“Talking about myself is very boring. I am not a good talker at all,” Irrfan Khan told THE WEEK in an interview in 2017 ahead of the release of Qarib Qarib Singlle. The overhyped promotions around the film releases had overwhelmed him. It was his second film that year, followed by the superhit Hindi Medium. The actor had said he was “tired of” repeating himself, and given a choice, he would have eliminated that process. “But you know, it’s a part (of work) and I have to do it,” he had said, adding that he tries and makes each of his conversation as “engaging and entertaining”.
During the brief 20-minute conversation, he regaled me with a few anecdotes from his life, some philosophical theories and shared titbits about life as an actor as he slouched on his chair in the basement of a café in Andheri and continually kept rolling his cigarette, looking up and making an eye contact before answering every question. In another instance, in the parking lot of the Star Network’s office in Mumbai in 2015, after he had requested a brief smoke break before the cameras rolled for a chat show, M Bole Toh, that he was doing as part of the promotions for Jazbaa along with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, he candidly spoke of his disinterest in talking constantly about his achievements or his life. Acting in front of the camera brought a sense of life in him, he had said that day to the three or four of us accompanying him, and the promotions “sucked it”.
“Irrfan was the everyman of Bollywood films. You could see yourself in each role he did,” an ex-colleague from that day messaged me. “May be that’s why this loss feels so personal,” he wrote in the text, soon after the news of his passing away came on the morning of April 29 following over a two-year-long battle with neuroendocrine tumour.
The versatile, globe-trotting actor could bring an extraordinary deftness to an ordinary situation. The underplayed Sajan Fernandes from The Lunchbox, who could read a letter from a stranger in the most intense way, and in another scene, yell at a child asking for his ball, “Do I look like your servant?” In playing a ruthless, manipulative politician in Haasil, Irrfan kept us on the edge of our seats as we wondered about his next move. Then, in Anup Singh’s Qissa, in the portrayal of the staunch patriarch, Umber Singh, he reflected the every Indian man who wishes to have a son to carry forward his legacy. Such is his character’s desire to have a boy that he raises his youngest girl (played by Tillotama Shome) as a boy and you try to find logic in what he is doing, clearly a sign of his immense acting abilities that you root for him even in his deed of villainy.
In Paan Singh Tomar, he portrays a steeplechase runner, the celebrated sportsperson who becomes an outlaw on the run in the Chambal valley. If there’s innocence in the portrayal of the sportsperson still figuring out the reality of people around him even as he perfects every physical aspect that the sport required, it is the angst in the portrayal of the outlaw that makes one empathise with him. “No one gave a damn about me when I won medals for the country. Today, when I'm a baaghi everyone wants to know about Paan Singh Tomar,” he says in one segment of the film, bringing out all the emotions. As an audience, it makes you angry and sad at the same time.
Irrfan enjoyed immense success in art house projects like Kamla Ki Maut (1989), Haasil (2003), Yeh Saali Zindagi (2011), Qissa (2014) among others; commercial acclaim with films like Maqbool (2003), Piku (2014) etc and a bouquet of international projects that’s started with Asif Kapadia’s The Warrior in 2001 and followed with films like, The Namesake, Life of Pi, Jurassic World, Inferno and the 2017 miniseries, Tokyo Trial.
The recent few films, like Blackmail, Hindi Medium, Karwaan, Angrezi Medium brought out his perfect comic timing. “Ek crore,” he says, his eyes widening and arms spreading, to the education counsellor played by Tillotama Shome in his last release Angrezi Medium. From a subtle body language that he exudes before this outburst of expression, you gauge how huge the amount is for a man living in a small-town in India and how well the actor understood the enormity of it.
In an interview, Irrfan had told me that his interest in understanding people and their behaviour had led him to study psychology once. But he soon realised that “psychology doesn’t give you answers, it is life which gives you answers”. He was talking about working in a film like Piku that was the closest he got to doing a romantic film. In his younger days, growing up in a small town, Tonk, in Rajasthan, he remembered how because the boys couldn’t be friends with girls, “girls used to be an enigma, a mystery and an object of desire”. His belief was shattered when he grew up, and ever since he paid attention to every detail that human emotions are made of.
For someone who thought that his name, Sahabzade Irrfan Ali Khan, was “too pompous”, and didn’t think much before inconspicuously dropping his surname Khan to avoid the interrogation and the airports and reportedly because of the fear of being bracketed with The Khans, success was elusive. It took its time to come. After completing his acting degree from the National School of Drama, where he also met his wife Sutapa Sikdar (studying direction), Irrfan slogged for years in television. In fact, for a late 80s child like me, an early memory of Irrfan is of his double role as brothers Somnath and Badrinath in the series Chandrakanta—one of the most popular shows of the mid-90s, followed by his turn in more than 150 episodes of Jai Hanuman as Valmiki.
In more than a three-decade long career, Irrfan enjoyed the art of filmmaking immensely. “All the aspects of storytelling which you don’t know and you come to know about it during the process of making a film (are fascinating),” he had said. The most exciting part about cinema, he said, is that one “is able to see it over and over again, culling out a different meaning from it every time you watch it.”
But of late, his desire was to only explore roles that he hadn’t so far, to delve deep in and to engage with the characters he plays. May be that’s the reason the mithaiwalla and the single father from Angrezi Medium evokes so much emotion. May be that’s why he could understand the pain of a father so well.
“I had got fame, I had got money, but it didn’t serve me well. I had started thinking what will I do with all of it,” he told me in 2017, “I have realised fame and money are not the answer to happiness, engagement is.”
Perhaps, that is why even in death, Irrfan conveniently deceived the fame he earned over the years and chose a silent last journey only with his loved ones surrounding him. Apart from his family members, the others at the burial ground included Tigmanshu Dhulia, Vishal Bharadwaj, Randeep Hooda and a few others from the film industry. “The image of the kabrastan is not going to leave me ever,” says journalist-turned-producer Sandiip Singh, who was present at the burial ground. Singh recalls how he always made sure to listen to people. Singh used to bump into the actor at the most unlikely places at times and there always used to be a personal touch to every such meeting. “May be it was destiny that I attended his last journey as well, the most personal it could get,” Singh says, adding that this was his way of making people special, always.