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Chasing Shadows

His mother’s and stepbrother’s untimely deaths have always been a mystery, but Khalid Mohamed is determined to unearth any shred of their lives’ stories for the sake of cinema — and closure.

Zubeida, the columnist’s mother

This week, I hope you will forgive me for striking a personal note — or for writing about my continuing search for the complete story of my late mother, Zubeida. A part of her story, which I could piece together, I wrote into a screenplay for director Shyam Benegal, who infused it with an elegant and elegiac spirit that was perhaps lacking in the writing.

Twelve years after it was released, the film Zubeidaa (the extra ‘a’ was added by the producer for numerological reasons) draws warm reactions from people, particularly women. I thought the eponymous role was enacted marvellously by Karisma Kapoor; a pity that she lost out on the National Award for Best Actress to Raveena Tandon for 
Daman. It seems Karisma and Tabu in Astitva were the lead contenders for the award, but at the last hour, the jury decided otherwise.

Be that as it may, I set out last month on a trip to Rajasthan for the umpteenth time, to collect as much information as I could on my real-life mother. I was two years old when she passed away in a plane crash with her second husband, Maharaja Hanwant Singh of Jodhpur. She was all of 19 years old at the time.

The story of Zubeida is complicated, for sure. The screenplay of Zubeidaa focused on her formal separation — talaaq — from my father who migrated overseas soon after. Defying conventions, Zubeida married the Jodhpur maharaja, leaving me in the care of her parents. And then the air crash tragedy. This much information I could convert into a screenplay. What happened after her death is a conundrum.

SURREAL STORY: (above) Shyam Benegal’s Zubeidaa, starring Karisma Kapoor and Manoj Bajpai, with music by A R Rahman, vividly tells Zubeida’s tale

The maharaja and Zubeida had a son, Hukum Singh aka Tutu Bana, an infant at the time of the air crash. He was brought up in the palace. He grew up to become a flamboyant and often short-tempered young man, whom I’d meet on his sporadic visits to Mumbai. Before I could bond with him emotionally came the news from Jodhpur that he had been killed in a mysterious encounter with a group of sword-wielding opponents. He was in his early thirties then. Over two-and-a-half decades later, his death has remained unsolved, a mystery that no one has ever cared to re-open or investigate.

In a bid to write a sequel to Zubeidaa, I was in Rajasthan, talking to Tutu Bana’s friends as well as strangers, only to receive Rashomon-like accounts on what happened that fateful night. Some said he was involved in a brawl, others said he had made far too many enemies because of his hot-headedness, while most shrugged their shoulders, saying, “It’s been so long. Why rake up the matter now?”

To that, my answer is, “Why not?” A brother, stepbrother albeit, has to bring the story to a closure. I’m determined to make the movie sequel. If I can’t raise sufficient funds, it will have to be related somehow in the more affordable medium of a stage play, or in the last resort, as a novel for which I’ve thought of the title The Imperfect Prince. Without a doubt, the story of Hukam Singh will have to dip considerably into conjectures and the imagination, for want of corroborated facts. In any case, these elements have become mandatory in the most authentic of biopics of those who are no longer alive.

Friends of Hukum Singh from Ajmer’s Mayo College, where royal families would send their children for schooling, remember him well. Dushyant Singh, the affable owner of Jaipur’s Naila Bagh Palace Hotel, recalled Tutu Bana’s antics fondly. “After seeing a Hollywood war film, he thought he could use a bed sheet as a parachute,” Singh narrated. “So with this sheet, he jumped from the second storey to thud on the ground, with countless bone fractures. Tutu Bana was back on his feet in no time though. He had this theory that he was invulnerable. Perhaps that was his undoing.”

Other interviewees, requesting anonymity, pointed out that absolutely no headway was made even in the initial stages of the Hukum Singh murder case. Quite a few Jodhpur dwellers remember him but are cagey to talk beyond a point. I’ve visited Rajasthan time and again, to stumble on a clue — or even a straw in the wind — that would invest an edge of credibility to my sequel to Zubeidaa. Who knows? Pieces in the jigsaw puzzle could fall into place.

More than anything else, that film, recounting a true-to-life mystery shrouded in fiction, if need be, is my goal. I haven’t ever written about this. And if I do today, it is in the hope that the sequel will be made in some form or the other. Shyam Benegal would be the perfect director to helm it, of course, but he has turned 80, and is not exactly enthused about diving into troubled waters.

The plot may thicken — it may be the challenge of a lifetime. But isn’t that the catalyst of making cinema, which seeks to uncover the truth? Entertainment included.