And Then One Day: A Memoir (20 page)

R had arrived in Bombay by the time I returned from the shoot, still drunk on my luck. She was staying, she wrote, with friends in Cumballa Hill, a rather swish part of town. I didn’t know she had any friends in the city. I then made one of the biggest mistakes of my life, arriving at this mansion-like place she was staying in sometime after dark without informing her. She must have stumbled upon a jackpot or something, I thought. My heart was breakdancing against my ribs as I walked up to the second floor and rang the bell. We were going to be together again. A friendly young man opened the door and informed me she hadn’t returned but I could come in and wait for her. Somewhat puzzled as to who he could possibly be I demurred but left a note and was about to trudge away when she appeared, back from work—she had moved fast since landing in Bombay, had already managed a job and a cushy place to live in. Of all the scenarios of ‘meeting again’ my imagination had painted over the last two years, meeting her in my travel-soiled clothes, on the landing of the stairs to her fancy residence, was the most improbable. She didn’t seem exactly overjoyed to see me, we didn’t fly into each other’s arms after all these years either; there was only a limp handshake before she produced a bunch of keys and let me into an apartment larger than any I had seen before. It had ornate Parsi furniture, a long hallway and spacious rooms on either side. There were about half a dozen thoroughly decent- looking young men present, all strangers to me but with all of whom she seemed to share an easy familiarity. What the fuck was going on here???

I suggested we go out somewhere instead but she didn’t seem keen on that. I was mortified at the prospect of having to hobnob with a lot of people I didn’t know at all, more so because all of them, though my age more or less, were total aliens with their nice haircuts, their polite conversation, their well-ironed shirts, their confident worldly air, and their banter about stocks and shares and people and things I had no inkling about. They were all in fact employees of Bank of America, I discovered later, and the apartment was company accommodation, where they all lived. There being a plethora of rooms, she was camping in one of them, and WITH one of them as well? I must have been a very sore thumb in that company, with nothing to contribute to the conversation. I wanted to be alone with her, something she didn’t seem to reciprocate, and after a while my ardour was completely deflated by her pointed enquiry whether I was in Bombay for the weekend—the question put so obviously to establish that I was no one special, that all I could do was mumble a reply, feeling like I was swallowing a bag full of pointed screws. I got up to leave, she didn’t stop me. I said my goodbyes, determined to return to Pune right away, I saw no point in staying. Outside the door as I was leaving she made me promise to come and meet her the next day, she would be free in the morning and she had something to tell me. Of course I immediately scrapped the plan of returning to Pune that night.

Next stop Colaba Causeway and Stiffles Hotel, the hippie hangout in those days, to score myself a tab of acid and survive till morning which, when it came, found my head still buzzing with paranoid visions. I picked up my bag and the two Pochampalli saris I’d brought for her from Hyderabad, and arrived once again at that forbidding doorstep. No one else was present, the other occupants presumably being at work. The opulence I had been so impressed by the night before now felt stifling. In the two or so jaw-clenching hours we spent together and during which I kept hallucinating looking at the curtains in the room, she didn’t once enquire about the film I had just done, or about the Institute but explained at length that she now wanted to marry and raise a family. I was in no position, she reiterated, to give her the life she desired and she couldn’t wait for things to improve for me. I agreed that I had no idea how long that might take. She was approaching her thirties, was concerned she would soon be past childbearing age, and was very keen on having children. She confirmed my suspicion that she had in fact met someone else with whom she reckoned it could go the distance. I listened, having to strongly hold back a totally unreasonable but irresistible urge to laugh, gave her the saris which she reluctantly accepted, and in a catatonic state caught a taxi back to Pune. I resolved I would never see her again though she had declared with certainty that she still considered me her dearest friend and if ever I needed anything... blah blah blah.

I managed to circumvent getting completely bogged down because when I got back to Pune there were more pressing matters to attend to: I had to act in my acting course short film and then find digs for myself in Bombay. There were about two months remaining before the Institute would no longer be home to us. In the interim, the diploma films had been shot and I was not in any of them. No skin off my nose, though, as I would soon have an entire feature film as my portfolio. Shyam was good enough to offer to come to Pune and direct the film which four of us had been allotted. He and Shama cobbled together a rather unfunny screenplay based on an Ismat Chughtai story. He shot, dubbed and edited it in three days flat.

Jaspal had already managed a room for himself in Bombay. Actors looking for accommodation in Bombay those days found it difficult to secure any, and for many good reasons: the unreliability of the profession, delays in paying the rent, odd hours, disreputable friends, noisy parties and women in their lives. Jaspal had therefore invented an alternative profession for himself—teacher in a municipal school—and secured paying guest accommodation, sharing with ‘Paddy’ A. M. Padmanabhan, a graduate in sound engineering passing off as an engineer. I decided I would be a journalist and Om who joined us later would run a small business manufacturing plastic toys. Dissembling thus, we all managed to find shelter over our heads in this mother of all cities. Now all we had to do was become movie stars.

To that end we decided to see some of the kind of films we should shortly be starring in and I decided to start with
Sholay,
then in its second week. I can confirm first-hand the many apocryphal stories of this film meeting with jeering and catcalls in its initial weeks. The nearest theatre showing it was the Ambar-Oscar complex in Andheri. Jaspal and I got delayed, bought tickets at the window, an achievement not many can claim, and entered a half-empty theatre. We missed the first scene or two and the ones that followed seemed to conform strictly to the abysmal pattern of so-called Indian action movies. The guns no doubt were real and the clothes the two heroes and the villain wore didn’t look as if they had just been laundered; some of the one-liners had the zinging wit one encounters not infrequently in UP. But I could identify the source of almost every single scene—not only Spaghetti Westerns this time but blithe borrowings from Hollywood classics as well, even Mr Chaplin was not spared. The action scenes were competent but by no means breathtaking, I had seen stunts of surpassing excellence in many a second-grade Hollywood Western.

Now of course much is made of the impact of this ‘cinematic masterpiece’, books are written about it, there are sociological studies about it and deep meanings are being read into how it and other equally shallow films reflected the ‘mood of the times’. The mood of the times in that case must have been to greatly appreciate things that aspired Hollywoodwards. What someone should research is what it was that caused this failure to become the most successful Hindi movie of all time. The cost of its making and the pre-release hype were both unprecedented at that time and the poor initial reception it got obviously sent tremors through the industry; there was so much riding on it they couldn’t afford to let it fail. A convenient scapegoat was found: the newcomer who had played Gabbar Singh the dacoit, in a manner the audiences were unfamiliar with. Apparently the writers had wanted another actor who was not available, so overriding their protests the director cast the then unknown Amjad Khan, who was blessed with enough confidence to fill a room by himself. I believe it was Amjad bhai’s contribution, and his gargantuan personality, that helped shape the character as it finally appeared on screen. I thought he was absolutely marvellous and yet the entire industry was holding him to blame: his girth, his voice, all came in for flak.

It is supremely ironic that even today just the name of the film immediately evokes the reaction ‘Gabbar Singh!’, probably followed by ‘Kitne aadmi thhe?’ in almost anyone, but that day I saw with my own eyes the rejection by an audience of an effective actor in a movie because he was upstaging the ones they identified with. His later applause-inducing non sequiturs (‘claptrap dialogue’ in Hindi cinema parlance) were that day being greeted with stony silence or hostile rejection by the majority of the Dharmendra/Bachchan fan club present. It took a week or two for the audiences to cotton on to the fact that, hey, they had been rooting for the wrong guys all along. Gabbar was their man. And as if to atone for this judgemental lapse they went overboard in their worship of this new god. Gabbar Singh, though modelled closely on a couple of Sergio Leone villains, was suddenly hailed as ‘the first of his kind’ and the theatres running the movie began packing them in (with some ‘feeding’ by the producers, I daresay), and continued to do so, one actually for two years. With time the film’s other virtues—the cinematography, the songs, the cool attitude of the heroes, the sharp dialogue—started becoming apparent and it seemed to become a habit with the audience to see the film every few weeks, there was so much bang for the buck in it, they realized.

Ramesh Konar, a Bachchan devotee who came into my household first to cook for me, then graduated to driver, then to Jeeves and has been a devoted family member for four decades now hated it at first, but being pressured by friends saw it again. Knowing what to expect this time he liked it a little and, deciding to give it one more chance, took some friends along for a third viewing and loved it this time. He has probably seen it more than once since, as have I in fact, and my initial opinion about it is still unchanged. While I do not dismiss for a moment the effort and time that went into it, I bristle every time it is included among the great Indian movies. Popular Hindi cinema is like a huge meal in which there is such a variety of food that the audience cannot and must not be able to devour every dish at one go, they must come back to taste what they missed out or couldn’t fully savour the last time. That I suppose is what makes people see the same movie over and over again, even though the first time they saw it they knew exactly what would happen next and even though they may not even have liked it. And that, I suppose is what makes a hit.

Very soon after, I went looking for Dubeyji, never for a moment suspecting that meeting him was to result in the most serendipitous happening of my life. I needed to work and he was sure to be producing some play or other—he always was—and I thought I might land a part. I found out he would be at St Columba School in South Bombay, reading a new play. I immediately went to this address, for many years a rehearsal haven for Dubeyji and other practitioners of experimental Hindi and Marathi theatre, to learn he was not in town. But I did bump into Amol Palekar who was then on an upward trajectory to major stardom. Amol said he had heard complimentary things about me, and he probably meant Dubeyji who was not due to turn up that day. I wrote him a note, and asked Amol to give it to him. I was also informed that Dubeyji these days rehearsed in Bandra in the lobby of the Balgandharva Rangmandir, a monstrously huge, seldom used open-air auditorium (now razed, but immortalized on film in
Waqt
and my own
Jaane bhi do Yaaron).
The place was a stone’s throw from Pamposh, my haunt of ten years ago, and I was on my way there the next day when Dubeyji spotted me and treated me to a cold sugarcane juice at a roadside stall very near a bus stop outside National College where I had once spent a few nights years ago. He hadn’t got my note but was in fact starting on a play he himself had written, called
Sambhog se Sanyas Tak,
translating roughly as ‘From Fornication to Salvation’, and there was a part in it for me.

This news was going down extremely well with the sugarcane juice when, to brighten my day further, a striking-looking girl who henceforth I could not keep my eyes off came up to Dubeyji and handed him a note, informing him it was ‘from Amol Palekar’. It was the note I had written for Dubeyji! I took to her the moment I saw her, and really felt I’d like to get to know her. I even at once considered the possibility of spending my life with her, though after all these years she still refuses to believe that, but I did and it seemed like a jolly good idea, being on the rebound be damned. We had not yet spoken to each other and I knew nothing about her but somehow I felt certain that she was my kind of person. She looked flushed with the heat just then and her flawless complexion seemed to glow. I found her absolutely delicious. Dubeyji who had just had all his teeth surgically removed introduced us; his clarity of speech not being at its best she misheard my name as Shivendra Sinha, then a serious film-maker of some repute. My beard having grown back, I daresay I was once again looking like anything but an actor, an art-film maker possibly. I only later discovered her name was Ratna and she was the daughter of the formidable Dina Pathak, once a huge star on the Gujarati stage and screen and now a much-loved elder in Hindi movies.

Ratna was playing the central part in the play, an apsara who while doing whatever apsaras do in heaven, is unfaithful to her husband (me). Sparks and curses fly back and forth and after being reborn on earth we are now labouring under the weight of our own lives, she as maid to a sex-starved princess and I as a poetry-spouting misogynist lout. I can only dimly recall what else happens in this abstruse nonsense but the plot was secondary to Dubeyji’s chief intention in writing and staging it: to deliver overwrought arguments against conventional moralities and air his pet obsessions— rebirth syndrome, reversal of sexual roles, woman fated to be abandoned, hopeless man-woman-man-woman-man daisy- chain, confusion of identities, sexual freedom. And there were two recurring motifs, the menstrual cycle and women writhing on the floor, in every play Dubey wrote and many he directed.