Unedited story behind why Bollywood actors would dance around trees

So the story begins like this...

When my father finished high school and had to join college in Ghazipur city, my grandmother took him to Bashir Manzil and requested Bashir Hasan Vakil Saheb, father of Rahi Masoom Reza, to keep my father as a house guest. And that’s how Aadha Gaon got intricately entwined with my life even before I was born. 

So much so that when I read the novel in my teens, I was confused. How could one call it a work of fiction? Half the characters were living, talking, real people whom I had grown up with, especially Rahi Saheb’s brothers and sisters - Moonis Dada, Afsari Nanna, Sallan Dadda, Munni Dadda.

But that’s how fluid and reality-bending Rahi Saheb’s literary style was. He deftly mixed the real and the imagined and created some unforgettable narratives. His fictional characters live his real life story like in Dil Ek Saada Kaaghaz or characters bearing real name like Bilqis, my mom’s namesake in Topi Shukla. But for all its mirroring, in the end, only the story remained and mattered.

We were distant poor cousins, and I had no idea but a lot of our growing up was under the extended narrative of Masoom Mamu, and the tilismi world he inhabited. There’d be days when a cryptic phone call would come in the evening, dad telling mom that mamu needs him urgently and he is leaving straight from the office to Bombay. Please rush a pair of spare clothes, his kurta-pyjama, toothbrush, and his medicines to the office. He would stuff them in his office jhola and leave to Bombay. And then we would wait. 

When dad would return a couple of days later, he’d be dressed exactly the way he was when he left for office earlier, as if the day has stretched for 72 hours to fill itself with his and Masoom Mamu's stories. We would hear of some filmstar or the other. Anecdotes from his personal life. I recall one stark image of him filling the boot of his car with "objectionable literature" and dumping the books at a friend’s house when Emergency was declared. I would devour all these stories and would imagine the physical spaces where these stories played out. 

Though I had met him in Delhi on his occasional visits, the chance to witness that physical space came when I first visited Mumbai in 1983 for the Christmas and New Year holidays. We stayed for a fortnight with him at his flat at Bandstand. I saw some people visiting him whose stories I had heard.

One afternoon he asked me what I wished to be when I grew up. I happily responded "actor". And that was it. He immediately called my father into the room and rebuked me for my choice. “Till the time I am alive no child of this family would ever enter the film industry.”

It’s ironic that three decades later I type this story in Mumbai with a handful of movies as an actor, and a couple of them as a screenplay/dialogue writer like him behind me. But I do understand his reasons now. 

Last Sunday, my grandaunt, his wife, was visiting Mumbai from Boston. I dropped in to say hello and to have lunch. We sat in the same room and reminisced tales from our lives. We were pointing at everyone’s favourite corner/spot in the room. In between Uncle Irfan, his son, pulled out an old photograph of Rahi Saheb, Ashok Kumar, Raj Khosla, and Shakti Samanta having a hearty laugh. My grandaunt, uncle, and my aunt couldn’t recall the incident but my uncle remembered another interesting story. 

He once asked Ashok Kumar about the origin of Hindi film actors dancing and singing around trees. Ashok Kumar laughed and said in the early days of cinema we didn’t have the wherewithal or technology to record audio tracks and the visual separately.

Further, the musicians and singers were very wary of physical editing abruptly destroying their songs. Thus everything had to be recorded simultaneously. To overcome this challenge the directors came up with the ingenious plan of making the singers and the musicians hide in the trees and the actors lip-syncing the song and dancing around the trees simultaneously. One day all hell broke loose when a crow pooped on a prominent musician. 

Then an assistant came up with the idea of a moving platform on rail tracks. Thus came the trolley into existence where the band, musicians, singers, camera team and the director would sit; and the actors would have to run along the trolley while lip syncing and performing the song. Ashok Kumar wasn’t visibly happy recollecting this exertion of keeping up with the trolley. 

Our afternoon continued but with the heavy awareness that with each such person’s death we lose a trove of stories. Thus it is important to have conversations especially with those who matter. 

Also read: Can Bollywood bring about change Indian cinema was once capable of?