And Then One Day: A Memoir (28 page)

To counter this event, something else happened around the same time, almost as if to illustrate to me that the film industry is not completely full of self-importance. With nothing much to do, I was snoozing one afternoon when Ramesh who had been looking after the kitchen for about a year came and woke

me, looking as if he had seen a ghost. ‘P.. P... Pr..... Prraaannn!’

his voice was trembling as he frantically gesticulated towards the outside room, ‘Pran saab is there!’ Only half registering what he meant, I went out and snakes alive! There was Mr Pran Sikand himself, wearing a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, grey trousers and white shirt sitting cross-legged, shoes off, on the huge mattress on my living room floor. Pran! He of the riding crop and breeches, of the evil eyes, of the pencil moustache, of the blood-curdling half-smile half-leer, was sitting in my living room looking as timid as a vacuum cleaner salesman.

Mr Pran had so defined the concept of villainy in Hindi movies that I suppose something in me expected to see him in felt hat and trench coat, nonchalantly blowing smoke rings; to see this side of a star of his magnitude was a revelation, it actually took me a few seconds to recognize him. He had come to invite me to play in a film-stars’ festival cricket match, but being pretty allergic to these things, I made an excuse and declined. He took the refusal in good spirit and, while leaving, remarked that I reminded him a great deal of his elder son, and he hoped we would work together some day. Through the time he was there, sharing a cup of tea and Shrewsbury biscuits with me (he had quit smoking though), he graciously said he admired my work. Thinking it too obvious to return the compliment, I gratefully swallowed his praises, not quite believing who they were coming from. I did get to work with him much later and discovered he loved being praised. He would be overjoyed, Mithun once told me, if he were in make-up and you walked past not recognizing—or rather, pretending not to recognize— him. Your subsequent fake apologies, ‘Pran saab, kya fantastic get-up hai! Main to pehchana hi nahin!’ would literally make him blush. I tried it and it worked! So punctual you could set your watch by him, always ready bang on time in full costume and make-up, usually pretty elaborate make-up, never leaving the set between shots, retiring to his green room only for lunch, then right back to the set in full battle readiness. This was something the entire old-time brigade of supporting actors, a breed that has vanished, had in common.

There was a survey conducted once which uncovered the disconcerting statistic that on an average five hundred young boys/girls arrive in Bombay every day to become actors. No one has ever researched the number of moneyed people who arrive here every day, hoping to produce films to multiply their investments and of course get photographed with the star, preferably the female star, but my guess is that that number too would be staggering. Among that legion was a multi-millionaire shipping magnate from Hong Kong who decided he wanted to be a movie mogul as well. While staying in the wings he had quietly financed the film
Shaayad
with a frontman acting as producer, and having tested the waters and decided they were to his taste, he had now decided to make a big noise to herald his arrival in the film world. He wanted his pictures in the glossies, he had had enough of being invisible and shelling out piddling amounts to make ‘Naseeruddin Shah type of serious movies’; he now wanted to scatter the stuff about and sign up the biggest stars he could buy, to appear in thoroughly commercial fare. ‘Money can get anything done’ being his motto, the overambitious gent formed a film production company and in four full-page ads in
Screen
announced four medium-to-large movies, all four to be shot simultaneously, at least two with big-name directors and each with a different star-cast. The only common factor was the presence, in a leading capacity, of Om Puri in each of them; in fact one of the films was to star Rajesh Khanna and Om Puri. The fourth, never made, was also announced thus, ‘Production no. 4 starring Om Puri’. Govind Nihalani had not spotted Om yet, he was not really known, so many assumed that this was a new leading lady being introduced. By the time these films got under way Om was gainfully employed elsewhere and to my knowledge, he didn’t actually appear in any of them.

I did, in one of the three, an adaptation of
Oliver!
and I did a bad imitation of Ron Moody’s Fagin, one of my favourite performances. Amjad Khan played Bill Sikes and this film did to the Carol Reed classic what many Hindi films have done and continue to do to classics to this day. Though, as in the original, the film’s title was the child’s name
(Kanhaiya)
the ads screamed out ‘Amjad Khan as Kanhaiya’, a marketing ploy that fooled no one. The mainstream audience didn’t know who I was but Amjad bhai’s massive fan following also decided to give this one a miss. The other two films produced by the company, starring some marquee names, plodded along for a few years then also died of natural causes at the box office. The shipping magnate, after being repeatedly taken to the cleaners by the film industry’s charlatans, was barely heard of after that and I have a bad feeling about those ships.

Still fancying myself to be leading-man material I initially turned down the part Ketan Mehta asked me to do in his gorgeous allegorical film of a folk tale,
Bhavni Bhavai,
but I hadn’t anticipated his persistence. I didn’t want to do it mainly because I wasn’t looking forward to a repeat of the kind of run- ins we’d had when he had directed
The Lesson
for us. In that production, apart from one stunning visual idea for the set— four gigantic books suspended by invisible wires from the four corners of the stage—he had had precious little by way of nuts- and-bolts help to give the actors and would constantly resort to unfathomable abstractions instead of tangible guidance: ‘a spiral turn is needed here’, ‘you must show the character’s contradictions’ and so forth; or when at a loss he would tauntingly toss the ball into my court: ‘Tum actor ho yaar kuch jadoo karo, kuch khelo!’ I would be halfway up the wall, and our friendship was seriously endangered by hysterical arguments occurring too often for my liking in the course of rehearsal.

I seriously thought I’d never work with the man again, and now he wanted me to play a bumbling Raja in a film that would be seen by many more people than had seen
The Lesson.
I had an immediate premonition that this film would work but the thought of playing a foolish character was not appetizing. I opted for a shorter, heroic role but Ketan would have none of it and coerced me into agreeing to do the Raja and am I glad he did. I look back on it with great affection and pride, not least because the splendid look of the film, for which Archana Shah and Mira Lakhia must get complete credit, belies its impossibly small budget. It was produced by a cooperative of which I was a member and everyone in the unit treated it as their own baby: no one in the unit was paid a penny, some of us even travelled to the location at our own expense, but despite it all, a group of friends mucking in together to create something, with the odds heavily stacked against them, created such joyous energy that all of us who acted in it, and are still alive, look back on it with great affection.

This film also helped illustrate what Mr Brecht had been saying all this time and which so far had made little impression on me who was dying to ‘become’ every character I ever played. Ketan’s vision for the acting in the film was that it should be like the behaviour of the characters in the
Asterix
comics, which on reading the delightful script made complete sense. Om was cast as the Untouchable who, in the best tradition of fairy tales, discovers and rears the baby prince. Benjamin was playing the Prime Minister; Suhasini Mulay on whom I had had a crush ever since
Bhuvan Shome
was the Queen; another dear friend, Mohan Gokhale, was the abandoned Prince; and Smita was his love interest. Another pivotal part, the Chorus, who narrates the story mostly in song, had not yet been cast. Ketan dearly wanted B. V. Karanth, something of a guru to him, to play it but Karanthji was unavailable and so crisis Number One hit us on the first day itself. A brainstorming session was held to discuss possibilities and inevitably Jaspal’s name cropped up—he could sing, reasoned Ketan, and working would do him good. So he was informed and called to the location, something I had major misgivings about but was assured we would be kept apart, and in any case we were never in the same frame together.

When he arrived for the shoot, staying true to his current form he proved impossible to handle, and had to be asked to leave. The man for all seasons, Om Puri, who couldn’t sing a note, took over and played both the narrator as well as one of the chief protagonists. I desisted from any I told you so’s because I was really disappointed. I knew that Jaspal had blown this as well; he wouldn’t now have another chance to redeem himself. This was the last chapter in which I was to figure in his long and extremely sad story. We never met at the location, and subsequently I had no more direct contact with him, just kept hearing bizarre, disturbing and often contradictory reports about his doings first in Delhi and then Patiala, whence apparently he returned when Ketan’s misguided plan to help him backfired.

W
hen Motley was formed, Benjamin and I, its nucleus, both had a wish list of plays we would have loved to do, but didn’t have the resources to attempt, so starting small, we staged a series of two-handers in English after
Godot
had fallen into place. Not into the kind of bedroom farces always so popular in Bombay, we wanted to include only the few people we knew well, who we enjoyed being with and who shared our love for theatre. Tom Alter, Kenny Desai, Aakash Khurana and of course Ratna when she ended her NSD course gradually began to form the core of the company. Like every other actor in the world, I too had often fantasized about playing Hamlet but suspected that mounting it was beyond me.

I often dreamt of grand glittering productions Alkazi could be proud of, but on the other hand there was Dubeyji’s example. Having directed many of the same plays Alkazi had, Dubeyji demonstrated that being hamstrung financially was no impediment; his productions could be as effective, if not more so, than the Old Man’s. With no resources and no agenda, political or otherwise, we had nothing to ‘say’; we were in the theatre only because of an unreasonable love for it. After some confusion as to the direction Motley should take, and not having access to even a thousandth of the kind of funding NSD received, I had to abandon my dreams of attempting an ‘Alkazi’ and settled for working with what we had, and Dubey’s route seemed the one to take. In any case I had been unable to hit upon a solitary insight that would make
Hamlet
say more than it already has over the centuries—portions of it baffle me still. I wished, quite simply, to do it only in order to play Hamlet and that didn’t seem a good enough reason. This is a thought that over the years has grown and hardened into an unshakeable conviction and has in a way contributed to my being able finally to arrive at a somewhat satisfactory equation theatre-wise.

Motley didn’t do much initially. The corporates had yet to make serious theatre fashionable and every show we attempted on our own put us further in the red. Of the plays I really wanted to do, there weren’t many that wouldn’t be merely exercises in vanity, so I thought I’d just be patient until a director who wished to do any of these saw in me the potential to play Macbeth or Lear. No one did, but I am pleased to report that getting to play neither did not devastate me because I was beginning to feel I might be on the verge of discovering a reason for doing theatre, other than to strut on the stage and lap up the applause. I felt I owed something more to theatre than tired re-enactments of well-known dramas or popular comedies. At one point, before my ideas had had time to germinate, and fed up of not being able to produce the kind of classy stuff I wanted to, I decided Motley would make some money by going popular with Neil Simon’s
The Odd Couple,
but the audience stayed away in droves. Benjamin then attempted Shaw’s
Arms and the Man
and both met the fate of many an early Motley production—closure after a dozen or so poorly attended shows. The headache of organizing and dealing with the real props in
The Odd Couple
made me resolve never ever again to try anything naturalistic onstage; and doing the Shaw play made it clear that one should never attempt his work unless the actors’ tongue muscles are flexible enough to handle the musical notes his dialogue demands.

Jerzy Grotowski’s concept of a theatre sans illusion began to make a little more sense: after all the audience never forgets they are in a theatre; they only need to glance away from your face to see the lights and the curtains. Attempting to convince them that what they are seeing is actually happening is futile and according to Brecht, undesirable; they must in fact be reminded that they are witnessing an enactment. This contention too began to seem extremely valid, but we plodded along for a while, doing other short pieces by Beckett, Pinter, Chekhov.

I next played Oedipus for another company in a production that received much acclaim and I witnessed for the first time at Prithvi a queue for tickets extending almost into the street. I have no idea what it was that so attracted audiences to this show—my presence could hardly have been the cause, else there should have been such a response for every play I appeared in and that was certainly not the case. I lost my voice on the fourth or fifth day of the run and the production was just this side of competent, but people who saw it were going away delirious. I guess the idea of a guy marrying his own mother is a tad titillating, and certainly
Oedipus Rex
is one of the most cracking whodunits ever written. Logistics problems made the play close after two stints of ten shows each, but in the course of it Ratna and I made friends we have stayed close to.

An earlier attempt at reading Jerzy Grotowski’s book
Towards a Poor Theatre
at NSD had not worked, but finding it staring at me accusingly in the face in a bookshop one day, I glanced through the Foreword in which he argues that poverty of resources should be theatre’s strength not its weakness, and decided to give it another crack. Profoundly influenced by Kathakali and the Balinese Mask Dance, and disillusioned by all Western theatre which, he felt, was at that time moving in the wrong direction (and incidentally still is) by becoming more and more illusory and technical, in fact attempting to create the hallucinatory quality of cinema—something which goes against its very nature—he originated the concept of a theatre comprising only the absolutely essential elements: actors and a text. Eliminating everything extraneous, decorative or suggestive, he zeroed in on the actor as the central tool of communication. There were no sets, actors performed on a bare stage wearing only bare minimum clothing, and he often even replaced the text with what he called ‘primal sounds’. Ritualistic/religious connotations were evoked, the performance space was ‘hallowed’, the terms ‘state of grace’, ‘holy Actor’, ‘exchange of energies between Actor and Audience’ were used. All this, apart from sounding pretty far out and well-nigh impossible to attain seemed also to demand an exceptional degree of commitment and physical skill, neither of which I suspected I had. Then in a passage on actor-training, I came upon the statement that created a paradigm shift in my ideas on learning how to act. His intention was not ‘to burden the Actor with skills, the skills must be taken for granted’; what he said he tried to do was ‘rid the Actor of everything that prevents him from being himself’. I don’t think the problem of learning acting has ever been put so succinctly, I knew that this training was what I needed if I wished to grow. There was no one around me who would even understand what I was talking about, let alone help with it; and I had a suspicion that neither the kind of ‘popular’ movies that were now coming my way nor the so- called serious cinema being made here would do it.

As if to vindicate this feeling I then got offered in quick succession a mixed bag of both kinds of films, some enjoyable but all in various ways somewhat unsatisfying:
Saza-e-Maut
(also called ‘Saza-e-Mouth’),
Katha, Chakra, Hum Paanch, Bezubaan, Woh Saat Din, Bazaar, Holi
and
Aadharshila—
in which I had to be respectively put-upon hero, lovable loser, lecherous street thug, buddy of the hero, smooth blackmailer, dutiful husband, alcoholic poet, upright professor and passionate film-maker. It was almost as if nature had benevolently decided to give me more time to decide which kind was my cup of tea, and also to ensure that I make some money. While the first and last three named films (until I saw them, that is) were the result of wishing desperately to be involved in the new kind of cinema, the others provided the bacon, so to say. And somewhere along the way between the lot of them, I moved at last from a rented apartment to one I owned. Miss Mary was proving too much trouble to maintain so I had to flog her and bought myself a Royal Enfield, my resources having exhausted themselves buying myself a home in Sherly Village, which then was actually a village with little thatched cottages, paddy fields and a profusion ofcoconut trees. Only the occasional high-rise had disturbed the equanimity of the place but all of it still had the wonderful laid-back energy that pervades the air in a coastal town. When Ratna and I married, it was the first home we made together.

Then one day in 1981 the playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar who knew of my desire to study under Grotowski called to tell me that the man himself was in town and would I like to meet him? Assuring me he wasn’t in jest, Mahesh gave me the address I should go to—Rekha Sabnis’s house, in fact, which I happened to know. I wasn’t sure what Grotowski looked like, I had seen only one photograph of him, looking somewhat robust, black-suited, hair short, eyes hidden behind dark glasses. It was obviously an old picture: he was now reed thin with a straggly beard and matted hair; dark glasses, however, were firmly in place. Barefoot, wearing a crumpled kurta, dirty jeans he smoked bidis incessantly; and well into the evening though it was, he seemed to have just awoken. He asked a few questions about why I wanted to come to Poland, I told him that his book and what I knew of his work had opened a few windows for me and I wished to undergo the training he could provide. In reply he said ‘the window opens inward, not outward’. Seeing I wasn’t too sure what he meant, he spoke in plain language: ‘It all might not turn out as you expect.’ I assured him I was prepared for anything, which in retrospect became an idle boast when I actually got there.

I did not know that Grotowski’s theatre ideas and practice had grown radically since he wrote that book. He had in fact abandoned performance altogether. Theatre in any case had been analogous to life for him and he had now decided to dispense with an audience as well, and was involved in a search for what he termed ‘the Primal State’. ‘One Actor, one Audience with the roles interchangeable’ had now become ‘Actor and Audience are one’.

The next day I received a note informing me I had been selected to participate in the ‘Theatre of Sources’ workshop to be conducted in Wroclaw where his Institute for Research into Acting was situated. The earnings from some of the above- mentioned movies helped me secure a ticket on Swissair to Warsaw via Vienna and I got ready to travel overseas for the first time. I was able to withdraw with some difficulty from one film I had taken on, was unable to withdraw from the other—I was unable to repay the money they had already given, having spent it on my ticket, and to trusty Taher’s complete incomprehension I told him I was going to a country he had never heard of. As far as he could see I was getting plenty of work and I was taking a chance with my career, but the fact was my acting abilities had come to a standstill, I was actually finding myself tiring of the whole business and had begun to fear that this was the mediocrity I was condemned to for the rest of my life. With no guidance, I was not growing. I was finding neither the commercial nor the art-house fare stimulating, I wasn’t getting the popular films I’d have liked to do and many of the serious types had already been shown up as money-grabbing idea appropriators who kept making the same film over and over, and not too well at that—a situation which didn’t seem to be heading to a resolution I liked. Well, I figured, if I can’t help my career at least I can help myself by acquiring new abilities, and from someone who knows and doesn’t mind sharing.

Also selected and travelling with me was Grotowski’s host in Bombay, Rekha Sabnis, though I still fail to see what he detected in common between us. I had flown within India quite often by now but I was really nervous at the prospect of an international flight. Ratna came to see me off and said later she’d had a bad feeling about this trip from the start. Rekha having travelled abroad before knew the ropes; she practically held my hand and guided me to the aircraft. It was the first night I spent in an aeroplane and I didn’t sleep a wink; in fact my heart hadn’t slowed one bit by the time Vienna hove into view. Some two decades later I spent some more time in that magical city, touring with Peter Brook’s
Hamlet,
and my appetite for architectural beauty was not only thoroughly satiated, it reached saturation point. The surfeit of aesthetics everywhere began to give me indigestion and to behold a faceless rectangular apartment block there was actually a relief.

We spent the morning taking in the sights within range of the airport, telephoning a friend of Rekha’s who lived in the Vienna Woods, getting set to go there, then remembering she had misplaced her passport, retracing our steps, managing to locate it, and after being fairly comprehensively swindled changing dollars on the street, getting on the Warsaw flight. Poland was at that time, like most East European countries, a fairly depressing place to be in and the biting wind and rain welcoming us there seemed entirely appropriate. Our destination, Wroclaw, was an hour’s flight away, and since we weren’t pre-booked, we thought we’d do the journey by train instead. We struggled to explain to the ticket clerk that we needed two seats on the train to Wroclaw (pronounced Vrotslav) and he, nodding vigorously in comprehension, slipped us two tickets to Bratislava, an error we managed to rectify just in time. There was no rail connection to Wroclaw so we boarded a very bumpy forty-five-minute flight to our destination.

We landed just as it was turning dark. There was no one to receive us, naturally, and without a clue where to go kept calling the two phone numbers we had and neither one responded. In a taxi we found our way to the institute, which had an almost unnoticeable front entrance bearing no sign, just a number. The door was locked and as we sat shivering in the porch I began to have serious second thoughts about this whole enterprise: being alone, friendless and hungry in a foreign land which made me almost decide to head straight back to the airport and catch the next plane back. The numerous complications involved in such a journey, however, made me desist, and just after I had rung the bell for the fiftieth time and even considered kicking down the door, someone passing by enquired what we wanted. He turned out to be one of the instructors at the institute, and he sheltered and fed us in his home that night. He was maddeningly evasive when we enquired when the work would begin or where we would stay and would just smile mysteriously when we asked when we would get to meet Grotowski—’maybe tomorrow ... maybe not’. I would soon discover to what extent this mythologization of the man would go, and that it too was part of the experiment he was conducting.