Saeed Mirza's 'I Know the Psychology of Rats' is all about spunk, candour, films and friendship

Nonika Singh

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WHO titles a book which quintessentially is a memoir about a dear friend, ‘I Know the Psychology of Rats’? Who is the rat really is a question worth pondering over. But the more important question here is, who was Kundan Shah, the maker who gave us the irreverent mind-blowing comedy Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro?

As one friend, National Award winning Saeed Mirza, remembers the other (Shah), the quirky and absurd title is not the only one to draw attention. Rather, each word, anecdote, insight that Mirza rustles up has you hooked. Here is a book that is at once a revealing memoir, a political treatise, a social commentary, a cinematic insight, even a historical account and above all, a readers’ delight. Of course, to craft it all requires the skill of a master craftsman. From his films (‘Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai’, ‘Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro’), we know Mirza is an exceptional auteur. But to weave a story around a friend which is as much a chronicle of the times he lived in, rather we live in, one would assume calls for a different skillset. Mirza seems to possess wizardry with words too in abundance.

He takes us into the world of their alma mater, FTII. If brevity is the soul of wit, a similar approach can be felt across Mirza’s writing. Just one page is devoted to the legendary Ritwik Ghatak, yet the man comes alive. In two lines, he delineates the difference between Italian filmmakers Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. A short remembrance about the then director of FTII, Girish Karnad, and you know how he championed freedom of speech.

Dissent is an underlying thread. Mirza is not the one to mince words or keep his or his friend’s political ideology to himself. While recalling ‘conversations, debates, dialectical upheavals’, we see Shah evolve — from a student who questioned ‘how can every film be political’ to the one who dared to imagine a film about two political leaders, one head of the world’s ‘greatest’ democracy and the other of the largest.

To the bigoted, Mirza’s angst may sound like diatribe. But pay heed, and this is only a wake-up call. Post the anti-Sikh riots, Shah quizzed aloud, ‘Where the hell have we reached?’ The book echoes the same thought time and again.

Our worldview informs our cinema. Mirza makes us see Shah through the lens of politics, through cataclysmic events, for, can a person be divorced from his beliefs, yes political too? With effortless ease, Shah traverses through the flashpoints such as Kashmir and Afghanistan, and shares what Shah thought or even may have about political upheavals. Even the events that have taken place after Shah’s death in 2017 take us to him. The Shaheen Bagh protest, scrapping of Article 370… there is a rare political event that does not find mention.

However, the book about a filmmaker and written by one at no point becomes a filmography, neither of Mirza nor of Shah. Mirza does not even care to mention the names of their superhit television serials like ‘Nukkad’ while talking about their creative partnership. Shah’s movies like ‘Kya Kehna’ and ‘Ek Se Badhkar Ek’ are dismissed in one line, “you can see Kundan’s heart was not in it”. And he does not care to critique Kundan’s best either. Most of us know Shah from that brilliant cult classic ‘Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro’. Instead, Mirza takes us behind the scenes and lets us into how the film was made. Kundan’s quirks figure too. How the Gujarati in him believed in making two rupees out of one, yet would spend a fortune on books and once blew up an entire sum of Rs 8,000 which his wife had earmarked for his clothes. But what towers above all is how Shah wanted to shake the world. But he couldn’t. For, was he not living in one where even their deep friendship had at one point forced Shah to reduce it to Hindu-Muslim binaries?

On the backflap, Mirza wonders aloud, “Will all of this make sense to readers?” You bet it does, every anecdote, even simple one and two-liners. Only don’t expect a linear biography of Shah or their long association. But when the comrades in question are the redoubtable Saeed Mirza and Kundan Shah, filmmakers of exceptional calibre, expecting the predictable would be blasphemous. The book does not hide under the veneer of sugar-coated platitudes and says it the way Shah would have. With spunk and candour.