An Ordinary Life

room located a stone’s throw from the academy. Those days, Gomti Nagar was a developing part of Lucknow, sort of like Gurgaon, buzzing with the construction of posh, shiny buildings. Next to this colony of glass towers was an ancient little village, perhaps 200 years old, with its traditional houses. I lived in one of them. It was a magnificent little time warp of a place to live in. You just had to look at the nubile girls there or other people to know that they had all belonged to major nawabi families at one point. The splendour was gone, but royalty oozed out of them. I was fascinated by their lifestyles: the young people were not used to working for a living, nor were they inclined to do so. Instead, they happily lived off whatever income came in from their inheritance of lands, mango orchards, etc. They would simply hang out for hours doing nothing; they had turned hanging out into a profession and a lifestyle. While their aristocracy had faded and their grandeur had died, the bloated egos that came with being blue bloods lived on.

One of our teachers asked us to study their lifestyles, as it would come in handy for a play in the future. I did as I was told. I went to the house of a chota-mota (small-time) nawab. But you could tell from his demeanour that in all likelihood his ancestry was of a powerful nobility. I clanged the heavy latch on the huge door of his haveli. A big, well-built, tall guy wearing a white kurta-pyjama opened the door, nursing a toothpick in his teeth, in archetypal nawabi manner. (They had a habit of clearing titbits of gosht (meat, especially of goat) from between their teeth. The idea was to show off that they were so prosperous that they ate such lavish meals every day.) This dude was obviously pretending. The reality was that he had eaten dal, the common man’s pulse. Apparently, he could not afford meat or poultry, he had to stick to plant protein. But he could still afford toothpicks and pull off a facade.

These tiny nuances are what I noticed. Soon after, I happened to watch Satyajit Ray’s spectacular Shatranj ke Khiladi (The Chess Players). The protagonists, Mirza Sajjad Ali (played by Sanjeev Kumar) and Mir Roshan Ali (Saeed Jaffrey) are typical Lucknawi nawabs who do nothing but play chess all day while smoking their pipes and munching on their paans. Their king, Wajid Ali Shah (Amjad Khan), is a gentle, vulnerable poet, a patron of the arts but a dedicated sybarite as well. The addiction of the two noblemen to chess seems utterly charming, though it is also sheer madness. As the world around them falls apart, they don’t give a damn about anything but their game. How marvellously has Ray captured the nuances of the nawabs! And what correct nuances he chose! Beautiful! That was when I knew that the world may go anywhere, even to hell, but the nawabs of Lucknow, even the crumbling ones I saw myself, would remain nawabs in their own little worlds with their large egos.

Anamika Haksar was among our illustrious teachers. She came from a prominent family; her father, I believe, was behind the Haksar Committee report on culture. She had studied at the renowned Moscow Art Theatre in Russia, an institute idolized by theatre folk all over the world. As if this achievement was not luminous enough, she had also studied from the grandmaster Konstantin Stanislavski himself. She had done a play based on Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat. While she was explaining it to us, her craft showed us St Petersburg and Moscow as if we were really there. With her performance, for the very first time in my life I became aware of Russian culture: of the houses snowed in, of samovars, but most of all the piercing cold. She had a very visual art form. Her own work and her teaching were about strong visual performances with very little dialogue. She made close to half a dozen people play the same character as an experiment. After learning from such masters I too was beginning to understand a little bit about acting.

One of her favourite exercises was to give us something meagre, like two lines, which we had to deliver within a relatively lengthy time period of, say, ten minutes. How you did it was up to you. Perhaps you could start with one line, hold a long pause and then say the second line at the very end. How to connect the two lines through this lengthy silence was something we had to figure out ourselves. Or you could create and hold on to an elongated silence and say both the lines together at the end. The meaning, the subtexts, and all that was going on between the two lines were of paramount importance. And that is how I learnt for the very first time about ‘essence’, from such teachers who were masters of their craft.

Anamika Haksar came to India after spending eight years in Russia. Her complexion, which was already very fair, seemed to have lightened even further during those years. I had never seen anybody that fair before. She pretty much looked Caucasian. She was beautiful and chubby, the latter quality not something that boys tend to stereotypically fall for. I had a massive crush on her. She did like me, but strictly in the way a teacher likes a good student.

Several years later, she married a random guy who was a few years my senior. I was completely baffled. Here, I had put her on a pedestal; she was the Anamika Haksar. The one who had studied at the Moscow Arts Theatre. The one who had studied under Stanislavski. The one who made us do these mind-blowing exercises. The teacher who was so intelligent that often I could not comprehend all that she taught. How could this brilliant woman marry this good-for-nothing guy? It