“May I speak to Mr. Pataudi?” I asked, expecting a staff to take the call and mumble an excuse. The year was 1993. The Sunday Magazine of The Hindu was planning an Independence Day special on the eve of 46th year of freedom, and I had been asked to get his views over phone.
“Yes, you are”, came the response in a rich baritone voice. I froze. Stammering in nervousness, I managed to convey the reason for my call. “Come over. I can't talk on the phone. I need to put a face to the voice.” he said. My hands began to tremble. My colleagues gave me a thumbs-up send-off. One of them put a voice-recorder into my bag, saying, “If he wants to put a face to the voice over the phone, he may also want his quotes to be recorded.”
My heart beating faster than usual, I sat in an autorickshaw and within five minutes found myself at the gate of No.1, Dupleix Road. What if he asks me something about cricket or about his career? Even as the cub reporter in me was coping with nervousness, there he was, standing in the long colonial verandah, dressed in white kurta-pyjama. He shook my hand and ushered me into an elegant living room.
“So what do you want to know?” he initiated the conversation. The rest, of course, went into print, verbatim.
About a year later, opportunity knocked again. I was doing a story on the boom in television channels and the Nawab of Pataudi figured on top of the list of the celebrities I had intended to get sound bites from. This time he did not answer the phone. His wife Sharmila did, “I will tell him you called. He will be here in the evening. Just check before coming.” I couldn't believe my luck. The second meeting went smoothly as well: what made ecstatic was that he remembered me and even asked me not to ‘Sir' him so much!
The third meeting was in 1998, when I was writing an article on how celebrities found life away from the limelight. This time I forgot my cassette recorder. But the Nawab of Pataudi put me at ease. During the interview, Sharmila Tagore walked in and he introduced her, “Meet my wife, though you maybe knowing her as an actress.” This meeting was the longest of the three I had with him. On each occasion, I discovered something new about Tiger Pataudi – down-to-earth, charming, humorous, outspoken. Thirteen years later, as the news of his demise came in, I could not prevent my mind from going back to the handsome bungalow in Delhi. That entire night I rummaged through my albums searching for an old black-and-white photo, taken by The Hindu photographer, of our very first meeting in 1993.
