Curtains at the Play

Sometime in 2011

It has been a long day – an early flight, followed by intense work – and I make it to the performing arts theatre just in time. I flop into a seat by the side door just as the lights dim. This is a weekday, the three short plays are in Hindi, have not been written by anyone famous and have no theatre stars or fetching reviews online, so, from the silhouettes of heads in front, the audience seems thin.

A couple of the usual announcements follow (‘No breaks. Each play of the duration of half-an-hour. Use your mobile phone and you will be hung upside down above a lion’s cage’…that sort of thing). I am hardly listening though, sending messages to friends I’d be meeting later that evening for dinner. The side-door to my immediate left opens and, in the darkness, I faintly notice a man being wheeled in by his assistant. The wheelchair is placed next to me and from the corner of my eye, I see the slumped silhouette of a senior citizen in a kurta-pyjama, his head half forward and cocked to one side, his mouth partly open.

The performance has just begun.

The stories are charming, commonplace and real, the language colloquial and the humour ready and simple, all of which make them happily engaging. Somewhere in the middle though, I hear a gentle snore from my left, not loud enough to annoy, yet hardly soft enough to ignore. This chap clearly did not pay the three hundred bucks I did! Even when he does not snore, he hardly seems to pay attention, for there is no movement of any sort. Not wanting to stare at his face to see if the eyes are open, I curb the urge and stay focused on the play.

When the final play ends, the audience stands up to applaud and the lights on stage come on. We cheer as the actors and the accomplished lady director take their bows and acknowledge gratitude to Prithvi Theatre for hosting the play. The lights brighten and, glancing to my left, I realise – after some initial difficulty – that, for the last couple of hours I have been sitting next to Shashi Kapoor.

The mind protests at once in confusion; it refuses to accept this image, choosing instead to rely on a cache of sepia-tinted, yet bright memories, of my favourite actor and the heart-throb of a million adolescents. Is this him? In that moment, I see the intensity of his performance in Kalyug – the words soft, the eyes expressive, the silence dignified – the starkness of Junoon, and of that one minute, just that minute, in Ijaazat that made all the difference. Of his skill at the masala stuff, led by Deewar, where he was always cut from a different cloth, a shade above, a class, shall we say, apart. Of a guy who always looked like a million bucks (give or take a couple of million). Of a guy with no attitude and an easy, fetching smile and charm. That was my Shashi Kapoor, wasn’t it?

I reluctantly walk slowly away, watching this figure from the corner of my eyes: an old man in the wheelchair, the visage – half-lidded eyes, drooping chin, unseeing eyes marked with disinterest, head unsteady and the slumping posture – only as unreal as a sepia-tinted figure of smoke in the mist.

That evening, though, at dinner, there is a warm feeling to know that I sat beside Shashi Kapoor for a couple of hours one memorable evening.

Shashi Kapoor

( March 18th1938 - December 4th 2017)