When Sambha danced - on the strange fame of Mac the naif

In his most famous movie role, he sat atop a big rock with a gun in his hand and replied to his master’s calls of “Arre O Sambha”. It was a small part, but it became so iconic that his profile could be used as the sole image on a “minimal Bollywood poster”, and anyone would know instantly that the film was Sholay. Yet what did the actor MacMohan himself feel about being defined and shadowed by that tiny role for the rest of his career?

I ask because a few weeks ago I caught a glimpse of an alternate future for the man, via a song from a 1964 film titled Aao Pyaar Karein. In the sequence (which you can and must see on YouTube here), the young MacMohan dances – daintily play-acting as a woman – with the movie’s leading man Joy Mukherjee, while their friends sit around clapping, shaking their heads and generally being baboons. Minus the distinctive beard and the streak of white hair, dressed in a formal suit with a bow-tie, filmed in black-and-white, MacMohan is unrecognisable from the screen persona he would eventually inhabit. His movements are lithe and graceful even during a strip-tease that ends with him in vest and striped shorts; with the always-affable Mukherjee giving him company, it doesn’t seem in poor taste (the woman who makes occasional appearances in the scene is more problematic).

Watching little Mac here is a reminder that a performer with disparate talents might get so pigeonholed that it becomes impossible to imagine him doing anything else. At this point in his career he was probably a young actor hoping for a big break, and on this evidence he might have had a future as a reliable supporting player: as the hero’s foil or a genial comedian. If he had been more personable and good-looking (whatever those words might mean in the context of the dubious physiognomic history of the Hindi-movie leading man, about which more in Mukul Kesavan’s essay “The Ugliness of the Indian Male”), he may even have hoped for something better. 

Something else that’s amusing about the Aao Pyaar Karein scene: clowning about on the periphery – as one of the other buddies – is the young Sanjeev Kumar, years before his stardom. In other words, here are two bit-part actors on level ground, long before their respective destinies in Hindi cinema were set, and a decade before they found themselves on opposite sides of the law – and at opposite ends of the fame continuum – as dacoit-minion Sambha and upright hero Thakur Baldev Singh.

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In a way it is fitting that one of MacMohan’s last screen appearances – 45 years after he danced with Joy Mukherjee – was in Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance, a film that knows about the serendipitous moment; about the combination of events – a chance encounter, a portfolio that happens to make its way to an office at just the right time, catching the eye of this rather than that person – that can make the difference between good fortune and continuing struggle. It is a film with sympathy for the underdogs, has-beens and never-weres of the movie industry, and it gave MacMohan the respect of a bona fide cameo part (as opposed to the anonymous sidey roles he played in so many films). Playing himself, he visits an acting workshop, where he is asked by enthusiastic students to speak the line that made him famous. He looks down, pauses for a moment, looks up and says “Poore pacchaas hazaar”.

It’s a touching moment, a view of a career summarised in – and frozen by – three words. The cynical might look at his worn expression and at the students' grinning faces and say this is a case of a man invited to participate in self-parody. But you can also see a performer making a serious effort to “act” for the two seconds or so it takes him to say the line. In its quiet acknowledgement of the dignity of labour, the scene reminds me of Satyajit Ray’s fine short story “Patol Babu, Film Star”, in which a middle-aged man hired to play a part in a film discovers that he is required to say nothing more than “Oh” in his scene, but then gets over his disappointment by uncovering the possibilities contained in the single word:

Patol Babu uttered the word over and over again, giving it a different inflection each time. After doing this for a number of times he made an astonishing discovery. The same exclamation, when spoken in different ways, carried different shades of meaning. A man when hurt said “Oh” in one way. Despair brought forth a different kind of “Oh”, while sorrow provoked yet another kind. There were so many kinds of Ohs – the short Oh, the long-drawn Oh, Oh shouted and Oh whispered, the high-pitched Oh, the low-pitched Oh, the Oh starting low and ending high, and the Oh starting high and ending low...Patol Babu suddenly felt that he could write a whole thesis on that one monosyllabic exclamation. Why had he felt so disheartened when this single word contained a golden mine of meaning? The true actor could make a mark with this one syllable.

I wonder if MacMohan, in his post-Sholay life, sometimes quietly muttered “Poore pacchaas hazaar” to himself, examining the phrase for depth and meaning, and reflecting on the strangeness of his fame.

P.S. the "Patol Babu" excerpt above is from Ray’s own English translation of the story, most recently published in Classic Satyajit Ray. Incidentally, this is also the story that Dibakar Banerjee has adapted for his short film for the 100 Years of Cinema project. As mentioned in my Banerjee profile for Caravan, Nawazuddin Siddiqi - an actor who struggled for years before breaking into the big league - is playing the lead role in that film, which will incorporate elements from Nawazuddin's own real-life story.

And an anecdote from an email exchange: probably not something one should read too much into, but then again who knows. A few months ago a photo of the young MacMohan from the Aao Pyaar Karein song was doing the rounds on the internet; movie buffs were asking each other to identify the man, “who became unexpectedly famous in the 1970s”. A friend tells me she was astonished by how many of her correspondents wrote back asking if the picture was that of a skinny young pre-stardom Rajesh Khanna, because “the smile is the same”. Perhaps the angle of the photo was particularly flattering to MacMohan, or perhaps this was because Khanna had recently died and everyone had him on their mind. But as my friend put it, “even if they were seeing things, clearly in that snap he did look hero-like enough for them.” (Or nearly as hero-like as Rajesh Khanna, which is not an unequivocal compliment.)

Mira Nair and others at Spring Fever

The schedule for Penguin India’s Spring Fever (March 15-24 at the India Habitat Centre's Amphitheatre) is out. On March 17 I’ll be speaking with director Mira Nair about her career, specifically the 25th anniversary of Salaam Bombay! (and the reprinting of Nair’s book about the genesis and making of that film), the upcoming release of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and the process of adapting Mohsin Hamid’s enigmatic novel into a movie. There are also sessions featuring Vikram Seth, Shobhaa De, Ruskin Bond, Gulzar and others. Full schedule below.

Naak naak, who's there?

[So, Kindle magazine asked me to do a piece for their cover spread about women “reclaiming” their bodies, and I obliged with this series of vignettes about the Nose. (The essays in the issue are about various body parts.) Still a bit unsure about what I was trying to do exactly, and it reads like a mix of personal anecdote and po-faced social commentary from the “look-at-me-I’m-such-a-sensitive-male” catalogue. But hopefully it isn’t a complete... stinker.

Post title courtesy that adroit punster, Baradwaj Rangan]

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My favourite photograph of my wife Abhilasha is, of all things, an X-Ray - a profile of her face that shows the outline of the nose and the jaw clearly enough, but with one tiny, jarringly non-organic substance visible in the nasal region. You feel like you're looking at an embedded metallic chip from a dystopian story about people being monitored by a totalitarian government.
 

Illustration: SOUMIK LAHIRI

Learn the context though, and it becomes funnier. Two years ago Abhilasha had a nose encounter of the weird kind. She had been wearing one of those small nose-rings that looks very compact on the outside but which comes with all sorts of complicated paraphernalia that lies just out of sight: a tiny cap screw, a bolt, and for all I know a warehouse supply of ball bearings and rotating-gear wheels too. Anyway, over time the little screw somehow got embedded in the wall of the nose, with the skin closing over it – and she discovered this only when she managed to remove most of the ring and realised something was still lodged inside, where only a surgeon’s delicate tools could reach.

Hence the X-Ray. Hence a quick appointment with the local clinic, where all of us had trouble keeping a straight face. (Surgeries involving a family member are not normally things to be laughed at, but.) Hence the giggling doctor – and I tell you, a big burly Sikh surgeon teehee-ing like Tinkerbell as he exits an operating theatre is a rare sight. Eventually Abhilasha came out looking sheepish, a small bandage-gauze awkwardly attached to half her proboscis. “Aaj tumne hamaari naak kaat ke rakh di,” I told her with the sternest expression I could muster.

It seemed the obvious thing to say. After all, we are the smugly liberal ones, right? We have grown up hearing – and superciliously shaking our heads at – those melodramatic pronouncements in Hindi movies. We feel we can use them in humour, even though we know they so often assume much darker expression in the real world: as condemnations, to suppress rights and freedoms; that they can even be a matter of life or death. A few months earlier, we had read the story about Bibi Aisha, the Afghan woman whose nose was cut off by her husband and in-laws when she tried to escape them after years of abuse. Aisha did eventually gain a measure of freedom – and became a poster-child for commentary on sexual oppression when she was featured on the cover of Time magazine – but one can safely assume that thousands of other women aren’t as lucky.

However, this attempt to construct otherness – to not acknowledge the large spectrum that links our own presumably enlightened lives with the uncivilised lives of "those" people – is self-deceptive. Years earlier, Abhilasha herself had been on the receiving end of a more serious “naak” denouncement. It was during one of her first stints in journalism. An unexpected “graveyard shift” happened to arise during a week when her parents were out of town and she was staying at her maasi’s house. Destined to be stuck in office past midnight and reluctant to disturb a household that had old people living in it, she decided to stay over at a friend’s who lived nearby – after having informed her aunt, of course. It was the practical thing to do in the circumstances. But the next day, when her mother returned, hell broke loose: there was screaming, there were wails and imprecations. What were you thinking? What will they think of us? What kind of a job is this? And that damning sentence: “Naak kaat di tumne hamaari.”

Two things worth noting here: one, that her parents seemed less concerned about what she had really been up to the previous night, and more concerned about what their relatives would think; deeply upset that the situation had been such that others knew. And two: Abhilasha’s mother had once been the principal of a small school and had in her younger days written short stories that might be described as feminist laments for the ways in which women are made to live in the shadows of men. Her apparent volte-face when it came to her own grown-up daughter seems like a classic case of a victim of patriarchy becoming absorbed into the system.

Here was an urban family that hadn’t thought twice about giving their daughter the same level of education as their son, and about encouraging her professional ambitions. But that didn’t erase the Lakshmana-rekha: it was untenable to stay out this late, to fail to be the Good Girl treading a straight path from office to home.

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The other “lakshmana-rekha” in the Ramayana – the one that doesn’t get described as such – is the clean slash Rama’s younger brother made across Surpanakha’s face with his sword, severing her nose and setting a chain of events in motion. It’s easy to see why this ambiguous episode has lent itself to so many literary retellings and alternate psychological explanations. In a short story titled "Surpanakha", for instance, the novelist and poet Amit Chaudhuri casts Rama and Lakshmana as posturing bullies, unable to deal with the idea of a woman as a sexually autonomous being. “Teach her a lesson for being so forward,” Rama tells his brother chillingly when Surpanakha propositions him; the words echo “punishments” meted out by patriarchal societies to women who dare express sexual desire.

Lakshman came back; there was some blood on the blade. “I cut her nose off,” he said. “It,” he gestured toward the knife, “went through her nostril as if it were silk. She immediately changed back from being a paradigm of beauty into the horrible creature she really is. She’s not worth describing,” he said as he wiped his blade.

“Horrible creature...not worth describing.”

To see that Time photo of Bibi Aisha is to be reminded of why the nose is so key to our perceptions of human beauty as well as personal dignity. Try looking at the photo with your finger awkwardly blocking out the missing organ, and you get a hint of inner radiance and poise; you see the forthright, proud gaze of someone who survived an ordeal. And yet, without the nose, the illusion becomes difficult to sustain – the organ is, to put it simply, central. With a gaping hole right in the middle of the face, the resemblance to a death-head is inescapable, and we are uncomfortably reminded of what we are beneath our hubristic ideas of our own beauty.

The nose is also, of course, the breathing apparatus – directly associated with the most fundamental activity of human existence. And in the “naak kat gayi” context, it can be an uncomfortable reminder of what existence is for so many women around the world. It means being the repository of a family’s or society’s “honour”, someone whose “transgressions” – real or imagined – can shame everyone around her. It means being custodian and possession, goddess and slave, at once. It means you have no identity as an individual, only as a symbol or as an object. As Nivedita Menon points out in her fine new book Seeing Like a Feminist, the obsession with a woman’s “honour” lies at the heart of the belief that rape is “a fate worse than death”; that once a woman has been “shamed” thus, she is a blot that society must purge itself of. (Or even marry off to the rapist so that a non-consensual sexual act is retrospectively legitimised.)

Something else Menon’s book discusses at length is gender performance: how women have internalised aspects of behaviour expected of them – keeping their eyes averted, focussing inward, occupying the least possible space in public places. Interestingly, an inversion on the Pinocchio story – Pinocchio’s Sister: A Feminist Fable, written by Abraham Gothberg – features a girl whose nose grows longer when she tells the truth, a metaphor perhaps for how women are often forced into living up to an ideal rather than being true to themselves.

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I offered a morbid view of the nose-ring at the start of this piece, which is perhaps unfair. Nose-rings can of course serve graceful decorative purposes, enhancing a woman’s aesthetic appeal (and why not a man’s too?) and making life more colourful and attractive generally. But beauty and ugliness can go hand in hand, in much the same way that many festive rituals can be celebratory fun while also being subliminal ways of maintaining a regressive tradition. I have friends – women among them – who cluck their tongues exasperatedly when I say that the large nose-ring worn by Indian brides in certain traditions reminds me of the rope threaded through a buffalo’s nostrils, used by its master to lead it about. And apparently I’m being a wet blanket and a grouch when I spell out my feelings about customs like the “nath atarna” – the removal of the nose-ring – which is often a euphemism for the end of a woman’s virginity. Or the sight – so touching to many eyes – of an adult woman sitting on her father’s lap during a wedding ceremony (the nose-ring prominent on her face), an object waiting to be transferred from one man to the other.

Of course, in many such cases, the custom is “harmless fun”, containing a sense of irony, with young people joking about the implications of what they are doing even while they are doing it. But it is useful to be aware of how firmly embedded certain ideas are in our social framework; how they become part of our everyday lives and assumptions, and are propagated by even the most innocent-seeming aspects of our popular culture. Consider the suhaag-raat scene in Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie, with Shashi Kapoor removing Raakhee’s ornaments one by one as she sings in memory of a lost love. On the face of it, this is a tender scene from one of our most beloved romantic movies, and the film is trying hard to present Kapoor’s Vijay as a caring, sensitive man. (It’s a terrible performance, incidentally – the actor has absolutely no clue how to play this scene, and can one blame him?) But think about what is really going on here and it becomes a little icky: a woman, who is in love with another man, is about to be bedded by a husband whom she barely knows (and in the patriarchy, deflowering is of course code for “possessing” – she is now his). The last ornament he removes is the nose-ring, as the song ends and the scene fades to black; it is as obvious a symbol as all those Hindi-movie shots of bees buzzing around flowers whenever two lovers draw near each other.

Metaphors for virginity aside, the author-mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has noted the many ways in which a woman wearing a nose-ring may be perceived. “The scientist said it has no scientific basis. A rationalist mocked her for mutilating her body in the name of beauty. Another rationalist pointed out that it was an ancient acupuncture technique. A feminist said she was sporting the symbol of patriarchy. A secularist said that made her a Hindu.” And so on. At the end comes the kicker: “Everybody saw the nose-ring. No one saw her.”

In a better world we would be able to see the whole person, as opposed to a cluster of disjointed parts. Perhaps it will happen one day.

Thoughts on Kai Po Che! as an adaptation

The process of comparing a film with the book it was adapted from is often ridden with simplifications; such comparisons also tend to have an inbuilt bias towards the book, being premised on the condescending idea that cinema is merely illustrated literature. But I think most people who have seen the new film Kai Po Che! and also read the Chetan Bhagat novel The 3 Mistakes of my Life will agree that the film is a more fully realised work, and it may be worth looking at where its strengths lie vis-a-vis the source text.

At his best, especially when writing about things that he has firsthand experience of, Bhagat knows how to pace a story for his target readership and give them characters and conversations they can relate to. (An old post about this here.) But a self-conscious strain enters his work when he deals with situations requiring gravitas – such as violence during a communal riot – and in The 3 Mistakes of My Life, the writing becomes most clunky at the points of highest drama. Consider this bit from the book's climax, which reads more like the first draft of a screenplay than a well-crafted passage in a finished novel; an inert, disjointed description of things happening one by one, rather than an attempt to convey the messy, urgent wholeness of the moment:

Mama closed his eyes again and mumbled silent chants. He took his folded hands to his forehead and heart and tapped it thrice. He opened his eyes and lifted the trishul. Ali stood up and tried to limp away.

Mama lifted the trishul high to strike.

“Mama, no,” Omi screamed in his loudest voice. Omi pushed the man blocking him. He ran between Mama and Ali. Mama screamed a chant and struck.

“Stop Mama,” Omi said.

Even if Mama wanted to, he couldn’t. The strike already had momentum. The trishul entered Omi’s stomach with a dull thud.

“Oh...oh,” Omi said as he absorbed what happened first and felt the pain later. Within seconds, a pool of blood covered the floor. Mama and his men looked at each other, trying to make sense of what had occurred.

Even a moderately well-directed and well-performed movie sequence would be an improvement on the above passage (a competent sound designer might also replace the “dull thud” when a sharp weapon enters human flesh with a more appropriate sound), and Kai Po Che! is more than a moderately good film. It is wonderfully acted and has a real sense of character development. The screenplay – on which Bhagat collaborated with Pubali Chaudhari, Supratik Sen and director Abhishek Kapoor – is more focused, and the dialogue more authentic-sounding, than the often flat prose in the book. The decision to remove the novel’s framing device (in which Bhagat receives a suicide note from an Ahmedabad businessman) was a sensible one, as was the paring of a couple of flabby subplots and peripheral characters such as the Australian cricketer who uses similes like “I’m off like a bride’s nightie”.

In the history of Auteurism (which I will not go on about here!), there are many instances of directors choosing source material that will enable them to revisit their cherished themes and personal obsessions. Though it’s way too early to call Abhishek Kapoor an auteur – even if you’re using the word in the most modest possible sense – one should note that like his last film Rock On!, Kai Po Che! is about the gap between innocence and experience, and about how life can scupper the best-laid plans of shiny-eyed young people. In this coming-of-age tale set mostly in 2001-2002, the three central characters – the friends Govind, Ishaan and Omi – are affected by various important things that happened to Gujarat and to India during that period: the Kutch earthquake, the emergence of a mall culture with the promise of attractive retail space and new business opportunities, the historic India-Australia Test match in Kolkata in March 2001, and most significantly the Godhra massacre and the anti-Muslim riots that followed it. The book’s narrator Govind is the film’s quiet anchoring figure (extremely well-played by Raj Kumar Yadav), a young man whose interest in Mathematics – the one certainty in a world where pretty much everything else is ambiguous and up for discussion – was one of the more entertaining things about the novel (it is somewhat toned down in the film). Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a temperamental cricket player who develops a bond with a 12-year-old Muslim boy, the extraordinarily gifted Ali. And Omi (Amit Sadh) is falling under the influence of his uncle Bittu maama, a leader of the chauvinistic local Hindu party.

With this basic information, it is easy enough to guess how the lives and personal equations of these three friends will be altered by the communal clashes – especially after Omi loses his parents in the Godhra attack. But I thought the film’s climax was more layered and challenging than the novel’s, partly because of how it makes Omi a participant in the riots. In the book he retains his innocence when crunch time arrives; he even ends up taking the trishul-blow intended for the boy Ali (as you might gather from the passage quoted above). And this allows the maama, a distant character in whom the reader has little emotional investment (fleshing out side-characters is not one of Bhagat’s strong suits anyway), to conveniently become the figurehead for Evil. Much of the responsibility for the bad things that happen in the end are fobbed off on him, while the three protagonists remain young innocents, our unsullied points of identification.

The film, on the other hand, has dramatic impetus (which is lacking in the final passages of the novel) along with a more developed sense of how “good” people – or “apolitical” people – can be engulfed by tides that they don’t fully understand. Long before Godhra, we have already seen Omi becoming a little closed and distanced from his friends, gradually turning into a puppet for his maama and a handsome public-relations man for the party. (Even his freshly grown moustache underlines his new status as his uncle's minion-clone and a card-carrying member of a group that feels the need to emphasize their masculinity because of the perception that they have been weak for too long.) Later, driven by personal vendetta in the climactic scenes where a Hindu mob attacks one of the city’s Muslim quarters, he is for a while indistinguishable from the older, more hardened men around him, and unrecognisable from the cheerful kid who helped his friends set up a sports shop earlier in the story.

Manav Kaul’s thin-lipped maama is a scary figure – the sort of man whom you can imagine planning a massacre, carefully examining the trunk-loads of scythes with which he will slit the bellies of his enemies. But watch Omi’s face near the end of the film – initial confusion and anguish slowly turning into watchful determination – and you see how he might become a similarly cold-blooded rabble-rouser a few years down the line. Eventually it takes a friend’s senseless murder – with his own hand on the trigger – for Omi to regain something of his humanity, but something much deeper has been lost. In the face of his transformation, the good guys-vs-bad guys dichotomy is no longer so easy to believe in. And this moral ambivalence belongs mostly to the film; there is no real parallel for it in the book.

[Some earlier posts on adaptations: Susanna’s Seven Husband/Saat Khoon Maaf; A Kiss Before Dying; notes from the Times of India lit-fest]

Meeting Nikhil Bhagat: a former actor remembers his brush with fame

[Did a version of this piece for the March issue of The Caravan]

On an unusually chilly Kolkata evening this January, at the inauguration of the Apeejay Literary Festival at the Victoria Memorial, I chanced to witness a little reunion. As guests gravitated towards the event's keynote speaker Shyam Benegal, the tireless festival director Maina Bhagat brought her 49-year-old son across to say hello to the filmmaker. “You haven’t changed at all, sir,” said Nikhil Bhagat, a wide, boyish smile peeling the years off his face. Trim, youthful-looking, Bhagat himself hadn't changed all that much since 1985, when he played a small but important role in Benegal’s classy ensemble film Trikaal. The year before that, aged barely 20, he was the rebellious football player Raghu, locking horns with a discipline-seeking sports coach in Prakash Jha’s Hip Hip Hurray.

20-year-old Nikhil Bhagat with co-star Neena Gupta during the Trikaal shoot in Goa

Not many actors can claim to have made their only two films (playing key roles in both) with directors of the stature of Benegal and Jha, and then to have slipped conclusively out of the movie world. Nikhil Bhagat’s star had shone briefly in the firmament of “parallel” cinema: this article by Avijit Ghosh on the Times of India website notes that he “induced nationwide hysterical squeals from pretty young things” after the Hip Hip Hurray release. He was nominated for a Filmfare Award as best supporting actor for that film, losing to the more experienced Anil Kapoor in Mashaal. And yet you will be very lucky to find a photo of him on Google Images today. (Even the official Shemaroo DVD cover of Hip Hip Hurray has pictures of others who had smaller roles in the film, but none of him.)

Having coincidentally watched both movies over the past year (I wrote about Trikaal here), and perhaps swayed by dramatic filmi narratives myself, I had wondered if a tragic tale lay behind his enigmatic disappearance. All such thoughts dissolved that evening at the Victoria Memorial. Bhagat is still handsome, well-turned-out, and apparently comfortable in his own skin. But speaking with him then, and on the phone afterwards, I could tell he was unused to being interviewed; he struggled to make sense of his movie stint, admitted to its randomness.

He was studying in St Xavier’s College in 1983 when Prakash Jha made a hurried Calcutta trip to scout for an athletic young man who could play football. The college put up a notice, 19-year-old Nikhil went with some friends to the hotel where Jha was staying (a couple of hundred students must have showed up in all) and nearly left after a while (“who’s going to wait so long?”) – but before he knew it he was in a final shortlist of three, and then Jha, who had already got permission from the college, was telling him to pack his bags for Ranchi. For Nikhil and his flummoxed parents, who hadn’t even known about the auditions, everything happened in a blur. He had just enough time to collect a pair of contact lenses from the one optician in the city who dispensed them at the time.

He spoke very little Hindi and his voice would have to be dubbed by someone else (friends would later tease him about this, his mother Maina told me), but Jha had clearly seen in him a combination of rugged insolence and vulnerability that would suit the role very well. Raghu is a posturing, cigarette-smoking teen who is confused on the inside. (“Don’t butt your head against a wall before your horns have even grown,” the coach, played by Raj Kiran, witheringly tells him; their clash is the earliest representation of what would become a recurrent theme in Jha’s cinema, the channelling of masculine energies into leadership, with positive and negative consequences.)

Later, Benegal saw him in Hip Hip Hurray and got in touch, and Trikaal happened. Nikhil would also work briefly with Benegal on his TV series Yatra, set on trains travelling the length and breadth of India. “My role got over quite fast,” he told me, “but I was on that train journey almost throughout the shoot, for two months.” (He has a small part in this episode.)

With Shyam Benegal

It would be an overstatement to say that those two films reveal a brilliant performer (and it would be unfair to expect that much from someone who only had brief experience of acting in school plays, and none at all for the camera). What they do show is a callow young man with definite screen presence, someone who might – with experience and nurturing – have gone on to big things. In Trikaal – a more sophisticated, better-directed film than Hip Hip Hurray – he already looks maturer, a little more at ease in front of the camera, even though he might have been lost in the large ensemble cast. He has a striking entrance scene too: Naseeruddin Shah’s narrator, introducing the viewer to figures from his past, says “Aur woh main, 25 saal pehle” and the camera picks out Nikhil, standing amidst a crowd at a funeral wake, the hint of a cocky smile on his face as he looks towards Anna, the girl he has a crush on.

There is something ingenuous and unrehearsed about Nikhil’s recollections of his acting stint. He couldn’t relate to Raghu, he says, but having watched movies like To Sir with Love, he knew about such character types and played it by instinct. He had never serenaded, or sung a lament for, a girl himself, but “you know, at that age one does have experience of raging hormones” – and so he lip-synched through a memorable little scene in Trikaal where Remo Fernandes strums a guitar next to him while Maqsood Ali – later famous as Lucky Ali – watches from a distance; with hindsight, this is a touching image of three young people with very different futures in the entertainment industry.

With Remo Fernandes in Trikaal

Nikhil's closest firsthand brush with his own celebrity came when Hip Hip Hurray was released in a Calcutta hall and friends spread the word that he was in the audience. “The crowd became unruly and I ended up sitting in the manager’s office until they had dispersed.” That apart, the St Xavier’s boy lived in a world far removed from the Bombay film industry, and he sounds nonchalant even when he speaks about the Filmfare nomination – “I was aware of it, but there was no real question of going to Bombay for it.” He had college to finish.

Belatedly, after graduating, he did go to Bombay for a while to try his luck, but soon realised, first, that public memory was short - "I hadn't struck when the iron was hot" - and second, that he lacked the inner drive needed for this profession. “You have to be either passionate about acting or desperate to become a star, and I was neither. I am a private person, and was unwilling to push myself beyond a point.” Besides, the divide between mainstream and non-mainstream cinema was sharper then: most serious movie buffs today know of Trikaal’s cinematic worth, but in 1985 it fell under the radar of most audiences; having it on his resume wasn’t going to get him auditions. There were missed opportunities too. Ketan Mehta called him for an interview for Holi – the film that would mark the debut of a youngster named Aamir Khan – but Nikhil couldn’t go because the floods in Kolkata that year made travel impossible for five crucial days.

For 25 years now he has worked in leather exports – he is now the director of Orbit Leathers – and says that while life has had its ups and downs, “as in any business”, he has no regrets. “How many people become film stars anyway, even if for a very short period? And those who do often end up living in golden cages, without the freedom to be normal people.” In fact, one doesn’t have to look far for cautionary tales about stardom and the dream factory: consider the sad story of Nikhil’s Hip Hip Hurray co-star Raj Kiran, who was last heard to be recuperating from a mental breakdown in the US. And then remember the rousing final scene of that film, the proud coach handing the baton of progress to the transformed Raghu.

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The photos above are courtesy Maina Bhagat. And here are two pictures of Nikhil as he is today:

 

The boy who fixed Earth - on Tik-Tik, The Master of Time

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review]

The narrator-hero of Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s new book for young readers is preoccupied with Time and wastes none of it in letting us know what the central peeve of his existence is. “There was one gigantic, colossal fault with our species which trumped all the advantages,” says Tik-Tik – a boy from the planet Nopter – on the opening page, “Our species was slow to grow up. Very slow.” In case you’re wondering, “growing up” isn’t code for a people collectively becoming wiser, or something else abstract or allegorical; it is literally about moving from childhood to adulthood. Hankering after the many freedoms available to adults, and impatient to become one of their rank, the single-minded Tik-Tik decides that “this state of affairs should not be allowed to continue unchallenged and uncured”.

In fact he continues to make such self-important proclamations throughout the book, for he is an endearingly deluded fellow. He gives himself heaps of credit along with many grand-sounding designations, but he constantly misreads situations and overestimates the worth of his own initiatives – which means much rescue work has to be done by other people, notably his unruffled friend Nib-Nib, with whom he shares a love-hate relationship (and whose cat Dum-Dum is a personal nemesis). This brings a bumbling charm to Tik-Tik’s narrative, which serves the book well, especially when he makes a proud announcement only to have the wind taken out of his sails a few sentences later. Or when he indulges in quasi-philosophical asides (“I realised that all planets have their Dum-Dums. One cannot escape them”) or over-dramatizes his problems: “With Dum-Dum prowling on the land mass, and the penguins underwater, this planet had now become for me the single most dangerous place in the whole cosmos [...] I hoped to find their military training camp, fitted out with rope ladders, horizontal beams and swings.” Even when he casts himself as an Evil Scientist driven to nefarious means for his survival, the effect is funny, not least because we know that little will come of his schemes.

This winsome book begins slowly, with a series of developments that culminate in Tik-Tik setting off on an inter-galactic journey in a space egg with his grandpa, but the pace lifts once they land on Earth and start figuring out “high science” methods to remedy the planet’s construction flaws. Hanging a giant comet from the “bottom” of Earth, for instance, would stabilise it and do away with the menace of changing seasons. A huge propeller fixed to the North Pole would be a nice way to speed up rotation and make time pass more quickly. And a polarity device is a neat method for keeping unwanted things and creatures as far away from you as possible (though this can, like anything else, backfire).

Sprinkled through the story are illustrations by Michelle Farooqi – the author’s wife – the best of which do a valuable job of enhancing the text and clarifying the things described. For example, it wasn’t until I saw the lovely drawing on page 61, a depiction of what Earth looks like after the propeller and the comet have been attached, that I felt I had a real sense of what Tik-Tik had been up to. The drawing is non-realist in that it shows Tik-Tik, his grandpa and five waddling penguins as abnormally large figures occupying a sizable part of the planet’s surface, both on the “top” and the “bottom” (the effect is similar to the famous images of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince on his tiny asteroid) but it is an instant mood-establisher, affectionate and quaint while also making the familiar seem unfamiliar.

Tik-Tik, The Master of Time is a breezy, humorous adventure story – with some very rudimentary science for young readers – but it has a self-evidently serious side too. Tik-Tik’s impatience is a version of a paranoia many of us have experienced as children: suspecting that Adulthood is an exclusive, privileged club floating unreachably in the misty distance; wondering when (or if!) we will be admitted to this fellowship and what deep secrets we might learn when that happens. The irony is that for a grown-up reader, a book such as this one can both create and fulfil the opposite sort of yearning. And this may be why the climax, though a bit laboured in its spelling out of ideas, is so affecting – Tik-Tik’s sense of loss and disorientation when he finally gets his wish and then realises that there is no going back is easy to relate to. For those of us with limited access to space eggs and giant propellers, revisiting our favourite children’s books – and discovering new ones – is a good practical way of bridging time’s great divide.

(Some earlier posts on the work of the versatile Farooqi: on his excellent translation of the Hamzanama here and here; on another children’s book, The Amazing Moustaches of Moochhander the Iron Man, here)

Of snails and superhumans - Uday Prakash's tales of deprivation

[Did a version of this review for Mint Lounge]

With the surge in Indian English publishing and a concurrent increase in literature festivals with an Anglophone slant, it is no secret that writers who work in the other Indian languages have felt increasingly neglected and undervalued. A particularly sharp expression of this occurs in the story “Mangosil”, by the celebrated Hindi writer Uday Prakash. “When I tried explaining my troubles to Delhi’s influential writers and thinkers,” says the narrator, a possible stand-in for Prakash himself, “I felt as if I were a snail that had surfaced to the world above, telling the divine bipeds patting their fat bellies about his wild, weird, othercaste experiences from his home at the bottom of the sea. My language was incomprehensible. They viewed my utterances born of sorrow, vulnerability, and nerves with indifference, curiosity, wonder.”

The chilling sense one gets from this passage is of someone trapped in a hermetically sealed room, failing to be heard (much less understood), the echoes of his own cries bouncing off the walls. It is unsurprising then that Prakash’s collection The Walls of Delhi - three stories translated by Jason Grunebaum - contain powerful representations of other forms of marginalisation too. The world of this book is one of spectral tunnels in which the untold chronicles of the dispossessed lie hidden (“walk outside your home and take a good look at the little crowd that hangs out at the shop or stall or cart – and who knows? You might find where the tunnel comes out”) as well as hollow walls containing the dark secrets of privileged people.

Thus, in the title story, a poor man named Ramnivas finds seemingly limitless treasure in an improbable but oddly appropriate place: inside a wall of a south Delhi gym to which the children of the rich come to work off the weight they have accumulated from eating too much (even as Ramnivas mulls that one of his own children died after eating fish caught from the sewer). The stacks of currency notes change Ramnivas’s life – and a man who had looked like an emaciated version of the actor Jeetendra transforms into a “gregarious, colourful, radiant Govinda, always ready to flash a smile” – but soon his dream begins to unravel. In “Mohandas”, a lower-caste man discovers that his name and job have been stolen by an upper-caste loafer, and then comes upon what seems to be a village of doppelgangers, each usurping another’s rightful place in the world. (“Were all the people who had good jobs and held high positions and ran around in automobiles and caroused who they really claimed to be?” he wonders.) And in “Mangosil” a child’s head grows at an abnormal pace because it knows things other heads don’t know, or don’t want to know; the virus that causes this mysterious disease, we learn, is poverty.

These are angry, sarcastic stories, infused with the rage of someone who has seen far too much meaningless injustice to want to withhold judgements or trade in nuances. It is the rage that comes with seeing the cities of a half-developed country from the sky, as “incongruous tokens of priceless, shining marble stuck in the mire and mud”. Prakash’s writing is full of poetic imagery. “One more stomach had delivered itself to the house that morning,” it is said of a child’s birth in a poor family. Insects seem to recognise the cough of a dying man and arrive in droves as his phlegm hits the ground. When Mohandas wades into a river to pray, “tiny kothari fish swam to the surface and fought to nip at the salt from his teardrops”. And the narrator occasionally breaks the fourth wall by giving us parenthetical asides about politics or the economy, showing a sense of curiosity about the wider world and about the lives of distant figures like Bill Clinton, almost as if trying to convince himself that his derelict protagonists really do inhabit the same planet as the one on which these other, “important” things involving supra-humans are taking place. (One thinks again of the snail and the well-cushioned bipeds.)

Not having read these stories in the original Hindi, Grunebaum’s translation seemed serviceable to me, though there is the odd jarring note: an old man says “hey blindy” – an awkward, slangy rendering of “andhi” – to his wife, and some phrases – “Isn’t this peachy?” – feel culturally discordant. But Grunebaum clarifies that he wanted to make these stories accessible to a non-Indian readership, which is as well, for their content is unsettling to begin with; there are some obviously fabulist elements in them, especially in the story of the large-headed Suri. At the same time it is useful to remember how strange reality can be. In his Afterword, Grunebaum mentions a trip with Uday Prakash to Chhatisgarh, where they just happened to run into the “real Mohandas”, walking on the road, “looking just as haggard and resilient as described in the story”. They spoke for a bit, took some photos and then went their separate ways – “Mohandas” presumably to continue fighting his small battles against shadowy imposters, Grunebaum returning to translate stories about deprivation for a readership that can sympathise but perhaps not fully understand.

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[Also see: Jason Grunebaum speaks with Trisha Gupta about translation here]