And Then One Day: A Memoir (22 page)

A
fter the
Nishant
release I spent most of the time licking my various wounds so to say, including the most recent one of being rejected as newsreader in both Hindi and English on Doordarshan, where Smita who had made something of a name for herself in Marathi suggested I audition. Shishir and Sunil, both then living with their parents at walking distance from my pad, often generously welcomed me into their homes. I give thanks very often for the times such undemanding friendships and unselfish affection have come my way as with these two, and earlier with KC and Pearly in Sem, then with Asif and Jasdev in Aligarh.

While I was studying at FTII, the news that Mr Gulzar was planning a film on the life of Mirza Ghalib had created quite a buzz and Mr Sanjeev Kumar, one of Gulzar bhai’s favourite actors, had been asked to play the part. Sanjeev Kumar, after a modest beginning in stunt movies, was now a highly acclaimed actor and a major star. After delivering some outstanding performances he seemed to have now developed a rather self-congratulatory way of performing and was thoroughly comfortable with the mannered acting habits typical of all stars. Even without having read more than a couplet of Ghalib’s poetry, I felt sure Gulzar bhai was making a mistake: Sanjeev Kumar was wrong for the part. Then one day I read that he had been hospitalized and the shooting of the film delayed, so with Vikram Mehrotra’s assistance I got hold of Gulzar bhai’s address and wrote him a letter informing him I was the man he was looking for. I enumerated my qualifications: I belonged to Meerut (true), a place Ghalib had connections with; I had lived in Old Delhi’s Gali Qasim Jaan where Ghalib had lived (false, I had only visited it); I spoke, wrote and read Urdu fluently (one-third true, I only spoke it); and I had studied the great man’s work (totally false). I assured him he would not regret choosing me and that I was already a very good actor. I hadn’t really expected a reply and didn’t get one; I had no idea what effect my letter may have had, but at that stage there was nothing to lose by trying; surely my missive would have had some impact—even if it had only irritated him he would remember it and then perhaps he had seen
Nishant
by now. I secured an appointment, was warmly received by him at his Pali Hill office and complimented on my work in the film, but no mention was made about the possibility of my working for him. Asking him about my letter began to seem terribly presumptuous and neither of us made any mention of it nor of the
Mirza Ghalib
project. It was only much later when I was actually playing Ghalib in his TV series that I mustered up the courage to tell him the letter story—turned out he had never received it.

Time was going by in a haze of hashish smoke, attempts to procure LSD at Stiffles which either failed or ended in disastrously bad trips, inexpensive meals in a dhaba outside Khar station, occasional visits to Falkland Road and a steady succession of dreams, and once even a close shave with the police. Jaspal/Shah were sitting on the ledge of the wall around ‘Aeroplane Park’ in Juhu, rolling a joint, when two plainclothes cops materialized out of nowhere, grabbed us not very gently by the arms and suggested we accompany them to the police station. Assuming we were being hauled in for doing drugs we meekly complied and managed to slip out of our palms the moist tobacco/hash mixture we had been preparing. I even managed to chuck away the precious little sliver of hash in my pocket on the way to the cop station. The rather polite officer there who questioned us explained that there had been a child-lifting incident at that very spot a few days earlier and the police were conducting a watch, we had been taken in as possible suspects, the cops were not interested in two stoned guys. The officer it then turned out had seen
Nishant
and managed to identify me. We were given a cup of tea and let go.

I began to sense that things were not quite well between Jaspal/Shah and one morning around dawn, when we both were sliding down the slope of the rainbow, I asked him to sing something and he turned on me with a malevolence I had never seen in him. ‘Why I should sing for you? You are special you think? All the time you are doing this to me you farking pancho sunawbeech! Fuckoff! @#^*^$! Come on if you are a man!’ and other such hysterical nonsense. I was still reeling with stupefaction at this when he actually got up and dared me physically, a challenge I would have risen to had it not been hurled at a time when there were still violet clouds in my brain and all I felt like doing was listening to the Moody Blues. What Bajju bhai had said to me about Jaspal some years before immediately came back. I stayed out of his way for a while after this, but then one day we were summoned to Mr Benegal’s office and told we would both be acting in the next film he was planning, a project that was to be funded by the Gujarat Milk Marketing Federation and was about the hugely successful cooperative milk-farming experiment in the state.

Shyam that day did not tell either of us what parts we would respectively be playing but assured us both of ‘good roles’ and told us to keep the months of February and March aside for the shoot which was to take place in a village near Rajkot in Gujarat. This film was to be made on an even smaller budget than
Nishant
and I was promised slightly less than I was paid on that one, but Shyam assured me that my part in it was a winner. The screenplay was by Vijay Tendulkar once again, but Dubeyji for some reason kept his distance from this project. Almost the entire
Nishant
cast once again assembled, with Girish Karnad playing the idealistic vet trying to set up a cooperative in the village, a character based on the real-life hero of the cooperative milk farmers’ movement and the founder of Amul, Dr Verghese Kurien. The antagonist, Amrish Puri again, was the exploitative milk- contractor, and in the other pivotal parts were Smita Patil, Kulbhushan, Mohan Agashe, Savita Bajaj, Sadhu Meher (whose performance once again had to be bolstered by Jaspal’s dubbing), myself and AP, a young lady with whom I had had a very brief dalliance while at FTII. I was not given a copy of the script beforehand nor even told very much about the story of the film or the character; Shyam just said he wanted me ‘full of beans’ through the shoot. I was to play a rebellious city-folk-hating village busybody who initially opposes the team trying to create awareness of the need for a co-op in the village, then changes his mind; and at the end, having recognized its benefits, takes up the gauntlet of running the cooperative after the team leaves in despair.

I flew to Rajkot with the other lead actors while the rest of the team, including Jaspal, travelled by train. The first day in my room at the guest house there, sharing with Kulbhushan yet again, I read the script, joyous at the great part I had landed, then delightedly passed it on to Jaspal, who in fact had just two or three scenes in the film. He glanced through it and to my disbelief tossed it aside with a maniacal celebratory laugh saying he had ‘understood it all’, and resumed attempting under the blanket to make a pass at AP who, though about as desperate for a relationship as he was, did not reciprocate, and his paranoia about me began to hit a new high.

When we started shooting on Day One with the scene where Girish, having just bailed me out from prison, is driving me back to the village, Jaspal was sitting close by and glaring at the goings-on. At first I thought he was admiring my acting; playing a villager, I had felt obliged to stay dressed and in character most of the time and was feeling rather pleased with the way I was looking. But then he started muttering first to himself, then gradually aloud, almost responding to what I was doing in the scene. This insistent aggressive disturbance not only threw me completely, it also made the unit uneasy enough for Shyam to ask him to leave. As he left, glaring back over his shoulder at me, I saw him mouthing the words ‘Bastard! You have done it again! You have done it again! I’ll get you!’ the veins in his neck bulging, his face contorted with rage, his eyes aflame. I assume it was while watching this scene shot that he suddenly realized he was not doing the role which, in the course of having cursorily glanced at the script, he thought he would be; I was doing it instead and his muddled reasoning told him that I had somehow manipulated all this, just as I had manipulated the strike at FTII. The confusion of Jaspal/Shah’s identity was taking its toll at last. The unit considered it a minor tiff between two close friends, but never having suspected him capable of this kind of behaviour, I felt a premonition of worse to come.

It came quite quickly. Though that evening, having scored some local hashish, he came to my room and we smoked together, he didn’t apologize, just laughed and said he had misunderstood the whole thing and patronizingly admitted I might also do well in the role that rightfully was his; but even in his small role he would show me anyway. He promised to thoroughly fuck my happiness with his brilliant acting. This was a joke that had often been exchanged between us in the past, but this time there was a blood-curdling conviction to the way he uttered these fantastical beliefs.

The next day, after he had done his first scene and rather well too, we were travelling back to Rajkot after the day’s shoot. I was seated next to AP on the bus and from a far corner I could feel Jaspal’s eyes on me. Then his muttering turned into a string of Punjabi swearing and, lathi in hand, he lunged at me. Fortunately a bit of distance and quite a few unit members separated us or I might have been taken by surprise. Even after he was subdued, he went on simmering, threatening to advance on me again. I could have taken him on and I wished the others would let him come at me—that would have settled matters for a while, though I didn’t relish the thought of doing bodily harm to someone I had been close to. Shyam, who had not witnessed the incident in the bus, agreed to my suggestion that we had better be kept apart. I was totally clueless as to what had caused this outburst but if he tried it again I would retaliate. It took me a long time to learn that he was at the mercy of the chemicals bombarding his brain and scarcely in control of his actions, but then the thought that he should harbour such resentment and such impulses was hard to bear. Grateful to escape KBK’s snoring and Jaspal’s bad energy I shifted to the bungalow in the village where Shyam and the leading actors were staying. Jaspal remained in the guest house in Rajkot, only being called to the location if he was shooting, and since we had no scenes together I seldom saw him. Only a matter of time, though, before he tried wooing AP again, then vented on another unit member, got thoroughly thrashed and, on Shyam’s instructions, was put on the next train back to Bombay, his one remaining scene having been scrapped.

Seeing the film
Manthan
now, one cannot help being struck by his performance, truncated though it is. There is an intensity in his presence that goes beyond acting, and there is the magnetism of a person completely sure of what he is doing and, paradoxically, completely out of control—a highly flammable combination. He had in fact become the character he was playing. This for me was a very early lesson in how undesirable it is for this to happen, and exposed the first of the many limitations naturalistic acting, in which I had devoutly believed so far, suffers from.

I often wonder how Jaspal’s career would have gone had he managed to keep a grip on his feelings and consumed less mind-altering substances. While at NSD I had thought him a superior actor in many ways—he could sing, he could dance, he was good-looking in a rustic Punjabi way and his acting had verve and energy. Though not suffering from lack of self- esteem and always generous in his praise of my work, I guess he could see that my English education invariably put me at an advantage in many respects, and he would often wistfully say he wished he could speak English the way I did, or act the way I did. I greatly envied his singing abilities but never said so. Naturally I had not an inkling of what was going on inside him, I always believed we had a mutual admiration society, a friendship with no insecurities. Mohan Agashe, acting in the film but by profession a psychiatrist, later tried to explain to me that these symptoms were typical of an ailment in which the close identification of oneself with an admired person can become so acute that it results in the complete immersion of one personality into another; and the confusion of identities becomes so total that the afflicted person can actually not see his own reflection in a mirror. This evidently is what the man who shot and killed John Lennon suffered from; believing HE was actually Lennon, he was only getting this impostor who was usurping all the credit out of the way. All this was too terrifying to comprehend and caused a miserable distraction right at the start of a film I felt was going to be significant for me. I tried to put it behind me and tore into the part with every physical, mental and emotional resource I had.

My efforts to behave as much like a villager as possible started with trying to mimic the posture of the Gujarati shepherds, the ‘Bharwads’ whose lathis are part oftheir bodies, whose sexy, graceful attire and eloquent body language are impossible to approximate without years of practice. So I did the next best thing: I stayed in costume all the time, slept on the floor, learnt to wash and milk a buffalo. All this, though vastly amusing to my fellow actors, was necessary to reawaken in my muscles the memory of people I had seen earlier in Sardhana. And though looking back on it I now cringe at the thought of the kind of song and dance about my commitment to the part I made in this film and later in Shyam’s
Junoon,
I was in a phase where I needed to do it. I had quite a bit to say in this film so I was constantly going over my lines as well. I did in fact end up trying too hard to shine in both these parts instead of understanding that the ideas they represented were far more important than the characters themselves, and no one had bothered to explain this to me yet. So in both
Manthan
and
Junoon,
despite Shyam’s injunction not to play the role ‘as you see it in your head but as it is written’, I did precisely what I should not have done, but didn’t manage to completely ruin either film with my misguided energy. That is why both these performances, despite generating more work for me and bringing me continued acclaim, are not among my personal favourites.