Free And Then One Day: A Memoir by Naseeruddin Shah Page A

school cricket team, and so cricket now became my alibi for going to rehearsals. The cramping inhibitions that had so beset me in Sem and the nervous twitches I’d always had began to erase themselves. The crushing feeling of bewildered incompetence about myself, the conviction that I was extremely stupid, diminished but didn’t go away. It still hasn’t fully. However, in this new school where the extent of my idiocy had not yet been noticed, I could operate with a degree of confidence I had not known before. In real life too, people began to listen and they sometimes approved. I had not known that before either.
    The day arrived. I had a feeling we couldn’t lose.
    Among the top contenders were something called
The Ugly Duckling
and
The Referee,
both farces being done by Classes 10 and 11. In the former, a guy called Ashok Wahi delivered a pretty competent performance as the Queen, and the latter, a play about mistaken identity, had cricket captain Arvind Ahluwalia in a double role. We preceded these two with our
Merchant.
Being on that stage was like being submerged in warm rose water, I didn’t want to ever get off. Our performance followed the juniors and seemed to be over in a flash. Everything had gone by in a sort of daze; I can’t say I felt satiated or relieved or anything, I just felt it was all over too bloody soon. I wanted more, I could happily have stayed on that stage forever, and in a sense I have. Whether I’d done well or badly was of no consequence. As an imitation of Mr Kendal it wasn’t too far off the mark, but the real revelation for me was the charge of energy I felt that day, and have continued to feel whenever I am onstage. I found myself doing things I hadn’t planned and doing them with complete certainty and to the approval of the audience. It was as if another hand was guiding me. This feeling has stayed with me till today; and therefore, though I am grateful for compliments, I never take full responsibility for either my successes or failures but do try to make sure that the ‘theatre god’ does not turn his back on me. The heady euphoria of acceptance I felt then I can still recall and savour, despite the fact that we lost out for Annual Day to
The Referee.
    BUT next morning the Reverend Cedric Fernandes who had directed
The Referee
came to our classroom, took me aside saying, ‘So... You’re a very good actor eh!’ I treasure the moment not only because the Rev. Cedric went on to be my first mentor but because for the first time in my life I was being told I was good at anything. Rev. Cedric had in his hand what looked like a few typed pages. He fiddled with them a little, this was obviously proving difficult for him, then, ‘I want you to replace Ahluwalia on Annual Day, ‘ he said and quickly handed me the pages. ‘Can you stay after class to attend rehearsal?’ What I didn’t tell him was that I would have walked on fire and chewed broken glass to attend rehearsal. It never occurred to me to consult or commiserate with Ahluwalia, I felt no sympathy for him. He later went into the army I think, so he probably wasn’t devastated about losing the part to a junior. My self-esteem took a gigantic leap upwards and it was days before it stopped soaring. Annual Day came and went, my parents didn’t turn up. At the end, two special prizes were announced: Ashok Wahi ‘Best Actress’ and myself’Best Actor’. We were handed an envelope each, which on being torn open turned out to be empty. Sure that there was some mistake I opened and examined it repeatedly; maybe I’d missed a trick somewhere, maybe the hundred buck note had gotten stuck to the side. No, it was well and truly empty, but even that did not dampen my spirits, and in the time it took me to cycle home and eat a cold solitary dinner, I had decided that acting was what I was born to do. No way was anything going to keep me from doing it for the rest of my life. Even the prospect of some day having to share this