RIP Shashi Kapoor: Bidding adieu to a humane actor!

MARCH 18, 1938 TO DECEMBER 4, 2017

Shashi Kapoor was a true blue Piscean.  He was charm personified one minute, tongue-in-cheek the next. But in the end, you usually warmed up to him because his charm outweighed his sarcasm.

I met him for the first time in the early ’80s at his office at Janki Kutir, near Prithvi Theatre. Seeing me dressed in a sari and a big bindi, he jested, “Are you sure you want a career in journalism? Or are you hoping to get noticed by Shyam (Benegal) and looking for a break in one of his movies? You are dressed for it.”

When I assured him I had no plans of facing the camera, he laughed and said, “I was just kidding.”

On another occasion, when I told him how flirtatious he was, he confessed that he could even romance a pole in a film. “Paint a pair of eyelashes and draw a mouth on a pole and I can even romance it,” he said. “But I’m not looking to do that with you because you are closer to Kunal’s (his elder son) age, than mine.” With Shashi, you could never have the last word. However, many of us from the media couldn’t get enough of him and were always looking for excuses to meet him. 

Though he had a quirky sense of humour, he was an extremely professional actor. There were times when he was doing multiple shifts for different films on the same day. But he was very much like the English (his in-laws were British) when it came to punctuality and professionalism because he managed to pack in so much into his day. He preferred to meet journalists only during the lunch break.  

The one thing that I often noticed was how frugal his food habits were. The meals that came from his home were supervised by his wife, Jennifer, who monitored his diet. Back in the day, Rishi Kapoor had once said, “Jennifer aunty had kept Shashi uncle on such a strict diet. Once she went away, he let himself go.’’

When we visited him at his home in Atlas Apartments in Mumbai, Shashi gave us a taste of the Kapoor hospitality.  Like the rest of his family, he pulled a face when I told him that I was vegetarian. “Is that any way to live?’’ he joked. Of course, his man Friday would ensure even the vegetarians were fed well.

The sight of Shashi settled in a chair in his drawing room dressed in a white kurta and a lungi still haunts me. He had put on loads of weight by the early ’90s and could not even bend to cut his toe nails. So, he had a man seated at his feet doing just that. Not that he enjoyed being ungainly, but he refused to apologise for his size!

When he teased a couple of journos and me by saying, “Oh, look, the baddies are here,’’ we would quip with “Look, fatty is here too.’’ And he always took it sportingly. How often do you see an actor allowing someone to take a jibe at him? But Shashi was different. He was real, he was fun.

And then one day everything changed. Shashi’s health started to fail. He suffered a slight memory loss. When we met him at Neetu Kapoor’s mother, Rajee Singh’s funeral, he smiled at us but there wasn’t any flicker of recognition in his eyes. Instead, there was a certain sadness in them. 

In March this year, he attended the launch of his nephew Rishi Kapoor’s book Khullam Khulla at a five-star hotel in Bandra. The entire Kapoor clan was there. Though Shashi didn’t recognise most people barring his family, all of us walked up to greet him. And then something terrible happened. One of the organisers stamped on Shashi’s foot by mistake. He winced in pain and his eyes clouded with tears. Though he didn’t know who caused the pain, he looked around helplessly. In that moment, I realised that Shashi may not be able to recognise people but he was alert enough to recognise and feel the pain caused by some clumsy oaf.

That thought broke my heart...just like his demise has.

... with wife Jennifer Kendal

...In a still from Deewar (1975)

...In a still from Junoon (1978) 

In a still from Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987)

Shashi Kapoor with daughter Sanjna and son Kunal