Naseeruddin Shah’s memoir is a detailed bildungsroman set in the India of the 1960s and 1970s. He is rivetingly honest and quintessentially minces no words. And when he does mince words, they transform into superior black humour and entrancing poetry. He tells ANANYA BORGOHAIN how writing the autobiography helped him connect with his past
When we reduce to dust eventually, all that remains is our story. All the memories are condensed to that framed photo on the wall. But there are also others who document their biographic details and present their chronicles to the world. This, however, requires a lot of strength, courage, and honesty. But most importantly, it requires audacity. Naseeruddin Shah needs no introduction, but his autobiography projects a reflection that is beyond his established quintessence. It is in fact a detailed bildungsroman set in the India of the 1960s and 1970s. It is a historical documentation of the pre-video player world, a world of gramophones, Doordarshan, T-model fords, and Fiats in the 60s, in the world of “a one-tractor town like Sardhana” and the “Aligarhian parlance”. Shah is rivetingly honest about all his activities and minces no words. And when he does mince words, they transform into either black humour or entrancing poetry. His memoir, however, ends when he finds stardom and marries Ratna Pathak, and one can only hope that he writes a sequel to cover the rest of his life history. But he categorically states, “No. There will be no sequel. I have communicated whatever I needed to.” I persist that for a National Award, Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan awardee, these moments in his life do deserve being talked about. “They mean nothing to me,” he clarifies, and continues, “So many awards are won because somebody lobbied for them and many awardees are not deserving at all. I get calls from people saying, ‘Yaar ye award dilwa do’. So why should I invest any interest and praise to them in my memoirIJ”
And Then One Day (published by Penguin) bares all — his ‘English’ upbringing, his schooling, his rejection by the Aligarh Muslim University, his family, his forever-hostile relationship with his father, his tryst with marijuana and prostitution, his first marriage when he was only 19, his failure as a father, being backstabbed (literally) by a close friend, his first film appearance, his distrust of film award functions, his second marriage, disillusionment with his theatre idols, and so on and so forth. So how relieving have the confessions beenIJ
“The catharsis has been tremendous. I have come to terms with many things that had earlier troubled me. I am a huge Pink Floyd fan and borrowed the title from their song ‘Time’. As the lyrics go, “...You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find ten years have got behind you...” This title for the memoir was the first one I had thought of. I didn’t want a pompous title like, How I Found Myself. Also, to me Ismat Chughtai was the greatest writer in the whole world and she said, “Jab main kahani likhti hoon, main padhne wale se baatein karti hoon (When I write, I talk to my readers)”. I wanted my memoir to also communicate with the reader.”
He talks about cultivating no interest in academia. His heart was always in the mesmerising world of acting: “I wanted to be rich. I wanted to be known. I wanted to be talked about.” Having discussed in elaborate detail his school life, he writes about running away to Mumbai and living at his friend’s girlfriend’s aunt’s house for a month, stubbornly refusing to leave. He speaks about applying for the job of a bellboy at the Taj Mahal Hotel to make two ends meet.
His perplexed father, who had administered the shrine of a Sufi saint in Ajmer, had to ask the only person he knew in Mumbai, Sakina (Dilip Kumar’s sister), to knock sense into his errant son. The megastar’s other sister Saeeda Khan picked him up from the pavement and took him home. It was at Kumar’s house where he was fed “and even had access to a bathroom”. Kumar’s cottage, which was removed from the main house and served as his study, was where he was familiarised with new names and access to cinema literature: George Arliss, William S Hart, Michael Curtiz, Georges Clouzot, Josef von Sternberg, and so on. He remembers picking up Filmfare trophies, which were so heavy that he thought they were nailed down. Once he even met the actor himself who “delivered a short lecture on why boys from good families should not join the film world”. He was sent back home but he moved to Delhi some years later to join the National School of Drama. Have these landscapes — Sardhana (his hometown), Aligarh, Mumbai — changed for him today thenIJ
“Actually, I don’t go to Sardhana at all now. The people there behave as if they own me. I find no peace there. My parents are buried there, but I cannot have a moment of tranquility when I visit their graves. My brother is the Vice-Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University and I had been at Aligarh for a performance, but it was a horrid experience. All these don’t encourage me to revisit these places. I live in Bandra in Mumbai and I often pass by the places I have mentioned in the book and wonder with amusement how lucky I must be to have been so mad and yet reach where I have today.”
However, one is also reckless and unnerving when one is young. He sure would never dare to leave home and land up at the alien world of Mumbai, starving and struggling on the street today. “Oh yes, the determination to work, be known, that passion came attached with the madness. Anything could have happened to that 14-year-old boy just roaming around in Mumbai. But I think that’s the amount of courage an actor needs. And I retained the same confidence as an actor, even when I was jobless, penniless and friendless,” he recalls.
There are also startling disclosures; startling, not from a moral compass but that he would mention them. He narrates his first sexual encounter with careful and graphic detailing: “At last I would uncover the mystery of the female anatomy, luxuriating on silken sheets, alabaster legs wrapped around me… Between the two younger girls, Mir (a classmate) and I both decided on the same one, then to avoid further delay left it to the girls. The fancy I’d felt turned out to be mutual and so the greasy four rupees having changed hands, I found myself alone with the woman who would initiate me into manhood…” What follows is the vivid depiction of a heated experience he recounts with a stunning dramatic fervour. As a subtext, there is also the story of his long extramarital affair with one ‘R’ whom he eventually breaks up with. He asks, “Why should I put myself on a pedestalIJ I have discarded self-censorship to the best I can.”
This memoir is clearly a tribute to his first family, to the times spent in yore. It is confessional and conversational, and ostensibly seeks redemption and catharsis. He writes about his failure as a son and living at the generosity of his brothers. He elaborates about his strained relationship with his father, which is also one of the most primary motifs in the book. His father, Aley Mohammed Shah, who was an Anglophile and by profession a Provincial Civil Services officer, always wanted an English education for his children.
Throughout the memoir, Shah writes about incidents which repeatedly let his father down — from his running away to Mumbai, to marrying a woman 14 years older without even informing him — until his father declared that he had finally given up on him. But when Shah failed to attend his father’s funeral and later heard of the painful death he had to endure, the reader sure is gripped by as profound a grief which the son felt himself.
He recalls, “My father had stopped existing for me. We were not on talking terms for a year and I caused him much anxiety. I am happy that he at least saw my first film Nishant, but he didn’t live to see my success. I introduced my mother to the President when I got the Padma Shri and she kept crying, wishing he was there to see it. So, when he is no longer around, what significance do these awards and fame hold for me anywayIJ” But in a sadder tone, he acknowledges his failure as a father himself. Having married at the age of 19, he says he was not prepared to be a father by the time he was just 21.
He saw his infant daughter as a stumbling block in his marriage and was envious of all the attention that he rightfully deserved but his wife directed towards their daughter. He writes about how, when both were left alone, they would have no words to exchange. Heeba left with her mother for Iran eventually, and when she was 14, returned to Mumbai to live with him. Heeba had never been to school and spoke only Farsi then. She studied drama in Delhi and is now an actor: “An asset to our company and an inspiringly positive influence on her two half-brothers.”
“Right now, as we speak, Heeba is halfway through the book. I got a message from her saying that she likes it. She was apprehensive because she knows that I don’t mince words.” So, has he never had a heart-to-heart conversation with herIJ “No, this is the first time I will be talking to her from the bottom of my heart, through this book. I could not have spoken the things that I have written. She knows I can’t be cheesy or sugar-coated.”
This is also one of those rare times when he speaks about his first wife Purveen, in the chapter titled ‘The woman with the sun in her hair’. She was a final year MBBS student specialising in ophthalmology when they first met. She was a Pakistani national who was in India for her studies; a thinking individual ahead of her time, who smoked, laughed, drove her black Fiat, and enjoyed his company. For the first time in his life, Shah says, he found somebody who accepted him the way he was and towards whom he cultivated a sense of belonging. He mentions her and Heeba living in Iran through the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini after the fall of the Shah. later, his wife became a fundamentalist, and has now passed away.
Having belonged to the background of literature, his vast experience and knowledge in the field have also been delved upon. He covers a range of genres and literatures from William Shakespeare to Bertolt Brecht to Samuel Beckett to Vijay Tendulkar. He also speaks at length about theatre veterans Ebrahim Alkazi and Satyadev Dubey. Elaborate chapters have been dedicated to highlight his mesmerisation by the craft of drama. When he hears of the NSD for the first time, he reacts, “An entire institution just for drama!” Having completed his education in the NSD, he joined the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). “I am told that Mr Alkazi’s family is offended by that line in the book, ‘Alkazi could be churlish at times...’ but I think it’s unjustified if they don’t see my ode to him in several pages but remember only one line from an entire memoir. Both Alkazi and Dubey never buried the hatchet and despite being two of the greatest theatre personalities, they never came together to create something. It would have been magic otherwise and Indian theatre would have been revolutionised,” he states.
During his NSD days, he also met Rajendra Jaspal, a fellow actor and classmate — along with one of his closest confidantes today, legendary actor Om Puri — who went on to become one of his closest friends. However, the friendship falls apart. It starts with minor tiffs, like slangs uttered in drunken stupor to Jaspal accusing Shah of moral corruption during a strike in FTII, to Jaspal stabbing Shah in a fit of murderous rage. It was in fact Om Puri who had played the saviour then. We see many facets of Jaspal: the drama aficionado, the enthusiastic friend, the cynical colleague, and finally his mental breakdown. One wonders why Shah has carved his depiction so carefully; Jaspal is a recurring character in the memoir, what is his significance in Shah’s life thenIJ
He ponders, “I feel supremely sad about him. He was better looking and more gifted than I was. But life did not shape well for him. With his addiction to drugs, he began to lose his sanity. He wanted to be me, but I also wonder if there was a homosexual configuration therein and his stabbing was actually a Freudian manifestation. I don’t know, but this also serves as a lesson for young writers to learn and watch out for. Envy and rage can consume you. I have always felt happy for other people’s success. Even when you watch Manthan, you will realise that Jaspal does not have solid screen presence, but that one shot he gives is powerful.”
There are also traces of a substantial distancing from iconoclasm. On the 16th page itself, he attacks the annual film awards, calling them “annual orgy of mutual jerking off”. later, he mentions one Sufiji, who was in charge of the family mosque, “When I discovered marijuana a few years later, I knew I had smelt it before, around the Ajmer Dargah and around Sufiji. Whatever, the elegant little mosque from the late 19th century was kept clean by his mystery man.” Even as far as the medium of formal education was concerned, he could not bring himself to care enough. In his trigonometry paper, he answered a question thus: “If you know it, why ask meIJ And if you don’t know it, what makes you think that I wouldIJ” Repeatedly he refers to himself as a man filled with “arrogance”.
“I don’t understand why we should give a God-like status to humans. I am not a God-fearing person. I don’t plead and bargain with God. I have been a bad, dissatisfied student. And of course if mainstream popular Hindi cinema fails to see my perspective to better it and calls me a hypocrite, then so be it. They have all become star-centric. First they choose the stars, then the music directors, in fact lyrics and music are composed at times without even reading the script. I don’t appreciate such popular practices. Even in Alkazi saab’s case, I think he is great, but not God. You may call it iconoclasm but I refuse to deify these things or people.”
Similarly, he mentions the disillusionment by celebrated masters of the craft like Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook. He was selected to participate in the ‘Theatre of Sources’ workshop conducted in Wroclaw where Grotowski’s Institute for Research into Acting was situated. But in retrospect, he remembers his experience as precarious with odd exercises in the forest which made him fear for his life and never meeting Grotowski — the meeting being the chief lure used to draw the attention of aspirants like him. He writes, “Setting himself up as a guru and withholding information from disciples is all that Grotowski seemed to have assimilated from the Indian guru-shishya tradition…I felt like a guinea pig. Brook was equally intent on mythologising himself and not only never bothered to learn how to pronounce the word ‘Mahabharata’, he turned out to be easily the vainest, most self-absorbed person I have ever met.”
And he adds, “Brook was the most publicity-savvy man. He even knew which angle would suit him for photos. To top that, he would make gestures indicating ‘no photos please’, but he would say that after he knew some photos had already been shot.”
The same extends to his experience in mainstream Hindi films too. Although Shah does not speak about much of his film life, he recalls the first appearance he made in a film as a junior artiste in a crowd. He also writes about similar appearances from which he was edited out. And then are fond memories of his first meeting with Shyam Benegal and when he got his breakthrough role in Nishant. There is also a mention of his presumption that he would be starred in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi only to realise later that Ben Kingsley is already playing the role. The fake screen tests and his first trip abroad to audition for it went in vain because it was always decided that Kingsley would play the role, only the makers hesitated to announce it right away that a white actor would play the role. There is also a revelation about a writer duo, who wrote some blockbusters of the time, who tried to persuade him to leave Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai and be a part of their film. “What film yaarIJ Who’s going to see itIJ” they would try to cajole him. And there is of course a commercial director who once advised, “Naseerji, this is not an art film, here you have to ACT!” I cannot help asking him what made him do a film like Jackpot then. He laughs, “For the money! I don’t watch most of my films though and have done several films free of charge. I have done television serials, social documentaries and I’ve been a part of both, as they call, the mainstream and parallel cinema. What troubles me is the popular attitude to not accommodate standpoints that seek to make Indian cinema superior and better. Tridev being such a huge hit does not mean much to me but I do regret the failure of Sunaina. I wish I could have done more.”
Shah’s black humour is quintessential. It is not self-righteous, is cathartic, and didactic at the same time. It is funny and one could almost clearly visualise the thespian smirking while he writes it. The humour is in fact one of its most engaging and effective narrative techniques. As a signing off note, he says, “I am not talking down to my readers, neither am I boasting about myself. Most people believe that I criticise the film industry and work in it at the same time. They don’t realise that I crib because I want to make my work better. My teachers mocked me, apparently I would have ended up in a gutter. Only my two brothers supported me. Iconoclasm could be harmful. I am no God, neither do I want to be one. I have tried to put my thoughts with clarity in the book.” Indeed, And Then One Day has the potential to serve as Bible for aspiring actors, who should take a leaf out of it.
ananyapioneer@gmail.com
