Brimming with delightful anecdotes as well as poignant, often painful revelations, this book is a tour de force, destined to become a classic of the genre
[alert type=”e.g. warning, danger, success, info” title=””]And Then One Day
Naseeruddin Shah
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 315; Price: Rs 699[/alert]
In a celebrated phrase, Oliver Cromwell instructed the painter Sir Peter Levy to “paint my picture truly like me…with all the roughness, pimples, warts and all”. Naseeruddin Shah has exactly followed the Cromwellian dictum and in this autobiography of the first thirty two years presented himself to the world truthfully and honestly. He is the enfant-terrible of Bollywood and has acted in two hundred feature films and either acted or directed in sixty professional theatre productions. He lives in Mumbai with his wife, Ratna Pathak Shah, their three children and a cat.
Very fascinating are the personal details — “I still keep in my cupboard one of the dupattas of my Mother and it carries her smell. The most soothing sensation I have ever felt in my life is the touch of the breadth-warmed dupatta on my eye-lids”.
Shah’s scintillating tale takes him from a village in Meerut to Catholic schools in Nainital and Ajmer and eventually to a place in the sun in Mumbai’s tinsel world. Brother Burke of St. Michaels in Nainital exposed him to the Best of Hollywood. He recalls with panache his journey through Aligarh University, the National School of Drama and the Film and Television Institute of India, where he started making waves.
We are presented a gripping account, noted for transparent honesty and couched in gracious language and with an extraordinary sense of humour. There are moving portraits of family members in authentic colour followed by hilarious accounts of his school days. Quite early he believed “Hindi movies and their actors never held much fascination for me. A role model in the Hindi film industry has been hard to find.”
The man who impressed him most was the original Shakespearewallah Geoffrey Kendall — who was the greatest actor, according to Shah, We have cameos of a galaxy of artists, he has worked with, Ebrahim Alkazi, Shyam Benegal, Girish Karnad, Om Puri and Shabana Azmi. The accounts of his struggle to earn a living through acting, his experiments with the craft, his love affairs, his early marriage, his successes and failures are narrated with utter frankness.
There are ambitious films that never get made-most prominently with Alyque Padamsee who made him bulk up and learn riding for the film version of Girish Karnad’s play Tughlaq that he kept postponing. There are fake screen tests to satisfy criticism-as his trip to London to ostensibly try out for the part of Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning movie when Ben Kingsley had already got the role. There is a best friend who falls by the wayside, consumed by drugs and despair at not having made it.
Then we have the tragic story of Purveen Murad his first wife, at 34 much older to his 20, from whom he soon grows distant. And then there is his father, Baba Aley Mohammed Shah, Provincial Civil Services officer and the one person whose approval Shah never earned. His father’s harsh judgemental nature and inflexible temperament affected him. And when Naseer is unable to make it in time even for his funeral after a particularly painful death, we are deeply moved.
The memoirs are about Shah, the son; the errant husband of Purveen, his first wife; the terrible student who found his metier in acting, which he proceeded to study at two of India’s best institutions with distinction (National School of Drama and the Film and Television Institute of India); and the actor forever trying to hone his craft. From his role in Shyam Benegal’s Nishant to the cuckolding husband in Shekhar Kapur’s Masoom, Shah has invested brilliance to every role he played.
Shah has castigated everyone and everything in Hindi cinema, from its biggest superstar Amitabh Bachchan to directors of India’s parallel cinema movement in the 1970s and 1980s. He can be candid, self-effacing. He is, first, an acting canon unto himself. Vishwam, his first lead role, in Shyam Benegal’s Nishant , Tungrus in Shyam Benegal’s Mandi , Mike Lobo in Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya , Albert in Saeed Mirza’s Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai, and Anirudh Parmar in Sai Paranjpye’s Sparsh, as an utterly convincing blind man in Hindi cinema.
Shah’s memoir is essentially about acting. He discovered a state of fearlessness on the stage in front of blinding lights, while he was a teenager during a school play; he confesses early on in the book that acting was the only skill that ever got him any praise. We travel with him through the classes of the National School of Drama, cradle of the great Ebrahim Alkazi, and through the thorny years at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), which was liberating as well as suffocating for the budding actor, the miracle of being found by Shyam Benegal, who is his foster parent.
The making and fruition of Motley, Shah’s theatre company with actor Benjamin Gilani, is a climactic end to this journey. Acting figures on almost every page, interrupted by a mental dissociation with his father and sympathetic love for his mother, his love affairs, the guilt of abandoning his first wife Purveen and their child Heeba, girlfriends and lovers, scoring LSD and hashish on the streets of Colaba with his one-time close friend and finally making a life with Ratna Pathak Shah.
He is hard on himself, refuses to play the martyr, and his minute recall of scenes from his past is astonishingly cinematic. It is memoir in the classical sense, in which the voice and the views are intensely personal. This is a book of its genre at once unique and entertaining.
P.P. Ramachandran
