Ayub Khan Din: Not his father’s son

On a quaint hillside in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain, far away from TV and cell phone network lives Ayub Khan Din with his wife and two daughters. Often, Ayub has to “climb the hill” to receive his e-mails. The playwright, and occassional script writer, wants his kids to go running in the hills when they feel like it.

His own childhood had none of the freedom his daughters now enjoy. Born to a Pakistani father and a British mother, Ayub grew up at his Manchester home under the ever-watchful eyes of his father who wanted his kids — ten of them — to live like Pakistanis. In the UK. Caught between wanting to live the way they desired to — the Western way — and the way their father wanted for them, all ten children walked out of the house one by one.

Years later, Ayub would pen down scenes from his childhood in a play that would get him much recognition, and a film deal. East Is East, directed by Damien O’ Donnell and starring Om Puri, Linda Bassett and Jimi Mistry, was based on an autobiographical screenplay by Ayub. Made on a modest budget of £1.9 million, the film turned out to be one of the surprise hits of 1999, grossing more than £10 million at the box office.

George of the jungle
In the film, set in 1971, we meet Genghis aka George Khan, the middle-aged Pakistani who runs a ‘chippy’ (a fish and chips shop) in Salford and insists his sons get married to other Pakistani women. But even as the spotlight remains on Khan, little Sajid, Khan’s youngest son in the film, looks on silently, bullied by his dominating elder siblings and afraid of his tyrannical father. Sajid sees his family revolt against Khan, and standing up to him when things begin to get out of control.

As a broken Khan walks out of the house in the last scene of East Is East, the camera pans to the kids coming out on to the streets, playing with each other, as the end credits rolls.

“It was deliberate to have an open ending. Not because I had planned a sequel to it then. But that’s how life is, right? Doesn’t end at any one point, but goes on,” says Ayub. “Even in West is West, the sequel, there’s no ‘end’ as such. Khan has some more of a life left to live,” says Ayub of the character, almost entirely based on his father. Sajid, of course, is Ayub himself.

In West Is West, the story is as much Sajid’s as Khan’s. The plot has moved five years ahead from the last time you saw the family and Sajid is the last of the kids remaining at home. Now 15, Sajid is Khan’s last chance to make some sort of an impression on any of his kids. So he takes Sajid to Pakistan, where his first wife and two daughters who Khan had abandoned 35 years earlier, live. Like in the first part, Ayub wrote a script entirely based on his personal experiences.

“It was an interesting time in my life — to be taken to this whole new place, Pakistan, and living for a while with my extended family. It made me understand my father better — it gave me an idea of where he was coming from and why he was the way he was,” says Ayub, adding that even though the film is a coming-of-age tale about Sajid, it is really the father who has the growing up to do. “Khan is a slightly different man in the sequel. He’s desperate for his youngest son to accept his way of life, but finds a new side to himself in the process.”

Acting with idiots
In real life, though, the growing up never happened. Ayub’s father remained as rigid in his beliefs till his last days as he was when he first came to England, and except for Ayub and two other sons, didn’t have much contact with his other kids. Ayub himself moved on in life, doing odd jobs before he found his true calling — writing plays. After East Is East, Ayub wrote Rafta Rafta, a comic adaptation of Bill Naughton’s 1963 play, All In Good Time, which centres on an Indian couple unable to consummate their marriage. Having received good reviews, a film adaptation of the play is now underway.

But much before he gained acclaim with his written works, Ayub enjoyed a short stint in acting, working in British films and television shows. He played Sammy in Sammy And Rosie Get Laid, where he shared space with an Indian actor commonly seen in British films of those   days — Shashi Kapoor. “It was unnerving. I could never think of him as anything other than a massive star.”

Ayub acted alongside another Indian actor who wasn’t a massive star then. Unknown to most, before Shah Rukh Khan made his Bollywood debut in Deewana, he starred in a Mani Kaul film called Idiot, based on the Fyodor Doestoskvy novel of the same name. The lead role was Ayub’s. “My Hindi was terrible, so I couldn’t understand why Kaul wanted me in the film. But I guess my accent and unfamiliarity worked for the character of Prince Myshkin, who’s come from a foreign land,” says Kaul, remembering Shah Rukh as a helpful actor who tapped Ayub on the legs when he forgot his lines in Hindi.    

Finding an acting career “dissatisfactory”, Ayub got down to writing East Is East, and never looked back. Incidentally, all his work revolves around the theme of cultural identity, which Ayub insists isn’t deliberate — it’s just something that comes naturally to him. He is currently writing a play about a white household in Salford coming to terms with a death in the family, another story he witnessed growing up in the area.

It’s probably the fidelity of his scripts to real life that enabled them to connect with audiences. “After East Is East, I received hundreds of mails — which continue to pour in till this day — from kids who shared similar problems with their fathers,” he says, adding that his daughters will never face the troubles he did.

“I am nothing like my father,” says Ayub.