Abbu visited me often at my university, mostly carrying a lot of stuff. Sometimes he brought a quintal of wheat or lentils, sometimes sacks of luscious mangoes or the choicest of other fruits that were in season. Anybody else might have considered lugging such heavy loads along such a long way laborious but not a parent. For Abbu, these were treasures for his child, so he carried them with joy. He travelled by bus; we all did those days as that was the only option for us. He carried the heavy sacks on his head as well as bags weighing around 10 kg on his shoulders and arms. In Budhana, of course, some young chap would load it into the bus for him. He was a big man in Budhana and there was simply no way the villagers would let him touch, leave alone carry, any luggage. Then, when he had to change buses at the depot in Muzaffarnagar, Abbu picked all of it up by himself and walked.
I had that arrogant ignorance of the young. I was too young to realize just how hard he had worked to bring these treats all the way from Budhana. I lived in Kankhal, a posh part of Haridwar, and did not want Abbu to come there because, in my young, arrogant eyes, he did not look presentable in that milieu. He looked like a villager; I was slightly ashamed. What if my friends or others saw him and mocked me? I greeted him at the threshold of the house itself, not letting him enter inside for fear of what others might say. He would unload his goodies with a smile, showing no signs of fatigue, and ask how I was, how my studies were. Then we would say our goodbyes and he would leave.
(It took me many years, almost eight years, to realize how awfully I had behaved with my father. How disgusting I was! Then I would want him to be next to me all the time. And I did keep him near me later, well until his death in 2015. By then the left side of his body had become paralysed as a result of a fall in the bathroom. A man that active, who could lug treasures to the remotest of places for the sake of his children, was unable to move for six to seven months until he finally called it quits.)
I got my bachelor’s degree in science (chemistry) from there. But it was not so simple. I did study, but I wanted something else out of life. I had no clue what it was. For several foggy years, I navigated through those fumes of confusion. I was lost, I did not know what my path was.
Nevertheless, just like jeeps drive through blinding mountain fog and then suddenly the fog lifts with the elegant ease of a veil without anybody having to do anything, so did my confusion. But even when I was engulfed by the fog, I had not sat still. I was doing what I had to do, just like the jeep drivers. I put my brand-new degree to use. I got a job in Baroda as a chemist at a petrochemical factory. Then somebody casually mentioned that there was a dramatics school there at Maharaja Sayajirao University. Something about it resonated and I applied. When, how, where and what my confusion evaporated into, I have no idea. I did not realize then that this would become my life’s path.
My experience in theatre was zero but somehow I got admission. I held my day job and in the evenings, I did plays. All the plays were in Gujarati. I barely knew the language, and picked up whatever was needed for my dialogues. Somebody then suggested that since I was most comfortable in Hindi, perhaps I should move to the National School of Drama in Delhi. But NSD required you to have done a certain number of plays already. I believe it was a dozen. Then somebody else suggested—you see, many of my life’s critical decisions have been made due to ‘somebody’s’ suggestions—that I try Bhartendu Natya Akademi (BNA) in Lucknow instead. It was a stellar institute as well and accepted theatre virgins.
I was fortunate to get accepted in the first attempt itself. In Lucknow, I found a place to live with fellow actors and spent one and a half years there for my diploma, during which time my blank acting résumé had been filled with ten to twelve impressive plays and that met NSD’s requirements. I still remember the first play I performed in front of an audience. It was Khamosh! Adalat Jari Hai, the Hindi version of the renowned Marathi courtroom drama Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe (Silence! The Court Is in Session) by Vijay Tendulkar.
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I was about twenty-six when I saw this famous play which changed my life—it changed the way I viewed life, the way I lived life. It was called Galileo and directed by a German director named Fritz Bennewitz. I did not even know what I was looking for but then I found this epiphany and realized that this was all I had been looking for my whole life and did not even know it.
Both BNA and NSD have two wings—one that houses the academy or the school where dramatics is taught, and the other, the repertory wherein professional actors, most of whom have graduated from the adjacent school, perform professional theatre, which is viewed by the public by buying tickets. Bennewitz, who was among our several brilliant visiting faculty, would come down and teach us about the techniques and plays of masters like Shakespeare, Jerzi Grotowski, Chekhov, Russian styles, and so on.
At the time, he was working