Farooque Shaikh-Baat Phoolon Ki

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It was May, 2005. I stumbled late into a press conference with my seven- year- old and panic in tow. As the child of a working mother, my son was used to sitting quietly  through interviews and media events. It was I who sometimes mismanaged time and this was one such occasion.Farooque Shaikh was in town to perform Aapki Soniya,  the sequel of Javed Siddiqi’s legendary play Tumhari Amrita and once I settled, there was time to catch a breath and  watch the actor light up the room. There he was in a crisp white kurta with an even crisper diction.  A glow and spontaneous warmth. He laughed that he was a lazy actor but we knew better, did we not? It was just our cinema that was lazy. That did not know what to do with him beyond a point. And yet, Shaikh was perhaps the only one of his generation who did not get bought into bad cinema.

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I remember asking him a question, and his eyes looked for me in the crowd and then settled on my son, and he asked, “And who may we ask is that gentleman next to you? ” My son, sir,” I said almost sheepishly and he smiled and said something to my son that I do not remember word to word but remember the gist of. It was just a witty but heartfelt sentence about how mothers  were the real heroes. He need not have said anything but his kindness took all my anxiety away just as his genial performances in his films had always done.

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Shaikh had that reassuring quality in life and in his cinema that made the world a better place just because he was in it. His face summed up the innocence, the idealism, the simplicity of the 80s when a hero, yes.. a leading man in a lungi and with a face smeared with shaving cream could open the door to a sunny salesgirl and fall in a love over a bucket frothing with  washing powder Chamko. The hero who would drive a black bike in a kurta to the tune of ‘Kaali Ghodi Dwar Khadi” with his eyes smiling through a pair of glasses at the girl who has stolen his heart. Someone who made real things  romantic and the joy of having coffee and Tutti Frutti ice-cream in a Delhi cafe palpable.

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He was the upright poet of Saath Saath who would touch the edge of a beautiful girl’s dupatta and sing wistfully, ” Jise hum gunguna nahin sakte….waqt ne aisa geet kyon gaya.“

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Sarju of Bazaar who sings Makhdoom to his beloved and sneaks into her home pretending to be a bangle seller and then watches in horror as greed and lust take her away with brutal finality.

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The young muslim in Partitioned India torn between divisive forces in MS Sathyu’s masterful Garam Hawa, also his debut film. The rootless, faceless, voiceless migrant of Gaman.

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The spineless yet compellingly irresistible nawab of Umrao-Jaan who with his adoring eyes, jamawar shawls and poetic manner spun a Shaharyar  ghazal for a  woman he  was going to love on an impulse and leave at will.

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The theatre actor who perhaps wondered while singing, “Noorie..Noorie” what the heck he was doing but pulled it off anyway. With conviction. Because that is what he never worked without. Conviction. Whether he was playing the aristocratic seducer of Ek Pal or the wily conman of Katha, he never failed the brief, never fell short of what he as an actor was supposed to deliver. He finally won in 2010, a  National Film Award for Best Supporting Actor for Lahore. But no other awards for a life time of work. None.

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I had asked him all those years back about how little there was of  him in the 90s and the cinema that came after and he had said, ” What I like I don’t get and what I get, I don’t like! I am selective about good cinema but I am waiting for someone to select me also! I can say though that apart from a few exceptions, I don’t regret doing any work that I have done in films. I am happy  with theatre and even though the big screen attracts me the most, I won’t do something just for the sake of doing it.’’ Ditto Television. After doing Saratchandra’s Srikanth and  pathbreaking sitcoms, Shaikh did not run into great material too often and waited for a challenge he would not be able to say `No’ to

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He laughed perhaps at himself or perhaps at the film makers who never approached him when he said, “`these days I am busy reading scripts!’’ No wonder then that theatre fulfilled the actor in him most often. Javed Siddiqui’s Tumhari Amrita and Aapki Soniya were just up his street because they were deep, pithy and he had said, ” Javed Siddiqui’s wriitng is something rare and powerful and also lyrical and fragile. The format of the play is such that the audience becomes the third character and because with each show, the third character changes, we change too.’’

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