Raj Kapoor ChildHood

The environment I grew up in was entirely one of theatre and films. We came to Bombay in 1927. That was the era of silent films. My father joined the. I Grant Anderson Theatre, where Ardeshir Irani made the first Indian talkie, Alam Ara, and Father was in it. I myself was barely five when I first acted in a play, called The Cart, for which I got my first award. It was then that the whole thing just entered me, and I could not do anything except belong to the world of show business.

I was very fair, with blue eyes. My Father’s actresses used to cuddle me whenever I visited the stage, and I used to feel very excited. But even that early I had learnt the art of concealing emotions. I was extremely precocious. And I was a worshipper of nudity. I think it all started because of my intimacy with my mother who was young, beautiful, and had the sharp features of a Pathan woman.

I think it all started because of my intimacy with my mother who was young, beautiful, and had the sharp features of a Pathan woman. We often bathed together, and seeing her in the nude must have left a deep erotic impression on my mind. There is an excellent Urdu phrase, muqaddas uriyan (sacred nudity), which describes this perfectly. In my films, bathing scenes recur often. Women in general occupy most of my early memories, and they appear in my films like ghosts that refuse to be buried.

We had once gone to Lyallpur in western Punjab, now in Pakistan, which is my father’s birthplace. My great grandfather was the tehsildar there, and the villagers held the family in great respect. An earthen oven was always kept lit in the center of the village, and women roasted chana on the fire. I remember having gone to buy chana wearing a shirt and nothing under it. The woman at the oven had an odd smile on her face as she said: ‘You don’t have to pay for the chana, just raise your shirt and make a bowl out of it.' I did, and stood like that, and she laughed her head off looking at me.

I was totally innocent. Years later when this memory came back to me and I understood the trick she must have been up to, it disturbed me a great deal. For some time in my life, chana itself become almost a *** object. It might have come back into my cinema at a subconscious level. There’s a scene in Bobby when the boy flashes a mirror into Bobby’s face while she’s sitting in the library. The girl comes out, first in rage, and then in playfulness. The boy says, ‘Let’s have tea.’ Bobby says, ‘No, let’s have chana.’

I was a precocious child. I was always aware of my surroundings. In Lyallpur, my great grandfather, the tehsildar, used to go plucking cotton and we kids would go with him because it was fun. One day, probably because of the heat, I must have wandered away to rest in the shade of a tree and gone off to sleep. At sunset, they missed me. My grandmother started howling and shouting. All of a sudden Ramu, the sweeper, an untouchable, brought me home and said, ‘Forgive me that I touched him. I’ve carried him here.’ He apologized with folded hands. I was not permitted to come into the house. My mother was asked to bathe me first, because an untouchable had touched me. I didn’t know the implications of all this then, but I knew that what was being done was wrong.

I was a precocious child. I was always aware of my surroundings. In Lyallpur, my great grandfather, the tehsildar, used to go plucking cotton and we kids would go with him because it was fun. One day, probably because of the heat, I must have wandered away to rest in the shade of a tree and gone off to sleep. At sunset, they missed me. My grandmother started howling and shouting. All of a sudden Ramu, the sweeper, an untouchable, brought me home and said, ‘Forgive me that I touched him. I’ve carried him here.’ He apologized with folded hands. I was not permitted to come into the house.

My mother was asked to bathe me first, because an untouchable had touched me. I didn’t know the implications of all this then, but I knew that what was being done was wrong.
We lived in Calcutta for eight years, returning to Bombay when I was fourteen. We lived on Hazra Raod near Kalighat. My father went to work every day on a bicycle. New Theaters was not very far away. I studied in St. Xavier’s School. In my neighborhood, everybody used to call me ‘Prithvi chhele.’ I was the pampered brat. Neighborhood weddings, Durga puja pandals, local musical soirees – I was a permanent fixture everywhere.

Everybody in our family is fond of food. That is the reason why the young and the old are all obese. As a child I too was very fat. My mother, giving me the example of my father, would always nag me to exercise.
While sending me to school, she would pack an omelette and chapatti for me. But my taste buds were always looking for new flavours… There were three or four eating-places, which I used to visit regularly.

My allowance was only two annas a day, which was not enough to meet. This expense. So I would stop my credit at one shop and open an account at another. Once the credit got beyond my means. I would sell a book or two….I would return home from school and give back the packed meal to my mother, saying that I didn’t eat it because I was on a diet. Her concern and love would make her feed me even more!

In school I was very fond of acting. My father was a great actor; so I through that it was my privilege and my prerogative to become a great actor as well. It so happened that our school staged a passion play. The most paramount thing in my mind was that every child who worked in that passion play given three coupons to eat sandwiches, samosas and coffee and ice cream- all sorts of beautiful things to eat. I got a costume…like a cassock that Fathers wore…a bit too long for my short size.

Anyway.we were supposed to go once or twice behind Christ, shouting hosanna.hosanna.hosanna. I did that once, I did it twice, and being an exuberant actor, I went in for the third entry, which was not supposed to be there. When I entered the stage, my foot got caught in the cassock I was wearing, and I fell down right in front in front of a very serious Christ, and people laughed and Christ also laughed. I was happy that I had made Christ laugh. When the curtain comes down, the drama master caught me by the neck. He hit me, and said, 'You are an actor? Your father is an actor? I think you are a donkey! You get out and don't come back again!' My coupons were taken away and I didn't get any sandwiches, I didn't get any ice cream.I didn't get any cake and I didn't get any samosas!

My childhood memories are pitted with indelible scars of experience. I was a fatty. Every sort of practical joke was ‘played on me)… apart from some vivid patches of happiness (my childhood years) were quite miserable. These patches of happiness were the occasions when I fell in love, but more of that later. To return to the miserable moments I soon packed up the most natural defence mechanism – the one used by all the great jokers of the world. I learnt that the more one resisted being a target, the more one suffered.

So, instead, I put on the mask of a joker by reacting as through I thoroughly enjoyed being made the butt of practical jokes. Indeed, I even took this a step further by inventing jokes on myself, which would make my colleagues laugh. You see, I was seeking that which every schoolboy seeks- the love, affection and esteem of others.

I wanted to be liked. I had un unlimited capacity to love and to be loved and it was not long before I fell in love…once, twice, thrice…and so forth. All these experiences began crystallizing into a rough and ready philosophy of life in my formative years…In (school) dramas and plays; I began to put into practice my theory of being liked and also being in the spotlight. I found that the audience at those school dramas tended to grow restive during long dreary passages. So, right in the middle of them, I would casually do something funny and totally unrelated to the proceedings and get involuntary giggles from the frontbenchers. I’d follow that up with another little funny thing, and the giggles would become laughter, and spread from the frontbenchers right through the house to the backbenches.

Thus I learned the rudimentary lessons in ‘scene-stealing’…I began adding to my storehouse of experiences, which I was to carry forward to the time when, many years later, I moved inevitably into films.

In Mera Naam Joker, the child's crush on his beautiful teacher, played by Simi Garewal, is no fantasy of the scriptwriter. I was a great favourite of women teachers in very school that I attended. My first school was the New Era Boys' School on Hughes Road Bombay, where the teachers would queue up to kiss me! I was in the prep class then, and I used to get irritated with them and ask them, 'Why do you kiss me? Are you my mother?' Undaunted, they would kiss me more! I was very fond of one of these teachers. Once we had gone out on a picnic with this teacher when we saw a large flock of birds winging into the evening sky.

It came back years later in a sequence in Mera Naam Joker with the song 'Titar ke do aage titar..' I got so attached to this teacher at age six, that when my father took up a ob with New

Theatres and we had to shift to Calcutta, I dug my heels in, telling my parents that I would rather stay at the school hostel than pack up and leave. In my last few days in Bombay, I used to bring her flowers. It was a tearful parting.

White is my favourite colour and it is deeply rooted in my mind in my heart. I remember to this day how the colour white came to be imprinted in my memory. We were living in Calcutta. One morning, as I was getting ready to go to school, I heard my mother tell the cook to buy chickens as some friends of my father were expected for lunch. Chicken! My mouth began to water. I decided to play truant that afternoon and return home for lunch. Father and his guests were already seated at the table when I entered the dining room. 'There is no school today?' Papa-ji asked me sternly. 'No' I mumbled, avoiding his eye, 'it is a half-day.'

Among the guests was a young woman. She was dressed in white. I looked at her, and I could not look away. She seemed to me to be the most beautiful woman in the world. The guests stayed all afternoon and I too hung around the house. I had fallen in love with her of course.

Then it was time for them to go. They were saying farewell. I went into the garden in front of the house. I plucked some creamy white tuberose. And I was still plucking them when the woman in white came down the steps. Stammering and blushing, I gave her the fragrant gift. She took the flowers from me, murmuring her pleasure. She walked through the garden and onto the road. Turn around, I pleaded in my heart. Just this once! Please look back! But she did not turn She was gone forever and I could not forget her.

Ever since it has been an endless search for the ideal which always recedes, leaving only the white flowers as visible evidence of the search.

I remember Principal Soares. He was also the Latin teacher and Latin was the second language in those days. In the examinations, when the Latin paper came up, I wrote, 'Latin is a dead language, why dig up the buried?' I got one mark out of a hundred and that too complimentary. Principal Soares said, 'Unfortunately, boy, I can't anything as far as your academic education is concerned. You are otherwise brilliant, and you have the world before you!'

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