What prompted you to write about your childhood rather than your journey in cinema?
I wrote my first book in 1981. It was a collection of poems called Namha Namha. After that, another collection, Black Wind and other Poems, came out. Then there was a book of short stories, titled The Mad Tibetan: Stories From Then and Now. I have always been a writer and a poet. This is my first memoir. I am not interested in writing biographies because it has the feeling of ‘been there, done that’. I might write about my journey through cinema, but it will not be an autobiography. This is the first time that I am writing about my childhood because I have always been interested in creative writing. I didn’t want to write about how I got this film or that film. It was my desire to do a literary piece of work, which prompted me to write this book.
In the book, your memories of Amritsar also paint a socio-political picture of the two decades of your life. Would you like to elaborate on that?
Amritsar is the city in which I grew up in. A… a border town will always be a border town––it will always be impacted by stories of Partition and the Hindu-Muslim tragedy that happened. The Holocaust and the horrors of it are what is recounted time and again. Although, in my own home, we were never told any gory details about Partition. But one had the sense of Lahore being 50 kms away.That proximity with the border was not a thing of imagination; it was just that it was right there. The impact of Partition on refugees were stories that we would hear all the time from the neighbours or from friends’ families––how Master Tara Singh came down Mall Road galloping on his steed, brandishing a sword. My childhood had to be placed in a way that the readers understood the geography, and why the history of Partition was so important in my childhood.
Tell us about the title of the book?
The title didn’t come to the book first. I was writing and in the initial phase, where I describe the ambience of the house I grew up in and the neighbourhood, is when I wrote the phrase. These are the sights, sounds and smells of the country––a country called childhood. And it was my editor who caught on to it and said this is what you are going to call your book.
Did you draw upon your childhoood experiences when you embarked on your acting career?
Not so consciously. In acting, we don’t take up anything consciously. I am sure that I wouldn’t have figured out how I was going to play Shakti (in Shakti: The Power), in my confrontation with Nana Patekar where I scream at him and call him names in a scene, if I hadn’t known Deoli, the woman from Mochistan
(a character in the book). Somewhere, at the back of my mind, I knew that Deoli would lambast her husband every night he came home drunk. Hers would be the last voice that we would hear as we slept on the rooftop. That voice of her reprimanding her husband stayed with me and when I got to play a woman like her, I didn’t think consciously of Deoli, it cameto me.
Who are your favourite authors?
I am not somebody who reads all the time, because my time is divided between so many things. After reading Ben Okri, I went on to (Haruki) Murakami and I am enjoying him so much now. I am also trying to get used to audio books. Someday, I would like to do a narration of my book also as an audio book. There is a wonderful narration of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, which I listen to because my mother was extremely fond of that book and would read out passages to us from time to time.