In my early days in Delhi, living in a one-room set in Laxmi Nagar, Jamna Paar—a location that elicited sympathetic smiles from polite company—weekends meant “hope.” Newspapers published my art reviews, sometimes more than one in a single week. Seeing my name in print mattered enormously. Each article also meant a cheque, which helped us scrape through.
But it was not just my own articles that I looked forward to. I eagerly waited for the column by Khalid Mohamed, the controversial film critic, author, director and screenwriter. In those days, he had a column in the Hindustan Times. He had earlier quit the Times of India, a move I knew little about at the time. Yet I could immediately resonate with his writing: irreverent, full of humour, and rich in historical depth—qualities that the mainstream often seemed to detest.
Then, one day, he left the Hindustan Times too. It was a shock to his readers, myself included. I took his departure rather personally. In those days, I was not watching many mainstream Hindi films anyway. There were enough films to see at Siri Fort Auditorium, Shakuntalam (now defunct), Max Mueller Bhavan, the Russian Culture Centre, the Iranian Culture Centre, the French Cultural Centre, Alliance Française and elsewhere.
I got my flavour of mainstream Bollywood through Khalid Mohamed’s reviews. They were my weekly dose of an adrenaline rush from the other side of cinema, without my ever having to see those films on the big screen. In 1997, I bought a desktop computer, complete with floppy-disk and CD drives. I remember watching Bade Miyan Chote Miyan for the first time, and many more films thereafter.
When I read Not Quite Family, Khalid Mohamed’s beautifully penned memoir, those memories came rushing back. What is a person, if not an ensemble of memories?
Khalid Mohamed’s life has never been separate from Hindi cinema. His early education in cinema came through the classical era of black-and-white films, watched with his grandmother, who brought him up with adab and a deep sense of etiquette.
In this intimate memoir of Bollywood, Khalid Mohamed recounts episodes and anecdotes from the lives of its male and female stars. Yet, even when these are ostensibly stories about celebrities, what emerges most clearly is a poignant portrait of the author’s own intellectual and emotional life. He may reveal the clay feet of many matinee idols, but what makes these revelations compelling is the perspective he brings to them. In the end, that perspective becomes more illuminating than the stars themselves.
Quite candidly, Khalid Mohamed observes that the new crop of actors working on OTT platforms, across numerous web series, are often more straightforward, intelligent, inclusive and talented, even though they do not receive the attention they deserve. We also get a glimpse of how the author navigated the rough waters of mutual-admiration clubs and nepotism while writing screenplays for films such as Mammo, Sardari Begum and Zubeida, directed by Shyam Benegal, and directing films such as Fiza, Tehzeeb and Silsilay.
Not Quite Family is not merely a memoir of Bollywood. It is also a memoir of a life lived alongside cinema—of watching, writing, remembering, observing and, ultimately, making sense of an entire cultural world.
A highly recommended memoir.
JohnyML
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