Geeta Doctor
My Memories of Anvar
Anvar Alikhan- Catcher in the Sunlight of his days
The first time I saw Anvar was on a stage in Bombay as it was known in the late 1960s performing scenes from Shakespeare.
It was an ambitious production by a Nepal born director, who was such a passionate Shakespearean, his nom-de-plume was Shakespearana. His real name was Shamsher Rana.
His love for the Bard was so intense, so filled with the desire to bring every word, every line, every character to life on the stage, that he directed his actors like kamikaze pilots. The characters had to come onto the stage and literally 'explode' in front of the audience.
Do we add here that almost all the actors were young and untrained. They had to surrender to the director's need to burn up the stage. One by one, the actors appeared before our eyes, delivered their lines, and vanished.
Anvar was totally up to this type of burning intensity as he delivered his lines.
He had been dressed in a black ensemble. It may have been a doublet that covered his tall lanky frame somewhat skimpily. Below them he wore a matching pair of ballooning pants in some shiny fabric, satin, perhaps, and black stockings. For the life of me I can't remember whether he came onstage as Hamlet, or Romeo, or Mark Anthony, or all three. It was in his final appearance as Iago that he made his mark.
He had a stagecraft sword tucked into his waist. He was tall and so light skinned he seemed ethereal. His eyes shone like pale blue sapphires.
By that time, we in the audience were beginning to tire of the continuous episodes of high drama before us. We were suppressing our laughter as best as we could. Sitting next to me was Deepak Bhise, an advertising hot-shot of the time along with Anvar, his colleague.
So, when Anvar in his black suit made his final speech and fell dead with a thud on the stage clutching at his sword, we were momentarily stunned. Had he really fallen back and hit his head? The sword had ridden up the fabric at an odd angle. The doublet had crumpled under the impact of the fall. He lay on the stage a wide expanse of his ivory white skin exposed from the waist to the armpit.
As we watched, the apparently dead Iago very slowly used his hand to pull the edge of his doublet and cover the exposed flesh.
Needless to say, it brought the House down.
Deepak took me backstage to introduce me to Anvar. Despite such beginnings, or because of them Anvar and I became friends. We met for endless cups of coffee at the Samovar, or if finances permitted for the delicious creamy frozen tulip glasses of "Viennoise" in the lounge at the Taj overlooking the Gateway of India.
It was certainly the best of times for art, for advertising, for drama, for music, and for being young and ready to taste the rebellion of the Sixties.
Looking back, I think of Anvar as a hero of his own imagination creating fictions for himself based on which book or film he was reading. To me he appeared luminous. He could change colors like a chameleon, depending on the idea that attracted him for a particular duration of time. This may be entirely my way of remembering him.
Living at Colaba in a small flat with an Uncle, he became a character from Truman Capote's novella, "Breakfast at Tiffany's". The Uncle was forever in search of a woman he could love and eventually marry. For a while, this became Anvar's quest, until such time that the Uncle did marry the woman of his dreams and settle down.
Downtown Bombay was fizzing with the energy fueled by the liberation theories floating across the sound-waves and ideas unleashed by what came to be known as the Beat Generation. There was the glamour of the buzzing world of advertising and film, still in its infancy. It was dominated by the Four Magi who were in charge of selling the fantasy of a desirable lifestyle to the newly emerging cosmopolitan set- Alyque Padamsee, Gerson Da Cunha, Kersi Katrak, Subhas Ghosal- together with the darker side of existentialism, looking for cheap thrills walking down the pavements of Colaba, observing the huddled masses sleeping, or furtively fornicating, under the shadow of the dim street lights.
At such times, Anvar walked in the footsteps of Holden Caulfield the articulate angst-ridden hero of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" with the jaunty evocation of the Robert Burnsian line - "If a body catch a body coming through the rye".
Anvar could be at home in both worlds. Or at least this is what he claimed, whenever we met him at different points of his life. He was a born story-teller. All he needed was an audience. When he came to dine at my parent's home in Madras, as it was then known, he would drive my Mother to despair when he refused to finish any meal that had been placed in front of him as he started on one of his stories.
She was the one who introduced him to one of the more permanent attachments of his life. He had asked her for a paying guest accommodation. She introduced him to one of her many cousins, Uma Ramachandran who was new to the idea of having a guest stay at the family's newly built house at Besant Nagar. Uma Aunty, as everyone calls her, opened up a different way of living together as a close-knit family. Perhaps it took Anvar by surprise. But more of this later.
In retrospect, I now believe that the need to create a fictional sense of the world around himself stemmed from his highly privileged background growing up in Hyderabad.
That now forgotten era comes alive in the book "The Days of the Beloved'' (Harriet Ronken Lynton and Mohini Rajan 1974), the most enlightened of the Nawabs of the Asaf Jahi dynasty, Mahbub Ali Pasha, who lived at the turn of the 19th century. Mahbub Pasha was rumored to walk through the streets of Hyderabad at night in disguise to discover whether the citizenry was being properly cared for by his officials.
Like many of his privileged cousins and friends, Anvar was educated at the Mayo College, Ajmer in Rajasthan and could tie a splendid turban like the best of them. At the same time, He was also enthralled by the stories that he had heard of his famous INA Uncle, Abid Hasan Safrani (1911-1984), who had given up his original name Zain-al-Abdin Hasan, to adopt the more poetic one of Safrani.
This was the link that endeared Anvar to my parents when he visited them in the early 1980s while living at Madras. My parents had travelled with Safrani on a slow boat from Bombay to Egypt and then onward to Europe as the first recruits as officers in the newly formed Indian Foreign Service. Like Anvar, they had heard first hand from Safrani how he had been inspired to coin the term "Jai Hind" while serving at the side of Subhas Chandra Bose and the soldiers that formed the liberationist movement in the East known as the INA.
Safrani was also an enthusiast of poetry both in Persian and Urdu who could also enjoy and share the finer aspects of a civilized way of life, with the people he met along the way.
There was a time when Anvar spent a few years in Colombo where I happened to visit him.
He was as enchanted by the tropical lushness of the Island as he was intrigued by the presence of Arthur C. Clarke, the science-fiction writer who was a longtime resident. That was the coloring he took while chasing Arthur Clarke for an interview. In those days, visitors were given a printed resume of the writer's achievements before they were allowed into his house. The highlight of the meeting was to watch Clarke play ping-pong, or table-tennis, with a robot as his opponent.
The other writer that Anvar interviewed while at Madras was quite the opposite. R.K. Narayan, the charmed inventor of the Malgudi stories lived in a modest block of apartments facing a busy thoroughfare of the City. When Anvar went to interview him, Narayan was dressed in a simple white cotton veshti, as the South Indian dhoti is known, and a banian, or vest, with short sleeves. He was equally interested in interviewing Anvar, as Anvar was in capturing the Magpie-like gaze of the famous writer looking at him through his spectacles.
Finally, R.K.Narayan relented and gave him a lesson in the making of fiction. He took him to his window and pointed to the figure of what appeared to be a 'common man' a driver standing on the road. "Look" he said, or words to that effect, "If you can make a story out of his life, you will have discovered the secret of writing."
Meanwhile, staying with the Ramachandrans, at Besant Nagar, Anvar found himself getting lessons in learning to be himself. The family adopted him as naturally as they did the gold-fish in their fish-tanks, the colorful canaries that twittered in their cages, as continually as Anvar unraveled his long stories, the family dogs, and visitors that dropped him at their house.
Uma Aunty had been a science graduate with a keen interest in Zoology in the early part of her career. She then decided to become a tour guide specializing in the monuments and temple towns of Tamil Nadu. When she was out on one of assignments, her role as content provider for the household was taken up by her husband Chandran Uncle. He nurtured not only his two sons, Mohan and Ram, but included Anvar as the older son.
Though, he was by all accounts a very shy individual, on some evenings, when in the midst of his three sons, Chandran Uncle would be persuaded to sing in his deep baritone accompanied by the strumming of a guitar. And they would sing along with him.
It would not be wrong to add that this is when Anvar finally found a rhythm to his life that matched his innermost longings to belong.
Or perhaps to understand finally the lines that Burns so eloquently put into verse: If a body catch a body, coming through the Rye...."
