Her Last Bow

Also in the room was her assistant, allegedly high on drugs; he later confessed to strangling Fatima to death. 8216;8216;He was a soft-spoken young man who came to my mother with a hard-luck story eight months ago and was employed on the spot,8217;8217; says the actress8217;s daughter Shailja, 20, disbelief at the crime obvious in her voice. But then, betrayal by the people closest to her was a pattern common in Fatima8217;s life.

At 16, defying family and tradition, Fatima fell in love with a 20-year-old Hindu boy from an orthodox landowning family and got married in a simple temple ceremony. Both families disowned them, but this too was a state she was familiar with. An orphan, she was adopted by her parents after they failed to have a child of their own. But her mother conceived when she was 10, and from then on, Fatima was on her own. 8216;8216;My mother used to say the first 10 years were the happiest she knew,8217;8217; says Shailja.

Later in life, Fatima was separated from her husband. Raising three children on her own and breaking new ground in theatre came as easily to her as raising eyebrows in a conservative city through her lifestyle, but it also meant that professional accolades were always overshadowed by personal criticism. 8216;8216;Our society is such that whoever moves ahead by flouting tradition will have 10 people to pull her down,8217;8217; says theatre director Sanjay Upadhyay. 8216;8216;In fact, even I received calls warning me against casting Fatima in my plays.8217;8217;

Fatima was well aware of the fact that she had enemies 8212; she always travelled with a gun 8212; but that did not shake her convictions. 8216;8216;On her face, they would say 8216;Fatima, you8217;re the greatest8217;, but as soon as her back was turned, it was a different story. But she never compromised,8217;8217; says Shailja.

For all that 8212; or maybe because of it 8212; Noor Fatima stories abound in Patna. There8217;s one about the colleague who tried to act fresh with her. Fatima reportedly took off her chappals and walked down the street hitting the man. 8216;8216;She was very individualistic, a strong feminist,8217;8217; says her close friend Vandana Kini, an IAS officer who has written plays in which Fatima acted.

Acting was a lifelong obsession for Fatima. At 18, she spotted an advertisement for the role of a frail girl in a foreign film. Fatima went for the audition, and found 800 others had already lined up. 8216;8216;Mummy used to say there were women who had come in tight pants and short skirts, swayed by the idea of a 8216;foreign8217; movie. Mummy was in a cotton saree with her hair in a plait. Apart from Shekhar Suman, she was the only Bihari to be chosen for Richard Attenborough8217;s Gandhi,8217;8217; says Shailja.

Fatima played the role of the girl in rags whom Gandhi spots as he crosses the Ganga from Patna; she inspires him to shed his western garb for khadi. After the shooting ended, Attenborough wrote in a certificate: 8216;8216;Fatima8217;s acting talent is of the first order and the sensitivity which she brought to bear on the portrayal of her role was extremely poignant.8217;8217;

Incidentally, Fatima went to acting school in Mumbai after her first success. Offers from the film industry, too, poured in, but by this time, she had three young children whom she refused to desert. The decision was a boon for Bihar8217;s flagging theatre scene, says Ajit Ganguly, additional secretary and director of Bihar Art Theatre. 8216;8216;I called her the Kohinoor of Patna.8217;8217;

But this Kohinoor was no touch-me-not diamond. From the early 1970s, Fatima essayed roles as varied and as unconventional as those of a prostitute, an actress, a mother and a cabaret dancer. One of her earliest roles was in a play called Headmaster aur Nritki, in which she played Nritki, a woman who lures children to come and watch her perform instead of concentrating on their studies. R P Tarun, who played the headmaster with whom she heads for a confrontation, remembers Fatima: 8216;8216;There was a scene which required her to take off her blouse and bra and throw them at me. She didn8217;t once object.8217;8217;

Word spread quickly of her commitment to her art, as much as her versatility, her dynamism, her punctuality and her ease with Urdu, Maithili, Sanskrit and Bhojpuri. Bollywood beckoned again, and this time she didn8217;t say no: She acted in brief roles in Prakash Jha8217;s coming-of-age film Hip Hip Hooray and in Shatrughan Sinha8217;s Bihari Babu. Simultaneously, she fought for better pay and perks for actors and launched her own theatre company, Ekta Manch.

But somewhere, reel and real life merged, and frustration at the lack of recognition became paramount. 8216;8216;She embarked on a self-destructive path,8217;8217; says Upadhyay. Close friends say she became addicted to prescription drugs, mainly anti-depressants. Her husband Amalendu Sinha they were never formally divorced says, 8216;8216;She lived for the stage and died for the stage.8217;8217; Her director Upadhyay probably says it better: 8216;8216;Art killed her.8217;8217;