The first time I ever saw Naseeruddin Shah was in a movie called Chamatkar, in which he plays a funny ghost and the only recollection today of that movie was a Cricket Match scene, in which Shah being invisible catches the ball midair, flummoxes the batsmen by changing the ball’s direction and hits the wicket to claim a wicket for the bowling team. I don’t remember any other scene or story line from that movie. I thought he was a character artist, playing a funny role. I saw him again twice in roles I don’t even recognize him in. They were Mahatma Gandhi in Hey Ram and some weirdo in “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (of which I saw a Telugu Dubbed version – Coincidentally, it is during this film that Naseer Saab started writing his memoir). 

I never thought Naseeruddin Shah could play a lead role in a film. He is the guy whose picture I never saw on a wall poster (I’m not talking of the big hoardings these days, but about the times where film posters were attached to the walls.) And then one day, I walked into a Landmark Store and all I can find was Naseeruddin Shah’s posters all around the place, smiling beatifically at whoever visited the store. I was very happy for him in a weird way. Finally I saw his poster stuck to a wall. I bought his memoir immediately (from Flipkart). 

I don’t read autobiographies in general, because I think most of them are full of exaggerated half-truths or just plain lies. This memoir has not proven me completely wrong, not that I claim to have firsthand knowledge on any of the stuff he wrote, but it felt honest for most of the time and is consistently readable, partly because it is a biography of a film personality and I’m very much interested in films, though it does not have much about films. I prefer to read it as a story of a self-centered underdog, confident in his abilities and blind to the things that he does not wish to see. As a story of a man in pursuit of his destination with a single-minded determination, laced with youthful arrogance this works brilliantly and thankfully does not gossip much or dwell into his later career where he was successful and popular. 

Shah’s first and everlasting love is the Theatre and I watched only one theatre play in my entire life. So, the names of the plays, his roles in them were all really obscure to me, yet I kept turning the pages because his digressions are often delightful, and there is a lot of self-effacing honesty and trademark dry wit to breeze through them. Also, he names a lot of interesting and little known films and personalities he watched and interacted with, googling about them was a different learning experience altogether. Also the pictures he shares of his days at FTII, NSD and his performances on stage add to the reading pleasure. 

And then One Day, is still primarily an auto biography, one that Shah has to “get it out of his system” in his own words, and one can see why, reading through the pages. I can only take a guess but it feels like it is a book he had to write at this phase and I think reading the book as a whole might probably be a liberating experience for him. It is difficult to follow his family tree, since it is a branchy one. Shah dedicates many pages to his troubled relationship with his father, and it is something most of the youth of this country and in his generation can really identify with. His dedication “To Dulha Bhai and Apa Bi who finally might have understood” is a truthful one which resonated pretty loud and clear with me. His relationships with women in his life were never fully explained and they don’t add much to the narrative, which is understood, as he tried to withhold their identities in part and this book was never about them. 

If there is one squabble that I have with this memoir is, and I really have one and I’m not making this one up just to have a roundedness to this write-up, the title “And then One Day”. It felt vague, irrelevant, easy and safe, almost as if Naseeruddin Shah was exhausted writing this and named it whatever came to his mind after finishing it. I was almost shouting out loud “Hey Naseeruddin Shah can’t name his book that”. But that’s all the nitpicking I can do about this must-read.

Update: Shah's first and everlasting love was not Theatre, as I gathered from this article