An Ordinary Life Page 19
In the end I did everything for my father. Subconsciously, at some point during my late teens or my early twenties, I had decided that someday I would make all of his false tales of grandeur come true. If Abbu were alive today, he would never have believed that I was really working with Amitabh Bachchan. He would have assumed right away that his son was lying, because he himself had lied about Bachchan. Some years before he died, Abbu asked me for some money, close to a crore. I asked him why. Very sheepishly he mumbled something about getting his land back. I told him to relax and set my brothers to work. Slowly but steadily, we bought back all of the land that was always supposed to be his. Being able to make my broken dad’s dreams come true, for me that is success.
When random passers-by give me their dua, for me that is success. Outside the airport at Pune, I had snuck into a corner, seeking inconspicuousness, for a quick smoke. Soon after managing this feat, as I was getting into the vehicle provided by the production company a random man came up to me and said, ‘We love to see you shine. May Allah bless you. May Allah take you to even greater heights!’ He held my hands in his, blessed me and disappeared into the crowd, melting my heart and making me feel like a million bucks with his love. That is success.
One of the pitfalls is a continuous pitter-patter of shady offers. Like some months ago, a guy approached me in Delhi: ‘Saheb, I can get you a Padma Shri,’ said the sly stranger. ‘Really?’ I asked in amusement. ‘Yes, sir, guaranteed. All you have to do is act in a film I’m producing. Here it is . . .’ And before I could say anything, he proceeded to narrate the script of what turned out, unsurprisingly, to be an awful film. So bad that had I agreed to do it—irrespective of the creepy offer—it could have derailed my entire career. And that’s the thing about being a star. Strugglers would kill for this kind of affluence, of being spoilt for choice. But stars cannot be careful enough, one wrong choice and your entire career that you worked so hard to establish, could get ruined.
Speaking of stars and success, a friend gave me the best advice ever: ‘Don’t stay separate from the crowd,’ he said. ‘Stay in the crowd and stay separate.’ That means to stay objective enough to be able to gauge the current of the crowd and yet not get carried away in it.
Even after all these years, Bennewitz’s Galileo still stays with me. Emotions are sold for cheap here in our industry. You make the audience cry and make them go ‘wah, wah’. You deliver a punchline to make people laugh and say ‘wah, wah’. And the film is a hit. People praise your performance. But apart from these basics, we touch very little of the vast gamut of emotions life has to offer, in our movies. I have tried to recreate this magic and failed. But perhaps if I get the right script, I could try again: a role in which people neither feel the need to break into peals of laughter nor burst into sobs. A role that entails nothing but a matter-of-fact performance, a thoroughly dry performance, like in Galileo, the man and the character. That’s what I’d love to do. Because, after all, what is a star? It’s an image. It’s easy to be that created image. It’s hard to be an actor.
I want to do all kinds of experiments, I want to stretch all boundaries, I want to go where no actor has gone before, I want to do every role possible, I want to live as many lives through my acting as there are grains of sand on a beach, or stars in the patch of the night sky above my terrace. After all, we have only one life, one tiny life to live. And one lifetime is way too short to do all of this. I will do as much as I can. I will pack in as many people, as many lives, as many roles, as many shades as I can into this one lifetime as an actor.
I grew up as an insightful child amidst a huge joint family of farmers with my nine siblings, seven brothers and two sisters, in Budhana, a small town in Muzaffarnagar district in Uttar Pradesh. (Nawaz—first row, extreme right—with Ammi, Faiz, Almas, Ayaz and sister Shamiya.)
When I was growing up in the 1970s, there was no television. The only source of entertainment used to be the village carnivals and folk performances. I remember, as a child, I was so deeply enchanted with the sheer energy of those performers that I always wanted to be like one of them. (Nawaz—above and facing page—at the age of twelve at a mela in Budhana.)
As the local saying goes, Budhana is the land of gehu, ganna aur gun (wheat, sugar cane and gun). (Twelve-year-old Nawaz with his younger sister Shamiya flaunting an airgun.)
Nawaz (third from right, third row from top) in DAV College after a mock parliament
Graduation days in Gurukula Kangri Vishwavidyalaya, Haridwar
At the age of twenty-one
In Manali, immediately after graduation
My aim was only to try and find myself through the characters, through the films and through the theatre that I have been part of. (Nawaz—fourth from left—as Kans in the play Kans directed by him.)
Struggling days in Mumbai
For those few golden minutes, my chain of struggles would evaporate into the smoke and my bloodshot eyes would be dreamy again.
In NSD with family members
Abbu never doted on me or pampered me openly or cuddled me the way Ammi did. He loved me dearly but he had a strange way of showing his affection; with Abbu at my sister Shamiya’s engagement.
With Ammi (extreme left) and my daughter, Shora (standing, extreme left), after Abbu’s death
In the film Chittagong
Receiving the National Film Special Jury Award in 2012 for Kahaani, Gangs of Wasseypur—Part 2, Dekh Indian Circus and Talaash
Acknowledgements
The greatest gratitude to our lovely publisher Penguin Random House and editor Premanka Goswami, without whom this book would not have happened. We could not have asked for a better publishing house! People no longer believe that matches are made in Heaven. Well, people, have faith, for this one certainly is. Premanka, you’re an angel; they truly don’t make ’em like you any more. Not only are you an outstanding editor but also an extremely supportive one. It gives great liberty to authors to focus solely on craft when you know that the editor has their back for all other matters. Thank You!
And there were a million other matters and waves of drama, in spite of which we managed to make the book happen. We could not have, without the support of mastermind Shamas Siddiqui who donned so many hats that they are impossible to count. One of them was playing Wikipedia and filling in the many blanks not only about growing up together with Nawaz in Budhana, but also throughout his life. Thank you, Shamas! You won’t be bugged with a million texts at odd hours any more. Anup Shashikant Pandey, sorry for all the nagging, and thank you for meeting all the requests.
Nawaz was shooting back-to-back. Even after shoots, in so-called ‘free time’, the Yari Road office always had an endless stream of visitors. It was getting impossible for us to sit down for lengthy, intimate, free-flowing conversations. The only way to get that kind of time and space was to accompany him on shoots. Thank you, Shamas, for that brilliant idea! Team Freaky Ali and Sohail Khan Production, thank you for making it happen: without your help, there was no way the book could have met its deadline. Thank you, Prapti Doshi Moorthy, for taking care of the logistics.
Anurag Kashyap, thank you for entertaining Rituparna at short notice and for answering her nosy questions with delightful tales. We understand how busy you were—bang in the middle of post-production for Raman Raghav 2.0. We also tremendously appreciate your generosity, like for letting her sit through the film’s rushes and get a deeper feel of character and preparation. Ghanshyam Garg, aka Ghannu, thank you for being a true golden yaar! We immensely appreciate your patience: sitting for hours upon hours, entertaining a hundred questions and giving extremely deep insights into the grey areas of Nawaz’s early years of struggle in Mumbai and the people who inhabited his life then. The entire section, Part III, Mumbai, would have been impossible without you. Being an actor yourself, who has seen his fair share of struggle, your responses were especially empathetic, thereby allowing us to make a better book.
This book is unique in so many ways. On
e of them is that it is a complete translation of Nawaz’s thoughts in Hindi, with whiffs of Urdu and Arabic, into English. This is when it helps to be married to somebody whose first language is Hindi and who loves Urdu shayaree. So this list would be incomplete without appreciating Rituparna’s supportive husband, Rajat, who helped answer questions about translating this to that, at odd hours. An odd addition here is her four-year-old son Reyo. The luxury of having a small child around all the time helped her perceive and produce a truer book, one in which childhood plays such a huge role that it is a character by itself. Of course, he was no help at all in meeting the deadline! On that note, thank you, Samsung, for making phones—on which a series of interviews have been recorded—that don’t break when toddlers tap dance on them.
Another thing that makes this book unique is that it was written continents away from Mumbai, in California, USA. That kind of isolation can be demotivating for an interactive book like this one. Thank you, Shamas, yet again, and Tanuja Naik for breaking through it by coordinating those video chats amidst Nawaz’s crazy, busy schedule. We can never express how tremendously we appreciate the invaluable insights from our writer’s group (Shut Up and Write, Silicon Valley Chapter) and our desi friends (Shashank, Vijaya, Anand, Amrita, Navneet, Rachna, Mili and Gaurav) in the San Francisco Bay Area here for constant readings and feedback on the antique Indianness of the book—like angeethi, buraad, akhara, growing up with cattle, and so on.
Rarely has an author become homeless during research as she was kicked out by a crazy landlady at hours’ notice. Thank you, Amrita Chatterji, Mittal Solanki and Ritika Prasad for sheltering the homeless. Otherwise, I’d have had to camp at the Magic If Films office itself. Amrita Chatterji, a special shout to you for providing dongles, SIM cards, Darjeeling tea, Chinese food, transport at wee hours, moral support—and whatnot—at odd hours and odd places, without which this project and one of its authors might have collapsed.
Last but definitely not least at all, the design team at Penguin—Gunjan Ahlawat and Neeraj Nath—the lovely and patient copy editor Shanuj V.C., Rachna Pratap for helping with the contracts, and the bright marketing folks—Preeti Chaturvedi, Peter Modoli and Neha Punj as well as ex-Penguin Aman Arora. Thank you all for this incredible journey!
THE BEGINNING
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
This collection published 2017
Copyright © Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Rituparna Chatterjee 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Ahlawat Gunjan
ISBN: 978-0-670-08901-7
This digital edition published in 2017.
e-ISBN: 978-9-387-32620-0
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.