Naseeruddin Shah's memories of his friend and fellow actor Om Puri

We returned from vacation for our final year, to be informed that auditions would be on for the next production, a Kabuki play in Hindi, Ibaragi, to be directed by an expert from Japan. My awareness of this classical form was as immature as that of a 22-year-old drama student can be expected to be. We had never actually seen a Kabuki play but had been shown films of some performances.

It would be a stretch to perform like that, I knew, particularly with the vocal acrobatics required, but I felt more than confident that the big part in it would be mine. Even though I then had frequent laryngeal trouble, and had to often perform with a voice that was no more than a ghostly whisper, I was cocky to the core that if anyone could pull this off it had to be me. It did not occur to me that there were other actors too, not as showy as myself, who had been far more diligent in practising their craft than I had been.

Arriving at the school for the first read-through, we were told that only the students of acting would be cast. We, the students of direction, were to only observe and assist in the production. I was gutted and so was Jaspal, who had naturally assumed that with his vocal abilities, he would be a shoo-in. And who should get cast in the main part but Om Puri, also a classmate, who had very quietly persevered in self-improvement through the time he had been at NSD.

When the play was performed Om, for once cast as a flamboyant warrior, was a revelation. I was stuck doing production duties for this play I would have killed to act in, and could only watch him in wonder and envy. Despite intensely coveting the role, it was difficult not to be thrilled at the level of performance he had achieved. Something told me I could NOT have done what he did.

Om had always been a model, if somewhat stodgy, student and human being: completely virtuous, genuinely considerate, deeply compassionate, industrious, punctual, attentive, thoughtful; but had so far received attention because of his sweet temperament rather than for his acting. Now he had delivered a knockout performance, and I could see there was no magic formula responsible.

He was so astoundingly good because, quite simply, he had gone for broke and expended every ounce of his energy in preparation. Om continued to inspire me for a very long time. Even though I initially found his sincerity amusing and quite unnecessary — at complete variance with my own attitude — I finally began to see its virtues, and had to admit to myself that none of my own performances in the school productions could begin to approach Om’s achievement in Ibaragi.

Next morning Jaspal/Shah were in Alkazi’s office, insisting on a transfer to the acting course. We couldn’t bear to not be acting in any more plays, and that is what now seemed likely, with direction students normally assisting with the lighting and backstage jobs. We wanted to act, at least I did and I suppose Jaspal did as well.

I find it hard to remember who was the mover behind all these decisions we took in tandem and who the follower. Alkazi was reluctant to let us go, reiterating time and again that we would benefit more by doing the course in direction. And he was right: we would have learnt more but, hell, we didn’t want to learn, we wanted to act.

As a last resort kind of thing to assure me I had a future as a director, he gave me a classroom assignment to direct Acts One and Two of Doll’s House, with Om acting in it, and even though I acquitted myself reasonably well as director, with Jaspal as stage manager (it was incidentally the first of two more later unsuccessful attempts at directing Om), it did not deter me from resuming my pleas to rejoin the acting course, a request Alkazi finally had to grant.

***

Om Puri so far had appeared in a few supporting parts in movies, including Sparsh. He wasn’t having an easy time but was enterprising enough to get a play and a company, Majma, together. His first attempt, a Hindi translation of Govind Deshpande’s Udhwastha Dharmshala, received tremendous acclaim and Om began to be known in his own right.

The play, done mainly with raw young actors and put together under great financial strain, also inaugurated the Prithvi Theatre which, now complete, opened with great fanfare. I played a small part in UD for the opening show and various other walkons as and when required, as did Ratna. 

Meanwhile Benjamin Gilani and I had found a lot of common ground during Junoon, and had launched, at his insistence, into Waiting for Godot, a play I had had an allergy to since having ploughed through it on Zahida apa’s insistence in Aligarh, and against which I had written a vituperative essay which nearly got me failed at NSD — a play I would never ever have attempted but for Benjamin.

When, after struggling with it for about a year, we finally felt it was stage-worthy, Om generously offered us the Majma banner for the opening show of Godot on July 29, 1979. It was only later that Ben formed the Motley company, which survives to the present day, as does the production which finally began to make sense to us once we stopped trying to understand it.

Om’s blazing salt-of-the-earth intensity finally caught the eye of many a filmmaker but it was Govind Nihalani who first recognised the magnetic simplicity in his screen presence and cast him in Aakrosh as the anguished silent Adivasi, wrongly accused of his wife’s murder, Om’s definitive film performance. I was to play the defence lawyer and Amrish Puri the prosecutor.

I got barely a day’s break between arriving in Bombay and leaving for Alibag for this shoot. It was a wrench coming from the gentle dreamlike world of Sparsh to this hard-edged portrayal of small-town corruption and its constant progenitors — lust and politics.

***

There was a survey conducted once which uncovered the disconcerting statistic that on an average five hundred young boys/girls arrive in Bombay every day to become actors. No one has ever researched the number of moneyed people who arrive here every day, hoping to produce films to multiply their investments and of course get photographed with the star, preferably the female star, but my guess is that that number too would be staggering.

Among that legion was a multi-millionaire shipping magnate from Hong Kong who decided he wanted to be a movie mogul as well. While staying in the wings he had quietly financed the film Shaayad with a frontman acting as producer, and having tested the waters and decided they were to his taste, he had now decided to make a big noise to herald his arrival in the film world. He wanted his pictures in the glossies, he had had enough of being invisible and shelling out piddling amounts to make "Naseeruddin Shah type of serious movies"; he now wanted to scatter the stuff about and sign up the biggest stars he could buy, to appear in thoroughly commercial fare.

"Money can get anything done" being his motto, the overambitious gent formed a film production company and in four full-page ads in Screen announced four medium-to-large movies, all four to be shot simultaneously, at least two with big-name directors and each with a different star-cast. The only common factor was the presence, in a leading capacity, of Om Puri in each of them; in fact one of the films was to star Rajesh Khanna and Om Puri. The fourth, never made, was also announced thus, "Production no. 4 starring Om Puri".

Govind Nihalani had not spotted Om yet, he was not really known, so many assumed that this was a new leading lady being introduced. By the time these films got under way Om was gainfully employed elsewhere and to my knowledge, he didn’t actually appear in any of them.

I did, in one of the three, an adaptation of Oliver! and I did a bad imitation of Ron Moody’s Fagin, one of my favourite performances. Amjad Khan played Bill Sikes and this film did to the Carol Reed classic what many Hindi films have done and continue to do to classics to this day. Though, as in the original, the film’s title was the child’s name (Kanhaiya) the ads screamed out Amjad Khan as Kanhaiya, a marketing ploy that fooled no one. The mainstream audience didn’t know who I was but Amjad bhai’s massive fan following also decided to give this one a miss.

The other two films produced by the company, starring some marquee names, plodded along for a few years then also died of natural causes at the box office. The shipping magnate, after being repeatedly taken to the cleaners by the film industry’s charlatans, was barely heard of after that and I have a bad feeling about those ships.

Still fancying myself to be leading-man material I initially turned down the part Ketan Mehta asked me to do in his gorgeous allegorical film of a folk tale, Bhavni Bhavai, but I hadn’t anticipated his persistence. I didn’t want to do it mainly because I wasn’t looking forward to a repeat of the kind of runins we’d had when he had directed The Lesson for us.

In that production, apart from one stunning visual idea for the set— four gigantic books suspended by invisible wires from the four corners of the stage — he had had precious little by way of nutsand-bolts help to give the actors and would constantly resort to unfathomable abstractions instead of tangible guidance:

"a spiral turn is needed here" , "you must show the character’s contradictions" and so forth; or when at a loss he would tauntingly toss the ball into my court: "Tum actor ho yaar kuch jadoo karo, kuch khelo!" I would be halfway up the wall, and our friendship was seriously endangered by hysterical arguments occurring too often for my liking in the course of rehearsal.

I seriously thought I’d never work with the man again, and now he wanted me to play a bumbling Raja in a film that would be seen by many more people than had seen The Lesson. I had an immediate premonition that this film would work but the thought of playing a foolish character was not appetizing. I opted for a shorter, heroic role but Ketan would have none of it and coerced me into agreeing to do the Raja and am I glad he did.

I look back on it with great affection and pride, not least because the splendid look of the film, for which Archana Shah and Mira Lakhia must get complete credit, belies its impossibly small budget. It was produced by a cooperative of which I was a member and everyone in the unit treated it as their own baby: no one in the unit was paid a penny, some of us even travelled to the location at our own expense, but despite it all, a group of friends mucking in together to create something, with the odds heavily stacked against them, created such joyous energy that all of us who acted in it, and are still alive, look back on it with great affection.

This film also helped illustrate what Mr Brecht had been saying all this time and which so far had made little impression on me who was dying to "become" every character I ever played. Ketan’s vision for the acting in the film was that it should be like the behaviour of the characters in the Asterix comics, which on reading the delightful script made complete sense.

Om was cast as the Untouchable who, in the best tradition of fairy tales, discovers and rears the baby prince. Benjamin was playing the prime minister; Suhasini Mulay on whom I had had a crush ever since Bhuvan Shome was the Queen; another dear friend, Mohan Gokhale, was the abandoned Prince; and Smita was his love interest. Another pivotal part, the Chorus, who narrates the story mostly in song, had not yet been cast.

Ketan dearly wanted BV Karanth, something of a guru to him, to play it but Karanthji was unavailable and so crisis Number One hit us on the first day itself. A brainstorming session was held to discuss possibilities and inevitably Jaspal’s name cropped up — he could sing, reasoned Ketan, and working would do him good. So he was informed and called to the location, something I had major misgivings about but was assured we would be kept apart, and in any case we were never in the same frame together. When he arrived for the shoot, staying true to his current form he proved impossible to handle, and had to be asked to leave.

The man for all seasons, Om Puri, who couldn’t sing a note, took over and played both the narrator as well as one of the chief protagonists. I desisted from any I told you so’s because I was really disappointed.

I knew that Jaspal had blown this as well; he wouldn’t now have another chance to redeem himself. This was the last chapter in which I was to figure in his long and extremely sad story. We never met at the location, and subsequently I had no more direct contact with him, just kept hearing bizarre, disturbing and often contradictory reports about his doings first in Delhi and then Patiala, whence apparently he returned when Ketan’s misguided plan to help him backfired.

(Excerpted with permission from Penguin India)