Om Puri At 75: Nandita Puri & Goutam Ghose Remember The Actor And The Gentleman

Today, Om Puri would have turned 75 and his wife, Nandita, and son, Ishaan, would have probably surprised him with 75 carefully selected gifts of all that he loved most—the way she had in 2000, when he hit a half century.

“Om had already left for London to shoot the British comedy heist film, The Parole Officer (2001), with Steve Coogan and Omar Sharif. As usual, Ishaan and I joined him a week later, with me carrying 50 small gifts, ranging from a cigarette and a matchstick to a chaddi (underwear) and his favorite lozenge. It was fun unwrapping each one and putting them all together,” Nandita smiles at the memory.

Since it was a milestone birthday, she had insisted her husband take the day off. They were spending it quietly with their son when Lesley Nicol—who played Auntie Annie in East is East (1999) and also its sequel, West is West (2010)—called to wish him. On learning that the original West End production of the musical Mamma Mia! had a show that evening, Nandita decided they had to catch it.

“A couple of British students studying at Oxford College agreed to babysit Ishaan, while we watched Mamma Mia! with Lesley, who was playing Rosie in the play, having arranged front row seats for us,” she reminisces.

They brought in Om’s 60th birthday at the Abu Dhabi film festival. This time, the staff of the hotel where they were staying surprised him with a cake, while Nandita whisked him off for lunch, before he took the evening flight to New York for another shoot. “Om wasn’t big on parties or presents. He would be happy if you gave him six chaddis and four pairs of socks, and I made him his favorite nolen gurer payesh (rice pudding). It was only when he turned 55 that we celebrated at the Renaissance Club and Naseer, one of the guests, gifted him an Armani watch Om had seen him wearing earlier and admired,” Nandita shares.

Seven years later, on January 6, 2017, Om Puri succumbed to a sudden heart attack soon after his 66th birthday. The following month, on February 26, he was honored at the 89th Academy Awards in a memoriam segment for his contribution to world cinema.

In a career spanning four decades and over 300 films, many of them releasing posthumously, Om bagged two National Awards, a ‘Best Actor’ Award for Ardh Satya (1983) at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, two Filmfare Black Ladies of which one was for ‘Lifetime Achievement’, a BAFTA nomination for East is East, the Padma Shri and was also made an honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire among several other salutations.

When I had quizzed him on his reaction to his first National Award, ‘Best Actor’ for Arohan (1982), he had recalled that they had been at a dinner hosted by the French Ambassador, when actor-director Amol Palekar, one of the other guests, suddenly stood up and asked for a minute to relay the news of the National Awards which had just been announced. To Om’s surprised delight, he had bagged the coveted national honor for his first lead role.

Shyam Benegal’s 1982 social drama was inspired by the true story of an impoverished farmer living in a remote village in Bengal in the ‘60s. He had moved court, waging a 14-year legal battle, to lay claim to the bargadari certificate giving him rights to the land he tilled and harvested for the jotdar (landlord) and subsequently, elected to the village Panchayat. Even though Om had never met the man who had died two years after this landmark judgement, he lived the role of Hari Mondal during the two months of the shoot in a village near Shantiniketan.

Two years later, the actor was seen in another film on rural exploitation, Paar (1984), in a special appearance. There is an interesting story about how he came to be cast as the village mukhia, Ram Naresh, in the film. One rainy evening in Mumbai in the ’80s, when Om was dubbing for Arohan, he met Goutam Ghose at a common friend’s place. They bonded immediately and he even dropped the filmmaker off at his hotel on his way home. They stayed in touch.

Soon after, Ghose returned to Kolkata and from there moved to Bihar to shoot Paar with Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi as the fugitive labourers Naurangia and Rama, Utpal Dutt as a tyrannical landlord and Anil Chatterjee as the benevolent schoolteacher, whose murder leads to a desperate flight and an even more desperate return. He had cast a man from the village as the mukhia—a non-actor who had sailed through the audition, but in the presence of stars, froze on camera.

“I needed a replacement, as soon as possible, and dashed off an SOS telegram to Om asking to speak to him, following which I booked a trunk call and pleaded with him to take a flight to Kolkata and from there, drive to the location in Bihar where we were shooting and bail me out. He had already won two National Awards (for Arohan and Ardh Satya) by then and was a busy actor. He could have easily refused me, but instead, after a moment’s thought, he said, ‘Goutam, you are in trouble, I’ll come.’ Relieved, I pushed the sequences featuring Ram Naresh by a fortnight, and waited for Om to arrive,” recounts Ghose.

Once he landed, the actor asked for a day to walk around the village, observe the body language of the locals and absorb the dialect they spoke, then carried off the character to perfection.

Paar, which opened on May 21, 1984, bagged the National Award for ‘Best Feature Film in Hindi’. It also won Shah and Azmi awards for ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Actress’ respectively. Om impressed in a role which, while not the lead, was an important one, connecting the narrative.

“It was a fantastic performance and showcased the bond between actors and filmmakers at the time when everyone, including critics and connoisseurs, worked as one towards making good cinema. I remain eternally grateful to Om for helping me out during a crisis. His only request was that I give him a bigger role in another film and I had planned an adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s novel, Foma Gordeyev – The Man Who Was Afraid (1899)—with him,” Ghose informs.

That project however didn’t work out, but he cast Om in his 1993 film, Patang. He was an internationally acclaimed actor by then, after City of Joy (1992). Against the advice of friends and well-wishers, Ghose took Azmi, Shatrughan Sinha, Mohan Agashe and him, all big names, to shoot in Gaya, infested with crime and criminals. “We did face some problems,” he admits. “But our passion for cinema carried us through.”

Om plays Mathura, a petty railway mafia, who had fractured his left hand in an earlier confrontation, and all through the film, fights with a hand that is still slightly stiff and difficult to maneuver. “I would see him practicing diligently before each shot. Om did several difficult action shots, which included running on the roof of a moving train and even falling off it, with this imagined physical handicap,” applauds Ghose.

He remembers that the train sequence was really risky, but Om refused to use a double. He pointed out at the moment he was Mathura and not Om Puri. So, he needed to pull off the stunt himself to make it look real.

Om, he informs, was an actor who during a shoot never wanted to stray too far away from the milieu. Ghose remembers that during Patang, even when he was not shooting, he would be around, working as his assistant, holding up the reflectors and managing the crowds.

“He was an amazing guy. We had a wonderful time during those two shoots in Bihar. I miss him. It’s unfortunate that because of unavoidable political reasons, Patang released only on TV and not many saw his brilliant performance. But we are restoring the film and rectifying that now,” says Ghose.

What can be a better birthday gift than that!

Roshmila Bhattacharya is a senior journalist and the author of four books on cinema.