The shooting of Miss Lovely commenced. Suzanne used to accompany me there. Then came the day when her visa expired and she needed to return to New York to sort it out. She was gone for many months. One day, while we were shooting a dance scene, something happened to my co-star Niharika Singh. When the director said, ‘Cut!’, she quietly rushed to her vanity van and stayed there. Something seemed to have happened to her. She was suddenly cold, went out of her way to maintain a distance from me and began to keep mum. I was puzzled. What was wrong with her? What had happened? She used to be friendly, social and talk quite a bit. I thought it was best to ask her what had happened and so I did, not once, not twice, but several times, for several days. She responded that nothing had happened. I silenced my curiosity. I simply urged her to talk, be more social, that it was not healthy to be so quiet. After some days she began to. I invited her over for a home-cooked meal, a mutton dish which was my speciality. She politely agreed and came over. The dish I had made for her turned out to be absolutely terrible. But she was too well mannered to say so. Not only did she eat everything that was on her plate, but she praised it as well.
‘Now you come to my house, Nawaz. I will cook mutton for you,’ she said warmly.
For the very first time I went to Niharika’s house. I rang the doorbell, slightly nervous. When she opened the door, revealing a glimpse of the house, I was speechless with amazement. A hundred, or so it seemed, little candles flickered beautifully. She wore soft faux fur, looking devastatingly gorgeous, her beauty illuminated even more in the candlelight. And I, being the lusty village bumpkin that I am, scooped her up in my arms and headed straight for the bedroom. We made passionate love. And just like that, out of the blue, I began a relationship with Niharika Singh, a relationship which I did not know then would last for almost one and a half years.
During the early days I wanted to impress her. I was a struggler but by then I had managed to get a car, a second-hand one, but a car nevertheless. She lived in Malad, I lived in Yari Road. There was this time when she had to come to Yari Road for some work. I told her that I would fetch her in my car. I decked myself up in my best clothes, sprinkled cologne and drove off to her place with a song in my heart. She sat inside, we drove off and bam! In the middle of the way, the cranky old car decided to break down. Since then, she blatantly said she would not sit in my car because it was not to be trusted, she would go in her own car instead.
Such last-minute setbacks had become a pattern for me from all ends. My love life had become a Siamese twin of my work life. I worked so diligently on getting girls and films. A momentum would build up and then, bam, lady luck would slap me on the face in both cases. I would be selected for a role, the costumes would be finalized and I would be flying on cloud nine that now I will become an established actor, and then, just like that, out of nowhere, would come a phone call cancelling my part or me in that role, right at the very last minute. I wondered why this happened to me. I still do when I look back.
Anyway, coming back to the story, in the meantime, emails from Suzanne started coming. ‘Why are you not mailing me, Nawaz? What’s wrong?’ I did not respond, I did not have the courage to. I trusted my silence would convey what needed to be conveyed. When I was checking my inbox one day, Niharika happened to see one of her emails.
‘Who is this?’ she inquired.
‘You know very well who it is,’ I said. ‘It’s Suzanne.’
‘Wo-ow! It’s still going on between you two! Amazing!’ Niharika thundered in anger. ‘It is wrong. I hope you know that.’
‘No, Niharika, nothing is going on between us. Sometimes her emails come, that’s all. Slowly she will realize that Nawaz is not interested and she will stop emailing,’ I explained softly.
‘No, Nawaz! You must maintain clarity,’ she said.
‘All right! I will email her clearly then,’ I said.
‘No, you won’t. So I will email her,’ she said sternly.
From that day, Niharika began to send emails to Suzanne from my email address. She would type, ‘I cannot continue with you . . .’ and sign off as me. Imagine the shock for Suzanne. She would send heartbreaking replies like: ‘What happened, Nawaz? Please tell me, Nawaz! . . . I am crying, Nawaz! Tell me, please.’ It was absolutely awful. I simply could not endure it! It was as if she was screaming, crying out aloud helplessly in unbearable pain.
It was apparent that
