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On a life well lived
Updated On: 06 February, 2022 08:47 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
Actress, veteran TV show host and Miss India trainer Sabira Merchant’s memoir looks back on a spirited life, even as it brings alive a more genial Bombay of the ’70s with charming accounts of potlucks, evenings at the theatre and running its chicest hangout spot
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Sabira Merchant collaborated with journalist Mitali Parekh on the book. Pic/Bipin Kokate
The speech, diction and etiquette manual which I have taught for the last 30-35 years is interesting, but I don’t think it is as interesting as the story of my life,” Sabira Merchant tells us over a video call from her Malabar Hill home. Her new book A Full Life (Jaico Publishing House), developed with journalist Mitali Parekh, was originally meant to be a self-help handbook for those keen to polish their diction and etiquette, but Merchant realised that accounts of her experiences at a finishing school in Switzerland and as a teen bride, as an actress directed by Alyque and Pearl Padamsee and as Bombay’s Quiz Queen with the show What’s the Good Word which ran for 15 years on Doordarshan, along with those of her enduring friendships and ties with family would make for a more arresting read. As Merchant shared her life’s story and the joys and frustrations that were part of it with Parekh, there developed a close camaraderie between the two. “It was a great togetherness that we enjoyed and I will never forget this time together,” Merchant shares.
For Parekh, the pictures and newspaper clippings she came across while writing proved to be treasures. Among these were those, she recalls, of a young Javed Jaffrey and Salman Khan at Studio 29, the discotheque that she founded in the late ’70s. Moreover, the association led her to realise that Merchant had been a touchstone for Bombay. “What you associate Mrs Merchant with tells you which part of the city you’re from or how old you are. So, if you remember her from What’s the Good Word, you were probably a young school-going child in the ’70s when there was black and white TV and that was the only English programme. If you know her as a thespian, then you’re probably from South Bombay. And everyone after the ’90s remembers her work with the Miss Indias.”
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