Every single fantasy I had, has been fulfilled

Sometime in 1978, filmmaker Shyam Benegal was shooting Junoon in a grand outdoor location in remote Bengal. Many elephants and horses were brought in to recreate the attack on a village by the British,during the 1857 Battle for Independence. Excited locals had gathered to witness this spectacle. Among them was the district magistrate and his wide-eyed son. The boy skipped across the set, autograph book in hand, to befriend the actor sporting the big hair and a long red beard. The actor, Naseeruddin Shah, was lost in concentration, perfecting his lines in his deep baritone. Seconds later, the boy was seen fleeing the scene with tears rolling down his cheeks. No one knows what transpired between the two, except that Shah had planted a firm slap across the boy’s face. “The magistrate was very upset and threatened to call off the shoot. I saved the day by giving Naseer a solid dressing down in front of him. I knew I was being unfair to him, but we were at the mercy of that guy. Naseer could never forgive me for that,” says Benegal, with a laugh.

Seated on a sofa in his spacious Bandra apartment is a much older, calmer and affable Naseeruddin Shah. The 64-year-old flashes a guilty smile when reminded of his famous temper, of which several actors and directors have been witnesses as well as victims. “There was a time I used to yell hysterically at actors I was directing. I realised it was a mistake. Being harsh with actors does not work,” he says.

Shah chronicles this more volatile self in his recently released memoir, And Then One Day. He had shared first copies of the book only with his two brothers and wife Ratna Pathak Shah, who was rather startled by some of its revelations. He embarked on the book in 2002 while shooting a “bone-wrenchingly boring” Hollywood film ( The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ) and continued adding to it in fits and starts over the next 12 years. Writer and historian Ramachandra Guha, who was also privy to the initial drafts by the actor, encouraged him to complete it. “It’s a terrific book, the best memoir I have read in years. The self-deprecatory wit is most appealing, and very un-Indian. Successful Indian males tend to be pompous and rather self-regarding, which makes Naseer’s ability to mock himself and his failures even more striking,” says Guha.

Recently, Shah attended a class reunion organised by his friends at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune. It struck him that in a class of 22, only three had gone on to have noteworthy careers in acting or direction. He’s the only actor from his batch who is working successfully in film and theatre today. The rest have vanished, without a trace. “It made me realise that every single fantasy I had has been fulfilled. That’s a dangerous space to be in. Except going to the North Pole,” he adds, “I have to do that before I get too old.”

He survived his days at FTII on an empty stomach and emptier pockets, all the while believing that the directors who were not casting him then would regret it one day. Yet, there’s no bitterness or melodrama in his re-telling of those years. “We were stone-cold broke. One day a friend and I sat in the canteen with an empty bottle and a placard that said ‘poor students’ fund’. Whoever passed by, put in four annas. Then after a point we started giving others change. We collected around ₹20 that day and bought breakfast,” he says, laughing at the memory.

Shah got his first film role and a substantial paycheque with Benegal’s Nishant . The filmmaker says, “I asked my friend Girish Karnad, who was the director of FTII at the time, if there were any promising actors graduating. He said, ‘There’s this guy called Naseeruddin Shah. He’s a pain in the ass but a brilliant actor.’ He turned out to be exactly that.”

Time out of joint

Those trying years were spent in a marijuana haze. “A lot of things involved working things out in my head and then performing it to myself, which is what I used to do when I was tripping alone. Whatever money we got we spent on bloody drugs instead of food. It was a big question on my mind whether I should write about these things because I imagine young actors are going to be the ones reading this book and I’m hardly a good example,” he says.

One can always expect honesty rather than diplomacy from Shah, especially when it comes to questions on films and performances. He once raised eyebrows and tempers when he questioned Amitabh Bachchan’s god-like status, saying that the actor had only one or two great films in his entire career. “A lot of the films I’ve been offered are what Mr Bachchan turned down. I don’t touch them either,” he says, half in jest.

To Shah’s credit, he’s been equally critical about his own life. While studying at Aligarh Muslim University, he married Purveen Murad, a Pakistani national 14 years his senior. By the time he was preparing to set off to New Delhi’s National School of Drama, Murad was expecting their first child, Heeba. “At that age I had no fondness whatsoever for children, no fondness for anything but myself. The enormity of bringing a new life into the world escaped me entirely, and I don’t suppose any amount of contrition could compensate for my utterly insensitive treatment of the child when she was born, and when all she needed from me was to be hugged and comforted,” writes Shah. He goes on to confess his “crushing disappointment” at fathering a daughter, and not a son like he had hoped. “I have no idea in what sort of light I will appear, if I say that for an unconsciously long time I felt nothing whatsoever for the child Heeba, but it is necessary that I confess it. She didn’t figure at all, it was almost as if she didn’t even exist,” he writes. Heeba is now in Mumbai and an important part of Shah’s theatre group Motley. “She’s a bit apprehensive about the book,” he says solemnly.

He admits that he has become more interested in other people in the last 15 years, ever since he had his sons, Imaad and Vivaan. “Ratna brought us all together, and today I realise the worth of family. I’m grateful to her for that,” he adds. Shah’s autobiography ends at a stage which would qualify as the interval of a movie. He’s in his early 30s, his career has just started to show promise, and he’s finally found lasting love in his wife Ratna Pathak. Rumour has it that Shah might be roped in for a second part to the book, but he appears least interested. “That was the most interesting part of my life. After that, it was smooth sailing. If I write another book, I would have to talk about film after film and play after play.”

Post interval

Today, Shah divides his time equally between films and his theatre group Motley. He considers not attaining super-stardom a mixed blessing as it allows him to pursue the kind of roles he genuinely loves. One of his most acclaimed roles was in Masoom (1983), a family saga woven around the discovery of a child from a short-lived love affair. Director Shekhar Kapur says, “The biggest regret of my life as a filmmaker is that Naseer and I have not worked together after Masoom . In that film, he created not just a character, but a being so human that 30 years later, three generations of film-goers still respond to the experience of watching him on screen... as if the film was made yesterday. He is one of India’s greatest actors.”

Relatively early in life, Shah made his peace with the fact that he didn’t have the charisma, good looks or dancing chops to be a conventional Bollywood hero. His early teens were spent in aping Shammi Kapoor till he discovered writers like Samuel Beckett and Anton Chekhov. “I realised that I can’t do a Dil deke dekho number but I can recite ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’. I’m more at home doing an abstraction from a Zoo Story than I am doing an emotional scene from a Hindi movie,” he admits. Watching The Old Man and the Sea taught him that if an actor with rather unconventional looks like Spencer Tracy could command such a great screen presence, then maybe he too stood a chance of making it. “He looked so real, he almost smelt of the sea. The sunburnt face, the tattered clothes, the bare feet, the calloused hands. He looked like he had spent his life on this boat. And this was an actor?!” he writes.

Yet, he did try his luck in a handful of commercial entertainers, which came and went so discreetly that they didn’t affect his career. The most memorable of them was Tridev (1989)where he grooves to Oye oye in a floppy hat with a red feather awkwardly sticking out of it. “The audience was surprised that this guy doesn’t have three left feet and can laugh. I think that’s why it did well. I cannot find any other explanation, because the film made no sense,” he says.

More recently, while filming The Dirty Picture (2011) he had to relive the horror of doing a song-and-dance routine once again. A month ahead of filming the song Ooh la la with co-star Vidya Balan, the actor religiously rehearsed his steps every morning. On the day of the shoot, he was made to don a ridiculous mythological costume — a purple dhoti teamed with a garish gold belt and armlets. Director Milan Luthria remembers how the crew members tiptoed around Shah, who grimaced every time his shiny armlets poked him. They had all heard tales of his volatile temper and understandably wanted to stay clear of the firing line. “Everybody was so nervous around him but they were pleasantly surprised at how easy he was to work with. When his part came to an end, he wanted to do more,” says Luthria.

There are several inexplicable contradictions in Shah. That’s also what makes him an intriguing subject for a book. He can eloquently recite Shakespeare on stage but still can’t tell the difference between a pronoun and an adverb. In school, he got the highest score in English Literature but failed grammar. Also, the actor hates commercial entertainers because of their complete suspension of disbelief. But he’s currently filming Welcome Back (expected to release in December), a sequel to a harebrained, tasteless comedy called Welcome (2007). “There’s tons of money in it and I had not done a movie like that in a long time. It’s the kind of film I’d never see. I’m hamming away to glory,” he says, with a wide grin.

His biggest quirk is his healthy disregard for fans who approach him for autographs and photos. Most actors dread receding into the sunset. Shah, on the other hand, may no longer slap you for approaching him with an autograph book, but chances are, he will look the other way or worse, refuse to oblige you. “Many of them don’t even know who I am. Most often, I am mistaken for Nana Patekar. It’s a compliment for Nana. It doesn’t upset me at all anymore. In fact, whenever I’m asked what my name is, I say ‘Girish Karnad’,” he says. As he gets older, if people don’t recognise him at all, he says he’d happily embrace a life of anonymity. “I’m very fortunate I’m in a profession where there’s no retirement age. You get better as you get older,” he says. And there’s no better example of that than Naseeruddin Shah.

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