Talat Hussain, behind the curtain

My first interaction with Talat Hussain took place when I was still in university. The man with a million expressions but one iconic deep voice walked gracefully towards the stage. It felt time glided with him. He spoke about discipline, commitment to the craft and how acting wasn't child's play. His gait and posture told you exactly what he meant by commitment to the craft. With time he became slender and more absent-minded, but that face with a million expressions was very much there. Veteran voice artist and extraordinary actor and writer, Talat Hussain passed away last Sunday morning at the age of 83. He leaves behind his wife, three children and a fandom that transcends age group and caste.

The uncompromising Talat

My second interaction with Talat sahib was as a journalist who reviewed theatre plays. He was annoyed, irate in fact, at my review of a Chekhov adaptation. I didn’t know that yet. Ever star struck in his presence, I ran up to him at an event to introduce myself. “Every critic is a failed artist. Remember that.”

Swept off-balance by his words, I mustered what remained of my courage and pretended I didn’t understand what he meant: “Sir?”

“What? I said every critic is a failed artist. Now, will you excuse me?”

Just like that, he walked off. In the moment, I felt like I’d been scolded by my grandfather for bad etiquette and laughed it off. But Talat sahib’s words weighed on me as I went to bed that night. One of the greatest talents this country has produced had called me a failed artist. Not once, but twice and so passionately each time. I hung my head in shame. I cried too, that night, the first time in my career as a journalist. I dared not review anything for at least another three months.

Gradually, I grew out of it. Words of reassurance from a professor and mentor – that I should consider being scolded by a legend a privilege – helped. As I grew older and my career progressed, I understood why every successful says “Hamnay tau buzurgon ki chaplain seedhi ki hain” – translated in context, it reads, “We have carried our seniors’ shoes,” alluding to the pride artists take in suffering the idiosyncrasies of legends who preceded them. Not that I considered myself a successful artist.

Still, even beyond my profession, I felt I couldn’t escape Talat sahib’s displeasure. His voice was with me, all of us really, every time I walked up to an ATM. His signature voice-over as I drew my hard-earned cash made me feel he was scolding me for doing something wrong!

But then that’s exactly how Talat sahib seemed in life and as a teacher: uncompromising to a fault and loving to the extent that he followed up with each of his students on their personal progress. For me, discovering his love took a while.

Master of movement

The best perk of working in the arts field is meeting your heroes up close and personal. If like me, you had just moved to a big city from a smaller town and were looking for anything to help you stand out in an ever-mobile crowd, it was only natural to find your place looking up to the stars. Every other evening, when I had the chance, I would walk in to the premises of the National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA) to catch a glimpse of the great Talat Hussain. He wasn’t the lone legend in the institute’s initial (and what now feel its better) days – it was helmed by a league of extraordinary gentlemen such as Zia Mohyeddin and Rahat Kazmi to name a few. But Talat sahib exuded the aura of a tribal chief, magnanimous at heart and hardened by principles any successors would find hard to maintain. His presence used to terrify me but I later discovered it was also his most unique aesthetic tool.

"Talat sahib was the master of footwork and movement in theatre," recalls actor Akbar Islam who graduated and later on worked at NAPA. "He was a very well-read and articulate, of course, but he really knew how an actor could make their presence felt through gestures and movement. He would manipulate the highs and lows of the audience's emotional journey just by pacing and directing movement in a certain manner."

The more I got to know him the more I realised how passionate he was about doing what he was doing, so much so that he had absorbed all that he had learnt and became a walking talking institution – but only for those who could look past the terror of his deep voice and hovering presence.

Gentle side to the giant

Once in 2011, while I was still trying to find my own in the creative field, a bunch of us friends decided to pass the time by prank calling the numbers of celebrities we had saved in our phones.

Talat sahib became one of our targets as we called to offer him a voiceover role. Our plan was to warm up the conversation and then pitch him an ad for a made-up contraceptive brand. Yes, we were ‘that’ immature to find it funny! Now, I cringe every time and wonder what we had been thinking.

In his signature voice, Talat sahib picked up our call. When we pulled our silly little punchline – that we wanted him to be the voice for ‘Libido Contraceptives’ – he simply said he is driving and would like for us to call him back with more information. Fearing being found out and being professionally ‘lynched’, I urged my friends to pull back. I was already a failed artist in Talat sahib’s eyes. I didn’t want to be a complete failure.

Against my better judgement, we still called him back. He still answered and peppered us with questions about our ‘brand’ to which we eventually had no answers.

A pause followed by a sinister laugh. “Call me when you have those details.”

We dropped the phone on the table and stared at each for a good few seconds without a word. Talat sahib had counter-pranked us and while he did initially mind the liberties we took, he eventually laughed it off as a comedic situation.

I never revealed myself as one of the pranksters to him, but I did realise that day that there are quite a few soft layers to this heavy soul. I understood why Paras Masroor, another well known actor and former NAPA graduate who now teaches at the academy, remembers Talat sahib for his kindness and affection. It was the year 2005 when he stepped into the academy for the first time as part of the auditioning process for prospective acting students. Had it not been for Hussain, Masroor may have not seen himself sitting in the academy as a student. “I had decided to recite a nazm in my audition and that had taken the President of the Academy, the late Zia Mohyeddin off guard,” Masroor remembers. “You are going to recite a nazm?” Zia sahib asked sounding a bit perturbed and taken aback by the boy’s choice of text but before his domineering sentiment would take over the whole room, Hussain came to Masroor’s rescue and said, “Let him recite Zia sahib, let’s give it a shot,” and that’s how all the teachers eventually warmed up to Masroor’s conviction.

Uzma Sabeen another NAPA graduate who now works at the Karachi Arts Council doesn’t remember Hussain using harsh words ever. “I don’t think I have ever seen him angry,” recalls Sabeen to my surprise. “He was quite fond of hanging out with his students. So much so that he would randomly join us and start chatting about a book he was reading and start picking our brains. In fact, for a man of his age he would put in extra effort to stay up to speed with technology and flaunt his iPhone only when it was safe to do that,” she laughs.

Life between the pauses

The one thing everyone, including the people who knew him closely or the backstage crew that worked with him, genuinely feared were his famed ‘pauses’. Talat sahib’s pause meant a pause in the entire conversation that nudged the participants to reflect.

On stage, his pauses kept the cast and crew on their toes. Since everyone knew his acting brilliance was characterised by subtlety, the prompter would think thrice before feeding him a dialogue when he took pauses in his performance. “Every time we fed him dialogues he would say I was thinking and you shouldn’t have done that and every time we didn’t, he would say’ Why didn’t you? I had forgotten my lines,” remembers Sabeen very fondly.

Saqib Sumeer another well-known actor who graduated from Napa remembered him for the style icon he was. “He was old but he was very stylish, which made him immensely popular amongst his students. The way he spoke, the way he dressed, the way he talked, everything made him not just inspirational but also relatable for all of us,” recalled Sumeer.

Spirituality of craft

While Talat Hussain’s wisdom stayed with his students who themselves are famous performers today, his stint as a teacher was cut short because of a skin disease that got the best of him. People close to him say there had come a time when he would show up for classes on the wrong day and it became a pattern that the administration wasn’t very keen on stretching. It was during those days that I reached out to him again, almost four years after my now most memorable encounter with any public figure. It was then, in 2012, when he really opened up to me about how he started as a gatekeeper of Lyric Cinema and eventually took over the world of performance by an eternal act of brilliance.

He was covered in blankets with petroleum jelly all over that ever-elegant face and all that didn’t deter him from opening up about personal struggles, why he thought Dilip Kumar was the last complete actor Bollywood had created, and why Pakistan doesn’t create actors like Roohi Bano and Khalida Riyasat anymore. What I also discovered that day was a deeply spiritual side to him which I felt was always overshadowed by his extraordinary voice and acting skill.

“Not calling my voice or acting skills God’s gift would be sacrilegious. I am because God wanted me to be,” He had said with a sigh, emphasising how the performing experience has always led him closer to God’s door still. The spiritual or the ‘sufi’ side as many refer to had always been there and sometimes worked against him.

What people, especially the younger lot, didn’t realise was that he was an incredibly well read man. He was always surrounded by books and all his philosophical, psychological and artistic pursuits eventually led to a larger question about the divine, an experience that many great thinkers go through. “Even in his last days he was surrounded by books about Sufism,” recalls Islam who had served as his assistant on many productions and later kept on visiting him during his last days.

“Whether you begin from Greek Mythology or something of a rather Indian origin, his biggest stance was that ‘drama’ is not our lineage. Poetry is and the sooner we understand the intricacies of language, especially Persian, the better we will be able to learn about ourselves and the world,” says Islam.

“At the same time all his lectures, talks and conversations, no matter how stimulating, eventually led us to a fear of divine power. So much so that some ignorant younger batches who probably didn’t have as much exposure to Pakistani society often labelled his classes as a religious sermon or ‘dars’. They weren’t aware of what his pursuit truly was all about and took no time to reduce his stature to that of an indoctrinated speaker.”

On the day after our last meeting, Talat sahib’s photo was on the front page of The Express Tribune. It was a public announcement of the skin disease that many believe was the reason for the dementia that consumed him towards the hard end of life. At 8:30 am, I got a call from him, saying, “Thank you so much Rafay. You have done a very good job with the interview! I just wished they had used a different picture or a pose, the mug shot doesn’t look that good! Before I could say, “I am sorry”, he interrupted and said, “You did your part well. Jeetay rahiye.”

It almost felt like life had come full circle for me. From being scolded by the greatest of actors of our time to being appreciated by him, perhaps life has its way of teaching us how to process the many emotions that add colour to our mortal canvas. As we grapple with these questions, the great Talat sahib has taken his final bow!