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ShareIsmail Merchant died a year ago. Even his death was like the rest of his life: sudden and dramatic, leaving close friends and family stunned because they remembered seeing him (or talking to him) just a few days earlier, when he was his usual self, going headlong into his next project. I suppose it would have been out of character for him to grow old and go feebly into the night.
On one of his last trips to India he had brought along Tina Turner. Suketu Mehta had written a script and The Goddess was going to be Ismail's next big film, another movie that he was going to direct. He had taken Tina to Varanasi and to Rajasthan, and on her last evening in Mumbai, he hosted dinner at the Taj Mahal's Golden Dragon.
At the large table were gathered Mumbai's finest; at its head sat Ismail and Turner. Ismail 'sat' only in a manner of speaking: he was up every instant, welcoming a new guest, looking after everyone's drinks, answering the phone...When he saw me, sitting halfway down the table, straining to hear what Turner was saying, he asked me to take his place. That small gesture was pure Ismail: not standing on ceremony, not given to false ideas of prestige. Now, sadly, that film will never be made. Nor will the comedy we talked about at the Locarno Film Festival. The organisers had arranged a trip to some of the area's picturesque spots. If Ismail looked out at all, it was to gaze at some distant horizon where new ideas, new films and new projects jostled, waiting for Ismail to conjure them up from thin air.
This restlessness, these high levels of energy, the almost compulsive drive to move on to the next project made him a producer without peer even in hard-driving Hollywood. These same qualities also worked against him when he directed films. I saw him in action during the filming of Cotton Mary. In between shots, he was constantly on the phone, making sure a car had gone to the airport to pick up an actor or soothing the nerves of another who was unhappy with her accommodation. This is what a producer does; a director, on the other hand, is concentrating on the next take. It showed: Cotton Mary was a bad film. (And I saw it in a preview theatre with Ismail sitting next to me, looking at me from time to time for the appreciation I didn't feel.)
But Muhafiz (made in Urdu and also in English as In Custody) was anothermatter altogether. Shashi Kapoor lived, rather than played, the role of a lifetime as a dissolute and dying poet, his life an allegory for a language anda culture on its very last legs. This was a milieu Ismail understood in spite of his years in Hollywood; this diminishing of a way of life was something he felt really deeply. Muhafiz showed that Ismail, temperamentally unsuited though he seemed to be for the job, could be a very good director when the subject was close to his heart.
But, of course, it is as a producer that the world will remember him. One feature a year for over 40 years! Twenty-six Oscarnominations! Films like The Householder, Shakespearwallah, Quartet, Room with a View, Remains of the Day...Actors like Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Paul Newman, Vanessa Redgrave, Raquel Welch, Isabel Adjani giving some of their best performances... These are achievements of a magnitude no Indian has ever reached, and not too many producers either.
The Merchant "family"was all-inclusive, and once you were in, you were in. He tried to rope me in too, what if my connections to cinema were tenuous. He certainly took Ayesha into the fold--she played the lead in Mystic Masseur.
And, who knows, he has begun a new partnership somewhere up there. For suddenly, on his first death anniversary, a New York museum decided to do a staged reading of The Goddess and they asked Ayesha to play the Tina Turner part.
The writer is a columnist
