Dead D’Mello brought us to life: incomparable humourist, humanist

Shah, who passed away Saturday of kidney failure at 74, was not just one of the finest comedians in Indian cinema; he was a humourist par excellence, whose craft shone in the way he imbued even his most inane roles with surprising depth and warmth. Yes, he could slip over banana peels with ease, but he could, with equal felicity, give you a snapshot appreciation of the character about to do the slipping, and that takes serious skill.

Of the countless roles he essayed in a career of around 50 years, the one most people will remember him for was the genial Indravadan “Indu” Sarabhai, who presided over his family and its “sukh-dukh”, with flavourful support from Maya Mazumdar Sarabhai, played by the inimitable Ratna Pathak Shah, in the long-running show, Sarabhai vs Sarabhai.

Shah was one of those trained FTII actors who was always in high demand, in both TV and films. Kundan Shah was quick to recognise the quicksilver quality in his batchmate, and the way he presented him in another DD classic Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi (1984) is a guaranteed chaser-away-of-the-blues: In the show fronted by the affable Shafi Inamdar and Swaroop Sampat, Satish Shah appeared in 55 different guises in the 60 plus episodes, using subtle shifts in delivery and expression.

Effortless actors like Shah make it easy to forget the effort certified comedians have to put in to create a differential, especially in Hindi cinema where humour was, and still is, often confined to crude, loud tracks.

He blurred the lines between the straight-up comedian and the character who uses comedic devices to play his part, whether he was playing “Doctor Chacha” in the 1994 Hum Aapke Hain Koun (helping a bashful Salman Khan woo the stunning Madhuri-in-that-purple-sari) with his “sher-o-shayari”, or a Gulshan Kumar-coded music baron handing out a break to the struggling musician played by Aamir Khan in Akele Hum Akele Tum (1995), or a college-professor-cum-buffoon who treats the world like his walking spittoon and who Shah Rukh Khan keeps having to dodge in Main Hoon Na (2004).

So good was Shah in these kinds of roles, which saw him in supporting roles to the three Khans, or in the ones he kept playing endless variations of the bumbling cop or the hopelessly amorphous ones in the loud comedies of David Dhawan and Rohit Shetty, that one forgot his early substantive parts in the socially conscious cinema of Saeed Akhtar Mirza: His characters in Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan (1978) and Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai (1980) had weight; they were integral to those movies.

Whichever way you sliced the entertainment pie, in both TV and movies during the ’80s and ’90s, there would be Shah, light on his feet despite his decidedly podgy frame, eyes twinkling in his round face, and that trademark moustache quivering in delight or disgust, depending upon the demands made on him.

There’s a film in which I remember Satish Shah’s sexologist, outfitted in a wildly colourful shirt, propping up two lissom lasses in a lift, giving advice to Riteish Deshmukh’s henpecked husband: that’s just the kind of thing that would have turned off-colour in someone else’s hands, but Shah never let us lose sight of his innate old-world charm, which is why he always appeared more at home in family-oriented roles, rather than the risible ones, even though he was capable of cracking us up in everything he did.

As I write this, I keep flashing back to D’Mello, smiling-frowning-smirking in quick succession in that iconic scene in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro in which Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani are flattering and deceiving in a burlesque of a very high order.

After which D’Mello-Shah is compelled to keep his mobile face frozen in one expression — a beatific look plastered across his visage — as the film roars towards its strident anti-corruption anthem. In that film, as in so many others that followed, Satish Shah, humourist, humanist, was incomparable.

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