Spoke my heart out to my father only at his grave: Naseeruddin

Naseeruddin Shah's unresolved relationship with his father Aley Mohammed Shah still haunts him and the actor in his autobiography has opened up about how he managed to have a real conversation with his parent only at his grave.
Their uneasy relationship despite the obvious affection they had for each other, flows like an undercurrent throughout the memoir 'And Then One Day' that details the first forty years of Shah's life and his struggle to find his voice as an actor, a dream that greatly clashed with his father's idea of how his son's life should be.
The 64-year-old actor recalls how he could not be with his father during his final moments as he failed to convince the airlines' staff about the urgency of boarding a flight.

In one of the most moving parts of the book, Shah describes how he finally managed to reach out to his father post his death.
"The day I arrived in Sardhana I visited the mound of earth that was Baba now and we had the first of the many easy conversations I was later to have with him. That day I talked to him about the film I had just done, felt his amusement at my playing a shaven-headed Hindu priest," Shah writes.
"... I told him about my dreams and my doubts, about Ratna (Shah's wife) whom he had never met, about how much I was now earning, anything that came into my head. I knew he was listening and responding. This was an actual conversation in which I took the initiative. I suddenly began to feel the weight of all I had lost out on and would never regain and I was surprised by how much I suddenly missed him."

In one of the earlier chapters of the autobiography, Shah says, "I was always told I was my father's favourite, words that would come back to haunt me later."
The actor, who also speaks candidly about his mistakes as a parent to his eldest daughter Heeba from his ill-fated first marriage to Purveen in the book, wonders whether he was a 'disappointment' right from the start as his father wanted a daughter.