And Then One Day: A Memoir (18 page)

J
aspal/Shah together scraped up enough to buy second- class unreserved tickets on the train to Delhi. If we’d had reserved seats or even if we’d had no tickets at all it would have mattered not a whit and we would still have been treated for the next twenty-two hours or so to the most memorable train journey of our lives. That day in 1974 coincided with the Indian Railways declaring a massive nationwide strike. This train was the very last one heading to Delhi for at least a few days. We had long since run through all our friends’ hospitality quotients in Bombay, and the hostel in the Institute was out of bounds for us—nowhere to go, we just had to be on that train. That turned out to be so for a few thousand others as well. Our tickets in our pockets, we arrived well in time, so we thought; one look at the train already in position wiped the smug look off our faces for the next two days. There were people jammed in the doorways, half-leaning out of windows, clambering on to the roof, suspended between compartments, hanging on to every conceivable hand or foot-hold. Navigating through the sea of people and getting to the train seemed impossible. The coolie who, in return for the 10 rupees we handed him earlier, had promised us a berth had been swallowed in the mob. Using whatever strength we had and every manner of persuasion, we managed to get to the compartment door and when the heaving mass of humanity moved a few inches further in we got on board; a few others tried clambering in after us but there was no more room to move until some really observant soul discovered the toilet unoccupied. Half a dozen passengers accommodated themselves in it and a few more squeezed aboard. Through that journey every single one of us there, no exaggeration, stayed on the same spot. So did those with berths, incidentally, because each berth was housing at least a half-dozen, if not more occupants. After a while, magically, all of us on the floor managed to sit where we stood and even managed a wink or so of sleep. The very intrepid ones even managed to alight at various stations to relieve themselves. I could not risk losing my precious space, stayed put, and my bladder and alimentary canal held out somehow. In any case we had no money to eat or drink and nothing in our stomachs to digest or emit.

No one was enterprising enough to come checking tickets on the journey and the tide of humanity that arrived at New Delhi was too large to monitor and swept out of the station unmolested. I felt just a nibble of regret over losing good money on those damn tickets. Then straight to the old NSD hostel for a free meal, to meet up with old pals and clean up— this last took some doing. Bajju bhai, known for his unstinting generosity to everyone, was temporarily on velvet with one of his pipe dreams, a Hindi poetry-recording project to be financed by a small-time industrialist, set to take off shortly, a novel idea for India but way ahead of its time. Despite some pretty heavy-duty recording machines and vinyl-disc cutting equipment being imported, it ultimately came to naught. For the duration of the dream though, Bajju bhai was provided with a car and driver and was lodged in a furnished bungalow, which was open house to all, on Malcha Marg, one of Delhi’s high-end neighbourhoods.

A lonely dreamer who had turned widower a couple of years ago, with an infant son and an immense store of affection and large-heartedness, he took us in to stay and I managed to bite his ear for the bus fare to Meerut where my parents, having come down from the Mussoorie winter, were staying in Dada Dipti’s bungalow ‘Masoom Villa’; the very same place from which I had fled to Bombay. Whether being there had reminded Baba of that misadventure or he believed what the papers had said about us acting students, I was received with a stormy look and the curt enquiry about whether I now intended to drive my teachers mad. ‘How dare you challenge them? You think you know better?!’ I felt like a moron, having come there hoping for comfort and understanding. Though I hadn’t the energy to explain the whole Gordian-knot situation to him, I unenthusiastically tried and suddenly I just didn’t care; he wouldn’t understand anyway, he had made up his mind. ‘Arrogance’, ‘stupidity’, ‘insubordination’ were some of the terms he hit me with. I didn’t ‘know what I was doing’, I had ‘gone mad smoking that damn charas’, what right did I have thinking I was ‘superior to everyone’ when I had in fact always been ‘a stupid ass’. Was I ‘trying to be a bloody communist going on strike’? He knew less than nothing about what had led to the agitation but he had not waited to pass judgement. The strain of the past three weeks, the unsympathetic situation at the Institute, the hungry stomach, empty pockets, having to eat crow after having been flag-bearer for a cause we believed in, all combined to make me snap. 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.

I was dying to unburden myself and put their minds at rest about the clarity and integrity of my intentions but conversation would just not take off. When I was leaving, he typically stuffed a 100 rupee note into my hand with a gruff admonition to behave myself and not smoke too much. Ammi hugged me warmly and told me to ‘try and understand him’. I left feeling drained, my heart weighing a ton. I had been too optimistic in hoping to be able to get through to Baba, but I had desperately wished that we might just find some contact if I talked to him seriously and feelingly about my work. I now knew for sure I was to find no meeting point with him, and that we had absolutely nothing in common, not even a desire to be friends.

It was made clear to the acting students that their conditions would not be met, and the Institute would not reopen until we gave in. When we finally received the blanket ‘no’ to our demand that only acting students be cast in the diploma films and that every student of acting get an equal opportunity, we decided that in that case none of us would appear in any diploma film. Not only was this stand accepted with an alacrity that surprised and hurt us but it also caused a falling- out among the acting students—some of whom were feeling that this ado over nothing much was endangering their one chance to display their wares. As a sop, the Institute offered to make films specially designed for the acting course students; films in which all actors would be accommodated. What still stings after all these years is that it occurred to no one to grant actors the same right accorded to any other member of the unit—the right to be considered an integral part of the whole, something that should be true of any team, particularly a unit in a film school where pulling together and contributing is supposed to be encouraged and where you are supposed to be taught to make do with what you are given, be it a particular camera or a particular actor. There was never any acknowledgement of actors being anything but a ‘headache to be put up with’, and the talk was always about ‘appeasing the actors’ or ‘accommodating them’, never about the necessity of ‘working with them’.

The strike ended in disarray, ‘acting course films’ were promised to each of us and the Institute was to reopen in a month. We retreated and went our respective ways, but not before Jaspal had subjected me to a passionate and almost violent harangue on how I was a sell-out and a double-crosser and had betrayed the entire class, even though the decisions were taken in consultation with all present, some conveniently not being present of course.

The muddy taste that all this left in my mouth didn’t last long, Ahmed Muneer from Bangladesh, a recent entrant to NSD, was to direct Albee’s
Zoo Story
for a theatre festival at the American Cultural Centre, and asked me if I would like to play Jerry in it. In the audience, apart from the glitterati of the city, were to be the celebrated critic and writer Mr Jerome Lawrence who was visiting. Muneer had an experiment in mind, which after my brief taste of applying the method at FTII, I enthusiastically endorsed. The idea was that since the two characters in the play have never met, the two actors playing them should not meet before the performance either, ergo we were to rehearse separately and meet only as the characters onstage. Thoroughly half-baked though this notion was, both the other actor Ravi Baswani, a long-time friend, and I found it worth pursuing. Muneer rehearsed with the two of us separately and had had a design on hand for a while.

I entered without apprehension into this play of which I had understood not a word in college but which on reading now, funnily all seemed to make complete sense. In the light of having to carry the burden of the uncertainty of my life, not to talk of the sense of failure and rejection I was in those days carting around as well, it is no wonder that Jerry’s despair at the failure of human contact, the impossibility of getting across, his paradoxical need for and shunning of human company and his anger at God ‘who turned his back on the whole thing some time ago’ found such a resonance in my own frustrations. I sank all twenty-eight teeth into the role with relish, it began to consume me and it seemed to be controlling me. For the month that we prepared, I tried to make the words my own by saying them repeatedly. I would speak them all the time regardless of where I happened to be—walking down the street, travelling in DTC buses, eating at dhabas; I would corner strangers in a park, trying to engage them in what I was saying but succeeded mostly in frightening them away. Through this month, financed by Muneer, who was on a Colombo Plan scholarship and always flush, we did LSD rather more frequently than we should have; the last trip featuring a vivid state that felt as if my mind was a plank of wood being split lengthwise, then a tactile hallucination which scared the shit right out of me and gave me (later, on reflection) an insight into why people believe they have seen or felt the presence of the supernatural, and drove me to what was probably the limit of my sanity.

The mistake we made was to drop the stuff before the sun had set. By the time it started to take effect, the sunlight had turned orange and every colour began to practically glow and turn almost fluorescent. The psychedelic beauty of all this escaped me totally because I began to worry about having no more sun for the next twelve hours. Unable to cope with the growing dark, and after unwittingly transmitting a couple of visual hallucinations to a bemused Vikram Mehrotra, who was on nothing at all, we descended from the terrace where we had been. My head aflame with colours that don’t exist and buzzing with the most mind-bending, never-before- thought-of ideas, all destined to disappear with the sunrise, I was descending the stairs when another brilliant idea, one I could put into action right away hit me. I would visit the lady with whom I had recently ended the liaison we’d shared for a year or so (I suppose I should mention that I had hardly been faithful to R in her absence). The lysergic acid diethylamide I had ingested that day kicked off some dusty memory and in the throes of its ecstatic enlightenment, the urge to repair this relationship suddenly began to seem like the right thing to do.

I knew she wouldn’t particularly want to see me again but I was determined she would, tonight—maybe I was just curious about what sex on LSD would be like. I was stepping through the door that led to the road when a hand stopped me dead in my tracks. I couldn’t see the hand but felt it quite clearly right bang in my solar plexus where the ribs join, and there was no mistaking the shape and the touch of that hand—it was hers. So utterly tangible was the feeling that it completely immobilized me, I couldn’t move. The message came through loud and clear. It was her telling me not to come. Retracing my steps and recovering whatever was left of my addled wits, I went back into Muneer’s room and launched into a dozen different renditions of ‘The Story of Jerry and the Dog’, hallucinated some more looking at a poster of Hendrix, then read the screenplay of the weird
El Topo
which made no sense whatsoever even in that state, nor incidentally did the film, on a sober viewing many years later. We then walked to India Gate to look at the sunrise, with Jerry’s words bouncing around in my head all the time and often bursting out of my mouth; I just couldn’t have enough of them.

Before the performance, Muneer thought I should not even have seen the theatre or the set. Ravi would be ready and seated onstage at show time, I was to wait at the NSD hostel, five minutes away, and Muneer would accompany me to the theatre and straight to the wing onstage from where I was to enter. The idea was that I should be completely unfamiliar with the space as well. Whether or not he had taken equal pains to ensure that Ravi (whose character visits the spot frequently) was thoroughly familiar with the space, I do not know. But all went according to plan, I entered on time and the performance went without a hitch except it was a little more chaotic than it would have been had we rehearsed together.

A few seconds after stepping onstage I knew that this esoteric call Muneer had made was not going to pay off in any way. If we had indeed gone all the way down that route then it should also have been an actor I had never seen before. The great experiment didn’t yield any earth-stopping results but so solid was my conviction that at last I had found a mouthpiece to express myself through—these were the things I myself wanted to say—that I had worked harder on this performance than I had ever done on anything before. And boy, had it turned out to be fun. The mordant humour and Jerry’s seemingly disconnected bits of banter cutting closer and closer to the bone as the action progresses was a joyride. The play in any case has genuine tour-de-force possibilities for the actor playing Jerry and given the unstoppable intensity of Albee’s language in delivering his nihilistic message, and the fact that I found myself in complete empathy with the character, the performance actually worked. My earlier flair for showing off had not been fully tempered but had taken a few knocks and so ‘brash’ would not now be apt to describe my attitude.