It was I think, 1969 when I was working at The Gateway theatre in Chester, that I first met a young Indian actor called Roshan Seth. He was charming, intelligent and urbane, and a ‘rara avis’ in Cheshire at the time. It’s a long time ago now, but I still remember one conversation we had about the coincidence in Russian novels and plays of the way people meet by improbable chance
‘Ah, that’s because as an Englishman you have little concept of the vast size of the country’. Roshan told me. Not so as it happened, for I had been away in the Merchant Navy for six years, but I took his point. He went on to tell me that as a young man he had been raised in Patna and gone to university in Delhi – a distance of about a 1000 kilometres. On one of his visits home the old man that his father retained to sweep up the leaves stopped to ask him about his travels.
‘I hear you have been to a place called Delhi where they say they have lights that burn all night, is this so?’ and ‘they say that all the roads are paved with stone, is this true?’
‘You see Tim, the distance is indeed great but to this man my horizon was incomprehensible. It was in another world that he had not seen, nor ever would, or comprehend.’
Which is why I guess when Zhivago, a Muscovite, pitches up in Yuriatin (fictionally in the Ural Mountains 6000 kilometres from Moscow) he stands out like a Sioux Indian in full war bonnet, so its’ no wonder that Lara quickly hears of him.
It may seem odd but in the late 60s I met people in this country who had never seen the sea which, in my mind at that time, was inconceivable. It brings to mind the story about Thor Heyerdahl, for the making and sailing of RA 2, (his second attempt demonstrate that Ancient Egyptians could have communicated with the Americas), he employed the boat building skills of Indians from the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca. After several days of negotiations it was agreed that the selected group of men would accompany him across the great water to a distance place where, once the boat was constructed, he would sail it back.
The following morning they departed on the ferry across the lake. On disembarking on the other side the group turned to him to say, ‘Well we’re here when do we get started?’ They had no conception of the world beyond the lake.
Yesterday I was frenetically raking up the leaves in the garden conscious that I was really taking time off from ‘the old toad work’ until I remembered the old man in Patna. ‘Ah’, I thought, ‘I should be inside his head now and think of nothing else but the task in hand.’ So I did and you know what? The time just ceased to matter and I really enjoyed what I was doing.
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