India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (15 page)

On graduation, he teaches for a while in the same Chandigarh acting school. Three years at the National School of Drama in Delhi follow. Again, only a timely stipend makes it possible for the cash-strapped kid from Shimla to pursue his ambition. After a brief job as a lecturer in drama in Lucknow, he makes the inevitable journey to Mumbai in search of fame. He alights at Mumbai Central railway station on 13 June 1981. It’s a Saturday. The trained actor would like to say the day marks the turning point in his life. It both does and it doesn’t. His arrival in Bollywood teaches him one vital lesson: his status as a qualified actor is worth zilch. ‘Half the people in this city couldn’t even pronounce National School of Drama.’ He is prematurely balding, not especially handsome and rather thin. And yet he wants to be a Bollywood actor. ‘It was unheard of.’

Undeterred, the ambitious twenty-something starts roaming town in the hunt for his break. The search will take him nearly three years. The interim, as he calls it, comprises his ‘disastrous period’. Homeless, he crashes on friends’ couches and dosses down on railway benches. He knocks on doors, attends auditions and stands for hour after hour outside producers’ houses. He tries theatre. He borrows money. Days go by when he eats nothing. Throughout it all, he refuses to give up. He has nowhere else to go, he tells himself. Nor, as he sees it, is there anything else he can do. He is meant to be an actor. He has moments of doubt, of course. On many occasions, he is ‘completely shattered or depressed’. What keeps him going is the ‘one chance’ he sees coming
his way. That, and a phrase of his grandfather’s. ‘If you work hard and you’re honest,’ he used to say, ‘then you’ll always get what you want.’ He doesn’t want to prove the old man wrong.

As with all good Bollywood stories, the hardship does not last for ever. Director Mahesh Bhatt is looking for someone to play a mardy, stubborn old man. For once being bald plays to the young actor’s advantage. Bhatt calls him to his house. ‘I’ve heard you’re good,’ the director tells him. ‘You heard wrong,’ our bolshie hero responds. ‘I’m not good. I’m brilliant.’ It isn’t arrogance speaking, he’d later claim. The words were spawned from the depths of rage and desperation. The answer singles him out all the same. He gets the role.
Saaransh
comes out on 25 May 1984. It’s a Friday. This time the date really does change his life. The film wins India’s nomination to the Oscars. Mr Kher’s career is made. Cue Act Two.

‘Yes,’ the veteran actor says, breaking off his tale and picking up the phone for the fifth or sixth time. ‘Let me just have a look . . . yes, around mid-June should be fine . . . that’s right, we’re shooting in the Lake District . . . okay, thanks, I’ll await your mail then.’

He turns to me with a bemused look. Have I ever heard of the television show,
Peschardt’s People
?

‘Sure, Michael Peschardt. It’s a documentary show. Goes out on BBC World. Why? Does he want to interview you?’

The acting-school head looks quietly chuffed with my response, but waves off my question with undisguised modesty. In the way only successful people can, Mr Kher considers his personal story a template for wider truths. Placing his hands behind his head, he begins perusing it for salient lessons.

After an acting career of nearly three decades, ‘one’ (the impersonal third person – always a giveaway sign of the grandee preparing to pontificate) gets a sense of where the world is going. His world, that is. The world of Bollywood. And his verdict? ‘It’s all change.’ Globalisation, modernisation, economic growth, an onslaught of satellite channels (‘Star Movies, Warner Brothers,
AXN, Hallmark, HBO’) – all, he regally observes, have dealt Hindi formula cinema a death blow.

In Old India, entertainment meant either watching movies or making babies. Then shops came. Malls came. Bars came. Cinema no longer occupies Number One spot. And when people do pay to see a film, they want something new, fresh, exciting. That, Mr Kher asserts, is why so many big movies are flopping. They’ve not caught up with the aspirations of their changing audience.

I ask what that means for the students at his school. ‘What does it
mean
? It means they stand a chance of getting a job.’ His manner is matter-of-fact. Directors are looking for actors that fit the role they have envisioned, not just a pretty face. In three years, he predicts, every actor in Bollywood will have had some professional training or other.

I think of Naval. Three years feels like a long time away. Mr Kher managed to pull it off. I wasn’t sure if his evening-class student had the stamina to do the same.

‘How many of your graduates actually land an acting job, then?’ I ask, willing to be persuaded that Naval’s odds are better than I surmise.

‘About forty per cent,’ he concedes. ‘But, as I say, it’s going up all the time.’

The veteran actor sits further back in his chair, moving his hands from his head to his paunch. He sounds every bit the elder statesman.

From the harsh city of his youth, Mumbai has transformed itself into a melting pot of opportunity. The city, he says, ‘has a big heart’. It gives everyone one chance. Everyone and anyone. Whether you’re a writer, whether you’re a hawker, whether you’re a businessman. ‘The point is whether you are prepared when you get that first chance.’

Embarking on a career is certainly easier today than in his day, he continues. Back then, there were no casting firms or talent agencies or acting schools. Reality shows such as
Indian Idol
and
Acting Ki Funshaala
didn’t exist. Today, you will be picked up.
‘But’, he reiterates, adamant for me not to miss his point, ‘you have to be good.’ Which is where his acting school comes in.

‘Today’s Indian youth is much more irreverent and much more straightforward than before . . .’

A leotard and leggings waltz in, disturbing his flow. The workout two-piece houses a slimline body belonging to the school’s dance teacher. She feels sick. He’s sorry to hear that. She should go home, get some rest. The dance attire floats back the same way it came in.

‘Where were we?’

‘The youth of today,’ I respond.

‘Ah yes, the youth of today. The present generation has nothing to do with the Independence struggle. They have none of the guilt of their parents. They are only interested in what they themselves can achieve. They are ready to adapt. They are ready to take risks. They are ready to go for it. They are ready to fail.’

Confidence. That, Mr Kher believes, is what differentiates the acting students now from those of his era. The current generation has enormous self-belief. It comes from greater access to knowledge, he thinks. It’s there and it’s ‘very, very real’.

He’s right, of course. Arya has it in bucket loads. The bionic boys and garrulous girls from the classrooms have it as well. So too does Naval, albeit less obvious to the naked eye. I’d missed it at first. It lay so deep that even Mr Sony, in his roving search for truth, had failed to unearth it. But it lay there simmering, sure as day.

I wonder whether I should ask Mr Kher about Naval. I’m keen to know how realistic he thinks his prospects are. Then I check myself. I’m suddenly aware of what he’ll say. His story is just the same, the acting-school’s director will tell me. Naval just happens to be at the start of his journey, not the end. His script is still being written. But his one chance will come. He must jump at it when it does, that’s all. That requires preparation. And patience.

Patience is something Naval has in spades. Although patience is not free. The young man must eat. It’s four weeks since his
evening course finished. I decide to head back to the Projects to find out how he is getting on.

We meet at the stretch of Ram Mandir Road and make the same silent walk to his flat.

Naval is wearing thick, tight jeans despite the suffocating heat. Covering his upper body is a close-fitting purple shirt with vertical black stripes. The polyester garment has white rectangular cufflinks for buttons, each embossed with a small black star. A white bunny rabbit nibbles at his breast pocket. The word ‘Playboy’ is stitched crookedly beneath. As dress sense goes, it’s the very latest in pavement-market chic.

I enquire how the course went after we last met. Naval’s eyes glaze over a little as he thinks back to the evening classes. Then, a broad grin stretches elastically across his face. ‘Very nice. The course, very nice and very glorious.’

He tells me some of the central lessons he took away from Mr Vyas’s instruction. The five Ws, for instance: ‘Where, What, Why . . .’ A pause. ‘. . . and stuff like that.’ He’s learned of the importance of getting into character. With the glint-eyed passion of a mystic’s pupil, he explains how to forget Naval, to forget self. ‘Suppose that you could not forget self, this is not better for you. This is not true for character.’ He regrets not taking the extra dance class. Singing might have been helpful too.

The glory came on the last day with the end-of-course performance. Each student was encouraged to act out a short skit. Drawing on his own experience, Naval chose to incorporate the persona of a street pedlar. The plot revolved around the relationship between Naval the aloo chard seller and his rich, handsome friend.

The memory appears to upset him. He sniffs. A purple sleeve reaches up to wipe his nose.

‘I gave a very nice performance. Sidartha, my teacher of drama, he is also very nice.’ Sniff. ‘He suggest to me that don’t fear. Your first-time performance drama, don’t fear. Don’t discourage. Mr Sidarth, very nice.’

He carried it off. Everyone clapped.

Naval takes a moment to compose himself. He is reliving that brief but luxuriant moment of triumph. It takes him a while to come back to the present.

‘Auditions?’ I venture. ‘How are they going? Any luck?’

The question, unfairly perhaps, brings Naval back to earth with a bump. He mumbles something about callbacks and waiting. It seems he’s been to four auditions. None has come to anything. For some, he’s not right. For others, he’s not eligible. ‘No money, no honey, no funny,’ he states plaintively. One casting director advised him to go back to his village, build his savings and then return to Mumbai. Naval dismissed the advice out of hand. ‘You are winner. I am winner.’ Instead, he’s started doing the rounds of the local factories. Two thousand rupees a month. ‘It’s nothing. How to pay rent?’

His shoulders suddenly collapse in on him, his body visibly crumpling forwards as if an industrial air suction had been slapped onto his stomach.

He rights himself a fraction. As he does so, fat, warm tears begin to trickle down his cheek.

‘I have two rupees. I am hungry. Last one week, I have no support. Not anythings. I’ve not any foods.’

I don’t know what to say. His tears keep flowing, filling the silence between us.

He babbles an incoherent story – or is it a set of stories? I struggle to catch much of it. One minute, he’s heading off to Gandinagar to meet a Member of Parliament. The next, he’s hopping on a train to Bhopal to speak to a film director. None of it seems to make sense, to him or me.

Between his rib-shuddering chokes, I catch a strand or two: ‘I am only water. Five days . . . Today, I go to church and pray to Jesus and ask for him to help me. I am feeling very, very sad . . .’

I wonder if I should offer him something. Some money? Food? Earlier, I’d suggested we chat in a cafe off the main road. He’d declined. I wonder how to console him.

‘. . . Occasionally I feel like I’m going wrong way. What am I
doing? But I feel God is saying, ‘No, you are right. Take patience. My dear, my child, my son . . .’

Consolation. Is that really what he wants? Something – a sense, an intuition – holds back my full sympathies. His tears are real. Yet how quickly they begin to fall. And how dramatic the whole act.

I’ve no doubt he’s hungry and broke. At one stage he pulls up his sleeve. ‘Look how thin my arm is. Before, I was fat.’ As he grabs at his taut skin, the truth of his pinched circumstances stares me in the face.

Yet could it just be that he’s performing?

Naval’s role-playing is, I am convinced, subconscious. Somehow, somewhere, he has developed an image of himself as a down-at-heel actor – yet a down-at-heel actor who, without doubt, will one day rise to become a star. Initially, I suspect him of aping Mr Kher’s script. The thought proves mistaken. When I ask him if the struggles of the academy’s director inspire him, he looks at me with genuine puzzlement. The high-visioner is oblivious to anything but his mentor’s present. ‘Anupam Kher is a very sentient person,’ he assures me flatly. ‘A very famous man.’ If he has cast himself as the bench-sleeping Kher of yesteryear, he has done so by accident. Not that the rags-to-riches story is a unique one. It is there in every film Naval has ever watched, in every magazine he’s ever read. It’s part of the Bollywood myth. Part of the New India story. Little wonder he’s imbibed the role as if it were his own.

All the while, Naval is still blubbering. He has to shift flat. Another shared room in the faceless blocks has become vacant. He will move in two days. The thought does not comfort him. His sobs increase. In Delhi, he also lived in ‘very poor place’. Near to Dr Mukherjee Nagar police station. The trains would run right beside his room.

His thoughts begin to jump. He has fever. He once did a play in the slums of New Delhi about swine flu. His hunger is ‘like crick in his bones’. He misses his mum.

I fear he’s become so engrossed in his part that he might just
turn hysterical. I try some practical, yes–no questions in the hope of calming him.

‘Can the school not help find you a job?’ No. ‘Can Mr Shilabhadra not advise you about casting agencies?’ Apparently not. ‘Can I buy you lunch?’ He’s fine. ‘Might you reconsider going home?’ Never.

The last question has the opposite effect to that which I’d hoped. He puts both hands over his face and gives himself over to a fit of unashamed sobbing. For a full minute, he is lost in his own grief. Eventually, after what feels like an age, he draws breath and stumbles to his feet. On the sill of an air duct out into the corridor is a colour passport photograph. It shows a diffident-looking woman staring at the camera from beneath the hood of her sari.