The showman’s story

ByKseniya Ryabinkina, the trapeze artiste from Raj Kapoor’s classic Mera Naam Joker is in Mumbai to celebrate the late showman’s 92nd birth anniversary.Ohhhhhh, difficult, difficult?” her sapphireyellow eyes dart. “Yes, yes, I remember now. The most difficult scene in Mera Naam Joker was when… How do you say it? cry? Cry when Raju’s mother dies. I don’t, can’t cry easy.”I’m in an eye jugalbandi of sorts with Kseniya Ryabinkina at Mumbai’s Russian Centre for Science Culture where the maddening honking traffic on Peddar Road is silenced by sound-proof windows. Now 74, the heartbreaker from Moscow, is in town to attend the 92nd birth anniversary memorial event of her Raju, Raj Kapoor. “My family calls me Ksana.You can call me that if you like,” she makes life easier for me, adding, “Sorry my English, it is not so very good. Okay?”Ksana, it is then. And our interpreter du jour, director and vice-consul of the Centre, Googles quickly to assert Kseniya means many things: Faith, Someone of Noble Character, Trustworthy. “Really, I did not know this,” laughs the trapeze artiste of RK’s four-hour-four-minute opus which unless you were hiding in a circus tent for decades, should know is justly considered a cult classic, never mind its no-show at the ticket windows way back in 1970s.Ksana looks baffled when the irony is pointed out, “Really?” she asks incredulously. “Well. I got thousands of letters for the movie.” Viceconsul pitches in with the take, “Maybe, people couldn’t adjust to the lengthy duration then.”This interview isn’t going to be smooth vodka, must proceed soberly and methodically, to know the dropdead stunner of Mera Naam Joker whose impact has been as lasting as the opus which had the audacity of studying the tears of a clown at its own pace and magnitude. The part of Marina came to her “suddenly”, the showman of all showmen had scouted for talent at Russian circus shows. He wasn’t exactly thrilled till he saw Ksana performing at the famed Bolshoi ballet.Elena, her elder sister by four years, was “the celebrity, I was not so much of celebrity-celebrity but he asked to meet me. I did, accompanied by officials from Sovexportfilm. The role was offered just like that. It was my second film. I had acted in one film before. In all I must have done 15 to 16 films. But I’m most remembered as the Marina of Raj Kapoor.”Cups of malai-flaked coffee materialise. Not surprisingly, they’re all left untouched. Ksana, a pukka Muscovite was born to a ballerina mother and a geo-physics doctor.Naturally ballet was on their daughter’s mind. Not “acting of dramatic kind, that happened only because of Raj Kapoor.” A kind man, a gentle man, he asked her to use glycerine for that lachrymose death scene. She wouldn’t, thought of the saddest things she could, and the tears dropped. After that shot, I felt… how do you say it?...empty.”Must be my eyes now but I detect a trace of a fog in her sapphires. Getting quite befikre now, I bring up her kissing scene with Raj Kapoor. The vice consul isn’t pleased, he’s turned fire-engine red. “Ohhhhhh that!” she tut tuts. “Nothing, nothing, felt nothing, in ballet dancers touch bodies. Only here... on the sets the camera and lights were adding to the summer temperature.” Shrugs she, too, to the fact that stunt artistes had to stand in for her for the trapeze act. “I wanted to fly,” she recalls. “Raj Kapoor wouldn’t allow it. Two different girls, one from Moscow and one from a circus here, did that job for me.”During the shoot of Mera Naam Joker, she stayed at hotels, other filmmakers wished to cast her, didn’t work out. Back home close to the Kremlin, she returned to ballet, acted some and retired at the age of 40 which is “normal”.Her inability to cry stokes my curiosity. So when was the last time she cried? Blank, sound-proof silence. Prod her to recollect and Ksana states, “When my husband Alexei died. Suddenly. Heart attack, at home. No warning. He was 56. Healthy, not classic handsome but the only man I have ever loved in all my life.”Their son Eugene, is a frontline actor. Ksana has three grandkids, one an expert at the violin, another at the piano, the third one “still decide… they are my jewels.” Speaking of jewels, Raj Kapoor gifted her a gold ring encrusted with pearls. He told her it was on behalf of an Indian delegation to the Moscow film festival but she suspects “he was shy to tell me it was a personal gift...and no, he never wrote any letters to me. How I remember his eyes, so blue, a clear ocean.”Ksana did visit India briefly, Chandigarh specifically, for a cameo in Chintuji seven years ago. Bring up Mumbai of the Joker days and now. She pauses, the vice consul looks askance. “Like all cities, Mumbai has changed, it is not better,” she says gently. “I went out to the city today. I loved driving past the VT (CST) railway station. Architecture, magnificent, preserved, beautiful.”We talk books (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hemingway top her favourites), movies (Nikita Mikhalkov she raves about), and the Kapoors. “I am guilty,” she surrenders, “I have not seen the films of Raj Kapoor’s grandchildren yet. I must.”Before I call it quits for the evening, she stops me, says give me five minutes. And returns with a photograph showing her at a ballet performance. It shows her with a co-dancer, reminiscent of Raj Kapoor-Nargis on the R K banner. “I think he saw me in that pose,” her eyes sparkle.” And that’s how Mera Naam Joker happened for me. Suddenly.”Mera Naam Joker is one of the lengthiest Indian films ever made. The 1970 release, written by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, marked the acting debut of director Raj Kapoor’s second son, Rishi, and took six years to make. Publicised as autobiographical, the film follows a clown who makes his audience laugh at the cost of his own sorrows. While it was a critical and commercial disaster upon release, putting RK in a financial crisis, Mera Naam Joker has, over the years, gained a cult classic status. Today, film experts label it a ‘misunderstood masterpiece’.