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

conviction with Baba didn’t appear too daunting, given the strength of my belief. Life suddenly seemed worthwhile. I had trouble getting to sleep that night, and still do every night after a theatre performance.



Back to their roots
    L ife went on apace, new Dilip Kumar films now appeared only once every few years instead of annually, much-loved Jawaharlal Nehru died, youthful John Kennedy got shot and Cassius Clay became King of the World by destroying mean old Sonny Liston. All this while my stock in the school was growing. I began to be known as ‘that actor’. People were actually taking the initiative to befriend me. I played a few cricket matches (actual ones) on the school team without doing anything spectacular. I started finding a leggy athlete from St Mary’s very attractive, she began smiling at me and we exchanged letters. Word quickly spread ‘Shah has a girlfriend yaar!’ I had not so much as brushed her hand with the back of mine but I was well and truly on the way to acquiring the ‘cat’ status I had so long yearned for.
    Debating was another field in which I found I could participate, and mostly bullshit my way through. My speeches, peppered with quotes from Shakespeare, were well memorized, thoroughly rehearsed and delivered with all the panache I had acquired at the feet of Mr Kendal. I invariably blustered my way to some prize or other but seldom did I know what I was talking about. Far from taking on the opponents over what they had said and providing a rebuttal I would just wittily, so I thought, mock ‘the worthy gentlemen on the other side’. While it all obviously went down very well with the judges because it made them laugh, it was not debate, it was elocution. This served me extremely well at the school, and later college, level but I was finally caught out a few years later in a national level debate at Baroda where, representing Aligarh University, I came away empty-handed despite having had the audience eating out of my hand. Neither acting nor debating would I have discovered had I stayed on in Sem. What a fortuitous coming together of energies this was: in a school founded in the memory of an eleventh-century monk who opposed William Rufus in Britain, in a town blessed by a Sufi saint from Iran, I was shown the right path by an Indian Jesuit priest who later quit the order. Before the year was out, Rev. Cedric had also done
The Bishop’s Candlesticks
in which I played the convict and a Christmas pageant where I was Pontius Pilate. I attempted coaxing him to try
Julius Caesar
next. He was reluctant.
    Even my relationship with the parents was somewhat on an even keel. Ammi, in any case, was always unconditionally supportive. She regarded me with a kind of detached amusement, making no attempt to get into my head apart from occasionally enquiring what was going on inside it. She never criticized, never chastised, I think that deep down somewhere she instinctively understood. Baba thought I was applying myself better, when all that had happened was that I was at last doing that which made sense to me. The tutors kept coming and going and receiving some credit for their efforts though all I remember of them was one smelt of horses, another had huge muscles and one had his name tattooed on his forearm.
    These were radio days. The Philips two-band Baba had bought in 1955 continued to serve him till his death, and on it he would listen to the news on the BBC or the Voice of America. He seemed to abhor music and wouldn’t tolerate any of us, except Babar Mamu who he doted on and had practically adopted, tuning in to Radio Ceylon or Vividh Bharati. Cricket commentaries were permitted but within tolerable limits. So of course, the moment he pedalled off to work at 8. 30 a. m. on the dot, wearing his hat (a sola topi for summers and a brown trilby for winters), I, already in school uniform and breakfasted, would wallow in film songs for the next half hour till it was time to go to school.