Balraj Sahni an autobiography A revealing intimate and delightful story of the life of a great actor. An insight into his life and into the world of films—the glamour, the romance, the secret lives and secret deals laid bare, as never before. A highly sensitive and brutally frank inside account of the world of the film industry. The uneasy road to stardom, the torture and the glory of success and fame.. This is Balraj Sahni by Balraj Sahni, the man adored by millions. Flash-back is an accepted technique of film-making. Unless, however, the viewers have first been made sufficiently familiar with the events that happen in the ‘present’ of the film, no flash-back is going to produce the desired effect on them. I, therefore, invite you to share same of my ‘present’ before I start unfolding before you the flash-back of my screen life. Come along then, I shall take you to a make-up room in one of the studios at Chembur. True to convention and tradition, the make-up man has applied a tilak to the mirror, before getting to work on my face. He has now finished his job. I look at myself in the mirror and notice that the ‘silver’ of my hair is showing rather prominently. Oh, yes, I have not used the khizab (dye) for several weeks now! I hastily pick, a dye pencil from the table in front of me and start vigorously drawing it across my temples. There, that’s better! While I was banishing my grey hair, the dressman called at my room to deliver my military uniform and boots, polished to perfection. The pungent smell of the polish has filled this small make-up room, which is no larger than a cubicle. In fact, mine is one of the three cubicles that have been improvised out of a large room by putting two partitions in it. These make- up rooms are the creations of Bhagwan Dada, who had taken this studio on lease, ten years, ago, following the phenomenal success of his film Albela. In his time, Bhagwan Dada was the darling of the working classes. They used to go wild over his pranks. He was truly their Bhagwan, and I had personal experience of the great esteem he was held in by his countless admirers. I had once heard a taxi-driver tell his companion, ‘Let him just say, he wants my motor gadi, I’ll step down and hand over the keys to him!’ Both Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar are no doubt much more popular than he is, but they do not enjoy the kind of popularity amongst the poorer classes that Bhagwan Dada does. He never fails to evoke an instant response from them, when he appears on the screen as an unsophisticated, happy-go-lucky simpleton. Indeed they see in him their own image and what endears him to them all the more is that he, a fellow-member of the proletariat, should go and make a beauty like Geeta Bali fall in love with him! Hindi films have always been divided into three main categories: the social, the religious and the ‘stunt’. And it is well-nigh impossible for an artiste to ‘migrate’ from the one to the other. Since Dada métiers had till then been ‘stunt’ films, he produced Albela himself. Its financial success enabled him to take this studio on lease. Though the lease has now expired, the present owner of the studio, a lady has maintained this room in the condition it was to show her great regard for Bhagwan Dada. But the studio itself has fallen on evil days. One of its two floors has been let out to a factory, where television sets are being- assembled. As a special gesture to me, the keys of this room have been ‘borrowed’ from Bhagwan Dada, since the other two rooms have been allotted to Nirupa Roy and Lalita Pawar each. You see, two male stars can manage to share a make-up room but two female stars simply cannot bring themselves to do so—especially if they happen to be” ex-heroines! Every film star is going to be applied the tag ‘ex’ some day. How, then, could Geeta Bali escape this fate? It is as well that she is no more now. I had seen her suffer the pangs of anguish in the evening of her film career, when the shadows of approaching oblivion were rapidly gathering around her. As luck would have it, we were then sharing the title roles in a couple of films. Once at the M & T Studio (which is now a factory), I happened to hear her complain bitterly to her saheli, ‘All I get now as .my hero is that blackface Balraj!’ Apparently, the memory of an incident of a few years ago was still fresh in her mind. She was then at the peak of her career, a queen whose word was law. She had threatened to turn down the heroine’s role in a film—whose story incidentally she had liked very much—just because she had heard that the producer was thinking of signing me for the male lead! Needless to say, the director eventually made the producer realize the folly of losing the services of so glamorous a star. Although Bhagwan Dada has now almost retired from films, he keeps this make-up room locked. He has probably a sentimental attachment to this room. Indeed every make-up room in a studio brings to an artist’s mind a host of memories of bygone days. An artiste does not leave merely the imprint of his face on the mirror hung on its wall. The mirror captures the reflection of his soul too! We showmen live in a world of our own, a world so weird and strange. We make people laugh or cry with us and thereby transport them to the magic world-of fantasy and make-believe. In the process we ourselves become part of that world, which brings added joy to our admirers. The more streamlined the car of a film star, the higher he rises in his fans esteem. Indeed, the pleasure a fan derives from looking at his favourite star’s car is more intense than the pleasure he might get from looking at his own car! No star, big or small, can resist the temptation of scanning the pages of a film magazine to see if his own photograph adorns one of them. For him, ‘the front page news’ in a newspaper is always the advertisement of his own film. The satisfaction he gets from seeing his name prominently displayed in a film-advertisement is tremendous. For an actor, that is the acme of happiness. Nothing pleases a film star more than an artificial thing, made beautiful. His values of beauty are distorted like those reflections you see in curved mirrors. But these ‘beautiful objects’ fade away one day and when that happens, he becomes sad and disillusioned. He comes down to earth from his world of fantasy. More often than not, life by then has become a nightmare for him. He no longer finds himself the cynosure of admiring eyes, an experience which used to be the very elixir of his life. Death might be preferable to such a life! What a galaxy of stars must have confided their innermost secrets to the mirror here in this make-up room! I cherish fond memories of the days when this room was newly built. How beautiful it looked then! I distinctly remember a little informal party in this very room, as if it had happened only yes-terday. What an evening it was and what a com-pany of friends to clink glasses with—Radhakrishna, the incomparable comedian, Bhagwan Dada and a few other fellow-artistes! The bottle of whisky had not yet been uncorked, when Radhakrishna started to narrate a hilarious anecdote. He was in a superb mood that evening. I wish I had paper and pencil to write down all the brilliant ‘quotes’ he was uttering in that inimitable style of his! In no other walk of life have I come across so many gifted conversationalists, men full of generosity and with a zest for life, as I have in this film profession. What a pity then that all these talented men should make only third-rate films! And as for Radhakrishna, he thought it fit to end his life the other day by hanging himself with a rope. The entire length of one wall of this room is taken up by a diwan, whose plush upholstery is of a deep red colour. The diwan is rather like a berth in a first-class railway compartment. A square shaped mirror is fixed at the spot where there would be a window in the railway compartment. I have ano-ther look at myself in the mirror. Well, I have almost finished the job of dyeing my hair. High-powered bulbs are fixed to the four sides of the mirror. Their brilliant glow fills the entire room. You have here shelves and drawers to keep the make-up things. The wall opposite is bare, save for a metal bar to hang clothes on and a couple of small cabinets. This bare wall is an eloquent testimony to the sorry pass the room has now come to. The room has obviously been left uncleaned for ages. Everywhere there are thick layers of dust. The whole place is in such shambles that one is reminded of one of those works of modern art — a riot of colours haphazardly splashed on the canvas! All around me there are all manner of stains—of rouge, of paan, of rasgull a juice! I try not to look at them for fear of having my stomach upset.