He Painted My Life With Colours Of Love, Peace And Humanity

I used to spend all my holidays and my entire vacations walking the roads of Bombay.(it was not Mumbai those days) My favourite place used to be the pavement from Churchgate Station to VT A and my only reason for walking all the way was to observe life which seemed to be a very strange liking for a boy of my age. I didn't have to spend any money because I travelled by train without a ticket both ways and I must say the times or God was kind to me as I was not caught even once. My favourite haunts used to be the British Council Library and the USIS Library where I could sit for hours and read the book I wanted again without spending any money. If I was hungry, I walked to the canteen of The Times Of India where I had a friend from my college days, Porus Cooper who was lucky to find a job as a sub-editor and a Hindi film critic who had never seen a Hindi film in his entire life till then and my other friend, M.J Akbar (the BJP MP who is now in the backyard because of his being involved in the #Metoo controversy with nineteen women accusing him of sexual harassment, a story I find difficult to believe because Akbar was once a Naxalite in Calcutta and an intellectual of a very high order and who was seen as a brig ht hope for the future of journalism.

I had my lunch for just fifty paise and then was back on the pavement unless there was a poetry reading session or some function or event which my friends from Times couldn't cover and I was happy with the tea and refreshments that were served. It was during these walks on the pavement that I saw a life which was so very different from the kind of life I had lived for years, a life which was no life as I discovered after my walks on the pavement in what we then called“the town". I was fascinated by the wide variety of characters that I came across during these long walks.....One afternoon as I was walking outside the Bombay High Court, I saw a strange man  dressed all in white and with matching and flowing white hair and walking barefeet in the heat of the sun in the month of April which the poet Chaucer called“the cruelest month"because April was always very hot and still continues to be...

I forgot the whole world and followed the image in white, not for just one day but for several days. A time came when I found him to be the only reason for me to take all the risks to travel to“the town". It took me more than a month to know that the man in white was the internationally known painter, M.F Husain and that gave me all the more reasons to follow him without trying to talk to him and seeing him very content with himself and unconcerned about the crowd of people watching him in admiration and awe... I did not see him for several years after those days, but there was something in me that told me that I would see him again. I not only saw him and met him, but we also grew into very good friends. I still not know what a man of his standing had seen in me.

I did some homework about him and found out that he had started life as one of the many junior painters in the studio of the legendary painter, Raja Ravi Varma and had later started painting posters of films with his studio being under the Mahalaxmi Bridge and was a great fan of actors like Master Vitthal, Kamala Kotnis, Durga Khote, Ruby Meyers (also known as Sulochana) and others of the silent and talkie era. He had also made a autobiographical film,“Through The Eyes Of A Painter". He had some strange fascination for Hindi films....

He found his chance when Raj Kapoor was making one of his last films,“Henna". He asked Raj Kapoor if he could paint the backdrop as the credit titles of the film rolled and how could the Showman say no to Husain who was a greater legend than the Showman himself, as the Showman himself accepted....His life took one big turn when he saw a film called“Hum Aapke Hain Koun"and at eighty-four, he fell in love with the young heroine of the film, Madhuri Dixit. He created some kind of a record when he saw the film hundred and twenty-eight times at the same theatre (Liberty) and sitting in the same seat.

His love for Madhuri made him do things which he told me he himself couldn't believe. He spent a huge sum of money to produce and direct a film called“Gaj Gamini". The film was too difficult for the common man to understand or appreciate, but Husain was happy that he had made a film with Madhuri who he called his muse.He also presented a film with Madhuri as the heroine called“Mohabbat"and even played a role (he played himself) in the film, but he lost money heavily, but did not mind and made another film with Tabu, which was also a flop at the box-office, but nothing could stop him from being in love with Madhuri and when asked if what he was doing was right, he said,“love has no age, it can happen at any age".

He used to prepare his own brand of biryani and carry it all the way to Madhuri's house in Juhu and was happy like a young lover when Madhuri appreciated his cooking skills.

It was during this time that I was releasing my first book and when I told him about it, he said no one would design the cover and he did it in one night and made my autobiography memorable. He had his own way of having his tea. He was once invited to have tea by Yash Chopra and tea was served to him in a silver cup and saucer. He left Yash Chopra's office with me and we went in a hunt to find the kind of tea he wanted. After efforts were made in the house of Shabana Azmi and Nadira Babbar and they failed, he asked his driver to drive to the domestic airport where he found his favourite Udupi hotel and the staff of the hotel knew how he liked his tea and he sat with his legs up on the chair and literally slurped his tea after pouring it into the saucer. He came to my house once and when my nervous wife said she did not know how to make good tea, he asked her for permission to go to her kitchen and prepare tea for all three of us and before leaving he asked for a sheet of paper, took out his felt pen and painted some design and said it was for my daughter who was not there when he had come.

It was a major exhibition of his paintings and the entire crowd of celebrities of Mumbai were present. He insisted that I come and when I lost my way, he asked me to sit in an Irani hotel and wait for him. He was there in his Mercedes within minutes and we both had the Irani brand of tea which he loved and then went to the venue of the exhibition. At six pm, I told him that I had to go to see a Gulzar play at NCPA. He asked me if he could join me. I felt it was a joke, but he was serious. I couldn't stop him. He asked me to get into his car and we were heading towards NCPA. I asked him what the guests at the exhibition (which included Madhuri) would feel and he said,“I am with my friend and nothing and nobody matters to me now". We saw the play standing because there was no seat as we were late. Soon after the play, we came out and he said,“yahaan ka bhutta bahut acha hota hai". I told him about my problem with my teeth and he just got into his car and said,“Chalo Swati Snacks jate hai". He sat on the parapet of the hotel and had three plates of dahi batata puri while I struggled with one plate of butter idli. It was nearing midnight. He had not mentioned his exhibition even once. He asked me to get into his car and said,“Chalo ghar chalte hai". I was puzzled. He added to my puzzled state when he asked the driver to stop the car and went behind and opened the dickey of the car and called me and I saw hundreds of currency notes lying all around. He asked me to pick up as much money as I wanted. I was stunned at his gesture and refused to touch any of the money. He then took out his official autobiography, signed it and presented it to me. It was worth more than all the money I had seen in the dickey of his car or anywhere in the world.

We reached home at two thirty in the night and he made sure that I was inside my house and said,“thankyou very much, bahut maza aaya, kal dophar ko Grand Maratha Sheraton mein aa jaana, waha ka khaana bahut acha hota hai". At the lunch meeting, he told me there was an empty wall in the new Yash Raj Studios and he wanted to paint it with his tribute to Hindi cinema. I told Yash Chopra about it and he was thrilled. That afternoon the eighty-six year old Husain climbed up a long wooden ladder while his family and Yash Chopra's family kept watching nervously and Yash Chopra even wondered what would happen is something would go wrong. But Husain reached the top of the sixty feet wall and painted  an image of Ganpati and did not stopped painting for the next three days.

He had completed one more mission and unfortunately that was the last time I saw him. Some Sena was baying for his blood because he had painted some goddess in the nude many years ago. He was not scared, his family was. He had to fly to Dubai where he lived like a king and finally landed in Qatar where he was made a citizen but he always pined for the pavements of Mumbai and suddenly died one morning. What could I or anyone do when humanity had turned to barbarism?

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