If you google I.S. Johar’s name with the auto-suggest feature on, it asks you to go ahead with “is johar and yash johar”, “is johar and yash johar relationship”, and “is johar karan johar related”. Google search for his images and scroll two rows down, you will be greeted not only with the other two Johars, but even Dev Anand, Shatrughan, Deven Verma and Yash Chopra will vie for your attention.

Even those of us who can recognize Johar only remember him for his odd comic roles and his famous Johar-Mehmood movies. But there was more to I.S. Johar, a writer, director, actor and playwright, he was an outspoken public figure, your convention-bending, anti-establishment hero. This facet of Johar’s character was highlighted in the overt political criticism that his movies indulged in. It is visible in his movies like Nasbandi (1978) which was a satire on the Indira Gandhi government’s sterilization policy for population control, and plays like Bhutto, which by his own admission was “not only anti-Bhutto,” but “anti-general Zia, Mrs. Gandhi… the demagogic despots of the Third World…”. Both the play and the movie were unsurprisingly banned by the then ruling Congress government.

Ignorant that I am, I started seeing Johar in this new light very recently after discovering a couple of stories about him in my father’s age-old collection of magazines. But this piece isn’t about all of them. It is about Johar’s tantalizingly bold confession published in 1983, a year before his death, in the M.J. Akbar edited, now-defunct magazine Sunday.

In the piece titled “My Sexual Nirvana”, which he declares is the first extract from his “proposed book” of the same name, Johar focuses on the taboo issues that till date we shy away from addressing. Mentioning our pet-argument that in the land of Kamasutra we are hypocritically shy when it comes to talking about sex, he begins:

We have recently started taking notice of the untold misery caused by the suppression and exploitation of the weaker sections. But the mind boggling misery that nine out of ten Indians suffer because of the unseen, unspoken sexual suppression, nobody still cares or dares to speak of.

Going ahead Johar does what very few of us, even those of us away from public gaze, would attempt to do. In his revealing portrait of himself which begins with him occupying the position of a spiritual guru, he tells us:

Because of a mystic experience I had, many were emboldened to seek my guidance and help for their sexual ailments. I suddenly saw a sexual desert bigger than all the deserts in creation, where men and women were writhing in pain without even the flapping sound of a fish dying out of water.

And then:

Even without mystic experience I was qualified to guide them because I was a suppressed sex patient myself all my life with symptoms of wet dreams, homosexuality, womanising, masturbation, impotence and even incest. The worst was my uncontrollable sexual day dreams in which I infused life into the pictures and statues of beautiful gods and goddesses, by my bhakti, to screw them.

Johar has only begun with a piece that is peppered with memorable anecdotes from his childhood in the town of Chakwal in the Pothwar region of West Pakistan. His sexual adventures began as early as when he was six years old. Along with cousin Thirman, who was his partner-in-crime, he would play his “sexual games” in the backyard playground, while consciously keeping Thirman’s four-year-old brother Gulu at bay lest he gets morally corrupt. With his inimitable wit, Johar narrates:

It was a rather simple game. Thirman and I would lie on each other by turns, fully clothed, and recite obscene rhymes. We pretended to be generals of opposing armies inspired by the fact that Pothovar was one of the leading centres of British Indian army recruitment.

Gulu would try to match up to them through words and action, but every time he would be “over-ruled”. The frustrated four-year-old unable to take the insult, once ran down the stairs and complained to the elders.

“Thirman and Indru (me) are screwing,” Gulu wailed, “and they are not including me.”

The two miscreants were called before Johar’s mother and other relatives. When Johar’s mom enquired if they took their clothes off, Gulu responded, in Johar’s words:

“Certainly not,” replied Gulu accusingly as if that were a foul too.

Mother’s order — ”Go stand naked in the street till I call you back” — had to be obeyed, even if unwillingly after a few lashing of her Peshawari shoe.

Johar’s next sexual adventure arrived a year later. Ecouterism, as we call it now, Johar here wasn’t part of the act, and was rather confused and frightened by it. He recollects:

I was woken up in the middle of the night by some sounds in the bedroom that I shared with my parents. It was too dark for anything to be visible. “Stop it, stop it,” said a feminine voice that sounded very much like my mother’s. “I won’t stop,” said another voice that sounded very much like my father’s. I felt my father was torturing my mother. Why was he torturing her? How could I help her? Should I make some noises to warn my father or would that instigate him to torture me too? In my fright, I sweated and peed.

Helpless and clueless in the noise then Johar found something of his own, that would develop a new bond between him and his father.

Now breathless, my father was reciting rhymes that were obscene to say the least. I thought they were playing the same sex game as cousin Thirman and I; and the most unbelievable was his line by line recitation of the same obscene rhymes that we had loved so much.

Years later when his father passed away, Johar remembers that over the chants of Ram Naam Sat Hai, in his head he was chanting the same obscenities. He believes his father did approve of it.