Review: Irrfan – Dialogues With the Wind by Anup Singh

“The room I had told you about, with the window that opens above a cherry tree, awaits you. Come.”

These lines, rich in emotion, appear after the dedication to Irrfan Khan’s wife and two sons at the start of Anup Singh’s Irrfan – Dialogues with the Wind. The book opens several windows, some closed, some veiled, some curtained off, some invisible, to give readers a glimpse into the minds of both, the subject, Irrfan Khan, and director/writer Anup Singh himself.

It is tough to review a book on a celebrity actor. But it is even tougher to write an entire book on one, especially if the author is not a professional writer but someone who directed the subject. Singh directed Irrfan Khan in Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost and Song of the Scorpions. Living mostly in Switzerland with occasional forays to France, Singh spends a long time researching a film, writing the story and the script, and then directing it.

Written after the untimely death of Khan in April 2020, Irrfan – Dialogues with the Wind is perhaps, Singh’s way of coping with the loss of someone with whom he shared a deep understanding on everything from how to approach a character to how a director and his actor could together try to turn a character into a “real” human being. Singh and Khan thought deeply about how best to exploit an actor’s body language and movements, how to get the hang of a particular scene, how to put coactors at ease, and how to acclimatize in extreme conditions.

This 195-page book is broken up into 18 chapters, each one flowing into the next seamlessly, much like Singh’s films. The reader is surprised to know that, initially, Khan was not quite ready to step into the role of Umber Singh in Qissa. A dark piece that winds its way through the helpless, unhappy world of its characters – Meher and her three daughters, the fiercely obsessive Umber Singh (Irrfan Khan), his last hapless daughter Kanwar, who is brought up as a boy, and Nili (Rasika Dugal), who finds she is married to a girl. It closes on a surrealistic note where the identities of Umber and Kanwar merge and the stronger Umber overcomes and subsumes the weak, vulnerable and perennially confused Kanwar within himself forever. Nili, the most innocent of them all but also the strongest, looks at this ghost of a man and jumps off the parapet of the ruins of the old home.

Singh believes the film would have been impossible to make if Irrfan had not stepped in. And what a “stepping in” it turned out to be. Perhaps this is what led to an almost surrealistically ideal symphony between director and actor. The book makes you wonder if the duo evolved a slow, telepathic rapport. The discovery that they were both passionately fond of the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – Irrfan Khan would listen to him constantly during their shoots — also brought them closer.

This book is not a biography or even an analysis of a select filmography of Irrfan Khan. It does not peep into the interior spaces of the personal lives of the author and his subject either. Rather, it provides glimpses of the human face hidden behind the visible personas of both these two creative artists. Despite their closeness and though they often shared smokes and drinks after a hard day’s work, Singh and Khan always addressed each other formally as “Janaab” and “Anup Saab”.

The depth of Singh’s feeling emerges in language that is poetic:

There are so many memories, and now, so many imagined memories. The film gets stuck, stutters, starts again. Gets stuck again, palpitate, melts and everything goes black. Then, it starts again. Irrfan, as I’ve seen him, imagined him, thought about him – Heer, Shams, Majnun, grass, not tree, earth, less fire, and becoming more and more water in the time I knew him.

This is like the lyrics of a song fading in the wind, turning itself into whispers, unheard, unsung, yet remembered forever.

The reader learns about Khan’s love for flying kites, a passion he picked up in his boyhood in Rajasthan. During the shooting of Qissa and Scorpions, he carried boxes filled with kites and spools of thread, using his hobby as an escape route or as a trigger when he felt he was not getting a certain expression right. To him, dotting the skies with those squares symbolized both freedom and control, a way of colouring the environment and liberating it even as he submitted to the strict discipline and rigours of rehearsals and shoots.

Roughly divided into two sections, the first part of the book includes the prelude to, the preparation for, and the shooting and release of the first film Qissa…, while the second covers the mental, emotional, physical and technical journey through the making of The Song of Scorpions, which was invited to the 70th anniversary celebrations of the Locarno Film Festival at the Piazza Grande in Switzerland in August 2017.

The Song of Scorpions is a story of twisted love, revenge and the redemptive power of a song. Nooran, carefree and defiantly independent, is a tribal woman learning the ancient art of healing from her grandmother, a revered singer. When Aadam (Irrfan Khan), a camel trader in the Rajasthan desert, hears her sing, he falls desperately in love. But even before they can get to know each other better, Nooran is poisoned by a brutal treachery that sets her on a perilous journey to avenge herself and find her song. Noted Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani portrayed Nooran while Waheeda Rehman plays her grandmother, who can strip the poison from a victim of scorpion sting through just music and song.

Descriptions of the places where the two films were shot, rendered in minute detail, enrich the text by bestowing it with a beautiful, third dimension. This includes anecdotes of the young man with real scorpions and a terrified Irrfan’s attempts to cope with the situation. Irrfan’s monologues with the camel and the enraged bullock — he talks to both as if they are human — is revealing, as are his attempts at singing to get into the mood, and to break through to Golshifteh when she is cold at the start of the shoot.

The text is occasionally broken by poetry and so much music that you can almost hear it resonating in your mind.

This is not just a book. It is magic.

Shoma A Chatterji is an independent journalist. She lives in Kolkata.

“The room I had told you about, with the window that opens above a cherry tree, awaits you. Come.”

These lines, rich in emotion, appear after the dedication to Irrfan Khan’s wife and two sons at the start of Anup Singh’s Irrfan – Dialogues with the Wind. The book opens several windows, some closed, some veiled, some curtained off, some invisible, to give readers a glimpse into the minds of both, the subject, Irrfan Khan, and director/writer Anup Singh himself.

It is tough to review a book on a celebrity actor. But it is even tougher to write an entire book on one, especially if the author is not a professional writer but someone who directed the subject. Singh directed Irrfan Khan in Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost and Song of the Scorpions. Living mostly in Switzerland with occasional forays to France, Singh spends a long time researching a film, writing the story and the script, and then directing it.

Written after the untimely death of Khan in April 2020, Irrfan – Dialogues with the Wind is perhaps, Singh’s way of coping with the loss of someone with whom he shared a deep understanding on everything from how to approach a character to how a director and his actor could together try to turn a character into a “real” human being. Singh and Khan thought deeply about how best to exploit an actor’s body language and movements, how to get the hang of a particular scene, how to put coactors at ease, and how to acclimatize in extreme conditions.

This 195-page book is broken up into 18 chapters, each one flowing into the next seamlessly, much like Singh’s films. The reader is surprised to know that, initially, Khan was not quite ready to step into the role of Umber Singh in Qissa. A dark piece that winds its way through the helpless, unhappy world of its characters – Meher and her three daughters, the fiercely obsessive Umber Singh (Irrfan Khan), his last hapless daughter Kanwar, who is brought up as a boy, and Nili (Rasika Dugal), who finds she is married to a girl. It closes on a surrealistic note where the identities of Umber and Kanwar merge and the stronger Umber overcomes and subsumes the weak, vulnerable and perennially confused Kanwar within himself forever. Nili, the most innocent of them all but also the strongest, looks at this ghost of a man and jumps off the parapet of the ruins of the old home.

Singh believes the film would have been impossible to make if Irrfan had not stepped in. And what a “stepping in” it turned out to be. Perhaps this is what led to an almost surrealistically ideal symphony between director and actor. The book makes you wonder if the duo evolved a slow, telepathic rapport. The discovery that they were both passionately fond of the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – Irrfan Khan would listen to him constantly during their shoots — also brought them closer.

This book is not a biography or even an analysis of a select filmography of Irrfan Khan. It does not peep into the interior spaces of the personal lives of the author and his subject either. Rather, it provides glimpses of the human face hidden behind the visible personas of both these two creative artists. Despite their closeness and though they often shared smokes and drinks after a hard day’s work, Singh and Khan always addressed each other formally as “Janaab” and “Anup Saab”.

The depth of Singh’s feeling emerges in language that is poetic:

There are so many memories, and now, so many imagined memories. The film gets stuck, stutters, starts again. Gets stuck again, palpitate, melts and everything goes black. Then, it starts again. Irrfan, as I’ve seen him, imagined him, thought about him – Heer, Shams, Majnun, grass, not tree, earth, less fire, and becoming more and more water in the time I knew him.

This is like the lyrics of a song fading in the wind, turning itself into whispers, unheard, unsung, yet remembered forever.

The reader learns about Khan’s love for flying kites, a passion he picked up in his boyhood in Rajasthan. During the shooting of Qissa and Scorpions, he carried boxes filled with kites and spools of thread, using his hobby as an escape route or as a trigger when he felt he was not getting a certain expression right. To him, dotting the skies with those squares symbolized both freedom and control, a way of colouring the environment and liberating it even as he submitted to the strict discipline and rigours of rehearsals and shoots.

Roughly divided into two sections, the first part of the book includes the prelude to, the preparation for, and the shooting and release of the first film Qissa…, while the second covers the mental, emotional, physical and technical journey through the making of The Song of Scorpions, which was invited to the 70th anniversary celebrations of the Locarno Film Festival at the Piazza Grande in Switzerland in August 2017.

The Song of Scorpions is a story of twisted love, revenge and the redemptive power of a song. Nooran, carefree and defiantly independent, is a tribal woman learning the ancient art of healing from her grandmother, a revered singer. When Aadam (Irrfan Khan), a camel trader in the Rajasthan desert, hears her sing, he falls desperately in love. But even before they can get to know each other better, Nooran is poisoned by a brutal treachery that sets her on a perilous journey to avenge herself and find her song. Noted Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani portrayed Nooran while Waheeda Rehman plays her grandmother, who can strip the poison from a victim of scorpion sting through just music and song.

Descriptions of the places where the two films were shot, rendered in minute detail, enrich the text by bestowing it with a beautiful, third dimension. This includes anecdotes of the young man with real scorpions and a terrified Irrfan’s attempts to cope with the situation. Irrfan’s monologues with the camel and the enraged bullock — he talks to both as if they are human — is revealing, as are his attempts at singing to get into the mood, and to break through to Golshifteh when she is cold at the start of the shoot.

The text is occasionally broken by poetry and so much music that you can almost hear it resonating in your mind.

This is not just a book. It is magic.

Shoma A Chatterji is an independent journalist. She lives in Kolkata.