A Glimpse Into Deepti Naval’s Childhood
“Prem preet ya love l’amour” – From Chashme Buddoor (1981)
Chashme Buddoor was released in 1981. It was the pre-liberalization era. Most households did not own television sets. Clunky DoT (now BSNL) landlines crackled across distances with all the trepidations and uncertainties that might have characterized telegrams. Trunk (long distance) calls were routed through belligerent operators, who were endearingly untrained in the artifices of customer service.
At a time, when the nation could heed such details, Deepti Naval’s kohl-lined eyes sucked us into the elations and upheavals of love. A heart-wrenching emotion, that was not reduced to synthetic song-and-dances or flippant to-and-fros. It was a Rom-com no doubt, before such a term was universally understood. Or greeted, as it might be in contemporary times, with cynical eye-rolls. It wasn’t just a bashful Farooq Sheikh who was mesmerized by Naval, but a country that was awakening to the sparks and innuendoes of romance. To the myriad expressions that could flit across her liquid face.
“Tumko Dekha To Ye Khayal Aaya” – From Saath Saath (1982)
Turning the pages of Naval’s biography, a poetic and lyrical meandering through the geography of her childhood, gave me a sense of why I, as many others, might have been bewitched by her artistry. Born soon after the nation’s Independence, on a stormy night in 1952, she quickly exhibited the fluidity that was to characterize her acting. Apparently, as a toddler, she would plead with her maternal grandmother for a little cheeni or sugar. When told off, she would accede to salt. “How could I be asking for sugar, and the next instant be ready to settle for salt?”
From an early age, she seemed to be watching the world with wide-eyed wonder, as intensely affected by the panoply of characters that flitted in and around Chandraavali, their four-storeyed bungalow in Amritsar, as she was by darkening noon skies or muezzin calls at a nearby mosque. She was only four years old, when she watched her mother distribute milk to needy children. Once, one little boy arrived breathless, a little too late. The milk had run out. Even as he held his empty bowl out, Deepti could feel herself watching him: “This was perhaps my first lesson in acting – taking a mental note of an experience and storing it away.”
The first time she really acted was to fake a stomach ache to avoid seeing a movie – because an earlier experience of watching a film had been horrifying. Later, she regretted having missed out on this other movie, which was a romance and devoid of violence, an experience her cousins had clearly relished.
“Yeh Tera Gar, Yeh Mera Gar” – From Saath Saath (1982)
Their house in Amritsar was like an Escher painting, filled with staircases that went nowhere, or that ended abruptly in dark corridors or sudden terraces. It was just the kind of home that would light up her imagination even as she wondered about mysterious creatures that inhabited its voids. Moreover, almost as if the house had plotted her future career, she and Didi (her older sister) dwelt in the “Green Room” – a room where Didi would read, and Deepti would daydream.
She mostly hung about on the barsati – the roofed terrace – which offered her a splendid view of the city, of other sun-blazed rooftops, of pigeons that alighted on the mosque’s dome. She would fling stones at the birds to set them aflight, then watch them land back again, only to be driven up by another stone. It was a space, where she could spend hours, gazing at cloud formations. Sometimes, she had a book in hand. But the book was mostly a prop, as she was happy just staring into the cityscape, or at the glassy blue sky, or at shape-shifting clouds.
For many years since partition, the mosque had settled into a morose stillness, with no prayers, no worshippers, no movement. While the dome was blackened by rains and winds, and staining pigeons. When a maulvi restarted services, a few worshippers straggled in.
Naval’s vivid curiosity turned with equal fascination towards the fakir who arrived from the mountains, singing his plaintive song. A song that would continue to haunt Deepti, as would his simple, monastic life. Was he married? How could he leave his children behind and wander among the plains? What did he do when he returned to his mountain life?
Sometimes those flamboyant daydreams evoked the opposite: nightly terrors. She trembled down the stairs at night, to pee in the toilet outside: a haunting journey filled with lurking shadows, and images of bearded men who might lunge out at any point, to grab her.
“Roz, roz, daali, daali, kay likh jaaye” – From Angoor (1982)
Evoking the temper of an earlier period, time flowed at a slower pace. Little Deepti was never bored, but enthralled by simple things. By the minutia of little dramas. Like her mother cleaning her ears with liquid hydrogen peroxide. Or by Jeet, who worked in their household, picking lice off the kids’ hair – her’s and Didi’s. Or playing hopscotch on scorching courtyards; rolling marbles on cool interior floors, lying flat to watch the colours fuse with glass.
She didn’t like bats, she was afraid of them. But they flapped around their house nonetheless, even permanently resting in some nook in the verandah. Elsewhere, she watched a “conference of lizards.” Naval, like the ever-animated Gerald Durrell, took it all in: The slick geckos sighting their prey, then stalking, pouncing and swallowing them.
She watched the monsoons with equal relish. The paper boats floated on riverine streets, the filmi rickshaw skidding into a pothole, slanting rains turning the landscape into a watery blur. Everything was exciting to little Deepti. Inside a neighboring tin shed, she watched a buffalo give birth to a black, velvety calf – one that she fittingly named “Black Velvet.”
“Kyun Zindagi Ki Raah Men Majabur Ho Gae” – From Saath Saath (1982)
The mochis or cobblers lived in a gully nearby. From a little shoeshine boy, she learned how to polish her shoes impeccably. With several rounds of circular brush motions and a final buffing with muslin.
Deepti’s Professor father had an amusing spat with the mochi kids, who were openly defecating on a drain adjoining their wall. The mochi kids were not easy to dislodge, even with Professor Naval waving an angry umbrella to scatter them. Eventually, he invited them home and taught them hygiene lessons with a blackboard. Over time, the kids were convinced to shift to public toilets; later, the community got toilets built into their locality.
At night, she would fall asleep to their songs, “to the cadence of the mochis’ music, their beedi-cracked voices.”
The Book: A Country Called Childhood
This book does not feel like a typical “celebrity” memoir. With equal felicity, Naval sketches memories of two wars, of parental fights and her parents’ eventual separation, of her own teenage escapades. Right through, we realize that Naval is extraordinary because of her enchantment with the ordinary. With the Sturm und Drang of India’s everydays and everyone. With more roles being scripted for ageless actors, we would love to watch her light up our screens again and again.
References
Deepti Naval, A Country Called Childhood: A Memoir, Aleph Book Company, 2022