My years in Amritsar, Mama, & first lesson in acting

I have spent the past one week sharing with people my journey with my memoir, something I started working on about 20 years ago. I had written three to four chapters around that time. But then life and work caught up, and that kept me away from the book. I was not able to sit down and write it the way I’d have liked to. Around five years ago, however, when my publisher David Davidar took on the project, I got down to seriously witing the book primarily about my childhood in Amritsar, where I was born in 1952.

All this while I had been taking notes — jotting down every memory that came to me, little things that I would remember . . . One memory would lead to another. Kahin aate jaate, chalte-phirte, uthte-baithe, a memory would be triggered and I would scribble it down. But the information was not complete. I kept cross-checking with my family.

My book is full of my own memories, my family history, my school life, the wars, the ambience of Amritsar, the mosque, the Mochi Mohalla, memories of my parents, the people I grew up around. I always thought that I should write about my childhood because it was so fascinating. People often tell me they don’t remember much about their childhood, but I could recall so much, it had to be written down. I wanted to share it with the world. I thought that as a writer, this is the book I’d like to write.

Amritsar of my childhood days was not the vibrant place it is today. It was a smaller, quieter city. Our street was not very crowded, but, of course, for the presence of the mochis, who intrigued me much, and lived in what I called the Republic of Mochistan. They lived in the narrow lane between our house and the mosque and made our lives quite vibrant. My family’s involvement in different things kept us busy. My parents were quite active socially, and so were my grandparents, Bibiji and Bauji.

A memoir is an exploration of the self and there are bound to be things one isn’t comfortable writing about. But over a period of time, I discussed these with my parents; they knew I was working on a memoir. My mother gave me a lot of details about how she lost three of her offsprings, including Sunny, who survived for eight months. Those were very sensitive things to write about, but I decided to share them because I wanted to give an honest account of my childhood and not make it sound all hunky-dory. No section of your life is complete unless you talk about both the joy and the angst. It was important to put things down the way they were, otherwise the picture wouldn’t be complete. I so wanted to write about my parents, their struggles, their angst and their striving to make a life for all of us.

My family played a major role in shaping the person that I am today. When I was doing research for my book, I got to know that Bauji had reserved three boxes in three cinema halls around our house and would see a little portion of a movie while walking back home from a hard day’s work in the court. I was so thrilled that there were others in the family who were obsessed with films.

In the book, I mention the story of a little boy who came to my mother with an empty bowl, in the hope of getting milk Mama and her friends were distributing. But he had to go empty-handed as milk had finished. That was my first lesson in acting. I internalised that look on his face, that emotion. As I share in the book: “In my later years, I would draw upon this emotion and use it in many ways. Sitting at a roadside cafe on Thirty-third Street and Lexington Avenue (in New York), he’d suddenly appear before me. Sometimes I was looking at life from the top of the staircase, and at other times, I was the little boy with the small dark face with large luminous eyes, standing at the bottom of the stairs with an empty bowl in my hand.”

I dreamt of being on the big screen one day. In the cinema hall, as people watched Meena Kumari and Nutan, I’d tell myself, ‘One day I’ll be up there and all these people would be watching me, connecting with me.’ This desire to be an actor came to me from listening to my mother’s stories of Burma. She wanted to be a performing artiste. She loved actors and actresses. She dreamt of being one, loved dance, dramas, plays, singing. She couldn’t realise her dream in her lifetime but passed that dream to me. My wanting to be an actor is rooted in my mother’s girlhood years.

I have written about our after-dinner walks with Mama and Pitaji. How I was impacted by Mama’s observations of life around her. How I would assimilate her reactions to things. I would notice how Mama responded to different situations of people around her. How she empathised with them. How she noticed little things . . . How Mama would find joy in nature, my father’s spirit of adventure — all these went into making me the person that I am.

I am looking forward to a multi-city tour of India with my book, followed by a multi-city tour of America to promote the book. And it is from Amritsar that we are opening on July 17. Most of the people from my growing-up years in Amritsar are now gone — I do have a very good friend, Santosh, there though; our house had to be disposed of, for it was falling apart. But now that the book is done, I would like to go there more often.

I would love it if all the young people as well as the older people read my book because I have tried to recreate that era during which I grew up in Amritsar. I want everyone to know what life was like back in those days. I want to share my splendid childhood memories with everybody.

— As told to Sarika Sharma