Kumar Shahani was like a river: Actor Mita Vashisht

I walked out of my final viva at the NSD when my dean said can you do the makeup for a play for Kumar Shahani. Alaknanada Samarth, an actor from Bombay who was his leading lady, was keen that an actor should do her makeup…. I did it of course. What better way to get a front-row view into understanding the process of a director with whom there was already some talk of acting in his film? I listened to everything he told Alaknanda. Once Alaknanda said she was walking a curve he wanted on stage, but he said what I want is an ellipsoid. It told me you can give him more, you can surprise him, but you can’t give him less than what he wants, he won’t settle for it. At the end of my two days, he told me he was in talks with an actor for his film but hadn’t met her yet, would I be interested? So, he ended up offering me the role twice! Yes, at the time I was offered the Bajaj ad and in 1997, `30,000 was a lot of money but something told me those two days were going to be among the most important days of my life in connection with my craft.

I asked him questions that we actors have been taught to ask at the NSD. The first shot was on the bank of a river. I asked who my lover was across the river. I got back a strange reply. A black swan was his answer. In my young mind I realised that a realistic question wouldn’t do with Kumar, he does not want ordinary ways of thinking about love. I was a student of literature, so I thought of Yeats’ Leda and the Swan. So, that’s what he would do. He would suggest to you a number of possibilities of how you could think and feel and leave it to you to enter your deep imaginative self and come up with an answer of your own. Till date, whenever I have had a conversation with him, he has opened up inside me numerous thoughts, feelings and ways of thinking that few can make you experience.

Siddheshwari had no characterisation, the character had no high points, it wasn’t plot driven, it had no beginning, middle or end. “Don’t try to be Siddheshwari,” said Mani. “You have to present her spirit, not play her. If I wanted someone like Siddheshwari Devi, I would have cast a plump girl.” Mani called me after watching Vaar Vaar Vari. After working with Kumar and to pick up what it was to work with intangibles, I was certainly ready for anything and prepared for Siddheshwari.

The first film is of course special. With each film I realised there was going to be no repetition of the old space, Kumar wasn’t going to repeat himself so I would be called upon to be a different me each time. He was like a river, there was no end to his giving.

To be an actor in Kumar’s or Mani’s films you had to have an understanding of the spectrum of all the arts to be able to enter their worlds. Mani, for instance, told me I should get some ideas about thumri and kathak for Siddheshwari. In the film, I may not have danced kathak much, but I needed to move as if my body knew its rhythm.

To be able to portray Tejo in Kasba [the daughter-in-law of a small-town entrepreneur who is married to his mentally challenged son], who actually runs the business, Kumar made me walk almost two hours for a week in his drawing room till I cracked the walk. He said think of Tejo as a female panther, a leisurely tigress, but someone who is alert, and is waiting for her chance…or he said think of Marc Chagall and his paintings where the figures float…. That walk ultimately influenced everything. The way I moved, the way I sat, the way I said my dialogues.

Kumar’s frames were so elegant, so as an actor even if you feel you haven’t done anything, the frames have done a lot.

That a human being is part of the cosmos, not something you place in an environment. And that you are not the centre of everything. And that the actor’s job is to understand the director and consider it a beautiful challenge. Kumar was never dismissive of an actor’s craft.