The little big man

Forty-two-year-old Liliput knows what he is talking about — he has received more than his fair share of jeers and taunts in his time.

Leaving his hometown Daya in Bihar, Misbahuddin Saruqui arrived in Mumbai at 11:30 pm on December 31, 1975. The timing was premeditated. The plan was to close the door on the past and look on 1976 as the beginning of a brand new journey in a `friendly’ city, with a brand new name — Liliput, from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver Travels. The name also accepted his limitation without demeaning it. Not so the city which looked on with stony silence as this dwarfed man struggled to fulfil his ambition of becoming an actor.

In two months, Liliput ran out of money and was thrown out of his lodgings. He found himself sleeping on railway platforms, working as a coolie and going hungry for days. Roles did come by — like Romance in 1981 with Kumar Gaurav, followed by one in Sagar — but conditions did not improve till the early’90s. "The only difference by then was that people knew about me," he muses.

Liliput’s sense of humour comes from his fatalism. For him, life is precast down to the last detail and there is no escaping from preset sequences. "If God has decided that 9:20 ko joota khayega and 9:30 ko log sar ankho per bhitayege, then that’s what will happen," he says. So, worrying about tomorrow is a wasted effort. "We attribute success to ourselves and when we fail, we look around for scapegoats," he adds.

When Liliput is not musing on the ironies of life, he writes comedies. Yes, comedies. Acting, for him, is an extension of writing. "Writing is thinking and penning down thoughts. Acting is evoking those thoughts on the face," he explains. His first script was in 1984 for the serial Idhar Udhar. This was followed by Isi Bahane, Indradhanush and the king of comedy — Dekh Bhai Dekh. How many people knew that he wrote that? In between came the movie script of Chamatkar. The Liliput concept of writing is not to rely onjokes. Rather, the thought itself should be comical and the situation absurd. "The events are real life, but the reactions are ulat-pulat," he comments.

His acting style is an unique blend of "phudakna aur anke phadna." Still, Liliput has never bagged satisfying roles. "The tragedy is that every time the length of the film increased, my scene was clipped, leaving the role without a head or tail," he says, adding that producers usually turn to him when they are on a shoestring budget. So, for acting satisfaction he turns to theatre, where he has dabbled with all kinds of roles and emotions. His favourite is of the demonic pimp in the play Junglee Kabootar. "Despite my height, I had to show that I was feared," he says.

Liliput believes that the psychology of the theatre goer is completely at odds with the movie buff. "At first glance they see a dwarf. But as the play progresses and the story’s tentacles envelop them, height is the last criteria on their mind," he says. He accuses the film industry ofnot having the guts to toss out conventions and stereotypes — a reason why his resume is so short. "They talk about roles I should do, but never give them to me.

Sochte raho, sochne se kya hota hai? Baatein hai baaton ka kya…"Consequently, Liliput suffered from a crippling inferiority complex. As a way out, he took to proposing to every girl he met — to test their reaction. "I wanted to know if they go for character, or for height," he recalls. Liliput was confident that everyone would turn him down. So it came as a shock, when in 1986, his colleague and co-struggler, Suketa, actually agreed to marry him. "But she tested me for a year and a half before tying the knot," he explains.

They have two daughters and though Liliput refers to Suketa as "Hitler", his love for her is visible. And though he has overcome his complex, he hasn’t given up on the `height-testing’. "Abhi bhi line marta hoon," he says half in jest. Suketa does not mind that one bit. Says Liliput, "She is confident that nomatter how hard I try, no one else will ever fall in love with me!"Except perhaps, the viewers of Woh.