What Irrfan Khan left behind

A disappearing man
What Irrfan Khan left behind
Photo: Tarun Khiwal

Toward the end, when he told friends he now appreciated everything, Irrfan Khan wanted to pay homage to the elements that made him. One day in July 2018, he drove outside London for a private viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s estate. He noticed the masks from Eyes Wide Shut in the hallway, and how Kubrick’s awards were placed on a window ledge in the kitchen. He sat at the table from The Shining and talked about a scene made effective by shaky cameras. As he stood in the library, he was in awe of the range of Kubrick’s reading. By one account, he was like a child. The house was a physical object, like a shrine, and it contained tangible things, like religious ornaments; he was there to take an inventory of inexplicable things. 

For Kubrick’s grandson, Khan only had questions about his methods and his work. For Kubrick’s wife, by whose side he sat, he had words of gratitude, and he held her hands and kissed them. He took the books they gave him and walked on outside, to the estate’s bright lawns, and made room for himself beside Kubrick’s grave in the shade of a tree. “I want to feel his essence,” Khan told his companions, and then said nothing for a while. 

He took a stone from beside the grave. And after he had enough of the grave, and its stones and daisies, he went over to a part of the estate populated with cows. “It was very strange. The cows gravitated towards him and he was standing there, having conversations with them,” a friend, Rajeev Rajam, said. It was a sight: a brown man in a pink jacket, white shirt, white pants, red cap and dark glasses, communing with cows. When it was time to leave, he hung back. “I’m going to be here a while,” he said.

After the days of seeking a cure for the neuroendocrine cancer, after desperately searching for illumination from his past, there were times when Khan felt like he had come around. “I looked at my body,” he told a friend, the Oscar-winning sound designer Resul Pookutty. “I have put all my organs out and spread them in front of me. I started speaking to them, and I realised that it’s going to be okay.” At other times, he felt vulnerable. “It’s different hearing about death, and facing it yourself,” Rajam remembered him saying.

When he couldn’t travel far, he had questions.

“Have you seen anything interesting?”

“So tell me, what’s new in Costa Rica?”

“What’s on that beach in Costa Rica?”

“Are there animals?”

“Have you ever wondered how birds die? Do they just fall out of the sky? Because that’s what happened yesterday.”

There was much else he didn’t know. Mira Nair, the film-maker, said she received a call from Alejandro Iñárritu, whose next production required an Indian actor. He asked about Khan. She did not mention this to him. It was between directors, and knowing would have only hurt Irrfan. 

After he died, his friends, and people he made feel like friends, and people who knew him from a distance, and who had met him for a minute or so, and who had been pulled into the orbit of the man and his projections, remembered and confessed out of grief. Strangers spilled their guts to other strangers. There were threaded tweets without end, followed by a series of recollections tacked on in the replies. Writers and actors and directors excavated themselves for essays to no one in particular. A person who knew him fleetingly had a 745-word reply to a nine-word question: “Tell me more about the day you saw him.” The director of an unreleased gangster movie with Khan in the lead spoke about him for almost two hours, rehashing old stories, telling new ones. Nair, busy editing A Suitable Boy, forgot her vertigo and ran over her allotted time.

And as much as they said, there was always something more to say, and then just a tiny bit more they hadn’t thought of until that moment. It was as if in thinking about him, they had entered a meditative state and finally heard what he had been saying all along.

Aditya Bhattacharya, who directed Khan in Dubai Return, read the writing about him, and thought he could explain it. “It’s a different kind of missing. It’s a level of honesty beyond any bag of tricks. It’s effortless.” 

It is now common knowledge that Khan could be anybody. But before he could be other people, he had to find a way to be himself. He told friends about the time his mother, whose approval he craved, demanded to know if he really wanted to act. She had asked him whether he saw himself singing and dancing around trees. The royal lineage they were of was more real to her than him. Anyway, times had changed; when the children needed new clothes, his mother purchased fabric in bulk. His response to her, he told them, was that he’d do what was needed of him, but would also make her proud. 

He built a reputation at the National School of Drama, not as a great actor just then, but a good one. He kept to himself and a few friends. He was rarely seen socialising or having fun. “He had the worst room in the hostel. One small room in a corner,” said a former first-year student named Tigmanshu Dhulia, who later directed him in commercially successful films. “He wasn’t the popular guy.” Khan didn’t speak much. People who saw him were left with the perception that he was a serious actor, always worried, always thinking. The concern was usually about an imagined inability to find harmony with a character. “He loved being worried about everything. ‘How should I do it?’ Or, ‘It’s not happening’,” Dhulia said. “He was never happy. I think it happens to people who set standards for themselves.” When Khan saw Brando and De Niro and Pacino then, and Philip Seymour Hoffman and early Tom Hardy later, he saw an ideal. “He was setting himself standards that were superb. He was always striving for that.”

In his third year, he performed in a production of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths. People watched open-mouthed while he spoke with his eyes. His mother still feared he would be a Bollywood extra. Khan went to television, and stayed there a while. He hung out with the NSD crowd, and together they echoed the immortal lament: Theatre had the same old faces, audiences were declining, government support was needed. 

The credits stacked up slowly at first. He began on Doordarshan in the 1980s, in epochal television shows and movies. There was nearly a major role for him in Salaam Bombay. By 1994, parts fell out of the sky for him. He became a librarian, a police inspector, a serial killer. Between 1986 and 2001, he turned up in, or headlined, 60 productions. But in the evenings, when he met with friends from NSD in Bombay, he told them he was getting tired of TV. “Nothing can be more tortuous than pretending to be somebody else when you don’t want to,” he would say later.

Then came The Warrior, Haasil and Maqbool, and finally real recognition: best actor, best supporting actor, best unbelievably fantastic actor, best depraved deeds, best seduction, just best.

After doing these films that stood apart, the director Mahesh Bhatt told him that movies like the ones he’d just come off of were rare, and would constitute roughly five per cent of all the work he would ever get. He wanted to believe that Bhatt was wrong. But he also wanted to go commercial, and experience the full effects of fame. Why couldn’t he be a superstar, he told Bhattacharya. Now Bhattacharya, who was once called India’s sexiest man, was alarmed because he could see more clearly the difference between affection and the fanaticism the other Khan superstars inspired. He just wanted to see Khan keep being excellent, he said. That’s what Irrfan did.

 This is how he did what he did.

“When we make a set,” Dhulia said, “when we are not shooting in a real location and we make a set, the set could be of a living room, bedroom, whatever. We say it should have a lived-in feeling. It should not look like a set. And when the actors come in, we ask them to get familiar with a space. When you walk in, you should know that this is your house. Walk freely, because you know every nook and corner of your house. So make it your own. Irrfan’s ability was to make characters lived in. He was aware of all the beats in a scene.” 

Khan’s method was to find common cause with a character and understand the cadence of their language and mind. (“Every character’s language has a rhythm. Once I understand the rhythm, I can do it. Anyone can do it,” he told a friend.) If it was not about rhythm, if a character was beyond his own bank of observations and experiences, he reduced them to their building blocks, a kind of emotional lowest common denominator, and found ways to amplify those elements within himself. For Paan Singh Tomar, he decided he would play the dacoit with nobility. During the production of the HBO series In Treatment, he first complained about being disturbed by a light outside his room window. But in minutes he changed his mind and asked that the defect not be fixed; he wanted to let the disturbance create the angst the role required. The man harnessed life like it was the wind.

“He had everything that surpasses cultural barriers. He had that face, those eyes, the way he breathed, his movement. It’s his being,” Pookutty said. He likened him to Toshiro Mifune, the Japanese star of Akira Kurosawa’s films. “When I saw him on the sets of Slumdog [Millionaire], there was a huge change. He’d found his language. It’s how he would sneak into someone else’s character and make it his own. A character is just written words. He transformed them into images. I saw that change in the years from The Warrior to Piku. His practice was arduous.” 

In a remembrance, Naseeruddin Shah wrote,  “When you watched him act, you felt as if you could read his mind. He never made an effort to reach you... An actor always makes efforts to reach out to his audience. Irrfan knew the audience would reach out to him.”

Fourteen years before, he called this reporter to his Malad home one Friday evening and, sitting on the floor, explained how he played regular characters. 

“I find realistic actors boring sometimes. They equate doing mundane things with realistic acting. But what you do in theatre and cinema is a very calculated, manipulative thing. It has to have some meaning.”

 Have you seen In Treatment?” Mira Nair asked. She was the third person to ask the question in a week, and the third person to talk about it like it was an undiscovered recording by the Beatles. She watched it the night before we spoke. “It’s a strange but effective series on HBO. Fifteen years ago, maybe. Irrfan plays an Ashok Ganguli-type, but not as self-effacing. He plays a proud, pissed-off Bengali guy who is living with his son and daughter-in-law and their two children, and the daughter-in-law can’t stand him. They have terrible conflict.

“What always struck me about Irrfan was his magical ability to embody the situation, rather than analyse it. I felt that yesterday when I saw him, when I think of him when he was young. Even then, he had that strange wisdom, which one could say was shyness or quietness or observation. I don’t remember him ever wasting his energy. [As an actor], I could ask him for anything, though there were always two levels to the work. One is the state of being, of imbuing the character. And the other is ‘Don’t let the tear fall.’ It was like he was a machine,” Nair remembered. 

“I think he felt deeply at home in his being, even if I put him in totally foreign contexts. Cambridge, Massachusetts or Columbia, or things he had never seen – the attitudes of American behaviour that were so new to him. He carried it with him from age 18. He carried that ‘I am like no other, but without ego’. The quiet proficiency. He was a vessel.”

Bhattacharya said, “You felt like he was not doing anything. The truth is, to arrive at that doing nothing, it had taken him a decade and a half. I don’t think we appreciated what we had. He was at a finer level. But people didn’t get him. If you look at it, there are very big gaps between the truly memorable Irrfan movies.” He wrote a film script with Khan in mind and showed it around. “People would love the script, but they didn’t think he could do that kind of business.” (As of 2017, his films have grossed $3.643 billion at the worldwide box office, according to IMDb.) 

That returns us to why people may have loved him. There are theories. He was exceptional. He could bring audiences to himself quietly. He played characters who were relatable.

Here’s one more. When he gave the best of himself, the things he did – the unexpected twitch of a hand, a tonal change halfway through a line, a joke told in a way you’d never heard before, a single teardrop that didn’t fall, a surprising expression of puzzlement – he snapped fictional men and their fictional worlds into place. Within moments of his appearance, he opened his suitcases and showed you everything. You could see a home you’d never seen before, his unmentioned parents, and you even knew his grades. And what he showed you just kept unfolding: You could imagine the specific crimes that went on in his neighbourhood, the smell of street food in the evening and oiled hair in the morning, the sound of shop shutters raised. 

By attending to small things for himself, Khan constructed worlds in the minds of people who watched him. He trusted them to piece it together.

Where was there room for a world-builder like him in Bombay films for the longest time, with its fixed notions of what audiences wanted to imagine, and what they wanted to see, and smell and hear? 

Of course he didn’t fit in.

“Regret is a terrible thing,” he told a friend who had wanted to act but decided against it. “One day you will wake up and regret it.” Khan wanted you to see what he saw. He wanted to sit by gravestones and talk to cows and breathe in every last bit of it all.