In focus: Love in the time of letters

In focus: Love in the time of letters
Yesterday, Amol Palekar turned a youthful 70. Surrounded by family and friends and in the midst of hectic preparations for a solo art exhibition which previews today, the actor took a quick stroll down memory lane to talk about the 1976 musical romance Chitchor. The film followed Rajnigandha (1974) and Chhoti Si Baat (1975), to complete a hat-trick of silver jubilee hits for Basu Chatterjee and him.

Based on a Bengali story by Subodh Ghosh, Chittachakor, the film revolves around a match being arranged for the headmaster’s daughter through letters by her elder sister.

In an ironic twist of fate, the engineer who was to arrive in the village of Madhupur is preceded by his overseer. Mistaking him for the groom-to-be, the parents have no objections to their younger daughter spending hours in his company. By the time they realise he’s the wrong man, Geeta has lost her heart to Vinod and is immune to the attentions of his boss, Sunil, much to everyone’s exasperation.

Describing his relationship with the director as “special, yet so different”, Amol remembers Basuda as a man of few words. “He would start narrating a story but after just two-and-a-half lines would trail off saying it would be better if I read the script myself. That’s what happened with the two earlier films and it was no different with Chitchor,” he smiles.

He is quick to add that the filmmaker knew what he wanted and how to get it without any dramatics. “A master of narration on screen, he was at a complete loss when he had to narrate the same story off screen. This contradictory aspect of his personality never failed to fascinate me,” admits Amol, who played the guy-nextdoor Vinod in Chitchor.

Quiz him on the shoot and he says that like all the films he did with Basuda, this one too was a lot of fun, may be more so because they went off on a long outdoor schedule to Panchgani and Mahabaleshwar. A day before they were to roll, the director, over a drink, asked Amol to take care of Vijayendra Ghatge who plays Sunil. “It’s his debut film and Vijayendra is tense. Can I put him in your room so you can do whatever is needed to help him unwind?” he requested. Amol readily agreed, having experienced the same during Rajnigandha. Even though that film about a girl torn between her college crush and a forgetful, bank clerk who brings her bunches of rajnigandha, was Amol’s debut in Hindi cinema, both Dinesh Thakur and he being from the stage, were self-assured actors. But this was a completely new medium for the other debutante Vidya Sinha and so Basu had made the same request to Amol.

“Basuda was living in Adarsh Nagar, Worli, at the time and all three of us would go there every evening and rehearse our scenes for a couple of hours,” reminisces Amol, admitting that by the time they started shooting, they had bonded and the friendship continued. “Dinesh has passed away but Vidya and I still meet and exchange notes. I’m also in touch with my wonderful Chitchor costar, Zarina (Wahab).”

He remembers Zarina as an impulsive, spontaneous actress who when he once asked her to repeat something that he had liked during rehearsals, had absolutely no memory of what she had done. Zarina on her part recalls that for some reason she developed a competitive streak and wanted to be one up on Amol in this particular film.

“But despite this Chitchor was like a picnic andwrapped up in just 25 days,” she says.

Almost four decades later, she still remembers filming the evergreen Yesudas hit, Gori tera gaon bada pyaara, in a bungalow in Panchgani. “I often visit the hill station and everytime I stop at the bungalow. It hasn’t changed much in all these years and brings back a flood of memories like applying lipstick after every shot, hoping Basuda would not notice,” she laughs. “But the hard taskmaster that he was, he always did and with a frown would tell me to wipe it off because he didn’t want his gaon ki gori Geeta to have any signs of artificial gloss.”