Free And Then One Day: A Memoir by Naseeruddin Shah

gave me a final lesson in what it is to love and serve the theatre. I have continued to feel hugely indebted to the Kendals despite the fact that that day, after they had performed their ‘Gems from Shakespeare’in St Anselm’s, Mr Kendal, probably tired, sweaty, too preoccupied to deal with a star-struck young follower and in no mood to say or hear anything at all, was changing out of his costume when I managed to get into the green room. My carefully rehearsed speeches flew out of my head as I stood before this giant glowering down at me in his half-costume. He didn’t say a word, just took the autograph book from my hand, signed it and continued undressing. I sneaked out with my back to the door, having received my life’s first and last autograph. I did not hear of or see Mr Kendal again for another dozen or so years but this encounter was, I daresay, the one which really lit the spark, and made me resolve to take control of my life and actually DO something.
    In St Anselm’s, students had a choice of subjects they could opt for. One didn’t, as in Sem, have to study everything. You could opt for arts or maths or bio. Sensing a heaven-sent opportunity to escape the maths monster, I thought I’d do the arts course. Studying only English lit and history and social studies seemed like a breeze. Plan was duly nipped in the bud by Baba who still nursed dreams of a ‘respectable’ profession for me, possibly medicine, and so biology was thrust down my unwilling throat. Well at least I’d escaped maths! All I retain of the biology I was taught are the words di-cotyledonous and Paramecium Caudatum, and I’m reasonably sure what they mean, but I make no further claim to any knowledge at all in either botany or zoology.
    And then one day a play competition was announced in the school. Each class was supposed to produce a half-hour piece with the best ones to be staged on Annual Day. The students themselves were supposed to take the initiative in devising the show. I knew instantly what I thought our class should do, and since no one else displayed any enthusiasm about it my vote carried. With Kendal/Shylock fresh in my mind, a newly acquired friend J. R. Khan, and of course the ever-willing Girish T in tow, we ransacked the mouldy, long-unused costume cupboard and came away with a mean-looking dagger, a brown cassock, probably donated to the school by some Franciscan monk (the cassock, I mean, not the dagger), also what I thought would pass off as a ‘lawyerly’ gown, and some velvety, vaguely Venetian-looking pantaloons and jackets for Bassanio and Antonio; the idea being to do scenes from
The Merchant of Venice
with me as Shylock naturally, and, as Portia in man’s garb, the best frog-dissector in class C. P. S. Shastri, now a psychiatrist in Chicago, not that his playing the role necessarily had anything to do with that. JR promised he could stick on me the best beard ever: he produced a bundle of crepe hair and a tube of rubber solution to prove it, so I got rid of the ‘hooked on to the ears’ beard but retained the skullcap I had purchased from the Dargah bazaar. The voluminous copy of Shakespeare’s
Collected Works
which had been gathering dust ever since Zaheer had received it as a ‘Best Actor’ trophy in Sem some years ago was retrieved and the sections to be performed marked out—all Shylock’s juiciest speeches of course. My own performance had been ready for some time; all that remained was to get the others to learn their lines and take them through the paces.
    Out of our motley group of four, the only one with ‘experience of the stage’, as I missed no opportunity to remind the others, was myself. So what I said went. And amazingly, for me, I seemed instinctively to know what I should do. The stage, I really did feel, was where I belonged. It was the only place apart from the cricket field where I felt happy in my skin. During this time, coincidentally, I also got called to a try-out for the