by Jerry Pinto
Once I asked him why and he said: ‘Leela, it’s like running a race. You see the end, and want to reach it, and till you are overtaken by the quagmire, you keep thinking the end is still in sight.’
Sahni was a perfect gentleman. But like many other perfect gentlemen, he was not above trying his luck. One day he dropped me home from the studios.
‘I think of you all the time,’ he said.
‘That’s kind of you,’ I said.
‘You are in my head,’ he said.
‘And how is your dear wife?’ I asked. I have found that this question generally manages to quench the libido of the perfect gentleman. It returns him to his suave self. But rejection also brings out a little imp.
Anuradha ends with me sweeping the floor, tears in my eyes. Balraj Sahni had other ideas. ‘Perhaps,’ he suggested to Hrishida, ‘She should say something like, “Get me a kilo of tomatoes from the market.”’ I knew where he was going with that one. Saying something like that would mean a reaction shot. It would shift the focus from Anuradha’s sacrifice to the doctor’s response. Luckily, Hrishida saw it too and told him he would think about it. I never had to ask for tomatoes and was grateful that I didn’t have to fight that one. Perhaps it was something to do with the fact that Hrishida was a mathematician. That showed in his cutting of the shots, which was precise and economical. It also showed in the logic in the exposition of his films. If the film was called Anuradha and the internal struggle was Anuradha’s against her circumstances, it seemed odd that it should end on a kilo of tomatoes and a reaction shot from the circumstances!
SEVEN
‘WHO AM I PLAYING, LEELA?’
I suppose word had spread that I was the kind of actress who wanted a script before she would sign on the dotted line. Of course, that was only metaphoric use because there were no proper contracts in those days, just a letter signed by the producer. I would be surprised if things are very different these days. So when R.K. Nayyar approached me, he told me that the film was based on William Saroyan’s Laughing Matter. But it soon turned out that they’d decided that the book was about jealousy and the film would also be about jealousy. I would not have been able to find that out earlier because there was no script. But by then, if someone told me that they had a story idea beyond ‘it is a love story, Madam, set in Kashmir’ or ‘it is a love story, Madam, with Shashi Kapoor’, I considered myself lucky and so I agreed to do Yeh Raste Hain Pyar Ke.
I told Nayyar that I would not pop up from behind a bush and take a spin in a spinney of trees.
‘Look, Leela,’ he replied, ‘if I told you to run around trees, you would do it tongue-in-cheek and it would show. That would ruin it.’
‘Quite right,’ I said and we got on fine after that. I was getting ready to play another wife when I got an urgent call. Anuradha had been sent to the Berlin Film Festival. Satyajit Ray met Hrishikesh Mukherjee there and asked him, ‘Where is she?’
Mukherjee was a little nonplussed. ‘Who?’
‘Your Anuradha. Where is Leela?’
And so I was given a day’s notice to fly to Berlin. I had a great time there, watching films and talking to all the interesting people who came to these festivals. Many of them were technicians and passionate about cinema in a way that few stars can be.
Hrishida then decided that it would be great fun for all of us to go to Paris. We were all short of cash but we went, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Sunil Dutt, Nargis and I. It was a pleasure for me to be back in the city that I had walked through as a child, led by my father’s friend, the architect. It was a pleasure simply to sit on a bench and watch lovers come and go and fight and make up near the Champs Elysées. But the men with me wanted a little bit of the high life so we went for a single meal to the George V, a very plush hotel. I had warned them that it would be expensive and ordered myself a frugal salad. Hrishida was busy running his finger down the right side of the menu and finally arrived at what he wanted to order. It was, as far as he could make out, the cheapest thing on the menu.
‘This,’ he said, pointing it out to the waiter.
The waiter inclined his snooty tête in the direction of the menu. Then a look of bewilderment began to spread over his face like a sauce over a pudding. He turned to me.
‘Seulement les curedents de porc-épic?’
Hrishida had ordered porcupine quills, which were sold as elegant toothpicks.
We went to versailles and I strolled in the gardens as the men wandered around the palace. When they had had enough, and were ready for lunch, I did what I have always done. Ask one of the people in the town where they would eat. I was directed this time to a small restaurant where we had a lunch of wild hare in mustard sauce, a house red and a salad. I did not eat the hare—I had had a rabbit as a pet—but the sauce was superb. The husband and wife team who ran the restaurant did all the work. She did the cooking and he maintained a kitchen garden and had a permit to shoot game. There was an apricot tart to follow, which was perfect. It was one of the best meals I had ever eaten.
Sunil Dutt asked if I could go to Spain and scout locations for Yeh Raste Hain Pyar Ke. I knew that my ticket could be extended but I was not sure that I had a visa that would work in Spain. I asked the French authorities and they assured me that a French visa was good for the whole of Europe. This was, of course, long before that agreement was signed in Schengen, Luxembourg, the one that made a single visa sufficient for fifteen European countries.
And so I flew to Madrid. At the airport I was horrified to discover that the French were wrong. The Spanish were outraged that the French should think their visa would suffice. They wanted a Spanish visa and they were going to deport me. I must have looked stricken at the thought and so the immigration officials decided to redirect their rage at the French officials who had misled me. Finally, one of them said he would give me one day to get a visa or else he would be forced to deport me.
I asked him for some advice. Where could I stay? Who would I have to meet? Soon the man was beaming in an avuncular fashion. He recommended a Hotel that was walking distance from the office to which I would have to go and advised me to present myself at nine o’clock the following morning. After an uneasy night, I rose and was at the office on the stroke of nine. No one else was. I kept asking various people, but they were mainly the cleaning staff and seemed surprised that anyone should think that a Spanish government office would be functional at that hour. It was finally eleven thirty when the officer arrived and he had many pressing matters to deal with before he could attend to me. The most urgent of these seemed to be that his shoes had not been polished. ‘Come tomorrow,’ he said surveying his footwear with horror.
At eleven?’ I asked.
He looked up, startled. ‘Madam, if you come at eleven, when will I get my shoes polished?’
Obviously, this was a man with his priorities straight. But after two days of suspense I finally got my visa for a three-month stay.
But another problem reared its head. I was on very short rations, since my foreign exchange was limited and my money was going to run out. Besides, I was still at the hotel, which was in front of the palace grounds. Like all Hotels that are located in prime positions, it was expensive but its clientele didn’t care much. They were all businessmen on expense accounts. As I walked around the Prado, I was wondering how one declared bankruptcy in another language and in a foreign city. Did they still have debtors’ prisons in Spain?
Another couple of days and Sunil Dutt wired me the money. I could relax and go out for paella and some flamenco. There were flamenco shows at the Hotel, of course, but I could tell that the performers were performers. They were not dancers. And so I asked an old waiter at the Hotel where I could have real paella and watch some real flamenco. He gave me directions and I set out around eight o’clock and got there when they were still sweeping the floor. The cleaners told me to come back at ten or eleven or later perhaps. I must have looked somewhat disconcerted at the thought of wandering the Streets for two and a ha
lf hours for one of them took pity on me and told me to sit down at the table. He brought me a rich bowl of paella and I ate as slowly as I could, spinning out the pleasure.
Then I walked to El Grotto for the flamenco. I cannot remember the name of the man who danced that night but he was an incredibly fine dancer. His sobriquet was ‘El Duende’ because it was said that he had fire inside him. Although he was past his youth, he brought all the fire and passion of the flamenco into his dancing. We did not see an old man with grey hair; in fact we did not see a man at all. We saw flamenco.
I walked Madrid, following cobbled pathways and alleys across the city. It was not difficult to find beautiful locations; everything offered itself as a possibility. Each morning I would have my breakfast in a little park near the hotel. There were small trolleys selling frittatas (crusty fried breads) and I would buy one piping hot and sit on the park bench and nibble it while the pigeons fluttered self-importantly around me and sparrows cocked their impertinent eyes at my breakfast.
A few days later, I returned to Mumbai and to R.K. Nayyar’s set.
Agha Jaani Kashmiri was the dialogue writer on this one and he would bring the dialogue to us, every morning, flavoured with the biryani of the night before. There were two make-up men who seemed afflicted with the giggles. They carried a make-up trunk and when they opened it, I saw they had put their dirty shoes inside. I decided that I would do my own make-up from that moment on. They went off, unabashed and still in inexplicable giggles. Later, someone told me that they were addicted to bhang, a cannabis-based narcotic.
We were shooting in Filmalaya where before each shot, someone would have to shoo away the pigeons with a stick, thumping at the corrugated iron of the roof. But the cooing was not the only zoological disturbance. There was also a herd of goats. As soon as the red light of the ‘No Entry’ sign would go on, signifying that a shot was in progress, the owner would kick one of his goats and it would set up a terrific racket. I thought he was unusually cruel to his animals but discovered that there was a commercial motive to his behaviour. The assistant directors also discovered this and we could depend on the goats going unmolested as long as the goatherd was tipped on a regular basis. At first he only charged Rs 10 but as time went by he got a little greedier and soon his rate was Rs 150.
Speaking of shepherds, I am reminded of one of the last scenes that had to be shot for The Householder. This was the scene that Satyajit Ray would eventually put at the beginning of the film. The character I was playing is very pregnant. I am on my way to Mehrauli, padded with towels, wrapped in a shawl. My mother and I were fairly sure that Merchant and Ivory would not have figured out a place for me to change, especially since this was to be an outdoor shot. So I dressed in my costume and bundled my ‘pregnancy’ under my petticoat. An old woman at the house in Mehrauli was very perturbed. ‘Is she married?’ She asked my mother. For some reason, she had mistaken me for the bride to be.
‘I think so,’ my mother said, much to the old lady’s consternation.
‘Chee chee chee,’ she sighed. ‘Nowadays, they get the baby first and then they marry.’
By then I had signed Yeh Raste Hain Pyar Ke and was expected back in Bombay. This meant that I had to finish the shot and rush back to Delhi airport. When it was over, I looked around for some place to change. We were in the middle of the Indo-Gangetic plain at its smooth unwrinkled best. Then my mother spotted a dry nullah.
‘Hop into that,’ she said. ‘But watch out for the snakes.’
I suppose it was what I would have said in the situation but it was not very reassuring. The thought of a snake is bad enough; the thought of a snake when one is half-dressed is a bit trying. But luckily no reptiles showed up and I scrambled out dressed in my ordinary clothes. My mother was chuckling as I got into the car that was taking us to the airport.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Turn around,’ she said, ‘and wave.’
I didn’t understand but I turned around and waved at a perplexed little shepherd boy who kept looking at the car and down into the nullah. Then it dawned on me that he had seen a pregnant woman leap into the nullah. A few seconds later a slim version of the same woman had emerged.
‘But he was a brave boy with a big heart,’ said my mother. ‘He immediately jumped into the nullah. I think he wanted to save the baby he thought you had abandoned.’
It was a delight to work with Ashok Kumar. He was a great actor, but also one of a peculiar breed that could belong only to Hindi commercial cinema. Ashok Kumar would come on to the set and look around. He would greet everyone and seemed to be very much at home. Then he would come up to me with a wry smile and say, ‘Leela, tell me, what is the name of the film?’
I would dutifully tell him the name of the film.
‘And what is the name of my character?’ I would tell him that too. ‘And yours?’
He was generally on the second of the three shifts of his work day. Anyone who works on several films at a time is likely to get confused.
‘Will you get them to write my character’s name on the tripod of the camera?’ He would ask and then vanish into his green room to get ready.
If I found that a little tiring the tenth time, I did not show it. There is no point losing your cool in a collaborative enterprise like cinema. Everyone has their idea of preparation and everyone has their idea of what constitutes a career. I had mine and Dada Moni had his.
However, he could be great fun too. In Ummeed, an unreleased film directed by Nitin Bose, I played his daughter. In one scene, he was supposed to be dying and I was supposed to approach his bed to take his blessings. The foot of the bed had been placed on a whole pile of bricks in order to raise it. This had something to do with the lighting.
Take one. I approach the bed, hopefully with the gait and bearing of a woman about to lose her beloved father. I lean over him and a maniacal cackle erupts from Dada Moni. Everyone, including me, jumped a foot. Dada moni pulls out a laughing box, the kind of gadget young children enjoy and shows it to me. Obviously, the take was declared NG, or No Good. Many apologies and we begin again.
Take two. I approach the bed, etc. etc. It seems that my screen father was unwilling to die for another hysterical cackle erupted. The odd thing was that he managed to startle us all again. This seemed so gloriously funny to Dada that he began to laugh in earnest. He laughed and he laughed and suddenly the bricks were shaking and the bed was tottering and down they all went in a heap.
When everything was raised again, he died quite perfectly and with no retakes needed.
That was not always the case with other actors. In Yeh Raste Hain Pyar Ke, we had to shoot what was, on the face of it, a perfectly simple scene. Rehman was supposed to knock on the door. I open it. He has to say something like, ‘I dropped by to give your children these chocolates.’ Nothing more than that. No histrionics. No emotional complexities. No difficult blocking. No long speech. A single line. If anything, it was a scene that required me to get through a sequence of events. I am lying down. I hear the knock. I respond. I get up. I hush my disturbed children. I go to the door and open it, all in one shot.
And yet, it is part of the mystery of acting that this veteran of hundreds of films would simply dry up after he’d managed the ‘good evening’. We used up thousands of feet of film as Rehman would start with his ‘good evening’ and then fall into an abyss of silence. By the twentieth take, as I rose once again, to hush my children and walk to the door, I was pleading with him in a little part of my head, ‘Oh please Mr Rehman, please finish this stupid line and let us all get on with our lives.’ But it went on and on and my face muscles ached as I kept trying to respond with the right mixture of surprise and suspicion that any woman might feel at a late night caller. Finally, someone suggested that Rehman be taken away and given a snifter. This was duly done and he came back, slightly flushed of face, and gave a perfect take.
But when we were shooting Arzoo, even the snifters had ceased to work. This wa
s a film in which I preside over much of the action from behind glass and a garland. As the first wife of Rehman, I was preparing to die, as the script required me to, early in the film. Rehman muffed the first take but pretended he was doing it on purpose. I gulped back my tears, dried my face, and got back into position. He muffed the second take but said that he was practising. I asked him, ‘Could you let me know when you are ready? Because I’m not using glycerine. I’m crying.’
He assured me that he was ready. So I mopped up again and affected some repairs to my make-up and got ready to die. The tears rolled, the cameras rolled but Rehman came to a standstill. It took him fourteen takes and left my eyelids feeling like sandpaper.
In the middle of the shooting of Yeh Raste Hain Pyar Ke, Commander Manekshaw Nanavati took his children and wife to a cinema hall and then went back to fetch his gun. He was going to see Prem Ahuja, who he felt had cuckolded him. He shot him dead and on 27 April 1959, he was accused of the murder. It was India’s last trial by jury.
The distributors were delighted because there seemed to be a similarity between the two cases. They felt that the notoriety of the case—a Presidential pardon finally meant that the much decorated Commander Nanavati did not hang—would ensure the success of the film. I was appalled at this. I would never have agreed to do a film that sought to exploit someone else’s tragedy. Besides, Nanavati’s sister and I went to the same B.K.S. Iyengar yoga class at Campion School. I had to tell her that the film I was doing was in no way exploitative. But the buzz continued and the rumours spread so I called a press conference to deny the connection. It was the only press conference I have ever called and I hope the only one I will ever need to call.
I had been asked to block ninety-one days for the shoot. But after ninety-one days, I was still shooting. I did not ask about money; I have never been very good about commerce. All I wanted was a script or at least a synopsis, a directorial vision and a coherent character to play. When I am asked why I did so few films, I often feel like retorting that it was because I had very few requirements from a part in a film, but those requirements were too many for most Hindi film directors.
