A Country Called Childhood beguiles you with its title, poetic and yet, to the point. The writing epitomises the quiet dignity of the author’s nature, evident in the way she consistently conducted herself as she navigated the minefield called Hindi films. But readers who pick up this weighty volume hoping to read about Deepti Naval’s work and life in films, are in for a disappointment.
The book will, instead, take them through the years of Naval’s childhood, stopping short much before she makes her debut as an actor on screen.
Naval’s style is simple and eloquent. She draws word pictures of the early years of her life in Amritsar, and young women, who also grew up in the 50s, will find many a parallel in her account of studying in a missionary school, as well as life at home as the much-loved daughter of educated, liberal parents.
Many of the episodes are touching, others make one laugh out loud. Naval takes detours to draw clear portraits of close relatives, which include her grandparents and their life in Burma. The passages about the grandmother’s love for her gramophone with its gleaming brass horn, which she insists on carrying along on their long trek across the Himalayas into India, are alternately funny and moving. Pen portraits of her parents reflect her admiration for her ‘beautiful Mama’, whose poise and grace the author adopted as her own, and the awe she held her erudite English professor father in.
Two exhaustive chapters, one on each parent, which include snatches of their lives before their marriage, bring them alive, showing up their personalities as seen through the eyes of a daughter who bonded closely with both. A poignant aside results from her knowledge that their relationship was far from perfect. Hearing them arguing disturbed the ‘perfect picture’ to the extent that it made her distrust all relationships.
Naval plumbs her relationships with candour, as when she questions her father’s attitude towards his daughters. “But you never patted me with love, or held me close or put me on your lap,”she says, and an entire relationship that existed in that generation between fathers and daughters is laid open when he replies, “It was the way of our generation, beta. In our time, fathers seldom mollycoddled their children,” adding that cuddling was left to the mothers.
Simple experiences find themselves recorded through the book. The rather eloquent description of her watching the burning of Ravan during Dusherra, when, as the sparks flew, “Our pony grew skittish... The tonga began swaying from side to side, then tipped up as the pony suddenly leapt in the air… It must have been quite a sight,” she continues, “The pony bucking in the same spot…the tonga tipping over, a spill of little girls giggling, crying, tumbling out if it.” Yet, despite the misadventure, she adds, “I retain the image in my head: the 10 heads of Ravan, spark-spitting to the ground.”
Naval’s first brush with a star happens when she’s 11. She gets an autograph from Balraj Sahni, whose ‘graceful’ ‘subtle’ and ‘genuine’ manner she vows to emulate through her career in films. Her long journey as a fan girl, sporting a Sadhana-fringe, collecting Meena Kumari memorabilia, or holding a long siege of silence like the silent Sharmila in Anupama make for delightful reading, and will evoke similar memories in many readers.
Impactful moments include her experience of blackouts during the Indo-Pak war, the shock of her mother’s near electrocution, and a searing description of her father in his first year in the US, working at night as a security guard, braving the cold on his rounds, to earn enough to get his family across to join him.
It’s a story full of ups and downs, with the author taking failures and upheavals in her stride with the calm of having survived it all and coming up smiling.
Reading this book is one way of visiting one’s own childhood, which is why the book leaves a soft glow. And a hope that Naval will be taking us on another journey through the country of her adulthood and her life in films soon.