Because He Is

Most people know Gulzar as a filmmaker, screenwriter, lyricist and poet. In this book his daughter, the director Meghna Gulzar, shows the side of him that the public rarely sees: the father at home. She builds her portrait around a belief he held, that parents are no wiser than their children when it comes to parenting itself. In that sense, she writes, when she was a two-year-old daughter he was a two-year-old father, and the two of them learned the roles together.

The details she remembers are small and warm. He got her ready for school every morning, braiding her hair and tying her shoelaces. However busy his film career was, he stopped work at 4 p.m. so he would be there when school let out. Every year until she turned thirteen, he wrote her a book for her birthday. Her earliest memories begin with waking to the sound of him playing the sitar, and the account runs up to the present, when he writes the songs for the films she directs.

Meghna describes a father who spoiled her in many ways and still brought her up to be independent and sure of her own choices. Along the way she also traces his body of creative work and the difficulties of his personal and professional life, through all of which, she says, she remained his priority.

The book includes photographs that have not been published before. It is an affectionate look at a famous man through the eyes of the child he raised.