The twinkle in her eyes

Zohra Sehgal. She could carry a description like “the quintessential grandmother” quite effortlessly on her frail shoulders.

Her saucy, expressive face, with those perennially twinkling eyes, and that highly infectious grin is what always come to mind when one thinks of her.

I first saw her in the British television series The Jewel in The Crown, one of the first major shows to be telecast on Doordarshan in the late 1980s, long, long before the mindboggling array of TV channels that are available today.

This was the period when she worked in quite a number of British TV productions.
She played an Indian aristocrat, Mrs Chatterjee, quite effortlessly.

What a competent actor, and how crisp her dialogue delivery was, I thought. And really didn’t think anymore about who she was, to be honest. One didn’t quite know who she was — at least outside theatre circles, where she was a fiery legend.

For the hardworking Indian cine-goer not given to critical appraisals and all that, she would not be part of their lives until she appeared in a number of popular Hindi films in the 1990s, with her laughing eyes and irrepressible grin.

People sat up and grinned back in darkened movie halls across the country. That was when the feisty Zohra entered into our consciousness.

She was then — over 70 years old — an age then when most people would have retired or would be preparing to retire.

Until then, the image of the filmi mother or grandmother was mostly the clichéd long-suffering maa, given to unnecessary sacrifices, silently taking all the hardships as a matter of course. That is when Zohra floated across the screen — strong-willed, with a mind of her own, and not afraid to say it like it was. And she defused all that serious stuff with that irrepressible twinkle and that little tilt of the head, and the use of her hands to pat a shoulder here, a head there.

Yes! We exclaimed, as we sat up in our seats and laughed, that is my favourite grandmother or aunt. If you pause for a minute and travel back a bit, you can appreciate the remarkable trail this exuberant woman has blazed. 

How she travelled from Lahore in an automobile across countries including Iran, Palestine (as it was called then), and Cyprus, and catching a ship from Egypt to Europe, how she happened to watch a Uday Shankar dance performance in Europe, how she became a part of his troupe, and how she met and married Kameshwar Sehgal, eight years her junior — all this is now public knowledge.

But what amazed me about this remarkable lady, who was known to be such a cheerful, lively soul, someone who you thought was on top of the world and didn’t have a worry, was the fact that the love of her life committed suicide years after they were married and had two children.

Whatever one may say about strong-willed people in life and feistiness and all that, it is not easy to recover from such a blow. That she went on to find work as an actor, and that she was able to speak about her husband in a candid manner is a tribute to her intellectual courage.

Stage actors who worked with her in IPTA and Prithvi Theatre talk about her sheer greed — there is no other word for it — for getting roles.

Some actors who have worked with her say that the more terrible the role, the happier she was — she could work on it and make it look better.

There is no doubt that in her heart she was a hardcore theatre actor who believed in the traditional honing of one’s skills by way of daily practice — what we Indians call riyaaz.

There are tales of her rehearsing again and again on characters that she played in countless plays until she felt she was doing justice to the role. One theatre activist had described long ago how she would keep reciting Urdu couplets everyday so that her diction and dialogue delivery were perfect.

She was a dancer as well (the first Indian to enroll in a ballet school in Dresden in the 1930s!) — So she would even use movements to what she was reciting. She even used her skills as a dancer to work as a choreographer in films, the most famous being Raj Kapoor’s dream sequence in Awaara.

Her 14 years at Prithvi theatre, when the man after whom the place was named, Prithviraj Kapoor, was still around, is the stuff that legends are made of.

For me, the image of her brandishing a knife high in the air like a medieval warrior, with that toothy grin, eyes ablaze with mischief, posing happily for the photographers, just about sums it up.

It was not a scene from a play or a film — this was 2012, and she was getting ready to cut a cake on her 100th birthday! Stars like her don’t die — they twinkle on — especially from the eyes! Long live, our dear, dear Zohra.