And Then One Day: A Memoir (26 page)

All this, needless to say, is par for the course in Hindi cinema, which seems to pride itself on churning out ghastly adaptations of much-loved Hollywood movies. I feared a bad trip coming on but foolhardily believed that I could surmount it by bringing authenticity to my performance. Besides, I was committed and had received a signing amount. There was no escape.

Rajshri Productions was vegetarian in the strictest sense: not only would there be nothing non-veg on the daily menu, the characters in their films could not consume meat even as part of a shot. Evil characters smoked and drank of course but the actual showing of either on screen was a taboo placed by the wonderfully old-fashioned paterfamilias, Mr Tarachand Barjatya, who had created and nurtured the company. I wondered what the suicidal drunk in the film would be consuming before throwing himself off the pier—grief, I reckoned, probably accompanied by a song. Then I heard the songs, both solos I had to perform to but mercifully not sing myself. They were not bad as Hindi film songs go, one of them is still heard occasionally, but the thought of being cast in the lead in a commercial film, singing those songs, probably dancing around trees, didn’t exactly thrill me because I didn’t know the first thing about how to do a song and a tree can’t make its partner look good.

The bravado that had carried me through actually singing on the stage in NSD was no longer part of my personality and I was now having trouble even faking the singing. All I thought I had to do was lip-synch perfectly, I felt it would be passable if it seemed like I was actually singing and that was all I practised. What in fact I should have done was study the songs in Shammi Kapoor’s movies and attempt to get somewhere remotely close to what he did. It’s what every male actor and every choreographer in Bombay post-Shammi has done—with varying degrees of success, of course. It took me years before I learnt the difference between merely singing a song and ‘performing’ it. But I was always slow.

One of the mistakes I had made in the preceding five years had been giving up on popular Hindi movies, both as audience and acting aspirant. I was convinced that there was absolutely nothing to be gained by seeing them and futile hoping to act in them—I just was not that kind of actor. Besides, there were no more Dara Singh films and the stars I had grown up loving—Dilip K, Shammi K, Dev Anand—all were way past their sell-by date as leading men and were being replaced by another less charismatic and infinitely shallower generation. I did attempt to see the odd so-called classics—
Reshma aur Shera
,
Upkaar, Mera Naam Joker, Abhimaan
—but none of them really blew me away. My attitude to Hindi cinema turned even more condescending, possibly because I couldn’t see myself fitting in in it. I was resentful in advance of being cast in roles it would hurt my ego to have to play. So I gave Hindi cinema a very wide berth even at FTII, quite seriously believing that I’d never have to act in such movies and that I’d get my due in the newer kind of cinema now being made, films like
Ankur.
Though I have to say the thought that I was not qualified to be the lead in popular movies pinched greatly, so this reaction was very possibly my defence mechanism working in advance to counter the rejection I anticipated. And now here I was, having to deliver the goods in the kind of movie wild horses could not have dragged me to see.

I was dimly aware that there would be a difference of approach in the acting in such movies but just not being able to zero in on what it was, decided to give it my usual kitchen-sink treatment. In retrospect I could probably have done this part without breaking a sweat when I was twenty and had my brief fling with Hindi cinema. But a decade and more later I was thrashing in the dark to find my own way of expressing, and I was also hampered by the hang-up that I could never be a popular star (even the girl who loved me had been cynical about my chances). I could no longer appreciate the kind of narcissistic, scenery-chewing, upstaging approach to performing required by popular films.

Since studying at FTII, I had worked assiduously at removing all that I began to consider as ‘larger-than- life’ nonsense from my performances and indeed from my personality, and the task of trying to recover it now was not only offensive to my newly acquired sensibility, it felt unachievable.

I tried misguidedly to apply the method as I understood it: insisting, much to the director’s disapproval, on wearing my own used clothes, the same set for the entire movie, and looking unshaven and sloppy throughout—after all, that’s what Chaplin did, I figured. Instead of drawing on the equivalent of the music-hall tradition from which the great man had devised his act, I just tried to be real in a film where everything—the characters, the story, the settings, the costumes, the situations—was screaming out its falseness in neon hues.

Not only did
Sunaina
fail to break new ground in the depiction of the Hindi film hero as I had hoped it would, it was dead on arrival. Taher Bahadur Khan, who had by now attached himself to me as manager, kept insisting ‘Hit hai Naseer bhai!’ but in actuality nobody went to see it from the day it came out. One critic described me as being ‘unfortunately no Amol Palekar’ and my performance, which in any case I had hated when I saw the film in a trial show, was completely underwhelming. I looked wrong even to myself, I found myself wondering what a guy who looked like that was doing in a film of this kind, and I feared the majority of the audience would share this view, so I didn’t gather the gumption to check it out in the theatre. Having heckled actors on screen several times myself, I was terrified at what I would hear from the audience about my shambling efforts to be real which, it was now confirmed, had only resulted in my looking grimy, unappetizing and out of place; fatal for a Hindi film hero who must always be clean cut, honourable and wholesome. I had not yet encountered the priceless gem ‘even the ugly character has to be handsome ugly’, passed on to me sometime later by Mr Subhash Ghai.

In addition to looking simply ugly there was nothing I did in the film that was heroic or even remotely funny. The director’s sense of humour was stuck in a time warp somewhere in the forties, and my suggestions were received with bewilderment. I just didn’t feel that I was getting through to anyone at all. Through the shoot, and particularly while performing the songs, I was a child in a new school finding everything unfamiliar and ominous and being asked questions the answers to which he has not the faintest clue about. My confidence during this seemingly unending shoot was not exactly spilling over and almost reached depletion point when one day, at the door to the set, dressed in full costume, I was refused entry by the doorman. The only diverting moment came when Mr Nag, greatly hassled and in need of the dialogue sheet, was yelling at his assistant to ‘Breeng the shit! Phor habben sak breeng the shit so I ken bhwark in piss!!’

T
wo more films in quick succession followed the release of
Junoon
in which my overheated performance received moderate praise. But these two,
Shaayad
and
Khwaab,
were such pure cat-vomit that the critics, who so far had been singing hosannas to this ‘exciting new talent’, began now to wonder whether they had been hasty in their assessment.

I knew even when shooting them that I was performing abominably and I hadn’t a solution for it, so despite trying to do exactly what the directors asked for, just couldn’t get it right. I have never felt so incompetent as an actor except perhaps when trying out for the Sem choir. In fact, the feeling has returned every time I have been part of a movie in which conviction necessarily has to be tempered with elan and not a little self-love, where being visibly synthetic, trumping the other actors and maintaining a certain detachment from the part while connecting closely with the audience are essential requirements. You can’t be real, the audience must never forget it’s you up there, they must not think you’ve become that guy you’re playing. The hordes of (mainly male)
monstres sacré
in our films clinging on to vestiges of what they did well in their youth unwittingly bear testimony to this—botoxed or bewigged gents actually endorsing skin tonics or hair oils; darkening their remaining hair, then whitening it to play age, taking great care that the white looks as false as possible. I thought that trying to perform in that manner was an impediment to the kind of acting I really wanted to do. Playing scenes that had appeared a gazillion times in other films, and singing songs and fighting bad guys and doing it all very badly didn’t seem to me to be the reason I had become an actor, so I continued vainly attempting to bring believability instead of attractiveness to the parts I played in these popular movies. It didn’t work and I just couldn’t take these movies seriously anyway, so I never quite got the hang of the kind of acting that was needed in them. I don’t, however, know if that’s a loss or a gain.

The very tangible benefit of doing
Khwaab,
apart from the money, was the discovery, when I was asked to match steps with Mithun Chakravarty, that I had an extra left foot. Both these films sank with barely a gurgle, but facilitated the purchase of my first car so I suppose they too were worth it. A second-hand Premier Padmini costing 18, 000 rupees being what I could afford, I went for it even though it was a hideous shade of blue. I dubbed her ‘Miss Mary’.

That winter Vikram Mehrotra, Tahir and I toodled off in this hideous turquoise apparition all the way to Delhi where I was to shoot a film,
Sparsh,
which proved to be a great energizer and a strong antidote to the rubbish I had recently found myself in. Most of the shooting was to be done on the precincts of the Blind Relief Association, in a school for visually impaired children whose headmaster, Mr Mittal, evidently was the model for the character I was playing, also a headmaster whose relationship with a colleague was based loosely on Mr Mittal’s own experience in wooing the lovely lady he wed shortly after the film was done. Ratna was in NSD now and when Miss Mary brought her cargo into Delhi, the first stop was the school to surprise her with my new acquisition. She made no secret that she thought I had blundered badly and she was bang on the button—the 600-kilometre journey had taken a lot out of the tired old machine; before long she began to limp and sputter, and through most of the shoot stayed in a garage.

The script of this film, centring on the love of a sighted woman and a sightless man played respectively by Shabana and myself (our third outing together), was an incisively observed piece of writing by Sai Paranjpye, who was also to direct it. A total deviation from the stock portrayal of sightless characters in Indian cinema, the story centred around these two, one very much his own man, treating the word disabled with disdain; and the other a grieving widow, disabled by society. Justifying his aggressive rejection of help, knowing that pity is only a step behind, the script was a startling depiction of the fact that being deprived of one sense necessarily means being compensated thoroughly by nature in the others, including in the sense of ego. The story, extremely moving in itself, was also an intense rumination on the prejudices faced by those who would have no problem of self-esteem if they were to receive the same regard and treatment as so-called normal people.

The thought that I would have to act as a sightless person with children who were actually sightless and acting as themselves took me as close to butterflies in the stomach as I have ever been. I was up against it this time, but at least on my own turf, I reminded myself, so managed to short circuit the inhibitions and anxieties that had returned with full force while shooting the previous two movies. The fear of being shown up disappeared the moment I started working on the script. On first hearing it, I knew how I was definitely NOT going to play the part—the way it always is in Hindi cinema: eyes fixed in a frontal gaze, stumbling around arms outstretched, bumping into walls, referring to oneself as ‘main bechaara laachaar’ and such nonsense. The script did not require me to do that anyway and Sai, bless her, forbade me from wearing dark glasses: ‘Mr Mittal has the most beautiful eyes I have seen,’ she told me.

I had also keenly observed a few sightless people including Nani Baji, the great Sardhana storyteller, and two classmates in Aligarh, because I found their physical manner intriguing: I had by now figured out that the key to it was that they directed their ears and not their eyes at the point they were addressing, and that caused their sometimes ungainly bodily posture, which, having absolutely no self-consciousness, they were oblivious to. I also spent quite some time watching Mr Mittal operate, chatting with him, and found that sightless people use the verb to ‘see’ quite freely and in the same sense as the rest of us. The day before the shoot began Mr Mittal and I spent a most entertaining and educative evening with a friend of his, a Mr Advani, also sightless and an undersecretary in the Ministry of Education who had invited us to dinner. After enquiring from Mr Mittal his preference, I loaded a plate for him, placed a fork in it and offered it to him. He accepted the plate but didn’t start eating with the rest of us nor did he respond to my puzzled enquiries, just sat there with the plate until his fiancée who was a little late arrived and replaced the fork with a spoon. Turned out sightless people never use forks.

It also turned out sightless people can thoroughly enjoy a drink, they do have dreams, they have a concept of the primary colours, they never keep pets (a guide dog does not qualify as a pet), and they possess a sense that operates above the waist which is why they do not bump into lamp posts or trees but do trip over low-lying objects. Post-dinner, we were headed down the steps when a power failure turned everything pitch black. Everyone except Mr Mittal stopped dead in their tracks. When told why, he continued down the steps chuckling, ‘Well, follow me then!’

I did a few sessions blindfolded, helped by sighted instructors, but I didn’t kill myself practising ‘how a blind man moves’ or trying to understand the psychology of the sightless; in any case this was a person I was playing, not an idea. I just had to empathize, to put myself in his shoes, not ‘become’ him or anything. Earlier, as practice, I had acquired a pair of very high-powered contact lenses to simulate the feeling of not being able to see, and actually attempted to navigate in my neighbourhood wearing them, but still being able to see hazily through them, I decided to just go with my imagination. I had always been able anyway to shut out all aural stimuli whenever I had felt like it, but shutting off all visual stimuli proved equally easy. Luckily my instincts were on the right track; and in any case Sai’s beautifully accurate script had already done the difficult work for me; all I had to do was submit to it and embody the character. She went along, trusting me all the way, and it must have been fun for her to watch her creation come alive.

Performing in this film was totally painless and totally pleasurable, without any sense of competition or frazzled egos or insecurities, something I can only say about a small handful of my films. Shabana was wonderfully supportive and encouraging, as she has always been to me through my career. I am very proud of this performance and even though the film didn’t come out for another two years it fetched me a National Award, but neither for me was as significant as the, no pun intended, eye-opening time I spent in the company of Mr Mittal and the students of the school. Their gentle, unhurried approach to life, their ready laughter, their willingness to enjoy life, the pride they take in their achievements, their acceptance of and ability to cope with permanent darkness was inspiring in a way few other things have been. In a heart-breaking moment, one of the boys playing a major part in the film asked me if he would ‘be able to see it’ and just as I was about to assure him that of course he would, it struck me that he mightn’t be able to identify himself when he did ‘see’ it; his voice would have been dubbed. Watching the way these boys (girls had a separate school of course, sightless people’s lives depending so much on touch) could identify people not just by sound or touch but by footsteps even, watching them play cricket or dial a phone or quite simply just go about their lives was a mind-expanding acting lesson. From Mr Mittal I learnt how a sightless person knows the traffic lights have changed, how he can regain his sense of direction if lost, how he lights a cigarette, how he signs his name. Braille was beyond me, though, despite learning the alphabet; Mr Mittal kindly explained that it is impossible for a sighted person to read Braille with his hands; the fingertips just do not have that kind of sensitivity.

The producer of the film, Basu Bhattacharya, could have done with some sensitivity himself. After having struck gold when his first film
Teesri Kasam
was belatedly hailed, he had made a reputation as a maker of very small-budget offbeat cinema. Notorious for paying absolutely no one in his unit, he probably turned delirious at the prospect of so many enthusiastic hands, most of them Delhi-based, happy to work for a pittance, and actors unhesitatingly coming on board without discussing fees or laying down conditions. He was getting a really good film, which also promised to be popular, made on less than a sandal-string budget.

Arriving in Delhi, I not only discovered that Shabana and I were to stay in a house belonging to a friend of his but that the schedule had been planned around being able to use my car for production duties. Miss Mary’s convalescence, which cost me almost as much as she had cost to buy, however, nipped that in the bud.

The car was now ready to undertake the return journey to Bombay with a different set of passengers—the absolutely wonderful Renu Saluja and motormouth Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who was then married to her. That return journey turned out to be somewhat more exhausting than the forty- five-day shoot had been, as anyone who has had to listen to Vinod Chopra non-stop for a couple of days will promptly attest. The absence throughout the shoot of any kind of stress, exasperation or exhaustion was thoroughly compensated for in that two-day journey.

The work itself had been such fun that the thought that I hadn’t been paid anything didn’t occur to me until I returned to Bombay and Taher learnt of it. A burly fellow who stood no nonsense and had begun to love me deeply, he promised to get Mr Bhattacharya to cough up, and to that end religiously turned up at the latter’s house every morning, disturbing his morning ritual, whatever it was, to politely remind him about ‘Naseer bhai payment Dada’. The persistence and the ‘I take no shit’ air made the immovable object give way ultimately, and Taher one day produced a wad of 10, 000 rupees plus another 2000 for petrol charges from Dada, who finally decided he preferred having his breakfast without Taher around. Dealing with Mr Bhattacharya, though a good first lesson in filmi financial negotiations, did not mean I never had to sit through the ‘no money’ ritual enacted by the popular film-makers time and time again, causing me to wonder why only guys with no money made movies. This charade was also resorted to very often by the ‘serious’ types, resulting ultimately in my having to sever ties with most of them.

Om Puri so far had appeared in a few supporting parts in movies, including
Sparsh.
He wasn’t having an easy time but was enterprising enough to get a play and a company, Majma, together. His first attempt, a Hindi translation of Govind Deshpande’s
Udhwastha Dharmshala,
received tremendous acclaim and Om began to be known in his own right. The play, done mainly with raw young actors and put together under great financial strain, also inaugurated the Prithvi Theatre which, now complete, opened with great fanfare. I played a small part in
UD
for the opening show and various other walk- ons as and when required, as did Ratna. Meanwhile Benjamin Gilani and I had found a lot of common ground during
Junoon,
and had launched, at his insistence, into
Waiting for Godot,
a play I had had an allergy to since having ploughed through it on Zahida apa’s insistence in Aligarh, and against which I had written a vituperative essay which nearly got me failed at NSD—a play I would never ever have attempted but for Benjamin. When, after struggling with it for about a year, we finally felt it was stage-worthy, Om generously offered us the Majma banner for the opening show of
Godot
on 29 July 1979. It was only later that Ben formed the Motley company, which survives to the present day, as does the production which finally began to make sense to us once we stopped trying to understand it.

Om’s blazing salt-of-the-earth intensity finally caught the eye of many a film-maker but it was Govind Nihalani who first recognized the magnetic simplicity in his screen presence and cast him in
Aakrosh
as the anguished silent Adivasi, wrongly accused of his wife’s murder, Om’s definitive film performance. I was to play the defence lawyer and Amrish Puri the prosecutor. I got barely a day’s break between arriving in Bombay and leaving for Alibag for this shoot. It was a wrench coming from the gentle dreamlike world of
Sparsh
to this hard-edged portrayal of small-town corruption and its constant progenitors—lust and politics.