in the pit band for Howell High School’s musicals. I ripped through Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” and then made my way through some improvised jams on the slightly out-of-tune piano. He used an old point-and-shoot camera to meticulously shoot video of me playing.
“Wow,” Shyamal said. But he said it in his Shyamal way. “Wowwwwww.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a photo with a familiar face hanging on a wall next to the piano. I knew I had seen that face before. Maybe a relative? Another uncle I hadn’t heard of? I couldn’t quite place it. Who was it? I thought as I blasted through another improvised bit. It was of a man with a striking, confident look. After I had finished my made-up progression, I pointed toward the hanging frame and asked Shyamal who it was. He scoffed, as if I should’ve known: It was a picture of the actor Omar Sharif, who died in 2015. He was a lead in Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, and during the 1960s and 1970s he was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Many prominent actors, particularly in Egypt and around the Middle East, have cited him as a seminal influence.
Here I must make a disclosure. I’m about to tell you the story of why my father hung this photograph in his flat. It is so out of character that I don’t actually know if it’s true. But I’m going to tell you anyway because I want to believe it’s true, and I don’t have any reason to think otherwise—other than, of course, its sheer ridiculousness.
Shyamal, in talking about his past, is very unemotional. His stories read as a recitation of facts and figures, devoid of spirit and sentiment. Even the way he described his siblings earlier, including the ones who had died during childbirth, was so unemotional. My father never cared about meeting celebrities. Shyamal was more interested in chemists and their work than actors. He was always unplugged from pop culture, so it’s something we never really discussed when I was younger. We had never once discussed our favorite movies or music.
In eighth grade, he did take me to see Zoolander. He said afterward, “I didn’t understand some of that stuff. Like where they were swinging around.”
Shyamal was referring to the orgy scene.
In spite of his apparent lack of interest in celebrity, the reason my father hung the Sharif picture on his wall is that he’s a fan and wanted to honor him after he died. This isn’t the surprising part, though. Many people hang up photos of people they like, though, by my estimation, many of them are not also grown adults. The weird part was told to us over more drinks.
In 2007, when my father abruptly decided to move back to India, the cheapest flight he could get was one that would take him through Cairo and then on to Mumbai and finally Kolkata. When he arrived in Cairo, my father was in ill health, the specific nature of which I’d find out about later. The airport had a doctor who examined him and told him he should rest for a couple of days before continuing to India. As my father told me this story, I didn’t press on the nature of his ailment. He had a habit of drifting off topic, and I was determined to hear this.
Though he wasn’t well enough to travel, he was apparently well enough to entertain fantasies. Shyamal had heard that Sharif lived in Cairo. He flagged down a cabdriver and asked him if he knew where Sharif lived. My father wanted to touch Sharif’s feet, a show of respect for Hindus.
“To them, he is a common man,” Shyamal told me in his apartment, as if he was answering for the absurdity of his question.
The cabdriver did indeed know and said he’d take my father to see him. According to the driver, if Sharif was in a good mood, he would accept my father as a visitor. But most of the time, he was in a bad mood.
Shyamal arrived at Sharif’s house and knocked on the door. Imagine walking up to Jack Nicholson’s mansion and asking to be let inside so that you could give him a fist bump. A man who wasn’t Sharif answered and asked my father who he was, where he was from, and what he wanted. The man paused and looked Shyamal up and down. My father wondered if