And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Naseeruddin Shah

And lastly a big fat slobbery kiss to the jewel of my existence, Ratna, queen of her species, who while doing so much else has also steadfastly, through thick and thin, better and worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health held my hand and propped me up for well-nigh forty years. May her tribe increase.

(I always puzzled over why they are called ‘drawing’ rooms—until a chance visit to Blair Castle in Pitlochry explained it; they were the rooms ladies would ‘withdraw’ to while the men drank their brandy and threw bread rolls at each other)

‘first wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first’.

Funny, the kind of things that stick in one’s mind, like ‘dust on honey’ as someone said.

I still keep in my cupboard one of her dupattas and it carries her smell. The most soothing sensation I have ever felt in my life is the touch of the breath-warmed corner of her dupatta on my eyelids.

I’ve always had ambivalent feelings about mist since. Beautiful yes, but also chilling; and there’s nothing ambivalent about my feeling for school bags—I still hate the damn things. The sensation of setting off from home seemed final. I’m not sure if I cried; I don’t think I did, I was too terrified. Walking uphill to the school, a mean climb, I don’t remember if Baba and I talked, but he must have said something to me. Even though he was a man of very few words, there must have been a time when we talked to each other.

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.

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.

In later life after having been roused to fury by something my own children did, I often, on calmer reflection, realized that it was my own insecurities and failings in something completely unrelated that had made me bully them thus, and I did it only because I could. When I’ve struck any of them or felt the urge to do so, my own frustrations have always been the cause. I sometimes wonder how many disappointments and failures poor Miss Perry or Brother Burke must have lived with to relish being so relentlessly cruel to the children in their care.

But on pondering the question, the matrons decided not to bring the matter to the Principal’s notice, the common consensus among them being that I was too much of an idiot to pull off something like this.

The suspicion that I was a complete idiot began to grow into a conviction, and I had not a clue what to do about it.

Having received my second ‘failed’ report card for Class 9, I went for as long a bicycle ride as I could to avoid going home and breaking the news. I wasn’t terribly distressed, didn’t contemplate suicide or anything, I just rode and rode and rode, with a completely empty head, until I couldn’t put off the inevitable any longer. But I had managed to delay it. Turning my cycle homeward at last, I frantically searched my mind for what lie I could possibly tell this time. It still gives me a twinge when I recall Baba’s worried but hopeful face when I returned, a good three hours or so after I should have, and the way it crumpled when he got the news accompanied by my weak protestations about how the marks for the half-yearly exams which I hadn’t appeared for at this school, naturally, had been included in our aggregates and that’s why I had failed. He didn’t say anything. Just quietly told me to go eat. I must confess that on this day I actually felt sorry for him.

They’d visit us once a year, normally in June, and these meetings, though enjoyable to a degree because we could go out of the school with them, would quickly turn into sharp interrogations about my progress in studies. Displeasure would be expressed, I would be reminded of the enormous expense going into my education, threats to pull me out of this ‘expensive’ school would be issued and tears invariably followed.

Around this time, the suffocating relationship with Baba made me start detesting and fearing his company. Ammi was emotionally supportive, and I could vent things on her, but with Baba it came to a point where all I got was sternness and disapproval. Though he never ever struck any of us, I don’t think I’ve ever been as terrified of anyone in my life. His desire to see us well educated consumed him, and he believed I was throwing away the opportunity to equip myself for life. The unanimous opinion of my teachers that I’d find it difficult to amount even to a small bag of beans made him begin to despair for me and, in turn, whatever I felt for him was replaced not by fear of his disapproval, which might have spurred me to do better, but by sheer undiluted terror of, and extreme hatred for, him. I don’t think either of us ever recovered what we lost, and I do know that I was never ever at ease in his company again, nor he in mine.

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.

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.

My whiskers had by now sprouted fully, as had my libido; and in Class 10, now that Baba was not around any more, I grew a beard, something I had been dying to do. He had always disapproved of the idea, probably fearing it proclaimed a Muslim identity. Being able at last to see the ‘adult’ Gina Lollobrigida or Marilyn Monroe films did little to calm the raging need males of that age—or of any age—feel for female companionship. Those were the days before prudery became fashionable and much before the moral police had begun flexing their biceps in India. Playboy magazine could be found in bookstores, nestling between copies of the Illustrated Weekly of India and Woman & Home. While browsing in the only bookshop in town, Rampersad’s, located under a giant tree and wedged between two shops, one of which belonged to Girish T’s dad, I discovered a weird Scandinavian publication, Health and Efficiency, with a feast of pictures in it of nudists of all ages frolicking in their colonies. I couldn’t have enough of it, fantasizing about naked women all the time but in the dark, so to say. I had no idea what one actually DID when in the act of sex. Though ignorant of masturbation, I knowingly bandied the term about when others did; it was assumed everyone knew what was implied when ‘five finger exercise’ was discussed, which was often, and I would play along. The inevitable fallout (no pun) of this ceaseless stimulation was wet dreams, which despite being kind of delicious puzzled me no...

For a moment I thought I was being hassled at the bus stop by a cop, and started gathering my things to move along, then remembered I was home and this was the one voice I hadn’t missed at all— Baba’s. They were both early risers and he had just risen and opened the door to find this bedraggled prodigal asleep on his bedroll on the doorstep. ‘Get up! Go meet your mother!’ he said, brushing aside my insincere apologetic mumbling. Ammi for the only time in her life abandoned her namaaz as I entered the bedroom. She held me in her arms with a fury I had never sensed in her, weeping and thanking the God who had brought me safely home. The smell of Ammi’s clothes I can still recall and I wallowed in it for as long as I could. The first breakfast in over sixty days lodged in my stomach, and a much-needed haircut and bath having been administered, I was marched off to the mosque to gain further absolution by giving thanks for having been delivered from ‘the path that had wrought (His) anger’. I instead entreated Him to ensure I would make it back to Bombay some day.

Sufiji was a walking Ouija board, he claimed he had visitations all the time, and in the pre- namaaz gossip sessions whenever he casually let it drop that ‘So-and-so [some long-dead ancestor] came to see me last night’, we children were immediately excluded from the conversation. I don’t know for a fact if these visions Sufiji had were geared towards attention grabbing or if he was pretending to pass on messages from the hereafter while actually being goaded to settle family politics, or if he was just stoned all the time.

With my earnings I would head every evening to the Hakman’s Hotel to play tombola, hoping for a windfall. I always ended up losing, which actually is a pattern that has repeated itself in my life many times over, whenever I have attempted to get something for nothing. It’s almost as if nature is redressing the balance of having looked after the massive gamble that my life has turned out to be, and in which I have had moderate but highly satisfying winnings most of the time.

When he wasn’t around I too felt free and uninhibited in this house, always receiving the attention I craved and being always ‘on’. I would turn talkative, even gregarious, and needed very little persuasion to show off my Shakespeare. I had no idea why this personality hid itself behind a dark cloud whenever I went home and to this day I have not quite figured out which one is the real me, and after a point I stopped trying.

Trying to appear like the coolest creatures in the cosmos we strolled into one of the classrooms and met our co-actors—the girls. One more dream in my grasp, thought I. So far all the acting I’d done had been with bewigged or long-haired Sikh boys playing the female roles. Having the female characters played by actual females was aphrodisiacal in the extreme.

Knowing how to create the impression that I understood it, however, was another matter and on that score I had little doubt.

Priapic twenty-one-year-old that I was, hopelessly self-absorbed, incapable of contributing in any way at all to making her feel good about herself, I found the bar on sex not easy to handle either.

My indifference to Heeba can only be explained, though not condoned, by the fact that I myself was then an insecure, ill-adjusted twenty-one-year-old with absolutely no conception of what it took to rear a newborn, and I completely shirked my share of the duties, while idiotically attempting at the same time to assert my rights as a husband.

I have no idea in what sort of light I will appear if I say that for an unconscionably long time I felt nothing whatsoever for the child Heeba, but it is necessary that I confess it. She didn’t figure at all, it was almost as if she didn’t even exist. When I did visit her in Aligarh she’d look at me as at a stranger, she seldom came near me and neither of us was comfortable when she did.

I had to wrench myself away from being around this dazzling personification of charisma and the other-worldly bliss of living, eating, sleeping theatre in order to pay to Heeba’s existence the attention it needed. Thoughts of my infant daughter were non-existent in my mind. A total disconnect with my life in Aligarh had happened, it all seemed like another time altogether. As my fascination with city life and theatre work grew, my connection with what I suppose were my roots began to shrivel. One of the things left behind was my relationship with Purveen. My relationship with Heeba had ossified before it began.

I discovered the magic of marijuana.

She was now two, walking and talking but had nothing to say to me and probably didn’t want to go anywhere with me. I think she must have been somewhat confused as to who I was and how she should behave with me. I was in a similar predicament. I didn’t know how to deal with children, I didn’t even know how she would respond if I tried to hug or hold her, and the reception from Purveen was always so unfailingly hostile that I finally decided to cease performing this onerous duty and in fact didn’t see Heeba again for another twelve years.

If I had to wipe out all memories of my father and keep only one, this is the one I would keep. He actually wanted me to stay on another day, he actually wanted my company! He had never sounded anything but authoritative in all my conversations with him, but this was a side of him I had not known before, or had completely forgotten. He was almost plaintive, well aware that I might refuse; and instead of the authority which came naturally to him, there was the tone of a father who had begun to feel he wanted to spend the little time he had left, or as much of it as he could, with his son. This feeling was new, I was never the son he had wanted to spend time with, but that day I stayed on and for once in my life I was able to talk to him about my dreams. He listened but his universe was too far removed from mine. His only concern was what would become of me.

Even though I initially found his sincerity amusing and quite unnecessary—at complete variance with my own attitude—I finally began to see its virtues, and had to admit to myself that none of my own performances in the school productions could begin to approach Om’s achievement in Ibaragi.

Incapable as an actor of responding to immediate stimulus, I had always needed a map, so to say, and was lost without one.

Now, for a change we were being told to ‘throw characterization out of the window’ and perform each action as ourselves, the attempt being to help us understand our own behaviour and reflexes. More importantly, it began to become clear that when you enter a scene, you are coming from somewhere to somewhere else and unless you know where and why in both cases all you will manage is to attempt a ‘great entry’, the very narcissistic trap I had fallen into and made a habit of. Along the way since then I have managed to extricate myself from this pit of self-absorption. We had been taught at NSD how to stand effectively onstage, how to be bang on cue, how to handle costumes, how to catch the light, how to project the voice; how, in short, to make a good picture. We were made to learn the Five Ws (who, why, what, where, when) by rote like the two-times-two table, but no one had been able to emphasize the importance of applying them, much less bothering to explain how they were to be applied.

Ammi, just bringing in something to eat, found me on my way out and witnessed for the only time in her life one of her children yelling back at their father. I told him I knew he could not tolerate my presence, well I had news for him—the feeling was mutual, I had never cared for him just as he had never cared for me and I knew he just wanted an excuse to lose me. I told him he was done with me forever. As I went on frothing at the mouth, he stayed silent but hurt and fear appeared in his eyes. I picked up my bag to go but he did not move. Had it not been for Ammi’s intervention at that moment I would probably never have gone anywhere near him again. So convinced was I that he deserved to be told all this that I was oblivious to how deep a wound I was inflicting. Ammi managed to hush us both up and made me stay for another two days, but in those two days he and I saw each other as little as possible and Ammi was practically an emissary.

Feeling self-congratulatory after a performance was not new to me, I was usually very pleased with myself regardless of how I’d done, but for the first time since The Lesson I knew that this performance hadn’t happened by chance or because of ‘my natural talent’; it had happened because I’d worked like a demon on it, I had been in control of what I was doing, it had not gone by like a blur. I kind of knew now what was good and what was not good about it and kind of knew why. The heady thought occurred that I may be making progress at last, I may at last be learning how to act.

She had always told me she loved me but had also always told me she couldn’t foresee a future together and she was intelligent and honest enough with herself to recognize that I was at that time incapable of giving her the kind of life she craved. I realized later she was right in believing this; she wanted to marry, settle down, have children; I was still in the process of building my career and of course ‘in films there is no guarantee of regular work’. She believed love could not withstand an empty stomach, I believed it could withstand anything.