Slightly ahead of Mandi House is a little park, one of those small neighbourhood parks cosily tucked inside a colony, surrounded by houses. This girl was my junior from NSD, studying in the first year while I was in the third year. By then, everybody around me had a girlfriend. I was already about twenty-two and had never had a serious relationship in my life. So I was feeling super depressed. I was friends with her and asked her to come to the park with me. She agreed. There we were, with nothing to say to each other, while my young male mind was racing, wanting to hold her and kiss her. We sat in complete silence for a long time. Nothing happened.
‘Yaar, bore ho gayee tere saath, Nawaz (Nawaz, you are making me bored),’ she suddenly said, breaking the silence as quietly as a cat might have.
I was taken aback. Then I thought she wanted me to do something. My mind, ruled by hormones and desires, mistook her complaint of boredom for something else altogether. Without thinking I placed my hand on hers, with a lot of love and respect. She reacted as if hit by a powerful jolt of electric current and immediately removed her hand. ‘What is this!’ she demanded. I was so shocked myself but trying to play it cool, I smiled and said, ‘Kuch nahin. Haath hai mera.’ (Nothing! It is just my hand.)
‘But it is illegal!’ she said.
The moment she uttered the word ‘illegal’, I stopped breathing. Her reaction shocked me like a gunshot in a silent fog. I went into a state of pure panic. What if she filed an FIR at the police station against me? What if? After all, I had done something ‘illegal’, but of course, I did not know it was illegal. Otherwise obviously, I would not have done it. Fear soared out of my orifices like smoke gushing out of a factory’s chimney. And I began to cry like a child, afraid of something he had done but did not understand.
There were other incidents too, though a little less childish and more corrupt. Later in Mumbai, and still without girls by the way, I told a former batchmate, ‘Main aapke saath sex karna chahta hoon.’ (I want to have sex with you.) I’m lucky she did not kick me in the balls. Today, of course, I am ashamed, but you see, we came from the village and we had no tameez (etiquette) about how to talk to girls. All of this freedom we saw of the modern women was scandalous and our narrow minds would think, ‘Oh, if this girl smokes, uske saath kuch bhi kiya ja sakta hai’ (you can do anything with her). Of course, it was utterly wrong and awful! But I did not know that then; it was only later that I learnt to respect women and their freedom.
Anurag found these incidents hilarious but he was also touched by their pure innocence. And so he translated the park episode of my life into the famous ‘permissun’ scene in Wasseypur.
I’m quite light on my feet, or so Anurag says. But during the fight scene in Wasseypur, even he did not want me to remove the protective wire from around my body. But it was hindering me and so I removed it and climbed all over freely, as freely as a cat, as the real Faisal might have done. How did I get that kind of confidence? I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s from this aura around Anurag. Whenever I’m around him, I’m flooded with an enormous sense of confidence.
We are warriors, fighting this battle together, to make a certain type of cinema, staying as true to our craft as possible. So for Gangs of Wasseypur II, Anurag wanted to shoot on the streets because it’s so much more alive, bustling and real compared to a studio set. But to shoot on the streets, you cannot shoot with stars—people would get star-struck and the flow of the shooting would stop. So he took the risk of shooting with unknown faces, which was a quite a gutsy decision because financiers obviously prefer to back movies with big stars. So UTV backed out but Anurag didn’t back out from his decision.
He had become great friends with Shweta Bhardwaj, an actress who had auditioned for Dev D (which did not work out; she then went on to act in another film called Mission Istanbul.) One evening, when they were having dinner at her place, she randomly commented, ‘Kaaliye ke saath kya kar rahe ho?’ (What are you doing with this black guy?) Anurag left instantly, right in the middle of dinner. He was deeply hurt by her words. When a director believes in you like this, how can you not give him beyond your best?
‘Isne to Nawaz jaise ko star bana diya!’ People think that if Anurag could make this ugly-looking guy, Nawaz, a star, he can make every fair-skinned Punjabi wannabe hero into a star as well. A lot of this crowd continues to stalk Anurag.
What many people don’t know is that I was supposed to work with Anurag in Gulaal. We were both super excited about it. I was supposed to do the role of Bhati. The role required me to drive a jeep across Rajasthan. And so, promptly I enrolled in driving classes and mastered driving well before the shoot was to begin. I could barely control my emotions at the railway station where I was about to board a train to Jaipur for the shoot. The thrill of the role and the quenching of my endless thirst for work flooded every cell in my body with euphoria.
