Happy Birthday Farida Jalal: B-Town’s Most Dependable Co-Actor

Sweetheart, pyari si sister, maa, dadimaa, nanimaa – she’s done it all, or almost. In the sweetheart domain, it was a brief stay. Shafted into the domain of the character actress prematurely, Farida Jalal who turns 68 today, has been apna Bollywood’s most dependable fixture.

Those who are on terms of endearment with her call her Freddy Aunty, the rest call her Faridaji in keeping with the showbiz adab. Cuddly, even cherubically so, and chatterboxy, she was bumped off this year by an internet post on 20 February (but then so has practically every adored film personality) to which her alarmed response was,

Her laughter like her dialogue pitch, is jaguar-fast. And yet every peal of ha-ha, and every word she delivers, is perfectly intoned, embellished by an Urdu tadka. A lost art nowadays, when movie dialogue is more Hinglish than Hindustani.

Besides the skillful dialoguegiri, she’s a natural-born artiste, extracting knowing smiles from the audience with her joie de vivre and tears when she’s confronted by those cataclysmically tragic script situations.

Am I gushing about Freddy Aunty? Frankly I am, mainly because we seem to have taken her for granted and partly for a personal reason since she incarnated the role of my late grand-aunt in Mammo, directed by Shyam Benegal way back in 1994.

Two decades and more have elapsed. I have met her intermittently, once again to offer her a part as a grandma, but the project vamoosed through the cracks. She had heard out the script narration patiently in an Arctically airconditioned vanity van and remarked, “I’ll do it, no question. Thanks for thinking of me. I wonder why the Yashraj people and Dharma Productions don’t call me any more nowadays. Maybe grannies also need fresh faces.”

She was wrong about Dharma though. A couple of months after her lament, she was cast by Karan Johar as Sidharth Malhotra’s grandma in Student of the Year.

Moral of the story: no one can quite ooze the milk of human kindness as Freddy Aunty does. She’s indispensable.

Not surprisingly, when I’d requested Jaya Bachchan to accept the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award eons ago, she’d snapped. “How come, you guys never think of Farida Jalal? Surely, she deserves that award more than I do at this point.” The point was noted but it’s still to come true.

On the other hand, she has snagged the Filmfare trophy four times over: as Supporting Actress for Paras, Henna and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, and as Best Actress, the Critics’ Award for Mammo (no Kangana Ranautish charges of ‘nepotism’ applicable here please, I wasn’t part of the jury, ahem).

By the way, Farida Jalal is pretty cool about not making it as the quintessential Bollywood heroine. “Yah yah, many remind of the Baaghon mein bahaar hai song from Aradhana with Rajesh Khanna,” she narrates.

Her filmography comprises over 200 films, ranging from the excellent and the good to the bizarre. When I’d asked her of the brain-roaster Elaan, in which she’s strapped with bombs by the baddies for the climaz and goes up in flames in broad daylight on the Flora Fountain square, she didn’t flinch,

Ulp, right.

In TV land, she has been seen in a bunch of serials (most notably Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, Dekh Bhai Dekh and Ballika Vadhu). Between 1983 and ’90, she had shifted to Bangalore with her husband, Tabrez Barmavar, who owned a soap factory there. Soon after he passed away, she returned with her son to Mumbai, back where she belonged before the camera.

On that aforecited personal note about Mammo, the lead part of Mehmooda Begum actually went by default to Farida Jalal. The script was written with Waheeda Rehman in mind. Benegal sir and I travelled to Bangalore, where she was living in a state of semi-retirement on a farmhouse. We returned home disappointed. Waheeda Rehman felt the story could spark controversy since it focused on an aged Pakistani woman who wishes to resettle with her sister in Mumbai. That was that.

For a while, Shaukat Azmi was being considered for the title role. I suggested Jaya Bachchan but Benegal sir felt she wasn’t doing any films at that stage, and he didn’t like the idea of getting another rejection slip. One afternoon, he called to ask, “What do you think of Farida Jalal?”

Now, that was an inspired sleight of casting. In retrospect, the firelog warmth between her and theatre actress Surekha Sikri as her sister Fayazi, couldn’t have been bettered. Mammo won the National Awards for Best Feature Film in Hindi and the Best Supporting Actress for Surekha Sikri.

Was she disappointed? I wondered. A pause and then she laughed that thunder-clap-loud laugh of hers, “Don’t be silly boy. Surekha Sikri ka us award pe pura haque banta hai. She was playing my younger sister, remember? And the chhoti aapa always wins.”

Some logic that. But then that’s Freddy Aunty, always the sporting one in a business of sore losers.