It was such a simple decision, but it was a life-turning moment. We always have a choice. Always.
Luckily, the summer vacation ended and with it my torture. The old routine returned and I began walking to school again. Among the things on the route was the very shop I loathed. Firoz now had a new boy, Rashid, to help him, one who was obviously smarter and more adept at the job. He could count instantly like a calculator. He could find things instantly. When Bhai Firoz would see me pass by, he would holler loud and clear, ‘Nawaz, come here. Nawaz, come here. Come have some chai, boy.’ I had no choice but to go to him. Needless to say, the tea he had called me for would never arrive. (But now that I have, he asks me for selfies.)
Often, there would be a customer who was being attended to. My cousin did not leave a single opportunity to bully me. He would praise the new hire in comparison to the fool that was me. ‘Look, how quickly the new boy can count change and return. Look, how nicely he stocks shelves and knows exactly what is where. Look at his efficiency,’ he would go on. ‘Not like some fools we had in the past. Look and learn. Look and learn.’ Sometimes, he would make it seem to the customer that he was talking about a third person who was absent, but represented all the good-for-nothings of a certain generation. Sometimes, he would directly point at me and narrate to the client, who was delighted with the great service he was getting, how the new boy was so competent and this boy here, meaning me, was a total loser.
Perhaps it was meanness, his bullying. Perhaps it was the fact that I was at the brink of adolescence, which is a very sensitive and impressionable age to be at. Perhaps it was just fate. But I am grateful for that painful episode, grateful that I was able to alchemize it. That is to say, for the very same reasons that it worked, it very well might not have and consequently my life too could have been completely derailed.
10The Haunting Dream
I had a strange, recurring dream night after night after night for many years. What was most spooky about it was that each and every time I was stuck at the very same point, like one of those worn-out favourite audio cassettes or records which you know will play and then keep getting irritably stuck at a certain part of the song, every time. In the dream I was a timeless traveller who had journeyed on foot for a long, long time that seemed like forever. I was sweating and I was completely burnt out. So I’d then stop out of exhaustion, always at this one place where I was looking at a giant block of black, rocky mountains in front of me. Beyond them in the horizon lay a serene whiteness, beckoning, but I could not bring myself to take one more step.
It was only about three or four years later that I stopped being stuck and finally crossed those mountains. They looked different the moment I crossed them. You could not call them snow-capped. They were shiny with a sprawling whiteness that can only happen in a dream world. I could feel the nippy weather there. I could feel the joy.
In my waking life at the time, I did not know what I wanted to do. There was an aching desire to do something though. There would be newspaper snippets littered on the street, flying around in the wind at the level of the feet and ankles, as is the fate of rubbish. But I picked them up and read them ravenously as if hunting for something in them. This earned me a mild reputation as a nutcase in Budhana.
I was about sixteen at the time of this recurring dream and I had failed in the all-important tenth-standard exams. I was so disturbed that I ran away to Meerut and sought refuge at a friend’s house there. Meanwhile, everyone at home, especially Ammi, cried away in worry wondering where I had disappeared.
Fifteen days later, I returned home. ‘Why did you run away, Nawaz? Why?’ everyone asked in chorus. But I had no answer for them. ‘I want to leave Budhana. I want to leave.’ That’s all I told Ammi, almost weeping. I somehow finished my twelfth standard and soon went to Haridwar. But my heart was not in anything I did. This went on for seven, eight, nine years. I did not know what I wanted and went on living in a state of dazed search. And then, I happened to see a play in Delhi. I don’t remember the play, but something stirred inside me.
Later, I went to Baroda, Gujarat, to work in a petrochemical factory. During those months I watched a lot of plays and was even part of a crowd scene in one of the plays. That’s when somebody suggested that I go to Delhi since I loved plays so much. It was then that I stopped searching and figured that this would be what I would do with my life. But the thought of cinema never struck me. I thought I would only do theatre acting.
PART IIYOUTH
11Accidental Meanderings into Chemistry, Theatre and BNA
You know how those years are when you’re just exiting your teens and entering your twenties. Your friends are your world. You wear whatever they wear. You do whatever they do. Many of my friends were studying science. Therefore, I thought I might as well follow
