Baba’s father being one of the original claimants, it was accepted that his portion belonged to us, though Baba had so far shown no interest at all in it. It was in the charge of his cousin and the section of it that was not being used as a buffalo-shed was in ruins. There was a large section of the courtyard however, with two cavernous rooms on either side. The meeting to take back ownership was stirring stuff: emotional cards were played with great dexterity on both sides, a ‘certain amount’ was finally agreed upon, a wall was marked out, and began to be built. Another once grand haveli was being further partitioned.

The struggle to build and maintain that home in Sardhana cost both my parents heavily but they embarked on it with a zeal I never thought they had, grappling with family politics, greedy contractors, lazy workers, grasping relatives, even burglars who practically cleaned out Ammi’s modest jewellery collection, but they slugged it out. Baba was to live most of his remaining life there, Ammi with one of the three of us for the rest of hers. No forebodings crossed their minds when they made the move. All they wanted was a place to rest their ageing bones, but their stay in Sardhana was by turns peaceful and turbulent, marked by a major falling-out between Babar and Khalid Mamu over (what else) property, a quarrel in which my parents naturally sided with the former, thus antagonizing the other. What exactly it was all about I have some idea, but do not wish to speculate upon it further. It forever soured relations between Khalid Mamu and us, and it hurt Ammi terribly that her brothers were at war with each other.

Everything was packed for the move, Baba typically giving away all he didn’t need or couldn’t transport: a large dining table, an ancient Afghan rug, the two leopard skins. His complete detachment from non-essentials was the one thing that always affected me, no matter how bad the equation between us may at that time have been. He would give away stuff on impulse. He had practically gifted away the only car we ever had to Ammi’s brother, sold his guns for a pittance to his own, gave away books, clothes, whatever money he could afford and once, to my great dismay, a beautiful antique pocket watch I’d had my eye on. He consistently refused the official car the Dargah kept offering him, choosing to cycle to work. He finally consented to be given what was then known as an auto cycle (a mo-ped) which he never used, and on which we were infrequently allowed to zip around. When it ran out of petrol, rare because it covered about a hundred miles to the gallon, you could even pedal the thing home.