One of my earliest assignments as a journalist, fresh after of my postgraduate journalism qualification, was to interview an “up-and-coming” actor named Nana Patekar for Bombay’s Mid-Day.
Little did I know that the young man I met in a modest one-room home off Mahim’s Tulsi Pipe Road (Senapati Bapat Marg) would go on to become one of Indian cinema’s most formidable performers.
I remember arriving at his one-room home for our appointment and discovering that there was barely enough room for us to sit and conduct an interview. So we stood and talked. I rested my notepad against the parapet and scribbled his answers. I didn’t even possess a tape recorder in those days.
For nearly 45 minutes, Nana spoke with extraordinary candour. Even then, he was the Nana Patekar the world would come to know: forthright, opinionated, fiercely independent and utterly unwilling to mince his words. His Marathi was colloquial, and the English words he used were heavily Marathi-accented.
He was scathing about Bollywood and the Hindi film establishment, but spoke passionately about Marathi theatre and the exciting experimentation taking place on its stages and gingerly making their way into cinema.
I remember him discussing Tennessee Williams’ plays and several experimental Marathi playwrights with whom he was working. He was particularly enthusiastic about his theatrical projects involving folk theatre forms and mentioned that he had a rehearsal at the celebrated Chabildas school hall that very evening.
But what remains equally vivid is a more personal conversation about his family’s Ganesh Chaturthi tradition.
His father had begun creating a Ganapati image entirely out of flowers, a tradition that had become famous in the neighbourhood (Phulacha Ganapati, it was called). Nana spoke about the crowds it attracted and warmly invited me to visit during the festival.
He assured me that if I asked for him, he would personally welcome me and offer “special prasad”.
Regrettably, I never took him up on that invitation.
The interview appeared as a full-page feature in Mid-Day, accompanied by a large photograph of Nana standing against the fence outside his home, his arms resting on the fence, taken by a staff photographer who visited separately.
I met Nana a couple of times in subsequent years. Remarkably, he remembered me. He once told me that my interview had featured the first really large photograph of him ever published in a newspaper. (I’ve misplaced the cutting and can only see it in my mind’s eye.)
That recollection will always be with me.
Today, as India mourns Nana Patekar, I remember not merely the celebrated actor but that candid, passionate young man in Mahim, speaking his mind in a tiny home, with enormous dreams and an unmistakable sense of purpose.
And I remember, with some regret, the invitation to see his family’s floral Ganapati that I never accepted.