An Ordinary Life

merit. By now, I had gathered ample theatre experience, but I had missed the application time window. So I had to wait an entire year to apply again. In the meantime, I joined a small troupe in Delhi called Sakshi Theatre Group. By the time I arrived, its heyday was over, it was now a fading glory. But once upon a time, it was a big, well-known group, not unlike N.K. Sharma’s Act One, which was the biggest theatre group back then. Act One was the highlight of Delhi theatre. Many of today’s famous actors, like Manoj Bajpai, acted in both groups. Saurabh Shukla was Sakshi’s director at the time. He directed one or two of the plays that I featured in. I forget the name but one of them was a play by Badal Sarkar and my character was called Gora. Other big directors were also associated with Sakshi, like Vibhanshu Vaibhav and KK (not the actor, although both the director and his namesake actor seem to have disappeared).

Theatre filled up my soul but it ignored my belly which remained empty. I had no choice but to get a day job. There was an opening for a watchman’s position at a toy establishment. Its head office, a tiny one, was in Delhi’s Shahdra where they were interviewing candidates, who, if selected, would be working in the National Capital Region. The main criterion for selection was the ability to produce a deposit of Rs 3000. I got selected and was posted in Noida. I took up lodging close by, in Lakshmi Nagar. I’d leave early in the morning for my chowkidar duty. After wrapping up work in the evening, I would take a bus directly to Mandi House to rehearse for plays. Rehearsals began roughly between five and six in the evening and went on often until ten at night. Then I would return to my rented room in Lakshmi Nagar to rest and then repeat the routine day after day. I lived this double life for close to a year.

I should not complain but who doesn’t complain about the scalding midday sun, even if it is a daily thing? My job required me to stand. Watchmen have to look alert, right? They must appear like they are diligently keeping a watch. Otherwise, what’s the point of them being there? I understood this and tried to comply with diligence, although in the end the sun defeated me and I sought refuge from its harshness by sitting on a chair every now and then. Often, I’d doze off, tired due to my hectic routine which left little room for rest. They gave me two warnings, and I tried to mend my ways. But I was burnt by the sun and exhaustion, so I kept scooting off to a chair in the shade and taking naps. The third time I was fired. It did not matter; my heart was in theatre. What mattered though was the deposit. It had resulted from my mother’s painstaking sacrifice. Ammi had pawned her jewellery yet another time so that one of her babies could take yet another baby step. How I chased the owners, but they did not return my deposit.

* * *

First BNA, then Sakshi: now nobody could push me aside for lack of dramatic experience. This time I applied to NSD on time and luckily got through in the first attempt itself. Home to some of the greatest actors of the country, it taught me everything about my craft. It is an unparalleled powerhouse of talent. Even today, it is bursting with actors who are way better than me. And the teachers! Every one of them was and remains a genius. No amount of praise does them justice.

It so happened that Anamika Haksar became my teacher at NSD as well. What can I say! The ways of coincidence and chance are cryptic—there is no point in trying to decipher them. The plays she did here though were of a different style from the ones at BNA. These had a great deal of absurdity and experimentation, which people did not always understand. She made us do a great deal of scene work at NSD. So we played out scenes of difficult plays or famous ones like Hamlet’s or Shylock’s speeches. But her exercises never ceased to amaze me.

Incidentally, my first kiss happened in NSD, that too on stage. By the way, it was not on the lips but on the cheek of my co-star Geetanjali, who is the wife of the excellent actor Atul Kulkarni. We were enacting Anton Chekhov’s last play, The Cherry Orchard, and it was part of the role. That was how sad my love life was.

During the second year, a bunch of us blackies—among them, Nirmalda and Sunderlal Chhabra—became best friends at NSD. Apart from the darkness of our skin that is so maligned in our country, the other thing that bound us was the consequence of that skin: leave alone getting a date, girls did not even look at us. Our classmates with fairer skin, which is so celebrated in our country even in men, got girlfriends easily. We kaalas kept trying to follow in their footsteps but no matter what we did, we remained unsuccessful.

Once, after downing a fairly potent dose of delicious bhang, one of us blackies lost it. The cannabis had worked its charm on us as well but not as strongly as it had done on him. So we had retained enough of our senses to know that this guy would do something ‘interesting’, so we followed him. He did not disappoint, forget disappoint, he shocked the daylights out of us. This mild-mannered, shy boy turned into a lascivious beast who began to touch the campus girls inappropriately. Our intoxication wore off almost instantly! Most of his victims that day happened to be girls from Kathak Kendra, a dance school. The girls ran helter-skelter screaming in panic that this man had gone mad. Some of them