Tribute to an evening walker

Less than a week before I heard the sad news of the actor Farooq Shaikh's passing, an SMS written in a familiar style had lit up my phone screen. "Adaab," it said, "Wish u a Merry Christmas, a Joyous New Year and a v happy life ahead. Best luck, always." A few minutes later the same message arrived again. This was possibly a network glitch, but having seen Mr Shaikh (or Farooque saab, as it seemed more apt to call him) a few weeks earlier, wrestling with and frowning at his handset, I could picture him having re-sent it accidentally.

Either way, I had become used to the courtliness of his texts in the previous two months, ever since I first contacted him in connection with a writing project. In mid-October I had texted him asking if we could speak for a short while; on the phone would be fine. He replied with an "Adaab sir", adding that he happened to be coming to Delhi at the end of the week, and it "wd be a plzre" to meet.

We met, and it was a pleasure - for me, at least - even though the conversation was short and unexceptional. He was everything you'd expect from his screen persona, warm and unfailingly polite in his direct addresses, though he did get a little agitated when he spoke more generally about falling standards in popular culture and commerce taking over the film world. "Vaahiyaat filmein agar teen sau crore ka business kar rahe hain (if senseless films make Rs 300 crore), then everyone will go down the same route."

I didn't agree with everything he said. Some of it mixed deep idealism, a yearning for a fabled past where things were always so much better than today, and a narrow, subject-oriented view of "good" and "bad" cinema. There were capricious asides: while making the (reasonable) point about Hollywood's technical excellence masking deficiencies in content and not allowing any other type of film to get breathing space, he suddenly brought up movies "jiss mein spaceship yun zor zor se awaaz karti hai, phir girne lagti hai - whereas it is a basic fact of zero gravity that a spaceship will not fall like that even if it breaks." But the discontent came from his views on the relationship between a society and its popular culture. "Cinema is a willing or unwilling appendage to society, so we may as well have some quality in it. You risk your health if you eat chaat all the time."

It wasn't all about venting anyway. He paused for breath and cracked a quiet joke about his own irritability. There was pragmatism ("it is unreal, and perhaps unfair, to expect that a filmmaker is going to do good to society at a loss to himself") and there were humorous analogies: "You know the Sea Link in Mumbai? It cuts down travel time dramatically while you are on it - but when you exit it you're in trouble again. That's how the industry today is. Film toh complete ho jaati hai but then the intelligent filmmaker is in a surrounding he cannot control." There are two people in the race, the sprinter and the evening walker, he observed, marking the difference between money-obsessed filmmakers and the ones with a social conscience. "The walker will not get ahead because he isn't in it for the race anyway."

The analogy reminded me of Sai Paranjpye's 1983 film Katha, based on the hare-and-tortoise fable, in which Shaikh was cast against type as the wily hare (or the sprinter). But when I alluded to the film, he merely nodded and gave a quick smile, not pursuing the point - he wasn't much interested in talking about his own movies, or his contribution to them. Which may be a reminder that he wasn't "in it for the race" himself: he seemed unconcerned with such things as fame or staying in the public memory. Still, he had done some fine work in the past couple of years, in films like Shanghai and Listen…Amaya, and notwithstanding his own indifference to plaudits, he might well have had a notable second innings as a screen actor. He went much too soon, leaving us with a body of work - old favourites like Chashme Buddoor, of course, but also fine lower-profile films like Gaman and Saath Saath - to rediscover and treasure.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer