A Daughter Portrays the Iconic Gulzar’s Legendary Journey Inside Indian Cinema

An Indulgent and Mindful Parent

There would be few Indians, whether they have grown up in India or as part of the globally-dispersed diaspora, who would not have certain lines of his running inside their heads, triggering memories and moods and a mélange of sweet-sour emotions. Even now, as I write this, Tere Bina Zindagi Se Koi Shikhwa Tho Nahi plays in the background. Aandhi, starring Sanjeev Kumar and Suchitra Sen, captured the impossible but strangely unyielding bond between a woman who has climbed the rungs of power to the nation’s highest office – that of the Prime Minister – and a man who remains a hotel manager. Despite the social chasm that separates them, despite the agonizing unworkability of their relationship, she would never choose a life without that “Shikwa” or “complaint”. Who else but Gulzar can capture the tangy thrills of a thorny relationship with such precision and conciseness, simultaneously yoking our senses and hitherto ineffable feelings?

So in her book about her father, when Meghna Gulzar, the immensely talented director of Raazi and Talvar among other films, writes “I know I am because he is…,” she is to some extent articulating a sentiment that millions might feel entitled to possess. After all, because he is, we all are, even if our relationships with his words have been forged over car radios or Antakshari fragments gustily shouted across school buses. But unlike the rest of us, who call him Gulzar Saheb or just Gulzar, she is the only one who knows him as “Papi,” a father who has, with that trademark modesty, grown up as a parent even as he raised her. Always willing to learn from Meghna rather than merely impart lessons, he was an involved and indulgent father.

Since Raakhee and Gulzar had decided to separate about a year after Meghna was born, he bore the mantle of a single parent with an enviable elan. Till Meghna turned ten, she had long hair that needed to be braided for school. Given her constant fights with the ayah, who never seemed to get them to an even length, Gulzar took to plaiting his daughter’s hair himself. He patiently did and redid them, till the lengths of both braids met her exacting standards. Not only that, he tied her school sash with an artful double knot. “And that trait,” says Meghna, “stayed with me, to make an event of a mundane ritual.”

Once during the shooting of Mausam, little Meghna was being hoisted by Gulzar, even as he directed the shots. While instructing the crew, he kept his daughter engaged with a mole on his face. Later, when an older Meghna was to ask her father if she was ever a burden to him, he said: “When something is an intrinsic part of you, how can it ever disturb you?”

Childhood and School Years

Before he became the Gulzar that we are familiar with, he bore a different name in his childhood home. Born to a Sikh family in the village of Dina (currently in Pakistan), he was called Sampooran Singh Kalra. Since his mother died very early, his own father plaited his long hair. Though he lived in Delhi during the Partition, he has vivid memories of that horrific time, when neighbors and friends turned on each other, “of garbage trucks filled with distorted carcasses; stray limbs left behind on the street.” Gulzar recalls the manner in which his Sikh father refused to betray his Muslim friends, embodying a tolerance that was transmitted to his children.

Growing up in Delhi, in a very crowded household, filled with rambunctious step-brothers and step-sisters, Gulzar was also a bit of a loner. As the only child of his mother (since his father had married other women before his marriage with her and after her death), he drifted towards poets and poetry during his school years. Participating in a ‘bait baazi’, he memorized shers, sometimes altering them slightly to improve the rhymes or enhance the sounds. Though he was already a student at St. Stephen’s College, his family, wary of his fondness for poetry, dispatched him to Mumbai in 1949, where an uncle ran a petrochemicals business.

At Mumbai, he enrolled at Khalsa College. Making the kind of tradeoff that many Indians would have considered “sensible”, he signed up to study Mathematics since Urdu, his first choice, wasn’t an option. He was also very young, only thirteen. (Though called “colleges” then, those academic years would be the equivalent of contemporary high-school years, leading up to Class 12 Board Exams).

Displaced from his family and Delhi, he spent many nights wandering around Mumbai, on his own, in Parel – where he lived in a hostel -, Matunga and around the Parsi neighborhood of Five Gardens. Given his writerly leanings, he gravitated towards the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and the Progressive Writers Association (PWA). At these organizations, he encountered iconic writers like Sahir Ludhianvi, Kaifi Azmi and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Those brushes with literary greats sparked off an ambition in the young Gulzar, to achieve a certain regard for his own work.

In the meanwhile, even as his own enchantment with writers and books only deepened, his family plotted on diverting him towards more practical paths. With all the ongoing rifts with his family, the dislocation from Delhi, the turmoil of external pressures and internal conflict, he ended up skipping his Class 12 exams, after which he decided to quit mainstream academics altogether.

He then started working in a small garage, where he was responsible for “spot paint jobs” on damaged cars. Through a friend from Delhi who worked for Bimal Roy productions, he ended up meeting the legendary director. Impressed that ‘Gulzar’ could also speak Bengali (which he had gleaned during his Delhi school days, in a remarkable auto-didactic manner), Roy asked him to pen the lyrics for a particular scene. A couple of weeks later, he was introduced to S.D. Burman and his son, R.D. Burman, who as Meghna puts it, “was still in half-pants at the time!” This was the genesis of the song “Mora gora ang lai le.”

But Gulzar wasn’t keen then to just be a songwriter. So Roy asked him to join his production house as an assistant director, since clearly he was too talented to continue at the motor garage.

Meeting with Raakhee

As Gulzar himself puts it, Raakhee was “longest short story of my life.”  Raakhee had been recently separated from her husband, Ajay Biswas, when she started encountering the young, clean-shaven poet, dressed in a starched kurta and dhoti. Having already heard about his poems, “[she] was expecting to see an old man with a snowy beard and says she was thoroughly disappointed when she met Papi.” However, that disappointment was to soon turn into a growing enchantment, as they ventured on many road trips together in and around Mumbai.

Around then, both their careers were also lifting off, Gulzar’s as a director known for exploring the complexity of human relationships with a keen sensitivity, and Raakhee as an actress who had proved her mettle at films like Daag, Sharmilee and 27 Down. Based on the Japanese film, The Happiness of Us Alone, Gulzar’s film Koshish broke new ground. It was also the beginning of two critical professional relationships – with Sanjeev Kumar and R.D. Burman.

Gulzar and Raakhee were married in April 1973, and Meghna was born in December of the same year. Gulzar called his little girl “Bosky”, a soft variety of Chinese silk that reminded him of his daughter.

Even their separation was gracefully managed. Instead of engaging in ugly custodial battles, they permitted Meghna to divide her time, as she pleased, between Raakhee’s farm house and Gulzar’s home in the city.

Collaboration with R.D. Burman

Gulzar had a very close association with R.D. Burman, known affectionately by most Indians as Pancham Da. There were probably many standout stories about the manner of their collaboration. Meghna recounts one of the more memorable ones. The beginnings of a particular song were sparked off inside R.D. Burman’s car. He had picked up Gulzar on the way to the studio, and as the car bumped across the city’s roads, they thrashed out melodies and lyrics. As he drove, “Pancham uncle would beat a rhythm on the dashboard of the car, on the steering wheel, doors and even the bonnet!” But as soon as they reached the studio, he asked Gulzar to leave, as he was in the midst of another recording.

But much later, at midnight, R.D. Burman returned to arouse a sleeping Gulzar. He insisted they drive out together at once, because “kuch sunaana hai…” (you have to hear something). He then played a tune that had been captured inside an audio cassette. Gulzar started feeding him with words, which were braided into Pancham Da’s tune. With the kind of tug-of-war that characterizes many creative associations – ‘yes this, not that’ – they had forged one of the iconic songs that featured in the Jeetandra-starring Parichay: “Musafir hoon yaaron, na ghar hai na thikaana, mujhe chalte jaana hai…” ( which can be loosely translated as, ‘I am a traveler, without a house or address, I have to keep moving’). Ironically, both men, were inside a moving vehicle, traveling around the city during its perilous nightly hours, even as they composed this.

With Sanjeev Kumar

Gulzar’s association with Sanjeev Kumar started as early as their IPTA and PWA days. Though their magnetic Director-Actor bond shines through in many movies, they had their occasional spats. Apparently, Gulzar was always meticulous about time, landing up punctually on sets. But Sanjeev Kumar had a tendency to arrive late. This inevitably resulted in Sanjeev Kumar being asked to leave the movie, “at least once” for each movie they worked on together.

Of course, they always patched up. And a rather emotional Sanjeev Kumar also insisted on being featured in the last scene of every Gulzar movie he acted in. He wanted to be around on the last day, before the sets were wrapped up. After the crew had packed up, the two always ended with a droll and perhaps, enchanting ritual. Kumar would come over to Gulzar’s home, for a drink and the two of them would watch Walt Disney’s Dumbo together: “And Sanjeev Kumar would cry, each time he saw Dumbo, and every time.”

A Disciplined Life

Despite his enormous public profile and global celebrityhood, Gulzar seems to live a restricted and simple life. He continues to wear white kurtas, made by the same tailor – “Ashok of Ashok Tailors in Santa Cruz”; his only extravagance is that he gets the kurtas cleaned and starched outside. He likes to wear them in a pristine white, with an almost sharp-edged stiffness.

As a director, scriptwriter, lyricist, poet, novelist, short story writer and translator, Gulzar is multifaceted in every respect. He also keeps himself animated by constantly mastering new skills. He started learning the sitar in his forties, tennis in his fifties. But writing is very important to him, and he makes sure, he sits in the office every day to write. He realizes how much of the art emerges from the sheer discipline of sitting at a desk and chair, and keeping at it.

He is a lark, up at 5 a.m., on most days. He practices Yoga thrice a week, and regularly plays tennis. Even at 84, he was still winning the Gymkhana’s tennis tournaments. Occasionally, the routine is disrupted by little Samay, Meghna’s son and Gulzar’s coveted grandchild, who climbs on his lap, takes his glasses off and pretends to write like his grandfather. We hope for the sake of all Indians, he does.

References

Gulzar, Meghna, Because He Is, Harper Collins India, Noida, 2018.