Director Anup Singh worked with Irrfan Khan in two critically acclaimed films - Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost and The Song of Scorpions. The two shared a deep bond of friendship and after the latter passed away due to an illness in 2020, Singh started penning down his memories of the great actor.
Edited excerpts from a conversation with Singh:
How did the book come about?
Initially, I just wanted to process that my friend was no more. I tried my best to keep the memories away but the moment you do that, the more they surface. I would be reminded of the rhythm of his walk if I saw a tree swaying in the wind. The door of my house has a particular creak and on silent nights, it would remind me of the tone of Irrfan’s voice. I realised that he is going to be with me all my life and I will see him in many aspects of my life.
That was the first acceptance. I thought maybe these memories are with me because there might be something incomplete in our work together. We had been planning to work on our next film and I decided to start writing the script. As soon as I did that, my grief subsided because I felt that we were collaborating again.
I kept writing and, in that process, a lot of other memories came to me – of some incident with him or something he had said and I would write them down in a separate notebook. Once in a while, I would share some anecdotes on social media. My friend and Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan encouraged me to write more as he felt Irrfan’s spirit in what I wrote. From that point onward, I started trying to structure these notes and memories into some kind of form which led to the book.
Did you share the work with his wife Sutapa, and what was her reaction?
For almost a year after his passing, I could not talk to Sutapa because I felt I would be destroyed. We would just text each other. I wasn’t thinking of a book at that point. After Amarjit spoke to me, I went through what I had written and I felt this is my sense of grief. Where is Irrfan’s joy of life and his affirmation of being in the present? So, I re-wrote a lot and once I felt that was happening, only then I sent the manuscript to Sutapa.
She was really emotional. She felt sad, of course, but also happy that here is a book that did not try to define him. This book is a celebration of a man and an actor who affected us and gave us a sense of life which otherwise we wouldn’t have. He not only made our lives more sensuous but also made it gentler and tender.
How did you think of approaching Amitabh Bachchan for the foreword?
I don’t know Mr Bachchan at all. Irrfan had learnt a lot during the shoot of Piku and we would often talk about him. The foreword is all Sutapa’s doing. She approached Mr Bachchan without telling me. He asked for the manuscript, and once he received it, almost immediately said that he wanted to do it. It is such a generous and such an insightful foreword - something only one great actor can see in another.
One of the things that drew me to him was his curiosity about life. Every moment would lead him to think about something else which would make him question what he had thought of it earlier. There was no point where he felt that he had understood a person, acting or a character. This curiosity created within him a quality of hesitation and it is this hesitation in the way he speaks as a character, the pauses he takes, a slow rhythm that suddenly catches on speed, the way he turns his head or the way he would look or not look at you. These kinds of moments – outside the domain of creating a character – are what we call a ‘rasa’. And because it’s full of hesitation, we who are watching him, hesitate with him and that performance becomes a part of our body. I think the sense of loss we feel is not only because a great actor has passed away but a certain way of living has gone.
These memories you have shared are so personal and because they are so personal, do you think the readers will connect with them even more?
I hope so. Irrfan was one of the least starry of the actors. He would meet strangers with the same ease as he would meet people he knew. Anybody could approach him and if he was not caught up in a performance, he was present for you. I think I have tried that in the choice of words and in the lilt of the writing that something of Irrfan’s lilt is felt and at the end of the book I would be very happy if you don’t take anything but just that little lilt in your body. To live life a little more sensuously and with a little more care for everything around us.
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