This is how the Mumbai monsoons are: they take over every centimetre of the city and every living and dying pore of its beings. I could not have asked for a better accessory than this weather. The gloom outside matched the gloom inside me perfectly. If my struggle to find work was akin to a mountain, then it wasn’t the Everest or even the one Dashrath Manjhi, the Mountain Man, had fought, but the one that Sisyphus had battled against. Or at least that was how it felt then. To put it mildly, I was down in the dumps.
We were three of us—Ashraful Haque, Rajpal Yadav and me—all friends, all actors, all united in the same quest as everyone in Mumbai: chasing the elusive rainbow, pursuing our slippery dreams, in order to become successful actors. Anurag Kashyap knew Ashraf quite well. But he was actually there to counsel Rajpal Yadav, who was fed up of waiting for that elusive Godot we call success and had decided to leave Mumbai. Anurag was telling him: ‘Don’t worry. We will figure something out.’ I had actually been chasing Anurag for work. In fact, I was chasing anybody who could give me work. Those were endless, anxious days of desperation. But even in that brief meeting of a few minutes, there was something in Anurag’s eyes, something about his demeanour, that struck me. I don’t quite know to this day what it was, but kuch tha (something was there)! It was that something which told me that this guy here in front of you, Nawaz, will give you work one day. Pukka!
As always, Anurag wore many hats, which then included that of a casting director’s—that meant knowing actors, something he knows anyway. He kind of knew me, as part of the NSD crowd. He had seen my scene from Sarfarosh—where I play a wretch who gets beaten up by cops, led by Aamir Khan, during an interrogation in a police station and pleads in vain for mercy. But what he had no idea about was that this character was played by me. In fact, he was certain that the casting guys had brought in a real-life criminal, a petty thief perhaps, to play that role. So imagine his shock when a fellow NSD actor informed him that this tiny role was actually played by a junior artiste called Nawaz.
What had blown Anurag away, as he later told me, was the fact that I had no screen presence at all. Zero! And therefore, it was only the character that could be seen on the screen, not the actor playing it. He could not believe such realism, which is why he had simply assumed that a small-time criminal, perhaps a petty real thief, had probably been cast as a junior artiste in Sarfarosh.
Anurag promised to cast me someday.
‘But why someday, why not now? Why not today?’ I begged. Remember I was desperate, capital letters DESPERATE!
He was actually casting for Shool then. And there was this teeny role of a junior artiste as a waiter taking orders from the characters played by Manoj Bajpai and Raveena Tandon. Anurag insisted that I not do the role. He believed in my acting more than I did and tried really hard to convince me. But my desperation had become a part of me, like a leg it propelled me forward.
I badly needed money, and any work, really, just about any work. The hunger of the soul and the hunger of the belly were both driving me mad. My madness pushed him into casting me, even as he was saying all the while, ‘Nawaz, mat kar, yaar! Nawaz, mat kar, yaar!’ (Nawaz, buddy, don’t do this! Don’t do this!)
Struggle—in our industry, this one simple word sums up lifetimes so simply, so nonchalantly, as if it’s just another word, just another thing. Like, say, a table, a wall or a biscuit. Those days, Anurag too was a struggler in the sense that he was struggling to make his own type of cinema. Yet, I continued to try to impress him, win him over, woo him, almost as if courting a prospective lover.
There was this famous play running those days called Tughlaq by the eminent playwright Girish Karnad. It had several powerful dialogues in it, which I learnt by heart. I asked Shamas to come with a tape recorder where we had recorded some dramatic music, timed perfectly to play in the background and amplify the impact of the speeches as I delivered them live. I had prepared this act especially for Anurag. I called him to an empty space in Juhu and delivered the speeches. And each time, Shamas—inconspicuous behind a door—would press play on the tape recorder for the music, or pause so that silence could play out, thereby magnifying the emotion being portrayed. It was not a normal audition; it was like a real performance, like you might see in a film that has been edited and is complete. It worked! Anurag was completely dazzled!
But it was only some years later that I finally got a role in one of Anurag’s movies. Gautam Kishanchandani cast me in Anurag’s Black Friday—the controversial film on the Bombay riots—in a major role. I was delighted and very impressed with the role. Anurag said that Aparna, the wife of his friend
