At home in Lucknowi and Queen’s angrezi

He was habitually wont to begin a sentence with, “Amma yaar”, as in “Amma yaar, aap kaise hain ”, “Amma yaar, badi manhoos garmi hai”, “Amma yaar, aaj shaam ko thodi gup-shup ho jaaye.”

How are you ; The weather’s wretchedly hot; or, let’s chat about this and that this evening. All these prouncements were prefixed with the untranslatable, “Amma yaar.”

Today’s actors of every generation, by contrast, go with a “Hey dude,” or a “So wassup!” but then he belonged to another era and tehzeeb, didn’t he Saeed Jaffrey, the continent-trotting actor, could be at home in Lucknawi argot as he could be in the Queen’s angrezi.

This dual identity was his strong suit even though, in overview, it proved to be an uncomfortable fit in the show whirl of Mumbai-manufactured movies.

“Amma yaar, musibat toh yeh hai ki,” he would say tetchily, “Bombaywallas believe I’m based in London and the Brits believe I’m in India. Think I’ll have to open my ‘dukaan’ as an actor in the Juhu-Vile Parle scheme. Hai na Your filmmakers here just have to give me a shout.”

Actually, many did: from Raj Kapoor and Yash Chopra to Ramesh Sippy, Shyam Benegal and Sai Paranjpye, auteurs who could detect that here’s an actor who wouldn’t cut corners before the camera. Shekhar Kapur cast him aptly as a jesting-jousting buddy in Masoom, in which he broke into a boogie with Naseeruddin Shah, to the tune of R.D. Burman’s “Huzur is kadar ” A sweet vignette that.

The actor could be such a stickler for perfection that he insisted on finding just the right name for the memorable bidi-paanwalla incarnated in Chashme Buddoor.

A story goes that he phoned Sai Paranjpye at the crack of dawn, to boom, “Hello, I’m your Lallan miyan”. The director responded, “Perfect!”, but within hours went on to wonder what the hell her Lallan was up to, calling for an abrupt respite in the day’s shoot in Delhi’s Nizamuddin East neighbourhood.

Amidst the onlookers he had sighted a man wearing a magenta lungi emblazoned with a glitzy image of the Taj Mahal monument. The startled onlooker was stripped to his underpants by the crew’s assistants, paid and thanked profusely. Saeed Jaffrey changed into the lungi right away, never mind if it couldn’t be seen, since he had to stand behind a counter. “I feel perfect now!” he whooped. Sai Paranjpye laughed her indulgent laugh and said, “Okay, good for you! Let’s get on with the shoot now.”

Yet he could scare the willies out of you, fetching up bare-chested, or almost, as a leering, lascivious sort in the now-mercifully forgotten pop musical Star. When I asked him about that during an interview, he tinkled the ice cubes in a glass of Scotch, to mumble, “Forget it, forget it. To err is human, to forgive divine. Hai na ” There was no amma yaar, this time.

On being quizzed about his errors, Saeed Jaffrey could be reticent but he would never clam up, a major relief from actors in general who’d rather brag than truth speak. He would recall his divorce, dating back to 1965, from actress-and-master-chef Madhur Jaffrey, nostalgically, “We were insanely in love. She’s a super woman, she’s a better actor than I am, I just didn’t meet her exacting standards.” And this within the earshot of his second wife, casting agent Jennifer Sorell, who jibed back sportingly, “Right Saeed, now you’re talking.”

Per force, conversations with the actor had to be contained. After all, his sprawling oeuvre in Bombay, Hollywood and Britain, could never be covered entirely. As for his work on stage and television, that was another world altogether.

Of his filmography, quite clearly Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj ke Khilari was his crowning glory, responsible for assigning him the unshakeable image of an indolent nawab who fiddled while his country burnt. That was one performance in a gazillion, in which he stalemated Sanjeev Kumar as simply as popping another zarda-paan into his mouth. Despite the hookah puffs and paan-chewing, he articulated every word of the Urdu dialogue chastely, and saucily.

As is the custom, that bravura performance snowballed into ceaseless “character roles”, a euphemism for those excluded from the lead. If this fazed him, the natty nawab didn’t show it, waltzing through the studios, at times to go no-holds-barred as the Hitlerite daddyji to Madhuri Dixit (Dil has to be re-seen to be disbelieved) and at times a benign Papa Khan Baba to the rural belle (Henna). Obviously, after his fill of surrogate daddyjis, he was bound to be disenchanted. After the sparsely seen Bhavishya: The Future (2006), he dropped off the Bollywood map.

In high profile international films like Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, as Sardar Vallabhai Patel despite little or no physical resemblance to India’s “Iron man”, he was credible. From all accounts, he didn’t rave from the rooftops about his participation in David Lean’s A Passage to India because by then Lean had become as crotchety as a king without a throne.

Independent British cinema found in Saeed Jaffrey the ideal actor to play the Southhall-Hounslow-settled Asian, best exemplified by the tongue-in-chic My Beautiful Laundrette. How Saeed Jaffrey introspected on his life and career during his closing years will remain unknown though. His autobiography, alas, doesn’t do the actor or the puckish child-man within him sufficient justice.

For sure he had many performances to go, many more awards to collect and limitless stories to narrate. Once he quit coming back to Mumbai, it was a classic case of out-of-sight-totally-out-of-mind. Saeed Jaffrey was forgotten. He had closed that dukaan in the Juhu-Vile Parle scheme.

And now, there will be no more “Amma yaars” darted over Scotch on the rocks, to anyone anymore.

The writer is a journalist, film critic and film director