A Country Called Childhood book review: Deepti Naval's memoir is thoughtful, intense

Deepti Naval writes that the idea to become an actor began to take shape in her mind when she was nine years old, but she was too afraid to tell her parents. (Image source: Twitter/DeeptiNaval)

If you are the kind of reader who is wary of celebrity memoirs, you might want to make an exception for actor-painter-filmmaker Deepti Naval’s book A Country Called Childhood (Aleph, 2002). The writing will leave you moved and mesmerised. She intends the book to be “more like a screenplay” so that you can walk with her “through those corridors of memory”.

Much of it is set in Amritsar, where she grew up in “a looming four-storey structure” with hidden staircases that satiated her appetite for both mystery and history. The house, bought by her paternal grandfather, was built on “a large 500 square yard plot on the outer edge of the walled city”. She grew up utterly fascinated by the mosque right next to the house.

She writes, “My memory of the house is entwined with the maseet’s dome, its minarets, and the mellifluous sound of the azaan, unexpectedly stirring something within you.” She was born in 1952, just a few years after the bloody Partition of 1947 that split Punjab into two. The mosque remained deserted until Naval was four years old because most Muslims in the city had left for Pakistan. The return of a maulvi in 1956 filled the place with sounds of prayer. Her father, stirred by this experience, opened up about his “boyhood days”.

Naval is skilled at evoking the mood and atmosphere of a particular time and place. She recalls being consumed with curiosity every time a faqir from the hills came down to the plains in the winter. Wrapped in her razai, she would hear him singing in the gully. Sometimes, she would offer him some flour. On other occasions, she would wonder if he had a family, if there was a woman in his life, if he had abandoned his children to wander forever.

The book captures simple moments of everyday life imprinted in the author’s consciousness – having her ears cleaned with a cotton swab dipped in hydrogen peroxide, relishing malai kulfi, bunking classes to watch movies, reading books on the terrace, and summer vacations in the Kullu Valley where her mother displayed a “knack for cooking apples in many different ways”. Their meals included apple stew, apple sabzi, apple soup, and apple pudding.

Naval offers a glimpse of how the idea of being an actor began to take shape in her mind. By the age of nine, she knew she wanted to act but she was petrified of telling her parents. Her mother used to direct plays, and her grandfather had a box reserved for himself in three cinema halls near their house, but she knew they would object to her taking up acting as a career. They did not even allow her to join art school in Mumbai, citing financial difficulties.

Naval grew up idolizing two actors in particular – Sadhana and Meena Kumari. The latter’s Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962) made a big impression. She writes, “Meena Kumari to me was an enigma, there could be no one else like her. There was so much depth in her persona, and she was beautiful too…In addition to the fact that I worshipped her, I was bewitched by her ability to emote – she made me believe every emotion she portrayed on screen.”

(Image source: Twitter/DeeptiNaval)

The distinction between reality and the world of make-believe was confusing for her, especially as a teenager. Naval reveals that she even ran away from home at the age of 13 to see Kashmir.

The book strikes an honest note. Naval calls herself “a rebel without a cause” who was “plagued” by numerous dilemmas at the time of puberty. She ended up doing things that she regretted later. She writes about “hostile exchanges” between her parents, and their separation that left her traumatized. Witnessing the breakdown of their “picture-perfect life” scarred her so badly that she never felt “completely secure in any relationship” later in her life.

Naval’s book narrates the personal against the backdrop of the political. Apart from the Partition, she also talks about India’s wars with China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1965, respectively. She devotes more space to the latter, particularly because of its immediacy. She writes, “As the pressure mounted, India realized that the offensive in the Jammu sector had to be offset by opening up another front on the Amritsar border.” Trenches were dug in Amritsar, and there were mock sirens every evening to train people to run and hide.

In retrospect, she feels embarrassed that the ritual of running and hiding was a bit like a game for all the children, including herself. They were excited rather than afraid. As an adult, she learnt to see the past through a different lens. In 1970, her parents migrated to the United States. Naval went to Hunter College in New York for her bachelor’s degree, and one of her friends there was a Pakistani woman named Meenu Munawwar who had witnessed the same war of 1965 at close quarters. The only difference was that Munawwar grew up in Lahore.

Sitting in Manhattan, these women wondered aloud, “Why war? Why? Why can’t human beings just live and let live, when life is so beautiful?” As mentioned earlier, this is not a regular celebrity memoir that can be quickly devoured in a few hours. It is perceptive, thoughtful, intense. It is the window to a sensitive mind in touch with a life beyond films.