During the nikah ceremony, the mullah asks three separate times, ‘Qubul hai?’ (Do you accept?) The persons getting married are supposed to reply each time with a ‘qubul hai’ three times. However, I blurted out rapidly, ‘Qubul hai! Qubul hai! Qubul hai!’ in one seamless, breathless go. Everybody broke into peals of laughter, including the mullah himself. My nervousness was that obvious. A little later, when photographs were being clicked and I was asked to place my hand on my wife’s shoulder, my shyness became apparent because I could not show intimacy publicly. I still cannot, I am a very private and shy person. In the wedding photo, my hand is on Anjali’s shoulder but there is a clear gap between our bodies, a formal aloofness—more like in an arranged marriage—that reflected nothing about the fact that we had had a live-in relationship and knew each other in and out well before the marriage.
Approximately three years after our wedding, Anjali decided to rename herself. She called herself Aaliya Siddiqui. And so did I. And so did the world.
Apart from that though, nothing changed. The fights continued and she would take off to her home in Jabalpur. During those few breaks between my shoots and her return, we were in a rush to plan a baby because we were not getting any younger. It did help too, because once we had children, she was too smitten with them to leave. The responsibility of bringing up children also happens to be always more on the woman. She never went back like earlier. Now she would only go for holidays.
Going back to the wise old people of Budhana, they say the first few years in a marriage are always full of trials. It takes six to seven years for things to cool down and peace to settle in. Call it habit or maturity but this is a formula that I have seen work in many marriages around me. We are peaceful today. But I have never been able to give her the time that is her right. After Gangs of Wasseypur II released, I was deluged with scripts, 270 of them to be precise. Obviously, I did not accept most of them. But I got dangerously busy, so busy that we barely spent any time together. She realizes that it is work which is keeping her husband away from her but it also provides us with every material comfort possible. But she is human. Sometimes she still gets rather cranky and throws fits of irritation, which are completely valid.
The habits Ammi had inculcated in us remain deeply etched. Sometimes Aaliya has to bear their side effects. We still wear our shoes everywhere. Aaliya has requested us many, many times to remove them before we enter our house for reasons of hygiene. Our children are small, they often play on the floor. So the floor must be as clean as possible. But somehow, all of us tend to forget. It is so bad that she had once imposed a fine of Rs 500 per person. Faizi has ended up violating this rule so many times—during one of his short visits he had to pay his bhabhi Rs 1000 within a week. Shamas has already paid over Rs 2500 within a week. Hopefully, we will give up this trait before the kids grow up.
Today I am more unavailable to Aaliya than ever before. I shoot non-stop, back-to-back. Part of me aches for a break to holiday with the family. Part of me does not want to take a break, after those years of struggle. Moreover, the roles are too tempting to pass up. More than ever before, I am now beginning to understand the expectations that people have from me to portray each character in a certain way. People have a certain belief that Nawaz will act in a certain way. This kind of faith is a massive responsibility. I continue to do my best; now my focus is solely on work; my focus on my family is practically zero. I leave home early in the morning for the office from where I go off to shoots. I return home close to midnight by when my wife and the kids are already asleep. But what can I do? As the roles get tougher, so much more is required of me. Recently I played the author Saadat Hasan Manto in a biopic. Manto said things during his era which even today progressive people will not say openly. For the very first time, I was given a character whose sensibilities matched mine. This was incredibly liberating. There is so much bursting inside me that I have wanted to say for a long time; through Manto I could finally say it all.
And then I had to simultaneously go moonwalking and do difficult dance steps in Munna Michael. How opposite these two worlds were! It took a Herculean effort to pull myself out of one to enter the other. I relate so much to Manto. But there was a lot of fun in the dance film which I would have hated to miss out on. In the middle of all this, I struggled to make time for family, for Aaliya.
17Shora, My Miracle
Like life’s mysteries go, I don’t exactly know how or why or even when the hunch came to me that our child growing in Aaliya’s belly would be a girl. Just as mysteriously, I decided her name would be Shora. If
